Quotes about century (3044 quotes, page 19)

“Even a very general knowledge of Indian history already shows that any instances of Hindu persecution of Buddhism could never have been more than marginal. After fully seventeen centuries of Buddhism's existence, from the 6 th century BC to the late 12 th century AD, most of it under the rule of Hindu kings, we find Buddhist establishments flourishing all over India. Under king Pushyamitra Shunga, often falsely labelled as a persecutor of Buddhism, important Buddhist centres such as the Sanchi stupa were built. As late as the early 12 th century, the Buddhist monastery Dharmachakrajina Vihara at Sarnath was built under the patronage of queen Kumaradevi, wife of Govindachandra, the Hindu king of Kanauj in whose reign the contentious Rama temple in Ayodhya was built. This may be contrasted with the ruined state of Buddhism in countries like Afghanistan or Uzbekistan after one thousand or even one hundred years of Muslim rule. Indeed, the Muslim chroniclers themselves have described in gleeful detail how they destroyed Buddhism root and branch in the entire Gangetic plain in just a few years after Mohammed Ghori's victory in the second battle of Tarain in 1192. The famous university of Nalanda with its fabulous library burned for weeks. Its inmates were put to the sword except for those who managed to flee. The latter spread the word to other Indian regions where Buddhist monks packed up and left in anticipation of further Muslim conquests. It is apparent that this way, some abandoned Buddhist establishments were taken over by Hindus; but that is an entirely different matter from the forcible occupation or destruction of Buddhist institutions by the foreign invaders.”

Pushyamitra Shunga King of Sunga Dynasty

Koenraad Elst: Religious Cleansing of Hindus, 2004, Agni conference in The Hague, and in: K. Elst The Problem with Secularism, 2007

Way , History , Knowledge , Universe

“In fact, their contempt for the native converts was deeper than that for their Hindu subjects. They had all along looked down upon the native converts as Ajlãf (low-born) and Arzãl (base-born) as compared to the Ashrãf (exalted) which distinctive designation they had reserved for themselves….. It was at this critical juncture that the frustrated fraternity of foreign Muslims took a very strategic step. They started swearing by a solidarity with the native Muslims whom they had despised so far. They let loose on the native Muslims an army of mercenary Mullahs recruited, mostly from their own ranks. These Mullahs went about broadcasting the message that ‘Islam was in danger’, and that ‘Hindus were out to enslave and exploit the Muslim minority’. It was in this manner that the residues of Islamic imperialism managed to ‘merge’ themselves with the native converts, and to present themselves at the head of a strong phalanx pitted against whatever historical forces threatened their unjust privileges. Hitherto, the haughty Ashrãf had stood strictly aloof from the abject Ajlãf and the despised Arzãl. Now all of a sudden the latter became the former’s ‘brothers in faith’. This was a tremendous transformation of the political scene in the second decade of the 20th century. … The British never attached more than a nuisance value to this noisy fraternity which had to be befriended or ignored according to the needs of British policy at any time. It was the national leadership which was impressed by this mobilisation of the ‘Muslim masses’ and the pathos of ‘Muslim plight’. They accepted not only separate electorates but also weightages for the ‘Muslim minority’ in many provinces.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Muslim Separatism – Causes and Consequences (1987)

Faith , Strong , Time

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

Bernard Harcourt (1963) American academic

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

Nature , Clothes

“To a degree which is difficult to determine, the esoteric impulse in twentieth-century music, literature and the arts reflects calculation. It looks to the flattery of academic and hermeneutic notice. Reciprocally, the academy turns towards that which appears to require its exegetic, cryptographic skills.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 6 (p. 38).

Art , Music , Literature , Appearance

“Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.</i”

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

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 11

Art , Nature

“The social conditions of the British people in the early years of the twentieth century cannot be contemplated without deep anxiety. … We are at the cross-ways. If we stand on the old happy-go-lucky way, the richer classes ever growing in wealth and in number, and ever declining in responsibility, the very poor remaining plunged or plunging even deeper into helpless, hopeless misery, then I think there is nothing before us but savage strife between class and class, with an increasing disorganization, with an increasing destruction of human strength and human virtue—nothing, in fact, but that dual degeneration which comes from the simultaneous waste of extreme wealth and of extreme want.”

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

The People's Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 138-139
Early career years (1898–1929)

People , Way , Thinking , Wealth

“Meanwhile, among all its countless other effects upon human culture, Starglider had brought to its climax a process that was already well under way. It had put an end to the billions of the words of pious gibberish with which apparently intelligent men had addled their minds for centuries.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The Fountains of Paradise

Source: The Fountains of Paradise (1979), Chapter 16 “Conversations with Starglider” (p. 96)

Men , Way , Intelligence

“The classical argument for why a supposedly decent and moral creature like Homo sapiens can mistreat and even extirpate other species rests upon an extreme position in a continuum. The Cartesian tradition, formulated explicitly in the seventeenth century, but developed in "folk" and other versions throughout human history no doubt, holds that other animals are little more than unfeeling machines, with only humans enjoying "consciousness," however defined.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?" pp. 389
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

History , Animals

“Now a willpower that I have polished with an artist's delight will sustain some shaky legs and some weary lungs. I will do it. Give a thought once in awhile to this little soldier of fortune of the twentieth century.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Last Letter to his Parents (1965)

“Séances date back to the 1800s after three sisters by the name of Fox claimed to be able to contact the dead. They toured America with their demonstrations and attracted the rich and famous and by the end of the century séances had taken off all over the western world. Spirits were manifested, tambourines flew, ectoplasm impossibly erupted from entranced mediums. Then, after forty years of this, rather embarrassed by what they’d started, one of the sisters, Margaret Fox, confessed that they were frauds. The miracles which had started it all off had been a scam. But her confession made very little difference and spiritualism continues to appeal to many people today.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Derren Brown: Séance (2004)

People , World , Fraud , Sister

“This shifted the centre of a truly Hellenic civilization to the east, to the Aegean, the Ionian littoral of Asia Minor and to Constantinople. It also meant that modem Greeks could hardly count as being of ancient Greek descent, even if this could never be ruled out.’ There is a sense in which the preceding discussion is both relevant to a sense of Greek identity, now and earlier, and irrelevant. It is relevant in so far as Greeks, now and earlier, felt that their ‘Greekness’ was a product of their descent from the ancient Greeks (or Byzantine Greeks), and that such filiations made them feel themselves to be members of one great ‘super-family’ of Greeks, shared sentiments of continuity and membership being essential to a lively sense of identity. It is irrelevant in that ethnies arc constituted, not by lines of physical descent, but by the sense of continuity, shared memory and collective destiny, i. e. by lines of cultural affinity embodied in distinctive myths, memories, symbols and values retained by a given cultural unit of population. In that sense much has been retained, and revived, from the extant heritage of ancient Greece. For, even at the time of Slavic migrations, in Ionia and especially in Constantinople, there was a growing emphasis on the Greek language, on Greek philosophy and literature, and on classical models of thought and scholarship. Such a ‘Greek revival’ was to surface again in the tenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as subsequently, providing a powerful impetus to the sense of cultural affinity with ancient Greece and its classical heritage.”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: National Identity (1991), p. 29: About Ethnic Change, Dissolution and Survival

Family , Feeling , Literature , Sense

“Fellow citizens. For eight years, it has been my honor to serve as your President. The first decade of this new century has been a period of consequence. A time set apart. Tonight, with a thankful heart, I have asked for a final opportunity to share some thoughts on the journey we have traveled together and the future of our nation.”

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

2000s, 2009, Farewell speech to the nation (January 2009)

Travel , Time , Future , Heart

“Mexico is a nineteenth-century country arranged for gaslight. Once brought into the harsh light of the twentieth-century media, Mexico can only seem false. In its male, in its public, its city aspect, Mexico is an arch-tranvestite, a tragic buffoon. Dogs bark and babies cry when Mother Mexico walks abroad in the light of day. The policeman, the Marxist mayor — Mother Mexico doesn't even bother to shave her mustachios. Swords and rifles and spurs and bags of money chink and clatter beneath her skirts. A chain of martyred priests dangles from her waist, for she is an austere, pious lady. Ay, how much — clutching her jangling bosoms; spilling cigars — how much she has suffered.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

"Night and Day" in Frontiers (1990)

Money , Dogs , Light , Suffering

“Day was breaking on the world. Light, hope, and freedom pierced with vitalizing ray the clouds and the miasma that hung so thick over the prostrate Middle Age, once noble and mighty, now a foul image of decay and death. Kindled with new life, the nations gave birth to a progeny of heroes, and the stormy glories of the sixteenth century rose on awakened Europe. But Spain was the citadel of darkness,—a monastic cell, an inquisitorial dungeon, where no ray could pierce. She was the bulwark of the Church, against whose adamantine wall the waves of innovation beat in vain.”

Francis Parkman (1823–1893) American historian

Pt. I, Ch. 7
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)

Life , Death , Age , World

“Wit lasts no more than two centuries.”

Stendhal (1783–1842) French writer

Le même esprit ne dure que deux cents ans.
Letter to Honoré de Balzac (30 October 1840)

“There is in the rules or definitions (sutras) of Panini a remarkably subtle and penetrating account of Sanskrit grammar. The construction of sentences, compound nouns, and the like is explained through ordered rules operating on underlying structures in a manner strikingly similar in part to modes of modern theory. As might be imagined, this perceptive Indian grammatical work held great fascination for 20th-century theoretical linguists. A study of Indian logic in relation to Paninian grammar alongside AristotleAristotelian]] and Western logic in relation to Greek grammar and its successors could bring illuminating insights.”

Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian

Pavle Ivić in: "Linguistics".

Imagination , Study , Parting

“It is a fact worth pondering that four centuries ago the evil of "an abundance or surplus" arose from its being kept off the market, while today the evil of surplus lies in its being thrown upon the market.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Part I, Chapter II, Government and Surplus Stocks, p. 28
Storage and Stability (1937)

Evil

“Even in a time of ferment and necessary social change—especially in such time—the most important thing about the legal profession is that we inherit the tradition of seven or eight centuries of continuous concern for the institutions and aspirations—for the processes, ideals and sense of right and justice—that make for a free and civilized society. It is not the age of the profession that matters… What matters most is that through the centuries the men of law have been persistently concerned with the resolution of disputes… in ways that enable society to achieve its goals with a minimum of force and a maximum of reason. Our own era has urgent need for lawyers not to resist change but to channel the vital forces at work in the community along the lines of justice and reason, on a scale and at a pace heretofore unprecedented. Only thus can we fulfil our ancient heritage.”

Archibald Cox (1912–2004) American prosecutor

"Lawyers and Social Ferment", 16 Harvard Law Journal (1962), p. 152.

Men , Age , Justice , Law

“It is quite clear that if by sudden attack by an Enemy landed in strength our Dock-yards were to be destroyed our Maritime Power would for more than half a century be paralysed, and our Colonies, our commerce, and the Subsistence of a large Part of our Population would be at the Mercy of our Enemy, who would be sure to shew us no Mercy—we should be reduced to the Rank of a third Rate Power if no worse happened to us. That such a Landing is in the present State of Things possible must be manifest. No Naval Force of ours can effectually prevent it. … One night is enough for the Passage to our Coast, and Twenty Thousand men might be landed at any Point before our Fleet knew that the Enemy was out of Harbour. There could be no security against the simultaneous Landing of 20,000 for Portsmouth 20,000 for Plymouth and 20,000 for Ireland our Troops would necessarily be scattered about the United Kingdom, and with Portsmouth and Plymouth as they now are those Two dock yards and all they contain would be entered and burnt before Twenty Thousand Men could be brought together to defend either of them. … if these defensive works are necessary, it is manifest that they ought to be made with the least possible delay; to spread their Completion over 20 or 30 years would be Folly unless we could come to an agreement with a chivalrous Antagonist, not to molest us till we could inform him we were quite ready to repel his attack—we are told that these works might, if money were forthcoming be finished possibly in three at latest in four years. Long enough this to be kept in a State of imperfect Defence.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Letter to Gladstone (15 December 1859), quoted in Philip Guedalla (ed.), Gladstone and Palmerston, being the Correspondence of Lord Palmerston with Mr. Gladstone 1851-1865 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1928), pp. 115-117.
1850s

Men , Money , Parting , Night

“In his present volume, Tsenov gives a careful and interesting account of the complicated historical events in the second half of the first century, which preserves its value, even when one would disagree with some of his claims”

Gancho Tsenov (1870–1949) Bulgarian historian

quotations for him
Source: Dr. Victor Lebezelter, „Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft”, Wien, 1936

“The defensiveness of Islam is its crucial feature today. It's what, by the way, is in such contrast to the most interesting period of Islamic history, when Islam was an open, absorbing religion, constantly taking in outside influences, as opposed to its current hedgehog-like posture, prickly to the outside … always looking backward. This is not how it was in the creative moment, in the first four, six, eight centuries of Islam, where it was constantly seeking out and absorbing.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/interviews/makiya.html, PBS Frontline (2002)

Religion , Way , History

“The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.

And even the books that do not last long, penetrate their own times at least, sailing farther than Ulysses even dreamed of, like ships on the seas. It is the author’s part to call into being their cargoes and passengers,—living thoughts and rich bales of study and jeweled ideas. And as for the publishers, it is they who build the fleet, plan the voyage, and sail on, facing wreck, till they find every possible harbor that will value their burden.”

Clarence Day (1874–1935) American writer

The Story of the Yale University Press Told by a Friend (1920), pp. 7–8.

Men , Books , World , Dreams

“The global role of the United States is perhaps the ultimate chapter in that long period of European expansion which had begun in western Europe, and especially on the Atlantic seaboard, during the 15th century. Europe slowly had outgrown its homeland. Its cultural empire eventually formed a long band traversing most of the Northern Hemisphere and dipping far into the Southern. The modern hub of the peoples and ideas of European origin is now New York as much as Paris, or Los Angeles as much as London. In the history of the European peoples the city of Washington is perhaps what Constantinople - the infant city of Emperor Constantine - was to the last phase of the Roman Empire; for it is unlikely that Europeans, a century hence, will continue to stamp the world so decisively with their ideas and inventions.”

Geoffrey Blainey book A Short History of the World

A Short History of the World (2000)

People , World , Angels , History

“We have reached the end of the Roman republic. We have seen it rule for five hundred years in Italy and in the countries on the Mediterranean; we have seen it brought to rum in politics and morals, religion and literature, not through outward violence but through inward decay, and thereby making room for the new monarchy of Caesar. There was in the world, as Caesar found it, much of the noble heritage of past centuries and an infinite abundance of pomp and glory, but little spirit, still less taste, and least of all true delight in life. It was indeed an old world; and even the richly-gifted patriotism of Caesar [b] could not make it young again. The dawn does not return till after the night has fully set in and run its course. But yet with him there came to the sorely harassed peoples on the Mediterranean a tolerable evening after the sultry noon; and when at length after a long historical night a new day dawned once more for the peoples, and fresh nations in free self-movement commenced their race towards new and higher goals, there were found among them not a few, in which the seed sown by Caesar had sprung up, and which were and are indebted to him for their national individuality.”

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

/b
Vol. 4, Pt. 2, Translated by W.P. Dickson.
Last paragraph of the last volume
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

Life , People , World , Religion

“And this is the friendship of centuries and centuries of death.
We saw the fare welling hands,
They were sickly.
It was the hand of age,
it was the hand of the millennium.”

Farrokh Tamimi (1934–2003) Iranian poet and translator

Poet, Fare welling Hands

Death , Friendship , Age

“Mexican sculpture, as soon as I found it, seemed to me true and right, perhaps because I at once hit on similarities in it with some eleventh-century carvings I had seen as a boy on Yorkshire churches. Its 'stoniness', by which I mean its truth to material, its tremendous power without loss of sensitiveness, its astonishing variety and fertility of form-invention and its approach to a full three-dimensional conception of form, makes it unsurpassed in my opinion by any other period of stone sculpture.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote of Henri Moore in 'The Listener', 24 April 1941, pp. 598-9; as cited in Henry Moore writings and Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson, University of California Press, California 2002, p. 104
1940 - 1955

Truth , Boy , Loss

“A third story, about a 12th century king Harsha of Kashmir, is apparently true but has nothing to do with religious persecution: he plundered Hindu temples of all sects including Buddhism, in his own kingdom, without bothering to desecrate them or their keepers apart from lucrative plunder. It is the one geunine case of a ruler plundering not out of religious motives but for the gold. There is no known case of a Muslim marauder who merely stole from temples without bothering to explicity desecrate them, much less of a Muslim ruler who plundered the sanctuaries of his own religion. Moreover, Kalhana's history book Rajatarangini relates this story with the comment: "Promoted by the Turks in his employ, he behaved like a Turk." This Harsha employed Turkish mercenaries (which his successors would regret, for they spied and ultimately grabbed power), and these Muslims already had a firm reputation of plundering temples with a good conscience.”

Harsha of Kashmir

Elst, Koenraad Negationism in India: concealing the record of Islam. 1992

Books , Religion , History , Motivation

“And that is all the Pope is saying to another human being. God made you the way you are, and loves you for it, and wants you to be happy as yourself. How much agony and pain has there been across so many centuries because we could not open our hearts to this truth? It is so strange to me how so many nonbelievers can see in this Pope’s interaction with others the spirit of Jesus, and how so many of the most devout seem terrified by it.”

Andrew Sullivan (1963) Journalist, writer, blogger

“God Made You Like That” http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/andrew-sullivan-why-we-should-say-yes-to-drugs.html, New York magazine (25 May, 2018)

Love , God , Pain , Truth

“It was not so long ago that the Bible enjoyed a stranglehold similar to that of the Quran over vast populations in the West. The theocracies propped up by the Bible in Europe and America had enacted similar sagas of slaughter and pillage for several centuries. But a sustained Western scholarship showed up the Bible for what it was. “It would be more consistent,” proclaimed Thomas Pain, “that we call it [the Bible] the work of a demon than the word of God.” The spell of Jehovah was broken…. The rest is history. Christianity is now seeking a refuge in countries like India where its rout in the West remains unknown.”

Sita Ram Goel book The Calcutta Quran Petition

The Calcutta Quran Petition (1986)

God , Pain , History , Country

“We need a philosophy of the individual in society and a political culture that values the social goods that give security, meaning and value to people: home, family, friendships, good work, locality and communities of belonging. These were the concerns of the 19th century debates between social liberals and ethical socialists which created the modern spirit of the left. We need to re-invent a plural and ethical socialism rooted in the ordinary life of the individual producing and relating in society. The central value of this socialism, alongside liberty, is equality.”

Jon Cruddas (1962) British politician

Tribune Magazine, Building the future politics on our toxic present, 15 June 2009 http://www.tribunemagazine.org/2009/06/building-the-future-politics-on-our-toxic-present/

Life , Friendship , People , Family

“I believe any philosophizing about art is absurd and empty. Unfortunately, in the last century a phenomenon has emerged in which the status of “work of art” were granted to many foolish, tacky, and distasteful works as long as they were accompanied by ten or twelve pages of philosophizing justification.”

Guity Novin (1944) artist

Dialogues on enlightenment and reason (2013)

Art

“Religious history also offers another striking parallel between Rome and China. The Buddhist faith began to penetrate the Han empire in the first century A. D., and soon won converts in high places. Its period of official dominance in court circles extended from the third to the ninth centuries A. D. This obviously parallels the successes that came to Christianity in the Roman empire during the same period.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Source: Plagues and Peoples (1976), Ch.3 "Confluence of the Disease Pools of Eurasia: 500 B.C. to A.D. 1200".

Faith , History , Success

“What then is it that, since 2007, has caused Wall Street capitalism's own suicide? At the bottom of this worst financial mess in a century is this: Milton Friedman-Friedrich Hayek libertarian laissez-faire capitalism, permitted to run wild without regulation. This is the root source of today's travails. Both of these men are dead, but their poisoned legacies live on.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

Farewell to Friedman-Hayek Libertarian Capitalism (2008)
New millennium

Men , Suicide , Dead

“Human civilization as we know it will end, sometime in the 21st century.”

David Goodstein (1939) American physicist

Public lecture http://www.incubatepictures.com/notomorrow/making.shtml on peak oil and energy, November 2004.

“The diffusion of alchemy westward, like the movement of astrology eastward, became significant only in the centuries after 200 A. D. The conservatism of learning was such that, even when commercial intercourse had made intellectual contacts possible, little serious interchange took place until severe social stress had disturbed the even tenor of the times in China, India, and Europe. Technology was a little, but only a little, less conservative.”

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)

Learning , Time

“For centuries men looked for comfort to their deepest anguish, but all answers seemed small before death. Until someone, it’s unknown who, discovered the truth. And since they saw it served all as an answer to the fears of the first man, they defended it with their blood and with the blood of others, first and then with the lie.”

Jorge Majfud (1969) Uruguayan-American writer

La ciudad de la Luna (2009)

Death , Men , Truth , Lie

“The historical significance of the Proclamation is not so much that it enacted the emancipation of people of African descent; on the contrary, it was a military strategy. But if we examine the meaning of this historical moment we might better be able to grasp the failures as well as the successes of emancipation. I have thought that perhaps we were not asked to reflect on the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation because we might realize that we were never really emancipated. But anyway, at least we may be able to understand the dialectics of emancipation; because we still live the popular myth that Lincoln freed the slaves and that this continues to be perpetuated in popular culture, even by the film Lincoln. Lincoln did not free the slaves. We also live with the myth that the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement freed the. Civil rights, of course, constitute an essential element of the freedom that was demanded at that time, but it was not the whole story.”

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

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

People , Failure , Understanding , Freedom

“After all, what new insights has religion produced in the last century?”

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

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 17

Religion

“Marcel Duchamp, one of this century's pioneers, moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another. There it changed form through a complex interplay of new mental and physical materials, heralding many of the technical, mental and visual details to be found in more recent art... He declared that he wanted to kill art ('for myself') but his persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference altered our thinking, established new units of thought, a "new thought for that object."”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

Jasper John's quote, from: Marcel Duchamps 1887 – 1968, in 'Artforum' 7 no. 3, November 1968, p. 6
1960s

Art , Thinking , Change

“There were times when Robert actually envied his ancestors, who had lived in dark ignorance, before the twenty-first century, and seemed to have spent most of their time making up weird, ornate explanations of the world to fill the yawning gap of their ignorance. Back then, one could believe in anything at all.
Simple, deliciously elegant explanations of human behavior—it apparently never mattered whether they were true or not, as long as they were incanted right. "Party lines" and wonderful conspiracy theories abounded. You could even believe in your own sainthood if you wanted. Nobody was there to show you, with clear experimental proof, that there was no easy answer, no magic bullet, no philosopher's stone. Only simple, boring sanity.
How narrow the Golden Age looked in retrospect.”

David Brin book The Uplift War

Source: The Uplift War (1987), Chapter 53 (pp. 324-325)

Age , World , Behavior , Time

“"Non-fiction", on the other hand, declares itself to be the carrier of fact, an expression of reality, and thus of truth. Why then does most fact-based work have a remarkably short shelf life? The reply might be that additional facts come along. That we are learning all the time. In that case, it was never an expression of reality or truth. And even if the facts are overtaken, the arguments built upon them should not date with such terrifying rapidity. Decade-old serious "non-fiction" often seems arcane, irrelevant. The written style itself seems to become old-fashioned. Two-centuries-old decent "fiction" on the other hand can easily remain fresh.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

On Equilibrium (2001)

Life , Truth , Fashion , Reality

“The proliferation of microgrids in the poorest regions of the developing world, powered by locally generated renewable energy, provides the essential electricity to run 3D printers, which can produce the tools and machinery needed to establish self-sufficient and sustainable twenty-first-century communities.”

Jeremy Rifkin (1945) American economist

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (2014)

World , Communication

“The graphic portrayal of quantitative information has deep roots. These roots reach into histories of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization, which are intertwined with each other. They also connect with the rise of statistical thinking up through the 19th century, and developments in technology into the 20th century. From above ground, we can see the current fruit; we must look below to see its pedigree and germination. There certainly have been many new things in the world of visualization; but unless you know its history, everything might seem novel.”

Michael Friendly (1945) American psychologist

Michael Friendly. " Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/milestone/milestone.pdf, at math.yorku.ca, 2008.

World , History , Thinking

“From the seventh century onwards and with a peak during Muhammad al-Qasim's campaigns in 712-713 a considerable number of Jats [Hindus] was captured as prisoners of war and deported to Iraq and elsewhere as slaves.”

Muhammad bin Qasim (695–715) Umayyad general

Andre Wink, Al Hind, Vol. I, p. 161

War

“Movies are one of the bad habits that have corrupted our century. They have slipped into the American mind more misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade.”

Ben Hecht (1894–1964) American screenwriter

Books

Age

“There are certain great sentiments which simultaneously possess many minds and make what we call the spirit of the age. That spirit at the close of the last century was peculiarly humane. From the great Spanish Cardinal Ximenes, who refused the proposal of the Bishop Las Casas to enslave the Indians; from Milton, who sang, 'But man over man He made not Lord; such title to himself Reserving, human left from human free', from John Selden, who said, 'Before all, Liberty', from Algernon Sidney, who died for it, from Morgan Godwyn, a clergyman of the Established Church, and Richard Baxter, the Dissenter, with his great contemporary, George Fox, whose protest has been faithfully maintained by the Quakers; from Southern, Montesquieu, Hutcheson, Savage, Shenstone, Sterne, Warburton, Voltaire, Rosseau, down to Cowper and Clarkson in 1783 — by the mouths of all these and innumerable others Religion, Scepticism, Literature, and Wit had persistently protested against the sin of slavery. As early as 1705 Lord Holt had declared there was no such thing as a slave by the law of England. At the close of the century, four years before our Declaration, Lord Mansfield, though yearning to please the planters, was yet compelled to utter the reluctant 'Amen' to the words of his predecessor. Shall we believe Lord Mansfield, who lived in the time and spoke for it, when he declared that wherever English law extended — and it extended to these colonies — there was no man whatsoever so poor and outcast but had rights sacred as the king's; or shall we believe a judge eighty-four years afterwards, who says that at that time Africans were regarded as people 'who had no rights which the white man was bound to respect?”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

I am not a lawyer, but, for the sake of the liberty of my countrymen, I trust the law of the Supreme Court of the United States is better than its knowledge of history.
1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

People , Age , Religion , Law

“And fighting the battle of life is fighting against fearful odds, too. There are giants and dragons in this nineteenth century, and the golden casket that they guard is not so easy to win as it appears in the story-books.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Life , Books , Fear , Appearance

“Half-a-century ago, I came to Odisha to embark on my musical journey. This land has nourished my soul and nurtured my spirit. Through this Gurukul I wish to give back a small part of what I received from here.”

Hariprasad Chaurasia (1938) Indian bansuri player

During the launching of his “Vrindaban Gurukul”, an institution for training in Indian classical music in Orissa. Quoted in A step forward in promotion of classical music, 22 March 2010, 19 December 2013, The Hindu http://www.hindu.com/2010/03/22/stories/2010032258300200.htm,

Music , Soul , Parting

“It remains, as ever, an axiom of conventional wisdom that the use of propaganda as a means of social and ideological control is distinctive of totalitarian regimes. Yet the most minimal exercise of common sense would suggest a different view: that propaganda is likely to play at least as important a part in democratic societies (where the existing distribution of power and privilege is vulnerable to quite limited changes in popular opinion) as in authoritarian societies (where it is not). It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.”

Alex Carey (1922–1988) Australian psychologist

Source: Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty (1995), p. 21

Wisdom , Exercises , Business , Sense

“Contract Bridge is likely the most challenging card game extant; it is certainly the the most obsessive for its ranks of zealous followers. The initial progenitor of all Bridge forms is the game of Triumph, which gained currency about A. D. 1500. In the mid seventeenth century, Triumph evolved into Whist, a partnership game for four players. The change from Whist to Bridge occurred about 1886with a publication in London of a small pamphlet, titled Biritch or Russian Whist.”

Richard Arnold Epstein (1927) American physicist

Source: The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic (Revised Edition) 1977, Chapter Eight, Contract Bridge, p. 252

Game , Change , Partnership

“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. … What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter https://web.archive.org/web/19991115034104/http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl64.htm to William Stephens Smith (13 November 1787), quoted in Padover's Jefferson On Democracy
1780s

Death , God , People , Nature

“Judged by the evolving nineteenth-century ideology of femininity, which emphasized women’s roles as nurturing mothers and gentle companions and housekeepers for their husbands, Black women were practically anomalies.”

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

Women, Race and Class (1983)

Women

“A reference framework is required in order to locate events in time and space. With some contractions and omissions, Figure 1.1 shows the conventional divisions for the classical and medieval periods. Even before the birth of the idea of nationality, it is quite acceptable to refer to specific countries, such as Greece and Italy, whose boundaries are well defined. It is also usual to refer to areas in which there is felt to have been some degree of cultural unity —— for example, the Roman Empire and Islam. Sometimes space and time are embraced by one image: the Roman Empire can mean either the first four centuries of our era or the area under Roman dominion. Used with care, these concepts have value for some historical purposes, but they can be very misleading. In the first place, we have to bear in mind the shifting of frontiers; in AD 750, for example, the Iberian peninsula was predominantly Muslim while Asia Minor was Christian — by 1450 the reverse was the case. Also, and this can be more serious, the conventional divisions are associated most closely with political and military realities, and often have little bearing on intellectual or social activities.”

Donald Hill (1922–1994) British historian and engineer

A History of Engineering in Classical and Medieval Times, (1985), 1. Introduction.

Idea , Birth , Reality , Time

“Scenario: In the summer of 1977 The Human League was formed due to the members finding no conventional channels for their immense talents.
Background: None of The Human League have any orthodox musical training, but prefer to regard compositions as an extension of logic, inspiration and luck. Therefore, unlike conventional musicians, their influences are not so obvious.
Conclusion/Manifesto: Interested in combining the best of all worlds, The League would like to positively affect the future by close attention to the present, allying technology with humanity and humour. They have been described as 'Later Twentieth Century Boys' and 'Intelligent, Innovatory and Immodest.”

Philip Oakey (1955) English pop singer

Press release by Philip Oakey about the The Human League's first single "Being Boiled" (April 1978), quoted in "Blind Youth - The Way It Was : Fast Product" http://home.freeuk.net/blindyouth/Product.htm

World , Music , Intelligence , Boy

“Christ's Passion, viewed from within, is of a diversity that the biblical texts and images leave hidden; but numerous mystics through the centuries have been allowed to experience a great deal of it in ever-varying aspects—if only by drops, as it were, compared with the Son of God.”

Hans Urs Von Balthasar (1905–1988) Swedish Catholic theologian

First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr (1968)

God , Passion , Christ

“On the other hand, Hindu saints used to assuage the outraged feelings of Hindus and encourage them reconvert to Hinduism. For instance Harihar and Bukka, sons of the Raja of Kampil, converted to Islam by Muhammad bin Tughlaq, fled his court. At the instance of sage Vidyaranya they reverted to Hinduism and founded the Vijayanagar kingdom to resist the expansion of Muslim power in the South. Like Vidyaranya, there were scores of Bhakta saints who were helping people to resist injustice and retain their original religion. In Maharashtra, Namdeva in the fourteenth century declared that people were blind in insisting upon worshipping in temples and mosques, while His worship needed neither temple nor mosque.69 Such courageous denunciations were infectious and these spread in Gujarat, Bengal, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. Ramananda, Kabir, Nanak, Chaitanya, Raidas, Dhanna, Sain, Garibdas and Dadu Dayal and a host of others spoke out in the same idiom openly and repeatedly. They came from all classes of society - Raidas was a chamar, Sain was a barber while Pipa was a Raja, Raja of Gauranggarh - but they were all respected and listened to. Of these the three most important saints who turned Bhakti into a movement were Kabir, Nanak and Chaitanya.”

K. S. Lal book The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India

Source: The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (1992), Chapter 6

People , Religion , Feeling , Courage

“The Machine Age’s commitment to cause and effect was the source of many dilemmas, including the one involving free will. At the turn of the century the American philosopher E. A. Singer, Jr., showed that science had, in effect, been cheating. It was using two different relationships but calling both cause and effect. He pointed out, for example, that acorns do not cause oaks because they are not sufficient, even though they are necessary, for oaks. An acorn thrown into the ocean, or planted in the desert or an Arctic ice cap does not yield an oak. To call the relationship between an acorn and an oak ‘probabilistic’ or ‘non deterministic causality,’ as many scientists did, was cheating because it is not possible to have a probability other than 1.0 associated with a cause; a cause completely determines its effect. Therefore, Singer chose to call this relationship ‘producer-product’ and to differentiate it from cause-effect.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1980s, Creating the Corporate Future, 1981, p. 224-225 as cited in: David Ing (2010) "The producer-product relation, and coproducers in systems theory". in the Coevolving blog, September 02, 2010.

Age , Science , Cheating

“Currency competition and free banking might increase the efficiency of the financial system, and bring some small triangle welfare gains. But the key question is whether their adoption would improve macroeconomic performance. Even though Salin argues (p. 281) that ‘the best system is that which produces the least inflation’, fluctuations in output are also expensive.
Hayek states that the adoption of his proposal would end recessions. There is absolutely no reason to believe that. Nineteenth century history is evidence that free banking and currency issue, in the wrong legal and regulatory framework, can produce rather than reduce instability. The proponents of free banking and currency issue in this volume do not go much beyond a general belief in competition in justifying their views; they have certainly not explored the necessary legal and regulatory environment in any detail.”

Stanley Fischer (1943) American economist

Stanley Fischer, "Friedman versus Hayek on Private Money: Review Essay" (1986)

History , Question

“The scientist tries to understand the origin of our solar system, the structure of the universe and the laws governing the atom. He has discovered X rays, the radioactive substances, and he has built cyclotrons. He has foreseen the existence of electromagnetic and electronic waves. Out of his thought has grown the technique of our century. But not until today has he begun to notice that the earth on which he moves is covered with sweat and with blood and that in the world in which he lives "the son of man has nowhere to lay his head."”

Leopold Infeld (1898–1968) Polish physicist

Quest: An Autobiography [1941] (second edition, 1980), Book III, "Search and Research", p. 338

World , Law , Understanding , Universe

“The Church in India has to join hands with all subaltern groups – the Dalits, the tribal people and women – in their struggle for liberation and justice. For centuries, the Dalits have been victims of oppression. In recent years violence against them has grown. The tribal people, too, are subjected to various forms of injustice.”

Kurien Kunnumpuram (1931–2018) Indian theologian

Kunnumpuram, K. (ed) (2007) World Peace: An Impossible Dream? , Mumbai: St Pauls
On Peace

Women , People , Justice

“Young men go to war. Sometimes because they are have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

Life , Men , War , Sadness

“As for Picasso, the specialist was amazed by the rapidity of his understanding. The tradition he came from had prepared him better than ours for a problem to do with structure. And Berthe Weil was right when she treated those who compared him/confused him with, a Steinlen or a Lautrec as idiots. He had already rejected them in their own century, a century we had no intention of prolonging. Whether or not the Universe was endowed with another dimension, art was going to move into a different field.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Cubism was born

Art , Understanding , Problem , Universe

“Government by inquisition has never been good. However, since January 1979, our country has been under the yoke of inquisitorial power. Five centuries after the Spanish Inquisition, Iran is living under the terror of a new Torquemada who is more pitiless and more sinister than its predecessor. In fact the Inquisition tribunals did not sentence men to be executed unless they were known to be heretics. They had the opportunity to recant and to repent; and they would call witnesses, which the Iranian Torquemada does not allow.
The tribunals are said to be Islamic. But the truth cannot be overlooked, and genuine Islamic law insists on the right of an accused man to defend himself. Islam is never served by hatred, vengeance and murder, but by justice, goodness, forgiveness and high moral standards. This explosion of hatred, supposedly "in the name of God", is an insult to God and to our religion. And this insult, I repeat, unfortunately threatens to do great harm to Islam, just as the Inquisition did great harm to Catholicism.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

Page 209
Publications, The Shah's Story (1980), On Islam and the Islamic Revolution

Men , God , Truth , Religion

“Most of the world's people have been robbed of their freedom by tyrants… In the last century alone, 272,000,000 were shot, burned, stabbed, tortured, beaten, starved to death, blasted to death, buried alive, or whatever other ways of murdering their slaves these thugs could imagine. This horrific and evil toll of bodies could head-to-toe circle the earth more than ten times. It is as though a catastrophic nuclear war had happened, but its mountain of deaths spread over each day of the last century”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

Source: The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007), p. 11

Death , War , People , World

“Homeschooling is radical, in the root sense of the word: in Latin, radicus means root. Compulsory schooling (forced attendance), and now, in the twenty-first century, compulsory education (forced learning) are very recent petals and offshoots of the root way humankind has historically nurtured its young into responsible adults and active citizens. Family, community, religious institutions, and work were all integrated into the daily lives and upbringing of children… The concept of universal compulsory schooling is a very recent idea, one that is not even two hundred years old, yet we act as if it is an ancient, sure-fire way to make sure our children 'learn something.”

Pat Farenga American activist

"
A Brief History of Homeschooling (2002)

Children , Education , School , Family

“The one thing that drives me up the wall is [people] saying, 'Look at all the deaths you Americans have caused in Iraq.' No! 'Scuse me? We invaded the place, we knocked over Saddam, and then Iraqis began killing each other… [B]ut who is doing this killing? Give me a break. These are Iraqis killing each other. So what did we do? If you're saying it's our fault that we unmasked them as knuckle-dragging savages from the 10th century — fine! I'll take credit.”

John Gibson (media host) (1946) American radio talk show host

April 25, 2007 http://mediamatters.org/research/200704250008

Death , People

“Perhaps the greatest novel of the century.”

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957) Sicilian writer and prince

Source: Criticism, L. P. Hartley on The Leopard, quoted in Robin Healey Twentieth-Century Italian Literature in English Translation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998) p. 146.

“The East knows a true lucidity, but to be an inheritor of the West is to hack through jungles of indiscipline, devoured by vile ants and words unstrung from sense, until the dripping foliage of delirium opens out onto a space of comprehensive ruin. This has never been understood, nor can it be. The foulness of our fate only deepens with the centuries, as the tracts of insanity sprawl. From bodies gnawed by tropical fevers we swim out through collapse to inexistence in forever, destined for Undo.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Shamanic Nietzsche" (1995), in Fanged Noumena, p. 223

Fate , Sense

“It is a lamentable fact if, in the midst of our civilization, and at the close of the nineteenth century, the workhouse is all that can be offered to the industrious labourer at the end of a long and honourable life. I do not enter into the question now in detail. I do not say it is an easy one; I do not say that it will be solved in a moment; but I do say this, that until society is able to offer to the industrious labourer at the end of a long and blameless life something better than the workhouse, society will not have discharged its duties to its poorer members.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in London (11 December 1891), quoted in The Times (12 December 1891), p. 7.
1890s

Life , Question

“In Daniel 7, Daniel had a vision where “the four winds of the heavens strove upon the great sea. And four beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another” (vv. 2-3). In the vision, Daniel saw a lion with eagle’s wings, a bear with three ribs in its mouth, a leopard with four wings, and a terrible beast with iron teeth and ten horns (v. 7). Bible scholars have speculated on the meaning of this passage for centuries. Some think the four beasts in this chapter represent a rehash of the first four empires from Babylon to the Roman Empire; while others think it is all yet in the future. I’m no scholar but here is my opinion: I (and many Bible scholars) think the four beasts are four world powers that will “strive” for world power (domination?) at the end of time before the one with ten horns finally becomes dominant. I think the four beasts are interpreted as follows: The lion sometimes standing like a man with eagle’s wings (v. 4) represents England (whose symbol as always been the lion) and America (whose symbol is the eagle) united, as one of four major end-time powers. The eagle’s wings “were plucked” and “it was lifted up from the earth, and made to stand upon the feet as a man, and a man’s heart was given to it” (v. 4). My best guess is that America will soon cease to be a world power (wings plucked) but there will still be enough of a godly influence that the English/American alliance will have some “heart” or compassion and maybe even be able to finally “take a stand” for God in the wicked world. I think the bear (v. 5) is Russia (whose symbol is the bear) and the three ribs in its mouth represent three countries it has dominated or “eaten,” such as Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, or perhaps Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia. The leopard with four wings (v. 6) could be some sort of oriental alliance between China, Japan, Korea, and a Southeast Asia alliance (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, etc.). Verse 6 says, “dominion was given to it.” Many certainly feel that China is soon to be the major economic (and military) power in the world. If they could get a military or economic alliance with some of the other oriental nations mentioned, they would indeed be a force to be reckoned with! No animal is named for the fourth beast. It is only described as being dreadful, terrible, strong exceedingly, having great iron teeth, different from all other beasts and having ten horns. As I said earlier there are three options from what I can see for this beast. It is either (A) the European Common Market or a future similar alliance; or (B) 10 world regions and (C) some sort of alliance of Muslim nations around the Middle East or the world. I tend to go with option (C)”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 94-95

Sea , Thinking , Feeling , Time

“Through massive immigration and official dhimmitude from European leaders, Muslims are accomplishing today what they have tried but failed to do for over a millennium: conquer Europe. If current demographic trends continue, France, Holland, and other Western European nations could have Muslim majorities by mid-century. … Europe is now reaping what it has long sown. Bat Ye'or, the pioneering historian of dhimmitude, chronicles how this has come to pass. Europe, she explains, began thirty years ago to travel down a path of appeasement, accommodation, and cultural abdication in pursuit of shortsighted political and economics benefits. She observe that today, "Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important poste-Enlightenment/secular elements, to a 'civilization of dhimmitued,", i. e, Eurabia: a secular-Muslim transitional society withits traditional Judeo-Christian more rapidly disappearing."”

Robert Spencer (1962) American author and blogger

Stealth jihad: how radical Islam is subverting America without guns or bombs, 2008, ISBN 9781596985568, pp. 270-273 http://books.google.com/books?id=3eLfhvNQBkgC&pg=PA270

… France and Germany have pursued a different strategy, attempting to establish the European Union as a global counterweight of the United States—a strategy that involves close cooperation with the Arab League.

Travel

“The element of heroic maleness had always been present in the concept of the artist as one who rides the winged horse above the clouds beyond the sight of lesser men, a concept seldom applied to those who worked with colours until the nineteenth century. When the inevitable question is asked, "Why are there no great women artists?" it is this dimension of art that is implied. The askers know little of art, but they know the seven wonders of the painting world.”

Germaine Greer The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work

Source: The Obstacle Race (1979), Chapter V: Dimension (p. 105)

Women , Men , World , Art

“The method applied by Newton to the grounding of the Infinitesimal Calculus, and which since the beginning of this century has been recognised by the best mathematicians as the only one that furnishes sure results, is the method of limits. The method consists in this, viz., instead of considering a continuous transition from one value of a quantity to another, from one position to another, or, speaking generally, from one determination of a concept to another, one considers in the first place a transition through a finite number of intervals and then allows the number of these intervals to increase so that the distances of two successive points of division all decrease infinitely.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

General Relation of the Concept System of Thesis and Antithesis
Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

Success

“The twentieth century return to Middle Age scholastics taught us a lot about formalisms. Probably it is time to look outside again. Meaning is what really matters.”

Yuri I. Manin (1937) Russian mathematician

in an edition by [Felix E. Browder, Mathematical developments arising from Hilbert problems, Volume 28, Part 1, American Mathematical Society Bookstore, 1976, 0821814281, 36]

Age , Time

“We are Seth, and whenever we have spoken we have been known as Seth. The entity had its beginning before the emergence of your time. It was instrumental, with many other entities, in the early formation of energy into physical form. We are not alone in this endeavor, for through your centuries other entities like us have also appeared and spoken.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 419, Page 326
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 8

Appearance , Time

“In the penultimate decade of the twentieth century science is sufficiently advanced to resolve the puzzles that stymied scientists in the last century and demonstrate, without metaphysical speculation, the consistency of evolution in all realms of experience. It is now possible to advance a general evolution theory based on unitary and mutually consistent concepts derived from the empirical sciences.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Evolution: the general theory (1996), p. 21 as cited in: Kingsley L. Dennis (2003) An evolutionary paradigm of social systems : An Application of Ervin Laszlo's General. Evolutionary Systems Theory to the Internet http://quigley.mab.ms/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/An-Evolutionary-Paradigm-of-Social-Systems-MA-Thesis.pdf.

Science

“This article aims at proposing some elements for a grounded theory of the network society. The network society is the social structure characteristic of the Information Age, as tentatively identified by empirical, cross-cultural investigation. It permeates most societies in the world, in various cultural and institutional manifestations, as the industrial society characterized the social structure of both capitalism and statism for most of the twentieth century.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society (2000), p. 5

Age , World

“When I think of the thousands and thousands of pounds which have been spent by the National Art Collections Fund on the purchase of paintings—some of questionable merit and dubious condition—by Old Masters already represented in the National Gallery—it makes me boil with rage to think that in 1905 it would not contribute one halfpenny towards the purchase for the nation of a picture by one of the Great French Masters of the late nineteenth century. It was a short-sighted policy, but the Fund's inertia and snobbish ineptitude are entirely characteristic of the habits of art-officialdom in England.”

Frank Rutter (1876–1937) British art critic

Rutter, Frank. Art in My Time, pp. 118–119. Rich & Cowan, London, 1933.
The National Art Collections Fund is now called The Art Fund.

Art , Question , Thinking , Rage

“Just as Mycenaean civilisation is a development of the Minoan, so too the Philistines who came to Palestine from Caphtor were an offshoot of the same general Aegean civilisation. …until David's victories around 1000 B. C., the Philistines dominated the Hebrews, so that, militarily at least, the Davidic monarchy was the Hebrew response to the Philistine stimulus. …the Achaeans, Trojans, Philistines and Hebrews during the closing centuries of the second millennium belonged to the same international complex of peoples, sharing many conventions and institutions, specifically in military matters.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Introduction
The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962])

People , Victory

“Keynes was no revolutionary, but his ideas revolutionized 20th-century economics.”

Samuel Bowles (1939) American economist

Source: Understanding Capitalism: Competition, Command, and Change, 2005, p.82

Idea

“Twenty-six years ago knew and noted in writing what was unknown to any of those who had written on the subject in any language, in the seven centuries which have elapsed since the eclipse of this so-called heresy. All writers who mentioned the subject insisted that the robes of Cathar priests were inevitably black. For twenty-six years, including her six years of correspondence with me, she stubbornly maintained that they were dark blue. She was proved correct by Jean Duvernoy of Toulouse but only in the last four years. In editing the register of the Inquisition of Jacques Fournier, Monsieur Duvernoy revealed that Cathar priests wore sometimes dark blue or dark green. This book was published in 1965. She expressed it in writing more than a year before publication of Duvornoy's book.”

Arthur Guirdham (1905–1992) British physician, psychiatrist and writer

Source: The Cathars and Reincarnation (1970), p. 10-11

Books

“This is what fascinates Shaw: this enormous force that ignores our human preferences, our logic and intellect. It fascinates him because to be suddenly gripped by it is to see that human beings are not the accidental products of a mechanical universe — that they are not 'alone'. As social animals, we live in a narrow but apparently logical world with a well-defined identity and position. But man is the satellite of a double-star; there is also an inner-world that seems to have a completely different set of laws from the rational universe. And in fact, if we judge this 'rational universe' by its own laws, we see that it is not self-complete and self-explanatory; space must end somewhere, time must have a stop; but the alternative propositions sound equally 'logical': space is infinite; time has neither beginning nor end. The answer to these paradoxes must be that the outer universe is not self-complete; it is only half a universe. The inner world is the other half. But at present we know very little about this inner world. It is only within the present century that its existence has been clearly recognized by psychology.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Bernard Shaw: A Reassessment (1969), p. 167

World , Law , Star , Universe

“Nobody can predict the future, but there is nobody in my generation who wants to be on the board of a symphony orchestra or an opera company and raise the kind of money that's needed. I think that the energy that in the 19th century went into opera is, in the 20th century, going into films. Films have that same over-the-top, overwhelming, high impact--all of the senses knocked out--and vast popular following, with stars who are larger than life. Well, that's what opera did in the 19th century.”

Peter Sellars (1957) American theatre director

Source: Mark Swed, "For L.A., History's Knocking", Los Angeles Times, December 26, 1996

Life , Money , Star , Thinking

“To prevent the starving peasants from fleeing to the towns an internal passport system was introduced and unauthorized change of residence was made punishable with imprisonment. Peasants were not allowed passports at all, and were therefore tied to the soil as in the worst days of feudal serfdom: this state of things was not altered until the 1970s. The concentration camps filled with new hordes of prisoners sentenced to hard labour. The object of destroying the peasants’ independence and herding them into collective farms was to create a population of slaves, the benefit of whose labour would accrue to industry. The immediate effect was to reduce Soviet agriculture to a state of decline from which it has not yet recovered, despite innumerable measures of reorganization and reform. At the time of Stalin’ s death, almost a quarter of a century after mass collectivization was initiated, the output of grain per head of population was still below the 1913 level; yet throughout this period, despite misery and starvation, large quantities of farm produce were exported all over the world for the sake of Soviet industry. The terror and oppression of those years cannot be expressed merely by the figures for loss of human life, enormous as these are; perhaps the most vivid picture of what collectivization meant is in Vasily Grossman’ s posthumous novel Forever Flowing.”

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

pg. 39
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume III: The Breakdown

Life , Death , World , Change

“We know that these challenges can be overcome because history moves in the direction of justice. The evils of slavery were accepted and unchanged for centuries, yet eventually the human heart would not abide them. There is a voice of conscience and hope in every man and woman that will not be silenced, what Martin Luther King called a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. That flame could not be extinguished at the Birmingham jail. It could not be stamped out at Robben Island prison. It was seen in the darkness here at Goree Island, where no chain could bind the soul. This untamed fire of justice continues to burn in the affairs of man, and it lights the way before us. May God bless you all.”

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

2000s, 2003, Hope and Conscience Will Not Be Silenced (July 2003)

God , Justice , Hope , Way

“By the nineteenth century… new circumstances called for new conformity enforcers… The government locked you in a house of penitence—a penetentiary—where your feelings of remorse would theoretically pummel you without cease.”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

Source: Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), Ch.9 The Conformity Police

Feeling , Housing

“It is evident that thought is also necessary for action. But the Church has for centuries … focused on orthodoxy and left orthopraxis in the hands of nonmembers and nonbelievers.”

Edward Schillebeeckx (1914–2009) Belgian theologian

"La teología" as cited in A Theology of Liberation (1973), p. 10

“The battles of this century … are less likely to be the product of extreme political ideology—like those of the 20th century—but they could easily be fought around the questions of cultural or religious difference.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

As attributed without citation in Awake! magazine (anonymous), January 2015 http://www.jw.org/en/publications/magazines/g201501/watching-the-world-religion/
2010s

Question