Quotes about century
page 17

“The civil engineer is the real 19th century architect.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

William Burges in: The Ecclesiologist, Vol. 28, 1867, p. 156: Cited in Crook (2004)

“Chateau Gaillard had utilized the last of the newly built, huge great towers, and Rochester had depended on its early twelfth-century tower. During the course of the thirteenth century defense shifted to a towered wall, the enceinte or enclosure castle. Two plans emerged: the castle could rely on a series of courtyards, which had to be taken one after another, or on a concentric defense in which a second wall entirely surrounded the inner wall.”

Marilyn Stokstad (1929–2016) art historian

Source: Medieval castles (2005), Ch. 2 : The Castle as Fortress : The Castle and Siege Warfare

Dependency

“Two pictures painted in the year 1907 can conveniently be taken as the starting point of twentieth-century art. They are Matisse's Blue Nude and Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon; and both these cardinal, revolutionary pictures represent the nude. The reason is that the revolt of twentieth-century painters was not against academicism: that had been achieved by the impressionists. It was a revolt against the doctrine, with which the impressionists implicitly agreed, that the painter should be no more than a sensitive and well-informed camera. And the very elements of symbolism and abstraction that made the nude an unsuitable subject for the impressionists commended it to their successors. When art was once more concerned with concepts rather than sensations, the nude was the first concept that came to mind.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. IX: The Nude As an End in Itself

Art, Painting

“As indicated by its title "A History of Great Ideas in Abnormal Psychology", this book is not just concerned with the chronology of events or with biographical details of great psychiatrists and psychopathologists. It has as its main interest, a study of the ideas underlying theories about mental illness and mental health in the Western world. These are studied according to their historical development from ancient times to the twentieth century.
The book discusses the history of ideas about the nature of mental illness, its causation, its treatment and also social attitudes towards mental illness. The conceptions of mental illness are discussed in the context of philosophical ideas about the human mind and the medical theories prevailing in different periods of history. Certain perennial controversies are presented such as those between the psychological and organic approaches to the treatment of mental illness, and those between the focus on disease entities (nosology) versus the focus on individual personalities. The beliefs of primitive societies are discussed, and the development of early scientific ideas about mental illness in Greek and Roman times. The study continues through the medieval age to the Renaissance. More emphasis is then placed on the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the enlightenment of the eighteenth, and the emergence of modern psychological and psychiatric ideas concerning psychopathology in the twentieth century.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Introduction text.
A History of Great Ideas in Abnormal Psychology, (1990)

Health, Books, Age, World

“If the 19th [century] was the century of the individual (liberalism means individualism), you may consider that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the state.”

Benito Mussolini book The Doctrine of Fascism

"The Doctrine of Fascism" (1932)
1930s

“The ancient Greek philosopher, Democritus, propounded an hypothesis of the constitution of matter, and gave the name of atoms to the ultimate unalterable parts of which he imagined all bodies to be constructed. In the 17th century, Gassendi revived this hypothesis, and attempted to develope it, while Newton used it with marked success in his reasonings on physical phenomena; but the first who formed a body of doctrine which would embrace all known facts in the constitution of matter, was Roger Joseph Boscovich, of Italy, who published at Vienna, in 1759, a most important and ingenious work, styled Theoria Philosophiæ Naturalis ad unicam legem virium, in Natura existentium redacta. This is one of the most profound contributions ever made to science; filled with curious and important information, and is well worthy of the attentive perusal of the modern student. In more recent days, the theory of Boscovich has received further confirmation and extension in the researches of Dalton, Joule, Thomson, Faraday, Tyndall, and others.”

Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787) Croat-Italian physicist

Alfred Marshall Mayer, Lecture-notes on Physics (1868) Part 1 https://books.google.com/books?id=hqsLAAAAYAAJ

Imagination, Science, Success, Parting

“Tolstoy becomes intelligible when he is interpreted as a nineteenth century Russian who participates, in the depths of his unconscious soul as well as consciously, in the cultural movements of his time, and in the Russian mystic sense of community with men and nature. It is so with all the members of the radical Christian group. When they meet Christ they do so as heirs of a culture which they cannot reject because it is part of them.”

H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) American theologian

Source: Christ and Culture (1951), p. 70

Men, Soul, Intelligence, Communication

“In the early twentieth century the problem of production had been solved; after that it was the problem of consumption that plagued society. In the 1950s and '60s, consumer commodities and farm products began to pile up in vast towering mountains all over the Western World. As much as possible was given away — but that threatened to subvert the open market. By 1980, the pro tem solution was to heap up the products and burn them: billions of dollars of worth, week after week.”

Philip K. Dick book Solar Lottery

Source: Solar Lottery (1955), Chapter 2 (p. 16)

World, Mountain, Problem

“Among the seminal discoveries in biology in the twentieth century were the chemical nature and the three-dimensional structure of the genetic material, deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA.”

Albert L. Lehninger (1917–1986) American biochemist

Principles of Biochemistry, Ch. 1 : The Foundations of Biochemistry

Nature

“The English have taught us that we were not one nation before and that it will reaquire centuries before we become one nation. This is without foundation. We were one nation before they came to India. One thought inspired us. Our mode of life was the same. It was because we were one nation that they were able to establish one kingdom. Subsequently they divided us.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

1900s, Hind Swaraj (1908)

Life

“The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 205

Art, Science

“The progress of human knowledge depends on maintaining that touch of scepticism even about the most "unquestionable" truths. A century ago, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was regarded as scientifically unshakeable; today, most biologists have their reservations about it. Fifty years ago, Freud's sexual theory of neurosis was accepted by most psychiatrists; today, it is widely recognized that his methods were highly questionable. At the turn of this century, a scientist who questioned Newton's theory of gravity would have been regarded as insane; twenty years later, it had been supplanted by Einstein's theory, although, significantly, few people actually understood it. It seems perfectly conceivable that our descendants of the twenty-second century will wonder how any of us could have been stupid enough to have been taken in by Darwin, Freud or Einstein.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved (2000), p. 4

People, Truth, Stupidity, Question

“But these two have been intractable problems for decades, even a century. Their root causes have been social injustice and economic injustice. Brilliant minds and experts have been harnessed to tackle these problems. And still the problems persist.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2009, Speech: The Socio-Economic Peace Program of Senator Francis Escudero

Problem

“They say that each generation inherits from those that have gone before; if this were so there would be no limit to man's improvements or to his power of reaching perfection. But he is very far from receiving intact that storehouse of knowledge which the centuries have piled up before him; he may perfect some inventions, but in others, he lags behind the originators, and a great many inventions have been lost entirely. What he gains on the one hand, he loses on the other.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

21 September 1854 (p. 256)
1831 - 1863, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)

Knowledge, Perfection

“The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed the breakdown of the mechanistic theory even within physics, the science where it was the most successful… Relativity took over in field physics, and the science of quantum theory in microphysics… In view of parallel developments in physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, and economics, many branches of the contemporary sciences became… ‘sciences of organized complexity’ — that is, systems sciences.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: The systems view of the world (1996), p. 8 as cited in: Martha C. Beck (2013) "Contemporary Systems Sciences, Implications for the Nature and Value of Religion, the Five Principles of Pancasila, and the Five Pillars of Islam," Dialogue and Universalism-E Volume 4, Number 1/2013. p. 3 ( online http://www.emporia.edu/~cbrown/dnue/documents/vol04.no01.2013/Vol04.01.Beck.pdf).

Science, Success

“Slavery exists in full vigor, but we do not perceive it, just as in Europe at the end of the Eighteenth Century the slavery of serfdom was not perceived.

People of that day thought that the position of men obliged to till the land for their lords, and to obey them, was a natural, inevitable, economic condition of life, and they did not call it slavery.

It is the same among us: people of our day consider the position of the laborer to be a natural, inevitable economic condition, and they do not call it slavery. And as, at the end of the Eighteenth Century, the people of Europe began little by little to understand that what formerly seemed a natural and inevitable form of economic life-namely, the position of peasants who were completely in the power of their lords-was wrong, unjust and immoral, and demanded alteration, so now people today are beginning to understand that the position of hired workmen, and of the working classes in general, which formerly seemed quite right and quite normal, is not what it should be, and demands alteration.”

Leo Tolstoy book The Slavery of Our Times

Source: The Slavery of Our Times (1890), Chapter 8: Slavery Exists Among Us

Life, Men, People, Understanding

“Arun Shourie tells us that a lot can be learned from the case of Narayan Guru who, early this century, as a member of the unapproachable Ezhava caste in Kerala, became an acknowledged religious leader and profoundly changed caste relations in Kerala for the better. He 'attained the highest spiritual states, thereby acquired unquestioned authority, and transformed society from within the tradition'. He made use of a major loophole in the rigidities of the caste system, a loophole which Hindu society deliberately maintained precisely because Hinduism was not merely a social system but, among other things, also a spiritual system: renunciates in general, and sages with acknowledged yogic realization in particular, are above the worldly divisions such as caste. They also have the authority to herald social transformations which Hindus would never accept from purely political busybodies.”

Narayana Guru (1855–1928) Indian social reformer

Elst, Koenraad (2002). Who is a Hindu?: Hindu revivalist views of Animism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and other offshoots of Hinduism. ISBN 978-8185990743

Learning, Change

“Kashmir's conversion to Islam on a large scale also dates from the beginning of the fifteenth century…. However, it was during the reign of Sikandar Butshikan (1394-1417), that the wind of Muslim proselytization blew the strongest. He invited from Persia, Arabia and Mesopotamia learned men of his own faith; his bigotry prompted him to destroy all the most famous temples in Kashmir - Martand, Vishya, Isna, Chakrabhrit, Tripeshwar, etc. Sikandar offered the Kashmiris the choice between Islam and death. Some Kashmiri Brahmans committed suicide, many left the land, many others embraced Islam, and a few began to live under Taqiya, that is, they professed Islam only outwardly. It is said that the fierce intolerance of Sikandar had left in Kashmir no more than eleven families of Brahmans. …By the time of Akbar’s annexation of Kashmir (C. E. 1586) the valley had turned mainly Mohammadan. When Father Xavier and Brother Benedict went to Kashmir with Akbar this is what they learnt: “In antiquity this land was inhabited by the Moors, possibly a reference to Timur (contemporary of Sikandar the Iconoclast), and since then the majority of the people accept Islam.””

Sikandar Butshikan

When Kashmir was under Muslim rule for 500 years (1319-1819) Hindus were constantly tortured and forcibly converted.
K. S. Lal (1993). Indian Muslims: Who are they. New Delhi: Voice of India.

Death, Men, People, Family

“If I tend to reread the European past in my own Postmodern image, if I frequently write about Bach and Beethoven in the same ways in which I discuss the Artist Formerly Known as Prince and John Zorn, it is not to denigrate the canon but rather to show the power of music all throughout its history as a signifying practice. For this is how culture always works—always grounded in codes and social contracts, always open to fusions, extensions, transformations. To me, music never seems so trivial as in its 'purely musical' readings. If there was at one time a rationale for adopting such an intellectual position, that time has long since past. And if the belief in the nineteenth-century notion of aesthetic autonomy continues to be an issue when we study cultural history, it can no longer be privileged as somehow true.”

Susan McClary (1946) American musicologist

McClary, Susan (2000), Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form, p. 186–169. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0520232089

Music, Way, History, Study

“The only thing that mattered was that the quarter century or so he had remaining would be his life, to live out as he chose and in his own best interests. Nothing took precedence over that: not work, not friendships, not relationships with women. Those were all components of his life, and valuable ones, but they did not define it or control it. That was up to him, and him alone.
The possibilities, Jeff knew, were endless.”

Ken Grimwood book Replay

Source: Replay (1986), Chapter 21 (p. 311)

Life, Women, Friendship

“If wealth, power, and income continue to concentrate at the very tippy top, our society will change from a capitalist democracy to a neo-feudalist rentier society like 18th-century France. That was France before the revolution and the mobs with the pitchforks.”

Nick Hanauer (1959) American businessman

"Beware fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming" TED (conference) August 2014 http://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocrats_the_pitchforks_are_coming/transcript?language=en

Democracy, Change, Wealth

“For Immanuel Kant, the term anthropology embraced all the human sciences, and laid the foundation of familiar knowledge we need, to build solidly grounded ideas about the moral and political demands of human life. Margaret Mead saw mid-twentieth-century anthropology as engaged in a project no less ambitious than Kant's own, and her Terry Lectures on Continuities in Cultural Evolution provide an excellent point to enter into her reflections.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. xii

Life, Idea, Knowledge, Science

“It may be safely assumed as an axiom in the government of states that the greatest wrongs inflicted upon a people are caused by unjust and arbitrary legislation, or by the unrelenting decrees of despotic rulers, and that the timely revocation of injurious and oppressive measures is the greatest good that can be conferred upon a nation. The legislator or ruler who has the wisdom and magnanimity to retrace his steps when convinced of error will sooner or later be rewarded with the respect and gratitude of an intelligent and patriotic people.
Our own history, although embracing a period less than a century, affords abundant proof that most, if not all, of our domestic troubles are directly traceable to violations of the organic law and excessive legislation.”

Andrew Johnson (1808–1875) American politician, 17th president of the United States (in office from 1865 to 1869)

Quote, Fourth State of the Union Address (1868)

Wisdom, People, Law, Error

“Let’s just grant the possibility that there is a Creator God, who’s omniscient, who occasionally authors books. And he’s gonna give us a book – the most useful book. He’s a loving God, he’s a compassionate God, and he’s gonna give us a guide to life. He’s got a scribe, the scribe’s gonna write it down. What’s gonna be in that book? I mean just think of how good a book would be if it were authored by an omniscient deity. I mean, there is not a single line in the Bible or the Koran that could not have been authored by a first century person. There is not one reference to anything – there are pages and pages about how to sacrifice animals, and keep slaves, and who to kill and why. There’s nothing about electricity, there’s nothing about DNA, there’s nothing about infectious disease, the principles of infectious disease. There’s nothing particularly useful, and there’s a lot of iron age barbarism in there, and superstition. This is not a candidate book.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris in interview by Big Think (04/07/2007) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zV3vIXZ-1Y&t=4m43s 2000s

Love, Life, God, Books

“We have to include a wider array of institutions—to distinguish democracy from authoritarian governments, and even there we need a scale to do so. But it means not just elections, indeed free and fair elections; I think it’s come in the twentieth century to mean a universal electorate, male and female, moving the age down a bit, that’s now just standard. Political parties and political competition and free and fair elections, and something that I’ve tried to add on, without, I suppose, a great deal of success in the real world or elsewhere: the ultimate popular control over the agenda.”

Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) American political scientist

A Conversation with Robert A. Dahl (2009)

Age, World, Democracy, Thinking

“In the form that it emerged at the turn of the century and developed in the 1920s and 1930s, the fascist ideology represented a synthesis of organic nationalism with the antimaterialist revision of Marxism. It expressed a revolutionary aspiration based on a rejection of individualism, whether liberal or Marxist, and it created the elements of a new and original political culture.”

Zeev Sternhell (1935) Israeli historian

Source: The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, 1994, p. 6

“He begins to think for himself and meets Nineteenth-century Rationalism Which can explain away religion by any number of methods.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 19–20
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

Religion, Thinking

“The fall of the patriciate by no means divested the Roman commonwealth of its aristocratic character. We have already indicated that the plebeian party carried within it that character from the first as well as, and in some sense still more decidedly than, the patriciate; for, while in the old body of burgesses an absolute equality of rights prevailed, the new constitution set out from a distinction between the senatorial houses who were privileged in point of burgess rights and of burgess usufructs, and the mass of the other citizens. Immediately, therefore, on the abolition of the patriciate and the formal establishment of civic equality, a new aristocracy and a corresponding opposition were formed; and we have already shown how the former engrafted itself as it were on the fallen patriciate, and how, accordingly, the first movements of the new party of progress were mixed up with the last movements of the old opposition between the orders. The formation of these new parties began in the fifth century, but they assumed their definite shape only in the century which followed. The development of this internal change is, as it were, drowned amidst the noise of the great wars and victories, and not merely so, but the process of formation is in this case more withdrawn from view than any other in Roman history. Like a crust of ice gathering imperceptibly over the surface of a stream and imperceptibly confining it more and more, this new Roman aristocracy silently arose; and not less imperceptibly, like the current concealing itself beneath and slowly extending, there arose in opposition to it the new party of progress. It is very difficult to sum up in a general historical view the several, individually insignificant, traces of these two antagonistic movements, which do not for the present yield their historical product in any distinct actual catastrophe. But the freedom hitherto enjoyed in the commonwealth was undermined, and the foundation for future revolutions was laid, during this epoch; and the delineation of these as well as of the development of Rome in general would remain imperfect, if we should fail to give some idea of the strength of that encrusting ice, of the growth of the current beneath, and of the fearful moaning and cracking that foretold the mighty breaking up which was at hand. The Roman nobility attached itself, in form, to earlier institutions belonging to the times of the patriciate. Persons who once had filled the highest ordinary magistracies of the state not only, as a matter of course, practically enjoyed all along a higher honour, but also had at an early period certain honorary privileges associated with their position. The most ancient of these was doubtless the permission given to the descendants of such magistrates to place the wax images of these illustrious ancestors after their death in the family hall, along the wall where the pedigree was painted, and to have these images carried, on occasion of the death of members of the family, in the funeral procession.. the honouring of images was regarded in the Italo-Hellenic view as unrepublican, and on that account the Roman state-police did not at all tolerate the exhibition of effigies of the living, and strictly superintended that of effigies of the dead. With this privilege were associated various external insignia, reserved by law or custom for such magistrates and their descendants:--the golden finger-ring of the men, the silver-mounted trappings of the youths, the purple border on the toga and the golden amulet-case of the boys--trifling matters, but still important in a community where civic equality even in external appearance was so strictly adhered to, and where, even during the second Punic war, a burgess was arrested and kept for years in prison because he had appeared in public, in a manner not sanctioned by law, with a garland of roses upon his head.(6) These distinctions may perhaps have already existed partially in the time of the patrician government, and, so long as families of higher and humbler rank were distinguished within the patriciate, may have served as external insignia for the former; but they certainly only acquired political importance in consequence of the change of constitution in 387, by which the plebeian families that attained the consulate were placed on a footing of equal privilege with the patrician families, all of whom were now probably entitled to carry images of their ancestors. Moreover, it was now settled that the offices of state to which these hereditary privileges were attached should include neither the lower nor the extraordinary magistracies nor the tribunate of the plebs, but merely the consulship, the praetorship which stood on the same level with it,(7) and the curule aedileship, which bore a part in the administration of public justice and consequently in the exercise of the sovereign powers of the state.(8) Although this plebeian nobility, in the strict sense of the term, could only be formed after the curule offices were opened to plebeians, yet it exhibited in a short time, if not at the very first, a certain compactness of organization--doubtless because such a nobility had long been prefigured in the old senatorial plebeian families. The result of the Licinian laws in reality therefore amounted nearly to what we should now call the creation of a batch of peers. Now that the plebeian families ennobled by their curule ancestors were united into one body with the patrician families and acquired a distinctive position and distinguished power in the commonwealth, the Romans had again arrived at the point whence they had started; there was once more not merely a governing aristocracy and a hereditary nobility--both of which in fact had never disappeared--but there was a governing hereditary nobility, and the feud between the gentes in possession of the government and the commons rising in revolt against the gentes could not but begin afresh. And matters very soon reached that stage. The nobility was not content with its honorary privileges which were matters of comparative indifference, but strove after separate and sole political power, and sought to convert the most important institutions of the state--the senate and the equestrian order--from organs of the commonwealth into organs of the plebeio-patrician aristocracy.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

The History of Rome - Volume 2

Death, Men, War, Youth

“On the whole, we will repeat that this Religion of Mahomet's is a kind of Christianity; has a genuine element of what is spiritually highest looking through it, not to be hidden by all its imperfections. The Scandinavian God Wish, the god of all rude men, — this has been enlarged into a Heaven by Mahomet; but a Heaven symbolical of sacred Duty, and to be earned by faith and well-doing, by valiant action, and a divine patience which is still more valiant. It is Scandinavian Paganism, and a truly celestial element superadded to that. Call it not false; look not at the falsehood of it, look at the truth of it. For these twelve centuries, it has been the religion and life-guidance of the fifth part of the whole kindred of Mankind. Above all things, it has been a religion heartily believed. These Arabs believe their religion, and try to live by it! No Christians, since the early ages, or only perhaps the English Puritans in modern times, have ever stood by their Faith as the Moslem do by theirs, — believing it wholly, fronting Time with it, and Eternity with it.”

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

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

Life, Men, God, Truth

“The Scottish Communist is a much misunderstood person. When he is a true Caledonian, and not a Pole or an Irishman, he is simply the lineal descendant of the old Radical. The Scottish Radical was a man who held a set of inviolable principles on which he was entirely unable to compromise. It did not matter what the principles were; the point was that they were like the laws of Sinai, which could not be added to or subtracted from. When the Liberal party began to compromise, he joined Labour; when Labour began to compromise, by a natural transition he became a Communist. Temperamentally he has not changed. He is simply the stuff which in the seventeenth century made the unyielding Covenanter, and in the eighteenth the inflexible Jacobite. He is honesty incarnate, but his mind lacks flexibility.”

John Buchan book Castle Gay

Source: Castle Gay (1930), Ch. 14

Law, Nature, Change, Personality

“While not a single Marxist ‘charismatic leader’ in the twentieth century made revolution in an advanced capitalist country (as Marx prescribed), or undertook the ‘withering away of the state’ (as both Marx and Engels insisted), or insured against the rule of elites (that both Marx and Engels identified as an essential of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’), or provide for the obligatory ‘rotation in office’ (again, as both Marx and Engels insured would be a post-revolutionary feature of socialist society), or resolved the problem of human ‘alienation’ (so emphatically lamented by the young Marx)—Western academics have never hesitated to directly associate Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Castroism, and even the barbarism of the Khmer Rouge, with the philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.”

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

Source: Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, (2001), p. 80

Problem, Country

“The Klu Klux Klan and the racial segregation that was so dramatically challenged during the mid-twentieth century freedom movement was produced not during slavery but rather in an attempt to manage free black people who would have been far more successful in pushing forward democracy for all.”

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

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Closures and Continuities (2013)

People, Democracy, Freedom, Success

“Novelty is density of connection. … We are in the grip of some kind of an attractor, and when we look back at history, we can have a sense, I think, that we have never been here before. But we are so accustomed to causal thought, that we assume we have been pushed here, pushed here by historical necessity, by bad political decisions, by the vicissitudes of evolution (cultural and otherwise). I don’t think so. I think we have been pulled here, that we are under the aegis of a kind of an attractor. Some people would call it a “destiny”, but what it is is a dream that is pulling us deeper and deeper into the adventure of existential becoming. And faster and faster—that’s the other thing. Deeper and deeper, faster and faster, so that the rate of change that people were accustomed to before the Industrial Revolution, for example—we can barely conceive of such slow-moving, stately, meta-stable societies. On the other hand, within the 20th Century, the acceleration has been even more intense, and continues to accelerate.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Talk at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, NYC http://www.abrupt.org/abruptlog/logos/terence-mckenna-at-saint-johns-2785/ 25 April 1996

People, Dreams, History, Thinking

“His mortal frame has vanished, but his spirit increases with the increasing years the richest legacy of the greatest century. Men show by what they worship what they are. It is no accident that before the great example of American manhood, our people stand with respect and reverence. In Abraham Lincoln is revealed our ideal; the hope of our country fulfilled. He was the incarnation of what America was to be. Through him, the Almighty bestowed upon the nation a new birth of freedom that this dear land of ours might be returned to the health of its fathers.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Duty of Government (1920)

Men, People, Health, Hope

“The term “introspective psychology” is misleading in that it covers a variety of diverging positions on the theory and practice of introspection. From the beginning there was a basic discrepancy between the British and the German philosophic tradition, the former relying more exclusively on introspection than the latter. Wilhelm Wundt’s advocacy and use of introspection was extremely circumscribed and essentially limited to simple judgments tied to external stimulation. During the first decade of the twentieth century some experimental psychologists, notably E. B. Titchener and the, greatly enlarged the scope of introspection, ushering in the brief vogue of “systematic introspection.” The latter never gained wide support in North America and was supplanted in Germany by developments that do not constitute “introspective psychology” in any precise sense.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

Source: "The history of introspection reconsidered." 1980, p. 241

Support, Sense

“Williams’s starting point is the immense pessimism of nineteenth-century men of letters…. One can explain this pessimism to some extent in terms of various social and political failures, especially in France…. But Dr Williams would rather look at the physically examinable, and he finds in the author’s disease the roots of what his book cover calls, with an admirable eye on the market, the horror of life….”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

Life, Men, Books, Disease

“Wow. Well on a personal level this century has been going so well for us, we finished our album, I had a little baby boy a little while ago, the whole Jubilee 2000 work has been incredible, just everything has been going great. There's also been some great breakthroughs in science, the disposible mobile phone, 3 blade razor and the female orgasmatron which is great - anyway now this... thanks everybody our record company has been great, our management have been great and our producer's amazing.”

The Edge (1961) Irish rock musician, guitar player of U2

2001
Acceptance speech at the Grammy's

Boy, Science, Baby, Personality

“I base my opinion on historical evidence. After Guru Gobind Singh's death, Sikh peasantry rose in arms under Banda Bahadur. Then Jats in the Sikh Misl [armed groups] fought all through the 18th century to establish Khalsa raj [rule]. Out of the 12 Sikh misls, 9 were headed by Jat chiefs. In this struggle, they made tremendous sacrifices. If one generation was wiped out, the next generation took up arms. Finally, they emerged victorious at the end of the century.”

Khushwant Singh (1915–2014) Indian novelist and journalist

On his pro-Jat bias in his historical book.
Khushwant Singh: "Japji Sahib is Based on the Upanishads

Death, Victory

“You don’t have to kill an animal because you want to be hot and fly. It’s not the 16th century anymore. We’ve got central heating for God’s sake. And you can get a fake fur coat. I have one. It’s fabulous.”

Taraji P. Henson (1970) American actress

At a party held at Stella McCartney’s Boutique in New York; quoted in "New York Fashion Week: Tim Gunn, Taraji Henson make the case against animal cruelty" http://www.nola.com/fashion/index.ssf/2011/02/new_york_fashion_week_tim_gunn.html, NOLA.com (10 February 2011).

God, Animals, Flying

“Philosophy is said to have taken the 'linguistic turn' in this century. One hundred years ago, a philosopher would think in terms of mind, spirit, experience, consciousness; now the by-word is language.”

David Wood (1946) British philosopher, born 1946

Source: Philosophy At The Limit (1990), Chapter 2, Metaphysics and Metaphor, p. 26

Thinking

“A prolonged and massive increase in aggregate wealth per capita has taken place over several centuries.”

Robert Gilpin (1930–2018) Political scientist

Source: The Political Economy of International Relations (1987), Chapter Three, Dynamics Of Political Economy, p. 100

Wealth

“I was an Editor-in-Chief of Philosophy of Science during its early years. Now, over a half century later, I have to admit that I was not very clear what the journal was about, except that it tried to reflect on the meaning of science and its relation to other human activities. At this time I am even less sure of its purposes.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

C. West Churchman "Guest editorial: what is philosophy of science" In: Philosophy of Science Vol. 61, No. 1 (Mar., 1994), p. 132-141
1980s and later

Science, Time

“My object in supporting this Motion is, that I may bring to bear upon the legislation of this House those virtues and that talent which have characterised the middle and industrious classes of this country. If you talk of your aristocracy and your traditions, and compel me to talk of the middle and industrious classes, I say it is to them that the glory of this country is owing. You have had your government of aristocracy and tradition; and the worst thing in this country has been its government for the last century and a half. All that has been done to elevate the country has been the work of the middle and industrious classes. Whether in literature, in arts, in science, in commerce, or in enterprise—all has been done by the middle and industrious classes; and it is because I wish to bring their virtue, intelligence, industry, and frugality, to bear upon the proceedings of this House, that I support the Motion of the hon. Member for Montrose.”

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

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1848/jul/06/national-representation-adjourned-debate in the House of Commons (6 July 1848) in favour of a Reform Bill that would have extended the vote to middle class men. 1840s

Art, Intelligence, Literature, Support

“When something dies, it is usually disassembled, digested, and decomposed. Only rarely is anything ever fossilized, and even fewer things are very well-preserved. Because the conditions required for that process are so particular, the fossil record can only represent a tiny fraction of everything that has ever lived. Darwin provided many environmental dynamics explaining why no single quarry could ever provide a continuous record of biological events, and why it would be impossible to find all the fossilized ancestors of every lineage. But despite this, he predicted that future generations, -having the benefit of better understanding- would discover a substantial number of fossil species which he called “intermediate” or “transitional” between what we see alive today and their taxonomic ancestors at successive levels in paleontological history. In fact, in the century-and-a-half since then, we’ve found millions of evolutionary intermediaries in the fossil record, much more than Darwin said he could reasonably hope for. There are three different types of transitional forms and we have ample examples of each. But creationists still insist that we’ve never found a single one, because what they usually ask us to present are impossible parodies which evolution would neither produce nor permit.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"9th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfoje7jVJpU, Youtube (May 8, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Hope, History, Understanding, Success

“I am against this Treaty not because I am a man of war but because I am a man of peace. I am against this Treaty because it will not end the centuries of conflict between the two nations of Great Britain and Ireland.”

Éamon de Valera (1882–1975) 3rd President of Ireland

(18 December 1921).
I'm Glad You Asked Me That (2007)

War, Peace

“As an industrialist, I am free to apply the technical methods of former centuries; but by doing so, I should invite certain ruin.”

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) French sociologist (1858-1917)

Source: Rules of Sociological Method, 1895, p. 3

“... I have excluded the idea of the Fall of Man... man has made a long climb from the status of the animal until the time when he could recognize right from wrong. That recognition, at first, was based on behavior that paid, that avoided the retribution of the tribe and the gods, and that enabled the primitive society to function. Yet, however lowly in origin—and I am referring to a period centuries before right seemed to be worth following simply because it was right, or because man’s dignity and status were sustained by doing right; centuries before right was conceived as pleasing to God because he was holy and righteous—that earliest recognition of a difference between right and wrong was an immense advance, even though wrong was chosen.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.236-237 [ellipsis added]

God, Behavior, Idea, Time

“The story of the brain's separation from the body begin with Rene Descartes. The most influential philosopher of the seventeenth century, Descartes divided being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a mortal carcass. The soul was the source of reason, science, and everything nice. Our flesh, on the other hand, was "clock-like," just a machine that bleeds. With this schism, Descartes condemned the body to a life of subservience, a power plant for the brain's light bulbs.”

Jonah Lehrer book Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Source: Proust Was a Neuroscientist (2007), Chapter 1, page 3.

Life, Soul, Light, Science

“Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. challenged the underlying premise of prevailing Civil War scholarship. The South, he pointed out, had shown no evidence of a willingness to end slavery; indeed, over time it had become ever more hysterical in its defense. With one eye firmly on the recent past, Schlesinger insisted that a society closed in support of evil could not be appeased, and if it was worth a war to destroy Nazism, surely it was worth one to eradicate slavery. But not until the 1960s, under the impact of the civil rights revolution, did historians en masse repudiate a half-century of Civil War scholarship, concluding that the war resulted from an irreconcilable conflict between two fundamentally different societies, one resting on slavery, the other on free labor. Historians pushed Emancipation to the center of their account of the Civil War, and it has remained there ever since.”

Eric Foner (1943) American historian

"The Civil War in 'Postracial' America" https://web.archive.org/web/20111001073757/http://ericfoner.com/articles/101011nation.html (10 October 2011), The Nation 2010s

War, Support, Evil, Time

“Reconstruction aspired to restore the foundations of freedom to a wayward South and it expected to triumph as effortlessly as 19th-century liberal notions of progress had promised. Instead, the same Romantic feudalism that had created the old Southern order reasserted its hegemony, and postwar Southern aristocrats appealed to a set of cultural and racial biases which safely defused the importance of property, and sharply restricted access to it. This might have been averted had the victorious Union been willing to pour the resources into Reconstruction it had devoted to winning the war. But Reconstruction became a symbol of how quickly political fatigue afflicts liberal democracies. Moreover, understanding Reconstruction as a bourgeois revolution which was strangled in its cradle by vengeful cotton nabobs offers some larger parallels to the optimistic era that prevailed between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Islamic state terrorism.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Defending Reconstruction (2017)

War, Democracy, Understanding, Freedom

“When a twelfth-century youth fell in love he did not take three paces backward, gaze into her eyes, and tell her she was too beautiful to live. He said he would step outside and see about it. And if, when he got out, he met a man and broke his head—the other man's head, I mean—then that proved that his—the first fellow's—girl was a pretty girl. But if the other fellow broke his head—not his own, you know, but the other fellow's—the other fellow to the second fellow, that is, because of course the other fellow would only be the other fellow to him, not the first fellow who—well, if he broke his head, then his girl—not the other fellow's, but the fellow who was the—Look here, if A broke B's head, then A's girl was a pretty girl; but if B broke A's head, then A's girl wasn't a pretty girl, but B's girl was. That was their method of conducting art criticism.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Love, Youth, Beauty, Art

“By the sixth century A. D., …a distinctively Chinese Buddhist art had arisen, in which figures with Chinese dress and Chinese faces nonetheless continued to conform to Indian conventions of gesture and ornament.”

William H. McNeill book The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community

The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963)

Art

“The first thing you’ve got to do is study and understand what we’re up against. You must realize that this is not a religion that you’re fighting against. You’re fighting against a theo-political belief system and construct. You’re fighting against something that’s been doing this thing since 622 AD - 7th century - 1,388 years. You want to dig up Charles Martel and ask him why he was fighting the Muslim army at the Battle of Tours in 732? You want to ask the Venetian fleet at LePonto why they were fighting a Muslim fleet in 1571? You want to ask the Christian – I mean the Germanic and Austrian – knights why they were fighting at the gates of Vienna in 1683? You want to ask people what happened at Constantinople and why today it’s called Istanbul? Because they lost that fight in 1453. You need to get into the Qur'an, you need to understand their precepts, you need to read the Sunnah, you need to read the Hadith and then you can really understand this is not a perversion: They are doing exactly what this book says. I want to close by saying this, and I think we’ve said this all through this morning so far: Until we get principled leadership in the United States that is willing to say that, we will continue to chase our tail, because we will never clearly define who this enemy is and then understand their goals and objectives - which is on any jihadist website - and then come up with the right and proper goals and objectives to not only secure our republic, but to secure western civilization.”

Allen West (politician) (1961) American politician; retired United States Army officer

Response to question: Why would [Islamist terrorists] warp a religion to justify attacking the United States. [Hudson Institute, Reclaim American Liberty Conference, January 13, 2010, http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=hudson_upcoming_events&id=741, March 22, 2011]
2010s

People, Books, Religion, Understanding

“I like Houston. It's the last great 19th-century city. Houston has a spirit about it that is truly American, an optimism. People there aren't afraid to try something new.”

Philip Johnson (1906–2005) American architect

Financial Times, June 3, 1989

People, Optimism

“Our governance is by a gerontocracy. This cataract of history can only be removed by youth. In this common man's century, only the common man can change the profile of this country.”

Baba Amte (1914–2008) Indian freedom fighter, social worker

On Governance
Baba Amte's Words of Wisdom

Youth, History, Change, Country

“We are not imitating Hitler and Mussolini. They are imitating us. They have just discovered what we knew for centuries: that a corporate, collectivist system pays.”

Toshio Shiratori (1887–1949) Japanese politician

Quoted in "The American Mercury" - Page 157 - edited by Henry Louis Mencken - 1942.

“The century has started with
the crime of the century.”

Anatoly Kudryavitsky (1954) a Russian/Irish novelist, poet, literary translator and magazine editor

Poems, Shadow of Time (2005)

“This country, having remained inviolate from invasion and plunder for so many centuries, is a rich storehouse of historical, literary, and legal records.”

Hugh Macmillan, Baron Macmillan (1873–1952) British judge

Source: A Man of Law's Tale (1952), In London, p. 297

Country

“The division of labour is not of recent origin, but it was only at the end of the eighteenth century that social cognizance was taken of the principle. though, until then, unwitting submission had been rendered to it. To be sure, several thinkers from earliest times saw its importance; but Adam Smith was the first to attempt a theory of it. Moreover, he adopted this phrase that social science later lent to biology.”

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) French sociologist (1858-1917)

Source: The Division of Labor in Society (1893), p. 39; Lead paragraph

Science, Time

“Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45°, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered throughout the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose? Or was it only the mirror world that counted; only a promise of a kind that the inward bow of a nose-bridge or a promontory of extra cartilage at the chin meant a reversal of ill fortune such that the world of the altered would thenceforth run on mirror-time; work and love by mirror-light and be only, till death stopped the heart's ticking (metronome's music) quietly as light ceases to vibrate, an imp's dance under the century's own chandeliers….”

Thomas Pynchon book V.

Source: V. (1963), Chapter Two, Part I

Love, Death, World, Music

“In the 14th Century an anonymous English mystic wrote a book called The Cloud of Unknowing, the main theme of which is that God cannot be apprehended by man's intellect and that only love can pierce the "cloud of unknowing" which lies between Him and us. I feel that in my own life anything I have done of possible worth has happened in spite of my gross, worldly self. I have been no more than the vessel used to convey ideas above my intellectual capacities. When people praise passages I have written, more often than not I can genuinely say, 'Did I write that?' I don't think this is due to my having a bad memory, because I have almost total recall of trivialities. I see it as evidence of the part the supernatural plays in lives which would otherwise remain earthbound.”

Patrick White (1912–1990) English-born Australian writer

Australians in a Nuclear War (1983)

Love, Life, God, People

“The world's present industrial civilization is handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping, and incompatible intellectual systems: the accumulated knowledge of the last four centuries of the properties and interrelationships of matter and energy; and the associated monetary culture which has evolved from folkways of prehistoric origin.The first of these two systems has been responsible for the spectacular rise, principally during the last two centuries, of the present industrial system and is essential for its continuance. The second, an inheritance from the prescientific past, operates by rules of its own having little in common with those of the matter-energy system. Nevertheless, the monetary system, by means of a loose coupling, exercises a general control over the matter-energy system upon which it is superimposed.Despite their inherent incompatibilities, these two systems during the last two centuries have had one fundamental characteristic in common, namely exponential growth, which has made a reasonably stable coexistence possible. But, for various reasons, it is impossible for the matter-energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doublings, and this phase is by now almost over. The monetary system has no such constraints, and according to one of its most fundamental rules, it must continue to grow by compound interest.”

M. King Hubbert (1903–1989) American geoscientist

"Two Intellectual Systems: Matter-energy and the Monetary Culture." Summary, by M. King Hubbert, of a seminar he taught at MIT Energy Laboratory, 30 September 1981, recovered from http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/monetary.htm

World, Exercises, Knowledge, Universe

“The issue [Israeli-Palestinian conflict], already lasting more than half a century, has brought deep suffering to the Palestinian people and remains an important reason of extended turbulence in the Middle East region.”

Xi Jinping (1953) General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and paramount leader of China

As quoted in "China rebukes Israel ahead of Netanyahu visit" http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/07/world/asia/china-israel-talks/index.html?hpt=hp_t2 in cnn.com (7 May 2013). 2010s

People, Suffering

“The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter II, Section III, p. 19

War, Wealth

“In the 20th Century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas. ("The Circles of Perdition," December 8, 1947)”

Whittaker Chambers (1901–1961) Defected Communist spy

TIME magazine (1939-1948)

Idea

“A young man who had been troubling society with impalpable doctrines of a new civilization which he called "the Kingdom of Heaven" had been put out of the way; and I can imagine that believer in material power murmuring as he went homeward, "it will all blow over now." Yes. The wind from the Kingdom of Heaven has blown over the world, and shall blow for centuries yet.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Economics of Ireland and the Policy of the British Government (1921)

World, Way, Imagination

“Look what happened in Tower Hamlets, in the heart of our capital city. We had political corruption on an epic scale: with voters intimidated and a court adjudicating on accusations of ‘undue spiritual influence’ for the first time since the 19th century. As the judge said: those in authority were too afraid to ‘confront wrongdoing for fear of allegations of racism’. Well this has got to stop.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

2010s, 2015, Speech on (20 July 2015)

Fear, Time, Heart

“What, then, is to be done? We have to begin with the state: as the incarnation of collective interests, collective purposes, and collective goods. If we cannot learn to “think the state” once again, we shall not get very far. But what precisely should the state do? Minimally, it should not duplicate unnecessarily: as Keynes wrote, “The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.” And we know from the bitter experience of the past century that there are some things that states should most certainly not be doing.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

" What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy? http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/12/17/what-is-living-and-what-is-dead-in-social-democrac/" (2009)

Thinking, Learning, Past

“After more than a quarter-century as a professional economist, I have a confession to make: There is a lot I don’t know about the economy. Indeed, the area of economics where I have devoted most of my energy and attention — the ups and downs of the business cycle — is where I find myself most often confronting important questions without obvious answers.”

N. Gregory Mankiw (1958) American economist

If You Have the Answers, Tell Me http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/business/economy/08view.html?_r=1&, The New York Times, May 7, 2011. 2000s -

Question, Business

“As a graduate student at Yale, I studied the whole of Christian theology but focused my attention on the Darwinian controversies. I wanted to get to the root of the conflict between Darwinian evolution and Christian doctrine. In the course of my research I learned (to my surprise) that biblical chronology played almost no role in the 19th- century controversies, since most theologians had already accepted geological evidence for the age of the earth and re-interpreted the days in Genesis as long periods of time. Instead, the central issue was design. God created the cosmos with a plan in mind. This affirmation is among the most basic in all of Christianity (and other theistic religions as well, including Unificationism). And that plan included human beings as the final outcome of the creative process: we are created in the image of God.”

Jonathan Wells (1942) American intelligent design advocate

Darwinism: Why I Went for a Second Ph.D http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Talks/Wells/DARWIN.htm

God, Age, Religion, Study

“…If you see that I am wrong, advise me and put me on the right track, and obey me as long as I obey God in you… God gave your mujahedeen brothers victory after long years of jihad and patience… so they declared the caliphate and placed the caliph in charge. This is a duty on Muslims that has been lost for centuries…”

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (1971–2019) leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

As quoted in "Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi addresses Muslims in Mosul", The Telegraph (5 July 2014)
2014
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10948480/Islamic-State-leader-Abu-Bakr-al-Baghdadi-addresses-Muslims-in-Mosul.html

God, Victory, Patience

“Indigenous converts added to the numerical strength of foreign Muslims. How quickly their numbers swelled may be inferred from the fact that when, early in the fourteenth century, Malik Kafur marched into Maabar (Malabar), about 20,000 Musalmans who had settled in South India for long and were fighting on the side of the Hindus, deserted to the imperialists and were spared.”

K. S. Lal book Indian Muslims: Who Are They

Indian Muslims: Who Are They (1990)

Fight

“Scientific fundamentalists claim that science is the disinterested pursuit of truth. But representing science in this way is to disregard the human needs science serves. Among us, science serves two needs: for hope and censorship. Today, only science supports the myth of progress. If people cling to the hope of progress, it is not so much from genuine belief as from fear of what may come if they give it up. The political projects of the twentieth century have failed, or achieved much less than they promised. At the same time, progress in science is a daily experience, confirmed whenever we buy a new electronic gadget, or take a new drug. Science gives us a sense of progress that ethical and political life cannot.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Against fundamentalism ― Religious and Scientific (p. 18-9)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Life, People, Truth, Fear

“Today, like the elusive planet Vulcan in the nineteenth century, dark matter is accepted by the majority of astronomers and physicists as actually existing. Dark matter, although it has never been seen, is part of the generally accepted standard model of physics and cosmology, which also includes the big bang beginning of the universe.”

John Moffat book Reinventing Gravity

Source: Reinventing Gravity (2008), Chapter 4, Dark Matter, p. 69

Universe, Parting

“Of the many references to Newton in 18th-century electrical writings only a small number were to the Principia, the greater part by far were to the Opticks. This was true not alone of the electrical writings but also in other fields of experimental enquiry…. [The Opticks] would allow the reader to roam, with great Newton as his guide, through the major unresolved problems of science and even the relation of the whole world of nature to Him who had created it…. in the Opticks Newton did not adopt the motto… —Hypotheses non fingo; I frame no hypotheses—but, so to speak, let himself go, allowing his imagination full reign and by far exceeding the bounds of experimental evidence.”

I. Bernard Cohen (1914–2003) American historian of science

I. Bernard Cohen, Preface to Opticks by Sir Isaac Newton (1952)

World, Imagination, Nature, Problem

“I'm reading George Borrow's Lavengro… and, of course, it fits perfectly into the pattern of my current reading! - Fallada and Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives Tale, i. e. my constant musings on the nineteenth century. I was amazed to learn from Bennett's book that in Papa's childhood you could watch an execution, which was a public entertainment, a real show, with high prices paid for windows with a good view, and the local hotels doing a roaring trade.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57.

Books, Learning, Reading, Childhood

“Industrial age companies created sharp distinctions between two groups of employees. The intellectual elite—managers and engineers—used their analytical skills to design products and processes, select and manage customers, and supervise day-to-day operations. The second group was composed of the people who actually produced the products and delivered the services. This direct labor work force was a principal factor of production for industrial age companies, but used only their physical capabilities, not their minds. They performed tasks and processes under direct supervision of white-collar engineers and managers. At the end of the twentieth century, automation and productivity have reduced the percentage of people in the organization who perform traditional work functions, while competitive demands have increased the number of people performing analytic functions: engineering, marketing, management, and administration. Even individuals still involved in direct production and service delivery are valued for their suggestions on how to improve quality, reduce costs, and decrease cycle times…
Now all employees must contribute value by what they know and by the information they can provide. Investing in, managing, and exploiting the knowledge of every employee have become critical to the success of information age companies”

Robert S. Kaplan (1940) American accounting academic

Source: The Balanced Scorecard, 1996, p. 5-6

People, Age, Knowledge, Time

“I think many non-Jews don't realise the tremendous emotional heat that is involved here in the second half of the twentieth century. A heat that derives from the Holocaust. That is to say the destruction, the mass murder of the Jews in Eastern Europe where most of the Jews were. That both the Israelis and the Jews of the United States are the bereaved children of that population who were murdered. And the bond between the Jews of the United States and the people of Israel has the emotional intensity derived from that common bereavement. And that is what gives. I do understand that people resent the power of the pro-Israel lobby in this country [the US], but that power derives from that elemental basic bond of the common bereavement and the horror that is there in the background. Therefore, Jews in the United States do react strongly – and that's what makes this a very powerful lobby, and it is – they do react strongly to anything that seems to them to threaten the connection of the United States in Israel, which is Israel's lifeline. They see this as threatening. This may be an exaggerated fear, but always there is the shadow there of a possible new Holocaust. Israel overrun. The people of Israel massacred again.”

Conor Cruise O'Brien (1917–2008) Irish politician

C-SPAN (March 26 1986).

Children, People, Fear, Understanding

“Perhaps not only in his attitude towards truth, but in his attitude towards himself, Montaigne was a precursor. Perhaps here again he was ahead of his own time, ahead of our time also, since none of us would have the courage to imitate him. It may be that some future century will vindicate this unseemly performance; in the meanwhile it will be of interest to examine the reasons which he gives us for it. He says, in the first place, that he found this study of himself, this registering of his moods and imaginations, extremely amusing; it was an exploration of an unknown region, full of the queerest chimeras and monsters, a new art of discovery, in which he had become by practice “the cunningest man alive.” It was profitable also, for most people enjoy their pleasures without knowing it; they glide over them, and fix and feed their minds on the miseries of life. But to observe and record one’s pleasant experiences and imaginations, to associate one’s mind with them, not to let them dully and unfeelingly escape us, was to make them not only more delightful but more lasting. As life grows shorter we should endeavour, he says, to make it deeper and more full. But he found moral profit also in this self-study; for how, he asked, can we correct our vices if we do not know them, how cure the diseases of our soul if we never observe their symptoms? The man who has not learned to know himself is not the master, but the slave of life: he is the “explorer without knowledge, the magistrate without jurisdiction, and when all is done, the fool of the play.””

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

“Montaigne,” p. 6
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

Life, People, Pleasure, Truth

“Probably in most education systems in a sense we are stuck with the disciplines as we created them last, last century and before that.”

Horst Ludwig Störmer (1949) German physicist

Small Wonders – The World of Nanoscience. Honeywell-Nobel Laureate Lecture Series at Czech Technical University, Prague (October 19, 2006), http://www.honeywellscience.com/nobel-laureates/physics/horst-stormer

Education, Sense

“I think that if I’m still here in ten thousand years, I’m going to be crazy as hell. Ten thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art was a goat. You really think you’re going to be anything recognizably human in a hundred centuries?”

Cory Doctorow book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)

Art, Hell, Thinking

“The strides of humanity are slow, they can only be counted in centuries.”

Georg Büchner Danton's Death

Act II.
Dantons Tod (Danton's Death) (1835)

“The unnaturalness of mathematical symbolism is attested to by history. The algebra of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Hindus, and the Arabs was what is commonly called rhetorical algebra. …on the whole they used ordinary rhetoric to describe their mathematical work. Symbolism is a relatively modern invention of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries…”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematics and the Physical World (1959), p. 59

History, Mathematics

“[O]ne reason there is no socialism in America is because of Lincoln. In the American context Lincoln imparted to liberal democracy a sense of nobility and purpose that it has not always had in other contexts. He makes democracy something transcendent, and especially at Gettysburg where he talks about the nation having this new birth of freedom. He ratchets the horizons of liberal democracy right up past the spires of Cologne Cathedral and he makes it this glowing attractive ideal that people are willing to make these tremendous sacrifices to protect. Because at the end of the day this is what the Civil War is about—it’s about the preservation of liberal democracy. In the 1860s the United States was the last Enlightenment experiment that was still standing. What you had in the climate of mid-19th century Europe was the renaissance of romantic aristocracy.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

War, People, Democracy, Birth

“But there was sufficient spirit of toleration and candor amongst the Italian ecclesiastics to allow the subject to be canvassed with much freedom They entered warmly themselves into the controversy often favoring different sides of the question and however much we may deplore the loss of time and labor devoted to the defense of untenable positions it must be conceded that they displayed far less polemic bitterness than certain writers who followed them beyond the Alps two centuries and a half later”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.3, p. 28
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Question, Freedom, Loss, Time

“These dangers inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism, dangers which have to-day produced their full harvest of human waste, of inequality and inefficiency, were fully recognized in the last century at the moment when such ideas were first put into practice.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

The Pivot of Civilization, 1922

Idea

“The one reason that I could not ignore, the one reason that grew deep inside me till it consumed me with guilt, was the realisation that I was abusing my faith for a mere political project. After learning in prison that Islamism was not the religion of Islam, but rather a political ideology dressed up as Islam, I no longer felt guilty simply for criticising a political system inspired by modern European constructs, while justified by seventh-century norms.”

Maajid Nawaz book Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism

Source: Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism (2012), p. 210

Faith, Religion, Learning

“The ‘spirituality’ of this art, in which scholars have tried to find all the essentials of the later medieval conceptions of art, is in reality only the same indefinite sort of spirituality which inspired the last centuries of paganism.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

The Social History of Art, Volume I. From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, 1999, Chapter IV. The Middle Ages

Art, Reality

“The Athenian empire lasted for fifty years at the most, and the stupendous creation of Alexander the Great for less. What has been the fate of succeeding imperialisms? That of Spain endured on the grand scale for little more than a century; that of Napoleon for a decade; the British Empire is less than two centuries old, and in its present form is a thing of yesterday. In the brief span of recorded history empires have had a shorter life than many monarchies, theocracies, and even republics. The Augustan alone reached a venerable age. In the coming of Christianity it had to face the greatest of all historic convulsions, but such was its potency that it weathered the storm and influenced profoundly the organization of the Christian church.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Augustus (1937)

Life, Fate, Age, History

“Every single living human being who encountered the first ray of light of this new century will pass away this century”

He Xuntian (1953) Chinese musician

Passing By the Earth (1999)

Light

“One sharp stern struggle and the slaves of centuries are free.”

Gerald Massey (1828–1907) British poet

The Patriot, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Public administration as an American profession originated in the early twentieth century with urban reformers advocating the application of scientific and business practices to rehabilitate corrupt city governments. That approach transformed governance in the United States but also guaranteed recurrent debate over the proper role of public administrators, who must balance the often contradictory demands of efficiency and politically defined notions of the public good. Currently the business approach holds sway. Legitimated by Al Gore's National Performance Review, the New Public Management movement promotes entrepreneurs over civil servants, performance over process, decentralization over centralization, and flexibility over rules. John Rohr demurs, arguing that the movement goes too far in downplaying the distinctively American challenges arising from the separated powers principle. Consequently, the NPM alienates public management from its natural home -- a nation-state established within a constitutional order.”

John Rohr (1934–2011) American political scientist

Abstract
Civil servants and their constitutions, 2002

Home, Business, Nature

“I know please, that Hungarian masses, Hungarian peasantry, Hungarian tradesmen and Hungarian vendors suffered from Jewish frauds for decades and centuries similarly as Slovaks were. Therefore, I am repeatedly delighted to welcome that Jews will be classified separately. […] We Hungarians stand on national and Christian position and we are so far from Jewish ideology as Slovaks.”

János Esterházy (1901–1957) Czechoslovak member of Czechoslovak national parliament, russian nation politician and hungary nation polit…

About incoming census in time when pro-Nazi government accelerated anti-Jewish measures. Parliamentary speech on October 8, 1940. Persecution of Jews Source: Meeting of The Slovak Assembly, October 8, 1940. The Joint Czech and Slovak Digital Parliament Library. http://www.nrsr.sk/dl/Browser/Document?documentId=178748

Fraud, Suffering