Source: No Way Out (2002), Ch. 7: What Kind Of Human Being Do You Want?
Speech in Keehi Lagoon Beach Park, Hawaii, (8 August 2008) http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=40384154
2008
Remarks by President Obama and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma in Joint Press Conference at Aung San Suu Kyi Residence in Rangoon, Burma on November 14, 2014 http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/11/14/remarks-president-obama-and-daw-aung-san-suu-kyi-burma-joint-press-confe
2014
“I never sought glory. Basic respect would suffice.”
Source: From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (2007), Chapter 3 “Clash of the Icons” (p. 69)
Then your life is useless and meaningless, and you're full of self contempt and nihilism, and that's not good. And so that's what I think is going on at a deeper level with regard to men needing this direction. A man has to decide that he's going to do something. He has to decide that."
Concepts
http://www.insideworldsoccer.com/2013/06/jose-mourinho-cristiano-ronaldo-thinks-he-knows-everything.html
2013
Just look at the animal kingdom. The simple and easiest thing is always the most likely thing to occur. It's the exception - the long term commitment - that needs explanation."
Concepts
“I'm basically an 'appy person, but I'm just not into fun things that much.”
NME (1980)
At his London speech on the commitment of political will of India.
Source: Adam Roberts Sir Democracy, Sovereignty and Terror: Lakshman Kadirgamar on the Foundations of International Order http://books.google.co.in/books?id=gq73AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA188, I.B.Tauris, 20 August 2012
“There is no salvation till they have seen their basic prejudice.”
On people accustomed to judging and dismissing the worth of other people based on categorical assessments, in "Assorted Landmines", p. 148
Awareness (1992)
Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 15 - 16
“The poor have the same basic pleasures as the rich, and the rich will always resent it.”
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified
Robert Layton Sibelius (London: J. M. Dent, [1965] 1971), ch. 16, p. 153.
Criticism
“Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1982), p. 123
2014, Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative Town Hall Speech (November 2014)
2015, State of the Union Address (January 2015)
11:30–12:03
"Nirvana's Krist Novoselic on Punk, Politics, & Why He Dumped the Dems" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4TPRH2uK9w
See You at the Top (2000)
Variant: Failure is an event, not a person. Yesterday ended last night.
Source: Consciencism (1964), Philosophy In Retrospect, pp. 5-6.
English and Welsh (1955)
In a letter to Russell Fritz (as known as Ron Franz), April 1992
Source: Mary Ellen Barnes (ed.). Back to the Wild (2nd ed.). Twin Star Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-9833955-0-8. (pp. 135-137)
http://www.popmonk.com/actors/leonardo-dicaprio/quotes-leonardo-dicaprio.htm
A Man Without a Country (2005)
Source: [Joseph P., Kahn, Joseph P. Kahn, Nonfamily humor, straight from home, y, http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2008/02/13/nonfamily_humor_straight_from_home/, The Boston Globe, P. Steven Ainsley, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, 2008-02-13, 2009-01-25, Irreverent songs win Hamilton youth a cult following]
Source: No Way Out (2002), Ch. 4: You Invent Your Reality
Robert J. Barro, Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Economic growth 2nd ed. (2004), Ch. 7 : Technological Change: Schumpeterian Models of Quality Ladders
Source: The German Ideology (1845-1846), Vol. III, 30.
2012, Yangon University Speech (November 2012)
From Hawking's article A Brief History of Relativity http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,993018-6,00.html, in Time magazine (31 December 1999)
2017, Farewell Address (January 2017)
2014, Statement on Cuban policy (December 2014)
War and Change in World Politics (1981)
Source: Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind (1990), p. 316
Interview with Somebody To Love, as quoted by MTV http://www.mtv.co.uk/news/justin-bieber/224435-justin-bieber, June 2010
‘student revolutionaries’
Imre Lakatos (1974) " From Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/pmo/eng/Lakatos-Falsification.pdf". as cited in: Thora Margareta Bertilsson (2009) Peirce's Theory of Inquiry and Beyond. p. 41.
“We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity.”
2013, Second Inaugural Address (January 2013)
Context: We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future. For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn.
2016, State of the Union address (January 2016)
Context: But democracy does require basic bonds of trust between its citizens. It doesn't – it doesn't work if we think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice, it doesn't work if we think that our political opponents are unpatriotic or trying to weaken America. Democracy grinds to a halt without a willingness to compromise or when even basic facts are contested or when we listen only to those who agree with us. Our public life withers when only the most extreme voices get all the attention. And most of all, democracy breaks down when the average person feels their voice doesn't matter; that the system is rigged in favor of the rich or the powerful or some special interest. [... ] So, my fellow Americans, whatever you may believe, whether you prefer one party or no party, whether you supported my agenda or fought as hard as you could against it, our collective futures depends on your willingness to uphold your duties as a citizen, to vote, to speak out, to stand up for others, especially the weak, especially the vulnerable, knowing that each of us is only here because somebody somewhere stood up for us. We need every American to stay active in our public life and not just during election time so that our public life reflects the goodness and the decency that I see in the American people every single day.
Oui interview (1979)
Context: The cool-person syndrome is peculiarly American. Part of that has to do with the way the educational business is run in the U. S. It’s not based on how much you can teach your child: it’s based on how much money the suppliers of basic materials can make off your child. Somewhere along the line most people pick up the desire to be a cool person, which is just another way to make them buy things. Once you’ve decided that you need to be a cool person, it makes you a possible victim of anyone whose products are the equivalent of bottled smoke. Somebody tells you to buy this particularly useless item and you’ll be a cool person. No matter how stupid it seems, you have to buy it. Pet Rocks. Pringle’s potato chips. whatever it is — the newest, the latest. Since the cool-person thing is something you learn in school, and since the school business is pretty suspicious and definitely tied up with the government, it makes you wonder whether or not the desire to be cool is part of a government plot to make you buy stupid things.
“Children are not afraid to pose basic questions that may embarrass us, as adults, to ask.”
Source: The Emperor's New Mind (1989), Ch. 10, Where Lies the Physics of the Mind?, p. 448–9 (p. 580 in 1999 edition).
Context: Beneath all this technicality is the feeling that it is indeed "obvious" that the conscious mind cannot work like a computer, even though much of what is involved in mental activity might do so.
This is the kind of obviousness that a child can see—though the child may, later in life, become browbeaten into believing that the obvious problems are "non-problems", to be argued into nonexistence by careful reasoning and clever choices of definition. Children sometimes see things clearly that are obscured in later life. We often forget the wonder that we felt as children when the cares of the "real world" have begun to settle on our shoulders. Children are not afraid to pose basic questions that may embarrass us, as adults, to ask. What happens to each of our streams of consciousness after we die; where was it before we were born; might we become, or have been, someone else; why do we perceive at all; why are we here; why is there a universe here at all in which we can actually be? These are puzzles that tend to come with the awakenings of awareness in any one of us — and, no doubt, with the awakening of self-awareness, within whichever creature or other entity it first came.
Address to the United Nations (1963)
Context: The Charter of the United Nations expresses the noblest aspirations of man: abjugation of force in the settlement of disputes between states; the assurance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion; the safeguarding of international peace and security.
But these, too, as were the phrases of the Covenant, are only words; their value depends wholly on our will to observe and honour them and give them content and meaning. The preservation of peace and the guaranteeing of man's basic freedoms and rights require courage and eternal vigilance: courage to speak and act — and if necessary, to suffer and die — for truth and justice; eternal vigilance, that the least transgression of international morality shall not go undetected and unremedied.
These lessons must be learned anew by each succeeding generation, and that generation is fortunate indeed which learns from other than its own bitter experience. This Organization and each of its members bear a crushing and awesome responsibility: to absorb the wisdom of history and to apply it to the problems of the present, in order that future generations may be born, and live, and die, in peace.
"Nature Is My God" - interview with Fred Matser in Resurgence No. 184 (September-October 1997) http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/184/gorbachev.htm
Context: We have retreated from the perennial values. I don't think that we need any new values. The most important thing is to try to revive the universally known values from which we have retreated.
As a young man, I really took to heart the Communist ideals. A young soul certainly cannot reject things like justice and equality. These were the goals proclaimed by the Communists. But in reality that terrible Communist experiment brought about repression of human dignity. Violence was used in order to impose that model on society. In the name of Communism we abandoned basic human values. So when I came to power in Russia I started to restore those values; values of "openness" and freedom.
Speech, "The War and the Future" (1940); published in Order of the Day (1942)
Context: It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
Context: The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real. He says, for example, "I am rich," when the proper designation for his condition would be "poor." He misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or even reversals of names. If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him. What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception. It is in a similarly restricted sense that man now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth. He is indifferent toward pure knowledge which has no consequences; toward those truths which are possibly harmful and destructive he is even hostilely inclined.
“Human life is basically a comedy.”
15
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
Context: Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.
2009, Nobel Prize acceptance speech (December 2009)
Context: As the world grows smaller, you might think it would be easier for human beings to recognize how similar we are; to understand that we're all basically seeking the same things; that we all hope for the chance to live out our lives with some measure of happiness and fulfillment for ourselves and our families.
And yet somehow, given the dizzying pace of globalization, the cultural leveling of modernity, it perhaps comes as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they cherish in their particular identities — their race, their tribe, and perhaps most powerfully their religion. In some places, this fear has led to conflict. At times, it even feels like we're moving backwards.
Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 293
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long
Context: I really agree that Yog-Sothoth is a basically immature conception, & unfitted for really serious literature. The fact is, I have never approached serious literature yet. But I consider the use of actual folk-myths as even more childish than the use of new artificial myths, since in the former one is forced to retain many blatant peurilities & contradictions of experienced which could be subtilised or smoothed over if the supernaturalism were modelled to order for the given case. The only permanently artistic use of Yog-Sothothery, I think, is in symbolic or associative phantasy of the frankly poetic type; in which fixed dream-patterns of the natural organism are given an embodiment & crystallisation... But there is another phase of cosmic phantasy (which may or may not include frank Yog-Sothothery) whose foundations appear to me as better grounded than those of ordinary oneiroscopy; personal limitations regarding the sense of outsideness. I refer to the aesthetic crystallisation of that burning & inextinguishable feeling of mixed wonder & oppression which the sensitive imagination experiences upon scaling itself & its restrictions against the vast & provocative abyss of the unknown. This has always been the chief emotion in my psychology; & whilst it obviously figures less in the psychology of the majority, it is clearly a well-defined & permanent factor from which very few sensitive persons are wholly free.... Reason as we may, we cannot destroy a normal perception of the highly limited & fragmentary nature of our visible world of perception & experience as scaled against the outside abyss of unthinkable galaxies & unplumbed dimensions—an abyss wherein our solar system is the merest dot... The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, & matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality—when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible & measurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt—as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiosity?
Quoted in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met Greta Thunberg: 'Hope is contagious', The Guardian, Emma Brockes https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/29/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-met-greta-thunberg-hope-contagious-climate|When (29 June 2019)
2019
Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 293
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long
2018, Speech at the University of Illinoise Speech (2018)
Letter to Satsvarupa, San Francisco, (9 April 1968)
Infinite Jest (1996)
Oui interview (1979)
2014, Queensland University Address (November 2014)
The Economics of Success (D. van Nostrand & Co., 1963), p. 281
The Creation of Patriarchy, Introduction, pp. 13-14
The Creation of Patriarchy (1986)
28 January 1933, quoted in Now or Never; Are We to Live or Perish Forever? (Pakistan Declaration)
Ideology of Pakistan
[TUNISIA: Neighbor's Duty, TIME, Monday, Dec. 02, 1957, 2, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,825330-2,00.html, September 6, 2011]
Source: Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole, p. 64.
Source: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Interview with The Morning Hustle, as quoted in The Daily Mail (2 March 2022) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10566331/Ukraine-country-Europe-Kamala-explains-Putins-invasion-laymens-terms.html
2022, March 2022
“Just like water and air, connection with others is a basic human need.”
“The most basic and somehow forgettable thing is this: Love is not pain. Love is goodness.”
Source: The Secret Life of Prince Charming
Source: The General's Daughter
"How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" (1978)
“People are basically irritating. Myself included.”
Source: Devil May Cry
Variant: If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
“We are all in flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo Sapiens.”
Source: The French Lieutenant's Woman
“Basically, I have two speeds…. Hostile or smart-aleck. Your choice.”
Source: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports
Source: Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
3 Minute Wonder, Episode 4
On Nature
Source: The Ricky Gervais Show - First, Second and Third Seasons
Tales of ordinary madness (1967-83)
Variant: .. the free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them...
Source: Tales of Ordinary Madness
Source: Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
“Big bad merc, down with a basic hip toss. In your place I'd be blushing.”
Source: Magic Burns
