Quotes about blind
page 10

“Fanaticism has been properly described as redoubling one’s effort after one’s aim has been forgotten, and this definition will serve as a good introduction to the fallacy of technology, which is the conclusion that because a thing can be done it must be done. The means absorb completely, and man becomes blind to the very concept of ends.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 60.

Effort

“Little by little it became evident that those who used great gifts, and even genius, to establish the truth of the after life, or to seek contact with their beloved dead, suffered from a strange blindness, and obtuseness of the spirit.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XII: The Last Terrestrials; Section 1, “The Cult of Evanescence” (p. 176)

Life, Truth, Suffering, Dead

“Left hemisphere industrialism has blinded the Chinese to the effects of our alphabet: pattern recognition is in the right hemisphere.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 81

“What he feared most was the blind spot between us and the future, the space between identities where we could get lost forever.”

Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) English-American novelist and essayist

"George Orwell, Artist" (1972), p. 46
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Fear, Future

“Though acts of reception and of understanding are in some measure fictions of ordered intuition, myths of reason, this truth does not justify the denial of intentional conduct. It is as absurd to discard as mendacious, as anarchically opaque, the bearing of contextual probability and suggestion, as it is to invest in such probability any blind trust. The negations of post-structuralism and of certain varieties of deconstruction are precisely as dogmatic, as political as were the positivist equations of archival historicism. The "emptiness of meaning" postulate is no less a priori, no less a case of despotic reductionism than were, say, the axioms of economic and psycho-sociological causality in regard to the generation of meaning in literature and the arts in turn-of-the-century pragmatism and scientism.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 3 (pp. 174-175).

Truth, Art, Literature, Understanding

“the technical work of scientists is blind to nationalities, they overlap and mingle like sounds from different instruments in an orchestra to create and constitute the grand symphony that science is.”

Varadaraja V. Raman (1932) American physicist

page 13
Truth and Tension in Science and Religion

Science

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, Speech to the Democratic National Convention (1936)

Democracy, Freedom, Forgetting

“But first me behoveth to tell you as anent my feebleness, wretchedness and blindness. — I have said in the beginning: And in this all my pain was suddenly taken from me: of which pain I had no grief nor distress as long as the Fifteen Shewings lasted following. And at the end all was close, and I saw no more. And soon I felt that I should live and languish; and anon my sickness came again: first in my head with a sound and a din, and suddenly all my body was fulfilled with sickness like as it was afore. And I was as barren and as dry as I never had comfort but little. And as a wretched creature I moaned and cried for feeling of my bodily pains and for failing of comfort, spiritual and bodily.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Fifteenth Revelation, Chapter 66

Pain, Feeling

“Knowing when you don’t know the answer and being honest about it is one of the greatest skills you can have. If you aim to be perfect, you’ll only end up disappointed. When you admit your blind spots, people will flock to support you.”

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

People, Disappointment, Support, Perfection

“You know the story of the famous seer Phineus whom the Argonauts consulted when they stopped in Salmydessos in Thrace on their way to Colchis to get the golden fleece. He was blind, but not entirely blind - he could see just enough to see that he could not see. And the little flickering spots of light that forced themselves on him were wind-harpies trying to steal from him his prophetic power. So he would beg everyone to make him blind, to rid him of the harpies. But people laughed at him because, so far as they could tell, he was as blind as any man needed to be. Only Hercules understood, because his spirit extended into the divine shadows. Only Hercules had the courage to make the blind Phineus blind.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

Cassandra in A Trojan Ending (London: Constable, 1937)

People, Way, Courage, Light

“The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people’s reproductive behaviour, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not.”

Germaine Greer (1939) Australian feminist author

Source: Sex and Destiny : The Politics of Human Fertility (1984), Chapter 14

People, World

“I saw Stay as You Are and Tess only. I didn't ask her if she saw every movie I did. I could never think about that. Why do I have to see every movie she did? Why? Sometimes she did movies with people I was bored by. I don't care about this or that director. So if she is so beautiful in a movie, it is because of her, not a director. So why should I see the movie then? As long as I am not blind, I don't need a dog to see. If I am blind, maybe I would like the dog to lead me. I am not blind. I don't have to see her movies. I know my child.”

Klaus Kinski (1926–1991) German actor

On his daughter, Nastassja, as quoted in Denise Worrell (1989), Icons: Intimate Portraits.

People, Beauty, Dogs, Thinking

“The larger the corporation, the greater the risk that you are flying blind.”

Patrick Dixon book Futurewise

Futurewise (1998)

Flying

“It is the English, not their Government; for if they were not blind cowards, they would lynch Chamberlain and Halifax and all the other smarmy traitors.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Letter to his parents (27 June 1939), from Simon Heffer, Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell (Phoenix, 1999), p. 53.
1930s

“Without mathematics, we are blind.”

Alain Badiou (1937) French writer and philosopher

Original French: Hors les mathématiques, nous sommes aveugles.
From Court traité d'ontologie transitoire. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998. ISBN 2020348853.

Mathematics

“Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

Money, Effort, Evil

“According to our analysis the uniformity of behaviour manifested by these groups was the outcome of a disparity in the rates of change possible in the technical organisation, on the one hand, and in the social organisation, on the other. The social sentiments and customs of work of the employees were unable to accommodate themselves to the rapid technical innovations introduced. The result was to incite a blind resistance to all innovations and to provoke the formation of a social organisation at a lower level in opposition to the technical organisation.”

Fritz Roethlisberger (1898–1974) American business theorist

Cited in: Urwick & Brech (1961: 186)
Management and the worker, 1939

Change

“Never has so much indifference masqueraded as so much compassion; never has there been such willful blindness. The once pragmatic English have become a nation of sleepwalkers.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Seeing Is Not Believing.
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Indifference

“His meaning is to fasten it faithfully in our heart: for He willeth that it dwell with us in faith to our life’s end, and after in fulness of joy, desiring that we have ever steadfast trust in His blissful behest — knowing His Goodness.
For our faith is contraried in diverse manners by our own blindness, and our spiritual enemy, within and without; and therefore our precious Lover helpeth us with spiritual sight and true teaching in sundry manners within and without, whereby that we may know Him. And therefore in whatsoever manner He teacheth us, He willeth that we perceive Him wisely, receive Him sweetly, and keep us in Him faithfully. For above the Faith is no goodness kept in this life, as to my sight, and beneath the Faith is no help of soul; but in the Faith, there willeth the Lord that we keep us. For we have by His goodness and His own working to keep us in the Faith; and by His sufferance through ghostly enmity we are assayed in the Faith and made mighty. For if our faith had none enmity, it should deserve no meed, according to the understanding that I have in all our Lord’s teaching.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Sixteenth Revelation, Chapter 70

Life, Faith, Soul, Lovers

“Imagine!, the two most important Sahabah in Islam, racing to help an old blind woman, at night and at the edge of the city!.”

Mohammed Alkobaisi (1970) Iraqi Islamic scholar

Understanding Islam, "Morals and Ethics" http://vod.dmi.ae/media/96716/Ep_03_Morals_and_Ethics Dubai Media

Imagination, Help, Night

“The first step is to measure whatever can easily be measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.”

Charles Handy (1932) Irish economist

The Empty Raincoat (1994); About the McNamara fallacy

Suicide

“A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane.”

Aldous Huxley book Grey Eminence

Grey Eminence (1940)

World

“The ultimate end of education is not a perfection in the accomplishments of the school, but fitness for life; not the acquirement of habits of blind obedience, and of prescribed diligence, but a preparation for independent action. We must bear in mind that whatever class of society a pupil may belong to, whatever calling he may be intended for, there are certain faculties in human nature common to all, which constitute the stock of the fundamental energies of man. We have no right to withhold from any one the opportunities for developing all their faculties. It may be judicious to treat some of them with marked attention, and to give up the idea of bringing others to high perfection. The diversity of talent and inclination, of plans and pursuits, is a sufficient proof of the necessity for such a distinction. But I repeat that we have no right to shut out the child from the development of those faculties also, which we may not for the present conceive to be very essential for his future calling or station in life.”

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) Swiss pedagogue and educational reformer

Letters on Infants' Education (1819)

Life, Education, School, Idea

“By the glare of false science betray’d,
That leads to bewilder, and dazzles to blind.”

James Beattie (1735–1803) Scottish poet, moralist and philosopher

The Hermit

Science, Falseness

“As a former denizen of Harvard, I’ve had to learn that a sense of reality doesn’t always flourish in elite institutions. It is the street virtue par excellence. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what’s what than Nobel Prize winners. The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to confront the world every day and learn, mostly from our mistakes, what works and what doesn’t. Yet even lengthy experience can fail us in life and in politics. Experience can imprison decision-makers in worn-out solutions while blinding them to the untried remedy that does the trick.”

Michael Ignatieff (1947) professor at Harvard Kennedy School and former Canadian politician

Getting Iraq Wrong http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/magazine/05iraq-t.html?ei=5070&en=1c14886ef4740931&ex=1187409600&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print&_r=0, The New York Times, August 5, 2007.

Life, World, Way, Reality

“Who can believe that all these mighty works
Have grown, unaided by the hand of God,
From small beginnings? that the law is blind
by which the world was made?”
Quis credat tantas operum sine numine moles Ex minimis, caecoque creatum foedere mundum?

Marcus Manilius Astronomica

Book I, line 492, as reported in Dictionary of Quotations (classical) (1897) by T. B. Harbottle, p. 240.
Astronomica

God, World, Law

“I have just been thinking that the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) does not really represent my work. I have always been convinced that other things of mine are more important… Narcism, fake heroism, and blindness have a lot to answer for, in the 'Blaue Reiter'. All those high-sounding words about the birth of a great spiritual moment still resounding in my ears. Kandinsky can air his personal opinion about that or any other revolution he cares to mention. But I dislike the whole thing… Take my advice – work, and don't spent so much time thinking about blue riders or blue horses.”

August Macke (1887–1914) German painter of the expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter

In a letter to his friend Franz Marc (Jan. 1912), quoted in 'Meseure 38'; as quoted in Movement, Manifesto, Melee: The Modernist Group, 1910-1914, Milton A. Cohen, Lexington Books, Sep 14, 2004, p. 73, (note 19)

Birth, Thinking, Time, Horse

“For his purposes (and mine), scientific medicine is defined as the set of practices which submit themselves to the ordeal of being tested. Alternative medicine is defined as that set of practices which cannot be tested, refuse to be tested, or consistently fail tests. If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine. Conversely, if a technique devised by the President of the Royal College of Physicians consistently fails in double-blind trials, it will cease to be a part of 'orthodox' medicine. Whether it will then become 'alternative' will depend upon whether it is adopted by a sufficiently ambitious quack”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

there are always sufficiently gullible patients
Foreword to Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations by John Diamond, Vintage, 2001.
Forewords

Parting, Dependency

“Bran said, “Why should some of the riders of the Dark be dressed all in white and the rest all in black?”
“Without color….” Will said reflectively. “I don’t know. Maybe because the Dark can only reach people at extremes—blinded by their own shining ideas, or locked up in the darkness of their own heads.””

Susan Cooper (1935) English fantasy writer

Source: The Dark Is Rising (1965-1977), Silver on the Tree (1977), Chapter 10 “The Rose-Garden” (p. 146)

People, Color, Idea

“She was moved by a kind of commiseration for Madame Ratignolle — a pity for that colorless existence which never uplifted its possessor beyond the region of blind contentment, in which no moment of anguish ever visited her soul, in which she would never have the taste of life's delirium.”

Kate Chopin book The Awakening

The Awakening (1899)

Life, Soul

“Love is blind, but desire just doesn't give a good goddam.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

sic
"The Clothes Moth and the Luna Moth", The New Yorker (date unknown); Further Fables for Our Time (1956)
From Fables for Our Time and Further Fables for Our Time

Love

“Blind aggressiveness would destroy the attack itself, not the defense.”

Carl von Clausewitz book On War

On War (1832), Book 1

“In ancient Israel and Rome the judge had appeared as a stand-in for the divine, and corruption was a blinding of the representative of the divine.”

John T. Noonan Jr. (1926–2017) United States federal judge

Part I, Chapter 4, p. 88
Bribes 1984

Appearance

“It is utterly hypocritical for Congress to extol the virtues of a color-blind society while officially sanctioning caucuses that are based solely on race and restrict their membership based on race.”

Tom Tancredo (1945) American politician

Tom Tancredo to Juanita Millender-MacDonald http://tancredo.house.gov/media/2007.01.25%20Tancredo%20to%20House%20Administration.pdf. (January 25, 2007).

Color

“My room overlooks the park and yesterday during the afternoon I'd opened up all the blinds and taken back the curtains so I could look out over the park. Come nightfall, I was grooving to some rap record in my room, bopping around the room for maybe half an hour. I don't know what I was doing, just messing around…and at one stage I looked out of the window and there were about 200 people looking up, clapping, applauding my dancing. That was funny.”

The Edge (1961) Irish rock musician, guitar player of U2

On dancing

People, Dance

“We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

14th time lucky (2005)

Light

“There is a wheel within a wheel; a secret sacred wheel of Providence (most visible in marriages), guided by His hand that allows not the race to the swift nor bread to the wise, nor good wives to good men: and He that can bring good out of evil (for mortals are blind to this reason) only knows why this blessing was denied to patient Job, to meek Moses, and to our as meek and patient Mr Hooker.”

Richard Hooker (1554–1600) English bishop and Anglican Divine

Izaak Walton, in Philip B. Secor, Richard Hooker: Prophet of Anglicanism and Son of Exeter http://www.exeter-cathedral.org.uk/Clergy/Hooker.html. Walton (August 9, 1593 - December 15, 1683) was the chief biographer of Hooker. About

Men, Marriage, Secret, Evil

“I became aware of Louise Bourgeois in my first or second year at Brighton Art College. One of my teachers, Stuart Morgan, curated a small retrospective of her work at the Serpentine, and both he and another teacher, Edward Allington, saw something in her, and me, and thought I should be aware of her. I thought the work was wonderful. It was her very early pieces, The Blind Leading the Blind, the wooden pieces and some of the later bronze works. Biographically, I don't really think she has influenced me, but I think there are similarities in our work. We have both used the home as a kind of kick-off point, as the space that starts the thoughts of a body of work. I eventually got to meet Louise in New York, soon after I made House. She asked to see me because she had seen a picture of House in the New York Times while she was ironing it one morning, so she said. She was wonderful and slightly kind of nutty; very interested and eccentric. She drew the whole time; it was very much a salon with me there as her audience, watching her. I remember her remarking that I was shorter than she was. I don't know if this was true but she was commenting on the physicality of making such big work and us being relatively small women. When you meet her you don't know what's true, because she makes things up. She has spun her web and drawn people in, and eaten a few people along the way.”

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) American and French sculptor

Rachel Whiteread, " Kisses for Spiderwoman http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2007/oct/14/art2," The Guardian, 14 Oct. 2007:

Women, People, Art, Way

“I am not blind to the shortcomings of the previous government: Before the coup, I supported the June 30 rallies against Morsy…. The military takeover aims to uproot the Muslim Brotherhood and its partners, replacing them through brute force with the losers of a democratic ballot”

Tawakkol Karman (1979) Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

2010s, Morsy is the Arab World's Mandela (2013)

Support

“At Bishop they learn'd that Dixon had been buried in back of the Quaker Meeting-House in Staindrop. Doctor Isaac stay'd with his Father, step for step. At the grave, which by Quaker custom was unmark'd, Mason beseech'd what dismally little he knew of God, to help Dixon through. The grass was long and beaded with earlier rain. A Cat emerg'd from it and star'd for a long time, appearing to know them.
"Dad?" Doc had taken his arm. For an instant, unexpectedly, Mason saw the little Boy who, having worried about Storms at Sea, as Beasts in the Forest, came running each time to make sure his father had return'd safely, — whose gift of ministering to others Mason was never able to see, let alone accept, in his blind grieving, his queasiness of Soul before a life and a death, his refusal to touch the Baby, tho' 'twas not possible to blame him…. The Boy he had gone to the other side of the Globe to avoid was looking at him now with nothing in his face but concern for his Father.
"Oh, Son."”

Thomas Pynchon Mason & Dixon

He shook his Head. He didn't continue.
"It's your Mate," Doctor Isaac assur'd him, "It's what happens when your Mate dies."
Mason & Dixon (1997)

Life, Death, God, Soul

“Affection is blind reason.”

James Howell (1594–1666) Anglo-Welsh historian and writer

Lexicon Tetraglotton (1660)

“What reason had he then for endeavouring, with such bitter hostility, to force me into the senate yesterday? Was I the only person who was absent? Have you not repeatedly had thinner houses than yesterday? Or was a matter of such importance under discussion, that it was desirable for even sick men to be brought down? Hannibal, I suppose, was at the gates, or there was to be a debate about peace with Pyrrhus; on which occasion it is related that even the great Appius, old and blind as he was, was brought down to the senate-house.”
Quid tandem erat causae, cur in senatum hesterno die tam acerbe cogerer? Solusne aberam, an non saepe minus frequentes fuistis, an ea res agebatur, ut etiam aegrotos deferri oporteret? Hannibal, credo, erat ad portas, aut de Pyrrhi pace agebatur, ad quam causam etiam Appium illum et caecum et senem delatum esse memoriae proditum est.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Philippica I; English translation by C. D. Yonge
Potentially the origin of the phrase "Hannibal ad portas" (Hannibal at the gates)
Philippicae – Philippics (44 BC)

Men, Hostility, Peace, Housing

“The most unfair things that could have happened in a society fell upon a blind man. This is something that no one can accept or explain away with any excuse. Everyone will ask: 'Do we actually have to exist in a society like this?”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, Ai Weiwei Says Blind Dissident’s Escape Will Inspire Chinese, 2012

“Just sit back and listen to some of the clamorous grievances against the contemporary global system. Our list does not pretend to be comprehensive, and the partiality of its selections will undoubtedly reveal our own blindnesses, but it should nonetheless give a sense of the range and depth of today's grievances.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

270
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Sense

“There is oftentimes a great deal of knowledge where there is but little wisdom to improve that knowledge. It is not the most knowing Christian but the most wise Christian that sees, avoids, and escapes Satan's snares. Knowledge without wisdom is like mettle in a blind horse, which is often an occasion of the rider's fall.”

Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) English Puritan

Quote reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895). p. 365.
Quotes from secondary sources

Wisdom, Knowledge, Horse

“Colour-blindness always extends to the complementary colours. Those who are red blind are also green blind; those who are blind to blue have no consciousness of yellow. This law holds good for all mental phenomena; it is a fundamental condition of consciousness.”

Otto Weininger book Sex and Character

Source: Sex and Character (1903), p. 110.

Law

“Alas! what boots it with incessant care
To tend the homely slighted shepherd's trade,
And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?
Were it not better done as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair?
Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days;
But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with th' abhorrèd shears,
And slits the thin-spun life.”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 64; comparable to: "Erant quibus appetentior famæ videretur, quando etiam sapientibus cupido gloriae novissima exuitur" (Translated: "Some might consider him as too fond of fame, for the desire of glory clings even to the best of men longer than any other passion"), Tacitus, Historiae, iv. 6; said of Helvidius Priscus.

Life, Hope, Home, Thinking

“Segregating science and spirituality has been the greatest crime against humanity in the past century. These two main branches of knowledge that should have gone hand in hand were divided and practitioners were either labeled as modern scientists or representatives of religious faiths. “Only scientific discoveries apply to logic and intelligence. They are the only truth. Religious faith is blind and misguided.” This was the ideology that was popularized. All the recent natural disasters and the alarming changes in the global climate are challenging the further survival of this beautiful earth we live in. Now, many people cannot help thinking that all this may be the result of weighing science and spirituality on opposite sides of a scale and deeming that one is much greater than the other.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

From Amritanandamayi's Address at the United Nations Academic Impact Conference on Technology for Sustainable Development (2015)

People, Truth, Faith, Beauty

“His fault was a common one. He simply did not know what he was; he saw no flaw in himself, a not unusual blindness and preferable, on the whole, to being unable to find any virtue in oneself.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Source: 1960s, Julian (1964), Chapter 6

“So strange is Chance, so blind the purposes of men!”
Pro fors et caeca futuri mens hominum!

Statius book Thebaid

Source: Thebaid, Book V, Line 718 (tr. J. H. Mozley)

Men, Chance

“The waitress took a bar rag, and she wiped it across her eyes.
And as she spoke her voice came out as something like a sigh.
She said "I wish that I was beautiful, or that you were halfway blind.
And I wish I weren't so dog-gone fat, I wish that you were mine.
And I wish that you'd come with me, when I leave for home.
For we both know all about loneliness, and livin' all alone."”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Better Place to Be
Song lyrics, Sniper and Other Love Songs (1972)

Beauty, Dogs, Home, Loneliness

“A horrid Monster, huge, deform'd, and blind.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro (2nd ed. 1654), Virgil's Æneis

“Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet
Writing a language dumb,
With never a spark in the empty dark
To hint at a life to come.”

Langdon Smith Evolution

Evolution (1895; 1909)

Life

“The same influences have persisted throughout my career: Stan Brakhage, Warhol, John Ford, Chaplin. Toxie's blind girlfriend is straight out of City Lights. And Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels; the school for the blind in Toxic Avenger Part II, that's from Sullivan's Travels. Most of what influenced me were classic American movies. I like Renoir a lot; I like Fritz Lang's American movies. In fact, I tried to re-enact the first shot of The Big Heat in Terror Firmer, where the guy blows his brains.”

Lloyd Kaufman (1945) American film director

Village Voice http://www.villagevoice.com/2014-01-15/film/troma-lloyd-kaufman-interview/ January 15, 2014 2014

School, Travel, Guy, Light

“At the end of time,
when the many become one,
the last storm shall gather
its angry winds
to destroy a land already dying.
And at its center, the blind man shall stand
upon his own grave.
There he shall see again,
and weep for what has been wrought.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Ending
(27 October 2009)

Time

“The rights of all private property owners, even those whose actions decent people find abhorrent, must be respected if we are to maintain a free society… Federal bureaucrats and judges cannot read minds to see if actions are motivated by racism. Therefore, the only way the federal government could ensure an employer was not violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to ensure that the racial composition of a business's workforce matched the racial composition of a bureaucrat or judge's defined body of potential employees… Racial quotas have not contributed to racial harmony or advanced the goal of a color-blind society. Instead, these quotas encouraged racial balkanization, and fostered racial strife… Relations between the races have improved despite, not because of, the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

The Trouble With the '64 Civil Rights Act
LewRockwell.com
2004-06-03
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul188.html
2000s, 2001-2005

People, Color, Way, Motivation

“Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”

Adam Ferguson book An Essay on the History of Civil Society

PART III, SECTION II.
An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767)

Age, Future

“I am not speaking, obviously, to the laughing hyenas who enjoy seeing images of the wreckage and snicker good–it–serves–the–Americans–right. I am speaking to those who, though not stupid or evil, are wallowing in prudence and doubt. And to them I say: "Wake up, people. Wake up!!" Intimidated as you are by your fear of going against the current—that is, appearing racist (a word which is entirely inapt as we are speaking not about a race but about a religion)—you don’t understand or don’t want to understand that a reverse–Crusade is in progress. Accustomed as you are to the double–cross, blinded as you are by myopia, you don’t understand or don’t want to understand that a war of religion is in progress. Desired and declared by a fringe of that religion, perhaps, but a war of religion nonetheless. A war which they call Jihad. Holy War. A war that might not seek to conquer our territory, but that certainly seeks to conquer our souls. That seeks the disappearance of our freedom and our civilization. That seeks to annihilate our way of living and dying, our way of praying or not praying, our way of eating and drinking and dressing and entertaining and informing ourselves. You don’t understand or don’t want to understand that if we don’t oppose them, if we don’t defend ourselves, if we don’t fight, the Jihad will win. And it will destroy the world that for better or worse we’ve managed to build, to change, to improve, to render a little more intelligent, that is to say, less bigoted—or even not bigoted at all. And with that it will destroy our culture, our art, our science, our morals, our values, our pleasures… Christ! Don’t you realize that the Osama Bin Ladens feel authorized to kill you and your children because you drink wine or beer, because you don’t wear your beard long or a chador, because you go to the theater or the movies, because you listen to music and sing pop songs, because you dance in discos or at home, because you watch TV, wear miniskirts or short–shorts, because you go naked or half naked to the beach or the pool, because you *** when you want and where you want and who you want? Don’t you even care about that, you fools? I am an atheist, thank God. And I have no intention of letting myself be killed for it.”

Oriana Fallaci book The Rage and the Pride

"Rage and the Pride">Oriana Fallaci - The Rage and the Pride http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rage-Pride-Oriana-Fallaci/dp/084782599X - Universe Publishing; Intl edition, 2002, ISBN 9780847825998

God, War, Children, People

“We have created a false dichotomy between behaviors attributable to companion animals and those of other species that blinds us to the inherent worth and needs of all animals.
The problem is that we have constructed a society in which we are rarely forced to think about where what we consume comes from, and this extends to the animals reared for our consumption. While we pamper one set of animals, another set of animals becomes our food. The main difference is that we come to know one set of these animals, while the other set is raised and killed for us, delivered in plastic wrap and Styrofoam, and served up as dinner. If nothing else, this belies the deep moral confusion that we have about animals as a culture.”

Bob Torres American podcaster

Source: Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights (2007), p. 2

Food, Behavior, Problem, Thinking

“It's bad to use words like 'genius' unless you are talking about the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, the black Chatterton of the 80s who, during a picturesque career as sexual hustler, addict and juvenile art-star, made a superficial mark on the cultural surface by folding the conventions of street graffiti into those of art brut before killing himself with an overdose at the age of twenty-seven. The first stage of Basquiat's fate, in the mid-80s, was to be effusively welcomed by an art industry so trivialized by fashion and blinded by money that it couldn't tell a scribble from a Leonardo. Its second stage was to be dropped by the same audience, when the novelty of his work wore off. The third was an attempt at apotheosis four years after his death, with a large retrospective at the Whitney Museum designed to sanitise his short, frantic life and position him as a kind of all-purpose, inflatable martyr-figure, thus restoring the dollar value of his oeuvre in a time of collapsing prices for American contemporary art. One contributor to the catalogue proclaimed that "Jean remains wrapped in the silent purple toga of immortality"; another opined that "he is as close to Goya as American painting has ever produced." A third, not to be outdone, extolled Basquiat's "punishing regime of self-abuse" as part of "the disciplines imposed by the principle of inverse ascetism to which he was so resolutely committed."”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

These disciplines of inverse ascetism, one sees, mean shooting smack until you drop dead.
Page 195
Culture of Complaint (1993)

Life, Death, Money, Fate

“You see, when a blind beetle crawls over the surface of a globe he doesn't notice that the track he has covered is curved. I was lucky enough to have spotted it.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Attributed to Einstein in Carl Seelig's Albert Einstein: A Documentary Biography (1956), p. 80 http://books.google.com/books?id=VCbPAAAAMAAJ&q=%22blind+beetle%22#search_anchor. Said to have been a comment he made to his son Eduard when Eduard asked him, at age 9, "Why are you actually so famous, papa?" Attributed in posthumous publications

“Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology — contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Obama Surfs Through (2008)

Rage, Evil, Time, Heart

“Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime.
:”

Imre Lakatos (1921–1974) Hungarian mathematician, philosopher

“In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire,
Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned!
His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls
The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat
To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power,
On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry
He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more.
But when one, fearless, turned and clawed like bronze,
Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws,
And he would weigh the heavier on those after.
Who rests in God's mean flattery now? Your wealth
Is but his cunning to make death more hard.
Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking.
And he has made the market for your beauty
Too poor to buy, although you die to sell.
Only that he has never heard of sleep;
And when the cats come out the rats are sly.
Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn.
But he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots,
And in the morning some pale wonder ceases.
Things are not strange and strange things are forgetful.
Ah! if the day were arid, somehow lost
Out of us, but it is as hair of us,
And only in the hush no wind stirs it.
And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes,
And restlessness still shadows the lost ways.
The fingers shut on voices that pass through,
Where blind farewells are taken easily...
Ah! this miasma of a rotting God!”

Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) English poet

written 1916 or before
On Receiving News of the War (1914), God

Death, Women, Men, God

“Love to faults is always blind,
Always is to joys inclined,
Lawless, winged, and unconfined,
And breaks all chains from every mind.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Love to Faults
1790s, Poems from Blake's Notebook (c. 1791-1792)

Love, Joy

“For a while I was most well known for that [the Janis Joplin album cover], and for “Keep on Truckin’.” That was a drawing that came out of LSD trips, and the words came from a Blind Boy Fuller song from 1935. I drew it in my sketchbook and then for Zap. It sort of caught the popular imagination. It became a horrible popular thing.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

"R. Crumb, The Art of Comics No. 1" http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6017/the-art-of-comics-no-1-r-crumb, The Paris Review, Summer 2010, No. 193.

Imagination, Boy, Drawing

“Repetition is useful, but continuous use of mechanical repetition also has harmful effects. It is dangerous because it easily induces habits of sheer mechanized action, blindness, tendencies to perform slavishly instead of thinking, instead of facing a problem freely.”

Max Wertheimer (1880–1943) Co-founder of Gestalt psychology

Source: Productive thinking, 1945, p. 112

Problem, Thinking

“People ask the way to Cold Mountain.
Cold Mountain? There is no road that goes through.
Even in summer the ice doesn't melt;
Though the sun comes out, the fog is blinding.
How can you hope to get there by aping me?
Your heart and mine are not alike.
If your heart were the same as mine,
Then you could journey to the very center!”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T'ang Poet Han-shan

People, Hope, Way, Mountain

“But the stock market is not 1:1-it is not a zero sum game. So those deaf, dumb and blind economists can't find the capital flows.”

Andy Kessler (1958) American writer

Part VII, The Margin Surplus, Wealth How?, p. 261.
Running Money (2004) First Edition

Game

“I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programmes a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature. To which I reply and say, "Well, it's funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the Almighty, always quote beautiful things. They always quote orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses." But I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he's five years old. And I reply and say, "Well, presumably the God you speak about created the worm as well," and now, I find that baffling to credit a merciful God with that action. And therefore it seems to me safer to show things that I know to be truth, truthful and factual, and allow people to make up their own minds about the moralities of this thing, or indeed the theology of this thing.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

From the BBC documentary Life on Air (2002)

God, People, Truth, Beauty

“I prize every candle in the darkness of the universe, even if it is not a supernova of blinding illumination.”

Thomas Flanagan (political scientist) (1944) author, academic, and political activist

Source: Game Theory and Canadian Politics (1998), Chapter 10, What Have We Learned?, p. 170 (Last text line...).

Universe

“Deny it as may the cunning capitalists who are clear-sighted enough to perceive it, or ignore it as may the torpid workers who are too blind and unthinking to see it, the struggle in which we are engaged today is a class struggle, and as the toiling millions come to see and understand it and rally to the political standard of their class, they will drive all capitalist parties of whatever name into the same party, and the class struggle will then be so clearly revealed that the hosts of labor will find their true place in the conflict and strike the united and decisive blow that will destroy slavery and achieve their full and final emancipation.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

The Socialist Party and the Working Class (1904)

Understanding, Decision

“The mystery brings peace to my eyes, not blindness.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

El misterio apacigua mis ojos, no los ciega.
Voces (1943)

Peace

“Hayek’s blind spot with regard to politics was clear in the early 1980s when the first Thatcher government, in an attempt to reduce inflation and bring the public finances closer to a balanced budget, was raising interest rates and cutting public spending. As he had done during the 1930s, Hayek attacked these policies as not being severe enough. It would be better, he told me in a conversation we had around this time, if Thatcher imposed a more drastic contraction on the economy so that the wage-setting power of the trade unions could be broken. He appeared unfazed by unemployment, which was already higher (more than three million people) than at any time since the 1930s, and would rise much further if his recommendations were accepted.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Friedrich Hayek I knew, and what he got right - and wrong (2015)

People, Appearance, Time

“Correctly understood, the phrase “tyranny of values” may supply the key to the understanding that all thinking about values only foments and intensifies the old and endless struggle between convictions and interests. Not much is gained by what the modern philosophy of values acknowledges as the “fundamental relationship,” according to which, occasionally the lower value may be preferred to the higher value, because that is the prerequisite of the higher value. All that points only to the confusion that affects the whole argumentation about values, which continually gives rise to new relations and points of view, thereby the position is always maintained from which the opponent is reproached that he does not heed the manifest values; or, in other words, he is disqualified as value-blind. The polemical utilization of the word “blind” is adequate to the logic of values as long as it is concerned with the systems of reference that it will build up out of viewpoints, standpoints, and vantage-points.”

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) German jurist, political theorist and professor of law

"The Tyranny of Values" (1959)

Understanding, Thinking

“I see the maths face quite a lot. It’s the blind panic that they have to do maths in front of people. It’s just fear and dread. There’s definitely a maths face – try it on someone.”

Rachel Riley (1986) television presenter

Interview, The Observer, 12 Oct 2014 http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/oct/12/rachel-riley-countdown-stop-saying-girls-arent-good-at-maths

People, Fear

“The most striking quality that humans and animals have in common is the capacity to experience suffering. Why do we still blind ourselves, now at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to the immeasurable suffering that we inflict on animals, knowing that a great part of the pain that we cause them is neither necessary nor unavoidable? Certainly we should know that there is no moral justification for inflicting needless pain and death on any being.”

Matthieu Ricard (1946) French writer and Buddhist monk

Introduction, p. 4
A Plea for the Animals (2014)

Death, Pain, Suffering, Animals

“The enemies of the Soviet state calculate that the heavy loss we have borne will lead to disorder and confusion in our ranks. But their expectations are in vain: bitter disillusionment awaits them. He who is not blind sees that our party, during its difficult days, is closing its ranks still more closely, that it is united and unshakable.”

Lavrentiy Beria (1899–1953) Georgian Soviet NKVD police chief under fellow Georgian and Soviet leader Stalin

Quoted in “The Current Digest of the Soviet Press – Page 9 – by Joint Committee – World Politics – 1953

Loss

“My mood, I say, was one of exaltation. I felt as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind. I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap men on the back, fling people's hats astray, and generally revel in my extraordinary advantage.”

H. G. Wells book The Invisible Man

Source: The Invisible Man (1897), Chapter 21: In Oxford Street

Men, People, Mood, Clothes

“The audacity of the man would have seemed sublime if she had felt sure that he knew the difference between good and evil, between a lie and the truth; but the more she saw of him, the surer she was that his courage was mere moral paralysis, and that he talked about virtue and vice as a man who is colour-blind talks about red and green; he did not see them as she saw them; if left to choose for himself he would have nothing to guide him. Was it politics that had caused this atrophy of the moral senses by disuse? Meanwhile, here she sat face to face with a moral lunatic.”

Henry Adams book Democracy: An American Novel

Madeleine Lee assessing Senator Silas P. Ratcliffe in Ch. XIII
Democracy: An American Novel (1880)

Truth, Lie, Courage, Sense

“Are we no greater than the noise we make
Along one blind atomic pilgrimage
Whereon by crass chance billeted we go
Because our brains and bones and cartilage
Will have it so?”

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) American poet

The Man against the Sky (1950).

Chance

“It (i. e., advertising) was like horoscopes—enough blind stabs and some of them are bound to strike a target.”

Orson Scott Card Ender's Game hexalogy

Page 185
Ender's Game series, First Meetings in the Enderverse (2003), Investment Counselor

“We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond the senses.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

The Five-sensed World (1910)

Wisdom, Imagination, Courage, Sense

“Too often, though, the beauty that is thrust upon us is illusory and deceitful, superficial and blinding, leaving the onlooker dazed; instead of bringing him out of himself and opening him up to horizons of true freedom as it draws him aloft, it imprisons him within himself and further enslaves him, depriving him of hope and joy. It is a seductive but hypocritical beauty that rekindles desire, the will to power, to possess, and to dominate others, it is a beauty which soon turns into its opposite, taking on the guise of indecency, transgression or gratuitous provocation. Authentic beauty, however, unlocks the yearning of the human heart, the profound desire to know, to love, to go towards the Other, to reach for the Beyond.”

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

in Meeting with Artists http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2009/november/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20091121_artisti_en.html (21 November 2009) 2009

Love, Beauty, Hope, Freedom

“Like racism and sexism, statism is the kind of moral vice that tends to enter the soul through self-deception, semi-conscious osmosis, and a kind of Arendtian banality, rather than through a forthright embrace; it is a form of spiritual blindness that can, and does, infect even those who are largely sincere and well-meaning.”

Roderick Long (1964) American philosopher

"Equality: the Unknown Ideal" (2001)

Soul, Sincerity

“Even nowadays an archaic sense of love-innocence recurs, however briefly, among most young men and women. Some few of these, who become poets, remain in love for the rest of their lives, watching the world with a detachment unknown to lawyers, politicians, financiers, and all other ministers of that blind and irresponsible successor to matriarchy and patriarchy — the mechanarchy.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

Introduction Poems about Love (1969).
General sources

Love, Women, Men, World

“Nobody is really happy with what's on their head. People with straight hair want curly, people with curly want straight, and bald people want everyone to be blind.”

Rita Rudner (1953) American comedian

Essay 7: "Should I Get My Head Analyzed or Just My Hair?", p. 24
Naked Beneath My Clothes (1992)

Happiness, People

“Your Dollar is your only Word,
The wrath of it your only fear.
You build it altars tall enough
To make you see, but your are blind;
You cannot leave it long enough
To look before you or behind.”

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) American poet

Cassandra (1950).

Fear

“We have to let God's love break through the hard crust of our indifference, our spiritual weariness, our blind conformity to the spirit of this age. Only then can we let it ignite our imagination and shape our deepest desires. That is why prayer is so important: daily prayer, private prayer in the quiet of our hearts and before the Blessed Sacrament, and liturgical prayer in the heart of the Church.”

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

2008, Closing Mass (19 July 2008)

Love, God, Age, Imagination

“If I’m a young black man in South Central L. A., where poverty is rampant and unemployment is skyrocketing, I see that Washington’s promises of a year ago have gone unfulfilled, I see that perhaps for a second time, the court’s inability to mete out justice in a blind fashion, why shouldn’t I vent my anger?”

Bryant Gumbel (1948) American sportscaster

To U.S. Republican. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), April 15, 1993, Today. Real Video http://www.mediaresearch.org/rm/projects/99/Gumbel4/segment1.ram

Justice, Fashion, Time, Anger

“In this situation, it becomes vital that our own country orient its policies in consonance with this basic evolutionary condition rather than pursue a course blind to the reality that the colonial era is now past and the Asian peoples covet the right to shape their own free destiny. What they seek now is friendly guidance, understanding, and support — not imperious direction — the dignity of equality and not the shame of subjugation.”

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)

People, Understanding, Support, Reality

“Donor fatigue’ expresses itself precisely in the reduction of funding. ‘Compassion fatigue’ expresses itself less obviously in the reduction of concern. One is the consequence of the other. Can we afford to indulge in compassion fatigue? Is the cost of meeting the needs of refugees greater than the cost that would be consequent on turning an indifferent, if not a blind, eye on their suffering? I appeal to donors the world over to fulfill the needs of these people who are in search, often it must seem to them a vain search, of refuge.”

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

Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech (2012)

People, World, Search, Suffering

“You should've loved me baby
When redemption's too blind
Nature took my soul
And sin left a scar so wide
Time ravaged my body
And now I live in the house
Where the red light's always on”

Courtney Love (1964) American punk singer-songwriter, musician, actress, and artist

"Life Despite God"
Song lyrics, America's Sweetheart (2004)

Love, Soul, Nature, Light

“It seems to me that the individual today stands at a crossroads, faced with the choice of whether to pursue the existence of blind consumer, subject to the implacable march of new technology and the endless multiplication of material goods, or to seek out a new way that will lead to spiritual responsibility, a way that ultimately might mean not only his personal salvation but also the saving of society at large; in other words, to turn to God.”

Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 218

God, Way, Personality

“The vicar’s right; he says that we
Are ever wayward, weak and blind;
He tells us in his homily
Ambition ruins all mankind;”

Gustave Nadaud (1820–1893) songwriter

Stanza 4.
Carcassonne, (c. 1887; with translation by John Reuben Thompson)

“The blind old man of Scio's rocky isle.”

George Gordon Byron book The Bride of Abydos

Canto II, stanza 2.
The Bride of Abydos (1813)

“It is commonly agreed that Keynes came up with the idea that public works are the best way to help the economy during a recession.
As a result, Keynesian economists seem to have developed a blind faith in the government in general, and in the system of public works in particular.
I do not share the same faith in the government.
I do not share the same faith in public works.<p”

Xavier Sala-i-Martin (1962) Catalan economist

http://www.columbia.edu/~xs23/keynes/keynes2.htm And this may help explain why. Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Xavier Sala-i-Martin's Home Page http://www.columbia.edu/~xs23/keynes/keynes1.htm.

Faith, Way, Idea, Help