Quotes about call
page 67

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

Sections I–II, p. 11–12
Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882), Chapter II. The Science of Justice (Continued)

Universe, Reality, Men, Pleasure

“Still got your eyes closed, Rach?' she called. 'You should have stayed in Brisbane where it's safe!”

Susan Ruth Johnson (1959)

Page 346.
Hungry Ghosts (1996)

“…when I do this, some people think that it's because I want my ego to be fed, right? Of course, I'm not saying — I'm not asking you to call it "Stallmanix," right?”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

2000s, Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation (2001)

People, Thinking

“One result of the nobility and gentry becoming more mobile and mixing more together was new kinds of parties. From the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, whenever people decided to entertain, they did so in much the same way. They gave either a dinner on its own, or a dinner combined with dancing. The latter combination started with a meal, sometimes enlivened by music. After dinner the company retired to a withdrawing room, and passed an hour or so by taking tea or dessert, or playing cards, or listening to more music. They then returned to the room where they had dined, for dancing or as it tended to be called, a ball; in the early eighteenth century as few as seven couples dancing together could be described as a ball. After dancing there was normally some kind of light refreshment, and then everybody went home. The refreshments at the end might, according to the century, be described as a banquet or a supper, the room for dinner and dancing a great chamber or a saloon; the dances danced, the music played and the food eaten changed, but the pattern remained much the same. The guests did one thing at a time, and they all did it together.”

Mark Girouard (1931) British architectural historian

Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (1978)

People, Food, Music, Way

“I'm often called the father of Mega Man, but actually, his design was already created when I joined Capcom. My mentor [Capcom senior member Akira Kitamura], who was the designer of the original Mega Man, had a basic concept of what Mega Man was supposed to look like. So I only did half of the job in creating him.”

Keiji Inafune (1965) Japanese video game designer

Source:Hirohiko Niizumi (23 September 2007). "TGS '07: Mega Man celebrates 20th anniversary" https://www.gamespot.com/articles/tgs-07-mega-man-celebrates-20th-anniversary/1100-6179759/. GameSpot. CBS Interactive Inc. Retrieved 1 February 2011.

“Surrealism is only trying to rejoin the most durable traditions of mankind. Among the primitive peoples art always goes beyond what is conventionally and arbitrarily called the 'real'. The natives of the Northwest Pacific coast, the Pueblos, New Guinea, New Ireland, the Marquesas, among others, have made 'objets' [in the Collections of Max Ernst, C. Levy-Strauss, Andre Breton, Pierre Matisse, Carlbach, Segredakis] which Surrealists particularly appreciate.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Quote of 1942, in the introduction of the Catalog 'First papers of surrealism: hanging by André Breton, his twine Marcel Duchamp'; exhibition at the Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies, Inc., New York, Oct. 14-Nov. 7, 1942
after 1930

People, Art

“The truth, of course, is that libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but that it in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which now is called private.Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf–master relationship to political–economic power concentrations.”

Karl Hess (1923–1994) American journalist

"Letter From Washington," http://www.panarchy.org/hess/libertarianism.html The Libertarian Forum 1, no. 6 http://web.archive.org/web/20071201123614/http://mises.org/journals/lf/1969/1969_06_15.pdf (15 June 1969), p. 2

People, Truth, Way

“Whatever the apparent aim of the artist, he is called upon first to move the spectator, after having been himself struck by a design or color composition which may or may not have a relation to natural objects. His predilections, his preferences, crystallize afterwards in the choice of means to interpret those natural objects; these means are always, obligingly, of imaginary essence.”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

Quote of Zadkine from New York, early 1944; as cited in: Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 429
1940 - 1960

Color, Nature

“The year 1967 gave us the feeling of the one-ness of Canada, until it was rudely jolted by de Gaulle and his insensate call for a "free" Quebec. That visit robbed the Centennial year of its high shine and made the people of the other nine provinces aware as never before of the crisis of Confederation.”

Judy LaMarsh (1924–1980) Canadian politician, writer, broadcaster and barrister.

Source: Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969), CHAPTER 6, The crisis of Confederation, p. 128

People, Feeling

“Piet van Oostrum: I find this a nice feature but it is not according to the documentation. Or is it a BUG?
Larry Wall: Let's call it an accidental feature.”

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

[6909@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV, 1990]
Usenet postings, 1990

“In naturalism, man is actually very insignificant, but arrogates to himself stupendous power. In Christianity, man is actually the apex of created significance, but is called to see it in abject humility.”

Ravi Zacharias (1946) Indian philosopher

Created for Significance

Nature

“There was a time when intellectual meant someone who uses reason and intellect. Today, people who call themselves intellectuals are in a form of mental death spiral: they search for, and find, those index cards that support their world view, and clutch little red books like rosaries in the face of all external evidence. They are ruled by appeals to authority. Their self-image and sense of emotional well-being trumps any and all objective evidence to the contrary.”

Bill Whittle (1959) author, director, screenwriter, editor

RAFTS https://web.archive.org/web/20060621091445/http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000132.html (18 June 2006) 2000s

Death, People, Books, World

“[I]f you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason-responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to [participate]. I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith as a way of getting to the truth, and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other (a worthy function that I do take seriously). But you must not expect me to go along with your defense of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify. Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side. You are sightseeing with a loved one in a foreign land, and your loved one is brutally murdered in front of your eyes. At the trial it turns out that in this land friends of the accused may be called as witnesses for the defense, testifying about their faith in his innocence. You watch the parade of his moist-eyed friends, obviously sincere, proudly proclaiming their undying faith in the innocence of the man you saw commit the terrible deed. The judge listens intently and respectfully, obviously more moved by this outpouring than by all the evidence presented by the prosecution. Is this not a nightmare? Would you be willing to live in such a land? Or would you be willing to be operated on by a surgeon you tells you that whenever a little voice in him tells him to disregard his medical training, he listens to the little voice? I know it passes in polite company to let people have it both ways, and under most circumstances I wholeheartedly cooperate with this benign agreement. But we're seriously trying to get at the truth here, and if you think that this common but unspoken understanding about faith is anything better than socially useful obfuscation to avoid mutual embarrassment and loss of face, you have either seen much more deeply into the issue that any philosopher ever has (for none has ever come up with a good defense of this) or you are kidding yourself.”

Daniel Dennett book Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

Love, People, Truth, Faith

“"I am simply stating a fact and it was not meant to be racist" - reaction to subsequent calls for an apology.”

Asenaca Caucau Fijian politician

Parliamentary speech, 28 July 2002 (and aftermath)

“That's why they call it Red Sox Nation. They follow us everywhere. Everywhere we go, we get big support.”

Manny Ramirez (1972) Dominican-American baseball player

In Ian Browne, "Manny cements his place in history"
Attributed

Support

“The sick in body call for aid: the sick
In mind are covetous of more disease;
And when at worst, they dream themselves quite well.
To know ourselves diseased, is half our cure.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Edward Young, "Night Thoughts," (1742-1745) Part IX http://www.litgothic.com/Texts/young_night_thoughts.pdf. Misattributed

Disease, Dreams

“The old theory that [the Great Pyramid] was built as a vault or tomb for an Egyptian king is unworthy of credence; for, as we shall see, it required more than the wisdom of the present day, to say nothing of that of Egypt four thousand years ago, to design such a structure. Besides, it contains nothing in the way of a casket, mummy or inscription. It was not until we had come into the time called in Daniel's prophecy "the Time of the End", when knowledge should be increased, and the wise should understand God's plan (Dan. 12:4, 9, 10), that the secrets of the Great Pyramid began to be understood, and our questions began to have a reasonable answer.”

Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916) Founder of the Bible Student Movement

Source: Milennial Dawn, Vol. III: Thy Kingdom Come (1891), p. 319.

Wisdom, God, Secret, Way

“The old lady Felderal had long railed at the emperor for not declaring war. She pretended that he feared to call on his subjects for the requisite means, lest their avarice, stronger than their patriotism, should depose him. When, however, war was declared, and the emperor's forces were victorious, she became enamoured of peace, and maintained that a moral and religious people ought not to rejoice at victories purchased by the sacrifice of human life. She invented a song, whose burden was "the golden days of commercial prosperity," and she organized a peace society, whose tenets compelled the members not to fight even an invading army. Finally, as these expedients failed to destroy the emperor, she collected the most desperate of her adherents, to concert means for tying his hands behind his back, "peaceably if they could, forcibly if they must," and delivering him to the king of Glanden.”

Alexander Bryan Johnson (1786–1867) United States philosopher and banker

The Philosophical Emperor, a Political Experiment, or, The Progress of a False Position: (1841)

Life, War, People, Fear

“As soon as I learned about this miracle of chip making I thought, what is the key missing element? … I'd been working on software so I decided that maybe that was what was necessary to bring all this power to life. I talked about that with a friend, Paul Allen, and we kept saying, "What can we do? Can we start our own software company?" It seemed impossible at the time because software was not done by independent companies. The companies that built the computers — IBM and DEC — they did all the software. And when we called them up and said, "We would like to do an operating system," they said, "who are you?" to which we said, "we're high-school students."”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

That was s, uh — that was the end of that conversation. Speech to the Economic Club of Detroit (1997) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzX6UUJ461s 1990s

Life, School, Learning, Time

“I call on the United States and the European Union to tell Saleh that he must leave now…They should end all support for his regime, especially that which is used to crush peaceful opposition…They should freeze the Saleh family's assets and those of Saleh's henchmen and return them to the people.”

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

2010s, Our revolution's doing what Saleh can't – uniting Yemen (2011)

People, Family, Peace, Support

“The conservation of matter in a chemical change is represented in a balanced chemical equation for that process. The study of the relationships between the numbers of reactant and product molecules is called stoichiometry. Stoichiometry is fundamental to all aspects of chemistry.”

David W. Oxtoby (1951) President of Pomona college

Principles of Modern Chemistry (7th ed., 2012), Ch. 2 : Chemical Formulas, Equations, and Reaction Yields

Study, Change

“It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing.”

Vernor Vinge A Fire Upon the Deep (1st edition)

Source: A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), Chapter 18 (p. 228).

“Fifty years is a very long period. The first 30–35 years – we could call this period as one when India equipped itself to face important problems. For example, we built institutions such as the IITs and the National Laboratories…We need much better infrastructure facilities and we must work on more difficult problems. Unfortunately, we have been used to working on problems that are somewhat repetitive. If we want to be at the cutting edge, we have to be innovators and originators.”

C. N. R. Rao (1934) Indian chemist

Quoted in pdf, In Conversation, 22 December 2013, Indian Institute of Science http://www.iisc.ernet.in/currsci/apr102002/788.pdf,

Problem

“The Russian economic system is state capitalism, there called state-socialism or even communism, with production directed by a state bureaucracy under the leadership of the Communist Party. The state officials, forming the new ruling class, have the disposal over the product, hence over the surplus-value, whereas the workers receive wages only, thus forming an exploited class.”

Antonie Pannekoek (1873–1960) Dutch astronomer and Marxist theorist

Lenin as Philosopher (1938), Chapter 8

Communication

“Schwartz closed his eyes. “My grandmother told me never to get mixed up with economists. Their thinking is muddy and their breath is bad, she said. She also warned me against Yale men. Perverts of the intellect, she called them. So here I am cooped up on an interstellar ship with five hundred alien creatures and one fellow human, and he has to be an economist from Yale.””

Robert Silverberg (1935) American speculative fiction writer and editor

Short fiction, Schwartz Between the Galaxies (1974)

Men, Thinking

“Why is it that countries which we call strong" are so powerful in creating wars but are so weak in bringing peace? Why is it that giving guns is so easy but giving books is so hard? Why is it, why is it that making tanks is so easy, but building schools is so hard?”

Malala Yousafzai (1997) Pakistani children's education activist

Nobel Peace Prize Lecture (December 10, 2014)

War, Books, School, Peace

“One can become overwhelmed on vacation—I have become so—by thinking thoughts that are too large. There is a condition identified in psychology textbooks as the Stendhal syndrome, also called, or related to, the Jerusalem syndrome, that describes a tourist’s overwhelmed response to great works of art or to a sudden apprehension of scale, antiquity, multitude, death—the accompanying fear is of one’s insignificance, but also of squandered opportunity.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

Death, Fear, Art, Thinking

“Why should not I call my works 'symphonies', 'arrangements', 'harmonies', and 'nocturnes'?... The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell. My picture of 'Harmony in Grey and Gold' is an illustration of my meaning – as snow scene with a single black figure and lighted tavern. I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the black figure, placed there because the black was wanted at that spot. All that I know is that my combination of grey and gold is the basis of the picture, Now this is precisely what my friends cannot grasp.”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

Quote in a letter to 'The World', London 22 Mai, 1878; as cited in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 186
1870 - 1903

Light, Past, Future

“Imagine that leader of all the enemy, in that great plain of Babylon, sitting on a sort of throne of smoking flame, a horrible and terrifying sight. Watch him calling together countless devils, to despatch them into different cities till the whole world is covered, forgetting no province or locality, no class or single individual.”

Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) Catholic Saint, founder of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits)

No. 140-141.
Spiritual Exercises (1548)

World, Imagination, Forgetting

“But by and by the time came when the Christian Church apostatized and turned away, and began to follow after their own wisdom, and the Prophets and Apostles ceased, so far as the affairs of the Christian Church on the earth were concerned. Revelations, and visions, and the various gifts of the spirit were also taken away, according to their unbelief and apostacy; but in the latter days God intends to again raise up a Christian Church upon the earth. Do not be startled, you who think that God will no more have a Church on the earth, for he has promised that he would again have one, and that he would set up his kingdom, and when he does you may look out for a great many Prophets and inspired men; and if you ever see a Church arise, calling itself a Christian Church, and it has not inspired Apostles like those in ancient times, you may know that it is a spurious church, and that it makes pretensions to something that it does not enjoy. If you ever find a church called a Christian Church that has no men to foretell future events, you may know, at once, that it is not a Christian Church. If you find a Christian Church that has not the ancient gifts, for instance the gift of healing, opening the eyes of the blind, unstopping the ears of the deaf, causing the tongue of the dumb to speak and the lame to walk; if you ever find a people calling themselves a Christian Church and they have not these gifts among them, you may know with a perfect knowledge that they do not agree with the pattern given in the New Testament. The Christian Church is always characterized with inspired men, whose revelations are just as sacred as any contained in the Bible; and, if written and published, just as binding upon the human family. The Christian Church will always lay hands upon the sick in the name of Jesus, in order that the sick may be healed. The Christian Church will always have those among its members who have heavenly visions, the ministration of angels, and the various gifts that are promised according to the Gospel.”

Orson Pratt (1811–1881) Apostle of the LDS Church

Journal of Discourses 18:171-172 (March 26, 1876).
Apostacy

Wisdom, Men, God, People

“They used to call me Cam-bones because I was so skinny.”

Cameron Richardson (1979) American actress

Maxim Magazine

“The left should carve out a new long-term narrative about British foreign policy: one that puts human rights and the protection of civilians centre stage again. And one that reasserts our commitment to the responsibility to protect those most at risk of mass atrocity crimes. This isn’t really about being pro or anti-military intervention. Rather it’s a call to redefine the principles that will guide the decisions we take, as well as a commitment to then honour them.”

Jo Cox (1974–2016) UK politician

A new progressive internationalism (17 June 2016)

Decision

“The people of your world became so stupid and rude that my companions and I no longer enjoyed teaching them. You must surely have heard of us: we were called oracles, nymphs, spirits, fairies, household gods, lemures, larvas, lamias, sprites, water-nymphs, incubi, shades, spirits of the dead, specters and ghosts.”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

Sun-being to Cyrano
The Other World (1657)

God, People, Stupidity, World

“Rather than seeing this as a negative, Jan, we need to rejoice, Maranatha – Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand. When we see up is down and right is called wrong, when this is happening, we were told this; these days would be as the days of Noah.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

Understanding the Times (October 5, 2013), quoted in Brian Tashman, " Bachmann: Obama Is Supporting Al Qaeda, Proving That We Are In The End Times http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/bachmann-obama-supporting-al-qaeda-proving-we-are-end-times", Right Wing Watch (October 7, 2013) regarding President Obama waiving the Arms Export Control Act to send defensive gear against chemical weapons to Syrian rebels 2010s

“Numbers were a mystery to me. I was so far behind. It was only in Nairobi, at age ten, that I figured out anything at all about the way time is calculated: minutes, hours, years. In Saudi Arabia the calendar had been Islamic, based on lunar months; Ethiopia maintained an ancient solar calendar. The year was written 1399 in Saudi Arabia, 1972 in Ethiopia, and 1980 in Kenya and everywhere else. In Ethiopia we even had a different clock: sunrise was called one o'clock and noon was called six. (Even within Kenya, people used two systems for telling time, the British and the Swahili.) The months, the days--everything was conceived differently. Only in Juja Road Primary school did I begin to figure out what people meant when they referred to precise dates and times. Grandma never learned to tell time at all. All her life, noon was when shadows were short, and your age was measured by rainy seasons. She got by perfectly well with her system.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

Source: Infidel (2007), Chapter 5: Secret Rendezvous, Sex, and the Scent of Sukumawiki

Life, People, Age, School

“England is the country of the English… England is the stage on which the drama of English history was played and the setting within which the English became conscious of themselves as a people … when politicians and preachers attempt to frighten and cajole the English into pretending away the distinction between themselves and people of other nations and other origins, they are engaged in undermining the foundation upon which democratic government by consent and peaceable civilised society in this country are supported … those who at the end of the twentieth century wish to keep alive that consciousness of being English, which seemed so effortless and uncontroversial to our forefathers, will discover that they are called upon, if they take their purpose seriously, to confront the most arrogant and imposing prejudices of their time.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Source: Speech to The Royal Society of St George (23 April 1988), from Simon Heffer, Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell (Phoenix, 1999), p. 918-19

People, History, Support, Time

“Panini, the ancient grammarian (probably belonged to 5th century or sixth century BC) mentions a character called Vasudeva son of Vasudeva, and also mentions Kaurava and Arjuna which testifies to Vasudeva Krishna, Arjuna and Kauravas being contemporaries. Megasthenes (350-290 BC), a Greek ethnographer and an ambassador of Seleucus I to the court of Chandragupta Maurya mentioned about Herakles in his famous work Indica.”

Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian

Many scholars have suggested that the deity identified as Herakles was Krishna Gopal Chowdhary in: The Greatest Farce of History http://books.google.com/books?id=9bOEAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA181, Partridge Publishing, 4 March 2014, p. 183.

“He said, we'll take us into town, lay our money down
I'll bring you the sweetest thing that grows
Because the fairest ones in sight are bloomin every night
At a tavern called the Sabre and the Rose..”

Kris Kristofferson (1936) American country music singer, songwriter, musician, and film actor

Sabre and the Rose
Song lyrics, Easter Island (1978)

Money, Night

“A methodical people," pulsed the voice of Kesa Khan. "They call themselves civilized because they can build tall castles and pitch their tents with geometric precision, but from here you can see the reality. Ants build in the same way. Are they civilized?”

David Gemmell book Waylander II: In the Realm of the Wolf

Source: Drenai series, Waylander II: In the Realm of the Wolf, Ch. 13

People, Way, Reality

“Call no one. Leave me not;
When you come back, I should be gone for aye.”

Edmond Rostand (1868–1918) French writer

Cyrano, Act 5, Sc. 6
Cyrano de Bergerac (1897)

“Money is here called the a medium and not, as customary, a unit of account because, clearly, money itself is not a unit, but the good whose unit is used as the unit of account.”

Jürg Niehans (1919–2007) Swiss economist

Source: The theory of money, 1978, p. 118

Money

“In other words, the conception is a philosophical and real account of the nature of an isolated human being, or created spirit, the numerical unit in the created universe, viewed as such a spirit appears in what has well been called its natural aspect; viewed, that is, as the organising subject of a natural-scientific experience, marked by fragmentariness that is forever being tentatively overcome and enwholed, — if I may coin a word to match the excellent German one ergänzt.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The City of God and the True God as its Head (In Royce’s “The Conception of God: a Philosophical Discussion Concerning the Nature of the Divine Idea as a Demonstrable Reality”), p.90-1

Nature, Universe, Appearance

“[W]e have more than two options… a critique of reason does not have to be a call for the return of superstition and arbitrary power…. [O]ur problems do not lie with reason itself but with our obsessive treatment of reason as an absolute value. Certainly it is one of our qualities, but it functions positively only when balanced and limited by the others.”

John Ralston Saul The Doubter's Companion

"Instrumental Reason"
The Doubter's Companion (1994)

Lie, Problem

“The founders of the English laws have with excellent forecast contrived, that no man should be called to answer to the king for any capital crime, unless upon the preparatory accusation of twelve or more of his fellow subjects, the grand jury: and that the truth of every accusation, whether preferred in the shape of indictment, information, or appeal, should afterwards be confirmed by the unanimous suffrage of twelve of his equals and neighbours, indifferently chosen, and superior to all suspicion. So that the liberties of England cannot but subsist, so long as this palladium remains sacred and inviolate, not only from all open attacks, (which none will be so hardy as to make) but also from all secret machinations, which may sap and undermine it; by introducing new and arbitrary methods of trial, by justices of the peace, commissioners of the revenue, and courts of conscience. And however convenient these may appear at first, (as doubtless all arbitrary powers, well executed, are the most convenient) yet let it be again remembered, that delays, and little inconveniences in the forms of justice, are the price that all free nations must pay for their liberty in more substantial matters; that these inroads upon this sacred bulwark of the nation are fundamentally opposite to the spirit of our constitution; and that, though begun in trifles, the precedent may gradually increase and spread, to the utter disuse of juries in questions of the most momentous concern.”

William Blackstone book Commentaries on the Laws of England

Book IV, ch. 27 http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/blackstone_bk4ch27.asp: Of Trial, And Conviction. Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769)

Truth, Secret, Peace, Justice

“The fashionable ideology that "artificial" lacks the inherent goodness of "natural" is an appealing, but hopelessly simplistic notion of the intellectually chic. Artifice is the result of a deliberate intent to make. Nature also "makes" things, using a set of basic building blocks common throughout the universe. Exchanging infinite time for deliberate design, nature has ingeniously built plants, planets, galaxies and unimaginable constructs which seem to structure the universe itself. What we call "natural" is simply the result of whatever set of rules nature has followed in fashioning our observable reality. On planet Earth, nature has manipulated the common elements to fashion everything from bacteria to the molten core of the planet. Discoveries in the "nano" technologies of bio, molecular, and micro engineering will re-edit the nomenclature of "natural" versus "unnatural", blurring if not erasing the line of distinction between "machine" and "organism", "natural" and "unnatural", "God-given" and "man-made."”

Syd Mead (1933–2019) American concept artist

Future Concepts: The World of Syd Mead, p.15, Car Styling Magazine 088, May 1992

God, Fashion, Nature, Reality

“The new, independent women should have no need to exploit a man's vestigial sense of chivalry. If they are truly suited to compete with men, they should be able to do so without special rules, privileges and protections. Men should not have to curb their behavior so that women can achieve. If "equality" were truly desired, men would never have to ask, "Mother, may I?"… To ask men to radically alter their behavior to facilitate the success of complete stranger with whom they may well be in direct or indirect competition is absurd. That's not "equality" any more than asking a boxer to fight with one hand tied behind his back and calling it a "fair fight."”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

And yet this is exactly what feminists ask of men... Men need to reject this.
"Mother May I" Masculinity
A Sky Without Eagles (2014)

Women, Men, Behavior, Sense

“Let us redeem our great words from base uses. Let that no longer call itself Love, which knows that it is not free!”

Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) American novelist, writer, journalist, political activist

Love's Pilgrimage (1911)

Love

“Then we went down to his work room, in the horrible beautiful Merz grotto [the 'Merz-Haus', built by Kurt Schwitters, where broken wheels paired with matchboxes, wire lattices with brushes without bristles, rusted wheels with curious Merz cucumbers… How often did we 'p-lay' in this room! Schwitters called playing, considering the sweat, working. There we glued together our paper pictures, and as I tossed away one of my glued-together works one morning, Schwitters asked, 'You don't like it? Can I have it?' – 'What do you want with this failed piece of toast?' Schwitters took a good look at it and said, 'I'll put what's on top on the bottom, I'll stick a little Merz nose in this corner and I'll sign the bottom Kurt Schwitters.' And, yes indeed, this collage became a wonderful picture by Kurt Schwitters. Schwitters was a wizard, just as Hokusai was a wizard.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

In 'Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling – Memories of Kurt Schwitters Hans Arp 1956; as quoted in I is Style, ed. Siegfried Gohr & Gunda Luyken - commissioned by Rudi Fuchs, director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam - NAI Publishers, Rotterdam 2000, pp. 140-141
1950s

Beauty

“I'm bisexual, but it's not the sort of thing I spent a lot of time thinking about … I've slept with girls; I've slept with guys, so I guess that's what they call it! I'm not anti trying to use language to simplify our lives.”

Amanda Palmer (1976) American punk-cabaret musician

As quoted in "Getting Real With Amanda Palmer" at AfterEllen (18 July 2007)

Guy, Girl, Thinking, Time

“She called today, Pretending not to care at all, For days and weeks, Now he’s hanging from the ceiling, What a life, Oh what a life, Was it a life? ~ "Sense"”

Pete Yorn (1974) American musician

Song lyrics

Life, Sense

“In my own researches and findings I have always insisted on plastic and sculptural values, and also on what I call a poetic climate. The object, whether it is a book, a bottle, or a human body, once it is visualized and expressed by means of clay, stone, or wood, ceases to be a document and becomes an animated object in stone, wood, or bronze and lives its independent life..”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

Quote of Zadkine from New York, early 1944; as cited in: Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 430
1940 - 1960

Life, Books, Animals

“Individuals who participate in interaction rituals are filled with emotional energy, in proportion to the intensity of the interaction. Durkheim called this energy “moral force,” the flow of enthusiasm that allows individuals in the throes of ritual participation to carry out heroic acts of fervor or self-sacrifice. I would emphasize another result of group-generated emotional energy: it charges up individuals like an electric battery, giving them a corresponding degree of enthusiasm toward ritually created symbolic goals when they are out of the presence of the group. Much of what we consider individual personality consists of the extent to which persons carry the energy of intense interaction rituals; at the high end, such persons are charismatic; a little less intensely, they are forceful leaders and the stars of sociability; modest charges of emotional energy make passive individuals; and those whose interaction ritual participation is meager and unsuccessful are withdrawn and depressed.”

Randall Collins (1941) American sociologist

Source: The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), p. 23

Star, Personality

“As we survey the various stages of evolution, from the simplest one-cell creatures up to man. we see a steady improvement in the methods of learning and adaptation to a hostile world. Each step in learning ability gives better adaptation and greater chance of survival. We are carried a long way up the scale by innate reflexes and rudimentary muscular learning faculties. Habits indeed, not rational thought, assist us to surmount most of life's obstacles. Most, but by no means all; for learning in the high mammals exhibits the unexplained phenomenon of "insight," which shows itself by sudden changes in behavior in learning situations -- in sudden departures from one method of organizing a task, or solving a problem, to another. Insight, expectancy, set, are the essentially "mind-like" attributes of communication, and it is these, together with the representation of concepts, which require physiological explanation. At the higher end of the scale of evolution, this quality we call "mind" appears more and more prominently, but it is at our own level that learning of a radically new type has developed -- through our powers of organizing thoughts, comparing and setting them into relationship, especially with the use of language. We have a remarkable faculty of forming generalizations, of recognizing universals, of associating and developing them. It is our multitude of general concepts, and our powers of organizing them with the aid of language in varied ways, which forms the backbone of human communication, and which distinguises us from the animals.”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

Source: Hebb, D. O., The Organization of Behavior, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1949.
Source: On Human Communication (1957), On Cognition and Recognition, p. 304

Life, Hostility, World, Way

“Very well, the starting point would be that claim of Professor Quarrey’s, which had been in the news at the beginning of the year, that the country’s greatest export was noxious gas. And who would like to stir up the fuss again? Obviously, the Canadians, cramped into a narrow band to the north of their more powerful neighbors, growing daily angrier about the dirt that drifted to them on the wind, spoiling crops, causing chest diseases and soiling laundry hung out to dry. So she’d called the magazine Hemisphere in Toronto, and the editor had immediately offered ten thousand dollars for three articles.
Very conscious that all calls out of the country were apt to be monitored, she’d put the proposition to him in highly general terms: the risk of the Baltic going the same way as the Mediterranean, the danger of further dust-bowl like the Mekong Desert, the effects of bringing about climactic change. That was back in the news—the Russians had revised their plan to reverse the Yenisei and Ob. Moreover, there was the Danube problem, worse than the Rhine had ever been, and Welsh nationalists were sabotaging pipelines meant to carry “their” water into England, and the border war in West Pakistan had been dragging on so long most people seemed to have forgotten that it concerned a river.
And so on.
Almost as soon as she started digging, though, she thought she might never be able to stop. It was out of the question to cover the entire planet. Her pledged total of twelve thousand words would be exhausted by North American material alone.”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

June “A PLACE TO STAND”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

War, People, Disease, Way

“One might even call him dreamy. It was a match made in heaven. Or it could’ve been, until he ghosted me.”

Jacob Tobia (1991) american LGBTIQ activist

Sissy Diaries: The Harsh Realities of Dating for Gender-Nonconforming Femmes https://www.them.us/story/sissy-diaries-dating-while-nonbinary (April 25, 2018).

“A good doctor pursues his calling without any regard to a bad result. Otherwise, teaching in medical school might be called into question and where would we be then?”

Alain-René Lesage (1668–1747) French writer

La Tontine (1709)

School, Question

“If a labor leader of national scale is arrested by the police, I will call a general strike.”

Amir Peretz (1952) Israeli politician

Attributed

“As to the Approbation or Esteem of those Blockheads who call themselves the Public, & whom a Bookseller, a Lord, a Priest, or a Party can guide, I do most heartily despise it.”

David Hume (1711–1776) Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian

Letter 138, To Gilbert Elliot of Minto; August 9, 1757

“Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God — the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God. Where are these responsible people?”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Letters and Papers from Prison (1967; 1997), Who Stands Fast?, p. 5.

Life, God, People, Faith

“We define a fruitful partnership between our twin professions of librarian and information systems scientist in support of this adventure in creativity, and the pursuit of wisdom? If it is the nature of the creative mind that it sets out to grapple with the tensions and contradictions in the "paradigm", as Kuhn calls it, it follows that first of all one must know what the paradigm is.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Librarians and Information Systems (1995)

Wisdom, Support, Nature, Partnership

“Another Visitor: How did you manage, Monsieur Degas, when you painted that plein air called 'Le Plage', the one Monsieur Rouart has?
Degas: It was quite simple. I spread my flannel vest on the floor of the studio, and had the model sit on it. You see, the air you breathe in a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors.”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

"The Crime and the Punishment" (p. 47)
posthumous quotes, Degas: An Intimate Portrait' (1927)

Painting

“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

This quote spread rapidly in the United States after appearing in a column by Molly Ivins (24 November 2002). It is repeated often and sometimes attributed to the "Fascism" entry in the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana. However hard copies of the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana exist in numerous libraries and the alleged quote is not in the text, nor is there anything that would support the alleged quote. A vaguely similar statement does appear in Doctrine of Fascism. We are, in other words, a state which controls all forces acting in nature. We control political forces, we control moral forces, we control economic forces, therefore we are a full-blown Corporative state. The same document explains that the "corporations" (corporazioni) on which the Fascist state rested were its own creations, modeled on guild associations and not private companies, which Italian normally calls società. For details see "Mussolini on the Corporate State" http://www.publiceye.org/fascist/corporatism.html by Chip Berlet. Attributed

“Upon a green achmardi she bore the consummation of heart’s desire, its root and its blossoming – a thing called "The Gral", paradisal, transcending all earthly perfection! She whom the Gral suffered to carry itself had the name of Repanse de Schoye. Such was the nature of the Gral that she who had the care of it was required to be of perfect chastity and to have renounced all things false.”

Wolfram von Eschenbach book Parzival

Ûf einem grüenen achmardî
truoc si den wunsch von pardîs,
bêde wurzeln unde rîs.
daz was ein dinc, daz hiez der Grâl,
erden wunsches überwal.
Repanse de schoy si hiez,
die sich der grâl tragen liez.
der grâl was von sölher art:
wol muoser kiusche sîn bewart,
die sîn ze rehte solde pflegn:
die muose valsches sich bewegn.
Bk. 5, st. 235, line 20; p. 125.
Parzival

Nature, Suffering, Heart, Perfection

“His life from the very beginning is a story of temptation; it is not only one particular period in his life, the forty days, that is the story of temptation – no his whole life is a story of temptation (just as it is also of suffering). Every moment of his life he is tempted – that is, he has this possibility in his power, to take his calling, his task, in vain.”

Sören Kierkegaard book For Self-Examination

Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, Hong p. 58-59
1850s, For Self-Examination (1851), Christ is the Way

Life, Suffering

“The scale of light can be described by numbers — called the frequency — and as the numbers get higher, the light goes from red to blue to ultraviolet. We can't see ultraviolet light, but it can affect photographic plates. It's still light — only the number is different.”

Richard Feynman book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

Source: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985), p. 13

Light

“[I was] a little boy with a patch over one eye, who sang and danced along the street. I had what’s called a lazy eye, so I had to wear the patch. You tend to be a prodded kind of kid when you look like that, but it makes you much stronger in the end.”

Holly Johnson (1960) British artist

Hooray For Hollywood http://www.zttaat.com/article.php?title=481 by Paul Simper at zttaat.com, Accessed May 2014.

Boy, Dance

“They fell upon an ungenial climate, where there were nine months of winter and three months of cold weather, and that called out the best energies of the men, and of the women too, to get a mere subsistence out of the soil, with such a climate. In their efforts to do that they cultivated industry and frugality at the same time — which is the real foundation of the greatness of the Pilgrims.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

On the Pilgrims, in a speech at a New England Society Dinner (22 December 1880).
1880s

Women, Men, Effort, Winter

“Determination in a single instance is an expression of courage; if it becomes characteristic, a mental habit. But here we are referring not to physical courage but to courage to accept responsibility, courage in the face of a moral danger. This has often been called courage d'esprit, because it is created by the intellect. That, however, does not make it an act of the intellect: it is an act of temperament. Intelligence alone is not courage; we often see that the most intelligent people are irresolute. Since in the rush of events a man is governed by feelings rather than by thought, the intellect needs to arouse the quality of courage, which then supports and sustains it in action.
Looked at in this way, the role of determination is to limit the agonies of doubt and the perils of hesitation when the motives for action are inadequate.”

Carl von Clausewitz book On War

Source: On War (1832), Book 1, Chapter 3.

People, Way, Feeling, Intelligence

“I think that with all the emphasis on achievement, careers and competitiveness, science education has become — with notable bright spots to be sure — a joyless, alienating and frustrating experience for millions and millions of kids.
There are those science-fair-winner types and then there's the rest of the class, not grooving on the material and hence, they find out, doomed to mediocre futures. Seems like ambivalence and hostility aren't such surprising responses to such a message. … I think things might go better if the narrative of our scientific understandings of nature — what some are calling "Big History" — were told early and often, capturing the interest and imagination of students from a young age. They might then be eager to learn the problem-solving, evidence-based process of scientific inquiry that has led to these understandings.”

Ursula Goodenough (1943) American biologist

"It's Time For A New Narrative; It's Time For 'Big History'", in 13.7: Cosmos & Culture (10 February 2011) http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/02/10/133652898/its-time-for-a-new-narrative-its-time-for-big-history

Hostility, Age, Education, Imagination

“I am Ra. Consider, if you will, a simple example of intentions which are bad/good. This example is Adolf. This is your vibratory sound complex. The intention is to presumably unify by choosing the distortion complex called elite from a social memory complex and then enslaving, by various effects, those who are seen as the distortion of not-elite. There is then the concept of taking the social memory complex thus weeded and adding it to a distortion thought of by the so-called Orion group as an empire. The problem facing them is that they face a great deal of random energy released by the concept of separation. This causes them to be vulnerable as the distortions amongst their own members are not harmonized.”

Carla Rueckert

Session 7 http://www.lawofone.info/results.php?s=7#14 Quotations as Ra

Problem, Memory

“When people address me as Shreyaji, I tell them, ek G Ghoshal ka to banta hai, lekin (G for Ghoshal is alright, but) please don’t call me Shreyaji!.”

Shreya Ghoshal (1984) Indian playback singer

People's response http://www.hindustantimes.com/tv/i-m-a-jhola-kurta-kind-of-girl-shreya-ghoshal/story-YrbzX4J8hhSCro4wvwjjnJ.html

People

“The people in every state in this country should have the right to determine who they want as president and what the agenda of the Democratic Party should be. That’s why we are in this race until the last vote is cast. That is why this campaign is going to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia with as many delegates as possible to fight for a progressive party platform that calls for a $15 an hour minimum wage, an end to our disastrous trade policies, a Medicare-for-all health care system, breaking up Wall Street financial institutions, ending fracking in our country, making public colleges and universities tuition free and passing a carbon tax so we can effectively address the planetary crisis of climate change.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Statement on his candidacy (27 April 2016) http://www.mediaite.com/online/sanders-emphasizes-fight-for-progressive-party-platform-in-primary-night-statement/ 2010s, 2016

People, Health, Universe, Change

“The power which causes the several portions of the plant to help each other, we call life. Much more is this so in an animal. We may take away the branch of a tree without much harm to it; but not the animal's limb. Thus, intensity of life is also intensity of helpfulness — completeness of depending of each part on all the rest. The ceasing of this help is what we call corruption; and in proportion to the perfectness of the help, is the dreadfulness of the loss. The more intense the life has been, the more terrible is its corruption.”

John Ruskin book Modern Painters

Volume V, part VIII, chapter 1, section 4 (1860).
Modern Painters (1843-1860)

Life, Tree, Loss, Help

“The word "mysticism" is popularly used in a variety of loose and inaccurate ways. Sometimes anything is called "mystical" which is misty, foggy, vague, or sloppy. It is absurd that "mysticism" should be associated with what is "misty" because of the similar sound of the words. And there is nothing misty, foggy, vague, or sloppy about mysticism.”

Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.

p. 10

Way

“The name [Pop] sounds so awful. Dada must have something to do with Pop. it's so funny, the names are really synonyms. Does anyone know what they're supposed to mean or have to do with, those names? Johns and Rauschenberg, Neo-Dada for all those years, and everyone calling them derivative and unable to transform the things they use, are now called progenitors of Pop. It's funny the way things change. I think John Cage has been very influential, and Merce Cunningham too, I think.... History books are being rewritten all the time.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

Source: 1963 - 1967, What Is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters, Part 1 (1963), pp. 116-19

Books, Way, History, Thinking

““Neither of us is very trustworthy, eh?”
“Pfutz!” Reich said emphatically. “We don’t play girl’s rules. We play for keeps, both of us. It’s the cowards and weaklings and sore-losers who hide behind rules and fair play.”
“What about honor and ethics?”
“We’ve got honor in us, but it’s our own code… not the make-believe rules some frightened little man wrote for the rest of the frightened little men. Every man’s got his own honor and ethics, and so long as he sticks to ’em, who’s anybody else to point the finger? You may not like his ethics, but you've no right to call him unethical.””

Alfred Bester book The Demolished Man

Source: The Demolished Man (1953), Chapter 6 (p. 84).

Men, Girl

“Babylonian mathematics and astronomy have left an indelible impression on our exact sciences. We still call some of the planets by their Babylonian names in translation.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Introduction
Adventures in the Nearest East (1957)

Mathematics, Science

“I mean it was bad enough when we had these people called the birthers who thought he was not born here. … But I was saying last night that I've identified this new group and I'm calling them the churchers. …The churchers. They're the people who don't think that he is a Christian. They think he's — he's a secret Muslim, Larry. I guess you haven't been paying enough attention. … When I talked to him, he told me about his plan to use drinking water to sterilize white people. I get — whoops, I've said too much.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

Larry King Live interview (2010)

People, Secret, Drink, Thinking

“The Church commends the law-makers for their prompt reaction to outlaw same-sex relationships in Nigeria and calls for the bill to be passed since the idea expressed in the bill is the moral position of Nigerians regarding human sexuality.”

Peter Akinola (1944) Anglican Primate of the Church of Nigeria

(Communique on the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Bill 2006
The 2006 Bill, as well as criminalising same-sex marriage, also proposed to criminalise "Registration of Gay Clubs, Societies and organizations" and "Publicity, procession and public show of same-sex amorous relationship through the electronic or print media physically, directly, indirectly or otherwise", on penalty of up to 5 years imprisonment.

Law, Sex, Idea

“In a book called Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect, Whitehead points out that perception is usually a matter of symbols, just like language; I say I see a book when I actually see a red oblong. The Transactionists (who have been influenced by Whitehead rather than Husserl) take this one stage further, and point out that when I 'perceive' something, I am actually making a bet with myself that what I perceive is what I think it is. In order to act and live at all, I have to make these bets; I cannot afford to make absolutely certain that things are what I think they are. But this means that we should not take our perceptions at face value, any more than Nietzsche was willing to take philosophy at its face value; we must allow for prejudice and distortion.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966), p. 66

Books, Thinking

“Black life expectancy is much lower than white and they do their best to kill us before we are even born. We are burned alive in fire-trap tenements. Our brothers and sisters OD daily from heroin and methadone. Our babies die from lead poisoning. Millions of Black people have died as a result of indecent medical care. This is murder. But they have got the gall to call us murderers.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

To My People (July 4, 1973)

Life, People, Sister, Baby

“I was right in the middle of examinations when they called me up into the Tactical Department Office. Colonel Russel "Red" Reeder told me what had occurred. He went on to explain that my father had suffered a broken neck and was paralyzed. He also said that they were in communication and would keep me informed. I wwent back to my room and wrote a cable which I went on December 10, 1945. It said: All of us here are praying for your speedy recovery and return home. I know you can do it. Your affectionate son. George.”

George S. Patton IV (1923–2004) U.S. Army general

Source: The Fighting Pattons (1997) by Brian M. Sobel, p. 52

Home, Communication, Suffering

““I opposed this (the invasion of Earth),” it (the alien) continued, “having doubts about the validity or usefulness of this continued aggression. In opposing it I was, of course, opposing the Pattern, and for a Triskan to do this was what you would call blasphemy.”
“Don’t feel bad,” I interjected. “Most everyone on this planet is ready to kill and destroy for their local god.”
“Yes,” the 3V agreed, “and almost without exception, the other races and civilization we have encountered have been quite ready to do violence of all kinds to their fellow sharers of life, so long as they could claim to be doing the will of a higher power, be it a god or a government.””

T. A. Waters (1938–1998) American magician

Source: The Probability Pad (1970), Chapter 16 (p. 125)

Life, God, Feeling

“Is there an inverse relation between knowledge and wisdom? At times it seems the more we know, the less we understand.
I am not the first to note this quandary. One scholar recently wrote, “Lysos and her followers chase the siren call of pastoralism, like countless romantics before them, idealizing a past Golden Age that never was, pursuing a serenity possible only in the imagination.””

David Brin book Glory Season

Introduction to Chapter 26 (p. 502)
Glory Season (1993)

Wisdom, Age, Imagination, Understanding

“I personally object to episodic games where you play one screen of Space Invaders and one screen of Breakout and one screen of Galaxians and one screen of this and one of that. To me, that's not a game. It's just taking five bad games, putting them together, and calling them one good game. I'm philosophically against that.”

Eugene Jarvis (1955) American game designer and game programmer

Joystik, September 1982

Game, Personality

“As coordination contains all the principles of organization, it likewise expresses all the purposes of organization, in so far as these purposes relate to its internal structure. To avoid confusion we must keep in mind that there are always two objectives of organization, the internal and the external. The latter may be anything, according to the purpose or interest that calls the group together, but the internal objective is coordinative always.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: Onward Industry!, 1931, p. 20

“As one might expect, the gunman’s fondness for Confederate heritage has become a focus of discussion. We’ve had people calling for the banning of Confederate flags as symbols of hate while certain defenders of Confederate heritage, sometimes after offering perfunctory statements of regret, rush to disassociate their cause from this mass murder or to offer other explanations for the gunman’s behavior. That’s to be expected, and it is to be regretted. We’ve had far too much discussion of the Confederate flag, both by people who hate it and people who love it, that trivialize the whole matter by turning it into a screaming match between extremes. Thoughtful commentary flounders in such environments, precisely because both sides will assail it. It's Sunday. If you haven’t already done so, think about the victims and their families and friends. Pray for those who have suffered. And think before you respond.”

Brooks D. Simpson (1957) American historian

2010s, Charleston: White Supremacy, Black Lives, and Red Blood (June 2015)

Love, Hate, People, Family

“Most of all, I dislike this idea nowadays that if you're a black person in America, then you must be called African-American. Listen, I've visited Africa, and I've got news for everyone: I'm not an African. The Africans know I'm not an African. I'm an American. This is my country. My people helped to build it and we've been here for centuries. Just call me black, if you want to call me anything.”

Whoopi Goldberg (1955) American actress

The Daily Telegraph interview, 20 April 1998

People, Idea, Help, Personality

“The head of state
Has called for me by name
But I don't have time for him
It's gonna be a glorious day
I feel my luck could change”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

"Lucky"
Lyrics, OK Computer (1997)

Feeling, Change, Time

“Throughout theological history we have been assured by religious leaders that if we perform certain rituals, repeat certain prayers or mantras, conform to certain patterns, suppress our desires, control our thoughts, sublimate our passions, limit our appetites and refrain from sexual indulgence, we shall, after sufficient torture of the mind and body, find something beyond this little life. And that is what millions of so-called religious people have done through the ages, either in isolation, going off into the desert or into the mountains or a cave or wandering from village to village with a begging bowl, or, in a group, joining a monastery, forcing their minds to conform to an established pattern. But a tortured mind, a broken mind, a mind which wants to escape from all turmoil, which has denied the outer world and been made dull through discipline and conformity — such a mind, however long it seeks, will find only according to its own distortion.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

1960s, (1969)

Life, People, Age, World

“My feet are set on the outward trails
And the call of the roistering sea.
My wings are spread on the outbound gales
And the paths that are long and free.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

From a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith (June 23, 1926)
Letters

Sea

“Bush, and Blair, and the prime minister of Japan, and Berlusconi, these people are criminals, and they are responsible for mass murder in the world, for the war, and for the occupation, through their support for Israel, and through their support for a globalized capitalist economic system, which is the biggest killer the world has ever known. It has killed far more people than Adolf Hitler. It has killed far more people than George Bush. The economic system which these people support, which leaves most of the people in the world hungry, and without clean water to drink. So we're going to put them on trial, the leaders, when they come. They think they're coming for a holiday in a beautiful country called Scotland; in fact, they're coming to their trial.”

George Galloway (1954) British politician, broadcaster, and writer

Interview on Abu Dhabi TV http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP91805, June 1, 2005

War, People, World, Beauty

“To say that the activity of science and art helps humanity's progress, if by that activity we mean the activity which now calls itself by those names, is as though one said that the clumsy, obstructive splashing of oars in a boat moving down stream assists the boat's progress. It only hinders it… The proof of this is seen in the confession made by men of science that the achievements of the arts and sciences are inaccessible to the labouring masses on account of the unequal distribution of wealth.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What then must we do? (1886)

Men, Art, Science, Help

“I call my balls the bush twins.”

Zach Galifianakis (1969) American actor and comedian

Live at the Purple Onion (2007)

“Thus, it is established that Adam is the human race, by whatever names he was called. Since it is clear that he became manifest in the form of a man, naturally on every plane he is fallible. But God is not his partner in any errors. For, he taught him beauty and ugliness and truth and falsehood, and he learned good and evil. But his kingship is a result of the divine decree. And if he remains continually in his position or steps down, or is deposed from it, in each case it is the result of the divine decree. His cause is exalted with God. Whenever he is a temporal ruler, his leadership is like that of any other. If he is among the prophets, his commands and prohibitions are from God, and his kingship is by God’s command, and he is the leader of the people as long as he lives. After their deaths, some hold that they must continue to be obeyed, and others mention them with their lips, and love for them is continual.”

Subh-i-Azal (1831–1912) Persian religious leader

Treatise on Kingship

Love, Death, God, People

“The men of my group who are under indictment here were under my military command. If they had not executed the orders which they were given, they would have been ordered by me to execute them. If they had refused to execute the orders they would have had to be called to account for it by me. There could be no doubt about it. Whoever refused anything in the front lines would have met immediate death. If the refusal would have come about in any other way, a court martial of the Higher SS and Police Leader would have brought about the same consequences.”

Otto Ohlendorf (1907–1951) German general

At the Nuremberg Trials. Quoted in "Valhalla's Warriors: A History of the Waffen SS on the Eastern Front" - Page 186 - by Terry Goldsworthy - History - 2007.

Death, Men, Way