Quotes about call
page 25

Amit Chaudhuri photo
Mel Gibson photo
John Selden photo
Richard Wurmbrand photo
Derren Brown photo
Frank Buckles photo

“I didn't lie; nobody calls me a liar, I may have increased my age.”

Frank Buckles (1901–2011) United States Army soldier and centenarian

Joking on joining the Army at age 15.
CNN March 8, 2008.

“Theology is now called to listen fully to the world, even if such a listening demands a turning away from the church's witness to Christ.”

Thomas J. J. Altizer (1927–2018) American radical theologian

The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966), Preface

James Hudson Taylor photo

“But God makes no mistakes; according to their service He divides the help, and those who are called to the holiest service are those who can have least assistance.”

James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) Missionary in China

(J. Hudson Taylor. Separation and Service: Or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. London: Morgan & Scott, n.d., 105).

Edward Everett photo
Mary Pickford photo

“You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down.”

Mary Pickford (1892–1979) Canadian-American actress

"Why Not Try God?", Chapter 6 (newspaper serial), appeared in St. Petersburg Times, 25 January 1936, sect. 2, p. 3 http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=SQxPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=500DAAAAIBAJ&pg=4725,3554118&dq=pickford+not-the-falling-down&hl=en

Richard Mead photo
Michael Moorcock photo
Gore Vidal photo
M. K. Hobson photo
Lord Dunsany photo
Larry Wall photo

“Call me bored, but don't call me boring.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199705101952.MAA00756@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

William Ewart Gladstone photo
Marianne von Werefkin photo
Charles Taze Russell photo
Erich Fromm photo
Norman G. Finkelstein photo
Sacha Baron Cohen photo

“War! Huh? What is it good for? Well, for start? It sorts out who is the strongest out of the two countries. Also, you get to see some amazing explosions. But, there is some people out there who not only don't enjoy the war, but they try to spoil the fun for everyone else. And those chickens is called the 'U. N.”

Sacha Baron Cohen (1971) English stand-up comedian, writer, actor, and voice actor

Me went to New York to meet these player-haters.
As quoted in "War" http://www.listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=aV3ncKB8a4s (28 February 2003), Da Ali G Show http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0508528/?ref_=ttep_ep2.

Francis Bacon photo

“It is not the pleasure of curiosity, nor the quiet of resolution, nor the raising of the spirit, nor victory of wit, nor faculty of speech … that are the true ends of knowledge … but it is a restitution and reinvesting, in great part, of man to the sovereignty and power, for whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names, he shall again command them.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature (ca. 1603) Works, Vol. 1, p. 83; The Works of Francis Bacon (1819) p. 133, https://books.google.com/books?id=xgE9AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA133 Vol. 2

Kathy Griffin photo

“I was raised right, I talk about people behind their backs. It's called manners!”

Kathy Griffin (1960) American actress and comedian

Is... Not Nicole Kidman (2005)

Alan Guth photo
Lewis M. Branscomb photo

“Shortly after taking office in 1993, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore called for a shift in American technology policy toward an expansion of public investments in partnerships with private industry.”

Lewis M. Branscomb (1926) physicist and science policy advisor

L.M. Branscomb, J.H. Keller (1999) Investing in innovation: creating a research and innovation policy that works.

Marianne von Werefkin photo
Robert P. George photo
Arthur Ponsonby photo
Aubrey Beardsley photo
Irene Dunne photo

“How do I remain what is called "normal"? Because for me it's the natural thing to do, and therefore easier than doing something else.”

Irene Dunne (1898–1990) American actress

How Do I Stay Normal in Hollywood (1942)

China Miéville photo
Leo Tolstoy photo
David Morrison photo
William Irwin Thompson photo
René Guénon photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Yves Klein photo
Max Tegmark photo
Thomas Jefferson photo

“The art and mystery of banks… is established on the principle that 'private debts are a public blessing.' That the evidences of those private debts, called bank notes, become active capital, and aliment the whole commerce, manufactures, and agriculture of the United States. Here are a set of people, for instance, who have bestowed on us the great blessing of running in our debt about two hundred millions of dollars, without our knowing who they are, where they are, or what property they have to pay this debt when called on; nay, who have made us so sensible of the blessings of letting them run in our debt, that we have exempted them by law from the repayment of these debts beyond a give proportion (generally estimated at one-third). And to fill up the measure of blessing, instead of paying, they receive an interest on what they owe from those to whom they owe; for all the notes, or evidences of what they owe, which we see in circulation, have been lent to somebody on an interest which is levied again on us through the medium of commerce. And they are so ready still to deal out their liberalities to us, that they are now willing to let themselves run in our debt ninety millions more, on our paying them the same premium of six or eight per cent interest, and on the same legal exemption from the repayment of more than thirty millions of the debt, when it shall be called for.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

ME 13:420
1810s, Letters to John Wayles Eppes (1813)

Noam Chomsky photo

“In Somalia, we know exactly what they had to gain because they told us. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, described this as the best public relations operation of the Pentagon that he could imagine. His picture, which I think is plausible, is that there was a problem about raising the Pentagon budget, and they needed something that would be, look like a kind of a cakewalk, which would give a lot of prestige to the Pentagon. Somalia looked easy. Let's look back at the background. For years, the United States had supported a really brutal dictator, who had just devastated the country, and was finally kicked out. After he's kicked out, it was 1990, the country sank into total chaos and disaster, with starvation and warfare and all kind of horrible misery. The United States refused to, certainly to pay reparations, but even to look. By the middle of 1992, it was beginning to ease. The fighting was dying down, food supplies were beginning to get in, the Red Cross was getting in, roughly 80% of their supplies they said. There was a harvest on the way. It looked like it was finally sort of settling down. At that point, all of a sudden, George Bush announced that he had been watching these heartbreaking pictures on television, on Thanksgiving, and we had to do something, we had to send in humanitarian aid. The Marines landed, in a landing which was so comical, that even the media couldn't keep a straight face. Take a look at the reports of the landing of the Marines, it must've been the first week of December 1992. They had planned a night, there was nothing that was going on, but they planned a night landing, so you could show off all the fancy new night vision equipment and so on. Of course they had called the television stations, because what's the point of a PR operation for the Pentagon if there's no one to look for it. So the television stations were all there, with their bright lights and that sort of thing, and as the Marines were coming ashore they were blinded by the television light. So they had to send people out to get the cameramen to turn off the lights, so they could land with their fancy new equipment. As I say, even the media could not keep a straight face on this one, and they reported it pretty accurately. Also reported the PR aspect. Well the idea was, you could get some nice shots of Marine colonels handing out peanut butter sandwiches to starving refugees, and that'd all look great. And so it looked for a couple of weeks, until things started to get unpleasant. As things started to get unpleasant, the United States responded with what's called the Powell Doctrine. The United States has an unusual military doctrine, it's one of the reasons why the U. S. is generally disqualified from peace keeping operations that involve civilians, again, this has to do with sovereignty. U. S. military doctrine is that U. S. soldiers are not permitted to come under any threat. That's not true for other countries. So countries like, say, Canada, the Fiji Islands, Pakistan, Norway, their soldiers are coming under threat all the time. The peace keepers in southern Lebanon for example, are being attacked by Israeli soldiers all the time, and have suffered plenty of casualties, and they don't like it. But U. S. soldiers are not permitted to come under any threat, so when Somali teenagers started shaking fists at them, and more, they came back with massive fire power, and that led to a massacre. According to the U. S., I don't know the actual numbers, but according to U. S. government, about 7 to 10 thousand Somali civilians were killed before this was over. There's a close analysis of all of this by Alex de Waal, who's one of the world's leading specialists on African famine and relief, altogether academic specialist. His estimate is that the number of people saved by the intervention and the number killed by the intervention was approximately in the same ballpark. That's Somalia. That's what's given as a stellar example of the humanitarian intervention.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Responding to the question, "what did the United States have to gain by intervening in Somalia?", regarding Operation Provide Relief/Operation Restore Hope/Battle of Mogadishu.
Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999, Sovereignty and World Order, 1999

Colin Wilson photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Joseph Chamberlain photo

“What is to be the nature of the domestic legislation of the future? (Hear, hear.) I cannot help thinking that it will be more directed to what are called social subjects than has hitherto been the case.—How to promote the greater happiness of the masses of the people (hear, hear), how to increase their enjoyment of life (cheers), that is the problem of the future; and just as there are politicians who would occupy all the world and leave nothing for the ambition of anybody else, so we have their counterpart at home in the men who, having already annexed everything that is worth having, expect everybody else to be content with the crumbs that fall from their table. If you will go back to the origin of things you will find that when our social arrangements first began to shape themselves every man was born into the world with natural rights, with a right to a share in the great inheritance of the community, with a right to a part of the land of his birth. (Cheers.) But all these rights have passed away. The common rights of ownership have disappeared. Some of them have been sold; some of them have been given away by people who had no right to dispose of them; some of them have been lost through apathy and ignorance; some have been stolen by fraud (cheers); and some have been acquired by violence. Private ownership has taken the place of these communal rights, and this system has become so interwoven with our habits and usages, it has been so sanctioned by law and protected by custom, that it might be very difficult and perhaps impossible to reverse it. But then, I ask, what ransom will property pay for the security which it enjoys? What substitute will it find for the natural rights which have ceased to be recognized?”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Speech to the Birmingham Artisans' Association at Birmingham Town Hall (5 January 1885), quoted in ‘Mr. Chamberlain At Birmingham.’, The Times (6 January 1885), p. 7.
1880s

David Icke photo
N. K. Jemisin photo

“So, there was a girl.
What I’ve guessed, and what the history books imply, is that she was unlucky enough to have been sired by a cruel man. He beat both wife and daughter and abused them in other ways. Bright Itempas is called, among other things, the god of justice. Perhaps that was why He responded when she came into His temple, her heart full of unchildlike rage.
“I want him to die,” she said (or so I imagine). “Please Great Lord, make him die.”
You know the truth now about Itempas. He is a god of warmth and light, which we think of as pleasant, gentle things. I once thought of Him that way, too. But warmth uncooled burns; light undimmed can hurt even my blind eyes. I should have realized. We should all have realized. He was never what we wanted Him to be.
So when the girl begged the Bright Lord to murder her father, He said, “Kill him yourself.” And He gifted her with a knife perfectly suited to her small, weak child’s hands.
She took the knife home and used it that very night. The next day, she came back to the Bright Lord, her hands and soul stained red, happy for the first time in her short life. “I will love you forever,” she declared. And He, for a rare once, found Himself impressed by mortal will.
Or so I imagine.
The child was mad, of course. Later events proved this. But it makes sense to me that this madness, not mere religious devotion, would appeal most to the Bright Lord. Her love was unconditional, her purpose undiluted by such paltry considerations as conscience or doubt. It seems like Him, I think, to value that kind of purity of purpose—even though, like warmth and light, too much love is never a good thing.”

Source: The Broken Kingdoms (2011), Chapter 11 “Possession” (watercolor) (pp. 202-203)

Jane Roberts photo
John Lancaster Spalding photo

“When the mind has grasped the matter, words come like flowers at the call of spring.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 17

Elizabeth Barrett Browning photo
Jerome K. Jerome photo
Kurt Schwitters photo
Joseph Beuys photo
Patrick Henry photo
Robert A. Dahl photo
Kenneth Grahame photo
Leonard Peikoff photo
Bobby Seale photo
Stephen Harper photo
Alfred de Zayas photo
Nguyen Khanh photo

“According to a stagist conception of progressive history (which is usually blind to its implicit teleology), the work of figures like Foucault, Derrida and other cutting-edge French theorists is often intuitively affiliated with a form of profound and sophisticated critique that presumably far surpasses anything found in the socialist, Marxist or anarchist traditions. It is certainly true and merits emphasis that the Anglophone reception of French theory, as John McCumber has aptly pointed out, had important political implications as a pole of resistance to the false political neutrality, the safe technicalities of logic and language, or the direct ideological conformism operative in the McCarthy-supported traditions of Anglo-American philosophy. However, the theoretical practices of figures who turned their back on what Cornelius Castoriadis called the tradition of radical critique—meaning anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist resistance—surely contributed to the ideological drift away from transformative politics. According to the spy agency itself, post-Marxist French theory directly contributed to the CIA’s cultural program of coaxing the left toward the right, while discrediting anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, thereby creating an intellectual environment in which their imperial projects could be pursued unhindered by serious critical scrutiny from the intelligentsia.”

Gabriel Rockhill (1972) philosopher

"The CIA reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left" (2017)

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo
Cao Xueqin photo
Forest Whitaker photo

“[About why he named his daughter True and son Ocean] I want those names to be their destiny, for my daughter to be honest and my son to be expansive. I try to be like a forest, revitalizing and constantly growing. … being called Forest helped me find my identity.”

Forest Whitaker (1961) American actor

To Webster Hall curator Baird Jones, reported in the New York Post (11 December 1999); quoted in “Forest Whitaker,” in Hollywood.com http://www.hollywood.com/celebrities/forest-whitaker-57300206/.

Rudyard Kipling photo

“We have fed our sea for a thousand years
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

The Song of the Dead http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/verse/volumeXI/songdead.html, II, Stanza 1 (1896).
The Seven Seas (1896)

Ann Coulter photo
Pope John Paul II photo

“Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Letter to artists, 4 April 1999
Source: Libreria Editrice Vaticana http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_23041999_artists_en.html

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi photo
Matthew Arnold photo
Daniel Handler photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Johannes Grenzfurthner photo

“Long time ago I called the greasy stuff on touch displays "hackerfat"… but it's better to change that to "socialsmear."”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

Twitter message https://twitter.com/johannes_mono/status/751789343333908481

David Attenborough photo
Isa Genzken photo
Pope Benedict XVI photo
Daniel Levitin photo
Maya Angelou photo
W. Somerset Maugham photo
Enoch Powell photo

“Too often today people are ready to tell us: "This is not possible, that is not possible." I say: whatever the true interest of our country calls for is always possible.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Conservative Party conference, 1968 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0t3BTAF0ns
1960s

“Only the scenario writers are exempt. These are tied between the tails of two spirited Caucasian ponies, which are then driven off in opposite directions. This custom is called "a conference."”

S.J. Perelman (1904–1979) American humorist, author, and screenwriter

"Strictly from Hunger", The Most of S. J. Perelman (1992) pp. 47-48

Monica Keena photo
Julie Taymor photo
Aurangzeb photo

“Verily, the guide and teacher of this path [of rebellion against, a reigning father] is Your Majesty; others are merely following your footsteps. How can the path which Your Majesty chose to follow can be called 'the path of ill-luck'?
My fathered bartered away the garden of Eden for two grains of wheat; I shall be an unworthy son if I do not sell it for a grain of barley!”

Aurangzeb (1618–1707) Sixth Mughal Emperor

Muhammad Akbar to Aurangzeb; see Studies in Aurangzib's reign: Being Studies in Mughal India, first series by Jadunath Sarkar, p. 68, Ayodhya Revisited https://books.google.com/books?id=gKKaDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA581 by Kunal Kishore, p. 581; Mughal Empire in India, 1526-1761: Volume 2 by Shripad Rama Sharma, p. 637
Quotes from late medieval histories

David Foster Wallace photo
Ryan North photo

“I saw The Mountain Ghost last night and they were really good but also scary! Actually they are called the Mountain GOATS and do not feature scary g-g-g-ghosts. Luckily.”

Ryan North (1980) Canadian webcomic writer and programmer

Blog post http://www.livejournal.com/users/qwantz/32795.html

Frederick Douglass photo
Clint Eastwood photo

“The UK does not deserve its place on the UN Security Council when it is a consistent violator of the principles it is meant to uphold: It is like having a gangster as a judge. To call Britain a rogue state is not to take an ideological position so much as to describe a basic fact in current international affairs.”

Mark Curtis (British author) British journalist and historian

When it comes to Middle East policy, the UK is nothing but a rogue state http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/when-it-comes-middle-east-policy-uk-rogue-state-1677623456 (6 April 2018), Middle East Eye.

Bill Bryson photo
Michel Foucault photo

“What all these people are doing is not aggressive; they are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body — through the eroticization of the body. I think it's … a creative enterprise, which has as one of its main features what I call the desexualization of pleasure.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

In reference to Sadism and Masochism, as quoted in Who's Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History: From World War II to the Present Day (2001) by Robert Aldrich and Gary Wotherspoon

Gloria Estefan photo

“We're lucky to call Miami and the United States home. What other city can claim to have its own foreign policy? Miami is many things, but it is never boring.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

comment to audience while headlining concert to open Carnival Center for the Performing Arts www.miamiherald.com (October 6, 2006)
2007, 2008