Quotes about balance
page 7

“After we have become familiar with the new idea, however, after it has become part of our general stock of theoretical concepts, our expectations are brought more into balance with its actual uses, and its excessive popularity is ended. A few zealots persist in the old key-to-the-universe view of it; but less driven thinkers settle down after a while to the problems the idea has really generated. They try to apply it and extend it where it applies and where it is capable of extension; and they desist where it does not apply or cannot be extended. It becomes, if it was, in truth, a seminal idea in the first place, a permanent and enduring part of our intellectual armory. But it no longer has the grandiose, all-promising scope, the infinite versatility of apparent application, it once had. The second law of thermodynamics, or the principle of natural selection, or the notion of unconscious motivation, or the organization of the means of production does not explain everything, not even everything human, but it still explains something; and our attention shifts to isolating just what that something is, to disentangling ourselves from a lot of pseudoscience to which, in the first flush of its celebrity, it has also given rise.”

Clifford Geertz book The Interpretation of Cultures

Source: The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), p. 3-4

Truth, Law, Motivation, Idea

“The revolution of 1832 was, therefore, in its ultimate results, a democratic revolution, though its earlier form was transitional and incomplete. This form was productive of great advantages for the time: indeed, for some years it might be said, without exaggeration, that the accidental equilibrium of political forces which it had produced presented the highest ideal of internal government the world had hitherto seen. But it was not the less provisional on that account. The forces by which political organisms are destroyed were, for the time, balanced by influences which still lingered, and were, therefore, neutralised. But these were increasing, and the others were decaying, and the balance could not last for any length of time. It has now been finally upset, and we have now fully reached the phase of political transformation to which the revolution of 1832 logically led.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Quarterly Review, 130, 1871, pp. 279-280
1870s

World, Time

“I do not care a button about having my name in any blessed place. I was never ardent about fame even in my political days; I preferred to remain behind the curtain, push people without their knowing it and get things done. It was the confounded British Government that spoiled my game by prosecuting me and forcing me to be publicly known and a 'leader'. Then, again, I don't believe in advertisement except for books etc., and in propaganda except for politics and patent medicines. But for serious work it is a poison. It means either a stunt or a boom' and stunts and booms exhaust the thing they carry on their crest and leave it lifeless and broken high and dry on the shores of nowhere… or it means a movement. A movement in the case of a work like mine means the founding of a school or a sect or some other damned nonsense. It means that hundreds or thousands of useless people join in and corrupt the work or reduce it to a pompous farce from which the Truth that was coming down recedes into secrecy and silence. It is what has happened to the 'religions' and is the reason of their failure. If I tolerate a little writing about myself, it is only to have a sufficient counter-weight in that amorphous chaos, the public mind, to balance the hostility that is always aroused by the presence of a new dynamic Truth in this world of ignorance. But the utility ends there and too much advertisement would defeat that object. I am perfectly 'rational', I assure you, in my methods and I do not proceed merely on any personal dislike of fame. If and so far as publicity serves the Truth, I am quite ready to tolerate it; but I do not find publicity for its own sake desirable.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

October 2, 1934
India's Rebirth

Hostility, People, Truth, Books

“You should stay away from your potential. I mean, that is something you should leave absolutely alone! You’ll mess it up! It’s potential, leave it! And anyway, it’s like your bank balance, you know: you always have much less than you think. […] Leave it as the locked door within yourself and then at least, in your mind, the interior will always be palatial. Wonderful gleaming marble floors, brocaded drapes. Mullioned windows, covered in mullions, whatever they are. Flamingos serving drinks. Pianos shooting out canapés into the mouths of elegant men and women who are exchanging witticisms… "Oh yes, this reminds me of the time I was in BudaPESHT with Binky… We were trying to steal a goose from the casino, muahahaha…" But it wont be like that[…] You don't want to find out that the most you could possibly achieve, if you gave it your all, if you harvested every screed of energy within you, and devoted yourself to improving yourself, that all you would get to, would be maybe eating less cheesy snacks.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

Monster (2004)

Women, Men, Drink, Thinking

“In any transition period there is a clash of realities. In the 1930s people considered the eventual solutions, at first, to be unrealistic. It’s the same this time round. At first, in the euro crisis there was to be no bailout. Then no buying of government debt. Then no QE. Each of these things have happened. Some things which are now seen as unrealistic will change with the political balance of forces.”

Euclid Tsakalotos (1960) Greek economist and politician

" Inside Syriza’s economic brain http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/Greece-syriza-election/2941" (20 January 2015) Quoted during an interview, via Skype, between Tsakalotos and a number of other economists. Hosted at the London School of Economics.

People, Reality, Change, Time

“[.. that he] would not touch the painting, nor finish it unless the claimant pays him the balance due or guarantees it by giving a security.”

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) Dutch 17th century painter and etcher

from a notary document, 1654 (location: RD, 1654/5, 310); as quoted in Rembrandt's Eyes, Simon Schama, Alfred A. Knopf, Borzoi Books, New York 1999, p. 569 - note 7
Rembrandt is rejecting the demand of the Portuguese Jewish merchant Diego d'Andrade, who rejected in 1654 the portray of his daughter which Rembrandt was painting, as "showing no resemblance at all to the head of the young daughter". D'Andrade demanded that Rembrandt immediately take up his brushes and finish the work to his satisfaction
1640 - 1670

Painting

“My beliefs are clearly that of a hardened skeptic […] I use the term "occult" to refer to any of all of these subjects. The reader is forewarned that The Skeptics Dictionary does not try to present a balanced account of occult subjects. If anything, this book is a Davidian counterbalance to the Goliath of occult literature. I hope that an occasional missile hits its mark…”

Robert Todd Carroll book The Skeptic's Dictionary

The Skeptic's Dictionary (book), pp. 1-3

Books, Hope, Literature

“I have never had any desire to play a maid, a liquor store owner kicking a black person out of my store, a rude and harried waitress, a worldly-wise acupuncturist, an early-rising, loose black cotton pants wearing elderly woman practicing tai chi in the park, a manicurist, a prostitute, a student in an English as a Second Language course, a purveyor of exotic mushrooms and ginseng, an exchange student, a newscaster covering gang warfare in Chinatown, a woman drowning my newborn baby in a bowl, a daughter crying with my mom over our constant battle between East and West yet finally coming together over a particularly intense game of mahjong…a young girl being raped and killed by GIs in the Killing Fields, a woman balancing a basket of any kind on my head…committing suicide because my white lover did not come back to Japan after the war, or having him come back for me and fooling him successfully for years and years thinking I am a woman when really I'm a dude, as if my race castrates me so much this deception is completely feasible…”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, PIGEONHOLING PEOPLE

War, Fools, Girl, Game

“There was a kind of shifting of the balances of my brain, of the way I had been thinking, the same kind of realignment as when, a few days before, words like democracy, liberty, freedom, had faded under pressure of a new sort of understanding of the real movement of the world towards dark, hardening power. I knew, but of course the word, written, cannot convey the quality of this knowing, that whatever already is has its logic and its force. I felt this, like a vision, in a new kind of knowing. And I knew that the cruelty and the spite and the I. I. I. I. of Saul and of Anna were part of the logic of war; and I knew how strong these emotions were, in a way that would never leave me, would become part of how I saw the world.”

Doris Lessing book The Golden Notebook

Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 4"
The Golden Notebook (1962)

War, World, Way, Democracy

“If you look at anyone successful, at the start they were not balanced. Balanced people go nowhere. They stay in one spot. To make progress, you must first go unbalanced. Just look at how you make progress walking. Thomas Edison was not balanced. He was focused. Bill Gates was not balanced. He was focused. Donald Trump is focused. George Soros is focused. George Patton did not take his tanks wide. He focused them and blew through the weak spots in the German line. The French went wide with the Maginot Line, and you know what happened to them. If you have any desire of being rich, you must focus.”

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!

People, Success

“The employment of the poor in roads and public works, and a tendency among landlords and persons of property to build, to improve and beautify their grounds, and to employ workmen and menial servants, are the means most within our power and most directly calculated to remedy the evils arising from that disturbance in the balance of produce and consumption.”

Thomas Robert Malthus Principles of Political Economy

Book II, Chapter I, On The Progress of Wealth, Section X, p. 430
Principles of Political Economy (Second Edition 1836)

Evil, Personality

“Nineteenth-century civilization rested on four institutions. The first was the balance-of-power system which for a century prevented the occurrence of any long and devastating war between the Great Powers. The second was the international gold standard which symbolized a unique organization of world economy. The third was the self-regulating market which produced an unheard-of material welfare. The fourth was the liberal state. Classified in one way, two of these institutions were economic, two political. Classified in another way, two of them were national, two international. Between them they determined the characteristic outlines of the history of our civilization.
Of these institutions the gold standard proved crucial; its fall was the proximate cause of the catastrophe. By the time it failed, most of the other institutions had been sacrificed in a vain effort to save it. But the fount and matrix of the system was the self-regulating market. It was this innovation which gave rise to a specific civilization.”

Karl Polanyi book The Great Transformation

The Great Transformation (1944), Ch. 1 : The Hundred Years' Peace

War, World, Way, History

“If there is no connection between quarks and leptons, since quarks make up the proton, then the balance of the proton and electron charge is just a remarkable coincidence. It seems impossible for any thinking person to be satisfied with coincidence as an explanation. Some principle must relate the charges of the quarks and the leptons. What is it? A fancier way of saying it, and more or less equivalent, is that for the electroweak theory to make sense up to arbitrarily high energies, the symmetries on which it is based must survive quantum corrections.”

Chris Quigg (1944) American physicist

Nature's greatest puzzles. http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-ph/pdf/0502/0502070v1.pdf SLAC Summer Institute 2004, p. 9.

Way, Thinking, Sense, Personality

“A strange persuasion came upon me that, save for the grossness of the line, the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form.”

H. G. Wells book The Island of Doctor Moreau

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 16: How the Beast Folk Tasted Blood

Life, Fate

“[Robinson Crusoe] is the true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday (the trusty slave who arrives on an unlucky day) is the symbol of the subject races. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

James Joyce, “Daniel Defoe,” translated from Italian manuscript and edited by Joseph Prescott, Buffalo Studies 1 (1964): 24-25

Intelligence

“Being a follower of Atatürk means being modern, being enlightened and sensible, being balanced and consistent, loving God, advocating the unity of the Islamic world and the Turkish world; it means advocating the Red Apple ideals, it means being decent, classy and handsome, this is what being a follower of Atatürk means.”

Harun Yahya (1956) Turkish author

30 December 2013.
A9 TV addresses, 2013

Love, God, World

“In church, sacred music would make believers of us all—but preachers can be counted on to restore the balance.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Music

“I’ve found that volunteer work can enrich one’s life providing balance and perspective. Indeed, the WJC was probably the most important thing to me outside of Seagram, offering a chance to develop aspects of my personality.”

Edgar Bronfman, Sr. (1929–2013) Canadian-American businessman

Good Spirits.

Life, Chance, Personality

“Hey folks, tonight I wanna talk about global warming. Now, The World is Hot and Flat Society is growing increasingly hysterical and that indeed is causing me to sweat a little. In the last month or so, I've heard suggestions that those skeptical of Al Gore's spiritual crisis are deniers and one good way to serve the planet would be to have one less kid and I've also read that mankind is 'a virus' and human beings are 'the AIDS of the earth.' Global warming is officially becoming creepy and I can't tell yet if it's facisitc or fetishistic but it's kinda like piercing or tattoos, I don't even wanna get one, because I see how hooked people are and it spooks me. I just find it odd that we've come to a point in history where if I don't concede that if Manhattan will be completely submerged in 2057 I'm thought to be a delusional contrarian by some of my more zealous fellow citizens. I'm sorry Angst Squad, but if we commissioned a public works project (let's call it 'The Manhattan Project') and tried our hardest to submerge Manhattan in the next 50 years, we couldn't pull it off, mainly because it wouldn't be environmentally sound and you guys would hang it up in the permitting process. Simply put, I can't worry about the earth right now because I'm too worried about the world. Why can't I take terrorism as seriously as Al Gore takes global warming? There are times that you think that liberals only fear car bombs if they have leaky exhaust systems. And why am I constantly beaten over the head with 'the delicate balance of nature'? Am I the only one who watches Animal Planet? Every time I turn it on, I see some demented harp seal chucking peguins down his gullet like they were maitre d'Tic-Tacs. To me, nature always appears more unbalanced than Gary Busey with a clogged eustachian tube. Listen, the weather is just like Hilary's explanation for her war vote: we just don't know, do we? We're here to miss our next Tuesday's weather much less the year 2057. Relax, we'll replace oil when we need to. American ingenuity will kick in and the next great fortune will be made. It's not pretty, but it is historically accurate. We need to run out of oil first. That's why I drive an SUV: so we run out of it more quickly. I consider myself at the vanguard of the environmental movement and I think the individuals who insist on driving hybrids are just prolonging our dillemma and I think that's just selfish. Come on, don't you care about our Mother Earth? Don'tcha?”

Dennis Miller (1953) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actor

6/17 The Half Hour News Hour
The Buck Starts Here

War, People, World, Fear

“We have nothing against the dollar, and I don't think China has anything against it either. But we believe that a modern currency system should be better balanced, so that when one of the currencies is sagging, this should be compensated by other global reserve currencies.”

Dmitry Medvedev (1965) Russian Prime Minister and former president

cnbc.com http://www.cnbc.com/id/102088768

Thinking

“Half a century ago, the first feeling of all Englishmen was for England. Now, the sympathies of a powerful party are instinctively given to whatever is against England. It may be Boers or Baboos, or Russians or Affghans, or only French speculators – the treatment these all receive in their controversies with England is the same: whatever else my fail them, they can always count on the sympathies of the political a party from whom during the last half century the rulers of England have been mainly chosen…It is striking, though by no means a solitary indication of how low, in the present temper of English politics, our sympathy with our own countrymen has fallen. Of course, we shall be told that a conscience of exalted sensibility, which is the special attribute of the Liberal party, has enabled them to discover, what English statesmen had never discovered before, that the cause to which our countrymen are opposed is generally the just one…For ourselves, we are rather disposed to think that patriotism has become in some breasts so very reasonable an emotion, because it is ceasing to be an emotion at all; and that these superior scruples, to which our fathers were insensible, and which always make the balance of justice lean to the side of abandoning either our territory or our countrymen, indicate that the national impulses which used to make Englishmen cling together in face of every external trouble are beginning to disappear.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

‘Disintegration’, Quarterly Review, no. 312; October 1883, reprinted in Paul Smith (ed.), Lord Salisbury on Politics. A selection from his articles in the Quaterly Review, 1860-1883 (Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 342-343
1880s

Justice, Feeling, Thinking

“The attack on economics sprang rather from a dislike of the application of scientific methods to the investigation of social problems. The existence of a body of reasoning which prevented people from following their first impulsive reactions, and which compelled them to balance indirect effects, which could be seen only by exercising the intellect, against intense feeling caused by the direct observation of concrete suffering, then as now, occasioned intense resentment.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

"The Trend of Economic Thinking", lecture delivered at LSE on March 1, 1933, published in Economica (May 1933)
1920s–1930s

People, Feeling, Exercises, Problem

“The future life of Europe was not their concern; its means of livelihood was not their anxiety. Their preoccupations, good and bad alike, related to frontiers and nationalities, to the balance of power, to imperial aggrandizements, to the future enfeeblement of a strong and dangerous enemy, to revenge, and to the shifting by the victors of their unbearable financial burdens on to the shoulders of the defeated.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter IV, p. 56

Life, Revenge, Strong, Future

“The rise of democracy was driven by the citizens' desire to escape from the paternalistic and arbitrary charity of those with money. They accomplished this by replacing charity with a fair, balanced, arm's-length system of public obligation. The principle tool of that obligation was taxation.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Reflections of a Siamese Twin (1997)

Money, Democracy

“the commitment needs to be a commitment to grow the economy and the budget will balance itself”

Justin Trudeau (1971) 23rd Prime Minister of Canada; eldest son of Pierre Trudeau

a week before 18 February 2014 https://www.macleans.ca/politics/justin-trudeaus-sunny-ways/ per Aaron Wherry of Macleans

“On principle i relative prices will be lowered in the interests of external balance and domestic expenditure will be inflated in the interests of internal balance. Internal balance will be very quickly restored although there is no net change in external balance. Relative prices must, therefore, continue to be lowered, which will tend now to produce a boom at home. The inflationary financial policy must, therefore, be replaced by a deflationary policy. In the end relative prices will be substantially lowered, while there may be a small net inflation or deflation of domestic expenditure by financial policy.”

James Meade (1907–1995) British economist

Source: The balance of payments, 1951, p. 160; As cited in: Metaxas & Weber (2013, p. 22)

Home, Change

“Market Anti-Inflation Plans
In such a context, it should be clear that balancing a nominal budget will solve nothing, and attempting to achieve such a spurious balance will produce much mischief.”

William Vickrey (1914–1996) Canadian noble laureate in economics

William Spencer Vickrey et al. Full Employment and Price Stability: The Macroeconomic Vision of William S. Vickrey. p. 4

“There is a delicate balance between shielding people and encouraging them, and the USA perhaps went too far in one direction and Australia in the other. The Soviet Union, born in 1917 and influenced a little by the exciting Australian and New Zealand experiments, would eventually show how the umbrella, if too big and cumbersome, exposed people far more than it protected them.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

A Shorter History of Australia (1994)

People

“A sovereign government's budget is not like the budget of a household or firm. Governments issue the currency, whereas households and firms use the currency. As the chartalist, or modern money approach, explains, modern governments actually spend by crediting bank accounts. It really just amounts to a keystroke, pushing a key on a computer that generates an entry on someone’s balance sheet. Government can never run out of these keystrokes.”

L. Randall Wray (1953) American economist

L. Randall Wray (2015), Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist. p. 66

Money

“I am in the camp that believes that we are on the verge of a monetary collapse given the fact that during the last year up to 70% of the money used to pay our ongoing expenditures were moneys printed up by the Federal Reserve I mean literally out of thin air. Monetary Collapse occurs when we are printing 100% of that money going forward and all of the roll over of treasury is that 15 trillion dollars is out there in existing notes when all of those notes also get rolled over with 100% of that money being printed … that's the monetary collapse. And that’s not something that their going to announce is going to happen two weeks from Thursday that’s just gonna happen literally overnight when we have a complete melt down in the bond market. Which I’m predicting is gonna happen unless we actually balance the federal budget so this is what we are entering into is a real mutual sacrifice on the part of all of us. I would argue let’s have that mutual sacrifice as opposed to all of us having nothing which is what happens during a monetary collapse that our money ends up being worth nothing. That happened in Russia part of that was Afghanistan. We’re not immune to this. We can fix it but we need to do it now and that’s the position that I hold.”

Gary Johnson (1953) American politician, businessman, and 29th Governor of New Mexico

Statement made to representatives of the Pagan Newswire Collective (PNC)
2011-10-16
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/paganswithdisabilities/2011/10/full-transcript-of-qa-with-presidential-candidate-gary-johnson/
2012-02-24
Economic Policy

Money, Parting

“Wherever I am, I am Love, no less
among these shepherds than with nobility.
And inequalities of subjects to my rule
I balance as I please.”

Torquato Tasso Aminta

Ovunque i mi sia, io sono Amore.
Ne'pastori non men, che ne gli heroi;
E la disagguaglianza de'soggetti,
Come à me piace, agguaglio.
Prologue
Aminta (1573)

Love

““Chaos has her moods and whims, that’s all. As I told you, she cannot remain stable. It is in her nature to be forever changing.”
“While it is in the nature of Law,” Alisaard explained, “to be forever fixed. The Balance is there to ensure that neither Law nor Chaos ever gain complete ascendancy, for the one offers sterility while the other offers only sensation.””

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Book 3, Chapter 1 (p. 626)
The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

Law, Mood, Nature, Change

“It’s no go the Yogi-Man, it’s no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.”

Louis MacNeice (1907–1963) poet

"Bagpipe Music", line 9, from The Earth Compels (1938)

“While I was mayor, I learned that government is a system of checks and balances — you can't simply walk in and change things. It takes time. I used to joke that it would be nice if a magic wand came with the job, if I could just wave it and make things work the way they're supposed to. But unfortunately it's not that easy. The bureaucracy is so huge that in a lot of situations all I can do is tell people the truth and let the chips fall where they may.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

I Ain't Got Time To Bleed (1999)

People, Truth, Way, Learning

“Courteous love was avowedly a form of drama, but not the less a force of society. Illusion for illusion, courteous love in Thibaut's hands, or in the hands of Dante and Petrarch, was as substantial as any other convention;— the balance of trade, the rights of man, the Athanasian Creed. In that sense the illusions alone were real; if the middle-ages had reflected only what was practical, nothing would have survived for us.”

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

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Love, Age, Sense

“We hear everywhere about this false trade-off between freedom of speech and freedom of religion, as though there were some kind of balance to be struck here. There is no balance to be struck. Freedom of speech never infringes on freedom of religion. There is nothing I can say in this podcast about religion in general, or about Islam in particular, that would infringe upon someone else's freedom to practice his or her religion. If your freedom of religion entails that you force those who do not share it to conform to it, well that's not freedom of religion. We have a word for that – that's theocracy. This respect that we are all urged to show for "religious sensitivity" is actually a demand that the blasphemy laws of Islam be followed by non-muslims.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, "After Charlie Hebdo and Other Thoughts" (21 January 2015) http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/after-charlie-hebdo-and-other-thoughts 2010s

Religion, Law, Freedom, Falseness

“With all the efforts now to disassociate President Bush from conservatism, I am starting to believe that conservatism itself — not the political machine, mind you, but the ideology — is heading toward that misty land-over-the-ocean where ideologies go after they've shuffled off this mortal coil. Sort of like the way post-Stalinist lefties used to say, "You can't say Communism's failed. It's just never really been tried."But as it was with Communism, so with conservatism. When all the people who call themselves conservatives get together and run the government, they're on the line for it. Conservative president. Conservative House. Conservative Senate.What we appear to be in for now is the emergence of this phantom conservatism existing out in the ether, wholly cut loose from any connection to the actual people who are universally identified as the conservatives and who claim the label for themselves.We can even go a bit beyond this though. The big claim now is that President Bush isn't a conservative because he hasn't shrunk the size of government and he's a reckless deficit spender.But let's be honest: Balanced budgets and shrinking the size of government hasn't been part of conservatism — or to be more precise, Movement Conservatism — for going on thirty years. The conservative movement and the Republican party are the movement and party of deficit spending. And neither has any claim to any real association with limited or small government. Just isn't borne out by any factual record or political agenda. Not in the Reagan presidency, the Bush presidency or the second Bush presidency. The intervening period of fiscal restraint comes under Clinton.”

Josh Marshall Talking Points Memo

Talking Points Memo (2006-06-13) http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/008733.php

People, Way, Communication, Effort

“My whole intention in painting is to make a thing poetical; but not poetical in a literary sense. I want something that evokes mood, a background, a stage set for certain characters that are playing certain parts. When I paint I do not consider myself an abstractionist in the sense that I'm trying to create beautiful forms that fit together like a puzzle. The things in my painting are intended to strike something that is an emotional involvement – that has to do with the human personality and all the mysteries of life, not simply colors or abstract balances. To me, it's all reality.”

William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter

Quote from An interview with William Baziotes, eds. P. Franks and M. White, Perspective no. 2, Hunter College New York (1956-57), pp. 27, 29-30
1950s

Life, Beauty, Color, Mood

“In developing his theory of gravitation, Newton assigned to every material body another property which is called its gravitational mass. Gravitational mass determines the force exerted by the body on other bodies, and so its function appears to be quite distinct from that of inertial mass. Nevertheless, the two are found to be identical in magnitude. Newton made experiments to verify this remarkable equality by swinging a pendulum with a bob which could be made with different materials. The period of the swing depended on the ratio of the inertial and gravitational masses of the pendulum, but in all cases it was found to be the same… In 1890 Eötvös made a much more refined test with the aid of a… torsion balance. Repeated experiments showed that inertial mass and gravitational mass were equal to within one part in 100 million. Einstein suggested that this was because inertia and gravitation are identical.”

Gerald James Whitrow (1912–2000) British mathematician

p, 125
The Structure of the Universe: An Introduction to Cosmology (1949)

Appearance, Parting, Dependency

“As the glossaries lengthen, as the footnotes become more elementary and didactic, the poem, the epic, the drama, move out of balance on the actual page. As even the more rudimentary of mythological, religious or historical references, which form the grammar of Western literature, have to be elucidated, the lines of Spenser, of Pope, of Shelley or of Sweeney Among the Nightingales, blur away from immediacy. Where it is necessary to annotate every proper name and classical allusion in the dialogue between Jessica and Lorenzo in the garden at Belmont, or in Iachimo's stealthy rhetoric when he emerges in Imogen's bedchamber, these marvellous spontaneities of enacted feeling become "literary" and twice-removed.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"Tomorrow".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Feeling, Literature

“I am completely convinced that the ultimate weapon is one that you can hold in your hand, point at a person, and thereby completely disrupt his sense of balance. All that he could do is lie in a huddled heap and puke. It would probably disrupt the concept of heroics for all time.”

Alexei Panshin book Rite of Passage

Source: Rite of Passage (1968), Chapter 10 (p. 139).

Lie, Sense, Time, Personality

“While [European] national cultures were concocted to distinguish one economic unit of capital from another, civilizational thinking was invented to unify these cultures against their colonial consequences. Islamic, Indian, or African civilizations were invented contrapuntally by Orientalism…in order to match, balance and thus authenticate ‘Western Civilization’.”

Hamid Dabashi (1951) American academic

For the Last Time Civilization. http://iss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/16/3/361

Thinking

“The symbolic order is striving for a homeostatic balance, but there is in its Kernel, at its very centre, some strange traumatic order - the Thing. Lacan coined a neologism for it: l'extimité - external intimacy, which served as a title for one of Jacques-Alain Miller's Seminars. And what, at this level, is the death drive? Exactly the opposite of the symbolic orderL the possibility of the second death,' the radical annihilation of the symbolic texture through which so-called reality is constructed. They very existence of the symbolic order implies a possibility of its radical effacement, of symbolic death”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

the the death of the so-called real object in its symbol, but the obliteration of the signifying network itself.
147
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Death, Reality

“After lengthy struggles I now find myself here [Dr Kohnstamm's sanatorium in Königstein, in Taunus] for a time to put my mind into some kind of order. It is a terribly difficult thing, of course, to be among strangers so much of the day. But perhaps I'll be able to see and create something new. For the time being, I would like more peace and absolute seclusion. Of course, I long more and more for my work and my studio. Theories may be all very well for keeping a spiritual balance, but they are grey and shadowy compared with work and life.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

Letter from Königstein, Taunus to Dr. Karl Hagemann, January 1916 (friend and patron in Leverkusen and collector of his art); as quoted in the biography-pdf http://www.kirchnermuseum.ch/data/media/downloads/Biography.pdf of the Kirchner museum, Davos Kirchner suffered then a serious mental breakdown and was also afraid for being drafted once more in the German army, so back in the war 1916 - 1919

Life, Peace, Time

“The planet is fine. The people are [bleeped out]. Because everyone is trying to save the planet. The planet doesn’t need that. The planet will take care of itself. People are selfish. And that's what they're doing is trying to save the planet for themselves to have a nicer place to live. They don't care about the planet in theory. They just care about having a comfortable place. And these people with the fires and the floods and everything, they overbuild, they put nature to the test and they get what's coming to them. That's what I say. That's what's happening, and I can't wait for the sea levels to rise. I can't wait for some of these cities to disappear. There are places that are going to go away. The map is going to change and that's because -- people think nature is outside of them. They don't take into them the idea that we are part of it. They say, "oh, we're going for a nature walk. We're going to the country because we like nature." Nature is in here. [points to chest] And if you're in tune with it, like the Indians, the Hopis, especially, the balance of life, the balance, the harmony of nature, if you understand that, you don't overbuild. You don’t do all this moron stuff.”

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

The View, 24 October 2007 http://newsbusters.org/blogs/justin-mccarthy/2007/10/24/george-carlins-view-wildfire-victims-get-whats-coming-them Interviews, Television Appearances

Life, People, Idea, Understanding

“I decided there ought to be another way of balancing out the various distortions without doing it mathematically.”

Arthur H. Robinson (1915–2004) American geographer

Robinson (1990) in The Times; As cited in: Myrna Oliver (2004): About the development of the Robinson projection.

Way, Mathematics

“Now I’m not saying that Keynes was right about everything, that we should treat The General Theory as a sort of secular bible - the way that Marxists treat Das Kapital. But the essential truth of Keynes’s big idea - that even the most productive economy can fail if consumers and investors spend too little, that the pursuit of sound money and balanced budgets is sometimes (not always!) folly rather than wisdom - is as evident in today’s world as it was in the 1930s. And in these dangerous days, we ignore or reject that idea at the world economy’s peril.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

"Why aren't we all Keynesians yet?", Fortune (Aug. 3, 1998)

Wisdom, Money, Truth, World

“They tell you in Washington, that if you want a friend get a dog. Harry Truman said that. That is not true. Get a family. This is a hard place to be. No matter how much honor you have, people will attack you one way or the other. And the principle solace that you get is from your family. Because they’re behind you no matter what happens. So never forget about that. Whatever interests you have in your career, you have to balance it with a deep relationship with your family.”

Merrick Garland (1952) American judge

[Merrick Garland, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U1a8pYMJDM, March 18, 2016, Life Lessons Learned, DC Circuit Court Judge Panel, JRCLS International Law Conference, February 15, 2013, Georgetown University Law Center]; also excerpted quote in:
[March 18, 2016, The Quotable Merrick Garland: A Collection of Writings and Remarks, http://www.nationallawjournal.com/home/id=1202752327128/The-Quotable-Merrick-Garland-A-Collection-of-Writings-and-Remarks, Zoe Tillman, The National Law Journal, March 16, 2016, 0162-7325]
DC Circuit Court Judge Panel, JRCLS International Law Conference (2013)

People, Family, Dogs, Way

“A visionary leader seeks to empower others. They continue to search for truth while maintaining their principle-centered focus. Visionary leaders have a good balance between right-brain and leftbrain thinking. The right brain is more feminine, nurturing, intuitive and creative; the left-brain is more masculine and “physical,” interested more in results. Visionary leaders often produce a host of solutions for social, economic and other types of problems.
If we want visionary leaders, we must, of course, learn to recognize them and support them. Visionary leaders have great qualities, which they develop through their interest in values, intuition and partnership with others. They can bring spiritual culture to our religious and political lives. Mahatma Gandhi once said, “I must first be the change I want to see in my world.””

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

A visionary leader knows he must lead by example, and that his leadership will have a powerful impact on both present and future generations.
Ten Characteristics of a Servant-Leader
Books, Leadership for an Age of Higher Consciousness, Volume II: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times (Hari-Nama Press, 2001)

Truth, World, Search, Support

“In the first two years this is a man [Clinton] who tried his best to balance the budget, to reform health care, to fight for gay rights, to support personal freedoms. Couldn’t those be considered doing the right things, evidence of true character?”

Bryant Gumbel (1948) American sportscaster

To David Maraniss, MSNBC’s InterNight, October 10, 1996. Real Video http://www.mediaresearch.org/rm/projects/99/gumbel8/segment1.ram

Health, Support, Freedom, Fight

“In the future it will be necessary on the one hand to establish a balance between the intimate and individualistic demands for housing, and on the other to take full account of general social conditions. Thus, for example, cooking should be transferred from the private single kitchen into the communal cooking laboratory; the main meal should be consumed in public eating establishments; and the rearing of children should become the responsibility of the kindergarten or the school... Presently our goal is the transition from housing as an agglomeration of many private dwellings to housing communes.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

Quote from: 'Communal Housing'
1926 - 1941, Rußland: Die Rekonstruktion der Architektur in der Sowjetunion' (1929)

Children, School, Communication, Future

“Art on the contrary sought this harmony in practice [of art itself]. More and more in its creations it has given inwardness to that what surrounds us in nature, until, in Neo-Plasticism, nature is no longer dominant. This achievement of balance may prepare the way for the fulfillment of man and signal the end of (what we call) art.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

In a letter to Rudolph Steiner, c. 1921-23; as quoted in Abstract Painting, Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co., 1964, p. 85
1920's

Art, Way, Nature

“Individually speaking, death is always a rupture, a violence. But taking a total view, death is the bell curve upon which the cosmos is balanced. Without it, nothing would work, everything would collapse, clogged and stagnant. Death is flow. It is the necessary lubrication of universal motion. It is, in itself, neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 3, Chapter 8, “The Wrath of Diana” (p. 337).
Jack Glass (2012)

Death, Universe

“To his son Henry, the quality that distinguished his father from all the other figures in the family group, was that, in his opinion, Charles Francis Adams possessed the only perfectly balanced mind that ever existed in the name.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Family

“The emphasis this week seems to be on the sun, and the fact that maybe its really the sun which has been driving climate change after all. That's what I've been saying for years, because its just unrealistic to ignore the largest and single most important contributor to our planets energy balance and to only focus on made-made CO2 and nothing else.”

Anthony Watts (1958) American television meteorologist

This week in Global Warming http://wattsupwiththat.com/2007/03/24/this-week-in-global-warming/, wattsupwiththat.com, March 24, 2007. 2007

Change, Sun

“There is in fact no contradiction at all between the statement of an exact bookkeeping balance ex post and the obvious inference that in a situation when saving is increasing without a corresponding increase of investment, or perhaps with an adverse movement in investment, there must be a tendency ex ante to a disparity.”

Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987) Swedish economist

Source: Monetary Equilibrium (1939), p. 46

“Unfortunately, pragmatism is not always good politics. The greatest asset of mid-20th century social democracy—its willingness to compromise its own core beliefs in the name of balance, tolerance, fairness and freedom—now looks more like weakness: a loss of nerve in the face of changed circumstances. We find it hard to look past those compromises to recall the qualities that informed progressive thought in the first place: what the early 20th century syndicalist Edouard Berth termed “a revolt of the spirit against... a world in which man was threatened by a monstrous moral and metaphysical materialism.””

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Ill Fares the Land (2010), Ch. 4 : Goodbye to All That?

World, Democracy, Freedom, Change

“I took a deep breath, and the humming began behind my left ear. I now knew how I’d solved that math problem in Ashmore’s class. Everything, every thought that came to us came from heaven through our guardian angel, our genius, when we were at peace in our hearts and in balance in our brains. So yes, I was barking up the right tree with all these thoughts and words that were coming out of my mouth. And with such ease.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

Peace, Angels, Problem, Tree

“Overall, the universe's apostrophe store stays in balance. It seems our linguistic world was intelligently designed -- for every gratuitous apostrophe there's an instance where it's omitted.”

Anu Garg (1967) Indian author

A.Word.A.Day (Sep 3, 2012) http://wordsmith.org/words/crows_feet.html

World, Intelligence, Universe

“General Kaika: Was it black men who filled the Mediterranean with poison? No, it was destroyed by the filthy wastes from European factories!
Reporter: Well, the Aswan dam--
General Kaika: Yes, yes, the Aswan dam may have tipped the balance finally, but before that the sea was dying. Because so many had to starve on the African coast there began this war. That is why I say the white countries are responsible. It is the typical white habit to ruin what you have and then go to steal from other people.
Reporter: Oh, General, you’re stretching the facts a bit!
General Kaika: Is the fact that it is dangerous to swim in the Mediterranean? Is the fact that the fish have died?
Reporter: Well, yes, but--
General Kaika: I have no more to say.”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

January “CHARGE ACCOUNT”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Men, War, People, Fish

“If you're in the mood for something that's completely visceral and mindless (really mindless — the plot is a joke, filled with contrivances and coincidences), this movie will fit the bill. Parts of it are excruciatingly bad, but there are numerous examples of well-directed action that, on balance, compensate for the worst gaffes. This is a poor man's Die Hard. It has the explosions, gunplay, and spectacular stunts, but little of the wit and intelligence. In other words, it's a typical summer action flick.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=1556 of Cliffhanger (1993). Two star reviews

Intelligence, Mood, Summer, Parting

“I departed from parental paths significantly and abruptly one Sunday morning when, sitting in the family pew of the Hyde Park United Church and idly twisting a loose button on the cushion beside me, I said to myself, "I do not believe in God." Some months previously… when our minister fell back on St. Anselm's ontological argument to prove the existence of God, he entirely failed to convince me. Quite the contrary, the argument struck me as an abuse of language. Though I duly submitted to the ritual of confirmation… Horton's unconvincing argument had sown doubt in my mind; and for that reason I can assign, on that morning, listening to his more emotional, hortatory rhetoric… the balance tipped, committing me to a secret, personal rejection of the Christian piety my parents held dear.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian's Memoir (2005)

God, Secret, Family, Parent

“NATO's nuclear strategy is an essential part of that balance [between East and West]. To threaten to upset it by refusing to let America base any of her nuclear weapons in Britain would make war more likely, not less likely.”

Denis Healey (1917–2015) British Labour Party politician and Life peer

The Guardian (14 August 1981).
1980s

War, Parting

“I would like to take this opportunity to explain the Zone of Ahimsa or peace sanctuary concept, which is the central element of the Five-Point Peace Plan. I am convinced that it is of great importance not only for Tibet, but for peace and stability in Asia.
It is my dream that the entire Tibetan plateau should become a free refuge where humanity and nature can live in peace and in harmonious balance.”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

Nobel lecture (1989)

Peace, Dreams, Nature

“Keynes disdained inside information — in fact, he once declared that Wall Street traders could make huge fortunes if only they would disregard their "inside" information — and his own oracles were nothing but his minute scrutiny of balance sheets, his encyclopedic knowledge of finance, his intuition into personalities, and a certain flair for trading.”

Robert L. Heilbroner book The Worldly Philosophers

Source: The Worldly Philosophers (1953), Chapter IX, John Maynard Keynes, p. 248-249

Knowledge, Personality

“Why can't a writer use writing as a painter uses paint? I try to. When I wrote The Tree of Man I felt I couldn't write about simple, illiterate people in a perfectly literate way; but in my present novel the language is more sophisticated. I think perhaps I have clarified my style quite a lot over the years. I find it a great help to hear the language going on around me; not that what I write, the narrative, is idiomatic Australian, but the whole work has a balance and rhythm which is influenced by what is going on around you. When you first write the narrative it might be unconscious, but when you come to work it over you do it more consciously. It gives what I am writing a greater feeling of reality.”

Patrick White (1912–1990) English-born Australian writer

In The Making (1970)

People, Way, Feeling, Thinking

“The Male Teacher Corps not only exposes children to men from a variety of professions, but exposes children to men with more risk-taking, entrepreneurial male energy and values, creating a balance between exposure to the male and female value systems.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 116.

Men, Children, Teachers

“When a man lacks mental balance in pneumonia he is said to be delirious. When he lacks mental balance without the pneumonia, he is pronounced insane by all smart doctors.”

Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962) American university teacher (1879-1962)

Fischerisms (1944)

“Now, blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep! It covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; it is meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot. It is the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap, and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise man, even.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book III, Ch. 68.

Pleasure, World, Fools, Drink

““We may suffer for it when the balance of things rights itself, but we do not lose hope and forego art and forget the words of the Making. Nature is not unnatural. This is not a righting of the balance, but an upsetting of it. There is only one creature who can do that.”
“A man?” Arren said, tentative.
“We men.”
“How?”
“By an unmeasured desire for life.”
“For life? But it isn’t wrong to want to live?”
“No. But when we crave power over life—endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality—then desire becomes greed. And if knowledge allies itself to that greed, then comes evil. Then the balance of the world is swayed, and ruin weighs heavy in the scale.””

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

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 3, "Hort Town" (Ged and Arren)

Life, Men, World, Hope

“A healthy forest, untouched by forestry technology, is made up of a strange mixture of vegetation. Alongside well-defined areas of noble trees, conditions of apparent chaos can be found, which can best be described as irregular confusion. People who are not aware of the importance of the balance in Nature, of which the forest is a part, want to clear areas of everything they do not consider to be useful. A great deal of sensitive concern and observation is necessary to begin to understand why Nature depends on an apparently chaotic disorder.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Viktor Schauberger wrote in 1930
Living Water

People, Understanding, Nature, Tree

“The combined efforts of Government policy since 1979 have been not to improve but substantially to worsen our competitive position. We have gone from a huge manufacturing surplus of £5.5 billion in 1980 to a 1986 third quarter deficit of £8 billion a year…Even with oil production continuing for some time, the current account has gone from a £3 billion surplus to a deficit predicted by the Chancellor of £1.5 billion…Sadly, the Government's great contribution, having refused to stimulate the economy by more respectable means, is a roaring consumer boom, which there is not the slightest chance of their moderating before an election. A roaring consumer boom does not, to any significant extent, mean more employment. In our competitive position, worsening under the Government, it means overwhelmingly higher imports, a still worse balance of payments position and a classic path to perdition. To have produced, after seven and a half years, the combination of total monetary muddle, a worsened competitive position, a widespread doubt in other countries as to how we are to pay our way in the future, a desperately vulnerable currency and the prospect of an unending plateau of the highest unemployment in a major country in the industrialised world is a unique achievement over which the Chancellor is an appropriate deputy acting presiding officer.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1986/nov/06/economic-policy in the House of Commons (6 November 1986) 1980s

World, Way, Effort, Chance

“The conservation of matter in a chemical change is represented in a balanced chemical equation for that process. The study of the relationships between the numbers of reactant and product molecules is called stoichiometry. Stoichiometry is fundamental to all aspects of chemistry.”

David W. Oxtoby (1951) President of Pomona college

Principles of Modern Chemistry (7th ed., 2012), Ch. 2 : Chemical Formulas, Equations, and Reaction Yields

Study, Change

“Of course, we are applying advances in technology. But when you use those advances just to boost the processing power, the trade-off is that you increase power consumption, make the machine more expensive and make developing games more expensive. When I look at the balance of that trade-off -- what you gain and what you lose -- I don't think it's good. Nintendo is applying the benefits of advanced technology, but we're using it to make our machines more power-efficient, quieter and faster to start. And we're making a brand-new user interface. I think that way of thinking is the biggest difference.”

Satoru Iwata (1959–2015) Japanese video game programmer and businessman

Q&A: Video-game industry maverick promises a Revolution, 2007-03-03, Bishop, Todd, 2005-05-20, Seattle Post-Intelligencer http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/225097_e3iwata20.html,

Way, Game, Thinking

“Democracy and markets are both fundamental building blocks for a decent society. But they clash at a fundamental level. We need to balance them.”

Ha-Joon Chang book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

Source: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2008), Ch. 8, Democracy and the free market, p. 174

Democracy

“I was born in the heart of the Great American Food Machine. From childhood on it was expected that I would someday take over and run what has become the world's largest ice cream company—Baskin-Robbins. Year after year I was groomed and prepared for the task, given an opportunity to live the Great American Dream… There is a sweeter and deeper American dream than the one I turned down. It is the dream of a success in which all beings share because it is founded on a reverence for life. A dream of a society at peace with its conscience because it respects and lives in harmony with all life forms. A dream of a people living in accord with the laws of Creation, cherishing and caring for the natural environment, conserving nature instead of destroying it. A dream of a society that is truly healthy, practicing a wise and compassionate stewardship of a balanced ecosystem.”

John Robbins book Diet for a New America

Introduction
Diet for a New America (1987)

Life, People, World, Peace

“[W]e have more than two options… a critique of reason does not have to be a call for the return of superstition and arbitrary power…. [O]ur problems do not lie with reason itself but with our obsessive treatment of reason as an absolute value. Certainly it is one of our qualities, but it functions positively only when balanced and limited by the others.”

John Ralston Saul The Doubter's Companion

"Instrumental Reason"
The Doubter's Companion (1994)

Lie, Problem

“Gandhi has sound economic and cultural reasons for encouraging the revival of cottage industries, but he does not counsel a fanatical repudiation of all modern progress. Machinery, trains, automobiles, the telegraph have played important parts in his own colossal life! Fifty years of public service, in prison and out, wrestling daily with practical details and harsh realities in the political world, have only increased his balance, open-mindedness, sanity, and humorous appreciation of the quaint human spectacle.”

Paramahansa Yogananda book Autobiography of a Yogi

Source: Autobiography of a Yogi, Chapter 44 - "With Mahatma Gandhi At Wardha

Life, World, Reality, Parting

“Looking backward on a period which is finished, we are looking at actually realized returns, costs, etc., as those items are registered in the bookkeeping of business. In such an ex post calculation there is, as we will show later, an exact balance between the invested waiting and the value of gross investment [Phil: he appears to mean savings and investment]. Looking forward there is no such balance except under certain conditions which remain to be ascertained. In the ex ante calculus it is a question not of realized results but of anticipations, calculations, and plans driving the dynamic process forward. Had this distinction been kept in mind, much confusion about “saving and investment” would have been avoided. There is in fact no contradiction at all between the statement of an exact bookkeeping balance ex post and the obvious inference that in a situation in which saving is increasing without a corresponding increase in investment, or perhaps with an adverse movement in investment, there must be a tendency ex ante to disparity.”

Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987) Swedish economist

Source: Monetary Equilibrium (1939), p. 34

Question, Business, Appearance, Waiting

“Our choice is apparently most free, and we are least obviously driven to determine our course, in those cases where the future is most obscure, that is, when the balance of advantage appears most doubtful.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Choice
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XX - First Principles

Appearance, Future

“[W]hat Reconstruction succeeded in doing: it helped us avoid a renewed outbreak of civil war (which, considering the history of civil conflicts, is no small achievement); it laid the legal and constitutional foundations for a more egalitarian America, foundations that it took only sixty-five years to revitalize into the Civil Rights Movement; it restored the original balance of constitutional federalism, putting aside the states’ rights absolutism of the pre-war Southern aristocracy. But I do not say this to encourage any historical Pollyannaism about Reconstruction. That restored federal balance permitted the emergence of the first women’s voting rights legislation, the curtailing of municipal corruption, and the introduction of widespread public schooling; it also permitted the emergence of Jim Crow. But as Lincoln said, “this is a world of compensation.””

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

The historical good and the evil, even in Reconstruction, do not come unmixed.
2010s, Interview with Sara Gabbard (2018)

Women, War, World, School

“Liberals have developed a utopian vision of how nature should behave. It must remain in perfect balance. To that end, they’ll exterminate harmless critters that violate the liberal idea of Order; of species correctness. While animals may not migrate illegally, or disrupt the preordained ‘natural’ order—liberal social engineers encourage non-indigenous peoples to mess with the social habitat of historic, host populations. Provided they’re white.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"The Curious Case of America's Waning Whites" http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/08/the-curious-case-of-americas-waning-whites/ The Daily Caller, December 8, 2016 2010s, 2016

People, Idea, Nature, Animals

“It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money — that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot — it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

Known as the Common Law of Business Balance, this quotation has been widely attributed to Ruskin but has never been sourced to any of his works.
[Shapiro, Fred R., The Yale Book of Quotations, 2006, Yale University Press, New Haven, 657]
Disputed

Money, Law, Business

“In their evolution, we see that the earliest pterosaurs were small, and yet still unnecessarily heavy and clumsy, both in the air and on the ground, but 160 million years of refinement has honed their abilities to the limit of incidental engineering. Despite their enormity, they were unbelievably lightweight; even the biggest ones were estimated at less than 500 lbs. They had hollow pneumatic bones of large diameter but only millimeters thick, making a strut-supported tubular frame that's surprisingly strong and highly resistant to the stresses of aeronautics. They also had extraordinarily powerful wing muscles, and this made them capable of vaulting airborne in a single bolt. Once in the air, muscle strands and tendons in the membrane of the wing itself worked with a network of pycnofibres to give them all the data they needed for subtle adjustments to the shape of the wing. The portions of the brain which were dedicated to flight, balance and visual gaze stabilization in birds are all larger and more adapted in pterosaurs. In fact, scientists are now convinced that these animals had such a mastery of flight, that the larger ones could even cross oceans, going 80 mph at 15,000 feet for thousands of miles on a single launch.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Pterosaurs are Terrible Lizards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_htQ8HJ1cA (December 3, 2013)

Support, Bird, Strong, Animals

“[A]ssuming that the observable universe is void of extraterrestrial civilizations, then what hangs in the balance is at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 human lives (though the true number is probably larger). If we represent all the happiness experienced during one entire such life with a single teardrop of joy, then the happiness of these souls could fill and refill the Earth’s oceans every second, and keep doing so for a hundred billion billion millennia. It is really important that we make sure these truly are tears of joy.”

Nick Bostrom book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Source: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), Ch. 6

Life, Happiness, Soul, Tear

“The universe is so well balanced that the mere fact that you have a problem also serves as a sign that there is a solution.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 127

Problem, Universe

“The capitalists misinformed and miseducated workers in the metropoles to the point where they became allies in colonial exploitation. In accepting to be led like sheep, European workers were perpetuating their own enslavement to the capitalists. They ceased to seek political power and contented themselves with bargaining for small wage increases, which were usually counter-balanced by increased costs of living. They ceased to be creative and allowed bourgeois cultural decadence to overtake them all. They failed to exercise any independent judgment on the great issues of war and peace, and therefore ended up by slaughtering not only colonial peoples but also themselves.”

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 316.

War, People, Peace, Exercises

“The external emergency proclaimed in 1971 has been revoked by me. Action has been taken to: to remove the remaining curbs on the fundamental freedoms and civil rights of the people; restore rule of law and the right of free expression to the press; review the Internal Security Act without denying the right to approach the courts; legislation to ensure that no political party is banned except on adequate grounds and after an independent judicial enquiry; repeal of The Prevention of Publication of Objectionable Matters Act; and Amendment to the Representatives of People’s Act. Suitable amendments to the Constitution shall be also be introduced to restore balance between the people and the Parliament.”

Basappa Danappa Jatti (1912–2002) Indian politician

Presidential Addresses to Parliament

People, Law, Freedom

“For every apparent gain, in short, we now observe a balancing danger. This is the world we have created.”

Mark Kingwell (1963) Canadian philosopher

Source: The World We Want (2000), Chapter 4, Spaces And Dreams, p. 165.

World

“i keep drinking the ink from my pen
and i'm balancing history books up on my head
but it all boils down to one quotable phrase
if you love something give it away”

Conor Oberst (1980) American musician

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

Love, Books, History, Drink

“People are so conditioned to take sides that a balanced analysis looks to them like hatred.”

Scott Adams Dilbert

Dilbert, in Daily Dilbert (26 March 2005)

People

“It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 82

“Horror has many iterations, many shades. Landing the perfect balance of melody, texture and sonics is the key to a great score. Some horror films require a huge, aggressive palette. Others are the complete opposite. Finding that musical happy place is what will make the movie from a score perspective.”

Michael Wandmacher (1967) composer

Interview with Underworld: Blood Wars Composer, Michael Wandmacher http://www.thesoundarchitect.co.uk/interview-underworld-blood-wars-composer-michael-wandmacher/ (February 15, 2018)

Happiness, Music, Perfection

“He saw that their distinctive virtue lay in their finitude, their minute particularity, their tortured balance between dullness and lucidity; and that to save them from these would be to annihilate them.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XV: The Maker and His Works; 2. Mature Creating (p. 178)

“Keynes’s design was in favour of the liberalization of the economy and the capital’s transfers, for the main purpose of monetary stability. To avoid devaluation of currencies - a practice followed by governments in order to sustain their export - Lord Keynes planned to introduce “Bancor”, a money of account to be accepted by all countries in international exchanges. The international body to be organized would get interests both from debtor and creditor countries, in order to finance the balance of payments system”

Nico Perrone (1935) Italian historian and writer

Source: The international economy from a political to an authoritative drive, p. 130

Money, Country

“You have to not be arrogant and say you know better, and you have to not thwart their creativity because they are creative people and they have a very different point-of-view than a filmmaker on how to get people in the seats. So, it’s a balance, like everything in life, between keeping your focus and being overly constricting. So, if you want to be a filmmaker, you have to realize what a long arbiter a movie is cut of and shaped on, how many phases there are to it, and how long you have to be totally focused on your story and the movie itself, and how it seemed one way but making a film is really trench warfare.”

Rob Cohen (1949) American film director, producer and writer

Interview: Rob Cohen – Director (The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor) http://horrornews.net/45720/interview-rob-cohen-director-the-mummy-tomb-of-the-dragon-emperor/ (December 16, 2008)

Life, People, Way