Quotes about beginning
page 19

“Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet— the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Attributed

Nature

“Maybe the times we had, they weren't that bad

And everything else was part of the plan

We sang: "I don't know where we go from here"

This is the alpha, omega, beginning and the end

And we all just idolize the dead

So you were born (So you were born!), and that was a good day

Someday you'll die (Someday you'll die!), and that is a shame

But somewhere in the between was a life of which we all dream

And nothing and no one will ever take that away

You had a love and that love had you

And nothing mattered, you were fine

And some will complain, they're just bitter, what a shame

They know that loving and losing is better than nothing at all

Maybe the times we had, they weren't that bad

And everything else was part of our path

We sang: "I don't know where we go from here"

This is the anthem, the slogan, the summary of events

And we all just idealize the past”

Tomas Kalnoky (1980) American musician

"Somewhere In The Between" from "Somewhere in the Between" (2007) http://risc.perix.co.uk/lyrics/sm/sitb/06/

Love, Life, Dreams, Time

“Now they saw it — its newness, its raw crudeness, and its strength — and turned their shuddering eyes away. "Give us back our well-worn husk," they said, "where we were so snug and comfortable." And then they tried word magic. "Conditions are fundamentally sound," they said — by which they meant to reassure themselves that nothing now was really changed, that things were as they always had been, and as they always would be, forever and ever, amen. But they were wrong. They did not know that you can't go home again. America had come to the end of something and to the beginning of something else. But no one knew what that something else would be and out of the change and uncertainly and the wrongness of the leaders grew fear and desperation and before long hunger stalked the streets. Through it all there was still only one certainty, though no one saw it yet. America was still America, and whatever new thing came of it would be American.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book III: An End and a Beginning
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

Hunger, Fear, Home, Change

“Between the early 1600s and the 1950s, more than 20 million people left the British Isles to begin new lives across the seas. Only a minority ever returned. No other country in the world came close to exporting so many of its inhabitants.”

Niall Ferguson (1964) British historian

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)

People, World, Sea, Country

“There is considerable evidence that the lipoprotein abnormalities (high LDL and low HDL) that are linked to heart attack deaths in adulthood begin to develop in early childhood and that higher cholesterol levels eventually get “set” by early food habits. What we eat during our childhood affects our lifetime cholesterol levels. For many, changing the diet to a plant-based, low-saturated-fat diet in later life does not result in the favorable cholesterol levels that would have been seen if the dietary improvements were started much earlier in life.”

Joel Fuhrman (1953) Family Physician and author

Source: Disease-Proof Your Child (2005), Ch. 3, p. 102

Life, Death, Food, Change

“February 17, 1887 (Jan. 25, lunar calendar), night
Sah, sah, I shall begin to level the ground completely. Sah, sah, with the portals opened, opened, I shall level the ground all over the world. Sah, I shall step out to level the ground. Sah, sah, shall I open the portals and level the ground? Shall I close the portals and level the ground?”

Nakayama Miki (1798–1887) Founder of Tenrikyo

An Anthology of Osashizu Translations, p. 17
Osashizu

World, Night

“It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.”

Jorge Luis Borges book Evaristo Carriego: A Book About Old-Time Buenos Aires

Evaristo Carriego (1930) Ch. 3

Books, Art, Parting

“A hard beginning makes a good ending.”

John Heywood (1497–1580) English writer known for plays, poems and a collection of proverbs

Part I, chapter 4.
Proverbs (1546)

“Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose
The suitable amours. Time will write them down.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change

Time

“These examples and many others demonstrate an alarming trend whereby the privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of man's life at will.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissenting, Osborn v. United States, 385 U.S. 323, 343 (1966)
Judicial opinions

Life, Secret

“We must begin with understanding that Turkey is vital to U. S. interests. Turkey is really our strongest ally against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), as well as a source of stability in the region. It provides badly needed cooperation with U. S. military operations. But the Obama administration is keeping Erdoğan’s government at arm’s length — an unwise policy that threatens our long-standing alliance.”

Michael T. Flynn (1958) 25th United States National Security Advisor

Our ally Turkey is in crisis and needs our support (2016)

Understanding

“There has to be an end somewhere, he thought. Each thing has to end, or there will never be any room for beginnings.”

Algis Budrys (1931–2008) American writer

The End of Summer, p. 32
The Unexpected Dimension (1960)

“I'm beginning to feel like a microwaved egg that will explode if anybody so much as breathes onto the surface.”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

Feeling

“We are being protected from hysteria. Isn't that what they call it? Maniacs! The world's been in a habitual state of crisis for fifty years. Fifty? What am I saying? It's been in a habitual state of crisis since the beginning — but for half a century now, almost unbearable. And why, for the love of God? What is the fundamental irritant, the essence of the tension? Political philosophies? Economics? Population pressure? Disparity of culture and creed? Ask a dozen experts, get a dozen answers. Now Lucifer again. Is the species congenitally insane, Brother?”

Walter M. Miller, Jr. book A Canticle for Leibowitz

Ch 24
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Voluntas Tua

Love, God, World

“I am thankful to have borne a part in the emancipating labours of the last sixty years; but entirely uncertain how, had I now to begin my life, I could face the very different problems of the next sixty years. Of one thing I am, and always have been, convinced—it is not by the State that man can be regenerated, and the terrible woes of this darkened world effectually dealt with. In some, and some very important, respects, I yearn for the impossible revival of the men and the ideas of my first twenty years, which immediately followed the first Reform Act.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to George William Erskine Russell (6 March 1894), quoted in G. W. E. Russell, One Look Back (Wells Gardner, Darton and Co., 1911), p. 265.
1890s

Life, Men, World, Idea

“The task of immune cells is to recognize foreignness. And fight with it. An implanted foreign organ, or its fragment, is undoubtedly a foreign body. The immune system therefore begins to fight it. However, now immunopressives – and therefore immunosuppressants – are so effective that rejection of transplants is inhibited.”

Włodzimierz Ptak (1928–2019) immunologist

Mazurek, Maria (7 July 2017): Cudowna armia, która broni naszego ciała http://plus.gazetakrakowska.pl/magazyn/a/cudowna-armia-ktora-broni-naszego-ciala,12271571. Gazeta Krakowska (in Polish), pp. 18–19.

Fight

“If you arrive late, you won’t know what anything is about, and if you are there all the way from the beginning, you won’t care. p. 277”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918–1923 (2014) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25758762M/Dorothy_Parker_Complete_Broadway_1918-1923, Chapter 5: 1922

Way

“The more freely abstract the form becomes, the purer, and also the more primitive it sounds. Therefore, in a composition in which corporeal elements are more or less superfluous, they can be more or less omitted and replaced by purely abstract forms, or by corporeal forms that have been completely abstracted... Here we are confronted by the question: Must we not then renounce the object altogether, throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract? This is a question that naturally arises, the answer to which is at once indicated by an analysis of the concordance of the two elements of form (the objective and the abstract). Just as every word spoken (tree, sky, man) awakens an inner vibration, so too does every pictorially represented object. To deprive oneself of the possibility of this calling up vibrations would be to narrow one's arsenal of expressive means. At least, that is how it is today. But apart from today's answer, the above question receives the eternal answer to every question in art that begins with 'must.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

There is no 'must' in art, which is forever free.
Quote from: Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, eds. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, 2 Vols. (transl. Peter Vergo); Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., (1982), p. 195; as cited in: Samet, Jennifer Sachs. Painterly Representation in New York, 1945-1975. Dissertation, The City University of New York, 2010. p. 25
1910 - 1915

Art, Question, Nature, Tree

“One room after another in the British museum took my enthusiasm. The Royal College of Art meant nothing in comparison. Every Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday I would go to the British Museum. But not till after three months did things begin to settle into any pattern of reality for me. Till then everything was wonderful – a new world at every turn. That is the value of the British Museum: you have everything behind you; you are free to try to find out your own way and, after a while, to find what appeals to you most. And after the first excitement it was the art of ancient Mexico that spoke to me most – except perhaps Romanesque, or early Norman. And I admit clearly and frankly that early Mexican art formed my views of carving as much as everything I could do.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

in 'Partisan Review', New York, March-April 1947
1940 - 1955

World, Art, Way, Reality

“It seems to him that he extends backwards (or is it forwards?) without beginning (or is it end?) and he can't just now remember whether the great tales and plots which he supposes he knows and forever broods on lie in the to-come or lie dead in the has-been. But then suppose that's how secrets are kept, and age-long tales remembered, and unbreakable curses made too.”

John Crowley (1942) American writer

Bk. 1, Ch. 4
Little, Big: or, The Fairies' Parliament (1981)

Lie, Secret, Age, Dead

“And I am very ugly. I am the ugliest fairy in the world; and I shall be, till people behave themselves as they ought to do. And then I shall grow as handsome as my sister, who is the loveliest fairy in the world; and her name is Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby. So she begins where I end, and I begin where she ends; and those who will not listen to her must listen to me, as you will see.”

Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) English clergyman, historian and novelist

Source: Water Babies http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/wtrbs10h.htm (1863), Ch. 5.

People, World, Sister

“I suspect that in the beginning Maurice hoped that Rosy would calm down. Yet mere inspection suggested that she would not easily bend. By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents. So it was quite easy to imagine her the product of an unsatisfied mother who unduly stressed the desirability of professional careers that could save bright girls from marriages to dull men. But this was not the case. Her dedicated austere life could not be thus explained — she was the daughter of a solidly comfortable, erudite banking family.
Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place. The former was obviously preferable because, given her belligerent moods, it would be very difficult for Maurice to maintain a dominant position that would allow him to think unhindered about DNA. Not that at times he'd didn't see some reason for her complaints — King's had two combination rooms, one for men, the other for women, certainly a thing of the past. But he was not responsible, and it was no pleasure to bear the cross for the added barb that the women's combination room remained dingily pokey whereas money had been spent to make life agreeable for him and his friends when they had their morning coffee.
Unfortunately, Maurice could not see any decent way to give Rosy the boot. To start with, she had been given to think that she had a position for several years. Also there was no denying that she had a good brain. If she could keep her emotions under control, there was a good chance she could really help him. But merely wishing for relations to improve was taking something of a gamble, for Cal Tech's fabulous chemist Linus Pauling was not subject to the confines of British fair play. Sooner or later Linus, who had just turned fifty, was bound to try for the most important of all scientific prizes. There was no doubt he was interested. … The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab.”

James D. Watson book The Double Helix

Description of Rosalind Franklin, whose data and research were actually key factors in determining the structure of DNA, but who died in 1958 of ovarian cancer, before the importance of her work could be widely recognized and acknowledged. In response to these remarks her mother stated "I would rather she were forgotten than remembered in this way." As quoted in "Rosalind Franklin" at Strange Science : The Rocky Road to Modern Paleontology and Biology by Michon Scott http://www.strangescience.net/rfranklin.htm The Double Helix (1968)

Life, Women, Men, Money

“In order that the mortar in the joints may not suffer from frosts, drench it with oil-dregs every year before winter begins. Thus treated, it will not let the hoarfrost enter it.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book VII, Chapter I, Sec. 6

Suffering, Winter

“You're at that game of threatening me with the loss of your affection again, are you? I think it couldn't have been very genuine stuff to begin with, if it's so easily demolished.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXX : Domestic Scenes; Arthur to Helen

Game, Thinking, Loss

“We begin by stating that religion is unbelief. It is a concern, indeed, we must say that it is the one great concern, of godless man…”

Karl Barth book Church Dogmatics

1:2
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)

Religion

“While it is possible to play a single game, unrelated to any other game events past or future, it is the campaign for which these rules are designed. It is relatively simple to set up a fantasy campaign, and better still, it will cost almost nothing. In fact you will not even need miniature figures, although their occasional employment is recommended for real spectacle when battles are fought. A quick glance at the Equipment section of this booklet will reveal just how little is required. The most extensive requirement is time. The campaign referee will have to have sufficient time to meet the demands of his players, he will have to devote a number of hours to laying out the maps of his "dungeons" and upper terrain before the affair begins.”

Gary Gygax (1938–2008) American writer and game designer

Preface of the Original Dungeons & Dragons, (1 November 1973)

Game, Time, Past, Future

“Let as many Numbers, as you please, be proposed to be Combined: Suppose Five, which we will call a b c d e. Put, in so many Lines, Numbers, in duple proportion, beginning with 1. The Sum (31) is the Number of Sumptions, or Elections; wherein, one or more of them, may several ways be taken. Hence subduct (5) the Number of the Numbers proposed; because each of them may once be taken singly. And the Remainder (26) shews how many ways they may be taken in Combination; (namely, Two or more at once.) And, consequently, how many Products may be had by the Multiplication of any two or more of them so taken. But the same Sum (31) without such Subduction, shews how many Aliquot Parts there are in the greatest of those Products, (that is, in the Number made by the continual Multiplication of all the Numbers proposed,) a b c d e. For every one of those Sumptions, are Aliquot Parts of a b c d e, except the last, (which is the whole,) and instead thereof, 1 is also an Aliquot Part; which makes the number of Aliquot Parts, the same with the Number of Sumptions. Only here is to be understood, (which the Rule should have intimated;) that, all the Numbers proposed, are to be Prime Numbers, and each distinct from the other. For if any of them be Compound Numbers, or any Two of them be the same, the Rule for Aliquot Parts will not hold.”

John Wallis (1616–1703) English mathematician

Source: A Discourse of Combinations, Alterations, and Aliquot Parts (1685), Ch.I Of the variety of Elections, or Choice, in taking or leaving One or more, out of a certain Number of things proposed.

Way, Parting

“Perhaps the first fire, the first tool, the first wheel, the first carving in a limestone cave, had each possessed a symbolic rather than a practical value, had each been pressed to serve distortion rather than reality. It was a sort of madness that had driven man from his humble sites on the edges of the woods into towns and cities, into arts and wars, into religious crusades, into martyrdom and prostitution, into dyspepsia and fasting, into love and hatred, into this present cul-de-sac; it had all come about in pursuit of symbols. In the beginning was the symbol, and darkness was over the face of the Earth.”

Brian W. Aldiss book Greybeard

Source: Greybeard (1964), Chapter 3 (p. 91)

Love, War, Art, Reality

“So, then, as darkness had no beginning, neither will it ever have an end. So, then, is it eternal. The negation of aught else, is its affirmation. Where the light cannot come, there abideth the darkness. The light doth but hollow a mine out of the infinite extension of the darkness. And ever upon the steps of the light treadeth the darkness; yea, springeth in fountains and wells amidst it, from the secret channels of its mighty sea. Truly, man is but a passing flame, moving unquietly amid the surrounding rest of night; without which he yet could not be, and whereof he is in part compounded.”

George MacDonald book Phantastes

Phantastes (1858)

Secret, Light, Parting, Sea

“It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. Retaining the male has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction.”

Valerie Solanas (1936–1988) American radical feminist and writer. Attempted to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. [1].

“From the beginning of the [Sovjet] Revolution I was a member of the Committee for Art. Was commissioned for the first Soviet flag for the First of May 1918, which was carried across Red Square by members of the government. Later I worked at 'Izo Narkomprosa'. From 1919 I taught at the Higher Artists' Workshops in Vitebsk”

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

our students Suetin, Judin and others
[the 'Vitebsk Higher Institute of Art'; - Lissitsky and Kazimir Malevich were invited to teach art by the director then Marc Chagall ]
1926 - 1941, Autobiography of the artist' (1941)

Art

“The "control mechanism" view of culture begins with the assumption that human thought is basically both social and public — that its natural habitat is the house yard, the market place, and the town square.”

Clifford Geertz book The Interpretation of Cultures

Source: The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), p. 45

Nature, Housing

“Everyone in Boston of a certain age knows the story of Rosie Ruiz, the marathoner who crossed the Boston finish line in 1980 at 2:31.56, flabby thighs and all, having barely broken a sweat. Despite mounting skepticism, she basked in the glory of having run the third-fastest female marathon in history – for a few days, that is, until a couple of students remembered seeing her jump out of the crowd half a mile from the finish.
Something of the sort has been going on recently with the shade of Friedrich von Hayek. The Austrian economist, who died in 1992 just short of what would have been his ninety-third birthday, never made false claims for himself – far from it: he knew all too well the loneliness of the long distance runner. And scrupulous work as editor by the late W. W. Bartley, interpreter Bruce Caldwell, and biographer Alan Ebenstein, have made it possible to see the man clear.
But the claims conservatives are making about the role he played as an economist are beginning to smack of Ruizismus. That is, they have jumped a caricature out of the bushes late in the day and claim that their guy ran a great race.”

David Warsh (1944) American journalist

"Ruizismus among the Austrians," 4 December 2011

Age, Guy, History, Birthday

“The light
Begin to bleed,
Begin to breathe,
Begin to speak.
D'you know what?
I love you better now.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Hounds of Love (1985), The Ninth Wave

Love, Light

“In the Diary which begins 1845 there is a much larger infusion of secular matter. I find myself deep in the literary history of the eighteenth century, reading Gray's Correspondence, Prior's Life of Goldsmith, Hume's Life and Correspondence …”

Mark Pattison (1813–1884) English author and Church of England priest

Source: Memoirs (1885), Chapter VI, p. 187

Life, History, Reading

“Do people notice Hillary is copying my airplane rallies - she puts the plane behind her like I have been doing from the beginning.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Tweet https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/778237485402980352 (20 September 2016), quoted in "Trump blasts Clinton for 'copying' his airplane rallies" http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-blasts-clinton-for-copying-his-airplane-rallies/article/2602310 by Kelly Cohen, Washington Examiner (20 September 2016) 2010s, 2016, September

People

“The First Amendment is national in scope and, as the Supreme Court said in Tinker, it does not stop at the schoolhouse door. Not all children are the same. Is a 17-year-old on the eve of his 18th birthday the same as a five-year-old? It is not the responsibility of librarians, or online content providers for that matter, to determine what is appropriate. We are at the very beginning of how we will handle this new medium.”

Judith Krug (1940–2009) librarian and freedom of speech proponent

"Library Interests Debate Decency Act" Newsbytes News Network (February 21, 1996)

Children, Birthday

“Although it was only nine o'clock he had already gone once around the pharmacological wheel to which he'd strapped himself for the evening, stolen a tuba, and offended a transvestite; and now his companions were beginning, with delight and aplomb, to barf. It was definitely a Crabtree kind of night.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

Night

“Wars begin in the minds of men, and in those minds, love and compassion would have built the defenses of peace.”

U Thant (1909–1974) 3rd Secretary-General of the United Nations

"Buddhism and the Charter" in Religion and International Affairs (1968) edited by Jeffrey Rose and Michael Ignatieff, p. 114

Love, Men, War, Peace

“"Maria" There is someone I should love.
At times I sustain deep, deep wounds.
But, by the person I should love,
they are all healed.
"Maria" Everyone is crying.
"Maria" But I want to believe.
"Maria" So I'm praying now
that this is my final love.
Beginnings come at random,
but endings always have a reason.”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Source: Lyrics, I am..., M

Love, Time, Personality, Cry

“I am not sure that I do not begin to like the correction of a mistake, even when it involves my having shown much ignorance and stupidity, as well as I like hitting on a new idea.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Inaccuracy
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XXII - Reconciliation

Stupidity, Idea

“The manuscripts in which these early Greek treatises have been preserved to us seem to be derived from an encyclopaedia compiled during the tenth century, at Constantinople, from the works of various alchemists…. The Greek text. now published by M. Berthelot and M. [Ch. Em. ] Ruelle, custodian of the Library of Ste.-Geneviève, is derived from a careful collation of all these sources, and is accompanied with notes by M. Berthelot bringing light and order into the mystical obscurity in which from the beginning the alchemists enveloped their doctrines.
First among these is the 'Physica et Mystica,' ascribed to Democritus of Abdera, a collection of fragments, among which a few receipts for dyeing in purple may be genuine, while the story of magic and the alchemical teaching are evidently spurious. The philosopher is made to state that his studies were interrupted by the death of his master, Ostanes the Magian. He therefore evoked his spirit from Hades, and learned from him that the books which contained the secrets of his art were in a certain temple. He sought them there in vain, till one day, during a feast in the sanctuary, a column opened, and revealed the precious tomes, in which the doctrines of the Master were summed up in the mysterious words: 'Nature rejoices in Nature, Nature conquers Nature, Nature rules Nature.'
The unknown Alexandrian who wrote under the name of Democritus gives not only receipts for making white alloys of copper, but others which, he positively asserts, will produce gold. M. Berthelot, however, shows in his notes that they can only result in making amalgams for gilding or alloys resembling gold or varnishes which will give a superficial tinge to metals”

Osthanes (-500) pen-name used by several pseudo-anonymous authors of Greek and Latin works of alchemy

, Marcellin Berthelot, Ch. Em. Ruelle, "The Alchemists of Egypt and Greece," Art. VIII. (Jan. 1893) in The Edinburgh Review (Jan.-Apr. 1893) Vol. 177, pp. 208-209. https://books.google.com/books?id=GuvRAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA208

Death, Secret, Books, Art

“What can be more discouraging to a man than to doubt if his soul be material, like a stone or a reptile, and subject to corruption like the vilest creatures? And does it not prove much more strength of mind and grandeur to be able to conceive the idea of a Being superior to all other beings, by whom and for whom all things were made; of a Being absolutely perfect and pure, without beginning or end, of whom our soul is the image, and of whom, if I may say so, it is a part, because it is spiritual and immortal?”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

Of Freethinkers (1)
Les Caractères (1688)

Soul, Idea, Parting, Perfection

“Reactions to our adversity are not entirely uniform. At the dovish extreme, we find Senator John Kerry, who warns that we should never again fight a war "without committing enough resources to win"; no other flaw is mentioned. And there is President Carter, the noted moral teacher and human rights apostle, who assured us that we owe Vietnam no debt and have no responsibility to render it any assistance because "the destruction was mutual," an observation so uncontroversial as to pass with no reaction. […] Properly statesmanlike, President Bush announces that "It was a bitter conflict, but Hanoi knows today that we seek only answers without the threat of retribution for the past." Their crimes against us can never be forgotten, but "we can begin writing the last chapter of the Vietnam war" if they dedicate themselves with sufficient zeal to the MIAs. We might even "begin helping the Vietnamese find and identify their own combatants missing in action," [New York Times Asia correspondent] Crossette reports. The adjacent front-page story reports Japan's failure, once again, to "unambiguously" accept the blame "for its wartime aggression."”

Noam Chomsky book Year 501

Year 501, 1993 http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/year/year-c10-s07.html. Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994

War, Failure, Teachers, Time

“(Television announcer) The Supreme Court staggered the nation today when they ruled that conception begins the minute you think about sex.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Variant: (Television announcer) The Supreme Court staggered the nation today when they ruled that conception begins the minute you think about sex. (pp. 60-61)
Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, pp. 60-61

Sex, Thinking

“God’s blessing has been on America from the very beginning of this nation, and I believe God isn’t done with America yet. I believe in you. I believe in the power of millions of courageous conservatives rising up to reignite the promise of America, and that is why today I am announcing that I’m running for president of the United States. It is a time for truth. It is a time for liberty. It is a time to reclaim the Constitution of the United States.”

Ted Cruz (1970) American politician

Presidential declaration speech, Ted Cruz declaration speech: Full transcript http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ted-cruz-declaration-speech-full-transcript-10128614.html, Independant.co.uk (March 23, 2015) 2010s

God, Truth, Courage, Time

“In all failures, the beginning is certainly the half of the whole.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

Failure

“No more important development has taken place in the last year than the beginning of a restoration of agriculture to a prosperous condition. We must permit no division of classes in this country, with one occupation striving to secure advantage over another. Each must proceed under open opportunities and with a fair prospect of economic equality. The Government can not successfully insure prosperity or fix prices by legislative fiat. Every business has its risk and its times of depression. It is well known that in the long run there will be a more even prosperity and a more satisfactory range of prices under the natural working out of economic laws than when the Government undertakes the artificial support of markets and industries. Still we can so order our affairs, so protect our own people from foreign competition, so arrange our national finances, so administer our monetary system, so provide for the extension of credits, so improve methods of distribution, as to provide a better working machinery for the transaction of the business of the Nation with the least possible friction and loss. The Government has been constantly increasing its efforts in these directions for the relief and permanent establishment of agriculture on a sound and equal basis with other business.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

People, Law, Business, Support

“The beginning of religion, more precisely its content, is the concept of religion itself, that God is the absolute truth, the truth of all things, and subjectively that religion alone is the absolutely true knowledge.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) German philosopher

Lectures on Philosophy of Religion, Volume 1 (1827)

God, Truth, Religion

“We have to give a sense of economic liberation to the masses and for that, I think the basic thing we have done or we attempted to do, in the beginning, and we have not yet completed that process, is that of land reforms. I think some of the Indian states have been successful in bringing about land reforms but to get a sensation of economic empowerment in society, even a bit of land of their own, is necessary for the common people and it has been shown by Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, which have achieved remarkable economic successes, that land reform was one basic prior thing they did.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Shri K. R. Narayanan President of India in Conversation with N. Ram on Doordarshan and All India Radio

People, Thinking, Sense, Success

“We all know that there is evil in the world — we read of it — we hear of it — but we never think of its entering our own charmed circle. Look round our circle of acquaintance; how it would startle us to be asked to name one whom we thought capable of crime; how much more so to find that crime had been committed by one near and dear to our inmost heart. What a moral revulsion would such a discovery produce — how weak we should find ourselves under such a trial — how soon we should begin to disconnect the offender and the offence; then, for the first time, we should begin to understand the full force of temptation, and to allow for its fearful strength; and should we not begin to excuse what had never before seemed capable of palliation?”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

No.11. The Heart of Mid Lothian — JEANNIE DEANS.
Literary Remains

World, Fear, Understanding, Thinking

“In fact, the Lokayata operated and developed as a tradition of universal criticism or negativism, without caring to evolve a durable or regular life-order, a socio-cultural order, of its own, with the result that it failed to commend itself to society at large. No wonder that a branch of the Lokayata, the Nilapata school, so called because its members dressed in blue, were responsible for inception of what may be called an inculture, a tradition of wanton living, about which it is said:…That is: ‘How can the Nilapata feel happy till rivers begins to overflow with wine, the mountains are made of meat, and the world is full of women?”

Charvaka An unorthodox school of Hindu philosophy

Harsh Narain, Myths of Composite Culture and Equality of Religions (1990) (quoting Puratanaprabandhasangraha)

Life, Women, Happiness, World

“Rev. and Mrs. Moon boldly entered Moscow in April 1990 and had a one-on-one meeting in the Kremlin with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. This was another miracle to have occurred. Rev. Moon conveyed his support to Gorbachev of his policies of glasnost and perestroika. I was there to translate that extraordinary meeting. Rev. Moon persuaded Gorbachev to allow religious freedom, to allow God to enter the Soviet Union. In my opinion, this meeting was crucially important in the sight of God. It was, in a way, the beginning of a peaceful process of the demise of the Soviet empire. Rev. Moon indeed motivated Gorbachev in the direction of peaceful reform. The greatest miracle that occurred in this century was the liberation of the Soviet Union without nuclear war. The threat of nuclear war was the single greatest concern of Rev. Moon. He said, "Thank God, not a single nuclear weapon was used against mankind since 1945."”

Bo Hi Pak (1930–2019) South Korean member of the Unification Church

Clearly, it was God who dismantled the Evil Empire. Introduction to the Life and Work of the Rev. and Mrs. Sun Myung Moon http://www.unification.net/misc/bhp9606.html 1996-06-17.

God, War, Peace, Way

“According to the ancient Chinese proverb, "A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step." My fellow Americans, let us take that first step. Let us, if we can, step back from the shadows of war and seek out the way of peace. And if that journey is a thousand miles, or even more, let history record that we, in this land, at this time, took the first step.”

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

1963, Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty speech

War, Peace, Way, History

“There is a sense of widespread neglect and decay in the field of indigenous education within a few decades after the onset of British rule. (…) The conclusion that the decay noticed in the early 19th century and more so in subsequent decades originated with European supremacy in India, therefore, seems inescapable. The 1769-70 famine in Bengal (when, according to British record, one-third of the population actually perished), may be taken as a mere forerunner of what was to come. (…) During the latter part of the 19th century, impressions of decay, decline and deprivation began to agitate the mind of the Indian people. Such impressions no doubt resulted from concrete personal, parental and social experience of what had gone before. They were, perhaps, somewhat exaggerated at times. By 1900, it had become general Indian belief that the country had been decimated by British rule in all possible ways; that not only had it become impoverished, but it had been degraded to the furthest possible extent; that the people of India had been cheated of most of what they had; that their customs and manners were ridiculed, and that the infrastructure of their society mostly eroded. One of the statements which thus came up was that the ignorance and illiteracy in India was caused by British rule; and, conversely, that at the beginning of British political dominance, India had had extensive education, learning and literacy. By 1930, much had been written on this point in the same manner as had been written on the deliberate destruction of Indian crafts and industry, and the impoverishment of the Indian countryside.”

Dharampal (1922–2006) Indian historian

Dharmapal: The Beautiful Tree, Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century. (1983)

People, Education, Way, Parent

“It seems to me that the notion of machine that was current in the course of the Industrial Revolution – and which we might have inherited – is a notion, essentially, of a machine without goal, it had no goal ‘of’, it had a goal ‘for’. And this gradually developed into the notion of machines with goals ‘of’, like thermostats, which I might begin to object to because they might compete with me. Now we’ve got the notion of a machine with an underspecified goal, the system that evolves. This is a new notion, nothing like the notion of machines that was current in the Industrial Revolution, absolutely nothing like it. It is, if you like, a much more biological notion, maybe I’m wrong to call such a thing a machine; I gave that label to it because I like to realise things as artifacts, but you might not call the system a machine, you might call it something else.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Pask (1972) in: Mary Catherine Bateson Our Own Metaphor: A Personal Account of a Conference on the Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation. New York : Alfred A Knopf. Quotes in: Usman Haque (2007) " The Architectural Relevance of Gordon Pask http://www.haque.co.uk/papers/architectural_relevance_of_gordon_pask.pdf" in: Architectural Design. Vol 77, Issue 4, p. 54.

“The sixth grade seemed to please him from the beginning: he went through a brief Egyptian Period that baffled me — he tried to walk flat a great deal, sticking one arm in front of him and one in back of him, putting one foot behind the other. He declared Egyptians walked that way; I said if they did I didn't see how they got anything done, but Jem said they accomplished more than the Americans ever did, they invented toilet paper and perpetual embalming, and asked where would we be today if they hadn't? Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Pt. 1, ch. 7
Jean Louise (Scout) Finch
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Way

“One hears murmurs against Mussolini on the ground that he is a desperado: the real objection to him is that he is a politician. Indeed, he is probably the most perfect specimen of the genus politician on view in the world today. His career has been impeccably classical. Beginning life as a ranting Socialist of the worst type, he abjured Socialism the moment he saw better opportunities for himself on the other side, and ever since then he has devoted himself gaudily to clapping Socialists in jail, filling them with castor oil, sending blacklegs to burn down their houses, and otherwise roughing them. Modern politics has produced no more adept practitioner.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

"Mussolini" in the Baltimore Evening Sun (3 August 1931), also in A Second Mencken Chrestomathy : New Selections from the Writings of America's Legendary Editor, Critic, and Wit (1994) edited by Terry Teachout, p. 34
1930s

Life, World, Housing, Perfection

“I will begin with the self-styled "Christian" party, who profess to base their morality on the New Testament. But whether it is really more Christian to follow or to ignore the teachings of the Gospels I shall not discuss.”

F. H. Bradley (1846–1924) British philosopher

The Limits of Individual and National Self-Sacrifice.

“Few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time, and now it seemed to George that there was a superb fitness in the fact that the one which held it better than all others should be a railroad station. For here, as nowhere else on earth, men were brought together for a moment at the beginning or end of their innumerable journeys, here one saw their greetings and farewells, here, in a single instant, one got the entire picture of the human destiny. Men came and went, they passed and vanished, and all were moving through the moments of their lives to death, all made small tickings in the sound of time--but the voice of time remained aloof and unperturbed, a drowsy and eternal murmur below the immense and distant roof.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book I, Ch. 5: The Hidden Terror
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

Death, Men, Distant, Time

“The history of France begins with the French language. Language is the primary sign of nationality.”

Jules Michelet (1798–1874) French historian

[Histoire de France, Michelet, Jules, Chamerot, 1861, 1, book 3]
History of France, 1833-1867

History

“If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

The American Mercury (March 1936) - referring to Franklin Delano Roosevelt
1930s

Housing

“When you are young and impecunious, society conditions you to exchange time for money, and this is quite as it should be. Very few people are hurt by having to work for a living. But as you become more affluent, it somehow is very, very difficult to reverse that process and begin trading money for time.”

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

Quoted in Time magazine (13 June 1988).
Books, articles, and speeches

Money, People, Time, Hurt

“You can't be in an unconscious state and paint. Because whatever is in your mind, and not the subject matter, but the feelings that you have related to that subject matter, is what you're going to paint. So, the beginning is not actually painting, you know. The beginning of painting is not you put down green, and then you like pink, and you put down pink.
Painting's not about that anymore than music is about this sound and that sound.... And it's something that drives you to expression. And it's irresistible.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

1974
1970's, interview, K. Horsfield & L. Blumenthal

Music, Feeling, Painting

“A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

“I have a feeling that sooner or later I shall arrive at something legitimate, only I must begin, not with hypotheses, but with specific instances, no matter how minute. If I then succeed in distinguishing a clear structure, I get more from it than from a lofty imaginary construction. And the typical will automatically follow from a series of examples.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (Bern, April 1902), as cited in Artists on Art, from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 442
1895 - 1902

Feeling

“The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods. In short we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

National self-sufficiency (1933) http://www.panarchy.org/keynes/national.1933.html Section 3, republished in Collected Writings Vol. 11 (1982).

War, Beauty, Intelligence, Success

“New beginnings and new shoots
Spring again from hidden roots
Pull or stab or cut or burn,
Love must ever yet return.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"Marigolds".
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

Love, Spring

“If you hear nonsense like that often enough for long enough, you begin to believe it.”

Octavia E. Butler book Parable of the Talents

Source: Parable of the Talents (1998), Chapter 15 (p. 291)

“What has happened is a hostile takeover of the Israeli government by dangerous elements. And it's just the beginning.”

Ehud Barak (1942) Israeli politician and prime minister

Hostility

“In Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Fauves – Matisse, Derain – were using bright colours in their full intensity, which continued with Kandinsky, Malevich, Kirchner, Léger and Mondrian. They employed all the colours of the spectrum. In the 1940's and 1950's the majority of the Abstract Expressionists in New York rebelled against this European use of colour and mostly used mixed colours. That is, the Abstract Expressionists did use bright colours sometimes, but they tended to paint wet-on-wet, which muddled their hues. As Matisse would say, a small patch of any one colour is far less intense than a large one of the same colour. I returned in 1954 [from Paris] to New York and showed paintings done in France at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1956 with bright colours that wouldn’t really be used until the Pop artists in the 1960's. My idea of using colour at its full intensity, which began with Colors for a Large Wall, hasn’t changed in the 60 years that I’ve been painting.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

1981 - 2008
Source: 'Colour Chart I', interview with Christoph Grunenberg, 1 May 2009; 'Sixty years at full intensity', Tate 2009

Color, Idea, Change, Painting

“The human aspect of industry has changed very considerably in the last fifty years. The nature and range of these changes are still partly unknown to us, but the question of their significance is no longer in dispute. Whereas the human problems of industry were regarded until recently as lying within the strict province of the specialist, it is now beginning to be realized that a clear statement of such problems in particular situations is necessary to the effective thinking of every business administrator and every economic expert.”

Elton Mayo (1880–1949) Australian academic

Source: The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilisation, (1933), p. 1, Chapter 1: Fatigue; Lead paragraph

Lying, Question, Business, Nature

“A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

Source: Attributed from posthumous publications, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), Ch. 22, August 17, 1941.

Flowers

“It is quite certain that, if from childhood men were to begin to follow the first intimations of conscience, honestly to obey them and carry them out into act, the power of conscience would be so strengthened and improved within them, that it would soon become, what it evidently is intended to be, "a connecting principle between the creature and the Creator."”

John Campbell Shairp (1819–1885) British writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 156.

Men, Childhood

“Here is a well-known trajectory: You begin with a heartfelt desire to help other people and the conviction, however well or ill founded, that your guild or club or church is the coalition that can best serve to improve the welfare of others. If times are particularly tough, this conditional stewardship — I'm doing what's good for the guild because that will be good for everybody — may be displaced by the narrowest concern for the integrity of the guild itself, and for good reason: if you believe that the institution in question is the best path to goodness, the goal of preserving it for future projects, still unimagined, can be the most rational higher goal you can define. It is a short step from this to losing track of or even forgetting the larger purpose and devoting yourself singlemindedly to furthering the interests of the institution, at whatever costs. A conditional or instrumental allegiance can thus become indistinguishable in practice from a commitment to something "good in itself." A further short step perverts this parochial summum bonum to the more selfish goal of doing whatever it takes to keep yourself at the helm of the institution ("who better than I to lead us to triumph over our adversaries?")We have all seen this happen many times, and may even have caught ourselves in the act of forgetting just why we wanted to be leaders in the first place.”

Daniel Dennett book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Breaking the Spell (2006)

People, Question, Time, Future

“a) The definition of history? Every historian would agree, I think, that history is a kind of research or inquiry. What kind of inquiry it is I do not yet ask. The point is that generically it belongs to what we call the sciences: that is, the forms of thought whereby we ask questions and try to answer them. Science in general, it is important to realize, does not consist in collecting what we already know and arranging it in this or that kind of pattern. It consists in fastening upon something we do not know, and trying to discover it. Playing patience with things we already know may be a useful means towards this end, but it is not the end itself. It is at best only the means. It is scientifically valuable only in so far as the new arrangement gives us the answer to a question we have already decided to ask. That is why all science begins from the knowledge of our own ignorance: not our ignorance of everything, but our ignorance of some definite thing-the origin of parliament, the cause of cancer, the chemical composition of the sun, the way to make a pump work without muscular exertion on the part of a man or a horse or some other docile animal. Science is finding things out: and in that sense history is a science.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

Source: The Idea of History (1946), p. 9

Way, History, Question, Knowledge

“I live in a world of actors where everyone is a little crazy to begin with, but it was interesting that he said all these elements to this disorder. I was like, “Oh my gosh!” I feel like this will be a great challenge to play the role, but I can tap into that because I feel like I know someone with that disorder.”

Danielle Savre (1988) actress

Danielle Savre – The Perfect Stalker http://starrymag.com/danielle-savre-the-perfect-stalker/ (December 30, 2016)

World, Feeling

“An internal combustion engine is 'clearly' a system; we subscribe to this opinion because we know that the engine was designed precisely to be a system. It is, however, possible to envisage that someone (a Martian perhaps) totally devoid of engineering knowledge might at first regard the engine as a random collection of objects. If this someone is to draw the conclusion that the collection is coherent, forming a system, it will be necessary to begin by inspecting the relationships of the entities comprising the collection to each other. In declaring that a collection ought to be called a system, that is to say, we acknowledge relatedness. But everything is related to everything else. The philosopher Hegel enunciated a proposition called the Axiom of Internal Relations. This states that the relations by which terms are related are an integral part of the terms they relate. So the notion we have of any thing is enriched by the general connotation of the term which names it; and this connotation describes the relationship of the thing to other things… [There are three stages in the recognition of a system]… we acknowledge particular relationships which are obtrusive: this turns a mere collection into something that may be called an assemblage. Secondly, we detect a pattern in the set of relationships concerned: this turns an assemblage into a systematically arranged assemblage. Thirdly, we perceive a purpose served by this arrangement: and there is a system.”

Anthony Stafford Beer (1926–2002) British theorist, consultant, and professor

Source: Decision and control: the meaning of operational research and management cybernetics, 1966, p. 242.

Knowledge, Parting, Drawing

“Painting, in the beginning, was a trade like any other. Some men became picture-makers as others became glaziers or carpenters. Painters painted shields, saddles and banners. The primitive painter was more of a craftsman than we are; he learned his trade superlatively well before he thought of letting himself go. The reverse is true today.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

13 January 1857 (p. 339)
1831 - 1863, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)

Men, Learning, Painting

“p>…[E]ach moment of joy but prompts the more
That madness buried at the base of dreamy souls,
That sadness in the dark citadel of the heart,
And in sorrowful eyes, images of innocence from the past.
All the Past is but an endless string of days,
All the Future is but a series of graves not yet fulfilled…
In the summer sun, fresh leaves begin to change in hue,
Weaving the autumn whose arrival is imminent—as in our lives
The green days follow in fading succession,
Weaving the shroud that covers our souls.”

Chế Lan Viên (1920–1989) Vietnamese writer

"The Graves", as quoted in Understanding Vietnam by Neil Jamieson (University of California Press, 1995), pp. 163–164

Sadness, Soul, Autumn, Change

“They said if you just turn against Trump it would be better, but he was doing good, and that's what makes it so bad… If he had been a piece a crap from the beginning, it wouldn't be so bad. But we made so many sacrifices. And now he's crapping all over us.”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

The Alex Jones Show, 13 April 2018; quoted in "Watch Alex Jones cry over Trump's decision to bomb Syria" https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/alex-jones-cry-syria/ by Christine Friar, The Daily Dot (14 April 2018). 2018

“I was very melancholic in the beginning. Then I was very angry. Then I fell in love again — but not stupid like in the beginning.”

Laura Pausini (1974) Italian singer

Los Angeles Daily News (October 16, 2014)

Love, Stupidity

“Something inhuman has come to Tarker's Mills, as unseen as the full moon riding the night sky high above. It is the Werewolf, and there is no more reason for its coming now than there would be for the arrival of cancer, or a psychotic with murder on his mind, or a killer tornado. Its time is now, its place is here, in this little Maine town where baked bean church suppers are a weekly event, where small boys and girls still bring apples to their teachers, where the Nature Outings of the Senior Citizen's Club are religiously reported in the weekly paper. Next week there will be news of a darker variety.
Outside, its tracks begin to fill up with snow, and the shriek of the wind seems savage with pleasure. There is nothing of God or Light in that heartless sound—it is all black winter and dark ice.
The cycle of the Werewolf has begun.”

Stephen King book Cycle of the Werewolf

January
Cycle of the Werewolf (1983)

God, Pleasure, Girl, Boy

“Because the — all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those — changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be — or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the — like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate — the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those — if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.”

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

4 February 2005
http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/muddled.asp
2000s, 2005

Idea, Sense, Change, Help

“People call this beautiful? - no, they are crazy, or I am mad! – How I learned now at Oosterbeek [c. 1834-36 that I should look at Nature completely different! In the beginning I could not make anything good; I soon realized that I had to start all over again.”

Johannes Warnardus Bilders (1811–1890) painter from the Northern Netherlands

version in original Dutch (citaat van Johannes Warnardus Bilders, in Nederlands): Moet dat nu mooi heeten? - neen, de menschen zijn gek, of ik! - Wat leerde ik nu te Oosterbeek die Natuur gansch anders aankijken! In 't begin kon ik niets goeds maken; ik zag al gauw, dat ik weer van voren af aan moest beginnen.
p. 78
1880's, Johannes Warnardus Bilders' (1887/1900)

People, Beauty, Nature, Learning

“Suspecting that we would be accused of apologetics for the Khmer Rouge, Chomsky and I went to some pains to point out Khmer Rouge crimes and to stress that our purpose was to emphasize the discrepancy between available facts and media claims and to lay bare what we saw to be a propaganda campaign of selective indignation and benevolence. This effort was futile. With such a powerful propaganda bandwagon underway, from the very beginning the mass media were closed to oppositional voices on the issue, and any scepticism, even identification of outright lies, was treated with hostility and tabbed apologetics for the Khmer Rouge. Our crime was the very act of criticizing the workings of the propaganda system and its relation to US power and policy, instead of focusing attention on approved villainy, which could be assailed violently and ignorantly, without penalty. The issue was framed as a simple one: those for and against Pol Pot. […] I would estimate with some confidence that over 90 percent of the journalists who mentioned Chomsky's name in connection with Cambodia never looked at his original writings on the subject, but merely regurgitated a quickly adopted line. The critics who helped formulate the line also could hardly be bothered looking at the actual writings; the method was almost invariably the use of a few selected quotations taken out of context and embedded in a mass of sarcastic and violent denunciation.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Herman, “Pol Pot, Faurisson, and the Process of Derogation”, in Otero, Ed. (1994), Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments, pp. 598-615.
1990s

Pain, Hostility, Penalty, Confidence

“It is possible to relegate the epoch of the starting of the expansion to minus infinity, e. g. by using instead of the ordinary time the logarithm of the time elapsed since the beginning. But this is only a mathematical trick. We call zero minus infinity, but that only means that we allow the universe an infinite time to get well started on its course of expansion, but it does not make the time during which anything really happens any longer.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

Mathematics, Universe, Time

“What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

Children for Adoption (1964). Ch. 3

“The revolution comes when two strangers smile at each other, when a father refuses to send his child to school because schools destroy children, when a commune is started and people begin to trust each other, when a young man refuses to go to war and when a girl pushes aside all that her mother has 'taught' her and accepts her boyfriends (sic) love.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

"The Revolution Is Life Versus Death" https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2157415-sanders-revolution.html, in Vermont Freeman (1969), as quoted in "The origins of Sanders' ideology, in his own words" http://edition.cnn.com/2016/02/29/politics/bernie-sanders-own-words/ by Brianna Keilar, CNN (29 February 2016) 1970s

Love, War, Children, People

“Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things… one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

BBC Newsnight Special: Christopher Hitchens, 29 November 2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mynVHOUXeDE&NR=1 2010s, 2010

Religion

“The temperature was six below zero and it kept me dying on the spot because the blood coagulated and clotted in ugly smears of cloth and skin and the pain hadn't started yet, so when the little fat guy who saw my eyes open and still bright pulled me away from the carnage he was almost in the shock I was going into. Nobody would listen to him. He was a drunk. I was nearly dead.
Sometimes the body responds to a stimulus that can't be explained. He got me upright. I walked woodenly, dyingly. I was sat in an old car. The fat man rolled down the windows. The blood stayed frozen. My hands were numb and I couldn't feel my feet. Idly, I wondered what frostbite was like. Breathing was a thing that was happening, but at a pace that said it could slow, then stop at any time. A dull, squeezing sensation of pain was beginning to gnaw on my insides and I knew that eventually, and very soon, it would grow into a terrible, devastating animal with an awful hunger and I would be eaten alive by it.
I wanted to scream but nothing would come out.”

Mickey Spillane book Black Alley

Black Alley (1996)

Hunger, Pain, Cars, Guy

“Just as we respect the right of each nation to determine its own future, we also recognize the responsibility of each nation to secure its own future.
Just as America's role is indispensable in preserving the world's peace, so is each nation's role indispensable in preserving its own peace.
Together with the rest of the world, let us resolve to move forward from the beginnings we have made. Let us continue to bring down the walls of hostility which have divided the world for too long, and to build in their place bridges of understanding — so that despite profound differences between systems of government, the people of the world can be friends.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

1970s, Second Inaugural Address (1973)

Hostility, People, World, Peace

“Bit by bit, as the legend unfolds, the reader gets a more accurate picture of the human race. By degrees, one gains the conviction that here is a race which can be little more than pure fantasy. It is not the kind of race which could rise from humble beginnings to the eminence of culture with which it is gifted in these tales. Its equipment is too poor.
So far it lack of stability has become apparent. Its preoccupation with a mechanical civilization rather than with a culture based on some of the sounder, more worthwhile concepts of life indicates a lack of basic character.
And now, in this tale, we learn of the limited communications which it possessed, a situation which certainly is not conducive to advancement. Man’s inability to understand and appreciate the thought and the viewpoint of another man would be a stumbling block which no amount of mechanical ability could overcome.”

Clifford D. Simak book City

Notes on the Fifth Tale (p. 119)
City (1952)

Life, Communication, Understanding, Learning

“Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled. This confrontation is willed by God who wants this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a new age begins.”

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

Former French president Jacques Chirac claimed in late 2009 that Bush made these statements to him at some point prior the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 while "appealing to him as a Christian" and attempting to convince him to have France join the invasion. The Independent, 2 January 2010 http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/columnists/richard-ingrams/richard-ingramsrsquos-week-blair-must-be-quizzed-over-bushs-biblical-crusade-1855418.html Attributed, Private/attributed

God, People, Age

“Morphy's principal strength does not rest upon his power of combination but in his position play and his general style…. Beginning with la Bourdonnais to the present, and including Lasker, we find that the greatest stylist has been Morphy. Whence the reason, although it might not be the only one, why he is generally considered the greatest of all.”

Paul Morphy (1837–1884) American chess player

José Raúl Capablanca, in Pablo Morphy by V. F. Coria and L. Palau.
About

“In science, conjecture drives both experiment and theory for it is only by forming conjectures (hypotheses) that we can make the direction of our experiments and theories informed. If such and such is true, then I should be able to do this experiment and look for this particular result or I should be able to find this theoretical formulation. Conversely, experiment and theory drive conjecture. One makes a startling observation or has a sudden insight and begins to speculate on its significance and implications and to draw possible conclusions”

Robert Curl (1933) American chemist

conjecture in his Nobel Lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1996/curl-lecture.html, December 7, 1996, Dawn of the Fullerenes: Experiment and Conjecture

Science, Drawing