Quotes about chaos
page 3

“At the helm of freshly-baked, forgive me, independent governments there will appear executives tested and appointed by us. Chaos will generate more chaos. Where this would prove impossible, power will be grabbed by plain old degenerates. Or political prostitutes, dear Vladimir Ilyich. Or simply nothings.”

Yurii Andrukhovych book The Moscoviad

The Moscoviad
Source: The Moscoviad. Yuri Andrukhovych. Spuyten Duyvil, New York City. ISBN1933132523, p. 176

Forgiveness, Appearance

“We should pause to appreciate that the American democratic experiment in ethnic and racial diversity is nearly unique. Indeed, the very idea of racial diversity and nationhood does not have much of a record of success in history. Few countries have been able to transcend their ethnic origins and sustain a racially pluralistic society. Rome was an exception and pulled it off for nearly 500 years, as the Roman Empire grew to encompass non-Italian peoples from the Euphrates to Scotland before unwinding into tribal chaos. The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires worked for long periods, though they relied on the use of autocratic force and imperial coercion to suppress minorities, in ways antithetical to modern notions of governance.”

Victor Davis Hanson (1953) American military historian, essayist, university professor

2010s, America: One Nation, Indivisible (2015)

People, Way, History, Idea

“Men become utilitarian out of fear of the alternative—the chaos of tangled or tepid desires, of rootlessness and boredom.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 148

Men, Fear

“Ye subterranean gods! whose awful sway
The gliding ghosts and silent shades obey:
O Chaos, hear! and Phlegethon profound!
Whose solemn empire stretches wide around!
Give me, ye great tremendous powers! to tell
Of scenes and wonders in the depths of Hell;
Give me your mighty secrets to display
From those black realms of darkness to the day.”

Christopher Pitt (1699–1748) English poet

Book VI, line 371
The Æneid of Virgil (1740)

God, Secret, Hell

“My conclusion is that today we are in chaos as far as the metropolis is concerned and do not do anything in the right direction.”

Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis (1914–1975) Greek architect

Source: Building Entopia - 1975, Chapter 12, Metropolis, p. 171

“When you educate someone, you teach them how to use language to arm them, straighten them out, organize them, elevate them and you ennoble them, and then they're not misshapen half-carved blocks of humanity – people that can stand up, stand around and manoeuvre through the world, contribute properly to the community and keep the world oriented between chaos and order.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Biblical Lectures

People, World, Education, Communication

“The negation of cognition thus correlates on the verbal level. For when those two pillars of Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity, lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; you chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence.”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982), Chapter 18, The Strange Man's Tale Goes on

Communication

“I was reading of chaos that contained order; of information as the primal, creative force; of systems that, by design, fell apart so they could renew themselves; and of invisible forces that structured space and held complex things together. These were compelling, evocative ideas, and they gave me hope, even if they did not reveal immediate solutions.”

Margaret J. Wheatley (1941) American writer

Source: Leadership and the New Science (1992), p. 2

Hope, Idea, Reading

“I believe, as Lenin said, that this revolutionary chaos may yet crystallize into new forms of life.”

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

As quoted in The Times [London] (18 May 1990)
1990s

Life

“Progress everywhere today does seem to come so very heavily disguised as chaos.”

Joyce Grenfell (1910–1979) British comedian, singer, actress

Stately as a Galleon (1978), "English Lit."

“The mess of my life, the selfishnesses and false turnings and the treacheries, all these things could fall into place, they could become a source of construction rather than a source of chaos, and precisely because I had no other choice.”

John Fowles book The Magus

Source: The Magus (1965), Ch. 27

Life, Falseness, Selfishness

“We have our own laws, rules and culture. That is why we don’t need to entertain and care about what those on the outside say, what else if coming from Arab countries which are in chaos themselves”

Ibrahim Ali (1957) Member of the Dewan Rakyat (parliament)

ibid http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/perkasa-on-allah-arabs-ignorant-westerners-have-vested-interests-and-some-i#sthash.oKV6D9cL.dpuf

Law, Country

“Nobody tells me what to do in my book. I can do whatever I wish and to whomever I want. It is fun for me. It calms the chaos inside my mind. That is why I write.”

Gaurav Sharma (author) (1992) Author and novelist

In the news

Books

“Think well about this, dear brothers and sisters, and you will see that we should have been in a state of terrible chaos, in a fratricidal war, in a country which would no longer be Yugoslavia, but be only a group of petty little states fighting among themselves and destroying each other. But our people do not want that to happen.”

Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman

Jasper Ridley, Tito: A Biography (Constable and Company Ltd., 1994), p. 263.
Other

War, People, Thinking, Sister

“Abélard would find most of his old problems sensitive to his touch today. Time has settled few or none of the essential points of dispute. Science hesitates, more visibly than the Church ever did, to decide once for all whether Unity or Diversity is ultimate law; whether order or chaos is the governing rule of the Universe, if Universe there is; whether anything except phenomena exists. Even in matters more vital to society, one dares not speak too loud. Why, and for what, and to whom, is man a responsible agent? Every jury and judge, every lawyer and doctor, every legislator and clergyman has his own views, and the law constantly varies. Every nation may have a different system. One court may hang, and another may acquit for the same crime, on the same day; and Science only repeats what the Church said to Abélard, that where we know so little, we had better hold our tongues.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Law, Problem, Universe, Science

“Women overwhelmingly carry the load of the economic chaos and social misery caused by the present money system everywhere in the world.”

Margrit Kennedy (1939–2013) German architect

Source: Interest and Inflation Free Money (1995), Chapter Three, Who Would Profit From a New Monetary System?, p. 84

Women, Money, World

“The Law of Time and Chaos: In a process, the time interval between salient events (that is, events that change the nature of the process, or significantly affect the future of the process) expands of contracts along with the amount of chaos.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)

Law, Nature, Change, Time

“We should engage with the new de facto power and help make the new government make the changes necessary, especially on the economy, so they can deliver for the people. The events that led to the Egyptian army's removal of President Mohamed Morsi confronted the military with a simple choice: intervention or chaos. Seventeen million people on the streets are not the same as an election. But it as an awesome manifestation of power. I am a strong supporter of democracy. But democratic government doesn't on its own mean effective government. Today efficacy is the challenge. This is a sort of free democratic spirit that operates outside the convention of democracy that elections decide the government. It is enormously fuelled by social media, itself a revolutionary phenomenon. And it moves very fast in precipitating crisis. It is not always consistent or rational. A protest is not a policy, or a placard a programme for government. But if governments don't have a clear argument with which to rebut the protest, they're in trouble.”

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

The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/07/egypt-army-morsi-tony-blair 6 July, 2013 Blair justifying the Egyptians army actions on removing Morsi. 2010s

People, Democracy, Support, Strong

“I am convinced that the majority of the religious hierarchy today deplores the hardship inflicted on our people. I am referring not only to the martyrs but of the families who have been dispersed and terrified, who have no resources, and to the four million unemployed who are suffering from the economic chaos of a country which only a year earlier was giving employment to a million foreigners. Those who have chosen to serve God must feel profoundly sad at seeing ridicule poured on the most sacred principles of our religion.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

Page 167
Publications, The Shah's Story (1980), On Islam and the Islamic Revolution

God, People, Sadness, Family

“All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Foreward (p. xv)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

People, Thinking, Change, Time

“The Tories deserved a kicking last night. With chaos and discord in our hospitals and schools, an unprecedented housing crisis and fatcats lining their pockets while life gets tougher for everybody else, it’s an outrage for David Cameron to appear on TV looking like the cat who got the cream, knowing his party is on track to win again in 2020.”

Jo Cox (1974–2016) UK politician

We nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership. Now we regret it (6 May 2016)

Life, School, Cats, Appearance

“The southern institution of racial segregation or racial separation was the correct, self-evident truth which arose from the chaos and confusion of the reconstruction period. Separation promotes racial harmony. It permits each race to follow its own pursuits, and its own civilization. Segregation is not discrimination. Segregation is not a badge of racial inferiority, and that it is not is recognized by both races in the Southern States. In fact, segregation is desired and supported by the vast majority of the members of both races in the South, who dwell side by side under harmonious conditions. … Let me make this clear, Mr. President: There is no racial hatred in the South. The Negro race is not an oppressed race. … Mr. President, it is the law of nature, it is the law of God, that every race has both the right and the duty to perpetuate itself. All free men have the right to associate exclusively with members of their own race, free from governmental interference, if they so desire. Free men have the right to send their children to schools of their own choosing, free from governmental interference and to build up their own culture, free from governmental interference. These rights are inherent in the Constitution of the United States and in the American system of government, both state and national, to promote and protect this right.”

James Eastland (1904–1986) American politician

1950s

Men, God, Children, Truth

“It can be tempting to look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude our best option is to pack up and go home. That may be satisfying in the short run, but I believe the consequences for American security would be devastating. If American forces were to step back from Baghdad before it is more secure, a contagion of violence could spill out across the entire country. In time, this violence could engulf the region. The terrorists could emerge from the chaos with a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they had in Afghanistan, which they used to plan the attacks of September the 11th, 2001. For the safety of the American people, we cannot allow this to happen.”

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

President Bush Discusses Fourth Anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2007/03/20070319.html (March 19, 2007) 2000s, 2007

People, Home, Time, Country

“All artists whether primitive or sophisticated, have been involved in the handling of chaos.”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 1. 1943-1945, p. 139

“And yet, Blaine thought, mankind showed an historic ability to avoid the extremes of doom as well as the extremes of bliss. Chaos was forever prophesized and utopia was continually predicted, and neither came to pass.”

Robert Sheckley book Immortality, Inc.

Source: Immortality, Inc. (1959), Chapter 3 (p. 9)

“We live well in the houses—well enough. But we are ruled utterly by fear. There was a time we sailed in ships between the stars, and now we dare not go a hundred miles from home. We keep a little knowledge, and do nothing with it. But once we used that knowledge to weave the pattern of life like a tapestry across night and chaos. We enlarged the chances of life. We did man’s work.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, City of Illusions (1967), Chapter 1

Life, Fear, Home, Star

“In more recent times, religious and racial diversity — in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, or contemporary Nigeria — has resulted in chaos and, occasionally, genocide. True, some nations have been able to incorporate different tribes, as in the United Kingdom’s unification of the various peoples of the British Isles, but usually after hundreds of years of fighting and only when there were underlying racial and cultural affinities that could trump tribal differences.”

Victor Davis Hanson (1953) American military historian, essayist, university professor

2010s, America: One Nation, Indivisible (2015)

People, Time, Fight

“The outcome of today's case will doubtless be heralded as a triumph of judicial statesmanship. It is not that, unless it is statesmanlike needlessly to prolong this Court's self-awarded sovereignty over a field where it has little proper business, since the answers to most of the cruel questions posed are political, and not juridical -- a sovereignty which therefore quite properly, but to the great damage of the Court, makes it the object of the sort of organized public pressure that political institutions in a democracy ought to receive. […] Ordinarily, speaking no more broadly than is absolutely required avoids throwing settled law into confusion; doing so today preserves a chaos that is evident to anyone who can read and count. Alone sufficient to justify a broad holding is the fact that our retaining control, through Roe, of what I believe to be, and many of our citizens recognize to be, a political issue, continuously distorts the public perception of the role of this Court. We can now look forward to at least another Term with carts full of mail from the public, and streets full of demonstrators, urging us -- their unelected and life-tenured judges who have been awarded those extraordinary, undemocratic characteristics precisely in order that we might follow the law despite the popular will -- to follow the popular will. Indeed, I expect we can look forward to even more of that than before, given our indecisive decision today. […] It was an arguable question today whether [Section] 188.029 of the Missouri law contravened this Court’s understanding of Roe v. Wade, and I would have examined Roe rather than examining the contravention. […] Of the four courses we might have chosen today -- to reaffirm Roe, to overrule it explicitly, to overrule it sub silentio, or to avoid the question -- the last is the least responsible. On the question of the constitutionality of [Section] 188.029, I concur in the judgment of the Court and strongly dissent from the manner in which it has been reached.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment), 492 U.S. 490 https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/492/490#writing-USSC_CR_0492_0490_ZC1, No. 88-605 ; decided July 3, 1989 1980s

Life, Law, Democracy, Understanding

“You worry that if you lower your guard, even for one second, your whole world will disintegrate into chaos.”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

World

“If you're a twofisted, spineless progressive (a mighty fashionable stance nowadays) Offissa Pupp, who forcefully asserts the will of socalled society, becomes a cosmic angel; while Ignatz Mouse, who forcefully defies society's socalled will by asserting his authentic own, becomes a demon of anarchy and a fiend of chaos. But if—whisper it—you're a 100% hidebound reactionary, the foot's in the other shoe. Ignatz Mouse then stands forth as a hero, pluckily struggling to keep the flag of free will flying; while Offissa Pupp assumes the monstrous mien of a Goliath, satanically bullying a tiny but indomitable David. Well, let's flip the coin—so: and lo! Offissa Pupp comes up. That makes Ignatz Mouse "tails."”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Now we have a hero whose heart has gone to his head and a villain whose head has gone to his heart.
A Foreword to Krazy (1946)

Angels, Shoe, Fashion, Heart

“Victor's unfortunate choice it was always to mis-see, to mis-hear, to misjudge. He read softness into her because of the softness of her voice, when she was only remembering. His was the self-centered chaos of childhood. All looks and thoughts, loves and hatreds, were directed at him. Softness was softness towards him, weakness was weakness in the face of his strength. He preheard answers and listened not. He was full-coloured and brilliant—all outside of him was pale.”

John Steinbeck book Burning Bright

Act One: The Circus
Burning Bright (1950)

Love, Reading, Childhood

“I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council—a Labour council—hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I'm telling you - and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and with people's services. The people will not abide posturing.”

Neil Kinnock (1942) British politician

Source: Speech to the Labour Party Conference in Bournemouth (1 October 1985).

People

“The description of the evolutionary trajectory of dynamical systems as irreversible, periodically chaotic, and strongly nonlinear fits certain features of the historical development of human societies. But the description of evolutionary processes, whether in nature or in history, has additional elements. These elements include such factors as the convergence of existing systems on progressively higher organizational levels, the increasingly efficient exploitation by systems of the sources of free energy in their environment, and the complexification of systems structure in states progressively further removed from thermodynamic equilibrium.
General evolution theory, based on the integration of the relevant tenets of general system theory, cybernetics, information and communication theory, chaos theory, dynamical systems theory, and nonequilibrium thermodynamics, can convey a sound understanding of the laws and dynamics that govern the evolution of complex systems in the various realms of investigation…. The basic notions of this new discipline can be developed to give an adequate account of the dynamical evolution of human societies as well. Such an account could furnish the basis of a system of knowledge better able to orient human beings and societies in their rapidly changing milieu.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

E. Laszlo et al. (1993) pp. xvii- xix; as cited in: Alexander Laszlo and Stanley Krippner (1992) " Systems Theories: Their Origins, Foundations, and Development http://archive.syntonyquest.org/elcTree/resourcesPDFs/SystemsTheory.pdf" In: J.S. Jordan (Ed.), Systems Theories and A Priori Aspects of Perception. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1998. Ch. 3, pp. 47-74.

Law, History, Communication, Understanding

“We're adapted to the meta-reality, which means that we're adapted to that which remains constant across the longest spans of time. And that's not the same things that you see around you day to day. They're just like clouds, they're just evaporating, you know? There are things underneath that that are more fundamental realities, like the dominance hierarchy, like the tribe, like the danger outside of society, like the threat that other people pose to you, and the threat that you pose to yourself. Those are eternal realities, and we're adapted to those. That's our world, and that's why we express all those things in stories. Then you might say, well how do you adapt yourself to that world? The answer, and I believe this is a neurological answer, is that your brain can tell you when you're optimally situated between chaos and order. The way it tells you that is by producing the sense of engagement and meaning. Let's say that there's a place in the environment that you should be. So what should that place be? Well, you don't want to be terrified out of your skull. What good is that? And you don't want to be so comfortable that you might as well sleep. You want to be somewhere where you are kind of on firm ground with both of your feet, but you can take a step with one leg and test out new territory. Some of you who are exploratory and emotionally stable are going to go pretty far out there into the unexplored territory without destabilizing yourself. And some people are just going to put a toe in the chaos, and that's neuroticism basically - your sensitivity to threat that is calibrated differently in different people. And some people are more exploratory than others. That's extroversion and openness, and intelligence working together. Some people are going to tolerate more chaos in their mixture of chaos and order. Those are often liberals, by the way. They're more interested in novel chaos, and conservatives are more interested in the stabilization of the structures that already exist. Who's right? It depends on the situation. That's why liberals and conservatives have to talk to each other, because one of them isn't right and the other is wrong. Sometimes the liberals are right and sometimes the liberals are right, because the environment is unpredictable and constantly changing, so that's why you have to communicate. That's what a democracy does. It allows people of different temperamental types to communicate and to calibrate their societies. So let's say you're optimally balanced between chaos and order. What does that mean? Well, you're stable enough, but you're interested. A little novelty heightens your anxiety. It wakes you up a bit. That's the adventure part of it. But it also focuses the part of your brain that does exploratory activity, and that's associated with pleasure. That's the dopamine circuit. So if you're optimally balanced - and you know you're there if you're listening to an interesting conversation or you're engaged in one…you're saying some things that you know, and the other person is saying some things that they know - and what both of you know is changing. Music can model that. It provides you with multi-level predictable forms that can transform just the right amount. So music is a very representational art form. It says, 'this is what the universe is like.' There's a dancing element to it, repetitive, and then little variations that surprise you and produce excitement in you. In doesn't matter how nihilistic you are, music still infuses you with a sense of meaning because it models meaning. That's what it does. That's why we love it. And you can dance to it, which represents you putting yourself in harmony with these multiple layers of reality, and positioning yourself properly.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

"The selection pressure that women placed on men developed the entire species. There's two things that happened. The men competed for competence, since the male hierarchy is a mechanism that pushes the best men to the top. The effect of that is multiplied by the fact that women who are hypergamous peel from the top. And so the males who are the most competent are much more likely to leave offspring, which seems to have driven cortical expansion."
Concepts

Love, Women, Men, People

“Restructuring is a favorite tactic of antisocials who have reached a senior position in an organization. The chaos that results is an ideal smokescreen for dysfunctional leadership. Failure at the top goes unnoticed, while the process of restructuring creates the illusion of a strong, creative hand on the helm.”

Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries (1942) Dutch academic

Source: The Leader on the Couch, 2011, p. 22

Failure, Strong

“There has been a lot of talk about the formation of a new centre party. Some have even been kind enough to suggest that I might lead it. I find this idea profoundly unattractive. I do so for at least four reasons. First, I do not believe that such a grouping would have any coherent philosophical base…A party based on such a rag-bag could stand for nothing positive. It would exploit grievances and fall apart when it sought to remedy them. I believe in exactly the reverse sort of politics…Second, I believe that the most likely effect of such an ill-considered grouping would be to destroy the prospect of an effective alternative government to the Conservatives…Some genuinely want a new, powerful anti-Conservative force. They would be wise to reflect that it is much easier to will this than to bring it about. The most likely result would be chaos on the left and several decades of Conservative hegemony almost as dismal and damaging as in the twenties and thirties. Third, I do not share the desire, at the root of much such thinking, to push what may roughly be called the leftward half of the Labour Party…out of the mainstream of British politics…Fourth, and more personally, I cannot be indifferent to the political traditions in which I was brought up and in which I have lived my political life. Politics are not to me a religion, but the Labour Party is and always had been an instinctive part of my life.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech to the Oxford University Labour Club (9 March 1973), quoted in The Times (10 March 1973), p. 4
1970s

Life, Religion, Idea, Thinking

“There as elsewhere a cruel universe combined to crush a child. As though three or four vigorous brothers and sisters, with the best will, were not enough to crush any child, every one else conspired towards an education which he hated. From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics, and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame. Rarely has the boy felt kindly towards his tamers. Between him and his master has always been war. Henry Adams never knew a boy of his generation to like a master, and the task of remaining on friendly terms with one's own family, in such a relation, was never easy.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Life, Hate, War, Education

“When they [N'Sync and Aerosmith] played, it wasn't music. It was the sound of chaos. I knew it was the sound of chaos because you could hear pigs being slaughtered. Women were weeping and men were gnashing their teeth, and there were sounds so horrible that I cannot repeat them to you, or you would flee from this room in horror!”

Lewis Black (1948) American stand-up comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor

The End of the Universe (2002)

Women, Men, Music

“The world is chaos. Nothingness is the yet-to-be-born god of the world.”

Georg Büchner Danton's Death

Act IV
Dantons Tod (Danton's Death) (1835)

God, World

“Psychic disturbances are the consequences of the sexual chaos of society. For thousands of years, this chaos has had the function of psychically subjecting man to the prevailing conditions of existence, of internalizing the external mechanization of life. It has served to bring about the psychic anchoring of a mechanized and authoritarian civilization by making man incapable of functioning independently.”

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) Austrian-American psychoanalyst

General Survey
The Function of the Orgasm (1927)

Life

“We're in the midst of the greatest crisis we've ever seen and if we don't stop laughing about it and deal with it, we're going to find ourself in the midst of chaos, confusion and civil war. It's time we started acting like grownups.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

Interview with KHAS-TV, Hastings, Nebraska, February 19, 2009. As transcribed verbatim...jt from MSNBC: Keith Olberman's "Countdown" February 20,09.
2009

War, Time

“The passions are a kind of thirst, inexorable and intense, for certain feelings or felt states. To find or invent 'objects' (which are, more strictly speaking, relational structures) whose felt quality satisfies the passions, - that for me is the activity of the artist, an activity which does not cease even in sleep. No wonder the artist is constantly placing and displacing, relating and rupturing relations; his task is to find a complex of qualities whose feeling is just right – veering toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Source: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), pp. 38-39

Feeling, Sleep, Passion

“Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression “individual rights” is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today’s intellectual chaos). But the expression “collective rights” is a contradiction in terms.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“It was a dramatization of total chaos, a functional definition of confusion, an unchoreographed dance of sad violence. It was war.”

Dan Simmons book The Fall of Hyperion

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 7 (p. 51)

War, Sadness, Dance

“The better artists are original and obdurate; they're the gravel in the pea soup. ln Jackson Pollock's painting the particularity, the immediacy, is the dripped paint, which remains dripped paint as a phenomenon, for all the beauty of the small shapes it makes it makes. The generality is in the scale or proportion and in the large shapes. It’s in the appearance of chaos. The gesture or the motion shown in the application of the paint varies from painting to painting from the particular to a middling generality. The size and the color generally occur in the middle between particularity and generality. At the same time as Pollock and since, almost all first-rate art has been based on an immediate phenomenon, for example the work of Dan Flavin and Larry Bell.”

Donald Judd (1928–1994) artist

Donald Judd (1987) Complete writings, 1975-1986. p. 35 : Cited in: Marjanovic, Marianne Berger. "To build new ways of talking about the work": Hovedbegreper i Donald Judds kunstteori." (2005).
1980

Beauty, Art, Color, Appearance

“That was the nature of chaos; its effects spanned time in ways that were not always immediately discernible, not even by beings outside of time.”

Karen Lord (1968) Barbadian novelist and sociologist of religion

Source: Redemption in Indigo (2010), Chapter 9 “A Stranger is Coming to Makendha” (p. 69)

Way, Nature, Time

“Like Kant before him, Darwin insists that the source of all error is semblance. Analogy, he says again and again, is always a ‘deceitful guide’ (see pp. 61, 66, 473). As against analogy, or as I would say merely metaphorical characterizations of the facts, Darwin wishes to make a case for the existence of real ‘affinities’ genealogically construed. The establishment of these affinities will permit him to postulate the linkage of all living things to all others by the ‘laws’ or ‘principles’ of genealogical descent, variation, and natural selection. These laws and principles are the formal elements in his mechanistic explanation of why creatures are arranged in families in a time series. But this explanation could not be offered as long as the data remained encoded in the linguistic modes of either metaphor or synecdoche, the modes of qualitative connection. As long as creatures are classified in terms of either semblance or essential unity, the realm of organic things must remain either a chaos of arbitrarily affirmed connectedness or a hierarchy of higher and lower forms. Science as Darwin understood it, however, cannot deal in the categories of the ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ any more than it can deal in the categories of the ‘normal’ and ‘monstrous.’ Everything must be entertained as what it manifestly seems to be. Nothing can be regarded as ‘surprising,’ any more than anything can be regarded as ‘miraculous.”

Hayden White (1928–2018) American historian

"The fictions of factual representation"

Family, Law, Error, Nature

“Well, it was a radical concept to me. Like any other American, I wasn’t sophisticated enough to study all its facets. All I knew about it was it was foreign to democracy. And here I was, I had been fighting for democracy and always aware of two political parties and brought up in that kind of atmosphere. Anything radical was dangerous to me, as it was to the average American. Nobody knew where a thing like that would lead and we were always afraid of chaos. So communism became the doorway to chaos, and the doorway to chaos was the doorway to evil. Your family might be hurt. Your friends might be hurt. You didn’t want to see a thing like that.”

Jack Kirby (1917–1994) American comic book artist, writer and editor

TCJ Archive, Jack Kirby Interview http://www.tcj.com/jack-kirby-interview/5/, The Comics Journal

Family, Democracy, Communication, Study

“The simple organization of a people into a national body, composite or otherwise, is of itself an impressive fact. As an original proceeding, it marks the point of departure of a people, from the darkness and chaos of unbridled barbarism, to the wholesome restraints of public law and society. It implies a willing surrender and subjection of individual aims and ends, often narrow and selfish, to the broader and better ones that arise out of society as a whole. It is both a sign and a result of civilization. A knowledge of the character, resources and proceedings of other nations, affords us the means of comparison and criticism, without which progress would be feeble, tardy, and perhaps, impossible. It is by comparing one nation with another, and one learning from another, each competing with all, and all competing with each, that hurtful errors are exposed, great social truths discovered, and the wheels of civilization whirled onward.”

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

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

People, Truth, Law, Error

“I've found him to be a disappointment. Wonderful speech in Egypt, and good intentions aside, foreign policy needs to be firmly grounded in reality, and understanding of a sort of chaos theory…[that is to say] it needs to be part good intention, part political intelligence, and part political savvy and knowledge of international interests and national burdens. President Obama has been extremely short-sighted in this sense, and if he fails, it will be a tragic blow for peaceniks and multilateralists the world over, and a manna from heaven for the Republican party.”

Munir Butt (1940–2015) British diplomat

Source: Foreign Affairs. 2009

World, Disappointment, Intelligence, Understanding

“Captain Humayun Khan was a hero to our country and we should honor all who have made the ultimate sacrifice to keep our country safe. The real problem here are the radical Islamic terrorists who killed him, and the efforts of these radicals to enter our country to do us further harm. Given the state of the world today, we have to know everything about those looking to enter our country, and given the state of chaos in some of these countries, that is impossible. While I feel deeply for the loss of his son, Mr. Khan who has never met me, has no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the Constitution, (which is false) and say many other inaccurate things. If I become President, I will make America safe again.”

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

2010s, 2016, July

People, World, Feeling, Problem

“The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value

Imagination

“She was grumbling. “The least he could have done was drop us near a town. Although in these parts they’d probably burn us as witches before asking any questions.” She shuddered. “I’m an awful snob about peasants, I’m afraid.”
I mentioned dryly that I thought those of her political persuasion had some sort of egalitarian duty to resist such prejudice. “Egalitarianism isn’t about prejudices,” she said, “it’s about equal shares of power. It’s the only means we have of steering some sort of even course through a future which is forever, by the very nature of the multiverse, unguessable. We have only institutions and a crude, fragile kind of democracy standing between us and absolute Chaos. That is why we must value and protect those institutions. And be forever reexamining them.””

Michael Moorcock book The Steel Tsar

Book 2, Chapter 8 “Revolutions” (p. 419)
The Steel Tsar (1981)

Democracy, Question, Nature, Future

“I think Iraq will have a formally independent government that will be in perpetual gridlock and chaos, and essentially, there will be a U. S. military administration utilizing NGOs that can do a lot of the heavy lifting in the country.”

George Friedman (1949) American businessman and political scientist

Interview with Matt Bai (2003)

Thinking, Country

“In 1925, Goebbels and Strasser argued in the Nazi daily, Völkischer Beobachter, that only the introduction of a ‘socialist dictatorship’ could save Germany from chaos. ‘Lenin scarified Marx.’ Goebbels wrote, ‘and in return gave Russia freedom.’ Of his own Nazi Party, he wrote in 1929 that it was a party of ‘revolutionary socialists.”

Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 260

Freedom

“I am sure that some day the Czechs will see that what we did was to save them for a happier future. And I sincerely believe that what we have at last opened the way to that general appeasement which alone can save the world from chaos.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury (2 October 1938), quoted in Keith Feiling, Neville Chamberlain (London: Macmillan, 1946), p. 375.
Prime Minister

World, Way, Future, Sincerity

“Were it not for the mind change of Sai devotees the world would already have fallen into complete chaos. The deterioration of mind and man has been very rapid and abrupt, even precipitous during the last fifteen years. That the world is not in total destruction is due to the change of mind of Sai devotees and to Sai's grace.”

Sathya Sai Baba (1926–2011) Indian guru

Conversations with... Sathya Sai Baba by Dr. J. Hislop, p. 190 old ed., page 173 new edition

World, Change

“Our task then is always to challenge the apparent forms of reality—that is, the fixed meaning and values of the few—and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false faces, and on until it surrenders its insight, its truth.”

Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer

"Brave Words for a Startling Occasion" (1953), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 154.

Truth, Reality, Falseness, Madness

“Universe is a cosmos and not a chaos. There exists a mental affinity; a scientific law; a rhythm of mental relationship in which the entire living world is held together, in one web of love.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

Love, World, Law, Universe

“If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.”

Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965) American judge

Concurring, United States v. United Mine Workers, 330 U.S. 312 (1946).
Judicial opinions

Law, Parting

“You're about to experience chaos. [before farting in a police officer's face, while being photographed nude after his arrest]”

Hans Reiser (1963) American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and convicted murderer

Source: Wired article http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/01/oakland-califor.html

“He knows that law is the adhesive force in the cement of society, creating order out of chaos and coherence in place of anarchy. He knows that for one man to defy a law or court order he does not like is to invite others to defy those which they do not like, leading to a breakdown of all justice and all order. He knows, too, that every fellowman is entitled to be regarded with decency and treated with dignity. Any educated citizen who seeks to subvert the law, to suppress freedom, or to subject other human beings to acts that are less than human, degrades his heritage, ignores his learning, and betrays his obligation.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Address at Vanderbilt University

Education, Justice, Law, Freedom

“The House has noticed the Prime Minister's remarkable transformation in the past few weeks from Stalin to Mr. Bean, creating chaos out of order, rather than order out of chaos.”

Vince Cable (1943) British Liberal Democrat politician

House of Commons' Hansard http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm071128/debtext/71128-0003.htm#71128-0003.htm_spnew0, 28 November 2007. 2007

Past, Housing

“There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

See e.g. Nigel Holden, Snejina Michailova, Susanne Tietze (editors). The Routledge Companion to Cross-Cultural Management. Routledge 2015.
Attributed

“All historical evidence seems to be that the party of chaos is suppressed by the party of order.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"‘The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation’ Interview with Nick Land" https://syntheticzero.net/2017/06/19/the-only-thing-i-would-impose-is-fragmentation-an-interview-with-nick-land/ (2017)

“Sometimes both sides of the civil war are evil, and sometimes intervention sometimes makes us less safe. This is real the debate we have to have in the Middle East. Every time we have toppled a secular dictator, we have gotten chaos, the rise of radical Islam, and we're more at risk. So, I think we need to think before we act, and know most interventions, if not a lot of them in the Middle East, have actually backfired on us.”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

2015-09-16
CNN REAGAN LIBRARY DEBATE: Later Debate Full Transcript
CNN
http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2015/09/16/cnn-reagan-library-debate-later-debate-full-transcript/
2010s

War, Thinking, Evil, Time

“I don't know if men will ever journey again, as we journeyed, to that intersection of latitude and longitude where a shell hangs forever — forever and yet not forever, in space and out of space — on the axis stretching through time from beginning to end.
From the dawn of the nebulae to the twilight of absolute entropy, when the framework of the cosmos has broken down into chaos, still that axis will stretch from dawn to dusk, from beginning to end. For as this world spins on an axis through space, so the sphere of time spins on its own axis.”

Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) American author

Source: The Time Axis (1949), Ch. 1 : Encounter In Rio

Men, World, Time

“Empires were like seawalls, he thought sadly, even those which embodied the best of hopes. The tide of chaos beat at them, and as soon as no one was shoring up the stones any more…”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, To Green Angel Tower (1993), Part 2, Chapter 6, “The Circle Narrows” (p. 150).

Hope

“There are two injustices which revolt Me! First, that which makes the people believe that those responsible for the [Franco-Khmer] treaty and who continue to have dealings with the French are traitors. Secondly, that which holds that… all who do not openly insult and struggle against the French are traitors… For Myself, I refuse [this logic]… If I am a traitor, let the Crown Council permit Me to abdicate!… I can no longer stand by and watch My country drown and My people die… Over these last few months we have no longer dared look each other in the face. In our offices and schools, everywhere people are discussing politics- suspecting each other; hatching plots; promoting this person, bringing down that one, pushing the third aside; doing no constructive work while, in the country at large, killing, banditry and murder hold sway. Chaos reigns, the established order has ceased to exist… The military and the police… no longer know where their duty lies. The Issaraks are told that they are dying for Cambodia, and so are our soldiers dying in battle against them… Each day threatens [to engulf us in] a veritable civil war… This is how things now stand gentlemen. The time has come for the Nation to make clear whether it desires to follow [the way of the rebels], or to continue in the path that I have traced.”

Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012) Cambodian King

Speech to the Council of the Throne (June 4, 1952), as quoted in Philip Short (2004) Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare, page 76.
Speeches

War, People, School, Way

“I cannot believe that there is any being in this universe who has created a human soul for eternal pain. I would rather that every god would destroy himself; I would rather that we all should go to eternal chaos, to black and starless night, than that just one soul should suffer eternal agony.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

What Must We Do To Be Saved? (1880) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38801/38801-h/38801-h.htm Section X, "The Evangelical Alliance."

God, Pain, Soul, Suffering

“The Myth is the Myth of the Blood, which, under the sign of the Swastika, released the World Revolution. It is the Awakening of the Soul of the Race, which, after a period of long slumber, victoriously put an End to Racial Chaos.”

Alfred Rosenberg book The Myth of the Twentieth Century

Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts ("The Myth of the Twentieth Century") - 1930 (in front of the actual text, not by Rosenberg himself)
Misattributed

World, Soul, Victory

“The indwelling deity who presides over the destiny of the race has raised in man's mind and heart the idea, the hope of a new order which will replace the old unsatisfactory order, and substitute for it conditions of the world's life which will in the end have a reasonable chance of establishing permanent peace and well-being…. It is for the men of our day and, at the most, of tomorrow to give the answer. For, too long a postponement or too continued a failure will open the way to a series of increasing catastrophes which might create a too prolonged and disastrous confusion and chaos and render a solution too difficult or impossible; it might even end in something like an irremediable crash not only of the present world-civilisation but of all civilisation…. The terror of destruction and even of large-scale extermination created by these ominous discoveries may bring about a will in the governments and peoples to ban and prevent the military use of these inventions, but, so long as the nature of mankind has not changed, this prevention must remain uncertain and precarious and an unscrupulous ambition may even get by it a chance of secrecy and surprise and the utilisation of a decisive moment which might conceivably give it victory and it might risk the tremendous chance.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

April, 1950 (From a Postcript Chapter to The Ideal of Human Unity.)
India's Rebirth

Life, Men, People, World

“I don’t think John Edwards knows what the heck he is talking about. John Edwards wants you and all the Democrats to think, ‘I want us out of there,’ but when you come back and you say, ‘O. K., John. What about the chaos that will ensue? Do we have any interest, John, left in the region?’ Well, John will have to answer yes or no. If he says yes, what are they? What are those interests, John? How do you protect those interests, John, if you are completely withdrawn? Are you withdrawn from the region, John? Are you withdrawn from Iraq, John? In what period? So all this stuff is like so much Fluffernutter out there. So for me, what I think you have to do is have a strategic notion. And they may have it—they are just smart enough not to enunciate it.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Speaking on Edwards' position for immediate withdrawal of about 40,000 American troops from Iraq (February 5, 2007), reported in the New York Observer http://www.observer.com/20070205/20070205_Jason_Horowitz_pageone_newsstory1-2.html 2000s

Thinking

“When Shaw is read in the light of the existentialist thinkers, a new philosophical position arises from his works as a whole, a position of he himself was probably unconscious. It is this: that although the ultimate reality may be irrational, yet man's relation to it is not. Existentialism means the recognition that life is a tiny corner of casual order in a universe of chaos. All men are aware of that chaos; but some insulate themselves from it and refuse to face it. These are the Insiders, and they make up the overwhelming majority of the human race. The Outsider is the man who has faced chaos. If he is an abstract philosopher — like Hegel — he will try to demonstrate that chaos is not really chaos, but that underlying it is an order of which we are unaware. If he is an existentialist, he acknowledges that chaos is chaos, a denial of life — or rather, of the conditions under which life are possible. If there is nothing but life and chaos, then life is permanently helpless — as Sartre and Camus think it is. But if a rational relation can somehow exist between them, ultimate pessimism is avoided, as it must be avoided if the Outsider is to live at all. It is this contribution which makes Shaw the key figure of existentialist thought.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Religion and the Rebel (1957), p. 289

Life, Men, Thinking, Reality

“To Donham, the case study stood squarely in the legal and cultural tradition of Anglo-American thought. Unlike French or Spanish law. Donham emphasized, English law was grounded on the doctrine of stare decisis, in which the written case decisions of the past shape, and instantiate, the law. Just as the recording of cases allowed English common law to break the arbitrariness of local law. Donham argued in 1925, business needed to universalize its procedures by itself adopting the case system. The chaos of local law that ruled in England before the common law. Donham contended, "is exactly the same situation that we have [in the world of business] where practically every large corporation is tightly hound by traditions which are precedents in its particular narrow field and narrow held only The recording of decisions from industry to industry [enables] us to start from facts and draw inferences from those facts; [it] will introduce principle… in the field of business to such an extent that it will control executive action in the field where executive action is haphazard or unprincipled or bound by narrow, instead of broad precedent and decision"”

Peter Galison (1955) American physicist

W. Donham, transcript of talk to the Association of Coll. School of Business Committee Reports and Other Literature, 5-7 May 1925. Harvard Business School, box 17, folder 10. 62
Source: Image and Logic, 1997, p. 57, footnote 66

World, School, Law, Literature

“We're fighting on many fronts, and Iraq is now the central front. Saddam holdouts and foreign terrorists are trying desperately to undermine Iraq's progress and to throw that country into chaos. The terrorists in Iraq believe their attacks on innocent people will weaken our resolve. That's what they believe. They believe that America will run from a challenge. They're mistaken. Americans are not the running kind.”

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

Speech in Portsmouth, NH http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/10/20031009-7.html (October 9, 2003) These lines have sometimes been attributed to Paul Wolfowitz, who was reported to have said them the next day, perhaps quoting the President's speech. 2000s, 2003

People, Fight, Country

“A physician, a civil engineer, and a computer scientist were arguing about what was the oldest profession in the world. The physician remarked, "Well, in the Bible, it says that God created Eve from a rib taken out of Adam. This clearly required surgery, and so I can rightly claim that mine is the oldest profession in the world." The civil engineer interrupted, and said, "But even earlier in the book of Genesis, it states that God created the order of the heavens and the earth from out of the chaos. This was the first and certainly the most spectacular application of civil engineering. Therefore, fair doctor, you are wrong: mine is the oldest profession in the world."”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

The computer scientist leaned back in her chair, smiled, and then said confidently, "Ah, but who do you think created the chaos?"
Source: Object-oriented design: With Applications, (1991), p. 2

God, Books, World, Smile

“At last their universe had been wrecked by rays, and Karl Pearson undertook to cut the wreck loose with an axe, leaving science adrift on a sensual raft in the midst of a supersensual chaos.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Universe, Science

“Where Breuil has seen chaos—or at least, randomness—in wall art, Leroi-Gourhan sought and found order.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (1992)

Art

“A fact is discovered, a theory is invented; is any theory ever deep enough for it to be truly called a creation? Most scientists would answer: no! Science, they would say, engages only part of the mind - the rational intellect - but creation must engage the whole mind. Science demands none of that ground swell of emotion, none of the rich bottom of personality, which fills out the work of art…
Creation consists in finding unity, finding likenesses, finding pattern…
Nature herself is chaos; she is full of infinite variety without order. But if you see her with inner vision, a creative mind (whether a poetic mind like Charles Baudelaire's or a scientific mind like Isaac Newton's), there comes a moment when many different aspects suddenly crystallize in a single unity. You have found a key; you have found a clue; you have found the path which organizes the material. You have found what Coleridge called "unity in variety."”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

That is the moment of creation. Source: The Creative Process, 1958, p. 97-98: As quoted in: S.P. Sector (‎1997). A Study of Issues Relating to the Patentability of Biotechnological Subject Matter. Footnote 51. https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/ippd-dppi.nsf/eng/ip00201.html

Art, Nature, Science, Parting

“Something appears midway between order and chaos, these forms, these expressions occupy a middle position.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

1973 - from CF,35; p. 67
Karel Appel, a gesture of colour' (1992/2009)

Appearance

“Individualism is one of the great foundations of Western culture. But unless society secures personal independence and basic security for the individual, it can lead to disaffection, anxiety, and chaos. For a long time now the United States has been turning toward its Wild West past, while the Nordic nations have been taking individualism in the logical direction of further progress, and into the future.”

Anu Partanen (1975) journalist

Source: The Nordic Theory of Everything, Chapter 9

Time, Past, Future, Personality

“There are so many elements flying in so many different directions that you really have to go with what feels like instinctively. The nature of the universe is fairly whimsical and nonsensical. In the most somber, beatific peacefulness there's complete chaos and maniacal laughter. I think music that doesn't reflect that is boring.”

Beck (1970) American Musician (b.1970)

Guitar magazine, January 1999

Peace, Music, Feeling, Nature

“Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena.”

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) Austrian-American psychoanalyst

Source: The Function of the Orgasm (1927), Ch. II : Peer Gynt

“Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart. The continuity such an impression ignores is a literary continuity.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

"Joan Didion" (1980)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

“Today we live in a chaos of straight lines, in a jungle of straight lines. If you do not believe this, take the trouble to count the straight lines which surround you. Then you will understand, for you will never finish counting.”

Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928–2000) Austrian artist

Mould Manifesto against Rationalism in Architecture (1958)

Understanding

“People flock around the sorcerer, the priest, the scientist, the commissar, the psychiatrist, the drug pusher, each generation of the faithful pitying the victims of past fallacies, and this repetitive vanity keeps us stupider than we need to be. **The Rules of Chaos (1969), p 106”

Stephen Vizinczey (1933) Hungarian-Canadian writer

People, Stupidity, Faith, Past

“Moonlighting was funny, innovative, genre-busting chaos. Also, apparently, unsustainable. Sigh.”

Jane Espenson (1964) American television writer and producer

Ain't It Cool News interview (17 July 2003) http://www.whedon.info/Jane-Espenson-Buffy-Tv-Series.h

“The armed forces have acted today solely from the patriotic inspiration of saving the country from the tremendous chaos into which it was being plunged by the Marxist government of Salvador Allende.… The Junta will maintain judicial power and consultantship of the Comptroller. The Chambers will remain in recess until further orders. That is all.”

Augusto Pinochet (1915–2006) Former dictator of the republic of Chile

Press conference (11 September 1973) Youtube.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hbhb0ozRuM 1970s

Country

“The passions are a kind of thirst, inexorable and intense, for certain feelings or felt states. To find or invent 'objects' (which are, more strictly speaking, relational structures) whose felt quality satisfies the passions,- that for me is the activity of the artist, an activity which does not cease even in sleep. No wonder the artist is constantly placing and displacing, relating and rupturing relations; his task is to find a complex of qualities whose feeling is just right – veering toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Source: 1940s, Beyond the Aesthetics' (1946), pp. 36-37

Feeling, Sleep, Passion

“At my back I hear the word—”homosexual”—and it seems to split my world in two…. It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that creates this terrifying erotic chaos. Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world.”

John Cheever (1912–1982) American novelist and short story writer

The Sixties, 1966 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

World, Light

“There were "evil people", who "wanted to make the kingdom a place for chaos and marches that are void of noble goals."”

Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud (1933–2012) Saudi Arabian former crown prince

At a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council in March 2011 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-15500679

People, Evil

“The thing framed says that nothing framed it; the tongue never made itself to speak, and yet talks against him that did; saying that which is made, is, and that which made it, is not. But this folly is infinite as hell, as much without light or bound as the chaos or the primitive nothing.”

Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667) English clergyman

"Apples of Sodom," part II, sermon XX of Twenty-Five Sermons for the Winter Half-Year, Preached at Golden Grove (1653)

Hell, Light

“It's all about discipline - and having an inner calm. That's one of the main driving forces for me when I step into the ring - you can’t have a fight and lose your temper. You need to remain calm and focused when everything around you is in chaos. It's a similar thing for the buddhists - they remain calm and disciplined in the hurly burly of everyday life.”

Johnny Nelson (1967) British boxer

Johnny 'Two worlds collide - the boxer meets the Buddhists'http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2002/09_september/09/boxer_yorkslincsinsideout.shtml

Life, Fight