Quotes about claim (1996 quotes, page 19)

“Standing in the presence of the Unknown, all have the same right to think, and all are equally interested in the great questions of origin and destiny. All I claim, all I plead for, is liberty of thought and expression. That is all. I do not pretend to tell what is absolutely true, but what I think is true. I do not pretend to tell all the truth.”

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

The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child (1877)
Context: Standing in the presence of the Unknown, all have the same right to think, and all are equally interested in the great questions of origin and destiny. All I claim, all I plead for, is liberty of thought and expression. That is all. I do not pretend to tell what is absolutely true, but what I think is true. I do not pretend to tell all the truth.
I do not claim that I have floated level with the heights of thought, or that I have descended to the very depths of things. I simply claim that what ideas I have, I have a right to express; and that any man who denies that right to me is an intellectual thief and robber. That is all.

Truth , Question , Thinking

“But from its primal nature forced to frame
Mysteries, destinies of various name,
Is forced to give that it has taught to claim.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Life Without and Life Within (1859), The One In All
Context: Existence is as deep a verity:
Without the dual, where is unity?
And the "I am"" cannot forbear to be;But from its primal nature forced to frame
Mysteries, destinies of various name,
Is forced to give that it has taught to claim.

Nature

“It ironically also delayed the very justice that these people claimed to be fighting for.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

2013, "Satyameva Jayate: Truth Alone Triumphs", 2013
Context: For so many years, they incessantly kept up their attack, leaving no stone unturned. What pained even more was that in their overzealousness to hit at me for their narrow personal and political ends, they ended up maligning my entire state and country. This heartlessly kept reopening the wounds that we were sincerely trying to heal. It ironically also delayed the very justice that these people claimed to be fighting for. Maybe they did not realize how much suffering they were adding to an already pained people.

People , Justice , Fight

“I do not claim to have a magic answer. But I believe there are some basic principles of existence, propounded by thinkers through the ages, which can guide us toward the goal of finding a purpose in life.”

Hyman George Rickover (1900–1986) United States admiral

Thoughts on Man's Purpose in Life (1974)
Context: I do not claim to have a magic answer. But I believe there are some basic principles of existence, propounded by thinkers through the ages, which can guide us toward the goal of finding a purpose in life.
Among these principles of existence, responsibility is the one which forces man to become involved. Acceptance of responsibility means that the individual takes upon himself an obligation. Responsibility is broad and continuous. None of us are ever free of it, even if our work is unsuccessful.
Responsibility implies a commitment to self which many are not willing to make; they are strongly attracted to accepting a course of action or direction for their lives imposed by an external source. Such a relationship absolves the individual from the personal decision-making process. He wraps himself in the security blanket of inevitability or dogma, and need not invest the enormous amounts of time, effort and, above all, the thought required to make creative decisions and meaningfully participate in the governance of his life.
Responsibility also implies a commitment to others, or as Confucius taught, each of us is meant to rescue the world. It is the business of little minds to shrink from this task or to go about it without enthusiasm. Neither art, nor science, nor any of the great works of humanity would ever come into being without enthusiasm.
The sense of responsibility for doing a job right seems to be declining. In fact, the phrase "I am not responsible" has become a standard response in our society to complaints on a job poorly done. This response is a semantic error. Generally what person means is: "I cannot be held legally liable." Yet, from a moral or ethical point of view, the person who disclaims responsibility is correct: by taking this way out he is truly not responsible; he is irresponsible.

Life , Age

“The oblast head of Church disproved the claim in a party newspaper. At the same time he condemned the president of the US as a warmonger.”

Aleksandr Zinovyev (1922–2006) Russian writer

Katastroika (1988)

Time

“Christians, and some Jews, claim we're in the "end times," but they've been saying this off and on for more than two thousand years.”

Tom Robbins (1932) American writer

The Syntax of Sorcery (2012)
Context: Christians, and some Jews, claim we're in the "end times," but they've been saying this off and on for more than two thousand years. According to Hindu cosmology, we're in the Kali Yuga, a dark period when the cow of history is balanced precariously on one leg, soon to topple. Then there are our new-age friends who believe that this December we're in for a global cage-rattling which, once the dust has settled, will usher in a great spiritual awakening.
Most of this apocalyptic noise appears to be just wishful thinking on the part of people who find life too messy and uncertain for comfort, let alone for serenity and mirth. The truth, from my perspective, is that the world, indeed, is ending – and is also being reborn. It's been doing that all day, every day, forever. Each time we exhale, the world ends; when we inhale, there can be, if we allow it, rebirth and spiritual renewal. It all transpires inside of us. In our consciousness, in our hearts. All the time.
Otherwise, ours is an old, old story with an interesting new wrinkle. Throughout most of our history, nothing – not flood, famine, plague, or new weapons – has endangered humanity one-tenth as much as the narcissistic ego, with its self-aggrandizing presumptions and its hell-hound spawn of fear and greed. The new wrinkle is that escalating advances in technology are nourishing the narcissistic ego the way chicken manure nourishes a rose bush, while exploding worldwide population is allowing its effects to multiply geometrically. Here's an idea: let's get over ourselves, buy a cherry pie, and go fall in love with life.

Time

“We have gone from Darwinism into neo-Darwinism, and, very recently, to ultra-Darwinism, which not only claims to be the sole custodian truth in regard to evolution, but to be evolution itself. Darwin himself did not display so much confidence when writing to one of his grandsons… Present-day ultra-Darwinism, which is so sure of itself, impresses incompletely informed biologists, misleads them, and inspires fallacious interpretations.”

Pierre-Paul Grassé (1895–1985) French zoologist

Grassé, Pierre Paul (1977); Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation. Academic Press, p. 6
Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation (1977)
Context: We have gone from Darwinism into neo-Darwinism, and, very recently, to ultra-Darwinism, which not only claims to be the sole custodian truth in regard to evolution, but to be evolution itself. Darwin himself did not display so much confidence when writing to one of his grandsons... Present-day ultra-Darwinism, which is so sure of itself, impresses incompletely informed biologists, misleads them, and inspires fallacious interpretations. The following is one of the numerous examples found in books today:
This text suggests that modern bacteria are evolving very quickly, thanks to their innumerable mutations. Now, this is not true. For millions, or even billions of years, bacteria have not transgressed the structural frame within which they have always fluctuated and still do.
It is a fact that microbiologists can see in their cultures species of bacteria oscillating around an intermediate form, but this does not mean that two phenomena, which are quite distinct, should be confused; the variation of the genetic code because of a DNA copy error and evolution. To vary and to evolve are two different things; this can never be sufficiently emphasized.

Truth , Confidence

“The hope of a benevolent civilization was shattered in the blood-soaked trenches of the First World War. The "war to end all wars" claimed sixteen million lives, and left embers which kindled an even more catastrophic conflagration.”

Bernard Lown (1921–2021) American cardiologist developer of the DC defibrillator and the cardioverter, as well as a recipient of the…

A Prescription for Hope (1985)
Context: The hope of a benevolent civilization was shattered in the blood-soaked trenches of the First World War. The "war to end all wars" claimed sixteen million lives, and left embers which kindled an even more catastrophic conflagration.
Over the sorry course of 5,000 years of endless conflicts, some limits had been set on human savagery. Moral safeguards proscribed killing unarmed civilians and health workers, poisoning drinking waters, spreading infection among children and the disabled, and burning defenseless cities. But the Second World War introduced total war, unprincipled in method, unlimited in violence, and indiscriminate in victims. The ovens of Auschwitz and the atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki inscribed a still darker chapter in the chronicle of human brutality. The prolonged agony which left 50 million dead did not provide an enduring basis for an armistice to barbarism. On the contrary, arsenals soon burgeoned with genocidal weapons equivalent to many thousands of World War II's.
The advent of the nuclear age posed an unprecedented question: not whether war would exact yet more lives but whether war would preclude human existence altogether.

War , World , Hope

“It's now plain for the world to see how the supreme leader and his fellow power-hungry, mid-level clerics have been abusing the peoples' faith to maintain the big lie that they derive their legitimacy from Islam. Gone is the delusion that one man, Mr. Khamenei, can appropriate the powers of state in the name of God. So the supreme leader has lost his theocratic claim to legitimacy just as his favorite president has lost his claim to popular legitimacy. Because many in the armed forces and Revolutionary Guards are followers of religious leaders who question Mr. Khamenei, he cannot even count on presiding over a typical military dictatorship for long.”

Reza Pahlavi (1960) Last crown prince of the former Imperial State of Iran

As quoted by Mark Pitzke, 'Iran Is My True and Only Home' http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/iran-s-crown-prince-reza-pahlavi-iran-is-my-true-and-only-home-a-641984-2.html, August 12, 2009.
Interviews, 2009

God , People , Lie , World

“I believe we can find unanimity among a diverse group of forces for the elimination of a system in which the regime tries everything to claim legitimacy… We are waiting for this boycott to show that the regime is only hanging on by sheer terror. The last time Iran voted, the regime was not even willing to tolerate its own candidates. There is no more faith in its system.”

Reza Pahlavi (1960) Last crown prince of the former Imperial State of Iran

As quoted in Damien McElroy, Exiled Crown Prince campaigns to bring Arab Spring to Iran http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/9117525/Exiled-Crown-Prince-campaigns-to-bring-Arab-Spring-to-Iran.html. The Telegraph. March 2, 2012.
Interviews, 2012

Faith , Time , Waiting

“The Islamic Republic of Iran is born out of a movement, based on the pure primordial nature of a people who rose up to regain their dignity, esteem and human rights. The Islamic Revolution toppled a regime which had been put in place through a coup, and supported by those who claim to be advocates of democracy and human rights thwarted the aspirations of the nation for development and progress for 25 years through intimidation and torture of the populace and submission and subservience to outsiders.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

2005, Address to the United Nations General Assembly (17 September 2005)

Democracy , Support , People , Nature

“But it may be urged, on the other side, that Liberty is not the sum or substitute for of all things men ought to live for... to be real it must be circumscribed... advancing civilisation invests the state with increased rights and duties, and imposes increased burdens and constraints on the subject... a highly instructed and intelligent community may perceive the benefit of compulsory obligations which, at a lower stage, would be thought unbearable... liberal progress is not vague or indefinite, but aims at a point where the public is subject to no restrictions but those of which it feels the advantage... a free country may be less capable of doing much for the advancement of religion, the prevention of vice, or the relief of suffering, than one that does not shrink from confronting great emergencies by some sacrifice of individual rights, and some concentration of power... the supreme political object ought to be sometimes postponed to still higher moral objects. My argument involves no collision with these qualifying reflections. We are dealing, not with the effects of freedom, but with its causes. ...influences which brought arbitrary government under control, either by the diffusion of power, or to an appeal to an authority which transcends all government, and among these influences the greatest philosophers of Greece have no claim to be reckoned.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

Religion , Country , Freedom , Intelligence

“The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation.”

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) German sociologist, philosopher, and critic

Original: (de) Die tiefsten Probleme des modernen Lebens quellen aus dem Anspruch des Individuums, die Selbständigkeit und Eigenart seines Daseins gegen die Übermächte der Gesellschaft, des geschichtlich Ererbten, der äußerlichen Kultur und Technik des Lebens zu bewahren - die letzterreichte Umgestaltung des Kampfes mit der Natur, den der primitive Mensch um seine leibliche Existenz zu führen hat.
Source: The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), p. 409

Fight , Problem , Life , Nature

“All the Messengers of God were sent to free people from poverty, injustice, oppression, and tyranny. Despite their claims, is there any government today that can prove to be similar to the Prophets?”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Twitter 6 Apr 2019
2019

God , People

“Owners are the shareholders, living outside the process of production, idling in distant countryhouse and maybe gambling at the exchange. A shareholder has no direct connection with the work. His property does not consist in tools of him to work; with his property consists simply in pieces of paper, in shares of enterprises of which he does not even know the hereabouts. His function in society is that of a parasite. His ownership does not mean that he commands and directs the machines; this is the sole right of the director. It means only that he may claim a certain amount of money without having to work for it. The property in hand, his shares, are certificates showing his right - guaranteed by law and government, by courts and police - to participate in the profits; titles of companionship in that large Society for Exploitation of the World, that is capitalism.”

Antonie Pannekoek (1873–1960) Dutch astronomer and Marxist theorist

Source: Workers Councils (1947), Chapter One, The Task, Section 1.2

Money , Distant , Law , World

“I am no politician, and still less can I be said to be a party-man : I have a hatred of tyranny, and a contempt for its tools; and this feeling I have expressed as often and as strongly as I could. I cannot sit quietly down under the claims of barefaced power, and have tried to expose the little arts of sophistry by which they are defended. I have no mind to have my person made a property of, nor my understanding made a dupe of. I deny that liberty and slavery are convertible terms, that right and wrong, truth and falsehood, plenty and famine, the comforts or wretchedness of a people, are matters of perfect indifference. That is all I know of the matter; but on these points I am likely to remain incorrigible, in spite of any arguments that I have seen used to the contrary. It needs no sagacity to discover that two and two make four; but to persist in maintaining this obvious position, if all the fashion, authority, hypocrisy, and venality of mankind were arrayed against it, would require a considerable effort of personal courage, and would soon leave a man in a very formidable minority.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

" "Preface" http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Hazlitt/Political/Preface.htm
Political Essays (1819)

Courage , Understanding , Indifference , Personality

“Only if men could see that they have nothing to do, nothing to claim, nothing to achieve in this already complete and blissful creation, they would begin to enjoy and also fulfil the purpose.”

Shantananda Saraswati (1934–2005) Hindu spiritual teacher

Good Company. The Study Society. 2009

Men

“Take the case of those Muslims who opposed Jinnah and his communalist demand for partition. While Aligarh was a hotbed of Pakistani agitation, the Deoband school advocated the gradual Islamization of the entire united India. The godfather of modern Islamic fundamentalism, Maulana Maudoodi, was one of the staunchest opponents of Partition. He claimed that the Muslims had a right to rule all of India.”

Abul A'la Maududi (1903–1979) Indian theologian, politician and philosopher

Quoted from Elst, Koenraad (1991). Ayodhya and after: Issues before Hindu society.
About

School

“I venture to claim two qualifications for the great office which I hold, which to my mind, without making invidious distinctions, is one of the most important that can be held by any Englishman; and those qualifications are that in the first place I believe in the British Empire, and in the second place I believe in the British race. I believe that the British race is the greatest of the governing races that the world has ever seen.”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Speech given to the Imperial Institute (11 November 1895), quoted in "Mr. Chamberlain On The Australian Colonies", The Times (12 November 1895), p. 6
1890s

World , Making love

“Zithsa hunter claim they sometimes see man-shaped creatures in the lowlands. Mist demons, the hunters call them, and say that they are the ghosts of the fabled lost race. I say they are half vodka, half imagination.”

Paul J. McAuley (1955) British writer

Source: Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988), Chapter 2 “The Hold” (pp. 131-132)

Imagination

“Although science claims the whole universe as its field... it confesses that its ignorance is more widely extended than its knowledge. In this very confession... it finds a safeguard for future progress. Science cannot... allow theologian or metaphysician... to the foreshore of our present ignorance, and so hinder the development in due time...”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

Time , Future , Knowledge , Universe

“The single merit I can claim at this junction is that I am not seeking to obtain agreement. I am seeking only to outline the reality that exists, not to win support, start a movement, or contrive concurrence. The reason is clear. It can’t be done. Additionally I do not know everything. Therefore, I can be wrong. What evil I could impose if I obtain agreement on a point that happened to be in error! I do not intend to be wrong, but the mind and the memory are both fallible. So I propose to set down what is so, to the degree I am capable of recognizing it.”

Robert LeFevre (1911–1986) American libertarian businessman

Source: A Way to Be Free: The Autobiography of Robert LeFevre, Volume I, (1999), pp. 18-19

Support , Reality , Memory , Error

“I think that this is a piece of a strategy. Um, it’s not a whole strategy. And I certainly don’t claim to single-handedly achieve much on my own. I’m just dealing with opinions.”

Natalie Wynn ContraPoints

ContraPoints, Miscellaneous, Contrapoints Is De-Radicalizing Young, Right-Wing Men https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Nrz4-FZx6k (Vice News, 2019)

Thinking

“Nagel once claimed that it is psychologically impossible to believe the Reductionist View. Buddha claimed that, though it is very hard, it is possible. I find Buddha’s claim to be true. After reviewing my arguments, I find that, at the reflective or intellectual level, though it is very hard to believe the Reductionist View, this is possible. My remaining doubts or fears seem to me irrational. Since I can believe this view, I assume that others can do so too. We can believe the truth about ourselves.”

Derek Parfit book Reasons and Persons

Source: Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 280

Truth , Fear

“When some principle requires us to act in some way, this principle’s acceptability cannot depend on whether such acts are often possible. We cannot defend some principle by claiming that, in the world as it is, there is no danger that too many people will act in the way that this principle requires.”

Derek Parfit book Reasons and Persons

Source: Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 387

World , Way , People , Dependency

“Puerto Rico in particular intertwines Caribbean Black Spanish. We dare to claim it. It is a source of pride and we are not linguistically crippled. My claim to fame is I can experiment, and sound intelligent with my linguistic experiments.”

Tato Laviera (1950–2013) Puerto Rican writer

On how he perceives Puerto Rico in “An Interview with Tato Laviera, the King of Nuyorican Poetical Migrations” https://www.latinorebels.com/2012/07/11/an-interview-with-tato-laviera-the-king-of-nuyorican-poetical-migrations/ in Latino Rebels (2012 Jul 11)

Intelligence

“The writer Arundhati Roy asserted that a pregnant Muslim woman had been murdered and then her foetus ripped from her womb by rioters. When it became clear that nobody knew of the incident and Roy was asked to come and help the police inquiry to find the unfortunate victim, she replied through her lawyers that there was no power which could compel her to attend. She claimed in addition that Ehsan Jafri’s daughters had been murdered alongside him at Gulbarg Society. This prompted Jafri’s son to write from the United States that there was only one daughter and she was in the US with him.”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

Marino, Andy (2014). Narendra Modi: A political biography. Ch. 7.

Help , Daughters

“A lot of what you see on the internet with people who claim to have autism is a very distorted and unrealistic view of what autism really is. You can spot these people by the absolute pride they have in their condition. They say autism is the best thing ever and some of them even say it places above the general population and makes them better or superior in some way.”

Thomas McKean (1734–1817) American politician

My Interview with Thomas McKean

Way , Making love , People

“Unfortunately for DOJ... these contentions about the relative power of the federal courts, congressional committees, and the President distort established separation-of-powers principles beyond all recognition. Thus, ultimately, the arguments that DOJ advances to support its claim of absolute testimonial immunity for senior-level presidential aides transgress core constitutional truths...”

Ketanji Brown Jackson (1970) United States District Judge

Committee on the Judiary, United States House of Representatives, Plaintiff, v. Donald F. McGahn II, Defendant. (Nov 25, 2019)

Truth , Support

“Thus, when presented with a case or controversy, it is the Judiciary’s duty under the Constitution to interpret the law and to declare government overreaches unlawful. Similarly, the House of Representatives has the constitutionally vested responsibility to conduct investigations of suspected abuses of power within the government, and to act to curb those improprieties, if required. Accordingly, DOJ’s conceptual claim to unreviewable absolute testimonial immunity on separation-of-powers grounds—essentially, that the Constitution’s scheme countenances unassailable Executive branch authority—is baseless, and as such, cannot be sustained.”

Ketanji Brown Jackson (1970) United States District Judge

Committee on the Judiary, United States House of Representatives, Plaintiff, v. Donald F. McGahn II, Defendant. (Nov 25, 2019)

Housing , Law

“I defy the most scrupulous defender of property to contest these principles, short of declaring openly that he understands this word as the right to despoil and assassinate his fellows. So how have people been able to claim that any sort of restriction, or rather any regulation of the trade in wheat, was an attack on property, and disguise that barbaric system under the specious name of freedom of trade? Do the authors of this system not perceive that they are inevitably in contradiction with themselves?”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

On Subsistence, (2 December 1792)

People , Understanding , Freedom

“Anti-Zionism is not criticism of Israel. It is a hatred of Israel — a hatred greater than that of any other country and a delegitimization of Zionism, the movement to reestablish the Jewish national home. Imagine someone who argued that the establishment of the Italian state — Italy — was illegitimate and who hated Italy more than any other country in the world yet claimed that he was in no way anti-Italian, as he had Italian friends and loved Italian culture. No one would believe such an absurdity.”

Dennis Prager (1948) American writer, speaker, radio and TV commentator, theologian

2010s, Why Most Jews Aren't Bothered By The Times' Anti-Semitic Cartoon (2019)

Home , Imagination , Hate , Country

“He who knows not his own soul, how shall he know the soul of another? and he who only knows hand and foot, how shall he know the Godhead? The prophets are unequal to understanding this matter; why dost thou foolishly claim to do so? When thou hast brought forward a demonstration of this subject, then thou wilt know the pure essence of the faith; otherwise what have faith and thou in common? thou hadst best be silent, and speak not folly. The learned talk nonsense all; for true religion is not woven about the feet of everyone.”

Sanai (1080–1131) Persian poet

Enclosed Garden Of Truth (Hadiqat al-Haqiqa wa Shari'at al-Tariqa): translated by John Stephenson, 1910

Soul , Faith , Religion , Understanding

“During a lecture the Oxford linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin made the claim that although a double negative in English implies a positive meaning, there is no language in which a double positive implies a negative. To which he decided to just go ahead and keep striving to figure it out HE MY FRIENDS WAS A DETERMINED HONEST SUPERIOR WEALTHY TRY HARDISH SWEATY PERSON WHO NEEDS TO DO I HAVE NO CLUE WHAT!”

Sidney Morgenbesser (1921–2004) American philosopher

Personality

“After all the wild claims made about their findings, the experts themselves have finally spoken… In a normal setting, the ASI findings should finish once and for all the campaign of history denial by the Marxists and their Muslim camp followers. But the world of Indian secularism is a fantasy-land where hard facts don’t count for much. So, a great many diehards unflinchingly reject the findings of science.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Ayodhya, the Finale (2003)

World , Science , History

“The aim of the pro-Babri Masjid historians was never to settle any historical questions. If it had been, then they would not have opposed the VHP’s request to organize systematic excavations at the site; nor would they have concealed the pro-temple evidence in their publications. Their aim was merely to distract public attention from the obvious and extremely simple solution of this controversy. The fact that this solution would be in favour of the Hindu claims was apparently unbearable to them because of their seething hatred of their ancestral religion.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

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

Religion , Question

“Islam has till today retained a lot of its medieval self- righteousness. While native Americans who claim back ancestral sacred places may have to confront economical interests, juridical technicalities or other small-human opposition against their demands, there is now hardly any ideologically motivated resistance against respecting their culture and their historical sensitivities. But in India, and in the countries which Islam has carved out of if, there is still a strong presence of an ideological drive to islamize India, and to make this clear by wresting all kinds of real and symbolical concessions from the Hindus, and by refusing them any concession whatsoever in return. The symbols of humiliation that have been inflicted on the Hindus, are being defended.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

1990s, Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991)

Country , Strong , Self-confidence , Motivation

“Another illustration of this spirit of exploitation is furnished by the Muslim insistence upon cow-slaughter and the stoppage of music before mosques. Islamic law does not insist upon the slaughter of the cow for sacrificial purposes and no Musalman, when he goes to Haj, sacrifices the cow in Mecca or Medina. But in India they will not be content with the sacrifice of any other animal. Music may be played before a mosque in all Muslim countries without any objection. Even in Afghanistan, which is not a secularized country, no objection is taken to music before a mosque. But in India the Musalmans must insist upon its stoppage for no other reason except that the Hindus claim a right to it.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)

Animals , Music , Law , Country

“Chârvâkas, a very ancient sect in India, were rank materialists. They have died out now, and most of their books are lost. They claimed that the soul, being the product of the body and its forces, died with it; that there was no proof of its further existence. They denied inferential knowledge accepting only perception by the senses.”

Charvaka An unorthodox school of Hindu philosophy

Swami Vivekananda as recorded in the complete works of Swami Vivekananda https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Works_of_Swami_Vivekananda/Volume_7/Inspired_Talks/Friday,_July_5.

Knowledge , Soul , Books , Sense

“We are not interested in suppressing other nations. We do not want to see other nations among us. We want to live our own life. … Germany and Poland are two nations, and these nations will live, and neither of them will be able to do away with the other. … We have assured all our immediate neighbours of the integrity of their territory as far as Germany is concerned. That is no hollow phrase: it is our sacred will. … The Sudetenland is the last territorial claim which I have to make in Europe. … I have assured Mr. Chamberlain, and I emphasize it now, that when this problem is solved Germany has no more territorial problems in Europe.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Speech in Berlin (26 September 1938), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 10
1930s

Problem , Life , Making love

“Germany has no claims to make against the European nations except to live exactly like the others. … What we have in mind is a legal order of European national states with equal rights.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

1930s
Source: Speech in Cologne (28 March 1936), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 10

Making love

“Moral rules and social norms no longer flow from the wise or the accomplished or from custom. The new moral rules and norms and taboos are frantic mass responses to claims of discrimination, oppression, offense, hurt feelings- even a failure to affirm some obvious delusion or pathosis… The Empire scrambles to accommodate victims, and that gives those who claim to be victims - often the most fragile, helpless, dysgenic and emotionally needy people - ultimate moral authority.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

Pg 41
A More Complete Beast (2018)

Feeling , People , Failure , Hurt

“Añez also faces a challenge to her legitimacy in Congress, where lawmakers loyal to Morales tried to hold new sessions that would undermine her claim to the presidency… Morales’ backers, who hold a two-thirds majority in Congress, boycotted the session that she called Tuesday night to formalize her claim to the presidency, preventing a quorum. She claimed power anyway, saying the constitution did not specifically require congressional approval.”

Jeanine Áñez (1967) President of Bolivia

Bolivia caught in a power struggle between Añez at home and Morales in exile https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/bolivia-caught-in-a-power-struggle-between-anez-at-home-and-morales-in-exile, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), (14 November 2019)
About

Night

“There is no alternative for Britain but to keep power on her side, which means the power of the United States. There is in my opinion no alternative for Britain other than to retain a nuclear capacity and arm under her ultimate control so that she can contribute to collective defence and claim an influence and authority wherever and whenever matters of nuclear peace or war are weighed in the scales.”

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

Speech in Grantham (29 November 1963), quoted in The Times (30 November 1963), p. 8
Prime Minister

War , Peace

“The reduction of a society and culture to dependence on mathematical abstraction has infantilised a grown-up civilisation and is well on the way to destroying it. Civilisations self-destruct anyway, but it is reasonable to ask whether they have done so before with such enthusiasm, in obedience to such an acutely absurd superstition, while claiming with such insistence that they were beyond being seduced by the irrational promises of religion.”

David Fleming (1940–2010) British activist

Surviving the Future, (2016), p. 180, Epilogue http://www.flemingpolicycentre.org.uk/lean-logic-surviving-the-future/

Religion , Dependency , Self-confidence , Mathematics

“Bolivia’s key reserves are in lithium, which is essential for the electric car. Bolivia claims to have 70 percent of the world’s lithium reserves… Morales made it clear that any development of the lithium had to be done with Bolivia’s Comibol—its national mining company—and Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB)—its national lithium company—as equal partners… Tesla (United States) and Pure Energy Minerals (Canada) both showed great interest in having a direct stake in Bolivian lithium. But they could not make a deal that would take into consideration the parameters set by the Morales government. Morales himself was a direct impediment to the takeover of the lithium fields by the non-Chinese transnational firms. He had to go.”

Evo Morales (1959) Bolivian politician

Vijay Prashad in The Bolivian Coup Comes Down to One Precious Mineral, https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-bolivian-coup-comes-down-to-one-precious-mineral/ TruthDig, (13 November 2019)
About

World , Cars , Making love

“Añez also faces a challenge to her legitimacy in Congress, where lawmakers loyal to Morales tried to hold new sessions that would undermine her claim to the presidency… Morales’ backers, who hold a two-thirds majority in Congress, boycotted the session that she called Tuesday night to formalize her claim to the presidency, preventing a quorum.”

Evo Morales (1959) Bolivian politician

Bolivia caught in a power struggle between Añez at home and Morales in exile https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/bolivia-caught-in-a-power-struggle-between-anez-at-home-and-morales-in-exile, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), (14 November 2019)
About

Night

“Outside of that you have teachers who are increasingly deskilled through models of curricula that claim that objective assessments are all that matters, and that teachers just have to implement the assessments. So teachers are completely losing control over the conditions of their labor, they’re being abused, they’re not being paid properly, they’re losing their benefits, and their unions are being disseminated. This is a full-fledged attack. It’s an attack on one of the most important foundations of a democracy, it’s an attack on teachers, and it’s an attack on young people — particularly those who are marginalized by virtue of class, race, and ethnicity.”

Henry Giroux (1943) American academic

Interview with Media For Us, 2019

Democracy , People , Teachers

“Bolivia’s key reserves are in lithium, which is essential for the electric car. Bolivia claims to have 70 percent of the world’s lithium reserves… Morales made it clear that any development of the lithium had to be done with Bolivia’s Comibol—its national mining company—and Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB)—its national lithium company—as equal partners… Tesla (United States) and Pure Energy Minerals (Canada) both showed great interest in having a direct stake in Bolivian lithium. But they could not make a deal that would take into consideration the parameters set by the Morales government. Morales himself was a direct impediment to the takeover of the lithium fields by the non-Chinese transnational firms. He had to go.”

Vijay Prashad (1967) Indian historian and journalist

Vijay Prashad in The Bolivian Coup Comes Down to One Precious Mineral, https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-bolivian-coup-comes-down-to-one-precious-mineral/ TruthDig, (13 November 2019)

World , Cars , Making love

“Idealists, I know, are dangerous, but the claim of the ideal (Ibsen) has to be felt or else…. Or else the world, our deteriorating world, will continue on its course by sheer inertia. Inertia is taking over, right here; you can sense it.”

Mary McCarthy book Cannibals and Missionaries

From Sophie Weil's diary in "Envoi"
Cannibals and Missionaries (1979)

World , Sense

“Men have had the same origin as other animals; they have the same general architecture of body and mind; and they have the same destiny. And they stand on the same general level of ethical claim and obligation.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Discovering Darwin", Proceedings of the International Anti-Vivisection and Animal Protection congress, held at Washington, D.C. December 8th to 11th, 1913 (1913), p. 156

Animals , Men

“I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1920s, Viereck interview (1929)

Star , Dance

“What counts is not what sounds plausible, not what we would like to believe, not what one or two witnesses claim, but only what is supported by hard evidence rigorously and skeptically examined. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

1 min 10 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Encyclopedia Galactica [Episode 12]

Support

“Art possesses the formidable tool of pietas. Take, for instance, theatre. Theatre, by convention, agrees to be fake; thanks to this convention, which is innocuous, it can tell the truth. Art can tell the truth, because it is a transfigured language which doesn’t claim to possess divine truth; with its ability to transform relationships, it can address even the most terrible issues, exploring them without being destroyed by them. But artists have to be conscious of their role.”

Moni Ovadia (1946) Italian actor, musician, singer and theatrical author

"Uncomfortable culture – Interview with Moni Ovadia – part two" https://www.inkroci.com/culture_movie/interviews/uncomfortable-culture-interview-with-moni-ovadia-part-two.html, Inkroci (2014).

Truth , Art

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

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

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

Freedom , War , People , Suffering

“How sincere and confidential we can be, saying all that lies in the mind, and yet go away feeling that all is yet unsaid, from the incapacity of the parties to know each other, although they use the same words! My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation until all is said which words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption. Is it that every man believes every other to be an incurable partialist, and himself a universalist? I talked yesterday with a pair of philosophers; I endeavored to show my good men that I love everything by turns and nothing long; that I loved the centre, but doated on the superficies; that I loved man, if men seemed to me mice and rats; that I revered saints, but woke up glad that the old pagan world stood its ground and died hard; that I was glad of men of every gift and nobility, but would not live in their arms. Could they but once understand that I loved to know that they existed, and heartily wished them God-speed, yet, out of my poverty of life and thought, had no word or welcome for them when they came to see me, and could well consent to their living in Oregon, for any claim I felt on them, — it would be a great satisfaction.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Nominalist and Realist

God , Understanding , Speed , Sincerity

“I read to you parts of the indictment claiming that I was part of a joint criminal enterprise to expel Croatians from Croatia, Muslims from Bosnia, Albanians from Kosovo, in order to create some sort of Greater Serbia. Now, if you have in mind that the greatest part of that Greater Serbia would be precisely the Republic of Serbia, which did not see any expulsions at all throughout the crisis, do you find it logical that Serbia should initiate expulsions from territories outside of Serbia?”

Slobodan Milošević (1941–2006) Yugoslavian and Serbian politician

Slobodan Milošević (2004) International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia https://www.icty.org/x/cases/slobodan_milosevic/trans/en/041116IT.htm

Parting , Reading

“A white man addressing a Negro behaves exactly like an adult with a child and starts smirking, whispering, patronizing, cozening. It is not one white man I have watched, but hundreds; and I have not limited my investigation to any one class but, if I may claim an essentially objective position, I have made a point of observing such behavior in physician, policemen, employers.”

Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks

Source: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), pp. 31

Behavior

“My sympathies are all with the Jews. I have known them intimately in South Africa. Some of them became life-long companions. Through these friends I came to learn much of their age-long persecution. They have been the untouchables of Christianity. The parallel between their treatment by Christians and the treatment of untouchables by Hindus is very close. Religious sanction has been invoked in both cases for the justification of the inhuman treatment meted out to them. Apart from the friendships, therefore, there is the more common universal reason for my sympathy for the Jews…. If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance but would have confidence that in the end the rest are bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.”

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

Mahatma Gandhi, Harijan, 26 November 1938. Quoted from Hinduism and Judaism compilation https://web.archive.org/web/20060423090103/http://www.nhsf.org.uk/images/stories/HinduDharma/Interfaith/hinduzion.pdf
1930s

Home , Sleep , Confidence , Imagination

“The rapid changes in the world of thought, arising from the nearness of the Coming of the World-Teacher, render useful some information as to a part of the world in which he lives, information which may, perhaps, to some extent prepare the public mind for his teachings.Be that as it may, I desire to associate myself with the statements made in this book, for the accuracy of nearly all of which I can personally vouch; and also to say on behalf of my colleague as well of myself, that the book is issued as a record of observations carefully made and carefully recorded, but not claiming any authority, nor making any demand for acceptance. It makes no claim to inspiration, but is only an honest account of things seen by the writer.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Annie Besant, Forward
The Masters and the Path (1925)

Personality , Teachers , Books , World

“In my own world, sir, sad to say, human prejudice is matched only by human folly. Not a soul claims to be prejudiced, of course, as there are few who would describe themselves as fools…”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Elric, chewing on a piece of barely palatable salt beef, remarked that this seemed a quality of a good deal of society, throughout the multiverse.
Book 2, Chapter 4 “Land at Last!” (p. 241)
The Elric Cycle, The Revenge of the Rose (1991)

World , Sadness , Fools , Soul

“We are in process of passing from one religious age into another. The spiritual trends of today are steadily becoming more defined. The hearts of men have never been more open to spiritual impression than they are at this time, and the door into the very centre of reality stands wide open. Paralleling, however, this significant development is a trend in the counter direction, and materialistic philosophies and doctrines of negation are becoming increasingly prevalent. To many, the whole question of the validity of the Christian religion remains to be determined. Claims are made that Christianity has failed and that man does not need the Gospel story with its implications of divinity and its urge to service and sacrifice.”

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

Source: From Bethlehem to Calvary (1937), Chapter One

Religion , Time , Question , Heart

“The books that I have written are sent out with no claim for their acceptance. They may, or may not, be correct, true and useful. It is for you to ascertain their truth by right practice and by the exercise of the intuition. Neither I nor A. A. B. is the least interested in having them acclaimed as inspired writings…”

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

Extract from a Statement by the Tibetan

Truth , Books , Exercises

“Civil freedom, gentlemen, is not, as many have endeavoured to persuade you, a thing that lies hid in the depth of abstruse science. It is a blessing and a benefit, not an abstract speculation; and all the just reasoning that can bo upon it, is of so coarse a texture, as perfectly to suit the ordinary capacities of those who are to enjoy, and of those who are to defend it. Far from any resemblance to those propositions in geometry and metaphysics, which admit no medium, but must be true or false in all their latitude; social and civil freedom, like all other things in common life, are variously mixed and modified, enjoyed in very different degrees, and shaped into an infinite diversity of forms, according to the temper and circumstances of every community. The extreme of liberty (which is its abstract perfection, but its real fault) obtains no where, nor ought to obtain any where. Because extremes, as we all know, in every point which relates either to our duties or satisfactions in life, are destructive both to virtue and enjoyment. Liberty too must be limited in order to be possessed. The degree of restraint it is impossible in any case to settle precisely. But it ought to be the constant aim of every wise public counsel, to find out by cautious experiments, and rational, cool endeavours, with how little, not how much of this restraint, the community can subsist. For liberty is a good to be improved, and not an evil to be lessened. It is not only a private blessing of the first order, but the vital spring and energy of the state itself, which has just so much life and vigour as there is liberty in it. But whether liberty be advantageous or not, (for I know it is a fashion to decry the very principle,) none will dispute that peace is a blessing; and peace must in the course of human affairs be frequently bought by some indulgence and toleration at least to liberty. For as the sabbath (though of divine institution) was made for man, not man for the sabbath, government, which can claim no higher origin or authority, in its exercise at least, ought to conform to the exigencies of the time, and the temper and character of the people, with whom it is concerned; and not always to attempt violently to bend the people to their theories of subjection. The bulk of mankind on their part are not excessively curious concerning any theories, whilst they are really happy; and one sure symptom of an ill-conducted state, is the propensity of the people to resort to them.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777)

Peace , Time , Freedom , People

“The Rainbow is making room for the Native American, the most exploited people of all, a people with the greatest moral claim amongst us. We support them as they seek the restoration of their ancient land and claim amongst us. We support them as they seek the restoration of land and water rights, as they seek to preserve their ancestral homeland and the beauty of a land that was once all theirs. They can never receive a fair share for all they have given us. They must finally have a fair chance to develop their great resources and to preserve their people and their culture.”

Jesse Jackson (1941) African-American civil rights activist and politician

Address to the Democratic National Convention, 1984

Chance , Support , Beauty , People

“For many years, the single most potent weapon in the armoury of invisibility was the shame with which gay men and women were taught to regard their sexual nature. What kindles the fury of the antigay right at the gay and lesbian claim to equality and freedom is the implicit rejection of that shame. The energy released by that triumph over shame is what makes the movement so powerful. The gay and lesbian movement signals the existence of a people who have decided that they know more about themselves than what has been shoved down their throats by an ignorant and fearful society.”

Michael Nava (1954) American writer

Source: Non-fiction, Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994), p.129-130

Freedom , People , Nature , Fear

“I hold that the Federal Government was never, in its essence, anything but an anti-slavery government. Abolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution need be altered. It was purposely so framed as to give no claim, no sanction to the claim, of property in a man. If in its origin slavery had any relation to the government, it was only as the scaffolding to the magnificent structure, to be removed as soon as the building was completed.”

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

As quoted in Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July https://books.google.com/books?id=-m2WBgAAQBAJ&pg=PT106&lpg=PT106&dq=%22scaffolding+to+the+magnificent+structure%22+douglass&source=bl&ots=KT4-pHUo5-&sig=ACfU3U21MIZj_niQo7pIGSxeO5vhEkXq4w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwim6fvM3I3iAhVqiOAKHWIqDK8Q6AEwB3oECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22scaffolding%20to%20the%20magnificent%20structure%22%20douglass&f=false
1860s, Should the Negro Enlist in the Union Army? (1863)

Relation ships

“As we begin to look beyond the war to the re-ordering of the world which must follow, we see three great Powers, the United States, Russia, and China. … In the company of these Titans Britain, apart from the rest of the Commonwealth and Empire, could hardly claim equal partnership. … If, in the future, Britain is to play her part without assuming burdens greater than she can support she must have with her in peace the same strength that has sustained her in this war. Not Great Britain only, but the British Commonwealth and Empire must be the fourth Power in that group upon which, under Providence, the peace of the world will henceforth depend.”

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax (1881–1959) British politician

Speech to centenary dinner of the Toronto Board of Trade (24 January 1944), quoted in The Times (25 January 1944), p. 3
Ambassador to the United States

Peace , Partnership , Dependency , War

“Not only does it deny the corporate claim to liberty of men and women organized in national societies, but it refuses the much more fundamental claim of men and women to the free expression of human personality, which rests upon the eternal value of every human soul. True pride of race may be tested by the behaviour of its possessors towards their own fellow citizens and towards others. It will forbid conduct to individuals of which they should be ashamed in their private lives. It is thus evidently something far removed from the ideal of a race which by the German philosophy of to-day is called to stamp out the civilization of another. Between these two conceptions there is a great gulf fixed. … Until these false creeds are abjured, and replaced by a wider toleration, they must continue to excite resistance. The future of humanity must not be left in the hands of those who would imprison and enslave it.”

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax (1881–1959) British politician

Speech to the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford (27 February 1940), quoted in The Times (28 February 1940), p. 10
Foreign Secretary

Soul , Personality , Future , Falseness

“In a time of crisis, with grave questions demanding urgent answer at every moment, no body of men would dare claim to be judged infallible. There was indeed no clear way, but almost always a hideous choice of evils. I can only know, for myself, that my mind will be at rest for having taken no decision inconsistent with what on all the facts I felt right.”

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax (1881–1959) British politician

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1938/oct/03/international-relations#column_1308 in the House of Lords (3 October 1938) on the Munich Agreement
Foreign Secretary

Time , Question , Decision , Way

“The national government will be formed if not today some time later. You and other members of the Working Committee and Maulana Azad as its President and Mahatma Gandhi as controller have given the best possible lead and placed the country on a sound footing in every respect. The truth about the Congress position and the Muslim League claim has been made known not only to Britain but also to the whole world.”

Rajendra Prasad (1884–1963) Indian political leader

T Prakasam in letter dated 20 July 1945, in: p. 5
Muslim League had demanded for partition of the country.
Dr. Rajendra Prasad: Correspondence and Select Documents : Presidency Period

World , Truth , Time , Country

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

Ernst Nolte (1923–2016) German historian and philosopher

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

Truth , Thinking , Communication

“We assert then that nothing has been accomplished without interest on the part of the actors; and — if interest be called passion, inasmuch as the whole individuality, to the neglect of all other actual or possible interests and claims, is devoted to an object with every fibre of volition, concentrating all its desires and powers upon it — we may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Often abbreviated to: Nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion.
Variant translation: We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without enthusiasm.
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1

World , Parting , Passion

“Several years ago, the United States started accusing Russia of violating the INF Treaty, without providing any evidence. We basically had to pry the information from the US, information that would help us understand… what they meant. The US eventually mentioned the 9M729 missile, claiming that it had been tested on certain days at a certain testing site, and that the range violated the treaty’s provisions. Our data concerning these tests showed the opposite. The missile’s range is allowed under the treaty.”

Sergey Lavrov (1950) Russian politician and Foreign Minister

News conference following the 25th OSCE Ministerial Council, Milan, Italy (7 December 2018)

Help , Understanding

“The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

Law, Legislation and Liberty, volume 3, chapter 3, p. 55 https://books.google.pt/books?id=nclLLOfnGqAC&pg=PA55 (1979)
1960s–1970s, Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973, 1976, 1979)

Appearance , Parting

“Neophil: …Leibniz, Wolff, and their various successors, to what a level of perfection and completeness they have brought philosophy! How proud Germany can be of them! Yet what does it help to claim more for oneself than is right? Let us always acknowledge that someone other than a German, I add further, someone other than a Christian, namely, Spinoza, has participated immensely in the work of bettering philosophy. Before the transition from the Cartesian to the Leibnizian philosophy could occur, it was necessary for someone to take the plunge into the monstrous abyss lying between them. This unhappy lot fell to Spinoza. How his fate is to be pitied! He was a sacrifice for the human intellect, but one that deserves to be decorated with flowers. Without him, philosophy would never have been able to extend its borders so far.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Moses Mendelssohn, in his Philosophical Writings (1755–77) [original in German]
M - R

Fate , Help , Perfection , Flowers

“In general, the books of RV level I (RV 4-6) are thoroughly South Asian and have reference to local climate, trees and animals. We therefore have to take them seriously at their word, and cannot claim that they belong just to Afghanistan.”

Michael Witzel (1943) German-American philologist

WITZEL 2000: The Languages of Harappa. Witzel, Michael. Feb. 17, 2000. (WITZEL 2000a:§13). Quoted in Talageri, S. G. (2010). The Rigveda and the Avesta. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

Animals , Tree , Books

“On condition that you protect my rights, I will protect your rights. How, then, does some party obtain the right to claim the protection of the other? Evidently, by actually protecting the rights of the other. But if this is so, no party will ever obtain a strictly legal claim to the protection of the other.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Science of Rights 1796, P. 220

“Now that her claims of being of Indian heritage have turned out to be a scam and a lie, Elizabeth Warren should apologize for perpetrating this fraud against the American Public.”

Elizabeth Warren (1949) 28th United States Senator from Massachusetts

Donald Trump, twitter, 11:16 PM · Oct 16, 2018

Fraud , Lie

“For those who take the vegetarian option seriously and adopt it as their own, it may well connect with their spiritual or religious orientation, even their sense of meaning and purpose in life. Some might see these as grandiose claims, but the point is that vegetarianism sheds light upon, and is in turn reflected by, our philosophical outlook on ourselves, our world, and our place in it.”

Michael Allen Fox (1940)

Source: Deep Vegetarianism (1999), p. 181

World , Life , Sense , Light

“He claimed that even when he was the Union home minister, Indira Gandhi had been hesitant to discuss Punjab affairs with him and had given a free hand to Chief Minister Darbara Singh. The two had always been at daggers drawn.”

Zail Singh (1916–1994) Indian politician and former President of India

Presidential Years:Zail Singh's posthumous defence of his controversial tenure

Home

“Rekha fashioned herself as an actress with a signature look very different from her early years as a struggling actress. This transformation was often referred to as as that of an ugly duckling. In interviews and film magazines Rekha claimed that she had achieved this by changing her lifestyle, healthy eating practices, and doing yoga. Soon she had inspired a whole fashion trend and had film magazines raving about her affair with Amitab Bachhan. Such publicity added to her image as a symbol of seduction and glamour. She was seen as a woman who could challenge patriarchal norms by remaining single and being famous.”

Rekha (1954) Indian film actress

Editor Manju Jain in [Jain, Manju, Narratives of Indian Cinema, http://books.google.com/books?id=ORE9TDOoU1IC&pg=PA187, 2009, Primus Books, 978-81-908918-4-4, 187–]

Fashion , Change

“I hope I may claim in the present work to have made it probable that the laws of arithmetic are analytic judgments and consequently a priori.”

Gottlob Frege book The Foundations of Arithmetic

Arithmetic thus becomes simply a development of logic, and every proposition of arithmetic a law of logic, albeit a derivative one. To apply arithmetic in the physical sciences is to bring logic to bear on observed facts; calculation becomes deduction.
Gottlob Frege (1950 [1884]). The Foundations of Arithmetic. p. 99.

Hope , Law

“Her claim was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted the birth control to prevent pregnancy. She’s gay, so clearly polycystic ovarian syndrome was a much more urgent concern than accidental pregnancy. After months of paying over $100 out of pocket, she just couldn’t afford her medication anymore and had to stop taking it. I learned about all of this when I walked out of a test and got a message from her that in the middle of her final exam period she’d been in the emergency room all night in excruciating pain. … Without her taking the birth control, a massive cyst the size of a tennis ball had grown on her ovary. She had to have surgery to remove her entire ovary.”

Sandra Fluke (1981) American women's rights activist and lawyer

U.S. Congressional testimony (February 23, 2012)

Pain , Birth , Night , Learning

“Esteemed chairman of the court, today we have to pass a verdict on the defendants Nicolae Ceaușescu and Elena Ceaușescu who have committed the following offenses: Crimes against the people. They carried out acts that are incompatible with human dignity and social thinking; they acted in a despotic and criminal way; they destroyed the people whose leaders they claimed to be. Because of the crimes they committed against the people, I plead, on behalf of the victims of these two tyrants, for the death sentence for the two defendants.”

Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918–1989) General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party

Chief prosecutor Dan Voinea at the Ceaușescus' trial http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Transcript_of_the_closed_trial_of_Nicolae_and_Elena_Ceau%C5%9Fescu (25 December 1989)
About Ceaușescu

Way , Thinking , Death , People

“I cannot think of a single answer that I made in the years that I argued before the Court while Justice White sat on it that seemed to satisfy him. While I won a number of cases that I argued before him, and he voted for my side in most of them, I never had the sense that anything I said pleased him. White, a former All-American running back (whose much-repeated college nickname, Whizzer, was one that appalled him), was no fan of press claims for broad First Amendment protection. He invariably asked questions that were both pointed and powerful.”

Byron White (1917–2002) Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, American football player

Floyd Abrams, Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment, (Viking Press, 2005), p. 71.

Sense , Thinking , Justice , Question

“But if we look a little deeper we shall find there is a pathetic, one might almost say a tragic, side to the picture. A shy man means a lonely man—a man cut off from all companionship, all sociability. He moves about the world, but does not mix with it. Between him and his fellow-men there runs ever an impassable barrier—a strong, invisible wall that, trying in vain to scale, he but bruises himself against. He sees the pleasant faces and hears the pleasant voices on the other side, but he cannot stretch his hand across to grasp another hand. He stands watching the merry groups, and he longs to speak and to claim kindred with them. But they pass him by, chatting gayly to one another, and he cannot stay them. He tries to reach them, but his prison walls move with him and hem him in on every side. In the busy street, in the crowded room, in the grind of work, in the whirl of pleasure, amid the many or amid the few—wherever men congregate together, wherever the music of human speech is heard and human thought is flashed from human eyes, there, shunned and solitary, the shy man, like a leper, stands apart. His soul is full of love and longing, but the world knows it not. The iron mask of shyness is riveted before his face, and the man beneath is never seen. Genial words and hearty greetings are ever rising to his lips, but they die away in unheard whispers behind the steel clamps. His heart aches for the weary brother, but his sympathy is dumb. Contempt and indignation against wrong choke up his throat, and finding no safety-valve whence in passionate utterance they may burst forth, they only turn in again and harm him. All the hate and scorn and love of a deep nature such as the shy man is ever cursed by fester and corrupt within, instead of spending themselves abroad, and sour him into a misanthrope and cynic.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Soul , Hate , Business , Strong

“We are… bound to attach the greatest importance to the preliminary step taken by Lavoisier, who is even more justly called the father of modern chemistry than Kepler is called the father of modern astronomy. The exact claims of Lavoisier to this important place in the history of chemistry have been variously stated: …since his time, and greatly through his labours, the quantitative method has been established as the ultimate test of chemical facts; the principle of this method being the rule that in all changes of combination and reaction, the total weight of the various ingredients—be they elementary bodies or compounds—remains unchanged. The science of chemistry was thus established upon an exact, a mathematical basis. By means of this method Lavoisier, utilising and analysing the results gained by himself and others before him, notably those of Priestley, Cavendish, and Black, succeeded in destroying the older theory of combustion, the so-called phlogistic theory.”

Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) French chemist

John Theodore Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century Vol.1 http://books.google.com/books?id=xqwQAAAAYAAJ (1903)

Time , History , Mathematics , Science

“It is disgraceful that the Prime Minister should deceive Church leaders to get their support for the Bill. He then had the audacity to mislead the nation by claiming that the Bill had the support of Christians.”

Mahendra Chaudhry (1942) Fijian politician

(Commenting on allegations made by Roman Catholic Archbishop Petero Mataca that Qarase had misled church leaders about the true contents of the legislation).
Opposition to the proposed Reconciliation and Unity Commission

Support

“Being an incomplete female, the male spends his life attempting to complete himself, become female. He attempts to do this by constantly seeking out, fraternizing with and trying to live through and fuse with the female and by claiming as his own all female characteristics - emotional strength and independence, forcefulness, dynamism, decisiveness, coolness, objectivity, assertiveness, courage, integrity, vitality, intensity, depth of character, grooviness, etc.”

Valerie Solanas book SCUM Manifesto

and projecting onto women all male traits - vanity, frivolity, triviality, weakness, etc. It should be said, though, that the male has one glaring area of superiority over the female - public relations. He has done a brilliant job of convincing millions of women that men are women and women are men.
Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. 2 (hyphens (not en- or em-dashes) so in original).

Courage , Life , Decision

“I desire to direct your attention to the fact that citizens of the United States, or persons claiming to be citizens of the United States, are large holders in foreign lands of this species of property, forbidden by the fundamental law of their alleged country. I recommend to Congress to provide by stringent legislation a suitable remedy against the holding, owning or dealing in slaves, or being interested in slave property, in foreign lands, either as owners, hirers, or mortgagors, by citizens of the United States.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

1870s, Third State of the Union Address (1871)

Personality , Law , Country

“Never have I met another man of such singleness of mind in his devotion to nature as Muir. He lived and moved and had his being as a devotee. … Of himself he took little heed, but no zealous missionary ever went abroad to spread the gospel with his fervor in communicating a love of nature. And with him a love of nature meant an understanding of her laws. He sauntered over the mountains, claiming kinship with the rocks and growing things and gathering them all to his heart. He has told me that he found it necessary, in getting people to listen, to tell them stories such as his immortal tale of Stickeen, but the real hope in his heart was to awaken their interest so they would want to go to nature themselves and to delve into the mysteries of her ways. … Every tree and flower, every bird and stone was to him the outward token of an invisible world in process of making.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Charles Keeler (pages 17-18)
Sierra Club Bulletin - Memorial Issue

Tree , Law , Understanding , Mountain

“Jonny goes on and on about this. Anybody who claims they write for *themselves is a liar. Everyone has an audience in mind. The only reason any artist would carry on is in the faith that one day somebody would see or hear their work.”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

source http://www.followmearound.com/presscuttings.php?year=1997&cutting=46

Faith

“I read some articles about him, his message and his work. I was deeply impressed by the extent of the recognition that he has received as he travels around the world. Millions of people have come to him throughout the years looking for inspiration and guidance. He has received honors from many cities around the world and has been invited to speak in some of the most prestigious forums. He is a true globalizer. More than that, what has struck me is—how much he has touched the lives of countless individuals, rich and poor alike, regardless of their beliefs or condition—in all positions in society. The need to find peace is a most pressing one. And it is a privilege and honor to welcome someone who claims that peace is possible and who offers to show a practical way to find peace within. He brings a message of hope and peace that is simple and from the heart. A message that is relevant for each and every individual.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Mr. S. Haribhakti, President of the Indian Merchants Chamber of Commerce, Mumbai, India. February 28, 2004.
About, 2000s

Peace , Reading , People , Heart

“I am a believer in liberty. That is my religion — to give to every other human being every right that I claim for myself, and I grant to every other human being, not the right — because it is his right — but instead of granting I declare that it is his right, to attack every doctrine that I maintain, to answer every argument that I may urge — in other words, he must have absolute freedom of speech.”

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

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

Religion , Freedom

“My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass.”

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

"Be It Resolved: Freedom of Speech Includes the Freedom to Hate," debate at University of Toronto, (2006-11-15). Hitchens argued the affirmative position. Info http://hhdce.sa.utoronto.ca/formaldebates_20062007.htm#20062007_3; video http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2007/03/free_speech_6.html.
2000s, 2006

Time , Kiss

“Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

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

2003-10-20
Mommie Dearest
Slate
1091-2339
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/mommie_dearest.html, quoted in Michael Shermer, "The Skeptic's Skeptic," Scientific American, November 2010, p. 86.
February/March
http://secularhumanism.org/library/fi/hitchens_24_2.html
Less than Miraculous
Free Inquiry
0272-0701
24
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." appears by itself in God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007).
Translation of the Latin phrase "Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.".
2000s, 2003
Variant: "What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof." in * 2004