Quotes about boundary
page 3

“At birth all of us imagine that we are the universe, and we don't distinguish the boundaries between ourselves and those around us. …in some social situations, there is the sense that we are central, important. …there was a natural projection of those attitudes upon the universe.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

Imagination, Birth, Nature, Sense

“It is love that leniently and mercifully says: I forgive you everything-if you are forgiven only little, then it is because you love only little. Justice severely sets the boundary and says: No further! This is the limit. For you there is no forgiveness, and there is nothing more to be said. P. 172”

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

1850s, Two Discourses at Friday Communion (August 1851)

Love, Justice, Forgiveness

“Community cannot feed for long on itself; it can only flourish where always the boundaries are giving way to the coming of others from beyond them — unknown and undiscovered brothers.”

Howard Thurman (1899–1981) American writer

The Search For Common Ground : An Inquiry Into The Basis Of Man's Experience Of Community (1971), p. 104

Way, Communication

“You delude yourself that you live in a free country because you never test the boundaries of that freedom.”

Jacob M. Appel book The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up

The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up (2012)

Freedom, Country

“In secondary immigration, as I await processing, I sit with people for whom I imagine the experience is less of a novelty. To be blunt, non-white people. Mexican and Arabian people, mostly—I assume, I don’t look at their passports; they don’t have them, they’re behind the desks with the border police, equally trapped and obese, behind the counter, often the same color as the people they’re casually harassing. “Who does this notion of nation most suit,” I wonder as I sit there, unable to use my phone. Proper rich people don’t encounter these rooms, these borders, these problems. For them the world is as it is when seen from space, without boundary, without limitation, full of fluid possibility and whispering wonder.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

People, World, Color, Imagination

“What he wanted was to make his proclamation as effective as possible in the event of such a peace. He said, in a regretful tone, 'The slaves are not coming so rapidly and so numerously to us as I had hoped'. I replied that the slaveholders knew how to keep such things from their slaves, and probably very few knew of his proclamation. 'Well', he said, 'I want you to set about devising some means of making them acquainted with it, and for bringing them into our lines'. He spoke with great earnestness and much solicitude, and seemed troubled by the attitude of Mr. Greeley, and the growing impatience there was being manifested through the North at the war. He said he was being accused of protracting the war beyond its legitimate object, and of failing to make peace when he might have done so to advantage. He was afraid of what might come of all these complaints, but was persuaded that no solid and lasting peace could come short of absolute submission on the part of the rebels, and he was not for giving them rest by futile conferences at Niagara Falls, or elsewhere, with unauthorized persons. He saw the danger of premature peace, and, like a thoughtful and sagacious man as he was, he wished to provide means of rendering such consummation as harmless as possible. I was the more impressed by this benevolent consideration because he before said, in answer to the peace clamor, that his object was to save the Union, and to do so with or without slavery. What he said on this day showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him. I listened with the deepest interest and profoundest satisfaction, and, at his suggestion, agreed to undertake the organizing a band of scouts, composed of colored men, whose business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown, to go into the rebel States, beyond the lines of our armies, and carry the news of emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Source: 1880s, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), pp. 434–435.

Men, War, Peace, Hope

“Taking the points in order, it's fairly easy to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy's bad guy. He's not just bad in himself but the cause of badness in others. While he survives not only are the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples compelled to live in misery and fear (the sheerly moral case for regime-change is unimpeachable on its own), but their neighbors are compelled to live in fear as well.

However—and here is the clinching and obvious point—Saddam Hussein is not going to survive. His regime is on the verge of implosion. It has long passed the point of diminishing returns. Like the Ceausescu edifice in Romania, it is a pyramid balanced on its apex (its powerbase a minority of the Sunni minority), and when it falls, all the consequences of a post-Saddam Iraq will be with us anyway. To suggest that these consequences—Sunni-Shi'a rivalry, conflict over the boundaries of Kurdistan, possible meddling from Turkey or Iran, vertiginous fluctuations in oil prices and production, social chaos—are attributable only to intervention is to be completely blind to the impending reality. The choices are two and only two—to experience these consequences with an American or international presence or to watch them unfold as if they were none of our business.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2002-11-07
Machiavelli in Mesopotamia
Slate
1091-2339
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2002/11/machiavelli_in_mesopotamia.html: On the 2003 invasion of Iraq
2000s, 2002

People, Fear, Guy, Business

“Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries, or distinctions of race.”

Herbert Spencer book Social Statics

Pt. IV, Ch. 30 : General Considerations
Social Statics (1851)

“Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility. Nearly all men of science, all men of learning for that matter, and men of simple ways too, have it in some form and in some degree. It is the faith that it is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission. If we abandon that mission under stress we shall abandon it forever, for stress will not cease. Knowledge for the sake of understanding, not merely to prevail, that is the essence of our being. None can define its limits, or set its ultimate boundaries.”

Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) American electrical engineer and science administrator

Source: Science is Not Enough (1967), Ch. X : The Search for Understanding, p. 191

Men, Faith, Way, Understanding

““We believe that when this secret is finally unlocked, every member of the Unbroken Spine who ever lived… will live again.”
A Messiah, a first disciple, and a rapture. Check, check, and double-check. Penumbra is, right now, teetering right on the boundary between charmingly weird old guy and disturbingly weird old guy. Two things tip the scales toward charm: First, his wry smile, which is not the smile of the disturbed, and micromuscles don’t lie. Second, the look in Kat’s eyes. She’s enthralled. I guess people believe weirder things than this, right? Presidents and popes believe weirder things than this.”

Robin Sloan (1979) American writer

Source: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (2012), Chapter 15 “The Strangest Clerk in Five Hundred Years” (p. 136)

People, Lie, Secret, Smile

“The Extras were as clean as they'd ever been in their lives, and their hair - and beards in the case of the older ones - had been laboriously trimmed, in styles that amusingly parodied the latest fashions. Gray had almost gone so far as to have them clothed - but after much experimentation he'd decided against it; even the slightest scrap of clothing made them look too human, and he was acutely aware of the boundary between impressing his guests with his daring, and causing them real discomfort. Of course, naked, the Extras looked exactly like naked humans, but in Gray's cultural milieu, stark naked humans en masse were not a common sight, and so the paradoxical effect of revealing the creatures' totally human appearance was to make it easier to think of them as less than human.”

Greg Egan (1961) Australian science fiction writer and former computer programmer

The Extra http://eidolon.net/?story=The%20Extra, published in Eidolon (Winter 1990) Fiction

Fashion, Thinking, Appearance, Clothes

“In a class system, the social hierarchy is based primarily upon differences in monetary wealth and income. Social classes are not sharply marked off from each other, nor are they demarcated by tangible boundaries. Unlike estates, they have no legal standing, individuals of all classes being in principle equal before the law. Consequently, there are no legal restraints on the movement of individuals and families from one class to another… Unlike caste, social classes are not organized, closed groups. Rather, they are aggregates of persons with similar amounts of wealth and property, and similar sources of income.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Class and society (1959), p. 15; as cited in: Ronald J. Samuda (1998) Psychological Testing of American Minorities: Issues and Consequences. p. 47.

Family, Law, Personality, Wealth

“The two great conceptual revolutions of twentieth-century science, the overturning of classical physics by Werner Heisenberg and the overturning of the foundations of mathematics by Kurt Gödel, occurred within six years of each other within the narrow boundaries of German-speaking Europe. … A study of the historical background of German intellectual life in the 1920s reveals strong links between them. Physicists and mathematicians were exposed simultaneously to external influences that pushed them along parallel paths. … Two people who came early and strongly under the influence of Spengler's philosophy were the mathematician Hermann Weyl and the physicist Erwin Schrödinger. … Weyl and Schrödinger agreed with Spengler that the coming revolution would sweep away the principle of physical causality. The erstwhile revolutionaries David Hilbert and Albert Einstein found themselves in the unaccustomed role of defenders of the status quo, Hilbert defending the primacy of formal logic in the foundations of mathematics, Einstein defending the primacy of causality in physics. In the short run, Hilbert and Einstein were defeated and the Spenglerian ideology of revolution triumphed, both in physics and in mathematics. Heisenberg discovered the true limits of causality in atomic processes, and Gödel discovered the limits of formal deduction and proof in mathematics. And, as often happens in the history of intellectual revolutions, the achievement of revolutionary goals destroyed the revolutionary ideology that gave them birth. The visions of Spengler, having served their purpose, rapidly became irrelevant.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

Life, People, History, Mathematics

“No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter XV-IXX

Nature, Effort

“Right knows no boundaries and justice no frontiers; the brotherhood of man is not a domestic institution.”

Learned Hand (1872–1961) American legal scholar, Court of Appeals judge

"A Pledge of Allegiance" - speech for "I Am an American Day" in Central Park, New York, New York. (20 May 1945).
Extra-judicial writings

Justice

“Everyone seems to be playing well within the boundaries of his usual rule set. I have yet to hear anyone say something that seemed likely to mitigate the idiocy of this age.”

John Perry Barlow (1947–2018) American poet and essayist

On The International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism, and Security - Personal blog http://barlow.typepad.com/ from Madrid, Spain (10 March 2005)

Age

“The new institutionalism focuses instead on nonlocal environments, either organisational sectors or fields roughly coterminous with the boundaries of industries, professions, or national societies. Environments, in this view, are more subtle in their influence; rather than being co-opted by organisations, they penetrate the organisation, creating the lenses through which actors view the world and the very categories of structure, action and thought.”

Paul DiMaggio (1951) American sociologist

Source: Introduction to The New Institutionalism and Organizational Analysis, 1991, p. 12-13.

World

“I know, as I've always known, that a gunner’s paradiso lies within himself, involved in his attitude toward his dog, his reverence for his bird; the boundaries are mental, not physical.”

George Bird Evans (1906–1998) American writer

An Affair with Grouse (1982)

Dogs, Bird

“Mahomed Ghoory, in the mean time returning from Ghizny, marched towards Kunowj, and engaged Jye-chund Ray, the Prince of Kunowj and Benares' This prince led his forces into the field, between Chundwar and Etawa, where he sustained a signal defeat from the vanguard of the Ghiznevide army, led by Kootbood-Deen Eibuk, and lost the whole of his baggage and elephants' He marched from thence to Benares, where, having broken the idols in above 1000 temples, he purified and consecrated the latter to the worship of the true God…'Mahomed Ghoory, following with the body of the army into the city of Benares, took possession of the country as far as the boundaries of Bengal, without opposition, and having destroyed all the idols, loaded four thousand camels with spoils.”

Muhammad of Ghor (1160–1206) Ghurid Sultan

Tarikh-i-Firishta, translated by John Briggs under the title History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, first published in 1829, New Delhi Reprint 1981, Vol. I, p. 100-108

God, Time, Country

“Color is primarily Quality. Secondly, it is also Weight, for it has not only color value but also brilliance. Thirdly, it is Measure, for besides Quality and Weight, it has its limits, its area, and its extent, all of which may be measured.Tone value is primarily Weight, but in its extent and its boundaries, it is also Measure.Line, however, is solely Measure.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote from Klee's lecture 'On Modern Art', Kunstverein, Jena (26 January 1924), trans. Paul Findlay in Paul Klee: On Modern Art (London, 1948)
1921 - 1930

Color

“The scientist has to have a way of thinking about the environment of a system that is richer and more subtle than a mere looking at for boundaries. He does this by noting that, when we say that something lies ‘outside’ the system, we mean that system can do relatively little about its characteristics or its behavior. Environment, in effect, makes up the things and people that are ‘fixed’ or ‘given’, from the system’s point of view.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Systems Approach (1968), p. 35

People, Way, Behavior, Thinking

“Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Somerset Maugham (1982).

Art, Suffering

“Let me end with… man's ageless fantasy, to fly to the moon…. Plutarch and Lucian, Ariosto and Ben Jonson wrote about it, before the days of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and science fiction. The seventeenth century was heady with… fables about voyages to the moon. Kepler wrote one full of deep scientific ideas… wrote… The Discovery of a New World. They did not draw a line between science and fancy… they all tried to guess where… earth's gravity would stop. Only Kepler understood that gravity has no boundary, and put a law to it—… the wrong law.
All this was a few years before Isaac Newton was born, and it was all in his head that day in 1666, when he… came to conceive… that the moon is like a ball… thrown so hard that it falls exactly as fast as the horizon… he went on to calculate how long… the distant moon would take to round the earth… [T]he imagination that day chimed with nature, and made a harmony.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

World, Law, Imagination, Idea

“We live among particulars, but we always want and see something more than any particular can give or reveal—thus our restlessness, our boredom, our suffering. We are certain to die, although we find in ourselves tokens of undying spirit—thus our sense of living under the pressure of an intolerable contradiction between our experience of selfhood and our recognition of the unyielding limits nature imposes on our existence. We can see only dimly beyond the boundaries of the social world that we ourselves make—thus our confusion, our inability to place our undeniable suffering and our apparent accomplishment within a context of all contexts that would keep them safe from doubt and denigration.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 24

World, Nature, Sense, Suffering

“In the minds of many writers systems engineering is synonomous with component selection and interface design; that is, the systems engineer does not design hardware but decides what types of existing hardware shall be coupled and how they shall be coupled. Complete agreement that this function is the essence of systems engineering will not be found here, for, besides the very important function of systems engineering in systems analysis, there is the role played by systems engineering in providing boundary conditions for hardware design.”

A. Wayne Wymore (1927–2011) American mathematician

Source: A Mathematical Theory of Systems Engineering (1967), p. 193.

“Not an unconscious state
Or mental chloroform without wilful return,
Samadhi but extends my realm of consciousness
Beyond the limits of my mortal frame
To the boundaries of eternity,
Where I, the Cosmic Sea,
Watch the little ego floating in Me.”

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) Yogi, a guru of Kriya Yoga and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship

Songs of the Soul by Paramahansa Yogananda, Quotes drawn from the poem "Samadhi"

Sea

“A system is a set of objects with relationships between the … in may be described generally as a complex of elements or components directly or indirectly related in a causal network, … Also, we are mainly interested in systems within which some process is continually going on, including an interchange with an environment across the boundary. It is generally agreed that when we deal with the more open system with a highly flexible structure, the distinction between the boundaries and the environment becomes a more and more arbitrary matter, dependent upon the purpose of the observer.”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Cited in: Addison C. Bennett (1978) Improving management performance in health care institutions: a total systems approach.. p. 40
A methodology for systems engineering, 1962

Dependency

“I have been attracted to Freemasonry of my own freewill and accord, because it is an International Brotherhood with worldwide interests and its spirit appears as comprehensive and embracing as the globe itself. This brotherhood represents an idealism in which national and racial boundaries find no place. Freemasonry places the fact of God, the Great Architect of the Universe, the Creator of all things in the forefront of its teaching. It recognizes no specific religion, but emphasizes the Universality of all religious faiths. From the limited experience, I have had of my formal admission to the Fraternity this evening, I see that there is a religious spirit underlying the whole symbolic teaching of Masonry. It seems to me that apart from the rituals and symbols peculiar to it, the object of Masonry is generally to make the world a better, brighter and happier place to live in. These are some of the more important and characteristic features of the institution, which have had the greatest appeal to me and that is how I find myself to be one with you from now onwards.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

In his address to the members of the Masonic Fraternity on the occasion of his joining as member of the Masonic Lodge. Article # 14 Initiate responds to his Toast R.W.Bro. Jaya Chamaraja Wadeyar http://masonicpaedia.org/showarticle.asp?id=14

God, World, Faith, Religion

“Soon, the enterprise of the information age will find itself immobilized if it does not have the ability to tap the information resources within and without its boundaries.”

John F. Sowa (1940) artificial intelligence researcher

Zachman & Sowa (1992, p. 613), cited in: Nik Bessis, Fatos Xhafa (2011) Next Generation Data Technologies for Collective Computational Intelligence. p. 84

Age

“There are benefits to be gained from the ambiguities of scientific discourse. Of the four previously identified functions served by ambiguity, two remain outside the boundaries of scientific work. The function of attaining enlightenment through the intuition of indeterminacy belongs to mysticism, or perhaps to philosophy and poetry, not to the disciplined activity of science. And the protection of one's meanings and intentions through ambiguously opaque utterance, while perhaps useful as a protective ploy in scientific competition, cannot be sanctioned as appropriate conduct for a scientific enquirer. Through its two other functions, however — the evocative representation of complex meanings and the bonding of a community through diffuse symbols — ambiguity has long served and will continue to serve the general objectives of scientific activity. It is useful for scientific formulations to express an abundance of meanings, for these can ignite a cluster of insights that in turn lead to novel explorations.”

Donald N. Levine (1931–2015) sociologist

Donald N. Levine (1988), The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays in Social and Cultural Theory. p. 218; Partly cited in: David L. Sills, ‎Robert King Merton (2000), Social Science Quotations: Who Said What, When, and Where. p. 129-130

Communication, Science

“Question number one is from someone who calls himself "The Controvert." He says, "Hi, Tina, I love you in the show. In my humble opinion, when a show pushes the boundaries, you end up with a lot of passionate people on both sides. What do you think of the criticism the show gets?" I think that people who say they love the show and they think it's great and they write good reviews of it, are-are correct and that people who don't like the show for any reason are probably-they're just confusing it with Studio 60.”

Tina Fey (1970) American comedian, writer, producer and actress

"Ask Tina" segment from NBC's 30 Rock website

Love, People, Question, Thinking

“It must be remembered that our State is but in its infancy. That its population is small, and its material wealth is very limited. That notwithstanding it embraces within its boundaries a large area of territory, which includes extensive districts of productive lands, valuable mines of coal, iron, and precious metals, vast quantities of timber, broad rivers, innumerable bays, harbors, and inlets, abounding in fish of the choicest kind sufficient to supply the markets of the world, yet its resources are comparatively undeveloped. And that while it possesses all the elements of grandeur and magnificence, its greatness can not be successfully achieved without the benefit of a well regulated government, whose foundation is laid upon the broad principles of honesty, economy, and justice.”

W. W. Thayer (1827–1899) American judge

W. W. Thayer (1880). Governor William W. Thayer - Biennial Message, 1880 http://records.sos.state.or.us/ORSOSWebDrawer/Recordpdf/6777837. Oregon State Archives, Oregon Secretary of State. Source: Messages and Documents, Biennial Message of Gov. William Thayer to the Legislative Assembly, 1880, Salem, Oregon, W.P. Keady, State Printer, 1880.

World, Justice, Fish, Wealth

“It’s the boundaries where the excitement is and where we will be in the future.”

Horst Ludwig Störmer (1949) German physicist

Small Wonders – The World of Nanoscience. Honeywell-Nobel Laureate Lecture Series at Czech Technical University, Prague (October 19, 2006), http://www.honeywellscience.com/nobel-laureates/physics/horst-stormer

Future

“I have broken the blue boundary of color limits, come out into the white, besides me comrade-pilots swim in this infinity. I have established the semaphore of Suprematism. I have beaten the lining of the colored sky, torn it away and in the sack that formed itself, I have put color and knotted it. Swim! The free white sea lies before you.”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

In the 'Catalogue 10th State Exhibition', Kasimir Malevich, Moscow, 1919; as quoted in Autocritique, – essays on art and anti-art 1963 – 1987, Barbara Rose, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New York, 1988, p. 71
1910 - 1920

Color, Sea

“I love John Waters. There's stuff in it that's beyond the boundaries of my taste, but his movies have always been like that.”

Tracey Ullman (1959) English-born actress, comedian, singer, dancer, screenwriter, producer, director, author and businesswoman

"Q&A: Tracey Ullman" http://www.newsweek.com/newsmakers-127011 (Newsweek, 19 September 2004)

Love, Water

“Spherical space is not very easy to imagine. We have to think of the properties of the surface of a sphere—the two-dimensional case—and try to conceive something similar applied to three-dimensional space. Stationing ourselves at a point let us draw a series of spheres of successively greater radii. The surface of a sphere of radius r should be proportional to r2; but in spherical space the areas of the more distant spheres begin to fall below the proper proportion. There is not so much room out there as we expected to find. Ultimately we reach a sphere of biggest possible area, and beyond it the areas begin to decrease. The last sphere of all shrinks to a point—our antipodes. Is there nothing beyond this? Is there a kind of boundary there? There is nothing beyond and yet there is no boundary. On the earth's surface there is nothing beyond our own antipodes but there is no boundary there.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

p, 125
Space, Time and Gravitation (1920)

Imagination, Thinking, Distant, Success

“Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.”

Alan Turing (1912–1954) British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist

Epigram to Robin Gandy (1954); reprinted in Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: the Enigma (Vintage edition 1992), p. 513.

Religion, Science

“[Clemenceau] said that the Rhine was a natural boundary of Gaul and Germany and that it ought to be made the German boundary now, the territory between the Rhine and the French frontier being made into an Independent State whose neutrality should be guaranteed by the great powers.”

Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) French politician

Quoted in a letter from the British Ambassador Lord Derby to Lord Balfour (14 December 1918), quoted in David Robin Watson, Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), p. 337.
Prime Minister

Nature

“The science of human nature belongs to people who are not afraid to live independent lives. They alone have the flexible access to experience which can bring human wisdom and strength into being, and once these assets exist, they will send forth their influence with an authority that cannot be resisted, unmindful of artificial man made boundaries, reaching anywhere in the world.”

Paul Rosenfels (1909–1985) American sociologist

A Renegade Psychiatrist's Story

Wisdom, People, World, Nature

“In its essence, the right of self-determination means that individuals and peoples should be in control of their destinies and should be able to live out their identities, whether within the boundaries of existing States or through independence.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order on the right of self determination http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IntOrder/Pages/Reports.aspx. 2015, Report submitted to the UN General Assembly

People

“No man has the right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation.”

Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891) Irish politician

Cork address (1885)

“The very highest duty of the States, when they entered into the Union under the Constitution, was to protect all persons within their boundaries in the enjoyment of these 'unalienable rights with which they were endowed by their Creator.' Sovereignty, for this purpose, rests alone with the States. It is no more the duty or within the power of the United States to punish for a conspiracy to falsely imprison or murder within a State, than it would be to punish for false imprisonment or murder itself.”

Morrison Waite (1816–1888) American politician

United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875)

Personality, Falseness

“We now have a technology that unites individuals in such a way that we can create the first global democracy. Hundreds of millions of people are climbing out of poverty and the Internet gives them access to the sort of information that was previously accessible only to elite scholars. They can join a worldwide conversation and come together in infinite permutations to check power anywhere it concentrates. The greatest achievement isn't in producing technology, but using it to re-define the boundaries of what is possible.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Pages 238-239.
The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War, 1st Edition

People, Way, Democracy

“We are not sent into this world to walk it in solitude. We are born to love, as we are born to breathe and eat and drink. The babe is hardly separated from his mother’s womb before he stretches out a tiny clasping hand, and from that time forth he will constantly stretch out to touch the world that lies about him and the folk that dwell therein. The purpose of our growth in life is to bring us into unity with the universe into which we are born, to make us aware that we are not lonely individual meteors hurtling blindly through an abysmal dark, but living parts of a living whole. As we grow we learn to love more and more: first ourselves; then the family within the small kingdom of the home; then the school, the wider circle of friends, the home community, the college, and the still wider community of the nation; and finally, the greatest country of all, which has no boundaries this side of Hell, and perhaps not even there.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding (1942) " The Practice of The Love of God http://www.quaker.org/pamphlets/wpl1942a.html", William Penn Lecture, delivered at Arch Street Meetinghouse, Philadelphia, 1942. In: Friends' Intelligencer, Vol. 99 p. 231-261 1940s

Love, Life, World, School

“[T]he establishment of a belligerent force’s intentions is always an urgently important matter in itself, regardless of how likely its ultimate victory may be, as America should have learned on December 7, 1941. As for the boundaries of our imagination being the boundaries of the possible, here’s another date: 9/11.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, On Some Counter-Arguments (October 2017)

Imagination, Learning, Victory

“There is a boundary to the understanding, and when it is reached, faith is the continuation of reason.”

William Adams (1706–1789) Fellow and Master of Pembroke College, Oxford

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 219.

Faith, Understanding

“Love has no limitations. It cannot be measured. It has no boundaries. Although many have tried, love is indefinable.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 73

Love

“General systems theory is the scientific exploration of "wholes" and "wholeness" which, not so long ago, were considered metaphysical notions transcending the boundaries of science. Hierarchic structure, stability, teleology, differentiation, approach to and maintenance of steady states, goal-directedness — these are a few of such general system properties.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p.xviii.

Science

“Definite portions of a manifoldness, distinguished by a mark or by a boundary, are called Quanta. Their comparison with regard to quantity is accomplished in the case of discrete magnitudes by counting, in the case of continuous magnitudes by measuring. Measure consists in the superposition of the magnitudes to be compared; it therefore requires a means of using one magnitude as the standard for another. In the absence of this, two magnitudes can only be compared when one is a part of the other; in which case also we can only determine the more or less and not the how much. The researches which can in this case be instituted about them form a general division of the science of magnitude in which magnitudes are regarded not as existing independently of position and not as expressible in terms of a unit, but as regions in a manifoldness.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

On the Hypotheses which lie at the Bases of Geometry (1873)

Science, Parting

“I believe in love, it's all we got.
Love has no boundaries, no borders to cross.
Love is simple, hate breeds.
Those who think difference is the child of disease.
Father and son make love and guns,
Families together kill someone.
Without love, I believe in love.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Believe
Song lyrics, Made in England (1995)

Love, Hate, Making love, Disease

“…the stereographic projection of the spherical surface. From the north pole P we draw radial lines to project every point of the surface of the sphere upon the horizontal plane [below, perpendicular to a line joining it to P and the sphere's center]. In general this transformation is unique and continuous, although the metrical relations are distorted; for the point P, however, it shows a singularity. Point P is mapped upon the infinite; i. e., no finitely located point of the plane corresponds to it. It can be shown that every transformation possesses a singularity in at least one point. The surface of the sphere is therefore called topologically different from the plane. Only a "sphere without a north pole" [point] would be topologically equivalent to a plane. …such a sphere has a point-shaped hole without a boundary and is no longer a closed surface.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

Drawing

“I am convinced that there is no sort of boundary between the living and the mental or between the biological and the psychological. From the moment an organism takes account of a previous experience and adapts to a new situation, that very much resembles psychology.”

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) Swiss psychologist, biologist, logician, philosopher & academic

Interview with Jean Claude Bringuier (1969)

“The rectangular plane of varying dimensions and colours visibly demonstrates that internationalism does not mean chaos ruled by monotony but an ordered and clearly divided unity. In Neo-Plasticism, there are, in fact, very definite boundaries. But these boundaries are not really closed; the straight lines in rectangular opposition to one another constantly intersect, so that their rhythm continues throughout the whole work... These frontiers will be clearly defined but not 'closed'; there will be no customs, no work permits. 'Foreigners' will not be viewed as aliens.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in 'The New Art – The New Life', Piet Mondrian, op. cit. Introd. Note 1., 1931
1930's

“During the Middle Ages, and indeed, throughout later years…Our boundary was the sea; it was a fixed boundary, and a boundary which none could cross when once there was a united nation able to guard that sea frontier; and it is owing to that, primarily and principally, that we were able to develop in this country our own peculiar civilisation and our own freedom in a security which was alien, at that time, to almost every other nation of the world.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast from London (25 September 1933), quoted in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 11.
1933

Age, World, Freedom, Time

“The infinitely smallest part of space is always a space, something endowed with continuity, not at all a mere point or the boundary between specified places in space.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Grundriss des Eigenthümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre in Rücksicht auf das theoretische Vermögen (1795) GA I.3, as quoted/translated by Erhard Scholz, "Philosophy as a Cultural Resource and Medium of Reflection for Hermann Weyl" http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0409596 (2004).

Parting

“The search for meaning is not limited to science: it is constant and continuous--all of us engage in it during all our waking hours the search continues even in our dreams. There are many ways of finding meaning, and there are no absolute boundaries separating them.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Evolution: the general theory (1996), p. 3.

Dreams, Way, Search, Science

“The barrier was only in my mind — which is true of this barrier as well. The more firmly I try to cross the barrier, the more firmly I'm rejected. Well, maybe it's the intention to cross the boundary that pushes me away.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Homecoming saga, The Ships Of Earth (1994)

“Simply pushing harder within the old boundaries will not do.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Attributed to Karl E. Weick in: Iyar, Subrah S. Why Buy the Cow,. 2007. p. 21
2000s

“Learning is sacred … it goes above boundaries.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Escape (2003)

Learning

“The outlaw is the conscious warrior who makes use of the aggression to break down the walls, barriers, and boundaries that artificially separate and alienate.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 132

“A recognition of limits, of boundaries, may be the only thing that prevents power from dizzy collapse.”

William Barrett (philosopher) book Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy

Source: Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958), Chapter Two, The Encounter With Nothingness, p. 32

“Snow, snow over the whole land
across all boundaries.
The candle burned on the table,
the candle burned.”

Borís Pasternak book Doctor Zhivago

As translated by Richard McKane (1985)
Doctor Zhivago (1957)

“The analogy between management and engineering has the unwholesome effect of taking management one further step away from governance. Engineering, like science, music, and theology, knows no national boundaries, and this is why scientists, artists, and theologians— often to their credit— make statesmen uneasy. Such men and women operate from a different normative base from those who govern. Despite the salience of the NAFTAs, the WTOs, and the EUs of this world, governing remains overwhelmingly the business of nation-states.”

John Rohr (1934–2011) American political scientist

Source: Civil servants and their constitutions, 2002, p. ix

Women, Men, World, Music

“Soon, the enterprise of the information age will find itself immobilized if it does not have the ability to tap the information resources within and without its boundaries.”

John Zachman (1934) American computer scientist

Source: Extending and Formalizing the Framework for Information Systems Architecture, 1992, p. 613, cited in: Nik Bessis, Fatos Xhafa (2011) Next Generation Data Technologies for Collective Computational Intelligence. p. 84

Age

“My first memories are of the early '60s at mount road which was then an emerging area. We were a close-knit family and the four of us -- Dipti, Nina, Anil and I -- were left to do what we wanted. There were boundaries, of course, but within those, we were not micro-managed. Things have changed so much now. When my kids, Isha and Akash, were in the third standard, we behaved as though it was our exam.”

Mukesh Ambani (1957) Indian business magnate

Always invest in businesses of the future and in talent

Family, Memory, Change

“… "folk art" signifies the poetical, musical, and pictorial activities of those strata of the population which are uneducated and not urbanized or industrialized. It is of the essence of this art that those who keep it in being are not only passively receptive, but normally are creative participants in the artistic activities, and yet do not stand out as individuals or claim any personal authorship of the productions. "Popular art" on the other hand is to be understood as artistic or quasi-artistic production for the demand of a half-educated public, generally urban and inclined to mass-behavior. In folk art, producers and consumers are hardly distinguished, and the boundary between them is always fluid; in the case of popular art, we find on the contrary an artistically uncreative, completely passive public, and professional production of artistic goods strictly in response to the demand for them. It is indeed a striking fact that folk art, especially folk-poetry, emerges from the ranks of those who enjoy it, whereas popular songs—the street-ballads and popular "hits"—derive from professionals belonging to and spiritually dependent upon the upper classes.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

Arnold Hauser (1985). The philosophy of art history. p. 279

Education, Art, Music, Behavior

“The biological organism and the social persona are profoundly different social constructions. The different systems of social practices, including discourse practices, through which these two notions are constituted, have their meanings, and are made use of, are radically incommensurable. The biological notion of a human organism as an identifiable individual unit of analysis depends on the specific scientific practices we use to construct the identity, the boundedness, the integrity, and the continuity across interactions of this unit. The criteria we use to do so: DNA signatures, neural micro-anatomy, organism-environment boundaries, internal physiological interdependence of subsystems, external physical probes of identification at distinct moments of physical time -- all depend on social practices and discourses profoundly different from those in terms of which we define the social person.
The social-biographical person is also an individual insofar as we construct its identity, boundedness, integrity, and continuity. But the social practices and discourses we deploy in these constructions are quite different. We define the social person in terms of social interactions, social roles, socially and culturally meaningful behavior patterns. We construct from these notions of the personal identity of an individual the separateness and independence of that individual from the social environment with which it transacts, the internal unity or integrity of the individual as a consistent persona, and the continuity of that persona across social interactions.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics, 1995, p. 68

Behavior, Time, Dependency, Personality

“Poland is like an island on the north European plain. At times the island has been swamped by a tide of iron or steel helmets converging from Germany and Russia. At times it has drifted suddenly with the current; if the continent of Africa had drifted relatively as much as the boundaries of Poland have drifted in the last two hundred years, then Africa would at one time have touched the north pole and at another the south pole.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

Across a Red World (1968)

Time

“We are the same. There is no difference anywhere in the world. People are people. They laugh, cry, feel, and love, and music seems to be the commons denomination that brings us all together. Music cuts through all boundaries and goes right to the soul.”

Willie Nelson (1933) American country music singer-songwriter.

[The Facts of Life: And Other Dirty Jokes, 119, Random House Digital, 2003, 9780375758607, Nelson, Willie; McMurtry, Larry]

Love, People, World, Music

“In brief, nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which requires the ethnic boundaries should not be cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state — a contingency already formally excluded by the principle in its general formulation — should not separate the power holders from the rest.”

Ernest Gellner (1925–1995) Czech anthropologist, philosopher and sociologist

Source: Nations and Nationalism (1983), Chapter 1, Definitions, p. 1

“To analyse graphic representation precisely, it is helpful to distinguish it from musical, verbal and mathematical notations, all of which are perceived in a linear or temporal sequence. The graphic image also differs from figurative representation essentially polysemic, and from the animated image, governed by the laws of cinematographic time. Within the boundaries of graphics fall the fields of networks, diagrams and maps. The domain of graphic imagery ranges from the depiction of atomic structures to the representation of galaxies and extends into the spheres of topography and cartography.”

Jacques Bertin (1918–2010) French geographer and cartographer

Source: Semiology of graphics (1967/83), p. 2

Law, Music, Mathematics, Time

“I have laid the stick that connects people together. Now it is up to you, your generation and the generations to come, to build upon that stick a bridge that will ensure the free sharing of information and teaching between the two peoples until the day we become united again as a single people, as we were once before; before men separated us with their imaginary political boundaries of today's Polynesia and Micronesia.”

Mau Piailug (1932–2010) Micronesian navigator from the Carolinian island of Satawal and a teacher of traditional, non-instrument wa…

From Baybayan, Chad Kalepa (2010-07-29). "Piailug's greatest lesson is that we are a single people". Honolulu Star-Advertiser

Men, People

“Practise silence, for the voice of God can be heard in the region of your heart only when the tongue and the inner storm are stilled, and the waves (of the mind) are calmed. There will be no temptation for others to shout when you talk to them in whispers. Set the level of the tone yourself: as low as possible, as high as necessary to reach the outermost boundary of the circle you are addressing. Conserve sound, since it is the treasure of the element ether (Akasa), an emanation from God Himself. Reason can prevail only when the arguments are advanced without the whipping up of sound. Silence is the speech of the spiritual seeker. Soft speech is the expression of genuine love. Hate screeches; fear squeals; conceit trumpets; but love sings lullabies, it soothes, it applies balm. Practise the vocabulary of love; unlearn the language of hate and contempt.”

Sathya Sai Baba (1926–2011) Indian guru

"Divine Discourse" (19 February 1970)

Love, God, Hate, Fear

“Katie Couric: You've cited Alaska's proximity to Russia as part of your foreign-policy experience. What did you mean by that?Sarah Palin: That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and on our other side, the land — boundary that we have with — Canada. It, it's funny that a comment like that was — kind of made to — cari— I don't know. You know. Reporters —Couric: Mocked?Palin: Yeah, mocked, I guess that's the word, yeah.Couric: Explain to me why that enhances your foreign policy credentials.Palin: Well, it certainly does because our— our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They're in the state that I am the executive of. And there in Russia—Couric: Have you ever been involved with any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?Palin: We have trade missions back and forth. We— we do— it's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where— where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is— from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to— to our state.”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

Interview with Katie Couric http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/25/eveningnews/main4479062.shtml, CBS Evening News () [Christine Lagorio, New Sarah Palin Clip: Keeping An Eye On Putin, http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2008/09/25/couricandco/entry4478088.shtml, Couric & Co., CBS News, September 25, 2008, 2008-09-25] Referring to ABC News interview with Charlie Gibson (see above). 2008, 2008 interviews with Katie Couric

Parting, Country

“Organizational forms — specific configurations of goals, boundaries, and activities — are the elements selected by environmental criteria, and change may occur either through new forms eliminating old ones or through the modification of existing forms. Environmental niches are distinct in combination of resources and other constraints that are sufficient to support organizational form. Organizational forms, then, are organized activity systems oriented toward exploiting the resources within a niche.
Selection pressures may favour or eliminate entire groups of organizations, such as industries, and the changing population distribution of organizations in a society reflects the operation of such selection pressures.”

Howard E. Aldrich (1943) American sociologist

Source: Organizations and Environments, 1979, p. 28

Support, Change

“I soon discovered that the greater part of a day in Old State was devoted to meetings. Where the boundaries of jurisdiction were fuzzy or overlapping, meetings became inevitable. Most questions affected a number of functional and geographic divisions…These meetings gave the illusion of action, but often frustrated it by attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable. What was most often needed was not compromise but decision.”

Dean Acheson book Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), State Department Management, Leadership Perspectives

Question, Decision, Parting

“Under this Constitution the boundaries of freedom have been enlarged, the foundations of order and peace have been strengthened, and the growth of our people in all the better elements of national life has indicated the wisdom of the founders and given new hope to their descendants.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1880s, Inaugural address (1881)

Life, Wisdom, People, Peace

“When the man governed by self-interest, the god of this world, does not renounce it but merely refines it by the use of reason and extends it beyond the constricting boundary of the present, he is represented (Luke XVI, 3-9) as one who, in his very person [as servant], defrauds his master [self- interest] and wins from him sacrifices in behalf of “duty.””

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Book IV, Part 1, Section 2, “The Christian religion as a natural religion”
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793)

God, World, Personality

“The Upholder of the Cycles which supports the whole of Life, is water. In every drop of water dwells the Godhead, whom we all serve; there also dwells Life, the Soul of the "First" substance - Water - whose boundaries and banks are the capillaries that guide it and in which it circulates. More energy is encapsulated in every drop of good spring water than an average-sized PowerStation is presently able to produce.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Callum Coats: Water Wizard
Variant: "The Upholder of the Cycles which supports the whole of Life, is water. In every drop of water dwells the Godhead, whom we all serve; there also dwells Life, the Soul of the "First" substance - Water - whose boundaries and banks are the capillaries that guide it and in which it circulates. More energy is encapsulated in every drop of good spring water than an average-sized PowerStation is presently able to produce."

Life, Soul, Spring, Support

“Most biologists," (says Vogel, 1981) "seem to have heard of the boundary layer, but they have a fuzzy notion that it is a discrete region, rather than the discrete notion that it is a fuzzy region.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

quoting Vogel, Steven, Life in Moving Fluids; the Physical Biology of Flow, Willard Grant Press, Boston, 1981.
Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 4.4

“Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian author

The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)

God, Beauty

“Marcel Duchamp, one of this century's pioneers, moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another. There it changed form through a complex interplay of new mental and physical materials, heralding many of the technical, mental and visual details to be found in more recent art... He declared that he wanted to kill art ('for myself') but his persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference altered our thinking, established new units of thought, a "new thought for that object."”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

Jasper John's quote, from: Marcel Duchamps 1887 – 1968, in 'Artforum' 7 no. 3, November 1968, p. 6
1960s

Art, Thinking, Change

“Man has only the rights he can defend. Our most basic right is life. It's enshrined not only in our Constitution, but in the charter of the United Nations. The prohibition against taking a life is found in our most ancient texts and in the statutes of every nation. Every murder, whether in Brooklyn, Santiago, Rwanda or Kosovo, demands punishment by whatever legal means possible. Otherwise, the right to life is just an empty promise. The law against murder applies to all. No matter the perpetrator, the victim, or the country where the murder is committed. It is the one moral law that recognizes no national, racial or religious boundaries. It can tolerate no exception. There is one law. One law. And when that law is broken it is the duty of every officer of any court to rise in defense of that law, and bring their full power and diligence to bear against the law breaker. Because Man has only those rights he can defend. Only those rights.”

Rene Balcer (1954) screenwriter, producer and director

Spoken by Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy in the Law & Order episode Vaya Con Dios.
Law & Order

Life, Law, Country

“A reference framework is required in order to locate events in time and space. With some contractions and omissions, Figure 1.1 shows the conventional divisions for the classical and medieval periods. Even before the birth of the idea of nationality, it is quite acceptable to refer to specific countries, such as Greece and Italy, whose boundaries are well defined. It is also usual to refer to areas in which there is felt to have been some degree of cultural unity —— for example, the Roman Empire and Islam. Sometimes space and time are embraced by one image: the Roman Empire can mean either the first four centuries of our era or the area under Roman dominion. Used with care, these concepts have value for some historical purposes, but they can be very misleading. In the first place, we have to bear in mind the shifting of frontiers; in AD 750, for example, the Iberian peninsula was predominantly Muslim while Asia Minor was Christian — by 1450 the reverse was the case. Also, and this can be more serious, the conventional divisions are associated most closely with political and military realities, and often have little bearing on intellectual or social activities.”

Donald Hill (1922–1994) British historian and engineer

A History of Engineering in Classical and Medieval Times, (1985), 1. Introduction.

Idea, Birth, Reality, Time

“Don’t do whatever you are able of, however try to do whatever you are capable of, the best you can; your boundaries are flexible try to move to upper levels.”

Elia M. Ramollah (1973) founder and leader of the El Yasin Community

The Great Master of Thought (Amen- Vol.3), Observing management

“Problems connected with political boundaries have frequently elicited the interest of geographers. In all countries with chronic or acute boundary problems the geographers are drawn into the general discussion, more or less as experts, and in some cases the professional geographer has actually been called upon to assist in the determination and demarcation of boundaries.”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

Hartshorne (1933) " Geographic and political boundaries in Upper Silesia http://piotrwroblewski.us.edu.pl/rudy/Richard_Hartshorne.pdf" in: Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Vol. 23, No. 4 (Dec., 1933), p. 195

Problem, Country

“The extreme moment of shock in battle presents in heightened and distorted form some of the distinctive characteristics of a whole society involved in war. These characteristics in turn represent a heightening and distortion of many of the traits of a social world cracked open by transformative politics. The threats to survival are immediate and shifting; no mode of association or activity can be held fixed if it stands as an obstacle to success. The existence of stable boundaries between passionate and calculating relationships disappears in the terror of the struggle. All settled ties and preconceptions shake or collapse under the weight of fear, violence, and surprise. What the experience of combat sharply diminishes is the sense of variety in the opportunities of self-expression and attachment, the value given to the bonds of community and to life itself, the chance for reflective withdrawal and for love. In all these ways, it is a deformed expression of the circumstance of society shaken up and restored to indefinition. Yet the features of this circumstance that the battle situation does share often suffice to make the boldest associative experiments seem acceptable in battle even if they depart sharply from the tenor of life in the surrounding society. Vanguardist warfare is the extreme case. It is the response of unprejudiced intelligence and organized collaboration to violence and contingency.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success (1987), p. 160

Love, Life, War, World

“A bird's-eye view of centralised and disempowered societies will reveal a strictly rectilinear network of streets, farms, and property boundaries. It is as though we have patterned the earth to suit our survey instruments rather than to serve human or environmental needs. We cannot perhaps blame Euclid for this, but we can blame his followers. The straight-line patterns that result prevent most sensible landscape planning strategies and result in neither an aesthetically nor functionally satisfactory landscape or stretscape. Once established, then entered into a body of law, such inane (or insane) patterning is stubbornly defended. But it is created by, and can be dismantled by, people.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 4.21

People, Law, Bird

“I know that my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government orders.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

My Religion (1884), as translated in The Human Experience : Contemporary American and Soviet Fiction and Poetry (1989) by the Quaker US/USSR Committee

People

“Gradually we began [ De Stijl-artists in The Netherlands, 1918] to present a closed front. By working there had been created not only a clarity in the collective consciousness of our group, but we had gained a certainty, which made it possible for us to define our collective attitude towards life and to perpetrate it according to the requirements of the period... As the world war [ World War I ] was coming to an end, we all came to feel the need of securing an interest in our efforts beyond the narrow boundaries of Holland.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote in Neue Schweizer Rundschau, 1929, p. 172 (Van Doesburg); as quoted in De Stijl 1917-1931 - The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/jaff001stij01_01/jaff001stij01_01_0003.php, J.M. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam, 1956, p. 17 Van Doesburg is looking back on the starting years of De Stijl-movement 1926 – 1931

Life, War, World, Feeling

“The interlacedness of the two heterogeneous origins [Remark: This refers to the origins of governance: (1) necessity to work cooperatively, (2) the fight between man and man] prevails as the fundamental characteristic of governance. Therefore even any true community, being successful somewhere between boundaries for a common purpose, elsewhere becomes in theory a means for misleading, used to interpret and cover-up actually existing power. Again and again things are named by their contrary and are hidden. In that manner, under the pretense of communication - the open discussion - people are interrogated and commands are given, under the pretense of freedom and voluntariness behavior is enforced, in the coat of pure ethics the evil is carried out, under the pretense of truth lies and fraud are committed, and all values valid at any one time are, depending on the situation, either applied or ignored. [Remarks: "Herrschaft" = "governance" or "leadership", "Gewalt" = "power" or "violence"]”

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) German psychiatrist and philosopher

On Truth (1948), Pt 2, Ch. 3, II, B, 3, b)

People, Truth, Behavior, Communication

“Hans Haacke's "Visitor's Profile" encouraged visitors to interact with a computer by inputting personal information, which was then tabulated to output statistical data on the exhibition's audience. Such demographic research - as art - opened up a critical discourse, following Foucault and others, on the exclusivity of cultural institutions and their patrons, revealing the myth of public service as a thin veneer justifying the hierarchical values that reify extant social relations. Similarly, "Interactive Paper Systems" by Sonia Sheridan, engaged museum-goers in a creative exchange with the artist and 3M's first commercially available color photocopying machine, dissolving conventional artist-viewer-object relations. In "The Seventh Investigation (Art as Idea as Idea)" Joseph Kosuth utilized multiple forms of mass media and distribution (a billboard, an newspaper advertisement, a banner, and a museum installation) to question the conceptual and contextual boundaries between art, philosophy, commerce, pictures, and texts.”

Edward A. Shanken (1964) American art historian

Edward A. Shanken. " The House That Jack Built: Jack Burnham's Concept of "Software" as a Metaphor for Art http://www.artexetra.com/House.html" in Leonardo Electronic Almanac 6:10 (November, 1998)

Art, Color, Idea, Question

“Some day we shall all be free. Racial hatred will die out; citizenship will be important but humanity as a whole much more so. Boundaries and territories will assume their rightful place in man's thinking, but goodwill and international understanding will matter more. Religious differences and sectarian dislikes must eventually vanish and we shall eventually recognise "one God and Father of all, Who is above all and through all and in us all."… They will emerge more rapidly when the right educational processes condition the coming generations… and when money and the products of the earth are regarded as goods to be shared.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Unfinished Autobiography (1951), Chapter II, Part 1

Money, God, Education, Understanding

“The power of God is redefined in Jesus as practical costly service extending to those who are beyond the normal boundaries of human concern: the diseased, the poor, the oppressed, the outcast. If humans are to claim a lordship over creation, then it can only be a lordship of service. There can be no lordship without service. According to the theological doctrine of animal rights, then, humans are to be the servant species — the species given power, opportunity, and privilege to give themselves, nay sacrifice themselves, for the weaker, suffering creatures.”

Andrew Linzey (1952) British theologian and divine

Source: Animal Gospel: Christian Faith as if Animals Mattered (1998), p. 39

God, Disease, Suffering, Animals

“In concept a feedback system is a closed system. Its dynamic behavior arises within its internal structure. Any action which is essential to the behavior of the mode being investigated must be included inside the system boundary.”

Jay Wright Forrester (1918–2016) American operations researcher

Source: Principles of Systems (1968), p. 4-1 as cited in: Richardson, George P. " Reflections on the foundations of system dynamics http://obssr.od.nih.gov/issh/2012/files/Richardson%202011.pdf." System Dynamics Review 27.3 (2011): 219-243.

Behavior

“Suppose, now, there is such a thing as an all-round inferior race. Is that any reason why we should propose to preserve it for ever…? Whether there is a race so inferior I do not know, but certainly there is no race so superior as to be trusted with human charges. The true answer to Aristotle’s plea for slavery, that there are “natural slaves,” lies in the fact that there are no “natural” masters… The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior. There is only one sane and logical thing to be done with a really inferior race, and that is to exterminate it. Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, and most of them are cruel. You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrew fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards did the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly with deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of their Indians; you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is not accustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that will expose it to infectious diseases to which you yourselves are immune, as the missionaries do the Polynesians; you may resort to honest simple murder, as we English did with the Tasmanians; or you can maintain such conditions as conduce to “race suicide,” as the British administration does in Fiji. Suppose, then, for a moment, that there is an all-round inferior race… If any of the race did, after all, prove to be fit to survive, they would survive—they would be picked out with a sure and automatic justice from the over-ready condemnation of all their kind. Is there, however, an all-round inferior race in the world? Even the Australian black-fellow is, perhaps, not quite so entirely eligible for extinction as a good, wholesome, horse-racing, sheep-farming Australian white may think. These queer little races, the black-fellows, the Pigmies, the Bushmen, may have their little gifts, a greater keenness, a greater fineness of this sense or that, a quaintness of the imagination or what not, that may serve as their little unique addition to the totality of our Utopian civilisation. We are supposing that every individual alive on earth is alive in Utopia, and so all the surviving “black-fellows” are there. Every one of them in Utopia has had what none have had on earth, a fair education and fair treatment, justice, and opportunity…Some may be even prosperous and admired, may have married women of their own or some other race, and so may be transmitting that distinctive thin thread of excellence, to take its due place in the great synthesis of the future.”

H. G. Wells book A Modern Utopia

Source: A Modern Utopia (1905), Ch. 10, sect. 3

Death, Women, World, Education

“Never day-beam hath shone o'er
Lovelier or wilder shore!
Half was land, and half was sea
Where the eye could only see
The blue sky for boundary.”

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

(30th November 1822) Fragments in Rhyme V: the Happy Isle
7th December 1822) Fragments in Rhyme VI: The Painter's Love see The Improvisatrice (1824
14th December 1822) Fragments in Rhyme VII: Manmadin, The Indian Cupid. Floating down the Ganges see The Improvisatrice (1824
21st December 1822) Fragments in Rhyme IX: The Female Convict see The Improvisatrice (1824
The London Literary Gazette, 1821-1822

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