Quotes about catalogue (55 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as 'slightly foxed', although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.”

Terry Pratchett book The Light Fantastic

Source: The Light Fantastic

Books

“I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: "No good in a bed, but fine against a wall."”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

From a speech given at the White Shrine Club, Fresno, California, quoted in The Event Makers I’ve Known (2012) by Elvin C. Bell, p. 161. She is described as being in her late 70s, so c. 1960–1962

Reading

“But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle...”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

Fate , Disease , Motivation , Hell

“What is Nature? An encyclopedical, systematic Index or Plan of our Spirit. Why will we content us with the mere catalogue of our Treasures? Let us contemplate them ourselves, and in all ways elaborate and use them.”

Novalis (1772–1801) German poet and writer

Novalis (1829)

Way , Nature

“I endorse all that you say of the superior intelligence of the felidae. Never have I been able to associate the docile servility and satellitism of the canidae with mental power. Zoölogists seem to consider the cerebration of cats and dogs about 50-50—but my respect always goes to the cool, sure, impersonal, delicately poised feline who minds his business and never slobbers—the aristocratic, epicurean philosopher who knows what he wants and tells interlopers to go to hell. There is no credit in having a dog attached to one—for a dog can be conditioned to become anybody's slave and property. But a cat is nobody's slave. You do not own a cat. If one lives in your home, it is because he regards your way of life favourably, and accepts you as a friend, as one gentleman accepts another. He takes no kicks or insolence from anyone. If you are not worthy to associate with him, he will depart to seek an environment more suited to a gentleman's taste. Therefore he who retains the respect and companionship of a feline has proven himself to be essentially a superior citizen. For a human being, membership in the Kappa Alpha Tau forms a badge of distinction. Many are the eminent names on that member ship list—Mahomet himself, Richelieu, Poe, Baudelaire... one could catalogue them endlessly. Certainly, I ask no greater honour than to be accounted a citizen of Ulthar beyond the River Skai!”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to E. Hoffmann Price (29 July 1936), published in Selected Letters Vol. V, p. 290
Non-Fiction, Letters, to E. Hoffmann Price

Life , Dogs , Way , Home

“Inconceivable events and conditions form a class apart from all other story elements, and cannot be made convincing by any mere process of casual narration. They have the handicap of incredibility to overcome; and this can be accomplished only through a careful realism in every other phase of the story, plus a gradual atmospheric or emotional build-up of the utmost subtlety. The emphasis, too, must be kept right—hovering always over the wonder of the central abnormality itself. It must be remembered that any violation of what we know as natural law is in itself a far more tremendous thing than any other event or feeling which could possibly affect a human being. Therefore in a story dealing with such a thing we cannot expect to create any sense of life or illusion of reality if we treat the wonder casually and have the characters moving about under ordinary motivations. The characters, though they must be natural, should be subordinated to the central marvel around which they are grouped. The true "hero" of a marvel tale is not any human being, but simply a set of phenomena. Over and above everything else should tower the stark, outrageous monstrousness of the one chosen departure from Nature. The characters should react to it as real people would react to such a thing if it were suddenly to confront them in daily life; displaying the almost soul-shattering amazement which anyone would naturally display instead of the mild, tame, quickly-passed-over emotions prescribed by cheap popular convention. Even when the wonder is one to which the characters are assumed to be used, the sense of awe, marvel, and strangeness which the reader would feel in the presence of such a thing must somehow be suggested by the author.... Atmosphere, not action, is the thing to cultivate in the wonder story. We cannot put stress on the bare events, since the unnatural extravagance of these events makes them sound hollow and absurd when thrown into too high relief. Such events, even when theoretically possible or conceivable in the future, have no counterpart or basis in existing life and human experience, hence can never form the groundwork of an adult tale. All that a marvel story can ever be, in a serious way, is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood. The moment it tries to be anything else it becomes cheap, puerile, and unconvincing. Therefore a fantastic author should see that his prime emphasis goes into subtle suggestion—the imperceptible hints and touches of selective and associative detail which express shadings of moods and build up a vague illusion of the strange reality of the unreal—instead of into bald catalogues of incredible happenings which can have no substance or meaning apart from a sustaining cloud of colour and mood-symbolism. A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis toward something to which they can be true; namely, certain wistful or restless moods of the human spirit, wherein it seeks to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural laws.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

"Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction", Californian 3, No. 3 (Winter 1935): 39-42. Published in Collected Essays, Volume 2: Literary Criticism edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 178
Non-Fiction

Life , People , Law , Way

“When the Viennese government compiled a Catalogue of Forbidden Books in 1765, so many Austrians used it as a reading guide that the Hapsburg censors were forced to include the Catalogue itself as a forbidden book.”

Craig Nelson (1971) Scottish footballer

Source: Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations

Books , Reading

“Mathematics catalogues everything that is not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics is an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders.”

Greg Egan book Oceanic

Source: Oceanic

Mathematics

“A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) edited by Alan Lindsay Mackay, p. 153

Books , World

“For me, Still's pictorial dramas are an extension of the Greek Persephone myth. As he himself has expressed it, his paintings are 'of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated'. Every shape becomes an organic entity, inviting the multiplicity of associations inherent in all living things. To me they form a theogony of the most elementary consciousness, hardly aware of itself beyond the will to live – a profound and moving experience. [in the catalogue introduction for the first one-man-show of Clyfford Still]”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

in Art of this Century, February 12 – March 2, 1946, Peggy Guggenheim Papers on the work of Clyfford Still; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 203
1940's

Painting

“Remember that Children and Fools want every thing because they want Wit to distinguish: and therefore there is no stronger Evidence of a Crazy Understanding, than the making too large a Catalogue of things necessary, when in truth there are so very few things that have a right to be placed in it.”

George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax (1633–1695) English politician

The Lady's New Year's Gift: or Advice to a Daughter (1688)

Children , Truth , Fools , Understanding

“Fantasizing about action out there in the 'real' world, spinning dreams abut the secret centrality, about the occult importance of the labours in which he has interred his existence — labours that the vast majority of his fellow men would deem wholly marginal and socially wasteful if they knew of them at all — the pure scholar, the master of catalogues, can sup on hatred. At the ordinary level, he will exorcize his spleen in the ad-hominem nastiness of a book review, in the arsenic of a footnote. He will vent his resentments in the soft betrayals of an ambiguous recommendation or examination report and in the scorpion's round of a committee on tenure. The violence stays formal. Not, one supposes, in Professor Blunt.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"The Cleric of Treason"
George Steiner: A Reader (1984)

Men , Secret , Books , World

“Now, leaving aside all the physical factors one can quote — leaving aside the rape or murder, leaving aside the bloody catalogue of oppression which we are too familiar with any way — what the system does to the subjugated is to destroy his sense of reality. It destroys his father's authority over him. His father can no longer tell him anything because his past has disappeared.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

"The American Dream and the American Negro" http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-dream.html in The New York Times (7 March 1965)

Way , Quotes , Reality , Sense

“Spring. All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher! And now I have become a bureaucrat as well as by compiling a large, precise catalogue of all my artistic productions ever since my childhood. I have left out only the school drawings, studies of nudes, etc., because they lack creative self-sufficiency.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Diary entry (Spring 1911), # 895, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918; University of California Press, 1968
1911 - 1914

School , Spring , Nature , Study

“I’ve protected it [the Nirvana catalogue] from everything from Kentucky Fried Chicken commercials to movies about board games. We’ve been offered $6 million for 18 seconds of one Nirvana song and I turned it down.”

Courtney Love (1964) American punk singer-songwriter, musician, actress, and artist

On managing the Nirvana catalogue, The Sydney Morning Herald (11 August 2014)
2014–2017

Game

“The morning slips away in a Valium haze and catalogues,
And numerous cups of coffee,
In the afternoon the weekly food is put in bags - as you float off down the high street.
The shop windows reflect, play a nameless host to a closet ghost -
A picture of your fantasy, a victim of your misery…”

Paul Weller (singer) (1958) English singer-songwriter, Guitarist

Private Hell, from Setting Sons (1979)

Food , Coffee

“Every night, at exactly a quarter past three, something dreadful happens on the street outside our bedroom window. We peek through the curtains, yawning and shivering in the life-draining chill, and then we clamber back beneath the blankets without exchanging a word, to hug each other tightly and hope for sound sleep before it's time to rise.

Usually what we witness verges on the mundane. Drunken young men fighting, swaying about with outstretched knives, cursing incoherently. Robbery, bashings, rape. We wince to see such violence, but we can hardly be shocked or surprised any more, and we're never tempted to intervene: it's always far too cold, for a start! A single warm exhalation can coat the window pane with mist, transforming the most stomach-wrenching assault into a safely cryptic ballet for abstract blobs of light.

On some nights, though, when the shadows in the room are subtly wrong, when the familiar street looks like an abandoned film set, or a painting of itself perversely come to life, we are confronted by truly disturbing sights, oppressive apparitions which almost make us doubt we're awake, or, if awake, sane. I can't catalogue these visions, for most, mercifully, are blurred by morning, leaving only a vague uneasiness and a reluctance to be alone even in the brightest sunshine.”

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

Scatter My Ashes http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/HORROR/SCATTER/Scatter.html, published in Interzone (Spring 1988)
Fiction

Life , Men , Hope , Sleep

“There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine —
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.”

John Keats Lamia

"Lamia", Pt. II, l. 229
Poems (1820)

Angels

“By definition, a catalogue raissonne employs methodical scholarship to gather and digest in systematic form all that can be known of an artist's work and life. In short the evidence of his intellectual and cultural life.”

Gail Levin (1948) art historian

Introduction -'Edward Hopper-an intimate biography' University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995 ISBN 0520214757

Life

“I am one of what must be an increasing number who find the portentous moralisings of A. Solzhenitsyn a bore and an irritation. Scarcely any aspect of life in the countries where he passes his voluntary exile has failed to incur his pessimistic censure. Coming from Russia, where freedom of the press has been not so much unknown as uncomprehended since long before the Revolution, he is shocked to discover that a free press disseminated all kinds of false, partial and invented information and that journalists contradict themselves from one day to the next without shame and without apology. Only a Russian would find all that surprising, or fail to understand that freedom which is not misused is not freedom at all.

Like all travellers he misunderstands what he observes. It simply is not true that ‘within the Western countries the press has become more powerful than the legislative power, the executive and the judiciary’. The British electorate regularly disprove this by electing governments in the teeth of the hostility and misrepresentation of virtually the whole of the press. Our modern Munchhausen has, however, found a more remarkable mare’s nest still: he has discovered the ‘false slogan, characteristic of a false era, that everyone is entitled to know everything’. Excited by this discovery he announces a novel and profound moral principle, a new addendum to the catalogue of human rights. ‘People,’ he says, ‘have a right not to know, and it is a more valuable one.’ Not merely morality but theology illuminates the theme: people have, say Solzhenitsyn, ‘the right not to have their divine souls’ burdened with ‘the excessive flow of information’.

Just so. Whatever may be the case in Russia, we in the degenerate West can switch off the radio or television, or not buy a newspaper, or not read such parts of it as we do not wish to. I can assure Solzhenitsyn that the method works admirably, ‘right’ or ‘no right’. I know, because I have applied it with complete success to his own speeches and writings.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Letter in answer to Solzhenitsyn's Harvard statement (21 June 1978), from Reflections of a Statesman. The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell (London: Bellew, 1991), p. 577
1970s

Life , Hostility , People , Travel

“I had just had an operation, I was totally bored and so I just took my camera and took some pictures of myself. Out of boredom. I only realised afterwards that this work was something special. Taking photos in the clinic and publishing them in a catalogue.... it suddenly took on a kind of seriousness. Everyone's scared of clinics, and no-one wants to see what a clinic looks like from the inside. Well not really. And everyone's a bit scared of having to go there themselves. And there I was in there. And I stand by it. And I used the clinic as a studio and started taking photos. And then I felt better. Just because it let me do something.”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

2001 - 2010, Isa Genzken in conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans' (2003)

Photo

“War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.”

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

On the Soviet Union’s failure to form a united Balkan front against Hitler ; in The Second World War, Volume III : The Grand Alliance (1950) Chapter 20 (The Soviet Nemesis).
Post-war years (1945–1955)

War

“I have said that mathematics is the oldest of the sciences; a glance at its more recent history will show that it has the energy of perpetual youth. The output of contributions to the advance of the science during the last century and more has been so enormous that it is difficult to say whether pride in the greatness of achievement in this subject, or despair at his inability to cope with the multiplicity of its detailed developments, should be the dominant feeling of the mathematician. Few people outside of the small circle of mathematical specialists have any idea of the vast growth of mathematical literature. The Royal Society Catalogue contains a list of nearly thirty-nine thousand papers on subjects of Pure Mathematics alone, which have appeared in seven hundred serials during the nineteenth century. This represents only a portion of the total output, the very large number of treatises, dissertations, and monographs published during the century being omitted.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A (1910), p. 283; Cited in: Moritz (1914, 108-9): Modern mathematics.

People , Youth , Feeling , History

“The New Testament is an invaluable book, though I confess to having been slightly prejudiced against it in my very early days by the church and the Sabbath school, so that it seemed, before I read it, to be the yellowest book in the catalogue. Yet I early escaped from their meshes. It was hard to get the commentaries out of one's head and taste its true flavor. — I think that Pilgrim's Progress is the best sermon which has been preached from this text; almost all other sermons that I have heard, or heard of, have been but poor imitations of this.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

It would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the Life of Christ because the book has been edited by Christians.
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Sunday

Life , Books , School , Thinking

“I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. … They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Summing Up

Source: The Summing Up (1938), p. 1

Time , Reading

“After six years of war service, I rejoined Ilford Public Library service in 1946, and set about completing my F. L. A., begun in 1940. This service had a good tradition of assistance to readers, and when I joined the Metal Box C. in 1948, I soon realised how the skills required for a scientific and industrial research “information officer” depended on the basic techniques of librarianship, notably classification and cataloguing. The enhancement of these led to the development of higher levels, in literature searching, and, more particularly, in current awareness service and selective dissemination of information….
Meeting with S. R. Ranganathan in 1948 gave me a new view of classification as facet analysis plus traditional generic analysis and I applied this in schemes for Packaging, Occupational Safety and Health, and Education. This experience has suggested to me that facet analysis applied to any subject can reveal hitherto uncoordinated concepts - materials, processes, etc – and thus offer an indication of possible areas of future research. This could be a unique Information Science to the World Wide Web.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Douglas Foskett (2000-04) " From Librarianship to Information Science http://faculty.libsci.sc.edu/bob/scrapbook/foskett2.htm" at

War , Health , World , Education

“It's a dream for any artist to have a catalogue of music that would be considered his greatest hits. For me, as a singer and songwriter, to release a collection of music that spans over two decades of my life and career is especially meaningful. Those songs represtent a life in progress. As it is with any life, people and experiences become a part of one's creations and helped give birth to twenty-four albums. I would like to dedicate this body of work -- especially "Nayib's Song" and "Along Came You" -- to my two beautiful children who inspired those songs and who inspire me on a daily basis, and whom I consider my best works to date. I owe a great deal of gratitude to all of my fans who have ridden this incredible rollercoaster of life with me and who are the reason I have tried to remain true to the gift I have been granted: that of making music. And although it's very difficult to decide what is truly essential, you can be sure that what is in this collection is what you -- the fans across the world -- made into hits. And for that, I will be eternally thankful.”

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

comment on gloriaestefan.com on release of 2-CD "The Essential Gloria Estefan" (October 4, 2006)
2007, 2008

Life , Children , People , World

“Sincerity is the most overrated virtue in the catalogue.”

Poul Anderson (1926–2001) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Star of the Sea (p. 637)
Time Patrol

Sincerity

“I have received your critical essay [of C. L. Ragghianti who visited Morandi's studio frequently and watched him painting] for the catalogue of the Mattioli collection. I must confess that I am not a little disturbed by what you say. I shall say no more. My own desire is to continue to live with a little peace, which is the only thing that still allows me to work. I am sure I am worth much less than what you say. Not out of modesty, believe me. I only wish it were as you say. If you could, please avoid the comparison with Picasso. Furthermore I must point out an error of fact where you say on p. 4 that 'for those who might not know, Morandi draws, tries out plans of his compositions, etc.., etc..' – and you have had the occasion to see the plans of objects on my table. This only serves to immediately recover my position when I reassemble a composition. Nothing more. Another thing…. [tracing the shape of his feet on the floor]…. it's to mark a reference for re-establishing the point of view. Think about this, then. I am grateful for your concern, but believe me when I say it leaves me ill at ease.”

Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) Italian painter

from his letter of 6 April 1953; as quoted in Morandi 1894 – 1964, ed: M. C. Bandera & R. Miracco, Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, 2008; p. 44
1945 - 1964

Peace , Error , Thinking , Drawing

“Accept these images for what they are —
Out of the past a fragile element
Of substance into accident.
I would speak honestly and of a full heart;
I would speak surely for the tale is short,
And the soul's remorseless catalogue
Assumes its quick and piteous sum.”

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) American poet, novelist, and literary critic

"San Francisco Night Windows"

Soul , Past , Heart

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

"The Novel Démeublé"
Not Under Forty (1936)

Parting

“The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Life , School , Dreams , Hope

“Dost thou wish me to complete the catalogue by thy death? Thy life is a worthless thing. Tempt me no more. I am but a man, and thy presence may awaken a fury which may spurn my control. Begone!”

Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) American novelist, historian and editor

Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798)

Life , Death

“In spite of the many valuable books available today, the state of Prokofiev scholarship cannot be considered adequate: suffice it to say that the detailed catalogue of his works has not been updated since it was published in 1961. At present, there is no edition of the Prokofiev sonatas free of errors. I have tried to do my best in pointing out some obvious mistakes, as well as certain doubtful readings. Many questions cannot be answered with certainty, as the manuscripts for some of the sonatas have been lost; those that have survived are not easily available for inspection. To get to some of them, I was fortunate to have the help of Russian colleagues in overcoming the restrictions of the current gatekeepers in Russia.”

Boris Berman (1948) Russian/American musician

Prokofiev’s piano sonatas : a guide for the listener and the performer (2008), Preface

Books , Error , Question , Reading

“The Universalists think they are very charitable. Why? Because they send all to heaven, whether they are good or evil, saints or sinners. Murderers, drunkards, and all classes of society are to dwell together in heaven. And what a heaven it would be!—Methodists contending against Baptists, and Baptists against Methodists, Presbyterians against Quakers, Roman Catholics against Protestants, and Nothingarians against Sectarians, and Sectarians against Nothingarians; and then add to the whole catalogue of contending sects drunkards, blasphemers, whoremongers, murderers, and every species of wicked beings, all jumbled up together. Oh, what a happy place! Brother Kimball says—"And all of them with a revolver and bowie knife at their sides."”

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

Journal of Discourses 7:88 (Aug. 28, 1859).
Who goes to heaven

Thinking , Evil , Happiness

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

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

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

Books , Sex , Way , Learning

“Starting on a large scale towards the end of the 1960s in the United States and expanding rapidly ever since, corporate funding has spread during the last five years to Britain and the Continent. Ambitious exhibition programs that could not be financed through traditional sources led museums to turn to corporations for support. The larger, more lavishly appointed these shows and their catalogues became, however, the more glamour the audiences began to expect.”

Hans Haacke (1936) conceptual political artist

1980s, "Museums, Managers of Consciousness," 1983

Support

“By an odd amalgam of liberal economic theory and Beccaria on punishment, nineteenth-century thinkers would replicate this exceptional relationship between markets and punishment: natural orderliness in the economic sphere, but government intervention in the penal realm. This is most evident in Jeremy Bentham’s work. The contrast between Bentham’s presumption of quietism in economic matters and his arch-interventionism in the penal domain effectively reproduced and reiterated the Physiocratic duality of economy and police. On the public economy side, Bentham tended toward Adam Smith’s liberalism. His Manual of Political Economy, written in the mid-1790s, rehearsed a presumption of governmental quietism based on his stringent belief in the superiority of individuals’ information and self-interest. But on the punishment side, Bentham embraced Beccaria’s philosophy whole cloth—especially Beccaria’s notion that policing is a sphere of human activity that must be shot through with government intervention. In fact, the criminal code, for Bentham, was precisely a “grand catalogue of prices” by means of which the government set the value of deviance. The penal code was a menu of fixed prices—the polar opposite of laissez-faire.”

Bernard Harcourt (1963) American academic

Source: The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (2011), p. 36

Nature , Clothes

“It is vain to recount further the catalogue of miseries. In earlier ages such horrors remain unknown because unrecorded. Just enough flickering light plays upon this infernal scene to give us the sense of its utter desolation and hopeless wretchedness and cruelty.”

Winston S. Churchill book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples

On a series of Viking raids; Vol I; The Birth of Britain.
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–58)

Age , Sense , Light

“One rainy day in Cologne on the Rhine, the catalogue of a teaching aids company caught my attention. It was illustrated with models of all kind – mathematical, geometrical, anthropological, zoological, botanical, anatomical, mineralogical, paleontological, and so forth- elements of of such a diverse nature that the absurdity of the collection confused the eye and mind, producing hallucinations and lending the objects depicted new and rapidly changing meanings. I suddenly felt my 'visionary faculties' so intensified that I began seeing the newly emerged objects against a new background. To capture it, a little paint or a few lines were enough, a horizon, a sky, a wooden floor, that sort of things. My hallucination had been fixed. Now it was a matter of interpreting the hallucination in a few words or sentences Such as: 'Above the clouds midnight passes. Above midnight glides the invisible bird of day..”

Max Ernst (1891–1976) German painter, sculptor and graphic artist

Quote in 'Biographical Notes. Tissue of truth, Tissue of Lies', 1929; as cited in Max Ernst. A Retrospective, Munich, Prestel, 1991, p. 290
1910 - 1935

Mathematics , Nature , Bird , Change

“It's bad to use words like 'genius' unless you are talking about the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, the black Chatterton of the 80s who, during a picturesque career as sexual hustler, addict and juvenile art-star, made a superficial mark on the cultural surface by folding the conventions of street graffiti into those of art brut before killing himself with an overdose at the age of twenty-seven. The first stage of Basquiat's fate, in the mid-80s, was to be effusively welcomed by an art industry so trivialized by fashion and blinded by money that it couldn't tell a scribble from a Leonardo. Its second stage was to be dropped by the same audience, when the novelty of his work wore off. The third was an attempt at apotheosis four years after his death, with a large retrospective at the Whitney Museum designed to sanitise his short, frantic life and position him as a kind of all-purpose, inflatable martyr-figure, thus restoring the dollar value of his oeuvre in a time of collapsing prices for American contemporary art. One contributor to the catalogue proclaimed that "Jean remains wrapped in the silent purple toga of immortality"; another opined that "he is as close to Goya as American painting has ever produced." A third, not to be outdone, extolled Basquiat's "punishing regime of self-abuse" as part of "the disciplines imposed by the principle of inverse ascetism to which he was so resolutely committed."”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

These disciplines of inverse ascetism, one sees, mean shooting smack until you drop dead.
Page 195
Culture of Complaint (1993)

Life , Death , Money , Fate

“This is how we go on: one day a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root canal at a time; boat builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.”

Stephen King book Bag of Bones

Bag of Bones (1998)

Men , Pain , Books , Fear

“After nearly a quarter of a century of prosperity under the Constitution, the spirit of slavery so far triumphed over the early principles and practices of the government that, in 1812, South Carolina and her followers in Congress succeeded in inserting the word 'white' in the suffrage clause of the act establishing a territorial government for Missouri. One by one the Slave States, and many of the free States, gave way before the crusade of slavery against negro citizenship. In 1817, Connecticut caught the infection, and in her constitution she excluded the negro from the ballot-box. In every other New England State his ancient right of suffrage has remained and still remains undisturbed. Free negroes voted in Maryland till 1833; in North Carolina, till 1835; in ennsylvania, till 1838. It was the boast of Cave Johnson of Tennessee that he owed his election to Congress in 1828 to the free negroes who worked in his mills. They were denied the suffrage in 1834, under the new constitution of Tennessee, by a vote of thirty-three to twenty-three. As new States were formed, their constitutions for the most part excluded the negro from citizenship. Then followed the shameful catalogue of black laws; expatriation and ostracism in every form, which have so deeply disgraced the record of legislation in many of the States.”

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

1860s, Oration at Ravenna, Ohio (1865)

Law , Way , Parting , Box

“A thrown-stone trajectory is a good metaphor for so many phenomena: the curve of an event, any event; the curve of a life, any life; the curve of a hypothesis; the curve experienced in the manufacture of a work of art; the curve of interest experienced in the manufacture of a catalogue.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Flying Out of This World

Life , Art

“[Downs Syndrome Winnie the Pooh] The minute I saw this in a catalogue I just fell about. It's so brave of Disney to introduce stuffed toys that represent serious illnesses in order to educate the little kiddies. Me, I just want this so I can make my very own 'Victorian Sanitarium' playset. Downs Syndrome Pooh will be kept perpetually in a bleak little cardboard cell, bullied by Doctor Action Man and Nurse Princess Leia, occasionally brought out to be brutally hosed down with cold water every week. I'm thinking of sending it to Hasbro.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

Yahtzee's Christmas Wishlist http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/essays/wishlist.htm
Fully Ramblomatic, Essays

Education , Thinking , Water , Princess

“In spite of Darwin's hopes, the acceptance of his views has led to no real improvement — scarcely indeed to any change at all in either the practice or aims of systematists. In a famous passage in the Origin he confidently declares that when his interpretation is generally adopted "Systematists will be able to pursue their labours as at present; but they will not be incessantly haunted by the shadowy doubt whether this or that form be a true species. This, I feel sure, and I speak after experience, will be no slight relief. The endless disputes whether or not some fifty species of British brambles are good species will cease." Those disputes nevertheless proceed almost exactly as before. It is true that biologists in general do not, as formerly, participate in these discussions because they have abandoned systematics altogether; but those who are engaged in the actual work of naming and cataloguing animals and plants usually debate the old questions in the old way. There is still the same divergence of opinion and of practice, some inclining to make much of small differences, others to neglect them. Not only does the work of the sytematists as a whole proceed as if Darwin had never written but their attitude towards these problems is but little changed.”

William Bateson (1861–1926) British geneticist and biologist

Source: Problems In Genetics (1913), p. 10

Hope , Way , Feeling , Confidence

“The declared object of deflation was the restoration of the gold standard at pre-war parity. Its actual effect has been to create unemployment by the restriction of industrial credit. By the lever of unemployment it has forced down wages and has thus facilitated the return to gold through the reduction of prices. An incidental effect has been to transfer purchasing power from the workers, whose wages have been reduced, to the bondholders, whose interest has remained the same. It has also doubled the real burden of Debt since 1920, and was largely responsible for the mining lock-out last year, by the reduction in terms of sterling of the money which we receive for coal sold abroad. Deflation, in fact, has been responsible for a sinister catalogue of disasters which can be substantiated in detailed argument that has never yet been rebutted.”

Oswald Mosley (1896–1980) British politician; founder of the British Union of Fascists

New Leader (20 September 1927), quoted in Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (Papermacs, 1981), pp. 152-153.

Money , War

“I do not know any reading more easy, more fascinating, more delightful than a catalogue.”

Anatole France book The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

La Bûche [The Log] (December 24, 1849)
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881)

Reading

“Prestige, competitive reputation, social philosophy, social standing, philanthropic interests, combativeness, love of intrigue, dislike of friction, technical interest, Napoleonic dreams, love of accomplishing useful things, desire for regard of employees, love of publicity, fear of publicity – a long catalogue of non-economic motives actually condition the management of business, and nothing but the balance sheet keeps these non-economic motives from running wild. Yet without all these incentives, I think most business would be a lifeless failure.”

Chester Barnard (1886–1961) American businessman

Source: Organization and Management: Selected Papers (1948), p. 15

Love , Fear , Dreams , Motivation

“Tobacco not only wrecks health and health systems; it’s a drain on economies and the environment. […] We must strengthen our efforts and scale up our actions while facing increasing interference from the tobacco industry. We are all familiar with the catalogue of deception, lies and half-truths in which tobacco industry specializes.”

Tedros Adhanom (1965) Director-General of the World Health Organization, former Minister in Ethiopia

Speech at the 17th World Conference on Tobacco or Health http://www.who.int/dg/speeches/2018/world-conference-on-tobacco-or-health/en/, 7 March 2018.

Health , Truth , Effort

“No one will question that this power is the most dangerous one to free government in the whole catalogue of powers. It usually is invoked in haste and excitement when calm legislative consideration of constitutional limitation is difficult. It is executed in a time of patriotic fervor that makes moderation unpopular. And, worst of all, it is interpreted by judges under the influence of the same passions and pressures. Always, as in this case, the Government urges hasty decision to forestall some emergency or serve some purpose and pleads that paralysis will result if its claims to power are denied or their confirmation delayed.”

Robert H. Jackson (1892–1954) American judge

On the "war power"; Woods v. Cloyd W. Miller Co., 333 U.S. 138, 146 (1948) (concurring)
Judicial opinions

Question , Decision , Passion , Time

“It is simplest to think of mathematics as the catalogue of all possible patterns. …When viewed in this way, it is inevitable that the world is described by mathematics. …In many ways the search for a Theory of Everything is a manifestation of a faith that this compression goes all the way down to the bedrock of reality…”

John D. Barrow (1952–2020) British scientist

New Theories of Everything (2007)

World , Faith , Way , Search

“No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Notes on the Next War (1935)
Context: Hit in the head you will die quickly and cleanly even sweetly and fittingly except for the white blinding flash that never stops, unless perhaps it is only the frontal bone or your optic nerve that is smashed, or your jaw carried away, or your nose and cheek bones gone so you can still think but you have no face to talk with. But if you are not hit in the head you will be hit in the chest, and choke in it, or in the lower belly, and feel it all slip and slide loosely as you open, to spill out when you try to get up, it's not supposed to be so painful but they always scream with it, it's the idea I suppose, or have the flash, the slamming clang of high explosive on a hard road and find your legs are gone above the knee, or maybe just a foot gone and watch the white bone sticking through your puttee, or watch them take a boot off with your foot a mush inside it, or feel an arm flop and learn how a bone feels grating, or you will burn, choke and vomit, or be blown to hell a dozen ways, without sweetness or fittingness: but none of this means anything. No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.

Men , War , Thinking

“The Great Monkey closes his eyes, scratches himself again and muses: before the sun has become completely hidden — it is now fleeing amid the tall bamboo trees like an animal pursued by shadows — I shall succeed in reducing this grove of trees to a catalogue.”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 8
Context: The Great Monkey closes his eyes, scratches himself again and muses: before the sun has become completely hidden — it is now fleeing amid the tall bamboo trees like an animal pursued by shadows — I shall succeed in reducing this grove of trees to a catalogue. A page of tangled plant calligraphy. A thicket of signs: how to read it, how to clear a path through this denseness? Hanumān smiles with pleasure at the analogy that has just occurred to him: calligraphy and vegetation, a grove of trees and writing, reading and a path. Following a path: reading a stretch of ground, deciphering a fragment of world. Reading considered as a path toward…. The path as a reading: an interpretation of the natural world? He closes his eyes once more and sees himself, in another age, writing (on a piece of paper or on a rock, with a pen or with a chisel?) the act in the Mahanātaka describing his visit to the grove of the palace of Rāvana. He compares its rhetoric to a page of indecipherable calligraphy and thinks: the difference between human writing and divine consists in the fact that the number of signs of the former is limited, whereas that of the latter is infinite; hence the universe is a meaningless text, one which even the gods find illegible. The critique of the universe (and that of the gods) is called grammar…. Disturbed by this strange thought, Hanumān leaps down from the wall, remains for a moment in a squatting position, then stands erect, scrutinizes the four points of the compass, and resolutely makes his way into the thicket.

Tree , Sun , Animals

“This Reger is a sarcastic, churlish fellow, bitter and pedantic and rude. He is a sort of musical Cyclops, a strong, ugly creature bulging with knotty and unshapely muscles, an ogre of composition. In listening to these works…one is perforce reminded of the photograph of Reger which his publishers place on the cover of their catalogue of his works, the photograph that shows something that is like a swollen, myopic beetle with thick lips and sullen expression, crouching on an organ bench.”

Max Reger (1873–1916) German composer, pianist and conductor

Anonymous article in Musical Portraits (1920), as quoted in Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven's Time (1965) by Nicolas Slonimsky, p.120

Music , Strong