Quotes about being
page 68

“I am interested in entertaining people, in bringing pleasure, particularly laughter, to others, rather than being concerned with "expressing" myself with obscure creative impressions.”

Walt Disney (1901–1966) American film producer and businessman

Quoted in "The man behind 'The Magic Kingdom'" in The Gazette [Colorado Springs http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4191/is_20050507/ai_n14625292/print (7 May 2005)]

People, Pleasure, Laughter

“Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man’s well-being is not their goal.”

Ayn Rand book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)

“From these two immediate perceptions, we gain a mediate, or inferential perception of the relation of all four instants. This mediate perception is objectively, or as to the object being represented, spread over the four instants; but subjectively, or as itself the subject of duration, it is completely embraced in the second moment. (The reader will observe that I use the word instant to mean a point in time, and moment to mean an infinitesimal duration.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The Law of Mind (1892)

Time

“I will achieve it only [being an artist] by perseverance, and by openly asserting my determination to emancipate myself, [but].... I both lament and envy your [Edma's] fate. Bichette [her niece] helps me to understand maternal love; she comes onto my bed every morning and plays so sweetly.... life gets more complicated by the day here now I am gripped by the desire to have children, that' all I need.”

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painter from France

in an unpublished extract from a letter of Berthe to Edma, written in 1869; as cited in The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot, ed. Denis Rouart; Camden, London 1986 / Kinston, R. I. Moyer Bell, 1989, p. 31 (private collection)
1860 - 1870

Love, Life, Fate, Children

“Spanish for, One day I got tired and I called him and told him my son come here, do not believe that being a star consists of being late for calls, being a star means arriving on time for his call, doing his duty, giving everything what you have to praise the public and come out triumphant as far as you can, that is to be a star but not to be late for the calls”

Sara García (1895–1980) Mexican actress

Un día me canse y lo llame y le dije óigame hijito venga para acá, no se crea usted que ser estrella consiste en llegar tarde a los llamados, el ser estrella consiste en llegar a tiempo a su llamado, cumplir con su deber, dar todo lo que se tiene para alagar al publico y salir triunfante hasta donde se pueda, eso es ser estrella pero no llegar tarde a los llamados. Sara responding after being asked about some passages of Pedro Infante's life in his artistic career that she remembered with more heart and couldn't forget. SARA GARCIA PARTE 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HyjqMuf5Vs

Star, Time

“It's not necessarily against a system that it collapses, because most systems do collapse in the end. That’s a part of the wheel of life - systems do collapse. So I’m to some extent slightly inclined to forgive capitalism for being about to collapse. I mean there are lots of fine things, lots of love affairs and the like which have come to a sticky end. On the other hand, it is quite an accusation - quite hard for it to live down - that it's going to destroy the entire planet with it.”

David Fleming (1940–2010) British activist

Interview, November 4th, 2010 http://www.darkoptimism.org/2016/10/14/by-popular-demand-david-flemings-interviews/

Love, Life, Forgiveness, Parting

““It would please me your not being obsequious. That is a trait of marketplace people who are selling shoddy goods. I am sure to prefer endless, stupid questions to that.”
“Ob… obseek…?”
“Obsequious. Flattering with oiliness. It is not liked by me. In Yiqanuc we say: ‘Send the man with the oily tongue to go and lick the snowshoes.’””

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Chapter 18, “A Net of Stars” (p. 262).

People, Stupidity, Question

“Gentlemen, we are going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because nothing is perfect. But we are going to relentlessly chase it, because in the process we will catch excellence. I am not remotely interested in just being good.”

Vince Lombardi (1913–1970) American football player, coach, and executive

First team meeting as Packers coach (1959), reported in Chuck Carlson, Game of My Life: 25 Stories of Packers Football (2004), p. 149; Richard Scott, Jay Barker, Legends of Alabama Football (2004), p. 78.

Perfection

“My job was to keep the house clean, get the children off to school, help the cook-housekeeper, and serve at table. The house was much more perfect than the sort of gilt-bordered Christmas-card-Heaven that a crooked-nosed woman would sacrifice everything to attain in the next world: it was an all-electric house, with machines being plugged in and started up all day long; there was no such thing as a fire; heat came from hot-springs underground, and the glowing embers in the fireplace were made of glass.”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

Children, World, School, Spring

“For being a man worth any thousand men, the response your Knox, your Cromwell gets, is an argument for two centuries whether he was a man at all. God's greatest gift to this Earth is sneeringly flung away.”

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

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero As King

Men, God

“I try to live with few rules, but one that I’ve adopted over the years is this: if it’s down to me being screwed up, or everybody else being screwed up, it is far, far, far more likely that I’m the one who’s screwed up.”

Mark Manson (1984) American writer and blogger

Source: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2016), Chapter 6, “You’re Wrong About Everything (But So Am I)” (pp. 145-146)

“I don't like to be my own audience, I find that being my own audience, being in the audience, makes me self-conscious, basically. So I tune in sometimes, with the sound off, to check it out and I back up to it. In the future I will look at it when some time has passed.”

Madeline Kahn (1942–1999) American actress

Charlie Rose, (December 16, 1996) "Charlie Rose - An interview with Madeline Kahn" http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/5799, Charlie Rose, PBS

Time, Future

“Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

On Boxing (1987)

Pain, Feeling, Box

“Human migration beyond Earth is our destiny, not as in something preordained, but in the sense of it being inevitable and necessary. The lot of humanity seems to be that of expanding consciousness into new territory.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Zero Gravity interview (2006)

Sense

“To me, your individual passion is what makes you an individual, and that might sound cheesy but it's really true. You should absolutely go after what you're passionate about because without it you lose what makes you you, and I think that's applicable not just to kids but to everyone. I feel like that is so integral to, not necessarily happiness, but to being comfortable with who you are. So that's what I would say, be comfortable with who you are and find self-worth in that.”

Aubrey Peeples (1993) American actress

Aubrey Peeples Talks About Becoming Jem, Accepting Who You Are (a Slytherin), and the Literal Skeletons in Her Closet http://community.sparknotes.com/2015/10/12/exclusive-aubrey-peeples-interview-jem (October 12, 2015)

Happiness, Feeling, Thinking, Passion

“Never penalize those who work for us for mistakes or reward them for being right about markets. It will go to their heads, is counterproductive and, in any event, material compensation will not correlate with their ability to predict the future next time.”

Eugene Rotberg (1930)

“'The only perfect hedge is a Japanese garden': Speech to the National Association of Corporate Treasurers." http://www.generotberg.com/speeches/1990s/The%20Only%20Perfect%20Hedge%20is%20a%20Japanese%20Garden.pdf. (1990)

Time, Future

“Jewish morality fatally, has two morals from the same fundamental dogmas of the Jewish religion, considering themselves a "chosen people" - and all other people as "goyim" (Gentiles), unbelievers, inferior beings with no rights and related to animals. It results from this, the neighbor, for Jews, is only a Jew, which is the only one to which he has moral duties. But when compared to those of other faiths - no one. This concept is found clearly expressed in the Bible…”

A.C. Cuza (1857–1947) Romanian politician

From Naţionalitatea în artă ("Nationality in Art"), Bucureşti: Cartea Romaneasca, 1905.

People, Faith, Religion, Animals

“All doctrines relating to the creation of the world, the government of man by superior beings, and his destiny after death, are conjectures which have been given out as facts, handed down with many adornments by tradition, and accepted by posterity as "revealed religion". They are theories more or less rational which uncivilised men have devised in order to explain the facts of life, and which civilised men believe that they believe.”

William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) British historian

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter II, "Religion", p. 138.

Life, Death, Men, World

“Rather than studying the laws of cause and effect, people spend their lives being the effect and running from the cause.”

Eugene J. Martin (1938–2005) American artist

Annotated Drawings by Eugene J. Martin: 1977-1978

People, Law, Study

“Here is how my father appeared to me as a boy. He came from a race of giants and demi-gods from a mythical land known as Chicago. He married the most beautiful girl ever to come crawling out of the poor and lowborn south, and there were times when I thought we were being raised by Zeus and Athena. After Happy Hour my father would drive his car home at a hundred miles an hour to see his wife and seven children. He would get out of his car, a strapping flight jacketed matinee idol, and walk toward his house, his knuckles dragging along the ground, his shoes stepping on and killing small animals in his slouching amble toward the home place. My sister, Carol, stationed at the door, would call out, "Godzilla's home!" and we seven children would scamper toward the door to watch his entry. The door would be flung open and the strongest Marine aviator on earth would shout, "Stand by for a fighter pilot!" He would then line his seven kids up against the wall and say, "Who's the greatest of them all?" "You are, O Great Santini, you are." "Who knows all, sees all, and hears all?" "You do, O Great Santini, you do."”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

We were not in the middle of a normal childhood, yet none of us were sure since it was the only childhood we would ever have. For all we knew other men were coming home and shouting to their families, "Stand by for a pharmacist," or "Stand by for a chiropractor".
Eulogy for a Fighter Pilot (1998)

Men, God, Happiness, Children

“The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

Statement from his final address, during a conference on East-West monastic dialogue, delivered just two hours before his death (10 December 1968), quoted in Religious Education, Vol. 73 (1978), p. 292, and in The Boundless Circle : Caring for Creatures and Creation (1996) by Michael W. Fox.

Idea, Parting

“.. my own paintings of that period (1916 – 1919) remain pure still-life compositions and never suggest any metaphysical, surrealist, psychological, or literary considerations at all [reacting on similarities with the art of Carrà, and de Chirico, suggested by the interviewer]. My milliners' dummies, for instance, are objects like others and have not been selected to suggest symbolic representations of human beings of legendary or mythological characters. The only titles that I chose for these paintings were conventional, like 'Still Life, Flowers or Landscape', without any implications of strangeness of an unreal world”

Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) Italian painter

as in Surrealism or in 'Pittura Metafisica' of De Chirico
Source: 1945 - 1964, Interview, 1960, pp. 106-107

Life, World, Art, Flowers

“I understand how it was possible for Spinoza to find deep and sustained happiness when he was excommunicated, poor, despised and suspected alike by Jew and Christian; not that the kind world of men ever treated me so, but that his isolation from the universe of sensuous joys is somewhat analogous to mine. He loved the good for its own sake. Like many great spirits he accepted his place in the world, and confided himself childlike to a higher power, believing that it worked through his hands and predominated in his being. He trusted implicitly, and that is what I do. Deep, solemn optimism, it seems to me, should spring from this firm belief in the presence of God in the individual; not a remote, unapproachable governor of the universe, but a God who is very near every one of us, who is present not only in earth, sea and sky, but also in every pure and noble impulse of our hearts, 'the source and centre of all minds, their only point of rest.”

Helen Keller book Optimism

Optimism (1903)

Love, Men, God, Happiness

“I don't respect people unless I think they deserve the respect. There are people who think that respect is something that should be given, and I happen to be one of the people who is perfectly happy saying no; respect should be earned. And without being earned, you don't get it. It's really that simple.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Mg5_gxNXTo

DebConf 14: Q&A with Linus Torvalds

DebConf 2014 Portland

Youtube/Google

14min35

2014

Daniel Gillmore, Ana Guerrerero López.
2010s, 2014

Happiness, People, Thinking

“You are what is keeping and making the black race look bad. Wake up fool. Do not glorify this half a man, he has worked for nothing. He chose to keep himself where he is, not the white people. It is time to take responsibility for your own actions, and not act like a stinking fool. Kids and young black men and women look at this site, and believe that they are abused. That is a bold-faced lie. It is out of the mouths of cheap thugs like you that are hurting our young and taking away the chances they have to make themselves a productive part of society. Brothers and sisters, the only slavery in America now is the one you put yourself into. Rise up like Doctor King as taught us, and be a real human being. We are all in this togehter, white and black. Peace to all, and I hope this stupid fake hate stops real soon. We are all brothers and sisters. Do not be fooled by the tyranny of evil men like this. Lift yourself up, educate yourselves, and work hard for a good life. No one owes you anything. Stand proud as a person of color, and do something meaningful with your life. I did and I am the best at what I do! Peace out, R. Sherman.”

Richard Sherman (American football) (1988) American football player

Posted on a website under the alias "RSherman25", quoted in "Richard Sherman Blasts 'Black Lives Matter' Activist" https://web.archive.org/web/20150916235759/http://newsbusters.org/blogs/culture/dylan-gwinn/2015/09/14/richard-sherman-blasts-black-lives-matter-activist (14 September 2015), by Dylan Gwinn, NewsBusters (2015), Reston, Virginia: Media Research Center. Sherman has said that although he agreed with some of the sentiments expressed, he did not write or say this http://www.seattletimes.com/sports/seahawks/video-richard-sherman-speaks-passionately-on-black-lives-matter/. Misattributed

Life, Women, Men, Hate

“A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”

Isaac Asimov book Runaround

"Runaround" in Astounding Science Fiction (March 1942); later published in I, Robot (1950)
The Three Laws of Robotics (1942)
Variant: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

“Only one thing is expect of you, and that is that you should come out of yourself and love with all your being and all your light without stopping.”

Michael Elmore-Meegan (1959) British humanitarian

All Will be Well (2004)

Love, Light

“Everything is being televised so you won't be able to tell where the Revolution is. "Who's revolting? Well, I don't know, what's on the other channel?"”

Maria Bamford (1970) American actress and comedian

Nerdist podcast, episode #25 http://www.nerdist.com/2010/07/nerdist-podcast-25-maria-bamford/, July 5, 2012 Other

“Being part of a team that belongs to everyone makes me feel good and at peace with myself. A lot of the time, it's better than sex: it lasts longer and if it all falls flat, it can't just be your fault.”

Andrea Pirlo (1979) Italian footballer

Ibid [p. 37]

Peace, Sex, Feeling, Time

“There is a view that one should never be permitted to be criticized for being even possibly in the future engaged in a contributory act that might be immoral, and that that type of arse-covering is more important than actually saving people's lives. That it is better to let a thousand people die than risk going to save them and possibly running over someone on the way. And that is something that I find to be philosophically repugnant.”

Julian Assange (1971) Australian editor, activist, publisher and journalist

[Wikileaks:Secrets and Lies, http://www.channel4.com/programmes/wikileaks-secrets-and-lies/4od, 2012-06-30]

People, Way, Future

“[W]hat al Qaeda is fighting for is a traditional understanding of the family. This is not a minor part of their program: it is at its heart. The traditional family is built around some clearly defined principles. First, the home is the domain of the woman and life outside the house is the purview of the man. Second, sexuality is something confined to the family and the home, and extramarital, extrafamilial sexuality is unacceptable. Women who move outside the home invite extramarital sexuality just by being there. Third, women have as their primary tasks reproduction and nurturing of the next generation. Therefore, intense controls on women are necessary to maintain the integrity of the family and of society. In an interesting way it is all about women, and bin Laden's letter [to the U. S. ] drives this home. What he hates about America is that it promotes a completely different view of women and the family.”

George Friedman (1949) American businessman and political scientist

Source: The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (2009), p. 50

Life, Women, Hate, Family

“In addition to that sentience, which the insect or animal has, the human being is endowed with intellect. Intellect is what is cognized, which the animal need not do. So it is this power of the intellect to discriminate and interpret what is cognized that gives the individual being a sense of individuality and makes him consider himself something special in this manifestation. What is more, he goes to the extent of believing that the entire manifestation has been created for his benefit! So, all the time he is thinking, In what way can I benefit by exploiting nature?”

Ramesh Balsekar (1917–2009) Indian guru

And the extent to which the human being has 'benefited' himself, we can all see.
Page 16

Way, Nature, Thinking, Sense

“Imaginative truth is the most immediate way of presenting ultimate reality to a human being … ultimate reality is what we call God.”

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet

R. S. Thomas : Priest and Poet, BBC TV (2 April 1972)

God, Truth, Way, Imagination

“Tis but a surface-view of human nature which gives the impression that the argument to immortality from our a priori powers leads to nothing more than bare continuance. What it really leads to, is the continuance of a being whose most intimate nature is found, not in the capacity of sensory life, but in the power of setting and appreciating values, through its still higher power of determining its ideals. For such a nature to continue, is to continue in the gradual development of all that makes for worth.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Human Immortality: its Positive Argument, p.310

Life, Nature

“Ye are the children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth - sinners! It is a sin to call man so; it is a standing libel on human nature. Come up, lions! and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Calcutta, 1985, Vol I. p. 11. Quoted from Goel, S. R. (1996). History of Hindu-Christian encounters, AD 304 to 1996. Chapter 13 ISBN 9788185990354

God, Children, Soul, Nature

“We are being obliged to consider the significance of woman and her existence as a problem. We cannot evade the question as to what we are and what we should be.”

Edith Stein (1891–1942) Jewish-German nun, theologian and philosopher

Essays on Woman (1996), Spirituality of the Christian Woman (1932)

Question, Problem

“It’s the oldest trick in the book. If you are being criticized, create a diversion. Invent tales so that from an aggressor you become the aggrieved party and people will start casting their sympathies at you.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Gulf News http://gulfnews.com/news/asia/philippines/destabilisation-cry-to-fend-off-graft-criticism-1.142820 2008

People, Books

“That passivity was the essence of the problem. The human being was intended to be passive only in a condition of fatigue, and not always then. Too much passivity of body produced surplus fat, short-windedness, indigestion: passivity of mind produced the same symptoms on the mental level. a feeling of spiritual dyspepsia. Since the average human being has no purposes that are not connected with the activities of keeping alive, the black room was bound to produce passivity, increasing dullness, a state in which the mind is at once awake and static, motionless, stagnant. This sense of dullness was nothing less than the collapse of the sense of reality and of values, the retreat into one's inner world.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Black Room (1975), p. 72

World, Feeling, Problem, Reality

“Another activity which is being encouraged is that of gardening. This is necessarily somewhat limited, but the opportunity for engaging in it has never been anywhere near exhausted. It makes its appeal alike to youth and age. It is extremely practical on the one hand, and lends itself to the artistic on the other.”

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

1920s, The Democracy of Sports (1924)

Youth, Age

“The self-awareness that grows out of the habit of witnessing is nonjudgmental. I look at my actions, my feelings, my experience with soft and compassionate eyes, from a great distance as if I were God or a novelist. The chief rule of the witness is: Judge not. Do not identify with or against anything you observe. The witness must be amoral, a pure phenomenologist. The courtroom of civil conscience must be closed for a time. There is a time when the outlaw switches from contemplation to trans-moral action. But in order to stop the reactionary patterns of thought and behavior that make up the personality, there must be a prior time of inaction. As I gain skill as an objective and compassionate witness, my identity gradually shifts from my persona to my self. In place of the old compulsive, preprogrammed reactions, I find a growing ability to pause between the stimulus and the response. I cease being merely a biological creature who reacts automatically to steak and potatoes, the lure of immediate sex, or the invasion of my territory; I deliberate and choose what is most desirable. I am no longer captive either to my impulses or to the judgments made upon me by my society. In the newfound silence, I find the freedom to disengage from my old self-images and addictions.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 137

God, Sex, Behavior, Feeling

“Men all say, "We are wise"; but being driven forward and taken in a net, a trap, or a pitfall, they know not how to escape. Men all say, "We are wise"; but happening to choose the course of the Mean, they are not able to keep it for a round month.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Doctrine of the Mean

Men

“Morally relevant emotions are essential for living in social groups and they provide the basis on which we may construct conceptual frameworks that help guide our actions, but human beings should more accurately be thought of as being endowed with morally relevant capacities rather than innate moral knowledge.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.128

Knowledge, Help

“The only person I do worry about, that I want to be a good person for, I think is my responsibility, is my sister. I'm going to be cool for you, okay. I like, I need to, I like being by myself right now. I think it's good for me.”

Britney Spears (1981) American singer, dancer and actress

Diane Sawyer interview http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/sixtyminutes/stories/2003_11_23/story_1024.asp, 60 Minutes (23 November 2003)

Thinking, Sister, Personality

“The interesting part about making these films is that it’s half directing, and half really being a leader, because you have such little time to shoot such a big concept. It’s really like a war against time, and your crew is your platoon. You’re going as hard and as fast as you can to try to get everything on screen.”

Griff Furst (1981) American actor, director and musician

'Ghost Shark' director Griff Furst is ready to ride 'Sharknado' Twitter wave http://www.nola.com/tv/index.ssf/2013/08/ghost_shark_director_griff_fur.html (August 20, 2013)

War, Time, Parting

“I believe there is one Supreme most perfect being. … I believe He is pleased and delights in the happiness of those He has created; and since without virtue man can have no happiness in this world, I firmly believe He delights to see me virtuous.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

"Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion" (1728).
1720s

Happiness, World, Perfection

““They want to find an imaginary mean between cupidity and charity,” says Arnaud, “as though our love could end and rest in any object other than God, this being charity, or in the creature, this being cupidity.” In this “imaginary mean” the new man had now established himself, and spent the greater part of his life; it was his spiritual homeland on earth. There he created habits for himself and made laws; he felt at ease and found ways of being virtuous and useful to his neighbors. God would not be angry with him for acting according to his own rules. Thus the worldly man was able to live perfectly well without thinking of a God who had formerly wanted everything done for his sake alone.”

Bernard Groethuysen (1880–1946) French literary historian, translator and writer

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), pp. 121-122

Love, Life, God, Law

“That there are degrees in the knowledge of rational beings, and also in their capacities to acquire it, cannot be disputed, as it is so very obvious among mankind.”

Ethan Allen (1738–1789) American general

Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Ch. IV Section I - Speculation on the Doctrine of the Depravity of Human Reason

Knowledge

“It is no surprise that the is thrilled about Khizr Khan’s “brutal repudiation of Donald Trump,” even though Khan, not quite accurately, claims that Trump wants to “ban us from this country.” Trump has said nothing about banning Muslim citizens of the U. S. from the country, only about a temporary moratorium on immigration from terror states. In any case, all the effusive praise being showered on Khizr Khan today overlooks one central point: he is one man. His family is one family. There are no doubt many others like his, but this fact does not mean that there is no jihad, or that all Muslims in the U. S. are loyal citizens.”

Robert Spencer (1962) American author and blogger

About Khizr M. Khan's speech during the (July 29, 2016)

Family, Country

“But to return to the Newtonian Philosophy: Tho' its Truth is supported by Mathematicks, yet its Physical Discoveries may be communicated without. The great Mr. Locke was the first who became a Newtonian Philosopher without the help of Geometry; for having asked Mr. Huygens, whether all the mathematical Propositions in Sir Isaac's Principia were true, and being told he might depend upon their Certainty; he took them for granted, and carefully examined the Reasonings and Corollaries drawn from them, became Master of all the Physics, and was fully convinc'd of the great Discoveries contained in that Book.”

John Theophilus Desaguliers (1683–1744) French-born British natural philosopher and clergyman

Source: Course of Experimental Philosophy, 1745, p. viii: Preface; Cited in Joseph Schwartz (1992), The creative moment: how science made itself alien to modern culture, p. 20

Truth, Books, Communication, Mathematics

“[In response to using profanity] I think I was just being myself for a moment there…Look, I think people should be kind of light about this. It's something that plenty of people have heard in their lives for sure.”

Eric Garcetti (1971) American politician

quoted by Michael Finnegan of the Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-garcetti-kings-swearing-apology-20140617-story.html (July 17, 2014) 2014, Los Angeles Kings Stanley Cup celebration

People, Thinking, Light

“Communication becomes the defining characteristic of homo sapiens; we are the species that speaks. We utter the words that create our world, and have learned to take our words and translate them into the ethereal play of zeros and ones, lay them out, at the speed of light, first on a wire, then a radio wave, and lately, on a beam of light, so that the voice, once constrained by mouth and ear, now straddles the entire planet in thirty millionths of a second, messages pinging back and forth, not unlike the meeting points of a synaptic gap, using photons as neurotransmitters, and each network router the equivalent of a synapic junction, deciding whether to activate or extinguish each message that crosses the continents, connected now in a seamless, endless web of knowledge, more than two billion pages, more than any one of us could ever read or know, the collected and collective intelligence of a species that seems to have made information the central mystery of culture, the project of civilization, and the goal of being.”

Mark Pesce (1962) American writer

From the narration to Becoming Transhuman http://www.webearth.org/bt.pdf

World, Intelligence, Communication, Knowledge

“I'm not anti-Jew. Jews are respected by everyone, like all human beings, and I respect them very much.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Discussion with reporters at the UN, September 21, 2007. Situation room, CNN, 21 September 2007, 2007-09-28 http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0609/21/sitroom.02.html, 2007

“When the busstopped suddenly to avoid
damaging a mother and child in the road, the
younglady in the greenhat sitting opposite
was thrown across me, and not being one to
miss an opportunity i started to makelove”

Roger McGough (1937) British writer and poet

"At Lunchtime A Story of Love", from The Mersey Sound (1967)

“All birth means separation from the All, the confinement within limitation, the separation from God, the pangs of being born ever anew. The return into the All, the dissolution of painful individuation, the reunion with God means the expansion of the soul until it is able once more to embrace the All.”

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 73

God, Pain, Soul, Birth

“That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

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

Commencement Address at Kenyon College. Gambier, Ohio. May 21, 2005.
Essays

Education, Understanding, Thinking, Sense

“Thou hast asked concerning the fundamentals of religion and its ordinances: Know thou that first and foremost in religion is the knowledge of God. This attaineth its consummation in the recognition of His divine unity, which in turn reacheth its fulfilment in acclaiming that His hallowed and exalted Sanctuary, the Seat of His transcendent majesty, is sanctified from all attributes. And know thou that in this world of being the knowledge of God can never be attained save through the knowledge of Him Who is the Dayspring of divine Reality.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

Dalá’Il-I-Sab‘ih

God, World, Religion, Knowledge

“[The Spanish news] really keeps me awake at night and in the day I can think of nothing else. I did not think it possible that anything could have made me regret being out of office, but I now wish I was in a situation, in which it might be possible to assist this glorious cause.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Letter to Lady Holland (2 July 1808), quoted in E. A. Smith, Lord Grey. 1764-1845 (Alan Sutton, 1996), p. 169.
1800s

Thinking, Night

“I shall inclose your Excellency a plan of the enemy's works, and of their strength, from the best ac counts we are able to get. They have never been out of their lines since the siege began, till, night be fore last, Colonel Bruce came out with one hundred and fifty men, to take off a small picket of ours, posted at the neck of Easton's beach. He partly succeeded in the attempt, by the carelessness of the old guard. He came over after dark, and lay in ambush, that when the new guard went down to take their post, the enemy came upon their backs before they discovered them, it being very dark. We lost twenty-four privates and two subalterns. Ten of the picket got off.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (August 1778)

Men, Night

“Sudden and near the trumpet's notes out-spread,
And soon his eyes could see the metal flower,
Shining upturned, out on the morning pour
Its incense audible; could see a train
From out the street slow-winding on the plain
With lyres and cymbals, flutes and psalteries,
While men, youths, maids, in concert sang to these
With various throat, or in succession poured,
Or in full volume mingled. But one word
Ruled each recurrent rise and answering fall,
As when the multitudes adoring call
On some great name divine, their common soul,
The common need, love, joy, that knits them in one whole.
The word was "Jubal!"… "Jubal" filled the air,
And seemed to ride aloft, a spirit there,
Creator of the choir, the full-fraught strain
That grateful rolled itself to him again.
The aged man adust upon the bank
— Whom no eye saw — at first with rapture drank
The bliss of music, then, with swelling heart,
Felt, this was his own being's greater part,
The universal joy once born in him.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

Love, Men, Youth, Age

“I started watching reality shows and being horrified at people signing up to be humiliated in front of the entire country. … I saw one show, The Amazing Race, in which people were eating spicy soup and vomiting and crying. Why would you do that? Also, I was fascinated by these actors and actresses who would sign up to be followed around by cameras in their life. You become a celebrity, not because of your work or what you do, but because you have no privacy. I've been careful to keep my life separate because it's important to me to have privacy and for my life not to be a marketing device for a movie or a TV show. It's worth more than that. I'm worth more than that.”

Lisa Kudrow (1963) American actress

Guardian interview (2006)

Life, People, Reality, Cry

“I'm totally grateful for the fans my family has and I have; they gave me a lot of support when I was in treatment. But it was just odd, you know? It's stressful. Just the whole fact of being someone in the public eye.”

Jack Osbourne (1985) Son of Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne

MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

Family, Support

“January, 14th, 1835: We came to anchor in the spacious bay of Santa Barbara. There was only one vessel in the port. Beside the vessel, there was no object to break the surface of the bay… directly opposite the anchoring ground, lie the mission and town of Santa Barbara, on a low plain, but little above the level of the sea, covered with grass, though entirely without trees, and surrounded on three sides by an amphitheater of mountains, which slant off to the distance of fifteen or twenty miles. The mission stands a little back of the town, and is a large building, or rather a collection of buildings, in the center of which is a high tower, with a belfry of five bells. The whole, being plastered, makes quite a show at a distance, and is the mark by which vessels come to anchor. The town lies a little nearer to the beach — about half a mile from it — and is composed of one-story houses built of sun-baked clay, or adobe, some of them whitewashed, with red tiles on the roof. I should judge that there was about a hundred of them… The town is finely situated, with a bay in front, and an amphitheater of hills behind.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. book Two Years Before the Mast

Two Years Before the Mast (1840)

Lie, Mountain, Tree, Grass

“We have to be truthful and transparent. If by being transparent we will be punished, then there's nothing we can do about it. We will still continue to be transparent.”

Lim Guan Eng (1960) Finance Minister of Malaysia

Lim Guan Eng (2018) cited in " Economy remains strong, fundamentals solid, says Guan Eng https://www.thestar.com.my/business/business-news/2018/05/25/economy-remains-strong-fundamentals-solid-says-guan-eng/" on The Star Online, 25 May 2018

Truth

“We must recognise that the absolutely free working of such a system cannot now be accepted. We are living too closely knit a structure of society in which the very complication of our immense programme of social reform and industrial development necessitates strong powers being retained at the centre. It will be necessary to use the organising power and majesty of the State in a variety of ways. The State will have to be the grand arbiter between competing interests.”

Rab Butler (1902–1982) British politician

Fundamental Issues (Conservative Political Centre, 1946), p. 7.

Way, Strong

“It has been the persuasion of an immense majority of human beings in all ages and nations that we continue to live after death,—that apparent termination of all the functions of sensitive and intellectual existence. Nor has mankind been contented with supposing that species of existence which some philosophers have asserted; namely, the resolution of the component parts of the mechanism of a living being into its elements, and the impossibility of the minutest particle of these sustaining the smallest diminution. They have clung to the idea that sensibility and thought, which they have distinguished from the objects of it, under the several names of spirit and matter, is, in its own nature, less susceptible of division and decay, and that, when the body is resolved into its elements, the principle which animated it will remain perpetual and unchanged.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

On a Future State (1815; publ. 1840)

Death, Age, Idea, Nature

“Ever since my extraordinary encounter with that big cream-colored wolf in the zoo near Thetford, I had wanted to see and know more about these creatures that had so preyed on my imagination as a child. I began reading natural history books, and a lot of what I had learned about foxes from years of watching them seemed applicable to what I was reading about wolves. Foxes were being cruelly and systematically persecuted because of a reputation I knew they didn't deserve; mankind had gone one further with wolves and exterminated them from most parts of the world. I began to wonder whether all the negative stories I had heard about wolves as I was growing up were any more reliable than the falsehoods I had been told about their small, red cousins.”

Shaun Ellis (1977) American football player, defensive end

The Man who lives with Wolves (2010)

Books, World, Color, Imagination

“While reading the Times of India each morning, my father spares a minute for the cartoon by R. K. Laxman. While my mother is, like a magician, making untidy sheets disappear in the bedroom and producing fresh towels in the bathroom, or braving bad weather in the kitchen, my father, in the extraordinary Chinese calm of the drawing-room, is dmiring the cartoon by R. K. Laxman, and, if my mother happens to be there, unselfishly sharing it with her. She, as expected, misunderstands it completely, laughing not at the joke but at the expressions on the faces of the caricatures, and at the hilarious fact that they talk to each other like human beings.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Afternoon Raag (1993)

Time, Reading, Drawing, Weather

“Intellectual superiority is not always accompanied by an equal degree of moral superiority, and the greatest geniuses may have much to expiate. For this reason, they often have to undergo an existence inferior to the one they have previously accomplished, which is a cause of suffering for them the hindrances to the manifestation of his faculties thus imposed upon a spirit being like chains that fetter the movements of a vigorous man. The idiot may be said to be lame in the brain, as the halt is lame in the legs, and the blind, in the eyes.”

Allan Kardec (1804–1869) systematizer of Spiritism

Source: The Spirits' Book, p. 193.

Suffering

“For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State,
They arrive at their conclusions—largely inarticulate.
Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none:
But sometimes in a smoking-room, one learns why things were done.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

The Puzzler http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/verse/p2/puzzler.html, Stanza 3 (1909). Other works

Confidence, Motivation, Learning

“Glenn Beck: But I was standing on the stage with Freedom Works on Friday in a show that we’re going to air tonight at 8:00 on TheBlaze and I was giving a speech and it struck me about halfway through, the similarities of what is being done right now to the beginning of our country— we are repeating, and we're at the very beginning of it, but we're repeating all of the steps that it took for use to be free in— around the time of the Declaration of Independence, don't you think?
David Barton: I agree. And I look—
Glenn Beck: It's starting to happen.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

2012-11-05
Will Christians show up this time? Glenn interviews David Barton
http://www.glennbeck.com/2012/11/05/will-christians-show-up-this-time-glenn-interviews-david-barton/
The Glenn Beck Program
Radio, quoted in * 2012-11-05
Beck & Barton Say Romney Will Win Because 'We are Repeating all of the Steps' the Founders Took to Create This Nation
Kyle
Mantyla
RightWingWatch
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/beck-barton-say-romney-will-win-because-we-are-repeating-all-steps-founders-took-create-nati
2012-11-07
2010s, 2012

Thinking, Freedom, Time, Country

“The greater the interest involved in a truth the more careful, self-distrustful, and patient should be the inquiry.
I would not attack the faith of a heathen without being sure I had a better one to put in its place, because, such as it is, it is better than nothing.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) Abolitionist, author

Letter to William Lloyd Garrison (1853).

Truth, Faith

“Being Irish is, no matter how real, a pose.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

“The wounded want power, nothing else; they think it will keep them from being hurt again.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Borders of Infinity (1989)

Thinking, Hurt

“To philosophize (we have already asked, What empowers the philosophical act to transcend the working-world?) — to philosophize means to take a step outside of the work-a-day world into the vis-à-vis de l'univers. It is a step which leads to a kind of "homeless"-ness: the stars are no roof over the head. It is a step, however, that constantly keeps open its own retreat, for the human being cannot live long in this way.”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), The Philosophical Act, p. 94

World, Way, Star

“Consider power as NOT getting people to obey you, but getting people to work in harmony with you with the goal being mutual benefit.”

Lupe Fiasco (1982) rapper

Rules 2 Rule

People

“The New Women! I could barely recognize them as being of the same sex as myself…They are satiated by everything, hungry for nothing. They are what I wanted to be; they are what I worked for them to be: and now I see them, I hate them.”

Fay Weldon (1931) English author, essayist and playwright

Praxis (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978) p. 9.

Women, Hate, Sex

“A King, by disallowing Acts of this salutary nature, from being the father of his people, degenerated into a Tyrant and forfeits all rights to his subjects' obedience.”

Patrick Henry (1736–1799) attorney, planter, politician and Founding Father of the United States

Speech on the Parson's Cause, in the Hanover County Courthouse (1763)
1760s, Speech on the Parson's Cause (1763)

People, Nature

“BECAUSE no People can be truly happy, though under the greatest Enjoyment of Civil Liberties, if abridged of the Freedom of their Consciences, as to their Religious Profession and Worship: And Almighty God being the only Lord of Conscience, Father of Lights and Spirits; and the Author as well as Object of all divine Knowledge, Faith and Worship, who only doth enlighten the Minds, and persuade and convince the Understandings of People, I do hereby grant and declare, That no Person or Persons, inhabiting in this Province or Territories, who shall confess and acknowledge One almighty God, the Creator, Upholder and Ruler of the World; and profess him or themselves obliged to live quietly under the Civil Government, shall be in any Case molested or prejudiced, in his or their Person or Estate, because of his or their conscientious Persuasion or Practice, nor be compelled to frequent or maintain any religious Worship, Place or Ministry, contrary to his or their Mind, or to do or suffer any other Act or Thing, contrary to their religious Persuasion.”

William Penn (1644–1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania Charter of Privileges (28 October 1701)

God, Happiness, People, World

“I believe instinctively in a God for whom I am prepared to search.

I believe it is an offence against the God of Nature for me to accept any hand-me-down, man-defined religion or creed without the test of reason. I believe no man dead or alive knows more about God than I can know by searching.

I believe that the God of Nature must be without prejudice, with exactly the same concern for all of His children, and that the human invokes no more, no less of fatherly love than the beaver or the sparrow.

I believe I am an integral part of the environment and, as a good subject, I must establish an enduring relationship with my surroundings. My dependence upon the land is fundamental.

I believe destructive waste and greedy exploitation are sins.

I believe the biggest challenge is in being a helper rather than a destroyer of the treasures in Nature's storehouse, a conserver, a husbandman and partner in caring for the Vineyard.

I accept, with apologies to Albert Schweitzer, "a Reverence for Life" and all that is of the Great Spirit's creation.

I believe mortality is not complete until the individual holds all of the Great Spirit's creatures in brotherhood and has compassion for all. A fundamental concept of Good consists of working to preserve all creatures with feeling and the will to live.

I am prepared to stand before my Maker, the Ruler of the entire Universe, with no other plea than that I have tried to leave things in His Vineyard better than I found them.”

Grant MacEwan (1902–2000) Alberta politician, Mayor of Calgary, Lieutenant Governor of Alberta

[Will The Real Alberta Please Stand Up, University of Alberta Press, 2010, 185–186, Geo Takach] The MacEwan Creed, 1969 http://www.macewan.ca/web/services/ims/client/upload/ACF16FF.pdf.

Love, Life, God, Children

“The so-called obscurity of modernist literature has, of course, a lot to do with the new stress on exegesis. When the overt meaning of a work can no longer be taken for granted, criticism is forced — or seems forced — to undertake the explication of the text of the work before doing anything else. But experience has shown us by now that the drift and shape of an "obscure" poem or novel can be grasped for the purposes of art without being "worked out." Part of the triumph of modernist poetry is, indeed, to have demonstrated the great extent to which verse can do without explicit meaning and yet not sacrifice anything essential to its effect as art. Here, as before, successful art can be depended upon to explain itself.”

Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) American writer and artist

"T.S. Eliot: A Book Review" (1950/1956), p. 244
1960s, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, (1961)

Art, Literature, Success, Parting

“Cellular automata are now being used to model varied physical phenomena normally modelled by wave equations, fluid dynamics, Ising models, etc. We hypothesize that there will be found a single cellular automaton rule that models all of microscopic physics; and models it exactly. We call this field DM, for digital mechanics.”

Edward Fredkin (1934) American physicist and computer scientist, a pioneer of digital physics

[An informational process based on reversible universal cellular automata, Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 45, 1–3, September 1990, 254–270, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016727899090186S, 10.1016/0167-2789(90)90186-S]

“I've made my best notes sitting outside cafes on busy streets, or in murky bars in foreign cities. I sorted out a big series of problems in the novel I'm just finishing while sitting drinking a long line of solitary beers in a bar in a small coastal town. The hangover was pretty brutal, but I'm not sure I'd have found the solutions any other way. Part of the job of being a writer is learning how your head works - when to push it, when to step back. This kind of self-management is actually far harder, I think, than learning how to write decent prose.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Associated Content Interview (October 23, 2006)

Way, Drink, Beer, Business

“There is often as much independence in not being led, as in not being driven.”

Tryon Edwards (1809–1894) American theologian

Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 253.

““How… how can”—savagely, he slashed an arm down before him in absolute negation of all he saw—“such be? How could God allow it?”
“God? You fool—there is no God!”
The words struck Faust like a great bronze clapper, shattering the crusted certainties of a lifetime, reverberating, setting up echoes that washed back and forth through his being in slowly lessening waves, leaving no atom unshaken, no belief untouched. There was no God. He knew this for the truth, recognized it as such on an almost physical level, for it summed up everything he had ever thought or reasoned. It resolved a thousand doubts. It left no question unanswered. There was no God! Everything was possible now. Nothing was forbidden.”

Michael Swanwick book Jack Faust

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 2, “Revelations” (pp. 30-31)

God, Truth, Fools, Question

“He is not bound so tightly by tradition that he will refuse a good idea simply for it being new, and not so wild that he would take a bad idea simply because it is new.”

Laura Anne Gilman book Flesh and Fire

Source: Flesh and Fire (2009), p. 230

Idea

“What causes [fragmentation] if not a need to act that specializes us and limits us to the horizon of a particular activity? Even if it turns out to be for the general interest (which generally isn’t true), the activity that subordinates each of our aspects to a specific result suppresses our being as an entirety. Whoever acts substitutes a particular end for what he or she is, as a total being.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: On Nietzsche (1945), p. xxvi

“This is the worst of love, this unmeant mystification — someone smiling and going out without saying where, or a letter arriving, being read in your presence, put away, not explained, or: "No, alas, I can't to-night" on the telephone — that, one person having set up without knowing, the other cannot undo without the where? who? why? that brings them both down a peg. Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.”

Elizabeth Bowen book The House in Paris

The House in Paris (1935)

Love, Jealousy, Smile, Feeling

“We are feelings and have human beings.”

Mariano Rajoy (1955) Spanish politician

25 February, 2016 As President, 2016 Source: El País http://elpais.com/elpais/2016/02/24/videos/1456319939_010865.html

Feeling

“The most important question a human being has to face… What is it? The question, Why are we here?”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

"“Why Are We Here?”, in The Watchtower (2006) http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2006768?q=Elie+Wiesel&p=par

Question

“While Moses forbids 'graven images' of Him whose name is not to be taken in vain, Spinoza goes farther. He clearly infers that God must not be so much as described. Human language is totally unfit to give an idea of this "Being" who is altogether unique. Whether it is Spinoza or the Christian theology that is more right in their premises and conclusion, we leave the reader to judge for himself. Every attempt to the contrary leads a nation to anthropomorphize the deity in whom it believes, and the result is that given by Swedenborg. Instead of stating that God made man after his own image, we ought in truth to say that "man imagines God after his image," forgetting that he has set up his own reflection for worship.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume I, Chapter IX

God, Truth, Imagination, Idea

“IT is in this we differ; I would seek
To blend my very being into thine—
I'm even jealous of thy memory:
I wish our childhood had been pass'd together.”

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

The Ancestress (Spoken by Bertha to Jaromir)
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)

Memory, Childhood

“I am well aware that some very eminent systematists regard the whole problem as solved. They hold as Darwin did that specific diversity has no physiological foundation or causation apart from adaptation, and that species are impermanent groups, the delimitations of which are ultimately determined by environmental exigency or "fitness." The specific diversity of living things is thus regarded as being something quite different in nature from the specific diversity of inorganic substances. In practice those who share these opinions are, as might be anticipated, to be found among the 'lumpers' rather than among the 'splitters.' In their work, certainly, the Darwinian theory is actually followed as a guiding principle; unanalysed intergradations of all kinds are accepted as impugning the integrity of species; the underlying physiological problem is forgotten, and while the product is almost valueless as a contribution to biological research, I can scarcely suppose that it aids greatly in the advances of other branches of our science.”

William Bateson (1861–1926) British geneticist and biologist

Source: Problems In Genetics (1913), p. 12.

Nature, Problem, Science

“If they (the ASME) had not been (aware of human problems involved) — and Taylor either failed to encounter, or to recognize the significance of, the early work in industrial psychology contributed by Walter Dill Scott, Hugo Munsterberg, and others — there was the amazing fact that one of them, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, happened to fall in love with a girl who was a psychologist by education, a teacher by profession, and a mother by vocation. I know of no occurrence in the whole history of human thought more worthy of the epithet "providential" than that fact. Here were three engineers — Taylor, Gantt, and Gilbreth — struggling to realize the wider implications of their technique, in travail with a "mental revolution," their great danger that they might not appreciate the difference between applying scientific thinking to material things and to human beings, and one of them married Lillian Moller, a woman who by training, by instinct, and by experience was deeply aware of human beings, the perfect mental complement in the work to which they had set their hands.”

Lyndall Urwick (1891–1983) British management consultant

Cited in: Harold F. Smiddy and Lionel Naum. " Evolution of a "Science of Managing" in America https://archive.org/details/selectedreadings00shul," in: Selected readings in management, Fremont A. Shull (edd), 1957. p. 16-17 1950s, "Management's Debt to the Engineers", 1952

Love, Education, History, Girl

“of the evils most liable to attend on any sort of early proficiency, and which often fatally blights its promise, my father most anxiously guarded against. This was self-conceit. He kept me, with extreme vigilance, out of the way of hearing myself praised, or of being led to make self-flattering comparisons between myself and others. From his own intercourse with me I could derive none but a very humble opinion of myself; and the standard of comparison he always held up to me, was not what other people did, but what a man could and ought to do. He completely succeeded in preserving me from the sort of influences he so much dreaded. I was not at all aware that my attainments were anything unusual at my age.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)

https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/32/mode/1up pp. 32–33

People, Age, Way, Evil

“My God! I have often regretted that I was born! I have often wished to fall back even into nothingness, rather than advance through so many falsehoods, so many sufferings, and so many successive losses, towards that loss of ourselves which we call death! Still, even in those moments of terrible faintheartedness, when despair overmasters reason, and when man forgets that life is a task imposed upon him to finish, I have always said to myself: "There are some things which I would regret not to have tasted — a mother's milk, a father's love, that relationship of heart and soul between brothers, household affections, joys, and even cares!" Our family is evidently our second self, more than self, existing before self, and surviving self with the better part of self. It is the image of the holy and loving unity of beings revealed by the small group of creatures who hold to one another, and made visible by feeling!”

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) French writer, poet, and politician

Book I, Note II, p. 19
Les confidences (1849)

Love, Life, Death, God

“I never expected to play lead roles! Primarily, because I was not the conventional good looking hero, and in fact, I used to feel I’ll never look as good as Rajesh Khanna. Why the hell am I going into it? Now that we are being frank and talking our hearts out, I’d like to say that I still remember a photograph of Kaka's which came in Filmfare and I thought ‘yaar, ye aadmi kya khaata hain? Iske gaal itne lal kaise hain?”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Quotable quotes by Amitabh Bachchan.

Feeling, Hell, Heart

“Human beings seem to be far more autonomous and self-governed than modern psychological theory allows for.”

Abraham Maslow book Motivation and Personality

Source: Motivation and Personality (1954), p. 123.

“I'd been acting and doing stand-up in New York about eight years, getting rejected, and I finally got the opportunity to do stand-up on Letterman, which holds even more importance for me. With comedians, that's definitely the pinnacle, but being from Indiana, it was a big to-do.”

Jim Gaffigan (1966) comedian, actor, author

On getting his big break, an appearance on Late Show With David Letterman — interview in Virginia Rohan (November 29, 2000) "Partly Howdy - Jim Gaffigan Is a Midwestern Weatherman Who Takes On The Big City in 'Welcome To New York'", The Record, p. Y1.

“She had impressed him as capable of behaviour even more meaningless than most human beings. He had watched her kill her own people with a ferocity that betrayed real grief. But she was someone, he had decided early, who struggled harder with life than she needed to: this he respected, even admired.”

M. John Harrison book Light

Source: Light (2002), Chapter 29 “Surgery” (p. 361)

Life, People

“Contemplating such questions as the dialectical relations between being and becoming has inspired and strengthened my beliefs. You are not hearing here some random ideas of a passionate student or a distressed prisoner, but reflections rooted in the experience of a woman physicist who happens to have also advocated for equal rights and human rights, and who as a result was subjected to threats, deprivation, arrests, continuous prosecutions, and finally sentenced to a total of 23 years of imprisonment, 16 years of which has to be served based on the ruling laws in Iran. The harsh treatment and excessive sentence to which I have been subjected were not due to any underground violent or terrorist activity on my part, but– as admitted by the judges of this very system–because of my insistence on the rights of civil society and of human rights. My case, then, clearly portrays the unjust, brutal and illegal practices of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Narges Mohammadi (1972) Iranian human rights activist

Letter Accepting 2018 Andrei Sakharov Prizefrom (2018)

Law, Idea, Question, Passion

Quotes about being page 68

Quotes about being
page 68