Quotes about cause
page 14

“Folks always seemed to think that as long as they didn’t know about something bad, it wasn’t happening, so whoever told them actually caused it to be true.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, The Crystal City (2003), Chapter 2 “Squirrel and Moose” (p. 33).

Thinking

“I don't mind failing in this world,
I'll stay down here with the raggedy crew,
'Cause getting up there means stepping on you,
so I don't mind failing in this world.”

Malvina Reynolds (1900–1978) American folk singer

Song I don't mind failing in this world https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ60n_-BK6Q (1966)

World

“If the penalty for even an accidental case [of abortion] is so severe, it is obvious that a deliberately induced abortion is very strongly forbidden. It is not necessary to ban deliberate abortion, since it is already eliminated by this law. Second, if a man who, in the course of a fight, unintentionally bumps a pregnant woman and causes her to abort, must suffer the death penalty, how much more so any person who intentionally induces an abortion?”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Source: Writings, The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973), pp. 263-264

Death, Law, Penalty, Suffering

“As we divided natural philosophy in general into the inquiry of causes, and productions of effects: so that part which concerneth the inquiry of causes we do subdivide according to the received and sound division of causes. The one part, which is physic, inquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes; and the other, which is metaphysic, handleth the formal and final causes.”

Francis Bacon book The Advancement of Learning

Book VII, 3
The Advancement of Learning (1605)

Nature, Parting

“They Head Start, Upward Lift, Bootstrap, and Upward Bound us into white society, 'cause they don’t want to face the real problem which is a man is poor for one reason and one reason only: 'cause he does not have money -- period. If you want to get rid of poverty, you give people money -- period.”

Stokely Carmichael (1941–1998) American activist

" Black Power http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/sayitplain/scarmichael.html" Speech at University of California, Berkeley, October 29, 1966

Money, People, Problem

“It seems to me that maybe,
It pretty much always means no
So don't tell me you might just let it go
And often times we're lazy
It seems to stand in my way
Cause no one no not no one
Likes to be let down”

Jack Johnson (musician) (1975) American musician

Flake.
Song lyrics, Brushfire Fairytales (2001)

Way, Time

“The operational sciences hoped to nourish business management, which however largely ignored them, and the latter continues to be undernourished by the business schools which are fairly broad but shallow everywhere. By over focus on short-range financial values, business management in the United States has lost a dozen major markets to the Japanese, added pollution in all its forms, and enriched itself out of all proportion to its value as just one factor of production.
Action science, developed by the social sciences over many years in relative isolation from the applied physical sciences, and which might otherwise have humanized them and made engineering more productive, was doomed to fail by being on one end of the two-culture problem wherein science and the humanities do not even speak the same language.
I could go on listing a few dozen paradigms: art, law, computer software design, medicine, politics, and architecture, each addressed to a certain context, level, or phase, each good in itself, but each limited to the fields of its origin and its purposes. The methodological problem is the same as if, in designing any large system, each subsystem designer were left to design each subsystem to the best requirements he knew. The overall requirement might not be met; overall harmony could not be achieved, and conflict could ensue to cause failure at the system level.
What is envisioned is a new synthesis, a unified, efficient, systems methodology (SM): a multiphase, multi-level, multi-paradigmatic creative problem-solving process for use by individuals, by small groups, by large multi-disciplinary teams, or by teams of teams. It satisfies human needs in seeking value truths by matching the properties of wanted systems, and their parts, to perform harmoniously with their full environments, over their entire life cycles”

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

Source: Metasystems Methodology, (1989), p.xi-xii, cited in Philip McShane (2004) Cantower VII http://www.philipmcshane.ca/cantower7.pdf

Life, Truth, School, Law

“Lenin’ s article of 1905, "Party Organization and Party Literature", was used for decades, and is still used, to justify ideologically the enslavement of the written word in Russia. It has been argued that it refers only to political literature, but this is not so: it relates to every kind of writing. It contains the words: "Down with non-partisan writers! Down with literary supermen! Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, ‘ a cog and a screw’ of one single great Social Democratic mechanism set in motion by the entire politically conscious vanguard of the entire working class" (Works, vol. 10, p. 45). For the benefit of "hysterical intellectuals" who deplore this seemingly bureaucratic attitude, Lenin explains that there can be no mechanical levelling in the field of literature; there must be room for personal initiative, imagination, etc.; none the less, literary work must be part of the party’ s work and controlled by the party. This, of course, was written during the fight for "hourgeois democracy", on the assumption that Russia would in due course enjoy freedom of speech but that literary members of the party would have to display party-mindedness in their writings; as in other cases, the obligation would become general when the party controlled the apparatus of state coercion.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

pg. 515
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume II, The Golden Age

Democracy, Imagination, Literature, Freedom

“Cook me in your breakfast,
and put me on your plate,
'cause you know i taste great.”

Devendra Banhart (1981) American folk singer

-At the Hop
From Niño Rojo
Variant: Put me in your dry dreams
or put me in your wet
If you haven't yet.

Cooking

“We should not forget that the spark which ignited the American Revolution was caused by the British attempt to confiscate the firearms of the colonists.”

Patrick Henry (1736–1799) attorney, planter, politician and Founding Father of the United States

This quotation not only has no known source, but also fails to use terminology contemporary to Patrick Henry. The earliest attribution of this phrase to Patrick Henry is after the year 2000.
Misattributed

Forgetting

“Utility alone is the cause of value.”

Eric Roll, Baron Roll of Ipsden (1907–2005) British economist

Source: A History of Economic Thought (1939), Chapter VIII, Modern Economics, p. 400

““Woman” was the test, but not every woman seemed to qualify. Black women, of course, were virtually invisible within the protracted campaign for woman suffrage. As for white working-class women, the suffrage leaders were probably impressed at first by the organizing efforts and militancy of their working-class sisters. But as it turned out, the working women themselves did not enthusiastically embrace the cause of woman suffrage.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

Women, Race and Class (1983)

Women, Sister, Effort

“By age 10, nearly all kids have fatty streaks in their arteries. This is the first sign of atherosclerosis, the leading cause of death in the United States. So the question for most of us is not whether we should eat healthy to prevent heart disease, but whether we want to reverse the heart disease we may already have.”

Michael Greger (1972) American physician, author, and vegan health activist

"Heart Disease Starts in Childhood" https://nutritionfacts.org/video/heart-disease-starts-in-childhood/?utm_content=buffer364bf&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer, in NutritionFacts.org (23 September 2013).

Death, Age, Disease, Question

“Sri Seshadri has cited the advice which Sarat Chandra Chatterjee had tendered to his people. He had written as follows in October, 1926: “Hindustan is the land of the Hindus. It is, therefore, the duty of the Hindus alone to liberate it from the shackles of foreign domination. Muslims are sitting with their faces turned towards Arabia or Turkey. Their heart is not in the land of Hindustan. But when it is not there, it is no use lamenting over it. We need not be unnerved by counting the heads of Muslims. Numbers are not the supreme truth in the world… In freedom’s battle in any country, do all the people of that country take part? When the Americans fought for their freedom, more than half the people of that country were with the British. In the Irish freedom struggle, how many were actually involved in it?… Right or wrong is not decided by the counting of heads. It is decided by the intensity of tapasya or the single-minded devotion to the cause. The problem before the Hindus is not to devise ways and means of bringing about an artificial unity. The problem before them in how to organise themselves.””

H.V. Sheshadri (1926–2005) Indian writer

Sarat Chandra Chatterjee cited by H.V. Sheshadri, quoted from S.R. Goel, Muslim Separatism - Causes and Consequences Ch.12
The Tragic Story of Partition (1982)

People, Truth, World, Way

“A lot of people tell me this, too: "Don't worry about it. It's God's will. Y'know, you weren't meant to be together. God's will." God's will? Really, God got involved in this? Really? Twenty years with somebody, twenty years of my life pretty much gone? All the money I made, the career I chose, pretty much torn to pieces? Two little kids' lives shattered? Really, God? Is that how you work? This brutal, disemboweling nightmare…is you? 'Cause if that's the case, then THERE IS NO GOD! (silence): And God said unto me: "Christopher…I did this so you could meet a 29-year-old, 5'11" Diesel jeans model who has two college degrees and already paid for her own boob job."”

Christopher Titus (1964) actor, writer, podcaster

[a light shines on him and he drops to his knees, imitating a heavenly chorus] How shall I serve thee, Lord?
Love is Evol (2009)

Life, Money, God, People

“Cause it can feel like perfection,
But never all the time.
And you don't wanna be alone again.
Oh my, my.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Ain't Love Strange
Lyrics, Let Me Up (I've Had Enough) (1987)

Feeling, Time, Perfection

“Persecution always says, 'I know the consequences of your opinion better than you know them yourselves.' But the language of toleration was always amicable, liberal, and just: it confessed its doubts, and acknowledged its ignorance … Persecution had always reasoned from cause to effect, from opinion to action, [that such an opinion would invariably lead to but one action], which proved generally erroneous; while toleration led us invariably to form just conclusions, by judging from actions and not from opinions.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Speech in the House of Commons (2 March 1790), quoted in Loren Reid, Charles James Fox: A Man for the People (1969), p. 261.
1790s

“From the late 1940s until the early 1960s, events seemed to prove the Keynesians correct. Then, beginning in the 1960s, several distinguished economists began to challenge Keynesian ideas. Their counterrevolutionary views, which in many ways mirrored those of the classical economists, were strengthened by events in the 1970s, when the economy’s behavior began to contradict some Keynesian ideas. But in 2008 and 2009, as the economy sank into the most serious worldwide recession since the Great Depression, Keynesian ideas were once again at the center of a heated debate about the causes of the problem and the appropriate remedies.”

Robert Hall (economist)

Robert E. Hall and Marc Lieberman, Macroeconomics (2012).

Way, Behavior, Idea, Problem

“I don’t plan to die for any cause,” said Jim Bowie. “Nor any man, excepting only myself. I know that ain’t noble, but it prolongs my days, which is philosophy enough for me.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, The Crystal City (2003), Chapter 17 “Foundation” (p. 334).

“In Swami Dayananda's view, the term Arya was not coterminous with the term Hindu. The classical meaning of the word Arya is 'noble'. It is used as an honorific term of address, used in addressing the honoured ones in ancient Indian parlance. The term Hindu is reluctantly accepted as a descriptive term for the contemporary Hindu society and all its varied beliefs and practices, while the term Arya is normative and designates Hinduism as it ought to be…. Elsewhere in Hindu society, 'Arya' was and is considered a synonym for 'Hindu', except that it may be broader, viz. by unambiguously including Buddhism and Jainism. Thus, the Constitution of the 'independent, indivisible and sovereign monarchical Hindu kingdom' (Art.3:1) of Nepal take care to include the Buddhist minority by ordaining the king to uphold 'Aryan culture and Hindu religion' (Art.20: 1)…. The Arya Samaj's misgivings about the term Hindu already arose in tempore non suspecto, long before it became a dirty Word under Jawaharlal Nehru and a cause of legal disadvantage under the 1950 Constitution. Swami Dayananda Saraswati rightly objected that the term had been given by foreigners (who, moreover, gave all kinds of derogatory meanings to it) and considered that dependence on an exonym is a bit sub-standard for a highly literate and self-expressive civilization. This argument retains a certain validity: the self-identification of Hindus as 'Hindu' can never be more than a second-best option. On the other hand, it is the most practical choice in the short run, and most Hindus don't seem to pine for an alternative.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Who is a Hindu, (2001)

Religion, Art, Dependency

“Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
And some are treasured for their markings –
They cause the eyes to melt
Or the body to shriek without pain.”

Craig Raine (1944) Poet

"A Martian Sends a Postcard Home", line 1; first published in The New Statesman, December 23 and 30, 1977.

Pain, Bird

“The ultimate "causes of price" - to use a Classical term - lie deeply embedded in the psychology and techniques of mankind and his environment, and are as manifold as the sands of the sea. All economic analysis is an attempt to classify these manifold causes, to sort them out into categories of discourse that our limited minds can handle, and so to perceive the unity of structural relationship which both unites and separates the manifoldness. Our concepts of "" and "supply" are such broad categories. In whatever sense they are used, they are not ultimate determinants of anything, but they are convenient channels through which we can classify and describe the effects of the multitude of determinants of the system of economic magnitude.”

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

Kenneth Boulding (1944) " A Liquidity Preference Theory of Market Prices http://cas.umkc.edu/econ/economics/faculty/wray/631Wray/Week%207/Boulding.pdf". In: Economica, New Series, Vol. 11, No. 42 (May, 1944), pp. 55-63. C. Brown (2003) " Toward a reconcilement of endogenous money and liquidity preference http://www.clt.astate.edu/crbrown/brownjpke.pdf" in: Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. Winter 2003–4, Vol. 26, No. 2. 323 commented on this article, saying: "Boulding (1944) argued that if liquidity preference were divorced from the "demand for money," the former could come into its own as a theory of financial asset pricing. According to this view, rising liquidity preference or a "wave of bearish sentiment" is manifest in a shift from certain asset categories, specifically, those that are characterized by high capital uncertainty (that is, uncertainty about the future value of the asset as a result of market revaluation) to assets such as commercial paper or giltedged securities." 1940s

Lie, Sense, Sea

“There is no method more likely to cure passion and rashness, than the frequent and attentive consideration of one's own weaknesses: this will work into the mind an habitual sense of the need one has of being pardoned, and will bring down the swelling pride and obstinacy of heart, which are the cause of hasty passion.”

James Burgh (1714–1775) British politician

The Dignity of Human Nature (1754)

Sense, Passion, Heart

“We seek to know the moving of each sphere,
And the strange cause of th' ebbs and floods of Nile;
But of that clock within our breasts we bear,
The subtle motions we forget the while.”

John Davies (poet) (1569–1626) English poet, lawyer, and politician, born 1569

Stanza 24.
Nosce Teipsum (1599)

Forgetting

“Cause me no causes.”

Philip Massinger A New Way to Pay Old Debts

A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1625), act i. sc. 3. See X me no X's.

“You know it's not too late to leave tomorrow,
'cause I know where I'm going…
I am building a bridge to Paradise!”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Earth Moving (1989)

“And see, a kind, refined lady will devour the carcasses of these animals with full assurance that she is doing right, at the same time asserting two contradictory propositions: First, that she is, as her doctor assures her, so delicate that she cannot be sustained by vegetable food alone, and that for her feeble organism flesh is indispensable; and, secondly, that she is so sensitive that she is unable, not only herself to inflict suffering on animals, but even to bear the sight of suffering. Whereas the poor lady is weak precisely because she has been taught to live upon food unnatural to man; and she cannot avoid causing suffering to animals — for she eats them.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: The First Step (1892), Ch. IX

Food, Suffering, Time, Animals

“Cause what she's doin' now is tearin' me apart,
Fillin' up my mind and emptyin' my heart.
I can hear her call each time the cold wind blows,
And I wonder if she knows…what she's doin' now.”

Garth Brooks (1962) American country music artist

What She's Doing Now, written by Pat Alger and G. Brooks.
Song lyrics, Ropin' the Wind (1991)

Time, Heart

“[O]f that scientifically practical skill which produces the greatest effect with the least possible expenditure of material and work, the instances are comparatively rare. In too many cases we see the strength and the stability which ought to be given by the skilful arrangement of the parts of a structure supplied by means of clumsy massiveness, and of lavish expenditure of material, labour, and money; and the evil is increased by a perversion of the public taste, which causes works to be admired, not in proportion to their fitness for their purposes, or to the skill evinced in attaining that fitness, but in proportion to their size and cost.”

William John Macquorn Rankine (1820–1872) civil engineer

p, 125
"On the Harmony of Theory and Practice in Mechanics" (Jan. 3, 1856)

Money, Evil, Parting

“Do not take up cause against the inaccuracies printed about you. They are your protection.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Diary of an Unknown (1988)

“You basically have to trick yourself into incredible intensity to do this stuff, and I do a good job of pretending that I’m racing to save my mom from getting killed or my sister from being raped—some horrible thing that causes me to dig deep, like old-school ‘Braveheart’ s---. If you come into battle with that in your head, you’re gonna be a different person than if you think you’re just going out for a little swordfight. But when you do that for 10 years straight, it wears your a-- out. It’s like crying wolf to yourself a million times. And at some point, you start to say, ‘Why am I doing this?”

Bode Miller (1977) American alpine ski racer

Interview with Newsweek, Nov. 2005, pub. 23 Feb. 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11522274/

School, Moms, Thinking, Sister

“Contemporary man has begun to lose his naiveté as … the deep causes of the situation in which he finds himself are becoming clearer. He realizes that to attack these deep causes is the indispensable prerequisite for radical change. And so he has gradually abandoned a simple reformist attitude regarding the existing social order, for, by its very shallowness this reformism perpetuates the existing system.”

Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928) Peruvian theologian

Source: A Theology of Liberation (1971), p. 48

Change

“High taxes, over-regulation, and an anti-business attitude are clearly the cause of our economic problems. Our economy is floundering, and too many Marylanders have been struggling, just to get by. 40 consecutive tax hikes have taken an additional $10 billion out of the pockets of struggling Maryland families and small businesses. We've lost more than 8,000 businesses, and Maryland's unemployment nearly doubled.”

Larry Hogan (1956) American politician

" State of the State Address: A New Direction for Maryland http://governor.maryland.gov/2015/02/04/state-of-the-state-address/" (4 February 2015)

Family, Business, Problem

“When Hume and Adam Smith prophesied that a little increase of national debt beyond the then amount of it, would probably occasion bankruptcy; the main cause of their error was the natural one, of not being able to see the vast increase of productive power to which the nation would subsequently obtain.”

Thomas Robert Malthus Principles of Political Economy

Book II, Chapter I, On The Progress of Wealth, Section X, p. 422
Principles of Political Economy (Second Edition 1836)

Error, Nature

“I really hope that the symbolism isn't lost on you four Superstars in the chamber right now, because it's killing me. Here's four extremely weak individuals that, every day, are locked inside a prison of addiction, like most of these people here today; and now, the four of you are locked inside the Elimination Chamber with me. And be sure, it's not me locked in here with you — it's you locked in here with me. And tomorrow morning, when you're nursing the pain and the wounds that this chamber and myself have caused you, I want you to remember that when your pod door opens and you came out and I defeated you, don't think of it as failure. Think of it as me saving you. [Standing over Rey Mysterio's pod] Think of it as me setting you free.
Punk: [To Undertaker, after elimination R-Truth] You'd better pray that your pod door opens last, 'cause when you come out, I'm gonna make you tap out, just like I did before. [To John Morrison] And I'm gonna prove to you that your decadent rock life will get you nowhere. I'm gonna prove to the world that straight-edge means I'm better than you! For those of you at home, feel free, place your hand on the screen and feel CM Punk flow through you!
Lawler: Matt, did you just put your hand on the screen?
Striker: Yes.
Lawler: Do you feel CM Punk flow through you?
Punk: Nobody can stop me!
Cole: Guys, the sermon's over in [checking the timer] three seconds.”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

Elimination Chamber - February 21, 2010
Friday Night SmackDown

Life, Pain, People, Truth

“Thought of tomorrow is the cause of much worry and anxiety. Commentary:—The thought of tomorrow such as "Where shall I go? What shall I eat?" etc., brings about planning. This planning and such thoughts rob a man of his peace of mind and make him restless and uneasy. The best thing to do is to depend fully upon God and to avoid planning, i. e., not to live either in the things of the past or of the future and to be indifferent to the things of the present. Contentment alone can give a man peace of mind and happiness.”

Swami Narayanananda (1902–1988) Indian guru

No. 165, p. 147
Revelation (1951)

God, Happiness, Peace, Past

“Guns are not the root cause of man's evil actions… Evil is part of the human condition, always has been, always will be. Evil can't be wished away, treated away, medicated away or legislated away. Evil is here to stay. Bad people do bad things. Deal, as they say in the hood.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Gun Violence? No! Goon Violence," http://www.unz.com/imercer/gun-violence-no-goon-violence/ The Unz Review, September 4, 2015. 2010s, 2015

People, Evil, Parting

“As we all know, socialism failed. At the height of its popularity it caused widespread starvation and deprivation, wrecking whole economies wherever it was applied. It inspired childish, petulant dictators — ideologues who were eager to do anything except give up an idea that didn’t work — to put millions against the wall and send millions more to places like Siberia because the people couldn’t (the dictators said 'wouldn’t') gladly transmogrify themselves into New Collectivist Mankind, or whatever the slogan was at the time. In the end, it finally destroyed the most enormous empire history had ever known.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"New Maps of Bulgaria," http://www.bigheadpress.com/lneilsmith/?p=41 26 October 2007.

People, History, Idea, Time

“Trying to get rid of the symptoms (terrorists) without paying attention to the root cause (terrorist motives) does not eradicate the disease but may instead exacerbate it.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

Disease, Motivation

“Cultures and religions do not exist apart from the individual minds that constitute them and the environments that constrain them, any more than biological species and varieties exist independently of the individual organisms that compose them and the environments that conform them. They are not well-bounded systems or definite clusters of beliefs, practices, and artifacts, but more or less regular distributions of causally connected thoughts, behaviors, material products, and environmental objects. To naturalistically understand what "cultures" are is to describe and explain the material causes responsible for reliable differences in these distributions.”

Scott Atran (1952) Anthropologist

Introduction: an evolutionary riddle, p. 10
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

Religion, Behavior, Understanding

“Those who sell or facilitate weapons to individuals that will commit human rights violations know that they have responsibility for the death and misery caused by those weapons and at some stage may be liable to face the International Criminal Court for complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

2013, UN rights expert hails Arms Trade Treaty and urges States to do more to also regulate production http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=13207&LangID=E. 2013

Death, War

“[P]ain is a marvelous purifier... It is not necessary to beat the child into submission; a little bit of pain goes a long way for a young child. However, the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely.”

James Dobson (1936) Evangelical Christian psychologist, author, and radio broadcaster.

From Dare to Discipline, pages 6 and 7
1970s

Pain, Way, Cry

“An event recognised as responsible for the production of a certain outcome… Human intuition is extremely keen in detecting and ascertaining this type of causation and hence is considered the key to construct explanations… and the ultimate criterion (known as “cause in fact”) for determining legal responsibility.
Clearly, actual causation requires information beyond that of necessity and sufficiency: the actual process mediating between the cause and the effect must enter into consideration.”

Judea Pearl (1936) Computer scientist

Source: Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, 2000, p. 309, as cited in: Rinke Hoekstra (2009), Ontology Representation: Design Patterns and Ontologies... p. 181

“Religious faith is the only area of discourse where immunity through conversation is considered noble. It's the only area of our lives where someone can win points for saying, "There's nothing that you can do to change my mind and I'm taking no state of the world ultimately into account in believing what I believe. There's nothing to change about the world that would cause me to revise my beliefs."”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, "The View From The End Of The World" (9 December 2005)
2000s

World, Faith, Change

“When you read God’s Word, in everything you read, continually to say to yourself: It is I to whom it is speaking - this is earnestness, precisely this is earnestness. Not a single one of those to whom the cause of Christianity in the higher sense has been entrusted forgot to urge this again and again as most crucial, as unconditionally the condition if you are to come to see yourself in the mirror.”

Sören Kierkegaard book For Self-Examination

Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, Hong p. 36-37
1850s, For Self-Examination (1851), What is Required in Order to Look at Oneself with True Blessing in the Mirror of the Word?

God, Sense, Reading

“The late affray that happened in this place, between the people of the town and those of the fleet, has been found to originate from a parcel of soldiers belonging to the Convention troops, and a party of British sailors which were engaged on board a privateer. The secret enemies to our cause, and the British officers in the neighbourhood of this place, are endeavouring to sow the seeds of discord as much as possible between the inhabitants of the place and the French belonging to the fleet. The French officers are well satisfied this is the state of the case, and it fills them with double resentment against the British. The Admiral and all the French officers are now upon an exceeding good footing with the gentlemen of the town. General Hancock takes unwearied pains to promote a good understanding with the French officers. His house is full from morning till night.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (September 1778)

Pain, People, Secret, Understanding

“If somehow we could snap our fingers and there would no longer be any drugs in the world whatsoever, would there be no more addiction? Would there be no more suffering? Or is it possible that addiction is not really about drugs, that addiction is really about the relationships that human beings form with one another and all sorts of things? That it's about the difference between establishing good relationships and bad relationships? Who is going to be in control? Who is going to say what this relationship should be between ourselves and these plants and chemicals and substances?… Is this a decision that we just put in the hands of government? Is this a decision we put just in the hands of doctors? Just in the hands of the pharmaceutical companies, the tobacco companies, the alcohol companies and all the other corporations that profit off of the production and sale of these things? The true challenge is how do we learn to live with these substances in such a way that they cause the least possible harm and the greatest possible good. What will cause people to wake up and say "Stop?" What will cause people to say, "Enough is enough?"”

Ethan Nadelmann (1957) American writer; campaigner for the legalization of marijuana

What will cause people to say, "I value my freedom even if that freedom involves a measure of risk?" Video address, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBW07ITbagc hosted on YouTube http://www.youtube.com by user "droppingknowledge." The War on Drugs

People, Alcohol, World, Way

“I am to show you, too, that in the world of eternal free-agents, the Divine offices called creation and regeneration not only survive, but are transfigured; that in this transfiguration they are merged in one, so that regeneration is implicit in creation, and becomes the logical spring and aim of creation, while creation itself thus insures both generation and regeneration—the existence of the natural order within the spiritual or rational, and subject to this, and the consequent gradual transformation of the natural into the image of the spiritual: a process never to be interrupted, however devious, dark, or often retrograde, its course may be. I am to show you all this by the light of Final Cause, which is to take the place of the less rational category of Efficient Causation, since—let it be repeated — this last cannot operate to sustain moral relationship, and since moral values, measured in real freedom, are for the conscience and the new theology the measure of all reality.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.350-1

World, Spring, Nature, Reality

“Then I found my head one day when I wasn’t even trying
And here I have to say, ‘cause there is no use in lying, lying
Yes the answer lies within, so why not take a look now?
Kick out the devil’s sin, pick up, pick up a good book now.”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

On The Road To Find Out
Song lyrics, Tea for the Tillerman (1970)

Books, Lying

“From time immemorial war has always caused widespread displacements of population. Driven abroad by the destruction of their homes, fleeing from the neighbourhood of the battlefields or from the threat of enemy occupation, floods of refugees have always taken to the roads in search of a haven which is never easy to find.”

Eugene M. Kulischer (1881–1956) American sociologist

Source: The Displacement Of Population In Europe, 1943, p. i

War, Home, Search, Time

“Things are never beautiful by themselves but appear so to anyone who projects on to them his superabundance of life. But just as unconscious activity is unaware of itself as such, so man ‘forgets himself’ as the cause of these ‘beauties’ and imagines that the world itself is laden with them.”

Sarah Kofman (1934–1994) philosopher from France

Source: Nietzsche et la métaphore (1972), p. 29

Life, World, Beauty, Imagination

“[The] length of the cycles and the tendency towards dampening are determined by the intrinsic structure of the swinging system, while the intensity (the amplitude) of the fluctuations is determined primarily by the exterior impulse. An important consequence of this is that a more or less regular ﬂuctuation may be be produced by a cause which operates irregularly.”

Ragnar Frisch Propagation problems and impulse problems in dynamic economics

Source: 1930s, Propagation problems and impulse problems in dynamic economics, 1933, p. 1

“I just want to be beside you everywhere,
As long as we're together, honey, I don't care,
cause you've started something,
Oh, can't you see?
That ever since we met
You've had a hold on me”

Mike Hawker (1956) American politician

Song I Only Want To Be With You

“But you should never be embarrassed by your trouble with living
Cause it's the ones with the sorest throats Laura,
who have done the most singing.”

Conor Oberst (1980) American musician

Laura Laurent
Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002)

Singing

“One thing which they ought to do, in order to hold their own against this enemy, is to give up cultivating what they call 'race pride', a sentiment too much like that which is 'the lion in the way' of our progress… Do we not know that every argument we make, and every pretension we set up in favor of race pride, is giving the enemy a stick to break our own heads? … You will, perhaps, think this criticism uncalled for. My answer is that truth is never uncalled for… In some of our colored public journals I have seen myself charged with a lack of race pride. I am not ashamed of that charge. I have no apology or vindication to offer. If fifty years of uncompromising devotion to the cause of the colored man in this country does not vindicate me, I am content to live without vindication. While I have no more reason to be proud of one race than another, I dare to say, and I fear no contradiction, that there is no other man in the United States prouder than myself of any great achievement, mental or mechanical, of which any colored man or woman is the author. This not because I am a colored man, but because I am a man; and because color is a misfortune, and is treated as a crime by the American people.”

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

Speech http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-nations-problem/

People, Truth, Fear, Color

“Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is “wishful thinking.” You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself. When you have checked my figures, then, and then only, will you know whether I have that balance or not. If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant—but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must first find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the psychological causes of the error.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

"Bulverism" (1941)

Fools, Error, Thinking, Chance

“Man is not dead when he is cold, stiff, pulseless, breathless, and even showing signs of decomposition; he is not dead when buried, nor afterward, until a certain point is reached. That point is, when the vital organs have become so decomposed, that if reanimated, they could not perform their customary functions; when the mainspring and cogs of the machine, so to speak, are so eaten away by rust, that they would snap upon the turning of the key. Until that point is reached, the astral body may be caused, without miracle, to reenter its former tabernacle, either by an effort of its own will, or under the resistless impulse of the will of one who knows the potencies of nature and how to direct them. The spark is not extinguished, but only latent — latent as the fire in the flint, or the heat in the cold iron.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume I, Chapter XIII

Nature, Effort, Dead

“This wicked man, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatreds, this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame, has now resolved to try to break our famous Island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction. What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagration he has caused in London have been removed. He has lighted a fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame until the last vestiges of Nazi tyranny have been burnt out of Europe, and until the Old World—and the New—can join hands to rebuild the temples of man's freedom and man's honour, upon foundations which will not soon or easily be overthrown.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Broadcast (11 September 1940), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 779
The Second World War (1939–1945)

World, Soul, Freedom, Light

“God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your Name to the Nations: we are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant.”

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

Written prayer placed by the pope into the Western Wall in Jerusalem on 26 March 2000, during his apostolic journey to the Holy Land Source: Libreria Editrice Vaticana http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/travels/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_20000326_jerusalem-prayer_en.html

God, Children, People, History

“In New Directions for Organization Theory, Jeffrey Pfeffer offers a comprehensive analysis and overview of the field of organization theory and its research literature. This work traces the evolution of organization studies, particularly its more recent history, and highlights the principle concepts and controversies characterizing the study of organizations. Pfeffer argues that the world of organizations has changed in several important ways, including the increasing externalization of employment and the growing use of contingent workers; the changing size distribution of organizations, with a larger proportion of smaller organizations; the increasing influence of external capital markets on organizational decision-making and a concomitant decrease in managerial autonomy; and increasing salary inequality within organizations in the US compared both to the past and to other industrialized nations. These changes and their public policy implications make it especially important to understand organizations as social entities. But Pfeffer questions whether the research literature of organization studies has either addressed these changes and their causes or made much of a contribution to the discussion of public policy…”

Jeffrey Pfeffer (1946) American academic

Book abstract.
New Directions for Organization Theory, 1997

World, Way, History, Literature

“If reason (I mean abstract reason, derived from inquiries a priori) be not alike mute with regard to all questions concerning cause and effect, this sentence at least it will venture to pronounce, That a mental world, or universe of ideas, requires a cause as much, as does a material world, or universe of objects; and, if similar in its arrangement, must require a similar cause. For what is there in this subject, which should occasion a different conclusion or inference? In an abstract view, they are entirely alike; and no difficulty attends the one supposition, which is not common to both of them.”

David Hume book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Philo to Cleanthes, Part IV
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)

World, Idea, Question, Universe

“When one exchanged the rowing-seat for a place in the bottom of the boat, he suffered a bodily depression that caused him to be careless of everything save an obligation to wiggle one finger. There was cold sea-water swashing to and fro in the boat, and he lay in it. His head, pillowed on a thwart, was within an inch of the swirl of a wave crest, and sometimes a particularly obstreperous sea came in-board and drenched him once more. But these matters did not annoy him. It is almost certain that if the boat had capsized he would have tumbled comfortably out upon the ocean as if he felt sure it was a great soft mattress.”

Stephen Crane book The Open Boat

Pt. IV
The Open Boat (1894)

Suffering, Water, Sea

“I always had a knack for it [music]. I bought a drum kit for like 50 bucks, and within three weeks I was in a band. Not only was I in a band, but people were saying that I was really good. Being someone with a short attention span who didn't have much patience for anything, that was great, 'cause it didn't take much. I could just sit down and do it instantly. I could play a basic rock beat right away, so it didn't require much patience, and that's probably why I ended up doing it. As I got some of the rewards for it, it fueled me to want to be better. Then the rewards thing gets old, and what you really want is to be good and understand it, 'cause you're so enthused by it. That's what got me into all the other instruments and songwriting and singing.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Interview with Request Magazine, October 1994 http://web.stargate.net/soundgarden/articles/request_10-94.shtml, Soundgarden Era

People, Music, Understanding, Singing

“Speak the truth in love, leaving no one in doubt about where you stand. Bear faithful witness. Be gentle as doves, but wise — even cunning — as serpents. Do not compromise your principles — out of fear or even in the hope of advancing worthy goals. Do not fall into the error of believing that a good end justifies a bad means. But do work tirelessly for the best causes — especially life and marriage, but also, and relatedly, to lift up the poor, the downtrodden and the persecuted, both here in the United States and abroad.”

Robert P. George (1955) American legal scholar

2017, Interview with Matthew Bunson (2017)

Love, Life, Marriage, Truth

“Whatever may happen to thee, it was prepared for thee from all eternity; and the implication of causes was from eternity spinning the thread of thy being, and of that which is incident to it.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Alternate Translation: Whatever may befall you, it was preordained for you from everlasting.
Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X, 5

“In taking leave of this subject for the present I wish to renew the expression of my conviction that the existence of African slavery in Cuba is a principal cause of the lamentable condition of the island. I do not doubt that Congress shares with me the hope that it will soon be made to disappear, and that peace and prosperity may follow its abolition.”

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

1870s, Fifth State of the Union Address (1873)

Peace, Hope

“He asked her twice to come along;
They said good-bye at the break of dawn.
'Cause you can't hold back the wind,
If it's meant to be again,
Then someday he'll find his way back to her arms.”

Garth Brooks (1962) American country music artist

That Ol' Wind, written by Leigh Reynolds and G. Brooks.
Song lyrics, Fresh Horses (1995)

Way

“This struggle to preserve the old creeds, cultures, and countries of the West is the new divide between Left and Right; this struggle will define what it means to be a conservative. This is the cause of the twenty-first century and the agenda of conservatism for the remainder of our lives.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2000s, The Death of the West (2002)

Country

“On that Day ye will continue to rove distraught, even as camels, seeking a drop of the water of life. God will cause oceans of living water to stream forth from the presence of Him Whom God shall make manifest, while ye will refuse to quench your thirst therefrom, notwithstanding that ye regard yourselves as the God-fearing witnesses of your Faith. Nay, and yet again, nay! Ye will go astray far beyond the peoples unto whom the Gospel, or the Qur’án or any other Scripture was given. Take good heed to yourselves, inasmuch as the Cause of God will come upon you at a time when you will all be entreating and tearfully imploring God for the advent of the Day of His Manifestation; yet when He cometh ye will tarry and will fail to be of those who are well-assured in His Faith.
Beware lest ye grieve Him Who is the Supreme Manifestation of your Lord; verily, He can well afford to dispense with your allegiance unto Him. Be ye careful and bring not despondency upon any soul, for surely ye shall be put to proof.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

XVII, 2
The Kitáb-I-Asmá

Life, God, People, Fear

“People lose their senses at the beach 'cause the sun beats down too hard. They say things that just don't gel, you know. Well, you've heard this a lot: "Pick up a shell - oh, you can hear the ocean!" You could pick up a bicycle and hear the ocean - you're at the beach. Put the shell down, you'll hear the ocean twice as loud.”

Elayne Boosler (1952) American comedian

Reported in Cader Books, That's Really Funny!: Over 1,000 More Great Jokes from Today's Hottest Comedians (2000), p. 164.

People, Sense, Sun

“Zionist Aspirations
Dr. Weizmann on Future of Palestine.
Dr. Weizmann; the Zionist leader, who had just returned from the Conference at San Remo, in the course of a statement yesterday on the future of Palestine expressed his appreciation, and that of his fellow Zionists for the assistance rendered to their cause by The Times. The Balfour declaration, by being incorporated in the Treat with Turkey, had received international sanction. Dealing with the mandate conferred on Great Britain, he said:
There are still important details outstanding, such as the actual terms of the mandate and the question of boundaries in Palestine. There is the delimitation of the boundary between French Syria and Palestine, which will constitute the northern frontier and the eastern line of demarcation, adjoining Arab Syria.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.67

Question, Time, Future

“Right now, at my institute in the US we are working on gene-caused failures in brain development that frequently lead to autism and schizophrenia. We may also find that differences in these respective brain development genes also lead to differences in our abilities to carry out different mental tasks.
In some cases, how these genes function may help us to understand variations in IQ, or why some people excel at poetry but are terrible at mathematics. All too often people with high mathematical abilities have autistic traits. The same gene that gives some people such great mathematical abilities may also lead to autistic behaviour. This is why, in studying autism and schizophrenia, we believe that we shall come very close to a better understanding of intelligence and, therefore, of the differences in intelligence.”

James D. Watson (1928) American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist.

To question genetic intelligence is not racism (2007)

People, Intelligence, Mathematics, Failure

“In 1891 a student in Paris, I found myself face to face with a beautiful development of landscape painting, which was quite new to me. "Impressionism," together with its numerous progeny of eccentric offshoots, was at the time causing a great furore in the schools. Curiously enough I had been charged with copying Monet's style long before I had seen his actual work, so that my conversion into an enthusiastic Impressionist was short, in fact, an instantaneous process.”

Wynford Dewhurst (1864–1941) British artist

Source: Impressionist Painting: its genesis and development. (1904), p. vii; Preface.

School, Beauty, Time, Painting

“Viewed from an evolutionary perspective, mind is not the cause of the order in nature; mind is an example of the order in nature - something to be explained rather than the explanation for everything else.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 101

Nature

“Christ as King means humanity free from bondage to ideologies and institutions, free from revolutionary causes as well, free from idolatry of Caesar, and, not the least of it, free from religion which tries to disguise such slavery as virtuous.”

William Stringfellow (1928–1985) American theologian

Source: William Stringfellow: Essential Writings (2013), "Jesus the Criminal" (1969), p. 67

Religion, Christ

“Half of the human race lives in manifest obedience to the lunar rhythm; and there is evidence to show that the psychological and therefore the spiritual life, not only of women, but of men too, mysteriously ebbs and flows with the changes of the moon. There are unreasoned joys, inexplicable miseries, laughters and remorses without a cause. Their sudden and fantastic alternations constitute the ordinary weather of our minds. These moods, of which the more gravely numinous may be hypostasized as gods, the lighter, if we will, as hobgoblins and fairies, are the children of the blood and humours. But the blood and humours obey, among many other masters, the changing moon. Touching the soul directly through the eyes and, indirectly, along the dark channels of the blood, the moon is doubly a divinity.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

"Meditation on the Moon"
Music at Night and Other Essays (1931)

Life, Women, Men, God

“I also believe that US backing for Israeli policies of expansion of the Israeli state and oppression of the Palestinian people is the major cause of bitter division and violence in the world.”

Clare Short (1946) British politician

Quoted in Weeping Skies http://weepingskies.blogspot.com/ and The Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/david_aaronovitch/article643725.ece.

People, World

“According to the academic world view that markets are efficient, only the revelation of a dramatic piece of information can cause a crash, yet in reality even the most thorough post-mortem analyses are typically inconclusive as to what this piece of information might have been. For traders and investors, the fear of a crash is a perpetual source of stress, and the onset of the event itself always ruins the lives of some of them.”

Didier Sornette (1957) French scientist

Source: Why Stock Markets Crash - Critical Events in Complex Systems (2003), Chapter 1, Financial Crashes: What, How, Why, And When?, p. 3.

World, Fear, Reality

“I taught at a school in Cincinnati with a 0% graduation rate and that was also interesting so I updated from thinking school was beneficial for other people but not beneficial to me, to thinking school was beneficial for maybe some people around the middle – at least some of the better schools – but not beneficial for the vast majority of people, to then actually reading the literature on education and on intelligence and academic accomplishment and symbolic manipulation and concluding "no, school isn't good for anyone". There might be a few schools that are good for people, like there's Blair and there's Stuyvesant and these schools may actually teach people, but school can better be seen as a vaccination program against knowledge than a process for instilling knowledge in people, and of course when a vaccination program messes up, occasionally people get sick and die of the mumps or smallpox or whatever. And when school messes up occasionally people get sick and educated and they lose biological fitness. And in either case the people in charge revise the program and try to make sure that doesn't happen again, but in the case of school they also use that as part of their positive branding and you know maintain a not-very-plausible story about it being intended to cause that effect while also working hard to make sure that doesn't happen again.”

Michael Vassar (1979) President of the Singularity Institute

In an interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cSG0p-uflA with Adam Ford, December 2012

People, Education, School, Intelligence

“We found that technological optimism is the common and the most dangerous reaction to our findings… Technology can relieve the symptoms of the problem without affecting the underlying causes. Faith in technology as the ultimate solution to all problems can thus divert our attention from the most fundamental problem— the problem of growth in a finite system- and prevent us from taking effective action to solve it… We would deplore an unreasoned rejection of the benefits of technology as strongly as we argue here against an unreasoned acceptance of them. Perhaps the best summary of our position is the motto of the Sierra Club; not blind opposition to progress but opposition to blind progress.
Taking no action to solve these problems is equivalent of taking strong action. Every day of continued exponential growth brings the world system closer to the ultimate limits of that growth. A decision to do nothing is a decision to increase the risk of collapse.
The way to proceed is clear… [we posses] all that is necessary to create a totally new form of human society… the two missing ingredients are the realistic long-term goal… and the human will to achieve that goal.”

Mihajlo D. Mesarovic (1928) Serbian academic

Source: Mankind at the Turning Point, (1974), p. 88, quoted in: Martin Bridgstock, David Burch, John Forge, John Laurent, Ian Lowe (1998) Science, Technology and Society: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press. pp. 245-246

World, Faith, Way, Optimism

“But greed is a bottomless pit
And our freedom's a joke we're just taking a piss
And the whole world must watch the sad comic display
If you're still free start runnin' away
'cause we're comin' for ya!”

Conor Oberst (1980) American musician

I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning (2005)

World, Sadness, Freedom

“Roger: It does a little bit of both I think it depends on the band. On a band that is enormously huge like Metallica it definitely hurts cause people are just going to download their stuff-period. But a smaller band maybe that hasn’t sold anything but has been able to have some good shows and get some fans out because of their MySpace or whatever you know what I mean. Using the Internet as a tool to promote the band is awesome. My sisters’ band doesn’t have a CD or whatever but they constantly pull 100 kids at their shows because they promote heavily on the internet and they stay in touch with their fans that way so it can be either or. For Less Than Jake we’re right in the middle. We definitely get a lot of paths to talk about the band, and interviews, and stuff for sale, and you know what I mean MySpace’s and Facebook’s all that kind of stuff there’s a presence there that definitely helps the band. But at the same time I know we’re one of the bands that is a victim of a lot of downloading so there you go.”

Roger Manganelli (1973) American musician

People, Way, Thinking, Sister

“In 1897, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) noticed a regular pattern in distributions of wealth or income, no matter the country or time period concerned. He found that the distribution was extremely skewed toward the top end: A small minority of the top earners always accounted for a large majority of the total wealth. The pattern was so reliable that Pareto was eventually able to predict the distribution of income accurately before looking at the data.
Pareto was greatly excited by his discovery, which he rightly believed was of enormous importance not just to economics but to society as well. But he managed to enthuse only a few fellow economists….
Pareto's idea became widely known only when Joseph Moses Juran, one of the gurus of the quality movement in the twentieth century, renamed it the "Rule of the Vital Few." In his 1951 tome The Quality Control Handbook, which became hugely influential in Japan and later in the West, Juran separated the "vital few" from the "trivial many," showing how problems in quality could be largely eliminated, cheaply and quickly, by focusing on the vital few causes of these problems. Juran, who moved to Japan in 1954, taught executives there to improve quality and product design while incorporating American business practices into their own companies. Thanks to this new attention to quality control, between 1957 and 1989, Japan grew faster than any other industrial economy.”

Richard Koch (1950) German medical historian and internist

Introduction
The 80/20 Individual (2003)

Idea, Business, Problem, Time

“(…) Is not meanness also a form of madness? And is not madness the misuse of the mind? Humanity’s problem lies in this misuse of the mind only. All the treasures of nature and spirit are open to man who will use his mind rightly. (…) Fear and greed cause the misuse of the mind. The right use of mind is in the service of love, of life, of truth, of beauty.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Mind
Source: I am That, P.128.

Love, Life, Truth, Fear

“One of the serious results of propaganda is that it has caused the public to think that education and propaganda are the same thing, and thus to make an ignorant multitude believe it is being educated when it is only being manipulated. Education aims at independence of judgement. Propaganda offers ready-made opinions for the unthinking herd.”

Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941)

Source: Are We Victims of Propaganda, Our Invisible Masters: A Debate with Edward Bernays (1929), p. 145

Education, Thinking

“Cause we are sick and tired of hearing your song,
Telling us how you are gonna change right from wrong,
'Cause if you really want to hear our views,
You haven't done nothin.”

Stevie Wonder (1950) American musician

You Haven't Done Nothin
Song lyrics, Fulfillingness' First Finale (1974)

Change

“Evolution is not a force but a process; not a cause but a law.”

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

On Compromise http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11557/11557-h/11557-h.htm (1874).

Law

“For many years after the promulgation of Lamarck's doctrine of progressive development, geologists were much occupied with the question whether the past changes in the animate and inanimate world were brought about by sudden and paroxysmal action, or gradually and continuously by causes differing neither in kind nor degree from those now in operation.”

Charles Lyell (1797–1875) British lawyer and geologist

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.21, p. 407

World, Question, Change, Past

“Then you women created a word: "Manscape." And we shaved ourselves bald like nine year-old boys. 'Cause we wanted to sleep with you.”

Christopher Titus (1964) actor, writer, podcaster

Neverlution (2011)

Women, Boy, Sleep

“.. without any deformation caused by the silly fashion of the corset... she stands somewhat uneasily, with her arms out and knees bent, as if she is balancing. Shadows play over her body and highlight her womanly figure.”

Fritz Bleyl (1880–1966) German artist

c. 1906; as quoted in Ernst Kirchner's Streetwalkers: Art, Luxury, and Immorality in Berlin, 1913 - 1916, Simmons, Sherwin, in 'The Art Bulletin', Vol. 82, No. 1. March 2000, p. 121
Bleyl stated that he favored this model Isabella due to her natural body. Using only two tones of yellow in the poster, Bleyl was able to impart a clear sense of this woman's physique. It is precisely this that got Bleyl in trouble: the police censored this image because they saw pubic hair in the shadow below the belly, apparently giving it an inappropriate sexual power

Fashion

“Sun is the reason
And the world it will bloom
‘Cause sun lights the sky
And the sun lights the moon”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

Sun C79
Song lyrics, Buddha and the Chocolate Box (1974)

World, Light, Sun

“And they told me
The times have changed
Cause' our parents had Hendrix, Janis and Jim
But what about River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain.”

River Phoenix (1970–1993) American actor, musician, and activist

War on Drugs Laughing Colors

Parent, Change, Time

“Our research has shown that your body often has a remarkable capacity to begin healing itself—and much more quickly than people once realized—when we address the underlying causes of illness. For many people, the choices we make each day in what we eat and in how we live are among the most important underlying causes. When most people are prescribed medications to lower their blood pressure, cholesterol, or blood sugar, they are usually told, “You will have to take this for the rest of your life," often in ever-increasing dosages. Why? Because the underlying causes are not being addressed. When I lecture, I often show a slide of doctors busily mopping up the floor around an overflowing sink without also turning off the faucet.”

Dean Ornish (1953) American physician

The Spectrum (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007), p. 16 https://books.google.it/books?id=YgooDmnD6l0C&pg=PA16.

Life, People

“The immediate cause of the increase of population is the excess of the births above deaths; and the rate of increase, or the period of doubling, depends upon the proportion which the excess of the births above the deaths bears to the population.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Essay on the Principle of Population (1798; rev. through 1826)

Death, Birth, Dependency

“If we follow the traditional way of thought, there will always be traditional enemies. Extremist circles from both sides will find causes to give rise to problems.”

Fatos Nano (1952) Albanian politician

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-RP5McU2WY

Way, Problem

“Well I guess you could say
That he don't even know where to begin
Cause he looked both ways but he was so afraid
Diggin' deeper through the ditch
With every chance he missed
And the mess he made
Cause hate is such a strong word
And every brick he laid
A mistake they say
That his walls are getting taller
His world is getting smaller.”

Jack Johnson (musician) (1975) American musician

Staple It Together
Song lyrics, In Between Dreams (2005)

Hate, World, Way, Strong

“It's a god-awful small affair
To the girl with the mousy hair
But her mummy is yelling "No"
And her daddy has told her to go
But her friend is nowhere to be seen
Now she walks through her sunken dream
To the seat with the clearest view
And she's hooked to the silver screen.
But the film is a saddening bore
'Cause she's lived it ten times or more.”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

Life on Mars?
Song lyrics, Hunky Dory (1971)

God, Dreams, Girl, Time

“And are there no laws of moral health? Can they be outraged and the penalty not paid? Let a man turn out of the bright and bustling Broadway, out of the mad revel of riches and the restless, unripe luxury of ignorant men whom sudden wealth has disordered like exhilarating gas; let him penetrate through sickening stench the lairs of typhus, the dens of small-pox, the coverts of all loathsome disease and unimaginable crimes; let him see the dull, starved, stolid, lowering faces, the human heaps of utter woe, and, like Jefferson in contemplating slavery a hundred years ago in Virginia, he will murmur with bowed head, 'I tremble for this city when I remember that God is just'. Is his justice any surer in a tenement-house than it is in a State? Filth in the city is pestilence. Injustice in the State is civil war. 'Gentlemen', said George Mason, a friend and neighbor of Jefferson's, in the Convention that framed the Constitution, 'by an inscrutable chain of causes and effects Providence punishes national sins by national calamities'. 'Oh no. gentlemen, it is no such thing', replied John Rutledge of South Carolina. 'Religion and humanity have nothing to do with this question. Interest is the governing principle with nations'. The descendants of John Rutledge live in the State which quivers still with the terrible tread of Sherman and his men. Let them answer! Oh seaports and factories, silent and ruined! Oh barns and granaries, heaps of blackened desolation! Oh wasted homes, bleeding hearts, starving mouths! Oh land consumed in the fire your own hands kindled! Was not John Rutledge wrong, was not George Mason right, that prosperity which is only money in the purse, and not justice or fair play, is the most cruel traitor, and will cheat you of your heart's blood in the end?”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Men, Money, God, War

“Oh, my, my. Oh, hell, yes.
Honey, put on that party dress.
Buy me a drink, sing me a song.
Take me as I come 'cause I can't stay long.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Mary Jane's Last Dance
Lyrics, Greatest Hits (1993)

Hell, Drink, Singing

“When I went home to my family in May, 1770, from the town meeting in Boston, which was the first I had ever attended, and where I had been chosen in my absence, without any solicitation, one of their representatives, I said to my wife, "I have accepted a seat in the House of Representatives, and thereby have consented to my own ruin, to your ruin, and to the ruin of our children. I give you this warning, that you may prepare your mind for your fate." She burst into tears, but instantly cried out in a transport of magnanimity, "Well, I am willing in this cause to run all risks with you, and be ruined with you, if you are ruined."”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

These were times, my friend, in Boston, which tried women's souls as well as men's. Letter http://www.readme.it/libri/Letteratura%20Inglese/SELECTIONS%20FROM%20ADAM'S%20CORRESSPONDENCE.shtml to Benjamin Rush (12 April 1809) 1800s

Women, Men, Fate, Children

Quotes about cause page 14

Quotes about cause
page 14