Quotes about borrower
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“Anyone who has read my book BJP vis-à-vis Hindu Resurgence (1997) will be surprised to see me described as an “advocate of the Sangh Parivar”. I suppose that in a world of partisan scholarship, where the party-line is scrupulously followed by activists and camp-followers alike, any attempt to remain objective must come across as counter-partisan, meaning partisan activism for the opposite side…. Hindutva is a fairly crude ideology, borrowing heavily from European nationalisms with their emphasis on homogeneity. Under the conditions of British colonialism, it was inevitable that some such form of Hindu nationalism would arise, but I believe better alternatives have seen the light, more attuned to the genius of Hindu civilization.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, The Problem with Secularism (2007)

Books, World, Light, Reading

“We know that this election is about the kind of America we will live in and the kind of America we will leave to future generations. When it comes to the character of America, President Obama and I have very different visions. Government is at the center of his vision. It dispenses the benefits, borrows what it cannot take, and consumes a greater and greater share of the economy. With Obamacare fully installed, government will come to control half the economy, and we will have effectively ceased to be a free enterprise society. This President is putting us on a path where our lives will be ruled by bureaucrats and boards, commissions and czars. He's asking us to accept that Washington knows best – and can provide all.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

2012-04-24
http://electad.com/video/mitt-romney-victory-speech-after-winning-de-ct-pa-ny-pa-primaries-in-manchester-new-hampshire-april-24-2012/
Mitt Romney Victory Speech After Winning DE / CT / PA / NY / PA Primaries in Manchester, New Hampshire – April 24 2012
ElectAd
2012

Future

“Most men’s conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

Source: The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. II, Reason in Society, Ch. VIII: Ideal Society

Men

“I know that the conquest of English America is an impossibility. You cannot, I venture to say it, you CANNOT conquer America… As to conquest, therefore, my Lords, I repeat, it is impossible. You may swell every expense, and every effort, still more extravagantly; pile and accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German Prince, that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign country; your efforts are for ever vain and impotent— doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your enemies— to overrun them with the sordid sons of rapine and plunder; devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms, never! never! never!… I call upon the honour of your Lordships to reverence the dignity of your ancestors, and to maintain your own. I call upon the spirit and humanity of my country to vindicate the national character. I invoke the genius of the constitution. From the tapestry that adorns these walls, the immortal ancestor of this noble Lord frowns with indignation at THE DISGRACE OF HIS COUNTRY! In vain he led your victorious fleets against the boasted Armada of Spain; in vain he defended and established the honour, the liberties, the religion, the Protestant religion of his country, against the arbitrary cruelties of Popery and the Inquisition.”

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708–1778) British politician

Speech in the House of Lords (18 November, 1777), responding to a speech by Henry Howard, 12th Earl of Suffolk, who spoke in favour of the war against the American colonists. Suffolk was a descendant of Howard of Effingham, who led the English navy against the Spanish Armada. Effingham had commissioned a series of tapestries on the defeat of the Armada, and sold them to King James I. Since 1650 they were hung in the House of Lords, where they remained until destroyed by fire in 1834.
William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (London: Aylott & Jones, 1848), pp. 150-6.

Religion, Effort, Victory, Country

“Now, there is a genuine social justice which proceeds not from the principle of equality, but from the principle: Suum cuique — to each his own. It is true that to deprive the workman of his just wage is not only a sin, but a sin that cries to heaven for vengeance. When one hinders social advance by putting barriers in the way of the diligent and the talented, one not only commits a personal injustice, but damages the common good of the whole nation, which always requires a genuine elite of ability and the contribution of extraordinary brainpower in every walk of life. And it would be socially unjust if a few individuals or certain groups had so much material wealth that, in consequence of this concentration of property and income, other classes had to live not only in povery, but in misery. Whoever lives in real abundance has a Christian duty to assist those living in wrechedness. Before we proceed, however, let us affirm that the notion of misery is different from that of poverty. Péguy has already drawn the distinction between pauvreté and misère. To live in misery means to suffer genuine physical privation: to know cold and hunger, to have no proper dwelling, to be dressed in rags, to be unable to secure medical attention. The poor, by contrast, have the necessities of life, but scarcely any more. They can borrow books, no doubt, but cannot buy them; they can hear music on the radio, but cannot afford a ticket to a concert; they cannot indulge in little extras of food and drink, but should, by self-discipline, be able to save a little. The poor have, therefore, the normal material preconditions for happiness — unless plagued by acquisitiveness or even envy, which has become a political force in the same measure as people have lost their faith. The fact that there are happy poor (alongside unhappy rich people) is beside the point. Demagogues know how to stir up terrible and murderous unrest even among the happy poor, as has been demonstrated clearly by the history of the left from Marat to Marx to Lenin to Hitler.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Pgs 53-54
The Timeless Christian (1969)

Life, Hunger, People, Books

“I was aware that the loosening of mortgage credit terms for subprime borrowers increased financial risk. But I believed then, as now, that the benefits of broadened home ownership are worth the risk.”

Alan Greenspan (1926) 13th Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the United States

September 2007 http://www.startribune.com/nation/12598281.html, Greenspan's memoir The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in the New World. 2000s

Home

“I have tried, in this book, to do three things. I try first to bring a greater awareness of the way in which the differences and the similarities in the bodies of human beings are the basis on which all our learnings about our sex, and our relationship to the other sex, are built. Talking about our bodies is a complex and difficult matter. We are so used to covering them up, to referring to them obliquely with slang terms or in a borrowed language to hiding even infants' sex membership under blue and pink ribbons. It is difficult to become aware of those things about us which have been, and will always be, patterned by our own particular modesties and reticences. We reject, and very rightly, catalogues of caresses arranged in frequency tables, or accounts of childhood that read like a hospital chart…”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1940s, Male and Female (1949), p. 4-5

Books, Sex, Way, Learning

“New discord has arisen in Europe of late years from the fact that Germany is not satisfied with the result of the late War. I have indicated several times that Germany got off lightly after the Great War. I know that that is not always a fashionable opinion, but the facts repudiate the idea that a Carthaginian peace was in fact imposed upon Germany. No division was made of the great masses of the German people. No portion of Germany inhabited by Germans was detached, except where there was the difficulty of disentangling the population of the Silesian border. No attempt was made to divide Germany as between the northern and southern portions which might well have tempted the conquerors at that time. No State was carved out of Germany. She underwent no serious territorial loss, except the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, which she herself had seized only 50 years before. The great mass of the Germans remained united after all that Europe had passed through, and they are more vehemently united to-day than ever before. You may talk of the War indemnity; what has happened there? I suppose that the Germans paid, in round terms, £1,000,000,000. But they had borrowed £2,000,000,000 at the same time, and there are no signs of their paying back.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1933/apr/13/adjournment-easter-1#column_2790 in the House of Commons (13 April 1933) The 1930s

War, People, Peace, Idea

“These conditions are simply these: viz., first, that each man shall do, towards every other, all that justice requires him to do; as, for example, that he shall pay his debts, that he shall return borrowed or stolen property to its owner, and that he shall make reparation for any injury he may have done to the person or property of another.

The second condition is, that each man shall abstain from doing to another, anything which justice forbids him to do; as, for example, that he shall abstain from committing theft, robbery, arson, murder, or any other crime against the person or property of another.

So long as these conditions are fulfilled, men are at peace, and ought to remain at peace, with each other.”

Lysander Spooner (1808–1887) Anarchist, Entrepreneur, Abolitionist

Section I, p. 5–6
Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882), Chapter I. The Science of Justice.

Men, Peace, Justice, Personality

“They borrow words for thoughts they cannot feel”

Jones Very (1813–1880) American poet and essayist

From The Dead

Feeling

“Pardon me 4 living, but this is my world 2
I can't help that what's cool to us might be strange to u.
Pardon me 4 breathing, can we borrow some of your air?
The problem with u and your kind is that u don't know love is there.”

Prince (1958–2016) American pop, songwriter, musician and actor

New Power Generation
Song lyrics, Graffiti Bridge (1990)

Love, World, Problem, Help

“I borrow some subject or other from life or from nature, and, using it as a pretext, I arrange lines and colors so as to obtain symphonies, harmonies that do not represent a thing that is real, in the vulgar sense of the word, and do not directly express any idea, but are supposed to make you think the way music is supposed to make you think, unaided by ideas or images, simply through the mysterious affinities that exist between our brains and such arrangements of colors and lines.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Source: 1870s - 1880s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 109

Life, Music, Color, Way

“I would gladly say 'Heil Hitler!' and at once part company with him, realizing what a pitiable insult it is to such a great man to try to flatter him with such an imitation which he has always disdained. His way is for Germany, ours is for Britain; let us tread our paths with mutual respect, which is rarely increased by borrowing.”

William Joyce (1906–1946) British fascist and propaganda broadcaster

National Socialism Now, pamphlet issued by the National Socialist League c. 1938.

Way, Parting

“So if I say you that your paintings [which his brother-in-law recently made] have nothing in common with what we see generally classified and accepted, and that you have always managed to produce things that were entirely your own work, as I truly see it, that does not mean you have the right to be seated next to Leonardo -
What's more, this originality is suicidal as it distances you from a 'clientele' used to 'copies of copiers', often referred to as 'tradition'-
One more thing, your technique is not the 'expected' technique – It's your own personal technique, borrowed from nobody – and there again, this doesn't attract the clientele.... In a word, do less self-analysis and enjoy your work without worrying about opinions, your own as well as that of others.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Quote from Duchamp's letter to Jean Crotti (Duchamp's brother-in-law) and his sister Suzanne Duchamp, New York 17 Augustus 1952; as cited in The Duchamp Book, ed. Gavin Parkinson, Tate Publishing, London 2008 pp. 167-168
1951 - 1968

Law, Suicide, Painting, Personality

“370. Would you know what mony is, go borrow some.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

“But the point, as I argued with Caplan, is not that managers are inherently less intelligent or capable as individuals. Rather, it’s that hierarchical organizations are—to borrow that wonderful phrase from Feldman and March—systematically stupid. For all the same Hayekian reasons that make a planned economy unsustainable, no individual is “smart” enough to manage a large, hierarchical organization. Nobody–not Einstein, not John Galt–possesses the qualities to make a bureaucratic hierarchy function rationally. Nobody’s that smart, any more than anybody’s smart enough to run Gosplan efficiently–that’s the whole point. No matter how insightful and resourceful they are, no matter how prudent, as human beings in dealing with actual reality, nevertheless by their very nature hierarchies insulate those at the top from the reality of what’s going on below, and force them to operate in imaginary worlds where all their intelligence becomes useless. No matter how intelligent managers are as individuals, a bureaucratic hierarchy makes their intelligence less usable.”

Kevin Carson (1963) American academic

Homebrew Industrial Revolution (2010), Chapter 7.
Homebrew Industrial Revolution (2010)

Stupidity, World, Intelligence, Nature

“Be humble. It becomes a creature, a depending and borrowed being, that lives not of itself, but breathes in another's air with another's breath, and is accountable for every moment of time and can call nothing its own, but is absolutely a tenant at will of the great Lord of heaven and earth.”

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

Advice to his children (1699)

Time, Dependency

“The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.”

Charles Lamb book Essays of Elia

The Two Races of Men.
Essays of Elia (1823)

Men

“While borrowing it is like eating a meal of milk and honey. When the loan is due to be paid, it feels as if the bones in the body are broken.”

Sarvajna Kannada poet, pragmatist and philosopher

Tripadis

Feeling

“Since its inception, Zionism's Jewish supremacy borrowed much from anti-Semitic rhetoric. Not only did Herzl agree with anti-Semites that it was Jews who 'caused' anti-Semitism but also with the anti-Semitic conclusion that the end of anti-Semitism could only be brought about by the removal of Jews from gentile societies.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

“The volume of credit depends upon three factors: the desire to borrow, the ability to lend and the desire to lend.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Part III, Chapter XIII, The Reservoir Plan and Credit Control, p. 154
Storage and Stability (1937)

Dependency

“Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Not a Kerouac quote, but part of the text from a publicity campaign for the Beat Museum, San Francisco, composed by the advertising agency Gyro: http://paulacw.com/The-Beat-Museum
Misattributed

Life

“The usual and basic Keynesian answer to recessions is a monetary expansion. But Keynes worried that even this might sometimes not be enough, particularly if a recession had been allowed to get out of hand and become a true depression. Once the economy is deeply depressed, households and especially firms may be unwilling to increase spending no matter how much cash they have, they may simply add any monetary expansion to their board. Such a situation, in which monetary policy has become ineffective, has come to be known as a "liquidity trap"; Keynes believed that the British and American economies had entered such a trap by the mid-1930s, and some economists believed that the United States was on the edge of such a tap in 1992.
The Keynesian answer to a liquidity trap is for the government to do what the private sector will not: spend. When monetary expansion is ineffective, fiscal expansion—such as public works programs financed by borrowing—must take its place. Such a fiscal expansion can break the vicious circle of low spending and low incomes, "priming the pump: and getting the economy moving again. But remember that this is not by any means an all-purpose policy recommendation; it is essentially a strategy of desperation, a dangerous drug to be prescribed only when the usual over-the-counter remedy of monetary policy has failed.”

Paul Krugman book Peddling Prosperity

Source: Peddling Prosperity (1994), Ch. 1 : The Attack on Keynes

“Dialogue in Hell:
finally comes the liquidation which adds 15, 20, or 30 millions. In short, in the general reckoning, the total of the unforeseen expenses forms one-third of the estimated expenditures. It is upon this last figure that the legislative vote of the Chambers falls as a form of confirmation. In this way, at the end of ten years the budget can be doubles and even tripled….

Monsesquieu:… It is certain that there are few governments who are not obliged to have recourse to borrowing; but it is also certain that they are obliged to make use of them sparingly; they could not, without immorality and danger, encumber future generations with exorbitant burdens, out of all proportion to”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Way, Hell, Future

“Life is bacterial and those organisms that are not bacteria have evolved from organisms that were. …Gene exchanges were indispensable to those that would rid themselves of environmental toxins. …Replicating gene-carrying plasmids owned by the biosphere at large, when borrowed and returned by bacterial metabolic geniuses, alleviated most local environmental dangers, provided said plasmids could temporarily be incorporated into the cells of the threatened bacteria. The tiny bodies of the planetary patina spread to every reach, all microbes reproducing too rapidly for all offspring to survive in any finite universe. Undercover and unwitnessed, life back then was the prodigious progeny of bacteria. It still is.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

What is Life? (1995)

Life, Universe

“Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.”

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer

I, who ne'er Went for myself a begging, go a borrowing, And that for others. Borrowing's much the same As begging; just as lending upon usury Is much the same as thieving. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan the Wise (1779), Act II, scene II http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/natws10.txt Misattributed

“There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt.”

Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet

Torvald Helmer, Act I
A Doll's House (1879)

Life, Beauty, Home, Freedom

“Modern economics and the welfare state borrowed heavily on the future.”

Gregory Benford book Timescape

Source: Timescape (1980), Chapter 43 (p. 445)

Future

“The appearance of [Virtue] was far different: her hair, seeking no borrowed charm from ordered locks, grew freely above her forehead; her eyes were steady; in face and gait she was more like a man; she showed a cheerful modesty; and her tall stature was set off by the snow-white robe she wore.”
[Virtutis] dispar habitus: frons hirta nec umquam composita mutata coma, stans vultus, et ore incessuque viro propior laetique pudoris celsa umeros niveae fulgebat stamine pallae.

Silius Italicus Punica

Book XV, lines 28–31
Punica

Appearance

“The Phoenicians were the Canaanites. Thus Phoenicia… was invaded by the Israelites, who eventually pushed the Phoenicians to the coastal fringe. Subsequently, the Israelites borrowed various cultural elements from the Phoenicians, including the first alphabet. Some groups of Israelites even adopted the god Ba'al and, presumably, the practice of child sacrifice.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

Source: What the Bones Tell Us (1997), Ch. 2

God

“Well, all those people, they think they've got it made,
But I wouldn't buy, sell, borrow or trade
Anything I have to be like one of them.
I'd rather start all over again.”

Neil Young (1945) Canadian singer-songwriter

Motion Pictures
Song lyrics, On the Beach (1974)

People, Thinking

“Ever from one who comes to-morrow
Men wait their good and truth to borrow.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Merlin's Song II http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=l&p=c&a=p&ID=20584&c=323 1860s, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

Men, Truth, Waiting

“Respecting the cosmogony of the Egyptian priests, we gather much information from writers of the Grecian sects, who borrowed almost all their tenets from Egypt, and amongst others that of the former successive destruction and renovation of the world.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.2, p. 10
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

World, Success

“Your borrowers of books—those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.”

Charles Lamb book Essays of Elia

The Two Races of Men.
Essays of Elia (1823)

Books

“The celebrated physicist and mathematician A. M. Ampere coined the word cybernetique to mean the science of civil government (Part II of "Essai sur la philosophic des sciences", 1845, Paris). Ampere's grandiose scheme of political sciences has not, and perhaps never will, come to fruition. In the meantime, conflict between governments with the use of force greatly accelerated the development of another branch of science, the science of control and guidance of mechanical and electrical systems. It is thus perhaps ironical that Ampere's word should be borrowed by N. Wiener to name this new science, so important to modern warfare. The "cybernetics" of Wiener ("Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the animal and the Machine," John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1948) is the science of organization of mechanical and electrical components for stability and purposeful actions. A distinguishing feature of this new science is the total absence of considerations of energy, heat, and efficiency, which are so important in other natural sciences. In fact, the primary concern of cybernetics is on the qualitative aspects of the interrelations among the various components of a system and the synthetic behavior of the complete mechanism.”

Qian Xuesen (1911–2009) Chinese rocket scientist

Source: Engineering cybernetics, (1954), p. vii. About the origin of the word Cybernetics

Behavior, Communication, Nature, Science

“The history of human civilisation is a history of mutual borrowings.”

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

Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.28

History

“What's wrong with readin' comic books? I don't understand this kiddin' about readin' comic books. When I get through with 'em the other players on our club borrow them from me. Nobody makes a fuss about that.”

Yogi Berra (1925–2015) American baseball player, manager, coach

Al Abrams, from "Sidelight on Sports: A New One on Yogi" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=kpJRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=pGoDAAAAIBAJ&pg=1705%2C4055373 in The Pittsburgh Press (Monday, September 15, 1952), p. 20.

Books, Understanding

“Thus, the way Romila Thapar equates Mahmud Ghaznavi with Harsha of Kashmir (twelfth century) as being both temple plunderers, can be shown up to be in gross conflict with the contemporary testimonies about the two….. Romila Thapar's explanation that Ghaznavi's behaviour was essentially the same as Harsha's, can only rest on an utter incompetence in reading the source material, or in a deliberate attempt to distort history. What is more, if at all one wants to compare Harsha's behaviour with that of the Muslim rulers, one should face the connection that the contemporary historian Kalhan explicitly makes. Commenting on Harsha's temple plundering, he writes :"Prompted by the Turks in his employ, he behaved like a Turk"…. Kalhan is simply saying that the very idea that a temple need not be respected, was borrowed by Harsha from the Muslim Turks. These already had a well-established reputation for temple desecration, and that is a fact to which the Nehruvian historians prefer not to draw the readers' attention….. So, here we have a case of a history professor who does not realize that the proofs he cites have hardly any logical connection with the thesis he proposes; or who is so assured about his eminence that he doesn't expect readers to notice the faulty reasoning.”

Harsha of Kashmir

Koenraad Elst 1991: Ayodhya and after: issues before Hindu society.

Way, History, Idea, Reading

“he was undoing the wooden box, and he took out the silver sword. "This is the best of my treasures," he said. "It will bring me luck. And it will bring you luck, because you gave it to me. I don't tell anybody my name - it is not safe. But because you gave me the sword and I didn't borrow it, I will tell you."”

Ian Serraillier book The Silver Sword

He whispered. "It is Jan."
The Silver Sword, Chapter 5, "The Goods Train"

Box

“A willingness to satisfy contradictory objections to one's manner of writing might turn one's work into the donkey that finally found itself being carried by its masters, since some readers suggest that quotation marks are disruptive of pleasant progress; others, that notes to what should be complete are a pedantry or evidence of an insufficiently realized task. But since in anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest. Perhaps those who are annoyed by provisos, detainments, and postscripts could be persuaded to take probity on faith and disregard the notes.”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1967), "A Note On The Notes", p. 262

Faith

“I wrote a little song for you
With a melody I'd borrowed put to words that didn't rhyme
To repeat what you already knew;
As the stones thrown at your window tapped in syncopation,
You kept a distance out of fear you'd break,
But what good's a single windchime, hanging quiet all alone?”

Aaron Weiss

In a Market Dimly Lit.
Brother, Sister (2006)

Fear

“The rhetorical process functioned in many areas other than speech: Curtius wrote about 'rhetorical landscape representations' while Serpieris speaks of 'la retorica al teatro' (the rhetorical use of theatrical space), and music historians have learned that the language and approach of musical theory in the Middle Ages were borrowed directly from medieval grammar and rhetoric.”

Thomas Binkley (1931–1995) lutenist

"The work is not the performance", Companion to Medieval & Renaissance Music. (1997). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198165404.

Age, Music, Learning

“We stop for a while, she gives me a smile
And snuggles her head on my chest
We start in to pet and that's when I get
Her talcum all over my vest

After I kinda straighten my tie
She has to borrow my comb
Once kiss then I continue again
Walkin' my baby back home”

Roy Turk (1892–1934) American songwriter

Song Walkin' My Baby Back Home http://ntl.matrix.com.br/pfilho/html/english/nkc/lyrics/walkin_my_baby_back_home.txt

Smile, Home, Kiss, Baby

“Another source of the Nazi Party’s popularity was its liberal borrowing from the intellectual tradition of the socialist left. Many of the men who would become the movement’s leaders had been involved in communist and socialist circles.”

Götz Aly (1947) German journalist, historian and social scientist

Source: Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (2007), p. 16

Men

“Newton… (after having remarked that geometry only requires two of the mechanical actions which it postulates, namely, to describe a straight line and a circle) says: geometry is proud of being able to achieve so much while taking so little from extraneous sources. One might say of metaphysics, on the other hand: it stands astonished, that with so much offered it by pure mathematics it can effect so little. In the meantime, this little is something which mathematics indispensably requires in its application to natural science, which, inasmuch as it must here necessarily borrow from metaphysics, need not be ashamed to allow itself to be seen in company with the latter.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Preface, Tr. Bax (1883) citing Isaac Newton's Principia
(1786)

Mathematics, Nature, Science

“Leader of the Chorus: Let's see. What shall our city be called? […]
Euelpides: Some name borrowed from the clouds, from these lofty regions in which we dwell — in short, some well-known name.
Pisthetaerus: Do you like Nephelococcygia?”

Aristophanés The Birds

tr. O'Neill 1938, Perseus http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Aristoph.+Birds+812 Birds, line 812 & 817-819 (our emphasis on 819) Birds (414 BC)

“Here we are, sitting in tuxedos and evening gowns, wearing borrowed jewels, and everyone's watching Shrek take a poot in the water.”

Vicky Jenson (1960) American animator

Quoted by Darryn King in " Pixar's 'Inside Out' and 'The Little Prince' Will Premiere at Cannes http://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-film/pixars-inside-out-and-the-little-prince-will-premiere-at-cannes-111960.html", Cartoon Brew (April 17, 2015); Jenson is describing her experience of premiering Shrek at the Cannes Film Festival.

Water

“The moral of the story of the Pilgrims is that if you work hard all your life and behave yourself every minute and take no time out for fun you will break practically even, if you can borrow enough money to pay your taxes.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part VI: Now We're Getting Somewhere, Miles Standish

Life, Money, Time

“My desire for information was, however, too strong to be turned aside and often have I been sent away from a bookstall when the owner became offended at my standing reading, which I used to do until I was sent away… I used to borrow books from a man who kept a small shop… leaving a small sum as a deposit. At the age of twenty, Place had worked through the histories of Greece and Rome and some translated works of Greek and Roman writers.”

Francis Place (1771–1854) English social reformer

Source: The life of Francis Place, 1771-1854, 1898, p. 17

Books, Age, History, Strong

“6089. To borrow upon Usury, bringeth on Beggary.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

“When the federal government spends more each year than it collects in tax revenues, it has three choices: It can raise taxes, print money, or borrow money. While these actions may benefit politicians, all three options are bad for average Americans. Deficits mean future tax increases, pure and simple. Deficit spending should be viewed as a tax on future generations, and politicians who create deficits should be exposed as tax hikers.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Deficits Make You Poorer http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul238.html (March 15, 2005). 2000s, 2001-2005

Money, Future

“[Some] disobey the earth and sharpen knives against the animals to gain clothing and food. The Indian Brahmans disapproved of this personally and taught the Naked Philosophers of Egypt to disapprove of it too. From there Pythagoras, who was the first Greek to associate with Egyptians, borrowed the principle. He let the earth keep living creatures, but held that what the earth grows is pure, and so lived off that because it was sufficient to feed body and soul. Clothing made from dead creatures, which most people wear, he considered impure; he dressed in linen and, for the same reason, made his shoes of plaited bark. He derived many advantages from this purity, above all that of perceiving his own soul.”

Apollonius of Tyana (15–100) Ancient Greek philosopher

Attributed to Apollonius in Philostratus, Life of Apollonius. Quoted from Ram Swarup (2000). On Hinduism: Reviews and reflections, Chapter India and Greece

People, Food, Shoe, Soul

“Dialogue in Hell:
probable resources. How are loans made? By the issue of bonds containing an obligation on the part of the government to pay a yearly interest proportionate to the capital which has been depleted. If the loan is at 5 percent, for instance, the state, at the end of twenty years, has paid a sum equal to the capital borrowed; at the end of forty years, a double amount; at the end of sixty years, a triple amount, and yet it always remains debtor for the total of the same capital. The modern states wished to put a necessary”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Hell, Parting

“Historically, "public administration" has grown in large part out of the wider field of inquiry, "political science." The history of American political science during the past fifty years is a story much too lengthy to be told here, but some important general characteristics and tendencies it has communicated to or shared with public administration must be noted.
The Secular Spirit Despite: the fact that "political science" in such forms as moral philosophy and political economy had been taught in America long before the Civil War, the present curriculum, practically in its entirety, is the product of the secular, practical, empirical, and "scientific" tendencies of the past sixty or seventy years. American students dismayed at the inadequacies of the ethical approach in the Gilded Age, stimulated by their pilgrimage to German universities, and led by such figures as J. W. Burgess, E. J. James, A. B. Hart, A. L. Lowell, and F. J. Goodnow have sought to recreate political science as a true science. To this end they set about observing and analyzing "actual government." At various times and according to circumstances, they have turned to public law, foreign institutions, rural, municipal, state, and federal institutions, political parties, public opinion and pressures, and to the administrative process, in the search for the "stuff" of government. They have borrowed both ideas and examples from the natural sciences and the other social disciplines. Frequently they have been inspired by a belief that a Science of Politics will emerge when enough facts of the proper kinds are accumulated and put in the proper juxtaposition, a Science that will enable man to "predict and control" his political life. So far did they advance from the old belief that the problem of good government is the problem of moral men that they arrived at the opposite position: that morality is irrelevant, that proper institutions and expert personnel are determining.”

Dwight Waldo (1913–2000) American political scientist

Source: The Administrative State, 1948, p. 22-23

Life, Men, War, Age

“Great Britain has been moving earth and hell to obtain allies against us, yet it is improper in us to propose an alliance! Great Britain has borrowed all the superfluous wealth of Europe, in Italy, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, and some in France, to murder us, yet it is dishonorable in us to propose to borrow money! By heaven, I would make a bargain with all Europe, if it lay with me. Let all Europe stand still, neither lend men nor money nor ships to England nor America, and let them fight it out alone. I would give my share of millions for such a bargain. America is treated unfairly and ungenerously by Europe. But thus it is, mankind will be servile to tyrannical masters, and basely devoted to vile idols.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Letter to B. Franklin (16 April 1781), Leyden. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/2105#lf1431-07_head_273 1780s

Men, Money, Hell, Fight

“Reform is never easy and there are municipalities fighting to maintain the status quo. They are surviving on borrowed time. We continue to fight these bureaucrats and are confident that taxation by citation will soon be coming to an end. Our efforts in Missouri are rooted in the belief that government is supposed to work for the people and not to grow government’s reach and influence by abusive schemes.”

Eric Schmitt (1975) American politician, lawyer

No more taxation by citation in Ferguson: Column https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/08/09/taxation-ferguson-police-reform-michael-brown-shooting-column/88445780/ (August 9, 2016)

People, Confidence, Effort, Time

“I don’t need to know most of what’s fed to us by newspapers and the TV. It’s largely useless information and daily moaning. There are only a few things in business that I really want to know about. Tell me about manufacturing productivity, employment, the balance of payments and borrowing levels. With these things you can decide on how to run a business, a constituency or even a country.”

Ivor Tiefenbrun (1946) Scottish businessman

INTERVIEW: Ivor Tiefenbrun – Of High Fidelity & Integrity http://www.hnwmagazine.co.uk/interview-ivor-tiefenbrun-high-fidelity-high-integrity/, HNW Magazine, 2 December 2012. 2012

Business, Country

“The growth in money and credit has outpaced both savings and economic growth. These inflationary pressures have been concentrated in asset prices, not consumer price inflation--keeping monetary policy too easy. This increase in asset prices has fueled domestic borrowing and spending. Government policy and the increase in securitization are largely responsible for this bubble. In addition to loose monetary policies by the Federal Reserve, government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have contributed to the problem. The fourfold increases in their balance sheets from 1997 to 1998 boosted new home borrowings to more than $1.5 trillion in 1998, two-thirds of which were refinances which put an extra $15,000 in the pockets of consumers on average--and reduce risk for individual institutions while increasing risk for the system as a whole.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

CONFERENCE REPORT ON S. 900, GRAMM-LEACH-BLILEY ACT, November 8, 1999 http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec99/cr110899-glb.htm 1990s

Money, Home, Problem

“Machines change their style so rapidly. If one tries to reproduce them in art as realistically as man and the horse in classical art, one immediately lapses into a kind of anecdotic or documentary art... Only the stylisation of a painter like Leger could integrate the machine as the subject matter of art. Here in Italy, the futurists, before 1914, attempted a similar integration of the machine.... César [French sculptor, in the generation of Marini] creates with elements borrowed from industry and the world of machines, sculptural fossils that appear to have survived the same kind of catastrophe as my own figures. But I would like to show you [ interviewer w:Eduard Roditi now in my studio my latest fossils..”

Marino Marini (1901–1980) Italian sculptor

Source: Interview with Edouard Roditi' (1958), p. 89

World, Art, Appearance, Change

“Don’t let me get grand with you; I’m not someone who was, from day one, turning himself into a philosophical academic or anything; I was, from day one, someone who was determined to survive, and to pay attention to what was going on around him, period, and when Elvis Presley came along, my heart stood still, to borrow the Larry Hart lyric. The first note I heard from him, I said, “Well, this is it, this is a sufferer like me, this is something new, this is what I want, this is who I am, in a way,” and Elvis had that gift. That’s why there are so many Elvis imitators.”

George W. S. Trow (1943–2006) American writer

My Pilgrim’s Progress (1999)

Way, Suffering, Heart

“Like Duchamp's 'ready mades' - manufactured objects which qualified as art because he chose to call them such, the most unremarkable and inappropriate items - a pin, a plastic clothes peg, a television component, a razor blade, a tampon - could be brought within the province of punk (un)fashion… Objects borrowed from the most sordid of contexts found a place in punks' ensembles; lavatory chains were draped in graceful arcs across chests encased in plastic bin liners. Safety pins were taken out of their domestic 'utility' context and worn as gruesome ornaments through the cheek, ear or lip… fragments of school uniform (white bri-nylon shirts, school ties) were symbolically defiled (the shirts covered in graffiti, or fake blood; the ties left undone) and juxtaposed against leather drains or shocking pink mohair tops.”

Dick Hebdidge

Dick Hebdidge (1979). . p.106-12

School, Art, Fashion, Clothes

“We borrow from Europe to defend Europe. We borrow from the Gulf states to defend the Gulf states. We borrow from Japan to defend Japan. Is it not a symptom of senility to be borrowing from the world so we can defend the world?”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2010s, Suicide of a Superpower (2011)

World

“Borrowing has a bad name, but you would be surprised how it helps in a pinch.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

[Scribner's Magazine, 1937, CII, 6, 19-21, I'm Not the Budget Type, Will Cuppy]

Help

“Unhappily, to borrow the words of Ganganelli, a large majority of mankind are "mere abortions": calling themselves rational and intelligent beings, they act as if they had neither brains nor conscience, and as if there were no God, no accountability, no heaven, no hell, no eternity.”

William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) American journalist

Introductory Remarks
Thoughts on African Colonization (1832)

God, Intelligence, Hell

“Though I am young, I scorn to flit
On the wings of borrowed wit.”

George Wither (1588–1667) English poet

The Shepherd’s Hunting (printed 1615); reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“I borrow to pay my honest debts and not to squander foolishly. What's more, I confine my borrowing to those who can well afford it. I don't go around sponging on widows and orphans unless they have plenty.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

[Scribner's Magazine, 1937, CII, 6, 19-21, I'm Not the Budget Type, Will Cuppy, http://www.unz.org/Pub/Scribners-1937dec-00019, PDF] Retrieved on June 25, 2012.

“Lending a favorite book has its risks; the borrower may not like it. I still don’t know a better novel than Crime and Punishment—still, every fourth or fifth borrower returns it unfinished: it depresses him; besides that, he didn’t believe it. More borrowers than this return the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past unfinished: they were bored. There is no book you can lend people that all of them will like.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“An Unread Book”, p. 50
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

People, Books, Past

“In 1932 many dark clouds still hung round the horizon. In 1933, although the outlook was distinctly brighter, there was no settled feeling that we were about to enjoy a spell of fine weather. To-day the atmosphere is distinctly brighter. The events of the last 12 months have shown gratifying evidence that the efforts of His Majesty's Government are bearing fruit…If you look to what I might call the telltale statistics, the unemployment figures and statistics of such things as retail trade, consumption of electricity, transport, iron and steel production and house building, in every case you see a definite revival of activity…If I might borrow an illustration from the titles of two well-known works of fiction, I would say that we have now finished the story of "Bleak House" and that we are sitting down this afternoon to enjoy the first chapter of "Great Expectations."”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Budget speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1934/apr/17/financial-statement in the House of Commons (17 April 1934) Chancellor of the Exchequer

Feeling, Effort, Housing, Weather

“I got shot in the guts at the Beaumont-Hamel show. It hurt like hell, let me tell you. They took me down to the field-hospital. I was busy dying, but a company-sergeant major had got it in the head, and he was busy dying, too; and he did die. Well, as soon as ever the sergeant-major died, they took out that long gut… and they put it into me, grafted it on somehow. Wonderful chaps, these medicos! … Well, this sergeant-major seems to have been an abstemious man. The lining of the new gut is much better than my old one; so I'm celebrating it. I only wish I'd borrowed his kidneys, too.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

Source: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch.21.

Hell, Business, Hurt

“What many of our businesses are lacking is confidence: confidence to expand; confidence to borrow; confidence to grow; and the confidence to fuel a real economic recovery that benefits everybody, offering decent jobs, paying decent wages and bridging the skills gap.”

Jo Cox (1974–2016) UK politician

Devolution and Growth Across Britain (19 June 2015)

Confidence, Business

“The uncomfortable examination of Islamic doctrines and history is required in order to understand the enduring phenomenon of Muslim Jew hatred, which dates back to the origins of Islam. We can no longer view Muslim Jew hatred as a “borrowed phenomenon,” seen exclusively, or even primarily, through the prism of Nazism and the Holocaust, the tragic legacy of Judeophobic Christian traditions, or “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” from Czarist Russia.”

Andrew Bostom (1900) American writer

The legacy of Islamic antisemitism : from sacred texts to solemn history, 2008

Understanding, History

“The poor man who takes property by force is called a thief, but the creditor who can by legislation make a debtor pay a dollar twice as large as he borrowed is lauded as the friend of a sound currency. The man who wants the people to destroy the Government is an anarchist, but the man who wants the Government to destroy the people is a patriot.”

William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) United States Secretary of State

Principal Speech Against Unconditional Repeal (16 August 1893)

People

“Our own tung should be written cleane and pure, vnmixt and vnmangled with borrowing of other tunges.”

John Cheke (1514–1557) English politician and scholar

Translation: Our own tongue should be written clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with [the] borrowing of other tongues. Internet Shakespeare, University of Victoria http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/cheke.html

“Cultural systems will be treated as extensions of the power to learn, store, and transmit information, and the evolution of culture as dependent upon the biological development of these abilities and the cultural developments that actualize them. Man's increasing mastery over the natural world, with its increments of available energy use, can be seen from this point of view as one consequence of his capacity to learn, invent, borrow, store, and transmit the necessary technological and political inventions for the changes of scale involved in increasing utilization of energy. Instead of focusing attention on discontinuities — the invention of tool-making tools, the invention of agriculture, the invention of writing, and the invention of invention as a conscious pursuit—this discussion will focus on the continuities involved and on the extent to which older forms of communication, energy use, and social organization also undergo transformation in the course of cultural evolution.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 31-32

World, Communication, Nature, Learning

“Dialogue in Hell:
limitation to the increase of taxes. So they conceived a scheme truly admirable for its simplicity…. A special fund was created, the capitalized resources of which are meant to be a permanent redemption of the public debt by successive fractions; so that every time the state borrows, it must endow the sinking fund with a certain capital for the purpose of liquidating the new debt at a given time….
Our system of accounting, fruit of long experience, is distinguished by the clarity and the certitude of its procedures. It obstructs abuses and gives to no one, from the smallest official to the chief of state himself, the means of diverting the least sum from its original purpose, or of making irregular use of it.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Hell, Time, Success

“Amongst so many borrowed things, I am glad if I can steal one, disguising and altering it for some new service.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book III, Ch. 12. Of Physiognomy
Essais (1595), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us.”

Kenneth Minogue (1930–2013) Australian political theorist

Introduction, p. 2 ; quoted in: " Professor Kenneth Minogue http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10155678/Professor-Kenneth-Minogue.html" in telegraph.co.uk, 2 July 2013. The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life

Money, Hate, Children, People

“For such kind of borrowing as this, if it be not bettered by the borrower, among good authors is accounted Plagiarè.”

John Milton book Eikonoklastes

Eikonoklastes (1649), 23

“It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own.”

Justin Cronin (1962) American writer

The Passage Trilogy, The Passage (2010)

Life, People, Idea, Personality

“Deficit financing proper is rather the process whereby a Government spends more money that it withdraws from the economy by taxation, borrowing, running down reserves, etc.; thereby causing in most circumstances, and very acutely in ours, monetary inflation and severe pressure on the balance of payments.”

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

March 29, 1967, page 249.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

Money

“A journalist who has to borrow a typewriter is bad news.”

Alan Williams (novelist) (1935) novelist

Toomey, Philippa. "Tilting at windmills", London Times, 8 July 1978, p. 12.

“I observe you have thought proper to insert the last number of the Philosophical Magazine your opinion that my attempts at the safety tubes and apertures were borrowed from what I have heard of Sir Humphrey Davy's researches. The principles upon which a safety lamp might be constructed I stated to several persons long before Sir Humphrey Davy came into this part of the country. The plan of such a lamp was seen by several and the lamp itself was in the hands of the manufacturers during the time he was here.”

George Stephenson (1781–1848) English civil engineer and mechanical engineer

Letter published in The Philosophical Magazine (1817-03-13)

Time, Parting, Personality, Country

“Man found that he was faced with the acceptance of "spiritual" forces, that is to say such forces as cannot be comprehended by the senses, particularly not by sight, and yet having undoubted, even extremely strong, effects. If we may trust to language, it was the movement of the air that provided the image of spirituality, since the spirit borrows its name from the breath of wind (animus, spiritus, Hebrew: ruach = smoke). The idea of the soul was thus born as the spiritual principle in the individual. Observation found the breath of air again in the human breath, which ceases with death; even today we talk of a dying man breathing his last. Now the realm of spirits had opened for man, and he was ready to endow everything in nature with the soul he had discovered in himself.”

Sigmund Freud book Moses and Monotheism

Moses and Monotheism (1938)
1930s

Death, Soul, Idea, Nature

“Stale is stale and borrowed is borrowed, no matter how original your models may have been.”

Robert Silverberg (1935) American speculative fiction writer and editor

Introduction to New Dimensions 1, edited by Robert Silverberg

“I'm singin' this borrowed tune I took from the Rolling Stones,
Alone in this empty room, too wasted to write my own.”

Neil Young (1945) Canadian singer-songwriter

Borrowed Tune
Song lyrics, Tonight's the Night (1975)

“The aim of life is to attain peace. No one can give us peace. We can't buy or borrow it. We have to cultivate it by practicing yama and niyama [yoga restraints and observances].”

Baba Hari Dass (1923–2018) master yogi, author, builder, commentator of Indian spiritual tradition

Source: Ashtanga Yoga Primer, 1981, p.5

Life, Peace

“Let men learn that a legislature is not “our God upon earth,” though, by the authority they ascribe to it, and the things they expect from it, they would seem to think it is. Let them learn rather that it is an institution serving a purely temporary purpose, whose power, when not stolen, is at the best borrowed.”

Herbert Spencer book Social Statics

Pt. III, Ch. 19 : The Right to Ignore the State, § 2
Social Statics (1851)
Context: “No human laws are of any validity if contrary to the law of nature; and such of them as are valid derive all their force and all their authority mediately or immediately from this original.” Thus writes Blackstone, to whom let all honour be given for having so far outseen the ideas of his time; and, indeed, we may say of our time. A good antidote, this, for those political superstitions which so widely prevail. A good check upon that sentiment of power-worship which still misleads us by magnifying the prerogatives of constitutional governments as it once did those of monarchs. Let men learn that a legislature is not “our God upon earth,” though, by the authority they ascribe to it, and the things they expect from it, they would seem to think it is. Let them learn rather that it is an institution serving a purely temporary purpose, whose power, when not stolen, is at the best borrowed.

Men, God, Thinking, Learning

“Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you?”

Étienne de La Boétie book Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)
Context: Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows — to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check.

“Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

"Under One Small Star"
Poems New and Collected (1998), Could Have (1972)
Context: I know I won't be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

Light

“It's kind of like borrowing the same ten bucks from somebody over and over again.”

Tom Waits (1949) American singer-songwriter and actor

Interviewed on Fresh Air, 2002-05-21 http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=13&prgDate=5-21-2002. Context: I collaborate with my wife on the songs, and every aspect of it, really— composing, and arranging, and recording, all that business. We have a rhythm and a way of working it. It's kind of like borrowing the same ten bucks from somebody over and over again. But when you live together, it makes it a lot easier, the pay back.

“Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Quotation and Originality
Context: We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim. The Past is for us; but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the Present. Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul.

Soul

“A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

22 September 1830.
Table Talk (1821–1834)
Context: A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection; and trust more to your imagination than to your memory.

Nature

“I know these writers, they say “borrow” when they mean “steal.””

Nick Drake (poet) (1961) British writer

ibid
The Rahotep series, Book 2: Tutankhamun
Context: Be careful, Rahotep, I know these writers, they say “borrow” when they mean “steal.” You will soon read your words coming back to you on some privately circulated scroll of new verse.

“I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness…”

William S. Burroughs book Naked Lunch

From "Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness," the introduction to the 1960 edition, pp. 199-201
Naked Lunch (1959)
Context: I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness... When I speak of drug addiction I do not refer to keif, marijuana or any preparation of hashish, mescaline, Banisteriopsis caapi, LSD6, Sacred Mushrooms or any other drugs of the hallucinogen group... There is no evidence that the use of any hallucinogen results in physical dependence.

Health, Age

“Roadstrum had always believed that he had troubles enough of his own. He seldom borrowed trouble, and never on usurious terms.”

R. A. Lafferty (1914–2002) American writer

Source: Space Chantey (1968), Ch. 5, on Polyphemia
Context: Roadstrum had always believed that he had troubles enough of his own. He seldom borrowed trouble, and never on usurious terms. He knew that it was a solid thing that sheep do not gather in taverns and drink beer, not even potato beer; that they do not sing, not even badly; that they do not tell stories. But a stranger can easily make trouble for himself on a strange world by challenging local customs.
"But I am the greet Roadstrum," he said, suddenly and loudly. "I am a great one for winning justice for the lowly, and I do not scare easily. I threw the great Atlas at the wrestle, and who else can say as much? I suffer from the heroic sickness every third day about nightfall, and I am not sure whether this is the third day or not. I say you are men and not sheep. I say: Arise and be men indeed!"
"It has been tried before," said Roadstrum's friend, the sheep, "and it didn't work."
"You have tried a revolt, and it failed?"
"No, no, another man tried to incite us to revolt, and failed."

“Where there is much pretension, much has been borrowed:”

Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801) Swiss poet

As quoted in Mental Recreation; or, Select Maxims (1831), p. 234
Context: Where there is much pretension, much has been borrowed: nature never pretends.

“No, there is nothing notably dignified about religious ideas. They run, rather, to a peculiarly puerile and tedious kind of nonsense. At their best, they are borrowed from metaphysicians, which is to say, from men who devote their lives to proving that twice two is not always or necessarily four. At their worst, they smell of spiritualism and fortune telling. Nor is there any visible virtue in the men who merchant them professionally. Few theologians know anything that is worth knowing, even about theology, and not many of them are honest.”

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

The American Mercury (March, 1930); first printed, in part, in the Baltimore Evening Sun (9 December 1929)
1920s
Context: The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. Its evil effects must be plain enough to everyone. All it accomplishes is (a) to throw a veil of sanctity about ideas that violate every intellectual decency, and (b) to make every theologian a sort of chartered libertine. No doubt it is mainly to blame for the appalling slowness with which really sound notions make their way in the world. The minute a new one is launched, in whatever field, some imbecile of a theologian is certain to fall upon it, seeking to put it down. The most effective way to defend it, of course, would be to fall upon the theologian, for the only really workable defense, in polemics as in war, is a vigorous offensive. But the convention that I have mentioned frowns upon that device as indecent, and so theologians continue their assault upon sense without much resistance, and the enlightenment is unpleasantly delayed.
There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly. If you doubt it, then ask any pious fellow of your acquaintance to put what he believes into the form of an affidavit, and see how it reads…. “I, John Doe, being duly sworn, do say that I believe that, at death, I shall turn into a vertebrate without substance, having neither weight, extent nor mass, but with all the intellectual powers and bodily sensations of an ordinary mammal;... and that, for the high crime and misdemeanor of having kissed my sister-in-law behind the door, with evil intent, I shall be boiled in molten sulphur for one billion calendar years.” Or, “I, Mary Roe, having the fear of Hell before me, do solemnly affirm and declare that I believe it was right, just, lawful and decent for the Lord God Jehovah, seeing certain little children of Beth-el laugh at Elisha’s bald head, to send a she-bear from the wood, and to instruct, incite, induce and command it to tear forty-two of them to pieces.” Or, “I, the Right Rev. _____ _________, Bishop of _________, D. D., LL. D., do honestly, faithfully and on my honor as a man and a priest, declare that I believe that Jonah swallowed the whale,” or vice versa, as the case may be. No, there is nothing notably dignified about religious ideas. They run, rather, to a peculiarly puerile and tedious kind of nonsense. At their best, they are borrowed from metaphysicians, which is to say, from men who devote their lives to proving that twice two is not always or necessarily four. At their worst, they smell of spiritualism and fortune telling. Nor is there any visible virtue in the men who merchant them professionally. Few theologians know anything that is worth knowing, even about theology, and not many of them are honest. One may forgive a Communist or a Single Taxer on the ground that there is something the matter with his ductless glands, and that a Winter in the south of France would relieve him. But the average theologian is a hearty, red-faced, well-fed fellow with no discernible excuse in pathology. He disseminates his blather, not innocently, like a philosopher, but maliciously, like a politician. In a well-organized world he would be on the stone-pile. But in the world as it exists we are asked to listen to him, not only politely, but even reverently, and with our mouths open.

Men, Idea

“I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children; who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Context: I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children; who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children; whose work serves the earth he lives on and from and with, and is therefore pleasurable and meaningful and unending; whose rewards are not deferred until "retirement," but arrive daily and seasonally out of the details of the life of their place; whose goal is the continuance of the life of the world, which for a while animates and contains them, and which they know they can never compass with their understanding or desire.

The Unforeseen Wilderness : An Essay on Kentucky's Red River Gorge (1971), p. 33; what is likely a paraphrase of a portion of this has existed since at least 1997, and has sometimes become misattributed to John James Audubon: A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.

Love, Life, Children, World

“Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Bruno's ideas were widely imparted, borrowed, sounded ; almost never, though, with the name Giordano Bruno attached to them.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Bill Kuhns, on the dangers to Spinoza and others, of citing Giordano Bruno as an influence, after his execution as a heretic, in "Giordano Bruno and Marshall McLuhan" in McLuhan Studies Issue 2 (1996) http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss2/1_2art5.htm Context: Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Bruno's ideas were widely imparted, borrowed, sounded; almost never, though, with the name Giordano Bruno attached to them. Kepler once chided Galileo for omitting his debt to Bruno; yet, we can discern Kepler's own indifference … Later generations would evoke Bruno's writings to the phrase, without quoting or acknowledging him. Recent scholarship on Spinoza, for example, cites Bruno's powerful exertion on his thought about infinity and on his style. Never does Spinoza cite Bruno by name.

Idea

“None of these guys did anything by themselves; they borrowed from other people's work.”

James Burke (science historian) (1936) British broadcaster, science historian, author, and television producer

Connections (1979), 10 - Yesterday, Tomorrow and You
Context: The question is in what way are the triggers around us likely to operate to cause things to change -- for better or worse. And, is there anything we can learn from the way that happened before, so we can teach ourselves to look for and recognize the signs of change? The trouble is, that's not easy when you have been taught as I was, for example, that things in the past happened in straight-forward lines. I mean, take one oversimple example of what I'm talking about: the idea of putting the past into packaged units -- subjects, like agriculture. The minute you look at this apparently clear-cut view of things, you see the holes. I mean, look at the tractor. Oh sure, it worked in the fields, but is it a part of the history of agriculture or a dozen other things? The steam engine, the electric spark, petroleum development, rubber technology. It's a countrified car. And, the fertilizer that follows; it doesn't follow! That came from as much as anything else from a fellow trying to make artificial diamonds. And here's another old favorite: Eureka! Great Inventors You know, the lonely genius in the garage with a lightbulb that goes ping in his head. Well, if you've seen anything of this series, you'll know what a wrong approach to things that is. None of these guys did anything by themselves; they borrowed from other people's work. And how can you say when a golden age of anything started and stopped? The age of steam certainly wasn't started by James Watt; nor did the fellow whose engine he was trying to repair -- Newcomen, nor did his predecessor Savorey, nor did his predecessor Papert. And Papert was only doing what he was doing because they had trouble draining the mines. You see what I'm trying to say? This makes you think in straight lines. And if today doesn't happen in straight lines -- think of your own experience -- why should the past have? That's part of what this series has tried to show: that the past zig-zagged along -- just like the present does -- with nobody knowing what's coming next. Only we do it more complicatedly, and it's because our lives are that much more complex than theirs were that it's worth bothering about the past. Because if you don't know how you got somewhere, you don't know where you are. And we are at the end of a journey -- the journey from the past.

People, Guy

Quotes about borrower page 3

Quotes about borrower
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