Quotes about call
page 61

“Extending the reach of political freedom is essential to prevailing in the great struggle of our time, but it is not enough. Many in this chamber have answered the call to help their brothers and sisters in need by working to alleviate hopelessness. These efforts to improve the human condition honor the highest ideals of this institution. They also advance our security interests. The extremists find their most fertile recruiting grounds in societies trapped in chaos and despair, places where people see no prospect of a better life. In the shadows of hopelessness, radicalism thrives. And eventually, that radicalism can boil over into violence and cross borders and take innocent lives across the world.”

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

2000s, 2008, Address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 2008)

Life, People, World, Sister

“I wished I had been born early enough to have been called a Little Englander. It was a term of sneering abuse, but I should be delighted to accept it as a description of myself. That little sounds the right note of affection. It is little England I love.”

J.B. Priestley book English Journey

English Journey, 1934. Reprinted in Judy Giles and Tim Middleton Writing Englishness: An Introductory Sourcebook,Routledge, 2003 (p. 26).

Love

“An idle man has a constant tendency to torpidity. He has adopted the Indian maxim — that it is better to walk than to run, and better to stand than to walk, and better to sit than to stand, and better to lie than to sit. He hugs himself into the notion, that God calls him to be quiet.”

Richard Cecil (clergyman) (1748–1810) British Evangelical Anglican priest and social reformer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 345.

God, Lie

“If I had to describe my remarks this evening frankly — as if I were in police court and on oath, so to speak — I should have to call it a ramble over several subjects, portions of which may seem to you to be impudent, and portions of which will be ignorant, and portions of which may contrive to be both at once.”

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

Can a Doctor Be a Humanist? (1984).

“Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art.”

Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) American writer and artist

1960s, Modernist Painting (1960)

Art

“We had to get rid of occupation and regain and enhance our sovereignty. We have now ended up with a capitalist system. We are calling for social justice, a social security system in terms of creating jobs and enhancing the productive base of the economy.”

Raid Jahid Fahmi (1950) Iraqi politician

Interview with Al Jazeera (25 May 2018)

Justice

“We've already said that it's the Holy Spirit who gives us the ultimate assurance of Christianity's truth. Therefore, the only role left for argument and evidence to play is a subsidiary role. I think Martin Luther correctly distinguished between what he called the magisterial and ministerial uses of reason. The magisterial use of reason occurs when reason stands over and above the gospel like a magistrate and judges it on the basis of argument and evidence. The ministerial use of reason occurs when reason submits to and serves the gospel… Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter, not vice versa.”

William Lane Craig (1949) American Christian apologist and evangelist

Source: Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (1994), p. 36.

Truth, Faith, Thinking

“Language is an abominable misunderstanding which makes up a part of matter. The painters and the physicists have treated matter pretty well. The poets have hardly touched it. In March 1958, when I was living at the Beat Hotel, I proposed to Burroughs to at least make available to literature the means that painters have been using for fifty years. Cut words into pieces and scramble them. You'll hear someone draw a bow-string. Who runs may read, To read better, practice your running. Speed is entirely up to us, since machines have delivered us from the horse. Henceforth the question is to deliver us from that other so-called superior animal, man. It's not worth it to chase out the merchants: their temple is dedicated to the unsuitable lie of the value of the Unique. The crime of separation gave birth to the idea of the Unique which would not be separate. In painting, matter has seen everything: from sand to stuffed goats. Disfigured more and more, the image has been geometrically multiplied to a dizzying degree. A snow of advertising could fall from the sky, and only collector babies and the chimpanzees who make abstract paintings would bother to pick one up.”

Brion Gysin (1916–1986) Canadian artist

Cut-Ups: A Project for Disastrous Success.

Lie, Literature, Idea, Birth

“In football you need to have everything in your cake mix to make the cake taste right. One little bit of ingredient that Tony uses in his cake gets talked about all the time is Rory’s throw. Call that cinnamon and he’s got a cinnamon flavoured cake. It’s not fair and it’s not right and it’s only a small part of what he does.”

Ian Holloway (1963) English association football player and manager

On Tony Pulis's style of management. Mirror Football, 10 December 2010 Holloway uses bizarre cake analogy for Pulis' Stoke style, Mirror Football, 2010-12-11, Jeremy, Butler, 2010-12-10 http://www.mirrorfootball.co.uk/news/Stoke-v-Blackpool-Ian-Holloway-blasts-critics-of-Tony-Pulis-style-by-using-a-bizarre-cake-analogy-article648761.html, Sourced quotes

Time, Football, Parting

“Mussolini himself, before he knew who would collect around the standards of the new Fascist Republican Party, committed himself to the realization of the original syndicalist and neo-idealist program of Fascism. His original intention was to call his new republic the Italian Socialist Republic—which nonetheless advertised itself as the vehicle of an Italian socialism, a national socialism.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 307

“What has been called Christianity has been a disturber of the public peace in all countries and at all times. Nothing has so alienated nations, nothing has so destroyed the natural justice of mankind, as what has been known as religion. The idea that all men must worship the same God, believe the same dogmas, has for thousands of years plucked with bloody hands the flower of pity from the human heart.”

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

"To the Indianapolis Clergy." The Iconoclast (Indianapolis, IN) (1883)

Men, God, Peace, Religion

“I have called these animals destriers, borrowing an old word for war-horses. I've given them clawed feet instead of hoofs because I think the genetic engineers will give them claws too. The horse's hoofs seem to be an evolutionary mistake. To speak in Lamarckian terms, the horse has lengthened its legs by standing on its toes until it has ended up standing on one toenail. […] Cheetahs, wolves, and greyhounds all have nonretractile claws that serve them as their spikes serve runners and baseball players. Racehorses could not run as fast as they do if they did not wear aluminum or magnesium shoes.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

"Cavalry in the Age of the Autarch", in Castle of the Otter (1982), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Castle of Days (1992)
Nonfiction

War, Shoe, Thinking, Animals

“Art does not lie down on the bed that is made for it; it runs away as soon as one says its name; it loves to go incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what it is called.”

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) sculptor from France

Quoted by Alan Magee, in Paintings, Sculpture, Graphics., Forum Gallery, New York, 2004
posthumous

Love, Lie, Art, Forgetting

“It was pretty sad, because for the first time I found how stupid people could be. It sort of made me feel alone in the world. The more people pointed at me in scorn the more stubborn I got and when they began calling me the Bad Girl of West Seattle High, I tried to live up to it.”

Frances Farmer (1913–1970) American actress

On reaction to her high school essay "God Dies", Collier's magazine, (8 May 1937)

People, Stupidity, World, Sadness

“First of all, no one can accuse me, Ayad Jamal Aldin, of secatarianism, because I support a secular regime that fully separates religion and the state. […] I believe that my freedom as a Shia and as a religious person will never be complete unless I preserve the freedom of the Sunni, the Christian, the Jew, the Sabai and the Yazidi. We will not be able to preserve the freedom of the mosque unless we preserve the freedom of entertainment clubs. […] The curricula - both the modern ones, in some Arab and Islamic countries, and the books of jurisprudence and heritage - have many flaws that must be fixed once and for all. There are rulings about Ahl al-Dhimma - even if, Allah be praised, no current regime can enforce these rulings. However, just for the sake of amusement and diversion, I recommend that the viewers read the books of jurisprudence, and see how Ahl al-Dhimma are treated. I especially recommend this to people with a lust for Arab and Islamic history, who claim that our history is a source of pride, and that others were treated with kindness and love - especially Christians and Jews. Among these rulings, a Dhimmi must wear a belt, so he would be identifiable. Moreover, it is recommended that he be forced to the narrowest paths, and there are even jurisprudents who say that it is recommended to slap a Christian on the back of his neck so he would feel humiliated and degraded. This is how we harass him and then invite him to join Islam. I can swear that the Prophet Muhammad is innocent of such inhuman jurisprudence. I challenge anyone among the people with a lust for history to talk candidly to the West, to the advocates of human rights, and tell them that our heritage has such evils and flaws. We are a nation of blackout and darkness. We cannot live in the light of day. […] We do not hold ourselves accountable. This is why America came to demand that the Arabs be accountable. We must have more self-confidence and be accountable before others hold us accountable. We must discipline ourselves before the Americans and English discipline us. We must maintain human rights, which we have neglected for 1,300 or 1,400 years, to this day - until the arrival of the Americans, the Christians, the English, the Zionists, the Crusaders - call them what you will. They came to teach you, the followers of Muhammad, how to respect human rights.”

Iyad Jamal Al-Din (1961) Iraqi politician

Sayyed Ayad Jamal Aldin: Sayyed Ayad Jamal Aldin: The Arabs Want Tyrannical Regimes, in Line with Their Backward Culture, LBC TV, July 31, 2005 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_ZKffu6Wsg,

Love, People, Books, Religion

“I just looked in the phone book, and called up the Executive Officer of the Servomechanisms Laboratory (Al Sise) and said, "I'm a math graduate student and would like a summer job. If you could find an electrical engineering student, I'm sure by the end of the summer we could make you an electronic calculator that would beat the pants off that little mechanical thing that Wiener has put together. Are you interested?"”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: An Interview with Douglas T. Ross (1984), p. 17.

Books, Summer

“Tories and others set about the task of dealing with the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution by calling upon the power of Government to redress injustice…[The State] assumed the functions of protecting the common interest and safeguarding the interests of the weaker members of society.”

Rab Butler (1902–1982) British politician

About the Industrial Charter (Conservative Political Centre, 1947), pp. 4-5.

“Let us call our man, the hero of this story, Kingbitter. We imagine a man, and a name to go with him. Or conversely, let us imagine the name, and the man to go with it.”

Imre Kertész (1929–2016) Hungarian writer

Liquidation (2003)

Imagination

“Once upon a very long time ago, in the time of Glaux, there was an order of knightly owls, from a kingdom called Ga'Hoole, who would rise up each night and perform noble deeds. They spoke no words but true ones, their purpose was to right all wrongs, to make strong the weak, mend the broken, vanquish the proud, and make powerless those who abused the frail. With hearts sublime they would take flight…”

Kathryn Lasky (1944) American children's writer

Noctus, Kludd's father, telling a legend of Ga'Hoole, repeated throughout the series; Chapter One: "A Nest Remembered", p. 14
The Capture (2003)

Strong, Time, Heart, Night

“One day she was playing on the swing when her father passed and called to her, "Come and give me a kiss, my little queen." Dérange-toi, Papa! Thérèse replied pertly — an untranslatable compound of "Come for it yourself" and "If you want it, you'll have to go the trouble of getting it", with perhaps even, "Don't be so lazy." Her father went by with a grave expression, but without a word, while Marie said: "You naughty little thing, how can you be so rude to your father?" I got off the swing at once; I had really learned my lesson, and the whole house echoed with my cries of contrition.”

Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) French Discalced Carmelite nun

Quoted in The Hidden Face, by Ida Gorres, p. 52

Kiss, Learning, Housing

“In America today there are many “colored” people who are designated “black” or “African.” Whereas they are mixed with the West—with the so-called whites who represent the West—in blood and spirit. This is a fateful, hidden matter though we do not see it as such. It may be partly responsible for deadly, one-sided polarizations in cultures around the globe that see themselves similarly locked into racial investitures.”

Wilson Harris (1921–2018) Guyanese writer

Interview with Wilson Harris (2003)

Fate, People, Color

“What are novels? What is the secret of the charm of every romance that ever was written? The first thing in a good novel is to place the persons together in circumstances which naturally call out the high feelings and thoughts of the character, which afford food for sympathy between them on these points — romantic events they are called. The second is that the heroine has generally no family ties (almost invariably no mother), or, if she has, these do not interfere with her entire independence.
These two things constitute the main charm of reading novels.”

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing

Cassandra (1860)

Secret, Family, Food, Feeling

“What I declare and believe to have demonstrated in this work as well as in earlier papers is that following the finite there is a transfinite (transfinitum)--which might also be called supra-finite (suprafinitum), that is, there is an unlimited ascending ladder of modes, which in its nature is not finite but infinite, but which can be determined as can the finite by determinate, well-defined and distinguishable numbers.”

Georg Cantor (1845–1918) mathematician, inventor of set theory

From Kant to Hilbert (1996)

Nature

“The field equations, in their most general form, contain a term multiplied by a constant, which is denoted by the Greek letter λ… sometimes called the "cosmical constant." This is a name without any meaning… We have, in fact, not the slightest inkling of what its real significance is. It is put in the equations in order to give them the greatest possible degree of mathematical generality, but, so far as its mathematical function is concerned, it is entirely undetermined: it may be positive or negative, it might also be zero.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

Mathematics

“If any part of it doesn’t seem to make sense, by all means call it to my attention. I’m not trying to send you out “on the road” in search of Valhalla, but merely pointing out that it is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it. There is more to it than that— no one HAS to do something he doesn’t want to do for the rest of his life. But then again, if that’s what you wind up doing, by all means convince yourself that you HAD to do it. You’ll have lots of company.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

"Letter to Hume Logan" April 22, 1958. Excerpted in 'Letters of Note' by Shaun Usher.
1950s

Life, Search, Sense, Parting

“Let the world call me a fool,
But if things are right with me and you,
That's all that matters.
And I'll do anything you asked me to.”

Waylon Jennings (1937–2002) American country music singer, songwriter, and musician

You Asked Me To, from Honky Tonk Heroes, written with Billy Joe Shaver (1973).
Song lyrics

World, Fools

“Happy will be the men who, having the power and the love and the benevolent forecast to [create a park], will do it. They will not be forgotten. The trees and their lovers will sing their praises, and generations yet unborn will rise up and call them blessed.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

"The Basin of the Columbia River" in Picturesque California (1888-1890); reprinted in Steep Trails (1918), chapter 22
1880s

Love, Men, Lovers, Tree

“On the second album I worked with a lot of people that I worked with on the Metamorphosis album. And when I worked on Metamorphosis I was so nervous and shy about going into the studio and working with people, they eventually toward the end made me feel so comfortable and so secure with myself. I loved working with them. I have a great relationship with them. I talk to them [all the time]. When we started talking about the second album, I was like, "I want to work with all the same people." They knew what was going on in my life, what I was going through. I would call them and say, "I feel like this right now. I want a song about this…" I never really felt like I had enough time to write my whole album and I don't know if I'm secure enough with myself to do that. But I wrote three songs on the album, one I wrote with my sister. It's so personal and these people really got what I was going through and how I feel inside. I think that's what makes it good and that's what makes me relate to them.”

Hilary Duff (1987) American actress and singer

Murray, Rebecca. "Hilary Duff Talks About 'Raise Your Voice'" http://movies.about.com/od/raiseyourvoice/a/raisehd092804.htm. About.com. Retrieved October 25 2006. On Hilary Duff (2004).

Love, Life, People, Feeling

“You know how in many parts of our troubled world they are yelling 'revolution! revolution!' In Tennessee they are yelling 'evolution… we want our thumbs!' The thing is they see people with thumbs on T. V. all day, boy that's got to drive them hog-wild huh? [mimics monkey] Trailers are shaking. They're nice people they're just, what would you call 'em - rural? Backwoods, country? They're real nice, after a show one of these guys came up to me and said 'hey, you're great, you cracked me up, I was about to spit!'… Sorry? He said 'no I loved it, I'd like you to meet my wife and sister.' And there was one girl standing there… not a thumb between 'em. Goddamnit now what are the odds of that? Okay the girl had a little nub growin' in, but girls evolve quicker than guys.”

Bill Hicks (1961–1994) American comedian

Sane Man (1989)

Love, People, World, Guy

“I am calling on my citizens, my brothers and sisters in Europe. Don’t have just three children; have five. The place in which you are living and working is now your homeland and new motherland. Stake a claim in it. Open more businesses, enroll your children in better schools, have your families live in better neighborhoods, drive the best cars, live in the most beautiful houses. That's because you are the future of Europe. It will be the best answer to the vulgarism, antagonism and injustices made against you.”

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (1954) 12th President of Turkey from 2014

As quoted in " Erdoğan to Turks in EU: Have 5 children, you are the future of Europe https://www.turkishminute.com/2017/03/17/erdogan-turks-eu-5-children-future-europe/", TurkishMinute (March 17 2017)

Children, School, Family, Beauty

“I am not going to enter into this chapter, but you all know that this which is called—I do not much like the name, but I confess I have not a better name—"State Socialism" is what has protected us from revolutionary socialism, which is much a worse thing. Probably a considerable portion of this audience consists of men who live on weekly wages; but I ask you not to rush at the first thing that is offered you, not to believe that because a thing sounds very pleasant—like compulsory reduction, for example, of the hours of labour—do not be quite sure until you have looked round it that it may not end in leaving your condition worse than it found it. I should deplore the advance of State Socialism, though I believe much may be hoped from it. I should regard it as a great disaster, the greatest disaster that could befall this great population, if it did anything to take away your self-reliance, the control of the individual over his own appetites and passions, his own idleness and self-indulgence, and make you look to anything but self-reliance. This, in the long run, would do more harm than good.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Speech at Rochdale town hall (23 April 1890), quoted in 'Mr. Morley At Rochdale', The Times (24 April 1890), p. 6.

Men, Hope, Passion

“No, the parallels are between modernism, late modernism, and socialist realism, of course. That's two sides of one coin. Both came of this idea of aristocrats, of people in power, imposing the culture on the people. A totally inhuman art. Modern art, and Pollock is the best example, is totally inhuman. Huge pictures for museums--now we call them museums; in Stalin times they were called palaces, but basically the same thing--which we rarely see and rarely visit. The sheer size of this painting, it's a totally inhuman scale. And there it can be typified…”

Alexander Melamid (1945) Russian artist

The search for a people's art: painting by the numbers, 1994

People, Art, Idea, Time

“The human heart is a meadow full of fireflies, a summer western sky of shimmering distant lightnings, a shore set round with flashing lighthouses, far-away voices calling that we cannot understand.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

Understanding, Distant, Heart, Summer

“People, especially liberals and psychiatrists, say that the two main causes of crime are mental illness and poverty. Insanity is therefore a defense in the criminal law. If we really believed that poverty caused crime, we would have a "poverty defense" as well, attorneys calling professors of economics to testify in court whether a particular defendant is guilty of theft or not by reason of poverty.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary (1990)

People, Law

“[…] France […] too had invested heavily in the Congress establishment and in the skewed advice of its so-called India experts.”

Swapan Dasgupta (1955) Indian politician, journalist and columnist

"A mighty fall from a moral high ground", 2014

“Snatch them baldheaded, slap their teeth out. Little starved faces four feet from the screen, you’d speak to them in a loud, commanding voice, get not even a twitch. Use of the preemptive splint, not everyone knows about it. The world reminds us of its power, again and again and again. Going along minding your own business, and suddenly an act of God, right there in front of you. Great falls of snow and bursting birds. Getting guilty, letting it all slide. Sown here and there like little…petunias, one planted in Old Lyme, one in Fairbanks, one in Tempe. Alleged that he slept with her while she was asleep, I can see it, under certain circumstances. You may wink, but not at another person. You may wink only at pigeons. You may pound in your tent pegs, pitch your tent, gather wood for the fire, form the hush puppies. They seek to return? Back to the nest? The warm arms? The ineffable smells? Not on your tintype. Well, I think that’s a little harsh. Think that’s a little harsh do you? Yes, harsh. Harsh. Well that’s a sketch, that is, that’s a tin-plated sketch— They write and telephone. Short of cash? Give us a call, all inquiries handled with the utmost confidentiality. They call constantly, they’re calling still, saying williwaw, williwaw”

Donald Barthelme book Sixty Stories

“Aria”.
Sixty Stories (1981)

God, World, Business, Bird

“The general disposition of the land is one of metals in the west, giving way, as you travel eastward, to a varied landscape of nonmetals, which terminates in largely inert elements at the eastern shoreline. To the south of the mainland, there is an offshore island, which we shall call the Southern Island. It consists entirely of metals of subtly modulated personality. North of the mainland, situated rather like Iceland off the northwestern edge of Europe, lies a single, isolated region-hydrogen. This simple but gifted element is an essential outpost of the kingdom, for despite its simplicity it is rich in chemical personality. It is also the most abundant element in the universe and the fuel of the stars.”

Peter Atkins (1940) British chemist

Source: Periodic Kingdom (1995), Chapter 1. The Terrain

Way, Travel, Star, Universe

“I'd like to say something about this last, about this last point of this terrible, terrible business. I mean Treblinka. I was given orders. I went to see Globocnik in Treblinka. That was the second time. The installations were now in operation, and I had to report to Müller. I expected to see a wooden house on the right side of the road and a few more wooden houses on the left; that's what I remembered. Instead, again with the same Sturmbannführer Höfle, I came to a railroad station with a sign saying Treblinka, looking exactly like a German railroad station — anywhere in Germany — a replica, with signboards, etc. There I hung back as far as I could. I didn't push closer to see it all. I saw a footbridge enclosed in barbed wire and over that footbridge a file of naked Jews was being driven into a house, a big… no, not a house, a big, one-room structure, to be gassed. As I was told, they were gassed with …what's it called? … Potassium cyanide… or cyanic acid. In acid form it's called cyanic acid. I didn't look to see what happened. I reported to Müller and as usual he listened in silence, without a word of comment. Just his facial expression said: "There's nothing I can do about it."”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

I am convinced, Herr Hauptmann, [Eichmann is referring to his interrogator, Avner Less] I know it sounds odd coming from me, but I'm convinced that if it had been up to Müller it wouldn't have happened.
Source: Eichmann Interrogated (1983), p. 84.

Business, Silence, Time, Housing

“The orderliness of nature—the so-called set of natural laws—is not an assumption but an observation.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 210

Law, Nature

“If music is what can be called my strategy, then every singer should be trying that.”

Shreya Ghoshal (1984) Indian playback singer

About strategy http://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/play/indias-idol-shreya-ghoshal/

Music

“I had a hard time watching Wolf Creek. It is a film with one clear purpose: To establish the commercial credentials of its director by showing his skill at depicting the brutal tracking, torture and mutilation of screaming young women. When the killer severs the spine of one of his victims and calls her "a head on a stick," I wanted to walk out of the theater and keep on walking.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/wolf-creek-2005 of Wolf Creek (23 December 2005) Reviews, Zero star reviews

Women, Wolf, Time

“He hated the thought of the past; there was nothing that called out his love and fellowship toward the strangers he had come amongst; and the future was all dark.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 2 (at page 17)

Love, Hate, Past, Future

“What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.”

Nicholas Carr (1959) American writer

Is Google Making us Stupid in The Atlantic, July 2008.

Intelligence, Thinking, Loss

“Thanks to its chokehold on the nation’s culture, liberalism is thus in power whether its politicians are elected or not; it rules over us even though Republicans have prevailed in six out of the nine presidential elections since 1968; even though Republicans presently control all three branches of government; even though the last of the big-name, forthright liberals of the old school (Humphrey, McGovern, Church, Bayhm, Culver, etc.) either died or went down to defeat in the seventies; and even though no Democratic presidential nominee has called himself a "liberal" since Walter Mondale. Liberalism is beyond politics, a tyrant that dominates our lives in countless ways great and small, and which is virtually incapable of being overthrown.Conservatism, on the other hand, is the doctrine of the oppressed majority. Conservatism does not defend some established order of things: It accuses; its rants; it points out hypocrisies and gleefully pounces on contradictions. While liberals use their control of the airwaves, newspapers, and schools to persecute average Americans — to ridicule the pious, flatter the shiftless, and indoctrinate the kids with all sorts of permissive nonsense — the Republicans are the party of the disrespected, the downtrodden, the forgotten. They are always the underdog, always in rebellion against a haughty establishment, always rising up from below.All claims of the right, in other words, advance from victimhood. This is another trick the backlash has picked up from the left. Even though republicans legislate in the interests of society’s most powerful, and even though conservative social critics typically enjoy cushy sinecures at places like the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal, they rarely claim to speak on behalf of the wealthy of the winners in the social Darwinist struggle. Just like the leftists of the early twentieth century, they see themselves in revolt against a genteel tradition, rising up against a bankrupt establishment that will tolerate no backtalk.Conservatism, on the other hand, can never be powerful or successful, and backlashers revel in fantasies of their own marginality and persecution.”

Thomas Frank book What's the Matter with Kansas?

Ibid.(pp. 119-120).
What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004)

School, Way, Success

“I'm really calling for major jobs, because the wealthy are going create tremendous jobs. They're going to expand their companies. They're going to do a tremendous job. I'm getting rid of the carried interest provision. And if you really look, it's not a tax -- it's really not a great thing for the wealthy. It's a great thing for the middle class. It's a great thing for companies to expand.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, September, First presidential debate (September 26, 2016)

“I am not a reformer. I think there is entirely too much attempt at reforming in the world and that we pay too much attention to reformers. We have two kinds of reformers. Both are nuisances. The man who calls himself a reformer wants to smash things. He is the sort of man who would tear up a whole shirt because the collar button did not fit the buttonhole. It would never occur to him to enlarge the buttonhole. This sort of reformer never under any circumstances knows what he is doing. Experience and reform do not go together. A reformer cannot keep his zeal at white heat in the presence of a fact. He must discard all facts.”

Henry Ford book My Life and Work

Source: My Life and Work (1922), p. 2

World, Thinking, Tear

“Everyone thinks I'm Jewish. I'm not. Last year I got a call: "Happy Hanukkah." I said "Ma, I'm not Jewish."”

Joy Behar (1942) US comedian, writer and actress

Longstanding Behar joke about how her Italian-Catholic persona is mistaken as being Jewish. As reported in The Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/articles/2008/04/20/in_the_swirl_of_the_view_a_stabilizing_force/?page=3 (April 20, 2008) page 3. Url accessed on December 12, 2008.

Thinking, Happiness

“I’m often called, so often called in the media, it’s like a part of my name “white supremacist” or whatever. I’m not one. I don’t want white people to be supreme. I don’t believe, in fact, that we should even have bases in 65 countries of the world I don’t think we should be in Iraq. I don’t believe we should try to control politics of the South American countries or the Southeast Asia or in Africa, or anywhere else in the world. But I do think we have a right to preserve our own culture, own heritage in our own country.”

David Duke (1950) American White nationalist, white supremacist, writer, right-wing politician, and a former Republican Louisiana …

Podcast (4 July 2006)

People, World, Thinking, Parting

“Modern Slavs, both Bulgarians and Macedonians, cannot establish a link with antiquity, as the Slavs entered the Balkans centuries after the demise of the ancient Macedonian kingdom. Only the most radical Slavic factions—mostly émigrés in the United States, Canada, and Australia—even attempt to establish a connection to antiquity […] The twentieth-century development of a Macedonian ethnicity, and its recent evolution into independent statehood following the collapse of the Yugoslav state in 1991, has followed a rocky road. In order to survive the vicissitudes of Balkan history and politics, the Macedonians, who have had no history, need one. They reside in a territory once part of a famous ancient kingdom, which has borne the Macedonian name as a region ever since and was called ”Macedonia” for nearly half a century as part of Yugoslavia. And they speak a language now recognized by most linguists outside Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece as a south Slavic language separate from Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian. Their own so-called Macedonian ethnicity had evolved for more than a century, and thus it seemed natural and appropriate for them to call the new nation “Macedonia” and to attempt to provide some cultural references to bolster ethnic survival..”

Eugene N. Borza (1935) American historian

"Macedonia Redux", in "The Eye Expanded: life and the arts in Greco-Roman Antiquity", ed. Frances B Tichener & Richard F. Moorton, University of California Press, 1999

History, Nature, Parting

“I call it simply the Book, with no qualifications or epithets, and in this abstinence and restraint there is a helpless sigh, silent capitulation to the immeasurableness of the transcendent; for no word, no allusion, could glisten, scent the air, or drift with such a shudder of terror, with any inkling of that unnameable thing, the very first taste of which, on the tip of the tongue, surpasses the capacity of our rapture.”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“The Book” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/sanatorium/book1.htm His father, Books

Books

“Liberalism, which Luxemburg called by its more appropriate name—“opportunism”—is an integral component of capitalism. When the citizens grow restive, it will soften and decry capitalism’s excesses. But capitalism, Luxemburg argued, is an enemy that can never be appeased. Liberal reforms are used to stymie resistance and then later, when things grow quiet, are revoked on the inevitable road to capitalist slavery. The last century of labor struggles in the United States provides a case study for proof of Luxemburg’s observation.The political, cultural and judicial system in a capitalist state is centered around the protection of property rights. And, as Adam Smith pointed out, when civil government “is instituted for the security of property, [it] is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” The capitalist system is gamed from the start. And this makes Luxemburg extremely relevant as corporate capital, now freed from all constraints, reconfigures our global economy, including the United States’, into a ruthless form of neofeudalism.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

"Reform or Revolution" (2016)

Game, Reality, Study

“Inside each of us dwells a more-perfect self waiting to unfold. It cries loudly for release, yet it is sometimes ignored. To answer its call, you must take time to listen.”

DeBarra Mayo (1953) American martial artist

Runner's World Yoga Book II, Anderson World Books, Inc., 1983 ISBN 0-89037-274-8

Time, Waiting, Perfection

“Although science is well qualified to make us progressively comprehend something of the world around us and of the life within us, it is neither able nor called upon to pronounce a judgment regarding the spiritual goal of human life and thus to provide us with ethical guidance.”

Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) Austro-Hungarian writer and academic

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Answers of Islam, Answer to Question # 3, p 142

Life, World, Science

“In general terms institutions have lost their credibility, not because they don't operate but rather because they operate behind closed doors; they have not been opened to the Chilean people. The national congress has been a closed space for many years, the binomial system has contained it within two political forces and it does not represent ideas calling for transformations, which have been present in our country for many years.”

Karol Cariola (1987) Chilean politician

Cariola, Mujer, Matrona, Dirigente Social y Política: Abrir el Congreso Nacional a la Ciudadanía, DiarioDigital, 2013-08-25 http://www.diarioreddigital.cl/index.php/politica/36-politica/443-karol-cariola-mujer-matrona-dirigente-social-y-politica-abrir-el-congreso-nacional-a-la-ciudadania-, Original: "Las instituciones en general han perdido credibilidad, no porque no funcionen sino porque funcionan a puertas cerradas, porque no se han abierto a que el pueblo chileno pueda entrar a ellas. El congreso nacional ha sido un espacio cerrado durante muchos años, el binominal lo ha mantenido contenido en dos fuerzas políticas y no representa otras ideas que son de transformación y que han estado presentes durante muchos años en nuestro país".

People, Idea, Country

“I was in a bookstore, browsing through an old Life magazine, when I saw a picture of what the article called spontaneous human combustion. There were an old guy's legs and shoes, perfectly intact…then, right around his knee area, was just a pile of charred ashes. I was going through some turmoil in my life, both good and bad, and the image struck a chord, so…I wrote a song about it.”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

On writing the song Pardon Me

Life, Shoe, Guy

“No one of the rocks seems to call me now, nor any of the distant mountains. Surely this Merced and Tuolumne chapter of my life is done.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, from Yosemite Valley (September 1874); published in William Federic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/life_and_letters/default.aspx (1924), chapter 11: On Widening Currents 1870s

Life, Mountain, Distant

“The progressive Islamisation of our country and the increase in political-religious demands are calling into question the survival of our civilisation.”

Marine Le Pen (1968) French lawyer and politician

Source: Interview with The Daily Telegraph (26 December 2010) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/8225697/National-Fronts-Marine-Le-Pen-to-prove-formidable-rival-to-Nicolas-Sarkozy.html

Question, Country

“Of course I'm a black writer…. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call "literature" is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hassidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

Interview in Newsweek (30 March 1981)

Literature

“There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes. And the more nervous they are-the quicker to take fright-the more violent they pray that every storm will be … Painters who have had this mentality, after repeated wounds and intimidations at the hands of the apparitions called human beings, have often come to believe in phantasms-they plainly saw monsters in broad daylight, in the midst of nature. And they did not fob people off with clowning; they did their best to depict these monsters just as they had appeared. Takeichi was right: they had dared to paint pictures of devils.”

Osamu Dazai book No Longer Human

The Second Notebook
No Longer Human

People, Nature, Appearance, Painting

“I called myself the king of debt. I'm the king of debt. I'm great with debt, nobody knows debt better than me. I made a fortune by using debt. And if things don't work out I renegotiate the debt, I mean that's a smart thing not a stupid thing. And I made a fortune.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, June

Stupidity

“There is something called bilingual education—a scheme proposed in the late 1960s by Hispanic-American social activists, later endorsed by a congressional vote. It is a program that seeks to permit non-English-speaking children, many from lower-class homes, to use their family language as the language of school. (Such is the goal its supporters announce.) I hear them and am forced to say no: It is not possible for a child—any child—ever to use his family’s language in school. Not to understand this is to misunderstand the public uses of schooling and to trivialize the nature of intimate life—a family’s ‘language.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Life, Children, Education, School

“When you remember how few Jews there are in Italy and how relatively few there are in Germany, one must wonder at the violence and the bitterness of this perse cution. The number of Jews in Italy is only a small fraction of those in the city of New York, while there are in the city of New York six times as many Jews as there were in the German Reich when the last war ended and possibly more than four times as many as there are there now. Yet the persecution, personal, physical, family, financial, goes on, openly and secretly, in a way that is perfectly appalling. To my great astonishment, this anti-Semitic persecution has been violently and publicly revived in this country within the last few weeks or months, and it is as discreditable to us that this should have happened as anything that we can imagine.'
Jews differ among themselves just as do Spaniards or Italians or Canadians or Americans. There are some who belong to one party, some who belong to another some whp hold one point of view, some who hold a point of view that is contradictory. The notion that all who belong to that race or profess that faith are of one mind in everything that relates to their public relationships is a grotesque departure from fact. But if you can play upon an excited public emotion by the use of these terms and by the insinuation that the entire Hebrew population is engaged, let us say as we have been told from the platform recently in trying to get this nation into war, such statements, although absolutely contradictory to every well-known fact, will, if repeated long enough, be believed and acted upon by a certain number of our unthinking population.
We cannot protest too vigorously and too strongly against that sort of thing. It may be the Ku Klux Klan persecuting the Catholics, it may be the anti-Semites persecuting the Jews: but persecution on racial or religious ground has absolutely no place in a nation given over to liberty and which calls itself a democracy.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

Liberty-Equality-Fraternity (1942)

War, Family, Faith, Way

“A substitute for all the gods:
This self, not that gold self aloft,
Alone, one's shadow magnified,
Lord of the body, looking down,
As now and called most high,
The shadow of Chocorua
In an immenser heaven, aloft,
Alone, lord of the land and lord
Of the men that live in the land, high lord.
One's self and the mountains of one's land,
Without shadows, without magnificence,
The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Men, God, Mountain

“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

“Ostanes, the Mede, was one of the celebrated early alchemists. Several writers have recorded for us the existence of a book called The Book of the Divine Prescriptions, which seems to have been the most famous writing of these Persian sages.”

Osthanes (-500) pen-name used by several pseudo-anonymous authors of Greek and Latin works of alchemy

Francis Preston Venable, A Short History of Chemistry (1894) p. 6. https://books.google.com/books?id=fN9YAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA6

Books

“There'll be what you might call a moment of inspiration – a way of seeing or feeling or remembering, an instance or a person that's made a large impression. Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning”

Carol Ann Duffy (1955) British writer and professor of contemporary poetry

Interviewed in The Guardian, December 4, 2005.

Truth, Way, Feeling, Personality

“Today there really aren't that many Fundamentalists left; I don't know if you know that or not, but they are such a minority; there aren't that many Fundamentalists left in America. … Now the word "fundamentalist" actually comes from a document in the 1920s called the Five Fundamentals of the Faith. And it is a very legalistic, narrow view of Christianity, and when I say there are very few fundamentalists, I mean in the sense that they are all actually called fundamentalist churches, and those would be quite small. There are no large ones.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

As quoted in Myths of the Modern Megachurch at The Pew Forum on Religion (23 May 2005) http://pewforum.org/Christian/Evangelical-Protestant-Churches/Myths-of-the-Modern-Megachurch.aspx

Faith, Sense

“In the course of my twenty years career as an assailant of special privilege, I have attacked pretty nearly every important interest in America. The statements I have made, if false, would have been enough to deprive me of a thousand times all the property I ever owned, and to have sent me to prison for a thousand times a normal man's life. I have been called a liar on many occasions, needless to say; but never once in all these twenty years has one of my enemies ventured to bring me into a court of law, and to submit the issue between us to a jury of American citizens.”

Upton Sinclair book The Brass Check

The Brass Check (1919)

Life, Law, Time, Falseness

“I read with great interest all that you have written me about what is called Colonialism, namely: bringing forward backward races and opening up the jungles. I was brought up to feel proud of much that we had done. Certainly in India, with all its history, religion and ancient forms of despotic rule, Britain has a story to tell which will look quite well against the background of the coming hundred years. … I am sceptical about universal suffrage for the Hottentots even if refined by proportional representation. The British and American Democracies were slowly and painfully forged and even they are not perfect yet.”

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

Letter to President Eisenhower (8 August 1954), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Never Despair': Winston S. Churchill, 1945–1965 (London: Heinemann, 1988), pp. 1040-1041. Cf. Lord Salisbury: "You would not confide free representative institutions to the Hottentots".
Post-war years (1945–1955)

Religion, Feeling, Democracy, History

“There are two styles of walls "opus reticulatum," now used by everybody and the ancient style called "opus incertum." Of these, the reticulatum looks better, but its construction makes it likely to crack… On the other hand, in the opus incertum, the rubble lying in courses and imbricated, makes a wall which though not beautiful, is stronger.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter VIII "Methods of Building Walls" Sec. 1

Beauty, Lying

“National-Socialism came to power in Germany in the same year as Roosevelt was elected President... Roosevelt comes from a rich family and belongs to the class whose path is smoothed in the Democracies. I am only the child of a small, poor family and had to fight my way by work and industry. When the Great War came, Roosevelt occupied a position where he got to know only its pleasant consequences, enjoyed by those who do business while others bleed... I shared the fate of millions, and Franklin Roosevelt only the fate of the so-called Upper Ten Thousand... he made profits out of the inflation, out of the misery of others, while I, together with many hundreds of thousands more, lay in hospital.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Speech Declaring War Against the United States http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/hitler-s-speech-declaring-war-against-the-united-states (December 11, 1941) 1940s

Fate, War, Family, Way

“She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind — or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.”

Thomas Hardy book Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Phase the Second: Maiden No More, ch. XIII
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)

World, Fear, Idea

“The nation has been, and is still being, eroded and hollowed out from within by the implantation of large unassimilated and unassimiliable populations—what Lord Radcliffe once in a memorable phrase called "alien wedges"—in the heartland of the state…The disruption of the homogeneous "we", which forms the essential basis of parliamentary democracy and therefore of our liberties, is now approaching the point at which the political mechanics of a "divided community"…take charge and begin to operate autonomously. Let me illustrate this pathology of a society that is being eaten alive…The two active ingredients are grievance and violence. Where a community is divided, grievance is for practical purposes inexhaustible. When violence is injected—and quite a little will suffice for a start—there begins an escalating competition to discover grievance and to remove it. The materials lie ready to hand in a multiplicity of agencies with a vested interest, more or less benevolent, in the process of discovering grievances and demanding their removal. The spiral is easily maintained in upward movement by the repetitions and escalation of violence. At each stage alienation between the various elements of society is increased, and the constant disappointment that the imagined remedies yield a reverse result leads to growing bitterness and despair. Hand in hand with the exploitation of grievance goes the equally counterproductive process which will no doubt, as usual, be called the "search for a political solution"…Indeed, attention has already been drawn publicly to the potentially critical factor of the so-called immigrant vote in an increasing number of worthwhile constituencies. The result is that the political parties of the indigenous population vie with one another for votes by promising remedy of the grievances which are being uncovered and exploited in the context of actual or threatened violence. Thus the legislature finds itself in effect manipulated by minorities instead of responding to majorities, and is watched by the public at large with a bewildering and frustration, not to say cynicism, of which the experience of legislation hitherto in the field of immigration and race relations afford some pale idea…I need not follow the analysis further in order to demonstrate how parliamentary democracy disintegrates when the national homogeneity of the electorate is broken by a large and sharp alteration in the composition of the population. While the institutions and liberties on which British liberty depends are being progressively surrendered to the European superstate, the forces which will sap and destroy them from within are allowed to accumulate unchecked. And all the time we are invited to direct towards Angola or Siberia the anxious attention that the real danger within our power and our borders imperatively demand.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech the Hampshire Monday Club in Southampton (9 April 1976), from A Nation or No Nation? Six Years in British Politics (Elliot Right Way Books, 1977), pp. 165-166
1970s

Lie, Disappointment, Democracy, Imagination

“I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics: Plagiarize!
Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize…
Only be sure always to call it please "research."”

Tom Lehrer (1928) American singer-songwriter and mathematician

"Lobachevsky"
Songs by Tom Lehrer (1953)

Secret, Mathematics, Success, Forgetting

““The achievement of this task depends on attaining to the true distinction, the real relation, between the two orders of existence which to ordinary and uncritical reflexion — usual common-sense — appear as two substances, so called, or species of substance, and are named "mind" and "matter." What is to be shown is, that this common-sense contrast, read off as a hard-and-fast dualism, is not intelligibly interpretable except as the distinction between two aspects of one and the same total nature in the beings that possess it””

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Preface to Second Edition, p.xlvi

Intelligence, Nature, Sense, Appearance

“I cannot believe that the gentry of England will be made mere drumheads to be sounded upon by a Prime Minister to give forth unmeaning and empty sounds, and to have no articulate voice of their own. No! You are the gentry of England who represent the counties. You are the aristocracy of England. Your fathers led our fathers: you may lead us if you will go the right way. But, although you have retained your influence with this country longer than any other aristocracy, it has not been by opposing popular opinion, or by setting yourselves against the spirit of the age. In other days, when the battle and the hunting-fields were the tests of manly vigour, why, your fathers were first and foremost there. The aristocracy of England were not like the noblesse of France, the mere minions of a court; nor were they like the hidalgoes of Madrid, who dwindled into pigmies. You have been Englishmen. You have not shown a want of courage and firmness when any call has been made upon you. This is a new era. It is the age of improvement, it is the age of social advancement, not the age for war or for feudal sports. You live in a mercantile age, when the whole wealth of the world is poured into your lap. You cannot have the advantages of commercial rents and feudal privileges; but you may be what you always have been, if you will identify yourselves with the spirit of the age. The English people look to the gentry and aristocracy of their country as their leaders. I, who am not one of you, have no hesitation in telling you, that there is a deep-rooted, an hereditary prejudice, if I may so call it, in your favour in this country. But you never got it, and you will not keep it, by obstructing the spirit of the age.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in the House of Commons http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1845/mar/13/effects-of-corn-laws-on-agriculturists (13 March 1845). 1840s

War, People, Age, World

“King Aillas talks softly and with great politeness; he has the uncomfortable skill of calling one a false-hearted blackguard, a liar, a cheat and a villain, but making it seem a fulsome compliment.”

Jack Vance Lyonesse Trilogy

Source: Lyonesse Trilogy (1983-1989), Madouc (1989), Chapter 6, section 5 (p. 807)

Heart, Cheating, Falseness

“I purpose now, while the impression is more pure and clear within me, to mark down the main things I can recollect of my father. To myself, if I live to after-years, it may be instructive and interesting, as the past grows ever holier the farther we leave it. My mind is calm enough to do it deliberately, and to do it truly. The thought of that pale earnest face which even now lies stiffened into death in that bed at Scotsbrig, with the Infinite all of worlds looking down on it, will certainly impel me. It is good to know how a true spirit will vindicate itself with truth and freedom through what obstructions soever; how the acorn cast carelessly into the wilder-ness will make room for itself and grow to be an oak. This is one of the cases belonging to that class, "the lives of remarkable men," in which it has been said, "paper and ink should least of all be spared." I call a man remarkable who becomes a true workman in this vineyard of the Highest. Be his work that of palace-building and kingdom-founding, or only of delving and ditching, to me it is no matter, or next to none. All human work is transitory, small in itself, contemptible. Only the worker thereof, and the spirit that dwelt in him, is significant. I proceed without order, or almost any forethought, anxious only to save what I have left and mark it as it lies in me.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)

Death, Men, Truth, World

“Then make those studies outside. With the utmost simplicity you try to get rid of all the so-called manners, and try in one word to follow nature with feeling, but without thinking about the works of others. (translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)”

Willem Roelofs (1822–1897) Dutch painter and entomologist (1822-1897)

(original Dutch: citaat van Willem Roelofs, in het Nederlands:) Maak dan die studies buiten; met de grootste eenvoudigheid, tracht u van alle zogenaamde manier te ontdoen en tracht in een woord de natuur met gevoel maar zonder denken aan het werk van anderen, na te volgen. Quote in Roelof's letter to his pupil Hendrik W. Mesdag, 1866; as cited in Zó Hollands - Het Hollandse landschap in de Nederlandse kunst sinds 1850, Antoon Erftemeijer https://www.franshalsmuseum.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/zohollands_eindversie_def_1.pdf; Frans Hals museum | De Hallen, Haarlem 2011, p. 16, note 7 1860's

Feeling, Nature, Thinking, Study

“TV—a clever contraction, derived from the words Terrible Vaudeville. We call it a medium, because nothing's well done.”

Goodman Ace (1899–1982) Comedian, television writer and columnist

Letter to Groucho Marx, published in The Groucho Letters

“Be sure that Christ is not behind you, but before, calling and drawing you on. This is the liberty, the beautiful liberty of Christ. Claim your glorious privilege in the name of a disciple; be no more a servant, when Christ will own you as a friend.”

Horace Bushnell (1802–1876) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 89.

Beauty, Christ, Drawing

“Those who are filled with concern for the lot of humanity as a whole, especially for the less fortunate portions of it, are wont nowadays to call themselves idealists. We should at least recognize that ideals in this sense are not the same as standards and that they are often indeed the opposite of standards. It would be easy to mention institutions of learning in this country that are at present engaged in breaking down standards in the name of ideals.”

Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) American academic and literary criticism

Source: "English and the Discipline of Ideas" (1920), pp. 64-65

Sense, Learning, Country

“The task of making more exact a vague or not quite exact concept used in everyday life or in an earlier stage of scientific or logical development, or rather of replacing it by a newly constructed, more exact concept, belongs among the most important tasks of logical analysis and logical construction. We call this the task of explicating, or of giving an explication for the earlier concept; this earlier concept, or sometimes the term used for it, is called the explicandum; and the new concept, or its term, is called an explicatum of the old one.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Source: Meaning And Necessity (1947), p. 7-8 as cited in: Erich Reck (2011) " Carnapian Explication: A Case Study and Critique http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~reck/Reck-C'ian%20Explic.%20(3rd.%20rev.).pdf"

Life

“That heareth not the loud winds when they call,
And moveth all together, if it moves at all.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Stanza 11.
Resolution and Independence (1807)

“Momentary concentration that focuses on mental or physical objects from moment to moment is called nondistraction (avikkhepa), a mental state that is the opposite of restlessness. When momentary concentration becomes strong, the mind seems to penetrate its object every time an object is noted.”

Mahasi Sayadaw (1904–1982) Burmese Buddhist philosopher

Source: Manual of Insight (1945), p. 62

Strong, Time

“Hey folks, tonight I wanna talk about global warming. Now, The World is Hot and Flat Society is growing increasingly hysterical and that indeed is causing me to sweat a little. In the last month or so, I've heard suggestions that those skeptical of Al Gore's spiritual crisis are deniers and one good way to serve the planet would be to have one less kid and I've also read that mankind is 'a virus' and human beings are 'the AIDS of the earth.' Global warming is officially becoming creepy and I can't tell yet if it's facisitc or fetishistic but it's kinda like piercing or tattoos, I don't even wanna get one, because I see how hooked people are and it spooks me. I just find it odd that we've come to a point in history where if I don't concede that if Manhattan will be completely submerged in 2057 I'm thought to be a delusional contrarian by some of my more zealous fellow citizens. I'm sorry Angst Squad, but if we commissioned a public works project (let's call it 'The Manhattan Project') and tried our hardest to submerge Manhattan in the next 50 years, we couldn't pull it off, mainly because it wouldn't be environmentally sound and you guys would hang it up in the permitting process. Simply put, I can't worry about the earth right now because I'm too worried about the world. Why can't I take terrorism as seriously as Al Gore takes global warming? There are times that you think that liberals only fear car bombs if they have leaky exhaust systems. And why am I constantly beaten over the head with 'the delicate balance of nature'? Am I the only one who watches Animal Planet? Every time I turn it on, I see some demented harp seal chucking peguins down his gullet like they were maitre d'Tic-Tacs. To me, nature always appears more unbalanced than Gary Busey with a clogged eustachian tube. Listen, the weather is just like Hilary's explanation for her war vote: we just don't know, do we? We're here to miss our next Tuesday's weather much less the year 2057. Relax, we'll replace oil when we need to. American ingenuity will kick in and the next great fortune will be made. It's not pretty, but it is historically accurate. We need to run out of oil first. That's why I drive an SUV: so we run out of it more quickly. I consider myself at the vanguard of the environmental movement and I think the individuals who insist on driving hybrids are just prolonging our dillemma and I think that's just selfish. Come on, don't you care about our Mother Earth? Don'tcha?”

Dennis Miller (1953) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actor

6/17 The Half Hour News Hour
The Buck Starts Here

War, People, World, Fear

“Critics frequently cry 'Dada' after attending one of my concerts or hearing one of my lectures. Others bemoan my interest in w:Zen. One of the liveliest lectures I ever heard was given by Nancy Wilson Ross at the Cornish School in Seattle. It was called Zen Buddhism and Dada. It is possible to make a connection between the two, but neither Dada nor Zen is a fixed tangible. They change; and in quite different ways in different places and times, they invigorate action. What was Dada in the 1920's is now, with the exception of the work of Marcel Duchamp, just art. What I do, I do not wish blamed on Zen, though without my engagement with Zen... I doubt whether I would have done what I have done... I often point out that Dada nowadays has in it a space, an emptiness, that it formerly lacked. What nowadays, America mid-twentieth century, is Zen?”

John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer

Quote in 'Silence: lectures and writings by Cage, John', Publisher Middletown, Conn. Wesleyan University Press, June 1961, x/SILENCE
1960s

School, Art, Way, Change

“I advocate an alliance of democratic states, with a dual purpose. One, to promote what I call open society. I talk about an alliance of open societies which would first foster the development of open societies within individual countries, because there's a lot that needs to be done in that effort. And secondly, to establish basic international law and international institutions that you need for a global, open society. So that's my sort of broad concept. Now, I have not worked out the details, because I don't think it's for me to work out the details. It's for them to work out the details.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

Interview with Mark Shapiro (2000)

Law, Thinking, Effort, Country

“Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea! Do not think that I am jesting or speaking figuratively when I regard those persons who cling to the Higher, and (because the vast majority belongs under this head) almost the whole world of men, as veritable fools, fools in a madhouse. What is it, then, that is called a "fixed idea"? An idea that has subjected the man to itself. When you recognize, with regard to such a fixed idea, that it is a folly, you shut its slave up in an asylum. And is the truth of the faith, say, which we are not to doubt; the majesty of (e. g.) the people, which we are not to strike at (he who does is guilty of — lese-majesty); virtue, against which the censor is not to let a word pass, that morality may be kept pure; — are these not "fixed ideas"? Is not all the stupid chatter of (e. g.) most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, Christianity, etc., and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

New York 1907, p. 54, 55
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

Men, God, People, Truth

“The Supreme God (kaḥ) (Rāma) [is resplendent] on [both] the earth (kau) and in Sāketaloka (ke); from him there is pleasure in the universe and in the sound of the peacock (kekakekākaḥ); he takes pleasure and bliss in the caw of the [Kākabhuśuṇḍi] crow (kākakākākakaḥ); from him there is pleasure for all the worlds (kakaḥ); for him the pain [of exile] is a pleasure (kākaḥ); his crow ([Kākabhuśuṇḍi]) is praiseworthy (kākaḥ); from him there is pleasure for Brahmā (kakaḥ); he calls out [to the devotees] (kākaḥ); from him there is pleasure for Kukā or Sītā (kukākaḥ); he calls out to the [Kākabhuśuṇḍi] crow (kākakaḥ); and from him there are worldly fruits and the bliss of liberation (kukaḥ). ॥ 20.92 ॥”

Rāmabhadrācārya (1950) Hindu religious leader

kaḥ kau ke kekakekākaḥ kākakākākakaḥ kakaḥ ।
kākaḥ kākaḥ kakaḥ kākaḥ kukākaḥ kākakaḥ kukaḥ ॥
Śrībhārgavarāghavīyam

God, Pain, Pleasure, World

“In that kitty of mine where people call me anpadh (illiterate), I do have a degree from Yale University as well, which I can bring out and show how Yale celebrated my leadership capacities.”

Smriti Irani (1972) Indian politician

Responding to critics saying that she is not qualified to be the Human Resource Minister, as quoted in " Smriti Irani claims she has degree from Yale University http://www.livemint.com/Politics/nOmCKp0bDGBTgrsytAy1NP/Smriti-Irani-claims-she-has-degree-from-Yale-University.html" Live Mint (10 August 2014)

People, Universe

“I took my little cat-it was really sweet -and put it on a table and called Sri Aurobindo. I told him, "Kiki has been stung by a scorpion, it must be cured." The cat stretched its neck and looked at Sri Aurobindo, its eyes already a little glassy. Sri Aurobindo sat before it and looked at it also. Then we saw this little cat gradually beginning to recover, to come round, and an hour later it jumped to its feet and went away completely healed.”

The Mother (1878–1973) spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo

One day a cat named Kiki happened to play with a scorpion and got stung. It quickly ran to the Mother and showed her the paw which was already dangerously swollen. "I took my little cat -it was really sweet, quoted in "Pondicherry", also in God Shall Grow Up: Body, Soul & Earth Evolving Together by Wayne Bloomquist (1 January 2001) http://books.google.co.in/books?id=T1Me82LNkP0C&pg=PA90, p. 90.

Cats

“Societies in which men were unwilling to dispose of themselves in war were societies that usually got disposed of. Societies that were protected were protected by killers, which is why I call the traditional role of men the role of killer-protector.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

Men, War

“You could call me antisocial, I’ve called myself that sometimes too, but I just prefer to be alone, and that’s nothing against you.”

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

"Antisocialsong"
Blue Walls and The Big Sky (1995)

“If our squawking pacifists were rational, they would perceive that war can be ended only by abolishing the several species of mammals called human; our spacecraft have shown us that Mars and Venus are perfectly warless worlds.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"On the Roof of the World", Liberty Bell magazine (December 1987)
1970s, 1980s

War, World

“It is not in the calm and measured paths of to day that we see the more bold and pronounced characters, whose outlines have been rough-hewn by the strong hand of necessity; yet to such troubled times often belong the development of our noblest and best qualities — the stormy gulf of Ormus throws up the finest pearls. It is not in the season of tranquility that we know aught of the generous devotion, the fertility of resource, and the forgetfulness of self often shown in the hour of trial. When the French revolution broke out, how many, only accustomed to indolence, luxury, and custom, showed that "there was iron in the rose;" and, whether at the call of duty or of affection, were prepared to bear even to the uttermost, and to exert a fortitude till then undreamed of.”

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

Literary Remains

Strong, Time, Forgetting, Season

“Politics have always covered two distinct kinds of problems: problems of administrative routine, and those that may be called 'questions of the moment.'… A question of the moment is, indeed, a substitute for some notion, such as the idea of God, or hereditary monarchy, or national glory, that has hitherto acted as a symbol of human co-ordination. It provides no new positive certainty to replace the discredited certainty, but is what the name implies: the raising of a question which the old certainty no longer answers.”

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

Laura Riding and Robert Graves from "Poetry and Politics", reprinted in The Common Asphodel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949)

God, Idea, Question, Problem

“I will oppose any attempt to use this tragic and reprehensible incident to prevent the truth about these illegal arms caches and documents that may related to electoral fraud from coming out through the imposition of martial law. I call on the people to be vigilant and to resist moves by those who seek to rule beyond 2010.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

The Official Website of the Senate of the Philippines http://www.senate.gov.ph/press_release/2009/1205_escudero1.asp 2009, Statement: on the Declaration of Martial Law in Maguindanao

People, Truth, Law, Fraud

“[Glossary of Broken Dreams] was born out of the frustration that debate culture (not only) on digital platforms has become radically fragmented and fractalized, making it hard to call it discourse. It's a Tower of Babel-like context confusion that pleases me as a nerd, but as a political being who wants society to progress, it doesn't please me at all. […] I just thought it was time for something like a political spring cleaning of concepts. Because picking up the broom and taking a chance to get rid of stuff is the only way to prevent us all from becoming social liberal hoarders. One of my examples is the concept of privacy that, at the moment, everyone coddles like a puppy. Let me say this, as a good old Neo-leftist, I'm having problems with the conservative and deeply bourgeois can of worms that the privacy debate entails. I think it's time to change our thought patterns here. Instead of trying to find ways to defend our privacy come hell or high water, we should ask ourselves why privacy is such a major concern for us? Is what we're trying to achieve here just reformist symptom-control rather than a solution to the underlying problems?”

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

from an interview about Grenzfurthner's film Glossary of Broken Dreams (via Boing Boing https://boingboing.net/2018/05/24/at-the-golden-calf-slaughterho.html)

Dreams, Way, Spring, Hell

“Don't call him "clock boy" since he never made a clock. Hoax Boy, having hoaxed his way into the White House, now wants $15M in addition!”

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

@RichardDawkins https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/669098728662409216 () Regarding the Ahmed Mohamed clock incident. Twitter

Way, Boy, Housing

Quotes about call page 61

Quotes about call
page 61