Quotes about back
page 73

“In the present state of society it appears necessary to go back to first principles in search of the most simple truths, and to dispute with some prevailing prejudice every inch of ground. To clear my way, I must be allowed to ask some plain questions, and the answers will probably appear as unequivocal as the axioms on which reasoning is built; though, when entangled with various motives of action, they are formally contradicted either by the words or conduct of men.”

Mary Wollstonecraft book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Source: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Ch. 1, opening

Search, Question, Truth, Appearance

“It is the event that is the immediate entity of perception; Nature is the sum-total of events, and every instrument of thought that our minds employ can be traced back to its ultimate origin in events.”

Herbert Dingle (1890–1978) British astronomer

pages 12–13 https://books.google.com/books?id=hwpKAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA12 Relativity for All, London, 1922

Nature

“Increasingly, I believe that the issue of migration will be seen by future historians as the fatal solvent of the EU. In their accounts Brexit will appear as merely an early symptom of the crisis. Their argument will be that a massive Völkerwanderung overwhelmed the project for European integration, exposing the weakness of the EU as an institution and driving voters back to national politics for solutions.”

Niall Ferguson (1964) British historian

"The EU melting pot is melting down" https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/06/18/the-melting-pot-melting-down/2tShNLlY7JLn4v3PQEtoLK/story.html Boston Globe, June 18, 2018.

Future, Appearance

“I think that I painted an accurate picture of what life was like for someone like Billy forty years ago. Looking back, maybe I was not as sympathetic as I could have been to some of the adult characters.”

Barry Hines (1939–2016) British author

On A Kestrel for a Knave
Barry Hines Interview: Homecoming Hero

Life, Thinking, Painting

“I thought I would like to show that these kids can do something which is in fact very skillful - not the old tale about them being cobblers and joiners, but something that means they have to get books out of the library. And it’s a technical skill; they’ve actually got to read about it before they can do something like training a hawk. My brother trained a kestrel in these fields at the back, and I wanted to show that kids can do this kind of thing. They can do all kinds of things if only they’re given opportunities.”

Barry Hines (1939–2016) British author

On A Kestrel for a Knave
Barry Hines 1970 interview

Training, Books, Reading

“The panopticon produces subjects with desires to improve their inner lives. In contrast the superpanopticon constitutes objects, individuals with dispersed identities, who may remain unaware of how those identities are construed by the computer. We are once again back with disappearing bodies.”

David Lyon (1948) British sociologist

§7, p. 115
Surveillance society

“Now she took the sword back into her hand and knelt on the rim of the invisible blackness below. She had gone this path once before and once only, and never thought to find any necessity in life strong enough to drive her down again. The way was the strangest she had ever known. There was, she thought, no such passage in all the world save here. It had not been built for human feet to travel. It had not been built for feet at all. It was a narrow, polished shaft that cork-screwed round and round. A snake might have slipped in it and gone shooting down, round and round in dizzy circles—but no snake on earth was big enough to fill that shaft. No human travelers had worn the sides of the spiral so smooth, and she did not care to speculate on what creatures had polished it so, through what ages of passage.”

C. L. Moore (1911–1987) American author

Black God's Kiss (1934); pp. 9-10
Short fiction, Jirel of Joiry (1969)

Strong, Way, Age, World

“It’s incredibly misogynist to tell me I can only write a certain type of woman. Because that’s saying women must be a certain type of person. That puts us back to the Stone Age—like women are saints and therefore not human and if we stray beyond that model, we’ll be severely punished. It denies us any humanity. It doesn’t even bother me. It just bounces off me. It’s such a ridiculous notion that my novels are misogynist because I don’t write the kind of women you want.”

Gillian Flynn (1971) American author and critic

On her novels being called misogynistic in “Gillian Flynn Isn’t Going to Write the Kind of Women You Want” https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/06/gillian-flynn-isnt-going-to-write-the-kind-of-women-you-want in Vanity Fair (2018 Jun 28)

Women, Personality, Age

“And thus He will bring back His world to its former aspect, so that the Cosmos will once more be deemed worthy of worship and wondering reverence, and God, the maker and restorer of the mighty fabric, will be adored by the men of that day with unceasing hymns of praise and blessing.”

Apuleius (125–170) Berber prose writer in Latin

The Prophecy of Hermes Trismegistus

World, God, Men

“He will call back to the right path those who have gone astray; He will cleanse the world from evil, now washing it away with water-floods, now burning it out with fiercest fire, or again expelling it by war and pestilence.”

Apuleius (125–170) Berber prose writer in Latin

The Prophecy of Hermes Trismegistus

World, War, Water, Evil

“Two features would by now be obvious: (1) far from being a clear and definite code, the shariah is ambiguous; (2) it is ambiguous on the entire spectrum of issues. Two operational consequences follow: (1) this ambiguity is one of the bases for the unrivalled power of the ulema; (2) the ulema therefore sabotage every effort to codify the shariah as zealously as they fight back every effort to replace it by a modern code common to all.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

The World of Fatwas (Or The Shariah In Action)

Fight, Effort

“There were considerably over 100 prisoners now. It was a problem to get them back safely to our own lines. There were so many of them, there was danger of our own artillery mistaking us for a German counterattack and opening upon us. I sure was relieved when we ran into the relief squads that had been sent forward through the brush to help us.”

Alvin C. York (1887–1964) United States Army Medal of Honor recipient

Account of 8 October 1918
Diary of Alvin York

Problem, Help

“I see their role as the same as ever; the artist is to give voice to the issues that are given to us in a confused manner, so that people can understand the role that they must play…I think the role of the cultural worker is to define those things we receive from those that are in power, and give it back to the community, presented it in a more clear way.”

Malaquías Montoya (1938) American artist

On how technological advancements have not diminished the cultural role of artists (as quoted in “’What better function for art at this time than as a voice for the voiceless’: The Work of Chicano Artist Malaquías Montoya” https://nacla.org/news/2019/02/17/%E2%80%9Cwhat-better-function-art-time-voice-voiceless%E2%80%9D-work-chicano-artist-malaqu%C3%ADas; 2019 Feb 15)

Understanding, People, Communication, Thinking

“Film and television essentially feel the same when you’re doing it, because it’s the same technical approach. All the homework is the same. The homework for each medium is all similar, but the gratification in a live theater context is much higher, because it’s immediate. It’s far more dangerous, because there are no retakes. It’s electric, it’s an actual chemical transaction that occurs between you and the audience. Whatever energy you’re throwing out to them they throw it right back to you, and it kind of feeds on itself in this vacuum…”

Benjamin Bratt (1963) American actor

On acting in various mediums in “Interview: Benjamin Bratt” https://www.cinemablend.com/new/Interview-Benjamin-Bratt-6673.html in Cinema Blend

Feeling

“Everything I do is because of writing. If I go for a walk, it’s because I’m thinking of writing. I go look at flowers, I go look at the garden, I go look at a museum, but it’s all coming back to writing. I don’t really do anything that isn’t about writing, and I don’t really know who I am if I’m not thinking about writing.”

Jamaica Kincaid (1949) Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer

On her obsession with writing in “Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?” https://www.guernicamag.com/does-truth-have-a-tone/ in Guernica (2013 Jun 17)

Flowers, Thinking

“I intended all of that. And this is what I like about this, and drawings like draw, like the gunman. I call this the shoot out, the high noon draw. That was also my intent as well as drawings; draw a bucket back to the cables and the whole idea about drawings…”

Lorna Dee Cervantes (1954) American writer

On how drawings are used in all of its forms as a recurrent theme in From the Cables of Genocide in “Poetry Saved My Life: An Interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes” https://opencourses.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/ENL9/Instructional%20Package/Texts//Readings/Chicana%20Movement-%20Further%20Reading/An%20Interview%20with%20Lorna%20Dee%20Cervantes.pdf (Spring 2007)

Idea, Drawing

“I try to tell the most authentic stories I can about womanhood and Dominican-ness and Afro-Dominican-ness/Afro-Latinidad that I can. Then I go back in and edit with the eye of who sets the table in this book, who gets left out, what am I saying, and what am I not saying right? I lean in or be more intentional about that. For me, it’s trying to be authentic and mindful of my own biases and questioning those while also just being incredibly truthful since truthfulness is inherently intersectional, right? I can’t not be woman and Black-descendant and culturally Latinx. Everything I write will have that in it.”

Elizabeth Acevedo American poet and author

On the tropes that she employs often in “AN Interview with Elizabeth Acevedo” https://www.washingtonsquarereview.com/new-page-21 in Washington Square Review

Truth, Books, Question

“Well I was concerned, back even at that early age of not quite 28, that as an African American woman entering the field of national security and foreign policy for the first time, that if I accepted a job in African policy at that stage without having demonstrated my ability to work on a wider range of issues, I feared, I think legitimately, ... that I might well get pigeonholed in Africa. That people in this predominantly white national security establishment would see me as black working on Africa — and therefore not capable of, or suited to do, anything else. And I made that choice. Looking back on it, it was quite a bracing thing to do to turn down at that age a substantive policy job.”

Susan Rice (1964) 24th United States National Security Advisor

On her attempts to avoid being pigeonholed in her career in “Susan Rice Talks Of Balancing Career And Motherhood, Reflects On Benghazi” https://www.npr.org/2019/10/07/768059915/susan-rice-talks-of-balancing-career-and-motherhood-reflects-on-benghazi in NPR (2019 Oct 7)

Time, People, Thinking, Age

“It seems to me that the biggest challenge for Chinese theater is to cultivate an audience, which would make possible long-running shows. A show that only runs for a few months, tops, fails to generate enough revenue to pay back the investment required to create it. A Chinese Broadway or West End may help to build an audience, but more theaters alone probably will not achieve this goal.”

David Henry Hwang (1957) Playwright

On how to cultivate Chinese theater in the United States in “DAVID HENRY HWANG ON THEATRE, TRUMP, AND ASIAN-AMERICAN IDENTITY” https://thetheatretimes.com/david-henry-hwang-on-theatre-trump-and-asian-american-identity/ in Theatre World (2019 Mar 15)

Making love, Help

“I’m obsessed with manhood as a brutal and artful performance. My mind always finds its way back to the crossroad where sex, race, and power collide. Journeys, transformation, as well as dashed attempts to transform, fascinate me as well.”

Saeed Jones (1985) American poet

On masculinity as a performance (as quoted in “Saeed Jones” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/saeed-jones in Poets.org)

Way, Sex, Art

“Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.”

Peter Matthiessen book The Snow Leopard

"October 5", p. 42
The Snow Leopard (1978)

Money, Life, Nature, Water

“Religions remain what they are. Zen is meditation. Meditation is the foundation of every religion. People today feel an intense need to go back to the source of religious life, to the pure essence in the depths of themselves which they can discover only through actually experiencing it. They also need to be able to concentrate their minds in order to find the highest wisdom and freedom, which is spiritual in nature, in their efforts to deal with the influences of every description imposed upon them by their environment. Human wisdom alone is not enough, it is not complete. Only universal truth can provide the highest wisdom. Take away the word Zen and put Truth or Order of the Universe in its place.”

Taisen Deshimaru (1914–1982) Japanese Buddhist monk

Online interview "Questions to Master Deshimaru" at zen-deshimaru.com https://web.archive.org/web/20111008034614/http://www.zen-deshimaru.com/EN/sangha/deshimaru/q-r/0101.htm

Religion, Freedom, People, Feeling

“I have been taking these photographs as I am dead, and then I look back at these photographs to re-experience what it was like, as someone who experienced themselves as a dead person. And they’re the same. It’s very much the same experience, just one is visual and one is more verbal. Both are ways to get through a very difficult experience, and they’re also ways to remember it.”

Esmé Weijun Wang American writer

On using various mediums to highlight an experience in “Schizophrenia Terrifies: An Interview with Esmé Weijun Wang” https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/04/schizophrenia-terrifies-an-interview-with-esme-weijun-wang/ in The Paris Review (2019 Feb 4)

Way, Personality, Dead

“They go off to sea for nine months, they’re sick half the time, bad things happen to them, they see others die. Then they come back home and they have not a cent in their account. The way it ruins these men in their very spirit is a crime that’s horrific to see. And it’s hard to capture that in writing because wage theft, that term, is so boring. But on the ocean, it’s so pervasive and so ruinous that I would put it up there on par with putting men in an oven and cooking them slowly.”

Ian Urbina (1972) American journalist

On the victims of wage theft in “Wage Theft, Slavery, and Climate Change on the Outlaw Ocean” https://civileats.com/2019/09/27/wage-theft-slavery-and-climate-change-on-the-outlaw-ocean/ (Civil Eats; 2019 Sep 27)

Home, Time, Bad luck, Way

“They’re supposed to be the people who support you, who love you no matter what, and the reality is they’re the first people who teach you to cast doubt on yourself, they’re the first people who sometimes don’t have your back…”

Laila Lalami (1968) American writer

On families not always being a bedrock of support in “Migrant State of Mind: A Q&A With Novelist Laila Lalami” https://www.thenation.com/article/laila-lalami-interview-the-other-americans/ in The Nation (2019 Apr 23)

Support, People, Reality, Love

“The 26th of July Movement is the revolutionary organization of the humble, by the humble, for the humble. The 26th July Movement is the hope of redemption for the Cuban working class, who can hope for nothing from the political cliques; it is the hope of land for the peasants who live like pariahs in the country whose freedom their grandfathers won; it is the hope of going back home for the emigres who had to leave their country, here they could not live or work, and it is the hope of daily bread for the hungry and of justice for the forgotten.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

Statement, Mexico, March 18th, 1956 as published in Carlos Franqui's Diary of the Cuban Revolution (1976), pp. 100-101.

Home, Justice, Freedom, Country

“A train full of pilgrims coming back from the destruction of this Ayodhya mosque which was disputed. The train caught fire; nobody knows who set fire to the train and 57 pilgrims were burnt…”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

Arundhati Roy commenting on the Godhra train attack The God of false things : How Arundhati Roy creates fake news and gets away with it https://www.opindia.com/2017/05/the-god-of-false-things-how-arundhati-roy-creates-fake-news-and-gets-away-with-it/ also https://www.opindia.com/2019/04/urban-naxals-congress-hacks-and-eminent-historians-what-media-wont-tell-you-about-writers-who-signed-the-anti-modi-statement/ (Her statement was criticized as being counter-factual.)

Training

“To make the revolution to transform the old society into a new one is a very glorious, but also extremely heavy task, a complex, protracted and hard struggle. Only a strong man can travel a long distance with a heavy load on his back. A revolutionary must have solid foundation of revolutionary morality in order to fulfill his glorious revolutionary task.”

Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) Vietnamese communist leader and first president of Vietnam

"On Revolutionary Morality" (1958)
1950's, On Revolutionary Morality (1958)

Strong, Making love, Travel

“My dear Dahl, the first, the primary, task is to bring the earth back into ecological balance. That’s your task, you and the Bahamas Corporation. Ours is to give people something exciting to do other than war while that is going on. Without us and our Hunt, you and your high-minded scientists will just be another group of dreamers living in an imaginary kingdom of sweet reason while the madness of real politics rages all around you. Be practical, Dahl, let’s do something together.”

Robert Sheckley book Hunter/Victim

“There is something in what you say,” Dahl admitted. “I’ve been aware for some time of the shortcomings inherent in the sane, dispassionate thinking that we scientists advocate. People don’t pay any attention. Unless there’s an emergency like Love Canal or Chernobyl, the idea of maintaining and upgrading the earth and its ecosystems is not exactly box-office.”
Source: Hunter/Victim (1988), Chapter 65 (p. 259)

War, Madness, People, Rage

“There was a moist, fertile, decaying sort of odor in the air. Florida was the sort of place that always seemed to be threatening to slip out of time and go back to the Paleozoic where it belonged. The light was a tawny gold filtered through a fragmented wall of green.”

Robert Sheckley book Hunter/Victim

Source: Hunter/Victim (1988), Chapter 38 (p. 175)

Light, Time

“Not only can you not step into the same river twice; it is not even the same you who can’t step into the same river twice. Everything modifies everything. There is no niche in the past waiting for him to come back and occupy it. Nature will tolerate a paradox, but she abhors a vacuum.”

Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) American writer

Slaves of Time (p. 18)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

Past, Waiting, Nature

“We cannot change the past even if we could go back in time. The fabric of space-time continuum may automatically correct anomalies caused by, say, a time traveler such that any ripple effects are short-lived.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

The Transhumanism Handbook, 2019

Past, Time, Travel, Change

“There are many busy-bodies in the world, always worrying, always rushing back and forth; every one wonders at them. They seem ready to jump out of their own skins; but in spite of it all, they make no more progress than does the Squirrel in his wheel.”

Ivan Krylov (1769–1844) Russian writer

An argosy of fables, "The Rain cloud" p. 402
The Fables (1883)

Business, World, Making love

“Savarkar is widely reviled in Indian history as an apostle of hate; through a reading of Hindutva I argue that he might better be understood as a spurned lover . . . Hindutva in its time was also a reminder to a Hindu community that even if Gandhi had left the political milieu, there was no need to worry. A political Hindu and a true nationalist was back and ready to lead India, even from behind prison walls. Hindutva was a pugilistic punch thrown against Gandhi in the competitive political ring for national leadership.”

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) Indian pro-independence activist,lawyer, politician, poet, writer and playwright

Vikram Sampath - Savarkar, Echoes from a Forgotten Past

Time, Hate, History, Reading

“Hindutva was a political argument made in a poetic register. It was an argument with and against an unnamed Gandhi at an opportune moment when he seemed finished with politics. Hindutva was also a political cry from behind prison walls, reminding the larger world outside that even if Gandhi was no longer on the political scene, Savarkar was back. He was still a leader, a politician capable of pulling together a nationalist community. But unlike Gandhi, he was offering a sense of Hindu-ness that could be the basis for a more genuine and, in the end, more effective nationalism than that of the Mahatma. The startling change for its time was Savarkar’s assertion that it was not religion that made Hindus Hindu. If Gandhi had officiated at the marriage of religion and politics, and Khilafat leaders were using the symbols of religion to forge a community, Savarkar argued that name and place were what bound the Hindu community, not religion . . . The fundamental (negative) contribution of Hindutva was to install a new term for nationalist discourse, one that was both modern and secular, if open to a secular understanding of religious identity. In place of religion qua religion, he secularized a plethora of Hindu religious leaders. In so doing, he did not create a sterilely secular nationalism. He did quite the opposite. He enchanted a secular nationalism by placing a mythic community into a magical land .”

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) Indian pro-independence activist,lawyer, politician, poet, writer and playwright

Janaki Bakhle quoted in Vikram Sampath - Savarkar, Echoes from a Forgotten Past, 1883–1924 (2019)

Religion, Time, Understanding, Marriage

“If inflation priced us out of world markets we should be back in the old nightmare of unemployment. What folly to risk throwing away all that we have gained. ... Our first duty at a time when there is more money about than goods to spend it on is to keep down Government expenditure. ... The second duty of the Government is to frame policies which encourage saving and discourage spending. ... in the long run there is only one answer to the 64,000 dollar question—to increase production. That is the answer. That is where the real hope lies.”

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) British politician

Speech at Bedford (20 July 1957), quoted in "More production 'the only answer' to inflation", The Times (22 July 1957), p. 4
Prime Minister

Money, Time, Question, Hope

“At first the child is amused by his anus and feces, and gaily inserts his finger into the orifice, smelling it, smearing feces on the walls, playing games of touching objects with his anus, and the like. This is a universal form of play that does the serious work of all play: it reflects the discovery and exercise of natural bodily functions; it masters an area of strangeness; it establishes power and control over the deterministic laws of the natural world; and it does all this with symbols and fancy. With anal play the child is already becoming a philosopher of the human condition. But like all philosophers he is still bound by it, and his main task in life becomes the denial of what the anus represents: that in fact, he is nothing but body so far as nature is concerned. Nature’s values are bodily values, human values are mental values, and though they take the loftiest flights they are built upon excrement, impossible without it, always brought back to it. As Montaigne put it, on the highest throne in the world man sits on his arse. Usually this epigram makes people laugh because it seems to reclaim the world from artificial pride and snobbery and to bring things back to egalitarian values. But if we push the observation even further and say men sit not only on their arse, but over a warm and fuming pile of their own excrement—the joke is no longer funny. The tragedy of man’s dualism, his ludicrous situation, becomes too real. The anus and its incomprehensible, repulsive product represents not only physical determinism and boundness, but the fate as well of all that is physical: decay and death.”

Ernest Becker book The Denial of Death

The Recasting of Some Basic Psychoanalytic Ideas
The Denial of Death (1973)

Law, Fate, Making love, Game

“Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.”

Ernest Becker book The Denial of Death

"The Recasting of Some Basic Psychoanalytic ideas", p. 26
The Denial of Death (1973)

Time, Housing, Food, Star

“Late you come, yet you do come!... You should have recognized the beneficial power of criticism when we were in the opposition. Back then, you had not yet been confronted with these words; back then our press was verboten and verboten and again verboten; our assemblies were banned; we were not allowed to speak, and I was not allowed to speak -- and that went on for years! And now you say criticism is beneficial!”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Speech in the Reichstag (23 March 1933) on the passing of the Enabling Act of 1933. Hitler is responding to Otto Wels, leader of the Social Democrats, who had made a speech in favour of "criticism", i.e. freedom of political opposition.
Hitler opens his response with a quotation from Schiller, "Spät kommt ihr, doch ihr kommt!"
1930s
Source: http://www.worldfuturefund.org/Reports2013/hitlerenablingact.htm
Source: https://www.zum.de/psm/ns/hitler11_macht.php

“Finding this quiet appropriation of my property a little too much, I took the liberty to ask for their return; they gravely replied that my diamond and other jewels were confiscated to the profit of Great Britain I returned sadly to my inn... I resigned myself, however, and slept the most profound sleep. I do not know what passed during the night; but the next morning, when I returned to the Custom House, I found the greatest change in manners and faces. The customs authorities spoke to me in the most respectful tone. They made a million excuses and gave me back my jewel box...”

Alessandro Cagliostro (1743–1795) Italian occultist

Cagliostro’s Letter to the English People (1787)

Sleep, Night, Housing, Box

“Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings. ...This means that they do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control. Rather, in this land of liberty, it is indisputable that current and former employees of the White House work for the People of the United States, and that they take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Moreover, as citizens of the United States, current and former senior-level presidential aides have constitutional rights, including the right to free speech, and they retain these rights even after they have transitioned back into private life.”

Ketanji Brown Jackson (1970) United States District Judge

Reference note: See The Federalist No. 51 (James Madison); The Federalist No. 69 (Alexander Hamilton); 1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America 115–18...
Committee on the Judiary, United States House of Representatives, Plaintiff, v. Donald F. McGahn II, Defendant. (Nov 25, 2019)

Life, Housing, History, Past

“After coming back to America, it was really a no-brainer. When we saw the Tea Party come from out of nowhere...we had the Russian perspective coming into it...It was very obvious. When we started connecting all the dots, it went right to Charles and David Koch.”

Yasha Levine journalist

Yasha Levine: using the web to fight 'journalistic malpractice', June 14, 2012 https://www.theverge.com/2012/6/14/3076664/yasha-levine-the-exiled-journalism-interview

Tea

“Putin firmly opposes U.S. policy toward Syria and the threat of force against Iran. But his opposition stems neither from anti-Americanism nor a desire to back the Iranian mullahs or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in their struggles with the West. It is rooted in his obsession with stability. Helping Tehran secure a nuclear weapon and keeping Assad in Damascus are not Putin’s goals. But an Israeli or U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, and NATO or the United Nations intervening in Syria to forcibly remove Assad, would increase global volatility.”

Fiona Hill (presidential advisor) (1965) American policy adviser

Dealing With the Real Putin, By Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/opinion/global/dealing-with-the-real-vladimir-putin.html (4 February 2013]

Help

“If, as is quite possible, America refuses to deal with the social evils that persist in the sixties, it will at the same time have turned its back on the racial minorities. There will be speeches on equality; there will be gains as the nation moves toward a constitutional definition of itself as egalitarian. The Negro will watch all this from a world of double poverty. He will continue to know himself as a member of a race-class condemned by heredity to be poor.”

Michael Harrington book The Other America

Source: The Other America (1962), p.81

World, Time, Evil

“People do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts. If it is for their salvation that they take arms against their oppressors, how can they be made o adopt a way of punishing them that would pose a new danger to themselves?”

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

Speech on the Trial of Louis XVI (Dec. 3, 1792)

Way, People, Justice, Law

“Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts. If it is for their salvation that they take arms against their oppressors, how can they be made to adopt a way of punishing them that would pose a new danger to themselves?”

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

Speech on the Trial of Louis XVI (Dec. 3, 1792)
Original: (fr) Les peuples ne jugent pas comme les cours judiciaires ; ils ne rendent point de sentences, ils lancent la foudre ; ils ne condamnent pas les rois, ils les replongent dans le néant : et cette justice vaut bien celle des tribunaux. Si c’est pour leur salut qu’ils s’arment contre leurs oppresseurs, comment seraient-ils tenus d’adopter un mode de les punir qui serait pour eux-mêmes un nouveau danger?

Justice, Law, Way, People

“There is no point in prioritizing doing your job when your organization faces being defunded in less than three months’ time if you don’t do something else: you do what’s necessary in order to ensure your organization survives, then you get back to work.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

This is how the iron law of bureaucracy installs itself at the heart of an institution. Most of the activities of any bureaucracy are devoted not to the organization’s ostensible goals, but to ensuring that the organization survives: because if they aren’t, the bureaucracy has a life expectancy measured in days before some idiot decision maker decides that if it’s no use to them they can make political hay by destroying it. It’s no consolation that some time later someone will realize that an organization was needed to carry out the original organization’s task, so a replacement is created: you still lost your job and the task went undone. The only sure way forward is to build an agency that looks to its own survival before it looks to its mission statement. Just another example of evolution in action.
Source: The Laundry Files, The Annihilation Score (2015), Chapter 16, “Democracy in Action” (pp. 311-312)

Time

“I bring everything I know to whatever I write, and I believe the same of other writers. A person’s complete life experience forms the basis of authorial voice, in my opinion. To hold back any part makes a narrative feel contrived.”

Tade Thompson British science fiction writer

On incorporating his medicine background into his writings in “Interview: Tade Thompson” http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-tade-thompson/ in Lightspeed Magazine (October 2017)

Personality, Life, Making love, Feeling

“The relationship between reader and writer in fiction is steeped in vulnerabilities. It really does require trust and faith because some books have the power to transform people. You feel like you can never go back, look at the world in the same way again. And that grand ambition is what I hope to do with my books because at the heart of my writing is a passion for telling stories of the oppressed, the marginalized, and the misunderstood.”

Randa Abdel-Fattah (1979) contemporary Australian writer of novels for young adults

On being a writer in “Both Freedom and Constraint: An Interview with Randa Abdel-Fattah” https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/both-freedom-and-constraint-an-interview-with in Words Without Borders (May 2015)

Faith, Hope, Heart, People

“It’s what I know best. It’s roots. It’s Dazed And Confused and Friday Night Lights. It’s border life and El Pato and Whataburger and getting drunk in a back of a pickup. It’s dancing every weekend to country music, or Tejano music, or club music. It’s the beach. It’s, for better or worse, home.”

Mando Alvarado actor

On how Texas influences his writings in “SIN MUROS: INTERVIEW WITH “LIVING SCULPTURE” PLAYWRIGHT MANDO ALVARADO” https://thetheatretimes.com/sin-muros-interview-living-sculpture-playwright-mando-alvarado/ in The Theatre Times

Home, Night, Country, Light

“Chicago for me means life. I have lived in Chicago all my life. It keeps calling me back even though I have tried to escape. Chicago is a city filled with some of the most corruption and also some of the most courageous and successful organizing resistance overall. Chicago will always affect how I represent myself when I travel. It is home…”

Kristiana Rae Colón (1986) American poet and playwright

On her relationship to the city of Chicago in “Aprils Fools and Their Universe: Kristiana Rae Colón and #LetUsBreathe Collective” http://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/aprils-fools-and-their-universe-kristiana-rae-colon-and-letusbreathe-collective/ in Sixty (2018 Oct 30)

Home, Courage, Success, Travel

“Reliance’s Big cinema had backed out as sponsors of MAMI as it was going through a massive financial crunch and there were rumours that it might shut down. ... From down-to-earth, genuine filmmakers like Shyam Benegal, the festival now was in the hands of corporates, critics, powerful people’s wives and their admirers. This was the year when MAMI officially transformed from a cinema lovers’ festival to a corporate club festival. I learnt this when I reached Chandan cinema with Pallavi for the closing award ceremony. We were official nominees, yet we were asked to sit in a corner seat in the tenth or twelfth row whereas the front rows were all occupied by commercial stars, star wives, their friends and people who are inconsequential to indie cinema. I was officially nominated; my wife Pallavi, besides being a senior actor is a national award winner and has been on the jury of the national awards, but nobody was ready to recognize those who did not make great press.”

Vivek Agnihotri (1973) director

Urban Naxals (2018)

Star, Making love, People, Lovers

“The question before the House is one of awful moment to this country. For my own part, I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery; and in proportion to the magnitude of the subject ought to be the freedom of the debate. It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings.”

Patrick Henry (1736–1799) attorney, planter, politician and Founding Father of the United States

Disputed, Give me liberty, or give me death! (1775)

God, Time, Housing, Country

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

Franz Bardon book Initiation Into Hermetics

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

Soul, Past, Bad luck, Knowledge

Alvin C. York (1887–1964) United States Army Medal of Honor recipient

Account of 8 October 1918
Diary of Alvin York

Problem, Help

“I hate that it breaks down that way. Your side and mine. One of my teachers back in school always used to say that contagion was the one absolute proof of community. People could pretend there weren’t drug users and prostitutes and unvaccinated children all they wanted, but when the plague came through, all that mattered was who was actually breathing your air.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Cibola Burn (2014), Chapter 27 (p. 277)

School, Hate, Children, People

“The proportions, the black hair, the dark eyes, everything was the same. Only, giant. It short-circuited his neural wiring. The lizard living at the back of his brain kept jumping back and forth between Mate with it! and Flee from it!”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 42 (p. 459)

“God has not made with two hearts within him. The incomparable Majesty who has conferred the boon of existence upon thee has placed within thee but one heart, to the end that with single heart thou mayest love Him alone, and mayest turn thy back on all besides and devote thyself to Him alone, and refrain from dividing thy heart into a hundred portions, each portion devoted to a different object.”

Jami (1414–1492) Persian poet

Lawāih, p. 20
Lawāih

God, Love, Heart, Making love

“We came to the bridge which had marked the terminal point of two previous attempts. On one of those attempts, King had turned his people back at this spot. On the other attempt, the state troopers had ridden into the crowd with clubs, and bullwhips, and tear gas. We paused there a moment, just to remember, and then we moved out on the highway. It was a divided highway, and the North side was reserved for us. Every few yards a soldier stood with a rifle and bayonet. Army cars drove ahead of us and behind us. In the air five helicopters circled endlessly, occasionally swooping down just above a clump of trees or bushes. Radios and walkie-talkies crackled orders back and forth. State troopers drove by in squad cars, two to a car. One drove, and the other quite ostentatiously took pictures of the marches. This is an Alabama form of intimidation. I kept remembering that these were the same state troopers who had two weeks earlier had ridden mercilessly into a defenseless mass of people! I marveled again at the power of the federal government whose presence stood between us and another massacre.”

Maurice Davis (1921–1993) American rabbi

Brotherhood Postponed (1965)

Tree, Cars, People, Tear

“Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

quote in Arp on Arp: poems, essays, memories, Viking, 1972, p. 231
Attributed from posthumous publications

Silence, Life

“It was very dispiriting because a lot of things needed to be done. One of the things that happened was, if you had a good rank-and-file activist in a trade union situation, they would make them an offer to become part of the staff—at which point the person was totally lost to the campaign where they were a catalyst and became part of an apparatus that was basically going nowhere. The odd thing is, despite The Permanent Revolution being on the bookshelves, they would explain everything by going back and finding a quote from Trotsky or from Lenin in order to explain things, as opposed to explaining how things were in the real world.... They were basically just living in their own universe as opposed to making real life connections.”

Henry Spira (1927–1998) American activist

Ethics Into Action: Henry Spira and The Animal Rights Movement by Peter Singer (1998).

Personality, Universe, Parting, World

“I thought back to Europe being invaded by the Nazi army with great sadness … For me, seeing Europe had been everything. When I came back to Cuba, I was taken aback by its nature, by the traditions of the Blacks, and by the transculturation of its African and Catholic religions. And so I began to orientate my paintings toward the African.”

Wifredo Lam (1902–1982) Cuban artist

On painting after returning to Cuba in “Wifredo Lam: Man of the World” https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/wifredo-lam-man-of-world (Tate; 2016 Aug 16)

Religion, Sadness, Painting, Nature

“Isn’t that funny: people wearing the mantle of the academic quest for knowledge who denounce the search for knowledge on the dogmatic plea that the outcome is known beforehand? …Even back then, given all the earlier evidence, everything indicated that something would be discovered. They themselves cannot have been ignorant of this, so their opposition was a deliberate attempt to obstruct the progress of scientific knowledge.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Ayodhya, the Finale (2003)

Knowledge, People, Search

“Islam has till today retained a lot of its medieval self- righteousness. While native Americans who claim back ancestral sacred places may have to confront economical interests, juridical technicalities or other small-human opposition against their demands, there is now hardly any ideologically motivated resistance against respecting their culture and their historical sensitivities. But in India, and in the countries which Islam has carved out of if, there is still a strong presence of an ideological drive to islamize India, and to make this clear by wresting all kinds of real and symbolical concessions from the Hindus, and by refusing them any concession whatsoever in return. The symbols of humiliation that have been inflicted on the Hindus, are being defended.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

1990s, Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991)

Country, Strong, Self-confidence, Motivation

“I hear so many complaints to the effect that Negroes do not take advantage of the educational opportunities offered them. Well, one of the reasons why more of my race do not go in for higher education is that as soon as one of us gets his head above the crowd there are millions of feet ready to crush it back again to that dead level of commonplace thus creating a racial deadline of culture in our Republic. For how am I to compete with other American artists if I am not to be given the same opportunity?”

Augusta Savage (1892–1962) American sculptor

On being denied a scholarship due to her race in “Sculptor Augusta Savage’s Towering Impact on the Harlem Renaissance” https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-sculptor-augusta-savages-towering-impact-harlem-renaissance in Artnet (2019 Apr 5)

Education, Dead

“Every Mexican family has a member that fought in the Revolution…There are stories in my family of two great uncles who fought on different sides and they would meet at my uncle’s land to share a meal and then they’d go back to the fight…The Revolution…it divided families.”

Nao Bustamante (1969) American artist

On the familial toll of the Mexican Revolution in “Femininity in Kevlar: Nao Bustamante’s women of the Mexican Revolution” https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-artist-nao-bustamante-women-of-the-mexican-revolution-20150513-column.html in Los Angeles Times (2015 May 14)

Fight, Family

“As a seasoned developer I have certain quirks, opinions, and common patterns that I fall back on. Having to explain to another person why I am approaching a problem in a particular way is really good for helping me break bad habits and challenge my assumptions, or for providing validation for good problem solving skills.”

Coraline Ada Ehmke technologist, activist, and transgender feminist

Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub https://where.coraline.codes/blog/my-year-at-github/ (July 5, 2017)

Personality, Bad luck, Help, Season

“Looking back on the history of these 30 years, one can well ask whether Hindu-Muslim unity has been realized? Whether efforts have not been made for its realization? And whether any efforts remain to be made? The history of the last 30 years shows that Hindu-Muslim unity has not been realized. On the contrary, there now exists the greatest disunity between them: that efforts—sincere and persistent—have been made to achieve it, and that nothing now remains to be done to achieve it except surrender by one party to the other. If anyone who is not in the habit of cultivating optimism where there is no justification for it, said that the pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity is like a mirage and that the idea must now be given up, no one can have the courage to call him a pessimist or an impatient idealist. It is for the Hindus to say whether they will engage themselves in this vain pursuit in spite of the tragic end of all their past endeavours, or give up the pursuit of unity and try for a settlement on another basis.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)

Courage, Optimism, History, Past

“There can thus be no manner of doubt that the Muslim Society in India is afflicted by the same social evils as afflict the Hindu Society. Indeed, the Muslims have all the social evils of the Hindus and something more. That something more is the compulsory system of purdah for Muslim women. As a consequence of the purdah system, a segregation of the Muslim women is brought about. The ladies are not expected to visit the outer rooms, verandahs, or gardens; their quarters are in the back-yard. All of them, young and old, are confined in the same room. …She cannot go even to the mosque to pray, and must wear burka (veil) whenever she has to go out. These burka women walking in the streets is one of the most hideous sights one can witness in India. Such seclusion cannot but have its deteriorating effects upon the physical constitution of Muslim women. They are usually victims to anaemia, tuberculosis, and pyorrhoea. Their bodies are deformed, with their backs bent, bones protruded, hands and feet crooked. Ribs, joints and nearly all their bones ache. Heart palpitation is very often present in them. The result of this pelvic deformity is untimely death at the time of delivery. Purdah deprives Muslim women of mental and moral nourishment. Being deprived of healthy social life, the process of moral degeneration must and does set in. Being completely secluded from the outer world, they engage their minds in petty family quarrels, with the result that they become narrow and restricted in their outlook. They lag behind their sisters from other communities, cannot take part in any outdoor activity and are weighed down by a slavish mentality and an inferiority complex. They have no desire for knowledge, because they are taught not to be interested in anything outside the four walls of the house. Purdah women in particular become helpless, timid, and unfit for any fight in life. … Not that purdah and the evils consequent thereon are not to be found among certain sections of the Hindus in certain parts of the country. But the point of distinction is that among the Muslims, purdah has a religious sanctity which it has not with the Hindus. Purdah has deeper roots among the Muslims than it has among the Hindus, and can only be removed by facing the inevitable conflict between religious injunctions and social needs. The problem of purdah is a real problem with the Muslims—apart from its origin—which it is not with the Hindus. Of any attempt by the Muslims to do away with it, there is no evidence.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)

Family, Time, Housing, Death

“There were the Chârvâkas, who preached horrible things, the most rank, undisguised materialism, such as in the nineteenth century they dare not openly preach. These Charvakas were allowed to preach from temple to temple, and city to city, that religion was all nonsense, that it was priestcraft, that the Vedas were the words and writings of fools, rogues, and demons, and that there was neither God nor an eternal soul. If there was a soul, why did it not come back after death drawn by the love of wife and child. Their idea was that if there was a soul it must still love after death, and want good things to eat and nice dress. Yet no one hurt these Charvakas.”

Charvaka An unorthodox school of Hindu philosophy

Swami Vivekananda as recorded in the complete works of Swami Vivekananda https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Works_of_Swami_Vivekananda/Volume_2/Jnana-Yoga/Maya_and_the_Evolution_of_the_Conception_of_God.

Hurt, God, Soul, Religion

“Shall they make rhymes upon us that we of Demonland, whom men repute and hold the mightiest lords in all the world, hung sheepishly back from this high needful enterprise lest, our greatest captains being abroad, our enemies might haply take us at home a disadvantage? It shall not be said of the women of Demonland that they upheld such counsels.”

Eric Rücker Eddison book The Worm Ouroboros

Mevrian, in Chapter 8, "The First Expedition to Impland"
The Worm Ouroboros (1922)

Home, World, Making love, Women

“Britain thought he could now go back to being just some English bloke and eating chips. It turns out this notion is utterly wrong, because when Martin walks into a room, I am rather startled to find that a stellar quality enters with him. His energy hits you from across the room: the intense stare, the piercing blue eyes, the feet that are usually barefoot nowadays.”

Chris Martin (1977) musician, co-founder of Coldplay

Sophie Heawood from 23 June, 2016 article on The Guardian.

“Everybody pick us for sixth place this year. The best way to prove to yourself this wrong is for Pirates to bounce back—to fight hard. I know something inside me explode when things are tough so I can do better.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Speaking with reporters on April 9, 1962 at F.O.E.'s Welcome Home Dinner; as quoted in "Sidelights on Sports" by Al Abrams, in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Wednesday, April 11, 1962), p. 24
Baseball-related, <big><big>1960s</big></big>

Way, Fight

“I have intentionally killed off a few people in my books, bullies who made life miserable for me in my schooldays and early teens when I couldn’t fight back. I have no plans to kill off any more – they are all dead now within my pages! However, I have a particular dislike of extremism. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, right or wrong. When anybody tries to shove their opinion down my throat as though their beliefs are gospel, it makes me angry.”

Guy N. Smith (1939–2020) British writer

Booksqawk Interview https://www.guynsmith.com/2014/10/booksqawk-interview/ (October 31, 2014)

Dead, People, Books, Fight

“The border is a notion too. It’s a mood. It’s a culture…after living seven years on the border, and I really was speaking in two tongues—I was dual person back then…”

Tanya Saracho Mexican-American actress, playwright and showrunner

On living on the border and how it affected her life in “An Interview with Tanya Saracho” https://www.theintervalny.com/interviews/2014/10/an-interview-with-tanya-saracho/ in The Interval (2014 Oct 29)

Personality, Mood

“They killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. Making them think the next sunrise would be worth it; that another stroke of time would do it at last. Only when she was dead would they be safe. The successful ones — the ones who had been there enough years to have maimed, mutilated, maybe even buried her — kept watch over the others who were still in her cock-teasing hug, caring and looking forward, remembering and looking back.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

Time, Dead, Success, Thinking

“His master stroke was to appoint Manmohan Singh as finance minister. He wanted a non-political reformer at the centre of decision-making, who could be backed or dumped as required. He presented Singh as the spearhead of reform while he himself advocated a middle path. Yet, ultimately, it was his vision that Singh executed.”

P. V. Narasimha Rao (1921–2004) Indian politician

Unsung hero of the India story

Making love, Decision

“Looking back, I may say that the government of the day made a wrong political judgment. Mr Narasimha Rao paid the price for this. The Congress party paid the price for this wrong political judgment. But it was induced by the lies and false promises of BJP.”

P. V. Narasimha Rao (1921–2004) Indian politician

Falseness

“He surely failed as prime minister to prevent the tragedy at Ayodhya. But his rivals in the Congress did their own party such disservice by spreading the canard that his (and their) government was responsible for that crime. This, more than anything else, lost them the Muslim vote in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar… any dispassionate reading of recent political history will tell you that this is a self-inflicted injury. The Congress has itself built a mythology whereby the Muslims have come to hold their party as responsible for Babri as the BJP … If you take Justice Liberhan’s indictment of so many in the BJP seriously, you cannot at the same time dismiss his exoneration of Rao, and the government, and the Congress Party under him. You surely cannot put the clock back on so much injustice done to him, like not even allowing his body to be taken inside the AICC building. But the least you can do now is to give him a memorial spot too along the Yamuna as one of our more significant (and secular) prime ministers who led us creditably through five difficult years, crafted our post-Cold War diplomacy, launched economic reform and, most significantly, discovered the political talent and promise of a quiet economist called Manmohan Singh.”

P. V. Narasimha Rao (1921–2004) Indian politician

Shekhar Gupta in Tearing down Narasimha Rao http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/tearingdownnarasimharao/547260/1, The Indian Express, 7 September 2011.

Time, Justice, Reading, History

“He could speak several Indian and foreign languages, he served under both Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv, as foreign, defence and home minister. His political activism dated back to the struggle for independence. also a poet and writer and after his retirement he wrote a book following the career of a person rising through the ranks of Indian politics.”

P. V. Narasimha Rao (1921–2004) Indian politician

BBC in: "Narasimha Rao - a reforming PM".

Home, Books, Personality

“Thirty-five years ago he and I were young men in London, with different outlooks, with different social surroundings, with different ideas about our careers, but an intimacy sprung up which was never checked…. Three things distinguished him then, as they did later: unflinching courage, a wide devotion to the State which always looked beyond himself, and an unshakable resolution when he had made up his mind. With these qualities Lord Curzon went to India as Viceroy. It is not necessary to agree about everything in his policy in order to appreciate how great an administrator Lord Curzon was there…. I know, not by his testimony but by the testimony of others, that by his courage and his determination to see justice done he redressed many an individual evil and put right much that a man of less energy and tenacity of purpose than himself could not have put right…. He was a man in a high sense of the word…. We shall look back upon his figure, we shall look back upon it as a figure which was that of a great Englishman, and we shall look back upon that figure with pride in our race.”

George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston (1859–1925) British politician

Lord Haldane in the House of Lords http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1925/mar/23/tribute-to-the-late-lord-curzon (23 March 1925). About Curzon

Courage, Justice, Sense, Idea

“A lot of people want to tell me their stories, and it’s not just the people who were alive back then. Though the play deals with AIDS, it’s about more than just the epidemic. It deals with things that plague gay men now. It’s very much about addiction, too. And the audience’s experiences run the gamut. And these audiences feel emboldened in the best way possible to not keep secrets. And they feel like they trust us enough to tell us their stories. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Matthew Lopez (playwright) (1978) American playwright

On the impact of The Inheritance in “PLAYWRIGHT MATTHEW LOPEZ WANTS TO HEAR YOUR STORIES” https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/matthew-lopez-the-inheritance-broadway-play-aids-gay-storytelling in Interview Magazine (2019 Nov 14)

Beauty, People, Secret, Way

“Every play is rhythmic control. If you want an audience to go on a journey, it’s rhythmic control. You’re crafting when they lean in, when they push back, when they breathe, when they surrender. It takes you probably five to six minutes to build trust with an audience. A musical you can build trust in three notes. Boom, boom, boom, you’re instantly seduced. So musicals have this easy potency, but generally, in my opinion, they waste them, because a musical is incredibly hard to do…”

George C. Wolfe (1954) American playwright

On a dramatic work having its own energy in “GEORGE C. WOLFE” https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/george-c-wolfe in Interview Magazine (2016 May 9)

Music

“Dick Cheney: I don’t know, Hugh. I vacillate between the various theories I’ve heard, but you know, if you had somebody as president who wanted to take America down, who wanted to fundamentally weaken our position in the world and reduce our capacity to influence events, turn our back on our allies and encourage our adversaries, it would look exactly like what Barack Obama’s doing. I think his actions are constituted in my mind those of the worst president we’ve ever had.”

Dick Cheney (1941) American politician and businessman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzmYQFaGEKU
Hugh Hewitt Radio
2015-04-08, quoted in [Cheney: If You Wanted a President 'To Take America Down … It Would Look Exactly Like What Barack Obama’s Doing, DANIEL HALPER, The Weekly Standard, http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/cheney-if-you-wanted-president-take-america-down-it-would-look-exactly-what-barack-obama-s-doing_912837.html, 2015-04-17]
Hewitt and Cheney discuss Obama's ongoing nuclear talks with Iran.
2010s, 2015

World, Thinking

“I believe in the British lion and I believe that the British character is lion-hearted, and I believe that it has not been lion-hearted in some of the post-War period, and I want it to get back to being lion hearted.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Second term as Prime Minister Source: Radio Interview for BBC Radio 3 (17 December 1985) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105934

War, Heart

“I have respect for the history of this House. There is nothing reprehensible in people recalling that some of the liberties of the people of this country enshrined in this House go back not merely to the conflicts of the seventeenth century, which will certainly apply to many of the matters with which we have to deal—the power over taxation which resides, or is still to reside, in this House—but to the controversies which prevailed in the House of Commons during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. If people say to me that all these are remote, old-fashioned ideas, I reply that they are as up-to-date as the ideas that brought the Labour Party into being.”

Michael Foot (1913–2010) British politician

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1972/feb/17/european-communities-bill#column_741 in the House of Commons (17 February 1972) 1970s

Housing, History, Country, People

“Like I said: the only god I believe in is coming back. And when he arrives, I’ll be waiting with a shotgun.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Epilogue, “On the Beach” (p. 301)
The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010)

God, Waiting

“Cultists. They’re like cockroaches. We humans are incredibly fine-tuned by evolution for the task of spotting coincidences and causal connections. It’s a very useful talent that dates back to the bad old days on the savannah (when noticing that there were lion prints by the watering hole and then cousin Ugg went missing, and today there are more lion prints and nobody had gone missing yet, was the kind of thing that could save your skin). But once we developed advanced lion countermeasures like stone axes and language, it turned into our secret curse. Because, you see, when we spot coincidences we assume there’s an intentional actor behind them—and that’s how we create religions. Nature does weird stuff, so it must be governed by supernature. There’s lightning in the clouds: Zeus must be throwing his thunderbolts again. Everyone’s dying of plague except those weird folks with the strange god who wash every day: it must be evil sorcery. And so on.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 8, “Club Zero” (p. 128)

God, Religion, Bad luck, Nature

“When we look back over the course of our nation’s history, what we see again and again almost like clockwork are these predictable efforts by the wealthy elite to use race as a wedge. To pit poor whites against poor people of color for the benefit of the ruling elite. Many people don’t realize that even slavery as an institution—the emergence of an all-Black system of slavery—was to a large extent the result of plantation owners deliberately trying to pit poor whites against poor Blacks. And ensure that poor whites would not join in any kind of resistance, movement, struggle, or revolt with poor Blacks…”

Michelle Alexander (1967) American lawyer, civil rights activist and writer

On the elite’s influence on the poor in in “The struggle for racial justice has a long way to go” https://isreview.org/issue/84/struggle-racial-justice-has-long-way-go in the International Socialist Review (May 2012)

Color, People, History, Effort

“I wrote the book just after Zimbabwe’s independence to encourage young Zimbabweans to develop themselves in spite of the challenges they would face doing so. There was also a lot of talk after independence of going back to one’s cultural roots. I wanted to interrogate that idea by examining aspects of the culture we were being told to go back to that affected women in my environment negatively. I was a newly minted feminist at the time and very eager. I also wanted to look at the ongoing effects of colonialism in the new dispensation. At the same time, I hoped to write a book that would be eminently readable, with recognizable characters.”

Tsitsi Dangarembga (1959) Zimbabwean author and filmmaker

On what she had hoped to convey with her first novel Nervous Conditions in “A Crisis of Personhood: Tsitsi Dangarembga by Bhakti Shringarpure” https://bombmagazine.org/articles/tsitsi-dangaremgba/ in BOMB Magazine (2019 Sep 27)

Time, Hope, Books, Idea

“I feared his visit. I was twenty-four, and the religious revival within myself was at its height. Earlier that summer, I had discovered Kierkegaard, and each week I brought back to the apartment one more of the Princeton University Press’s elegant and expensive editions of his works. They were beautiful books, sometimes very thick, sometimes very thin, always typographically exhilarating, with their welter of title pages, subheads, epigraphs, emphatic italics, italicized catchwords taken from German philosophy and too subtle for translation, translator’s prefaces and footnotes, and Kierkegaard’s own endless footnotes, blanketing pages at a time as, crippled, agonized by distinctions, he scribbled on and on, heaping irony on irony, curse on curse, gnashing, sneering, praising Jehovah in the privacy of his empty home in Copenhagen. The demons with which he wrestled—Hegel and his avatars—were unknown to me, so Kierkegaard at his desk seemed to me to be writhing in the clutches of phantoms, slapping at silent mosquitoes, twisting furiously to confront presences that were not there.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

The Astronomer by John Updike from Pigeon Feathers: and other stories p. 125 1959, 1962 Ballantine Books

Home, Time, Beauty, Universe

“One step forward, two steps back. … It happens in the lives of individuals, and it happens in the history of nations and in the development of parties. It would be the most criminal cowardice to doubt even for a moment the inevitable and complete triumph of the principle of revolutionary Social-Democracy, of proletarian organization and Party discipline. We have already won a great deal, and we must go on fighting, undismayed by reverses, fighting steadfastly, scorning the philistine methods of circle wrangling, doing our very utmost to preserve the hard-won single Party tie linking all Russian Social-Democrats, and striving by dint of persistent and systematic work to give all Party members, and the workers in particular, a full and conscious understanding of the duties of Party members, of the struggle and Second Party Congress, of all the causes and all the stages of our divergence, and of the utter and disastrousness of opportunism., which, in the sphere of our programme and our tactics, helplessly surrenders to the bourgeois psychology, uncritically adopts the point of view of bourgeois democracy, and blunts the weapon of the class struggle of the proletariat.”

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

Lenin Anthology, p. 119
1900s, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904)

Democracy, Fight, Understanding, History

“Watch John Blue give Rob Pearson a cross-check like you can’t believe. Watch this. He gets up, Pearson goes back, WHAM! Well what can you expect from a guy named Blue?”

Don Cherry (1934) ice hockey coach, television commentator

In the "Crease Crashers" segment of the Rock'Em Sock'Em Six hockey highlights video.

Guy

“We had this brilliant idea that we were going to come to Pakistan and create a force of mujaheddin, equip them with Stinger missiles and everything else, to go after the Soviets inside Afghanistan. And we were successful. The Soviets left Afghanistan. And then we said great, goodbye – leaving these trained people who were fanatical in Afghanistan and Pakistan, leaving them well armed, creating a mess, frankly, that at the time we didn’t really recognize. We were just so happy to see the Soviet Union fall and we thought, okay, fine, we’re okay now, everything’s going to be so much better. Now you look back; the people we’re fighting today we were supporting in the fight against the Soviets.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Interview With Greta Van Susteren of Fox News https://2009-2017.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2010/07/144969.htm, July 18, 2010 Secretary of State (2009–2013)

Time, Success, Support, People