Quotes about base (2736 quotes, page 16)

“It was very personal. Political comes from the viewing process. Nothing is ever political if it's genuine. In the reaction, yes, it can be political. But the motives were based completely on a deep need to communicate and share information. The film language has evolved enough that you should get people interacting with the film. It's exciting for us to exhibit it, and it's exciting for people to watch it…I think it's very important for the gay community to have random characters that represent nothing more than people…I think it's part of a wave that will set a precedent of some sort so that you will no longer need a label.”

River Phoenix (1970–1993) American actor, musician, and activist

On My Own Private Idaho, The Face, (1992)

People , Communication , Motivation , Thinking

“We are not so naive as some think of us; we do not believe that a neutral base will turn men into angels; we know quite well that the people who are evil will still be evil; but we believe that communication and relationships based on a neutral base will at least do away with the great mass of brutality and crimes which are caused not by ill will, but simply by mutual misunderstandings and impositions.”

Ludoviko Lazaro Zamenhof (1859–1917) Polish ophthalmologist and inventor of Esperanto

Address http://reto.cn/biblioteko/movado/zamenhof/paroladoj/uk2.htm to the Second World Congress of Esperanto, Geneve, Switzerland. 27 August 1906.

Men , People , Angels , Communication

“McGraw was an improviser, a teacher. He brought much to the game that keeps baseball fresh and suspenseful today—the hit-and-run play, the steal, the squeeze play, the uses of the bunt and the defenses against it. He helped turn the game into a thing of fluid beauty, infielders charging the plate or roaming far from their bases, outfielders moving with each pitch, racing in for base hits before them, backing each other in the outfield, entering the infield itself on rundown plays. Yet when the game changed radically, with the introduction of the livelier baseball, McGraw naturally shifted to a power emphasis, founding his team about such men as George Kelly, Bill Terry, Mel Ott. He knew, too, that the old pitching style of permitting a man to hit a deadened ball because it would then be caught in the big fields had to be changed, and his staffs led the league year after year in strikeouts, in earned-runs.”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

Hano, Arnold (1967). Greatest Giants of Them All. New York, NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons. pp. 248–249.
Sports-related

Men , Beauty , Game , Nature

“I have opinions that are based on the facts that are presented to me. I don't apologize. I stand by it. If I'm hated, so what? If I'm loved, so what?”

Stephen A. Smith (1967) sports journalist

Quoted by Richard Sandomir in " ESPN's New Master of the Offensive Foul http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/arts/television/31sand.html?ei=5090&en=f4ace7eed00624de&ex=1280462400&partner=rssuserland&emc=rs&pagewanted=print", New York Times (July 31, 2005).

Love , Hate

“In the form that it emerged at the turn of the century and developed in the 1920s and 1930s, the fascist ideology represented a synthesis of organic nationalism with the antimaterialist revision of Marxism. It expressed a revolutionary aspiration based on a rejection of individualism, whether liberal or Marxist, and it created the elements of a new and original political culture.”

Zeev Sternhell (1935) Israeli historian

Source: The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, 1994, p. 6

“[It remains to be seen whether the newer management theories, based as they are on research in industrial concerns, will be] equally applicable to other kinds of organized human activity, such as schools, voluntary organizations, unions, hospitals, governmental agencies, scientific and professional organizations, and the like.”

Rensis Likert (1903–1981) American statistician

Source: New patterns of management, (1961), p. 4; as cited in: James G. March. Handbook of Organizations (RLE: Organizations). 2013. p. 817

School

“Love is not honourable, unless it is based on equality.”

Marie de France Equitan

Amur n'est pruz se n'est egals.
"Equitan", line 137; p. 58.
Lais

Love

“The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk.”

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

" "We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore" In These Times (26 August 2004) http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/979/

People , Faith , Boy , Evil

“Bangladesh is a majority Muslim country, with a significant, if shrinking Hindu minority—about 25-30% at the time of Partition in 1947, and less than 9% in 2003. The textbooks in Bangladesh are not based on an anti-Indian bias as are state sponsored textbooks in Pakistan. The social studies curriculum in Pakistan is premised on creating a national identity that is distinct from India, whereas Bangladeshi textbooks reflect a more pan-South Asian perspective, though Bengal-centric.”

Yvette Rosser (1952) American activist

Rosser, Yvette Claire (2003). Curriculum as Destiny: Forging National Identity in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (Dissertation). University of Texas at Austin.

Study , Time , Country

“[Henry] James’s repressions and evasions are many, varied and exhausting. Why more people are not seen rushing shrieking from libraries, shredding James novels in their hands, I cannot say. I used to wonder whether enthusiasm for him was based on identification, since his passive, tentative heroes resemble many academics. Perhaps what is intolerable is his enshrinement in a soporific criticism. So much must be overlooked to crown him with laurel.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 622

People

“Everyone knows that we need to make better choices with what we eat. Football players are no different – and they’ve seen me, coming in at year fourteen, which I completely attribute to the dramatic change in my diet. Eating a more plant-based diet has allowed me to bounce back quicker, it’s helped me to stay around the NFL and still play at the high-level I play at – at a physically demanding position. I attribute everything to my diet.”

Tony Gonzalez (1976) American football and basketball player

"Q & A with Tony Gonzalez: All-Pro Football Player on Plant-Based Diet, Slow Food + More!" https://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-1304/Q-A-with-Tony-Gonzalez-AllPro-Football-Player-on-PlantBased-Diet-Slow-Food-More.html, MindBodyGreen.com (August 24, 2010).

Change , Help , Football

“A movie loosely based upon my novel, I Know What You Did Last Summer, opened in theaters around the country. I was ecstatic until I settled into a theater seat with my box of popcorn and discovered that Hollywood had turned my teenage suspense story into a slasher film. The setting had been changed from the mountains of New Mexico to a fishing village on the East Coast, so an insane fisherman, who wasn't in my book, could decapitate my characters with an ice hook. The first thing I did after leaving the theater was phone our daughter Kerry and warn her not to let the grandchildren see it.”

Lois Duncan (1934–2016) American young-adult and children's writer

On the adaptation of her novel I Know What You Did Last Summer in 1997, quoted in MoviePilot https://moviepilot.com/posts/3514425 piece
1990–2002

Books , Mountain , Fish , Change

“I base my opinion on historical evidence. After Guru Gobind Singh's death, Sikh peasantry rose in arms under Banda Bahadur. Then Jats in the Sikh Misl [armed groups] fought all through the 18th century to establish Khalsa raj [rule]. Out of the 12 Sikh misls, 9 were headed by Jat chiefs. In this struggle, they made tremendous sacrifices. If one generation was wiped out, the next generation took up arms. Finally, they emerged victorious at the end of the century.”

Khushwant Singh (1915–2014) Indian novelist and journalist

On his pro-Jat bias in his historical book.
Khushwant Singh: "Japji Sahib is Based on the Upanishads

Death , Victory

“Control every single moment of a slaves life, every minute of their day; it would tell them where to go, what to wear, where to sleep, when to work, when to eat, what to eat, when to speak, when to be silent. This is probably the biggest form of government that human beings have ever invented in the whole of history. I vigorously support Abraham Lincoln’s federal takeover of the southern states, and his highly commendable commitment to human rights. Lincoln viewed secession as an attempt to expand slavery. The Confederacy was based on the glorification of inequality and tyranny. The southern leaders clearly spelled out their views. Their motivation was not to be left alone, it was to enshrine slavery. CSA President Jefferson Davis said all black people are 'not fit to govern themselves', and they should be treated in a manner similar to 'lunatics, criminals and children.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Joshua Felipe, as quoted in "The Libertarian Attack on Abraham Lincoln" https://diplomatdc.wordpress.com/2010/06/05/the-libertarian-attack-on-abraham-lincoln-by-gregory-hilton/ (5 June 2010), by Gregory Hilton, The DC World Affairs Blog, WordPress

Life , Children , People , History

“Fundamentalism is not accidental but essential to Islam. It is inherent in those religious ideologies which are built on a narrow spiritual vision, have a limited psychic base, and which emphasise dogma and personalities, other than experience and impersonal truth. Islam's fundamentalism is rooted in its theology, its founder and his practices. It means that it will also have to be fought there. But this point is ill understood and, therefore, the struggle is at the best of times phoney war.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Ram Swarup, Swords to sell a god, ( 16 June 1992 in The Telegraph) quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (editor) (1998). Freedom of expression: Secular theocracy versus liberal democracy. https://web.archive.org/web/20171026023112/http://www.bharatvani.org:80/books/foe/index.htm

War , Truth , Time , Personality

“Well what happened was I was asked to be on Seinfeld. They said: “Would you do a Seinfeld?” And I said, and I just happened to know to see a few Seinfelds and I knew these guys were really tops; they were really, really clever guys, and I liked the show. And so I said “Sure!” and I thought they would ask me to do a walk-on, the way it came: "Would you come be part of the show?" And I said “Yeah, sure I’ll do it.” You know what I mean? Then I got the script and my name was on every page because it was about my car. And I laughed; it was hysterically funny. So I was really delighted to do it. The writer came up to me and he said “Jon, would you come take a look at my car to see if you ever owned it?”, because the writer wrote it from a real experience where someone sold him the car based on the fact that it was my car. And I went down and I looked at the car and I said “No, I never had this car.””

Jon Voight (1938) American actor

So unfortunately I had to give him the bad news. But it was a funny episode.
In a Red Carpet interview at the 2006 BAFTA Emmy Awards describing his involvement in and appearance on the 1994 Seinfeld episode The Mom and Pop Store http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8o140TFyAA

Cars , Way , Guy , Parting

“In Fascism, as in Communism, the idea of the future was based on a critique of bourgeois modernity… It rose from a variety of currents and from authors of very different origins, all of whom demonized the bourgeoisie. The doctrine was cast as post-Marxist, not as pre-liberal.”

François Furet (1927–1997) French historian

Source: The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1999), p. 175

Communication , Idea , Future

“Today, universities and their researchers are ranked mainly based on the amount of funding they receive, the number of papers they publish and their intellectual caliber. … Along with this, we should take into consideration how much we have been able to use their research to serve the lowest and most vulnerable strata of society.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

From Amritanandamayi's Address at the United Nations Academic Impact Conference on Technology for Sustainable Development (2015)

Universe

“Sitting in Baghdad, listening to the God-awful propaganda rhetoric of the Iraqis but watching the often promiscuous American and British air attacks, I have a suspicion that what's gone wrong has nothing to do with plans. Indeed, I suspect there is no real overall plan. Because I rather think that this war's foundations were based not on military planning but on ideology.”

Robert Fisk (1946) English writer and journalist

The monster of Baghdad is now the hero of Arabia http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles202.htm, April 1, 2003
2003

God , War , Thinking

“Little is known about the interface between separate marketing units and sales units. This article develops a multidimensional model of the marketing and sales interface. The model integrates a broad range of conceptual domains, including information sharing, structural linkages, power, orientations, and knowledge of marketing and sales. The authors empirically explore the conceptual model through a cross-industry study of 337 European Union–based companies. They identify five empirical archetypes of the marketing and sales interface. The taxonomy shows that the role and characteristics of marketing and sales vary a great deal. This finding challenges existing stereotypes about marketing and sales. Finally, the article explores organizational outcomes of the five configurations. The findings suggest that the most successful configurations are characterized by strong structural linkages between marketing and sales and a high extent of market knowledge in marketing.”

Christian Homburg (1962) German academic

Source: "Configurations of marketing and sales: a taxonomy", 2008, p. 133; Abstract

Knowledge , Study , Strong , Success

“Intersectionality is a concept for understanding oppression, not exploitation. Many Black feminists acknowledge the systemic roots of racism and sexism, but place far less emphasis than Marxists on the connection between the system of exploitation and oppression. Marxism is necessary because it provides a framework for understanding the relationship between oppression and exploitation and also identifies the agency for creating the material and social conditions that will make it possible to end both oppression and exploitation: the working class. Workers not only have the power to shut down the system, but also to replace it with a socialist society, based on collective ownership of the means of production. Although other groups in society suffer oppression, only the working class possesses this collective power. So the concept of intersectionality needs Marxist theory to realize the kind of unified movement that is capable of ending all forms of oppression. At the same time, Marxism can only benefit from integrating left-wing Black feminism into our own politics and practice.”

Sharon Smith (writer) (1956) American historian

A Marxist Case For Intersectionality (2017)

Understanding , Suffering , Time

“Diabetes is not and never was caused by eating a high carbohydrate diet, and it is not caused by eating sugar. The cause of diabetes is a diet that builds up the amount of fat into the blood. I'm talking about a typical meat-based, animal-based diet. You can look into the muscle cells of the human body, and you find they're building up tiny particles of fat which is causing insulin resistance. What that means is the sugar that is naturally from the foods that you're eating can't get into the cells where it belongs. It builds up in the blood and that is diabetes.”

Neal D. Barnard (1953) American physician, author, and clinical researcher

Interview in the documentary-film What the Health by Kip Andersen (2017).

Food , Nature , Animals

“It is in this matter that I fall foul of so many American writers on writing; they seem to think that writing is a confidence game by means of which the author cajoles a restless, dull-witted, shallow audience into hearing his point of view. Such an attitude is base, and can only beget base prose.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Elements of Style (1959).

Confidence , Game , Thinking

“... I have excluded the idea of the Fall of Man... man has made a long climb from the status of the animal until the time when he could recognize right from wrong. That recognition, at first, was based on behavior that paid, that avoided the retribution of the tribe and the gods, and that enabled the primitive society to function. Yet, however lowly in origin—and I am referring to a period centuries before right seemed to be worth following simply because it was right, or because man’s dignity and status were sustained by doing right; centuries before right was conceived as pleasing to God because he was holy and righteous—that earliest recognition of a difference between right and wrong was an immense advance, even though wrong was chosen.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.236-237 [ellipsis added]

God , Behavior , Idea , Time

“If any real efforts are to be made to free Black people of the constraints and conditions that characterize racial subordination, then theories and strategies purporting to reflect the Black community’s needs must include an analysis of sexism and patriarchy. Similarly, feminism must include an analysis of race if it hopes to express the aspirations of non-white women. Neither Black liberationist politics nor feminist theory can ignore the intersectional experiences of those whom the movements claim as their respective constituents. In order to include Black women, both movements must distance themselves from earlier approaches in which experiences are relevant only when they are related to certain clearly identifiable causes (for example, the oppression of Blacks is significant when based on race, of women when based on gender). The praxis of both should be centered on the life chances and life situations of people who should be cared about without regard to the source of their difficulties.”

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw book Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex

Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex (1989)

Life , Women , People , Hope

“In the years after 1936, whilst Hayek was working on The Pure Theory of Capital, most economists were convinced by Keynes, whose theory had an elegance and simplicity that Hayek’s did not. Keynes’ theory lacked Hayek’s theoretical rigor in that it was not based on equilibrium (on individual rationality), and there were places in the argument where Keynes relied on loose, informal arguments, preferring to put his trust in intuition rather than formal theory. Keynesians did not solve the problems with capital theory that Hayek had identified: they just bypassed or ignored them. According to Hayek’s methodological criteria, Keynes’ theory was decidedly inferior. Against this, Keynes’ theory provided opportunities for mathematical and statistical analysis that Hayek’s did not. Indeed, though Hayek paid some attention to data, he did so only minimally: he certainly made no attempt to test his theory against statistical data. The choice of Keynesian theory was, at least in part, a methodological one.”

Roger Backhouse (economist) (1951) British economist

"Hayek on money and the business cycle", 2006

Mathematics , Problem , Parting

“What interests me about fascism is that it is a black hole of free will. It is a system which isn’t necessarily unique, but it absolves brutality, it absolves the lack of morals and it absolves people of their own decisions. When they tell you ‘you can kill these people because they are Jews, reds or homosexuals, or whatever!’ In this world you can permit a brutal action on the base of collective advice; that is what scares me.”

Guillermo del Toro (1964) Mexican film director

Lo que me interesa del fascismo es justamente que es un hoyo negro de la voluntad. Es un sistema que no necesariamente es único, pero absuelve la brutalidad, absuelve la falta de moral y absuelve la decisión propia. Cuando te dicen “Tú puedes matar a esta gente porque que son judíos, rojos o homosexuales, ¡lo que sea!”
En ese mundo puedes permitir una acción brutal en base a un consejo colectivo, eso es lo que me asusta.
Interview with Guillermo del Toro on 10/23/2006. http://www.fantasymundo.com/articulo.php?articulo=467

People , World , Decision

“I would love to talk to you about that, Josh, but there's something else I want to bring up, and that's this. (Holds up a screenplay entitled "Live For The Moment: The Jeff Hardy Story") I had a friend in a fancy Hollywood agency the other day, and he ran across this little gem. Somebody actually took the time to write a screenplay about the Jeff Hardy story. So I was paging through it, and lo and behold, it culminates, of course, with Jeff conquering his demons and beating me her tonight in a TLC match at SummerSlam. What a great feelgood story, Josh, all except, of course, for the ending, which is not reality-based. It's fake, it's phony, just like everybody who lives in this town. I'd go as far as to say that I'm the only real person in this building right now. I wish I could say it's a Los Angeles epidemic, but the fact is it's worldwide. You have people that falsely idolize what they see in movies and on television; you have housewives in Iowa that subscribe to U. S. Weekly, US Weekly, or whatever it's called, so they can model their hair after Kate Gosselin, instead of helping their own children with their homework; you have little kids all over the world, millions of them, who idolize the "hip, cool star", and it doesn't matter if that hip cool star is some dork vampire in Twilight, or if it's Jeff Hardy. It doesn't matter if that hip cool star has a reprehensible, reckless lifestyle. You know, it doesn't matter if the collective intelligence of this entire country continues to spiral downward, day in and day out. It doesn't matter as long as it's cool, right? You know why they don't make movies about a guy like me? It's cause I don't support your poisoned society. I don't support this den of iniquity known as Hollywood. No, instead, I'm dismissed as being preachy, except I'm not preachy—I never have been. I just tell the truth. You know, I'm not a screenwriter either, but tonight I think I'll take a stab at it. Tonight I'm gonna rewrite the ending of "The Jeff Hardy Story."”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

It's gonna be horrifying. It's gonna be very, very graphic. It might be hard to watch for a lot of people, but it will have a happy ending: new World Heavyweight Champion—CM Punk.
At SummerSlam
Friday Night SmackDown

Love , Children , People , Truth

“The policy of plunder was the cornerstone for the welfare of the German people and a major guarantor of their political loyalty, which was first and foremost based on material considerations. The unshakable alliance between the state and the people was not primarily the result of cleverly conceived party propaganda. It was created by means of theft, with the spoils being redistributed according to equalitarian principles among the member of the ethnically defined Volk.”

Götz Aly (1947) German journalist, historian and social scientist

Source: Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (2007), p. 291

People , Loyalty

“Every weekend families across Britain settle down to watch the X-factor or Britain’s Got Talent. We revel in the discovery of new talent, the chance for someone to come from nowhere and suddenly make it big based simply on their raw ability and hard work. Yet (perhaps outside the realm of music and entertainment) our society is all too often the opposite of this ideal of opportunity.”

Jo Cox (1974–2016) UK politician

Jo Cox: Opportunity must knock in a fairer society http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opinion/jo-cox-opportunity-must-knock-in-a-fairer-society-1-6857022 (24 September 2014)

Family , Music , Chance

“Some people in our country seem more concerned about respecting the dignity and privacy of criminals and terrorists than they are about having an airport full of people obliterated, or a completely booked hotel blown to bits. Perhaps they think, Let's not get so upset about attacks on our embassies or military bases. Maybe, they surmise, the terrorists have good reason for attacking us. We have no right to be harassing innocent people in our country. For some people, not even the grotesque images that filled our television screens after al Qaeda's blatant attacks on 9/11 seem enough to wake them out of their utopia feel-good world.”

John Ashcroft (1942) American politician

Source: Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice (2006), p. 259

People , Books , World , Feeling

“Voluptuous habits speedily bind all the powers of the soul in loathsome vassalage, and exclude every thought except such as relate to the beastly pleasures of which it is the slave. Distracted by cravings as inexorable as they are base, and in their vileness perpetually reproduced, — tantalized by the impure fountains of a diseased imagination, and oppressed with its own effeminacy, — the mind loses its vigor and its productiveness. Every faculty rapidly deteriorates and decays; memory becomes extinguished, inanity destroys resolution, and the heart is as cold and callous as a cinder extinct. It ceases to love, to sympathize, and diffuse the delicious tears that sanctify friendship's shrine. The whole countenance assumes an expression of obdurateness and repugnance. The features, marked with premature decay, proclaim that the source of gentle sentiments, pure emotions, and innocent joys, is exhausted, like a limpid fountain invaded by the scoria and flame of a volcano. All the elements of life seem to have retreated into their abused organs only to perish there. Even the organs themselves are withered, and worse than dead; their infirmities, maladies, sufferings, rush in a multitude upon the degraded victim, and overwhelm him in awful retribution.”

Elias Lyman Magoon (1810–1886) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 354.

Love , Life , Friendship , Pleasure

“We all know the disappointments that come when we base anticipation on what we and other humans can deliver. God will never have a problem delivering!”

James MacDonald (1960) American pastor

Source: Always True (Moody, 2011), p. 89

God , Disappointment , Problem

“We never fully understood why Milosevic decided to give Sarajevo to the Muslims. But in retrospect, the best explanation may be that he was fed up with the Bosnian Serbs and had decided to weaken their Pale base by giving away the Serb-controlled part of Sarajevo. By giving the Federation all of Bosnia's capital, perhaps Milosevic wanted to weaken Karadzic and stregthen the Serbs in other parts of Bosnia, especially Banja Luka. This explanation was consistent with one of Milosevic's main themes at Dayton: that the Bosnian Serb leadership had become an impediment, even though he had earlier made common cause with them. Milosevic had often talked of strengthening the "intellectuals" and businessmen of Banja Luka in order to weaken Pale; now he seemed to be putting his theory into action.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p.293

Parting

“[I]f we lose our chance now…that chance will not return either to us or to our children. The memories of the last War will grow dim. The world will get back into the old rut, familiar professions and piety about peace will again soothe us to sleep, and the various countries will once more base their security upon military preparation. So they will all, in the end, find themselves drifting hopelessly upon those currents that make for war. … And remember what the next war will be like. The old lines which divide combatants from non-combatants, the weak and the diseased from the strong and the robust, men from women and children, will all be obliterated and civilization itself assailed, and from sea and sky will be brought to a heap of ruins.”

Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937) British statesman; prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester (24 May 1929), quoted in David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (Metro, 1997), p. 487
1920s

Women , Men , War , Children

“Simple calculations based on a range of variables are better than elaborate ones based on limited input.”

Ralph Brazelton Peck (1912–2008) American civil engineer

as taken by Professor Ralph Peck's Legacy Website http://peck.geoengineer.org/words.html#

“The new arguments for rules take an entirely different tack. They are based neither on the ignorance nor the knavery of public officials and, in fact, assume that everyone knows how the economy operates—even the government! Moreover, the government's objectives are assumed to coincide with the people's objectives, and everyone has rational expectations. Despite these seemingly ideal circumstances, modern critics argue that a central bank left with discretion will err systematically in the direction of excessive inflation. To remedy this distortion, they advocate a fixed rule.”

Alan Blinder (1945) economist

Source: Central Banking in Theory and Practice. 1998, p. 47

People

“In societies based around small communities, where almost everyone is either a friend, a relative, or an enemy of everyone else, the languages spoken tend even to lack words that correspond to "self-interest" or "altruism" but include very subtle vocabularies for describing envy, solidarity, pride, and the like. Their economic dealings with one another likewise tend to be based on much more subtle principles. … The work of destroying such ways of life is still often done by missionaries—representatives of those very world religions that originally sprang up in reaction to the market long ago. Missionaries, of course, are out to save souls; but they rarely interpret this to mean their role is simply to teach people to accept God and be more altruistic. Almost invariably, they end up trying to convince people to be more selfish and more altruistic at the same time. On the one hand, they set out to teach the "natives" proper work discipline, and try to get them involved with buying and selling products on the market, so as to better their material lot. At the same time, they explain to them that ultimately, material things are unimportant.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Army of Altruists (2007)

Life , God , People , World

“But Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity;
Her citizens, imperial spirits,
Rule the present from the past,
On all this world of men inherits
Their seal is set.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Hellas

Source: Hellas (1821), l. 696-703

Men , War , World , Past

“I believe that what we get out of our bodies is a direct result of what we put in. I (mostly) follow a plant-based diet of whole foods that helps my body stay in balance and limits additional inflammation. I try to surround myself with positive people, and I work to minimize distractions whenever possible. My lifestyle has helped me stay physically and mentally fit.”

Tom Brady (1977) American football quarterback

"Sunday Paper Exclusive: Tom Brady on the Mind of a Champion" http://mariashriver.com/tom-brady-on-the-mind-of-a-champion/, MariaShriver.com (2017).

People , Food , Help

“The bourgeoisie is the first class that has learned to say I and that at the same time has the experience of labor. All older class narcissisms can base themselves “only” on struggle, military heroism, and the grandiosity of rulers. When the bourgeois says “I” the idea of the pride of labor, of productive accomplishment can also be heard for the first time.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 63

Idea , Learning , Time

“Do we really believe in a culture of death? Absolutely not. We believe in the culture of martyrdom. Martyrdom is valuable, sacred, respectable, and great, not something that can be used as an accusation. It is an honor for us to be accused of believing in the culture of martyrdom. What is martyrdom? It is death for the sake of Allah, and in defense of what is just…. Hizbullah, when it comes to matters of jurisprudence pertaining to its general direction, as well as to its Jihad direction, based itself on the decisions of the Jurisprudent. It is the Jurisprudent who permits, and it is the Jurisprudent who forbids. When the resistance of Hizbullah was launched in 1982, it was based on the jurisprudent position and decision of Imam Khomeini, who deemed fighting Israel to be an obligation, and therefore, we adhered to this opinion…. Even with regard to martyrdom operation – a person cannot kill himself unless he has jurisprudent permission.”

Naim Qassem (1953) deputy general secretary of Hezbollah

Deputy Secretary-General of Hizbullah, Sheik Naim Qassem: We Received Jurisprudent Permission to Carry Out "Martyrdom" Operations and to Fire Misilles at Israeli Civilians from Iran, MEMRI, April 2007 http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/1425.htm,

Death , Decision , Fight , Personality

“[Jury selection] is best based upon seat-of-the-pants instincts, which are undoubtedly crudely stereotypical and may in many cases be hopelessly mistaken.”

William H. Rehnquist (1924–2005) Chief Justice of the United States

Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986) (dissenting opinion).
Judicial opinions

“My campaign is based upon the proposition that the answers to the problems which currently plague our cities, our towns, and our homes, are not to be found in the decisions in Washington. They are instead to be found in the hearts, minds and resources of our own people here at home.”

Jerry Springer (1944) American television presenter, former lawyer, politician, news presenter, actor, and musician

from a speech given circa 1970 to citizens in Cincinnati Ohio.
This American Life http://www.thislife.org/pages/descriptions/04/258.html, Ep. 258, 01/30/04, Leaving the Fold; Act One.

People , Home , Problem , Decision

“Since it seems to be the nature of man that he wants to go to hell as quickly as possible, it is not surprising that effective base rhetoricians can greatly accelerate this process for millions. … Many individuals try to drive men into slavery, as if they were cattle, but only a few succeed. These we hail as “great historical figures.” I submit that we cannot judge the noble rhetorician by this standard. Since he urges men to be better than they are, the noble rhetorician cannot possibly succeed in changing those who prefer to remain as they are or become evil. Indeed, because his task is to bring men to themselves, not to him, the noble rhetorician ought not to be judged by his manifest effect on others at all. Rather, he ought to be judged by the clarity and steadfastness with which he proclaims his counsel. Should not a single person heed his advice, the noble rhetorician would still have to be judged successful in proportion as he succeeds in perfecting his own language. … In the final analysis, what Karl Kraus sought was to purify himself by purifying his own language. He achieved his goal. He dies a semantic saint in a semantically satanic society.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: Anti-Freud (1990), pp. 56-57.

Men , Hell , Nature , Evil

“General systems theory deals with the most fundamental concepts and aspects of systems. Many theories dealing with more specific types of systems (e. g., dynamical systems, automata, control systems, game-theoretic systems, among many others) have been under development for quite some time. General systems theory is concerned with the basic issues common to all these specialized treatments. Also, for truly complex phenomena, such as those found predominantly in the social and biological sciences, the specialized descriptions used in classical theories (which are based on special mathematical structures such as differential or difference equations, numerical or abstract algebras, etc.) do not adequately and properly represent the actual events. Either because of this inadequate match between the events and types of descriptions available or because of the pure lack of knowledge, for many truly complex problems one can give only the most general statements, which are qualitative and too often even only verbal. General systems theory is aimed at providing a description and explanation for such complex phenomena.”

Mihajlo D. Mesarovic (1928) Serbian academic

Mihajlo D. Mesarovic and Y. Takahare (1975) General Systems Theory, Mathematical foundations. Academic Press. Cited in: Franz Pichler, Roberto Moreno Diaz (1993. Computer Aided Systems Theory. p. 134

Game , Mathematics , Knowledge , Problem

“Before the Industrial Revolution all techniques in use were supported by very narrow epistemic bases. That is to say, the people who invented them did not have much of a clue as to why and how they worked. The pre-1750 world produced, and produced well. It made many path-breaking inventions. But it was a world of engineering without mechanics, iron-making without metallurgy, farming without soil science, mining without geology, water-power without hydraulics, dye-making without organic chemistry, and medical practice without microbiology and immunology. The main point to keep in mind here is that such a lack of an epistemic base does not necessarily preclude the development of new techniques through trial and error and simple serendipity. But it makes the subsequent wave of micro-inventions that adapt and improve the technique and create the sustained productivity growth much slower and more costly. If one knows why some device works, it becomes easier to manipulate and debug it, to adapt to new uses and changing circumstances. Above all, one knows what will not work and thus reduce the costs of research and experimentation.”

Joel Mokyr (1946) Israeli American economic historian

Joel Mokyr, " The knowledge society: Theoretical and historical underpinnings http://ehealthstrategies.comnehealthstrategies.comnxxx.ehealthstrategies.com/files/unitednations_mokyr.pdf." AdHoc Expert Group on Knowledge Systems, United Nations, NY. 2003.

People , World , Error , Support

“Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown out any logically based dissension, it is usually the American soldier that is given the order to carry out some ill-conceived mission.”

Chelsea Manning (1987) United States Army soldier and whistleblower

Letter to Barack Obama (2013)

Question , Cry

“In strategic thinking, one first seeks a clear understanding of the particular character of each element of a situation and then makes the fullest possible use of human brainpower to restructure the elements in the most advantageous way. Phenomena and events in the real word do not always fit a linear model. Hence the most reliable means of dissecting a situation into its constituent parts and reassembling then in the desired pattern is not a step-by-step methodology such as systems analysis. Rather, it is that ultimate nonlinear thinking tool, the human brain. True strategic thinking thus contrasts sharply with the conventional mechanical systems approach based on linear thinking. But it also contrasts with the approach that stakes everything on intuition, reaching conclusions without any real breakdown or analysis… No matter how difficult or unprecedented the problem, a breakthrough to the best possible solution can come only from a combination of rational analysis, based on the real nature of things, and imaginative reintegration of all the different items into a new pattern, using nonlinear brainpower. This is always the most effective approach to devising strategies for dealing successfully with challenges and opportunities, in the market arena as on the battlefield.”

Kenichi Ohmae (1943) Japanese academic

Source: The Mind Of The Strategist, 1982, p. 304

Way , Imagination , Understanding , Nature

“The federal government and the state government must not fear programs who change lives, but must welcome those faith-based programs for the embetterment of mankind.”

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

Remarks at a luncheon http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/WCPD-2002-08-26/html/WCPD-2002-08-26-Pg1411.htm for gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon in Stockton, California, August 23, 2002.
2000s, 2002

Fear , Faith , Change

“We are trying to persuade all the Iraqi opposition to come breathe freedom in Iraq and use liberated Kurdistan as a base for our common struggle.”

Jalal Talabani (1933–2017) Iraqi politician

On an attempt to build an opposition force to overthrow Saddam Hussein — reported in Ethan Bronner (October 25, 1992) "Kurds Organizing Anti-Hussein Forces - Sidebar For a Quiet Colonel, A Moving Role as Santa Claus", Boston Globe, p. 1.

Freedom

“But I think [the] Uttar Pradesh electorate was fed up of this caste-based politics as the state has hardly seen any development, [the] [law-and-order] situation has deteriorated, investment, employment, women’s safety, rural and agriculture development, these areas hardly saw any development.”

Amit Shah (1964) Indian politician

"Exclusive Amit Shah Interview: People are waiting to vote for Modi," 2013, "Sunday Interview: We had 450 video raths with GPS and I’d get feedback on my mobile, says Amit Shah", 2014

Women , Law , Thinking

“The analogy between management and engineering has the unwholesome effect of taking management one further step away from governance. Engineering, like science, music, and theology, knows no national boundaries, and this is why scientists, artists, and theologians— often to their credit— make statesmen uneasy. Such men and women operate from a different normative base from those who govern. Despite the salience of the NAFTAs, the WTOs, and the EUs of this world, governing remains overwhelmingly the business of nation-states.”

John Rohr (1934–2011) American political scientist

Source: Civil servants and their constitutions, 2002, p. ix

Women , Men , World , Music

“Orthodox tools based on a normal distribution therefore fail exactly where they are most needed, at the extremes.”

David Orrell (1962) Canadian mathematician

Source: The Other Side Of The Coin (2008), Chapter 7, Straight Versus Crooked, p. 223

“Euclidean geometry can be easily visualized; this is the argument adduced for the unique position of Euclidean geometry in mathematics. It has been argued that mathematics is not only a science of implications but that it has to establish preference for one particular axiomatic system. Whereas physics bases this choice on observation and experimentation, i. e., on applicability to reality, mathematics bases it on visualization, the analogue to perception in a theoretical science. Accordingly, mathematicians may work with the non-Euclidean geometries, but in contrast to Euclidean geometry, which is said to be "intuitively understood," these systems consist of nothing but "logical relations" or "artificial manifolds". They belong to the field of analytic geometry, the study of manifolds and equations between variables, but not to geometry in the real sense which has a visual significance.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

Mathematics , Reality , Sense , Study

“Asimov: Science fiction always bases its future visions on changes in the levels of science and technology. And the reason for that consistency is simply that—in reality—all other changes throughout history have been irrelevant and trivial. For example, what difference did it make to the people of the ancient world that Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire? Obviously, that event made some difference to a lot of individuals. But if you look at humanity in general, you'll see that life went on pretty much as it had before the conquest.
On the other hand, consider the changes that were made in people's daily lives by the development of agriculture or the mariner's compass… and by the invention of gunpowder or printing. Better yet, look at recent history and ask yourself, "What difference would it have made if Hitler had won World War II?" Of course, such a victory would have made a great difference to many people. It would have resulted in much horror, anguish, and pain. I myself would probably not have survived.
But Hitler would have died eventually, and the effects of his victory would gradually have washed out and become insignificant—in terms of real change—when compared to such advances as the actual working out of nuclear power, the advent of television, or the invention of the jet plane.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Mother Earth News interview (1980)

Life , Pain , War , People

“At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author

Quoted in Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food (New York: Norton & Company, 2009, ISBN 978-0-393-06595-4), p. 137 https://books.google.it/books?id=vqucAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA137&lpg=PA137
Attributed

Pain , World , Way , Support

“They act as they please: here and there, they use force against sovereign states, building coalitions based on the principle 'If you are not with us, you are against us.' To make this aggression look legitimate, they force the necessary resolutions from international organizations, and if for some reason this does not work, they simply ignore the UN Security Council and the UN overall.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

Crimea address (18 March 2014) http://rt.com/news/putin-address-ten-quotes-778/
2011 - 2015

“Promoting veganism, I think it’s such an important message. … I remember as a child, my grandma instilling in us that no matter how little you think you have, there are always people and beings that are suffering on the planet and have even less than us. As I’ve grown older, the love just continues to grow for all living beings. It breaks my heart when I see animals being mistreated. As we all know, in agriculture, that’s like one of the biggest mistreatments that animals endure in our country. The more I educated myself about the subject, the more I was able to make wiser, more intelligent decisions in my life. … I’ve seen some tremendous positive changes in my health in the last six years when I switched to a plant-based diet … I live by the Golden Rule: treat others as you would like to be treated. And to me, that includes animals as well. They should be loved. They are souls on this planet just like we are.”

Susie Castillo (1979) MTV VJ, Miss USA 2003

"In-Depth with Loving the Silent Tears MC: Susie Castillo (Vegan)", GodsDirectContact.org (2012) http://www.godsdirectcontact.org.tw/eng/news/211/sr_43.htm.

Love , Life , People , Health

“I’m quite certain that we’ll have such [lunar] bases in our lifetime, somewhat like the Antarctic stations and similar scientific outposts, continually manned.”

Neil Armstrong (1930–2012) American astronaut; first person to walk on the moon

BBC interview (1970) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtdcdxvNI1o

“This is going to be hard and difficult work. The coalition will throw up all sorts of challenges, but I believe together we can provide that strong and stable government that our country needs, based on those values, rebuilding family, rebuilding community, above all, rebuilding responsibility in our country. Those are the things I care about, those are the things that this Government will now start work on doing. Thank you very much.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

2010s, 2010, First speech as UK Prime Minister (2010)

Family , Communication , Strong , Country

“Certain combinations of dimensions produce harmonious results, but since the time of the ancient Greeks no system of design, consistently base on that knowledge, has been formulated.”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Source: Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922), Ch. II

Knowledge , Time

“They [free market policies] were never based on solid empirical and theoretical foundations, and even as many of these policies were being pushed, academic economists were explaining the limitations of markets — for instance, whenever information is imperfect, which is to say always.”

Joseph E. Stiglitz (1943) American economist and professor, born 1943.

"Bleakonomics" http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/Stiglitz-t.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=books&adxnnlx=1191080508-xgqHp+i170M7vW5X5Q4Yeg&oref=slogin The New York Times Sunday Book Review (2007-09-30).

“I have learned a great deal from Marxism as I do not hesitate to admit… The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun. The whole of National Socialism is based on it… National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order.”

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

Source: Disputed, Hitler Speaks (1940), p. 186

Learning

“A textual critic engaged upon his business is not at all like Newton investigating the motions of the planets: he is much more like a dog hunting for fleas. If a dog hunted for fleas on mathematical principles, basing his researches on statistics of area and population, he would never catch a flea except by accident.”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

"The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism", a lecture delivered on August 4, 1921

Dogs , Mathematics , Business

“After having my daughter, I made a conscious effort to regain control of my health and my body. But I didn't want to do a crash diet. I was a mom now. I needed to change my ways and set an example for my child. … A year later (around November 2013), my husband and I decided we wanted to try a completely plant-based diet … And so the journey began that helped me get into the best shape of my life. Little did I know the long-lasting effects it would have. I thought, like with most diets, I would feel deprived and hate food, that I would miss out on restaurants and celebrations, that I would get headaches and be irritable, etc. I was wrong about all of that. It took a few days to adjust, but what I discovered was increased energy, better sleep, weight loss, improved digestion, clarity, and an incredibly positive feeling for my actions and the effects it would have on those around me and the environment.”

Beyoncé (1981) American singer, songwriter and actress

Foreword https://books.google.it/books?id=KfeoBAAAQBAJ&pg=PP10 to Marco Borges's The 22-Day Revolution, New York: Penguin, 2015

Life , Hate , Health , Food

“There are occasions … when all consolation is base and it is a duty to despair.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe book Elective Affinities

Es gibt Fälle, ... wo jeder Trost niederträchtig und Verzweiflung Pflicht ist.
Bk. I, Ch. 18, R. J. Hollingdale, trans. (1971), p. 147
Elective Affinities (1809)

Despair

“An ideological movement is a collection of people many of whom could hardly bake a cake, fix a car, sustain a friendship or a marriage, or even do a quadratic equation, yet they believe they know how to rule the world. The university, in which it is possible to combine theoretical pretension with comprehensive ineptitude, has become the natural habitat of the ideological enthusiast. A kind of adventure playground, carefully insulated from reality in order to prevent absent-minded professors from bumping into things as they explore transcendental realms, has become the institutional base for civilizational self-hatred.”

Kenneth Minogue (1930–2013) Australian political theorist

Kenneth Minogue in National Review, November 18, 1991, cited in: fortnightlyreview.co.uk http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2013/07/quick-define-quadratic-equation/, 2013/07

Friendship , Marriage , People , World

“Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier in the Great War, a political organizer of the first rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him… Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

Column discussing John Toland's biography of Hitler http://www.realchange.org/hitler.htm (1977).
1970s

War , History , Courage , Sense

“Hayek sees that the zero-sum vision is fired by an implacable negative energy. It is not the concrete vision of some real alternative that animates the socialist critic of the capitalist order. It is hostility toward the actual, and in particular toward those who enjoy advantages within it. Hence the belief in equality remains vague and undefined, except negatively. For it is essentially a weapon against the existing order – a way of undermining its claims to legitimacy, by discovering a victim for every form of success. The striving for equality is, in other words, based in ressentiment in Nietzsche’s sense, the state of mind that Max Scheler identified as the principal motive behind the socialist orthodoxy of his day. It is one of the major problems of modern politics, which no classical liberal could possibly solve, how to govern a society in which resentment has acquired the kind of privileged social, intellectual, and political position that we witness today.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"Hayek and conservatism", in Edward Feser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek (2006)

Hostility , Way , Motivation , Problem

“They taught me the importance of eating right and how it can benefit my boxing career. I went vegan ‘cold Tofurkey’. … Since being plant based, I am 23-0, winning 3 International Golds and 2 National tournaments and can thank my new lifestyle.”

Cam F. Awesome (1988) American boxer

"Cam Awesome vegan boxer" https://web.archive.org/web/20151113022902/http://www.greatveganathletes.com/cam-awesome-vegan-boxer, interview with GreatVeganAthletes.com (2013).

Box

“I want to argue that the “sudden” appearance of species in the fossil record and our failure to note subsequent evolutionary change within them is the proper prediction of evolutionary theory as we understand it. […] Evolutionary “sequences” are not rungs on a ladder, but our retrospective reconstruction of a circuitous path running like a labyrinth, branch to branch, from the base of the bush to a lineage now surviving at its top.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Ever Since Darwin

"Bushes and Ladders in Human Evolution", p. 61
Ever Since Darwin (1977)

Failure , Understanding , Appearance , Change

“This is a message to all those out there who think that you need animal products to be fit and strong. Almost two years after becoming vegan I am stronger than ever before and I am still improving day by day. Don't listen to those self proclaimed nutrition gurus and the supplement-industry trying to tell you that you need meat, eggs and dairy to get enough protein. There are plenty plant-based protein-sources and your body is going to thank you for stopping to feed it with dead-food. Go vegan and feel the power!”

Patrik Baboumian (1979) German strength-athlete

Message attached to his YouTube video “555kg yoke-carry for 10m in the middle of Berlin” (1 September 2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vUQISAuFiI.

Food , Feeling , Thinking , Strong

“And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U. S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean."”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
Essays

Coffee , Thinking

“The world political system is till based on the concept of the national sovereign state. For the first time therefore, in three hundred years economy and sovereignty are becoming divorced from each other.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 3, p. 739

World , Time

“Science is international but its success is based on institutions, which are owned by nations. If therefore, we wish to promote culture we have to combine and to organize institutions with our own power and means.”

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

When asked the question, “Why a ‘Jewish’ University?” when Einstein was assisting Chaim Weizmann in fundraising for The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
As quoted in [Albert Einstein, Letter “Einstein in Singapore.” Manchester Guardian, October 12, 1929]
1920s

Science , Success

“He is firm in constitution, as in resolution; industrious, indefatigable, determined and persevering; fixed in opinion, and unbiased in judgment; not over accessible, but studious to reward merit. He is a rock against which the waves of calumny and malice, moved by the gusts of passion natural to envy, have dashed; have washed its sides: he is still immovable on his base. He is in some degree susceptible of adulation, as is every man who has an honest thirst for military fame. He endures fatigue and hardship with fortitude uncommon for a man of his years. I have seen him, in the most severe night of the winter of 1794, sleep on the ground, like his fellow-soldiers, and walk around the camp at four in the morning, with the vigilance of a sentinel.”

Anthony Wayne (1745–1796) Continental Army general

Major William Eaton, commander of the US Marines at Derna, 1806 ("...the Shores of Tripoli..."), of Wayne

Nature , Sleep , Passion , Winter

“While we recognize that in the general development of history the material determines the mental and social being determines social consciousness, we also - and indeed must - recognize the reaction of mental on material things, of social consciousness on social being and of the superstructure on the economic base. This does not go against materialism; on the contrary, it avoids mechanical materialism and firmly upholds dialectical materialism.”

Mao Zedong book On Contradiction

On Contradiction (1937)

History

“We had to get rid of occupation and regain and enhance our sovereignty. We have now ended up with a capitalist system. We are calling for social justice, a social security system in terms of creating jobs and enhancing the productive base of the economy.”

Raid Jahid Fahmi (1950) Iraqi politician

Interview with Al Jazeera (25 May 2018)

Justice

“We've already said that it's the Holy Spirit who gives us the ultimate assurance of Christianity's truth. Therefore, the only role left for argument and evidence to play is a subsidiary role. I think Martin Luther correctly distinguished between what he called the magisterial and ministerial uses of reason. The magisterial use of reason occurs when reason stands over and above the gospel like a magistrate and judges it on the basis of argument and evidence. The ministerial use of reason occurs when reason submits to and serves the gospel… Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter, not vice versa.”

William Lane Craig (1949) American Christian apologist and evangelist

Source: Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (1994), p. 36.

Truth , Faith , Thinking

“The work that has so far been done has indeed been of the highest value. The growth during the last 50 years, of a feeling of common nationality, based upon common tradition, common disabilities, and common hopes and aspirations, has been most striking. The fact that we are Indians first, and Hindoos, Mahomedans, Parsees, or Christinas afterwards, is being realized in a steadily increasing measure, and the idea of a united and renovated India, marching onwards to a place among the nations of the world worthy of her great past, is no longer a mere idle dream of a few imaginative minds, but is definitely the accepted creed of those who form the brain of the community-the educated classes of the country.”

Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866–1915) social and political leader during the Indian Independence Movement

Extract from his speech during setting up and defining the charter of the Servants of Scoiety. Page=702
Sources of Indian Tradition

World , Education , Dreams , Hope

“First, most of the speculation about the superiority of the communist system - including the popular view that Western economies could painlessly accelerate their own growth by borrowing some aspects of that system - was off base. Rapid Soviet economic growth was based entirely on one attribute: the willingness to save, to sacrifice current consumption for the sake of future production. The communist example offered no hint of a free lunch.
Second, the economic analysis of communist countries' growth implied some future limits to their industrial expansion - in other words, implied that a naive projection of their past growth rates into the future was likely to greatly overstate their real prospects. Economic growth that is based on expansion of inputs, rather than on growth in output per unit of input, is inevitably subject to diminishing returns. It was simply not possible for the Soviet economies to sustain the rates of growth of labor force participation, average education levels, and above all the physical capital stock that had prevailed in previous years. Communist growth would predictably slow down, perhaps drastically.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Pop Internationalism (1996), Asia's Miracle (1994)

Education , Past , Future , Country

“The figure [neo-roman writers] wish to hold out for our admiration is described again and again. He is plain and plain-hearted; he is upright and full of integrity; above all he is a man of true manliness, of dependable valour and fortitude. His virtues are repeatedly contrasted with the vices characteristic of the obnoxious lackeys and parasites who flourish at court. The courtier, instead of being plain and plain-hearted, is lewd, dissolute and debauched; instead of being upright, he is cringing, servile and base; instead of being brave, he is fawning, abject and lacking in manliness.”

Quentin Skinner (1940) British historian

Source: Liberty Before Liberalism (1998), pp. 95-96

Heart , Dependency

“Those who can bring themselves to renounce wealth, position and power accruing from a social system based on violence and putting a premium on acquisitiveness, and to identify themselves in some real fashion with the struggle of the masses toward the light, may help in a measure — more, doubtless, by life than by words — to devise a more excellent way, a technique of social progress less crude, brutal, costly and slow than mankind has yet evolved.”

A. J. Muste (1885–1967) Christian pacifist and civil rights activist

As quoted in American Power and the New Mandarins (2002) by Noam Chomsky, p. 160.

Life , Way , Fashion , Light

“The Prime Minister constantly asserts that the nuclear weapon has kept the peace in Europe for the last 40 years… Let us go back to the middle 1950s or to the end of the 1940s, and let us suppose that nuclear power had never been invented… I assert that in those circumstances there would still not have been a Russian invasion of western Europe. What has prevented that from happening was not the nuclear hypothesis… but the fact that the Soviet Union knew the consequences of such a move, consequences which would have followed whether or not there were 300,000 American troops stationed in Europe. The Soviet Union knew that such an action on its part would have led to a third world war—a long war, bitterly fought, a war which in the end the Soviet Union would have been likely to lose on the same basis and in the same way as the corresponding war was lost by Napoleon, by the Emperor Wilhelm and by Adolf Hitler…
For of course a logically irresistible conclusion followed from the creed that our safety depended upon the nuclear capability of the United States and its willingness to commit that capability in certain events. If that was so—and we assured ourselves for 40 years that it was—the guiding principle of the foreign policy of the United Kingdom had to be that, in no circumstances, must it depart from the basic insights of the United States and that any demand placed in the name of defence upon the United Kingdom by the United States was a demand that could not be resisted. Such was the rigorous logic of the nuclear deterrent…
It was in obedience to it… that the Prime Minister said, in the context of the use of American bases in Britain to launch an aggressive attack on Libya, that it was "inconceivable" that we could have refused a demand placed upon this country by the United States. The Prime Minister supplied the reason why: she said it was because we depend for our liberty and freedom upon the United States. Once let the nuclear hypothesis be questioned or destroyed, once allow it to break down, and from that moment the American imperative in this country's policies disappears with it.
A few days ago I was reminded, when reading a new biography of Richard Cobden, that he once addressed a terrible sentence of four words to this House of Commons. He said to hon. Members: "You have been Englishmen." The strength of those words lies in the perfect tense, with the implication that they were so no longer but had within themselves the power to be so again. I believe that we now have the opportunity, with the dissolution of the nightmare of the nuclear theory, for this country once again to have a defence policy that accords with the needs of this country as an island nation, and to have a foreign policy which rests upon a true, undistorted view of the outside world. Above all, we have the opportunity to have a foreign policy that is not dictated from outside to this country, but willed by its people. That day is coming. It may be delayed, but it will come.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech on Foreign Affairs in the House of Commons http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1987/apr/07/foreign-affairs (7 April 1987).
1980s

War , People , World , Peace

“The story of the Ten Commandments is clearly based on the earlier story of the law code of Hammurabi, which was a better list and actually existed in real history centuries before the legends now attributed to Moses. Since then, people have come up with better documents like the Magna Carta and the U. S. Constitution. These are better, largely because they stand against what [the] Commandments represent; giving power to the people instead of indomitable despots.”

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

Youtube, Other, The Damn Commandments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u3z69YpLx0 (January 7, 2015)

People , Law , History

“In our United Kingdom, the main terrorist threat has come from the IRA. Their minds twisted by hatred and fanaticism, they have tried to bomb and murder their way to their objective of tearing more than a million citizens out of the United Kingdom. The truth is that the whole IRA campaign is based on crushing democracy and smashing anyone who doesn't agree with them. To all those who have suffered so much at their hands—to the Northern Ireland policemen and prison officers and their families, to the soldiers, the judges, the civil servants and their families—we offer our deepest admiration and thanks for defending democracy and for facing danger while keeping within the rule of law—unlike the terrorist who skulks in the shadows and shoots to kill…we will never give up the search for more effective ways of defeating the IRA. If the IRA think they can weary us or frighten us, they have made a terrible miscalculation. People sometimes say that it is wrong to use the word never in politics, I disagree, some things are of such fundamental importance that no other word is appropriate. So I say once again today that this Government will never surrender to the IRA. Never.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Conservative Party Conference (14 October 1988) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=107352
Third term as Prime Minister

People , Truth , Family , Law

“Neoliberalism is essentially a form of governing that sees democracy as an obstacle, at best, or as an illegitimate intervention into the rule of the market, at worst. For neoliberalism, rule by markets is understood as a form of governance that should be applied everywhere, not just to marketised goods, but to education, prisons, the organisation of state, and so on. So neoliberalism treats popular sovereignty, or decisions based on human agreement and deliberation, as inappropriate interference with the efficient market and the price mechanism.”

Wendy Brown (1955) American political theorist

Neoliberalism Has Eviscerated the Fabric of Social Life http://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/neoliberalism-has-eviscerated-the-fabric-of-social-life/, interview with Wendy Brown by Adam Ostolski, Green European Journal, March 2017

Education , Democracy , Decision

“The groups are not unified under any single authoritiy but rather relate to each other in a network structure. Social forums, affinity groups, and other forms of democratic decision-making are the basis of the movements, and they manage to act together based on what they have in common. … These globalization protest movements are obviously limited in many regards. First of all, although their vision and desire is global in scope, they have thus far only involved significant numbers in North America and Europe. Second, so long, as they remain merely protests movements, traveling from one summit meeting to the next, they will be incapable of becoming a foundational struggle and of articulating an alternative to social relations. These limitations may only be temporary obstacles, and the movements may discover ways to overcome them.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

86-87
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Way , Travel , Decision

“Programming languages on the whole are very much more complicated than they used to be: object orientation, inheritance, and other features are still not really being thought through from the point of view of a coherent and scientifically well-based discipline or a theory of correctness. My original postulate, which I have been pursuing as a scientist all my life, is that one uses the criteria of correctness as a means of converging on a decent programming language design—one which doesn’t set traps for its users, and ones in which the different components of the program correspond clearly to different components of its specification, so you can reason compositionally about it. […] The tools, including the compiler, have to be based on some theory of what it means to write a correct program.”

C. A. R. Hoare (1934) British computer scientist

Oral history interview http://hdl.handle.net/11299/107362 by Philip L. Frana, 17 July 2002, Cambridge, England; Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.

Life

“The Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism has two outstanding characteristics. One is its class nature: it openly avows that dialectical materialism is in the service of the proletariat. The other is its practicality: it emphasizes the dependence of theory on practice, emphasizes that theory is based on practice and in turn serves practice.”

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

On Practice (1937)

Nature , Dependency

“Our debt to Hayek is very substantial. He helped to establish a freedom-based approach of evaluation through which economic systems can be judged (no matter what substantive judgments we arrive at). He pointed to the importance of identifying those services that the state can perform well and has a social duty to undertake. Finally, he showed why administrative psychology and propensities to corruptibility have to be considered in determining how states can, or cannot, work and how the world can, or cannot, be run.”

Amartya Sen (1933) Indian economist

"An insight into the purpose of prosperity", Financial Times (September 20, 2004)
2000s, "An insight into the purpose of prosperity," 2004

World , Freedom , Help

“Science fiction these days is only half a step ahead of science. Astrophysicists and scientists are working in the same way as science fiction writers. They’re working things out in their imagination based on the slim scientific facts that they know. Hawking imagines a black hole and then discovers the mathematics that support his theory, and new possibilities come to light. That’s the imaginative flair that scientists have to have. For me as a sci-fi writer, spinning those ideas in your mind brings you to the point where you dream in science fiction. Suddenly you think of something in the middle of the night, and it’s so vivid you don’t need to write it down because you know you’ll remember it in the morning. That’s what these books, Zero G, reflect: a vivid imagination.”

William Shatner (1931) Canadian actor, musician, recording artist, author, and film director

"William Shtner on Sci-Fi, Aging and the Environment" http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/08/22/in-the-magazine/shatner.html as interviewed by Jeanne Wolf, Saturday Evening Post, September/October 2017

Books , Dreams , Way , Imagination

“The most powerful presentations were based on legal precedents, especially Calvin's Case (1608), which, it was claimed, proved on the authority of Coke and Bacon that subjects of the King are by no means necessarily subjects of Parliament.”

Bernard Bailyn book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter V, TRANSFORMATION, p. 225

“Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions. It differs, however, from most other branches of human activity in that not only are the pathways of scientific thought determined by the presuppositions of the scientists but their goals are the testing and revision of old presuppositions and the creation of new.”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

Source: Mind and Nature, a necessary unity, 1988, p. 25

Religion , Art , Sleep , Science

“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

“I came here tonight to talk about the agreement and security that are broad consensus within Israeli society. This is what guides our policy. This policy must take into account the international situation. We have to recognize international agreements but also principles important to the State of Israel. I spoke tonight about the first principle - recognition. Palestinians must truly recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people. The second principle is demilitarization. Any area in Palestinian hands has to be demilitarization, with solid security measures. Without this condition, there is a real fear that there will be an armed Palestinian state which will become a terrorist base against Israel, as happened in Gaza. We do not want missiles on Petah Tikva, or Grads on the Ben-Gurion international airport. We want peace.”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

Speech at Bar-Ilan University, as quoted in "Full text of Netanyahu's foreign policy speech at Bar Ilan" in Haaretz (14 June 2009) http://www.haaretz.com/news/full-text-of-netanyahu-s-foreign-policy-speech-at-bar-ilan-1.277922
2000s, 2009

People , Fear , Peace

“I’m often called, so often called in the media, it’s like a part of my name “white supremacist” or whatever. I’m not one. I don’t want white people to be supreme. I don’t believe, in fact, that we should even have bases in 65 countries of the world I don’t think we should be in Iraq. I don’t believe we should try to control politics of the South American countries or the Southeast Asia or in Africa, or anywhere else in the world. But I do think we have a right to preserve our own culture, own heritage in our own country.”

David Duke (1950) American White nationalist, white supremacist, writer, right-wing politician, and a former Republican Louisiana …

Podcast (4 July 2006)

People , World , Thinking , Parting

“…I don't feel that they deserve a blanket condemnation at all. There are many things to object to in any society. But take China, modern China; one also finds many things that are really quite admirable. […] There are even better examples than China. But I do think that China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

" The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act? Noam Chomsky debates with Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, et al. http://www.chomsky.info/debates/19671215.htm" in New York, December 15, 1967; Republished at chomsky.info, accessed May 23, 2014.
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1960s

Feeling , Communication , Understanding , Thinking

“The Ryan White Care Act provides money for community-based counseling centers. While that may sound noble and compassionate, we know from experience that "AIDS education" becomes a platform for the homosexual community to recruit adolescents and lure teens into a self-destructive sexual lifestyle.”

Christine O'Donnell (1969) American Tea Party politician and former Republican Party candidate

Concerned Women for America press release
2010-09-15
Christine O'Donnell Does Not Like Gays.
Instaputz
http://instaputz.blogspot.com/2010/09/christine-odonnell-does-not-like-gays.html
2010-10-20

Money , Education , Communication

Quotes about base page 16

Quotes about base
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