Quotes about being
page 70

“The assignment must fit the kid. That's the beauty of it, Obie." Obie waited a minute or two and couldn't resist asking, "You running out of ideas, Archie?" The great Archie Costello running dry? The possibility was staggering to contemplate. "Just being artistic, Obie. It's an art, you know. Take a kid like this Renault. Special circumstances.”

Robert Cormier book The Chocolate War

He fell silent. "Put him down for the chocolates."
Source: The Chocolate War (1974), p. 15

Beauty, Art, Idea, Waiting

“Society today is being fragmented by a way of thinking that is inherently short-sighted because it disregards the full horizon of truth - the truth about God and about us. By its nature, relativism fails to see the whole picture. It ignores the very principles that enable us to live and flourish in unity, order and harmony.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2008, Youth Day Vigil (19 July 2008)

God, Truth, Way, Nature

“On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being; the words are rising to their lips in immediate spontaneity … The theater is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are."”

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) American playwright and novelist

Writers at Work interview (1958)

Past, Future

“I remember I felt an extraordinary persuasion that I was being played with, that presently, when I was upon the very verge of safety, this mysterious death--as swift as the passage of light--would leap after me from the pit about the cylinder and strike me down.”

H. G. Wells book The War of the Worlds

Book I, Ch. 5: The Heat-Ray
The War of the Worlds (1898)

Death, Light

“In those days kitchen matches were heavy-duty implements—more like signal flares than the weedy sticks we get today. You could strike them on any hard surface and fling them at least fifteen feet and they wouldn’t go out. Indeed, even when being beaten vigorously with two hands, as when lodged on the front of one’s sweater, they seemed positively determined not to fail.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

Source: The Life And Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006), p. 170

“I saw the charter as an expression of my long-held view that the subject of law must be the individual human being; the law must permit the individual to fulfil himself or herself to the utmost.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

Part 4, 1979 - 1984 "Welcome to the 1980's", p. 322
Memoirs (1993)

Law

“The playbill, which is said to have announced the tragedy of Hamlet, the character of the Prince of Denmark being left out.”

Walter Scott book The Talisman

The Talisman (1825), Introduction.

“I think that part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids…Because as soon as you have a kid, you know for sure that you're going to die. When you have a kid, you see your own gravestone.”

Stephen King book Christine

Pt. 1, Ch. 3
Christine (1983)

Thinking, Parent, Parting

“Love is an emotion common to all living beings. It is the path women can take to reach men, men to women, both to Nature, and Nature to the universe. And the love that overflows all boundaries is vishwa matrutvam—universal motherhood.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

The Infinite Potential of Women (2008)

Love, Women, Men, Nature

“The artificial intelligence people, the artificial intelligencia,… kept choosing little games to play, and little things that they could master, right? But my whole philosophy has always been give me a really tough problem that's just beyond the state-of-the-art, and give me a whole bunch of users beating on me to get it done. In other words, the real core of what being an engineer is.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: An Interview with Douglas T. Ross (1989), p. 24-25.

People, Art, Game, Intelligence

“The belief that torture is always wrong is a prejudice inherited from an obsolete philosophy. We need to shed the belief that human rights are violated when a terrorist is tortured. As Rawls and others have shown, basic freedoms must form a coherent whole. Self-evidently, there can be no right to attack basic human rights. Therefore, once the proper legal procedures are in place, torturing terrorists cannot violate their rights. In fact, in a truly liberal society, terrorists have an inalienable right to be tortured.This is what demonstrates the moral superiority of liberal societies over others, past and present. Other societies have degraded terrorists by subjecting them to lawless and unaccountable power. In the new world that is taking shape, terrorists, although they themselves degrade human rights by practising terrorism, will be afforded the full dignity of due legal process, even while being tortured.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

A Modest Proposal (2003)

World, Freedom, Past

“'What do you mean by "a man like me"?' he [Philip Trent] demanded with a sort of fierceness. 'Do you take me for a man without any normal instincts? I don't say you impress people as a simple, transparent sort of character — what Mr Calvin Bunner calls a case of openwork; I don't say a stranger might not think you capable of wickedness, if there was good evidence for it: but I say that a man who, after seeing you and being in your atmosphere, could associate you with the kind of abomination I imagined is a fool — the kind of fool who is afraid to trust his senses.'”

Edmund Clerihew Bentley book Trent's Last Case

Source: Trent's Last Case (1912), Chapter XIII: "Eruption"

People, Fools, Imagination, Thinking

“I'm a critic. I think the administration has really undermined America's power and reputation and that Iraq may go down in history as the greatest disaster in American foreign policy, which means that I think it's worse than Vietnam in its unintended consequences and for our reputation. This president, because his administration is imposing democracy, which is an oxymoron, has, I think, hurt the concept. It is not just that the administration has been unilateral but that it has been unidimensional. It has paid attention primarily to one part of the world, without enough attention being paid to other parts.”

Madeleine K. Albright (1937–2022) Former U.S. Secretary of State

When asked what the George W. Bush administration's legacy in foreign affairs would be, interview http://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2008/01/02/qa-madeleine-albright with Thomas Omestad, U.S. News & World Report (January 2, 2008) 2000s

World, Democracy, History, Thinking

“When we scrutinize the actual procedures that may be called projective methods we find a wide variety of techniques and material being employed for the same general purpose, to obtain from the subject 'what he cannot or will not say,' frequently because he does not know himself and is not aware what he is revealing about himself through his projections.”

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

Source: Projective methods for the study of personality (1939), p. 404 as cited in: Gardner Lindzey (1961) Projective Techniques and Cross-Cultural Research. p. 36

“The universality of card-playing in the reign of this monarch is evident from a prohibitory statute being necessary to prevent apprentices from using cards except in the Christmas holidays, and then only in their masters' houses…But this moderation, I apprehend, was by no means general, for several contemporary writers are exceedingly severe in their reflections upon the usage of cards, which they rank with dice, and consider both as destructive to morality and good order.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 327
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Cards

Universe, Holiday, Christmas, Housing

“There it is — in such patient silence — that we accumulate the inward power which we distribute and spend in action; that the soul acquires a greater and more vigorous being, and gathers up its collective forces to bear down upon the piecemeal difficulties of life and scatter them to dust; there alone can we enter into that spirit of self-abandonment by which we take up the cross of duty, however heavy, with feet however worn and bleeding.”

Wayland Hoyt (1838–1910) American Baptist Minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 470.

Life, Soul, Silence

“They are more complex to begin with, but their organization, the way they end up being put together, isn't that different. You can't shake your own sensibility. No matter what the concept is; the artist's eye decides when it's right.... which is a notion of sensibility.”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

Source: Quotes, 1971 - 2000, Bomb: X Motion Picture and Center for New Art Activities, 2000, p. 28.

Way

“The official style is at once humble, polite, curt and disagreeable: it derives partly from that used in Byzantine times by the eunuch slave-secretariat, writing stiffly in the name of His Sacred Majesty, whose confidence they enjoyed, to their fellow-slaves outside the palace precincts — for the Emperor had summary power over everyone; and partly from the style used by the cleric-bureaucracy of the Middle Ages, writing stiffly in the name of the feudal lords to their serfs and, though cautious of offending their employers, protected from injury by being servants of the Church, not of the Crown, and so subject to canon, not feudal, law. The official style of civil servants, so far as it recalls its Byzantine derivation, is written by slaves to fellow-slaves of a fictitious tyrant; and, so far as it recalls its mediaeval derivation, is written by members of a quasi-ecclesiastical body, on behalf of quasi-feudal ministers (who, being politicians, come under a different code of behaviour from theirs) to a serflike public.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

Source: The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1943), Ch. 4: "The Use and Abuse of Official English".

Age, Law, Confidence, Time

“There are few, however, who devote thought and study to perfection of Divine service—to love, fear, communion and all of the other aspects of saintliness. It is not that they consider this knowledge unessential; if questioned each one will maintain that it is of paramount importance and that one who is not clearly versed in it cannot be deemed truly wise. Their failure to devote more attention to it stems rather from its being so manifest and so obvious to them that they see no need for spending much time upon it. Consequently, this study and the reading of works of this kind have been left to those of a not too sensitive, almost dull intelligence. These you will see immersed in the study of saintliness, not stirring from it. It has reached the stage that when one sees another engaging in saintly conduct, he cannot help but suspect him of dullwittedness.”

Moshe Chaim Luzzatto book Mesillat Yesharim

Mesillat Yesharim (1738), Introduction

Love, Fear, Intelligence, Failure

“At the end of Being and Nothingness, … Being in-itself and Being for-itself were of Being; and this totality of beings, in which they were effected, itself was linked up to itself, relating and appearing to itself, by means of the essential project of human-reality. What was named in this way, in an allegedly neutral and undetermined way, was nothing other than the metaphysical unity of man and God, the relation of man to God, the project of becoming God as the project constituting human-reality. Atheism changes nothing in this fundamental structure.”

Jacques Derrida book Specters of Marx

"The Ends of Man," Margins of Philosophy, tr. w/ notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1982. (original French published in Paris, 1972, as Marges de la philosophie). p. 116
Specters of Marx (1993), 1970s

God, Way, Reality, Appearance

“Thinta flew safely, and I realized how much I preferred being with Hergal and feeling the blood drain out of my head with fright. Actually when I’m with Hergal I always realize how much I prefer being with Thinta and not feeling the blood drain out of my head with fright.”

Tanith Lee book Don't Bite the Sun

Part 1, Chapter 3 (p. 22)
Don't Bite the Sun (1976)

Feeling

“All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

"Pacifism and Philosophy" (1936)

War

“I saw a Divine Being. I'm afraid I'm going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.”

Alfred Jules Ayer (1910–1989) English philosopher

A statement he made soon after recovering from his near-death experience, as reported by Dr. Jeremy George, in "Did atheist philosopher see God when he 'died'?" by William Cash, in National Post (3 March 2001) http://gonsalves.org/favorite/atheist.htm.

Books

“The economic problems of society are important. On the whole, we are meeting them fairly well. They are so personal and so pressing that they never fail to receive constant attention. But they are only a part. We need to put a proper emphasis on the other problems of society. We need to consider what attitude of the public mind it is necessary to cultivate in order that a mixed population like our own may dwell together more harmoniously and the family of nations reach a better state of understanding. You who have been in the service know how absolutely necessary it is in a military organization that the individual subordinate some part of his personality for the general good. That is the one great lesson which results from the training of a soldier. Whoever has been taught that lesson in camp and field is thereafter the better equipped to appreciate that it is equally applicable in other departments of life. It is necessary in the home, in industry and commerce, in scientific and intellectual development. At the foundation of every strong and mature character we find this trait which is best described as being subject to discipline. The essence of it is toleration. It is toleration in the broadest and most inclusive sense, a liberality of mind, which gives to the opinions and judgments of others the same generous consideration that it asks for its own, and which is moved by the spirit of the philosopher who declared that 'To know all is to forgive all.”

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

It may not be given to infinite beings to attain that ideal, but it is none the less one toward which we should strive.
1920s, Toleration and Liberalism (1925)

Life, Family, Home, Forgiveness

“The university is a vast public utility which turns out future workers in today's vineyard, the military-industrial complex. They've got to be processed in the most efficient way to see to it that they have the fewest dissenting opinions, that they have just those characteristics which are wholly incompatible with being an intellectual. This is a real internal psychological contradiction. People have to suppress the very questions which reading books raises.”

Mario Savio (1942–1996) American activist

Quoted in interview with Jack Fincher, "The University Has Become a Factory," Life magazine (1965-02-26).

People, Books, Way, Question

“I have never claimed that democracy was a perfect system because we human beings are not perfect. We are not capable of producing a system that is perfect. But I think there is something nice and challenging about imperfection. If we were all perfect I think it would be a very boring world. But as it is because we have to cope everyday with our imperfections everyday can become a day of excitement. You wake up and say to yourself now which one of my many imperfections shall I work on today and that makes it very interesting and very challenging. But it is more important that we work on the imperfections of societies and of laws and of practices that truly hurt us as human beings, that erode the foundation of human dignity.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (1945) State Counsellor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy

Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought Acceptance Speech (2013)

World, Law, Democracy, Thinking

“The truth emerging from this scattered picture of nuclear proliferation is simple: there is a stronger chance of a nuclear bomb being used now than at almost any point in the Cold War.”

Johann Hari (1979) British journalist

Will we wake from our nuclear coma?, JohannHari.com, October 20, 2004, 2007-01-26 http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=465,

War, Truth, Chance

“Very few Americans—indeed very few Western leaders who, from time to time, use the word “war” and promise to “win” it—seem to recognize that a global war is being waged against us. Even the few who follow the actual combat tend to see the events separately: there’s fighting in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and the Sinai, terrorists are at work all over the place, and we try to figure out what to do in each case.”

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

Introduction
The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies (2016)

War, Time, Fight

“Although it is obvious that the Keynesians were all wrong and interventionism and central economic planning don’t work, whom are we listening to for advice on getting us out of this mess? Unfortunately, it’s the Keynesians, the socialists, and big-government proponents. Who’s being ignored? The Austrian free-market economists — the very ones who predicted not only the Great Depression, but the calamity we’re dealing with today. If the crisis was predictable and is explainable, why did no one listen? It’s because too many politicians believed that a free lunch was possible and a new economic paradigm had arrived. But we’ve heard that one before — like the philosopher’s stone that could turn lead into gold. Prosperity without work is a dream of the ages.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

The Austrians Were Right, November 20, 2008 http://www.house.gov/apps/list/speech/tx14_paul/statement_11_20_08.shtml http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PIEGK0IbA4 2000s, 2006-2009

Age, Dreams

“There is no logical basis to support the theory that plants feel pain. The dubious possibility that they might, however, is no justification for killing obviously sentient beings. Any rational person understands the striking difference between slitting the throat of a sentient animal and plucking a fruit or vegetable.”

Joanne Stepaniak (1954) American writer

Source: Being Vegan (2000), p. 43

Pain, Feeling, Understanding, Support

“Lately I have been frustrated with societal views towards vegans. There needs to be an awareness movement to show that all vegans aren’t “one of those vegans”. If you’re vegan for animal rights, you NEED to care about how people view vegans. … Passion is hard to control and that’s why many vegans seem aggressive or judgmental. … We need to take accountability for rebranding ourselves and being a welcoming organization. There are so many people converting to the lifestyle and even more are filling their toes in the water out of curiosity. The more people that fall into the vegan diet, the more aware they will be. This would lead to them being apt to adopt an animal free wardrobes, boycott animal entertainment, etc. But its starts with being welcoming.”

Cam F. Awesome (1988) American boxer

"Perception of vegans: progressive not aggressive" http://www.celebritysportsspeaker.com/vegan/progressive-vegans/, in his website CelebritySportsSpeaker.com (January 17, 2017).

People, Water, Passion, Animals

“Out of love, God becomes man. He says: "See, here is what it is to be a human being."”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, The Sickness unto Death (July 30, 1849), p. 161

Love, God

“In any event, any person from 2.0 down on the Tone Scale should not have, in any thinking society, any civil rights of any kind, because by abusing those rights he brings into being arduous and strenuous laws which are oppressive to those who need no such restraints.”

L. Ron Hubbard book Science of Survival

The "Tone Scale" is Scientology's measure of mental and spiritual health; p. 145.
Science of Survival (1951)

Law, Thinking, Personality

“For to love is to give what one is, his very being, in the most absolute, the most brazenly metaphysical, the least phenomenalizable sense of this word.”

Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) French philosopher

The Peasant of the Garonne (1968), p 9.

Love, Sense

“b>Over us human beings there hangs an awful sword of justice.

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Four: The Beauty of the Heavens

Justice

“Opportunity marries with circumstance and is midwife to the resultant bartering of public office. The mutuality is advantage to the parties involved merely facilitates the spread of such practices. When it reaches the point of being commonplace and is pragmatically perceived as the most practical means of getting things done, it has become systemic and difficult to eradicate.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Opening remarks to Transparency International Pacific Regional Meeting, 13 April 2005.

“The presidency is not an office job. If I only sit in the office in Dar es Salaam I’m not running the country. I visit the country to inspect development programmes, to inspect activities, to see how things are going, how the government agenda is being implemented, what are the teething issues. And some of these problems simply need my simple word. My simple word of do it, then it is done.”

Jakaya Kikwete (1950) Tanzanian politician and president

About his frequent travelling around the country. Interviews, Interview with Financial Times, 2007-10-04 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d8a07e28-72a3-11dc-b7ff-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check1/

Problem, Country

“The image of the whole of Bharatavarsha being a chakravartikshetra is as old as the oldest Vedic literature. The Itihasa-Purana provide glorious accounts of many chakravartins-Ikshvaku, Puru, Prithu Vainya, Sivi Ausinara, Mandhata, Raghu and so on-who accompanied the ašvamedha horse demanding submission from all kingdoms and republics, big and small, spread all over the country. The rãjasûya yajña which was performed at the end of this campaign was more in the nature of a meeting of equals than a durbar held by a despot in order to humble or humiliate subordinate princes and patriarchs. Sri Krishna had demanded death for Jarasandha because the latter had violated this dharmic tradition of empire-building, and kept a hundred kings captive in his castle. The Nandas had won notoriety as an ignoble dynasty because they had also violated the standard code of conduct laid down by the rãjadharma for righteous emperors, destroyed many local dynasties, and reduced other princes to provincial satraps.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Muslim Separatism – Causes and Consequences (1987)

Death, Literature, Nature, Horse

“The truth seems to be, that like many other geniuses, this Man of Mosses takes great delight in hoodwinking the world, — at least, with respect to himself. Personally, I doubt not, that he rather prefers to be generally esteemed but a so-so sort of author; being willing to reserve the thorough and acute appreciation of what he is, to that party most qualified to judge — that is, to himself. Besides, at the bottom of their natures, men like Hawthorne, in many things, deem the plaudits of the public such strong presumptive evidence of mediocrity in the object of them, that it would in some degree render them doubtful of their own powers, did they hear much and vociferous braying concerning them in the public”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

Hawthorne and His Mosses (1850)

Men, Truth, World, Nature

“You know, we live in a country where if you want to go bomb somebody, there's remarkably little discussion about how much it might cost, even though the costs almost inevitably end up being orders of magnitude larger than anybody projected at the outcome.”

Andrew Bacevich (1947) United States Army officer

Conversation with Bill Moyers, 2014 June 20.

Country

“Metaphorically speaking, free African-American politicians and activists are boiling the bones of their enslaved ancestors to make soup. The suffering of slaves is being exploited posthumously to shape discourse in politically advantageous ways.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"What Cultural Marxist Would Say About Looting, http://www.wnd.com/2017/09/what-cultural-marxists-would-say-about-looting/" WND.COM, September 14, 2017 2010s, 2017

Way, Suffering

“My observation of the flight of buzzards leads me to believe that they regain their lateral balance when partly overturned by a gust of wind, by a torsion of the tips of the wings. If the rear edge of the right wing tip is twisted upward and the left downward the bird becomes an animated windmill and instantly begins to turn, a line from its head to its tail being the axis. It thus regains its level even if thrown on its beam’s end, so to speak, as I have frequently seen them. I think the bird also in general retains its lateral equilibrium, partly by presenting its two wings at different angles to the wind, and partly by drawing in one wing, thus reducing its area. I incline to the belief that the first is the more important and usual method….
My business requires that my experimental work be confined to the months between September and January and I would be particularly thankful for advice as to a suitable locality where I could depend on winds of about 15 miles per hour without rain or too inclement weather. I am certain that such localities are rare.”

Wilbur Wright (1867–1912) American aviation pioneer

Letter to Octave Chanute (13 May 1900)

Business, Bird, Thinking, Animals

“EFI is this other Intel brain-damage (the first one being ACPI).”

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

the first one being ACPI Message to linux-kernel mailing list, 2006-07-24, Torvalds, Linus, 2007-05-28 http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/7/25/23, 2000s, 2006

“You know how much I admire Che Guevara. In fact, I believe that the man was not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age: as a fighter and as a man, as a theoretician who was able to further the cause of revolution by drawing his theories from his personal experience in battle.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

As quoted in Marianne Sinclair's !Viva Che!: Contributions in Tribute to Ernesto 'Che' Guevara (1968)

Age, Drawing, Personality

“Gentlemen, the melancholy event of yesterday reads to us an awful lesson against being too much troubled about any of the objects of ordinary ambition. The worthy gentleman, who has been snatched from us at the moment of the election, and in the middle of contest, whilst his desires were as warm, and his hopes as eager as ours, has feelingly told us, what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Speech at Bristol on declining the poll (9 September 1780), referring to a Mr. Richard Coombe.
1780s

Hope, Reading

“When I had the honour of his conversation, I endeavoured to learn his thoughts upon mathematical subjects, and something historical concerning his inventions, that I had not been before acquainted with. I found, he had read fewer of the modern mathematicians, than one could have expected; but his own prodigious invention readily supplied him with what he might have an occasion for in the pursuit of any subject he undertook. I have often heard him censure the handling geometrical subjects by algebraic calculations; and his book of Algebra he called by the name of Universal Arithmetic, in opposition to the injudicious title of Geometry, which Des Cartes had given to the treatise, wherein he shews, how the geometer may assist his invention by such kind of computations. He frequently praised Slusius, Barrow and Huygens for not being influenced by the false taste, which then began to prevail. He used to commend the laudable attempt of Hugo de Omerique to restore the ancient analysis, and very much esteemed Apollonius's book De sectione rationis for giving us a clearer notion of that analysis than we had before.”

Henry Pemberton (1694–1771) British doctor

Preface; The bold passage is subject of the 1809 article " Remarks on a Passage in Castillione's Life' of Sir Isaac Newton http://books.google.com/books?id=BS1WAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA519." By John Winthrop, in: The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, from Their Commencement, in 1665, to the Year 1800: 1770-1776: 1770-1776. Charles Hutton et al. eds. (1809) p. 519. Preface to View of Newton's Philosophy, (1728)

Books, Mathematics, Learning, Universe

“China, up to 50 years ago, was completely non-homogenous, being compartmented into groups divided against each other. The war-making tendency was almost non-existent, as they still followed the tenets of the Confucian ideal of pacifist culture. At the turn of the century, under the regime of Chang Tso Lin, efforts toward greater homogeneity produced the start of a nationalist urge. This was further and more successfully developed under the leadership of Chiang Kai-Shek, but has been brought to its greatest fruition under the present regime to the point that it has now taken on the character of a united nationalism of increasingly dominant, aggressive tendencies.”

Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) U.S. Army general of the army, field marshal of the Army of the Philippines

1950s, Farewell address to Congress (1951)

War, Effort, Change

“The way is the beginning of all beings and the measure of right and wrong.”

Han Fei (-279–-232 BC) Chinese philosopher

from "The Way of the Ruler", Han Fei Tzu: Basic Writings, Columbia University Press, New York, 1996. Translated by Burton Watson.

Way

“Interestingly, the Downing Street memo is actually being reported by CNN and FOX News. It is being discussed in the major papers. Congress intends to examine it. Hearing it mentioned on the half hour by CNN Headline News has not dispossessed me of the belief that a state suicide is impossible. Thus, my gentle thoughts are increasingly turning to murder. Murder of the state. In self-defense, of course!”

Karen Kwiatkowski (1960) retired military officer and author

" Unleashing the Resistance http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski113.html", LewRockwell.com, 15 June 2005.

Suicide

“People do what they do by choice, so I don’t really know it’s a matter of people being comfortable in front of the camera. I think it’s a matter of doing the work that’s available to you and then striving in it. If you realized how hard it is to get a job in the entertainment industry, and you were working prolifically in voice over and you can work doing on camera stuff here and there, it has nothing to do with being worried about how you look on camera. It’s about the work and you do the work that is available to you. These actors are that good that they’re able to do the voiceover stuff. It’s hard. A lot of people think that it’s easy to just go and talk in front of a microphone and that’s not the case. You’re not just talking, you’re acting. You’re acting in front of a microphone as opposed to a camera. It’s a lot more specific of a technique than most people think. It’s not, “Oh, do a silly voice!” Try doing a silly voice for four hours, then take a lunch break, and then do another silly voice for four hours. It’s not easy, especially because it’s about the acting. So I think that mindset is a little off.”

John DiMaggio (1968) American voice actor and comedian

Exclusive Interview: John DiMaggio & Lawrence Shapiro https://diaboliquemagazine.com/exclusive-interview-john-dimaggio-lawrence-shapiro/ (September 6, 2013)

People, Thinking

“Our roads have become safety hazards in themselves. The government should step up in securing the well-being of motorists and the riding public by upgrading and regulating the country’s road infrastructures, which have been neglected for so long.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

The Manila Times http://www.manilatimes.net/escudero-files-bill-mandating-dpwh-to-make-roads-safer/209625/ 2015

Country

“Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution.”

Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher

Desire and Need (1967).

Reality, Science

“Ichthyophils imagine that human beings want a life in which they can make their own choices. But what if they can be fulfilled only by a life in which they follow each other? The majority who obey the fashion of the day may be acting on a secret awareness that they lack the potential for a truly individual existence. Liberalism – the ichthyophil variety, at any rate – teaches that everyone yearns to be free. Herzen’s experience of the abortive European revolutions of 1848 led him to doubt that this was so. It was because of his disillusionment that he criticized Mill so sharply. But if it is true that Mill was deluded in thinking that everyone loves freedom, it may also be true that without this illusion there would be still less freedom in the world. The charm of a liberal way of life is that it enables most people to renounce their freedom unknowingly.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

An Old Chaos: Ichthyophils and Liberals (p. 62)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Love, Life, People, Secret

“98 percent of the animals raised for food suffer horrifically on factory farms before being slaughtered. Every time you eat a vegan meal, you're voting for something different.”

Victoria Moran (1950) American writer

Source: The Good Karma Diet (2015), Ch. 2: The Good Karma Diet

Food, Suffering, Time, Animals

“The only infallible rule we know is, that the man who is always talking about being a gentleman never is one.”

Robert Smith Surtees (1805–1864) English writer

Ask Mamma (1858) ch. 1

“Another thing which is about as sure as death and taxes, is that no man can go on bluffing indefinitely without being called.”

E. W. Howe (1853–1937) Novelist, magazine and newspaper editor

Country Town Sayings (1911), p261.

Death

“You used to be able to depend on a bad film being poorly made. No longer. The Punisher: War Zone [sic] is one of the best-made bad movies I've seen…Its only flaw is that it's disgusting.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/punisher-war-zone-2008 of Punisher: War Zone (3 December 2008) Reviews, Two star reviews

War, Dependency

“When I looked at the science of engineering and saw that it had disappeared after its ancient heritage, that its masters have perished, and that their memories are now forgotten, I worked my wits and thoughts in secrecy about philosophical shapes and figures, which could move the mind, with effort, from nothingness to being and from idleness to motion. And I arranged these shapes one by one in drawings and explained them.”

Al-Muradi

Al-Muradi, The Book of Secrets in the Results of Ideas, 11th century; Translated and cited at leonardo3.net/bookofsecrets/index http://www.leonardo3.net/bookofsecrets/index_eng.html, 2015

Effort, Memory, Science, Drawing

“We Germans will never forget what the Soviet Army has accomplished for Germany during the past 10 years. I hope that in spite of all present existing difficulties our thanks will be expressed in deed. I drink a toast to the well-being and the future of the great and glorious Soviet Army and of loyal comradeship in arms for today and in the future.”

Werner von Blomberg (1878–1946) German field marshal

Quoted in "Germany plots with the Kremlin" - Page 49 - by Tete Harens Tetens - 1953

Hope, Drink, Past, Future

“One hundred and twenty acres, according to the County Clerk, is the extent of my worldly domain. But the County Clerk is a sleepy fellow, who never looks at his record books before nine o’clock. What they would show at daybreak is the question here at issue. Books or no books, it is a fact, patent both to my dog and myself, that at daybreak I am the sole owner of all the acres I can walk over. It is not only boundaries that disappear, but also the thought of being bounded.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“July: Great Possessions”, p. 41.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "May: Back from the Argentine," "June: The Alder Fork," "July: Great Possessions," and "July: Prairie Birthday"

Books, Dogs, Question

“When in the sciences or techniques one states that a certain problem is unsolvable, a rigorous demonstration of such unsolvability is required. And when a scientist submits an article to publication, the least that its referees demand is that it be intelligible. Why? Because rational beings long for understanding and because only clear statements are susceptible to be put to examination to verify whether they are true or false. In the Humanities it is the same, or it should be, but it is not always so. Nietzsche reproached John Stuart Mill's clarity. Henri Bergson, although an intuitionist himself, wrote clearly and declared that "clarity is the philosopher's courtesy."”

Mario Bunge (1919) Argentine philosopher and physicist

Obscurity is rude, because it assumes the interlocutor is incapable of understanding and dialoguing.
"Xenius, Platón y Manolito," newspaper essay (in Spanish) in La Nación, July 9, 2008.
2000s

Intelligence, Understanding, Problem, Science

“If, of course, one builds into the concept of an 'individual' all that Professor Hayek does in his Road To Serfdom, Individualism and Economic Order and many other works, which is, to put it briefly, the whole of laisser-faire economic theory, then plainly man as such a programmed predator has very little interest in being fraternal, or very little chance.”

Bernard Crick (1929–2008) British political theorist and democratic socialist

A Footnote To Rally Fellow Socialists, p. 234.
In Defence Of Politics (Second Edition) – 1981

Chance

“How can a rational being be ennobled by anything that is not obtained by its own exertions?”

Mary Wollstonecraft book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Source: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Ch. 3

“New Labour’s community development work was all private-sector driven, consultation-tinged regeneration that was done to poor people rather than being controlled by them. I found it, on the whole, a massive waste of money.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Third Sector, 6 June 2011 http://www.thirdsector.co.uk/news/Article/1073529/Interview-Lord-Glasman/

Money, People, Communication

“However it may have happened, it is an excellent thing, and I do not like it the worse for its being so very triumphant a peace for France…The sense of humiliation in the Government here will be certainly lost in the extreme popularity of the measure…this rascally people are quite overjoyed at receiving from Ministers what, if they had dared to ask it, could not have been refused them at almost any period of the war. Will the Ministers have the impudence to say that there was any time (much less that when Bonaparte's offer was refused) when we might not have had terms as good? Bonaparte's triumph is now complete indeed, and, since there is to be no political liberty in the world, I really believe he is the fittest person to be the master.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Letter to T. Maitland (1801), quoted in L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. 169-170.
1800s

War, People, World, Peace

“We all have to be responsible for ourselves. I accept the concept that respect for yourself must be the foundation of respect for others. It is only if you respect yourself as a human being and you have faith in your ability to achieve what should be achieved that you will be able to help others.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (1945) State Counsellor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy

Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought Acceptance Speech (2013)

Faith, Help

“I am a skeptic about everything, including God and atheism. I am not certain about issues of cosmology.… I am more certain that the miraculous stories that form the basis of most religious beliefs are myths. Yet I respect the Bible and enjoy reading and teaching it. Indeed, I find it even more fascinating as a human creation than as a divine revelation. I consider myself a committed Jew, but I do not believe that being a Jew requires belief in the supernatural.… Indeed, it is while praying that I experience my greatest doubts about God, and it is while looking at the stars that I make the leap of faith.… If there is a governing force, He (or She or It) is certainly not in touch with those who purport to be speaking on His behalf.”

Alan M. Dershowitz (1938) American lawyer, author

"Taking Disbelief Out of the Closet", Free Inquiry, 19(3), p. 7, Summer 1999.

God, Faith, Star, Reading

“Fools scorn me when I dwell in human form: my higher being they know not as Great Lord of beings.”

W. Douglas P. Hill (1884–1962) British Indologist

Source: Chapter 9 (Raja–Vidya–Raja–Guhya yoga), p. 141. (11.)

Fools

“At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

John Keats Letter to George and Thomas Keats

Letter to George and Thomas Keats (December 22, 1817)
Letters (1817–1820)

Literature

“A topic that sometimes succeeds in being fully resolved with the help of long explanations in speech or writing, with arguments and letter, but more often fails the harder it is pursued, can be resolved by dumbness in a single hour.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

Help

“The work of art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way. From him it gains life and being. Nor is its existence casual and inconsequent, but it has a definite and purposeful strength, alike in its material and spiritual life.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

VIII. Art and Artists
1910 - 1915, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911

Life, Secret, Art, Way

“You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn’t. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965, he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest…. The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do — keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you are not busy being born, you’re busy dying.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

As quoted in Steve Jobs (2011) by Walter Isaacson, p. 570
2010s

Money, People, Art, Way

“It might be the doing of Satan, in whom Aaron anxiously believed with all of his being except, perhaps, his mind.”

Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 4

“Let us examine therefore, in summary fashion, the laws whereby a woman in Israel might obtain a divorce by death and re-marry. The laws calling for the death penalty against the man. To list these without taking time to give all the references, the Biblical references, which can be given although we dealt with many of them:
1. Adultery, 2. Rape, 3. Incest, 4. Homosexuality or sodomy, 5. Bestiality, 6. Premeditated Murder, 7. Smiting Father or Mother, 8. Death of a woman from miscarriage due to assault and battery, 9. Sacrificing children to Molech, 10. Cursing Father or Mother, 11. Kidnapping, 12. Being a wizard, 13. Being a false prophet or dreamer, 14. Apostacy, 15. Sacrificing to other Gods, 16. Refusing to follow the decision of judges, 17. Blasphemy, 18. Transgressing the Covenant.
In other words, for all these offenses, a woman gained a divorce by death. On the other hand, a divorce by death was obtainable by men because of the following death penalties cited for women: 1. Unchastity before marriage, 2. Adultery after marriage, 3. Prostituion by a priests daughter, 4. Bestiality, 5. Being a witch or a sorceress, 6. Transgressing the covenant, and 7. Incest.
Now it is obvious that that the list for men is more than twice as long. And it is obvious that some of the death penalties for men would also apply to women, as for example murder. But many of the crimes that are cited for men such as rape and kidnapping, while it is conceivable that the woman would be guilty of those it is not very likely. Those are primarily masculine offenses.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, The Law of Divorce (n.d.)

Death, Women, Men, God

“I really wanted to go on Broadway but I was like - do I want to leave my dogs, my house and my friends for nine months? But then I thought, "Wait a second. If this wasn't being offered to me and I heard there was an audition I'd be desperate to have the job." When you're offered things, it makes it so much easier to be indecisive. And it's silly because you can pass on some really amazing things.”

Alicia Silverstone (1976) American actress

Interview with Barbara Ellen: The Observer, Sunday 29 February 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2004/feb/29/features.review

Dogs, Waiting, Housing, Indecision

“Intellectual honesty requires that one reflect on the contribution one’s theory makes to the class struggle, and acknowledge it openly. One does not have to accept the specific claim that there are two, and only two, mutually exclusive worldviews, to one of which any theory must commit itself, to accept the general claim that entertaining, developing and propounding a theory are actions, and as such they represent ways of taking a position in the world. This means that any kind of comprehensive understanding of politics will also have to treat the politics of theorization, including the politics of whatever theory is itself at the given time being presented for scrutiny, as a candidate for acceptance.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Philosophy and Real Politics (2008).
Philosophy and Real Politics (2008)

World, Way, Understanding, Time

“.. Our life is a pilgrim's progress. I once saw a very beautiful picture: it was a landscape at evening. In the distance on the right-hand side a row of hills appeared blue in the evening mist. Above those hills the splendour of the sunset, the grey clouds with their linings of silver and gold and purple. The landscape is a plain or heath covered with grass and its yellow leaves, for it was in autumn. Through the landscape a road leads to a high mountain far, far away, on the top of that mountain is a city wherein the setting sun casts a glory. On the road walks a pilgrim, staff in hand. He has been walking for a good long while already and he is very tired. And now he meets a woman, or figure in black, that makes one think of St. Paul's word: As being sorrowful yet always rejoicing. That Angel of God has been placed there to encourage the pilgrims and to answer their questions and the pilgrim asks her: Does the road go uphill then all the way? And the answer is: "Yes to the very end."”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote of Vincent van Gogh, from his 'First Sunday Sermon' http://www.vggallery.com/misc/archives/sermon.htm: 'I Am a Stranger on the Earth..'; 29 October 1876 1870s

Life, God, Beauty, Angels

“Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

Letter (20 August 1959), as quoted in Victoria Glendinning, Rebecca West: A Life (1987), Part 5, Chapter 8, p. 206

Horse

“It is true that the masses have always been led in one manner or another, and it could be said that their part in history consists primarily in allowing themselves to be led, since they represent a merely passive element, a “matter” in the Aristotelian sense of the word. But, to lead them today, it is sufficient to dispose of purely material means, … and this shows clearly to what depths our age has sunk. At the same time the masses are made to believe that they are not being led, but that they are acting spontaneously and governing themselves, and the fact that they believe this is a sign from which the extent of their stupidity may be inferred.”

René Guénon (1886–1951) French metaphysician

Source: The Crisis of the Modern World (1927), p. 109

Age, Stupidity, History, Sense

“You know, when you're young, God sweeps you up. He holds you there. The real snag is to stay there and to know how to fall. All those days when you can't hold on any longer. When you tumble. The test is being able to climb up again.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book One: All Respects to Heaven, I Like it Here

God

“Human beings will never evolve to higher creatures if we are constantly restricted by rules and regulations.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

The Nightmares of a Journalist (1991)

“Through Operation Flood, milk has been transformed from a commodity into a brand, from insufficient production to sufficient production, from rationing to plentiful availability; from loose unhygienic milk to milk that is pure and sure, from subjugation to as symbol of farmer’s economic independence, to being the consumer’s greatest insurance policy for good health.”

Verghese Kurien (1921–2012) Indian founder of dairy-cooperative Amul

In p. 85
Quote, Our Leaders

Health

“Here we are, up to our ears in transcendence: Any organization or function is controlled by it. The building blocks for making living creatures are utilized by it. Thus, the entire world of living beings is transcended by phenomena that create finality. Natural selection working for the continuance and welfare of animals, plants, and man himself, is seen to be the grand law which organizes the living universe. So the Darwinians, who fancied they had exorcized finalism and transcendency but forgot to analyze critically the idea of natural selection, failed to see its implications or metaphysical consequences. They thought they were absolved from giving any finalization or deistic interpretation by decreeing that on earth all is but deceptive appearances; finality is a sham, guided evolution illusory. How is it possible to understand such an attitude?”

Pierre-Paul Grassé (1895–1985) French zoologist

Grassé, Pierre Paul (1977); Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation. Academic Press, p. 2-3
Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation (1977)

World, Law, Idea, Understanding

“The desire to tell the truth is only one condition for being an intellectual. The other is courage, readiness to carry on rational inquiry to wherever it may lead … to withstand … comfortable and lucrative conformity.”

Paul A. Baran (1909–1964) American Marxist economist

"The Commitment of the Intellectual," in The Longer View (1969), p. 14

Truth, Courage

““You look older, son.”
“Yes, well, some of us have to get on with the business of being alive in the entropic universe.””

Alastair Reynolds book Revelation Space

Source: Revelation Space (2000), Chapter 16 (p. 332).

Business, Universe

“War", Philip had announced, "was being declared against the Persians on behalf of the Greeks, to punish the barbarians for their lawless treatment of the old Greek temples.”

Robin Lane Fox (1946) Historian, educator, writer, gardener

Source: Alexander the Great, 1973, p.92

War

“What’s true is that everyone is uncomfortable with expressing anger and being critical. Anger and criticism generates rejection. And everyone hates rejection.”

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

Source: Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000), p. 21.

Hate, Anger

“So the game plan is not merely to free the income of the wealthiest class to “offshore” itself into assets denominated in harder currencies abroad. It is to scrap the progressive tax system altogether. … How stable can a global situation be where the richest nation does not tax its population, but creates new public debt to hand out to its bankers? … The “solution” to the coming financial crisis in the United States may await the dollar’s plunge as an opportunity for a financial Tonkin Gulf resolution. Such a crisis would help catalyze the tax system’s radical change to a European-style “Steve Forbes” flat tax and VAT sales-excise tax…. More government giveaways will be made to the financial sector in a vain effort to keep bad debts afloat and banks “solvent.” As in Ireland and Latvia, public debt will replace private debt, leaving little remaining for Social Security or indeed for much social spending. … The bottom line is that after the prolonged tax giveaway exacerbates the federal budget deficit – along with the balance-of-payments deficit – we can expect the next Republican or Democratic administration to step in and “save” the country from economic emergency by scaling back Social Security while turning its funding over, Pinochet-style, to Wall Street money managers to loot as they did in Chile. And one can forget rebuilding America’s infrastructure. It is being sold off by debt-strapped cities and states to cover their budget shortfalls resulting from un-taxing real estate and from foreclosures. Welcome to debt peonage. This is worse than what was meant by a double-dip recession. It will be with us much longer.”

Michael Hudson (economist) (1939) American economist

Obama's Bushism http://michael-hudson.com/2010/12/obamas-bushism/ (December 8, 2010) Michael-Hudson.com, 1998-

Money, Game, Effort, Change

“Cardan's originality in the matter seems to have been shown chiefly in four respects. First, he reduced the general equation to the type x^3 + bx = c; second, in a letter written August 4, 1539, he discussed the question of the irreducible case; third, he had the idea of the number of roots to be expected in the cubic; and, fourth, he made a beginning in the theory of symmetric functions. …With respect to the irreducible case… we have the cube root of a complex number, thus reaching an expression that is irreducible even though all three values of x turn out to be real. With respect to the number of roots to be expected in the cubic… before this time only two roots were ever found, negative roots being rejected. As to the question of symmetric functions, he stated that the sum of the roots is minus the coefficient of x2</sup”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

Source: History of Mathematics (1925) Vol.2, pp.461-464

Idea, Question, Time

“Indians tend to be a little insecure and they should stop being insecure — I have visited India many times and I can tell you questions I get after my talks are as perceptive as anywhere else in the world, including places like Harvard or MIT. It’s perfectly fine to take pride that someone from their region has used their background and succeeded. That gives them a positive message that they can do anything that they want.”

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (1952) Nobel prize winning American and British structural biologist

Venki’ makes light of India link- Winner says not to treat science like cricket; league of misses grows

World, Question, Time

“In India, if you are from the elite, dogs are extremely important. The breed of the dog indicates your wealth, that you are westernized. The cook, another human being, is on a much lower level than your dog. You see this all the time.”

Kiran Desai (1971) Indian author

Kiran Desai on the Costs Of Literary Celebrity http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117701272922375905.html (April 21, 2007) by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal

Dogs, Time, Cooking, Wealth

“In the Far West, the United States of America openly claimed to be custodians of the whole planet. Universally feared and envied, universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character of man’s existence. By this time every human being throughout the planet made use of American products, and there was no region where American capital did not support local labour. Moreover the American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph and televisor ceaselessly drenched the planet with American thought. Year by year the aether reverberated with echoes of New York’s pleasures and the religious fervours of the Middle West. What wonder, then, that America, even while she was despised, irresistibly moulded the whole human race. This, perhaps, would not have mattered, had America been able to give of her very rare best. But inevitably only her worst could be propagated. Only the most vulgar traits of that potentially great people could get through into the minds of foreigners by means of these crude instruments. And so, by the floods of poison issuing from this people’s baser members, the whole world, and with it the nobler parts of America herself, were irrevocably corrupted.
For the best of America was too weak to withstand the worst. Americans had indeed contributed amply to human thought. They had helped to emancipate philosophy from ancient fetters. They had served science by lavish and rigorous research. In astronomy, favoured by their costly instruments and clear atmosphere, they had done much to reveal the dispositions of the stars and galaxies. In literature, though often they behaved as barbarians, they had also conceived new modes of expression, and moods of thought not easily appreciated in Europe. They had also created a new and brilliant architecture. And their genius for organization worked upon a scale that was scarcely conceivable, let alone practicable, to other peoples. In fact their best minds faced old problems of theory and of valuation with a fresh innocence and courage, so that fogs of superstition were cleared away wherever these choice Americans were present. But these best were after all a minority in a huge wilderness of opinionated self-deceivers, in whom, surprisingly, an outworn religious dogma was championed with the intolerant optimism of youth. For this was essentially a race of bright, but arrested, adolescents. Something lacked which should have enabled them to grow up. One who looks back across the aeons to this remote people can see their fate already woven of their circumstance and their disposition, and can appreciate the grim jest that these, who seemed to themselves gifted to rejuvenate the planet, should have plunged it, inevitably, through spiritual desolation into senility and age-long night.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter II: Europe’s Downfall; Section 1, “Europe and America” (p. 33)

Fate, People, Pleasure, Youth

“Human beings are still fish.”

PZ Myers (1957) American scientist and associate professor of biology

During an interview for Ray Comfort's " Evolution vs. God http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0u3-2CGOMQ" (2013), after explaining that Comfort was wrong to disregard the Lenski experiment on the grounds that Lenski's bacteria "are still just bacteria". After Comfort asked him again, "Humans beings are fish?", Myers replied again "Yes, of course they are."

Fish