Quotes about century (3044 quotes, page 29)

“Socialism, I want to propose, is the hope for human freedom and justice under the unprecedented conditions of life that humanity will face in the twenty-first century.”

Michael Harrington (1928–1989) American political writer

Source: Socialism: Past and Future (1989), p. 1

Hope , Life , Justice , Freedom

“I was determined to accept the invitation I had earlier received from General Jaruzelski to go to Poland. I always felt the greatest affection and admiration for this nation of indomitable patriots, whose traditions and distinctive identity the Prussians, Austrians and Russians (in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) and the Nazis and communists (in the twentieth century) had sought vainly to extinguish. I could not forget the Polish airmen who had fought with the RAF against Nazism, and how a war begun over the freedom of Poland had ended leaving them trapped under tyranny.”

Margaret Thatcher book The Downing Street Years

Source: The Downing Street Years (1993), p. 777

War , Freedom , Forgetting

“This evolution toward noise-sound is only possible today. The ear of an eighteenth century man never could have withstood the discordant intensity of some of the chords produced by our orchestras (whose performers are three times as numerous); on the other hand our ears rejoice in it, for they are attuned to modern life, rich in all sorts of noises. But our ears far from being satisfied, keep asking for bigger acoustic sensations. However, musical sound is too restricted in the variety and the quality of its tones. Music marks time in this small circle and vainly tries to create a new variety of tones... We must break at all cost from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.”

Luigi Russolo (1885–1947) Electronic music pioneer and Futurist painter

Source: 1910's, The Art of Noise', 1913, p. 6

Music , Life , Time

“America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet on her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.... Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.”

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)

Independence Day address (1821)

Peace , Justice , Friendship , Search

“In this century of violent violence in all parts of the world, it is almost ridiculous to ask people to be thankful, but women must continue to teach their children to be thankful… saying to appreciate the smallest thing that comes from others for free.”

Doris Veillette (1935–2019) Quebec journalist

Chronicle "Interdit aux hommes" (Forbidden to men), by Doris Veillette-Hamel, Journal Le Nouvelliste, 9 November 1970, page 11.
Chronicle "Forbidden to men", 1970

Children , People , Parting , World

“Hindu society is guilty of trying to manage its own affairs at its own sacred site, so it deserves to be punished with administrative restrictions on its access to the Rama-Janmabhoomi, and perhaps with further judicial restrictions later. The judges simply confirm what is explicitly laid down in article 30 of the Constitution: minorities enjoy privileges which are denied to Hindus, including the non-interference by the government in the affairs of their places of worship. Hindus have no right to complain when the government takes over Hindu temples, nor when it works hand-in-glove with Islamic activists trying to take over a Hindu sacred site. They should be satisfied with the status of second-class citizens, to which they have been so well accustomed by centuries of colonial rule, Islamic as well as Christian.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Ayodhya: The Case Against the Temple (2002)

“The earliest body of gospel tradition, represented by Mark no less than by the primitive non-Marcan document embodied in the first and third gospels, begins, not with the birth and childhood of Jesus, but with his baptism; and this order of accretion of gospel matter is faithfully reflected in the time order of the invention of feasts. The great church adopted Christmas much later than Epiphany; and before the 5th century there was no general consensus of opinion as to when it should come in the calendar, whether on the 6th of January, or the 25th of March, or the 25th of December.”

Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare (1856–1924) British orientalist

[Christmas, Wikisource, 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, 1911, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclopædia_Britannica/Christmas]

Childhood , Christmas , Birth , Time

“Piketty ends Capital in the Twenty-First Century with a call to arms — a call, in particular, for wealth taxes, global if possible, to restrain the growing power of inherited wealth. It’s easy to be cynical about the prospects for anything of the kind. But surely Piketty’s masterly diagnosis of where we are and where we’re heading makes such a thing considerably more likely. So Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an extremely important book on all fronts. Piketty has transformed our economic discourse; we’ll never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

"Why We’re in a New Gilded Age", The New York Review of Books (May 8, 2014)
The New York Review of Books articles

Way , Wealth , Books , Making love

“There were the Chârvâkas, who preached horrible things, the most rank, undisguised materialism, such as in the nineteenth century they dare not openly preach. These Charvakas were allowed to preach from temple to temple, and city to city, that religion was all nonsense, that it was priestcraft, that the Vedas were the words and writings of fools, rogues, and demons, and that there was neither God nor an eternal soul. If there was a soul, why did it not come back after death drawn by the love of wife and child. Their idea was that if there was a soul it must still love after death, and want good things to eat and nice dress. Yet no one hurt these Charvakas.”

Charvaka An unorthodox school of Hindu philosophy

Swami Vivekananda as recorded in the complete works of Swami Vivekananda https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Works_of_Swami_Vivekananda/Volume_2/Jnana-Yoga/Maya_and_the_Evolution_of_the_Conception_of_God.

Hurt , God , Soul , Religion

“Seven decades ago, the warriors of D-day fought a sinister enemy who spoke of a thousand-year empire. In defeating that evil, they left a legacy that will last not only for a thousand years, but for all time—for as long as the soul knows of duty and honor; for as long as freedom keeps its hold on the human heart. To the men who sit behind me, and to the boys who rest in the field before me, your example will never, ever grow old. Your legend will never tire. Your spirit—brave, unyielding, and true—will never die. The blood that they spilled, the tears that they shed, the lives that they gave, the sacrifice that they made, did not just win a battle. It did not just win a war. Those who fought here won a future for our Nation. They won the survival of our civilization. And they showed us the way to love, cherish, and defend our way of life for many centuries to come. Today, as we stand together upon this sacred Earth, we pledge that our nations will forever be strong and united. We will forever be together. Our people will forever be bold. Our hearts will forever be loyal. And our children, and their children, will forever and always be free. May God bless our great veterans, may God bless our Allies, may God bless the heroes of D-day, and may God bless America. Thank you. Thank you very much.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2019, June, Remarks on the 75th Anniversary of D-Day in Colleville-sur-Mer, France

God , Soul , Time , Freedom

“In the past century a myth has grown up that free market capitalism—equality of opportunity as we have interpreted that term—increases such inequalities, that it is a system under which the rich exploit the poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wherever the free market has been permitted to operate, wherever anything approaching equality of opportunity has existed, the ordinary man has been able to attain levels of living never dreamed of before. Nowhere is the gap between rich and poor wider, nowhere are the rich richer and the poor poorer, than in those societies that do not permit the free market to operate.”

Milton Friedman book Free to Choose

Source: Free to Choose (1980), Ch. 5 “Created Equal”, p. 146

Truth , Dreams , Past

“The nineteenth-century liberal regarded an extension of freedom as the most effective way to promote welfare and equality; the twentieth-century liberal regards welfare and equality as either prerequisites of or alternatives to freedom.”

Milton Friedman book Capitalism and Freedom

Introduction, p. 5
Capitalism and Freedom (1962)

Way , Freedom

“As it developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the intellectual movement that went under the name of liberalism emphasized freedom as the ultimate goal and the individual as the ultimate entity in the society. It supported laissez faire at home as a means of reducing the role of the state in economic affairs and thereby enlarging the role of the individual; it supported free trade abroad as a means of linking the nations of the world together peacefully and democratically. In political matters, it supported the development of representative government and of parliamentary institutions, reduction in the arbitrary power of the state, and protection of the civil freedoms of individuals.”

Milton Friedman book Capitalism and Freedom

Introduction, p. 5
Capitalism and Freedom (1962)

World , Home , Support , Freedom

“Britain is not earning her living. We are not keeping pace with the economic performance of our European and North American neighbours, and we are certainly not achieving the potential that is in us. … At the end of a war of prolonged sacrifice we were left with much obsolete industrial plant, and a short-fall in the capital necessary to scrap and renew it. For a century we had lived on cheap food and raw materials imported from overseas. They are not and will not in future be available to us. … We cannot continue to live beyond or ability or our willingness to earn. That is the one basic fact with which Britain has yet to come to terms.”

Alec Douglas-Home (1903–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

'Foreword' (June 1977), Patrick Hutber (ed.), What's Wrong with Britain? (Sphere, 1978), p. 7
Later life

War , Future , Food

“Should Latin America and the Caribbean accept these methods that so hurt our region in the entire 20th century? How many military interventions? How many coup d’états? How many dictatorships were imposed during the long and dark 20th century in Latin America and the Caribbean, and who did it favor? Did it favor the Peoples? What interests did they represent? The interests of the transnational companies, the unpopular interests; long dictatorships, like Augusto Pinochet’s in Chile, were faced by our peoples due to the stubbornness of the American elites…”

Nicolás Maduro (1962) 53rd President of Venezuela

President Maduro's speech at the United Nations General Assembly (excerpts), 26 September 2018

Hurt , People

“I have respect for the history of this House. There is nothing reprehensible in people recalling that some of the liberties of the people of this country enshrined in this House go back not merely to the conflicts of the seventeenth century, which will certainly apply to many of the matters with which we have to deal—the power over taxation which resides, or is still to reside, in this House—but to the controversies which prevailed in the House of Commons during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. If people say to me that all these are remote, old-fashioned ideas, I reply that they are as up-to-date as the ideas that brought the Labour Party into being.”

Michael Foot (1913–2010) British politician

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1972/feb/17/european-communities-bill#column_741 in the House of Commons (17 February 1972)
1970s

Housing , History , Country , People

“I learn with great satisfaction that you are about committing to the press the valuable historical and State papers you have been so long collecting. Time and accident are committing daily havoc on the originals deposited in our public offices. The late war has done the work of centuries in this business. The last cannot be recovered, but let us save what remains; not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.”

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

Letter to a Mr. Hazard (18 February 1791) published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1853), Vol. 2, edited by Henry Augustine Washington, p. 211
1790s

Business , War , Time , Learning

“I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive. It places the governors indeed more at their ease at the expense of the people. The late rebellion in Massachusetts has given much more alarm than I think it should have done. Calculate that one rebellion in thirteen States in the course of eleven years is but one for each State in a century and a half. No country should be so long without one. Nor will any degree of power in the hands of the government prevent insurrections. In England, where the hand of power is heavier than with us, there are seldom half a dozen years without an insurrection. In France, where it is still heavier but less despotic, as Montesquieu supposes, than in some other countries and where there are always two or three hundred thousand men ready to crush insurrections, there have been three in the course of the three years I have been here, in every one of which greater numbers were engaged than in Massachusetts.”

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

Letter to James Madison, Paris, (20 December 1787), The Political Writings Of Thomas Jefferson, Dumbauld, Edit. (1955) pp. 67-68
1780s

Country , Thinking , People , Men

“I promise not to hammer a stake through your heart or set you on fire, as long as you promise not to rip my throat out. Okay? We in the twenty-first century have this marvelous technical innovation; it’s called civilization, and it means we don’t have to make promises like that to everyone we meet because we can usually take it for granted.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014), Chapter 11, “Boardrooms and Brokers” (p. 203)

Making love , Heart

“They’re outside the Nicene Creed and they’re not actually Christians, although they think they are—like the Mormons. But while the Book of Mormon is just a nineteenth-century fabrication there’s stuff in here that’s, uh, disturbing. Very disturbing, Bob.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 12, “With a Bible and a Gun” (p. 240)

Thinking , Books

“I believe art is a wholly formal enterprise, encompassing almost all the tenets that the nineteenth century spoke of as l’art pour l’art, tenets which have made twentieth century’s experimentation possible.”

Samuel R. Delany book Flight from Nevèrÿon

What postmodern doesn’t?
Section 9.811 (p. 273)
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

Art

“Schliessmann arrives at his own unique interpretations, with reverence for the past (Cortot, Michelangeli, Rubinstein, and Horszowski especially). While each phrase is impeccably shaped, there is an overall thrust to each work that holds everything together. He uses rubato sparingly, and while he embraces the virtuosity in the music, it never overrides other musical content. After a half century of listening to a number of these works, I must say that Schliessmann shed new light on most of them.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

James Harrington in American Record Guide ARG, USA, issue November/December 2010, Volume 73, Number 6, p. 107

Light , Past , Music

“The next hundred years will witness the greatest improvement in moral practice and understanding this world has ever seen. Nothing to compare with it has ever taken place in the evolution of ethics. The twentieth century is going to be a humanitarian century. The twenty-first century will dawn on a very different condition of things from that which we see around us to-day. Men are going to be Brothers, as certainly as the stars rise in the east. The marching and counter-marching going on in the industrial world to-day will end in a new order of society based on Mutualism, in which there will be not only division of labour but division of the products of labour as well. And along with the recognition of human brotherhood will come, is bound to come, the corollary recognition of the brotherhood of all those that feel.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), The World to Be, p. 147

Understanding , Star , World , Feeling

“Oh, the hope of the centuries and the centuries and centuries to come! It seems sometimes that I can almost see the shining spires of that Celestial Civilisation that man is to build in the ages to come on this earth—that Civilisation that will jewel the land masses of this planet in that sublime time when Science has wrought the miracles of a million years, and Man, no longer the savage he now is, breathes Justice and Brotherhood to every being that feels.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: The New Ethics (1907), Conclusion, p. 215

Time , Justice , Hope , Age

“In their phenomena of life the inhabitants of the earth display endless variety. They swim in the waters, soar in the skies, squeeze among the rocks, clamber among the trees, scamper over the plains, and glide among the grounds and grasses. Some are born for a summer, some for a century, and some flutter their little lives out in a day. They are black, white, blue, golden, all the colours of the spectrum. Some are wise and some are simple; some are large and some are microscopic; some live in castles and some in bluebells; some roam over continents and seas, and some doze their little day-dream away on a single dancing leaf. But they are all the children of a commion mother and the co-tenants of a common world. Why they are here in this world rather than some place else; why the world in which they find themselves is so full of the undesirable; and whether it would not have been better if the ball on which they ride and riot had been in the beginning sterilised, are problems too deep and baffling for the most of them. But since they are here, and since they are too proud or too superstitious to die, and are surrounded by such cold and wolfish immensities, what would seem more proper than for them to be kind to each other, and helpful, and dwell together as loving and forbearing members of One Great Family?”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Conclusion", pp. 324–325
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

Family , Tree , Sea , Making love

“A central truth of the Darwinian philosophy is the unity and consanguinity of all organic life. And during the next century or two the ethical corollary of this truth is going to receive unprecedented recognition in all departments of human thought.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Ethical Implications of Evolution", p. 323
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

Truth , Life

“Look at the manner in which the aborigines are swept away from continent after continent by the sword and beverage of the Aryans. See how the red children of America have been cheated and debauched and driven from homes where they and their fathers had lived from immemorial generations. When the banner of Castile first furled in Bahama breezes, America was inhabited by a noble, magnanimous, and happy people. They were not like the sodden, suspicious, revengeful remnants that to-day huddle on barricaded reserves, the vindictive survivors of four centuries of injustice. They were kind and generous. They came to the invading Europeans as children, with minds of wonder and with hands filled with presents. They were treated by the invaders like refuse. They were plundered, and their outstretched hands cut off and fed to Spanish hounds. They are gone from the valleys where once their camp-smokes curled to heaven, and their quaint canoes ruffle the moonlight of the rivers no more. They that remain are too weak to rise in warlike challenge to the aggressions of the mighty white. But the story of the meeting of the pale and the red, and of the wrongs of the vanquished red, will remain as one of the mournful tales of this world when the kindred of Lo, like fleecy clouds, have melted into the infinite azure of the past.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Preponderance of Egoism, p. 133–134

Home , Cheating , Past , Children

“We are a workers’ party because we see in the coming battle between finance and labor the beginning and the end of the structure of the twentieth century. We are on the side of labor and against finance.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

. . The value of labor under socialism will be determined by its value to the state, to the whole community. Labor means creating value, not haggling over things.
“Those Damn Nazis: Why Are We a Workers’ Party?” https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/haken32.htm written by Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken, Nazi propaganda pamphlet (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932)
1930s

“The much loved classical diva of 20th century India Akhtaribai Faizabadi, or Begum Akhtar was the last of the great female singers from the courtesan (tawaif) community.”

Begum Akhtar (1914–1974) Indian musician

In New Release: Begum Akhtar: Love’s Own Voice, 31 August 2009, 2 January 2014, Hindustan Times http://www.hindustantimes.com/lifestyle/books/new-release-begum-akhtar-love-s-own-voice/article1-448844.aspx,

Love , Making love , Communication

“His real talent lay above his shoulders. His was easily the hockey brain of the century. He could see a field the way a chess player sees the board. He knew where his teammates were, and more importantly where his opponents were - without looking. It was almost psychic.”

Dhyan Chand (1905–1979) Indian field hockey player

Dhyan Chand (a biographical sketch)

Way , Hockey

“Thousands of writers, of poets, of scholars, have laboured to increase knowledge, to dissipate error, and to create that atmosphere of scientific thought, without which the marvels of our century could never appeared. And these thousands of philosophers, of poets, of scholars, of inventors, have themselves been supported by the labour of past centuries. They have been upheld and nourished through life, both physically and mentally, by legions of workers and craftsmen of all sorts. They have drawn their motive force from the environment.”

Peter Kropotkin book The Conquest of Bread

Source: The Conquest of Bread (1892), Ch. 1 : Our Riches, p. 57

Support , Past , Knowledge , Appearance

“The issues raised in the historic conflict between Charles I, resting his claim to govern Britain on the divine right of kings, and Parliament - representing, however imperfectly, a demand for the wider sharing of power - concerned the use and abuse of state power, the right of the governed to a say in their government, and the nature of political freedom. The Levellers grew out of this conflict. They represented the aspirations of working people who suffered under the persecution of kings, landowners and the priestly class, and they spoke for those who experienced the hardships of poverty and deprivation. They developed and campaigned, first with Cromwell and then against him, for a political and constitutional settlement of the civil war which would embody principles of political freedom, anticipating by a century and a half the ideas of the American and French revolutions.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

' The Levellers and the Tradition of Dissent https://web.archive.org/web/20081214151939/https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/civil_war_revolution/benn_levellers_01.shtml' (1 June 2001)
2000s

Freedom , War , People , Suffering

“All those movements which took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and which had the Reformation as their main expression and result should be analyzed as a great crisis of the Western experience of subjectivity and a revolt against the kind of religious and moral power which gave form, during the Middle Ages, to this subjectivity. The need to take a direct part in spiritual life, in the work of salvation, in the truth which lies in the Book—all that was a struggle for a new subjectivity.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Source: "The Subject and Power" (1982), p. 782

Truth , Books , Age , Life

“The constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Preface to 1961 edition
History of Madness (1961)

Silence , Madness , Memory

“Now, if ever, we ought to be able to appreciate the whole importance of the stand which was made by our forefathers against the House of Stuart. All around us the world is convulsed by the agonies of great nations. Governments which lately seemed likely to stand during ages have been on a sudden shaken and overthrown. … Meanwhile in our island the regular course of government has never been for a day interrupted. The few bad men who longed for license and plunder have not had the courage to confront for one moment the strength of a loyal nation, rallied in firm array round a parental throne. And, if it be asked what has made us to differ from others, the answer is that we never lost what others are wildly and blindly seeking to regain. It is because we had a preserving revolution in the seventeenth century that we have not had a destroying revolution in the nineteenth. It is because we had freedom in the midst of servitude that we have order in the midst of anarchy. For the authority of law, for the security of property, for the peace of our streets, for the happiness of our houses, our gratitude is due, under Him who raises and pulls down nations at his pleasure, to the Long Parliament, to the Convention, and to William of Orange.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

Vol. II, ch. 10
History of England (1849–1861)

Courage , Peace , Housing , Law

“Mussolini is not an ordinary socialist. You will perhaps see him one day as a leader of a consecrated battalion, saluting the flags of Italy with his sword. He is an Italian of the fifteenth century, a condottiere. He is the only man with the strength to correct the weakness of the government.”

Georges Sorel (1847–1922) French philosopher and sociologist

As quoted in The Genesis of Georges Sorel, James H. Meisel, Ann Arbor, Wahr (1951), p. 220, n.21

“Sovereignty and kingship are never decided by academic debate. They are seized by force. The Ottoman dynasty appropriated by force the government of the Turks, and reigned over them for six centuries. Now the Turkish nation has effectively gained possession of its sovereignty… This is an accomplished fact… If those assembled here … see the matter in its natural light, we shall all agree. Otherwise, facts will still prevail, but some heads may roll.”

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) Turkish army officer, revolutionary, and the first President of Turkey

Abolition of the Ottoman sultanate, 1922 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_the_Ottoman_sultanate; also quoted in Nutuk http://tr.wikisource.org/wiki/Nutuk/14._b%C3%B6l%C3%BCm/M%C3%BC%C5%9Fterek_Enc%C3%BCmen%27e_anlatt%C4%B1%C4%9F%C4%B1m_hakikat (1927) by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Light , Nature

“The Jews cannot receive sovereign rights in a place which has been held for centuries by Muslim powers by right of religious conquest. The Muslim soldiers did not shed their blood in the late War for the purpose of surrendering Palestine out of Muslim control.”

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

Mahatma Gandhi, Young India, 6 April 1921. Quoted from Hinduism and Judaism compilation https://web.archive.org/web/20060423090103/http://www.nhsf.org.uk/images/stories/HinduDharma/Interfaith/hinduzion.pdf
1920s

War

“Here’s my attitude, and I’m sort of sorry to say this sometimes – but there are people who try and elevate film music - of all kinds – to being the great twentieth century classical music, and my opinion is it just isn’t. It’s very straightforward, major/minor or modal writing. The only time you get any kind of originality is usually in the timbres and the sounds and the mixture of elements. But to get through a scene it’s either happy, or sad – and it’s either going forward in action or it’s not – and it can be ironic, which means you’ve got to switch from major to minor frequently. But it’s not rocket science. It’s a lot of skills – a lot of political skills, frankly. It’s being in a room and playing off fifty opinions from studios, producers, directors, sometimes actors – and coming out the end with something that vaguely represents music. And frequently it doesn’t. The minute you try to get original or break the box – unless you’ve got either a very experimental or powerful director, it’s probably not going to happen.”

Graeme Revell (1955) New Zealand musician

Time , Box , People , Music

“We have now reached a point in the twenty-first century in which the externalities of this irrational system, such as the costs of war, the depletion of natural resources, the waste of human lives, and the disruption of the planetary environment, now far exceed any future economic benefits that capitalism offers to society as a whole. The accumulation of capital and the amassing of wealth are increasingly occurring at the expense of an irrevocable rift in the social and environmental conditions governing human life on earth.”

John Bellamy Foster (1953) Sociology professor and Marxist writer

Capitalism Has Failed—What Next?, 2019

War , Future , Wealth , Nature

“To say that capitalism is a failed system is not, of course, to suggest that its breakdown and disintegration is imminent. It does, however, mean that it has passed from being a historically necessary and creative system at its inception to being a historically unnecessary and destructive one in the present century.”

John Bellamy Foster (1953) Sociology professor and Marxist writer

Capitalism Has Failed—What Next?, 2019

“I am mimetic. If I write a book set in the seventeenth century, I write in a Baroque style. If I’m writing a book set in a newspaper office, I write in Journalese.”

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist

quoted in Marco Belpoliti, " Umberto Eco: How I Wrote my Books http://en.doppiozero.com/materiali/interviste/umberto-eco-how-I-wrote-my-books" (2015)

Books

“Indeed, if I may be allowed the anachronism, the Hindus were Spinozists more than two thousand years before the advent of Spinoza, and Darwinians many centuries before Darwin, and Evolutionists many centuries before the Doctrine of Evolution was accepted by the scientists of the present age, and before any word like ’Evolution’ existed in any language of the world.”

Monier Monier-Williams (1819–1899) Linguist and dictionary compiler

Sir Monier Monier Williams. source: The Inner Teachings of the Philosophies and Religions of India, Yogi Ramacharaka.Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

World , Age

“Members of the Christian faith sometimes object to the doctrine of reincarnation on the grounds that to accept it would be a violation of Christian doctrine. While it is true that a Council of Constantinople in the sixth century A. D. pronounced belief in the pre-existence of the soul to be heretical, an examination of the Scriptures strongly suggests that the doctrine of rebirth was generally accepted in those days and that Our Lord himself believed it. Whether this be the case or not, the student of the Christian doctrine may well ask whether a decision made by a group of men in the sixth century should be regarded as binding today. This objection to reincarnation by Christians, on grounds of doctrinal fidelity, is sufficiently important to merit a somewhat detailed examination. From this it is found that reincarnation has neither been proclaimed nor condemned by any general council of the Church or by any creed accepted by a general council. The Council of Constantinople held in 543 A. D., which proclaimed heretical Origen’s teaching of the preexistence of the soul and affirmed the doctrine of special creation, was not a general council, and so not universally authoritative.”

Geoffrey Hodson (1886–1983) New Zealand occultist

Reincarnation & Christianity https://www.theosophical.org/files/resources/articles/ReincarnationChristianity.pdf (1967)

Soul , Faith , Universe , Decision

“Karma is an unfamiliar word for Western ears. It is the name adopted by Theosophists of the nineteenth century for one of the most important of the laws of nature. Ceaseless in its operation, it bears alike upon planets, systems of planets, races, nations, families, and individuals. It is the twin doctrine to reincarnation. So inextricably interlaced are these two laws that it is almost impossible to properly consider one apart from the other. No spot or being in the universe is exempt from the operation of Karma, but all are under its sway, punished for error by it yet beneficently led on, through discipline, rest, and reward, to the distant heights of perfection. It is a law so comprehensive in its sweep, embracing at once our physical and our moral being, that it is only by paraphrase and copious explanation one can convey its meaning in English. For that reason the Sanskrit term Karma was adopted to designate it.”

William Quan Judge (1851–1896) American occult writer

The Ocean of Theosophy by William Q. Judge (1893), Chapter 11, Karma

Family , Law , Nature , Universe

“How, it may be asked, are we to make ourselves capable of sharing in this great work? Well, there is no mystery as to the qualifications which are needed by one who aspires to be a helper; the difficulty is not in learning what they are, but in developing them in oneself. To some extent they have been already incidentally described, but it is nevertheless as well that they should be set out fully and categorically. Single-mindedness… Perfect self-control… Calmness. This is another most important point - the absence of all worry and depression. Much of the work consists in soothing those who are disturbed, and cheering those who are in sorrow; and how can a helper do that work if his own aura is vibrating with constant fuss and worry, or grey with the deadly gloom that comes from perpetual depression? Nothing is more hopelessly fatal to occult progress or usefulness than our nineteenth century habit of ceaselessly worrying over trifles - of eternally making mountains out of molehills…. Knowledge…. while the slightest taint of selfishness remains in a man, he is not yet fit to be entrusted……..”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: Invisible Helpers (1915), Ch. 14

Selfishness , Mountain , Learning , Knowledge

“For, strange as the statement will appear at first sight, modern metaphysics, and to a large extent modern physical science, have been groping for centuries blindly after knowledge which occult philosophy has enjoyed in full measure all the while. Owing to a train of fortunate circumstances, I have come to know that this is the case; I have come into some contact with persons who are heirs of a greater knowledge concerning the mysteries of Nature and humanity than modern culture has yet evolved; and my present wish is to sketch the outlines of this knowledge, to record with exactitude the experimental proofs I have obtained that occult science invest its adepts with a control of natural forces superior to that enjoyed by physicists of the ordinary type, and the grounds there are for bestowing the most respectful consideration on the theories entertained by occult science concerning the constitution and destinies of the human soul.”

Alfred Percy Sinnett book The Occult World

Introduction
The Occult World

Soul , Personality , Nature , Knowledge

“The subject of a coming Avatar or World Teacher or Christ is one that has enthralled men of all backgrounds and teachings for centuries. Even the most sceptical will often express the wish that such a desirable event were possible, however unlikely. To these, this paper is presented as an interesting hypothesis.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The Reappearance of the Christ and the Masters of Wisdom (1980)

World , Teachers , Christ , Men

“Until now, every Teacher who has come to the world has given His teaching to a small group. It has then taken centuries for the Teaching to be disseminated----and in the process distortions and discolourations of the original teaching have crept in. For the first time in our history the Teacher can speak directly to all through the linked media networks…”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Maitreya's Mission Vol. I (1986)

World , Time , History , Teachers

“Many people await the return of the Christ with trepidation and fear. They sense that His appearance will promote great changes in all departments of life. His values, they rightly assume, will necessarily alter their ways of thinking and living and they blanch at such a prospect. Besides, so mystical has been the view of the Christ presented down the centuries by the churches that many fear His judgement and omnipotent power; they await Him as God come to punish the wicked and reward the faithful.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Maitreya's Mission Vol. III (1997)

God , Fear , Faith , People

“Such is, and will be seen to be, the effect of the legislation which the House of Commons must accept if the Treaty of Accession is to be ratified. It will be asked to divest itself of the unrestricted competence and authority which it has gained and maintained over centuries, and which the people of Britain regard as the guarantee of their national independence and political liberties.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech to The Lions' Club, Brussels (24 January 1972), quoted in The Common Market: Renegotiate or Come Out (Elliot Right Way Books, 1973), pp. 52–53
1970s

Housing , People

“The omnipotence of Parliament is for the British what for other nations is represented by the constitution, the declaration of independence and the law of human rights all rolled into one. That division of powers which was wrongly deduced from observation of Britain in the eighteenth century is unknown to Britain: just because we have no written constitution, the control of Parliament over both law and government has to be unlimited. In order for Britain to join the Community, the House of Commons has to be told, and to accept, that it will progressively lose its exclusive power to control legislation and government.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Vaduz (15 January 1972), quoted in The Common Market: Renegotiate or Come Out (Elliot Right Way Books, 1973), pp. 30–31
1970s

Housing , Law , Communication

“If men look for the Christ Who left His disciples centuries ago, they will fail to recognise the Chirst Who is in the process of returning. The Christ has no religious barriers in His consciousness. It matters not to Him of what faith a man may call himself… He cometh not alone. His advance guard is already here, and the Plan which they must follow, is already made clear. Let recognition be the aim.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Reappearance of the Christ (1948), Chapter III: The Reappearance of the Christ, World Expectancy, p. 60

Faith , Christ , Men

“So I must proceed with patience, by reforms, measures that will gradually lead to socialism—nationalizing when possible, refraining from it when necessary, respecting the foreign capital of which we have need. I must take my time, be a surgeon who doesn’t plunge his knife too deeply into the fabric of society. This is a very sick society, and if it’s not to die under the knife, you have to oper ate with caution, waiting slowly for a wound to heal, for a reform to be consolidated. We’ve been asleep for so many centuries, we can’t violently wake ourselves up with an earthquake. Besides, even Lenin, in the beginning, stooped to compromises.”

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1928–1979) Fourth President and ninth Prime Minister of Pakistan

Oriana Fallaci. Interview with Ali Bhutto in Karachi, April 1972

Patience , Time , Waiting

“He felt like Hercules at the Augean stables commissioned to clean out the accumulated filth of centuries.”

Michael Nava (1954) American writer

Source: The Children of Eve' series of novels (historical fiction), The City of Palaces (2014), p.86

“In the early twenty-first century, perhaps the most important artistic genre is science fiction. Very few people read the latest articles in the fields of machine learning or genetic engineering. Instead, movies such as The Matrix and Her and TV series such as Westworld and Black Mirror shape how people understand the most important technological, social and economic developments of our time.”

Yuval Noah Harari book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Time , Reading , Understanding , People

“Not visiting any temples and not believing in any god is also a viable option. As the last few centuries have proved, we don’t need to invoke God’s name in order to live a moral life. Secularism can provide us with all the values we need.”

Yuval Noah Harari book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

God , Life

“What’s the point of our living all these centuries if we haven’t grown up even a little?”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 19 “Thule”, Section 27 (p. 482)

“The world cannot be changed through the state. Both theoretical reflection and a whole century of bad experience tell us so.”

John Holloway book Change the World Without Taking Power

Change the World Without Taking Power (2002)

World , Bad luck , Change

“Meister Eckhart, the German churchman and mystic of the fourteenth century; Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in the fifteenth; Jacob Boehme, a German, in the sixteenth and seventeenth; Emanuel Swedenborg in the seventeenth and eighteenth. We are spiritually free, they said, the stewards of our own evolution. Humankind has a choice. We can awaken to our true nature. Drawing fully from our inner resources we can achieve a new dimension of mind; we can see more.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Two, Premonitions of Transformation and Conspiracy

Drawing , Nature

“Although they themselves moved beyond the dominant ideas of their day, they carried few of their contemporaries with them. Most often they were misunderstood, lonely, even ostracized. Until this century, with its rapid communication, there was little chance for linkage among these scattered individuals. Their ideas, however, served as fuel for future generations.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Two, Premonitions of Transformation and Conspiracy

Idea , Future , Chance , Communication

“Rather painfully, we managed to digest Darwinian evolution so far as physical attributes were concerned within half a century of the initial controversy.”

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

I say “we,” but if you’re a Bible-thumping fundamentalist I expect you at this point to take the book by one corner at arm’s length and ceremonially consign it to the place where you put most sensible ideas, along with everything else you decline to acknowledge the existence of, such as mainly shit.
context (5) “The Grand Manor”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“These our well-meaning but unthinking friends take their dreams for realities. That is why they are impatient of communal tangles and attribute them to communal organizations. But the solid fact is that the so-called communal questions are but a legacy handed down to us by centuries of a cultural, religious and national antagonism between the Hindus and the Moslems. When time is ripe you can solve them; but you cannot suppress them by merely refusing recognition of them. It is safer to diagnose and treat deep-seated disease than to ignore it. Let us bravely face unpleasant facts as they are. India cannot be assumed today to be a unitarian and homogeneous nation, but on the contrary there are two nations in the main; the Hindus and the Moslems, in India. And as it has happened in many countries under similar situation in the world the utmost that we can do under the circumstances is to form an Indian State in which none is allowed any special weightage of representation and none is paid an extra-price to buy his loyalty to the State. Mercenaries are paid and bought off, not sons of the Motherland to fight in her defence.”

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) Indian pro-independence activist,lawyer, politician, poet, writer and playwright

V.D. Savarkar: Hindu Rashtra Darshan, quoted in part in Elst, Koenraad (2001). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p.332

Time , Country , Question , Dreams

“There was an outflow of people from India before the fifteenth century BC.”

F. E. Pargiter (1852–1927) British civil servant and orientalist

Ancient Indian Historical Tradition (1962)

People

“It is patent to every student of the closing forty years of the last century, that crowds of thoughtful and moral people have slipped away from the churches, because the teachings they received there outraged their intelligence and shocked their moral sense. It is idle to pretend that the widespread agnosticism of this period had its root either in lack of morality or in deliberate crookedness of mind. Everyone who carefully studies the phenomena presented will admit that men of strong intellect have been driven out of Christianity by the crudity of the religious ideas set before them, the contradictions in the authoritative teachings, the views as to God, man, and the universe that no trained intelligence could possibly admit. Nor can it be said that any kind of moral degradation lay at the root of the revolt against the dogmas of the Church. The rebels were not too bad for their religion; on the contrary, it was the religion that was too bad for them. The rebellion against popular Christianity was due to the awakening and the growth of conscience; it was the conscience that revolted, as well as the intelligence, against teachings dishonouring to God and man alike, that represented God as a tyrant, and man as essentially evil, gaining salvation by slavish submission.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Esoteric Christianity (The Lesser Mysteries) (1914)

God , Religion , Study , Strong

“Yesterday, when asked about reparations, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered a familiar reply: America should not be held liable for something that happened 150 years ago, since none of us currently alive are responsible… This rebuttal proffers a strange theory of governance, that American accounts are somehow bound by the lifetime of its generations. But well into this century, the United States was still paying out pensions to the heirs of Civil War soldiers. We honor treaties that date back some 200 years, despite no one being alive who signed those treaties… But we are American citizens, and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975) writer, journalist, and educator

Ta-Nehisi Coates Makes the Case for Reparations at Historic Congressional Hearing, Democracy Now (20 June 2019)

War , Personality

“What this means is that liberalism had been poisoned by a false definition of liberty, one characterized by an unethical authoritarian demeanor, cast in rigid conformity to authority, obedience to rules, and slave-like submission to the collective, making individual subservient to the group. Instead of questioning authority or challenging state power, the apostles of illiberal positive rights idealize the State as a social panacea. To them, the state is everything, and almost nothing should be outside the state’s jurisdiction. This variant of creeping fascization infected Germany, Italy, and Russia in the first half of the 20th century.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the ‘Free Left’ and the ‘Statist Left', (2019), p. 5

Falseness , Making love , Question

“Since the time of Aristarchus, the great Alexandrian scholar, it has been the rule among philologists not to base the interpretation of Homeric words on references to classical Greek, and not to allow themselves to be influenced by the usage of a later generation when investigating Homeric speech. Today we may expect even richer rewards from this rule than Aristarchus hoped to glean for himself. Let us explain Homer in no terms but his own, and our understanding of the work will be the fresher for it. Once the words are grasped with greater precision in their meaning and relevance, they will suddenly recover all their ancient splendour. The scholar too, like the restorer of an old painting, may yet in many places remove the dark coating of dust and varnish which the centuries have drawn over the picture, and thus give back to the colours their original brilliance.”

Bruno Snell book The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought

"classical Greek" here refers to Greek in the classical period spanning approximately the time between 5th and 4th centuries BC, i.e., in contrast to Homeric Greek from Archaic Greece.
Source: The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought (1953), p. 1

Painting , Time , Hope , Understanding

“I am still sometimes surprised by the contemporary Left’s show of aggressivity, and I can’t even think about it without finding something ridiculous in it. It is really so difficult to note that an internal necessity pushes us toward the historico-genetic conception of the theory of totalitarianism if we subscribe to the basic points of the Marxist interpretation of the twentieth century without accepting the claim of Marxism, and thus of communism, of having the market on absolute truth?”

Ernst Nolte (1923–2016) German historian and philosopher

Source: Fascism & Communism (2004), p. 24

Truth , Thinking , Communication