Quotes about choice
page 8

“I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. … Strangely enough, I think I would choose to have it. It's complicated. Depression is awful beyond words or sounds or images … So why would I want anything to do with this illness? Because I honestly believe that as a result of it I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely; … worn death 'as close as dungarees', appreciated it - and life - more; seen the finest and most terrible in people … But, normal or manic, I have run faster, thought faster, and loved faster than most I know. And I think much of this is related to my illness - the intensity it gives to things”

Kay Redfield Jamison (1946) American bipolar disorder researcher

An Unquiet Mind

Love, Life, Death, People

“It was a miracle — more than a miracle — when I found you, Melanie. Right now, if I was given the choice between having the world back and having you, I wouldn't be able to give you up. Not to save five billion lives.”

Stephenie Meyer book The Host

Jared Howe to Melanie Stryder, p. 78
The Host (2008)

World

“I never wanted to belong to a crowd. I never had a herd mentality… I always knew what I wanted and I made sure I got it. And I always knew that I wanted to be an actress. I exist because I can act. I will not sit here and say, 'Arrey, by chance, offer aa gaya' (I got the offer by chance). No, I made acting happen to me. The first opportunity I got to act, I grabbed it. Nobody had even heard of me till a couple of years ago. But it's by sheer hard work and focus that I am here. Also, I think I chose the right scripts. Like Robert De Niro says, 'Talent is in the choice you make!”

Mallika Sherawat (1976) Indian actress

Cine Bliitz magazine,(July 2005)

Thinking, Chance

“Young women have more choices to make today about what to be. One of those choices is activist.”

Gillian Anderson (1968) American-British film, television and theatre actress, activist and writer

Global Goals United Nations https://twitter.com/GlobalGoalsUN/status/712709697468571648 (March 23, 2016) 2010s

Women

“My dear Duret, I went to see Monet yesterday. I found him heart-broken and completely on the rocks. He asked me to find him someone who would take from ten to twenty of his paintings at their choice, for 111 fr. apiece. Shall we do it between us, making 500 fr. each? Naturally, no one, least of all he, must know that it is we who are doing it..”

Edouard Manet (1832–1883) French painter

Quote from Manet's letter to the Paris' art-critic Théodore Duret, 1875, as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock -, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 121
1850 - 1875

Nature, Heart, Painting

“The Arab world has seen elections before. However, virtually all of them were artificial affairs, their outcomes never in doubt. They were in the end celebrations of one version or another of autocracy, never a repudiation of them. That kind of state-management is not what has just taken place in Iraq. Millions of people actually made choices, and placed claims on those who will lead them in the future. To act upon one's own world like this, and on such a scale, is what politics in the purest sense is all about. It is why we all, once upon a time, became activists. And it is infectious. The taste of freedom is a hard memory to rub out. No wonder the political and intellectual elites of the Arab world are so worried, and no wonder they were so hostile to everything that happened in Iraq since the overthrow of the Saddam regime. They had longed for failure. They trotted out the tired old formulas of anti-Americanism to impart legitimacy to the so-called Iraqi "resistance to American occupation." But the people of Iraq have put an end to all that. En masse, ordinary people took to the streets in the second great Iraqi revolt against the politics of barbarism exemplified by Abu Musab al Zarqawi's immortal words: "We have declared a bitter war against the principle of democracy and all those who seek to enact it."”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"The Shiite Obligation", Wall Street Journal (February 7, 2005)

Hostility, War, People, World

“If indeed, as was later alleged, [Hitler] voiced support for the Social Democrats in preference to the Communists, it was presumably viewed as a choice of the lesser of two evils.”

Ian Kershaw (1943) British historian

Source: Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (1999), p. 120

Support, Evil

“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life…. people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail…. We conclude the line should be drawn at viability, so that, before that time, the woman has a right to choose to terminate her pregnancy…. there is no line other than viability which is more workable. To be sure, as we have said, there may be some medical developments that affect the precise point of viability, but this is an imprecision within tolerable limits…. A husband has no enforceable right to require a wife to advise him before she exercises her personal choices.”

Anthony Kennedy (1936) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=505&invol=833 (29 June 1992) (joint opinion coauthored with Justices Souter and O’Connor).

Life, People, Exercises, Universe

“The Rgvedic texts were read in the political context of nineteenth-century philology, which has been outlined in chapter 1. This certainly influenced the choice of possible inter- pretations placed on such words as andsa and on the battles of the Aryas and the Dasas. The racial interpretations extrapolated from the texts to support an Aryan migration have been justly challenged by both Indian and, albeit after the lag of a century, Western scholars. Their place in serious discussions of the Indo-Aryan problem is highly questionnable.”

Edwin Bryant book The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture

The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture

Support, Problem, Reading

“The devil makes work for idle thirsts. But given the choice between booze and cannabis, I go for ganja every time.”

Dennis Nilsen (1945–2018) British serial killer

As quoted in Exclusive: Dennis Nilsen: My Prison Life of Drink and Drugs http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/exclusive-dennis-nilsen-prison-life-555104, Mirror.co.uk (27 August, 2005)

Time

“My business strategy is either to be geographically focused with lots of businesses or you can be a global player in selected businesses. Since I chose the route of being global, that is where I am going. You have to be competitive. It’s a matter of choice.”

Sukanto Tanoto (1949) Indonesian businessman

Globe Asia Interview, Sep, 2015. http://www.inside-rge.com/Sukanto-Tanoto-Resource-King-GlobeAsia 2015

Business

“Character and training disposed him not to interfere in other mens’s business. His job was to find out what they did, and his inclination was to let them go on doing it. He preferred to be enlightened, rather than to enlighten; to seek facts rather than the Truth. But even the most unmissionary soul, unless he pretend he has no emotions, is sometimes faced with a choice between commission and omission. “What are they doing?” abruptly becomes, “What are we doing?””

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

and then, “What must I do?”
Section 5
Hainish Cycle, The Word for World Is Forest (1972)

Men, Truth, Soul, Business

“A question about the authenticity of the soul, I suppose. Or the wishbone—some little tug-of-war; some tension. The tension I have come to depend upon. That is what I mean by brown. The answer is that I cannot reconcile. I was born a Catholic. Is homosexuality, then, a conversion experience? No. I was born gay. Is Catholicism ever a choice? Yes. No. Not at first. I embraced Catholicism without question. It was the air, it was the light. Years later, I came to Catholicism in deliberation, defeat—satirically, perhaps—nevertheless on my knees. How else to approach a church established for losers, for a kingdom not of this world, a kingdom of fools? Whatever faith I confess is based upon my certainty that I can do nothing.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

War, World, Faith, Fools

“If I had a Luger, I thought, I could drill the bastards. I leaned on one elbow and pointed a finger at the window, seeing what kind of shot I would get. Perfect. There was just enough light in the street for a good silhouette. I knew it would happen quickly, I’d have no choice: just pull the trigger and go deaf from the terrible noise, a frenzy of screaming and scratching followed by a ghastly thump of a body knocked back and down to the sidewalk.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

1990s, The Rum Diary (1998)

Light, Perfection

“With every experience in life, you have two choices: One, you can choose to enjoy and learn from the encounter, even if it is something you don't like. Two, you can struggle through the experience, blaming everyone and everything else around you the entire time. What if you were to view any unfavorable experience in a new way? What if you simply accepted the experience as momentary and learned what you could from it? Think how peaceful that experience would become.”

Scott Shaw (1958) American actor

About Peace

Life, Peace, Way, Thinking

“Prophets tend to be impatient with detailed analyses of particular choices made in the past—choices that determined how, month by month, we got to where we are from where we were. They tend to be equally impatient with how we can practically get from where we are today to some modest increments of improvement a month from now. To the prophet such preoccupation seems to be rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

James Gustafson (1925) American academic

Source: "Varieties of Moral Discourse: Prophetic, Narrative, Ethical and Policy", p. 50

Past

“I told Johnson and old colleagues on Capitol Hill that we had two clear choices. Either win the [Vietnam] war in a relatively short time, say within a year, or pull out all our troops and come home.”

Barry Goldwater (1909–1998) American politician

Source: Goldwater (1988), p. 222

War, Home, Time

“My choice is what I choose to do.
And if I'm causing no harm
It shouldn't bother you.
Your choice is who you choose to be.
And if your causin' no harm
Then you're alright with me.”

Ben Harper (1969) singer-songwriter and musician

Burn One Down.
Song lyrics, Fight for Your Mind (1995)

“What picture of American society is likely to be imprinted on the consciousness of average Europeans? Given what they read or hear every day from intellectuals and politicians, they can hardly have any choice in the unpleasant particulars, especially if they happen to be French. The picture repeatedly sketched for them is as follows: American society is entirely ruled by money. No other value, whether familial, moral, religious, civic, cultural, professional, or ethical has any potency in itself. Everything in America is a commodity, regarded and used exclusively for its material value. A person is judged solely by the worth of his bank account. Every U. S. President has been in the pockets of the oil companies, the military-industrial complex, the agricultural lobby, or the financial manipulators of Wall Street. America is the "jungle" par excellence of out-of-control, "savage" capitalism, where the rich are always becoming richer and fewer, while the poor are becoming poorer and more numerous. Poverty is the dominant social reality in America. Hordes of famished indigents are everywhere, while luxurious chauffeured limousines with darkened windows glide through the urban wilderness.”

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) French writer and philosopher

2000s, Europe's Anti-American Obsession (2003)

Money, Family, Reality, Reading

“We all choose our own teachers, don't we? I wonder if our choice of teacher shows anything about what our lives will be.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Homecoming saga, Earthborn (1995)

Teachers

“The social rootedness of science is often associated with the utility of applied science; this is an error and a dangerous error. But precisely the detachment of the theoretical scientist is rooted in the institutions of his society and in the evaluative choices which underlie those institutions. He can focus his whole attention, bringing every relevant clue to bear, on a problem wholly without appetitive or utilitarian implications, he can put his whole heart and mind into the search for understanding for the sake of understanding alone. How can he do this? First, because he himself has been nourished and disciplined by traditions cultivated within his society which have produced this kind of devoted attention to impersonal goals. And secondly, because the society itself, in its deepest foundations, respects those independently self-sustaining traditions of scientist or scholar.”

Marjorie Grene (1910–2009) American philosopher

The Knower and the Known (1974), pp. 180-181

Error, Search, Understanding, Problem

“"The Polarity Principle:" The more government, the more violence. By ‘more government’ is meant more centralization of government power, more intervention in personal, social, and economic affairs and activities, more limits on political criticism and competition, and more narrowing of electoral choices. In other words, by ‘more government’ is meant less freedom, less civil liberties, political rights, and economic freedom.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

“Libertarianism, Violence within States, and the Polarity Principle,” Comparative Politics, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Jul., 1984), pp. 443-462. Published by Comparative Politics, Ph.D. Programs in Political Science, City University of New York.

Freedom, Personality

“I had by this time heard a number of his public speeches and was beginning to understand the pattern of their appeal. The first secret lay in his choice of words. Every generation develops its own vocabulary of catchwords and phrases, and these date thoughts and utterances. My own father talked like a contemporary of Bismarck, the people of my own age bore the stamp of Wilhelm II, but Hitler had caught the casual camaraderie of the trenches, and without stooping to slang, except for special effects, managed to talk like a member of his audience. In describing the difficulties of the housewife without enough money to buy the buy the food her family needed in the Viktualien Market he would produce just the phrases she would have used herself to describe her difficulties, if she had been able to formulate them. Where other national orators gave the painful impression of talking down to their audience, he had his priceless gift of expressing exactly their own thoughts.”

Ernst Hanfstaengl (1887–1975) German businessman

Quoted in "Hitler: The Missing Years" - Page 67 - by Ernst Hanfstaengl, John Toland - 1994

Money, Pain, People, Secret

“Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited

Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 5 (p. 42)

People

“One area which shows how unknowingly predictable we are, is the way we decorate our houses. We all feel we make unique and distinct choices, yet we all conform to a cultural standard.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Way, Feeling, Housing

“The fundamental thesis of ordinary conventionalism, represented for instance by Poincare, states that there are problems which cannot be solved by appeal to experience unless one introduces a certain convention, since only such a convention, together with experimental data, makes it possible to solve the problem in question. The judgements which combine to make up such a solution are thus not forced on us by empirical data alone, but their adoption depends partly on our recognition, since the said convention which co-determines the solution of the problem can be arbitrarily changed by us so that as a result we obtain different judgements.
In the present paper it is my intention to make that thesis of ordinary conventionalism more general and more radical. Namely, we want to formulate and to prove the theorem that not only some, but all the judgements which we accept and which combine to make up our image of the world are not univocally determined by empirical data, but depend on the choice of the conceptual apparatus by means of which we make mappings of those empirical data. We can, however, choose this or that conceptual apparatus, which will change our whole image of the world.”

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890–1963) Philosopher, logician

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, "Das Weltbild und die Begriffsapparatur", in Erkenntnis, 1934, Vol. 4, p. 259; as cited in: Schaff (1962;81-82)

World, Question, Problem, Change

“There has never been just one best way to teach quantum mechanics. My goal is neither to sow nostalgia for the philosophically engaged style of Oppenheimer and Nordheim, nor to condemn the pragmatic approach of Fermi, Bethe and Feynman. It is rather to highlight the choices that physicists must always make when stepping into the classroom. Choices of topics to discuss and problems to assign reflect deeper decisions about the ideal type of physicist one seeks to train. Should the new generation be philosophically attuned, concerned with minute details of conceptual interpretation? Or should physicists hone their ability to calculate, pushing Heisenberg’s and Schrödinger’s equations into the service of ever more elaborate problems to solve and phenomena to analyse? Competing ideals have flourished under different pedagogical conditions.”

David Kaiser (1971) American physicist

Turning physicists into quantum mechanics (2007)

Way, Problem, Decision, Nostalgia

“Marx may have erred in analyzing the nature of this conflict. Interests of workers and capitalists may not be irreconcilable under all circumstances, and workers may see the choice between capitalism and socialism differently depending upon the specific political and economic conditions under which they live.”

Adam Przeworski (1940) Polish-American academic

Adam Przeworski and Michael Wallerstein, The American Political Science Review (Jun., 1982)

Nature, Dependency

“In your choices lies your talent.”

Stella Adler (1901–1992) American actress and teaching coach

Quoted in Mark Ruffalo & James Lipton, "Stella Adler Technique" http://www.actingschoolsinlosangeles.us/stella-adler-technique/

“Tonight, nobody could vote for their own country, but it is good to be able to vote and it is good to have a choice. Good luck on your journey, Azerbaijan. Europe is watching you!”

Anke Engelke (1965) German actress

"Heute Abend konnte niemand für sein eigenes Land abstimmen. Aber es ist gut wählen zu können, und es ist gut eine Wahl zu haben. Viel Glück auf Deiner Reise, Aserbaidschan. Europa beobachtet Dich!"
Anke Engelke's jab at Azerbaijan's dictatorship, while actually announcing the German vote in the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest. Transmitted live on TV to 120 million viewers, including the Azerbaijan state TV. (May 26th, 2012).

Country

“Wodeyar's musical output numbers close to 100 kritis [Compositions]. The nature of this output, whether it is in the choice of ragas like Bhanu Chandrika, Hamsanatini and Bhoopala Panchama, or in the lyrics which carry deep meanings drawn form the Upanishads and Srividya worship, show a keen and intelligent mind at work. Fascinating as the life was of this multi-faceted personality, it also had a poignancy for the trials and tribulations he faced.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

In Jayachamaraja Wodeyar http://www.radioweb.in/programs/jayachamaraja-wodeyar

Life, Music, Intelligence, Nature

“Yet on some level we do know the truth. We know that meat production is a messy business, but we choose not to know just how messy it is. We know that meat comes from an animal, but we choose not to connect the dots. And often, we eat animals and choose not to know we're even making a choice. Violent ideologies are structured so that it is not only possible, but inevitable, that we are aware of an unpleasant truth on one level while being oblivious to it on another. Common to all violent ideologies is this phenomenon of knowing without knowing.”

Melanie Joy book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows

And it is the essence of carnism.
Source: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (2010), p. 71

Truth, Business, Animals

“What defines a people is not race, not tradition, not geography, but the free choice of a group of human beings to live together as fellow citizens.”

Thomas G. West (1945) American academic

Source: 2000s, Vindicating the Founders (2001), p. 28

People

“Gordon Tullock, on the other hand, might be characterized as the somewhat cynical pragmatist, who set out to understand the world, not to change it. This side of Tullock is visible in his early paper on simple majority rule, and is perhaps most apparent in his work on rent seeking. These differences should not be pushed too far, however. Buchanan (1980) also contributed to the rent-seeking literature, and often has described public choice as “politics without romance.” One of the most dispiriting contributions to the public choice literature has to be Kenneth Arrow’s (1951) famous impossibility theorem. In a too little appreciated article, Tullock (1967b) demonstrated with the help of a somewhat torturous geometrical analysis, that the cycling that underlies the impossibility theorem is likely to be constrained to a rather small subset of Pareto-optimal outcomes, and thus Arrow’s theorem was “irrelevant,” a rather happy result, and one which anticipated work appearing more than a decade later on the uncovered set. In Chap. 10 of Toward a Mathematics of Politics, Tullock (1967a) engages in a bit of wishful thinking about constitutional design by describing how one could achieve an ideal form of proportional representation in a legislative body. He also was an early enthusiast of the potential for using a demand-revelation process to reveal individual preferences for public goods”

Dennis Mueller (1940) American economist

Tideman and Tullock 1976
James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and The Calculus (2012)

Happiness, World, Literature, Mathematics

“Chairman (Larry) O'Brien, Chairwoman (Yvonne) Burke, Senator (Ted) Kennedy, Senator (Thomas) Eagleton and my fellow citizens, I'm happy to join us (sic) for this benediction of our Friday sunrise service. I assume that everyone here is impressed with my control of this Convention in that my choice for Vice President was challenged by only 39 other nominees. And I can tell you that Eleanor (McGovern) is very grateful that the Oregon delegation at least kept her in the race with (wife of Attorney General John N Mitchell) Martha Mitchell. -McGovern's acceptance speech at the 1972 Democratic National Convention, America's Political Parties: Power and Privelige Part 1: The Democrats hosted by Ben Wattenberg”

George S. McGovern (1922–2012) American politician, Congressman, senator, Democratic presidential candidate

Happiness, Parting

“The agitation for the Universal Colour Bill continued for three years; and up to the last moment of that period it seemed as though Anarchy were destined to triumph.

A whole army of Polygons, who turned out to fight as private soldiers, was utterly annihilated by a superior force of Isosceles Triangles — the Squares and Pentagons meanwhile remaining neutral. Worse than all, some of the ablest Circles fell a prey to conjugal fury. Infuriated by political animosity, the wives in many a noble household wearied their lords with prayers to give up their opposition to the Colour Bill; and some, finding their entreaties fruitless, fell on and slaughtered their innocent children and husband, perishing themselves in the act of carnage. It is recorded that during that triennial agitation no less than twenty-three Circles perished in domestic discord.

Great indeed was the peril. It seemed as though the Priests had no choice between submission and extermination; when suddenly the course of events was completely changed by one of those picturesque incidents which Statesmen ought never to neglect, often to anticipate, and sometimes perhaps to originate, because of the absurdly disproportionate power with which they appeal to the sympathies of the populace.”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART I: THIS WORLD, Chapter 10. Of the Suppression of the Chromatic Sedition

Children, Universe, Change, Fight

“It's like being home again, when they bring in the hopelessly mangled person from the mine explosion, or the woman in her third day of labor, or the famished child struggling against pneumonia and my mother and Prim, they wear that same look on their faces. Now is the times to run away tho the woods, to hide in the trees until the patient is long gone and in another part of the Seam the hammers make the coffin. But I'm held here both by the hovercraft walls and the same force that holds the loved ones of the dying. How often I've seen them, ringed around our kitchen table and I thought, Why don't they leave? Why do they stay to watch?
And now I know. It's because you have no choice.”

Suzanne Collins (1962) American television writer and novelist

Katniss Everdeen, pp. 347-348
The Hunger Games trilogy, The Hunger Games (2008)

Love, Home, Tree, Time

“The difference between management and administration (which is what the bureaucrats used to do exclusively)… is the difference… between choice and rigidity.”

Robert Heller (1932–2012) British magician

Robert Heller, cited in: Director Vol 35 (1982). p. 88

“How many shots does it take before the concept ay choice becomes obsolete?”

Irvine Welsh book Trainspotting

Renton, Blowing It: Courting Disaster" (Chapter 4, Story 1).
Trainspotting (1993)

“Guard against those men who make a great noise about religion, in choosing representatives. It is electioneering intrigue. … If pure religion is the criterion to denominate candidates, those who make a noise about it must be rejected; for their wrangle about it, proves that they are void of it. Let honesty, talents and quick despatch, characterise the men of your choice.”

John Leland (Baptist) (1754–1841) American Baptist minister

Source: An Oration delivered at Cheshire (5 July 1802), p. 267

Men, Religion

“Decision theory, as it has grown up in recent years, is a formalization of the problems involved in making optimal choices. In a certain sense — a very abstract sense, to be sure — it incorporates among others operations research, theoretical economics, and wide areas of statistics, among others.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Source: 1970s-1980s, The Economics of Information (1984), p. 55

Optimism, Problem, Decision, Sense

“But a sculpture which sets out to achieve the same ends demands an almost unbelievable effort of concentration. Practically none of the episodes or moments of such a legend, [of Prometheus ] really lends itself to sculpture, and the sculptors of the nineteenth century were often quite careless or foolish in the choice of the moment which they set out to represent. Their works could thus become cluttered with all sorts of narrative details which detract from the monumental quality of the whole... That's why, in my 'Prometheus', I represent the fire as an integral part of the presence or appearance of the hero; he stands there before us in all his awe-inspiring grandeur, a human figure that seemed in the eyes of the men who first saw him to be actually consumed by the fire that he was bearing.”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

c. 1960
Source: 1960 - 1968, Dialogues – conversations with.., quotes, c. 1960, p. 154

Men, Effort, Appearance, Parting

“Philosophy establishes itself as a discourse by opposition to the authority of received opinion, especially the opinions sedimented as cult and as law. Philosophy puts into question the authority of what has been handed down. It is not just that there is a critique of philosophic authorities; rather, philosophy appears to be characterized by rejection of intellectual authority as such. How is philosophy to distinguish, then, a permissible authority from those many impermissible authorities which it must reject if it is to survive?
Perhaps it would be better to avoid the quandary altogether by dismissing authority in order to consider only the "content" of the claims under consideration, regardless of their pretensions. The dismissal fails for at least two reasons. The first is that there are no claims in philosophic texts that are wholly free at least from the implicit constructions of authority. If criticism takes only the content, then it ends up with something other than the texts that have constituted the discourse of philosophy. There is no Platonic "theory of Forms" dissociable from the Platonic pedagogy, that is, from the teaching authority of the Platonic Socrates. The second reason for not being able to dismiss authority altogether is that the very criticism that wants to look only at contents will impose itself as an authority in its choice of procedure. One will still have authority, but an authority that refuses to raise any question about authority.
Perhaps the question about legitimate authority could be avoided, again, by replying that the obvious criterion for claims in philosophy is the truth. The assumption here is that access to the truth is had entirely apart from the authority of philosophical traditions. Yet it is a biographical fact that one is brought into philosophy by education. First principles are learned most often not by simple observation or by the natural light of reason, but under the tutelage of some authoritative tradition.”

Mark D. Jordan (1953)

Authority and persuasion in philosophy (1985)

Truth, Education, Law, Question

“Well, moving swiftly sideways into cognitive neuroscience…In the past twenty years we’ve made huge strides, using imaging tools, direct brain interfaces, and software simulations. We’ve pretty much disproved the existence of free will, at least as philosophers thought they understood it. A lot of our decision-making mechanics are subconscious; we only become aware of our choices once we’ve begun to act on them. And a whole lot of other things that were once thought to correlate with free will turn out also to be mechanical. If we use transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the right temporoparietal junction, we can suppress subjects’ ability to make moral judgements; we can induce mystical religious experiences: We can suppress voluntary movements, and the patients will report that they didn’t move because they didn’t want to move. The TMPJ finding is deeply significant in the philosophy of law, by the way: It strongly supports the theory that we are not actually free moral agents who make decisions—such as whether or not to break the law—of our own free will.
“In a nutshell, then, what I’m getting at is that the project of law, ever since the Code of Hammurabi—the entire idea that we can maintain social order by obtaining voluntary adherence to a code of permissible behaviour, under threat of retribution—is fundamentally misguided.” His eyes are alight; you can see him in the Cartesian lecture-theatre of your mind, pacing door-to-door as he addresses his audience. “If people don’t have free will or criminal intent in any meaningful sense, then how can they be held responsible for their actions? And if the requirements of managing a complex society mean the number of laws have exploded until nobody can keep track of them without an expert system, how can people be expected to comply with them?”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 26, “Liz: It’s Complicated” (pp. 286-287)

People, Law, Way, Idea

“What I think needs to be done in 2018 is more dialogue around the ethics, the principles that we can use for the engineers and companies that are building AI [artificial intelligence], so that the choices we make do not cause us to create systems with bias.”

Satya Nadella (1967) CEO of Microsoft appointed on 4 February 2014

Scroll.in: "Artificial intelligence will not kill human jobs, says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella" https://scroll.in/latest/880684/artificial-intelligence-will-not-kill-human-jobs-says-microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella (29 May 2018)

Intelligence, Thinking

“Quantum theory may be formulated using Hilbert spaces over any of the three associative normed division algebras: the real numbers, the complex numbers and the quaternions. Indeed, these three choices appear naturally in a number of axiomatic approaches. However, there are internal problems with real or quaternionic quantum theory. Here we argue that these problems can be resolved if we treat real, complex and quaternionic quantum theory as part of a unified structure. Dyson called this structure the "three-fold way"…. This three-fold classification sheds light on the physics of time reversal symmetry, and it already plays an important role in particle physics.”

John C. Baez (1961) American mathematician and mathematical physicist

Way, Nature, Problem, Light

“The next stop on Reagan's European tour after Bitburg was Madrid, where he made a speech in which he said, "I know there's been a lot of controversy about the United States and Spain at that time, indeed some Americans once came here to fight in the civil war." He said, "But the thing is," said Reagan, "they were on the wrong side." In other words a conscious choice, a conscious and deliberate remark showing that the sympathy for fascism, not accidental, not anecdotal, not a slip of the tongue, but something bred-in-the-bone; and, I think, also worth recalling.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

1990s

War, Thinking, Time, Fight

“I really think for the good of this world that, if I could have it my way, the whole world would be vegan and straightedge. So that’s why I feel it’s important to create an awareness of this lifestyle, create an awareness of the choices people make. To bring awareness about those lifestyles can bring a positive change, if only on the level of an individual.”

Davey Havok (1975) American singer

Fly magazine, November 2009

People, World, Way, Feeling

“The bill of grievances contained in the immortal Declaration of Independence could be extended by our own citizens in modern times, had they the stomach for it. … So important is the right and duty of the people to dispense with despotism, this great Declaration contains the sentence not once, but twice. In its final utterance, the choice of words does not call for the formation of a government. Rather, it calls for "new guards" which may or may not entail such a unit as an artificial agency.”

Robert LeFevre (1911–1986) American libertarian businessman

This Bread is Mine (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: American Liberty Press, (1960) pp. 363, 365. Source. http://alexpeak.com/twr/doi/

People, Time

“However devoutly a girl may worship the man of her choice, there always comes a time when she feels an irresistible urge to haul off and let him have it in the neck.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Joy in the Morning

Joy in the Morning (1947)

Feeling, Girl, Time

“The Christian right wing in America is a polarizing force when it comes to gay rights, abortion, and patriotism. To me, these aren't "issues," they are matters of individual freedom of choice. But the militant Christians … especially don't like anything beyond their idea of the "normal"—like the percentage of our population who happen to be gay.
To me, gay rights is simple: it's about equality. We're all supposed to be equal under the Constitution, which doesn't say anything about the "Hetero States of America."”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

Source: Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! (2008), Ch. 10 (p. 180)

Idea, Freedom

“The storyteller makes no choice, soon you will not hear his voice, his job is to shed light, and not to master”

Robert Hunter (1941–2019) American musician

"Lady With a Fan"
Song lyrics, (1977)

Light

“The issues revolve around experiences of truth and fairness but also address the practice of having choices forced upon you as opposed to freely making your own based on true-to-the-moment information instead of calculated misinformation.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(from 2012 essay Catching Up with Our Humanity).
From Articles, Essays, and Poems, On Guerrilla Decontextualization

Truth

“We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation — the moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.”

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

2000s, 2005, Second Inaugural Address (January 2005)

Freedom

“A “shared choice” movement sees the fetus as the genes of a woman and the genes of a man; the flesh of the woman, the flesh of the man; the bone of a woman, the bone of a man; the responsibility of a woman, the responsibility of a man; the rights of a woman, the rights of a man. It desires a transition to equality.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 158.

“Nor are the general laws of economics "institutional." They work in an institutional setting, and upon institutional material; institutions supply much of their content and furnish the machinery by which they work themselves out, more or less quickly and completely, in different actual situations. Institutions may determine the alternatives of choice and fix the limits of freedom of choice, but the general laws of choice among competing motives or goods are not institutional unless rational thinking and an objective world are institutions, an interpretation which would make the term meaningless. Economic activity consists in the use of certain resources by certain processes, to produce "wealth." The content of the concept wealth is largely institutional, and the resources available and processes known and used at any place and time for producing wealth are in a sense historical products; but there are general laws of production and consumption which hold good whatever specific things are thought of as wealth and whatever productive factors and processes in use.”

Frank Knight (1885–1972) American economist

Source: "The limitations of scientific method in economics", 1924, p. 129 (2009 edition)

World, Law, Motivation, Thinking

“This naive manner of conceptualizing capitalism by reference to a “pursuit of gain” must be relegated to the kindergarten of cultural history methodology and abandoned once and for all. A fully unconstrained compulsion to acquire goods cannot be understood as synonymous with capitalism, and even less as its “spirit.” On the contrary, capitalism can be identical with the taming of this irrational motivation, or at least with its rational tempering. Nonetheless, capitalism is distinguished by the striving for profit, indeed, profit is pursued in a rational, continuous manner in companies and firms, and then pursued again and again, as is profitability. There are no choices. If the entire economy is organized according to the rules of the open market, any company that fails to orient its activities toward the chance of attaining profit is condemned to bankruptcy.
Let us begin by defining terms in a manner more precise than often occurs. For us, a "capitalist" economic act involves first of all an expectation of profit based on the utilization of opportunities for exchange; that is of (formally) peaceful opportunities for acquisition. Formal and actual acquisition through violence follows its own special laws and hence should best be placed, as much as one may recommend doing so, in a different category. Wherever capitalist acquisition is rationally pursued, action is oriented to calculation in terms of capital. What does this mean?”

Max Weber (1864–1920) German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist

Prefatory Remarks to Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion (1920)

Peace, Law, History, Motivation

“Okay, I get it. You people destroy billions of brain cells on a daily basis with your excess consumption of alcoholic beverages, over-the-counter as well as prescription medication—the latter of which, chances are, aren't even yours—and a veritable laundry list of substances that you shove into your soft little bodies day after day. The reason I bring up your chemically-induced mind is because I think the lot of you have forgotten my accomplishments, so please allow me to jog your ailing memory: I am the only three-time straight-edge World Heavyweight Champion in WWE history, I am the only Superstar in WWE history to win back-to-back Money in the Bank Ladder Matches at WrestleMania, and don't forget I am the man that did you, the WWE Universe, a favor that you didn't even deserve when I got rid of the Charismatic Enabler Jeff Hardy from this company…forever. But that runs a close #2 to my crowning achievement of using my Anaconda Vice and, for the first time, making the Undertaker [makes the motion on his chest] tap out—I did that. Me. I did that, and I did it all without drugs, I did it all without alcohol, and above all else, I did it all without any help from any of you. So I want somebody, anybody in a position of power to come out here right now and treat me with the respect I have earned, not only as the face of SmackDown, but the poster boy of the entire company, and as the choice of a new generation, I deserve to know who my next opponent is now that I have defeated the all-powerful Undertaker. [Waits amidst the boos of the crowd] Oh, that's right. There isn't anybody left!”

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

September 25, 2009
Friday Night SmackDown

Money, People, Alcohol, World

“It’s funny about career choices. I had to fight to test for the Janet Leigh role in Walking My Baby Back Home. Janet couldn’t dance at the time and I could—but she was a bigger name. I also fought to get the role Piper Laurie had in Son of Ali Baba. Luckily, I lost that one. The one I didn’t want to do was Revenge of the Creature. Science-Fiction was considered bottom of the barrel in those days. Of course, that’s the picture I am most remembered for. It’s very ironic!”

Lori Nelson (1933) Actress, model

Interview with Lori Nelson http://www.westernclippings.com/interview/lorinelson_interview.shtml

Home, Revenge, Science, Time

“Now this was a demand for the indefinite extension of slavery, so the choice facing the country was whether slavery will be restricted or whether it will be extended indefinitely with the whole power of the federal government behind the extension of slavery.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

Country

“All your life you had to stand in line
Still you’re standing on your feet.
All your choices made you change your mind
Now your calendar's complete.
Don't wait for answers
Just take your chances
Don't ask me why.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Don't Ask Me Why.
Song lyrics, Glass Houses (1980)

Life, Change, Chance, Waiting

“Broadly, the Long Tail is about abundance. Abundant shelf space, abundant distribution, abundant choice.”

Chris Anderson book The Long Tail

Source: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006), Ch. 8, p. 143

“The American people have been offered two lousy choices. One, which is corporatism, a fascist type of approach, or, socialism. We deliver a lot of services in this country through the free market, and when you do it through the free market prices go down. But in medicine, prices go up. Technology doesn't help the cost, it goes up instead of down. But if you look at almost all of our industries that are much freer, technology lowers the prices. Just think of how the price of cell phones goes down. Poor people have cell phones, and televisions, and computers. Prices all go down. But in medicine, they go up, and there's a reason for that, that's because the government is involved with it… I do [think that prices will go down without government involvement], but probably a lot more than what you're thinking about, because you have to have competition in the delivery of care. For instance, if you have a sore throat and you have to come see me, you have to wait in the waiting room, and then get checked, and then get a prescription, and it ends up costing you $100. If you had true competition, you should be able to go to a nurse, who could for 1/10 the cost very rapidly do it, and let her give you a prescription for penicillin. See, the doctors and the medical profession have monopolized the system through licensing. And that's not an accident, because they like the idea that you have to go see the physician and pay this huge price. And patients can sort this out, they're not going to go to a nurse if they need brain surgery…”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Interview by Laura Knoy on NHPR, June 5, 2007 http://info.nhpr.org/node/13016 2000s, 2006-2009

People, Idea, Thinking, Waiting

“Churchman recognized in his critical systemic thinking that the human mind is not able to know the whole. … Yet the human mind, for Churchman, may appreciate the essential quality of the whole. For Churchman, appreciation of this essential quality begins … when first you see the world through the eyes of another. The systems approach, he says, then goes on to discover that every worldview is terribly restricted. Consequently, with Churchman, a rather different kind of question about practice surfaces. … That is, who is to judge that any one bounded appreciation is most relevant or acceptable? Each judgment is based on a rationality of its own that chooses where a boundary is to be drawn, which issues and dilemmas thus get on the agenda, and who will benefit from this. For each choice it is necessary to ask, What are the consequences to be expected insofar as we can evaluate them and, on reflection, how do we feel about that? As Churchman points out, each judgment of this sort is of an ethical nature since it cannot escape the choice of who is to be the client—the beneficiary—and thus which issues and dilemmas will be central to debate and future action. In this way, the spirit of C. West Churchman becomes our moral conscience. A key principle of systemic thinking, according to Churchman, is to remain ethically alert. Boundary judgments facilitate a debate in which we are sensitized to ethical issues and dilemmas.”

Robert L. Flood (1959) British organizational scientist

Robert L. Flood (1999, p. 252-253) as cited in: Michael H. G. Hoffmann (2007) Searching for Common Ground on Hamas Through Logical Argument Mapping. p. 5.

World, Way, Feeling, Question

“Already a third and more of England is in the hands of the Pope. There cannot be two temporal sovereigns in one country; either Edward is King or Urban is king. We make our choice. We accept Edward of England and refute Urban of Rome.”

John Wycliffe English theologian and early dissident in the Roman Catholic Church

Quoted in William Tyndale: If God Spare My Life — Martyrdom, Betrayal and the English Bible (2003) by Brian Moynahan, p. xvii

Country

“People often think they would have made the noblest choice, but when they find themselves actually in such a situation, they discover matters aren’t quite so simple.”

Ann Leckie book Ancillary Justice

Source: Ancillary Justice (2013), Chapter 10 (p. 145)

People, Thinking

“With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual became clear. Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice—the power of change, the essential function of life. The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 10 (p. 333)

Life, Way, Thinking, Change

“Experience shows that the success of a programming course critically depends on the choice of these examples.”

Niklaus Wirth (1934) Swiss computer scientist

Program Development by Stepwise Refinement (1971)

Success, Dependency

“To me, there are two different types of musicians. Those who are display oriented and those who are content oriented, Bill Evans being a prime example of the content orientation. I am not interested in the displayers—guys who want to be playing a lot of notes to try to impress you that they got a lot of things that they can lay in there. I'm more interested in somebody picking something that has some really great feeling and laying it in, in a really good time concept. Jimmy Rowles is a perfectly good example of that. His choice of notes may not be uncommon, but boy where he lays them down is so individual that I will go for that every time. The same thing applies with composers. When you're a young composer and you first have a chance—and this goes with everybody—you write your most complex works when you're a young man. And then, as you get a little bit older, you find that you can lot simpler things [sic] and still enjoy the devil out of what you're doing.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Radio interview, circa 1985, by Ben Sidran, as quoted in Talking Jazz With Ben Sidran, Volume 1: The Rhythm Section https://books.google.com/books?id=O3hZDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT461&lpg=PT461&dq=%22It+seems+that+today,+particularly+with+younger+piano%22&source=bl&ots=vkOwylFb7q&sig=zPFSLx48xHOhugAAlpcRNKTxUlQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjY_Zay4cbRAhWLKiYKHdVRC3gQ6AEIFDAA#v=onepage&q&f=false (1992, 2006, 2014)

Guy, Feeling, Boy, Chance

“One of the things that we can learn [from] the Cubans is that they are highly politically conscientized. …they understand what constitute progress and what constitute the enemy. And they have come to appreciate that they are in the situation they are because of the choice they have made, of not wanting to follow what the big brother America says they must do. And they know that if it was not [for the] illegal embargo imposed on them, they were actually going to be a much much more better country. Look at them, they have succeeded, the better education, better healthcare, the illiteracy levels are extreme low, under difficult circumstances. [The] quality of education, the quality of primary healthcare [of some country's without embargoes] is nothing compared to a country [Cuba] which is suffering from a serious economic embargo. So we can learn from the Cubans through their determination, through their appreciation that they are a unique nation, and have chosen their path, and they will lead by their conviction. [Interviewer Bryce-Pease asks Malema about Cuba's socialist-democratic model, lack of human rights, lack of freedom of association or freedom of speech among the opposition, and whether South Africa should take those as lessons. ] Malema: …if they think that their model works for them I am not the one to impose on them what should be the type of political systems in Cuba. They are the ones who can chose which direction they want to take. [Bryce-Pease: Do you see a model like Cuba existing in South Africa? ] When we can do actually much better, our democratic system is intact, it is working […] but there are a lot of things to learn from Cuba [for instance] inculcating the history of the revolution in our education system, so that everybody else is conscientized… Of course there will be some few elements who are not happy. … [Castro] is bound to commit mistakes but generally we are more than happy with the type of work he has done for the Cubans and for the Africans as well, having contributed to the decolonization of Africa and the defeat of apartheid in southern Africa…”

Julius Malema (1981) South African political activist

In Cuba, after paying his respects at Fidel Castro's funeral, Julius Malema in Cuba for Castro's funeral https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQy8ALs-aIo, SABC News (5 December 2016)

Happiness, Education, History, Understanding

“The differential equation of the first order
\frac {dy}{dx} = f(x, y)
… prescribes the slope \frac {dy}{dx} at each point of the plane (or at each point of a certain region of the plane we call the field")…. a differential equation of the first order… can be conceived intuitively as a problem about the steady flow of a river: Being given the direction of the flow at each point, find the streamlines…. It leaves open the choice between the two possible directions in the line of a given slope. Thus… we should say specifically "direction of an unoriented straight line" and not merely "direction."”

George Pólya (1887–1985) Hungarian mathematician

Mathematical Methods in Science (1977)

Problem

“Too often secondary school counselors seem to press academically talented students toward an early vocational choice. We believe more mistakes are made by an early vocational decision than a delayed decision, especially by students who are intellectually gifted and who possess wide interests.”

Eugene S. Wilson (1905)

"We're Pushing Out Kids Too Hard", Kiplinger's Personal Finance, March 1968, p. 27 http://books.google.com/books?id=fgAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA27 Attributed

School, Decision

“I've never really lived a conventional life, so I think it's quite foolish for me or anyone else to start thinking that I am going to start making conventional choices.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Madonna Misses "Certain Things" About Being Married, OK!, 2012-01-12 http://www.okmagazine.com/news/madonna-misses-certain-things-about-being-married,

Life, Thinking

“There is a dangerous deception within international organizations, called Participation of local communities. This is essentially based on a lie. Communities are invited to participate on the terms of the donor who has the money. Unless all the choices and decisions are owned and made by the communities, there can be no authentic lasting development.”

Michael Elmore-Meegan (1959) British humanitarian

All Will be Well (2004)

Money, Lie, Communication, Decision

“I cannot approve of monarchs who want to rule over the conscience of the people, and take away their freedom of choice and religion.”

William the Silent (1533–1584) stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht, leader of the Dutch Revolt

1564- Havo Exam

People, Religion, Freedom

“My view of the world is a holistic one. I view the world as being interconnected and interdependent. All things have a way of expressing their identity through one powerful immanent reality. As each one of us makes a choice, that choice impacts the world. We can then come to a realization of the power that each individual has, and the tremendous expressiveness and potential of our existence. The principles that animate my life and involvement have to do with this understanding of the essential interconnectedness of all humanity. Therefore, we should be aware that we affect others in the choices that we make. We affect not only other people, we affect other species as well. So we must take care to be respectful of this planet and of all those who participate in the life of this planet.”

Dennis Kucinich (1946) Ohio politician

Interview with Monte Leach, Peace is possible, peace is inevitable, Share International (July 2003) http://www.share-international.org/magazine/old_issues/2003/july_03.htm#voice.

Life, People, World, Way

“[.. feel interested in] Things that are not overworked, that are in essence light. In other words, the great Cezannes that are not all filled in.... while I can recognize a master piece that is heavily painted or darkly painted or painted in layers as great and sublime, it would not be my choice to hang a - [inaudible] - for five years if I could instead perhaps have a Cezanne of the kind I just described. Or a certain kind of Matisse. Or one of those large Rubens sketches, where the first breath of feeling is the picture, rather than the labor and the gift.”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

quote about 'light' paintings
1960s, Interview with Barbara Rose', Archives - American Art, 1968

Feeling, Light, Painting

“Are these the choice dishes the Doctor has sent us?
Is this the great poet whose works so content us?
This Goldsmith’s fine feast, who has written fine books?
Heaven sends us good meat, but the Devil sends cooks?”

David Garrick (1717–1779) English actor, playwright, theatre manager and producer

Epigram on Goldsmith’s Retaliation. Vol. ii. p. 157. Compare: "God sendeth and giveth both mouth and the meat", Thomas Tusser, A Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1557); "God sends meat, and the Devil sends cooks", John Taylor, Works, vol. ii. p. 85 (1630).

Books, Cooking

““To be, or not to be” is such a mesmerizing quote because it applies to almost every decision in life. The choices we make define who we are.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Life, Quotes, Decision

“The caring person is the carrier of radical middle politics. … To see this clearly, it helps to look at three competing archetypes of the Good American. … Self-aggrandizers are ambitious strivers. They get their primary identity from their occupation and the social status associated with that. … Self-sacrificing individuals are not personally ambitious – and when they are they try to hide it. They get their primary identity from their ethnic, racial, or religious affiliation or sexual orientation. … Caring persons may or may not be personally ambitious, but they want their jobs to provide them with opportunities for personal growth and social relevance. They get their primary identity from the lifestyle choices they make and the values they consciously choose. They are equally committed to personal freedom and social justice, self-development and social change.”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

Source: Radical Middle (2004), Chapter 2, "The Caring Person," pp. 17–18.

Justice, Freedom, Change, Help

“Pensioners in this country receive almost the lowest pension paid in any country in Europe. They live in the coldest homes with the highest rate of death through hypothermia, and have the worst possible conditions of all pensioners. Is that because the country is so poor that it cannot afford the pension, as Conservative Members seem to be saying, or is it because the Government prefer to spend money on other things, such as Trident submarines and the nuclear missile programme? It is question of choice. If we wish to end the monstrous death rate of pensioners every winter, something else has to go. I suggest that it is the arms programme, and I suggest the nuclear arms programme at that.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1986/mar/06/plight-of-the-elderly in the House of Commons (6 March 1986). 1980s

Death, Money, Home, Question

“One-hundred percent of British Muslims, polled by Gallup… believe that homosexuality is an unacceptable lifestyle choice… and fifty-two percent of those Muslims believe that homosexuality, or homosexual sex rather should be made illegal; that I should go to prison, for my love life.”

Milo Yiannopoulos (1984) British journalist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JciVfnR2lis Milo Yiannopoulos - Christianity vs. Islam on gays, Sky News (12 July 2016) 2016

Love, Life, Sex

“He decided to stay in his space suit; explosive decompression didn’t appeal to him. Come to think about it, death from old age was his choice.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Long Watch

The Long Watch (p. 214)
Short fiction, The Past Through Tomorrow (1967)

Death, Age, Thinking

“.. keep working quietly and have faith in what I tell you, never ask how someone else did it or is doing, try to understand nature, observe everything, try to learn to see and find your easiest way to represent it; one can make different choices from nature, follow what the heart tells you, for which you feel the most.... search for what contains effect, something what wants to tell clear things.”

Paul Gabriël (1828–1903) painter (1828-1903)

translation from the Dutch original: Fons Heijnsbroek
1880's + 1890's

Faith, Way, Feeling, Search

“During the 1980s, widespread dissatisfaction with America’s schools gave rise to a powerful movement for educational change, and the nation’s political institutions responded with aggressive reforms. Chubb and Moe argue that these reforms are destined to fail because they do not get to the root of the problem. The fundamental causes of poor academic performance, they claim, are not to be found in the schools, but rather in the institutions of direct democratic control by which the schools have traditionally been governed. Reformers fail to solve the problem-when the institutions ARE the problem. The authors recommend a new system of public education, built around parent-student choice and school competition, that would promote school autonomy—thus providing a firm foundation for genuine school improvement and superior student achievement.”

Terry M. Moe (1949) American political scientist

John E. Chubb, and Terry M. Moe (1990). Politics, markets, and America's schools. Brookings Institution Press; Book abstract

Education, School, Problem, Parent

“It is remarkably difficult to avoid falling under the spell of our own intellectual heritage. As we analyse and reflect on our normative concepts, it is easy to become bewitched into believing that the ways of thinking about them bequeathed to us by the mainstream of our intellectual traditions must be the ways of thinking about them. … The history of philosophy, and perhaps especially of moral, social and political philosophy, is there to prevent us from becoming too readily bewitched. The intellectual historian can help us to appreciate how far the values embodied in our present way of life, and our present ways of thinking about those values, reflect a series of choices made at different times between different possible worlds. This awareness can help to liberate us from the grip of any one hegemonal account of those values and how they should be interpreted and understood. Equipped with a broader sense of possibility, we can stand back from the intellectual commitments we have inherited and ask ourselves in a new spirit of enquiry what we should think of them.”

Quentin Skinner (1940) British historian

Source: Liberty Before Liberalism (1998), pp. 116-117

Life, World, Way, History

“I learned later that economic reasoning was not just mathematics and could be applied to a wide variety of social problems. Now, I think that no forms of social interaction—including religion, love, crime, and fertility choice—are immune from the power of economic reasoning. Hence, even widely held beliefs—for example, that beauty is an illegitimate credential of a worker or that democracy is important for economic growth—are not sacred truths and are subject to analysis.”

Robert Barro (1944) American classical macroeconomist

Source: Nothing Is Sacred (2002), p. xiii

Love, Truth, Religion, Beauty

“The state owned monopolies are among the greatest millstones round the neck of the economy…Liberals must stress at all times the virtues of the market, not only for efficiency but to enable the widest possible choice…Much of what Mrs Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph say and do is in the mainstream of liberal philosophy.”

Jo Grimond (1913–1993) British soldier, politician and academic

Jo Grimond, The Future of Liberalism (October, 1980).

Time

“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

“Erdogan really needs to get a grip on himself, if only because, sadly, Turkey needs him right now as the least bad option in a confused situation. He may be every Turk’s first choice but he sure is the second choice of many. The first thing he needs to do is to take a deep breath since breathing is not one of those things that the ruler had better not do. Next, he needs to restore a measure of discipline within his camp, at least as far as the narrative of the events is concerned.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Opinion: Turkey – Towards a “One and a Half Party” System http://english.aawsat.com/2016/08/article55355819/opinion-turkey-towards-one-half-party-system, Ashraq Al-Awsat (5 Aug, 2016).

“Neglect of the problem of the human individual leads to impoverishing Marxism at the theoretical level and to distorting it at the practical level. In this mistake lies the deep secret of Stalinism. This is why the protagonists of “true” Marxism — where the individual is absent—are so dangerous. I am referring not only to those who put Stalinism into practice, but also to its theorists, whose various political lucubrations and theoretical mistakes have resulted in the thesis that Marxism is anti-humanism. If this were the case, we would have to fight it. But it is a pure lie: Marxism is humanism, and it is the concern of Marxists to fight in the name of such humanism. This has always been my firm belief, as a Marxist and as a Communist. And this fact explains the choice of the lietmotif of my philosophical works.”

Adam Schaff (1913–2006) Polish Marxist philosopher and theorist

Adam Schaff (1967) in: "Conversation with Ponzio," in Ponzio 2002; as cited in: Petrilli and Ponzio (2007)

Lie, Secret, Problem, Fight

“The church of my choice is the free, open world.”

Philip K. Dick book Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Source: Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974), Chapter 13 (p. 124)

World

“Lancelet said, “And I must believe that man has the power to know the right, to choose between good and evil and know that his choice has made a difference…””

Marion Zimmer Bradley book The Mists of Avalon

The Mists of Avalon (1983)

Evil

“To deny political equality is to rob the ostracised of all self-respect; of credit in the market place; of recompense in the world of work; of a voice among those who make and administer the law; a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) Suffragist and Women's Rights activist

Solitude of Self (1892)

World, Law

“To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book Four Ways to Forgiveness

"A Man of the People", p. 104; first published in Asimov's (1995)
Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)

Change

“This Nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space, and we have no choice but to follow it. Whatever the difficulties, they will be overcome. Whatever the hazards, they must be guarded against. With the vital”

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

The original anecdote from whence Kennedy derived this comparison is in An Only Child, Frank O'Connor, London: MacMillan & Co. Ltd., 1961; p. 180.
1963, President John F. Kennedy's last formal speech and public words
Context: This Nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space, and we have no choice but to follow it. Whatever the difficulties, they will be overcome. Whatever the hazards, they must be guarded against. With the vital help of this Aerospace Medical Center, with the help of all those who labor in the space endeavor, with the help and support of all Americans, we will climb this wall with safety and with speed-and we shall then explore the wonders on the other side.

“Choosing safety is a choice of life over career.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 35.

Life