Quotes about balance
page 4

“Although all human beings experience desires, all are not controlled by them. Those who are not controlled by desire maintain balance in their lives and can thereby attain higher levels of understanding.”

Scott Shaw (1958) American actor

The Warrior is Silent

Understanding

“We're adapted to the meta-reality, which means that we're adapted to that which remains constant across the longest spans of time. And that's not the same things that you see around you day to day. They're just like clouds, they're just evaporating, you know? There are things underneath that that are more fundamental realities, like the dominance hierarchy, like the tribe, like the danger outside of society, like the threat that other people pose to you, and the threat that you pose to yourself. Those are eternal realities, and we're adapted to those. That's our world, and that's why we express all those things in stories. Then you might say, well how do you adapt yourself to that world? The answer, and I believe this is a neurological answer, is that your brain can tell you when you're optimally situated between chaos and order. The way it tells you that is by producing the sense of engagement and meaning. Let's say that there's a place in the environment that you should be. So what should that place be? Well, you don't want to be terrified out of your skull. What good is that? And you don't want to be so comfortable that you might as well sleep. You want to be somewhere where you are kind of on firm ground with both of your feet, but you can take a step with one leg and test out new territory. Some of you who are exploratory and emotionally stable are going to go pretty far out there into the unexplored territory without destabilizing yourself. And some people are just going to put a toe in the chaos, and that's neuroticism basically - your sensitivity to threat that is calibrated differently in different people. And some people are more exploratory than others. That's extroversion and openness, and intelligence working together. Some people are going to tolerate more chaos in their mixture of chaos and order. Those are often liberals, by the way. They're more interested in novel chaos, and conservatives are more interested in the stabilization of the structures that already exist. Who's right? It depends on the situation. That's why liberals and conservatives have to talk to each other, because one of them isn't right and the other is wrong. Sometimes the liberals are right and sometimes the liberals are right, because the environment is unpredictable and constantly changing, so that's why you have to communicate. That's what a democracy does. It allows people of different temperamental types to communicate and to calibrate their societies. So let's say you're optimally balanced between chaos and order. What does that mean? Well, you're stable enough, but you're interested. A little novelty heightens your anxiety. It wakes you up a bit. That's the adventure part of it. But it also focuses the part of your brain that does exploratory activity, and that's associated with pleasure. That's the dopamine circuit. So if you're optimally balanced - and you know you're there if you're listening to an interesting conversation or you're engaged in one…you're saying some things that you know, and the other person is saying some things that they know - and what both of you know is changing. Music can model that. It provides you with multi-level predictable forms that can transform just the right amount. So music is a very representational art form. It says, 'this is what the universe is like.' There's a dancing element to it, repetitive, and then little variations that surprise you and produce excitement in you. In doesn't matter how nihilistic you are, music still infuses you with a sense of meaning because it models meaning. That's what it does. That's why we love it. And you can dance to it, which represents you putting yourself in harmony with these multiple layers of reality, and positioning yourself properly.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

"The selection pressure that women placed on men developed the entire species. There's two things that happened. The men competed for competence, since the male hierarchy is a mechanism that pushes the best men to the top. The effect of that is multiplied by the fact that women who are hypergamous peel from the top. And so the males who are the most competent are much more likely to leave offspring, which seems to have driven cortical expansion."
Concepts

Love, Women, Men, People

“The past is not more important than the future, despite what your culture has taught you. Your future observations, conclusions, and beliefs are more important to you than those in your past ever will be. The world is changing so fast the balance between the past and the future has shifted.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Usenet signatures

World, Change, Past, Future

“At each stage I reach a balance, a conclusion. At the next sitting, if I find that there is a weakness in the whole, I make my way back into the picture by means of the weakness — I re-enter through the breach — and I reconceive the whole. Thus everything becomes fluid again.”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

Statement by Matisse to Tériade; as quoted by Tériade in 'Constance de Fauvisme', in 'Minotaure' (15 October 1936), translated by Jack Flam in Matisse on Art (1995)
1930s

Way

“I will be the answer
At the end of the line.
I will be there for you,
Why take the time?
In the burning of uncertainty,
I will be your solid ground.
I will hold the balance
If you can't look down.”

Sarah McLachlan (1968) Canadian musician, singer, and songwriter

Answer
Song lyrics, Afterglow (2003)

Time

“people see me
I'm a challenge to your balance
I'm over your heads
how I confound you and astound you”

Natalie Merchant (1963) American singer-songwriter

Song lyrics, Tigerlily (1995), Wonder

People

“TV is unbalanced—if I own a TV station, and you own a television, I can speak to you, but you can’t speak to me. Phones, by contrast, are balanced; if you buy the means of consumption, you automatically own the means of production. When you purchase a phone, no one asks if you just want to listen, or if you want to talk on it too. Participation is inherent in the phone, and it’s the same for the computer. When you buy a machine that lets you consume digital content, you also buy a machine to produce it. Further, you can share material with your friends, and you can talk about what you consumed or produced or shared. These aren’t additional features; they are part of the basic package.”

Clay Shirky (1964) American technology writer

Cognitive Surplus : Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2010)

Parting

“Apple is balancing on a knife edge. I think we're looking at the end stage of a successful technology disruption on the classic pattern. The question is no longer whether Android can be stopped, but when Apple's market share will fall off a cliff. I think that could easily happen as soon as the next 90 days.”

Eric S. Raymond (1957) American computer programmer, author, and advocate for the open source movement

The Smartphone Wars: multicarrier breakout fail http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3152 in Armed and Dangerous (21 April 2011)

Question, Thinking, Success

“In lectures, it is important that you lecture simply. We are interested in the smartest students, and we really should take care of those who have most difficulties to understand certain concepts. I try to balance it.”

Marek Sanak (1958) Polish scientist

Kobos, Andrzej (2012). Po drogach uczonych. 5. Polska Akademia Umiejętności. pp. 317–335. ISBN 978-83-7676-127-5.

Understanding

“The general character of our solution must be, therefore, that it withdraws from expenditure a proportion of the increased earnings. This is the only way, apart from shortages of goods or higher prices, by which we can secure a balance between money to be spent and goods to be bought.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Source: How to Pay for the War (1940), Ch. 2 : The Character of the Solution

Money, Way

“Centuries of growth in advanced economies have left little carbon space for the developing world, challenging their growth. The thin lines of balancing economic development and protection of the environment will remain a great challenge in future development policy-setting. It is therefore critical that developed countries honour their commitments and compensate damage to the environment, on the basis of common but differentiated responsibilities.”

Mahinda Rajapaksa (1945) Prime Minister of Sri Lanka

United Nations, Sri "Lanka urges UN to study global inequality, failure to lift millions out of poverty" http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp/html/story.asp?NewsID=45978&Cr=general+assembly&Cr1=, 24 September 2013.

World, Future, Country

“Summer is the season when the sun reaches its zenith, its peak, when it burns the hottest and shines most golden for the longest days of the year… It embraces everything with its light, spreads a blanket of reassuring warmth, induces fertility and growth and regeneration, and even causes rainstorms to balance its own overwhelming power. Michael Jackson was very much like that with an abundance of creative spiritual energies that enriched, inspired, and empowered the lives of more human beings than anyone can accurately count.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(from essay Michael Jackson and Summertime from this Point On).
From Articles, Essays, and Poems, On Michael Jackson

Light, Sun, Summer, Season

“No system of balance functions automatically.”

Kenneth N. Waltz book Man, the State, and War

Source: Man, the State, and War (1959), Chapter VII, Some Implications Of The Third Image, p. 210

“We will be able to depart this life with the quiet peace-giving notion, that we were permitted to contribute to the happiness of many who will live after us. In our long lives we endeavored to unfold the collective consciousness. In our lives we have known hell and heaven; the final balance, however, is that we helped pave the way to dynamic harmony in this earthly house. That, I believe, is the meaning of this live.”

Reinout Willem van Bemmelen (1904–1983) Dutch geologist

Letter to a friend, July 1981 cited in: "In Memoriam R. W. van Bemmelen," Geologie en Mijnbouw, Vol 63, No. 1 (1984); Reprinted online at Tectonics and Sedimentation of Indonesia http://fosi.iagi.or.id/tecsed/tecsed-inmemoriam.htm website, 1999.

Life, Happiness, Peace, Way

“Human interactions, stimulated as they are by disequilibrium, never achieve balance. In even the most favorable transaction, one party—whether he realizes it or not—must always come out the worse.”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

"Morreion" (first published in Flashing Swords #1, March 1973), chapter 4
Dying Earth (1950-1984), Rhialto the Marvellous (1984)

“The historic role of the Conservative Party is to use the leverage of its political and diplomatic skills to create a fresh balance between the different elements within the state at those times when, for one reason or another, their imbalance threatens to disrupt the orderly development of society.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

Newspaper article, February 1975.[citation needed]
Post-Prime Ministerial

Time

“At a time when pimpery, lick-spittlery, and picking the public's pocket are the order of the day — indeed, officially proclaimed as virtue — the poet must play the madcap to keep his balance. And ours.”

Studs Terkel (1912–2008) American author, historian and broadcaster

On Nelson Algren, Talking to Myself Bk. 4 (1973)

Time

“Your body will never be more connected to your mind than when something is at stake. That's how you measure the value of a movement: by its consequences. Climb a tree, throw a rock, balance on the edge of a cliff-- you lose focus for a fraction of a second, you're screwed. It takes a very affluent and indulged culture to convince itself that standing around in weird poses is exercise.”

Erwan Le Corre (1971)

Christopher McDougall (2015). Natural Born Heroes: How A Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance, Vintage.

Exercises, Tree

“You mention the circle and I agree with your definition.... why does the circle fascinates me? It is (1) the most modern form, but asserts itself unconditionally, (2) a precise but inexhaustible variable, (3) simultaneously stable and unstable, (4) simultaneously loud and soft, (5) a single tension that caries countless tensions within it. The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form, and in balance. Of the three primary forms (triangle, square, circle), it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote from Kandinsky's letter to Will Grohmann, c. 1926; as cited in Kandinsky, Frank Whitford, Paul Hamlyn Ltd, London 1967, p. 36
1920 - 1930

“Kapila's arguments are listed [by Dr. Ambedkar], and the last one introduces yet another fundamental concept of Buddhism: suffering (dukkha). It is brought in from an unusual angle: 'Kapila argued that the process of development of the unevolved is through the activities of three constituents of which it is made up, Sattva, Rajas and Tamas. These are called three Gunas. [Sattva is] light in nature, which reveals, which causes pleasure to men; [Rajas is] what impels and moves, what produces activity; [Tamas is] what is heavy and puts under restraint, what produces the state of indifference or inactivity (') When the three Gunas are in perfect balance, none overpowering the other, the universe appears static (achetan) and ceases to evolve. When the three Gunas are not in balance, one overpowers the other, the universe becomes dynamic (sachetan) and evolution begins. Asked why the Gunas become unbalanced, the answer which Kapila gave was that this disturbance in the balance of the three Gunas was due to the presence of Dukkha (suffering).”

Kapila Vedic sage, of the Samkhya school of Hindu philosophy

Buddhism is quite close to the Samkhya-Yoga viewpoint: to Samkhya for its philosophical framework, to Yoga for its methods of meditation.
Quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2002). Who is a Hindu?: Hindu revivalist views of Animism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and other offshoots of Hinduism. ISBN 978-8185990743, with quote from Ambedkar: The Buddha and his Dhamma, 1:5:2.

Men, Pleasure, Nature, Light

“The charge of "sentimentalism" is frequently brought against those who plead for animals' rights. Now "sentimentalism," if any meaning at all can be attached to the word, must signify an inequality, an ill balance of sentiment, an inconsistency which leads men into attacking one abuse, while they ignore or condone another where a reform is equally desirable. That this weakness is often observable among "philanthropists" on the one hand, and "friends of animals" on the other, and most of all among those acute "men of the world," whose regard is only for themselves, I am not concerned to deny; what I wish to point out is, that the only real safeguard against sentimentality is to take up a consistent position towards the rights of men and of the lower animals alike, and to cultivate a broad sense of universal justice (not "mercy") for all living things. Herein, and herein alone, is to be sought the true sanity of temperament.”

Henry Stephens Salt (1851–1939) British activist

Source: Animals' Rights, Chapter 1

Men, World, Justice, Sense

“An organic system is like a fountain balanced upon a pyramid of fountains.”

William Foote Whyte (1914–2000) American sociologist

Source: Human relations in the restaurant industry. 1948, p. 49

“I'm not too interested in these swan songs I'm continuing to hear. I'm just Mike. I'm a peasant. I'm here to entertain the people. I'm no elite person. At one stage in my life, I had my little jewelry and all my little girlfriends and my big cars and things. At one point, I thought life was about acquiring things. But as a I get older life is totally about losing everything. As life goes on, we lose more than we acquire. I don't want the finest girl in the world anymore. I'm just trying to stay balanced, basically.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

As quoted in USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/sports/boxing/2005-06-12-tyson-retire-talk_x.htm (2005). Reported in The New Yorker as: “At one point, I thought life was about acquiring things. Life is totally about losing everything.” http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/06/27/050627ta_talk_remnick On himself

Life, People, World, Cars

“The defects of German philosophy are those of professionalism: a closed atmosphere, books instead of life, inability to communicate discoveries to the world at large, contempt for good style, inbreeding, lack of general culture, gruesome earnestness. The defects of the cultured philosophe are those of amateurism: too many interests, superficiality, the cultivation of good style as an end in itself, the sacrifice of truth to wit, lack of intellectual honesty, philosophizing but no philosophy, inconsistency. Nietzsche achieves a balance between these two types of mind and two styles of expression: he is profound but not obscure; he aims at good style but reconciles it with good thinking; he is serious but not earnest; he is a sensitive critic of the arts and of culture but not an aesthete; he is an aphorist and epigrammist, but his aphorisms and epigrams derive from a consistent philosophy; he is the wittiest of philosophers, but he rarely succumbs to the temptation to sacrifice truth to a witty phrase; he has many interests but never loses sight of his main interests. He achieves, especially in his later works, a conciseness and limpidity notoriously rare in German writing: no modern thinker of a like profundity has had at his command so flexible an instrument of expression.”

R. J. Hollingdale (1930–2001) British Author

1. The Child
Nietzsche (1965, 1999)

Life, Truth, Books, World

“Anyone who loves nature, as I do, cries out at the havoc being spread by humans, all over the globe. The pressures of city life can be appalling, as are the moral ambiguities that plague us, both at home and via yammering media. The temptation to seek uncomplicated certainty sends some rushing off to ashrams and crystal therapy, while many dive into the shelter of fundamentalism, and other folk yearn for better, “simpler” times. Certain popular writers urgently prescribe returning to ancient, nobler ways.
Ancient, nobler ways. It is a lovely image... and pretty much a lie. John Perlin, in his book A Forest Journey, tells how each prior culture, from tribal to pastoral to urban, wreaked calamities upon its own people and environment. I have been to Easter Island and seen the desert its native peoples wrought there. The greater harm we do today is due to our vast power and numbers, not something intrinsically vile about modern humankind.
Technology produces more food and comfort and lets fewer babies die. “Returning to older ways” would restore some balance all right, but entail a holocaust of untold proportion, followed by resumption of a kind of grinding misery never experienced by those who now wistfully toss off medieval fantasies and neolithic romances. A way of life that was nasty, brutish, and nearly always catastrophic for women.
That is not to say the pastoral image doesn’t offer hope. By extolling nature and a lifestyle closer to the Earth, some writers may be helping to create the very sort of wisdom they imagine to have existed in the past. Someday, truly idyllic pastoral cultures may be deliberately designed with the goal of providing placid and just happiness for all, while retaining enough technology to keep existence decent.
But to get there the path lies forward, not by diving into a dark, dank, miserable past. There is but one path to the gracious, ecologically sound, serene pastoralism sought by so many. That route passes, ironically, through successful consummation of this, our first and last chance, our scientific age.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Afterword (p. 563)
Glory Season (1993)

Love, Life, Wisdom, Women

“See how involved it gets? Clover, bees, nitrogen, escape speed, power, plant-animal balance, gas laws, compound interest laws, meteorology—a mathematical ecologist has to think of everything and think of it ahead of time. Ecology is explosive; what seems like a minor and harmless invasion can change the whole balance.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Farmer in the Sky

Source: Farmer in the Sky (1950), Chapter 12, “Bees and Zeroes” (p. 125)

Law, Mathematics, Thinking, Bee

“As Jews presently enjoy a disproportionate share of the wholesale and retail trade, such a balanced distribution can be achieved only by refusing them further trading licenses, until such a time as the other main population groups, such as English- and Afrikaans-speakers, have gained a proportion which (as far as practicable) corresponds to their percentage of the white population. … Of course, the discrimination must disappear as soon as the correct balance (ewewigtige toestand) has been achieved.”

Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966) Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 until his assassination in 1966

As editor of Die Transvaler on 1 October 1937, 10 quotes by Hendrik Verwoerd (Politics Web) https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/hendrik-verwoerd-10-quotes-hendrik-verwoerd-politics-web-20-september-2016, sahistory.org.za (20 September 2016)

Time

“Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 469

Faith

“As for the article, much has changed in 32 years and much has not. The essential argument holds: no set of realistically achievable geographic borders produces safety for Israel. Rather, the security requirement is that any of the territory taken in the Six-Day War and given back as part of a peace settlement should be effectively demilitarized. Of course, the Sinai Peninsula was returned to Egypt long ago in exactly this way, resulting in relative quiet along Israel's southern border and creating a fundamental shift in the regional balance of forces. This opportunity was not skillfully exploited, so the result has been a "cold peace."”

Merrill McPeak (1936) United States Air Force general

But it is nevertheless peace and has served the interests of both sides.
How to Secure Israel: Demilitarized land for peace is the key to a settlement (April 2008)

War, Peace, Way, Change

“Harry Dresden: As I pulled into the parking lot, I reflected that odds were that not a lot of clandestine meetings involving mystical assassination, theft of arcane power, and the balance of power in the realms of the supernatural had taken place in a Wal-Mart Super Center. But then again, maybe they had. Hell, for all I knew, the Mole Men used the changing rooms as a place to discuss plans for world domination with the Psychic Jellyfish from Planet X and the Disembodied Brains-in-a-Jar from the Klaatuu Nebula. I know I wouldn’t have looked for them there.”

Jim Butcher The Dresden Files

Source: The Dresden Files, Summer Knight (2002), Chapter 18

Men, World, Hell, Change

“The hymns were unfamiliar to him, but he quickly picked up the general beat. The hymns had a redundant simplicity; the same phrases and tones appeared and reappeared. The same monotonous ideas, repeated indefinitely. The appetite of (Tetragrammaton) was insatiable, he concluded. A childish, nebulous personality that required constant praise—and in the most obvious terms. Quick to anger, (Tetragrammaton) was equally quick to sink into euphoria, was eager and ready to lap up these blatant flatteries.
A balance. A method of lulling the Deity. But what a delicate mechanism. Danger for everyone…The easily-aroused Presence that was always nearby. Always listening.”

Philip K. Dick book Eye in the Sky

Source: Eye in the Sky (1957), Chapter 7 (pp. 97-98)

Idea, Appearance, Personality, Anger

“The great joy of being a prosecutor is that you don’t take whatever case walks in the door. You evaluate the case, you make your best judgement, you only go forward if you believe that the defendant is guilty. You may well be wrong, but you have done your best to ensure that as far as the evidence that you are able to attain, the person is guilty. It is the kind of even-handed balancing that a judge should undertake although of course a judge has the advantage of having somebody speak for the other side.”

Merrick Garland (1952) American judge

[Merrick Garland, Confirmation hearing on nomination of Merrick Garland to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, United States Senate, December 1, 1995]; quote excerpted in:
[March 18, 2016, http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2016/03/16/judge-merrick-garland-in-his-own-words/, Judge Merrick Garland, In His Own Words, Joe Palazzolo, March 16, 2016, The Wall Street Journal]
Confirmation hearing on nomination to United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (1995)

Joy, Personality

“As a metaphor - and I stress that it is intended as a metaphor - the concept of an invariant that arises out of mutually or cyclically balancing changes may help us to approach the concept of self. In cybernetics this metaphor is implemented in the ‘closed loop’, the circular arrangement of feedback mechanisms that maintain a given value within certain limits. They work toward an invariant, but the invariant is achieved not by a steady resistance, the way a rock stands unmoved in the wind, but by compensation over time. Whenever we happen to look in a feedback loop, we find the present act pitted against the immediate past, but already on the way to being compensated itself by the immediate future. The invariant the system achieves can, therefore, never be found or frozen in a single element because, by its very nature, it consists in one or more relationships - and relationships are not in things but between them.
If the self, as I suggest, is a relational entity, it cannot have a locus in the world of experiential objects. It does not reside in the heart, as Aristotle thought, nor in the brain, as we tend to think today. It resides in no place at all, but merely manifests itself in the continuity of our acts of differentiating and relating and in the intuitive certainty we have that our experience is truly ours.”

Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010) German philosopher

Source: Cybernetics, Experience and the Concept of Self, 1970, pp.186-7 cited in: Vincent Kenny (2010) Remembering Ernst von Glasersfeld http://www.oikos.org/vonen.htm at oikos.org, retrieved Oct 11, 2012.

World, Way, Nature, Thinking

“I saw us as coming from a source self, free of space and time, into this reality. The focus personality (or the self we know) focuses in this life, but is also composed of of other Aspects or parts of the source self that are latent within the psyche, though "alive" in other realities. These form the basic structure of the psyche from which the focus personality emerges. I call these "prime Aspects." A harmonious working relationship between these prime Aspects results in a well-balanced focus personality -- one that is reasonably happy, healthy, and creative.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book (1976), p. 197

Life, Happiness, Reality, Time

“When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.”

Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) French politician

Conversation with Jean Martet (1 January 1928), Ch. 12
Clemenceau, The Events of His Life (1930)

Thinking

“It's wonderful to be part of a place that so values fair and balanced news.”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

On joining FOX News, quoted in [2010-01-11, Sarah Palin signs on as a commentator with Fox News, BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8453223.stm]
2014

Parting

“An artist using statistics as a brush could paint two very different pictures of our country. One would have warning signs: increasing layoffs, rising energy prices, too many failing schools, persistent poverty, the stubborn vestiges of racism. Another picture would be full of blessings: a balanced budget, big surpluses, a military that is second to none, a country at peace with its neighbors, technology that is revolutionizing the world, and our greatest strength, concerned citizens who care for our country and care for each other.”

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

2000s, 2001, Address to Joint Session of Congress on Administration Goals (February 2001)

World, School, Peace, Painting

“She staggers over to the bathroom door and grabs the edge of it to balance herself and blood starts running down her legs in thin rivulets and when she lifts up the robe we both can see her underwear soaked with blood and she pulls it off, panicking, and suddenly a huge gush of blood expels itself from beneath the robe, splashing all over the bathroom floor.She gasps, a thick noise comes out of her throat and she doubles over, grabbing her stomach, then she screams. Looking surprised and still clutching her stomach, she vomits will staggering backwards, collapsing onto the bathroom floor. There are strands of tissue hanging out of her.”

Bret Easton Ellis book Glamorama

Glamorama (1998)

“The events of these last few days constitute one of the greatest diplomatic defeats that this country and France have ever sustained. There can be no doubt that it is a tremendous victory for Herr Hitler. Without firing a shot, by the mere display of military force, he has achieved a dominating position in Europe which Germany failed to win after four years of war. He has overturned the balance of power in Europe. He has destroyed the last fortress of democracy in Eastern Europe which stood in the way of his ambition.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1938/oct/03/prime-ministers-statement#column_52 in the House of Commons (3 October 1938) against the Munich Agreement. 1930s

War, Way, Democracy, Victory

“With The Dark Knight you had to strike a balance of familiarity with the audience. It is a sequel, and they want familiar elements, things they liked from the first film. But you always have to be very aware that the audience is extremely ruthless in its demand for newness, novelty and freshness. At script stage, we really tried to thrash that out—are we striking that right balance?”

Christopher Nolan (1970) British–American film director, screenwriter, and producer

Chris Nolan Q&A About 'Inception' http://deadline.com/2011/01/oscar-christopher-nolan-qa-inceptions-writer-director-is-a-hollwood-original-94704

“To gain control over this resource, and have probably military bases there, is a tremendous achievement for world control. You read counter-arguments to this, and they're worth looking at. So it's argued that it can't be true, because the costs of reconstruction are going to be greater than the profits that will be made. Well, maybe that's true, maybe it isn't, but it's totally irrelevant. And the reason is because the costs of reconstruction are going to be paid by the taxpayer, by you, and the profits are going to go right into the pockets of the energy corporations. So yeah, it doesn't matter how they balance out, it's just another taxpayer subsidy to the rich.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

KGNU benefit at the University of Colorado at Boulder, April 5, 2003 http://www.freespeech.org/fscm2/contentviewer.php?content_id=418 Quotes 2000s, 2003

World, Reading

“Linking the basic parts are communication, balance or system parts maintained in harmonious relationship with each other and decision making. The system theory include both man-machine and interpersonal relationships. Goals, man, machine, method, and process are woven together into a dynamic unity which reacts…”

George R. Terry (1909–1979)

Source: Principles of Management, 1960, p. 284 (6th ed. 1971)

Communication, Decision, Parting

“No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music, and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive, and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

Letter to Robert Bridges (15 February 1879)
Letters, etc

Hope, Music, Time, Painting

“Certain it is, however, that this great power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world, without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance.”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

Hawthorne and His Mosses (1850)

World, Mood, Thinking, Sense

“A new view of the role of art and science in cartography is clearly needed. It is probably a mistake to view maps as objects that contain varied amounts of scientific or artistic content for which we must determine an appropriate balance (as both Keates, 1984, and Robinson, 1952, seem to, with Keates arguing for more art and Robinson for more science). Instead, it makes more sense to consider complementary artistic and scientific approaches to studying and improving maps, both of which can be applied to any given cartographic problem. The artistic approach is intuitive and holistic, achieving improvements through experience supplemented by critical examination (where critical examination implies expert appraisal of the results of our cartographic decision-making efforts). It draws on science in using perspective, understanding of human vision, color theory, and so on.”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

Source: How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995), p. 9

Art, Color, Understanding, Problem

“The thing that worries me about the computer age is the fact that people know so much about you. It's an incredible invasion of privacy. And no matter where you are in the world people can monitor you if you're using your credit card. I heard this weird rumor on the Internet about how the military is funding this great big research project and basically, they believe that in the future, the balance of power won't be determined by who has the most nuclear weapons, but by who has all the information. I'm not afraid of being taken over by computers though, because the thing is, computers cannot resist. You can always smash 'em up, and they're totally defenseless. All we need are more people with hammers.”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

source http://radiohead1.tripod.com/band/thomquotes.htm

People, Age, World, Future

“My classmates were spinning their fantasies for the future: lawyer, ethnobotanist, Buddhist monk (it was a very progressive high school). Even the dumb, uninteresting ones who were there to provide “balance” looked forward to their marriages and their children. I knew I wasn’t going to have any of this because I knew I didn’t want it. But did that mean I would have nothing? I was the first person in the history of the school not to go to college.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Girl, Interrupted (1994)

Marriage, Children, School, History

“Cognitive consonance is what writing in the Age of the idiot is all about. The key to success in the scribbling profession is to strike the right balance of mediocrity in writing and thinking, which invariably entails echoing one of two party lines, poorly.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“National Review Eunuchs,” http://rt.com/op-edge/paleolibertarian-column-ilana-mercer/national-review-john-derbyshire RT, April 13, 2012. 2010s, 2012

Age, Thinking, Success

“To shoot a grouse exacts something from the thinking man. It requires principle, which like good manners is not old-fashioned and never has been. It is something in your heart and in your head. The perceptive gunner is immersed in the style and charm of his dog’s work and in the shot, but with it all, he is one with what happens to the bird. His shooting is not vindictive, a getting-even because the grouse is so hard to hit. To regret a miss is normal animal response to temporary failure, not to be confused with sentient “the bastard got away.” Emotions are drawn to such thin threads they reach the breaking point, but when finely-honed tensions balance, shooting becomes a spiritual thing between you and the grouse.”

George Bird Evans (1906–1998) American writer

An Affair with Grouse (1982)

Dogs, Fashion, Failure, Bird

“No matter what coercive powers of enforcement governments may assert, the peoples in country after country in all ages have demonstrated that Man was meant to be free but that this ideal can be realized only under the rule of law. And this must be a rule that places restraints on individuals and on governments alike. This is a delicate, a fragile, balance to maintain. It is fragile because it is sustained only by an ideal that requires each person in society, by an exercise of free will, to accept and abide the restraints of a structure of laws.”

Warren E. Burger (1907–1995) Chief Justice of the United States from 1969 to 1986

Reported in The Episcopalian: Volume 138 (1973), p. 12.

People, Age, Law, Exercises

“My dad's a beautiful man, but like a lot of Mexican men, or men in general, a lot of men have a problem with the balance of masculinity and femininity--intuition and compassion and tenderness--and get overboard with the macho thing. It took him a while to become more, I would say, conscious, evolved.”

Carlos Santana (1947) Mexican and American rock musician

Carlos Santana on his father.http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0GER/is_2000_Summer/ai_63500762

Men, Beauty, Problem

“Many things can cause a loss of balance. One cause is danger, another is hardship, and another is surprise. You must research this.
In large-scale strategy it is important to cause loss of balance. Attack without warning where the enemy is not expecting it, and while his spirit is undecided follow up your advantage and, having the lead, defeat him.”

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

Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Fire Book

Loss

“I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the first amendment's guarantees of religious liberty. Nor would our system of checks and balances permit him to do so — and neither do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test — even by indirection — for it. If they disagree with that safeguard they should be out openly working to repeal it.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1960, Speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association

“In recent weeks, we have taken bold steps to prevent a severe disruption of the American economy, which would have a devastating effect on other economies around the world. We've promoted stability in the markets by preventing the disorderly failure of major companies. The Federal Reserve has injected urgently needed liquidity into the system. And last week, I announced a decisive action by the federal government to address the root cause of much of the instability in our financial markets, by purchasing illiquid assets that are weighing down balance sheets and restricting the flow of credit. I can assure you that my administration and our Congress are working together to quickly pass legislation approving this strategy, and I'm confident we will act in the urgent time frame required.”

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

2000s, 2008, Address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 2008)

World, Confidence, Failure, Decision

“The cognitive functioning of a human brain depends on a delicate orchestration of many factors, especially during the critical stages of embryo development—and it is much more likely that this self-organizing structure, to be enhanced, needs to be carefully balanced, tuned, and cultivated rather than simply flooded with some extraneous potion.”

Nick Bostrom book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Source: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), Ch. 2

Dependency

“In this country, Fox News has gotten a big, big audience that appreciates its independence. There's passion there, and it's pushed. … It has taken a long boot time, but it has now changed CNN because it has challenged them — they've become more centrist in their choice of stories. They're trying to become, using our phrase, more fair and balanced.”

Rupert Murdoch (1931) Australian-American media mogul

citation needed

Passion, Change, Time, Country

“You want to do something that shows some type individuality and talent and imagination ¿ at the same time, you want to be truthful to the predecessors, because obviously the audience liked something about them and you have to replicate that experience to a certain extent. Not to just go ahead and make something that¿s completely different and ruin a franchise. At the same time, you don't want to be embarrassed in front of your peers and look like you¿re just copying something, and there's nothing individual. It's a very tricky balance. There are pressures, because you¿re going to be compared to the predecessors.”

Renny Harlin (1959) Finnish film director and film producer

Interview With Renny Harlin http://www.ign.com/articles/2001/04/27/interview-with-renny-harlin (April 27, 2001)

Truth, Imagination, Time

“But for us there are moments, O, how solemn, when destiny trembles in the balance, and the preponderance of either scale is by our own choice.”

Mark Hopkins (educator) (1802–1887) American educationalist and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 53.

“I think that if people look deeply enough into their trading patterns, they find that, on balance, including all their goals, they are really getting what they want, even though they may not understand it or want to admit it.”

Ed Seykota (1946) American commodities trader

Source: Schwager, Market Wizards, page 172, Read it here http://books.google.com/books?id=jNG7r-Ul7jwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=market+wizards&ei=stanR4q2LKTeiQGMxbFo&sig=8NhAQMHBUZCiBzaJjF4o2ZcOGMY#PPA172,M1

People, Understanding, Thinking

“We believe that capitalism, and unfettered capitalism poses a threat to human existence through the commodification of the person and nature. And we believe in defending people and nature through democratic association, and confronting and constraining the domination of capital through building a balance of interests in corporate governance and public sector. We take on, we’ve taken on the banks in the city of London. That’s who we are.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Interview with Australian Fabians: http://www.fabians.org.au/interview_with_maurice_glasman

People, Nature, Personality

“Mattei pushed hard for a line of detachment, of critical participation in NATO and even of getting out of NATO and into a neutralist position. Mattei therefore not only annoyed the United States with his oil deals in the Middle East, which broke up the balance of the international oil cartel, and broke up the price equilibrium, but it was Mattei who pushed even harder for Italy's entire policy to take its distance from the United States and to open up toward the Third World countries, which were traveling in a certain way along a road similar to the painful and laborious road which Italy had had to travel. Mattei was very sensitive to these problems, because he had been a witness to this difficult road of Italy's and had had great difficulties at the beginning of his career. So he knew what it meant for a country to free itself from the colonial yoke and find its own way, its own balance, and a way of arranging its own economy which would not be an economy of pure exploitation by the great powers”

Nico Perrone (1935) Italian historian and writer

Source: The Strategic Stakes in Mattei's Flight, p. 23

Pain, World, Way, Travel

“Ad Aertsen succeeds in allowing his sense of humour to shine through the deep seriousness of his scientific ethos. He also has a very balanced attitude to the question of "theory or experiment."”

Valentino Braitenberg (1926–2011) Italian-Austrian neuroscientist

Braitenberg cited in: " Ad Aertsen - an expedition into the brain http://www.bcf.uni-freiburg.de/press/before-2010/articles/aa-exped-en.pdf" uni-freiburg.de, 2010

Question, Sense

“[Magna Carta provided] “a system of checks and balances which would accord the monarchy its necessary strength, but would prevent its perversion by a tyrant or a fool.””

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

Magna Carta and Man’s Quest for Freedom, JW.org http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/102002924?q=Churchill&p=par Post-war years (1945–1955)

Fools

“Socialism knows that revolutionary upheavals and transformations proceed from the rock bed of material needs. With a full appreciation of and veneration for moral impulses that are balanced with scientific knowledge, it eschews, looks with just suspicion upon and gives a wide berth to balloon morality, or be it those malarial fevers that reformers love to dignify with the name of "moral feelings"”

Daniel De Leon (1852–1914) American newspaper editor

Materialism-Morality
Reform or Revolution (1896)

Love, Feeling, Knowledge

“If we harden our hearts to the suffering of the creatures, we must by an immutable law harden our hearts to our brother and sister, and this can never lead to ideal conditions. The adoption of this vegetarian way of life, if the food is balanced, will lead to a new, better, higher, and more noble rhythm of living.”

Gordon Latto (doctor) (1911–1998)

Speech at the 24th International Vegetarian Congress, India, 1977; quoted in The Vegetarians by Rynn Berry (Autumn Press, 1979), pp. 133-134.

Life, Law, Food, Way

“First and foremost, yoga made its contribution to my quest to understand consciously the mechanics of violin playing, a quest which by 1951 had long been one of the themes of my life. All influences pointed to less tension, more effective application of energy, the breaking down of resistance in every joint, the coordination of all motions into one motion; and illustrated the profound truth that strength comes not from strength but from the subtle comprehension of process, proportion and balance.”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Source: The Dawn of Indian Music in the West http://books.google.co.in/books?id=OSZKCXtx-wEC&pg=PA46, A&C Black, 24 April 2006, p. 46

Life, Truth, Understanding

“.. displacement of bodies in [the] atmosphere [where] two persons form but one plastic unity, rhythmically balanced.”

Gino Severini (1883–1966) Italian painter

Quote from Severini's catalog entry for his exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in London in April 1913, reproduced in Archivi del Futurismo, Volume 1., eds. Maria Drudi Gambillo and Teresa Fiori (Rome: De Luca, 1958-68. 2d 1986), p. 116
Severini explains in short the conception behind his painting 'The Bear Dance at the Moulin Rouge', 1913

Personality

“The Obama years have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Severely wanting. By the end of Obama's presidency, the U. S. standing in the world was weaker—clearly and appreciably weaker—than when he became president. The force of American power was diminished, and freedom was in retreat. By the end of Obama's presidency, was there a single part of the world where the United States was in a stronger position than when he took office? Was there an ally who was more confident or an adversary who was less so? By the end of Obama's presidency, were any important countries either friendlier or freer than they had been when he took over? The answer to all these questions: no.”

William Kristol (1952) American writer

2010s, 2017, Obama's Legacy (2017)

World, Confidence, Question, Freedom

“Alas for him who seeks salvation in good only!
Balanced on God's strong shoulders, Good and Evil flap
together like two mighty wings and lift him high.”

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) Greek writer

Odysseus, Book VIII, line 770
The Odyssey : A Modern Sequel (1938)

God, Strong, Evil

“He must be a born leader or misleader of men, or must have been sent into the world unfurnished with that modulating and restraining balance-wheel which we call a sense of humor, who, in old age, has as strong a confidence in his opinions and in the necessity of bringing the universe into conformity with them as he had in youth. In a world the very condition of whose being is that it should be in perpetual flux, where all seems mirage, and the one abiding thing is the effort to distinguish realities from appearances, the elderly man must be indeed of a singularly tough and valid fibre who is certain that he has any clarified residuum of experience, any assured verdict of reflection, that deserves to be called an opinion, or who, even if he had, feels that he is justified in holding mankind by the button while he is expounding it.”

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

On Democracy (6 October 1884)

Men, Youth, Age, World

“I’m very skeptical in approaching Bach as a clean slate. To understand Bach, one has to be at home in the whole literature of art and interpretation; one must have great experience in performing the complete literature, from Bach until the early avantgarde. I’m absolutely convinced that only by this deep knowledge one can feel the all-embracing range of effects that are compressed in Bach and his music - and how later generations have been inspired. Only by this experience you can give the Bach interpretation a new balance and tension. In the case of the Goldberg Variations we are confronted with these all-emotional effects, and I’m also skeptical whether this all-embracing range can be touched by much too young players, on harpsichord as well as on piano. Knowing the true worth of this condensed and nearly welded-in polyphonic structure and singular musical architecture, one ultimately knows that it is impossible to play with the variations, meaning to change voices, or make doublings. Then the music itself would be robbed of its true worth and sense, which can only be revealed by bringing out the embedded simplicity, which however is transformed to an electrified, heated atmosphere. One has to respect the internal strength.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Art, Music, Feeling, Home

“The technology needed for an early Internet-connection implant is no more than 25 years off. Imagine that you could understand any language, remember every joke, solve any equation, get the latest news, balance your checkbook, communicate with others, and have near-instant access to any book ever published, without ever having to leave the privacy of yourself.”

Bran Ferren (1953) American technologist

Technology Predictions: Wired for Life: The Internet Implant (June 1998 Columns), Columns Magazine, University of Washington, August 31, 1998, September 8, 2013 http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/june98/technology.html,

Books, Imagination, Communication, Understanding

“[The Conservatives' Industry Act contains] the most comprehensive armoury of government control that has ever been assembled for use over private industry, far exceeding all the powers thought necessary by the last Labour government…Heath has performed a very important historical role in preparing for the fundamental and irreversible transfer in the balance of power and wealth which has to take place…The whole nature of the mixed economy operating on market forces has been transformed by this quiet revolution in a way that is not yet fully appreciated.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

'Heath's spadework for socialism', The Sunday Times (25 March 1973), p. 61
1970s

Way, Nature, Wealth

“If we try to keep a sense of balance, the exposures of the past several months are analogous to the discovery that the directors of Murder, Inc. were also cheating on their income tax. Reprehensible, to be sure, but hardly the main point.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

" Watergate: A Skeptical View http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19730920.htm," New York Review of Books, September 20, 1973. Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1970s

Sense, Past, Cheating

“If you have little money and you want to be rich, you must first be “focused,” not “balanced.””

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

Money

“If my hon. Friend is now envisaging the establishment of a federal Europe, will he not reflect that the Maastricht treaty does not take us in the direction of the checks and balances contained in the American federal constitution? It takes us in the opposite direction of an unelected legislative body—the Commission—and, in the case of foreign policy, a policy Commission that will be, in effect, imposing foreign policy on nation states that have fought for their own democratic accountability.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1993/mar/30/treaty-on-european-union in the House of Commons (30 March 1993). 1990s

“But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility. Who am I—though I have the power to do it—to punish and reward, playing with men’s destinies?”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 4, "Magelight" (Ged)

Men, World, Intelligence, Nature

“On balance Mao did more good than harm.”

Diane Abbott (1953) British Labour Party politician

On BBC One's This Week during a debate over who was the history's worst dictator. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/11/27/diane-abbott-said-on-balance-mao-did-more-good-than-harm_n_8660910.html (27/11/2015) 2010s, 2015

“There is a science of Dynamics in man's fortunes and nature, as well as of Mechanics. There is a science which treats of, and practically addresses, the primary, unmodified forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of Love, and Fear, and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, Religion, all which have a truly vital and infinite character; as well as a science which practically addresses the finite, modified developments of these, when they take the shape of immediate “motives,” as hope of reward, or as fear of punishment.
Now it is certain, that in former times the wise men, the enlightened lovers of their kind, who appeared generally as Moralists, Poets or Priests, did, without neglecting the Mechanical province, deal chiefly with the Dynamical; applying themselves chiefly to regulate, increase and purify the inward primary powers of man; and fancying that herein lay the main difficulty, and the best service they could undertake. But a wide difference is manifest in our age. For the wise men, who now appear as Political Philosophers, deal exclusively with the Mechanical province; and occupying themselves in counting-up and estimating men's motives, strive by curious checking and balancing, and other adjustments of Profit and Loss, to guide them to their true advantage”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Love, Men, Age, Fear

“My observation of the flight of buzzards leads me to believe that they regain their lateral balance when partly overturned by a gust of wind, by a torsion of the tips of the wings. If the rear edge of the right wing tip is twisted upward and the left downward the bird becomes an animated windmill and instantly begins to turn, a line from its head to its tail being the axis. It thus regains its level even if thrown on its beam’s end, so to speak, as I have frequently seen them. I think the bird also in general retains its lateral equilibrium, partly by presenting its two wings at different angles to the wind, and partly by drawing in one wing, thus reducing its area. I incline to the belief that the first is the more important and usual method….
My business requires that my experimental work be confined to the months between September and January and I would be particularly thankful for advice as to a suitable locality where I could depend on winds of about 15 miles per hour without rain or too inclement weather. I am certain that such localities are rare.”

Wilbur Wright (1867–1912) American aviation pioneer

Letter to Octave Chanute (13 May 1900)

Business, Bird, Thinking, Animals

“We are best friends! I think our personalities balance one another extremely well — plus we know how to interact positively and productively with each other. We work hard at maintaining our partnership, but to be honest, it's just what we've come to know and depend on. I hardly remember my life without Scott!”

Scott Moir (1987) Canadian figure skater

Tessa Virtue, Interview for Golden Skate (17 September 2007)
Partnership with Tessa Virtue, Tessa Virtue about Moir

Life, Thinking, Dependency, Personality

“Men’s immediate path from the Insanity Track to the Sanity Track is in demanding that both sexes have the freedom to strike a balance between homeplace and workplace. Men must expect their wives to financially support them to be fathers as much as they now financially support their wives to be mothers. Women must have our approval to marry the warrior of love rather than the warrior of money.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 212.

Love, Women, Men, Money

“Although the future exists, you can avoid or alter it by changing you present condition. By the quality of our condition, we attract or are attracted to particular types of experiences. If our condition is good we do not attract or need to experience certain events that would otherwise be necessary to balance our lives. We exert control over and have responsibility for our future because it is determined by our present condition.”

Michio Kushi (1926–2014) Japanese educator

Source: Spiritual Journey: Michio Kushi's Guide to Endless Self-Realization and Freedom (1994, with Edward Esko), p. 63

Change, Future

“So the game plan is not merely to free the income of the wealthiest class to “offshore” itself into assets denominated in harder currencies abroad. It is to scrap the progressive tax system altogether. … How stable can a global situation be where the richest nation does not tax its population, but creates new public debt to hand out to its bankers? … The “solution” to the coming financial crisis in the United States may await the dollar’s plunge as an opportunity for a financial Tonkin Gulf resolution. Such a crisis would help catalyze the tax system’s radical change to a European-style “Steve Forbes” flat tax and VAT sales-excise tax…. More government giveaways will be made to the financial sector in a vain effort to keep bad debts afloat and banks “solvent.” As in Ireland and Latvia, public debt will replace private debt, leaving little remaining for Social Security or indeed for much social spending. … The bottom line is that after the prolonged tax giveaway exacerbates the federal budget deficit – along with the balance-of-payments deficit – we can expect the next Republican or Democratic administration to step in and “save” the country from economic emergency by scaling back Social Security while turning its funding over, Pinochet-style, to Wall Street money managers to loot as they did in Chile. And one can forget rebuilding America’s infrastructure. It is being sold off by debt-strapped cities and states to cover their budget shortfalls resulting from un-taxing real estate and from foreclosures. Welcome to debt peonage. This is worse than what was meant by a double-dip recession. It will be with us much longer.”

Michael Hudson (economist) (1939) American economist

Obama's Bushism http://michael-hudson.com/2010/12/obamas-bushism/ (December 8, 2010) Michael-Hudson.com, 1998-

Money, Game, Effort, Change

“Since the belief in transmission of acquired adaptations arose from preconception rather than from evidence, it is worth observing that, rightly considered, the probability should surely be the other way. For the adaptations relate to every variety of exigency. To supply themselves with food, to find it, to seize and digest it, to protect themselves from predatory enemies whether by offence or defence, to counter-balance the changes of temperature, or pressure, to provide for mechanical strains, to obtain immunity from poison and from invading organisms, to bring the sexual elements into contact, to ensure the distribution of the type; all these and many more are accomplished by organisms in a thousand most diverse and alternative methods. Those are the things that are hard to imagine as produced by any concatenation of natural events; but the suggestions that organisms had had from the beginning innate in them a power of modifying themselves, their organs and their instincts so as to meet these multifarious requirements does not materially differ from the more overt appeals to supernatural intervention. The conception, originally introduced by Hering and independently by S. Butler, that adaptation is a consequence or product of accumulated memory was of late revived by Semon and has been received with some approval, especially by F. Darwin. I see nothing fantastic in the notion that memory may be unconsciously preserved with the same continuity that the protoplasmic basis of life possesses. That idea, though purely speculative and, as yet, incapable of proof or disproof contains nothing which our experience of matter or of life at all refutes. On the contrary, we probably do well to retain the suggestion as a clue that may some day be of service. But if adaptation is to be the product of these accumulated experiences, they must in some way be translated into terms of physiological and structural change, a process frankly inconceivable.”

William Bateson (1861–1926) British geneticist and biologist

Source: Problems In Genetics (1913), p. 190

Life, Food, Way, Imagination

“Of the splendid constellation of great names… we admire the living and revere dead far too warmly and too deeply to suffer us sit in judgment on their respective claims to in this or that particular discovery; to balance mathematical skill of one against the experimental dexterity of another, or the philosophical acumen a third. So long as "one star differs from another in glory,"—so long as there shall exist varieties, or even incompatibilities of excellence,—so long will the admiration of mankind be found sufficient for all who merit it.”

John Herschel (1792–1871) English mathematician, astronomer, chemist and photographer

On the Theory of Light https://books.google.com/books?id=Lo4_AAAAcAAJ (1828) p.494

Star, Mathematics, Suffering, Dead

“To see and feel one’s beloved naked for the first time is one of life’s pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 18 (pp. 348-349)

Love, Life, Pain, Truth

“The impregnability of his stonewall defense rested on his ability to reach the ball, and then throw it. Now he could move less well; now he was not coming up with the ball with that "perfect technique" Eddie Brannick had once admired, his body beautifully balanced, the ball directly in front of him. Now it was a movement full of desperate lunges. Fortunately he had his great arm, so even off-balance, he was throwing out runners, and each time he'd throw—though it had happened hundreds of prior times—the fans at the Polo Grounds, or elsewhere around the league, would gasp at the low blur that streaked across the diamond, dead on target. But he had more than a powerful arm. He had courage. And on he played, in pain and out.”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

On Travis "Stonewall" Jackson, from "Stonewall," in Greatest Giants of Them All (1967), p. 172
Sports-related

Pain, Courage, Time, Perfection

“An individual gets away from this type of self-centeredness when he pauses enough to see that no matter what he does in life, he does that because somebody helped him to do it. And he then gains the type of perspective and the type of balance which keeps him from becoming self-centered. He comes to see that somebody stands in the background, often doing a little job in a big way, making it possible for him to do what he’s doing.”

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

1950s, Conquering Self-centeredness (1957)

Life, Way, Help

“Our relationship couldn’t continue to balance, as it did, on the point of a knife. We would fall off one edge or the other, depending entirely on his decision, or his instincts. My decision was made, made before I’d ever consciously chosen, and I was committed to seeing it through. Because there was nothing more terrifying to me, more excruciating, than the thought of turning away from him. It was an impossibility.”

Stephenie Meyer (1973) American author

Bella Swan about Edward Cullen, p. 248
Twilight series, Twilight (2005)

Decision, Dependency

“Mr. Khan, I’ve read our Constitution and firmly recognize the preeminent responsibility of our federal government is to “provide for the common defense.” I also comprehend the relationship between the three branches of government…you know separation of powers, checks and balances, coequal branches of government.”

Allen West (politician) (1961) American politician; retired United States Army officer

2010s, Open letter to Khizr M. Khan (31 July 2016)

Reading

“Expediency may tip the scales when arguments are nicely balanced.”

Benjamin N. Cardozo (1870–1938) United States federal judge

Woolford Realty Co., Inc., v. Rose, 286 U.S. 319, 330 (1932)
Judicial opinions

“Only the sword now carries any weight in the balance for the destiny of a nation.”

Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935) Polish politician and Prime Minister

(1914) [Adam Zamoyski, The Polish Way, 1987, 422, John Murray, London, ISBN 0531150690, p. 332]
Attributed

“This intelligence-testing business reminds me of the way they used to weigh hogs in Texas. They would get a long plank, put it over a cross-bar, and somehow tie the hog on one end of the plank. They'd search all around till they found a stone that would balance the weight of the hog and they'd put that on the other end of the plank. Then they'd guess the weight of the stone.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Quoted by Dorothy Canfield Fisher in Vermont Tradition http://books.google.com/books?id=K7wMAAAAYAAJ&q=%22This+intelligence-testing+business+reminds+me+of+the+way+they+used+to+weigh+hogs+in+Texas+They+would+get+a+long+plank+put+it+over+a+cross-bar+and+somehow+tie+the+hog+on+one+end+of+the+plank+They'd+search+all+around+till+they+found+a+stone+that+would+balance+the+weight+of+the+hog+and+they'd+put+that+on+the+other+end+of+the+plank+Then+they'd+guess+the+weight+of+the+stone%22&pg=PA380#v=onepage (1953) Misc. Quotes

Way, Search, Intelligence, Business

“When we study the habits of animals in a truly sympathetic way and become thoroughly acquainted with them and with the work that each one is performing, we shall see that each one has its place in the economy of God's world, that each has its part to play, and that even so far as the animal world is concerned we are all related and inter-related. If we destroy or permit to be destroyed that marvellous balance which the Divine Power has instituted in the Universe, we do it at our own peril. Instead, then, of being the enemies of the animal world, instead of being its persecutors and its destroyers, we should be its friends and helpers.”

Ralph Waldo Trine (1866–1958) American author

Source: Every Living Creature (1899), p. 64

God, World, Way, Study

“We have been living in an ideological bubble — one of market fundamentalism.From the trauma of the Great Depression to 1973, there was a broad consensus across the democratic world that markets were absolutely essential to generate wealth, but they will also cause all sorts of problems if they are left unregulated. Economists like JM Keynes and JK Galbraith taught us that if you abolish markets, you get starvation; but if you abolish all the democratic checks and balances on markets, you get a system that eats itself. Unregulated businesses will cause unsustainable levels of pollution and inequality, and ultimately start pursuing unhinged business models that cause the whole system to collapse.”

Johann Hari (1979) British journalist

"Has Market Fundamentalism Had Its Day?" http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1269, The Independent (2008-03-20).

World, Business, Problem, Wealth

“The process of formulating and structuring a system are important and creative, since they provide and organize the information, which each system. "establishes the number of objectives and the balance between them which will be optimized". Furthermore, they help identify and define the system parts. Furthermore, they help identify and define the system parts which make up its "diverse, specialized structures and subfunctions.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. 70; First sentences of Ch. 3. Formulating and Structuring the System
In this text Harold Chestnut is here citing:
C. West Churchman, Russell L. Ackoff, and E. Leonard Arnoff (1957) Introduction to Operations Research. Wiley. New York, and
J. Morley English (1964) "Understanding the Engineering Design Process." The Journal of Industrial Engineering, Nov-Dec. 1964 Vol 15 (6). p. 291-296

Optimism, Help, Parting

“It must be emphasized that in seeing a work of art that has been composed by precise means, the viewer does not perceive dominant details. His impression is one of perfect balance to which all the parts contribute, an impression which not only applies to the parts as such, but is transmitted also to the relation existing between the work of art and the viewer. Although it is very difficult to express in words the effect of a work of art, it may be said that the viewer’s deepest impression can best be defined as the achievement of a balance between objective meaning and subjective meaning, both directly penetrated by awareness. He has a sensation of height and of depth which are no longer in any way bound to natural conditions or to spatial dimensions, a sensation which places the viewer in a state of consciousness harmony.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

1922
Quote from 'Grundbegriffe der neuen Gestaltenden Kunst', essay by Van Doesburg (published between 1921-23 in De Stijl) - last Chapter; as quoted in 'Fifty Years of Accomplishment, From Kandinsky to Jackson Pollock', by Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co. 1964, p. 85-86
1920 – 1926

Art, Way, Nature, Parting

“"Could you try not aiming so much?" he asked me, still standing there. "If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck." He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. "How can it be luck if I aim?" I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. "Because it will be," he said. "You'll be glad if you hit his marble — Ira's marble — won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it."”

Jerome David Salinger book Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Seymour: An Introduction (1959)

Love, Feeling, Communication

“Professor Ohlin also made an important contribution to what now might be called the macro-economic aspects of a country's balance of payments. In 1929 in the Economic Journal he engaged in a famous controversy with Keynes on the problem of transferring payments from one country to another across the foreign exchanges. In this he laid stress upon the income-expenditure effects of the reduced spending power in the paying country and of the increased spending power in the recipient country. In doing so he made use of the usual distinction between a country's imports and exports; but in addition he emphasised the importance of the less usual distinction between a country's domestic non-tradeable goods and services and its tradeable, exportable and importable, goods. I made some use of this latter distinction in my Balance of Payments; but looking back I regret that I did not let it play a much more central role in that book”

James Meade (1907–1995) British economist

The Meaning of "Internal Balance", (1977)

Books, Problem, Country

Quotes about balance page 4

Quotes about balance
page 4