Quotes about being (10000 quotes, page 70)

“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

“If it is necessary that each sentient being must have the possibility of achieving an overwhelming good, then it is clear that there must be some form of life after earthly death. Despite the many pointers to the existence of God, theism would be falsified if physical death was the end, for then there could be no justification for the existence of this world. However, if one supposes that every sentient being has an endless existence, which offers the prospect of supreme happiness, it is surely true that the sorrows and troubles of this life will seem very small by comparison. Immortality, for animals as well as humans, is a necessary condition of any acceptable theodicy; that necessity, together with all the other arguments for God, is one of the main reasons for believing in immortality.”

Keith Ward (1938) British philosopher, theologian, priest and scholar

Rational Theology and the Creativity of God (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), pp. 201-202.

Life , Death , God , Happiness

“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

“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

“Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.”

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician

Fractals : Form, chance and dimension (1977)

Mathematics

“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

“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

“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

““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

“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

“Capitalism is being attacked not because it is inefficient or misgoverned but because it is cynical. And indeed a society based on the assertion that private vices become public benefits cannot endure, no matter how impeccable its logic, no matter how great its benefits.”

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

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Practice of Management (1954), p. 392

“The question "cui bono" to what practical end and advantage do your researches tend? is one which the speculative philosopher who loves knowledge for its own sake, and enjoys, as a rational being should enjoy, the mere contemplation of harmonious and mutually dependent truths, can seldom hear without a sense of humiliation. He feels that there is a lofty and disinterested pleasure in his speculations which ought to exempt them from such questioning; communicating as they do to his own mind the purest happiness (after the exercise of the benevolent and moral feelings) of which human nature is susceptible, and tending to the injury of no one, he might surely allege this as a sufficient and direct reply to those who, having themselves little capacity, and less relish for intellectual pursuits, are constantly repeating upon him this enquiry.”

John Herschel (1792–1871) English mathematician, astronomer, chemist and photographer

A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831)

Love , Happiness , Pleasure , Truth

“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

“Human beings—any one of us, and our species as a whole—are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.”

Bill McKibben (1960) American environmentalist and writer

Source: The Age of Missing Information (1992), p. 228

Secret , World , Mountain , Nature

“I cannot believe that there is any being in this universe who has created a human soul for eternal pain. I would rather that every god would destroy himself; I would rather that we all should go to eternal chaos, to black and starless night, than that just one soul should suffer eternal agony.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

What Must We Do To Be Saved? (1880) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38801/38801-h/38801-h.htm Section X, "The Evangelical Alliance."

God , Pain , Soul , Suffering

“The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Time (23 October 1950)

“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]

“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

“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

“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

“"Hair loss and retrieval" (Translation of "Pérdida y recuperación del pelo")

To combat pragmatism and the horrible tendency to achieve useful purposes, my elder cousin proposes the procedure of pulling out a nice hair from the head, knotting it in the middle and droping it gently down the hole in the sink. If the hair gets caught in the grid that usually fills in these holes, it will just take to open the tap a little to lose sight of it.

Without wasting an instant, must start the hair recovery task. The first operation is reduced to dismantling the siphon from the sink to see if the hair has become hooked in any of the rugosities of the drain. If it is not found, it is necessary to expose the section of pipe that goes from the siphon to the main drainage pipe. It is certain that in this part will appear many hairs and we will have to count on the help of the rest of the family to examine them one by one in search of the knot. If it does not appear, the interesting problem of breaking the pipe down to the ground floor will arise, but this means a greater effort, because for eight or ten years we will have to work in a ministry or trading house to collect enough money to buy the four departments located under the one of my elder cousin, all that with the extraordinary disadvantage of what while working during those eight or ten years, the distressing feeling that the hair is no longer in the pipes anymore can not be avoided and that only by a remote chance remains hooked on some rusty spout of the drain.

The day will come when we can break the pipes of all the departments, and for months to come we will live surrounded by basins and other containers full of wet hairs, as well as of assistants and beggars whom we will generously pay to search, assort, and bring us the possible hairs in order to achieve the desired certainty. If the hair does not appear, we will enter in a much more vague and complicated stage, because the next section takes us to the city's main sewers. After buying a special outfit, we will learn to slip through the sewers at late night hours, armed with a powerful flashlight and an oxygen mask, and explore the smaller and larger galleries, assisted if possible by individuals of the underworld, with whom we will have established a relationship and to whom we will have to give much of the money that we earn in a ministry or a trading house.

Very often we will have the impression of having reached the end of the task, because we will find (or they will bring us) similar hairs of the one we seek; but since it is not known of any case where a hair has a knot in the middle without human hand intervention, we will almost always end up with the knot in question being a mere thickening of the caliber of the hair (although we do not know of any similar case) or a deposit of some silicate or any oxide produced by a long stay against a wet surface. It is probable that we will advance in this way through various sections of major and minor pipes, until we reach that place where no one will decide to penetrate: the main drain heading in the direction of the river, the torrential meeting of detritus in which no money, no boat, no bribe will allow us to continue the search.

But before that, and perhaps much earlier, for example a few centimeters from the mouth of the sink, at the height of the apartment on the second floor, or in the first underground pipe, we may happen to find the hair. It is enough to think of the joy that this would cause us, in the astonished calculation of the efforts saved by pure good luck, to choose, to demand practically a similar task, that every conscious teacher should advise to its students from the earliest childhood, instead of drying their souls with the rule of cross-multiplication or the sorrows of Cancha Rayada.”

Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) Argentinian writer

Historias de Cronopios y de Famas (1962)

Money , Family , Way , Feeling

“It's me versus Mother Nature and me versus me. I want to see how far a human can fly with six kilograms of high-tech nylon over his head with no engine. Ultimately though, I love being able to fly like a bird.”

Godfrey Wenness (1967)

"SMH Article 3 Feb 2007" http://www.smh.com.au/news/new-south-wales/the-thriller-in-manilla/2007/02/01/1169919460467.html?page=3

Love , Nature , Bird , Flying

“The times we live in are alternately derided for their failings and romanticized for their emerging opportunities. It sometimes seems that we now live amid greater violence, greater uncertainty; that the world suffers more conflicts and tragedies; that the poor are poorer and greater in number; that race, ethnicity and nationalism divide us more intractably than ever before.
But that is not so. Human beings are still capable of violence and cruelty. We all succumb to sin. But look back at any preceding century or even just a few decades, and you will see cruelty, violence and misery on a scale that is, with few exceptions, unknown today.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

1990s, Speech at Ohio Wesleyan University (1997)

World , Suffering , Time

“American families are in the process of passing along a $9 trillion legacy from one generation to the next. This is a lot of money, but it is distributed very unevenly.. … Hand in hand with this money, I submit, what is really being handed down from generation to generation is the profound legacy of reproducing racial inequality. The legacy is difficult to discern because the language of family heritage hides it from our political consciousness.”

Thomas Shapiro (1947) American sociologist

Source: The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality (2005), p. 32

Money , Family

“Most human lives are forgotten after four generations. We build our splendid houses on the edge of the abyss then distract and dazzle ourselves with entertainers and sex while we slowly at first, then more rapidly, spin around the ever-thirsty plughole in the middle. My treasured possessions -- all the silly little mementoes and toys and special books I’ve carried with me for decades -- will wind up on flea market tables or rot on garbage heaps. Someone else will inhabit the rooms that were mine. Everything that was important to me will mean nothing to the countless generations that follow our own. In the grand sprawl of it all, I have no significance at all. I don’t believe a giant gaseous pensioner will reward or censure me when my body stops working and I don’t believe individual consciousness survives for long after brain death so I lack the consolations of religion. I wanted Annihilator to peek into that implacable moment where everything we are comes to an end so I had to follow the Black Brick Road all the way down and seriously consider the abject pointlessness of all human endeavours. I found these contemplations thrilling and I was drawn to research pure nihilism, which led me to Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound and back to Ligotti. I have a fundamentally optimistic and positive view of human existence and the future and I think it’s important to face intelligent, well-argued challenges to that view on a regular basis. While I agree with Ligotti that the universe is, on the face of it, a blind emergent process, driven by chance over billions of years of trial and error to ultimately produce creatures capable of little more than flamboyant expressions of the agonizing awareness of their own imminent deaths, I don’t share his slightly huffy disappointment at this state of affairs. If the universe is intrinsically meaningless, if the mindless re-arrangement of atomic debris into temporarily arising then dissipating forms has no point, I can only ask, why do I see meaning everywhere, why can I find a point in everything? Why do other human beings like me seem to see meaning in everything too? If the sun is only an apocalyptic series of hydrogen fusion reactions, why does it look like an angel and inspire poetry? Why does the flesh and fur-covered bone and jelly of my cat’s face melt my heart? Is all that surging, roaring incandescent meaning inside me, or is it out there? “Meaning” to me is equivalent to “Magic.” The more significance we bring to things, even to the smallest and least important things, the more special, the more “magical” they seem to become. For all that materialistic science and existential philosophy tells us we live in a chaotic, meaningless universe, the evidence of my senses and the accounts of other human beings seem to indicate that, in fact, the whole universe and everything in it explodes second-to-second with beauty, horror, grandeur and significance when and wherever it comes into contact with consciousness. Therefore, it’s completely down to us to revel in our ability to make meaning, or not. Ligotti, like many extreme Buddhist philosophers, starts from the position that life is an agonizing, heartbreaking grave-bound veil of tears. This seems to be a somewhat hyperbolic view of human life; as far as I can see most of us round here muddle through ignoring death until it comes in close and life’s mostly all right with just enough significant episodes of sheer joy and connection and just enough sh-tty episodes of pain or fear. The notion that the whole span of our lives is no more than some dreadful rehearsal for hell may resonate with the deeply sensitive among us but by and large life is pretty okay generally for most of us. And for some, especially in the developed countries, “okay” equals luxurious. To focus on the moments of pain and fear we all experience and then to pretend they represent the totality of our conscious experience seems to me a little effete and indulgent. Most people don’t get to be born at all, ever. To see in that radiant impossibility only pointlessness, to see our experience as malignantly useless, as Ligotti does, seems to me a bit camp.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2014
http://www.blastr.com/2014-9-12/grant-morrisons-big-talk-getting-deep-writer-annihilator-multiversity
On life

Life , Death , Pain , People

“There’s no single right way to accomplish your goals. Each of us has a number of avenues to reach our potential. The world constantly changes. Life often unfolds as a series of phases. Our potential is likely to evolve as the world evolves and as we continue to learn, grow, and develop our capabilities.
Reaching your potential is not simply about dreaming or being idealistic, It is a process that involve specific actions, exercises, discipline and hard work. It is challenging, rewarding and unending.”

Robert S. Kaplan (1940) American accounting academic

Source: What You're Really Meant To Do, 2013, p. 11

Life , World , Dreams , Way

“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.

“Anacharsis coming to Athens, knocked at Solon's door, and told him that he, being a stranger, was come to be his guest, and contract a friendship with him; and Solon replying, "It is better to make friends at home," Anacharsis replied, "Then you that are at home make friendship with me."”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Life of Solon
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Friendship , Home

“…institutions like the House of Lords must die, like all other organic beings, when their time comes.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Letter to Alfred Austin (29 April 1888), from Paul Smith (ed.), Lord Salisbury on politics: a selection from his articles in the Quarterly Review, 1860–83 (1972), p. 39, footnote
1880s

Time , Housing

“No one but you and one ‘jade’ I have fallen in love with, to my ruin. But being in love doesn’t mean loving. You may be in love with a woman and yet hate her.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian author

The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)

Love , Hate

“You are happily being misunderstood in your use of the word "God."”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris in debate against Deepak Chopra on ABC Nightline (23 March 2010) "Does God Have a Future?"
2010s

God

“What had he learned?
Enough Hebrew and Greek to be able to crawl through the Bible by using lexicons—so that, like all his classmates once they were out of the seminary, he always read it in English. A good many of the more condemnatory texts of the Bible—rather less than the average Holy Roller carpenter-evangelist. The theory that India and Africa have woes because they are not Christianized, but that Christianized Bangor and Des Moines have woes because the devil, a being obviously more potent than omnipotent God, sneaks around counteracting the work of Baptist preachers.”

Sinclair Lewis book Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry (1927)

God , Learning , Reading

“Question: Does a detached person remain unoccupied all the time, or what does he or she do?
Answer: The activity of really detached people lies in their becoming detached, and their achievement is to remain unoccupied because they remain calm in action and unconcerned about their achievements.
Question: What is their conduct toward their fellow human beings?
Answer: They enjoy the companionship of people, but without being compromised by them. They love them without attachment, and they show them sympathy without anxious concern - all in true freedom.
Question: Is such a person required to go to confession?
Answer: The confession that is motivated by love is nobler than one motivated by necessity.
Question: What is such people’s prayer like? Are they supposed to pray, too?
Answer: Their prayer is effective because they forestall the influence of the senses. God is spirit and knows whether this person has put an obstacle in the way or whether he or she has acted from selfish impulses. And then a light is enkindled in their highest power, which makes clear that God is the being, life and activity within them and that they are merely instruments.
Question: What are such a person's eating, drinking and sleeping like?
Answer: Externally, and in keeping with their sensuous nature, the outward person eats. Internally, however, they are as if not eating; otherwise, One does not arrive at the goal by asking questions. It is rather through detachment that one comes to this hidden truth they would be enjoying food and rest like an animal. This is also the case in other things pertaining to human existence.”

Henry Suso (1295–1366) Dominican friar and mystic

The Exemplar, The Little Book of Truth

Love , Life , God , People

“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.

“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

“Ambassador Taylor and, and, and, and me, and I, we had a very bad moment together at that day in the general staff. Ambassador want to see me uh because he uh made what we called a young turk at that time, a young general officer, namely Nguyen Cao Ky, and Nguyen Van Thieu, and other general. And uh… to kind of to insult them uh for, you know, being changing what we call the civilian government at that time.”

Nguyen Khanh (1927–2013) South Vietnamese soldier

Confrontation with Maxwell Taylor in November 1964: On conflict with Maxwell D. Taylor in November 1964
1980s, Interview with Nguyen Khanh (1981)

Change , Time

“I must be absolutely clear about this. Britain cannot accept the present situation on the Budget. It is demonstrably unjust. It is politically indefensible: I cannot play Sister Bountiful to the Community while my own electorate are being asked to forego improvements in the fields of health, education, welfare and the rest.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Winston Churchill Memorial Lecture (18 October 1979) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104149 regarding the UK's contribution to the European Community budget.
First term as Prime Minister

Health , Education , Communication , Sister

“This nation was founded," President Bush wrote, "upon the belief that every human being is endowed by our Creator with certain 'unalienable rights.'" The President, in using the exact language of the Declaration of Independence, including the archaic "unalienable," has expressed the conviction that "the laws of nature and of nature's God" furnish the moral foundation of constitutional government. "President Jefferson's timeless principle," he wrote, "obligates us to pursue a civil society that will democratically embrace its essential moral duties…”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, Bush's Lincolnian Challenge (2002)

God , Law , Nature

“Tis the hardest thing in the world to be a good Thinker, without being a strong Self-Examiner.”

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) English politician and Earl

Vol. 1, p. 92; "Soliloquy: or Advice to an Author".
Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711)

World , Strong

“Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.”

Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist

Writers at Work interview (1963)

Life , Chance

“In the night as he slept Boyd came to him and squatted by the deep embers of the fire as he'd done times by the hundreds and smiled his soft smile that was not quite cynical and he took off his hat and held it before him and looked down into it. In the dream he knew that Boyd was dead and that the subject of his being so must be approached with a certain caution for that which was circumspect in life must be doubly so in death and he'd no way to know what word or gesture might subtract him back again into that nothingness out of which he'd come. When finally he did ask him what it was like to be dead Boyd only smiled and looked away and would not answer. They spoke of other things and he tried not to wake from the dream but the ghost dimmed and faded and he woke and lay looking up at the stars through the bramblework of the treelimbs and he tried to think of what that place could be where Boyd was but Boyd was dead and wasted in his bones wrapped in the soogan upriver in the trees and he turned his face to the ground and wept.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

Life , Death , Smile , Dreams

“He [Bhagwan Dass] wasn't the least bit interested in all of the extraordinary dramas that I had collected … He was the first person I couldn't seduce into being interested in all this. He just didn't care.
And yet, I never felt so profound an intimacy with another being. It was as if he were inside of my heart. And what started to blow my mind was that everywhere we went, he was at home.”

Ram Dass book Be Here Now

Be Here Now (1971)

Home , Heart , Personality

“It is fitting that a discourse on Romantic music should commence with a meditation on the art of Bach. The Bach revival is still sometimes considered an early nineteenth-century phenomenon, although this is hardly tenable: in the 1780s Mozart was deeply affected by Bach, and at the same time Beethoven was being brought up on the Well-Tempered Keyboard. Bach was well known to European musicians as a composer of keyboard music through manuscript copies of this work long before systematic publication began in 1800. The "revival" of Bach in the Romantic period was basically a rediscovery of his choral works and a new evaluation of his technique: his art was no longer simply a model for the fugue, as it had been in the eyes of Mozart, but for the art of music as a whole. The new approach to Bach and to Baroque music in general, however, did not extend to the sound of that music on the original instruments. Few musicians in the 1820s and '30s 'had the slightest interest in the sonority of old harpsichords or Baroque organs (Ignaz Moscheles was an engaging exception). What they saw, and needed to see, in Bach was the achievement of an ideal.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 1 : Music and Sound

Art , Music , Time

“Today the poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our consciences by being branded as inferior or incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty.
The problem indicates that our emphasis must be twofold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)

People , Hope , Problem

“Afterward she opened the matter more plainly to M. Rise and Mistres Clarentius (if it be true that they tolde me, whiche hearde it of M. Rise himselfe) who then being most familiar with her, & most bold about her, tolde her that they feared she took thought for king Philips departing from her. Not that onely (sayde she) but when I am dead & opened, you shall find Calice lying in my hart.”

John Foxe (1516–1587) British historian

Bk. 12, p. 2098
Acts and Monuments (1563)

Fear , Lying , Dead

“At the times in my life when I was feeling the most gregarious and looking for bosom friendships, I couldn't find any takers so that exactly when I was alone was when I felt the most like not being alone. The moment I decided I'd rather be alone and not have anyone telling me their problems, everybody I'd never even seen before in my life started running after me to tell me things I'd just decided I didn't think it was a good idea to hear about. As soon as I became a loner in my own mind, that's when I got what you might call a "following."”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

As soon as you stop wanting something you get it. I've found that to be absolutely axiomatic.
Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Ch. 1: Puberty

Life , Friendship , Feeling , Idea

“Its part of a comedy cultural exchange tour: tonight, I am doing the UK and Jim Davidson is being buggered in Baghdad right now, systematically and without cessation, by United States Troops! Such fun.”

Omid Djalili (1965) Iranian-British stand-up comedian

No Agenda (2007)

Parting

“.. the personification of the close-up detail, the individualisation of the fragment, where the drama takes shape, moves and have it being. Film concurs with this aspect for life. The hand is a multiple, transformable object. Before I saw it in a film, I did not know what a hand was! The object in itself is capable of becoming an absolute, moving, tragic thing.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote from: 'L'ésthetique de la Machine - l'Ordre Géometrique et le Vrai', in Propos d’Artistes, 1925
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1920's

Life

“It is quite likely that it is possible, yes. But what we've said all along -- speaking for both the (Roslin) Institute and the PPL staff - is that we would find it ethically unacceptable to think of doing that. We can't think of a reason to do it. If there was a reason to copy a human being, we would do it, but there isn't.”

Ian Wilmut (1944) embryologist

On human cloning, in "Dr. Frankenstein, I Presume?" by Andrew Ross in Salon February 1997) http://web.archive.org/web/20000301033550/http://www.salon.com/feb97/news/news2970224.html.

Thinking

“Whom could this operetta offend? Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel. We may become even more aware of the way we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs. The dauntless, scrubbed-face heroine (Julie Andrews), in training to become a nun, is sent from the convent to serve as governess to the motherless Von Trapp children, and turns them into a happy little troupe of singers before marrying their father (Christopher Plummer). She says goodbye to the nuns and leaves them outside at the fence, as she enters the cathedral to be married. Squeezed again, and the moisture comes out of thousands--millions--of eyes and noses. Wasn't there perhaps one little Von Trapp who didn't want to sing his head off, or who screamed that he wouldn't act out little glockenspiel routines for Papa's party guests, or who got nervous and threw up if he had to get on a stage? The only thing the director, Robert Wise, couldn't smooth out was the sinister, archly decadent performance by Christopher Plummer--he of the thin, twisted smile; he seems to be in a different movie altogether.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

"The Sound of Music," p. 697
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

Happiness , Children , Smile , Way

“Well, I hate to admit it, but it is possible that there is (one) such a thing as telepathy and (two) that the CETI project's idea that we might communicate with extraterrestrial beings via telepathy is possibly a reasonable idea--if telepathy exists and if ETIs exist. Otherwise we are trying to communicate with someone who doesn't exist with a system which doesn't work.”

Philip K. Dick book The Dark Haired Girl

The Dark Haired Girl, (1989)

Hate , Communication , Idea

“The most powerful way of being able to listen to your own intuition is by being silent. Find a quiet space, slow down and calm your mind. Your goal is to eliminate all that noise going through your head – all those thoughts that appear from nowhere.”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, 100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living (2016) https://books.google.ae/books?idnu0lCwAAQBAJ&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIMjAE

Way , Appearance

“Generally speaking there is no irreducible taste or inclination. They all represent a certain appropriative choice of being. It is up to existential psychoanalysis to compare and classify them. Ontology abandons us here; it has merely enabled us to determine the ultimate ends of human reality, its fundamental possibilities, and the value which haunts it.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Being and Nothingness

Being and Nothingness (1943)

Reality

“When I asked Amin [Husain] and Katie [Davison] what Occupy Wall Street’s ultimate goal was, they said, “A government accountable to the people, freed up from corporate influence.” … Organizers described Occupy Wall Street as “a way of being,” of “sharing your life together in assembly.” … The ambitions of the core group of activists were more cultural than political, in the sense that they sought to influence the way people think about their lives. “Ours is a transformational movement,” Amin told me with a solemn air. Transformation had to occur face to face; what it offered, especially to the young, was an antidote to the empty gaze of the screen.
In meetings and elsewhere, this Tolstoyan experience of undergoing a personal crisis of meaning, both political and of the soul, seemed deeply shared. Apart from Amin, I’ve met an architect, a film editor, an advertising consultant, an unemployed stock trader, a spattering of lawyers, and people with various other jobs who, after joining OWS, found themselves psychologically unable to go about their lives as before. … Michael Ellick, the minister at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, said that when he first visited Zuccotti Park he was reminded of his years at a monastery. “When people enter a monastery, they don’t know why they’ve come,” said Ellick. “They are there to find out why they are there, why they were compelled to leave the other world.””

Michael Greenberg (1952) American author

“What Future for Occupy Wall Street?” The New York Review of Books, vol. 59, no. 2, February 9, 2012

Life , People , World , Way

“The philosophy of nonviolence, which I learned from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., during my involvement in the civil rights movement was first responsible for my change in diet. I became a vegetarian in 1965. … Under the leadership of Dr. King I became totally committed to nonviolence, and I was convinced that nonviolence meant opposition to killing in any form. I felt the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” applied to human beings not only in their dealings with each other—war, lynching, assassination, murder and the like—but in their practice of killing animals for food or sport. Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel and brutal taking of life.”

Dick Gregory (1932–2017) American comedian, social activist, social critic, writer, and entrepreneur

Source: Dick Gregory's Natural Diet For Folks Who Eat (1973), pp. 15-16

Life , Death , Pain , War

“[on John McCain being too old] When you die at 72, no matter what you die of, it's natural causes. Even if you get hit by a truck, it's natural causes. 'Cause if you was younger, you'd have got out the way!”

Chris Rock (1965) American comedian, actor, screenwriter, television producer, film producer, and director

Kill the Messenger (2008)

Way , Nature

“What humiliation, what disgrace for us all, that it should be necessary for one man to exhort other men not to be inhuman and irrational towards their fellow-creatures! Do they recognise, then, no mind, no soul in them — have they not feeling, pleasure in existence, do they not suffer pain? Do their voices of joy and sorrow indeed fail to speak to the human heart and conscience — so that they can murder the jubilant lark, in the first joy of his spring-time, who ought to warm their hearts with sympathy, from delight in bloodshed or for their ‘sport,’ or with a horrible insensibility and recklessness only to practise their aim in shooting! Is there no soul manifest in the eyes of the living or dying animal — no expression of suffering in the eye of a deer or stag hunted to death — nothing which accuses them of murder before the avenging Eternal Justice? …. Are the souls of all other animals but man mortal, or are they essential in their organisation? Does the world-idea (Welt-Idee) pertain to them also — the soul of nature — a particle of the Divine Spirit? I know not; but I feel, and every reasonable man feels like me, it is in miserable, intolerable contradiction with our human nature, with our conscience, with our reason, with all our talk of humanity, destiny, nobility; it is in frightful (himmelschreinder) contradiction with our poetry and philosophy, with our nature and with our (pretended) love of nature, with our religion, with our teachings about benevolent design — that we bring into existence merely to kill, to maintain our own life by the destruction of other life. …. It is a frightful wrong that other species are tortured, worried, flayed, and devoured by us, in spite of the fact that we are not obliged to this by necessity; while in sinning against the defenceless and helpless, just claimants as they are upon our reasonable conscience and upon our compassion, we succeed only in brutalising ourselves. This, besides, is quite certain, that man has no real pity and compassion for his own species, so long as he is pitiless towards other races of beings.”

Bogumil Goltz (1801–1870) German humorist and satirist

Das Menschendasein in seinen weltewigen Zügen und Zeichen (1850); as quoted in The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-eating https://archive.org/stream/ethicsofdietcate00will/ethicsofdietcate00will#page/n3/mode/2up by Howard Williams (London: F. Pitman, 1883), pp. 287-286.

Love , Life , Death , Men

“If you've spent any time trolling the blogosphere, you've probably noticed a peculiar literary trend: the pervasive habit of writers inexplicably placing exclamation points at the end of otherwise unremarkable sentences. Sort of like this! This is done to suggest an ironic detachment from the writing of an expository sentence! It's supposed to signify that the writer is self-aware! And this is idiotic. It's the saddest kind of failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can't tell if what they're creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It's an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they're being entertained. Of course, the reader really isn't sure, either. They just want to know when they're supposed to pretend that they're amused. All those extraneous exclamation points are like little splatters of canned laughter: They represent the “form of funny,” which is more easily understood (and more easily constructed) than authentic funniness.”

Chuck Klosterman Eating the Dinosaur

Eating the Dinosaur (2009)

Age , Failure , Laughter , Chance

“When I looked up at my father as a boy, I thought being a man was having control. Being the master and commander of your own destiny. How could any boy know that freedom is lost the moment you become a man. Things start to count. To press in. Constricting slowly, inevitably, creating a cage of inconveniences and duties and deadlines and failed plans and lost friends. I'm tired of people doubting. Of people choosing to believe they know what is possible because of what has happened before.”

Pierce Brown book Morning Star

Source: Morning Star (2016), Ch. 31: The Pale Queen

People , Boy , Freedom

“He must be a born leader or misleader of men, or must have been sent into the world unfurnished with that modulating and restraining balance-wheel which we call a sense of humor, who, in old age, has as strong a confidence in his opinions and in the necessity of bringing the universe into conformity with them as he had in youth. In a world the very condition of whose being is that it should be in perpetual flux, where all seems mirage, and the one abiding thing is the effort to distinguish realities from appearances, the elderly man must be indeed of a singularly tough and valid fibre who is certain that he has any clarified residuum of experience, any assured verdict of reflection, that deserves to be called an opinion, or who, even if he had, feels that he is justified in holding mankind by the button while he is expounding it.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

On Democracy (6 October 1884)

Men , Youth , Age , World

“"Global Warming" represents the last gasp of so-called "scientific progressivism", a mass of pitifully transparent falsehoods being employed to justify reducing mankind under the absolute despotism of "experts", the obvious implication being that we can’t even breathe responsibly. Environmentalism, Gaianism, is a religion on the basis of which — illegally under the First Amendment — public policy is being generated. Exhaling carbon dioxide is Original Sin, a reliable source of unlimited power and wealth to a Parasitic Class of politicians, bureaucrats, and cops with which our civilization now finds itself infested.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Wanna Buy a Future?"

Religion , Wealth

“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the north, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails. I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.”

Alexander H. Stephens (1812–1883) Vice President of the Confederate States (in office from 1861 to 1865)

The Cornerstone Speech (1861)

Men , War , Truth , World

“The thought of being under absolute compulsion, the plaything of another, is unendurable for a human being. Hence, if every way of escape from the constraint is taken from him, there is nothing left for him to do but to persuade himself that he does the things he is forced to do willingly, that is to say, to substitute devotion for obedience. … It is by this twist that slavery debases the soul: this devotion is in fact based on a lie, since the reasons for it cannot bear investigation. … Moreover, the master is deceived too by the fallacy of devotion.”

Simone Weil book Gravity and Grace

Source: Gravity and Grace (1947), p. 142 (1972 edition)

Lie , Way , Soul

“What was important, now, with her eyes bent upon him, and the shadow of a branch trembling across her breast, was the immemorial game of love: no less a game for being grave. No less grave for being wild. Grave as a great green sky. Grave as a surgeon’s knife.”

Mervyn Peake book Titus Alone

Source: Titus Alone (1959), Chapter 42 (p. 881)

Love , Game

“It is of first-rate importance to notice from the start that stupidity is not the same thing, or the same sort of thing, as ignorance. There is no incompatibility between being well-informed and being silly, and a person who has a good nose for arguments or jokes may have a bad head for facts.”

Gilbert Ryle book The Concept of Mind

Source: The Concept of Mind (1949), Ch. II: Knowing How and Knowing That, (2) Intelligence and Intellect

Stupidity , Personality

“Wert thou to open the heart of a single soul by helping him to embrace the Cause of Him Whom God shall make manifest, thine inmost being would be filled with the inspirations of that august Name. It devolveth upon you, therefore, to perform this task in the Days of Resurrection, inasmuch as most people are helpless, and wert thou to open their hearts and dispel their doubts, they would gain admittance into the Faith of God.”

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

XVII, 15
The Kitáb-I-Asmá

God , People , Faith , Soul

““Are you coming?” he said.
“In a moment.”
“It’s now or never.”
Maybe it would be never, then. She was so transfixed by the formidable power being unleashed in front of her, she couldn’t avert her astonished gaze. It fascinated her that strength of this magnitude should be turned to the sordid business of atrocity; something was wrong with a reality that made that possible, and offered no cure for it, nor hope of cure.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

Part Thirteen “Magic Night”, Chapter iv “Symmetry”, Section 2 (p. 569)
(1987), BOOK THREE: OUT OF THE EMPTY QUARTER

Hope , Business , Reality

“It is possible to be a woman who is intelligent, thoughtful, articulate, ambitious while being a woman who is maternal, nurturing, sexual and for other women.”

Gwyneth Paltrow (1972) American actress, singer, and food writer

At Variety‘s Power of Women luncheon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TttzBPTmAxc (October 9, 2015)

Women , Intelligence , Maternity

“I joined UKIP in 2003, when it was a party hardly anyone had heard of, but it was the start of an upward trend as we grew in importance and professionalism. In recent time I have watched the chaotic infighting and seen the growing frustration of members who feel their voices are once again being ignored as we embark on a new future for the United Kingdom. And it’s this future I want to help shape by leading the party which had such a significant impact on the political scene in this country, under the leadership of Nigel Farage. My message is clear: I'm offering a real alternative to the other options of EDL-lite or diet Labour.”

Jane Collins (1962) British politician

Ukip will die away if it decides to ape the EDL or Labour — I can save it http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/28/ukip-will-die-away-decides-ape-edl-labour-can-save/ (July 28, 2017)

Feeling , Time , Future , Help

“While many brilliant writers and speech makers have been battling passionately about communism, fascism, socialism, and democracy, our studies of how governmental organizations actually function have forced us to the conclusion that there is little significance to these terms. Indeed, it has been our general observation that not only in different countries, but from generation to generation men go on organizing their governments and earning their living in much the same manner. Notable changes and improvements can be credited from time to time to the scientists and engineers, and in general to improved technology, but throughout history economic laws and the processes of production and distribution display an utter contempt for changes in the political complexion of government. In appraising the many experiments in governmental organization that are being tried currently throughout the world, it is important that we should not be thrown off the track by the circumstance that the various revolutionary movements or changes in government have adopted different symbols around which to rally supporters. The vital point is the plain fact that, once the controlling group gets into power, the practical circumstances of the situation force the new leaders to organize the government according to principles of organization that are as old as the hills.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: The Principles of Organization, 1947, p. 14-15; as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 251-252 ; Parts published earlier in: News and Views. General Motors Acceptance Corporation, General Exchange Insurance Corporation, Motors Insurance Corporation, 1938. p. 8

Men , World , Law , Democracy

“It was dangerous to have a sadist in the barracks, especially one who justified his excesses by religiously invoking the sacrosanct authority of the plebe system. The system contained its own high quotient of natural cruelty, and there was a very thin line between devotion to duty, that is, being serious about the plebe system, which was an exemplary virtue in the barracks, and genuine sadism, which was not. But I had noticed that in the actual hierarchy of values at the Institute, the sadist like Snipes rated higher than someone who took no interest in the freshmen and entertained no belief in the system at all. In the Law of the Corps it was better to carry your beliefs to an extreme than to be faithless. For the majority of the Corps, the only sin of the sadist was that he believed in the system too passionately and applied his belief with an overabundant zeal. Because of this, the barracks at all times provided a safe regency for the sadist and almost all of them earned rank. My sin was harder to figure. I did not participate at all in the rituals of the plebe system. Cruelty was easier to forgive than apostasy.”

Pat Conroy The Lords of Discipline

Source: The Lords of Discipline (1980), p. 96

Law , Forgiveness , Nature , Passion

“What I would take 'racialist' to mean is a person who believes in the inherent inferiority of one race of mankind to another, and who acts and speaks in that belief. So the answer to the question of whether I am a racialist is 'no'—unless, perhaps, it is to be a racialist in reverse. I regard many of the peoples in India as being superior in many respects—intellectually, for example, and in other respects—to Europeans. Perhaps that is over-correcting.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Interview with the Birmingham Post (4 May 1968), from Simon Heffer, Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell (Phoenix, 1999), pp. 466-467
1960s

People , Question , Personality

“Of course I am very proud of being a Tory. Yes, in my head and in my heart I regard myself as a Tory. As I have said, I was born that way; I believe it is congenital. I am unable to change it. That is how I see the world… [The EEC] is the most un-Tory thing that can be conceived.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Interview by Brian Walden (29 January 1978), from Simon Heffer, Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell (Phoenix, 1999), p. 800
1970s

World , Way , Change , Heart

“Proceeding from ourselves, from our own human consciousness, the only consciousness which we feel from within and in which feeling is identical with being, we attribute some sort of consciousness, more or less dim, to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for they also live. And the evolution of organic beings is simply the struggle to realize fullness of consciousness through suffering, a continual aspiration to be others without ceasing to be themselves, to break and yet to preserve their proper limits.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VII : Love, Suffering, Pity

Feeling , Suffering

“We are programmed to find sex pleasurable for one simple reason—because animals who mate have offspring. Those who do not mate have none. Traits that result in successful reproduction get reinforced and passed on. Evolution is that simple.
It is therefore useless to bemoan as evil the fact that men tend toward aggression. Among our ancestors, aggression often helped males have more offspring than their competitors. “Good” and “evil” had little to do with it.
That is, until we reached consciousness, at which point, good and evil became pertinent indeed! Behaviors which might be excusable in dumb beasts can seem perverted, criminal, when performed by thinking beings. Just because a trait is “natural” does not oblige us to keep it.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Introduction to Chapter 7 (pp. 105-106)
Glory Season (1993)

Men , Pleasure , Sex , Behavior

“Every piece of data suggests that workplaces are in dire shape and there is low levels of trust in leaders. For instance, data on employee engagement from Gallup show that worldwide only about 13% of employees report being engaged with their work, and in the U. S., the number is barely higher at 20%. Job satisfaction has declined almost linearly since 1987 to the present. The Edelman Trust index indicates that the public at large has low trust in leaders, while other surveys show that employees do not expect their own leaders to make ethical decisions or to consistently tell them the truth about difficult situations.”

Jeffrey Pfeffer (1946) American academic

Jeffrey Pfeffer in: Dan Schawbel. " Jeffrey Pfeffer: What Most People Don't Know About Leadership http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2015/09/15/jeffrey-pfeffer-what-most-people-dont-know-about-leadership," at Forbes.com, Sept. 15, 2015

Truth , Decision

“Especially must we find a substitute for creation by fiat, or efficient causation. For no being that arises out of efficient causation can possibly be free”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.332

“The indwelling deity who presides over the destiny of the race has raised in man's mind and heart the idea, the hope of a new order which will replace the old unsatisfactory order, and substitute for it conditions of the world's life which will in the end have a reasonable chance of establishing permanent peace and well-being…. It is for the men of our day and, at the most, of tomorrow to give the answer. For, too long a postponement or too continued a failure will open the way to a series of increasing catastrophes which might create a too prolonged and disastrous confusion and chaos and render a solution too difficult or impossible; it might even end in something like an irremediable crash not only of the present world-civilisation but of all civilisation…. The terror of destruction and even of large-scale extermination created by these ominous discoveries may bring about a will in the governments and peoples to ban and prevent the military use of these inventions, but, so long as the nature of mankind has not changed, this prevention must remain uncertain and precarious and an unscrupulous ambition may even get by it a chance of secrecy and surprise and the utilisation of a decisive moment which might conceivably give it victory and it might risk the tremendous chance.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

April, 1950 (From a Postcript Chapter to The Ideal of Human Unity.)
India's Rebirth

Life , Men , People , World

“I obviously hoped that everything that I found would make a difference, … It ended up being way behind my wildest dreams.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

(Feb 22, 2012) http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57570712/jimmy-carter-obama-thanked-my-grandson-who-discovered-romneys-47-video/
Post-Presidency

Dreams , Hope , Way

“Emile Janza was tired of being treated like one of the bad guys. That's the way Archie made him feel. "Hey, animal," Archie would say. Emile wasn't an animal. He had feelings like everybody else. Like the guy in the Shakespeare thing in English I, "Cut me, do I not bleed?" All right, so he liked to screw around a little, get under people's skin. That was human nature, wasn't it? A guy had to protect himself at all times. Get them before they get you. Keep people guessing- and afraid.”

Robert Cormier book The Chocolate War

Source: The Chocolate War (1974), p. 237

People , Way , Guy , Feeling

“I guess my first pilot was February of '96. I did a pilot with Kevin Pollak and his wife, Lucy Webb, for CBS, that was not picked up. And then I kind of started being more in the process. I kind of hung around, looking for work. Didn't do a pilot the next year, but in that time did this film called Southie that we shot in south Boston with these guys that I knew. But really was more focused on doing dramatic stuff. And then every year or couple of years doing, you know [with forced cheer] sitcom pilot!”

Will Arnett (1970) Canadian actor

"The Will Arnett Interview," Television Without Pity (2005) http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/articles/content/a1005/index-4.html
2005

Guy , Time

“Loving someone means helping them to be more themselves, which can be different from being what you'd like them to be, although often they turn out the same.”

Merle Shain (1935–1989) Canadian writer

Some Men are More Perfect Than Others (1973)

Love , Help

“I have retained a belief that it is the popular sporty kids at school who grow up to have the least interesting lives, and the unhappy young souls who develop into the most extraordinary adults. Whoever heard of a creative genius being understood as a child and well loved by his class mates? Who like to imagine an artist who emerged into adulthood content with his lot? And, conversely, how satisfying to hear that almost without exception, the untroubled, popular kids at school have ended up blandly as accountants, solicitors or ‘in IT’. Hold on, misfits, your day will come.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

Love , School , Soul , Imagination

“In this sense the Negro problem is not only America's greatest failure but also America's incomparably great opportunity for the future. If America should follow its own deepest convictions, its well-being at home would be increased directly. At the same time America's prestige and power abroad would rise immensely.”

Gunnar Myrdal book An American Dilemma

Source: An American Dilemma (1944), p. 1021

Home , Failure , Problem , Sense

“A generation on the verge of being lost, have been found.”

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

2010s, 2014, U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit Spousal Program (August 2014)

“When people are uncertain about what is right and what is wrong, and anxious about being considered old-fashioned, it seems to be worse than folly that Christians are still arguing about doctrinal matters which can only bring needless distress to a number of people.”

Charles, Prince of Wales (1948) son of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom

Clifford Longley, "Handicaps of royalty are highlighted by Prince's controversial remarks", The Times, Monday, 3 July 1978, p. 2
Speech to the International Congress of the Salvation Army at the Empire Pool, Wembley, 30 June 1978. Senior British Roman Catholics took this as an attack on their Church and pointed to the religious disabilities attaching to the succession to the throne.
1970s

People , Fashion

“One very hot day when he and I were out with Mom, we got very thirsty and started to walk over to a public water fountain. Mom reminded us that we must use the "coloreds" fountain. Being somewhat rambunctious, however, we made sure no one was watching us, and then we drank, first from the forbidden "whites only" fountain, and after that from the "coloreds" fountain. Then we looked at each other and said, "You know what? The 'whites only' water tastes just the same as the 'coloreds' does!"”

Herman Cain (1945) American writer, businessman and activist

pp. 24-25 http://books.google.com/books?id=hdhWF9bVqXwC&pg=PA24
2010s, This is Herman Cain!: My Journey to the White House (2011)

Color , Moms , Water

“This light within may indeed prove to be the witness of God in my being, but it is not God himself.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The City of God and the True God as its Head (In Royce’s “The Conception of God: a Philosophical Discussion Concerning the Nature of the Divine Idea as a Demonstrable Reality”), p.112

God , Light

“A tendency toward the abstract is inherent in linear expression: graphic imagery being confined to outlines has a fairy-like quality and at the same time can achieve great precision.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Section I
1916 - 1920, Creative Credo (1920)

Time

“What exactly did these words, of both the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, mean? They meant that there was no difference, between one human being, and another human being, that made one the master and the other the servant. As Jefferson once put it, some men are not born with saddles on their backs, nor are others born booted and spurred to ride them. That a man or woman rides a horse corresponds with the difference in their natures. No injustice is done to the horse! That an ox should pull a plow, while a man walks behind, is according to nature. In these cases, servitude follows from the laws of nature. But these same laws of nature tell us that when a human being is subjected to other human beings as if he were a horse or an ox, the laws of nature are violated. All human beings are accordingly equal in their right not to be enslaved, and in their right to be in secure possession of their lives, liberties, and property. To this end they have a right to be governed only by laws to which they have consented.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, God Bless America (2008), The American Proposition

Men , Law , Nature , Horse

“The noise against me is only the means by which the Jews and Communists are attempting and with good success to implement a further dismemberment of Germany. I think that if I resigned as I threatened to do yesterday, it would simply discredit me to no purpose... This august lady [Fifteenth Army]... has the job of reviewing the strategy and tactics of the war to see how the former conformed to the unit plans and how the tactics changed. Were it not for the fact that it will be, so far as I am concerned, a kick up stairs, I would like it much better than being a sort of executioner to the best race in Europe.
Later when people wake up to what is going on here, I can admit why I took the job.
Am I weak and a coward? Am I putting my posthumous reputation above my present honor? God how I wish I knew…
P. S. No one gives a damn how well Bavaria is run. All they are interested in now is how well it is ruined.”

George S. Patton (1885–1945) United States Army general

Letter to Beatrice (29 September 1945), published in The Patton Papers (1996), edited by Martin Blumenson Vol. 2 , p. 786 https://books.google.com/books?id=XGP_AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA786

God , War , People , Thinking

“But such meanness can incite you to achieve great things. I take insults - insults to my physical being, to my mental being, to my pride - very deeply. I can't shake them off! I bear these insults to my sense of fair play and justice to this day. It's almost an inextinguishable flame, which is why I make a very bad enemy. I just felt "I want to show you. I will show you." From early on, I developed this strong anger which, in many ways, propelled me forward in life.”

Robert Kuok (1923) Malaysian businessman

Cap 1 "Moulded by Mother"

Life , Justice , Way , Sense