Quotes about clarity
page 2

“He had a feeling that somewhere in the course of her life something had happened to her, something terrible which in the end had given her a great understanding and clarity of mind. He knew, too, almost at once, on the day she had driven up to the door of the cottage, that she had made a discovery about life which he himself had made long since... that there is nothing of such force as the power of a person content merely to be himself, nothing so invincible as the power of simple honesty, nothing so successful as the life of one who runs alone. Somewhere she had learned all this. She was like a woman to whom nothing could ever again happen.”

Louis Bromfield (1896–1956) American author and conservationist

Early Autumn : A Story of a Lady (1926)

Life, Feeling, Understanding, Learning

“They certainly demonstrate that Seth, whether an aspect of Jane Robert's unconscious mind or a genuine "spirit," was of a high level of intelligence. Yet when Jane Roberts produced a book that purported to be the after-death journal of the philosopher William James, it was difficult to take it seriously. James's works are noted for their vigour and clarity of style; Jane Robert's "communicator" writes like an undergraduate... there is a clumsiness here that is quite unlike James's swift-moving, colloquial prose.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved (2000), p. 390

Death, Books, Intelligence, Communication

“I like Sarah Palin, and I’ve heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is — and quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn’t speak the King’s English — big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns — that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Obama Surfs Through (2008)

Life, Women, People, Stupidity

“[…] ironically, the jihadis are just as opposed to the theory of evolution as creationists. So they have that in common […] This is an area in which Islamists agree 100% with the Discovery Institute and creationists. If that makes you uncomfortable … well, it should. […] I'm making a very narrowly defined point. The proponents of "intelligent design" are on the same page with radical Islamists, on that issue. And the devaluation of science by Islam, in favor of religion, is largely responsible for the appalling state of the Islamic world today. Western civilization has advanced to its current point because we DO have a strict division between these two disciplines. Science is not religion, and religion is not science. If we lose that clarity, we're in danger of losing everything. As I've tried to say at least 20 different ways, this is not a put down of religion. Religion is a civilizing force, as long it's not allowed to rule people's lives. The intelligent design movement is trying to erase these lines and bring us back into the Dark Ages. We should learn from the failure of Islam, but this is an issue that is obviously not going to rest easy.”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

June 16, 2008 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/30370_Video-_Bobby_Jindal_Supports_Teaching_Intelligent_Design/comments/

People, Age, World, Religion

“A lack of clarity could put the brakes on any journey to success.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 38

Success

“And there you In a new embrace, with a new torrent of eternal love: all the elect, angels and men, from the last to the first are embraced It is a living and fruitful unity, which is the source and the fount of all life All creatures are there without themselves as in their eternal origin, One essence and one life with God These enlightened people are lifted up with free mind above reason…To the summit of their spirit Their naked understanding is penetrated with eternal clarity as the air is penetrated by the light of the sun. The bare elevated will is transformed and penetrated with fathomless love, just as iron is penetrated by the fire [God] gives Himself in the soul’s essence…Where the soul’s powers are unified…And undergo God’s transformation in simplicity. In this place all is full and overflowing, for the spirit feels itself as one truth and one richness. And one unity with God All spirits thus raised up Melt away and are annihilated by reason of enjoyment in God’s essence They fall away from themselves and are lost in a bottomless unknowingWith God they will ebb and flow, and will always be in repose…They are drunk with love and have passed away into God in a dark luminosity must accept that the Persons yield and lose themselves whirling in essential love, that is, in enjoyable unity; nevertheless, they always remain according to their personal properties In the working of the Trinity. You may thus understand that the divine nature is eternally at rest and without mode according to the simplicity of its essence. It is why all that God has chosen and enfolded with eternal personal love, he has possessed essentially, enjoyably in unity, with essential love.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Little Book of Enlightenment (c. 1364)

Love, Life, Men, God

“.. can you [contemporary painters] ever get close, even vaguely, to the solidity, the transparency, the lyric strength of colour, to the clarity, the mystery, the emotion of any of the paintings of Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, Botticelli, Dürer, Holbein or of young Raphael? Friends, have you ever realized that with the oil colours used today this is absolutely impossible?... In the museums of Europe I have observed the work of the Flemish painters at length – those earlier, later as well as contemporary to the [brothers] Van Eycks – and I am convinced that the above mentioned brothers were not the discoverers of oil paint in its true sense, as is held today, but that what they did was introduce oil in emulsion with other substances, especially live and fossil resins, into so-called oil tempera emulsion, which was already known in the Flanders, to enable them through the use of veiling to give a greater finish, cleanliness and strength of colour to their painting.
'These oils which are their tempera' said Vasari, speaking of the Flemish [painters] in his Life of Antonello; and without doubt he was alluding to Flemish oil tempera emulsion, but it is sure, absolutely sure, that.... we are dealing with.... a tempera based mixture (egg, glue, resin, tempera etc) in which oil was only used as a means of unity and for the finish of the painting.”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Quote from De Chirico's text 'Pro tempera oratio', c. 1920; from 'PRO TEMPERA ORATIO' http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/475-480Metafisica5_6.pdf, p. 475 1920s and later

Life, Sense, Painting

“I think a lot of people see food in terms of whether it's going to make them fat or make them skinny. I'm seeing food in terms of how it's going to make me think and will it give me clarity.”

David Zabriskie (1979) road bicycle racer

"Riding the Tour De Vegetable" https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304314404576414124184873028, interview with The Wall Street Journal (29 June 2011).

People, Food, Thinking

“The free exchange of opinion and information is the very lifeblood of the society to which you owe everything you have. It's the oxygen that gives us clarity and strength. Restricting it is like closing down synapses in the collective brain. It's an act of sabotage and nobody has the right to do it any more than they have the right to arbitrarily ration water or air. No judge, no politician, no police officer and certainly no braying mob of sanctimonious, privileged, middle-class, left-wing, students who think they know best for everyone.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"A word to left-wing students" (11 July 11 2013) https://youtube.com/watch?v=85q6BOnwIAQ 2013

Thinking, Water

“Clarity is the antidote to anxiety, and therefore clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear.”

Marcus Buckingham (1966) British writer

Source: The One Thing You Need to Know (2005), p. 146

“[As a vegan] I feel better, I look better, so it’s a big change for me. You have more clarity and I think that all of us want to be more clear. I wanted to look younger and feel better and wanted to be a greater contributor to the good on the planet […] The more I learned about factory farming… the more I realized that I could not, in good conscience, be a contributor to such violence.”

Russell Simmons (1957) American entrepreneur, producer and author

In 2008 to CNN. Quoted in "Russell Simmons Becomes a Stamp", in SoJones.com (1 December 2011) http://sojones.com/news/105789-russell-simmons-becomes-a-stamp/.

Feeling, Thinking, Learning, Change

“When I first lived in a monastery, I learned very quickly that monastic life did not afford more escape from the world than any other place. Rather, it presented a deeper encounter with it. The monastic life is not a rejection of the world; it is a decision to engage with this world from a different dimension, from the enlarged perspective of love, as perceived by the Gospel in its utter simplicity and clarity.”

Wayne Teasdale (1945–2004) American writer

Source: A Monk in the World: Cultivating a Spiritual Life (2003), p. 1

Love, Life, World, Decision

“The standard model of ethical theory may seem like merely a necessary consequence of applying to normative ethics the high standards of clarity and rigor prized by all of us who like to think of ourselves as philosophers in the analytic tradition. This way of doing ethics obviously parallels the way analytical philosophers treat many other subjects – by formulating generalizations about this or that and testing them against intuitive counterexamples. But I think the Sidgwickian method of intuitional ethics, or the Rawlsian method of reflective equilibrium, is not the only way to think clearly about ethical theory.”

Allen W. Wood (1942) academic

Kantian Ethics (2008)

Way, Thinking

“I shall never cease to marvel at the clarity of stars when viewed from midocean, each as sharp and bright as the laser pointer God uses when lecturing the angels on evolution.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 14 (p. 333)

God, Angels, Star

“How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity —in short: what mathematicians call "elegance"— are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

1980s
Source: EWD648.

People, Failure, Success

“In real life, too, it takes a long time for a woman to bring the animus into consciousness, and it costs her a great deal of suffering. But if she succeeds in freeing herself from his possession, he changes into an "inner companion" of the highest value, who confers on her positive masculine qualities such as initiative, courage, objectivity, and intellectual clarity. Like the anima in a man, the animus also commonly exhibits four stages of development. In the first stage he manifests as a symbol of physical force, for example, a sports hero. In the next stage, in addition he possesses initiative and focused ability to act. In the third stage, he becomes "the word" and is therefore frequently projected onto noteworthy intellectuals, like doctors, ministers, and professors.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (1994), The Animus, a Woman's Inner Man

Life, Courage, Sport, Suffering

“When we look to presumed sources of origin for competing evolutionary explanations of the giraffe's long neck, we find either nothing at all, or only the shortest of speculative conjectures. Length, of course, need not correspond with importance. Garrulous old Polonius, in a rare moment of clarity, reminded us that "brevity is the soul of wit" (and then immediately vitiated his wise observation with a flood of woolly words about Hamlet's Madness.)”

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

"The Tallest Tale", p. 304
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Soul, Madness

“When in the sciences or techniques one states that a certain problem is unsolvable, a rigorous demonstration of such unsolvability is required. And when a scientist submits an article to publication, the least that its referees demand is that it be intelligible. Why? Because rational beings long for understanding and because only clear statements are susceptible to be put to examination to verify whether they are true or false. In the Humanities it is the same, or it should be, but it is not always so. Nietzsche reproached John Stuart Mill's clarity. Henri Bergson, although an intuitionist himself, wrote clearly and declared that "clarity is the philosopher's courtesy."”

Mario Bunge (1919) Argentine philosopher and physicist

Obscurity is rude, because it assumes the interlocutor is incapable of understanding and dialoguing.
"Xenius, Platón y Manolito," newspaper essay (in Spanish) in La Nación, July 9, 2008.
2000s

Intelligence, Understanding, Problem, Science

“The mysterious musicality, the organic intermarriage of its forms convex and concave, the high singing phrase of a straight line bordering a plane and its sudden dropping into a scarcely traceable curve, and feel deeply, sharply, the profound peace, the philosophy awakened by the even distribution of light and shade, wandering from one curved plane into a deep clarity of light, enriching a carefully carved stone plane. One will understand at once that those awakened sensation have nothing to do with anatomical considerations, exactitudes observed or not.”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

n.p.
1960 - 1968, Plastic Language, Ossip Zadkine

Peace, Music, Feeling, Understanding

“Is it dangerous to claim that parents have no power at all (other than genetic) to shape their child's personality, intelligence, or the way he or she behaves outside the family home? … A confession: When I first made this proposal ten years ago, I didn't fully believe it myself. I took an extreme position, the null hypothesis of zero parental influence, for the sake of scientific clarity. … The establishment's failure to shoot me down has been nothing short of astonishing.”

Judith Rich Harris (1938–2018) psychology researcher

The Edge Annual Question — 2006: WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA? http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_6.html#harris

Family, Way, Home, Intelligence

“Despite its flaws, Peddling Prosperity has much to recommend it. There is no book written for a lay audience that explains the economics profession with more perception or clarity than this one.”

N. Gregory Mankiw (1958) American economist

N. Gregory Mankiw, Review of Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in the Age of Diminished Expectations by Paul Krugman, Journal of Economic Literature (Dec., 1995)
1990s

Books

“The tools of scholarly criticism-stylistics, iconographical analysis, historical context, and formal analysis in the last 50 years remain as trusted now as ever. Yet they explain with diminishing clarity what has happened after 1800, and almost nothing of what has happened in sculpture in the last 60 years.”

Jack Burnham (1931) American art historian

Preface.
Beyond Modern Sculpture, 1968

“I believe that in our period it is definitely necessary that, as far as possible, the paint is applied in pure colours, set next to each other in a pointillist or diffuse manner. This is stated strongly, and yet it relates to the idea which is the basis of meaningful expression in form, as I see it. It seems to me that the clarity of ideas should be accompanied by a clarity of technique.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in Mondrian's letter to Israel Querido, Summer of 1909; published in the weekly magazine 'De Controleur' 23 Oct, 1909; as cited in English translation, in Two Mondrian sketchbooks 1912 - 1914, ed. Robert P. Welsh & J. M. Joosten, Amsterdam 1969 p. 10
1900's

Idea, Painting

“Everybody's daily life consists of problems arising from what you decided yesterday. Managers understand that. Mathematicians want to solve a theorem, publish the results and walk away clean. Managers never walk away clean. The real world is a very dirty place.
Clarity is supposed to be the objective of science. I disagree. I think the objective of science is confusion, because confusions carries you into problems.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

C. West Churchman cited in: Peter R. Horner (1993). "TIMS Turns 40," in: OR/MS Today, Vol. 20, No. 2, p. 40-43
1980s and later

Life, World, Understanding, Problem

“My roster of the new literature, in short, would include all the writers who come bearing new information and who present it with vigor, clarity and humanity.”

William Zinsser (1922–2015) writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, professor

Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 9, Nonfiction as Literature, p. 61.

Literature

“I have always thought that clarity is a form of courtesy that the philosopher owes; moreover, this discipline of ours considers it more truly a matter of honor today than ever before to be open to all minds … This is different from the individual sciences which increasingly [interpose] between the treasure of their discoveries and the curiosity of the profane the tremendous dragon of their closed terminology.”

José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist

Source: What is Philosophy? (1964), p. 19

Science

“A lack of clarity is food for failure.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 131

Food, Failure

“The song cycle is the most original musical form created in the first half of the nineteenth century. It most clearly embodies the Romantic conception of experience as a gradual unfolding and illumination of reality in place of the Classical insistence on an initial clarity. The form of Schubert's song cycle is not less precise than that of a Classical sonata, but its precision is only gradually comprehended as it unfolds.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 3 : Mountains and Song Cycles

Music, Reality

“Lack of clarity is always a sign of dishonesty.”

Celia Green (1935) British philosopher

The Decline and Fall of Science (1976)

“Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating. […] For Hamas, the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

Column, January 2, 2009, "Moral clarity in Gaza" http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer010209.php3 at jewishworldreview.com. 2000s, 2009

War, Dead

“For Witold Doroszewski, at the root of semantic analysis lies the philosophical issue of the relationship between the general and the particular, the starting point being the analysis of the function of the copula "is". Doroszewski analyses the problem of meaning as closely linked with denotation. It is in that question that he sees the focal point of semantics.
According to Doroszewski, the history of meaning consists in the growth of a "gap" between the sign and its designatum. and the cause of changes in meanings lies in the conflict between the general character of the sign and the need for its being made to rise to the occasion whenever it is concretely embodied.
The attitude of Doroszewski, a representative of linguistic semantics, is of interest not only because he draws concrete conclusions from the general definition of semantics, but also because of his reflections on the relationship between semantics as pursued by linguists, and semantics as pursued by logicians. By touching here upon that issue, I anticipate further analysis. This does not advance the clarity of exposition, but is, unfortunately, often inevitable. In this case, it is justified in so far as it helps us to realize better the specific traits of linguistic semantics and its research objectives.”

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

Source: Introduction to semantics, 1962, p. 6

History, Question, Problem, Change

“Equally up to the task was baritone Vytautas Juozapaitis who's tortured characterization of Rigoletto was near flawless, strong and acted with intelligence and emotional depth. Mr. Juozapaitis has a full baritone that displays nice range and clarity, and coupled with the ease with which he commanded the stage, provided just the right measure of appeal that communicated to the audience the conflict and suppressed rage the character, no doubt, felt toward those who used and mocked him. Nicely done!”

Vytautas Juozapaitis (1963) Lithuanian opera singer

Paul Walkovski, "If the rest of the season matches this production in artistic quality, it's going to be one hell of a good season for opera in Boston". operaonline.us (October, 2006) http://www.jennykellyproductions.com/prod_teatro_review_rigoletto.htm

Intelligence, Communication, Strong, Rage

“It is clear, then, that the idea of a fixed method, or of a fixed theory or rationality, rests on too naive a view of man and his social surroundings. To those who look at the rich material provided by history, and who are not intent on impoverishing it in order to please their lower instincts, their craving for intellectual security in the form of clarity, precision, "objectivity", "truth", it will become clear that there is only one principle that can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Against Method

Pg. 27 & 28, italics are Feyerabend's
Against Method (1975)

Truth, History, Idea

“Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit.”

Robertson Davies book The Cunning Man

Part 1, section 4.
The Cunning Man (1994)

“It was Sophie [Taeuber] who, by the example of her work and her life, both of them bathed in clarity, showed me the right way. In her world, the high and the low, the light and the dark, the eternal and the ephemeral, are balanced in prefect equilibrium.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

In 'Unsern täglichen Traum', Hans Arp (1914 - 1954); p. 76; as quoted in Arp, ed. Serge Fauchereau, Ediciones Poligrafa, S. A., Barcelona 1988, p. 11
1960s

Life, World, Way, Light

“It was not knowing that was the seed of madness, loneliness, fear. But there were ways to solve all this. Clarity had made her knowable to the world, and had made her better, had brought her close, she hoped, to perfection. Now the world would follow. Full transparency would bring full access, and there would be no more not-knowing. Mae smiled, thinking about how simple it all was, how pure. Bailey shared her smile.”

Dave Eggers book The Circle

Source: The Circle (2013), p. 470

World, Fear, Smile, Hope

“The harbor and city.... were behind us [Klee's first glimpse of Tunis], slightly hidden. First, we passed down a long canal. On shore, very close, our first Arabs. The sun has a dark power. The colorful clarity on shore full of promise. Macke too feels it. We both know that we shall work well here.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Diary-note, 7 April 1914; as quoted by June Taboroff, on 'AramcoWorld', May, June 1991 http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/199103/travels.in.tunisia.htm 1911 - 1914, Diary-notes from Tunisia' (1914)

Color, Feeling, Sun

“My Marxist outlook pointed out to me with an illuminating clarity that women's liberation could take place only as the result of the victory of a new social order and a different economic system.”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

Women, Victory

“Miss Follett was not a “business woman,” in the sense of having actually managed any sort of business. But her lucid and illuminating ideas about organization were of priceless interest and value to the many industrial leaders and students of human relations problems, organization and politics with whom she came in contact. Her conceptions were in advance of her time. They are still in advance of current thinking. But they are a gold-mine of suggestion for anyone who is interested in the problems of establishing and maintaining human co-operation in the conduct of an enterprise. They have the added advantage of being presented with remarkable simplicity and clarity.”

Henry C. Metcalf (1867–1942) American business theorist

Source: Dynamic administration, 1942, p. xi

Idea, Business, Problem, Thinking

“Some find they can practice effectively by bringing attention to the arising of like, dislike and indifference in their meditation practice and daily life. Others are able to use the power of loving kindness, compassion, equanimity, or devotion to change the way they experience things. And still others develop or naturally have enough capacity in awareness that they experience attraction as delight, aversion as clarity, and indifference as non-thought.”

Ken McLeod (1948) Canadian lama

Practice Tip http://onedharmanashville.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/practice-tip-from-ken-mcleod/. (2010-11-09) (Topic: Practice)

Love, Life, Way, Nature

“[the foreign Muslims (or Turks)] “alone are capable of virtue, kindness, generosity, valour, good deed, good works, truthfulness, keeping of promises… loyalty, clarity of vision, justice, equity, recognition of rights, gratitude for favours and fear of God. They are, consequently, said to be noble, free born, virtuous, religious, of high pedigree and pure birth. These groups, alone are worthy of offices and posts in the government… Owing to their actions the government of the king is strengthened and adorned.” [On the other hand the] “low-born” (Indian) Muslims are capable only of vices - immodesty, falsehood, miserliness, misappropriation, wrongfulness, lies, evil-speaking ingratitude,…shamelessness, impundence… [So they are called] low-born, bazaar people, base, mean, worthless, plebian, shameless and of dirty birth”.”

Ziauddin Barani (1285–1357) Indian Muslim historian and political thinker (1285–1357)

Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1990). Indian muslims: Who are they. Chapter 2.
Fatawa-i-Jahandari

God, People, Truth, Fear

“I'll tell you what harms the vast majority of Muslims that love freedom and hate terror: Muslim theocracy does. Muslim intolerance does. Wahabism does. Salafism does. Islamism does. Jihadism does. Sharia law does. The mere conservatism of traditional Islam does. We're not talking about only jihadists hating homosexuals and thinking they should die, we're talking about conservative Muslims. The percentage of British Muslims polled who said that homosexuality was morally acceptable was zero. Do you realize what it takes to say something so controversial in a poll that not even 1% of those polled would agree with it? There's almost no question that extreme that you will ever see in a poll that gets a zero, but ask British Muslims whether homosexuality is morally acceptable, and that's what you get. And the result is more or less the same in dozens of other countries. It's zero in Cameroon, zero in Ethiopia. 1% in Nigeria, 1% in Tanzania, 1% in Mali, 2% in Kenya, 2% in Chad. 1% in Lebanon, 1% in Egypt, 1% in the Palestinian territories, 1% in Iraq, 2% in Jordan, 2% in Tunisia, 1% in Pakistan. But 10% in Bangladesh. Bangladesh: that bright spot in the Muslim world where they are regularly hunting down and butchering secular writers with machetes. The people who suffer under this belief system are Muslims themselves. The next generation of human beings born into a Muslim community who could otherwise have been liberal, tolerant, well-educated, cosmopolitan productive people are to one or another degree being taught to aspire to live in the Middle Ages, or to ruin this world on route to some fictional paradise after death. That's the thing we have to get our heads around. And yes, some of what I just said applies with varying modifications to other religions and other cults. But there is nothing like Islam at this moment for generating this kind of intolerance and chaos. And if only a right wing demagogue will speak honestly about it, then we will elect right wing demagogues in the West more and more in response to it. And that will be the price of political correctness: that's when this check will finally get cashed. That will be the consequence of this persistent failure we see among liberals to speak and think and act with real moral clarity and courage on this issue. The root of this problem is that liberals consistently fail to defend liberal values as universal human values. Their political correctness, their multiculturalism, their moral relativism has led them to rush to the defense of theocrats and to abandon the victims of theocracy and to vilify anyone who calls out this hypocrisy for what it is as a bigot. And to be clear, and this is what liberals can't seem to get, is that speaking honestly about the ideas that inspire Islamism and jihadism, beliefs about martyrdom, and apostasy and blasphemy and paradise and honour and women, is not an expression of hatred for Muslims. It is in fact the only way to support the embattled people in the Muslim community: The reformers and the liberals and the seculars and the free thinkers and the gays and the Shiia in Sunni-majority context and Sufis and Ahmadiyyas, and as Maajid Nawaz said, the minorities within the minority, who are living under the shadow, and sword rather often, under theocracy. […] If you think that speaking honestly about the need for reform within Islam will alienate your allies in the Muslim community, then you don't know who your allies are.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, "Waking Up with Sam Harris Podcast #38 — The End of Faith Sessions 2" (15 June 2016) https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-end-of-faith-sessions-2 2010s

Love, Death, Women, Hate

“How many voices have escaped you until now,
the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot,
the steady accusations of the clock
numbering the minutes no one will mark.
The terrible clarity this moment brings,
the useless insight, the unbroken dark.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Insomnia" http://www.danagioia.net/poems/insomnia.htm Poetry, The Daily Horoscope (1986)

“I’ve been a vegan now since 1995, that would be more than 14 years, and as a result I’ve had tremendous health… great energy, clarity — I’ve had the ability to connect my dietary choices with my health. I had Crohn’s growing up and I had a pretty serious bout with it throughout my thirties and forties. When I changed my diet, the symptoms began to disappear. And I started to understand also how the choice of diet affects the environment, resources, energy — it’s a spiritual choice, as well. And so if I had one day to make an imprint on the nation, I’d look at the choices that we make as respect to food. Also, the matters of compassion towards living creatures who become food. We need to be more thoughtful as a nation about the choices that we make and the food that we consume.”

Dennis Kucinich (1946) Ohio politician

Interview on Reddit, quoted in "Dennis Kucinich Wants To Give Vegan Chocolate Chip Brownies To The World", Ecorazzi (21 December 2009) http://www.ecorazzi.com/2009/12/21/dennis-kucinich-wants-to-give-a-vegan-chocolate-chip-brownie-to-the-world/

Health, Food, Understanding, Change

“It was not his to choose from what volume or on which page thereof he would read; accident, as it seemed, decided that; but the chance-opened page lay unblurred before him, and he saw it with a clarity denied to other men of his generation.”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 23 : Economic Considerations of Piety

Men, Chance, Reading

“Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity… but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'…”

George Chapman (1559–1634) English dramatist, poet, and translator

Preface to Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

“His Blinky Palermo constructive pictures have remained in my memory because they particularly appeal to me, because I can't produce such a thing. I always found it very good how he made it and that he made it – this astonished me. There was an aesthetic quality which I loved and which I couldn't produce, but I was happy that such a thing existed in the world. In comparison, my own things seemed to me somewhat destructive, without this beautiful clarity.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 96, note 30

Love, World, Beauty, Memory

“Everything is love. "HEAVEN ON EARTH" our idea of heaven has been formed by painting and nothing else. I love pure, bright colours, their intellectual clarity of expression conveying nothing but feeling. Painting - the inspired animation of the surface.”

Stefan Szczesny (1951) German painter and sculptor

Mustique (2002)

Love, Feeling, Idea, Animals

“Since lives and liberties depend upon clarity, not obfuscation, and reason, not hyperbole, let me take this opportunity today to be clear: Each action taken by the Department of Justice, as well as the war crimes commissions considered by the president and the Department of Defense, is carefully drawn to target a narrow class of individuals- terrorists. Our legal powers are targeted at terrorists. Our investigation is focused on terrorists. Our prevention strategy targets the terrorist threat.”

John Ashcroft (1942) American politician

Source: Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice (2006), p. 192

War, Justice, Dependency

“If there are any lessons to be learned from history, it is that we should be skeptical of all points of view, including those of the skeptics. No one is infallible, and no one can claim a monopoly on truth or virtue. It would be contradictory for skepticism to seek to translate itself into a new faith. One must view with caution the promises of any new secular priest who might emerge promising a brave new world—if only his path to clarity and truth is followed. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to temper the intemperate and to tame the perverse temptation that lurks within.”

Paul Kurtz (1925–2012) American professor of philosophy

Source: Multi-Secularism: A New Agenda, (2014), p. 338

Truth, World, Faith, Hope

“Light, colour, love - let me come under your spell. Life can be represented only by a lively kind of painting. There is clarity in passion.”

Stefan Szczesny (1951) German painter and sculptor

Mustique (2002)

Love, Life, Light, Passion

“[American exceptionalism] is a reaction to the inability of people to understand global complexity or important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now selecting to be, so to speak, the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases, stunningly ignorant.”

Zbigniew Brzeziński (1928–2017) Polish-American political scientist

Spokespersons of US Right 'In Most Cases Stunningly Ignorant, Interview in Der Spiegel http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,733079,00.html (December 6, 2010).

People, Search, Understanding, Dependency

“Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 57

Way, Courage

“The author… has known for that for several centuries freethinkers have led mankind. Only recently… new to him though perhaps long understood by others, possibly Kant and certainly Nietzsche, there emerged into his mind a clarity that will remain… the conception of transcendental divinity is damaging to man.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

The Universe of Experience: A Worldview Beyond Science and Religion (1974)

“Like most visionaries, The Teller saw the distant future with optical-glass clarity, the intermediate future with beeswax clarity, and the immediate future with the clarity of dark glasses dipped in tar.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 13 (p. 153)

Distant, Future

“Freud … hoped that somehow, despite the near equality of our warring emotions, reason would cleverly manage to reassert itself, despite its congenital weakness—not in the high and mighty way preached by Plato and his Christian successors but in a modest, even sly manner that would alternately dazzle and lull the more powerful emotions into submission. This way actually demands, it seems, the kind of character ideal we have called the “therapeutic” in order to contrast it with the more rigid character ideal produced by the moral demand systems preceding modernity. In the age of psychologizing, clarity about oneself supersedes devotion to an ideal as the model of right conduct.”

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) American sociologist

The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

War, Age, Hope, Way

“The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 3 (p. 9).

Life, Music, Learning, Heart

“In Plato we find the essential form of the European attitude: the intellectual rejection of the phenomenal world of process on account of its sordid ruthlessness and the emancipation of the spirit within its own realm of permanent intellectual clarity and harmony. The ancient, aristocratic, tragic consciousness disappears; man sets out to console his spirit and protect his body by the exploitation of static ideas.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 201

World, Idea

“A dark and troubled abstention:
Put a flower for me in the most secret garden
In a horizon of grace and clarity
Which was untouchable and next.A static promise in the light of the moon
Of the density which was corporal in me.
It is not the fault, it is the memory
Of the first morning of the sin
Without Eve and Adam.Only the proven fruit
And the rolled serpent
In my loneliness.”

Natália Correia (1923–1993) Portuguese writer

Uma obscura e inquieta castidade:
pôs uma flor para mim no jardim mais secreto
num horizonte de graça e claridade
intangível e perto.Promessa estática no luar
da densidade em mim corpórea.
não é a culpa, é a memoria
da primeira manhã do pecado
sem Eva e sem Adão.Só o fruto provado
e a serpente enroscada
na minha solidão.
Obscura Castidade (Dark Abstention).

Secret, Flowers, Light, Memory

“It is always impossible—he was conscious again with that strange clarity of mind—for a man to face his own death honestly. A man always continues to believe to the last moment of his life that something will intervene to save him.”

Andre Norton book The Time Traders

Source: The Time Traders (1958), p. 198

Life, Death

“If you do not remember while you are writing, it may seem confused to others but actually it is clear and eventually that clarity will be clear, that is what a master-piece is, but if you remember while you are writing it will seem clear at the time to any one but the clarity will go out of it that is what a master-piece is not.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them (1936)

Time

“The geometrical spirit is not so tied to geometry that it cannot be detached from it and transported to other branches of knowledge. A work of morals or politics or criticism, perhaps even of eloquence, would be better (other things being equal) if it were done in the style of a geometer. The order, clarity, precision and exactitude which have been apparent in good books for some time might well have their source in this geometric spirit. …Sometimes one great man gives the tone to a whole century; [Descartes], to whom one might legitimately be accorded the glory of having established a new art of reasoning, was an excellent geometer.”

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) French writer, satirist and philosopher of enlightenment

"The Utility of Mathematics," i.e. "Préface sur l'utitlité des mathématiques et de la physique et sur les travaux de le Académie des Sciences," Œuvres de Monsieur de Fontenelle (1753) Vol. 6, pp.37-50, as quoted by Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science 1300-1800 (1949).

Books, Art, Knowledge, Time

“A framework as it applies to enterprises is simply a logical structure for classifying and organising the descriptive representations of an enterprise that are significant to the management of the enterprise as well as to the development of the enterprise's system [with the aim of] rationalising the carious concepts and specifications in order to provide for clarity of professional communication, to allow for improving and integrating development methodologies and tools, and to establish credibility and confidence in the investment of systems resources.”

John Zachman (1934) American computer scientist

Zachman cited in: Egon Berghout and Dan Remenyi, Egon Berghout (2003) Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Information Technology Evaluation - 2003. p. 503
In this quote the "framework" refers to the Zachman Framework

Confidence, Communication

“The clarity of Socrates' situation is remarkable. … his exit is wonderfully seductive. It is calm, clear, convincing. Friends are present, wise words are said, the ethical unfolding of life is tied up in a neat package. And then he slips away, slowly becoming stone-cold from the feet up. It is our fantasy of the normal death, with the addition of social and prophetic implications, to say nothing of heroic proportions. Again, most of us will likely drop dead on a subway platform, in the middle of an orgasm or straining on a toilet seat early in the morning. The real tragedy of death may be just how often it is comic.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

On Equilibrium (2001)

Life, Death, Dead

“Abusive' (or 'hostile,' which in this context I take to mean the same thing) does not seem to me a very clear standard - and I do not think clarity is at all increased by adding the adverb objectively or by appealing to a reasonable person's notion of what the vague word means.”

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

Harris v. Forklift Systems, Inc., 510 U.S. 17 http://straylight.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/92-1168.ZC.html (1993) (concurring). 1990s

Hostility, Thinking, Personality

“Philosophic clarity has been a key to his life in business, and he doesn’t fall for facile or self-flattering descriptions—not even, usually, for the self-flattery of thinking he is immune to self-flattery.”

John Barnes book Mother of Storms

Source: Mother of Storms (1994), p. 45

Life, Business, Thinking

“How few people, even among the supposedly well educated, can give an intelligent explanation of the qualities of a design! …the essential ones …are necessary in order that the design may be worthy to be classed at all as a work of art. Among the essential qualities are reason, unity, harmony, clarity, and variety. Among the desirable qualities are imagination, interest, refinement, simplicity, dignity, and style.”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)

People, Education, Art, Imagination

“To me, Pollock is the height of American painting. It's very lyrical. Gorky, who is very passionate, can copy a drawing or take a drawing and copy it exactly as a painting, and Miro can too, it's amazing. Miro can do a drawing to paint and that's another training in a sense. So there's a certain mannerism that comes in both of them [three], and probably everything becomes obvious in time. But I don't have that. The line is illustrated or the colour. I'm sure it has great feeling when they're doing it, but it's more towards defining something. It has a certain clarity because it's a complex thing. I'm a painter and my whole balance is not having to think about things. So all I think about is painting. It's the instinct for the placement where all that happens. I don't have to think about it. So I don't think of composition; I don’t think of colour here and there. Sometimes I alter something after. So all I could think is the rush... I cannot make a picture unless everything is working. It's like a state.”

Cy Twombly (1928–2011) American painter

Source: 2000 - 2011, Cy Twombly, 2000', by David Sylvester (June 2000), p. 179

Feeling, Thinking, Sense, Passion

“What's needed in this next campaign is to say, with clarity, why a pro-individual-liberty, small-government perspective is what most Americans really want.”

John R. Bolton (1948) American lawyer and diplomat

"The Man with the Mustache"

“It's a lack of clarity that creates chaos and frustration. Those emotions are poison to any living goal.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 101

“In my case, I find a blank canvas so beautiful that that to work immediately, in relation to how beautiful the canvas is as such, is inhibiting and, for me, demands 'too much to quickly'; so that my tendency is to get the canvas 'dirt', so to speak, in one way or another, and then, so to speak 'work in reverse', and try to bring it back to an equivalent of the original clarity and perfection of the canvas, that one began on…”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

as cited in Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 111
1960s, Interview with David Sylvester', (1960)

Beauty, Way, Perfection

“It [the human relations school ] lacks empirical support and conceptual clarity, and it fails to grapple with the realities of authoritarian control in organizations and the true status of the subordinate”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1970s, Complex organizations, 1972, p. 119

School, Support, Reality

“Thoughts at the open window of the payroll department [in a military barrack - World War I. ]: That everything is transitory is merely a simile. Everything we see is a proposal, a possibility, an expedient. The real truth, to begin with, remains invisible beneath the surface. The colors that captivate us are not lighting, but light. The graphic universe consists of light and shadow. The diffused clarity of slightly overcast weather is richer in phenomena than a sunny day. A thin stratum of cloud just before the stars break through. It is difficult to catch and represent this, because the moment is so fleeting. It has to penetrate into our soul. The formal has to fuse with the Weltanschauung”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

world view
Quote (July 1917), # 1081, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1916 - 1920

War, Truth, World, Color

“Since it seems to be the nature of man that he wants to go to hell as quickly as possible, it is not surprising that effective base rhetoricians can greatly accelerate this process for millions. … Many individuals try to drive men into slavery, as if they were cattle, but only a few succeed. These we hail as “great historical figures.” I submit that we cannot judge the noble rhetorician by this standard. Since he urges men to be better than they are, the noble rhetorician cannot possibly succeed in changing those who prefer to remain as they are or become evil. Indeed, because his task is to bring men to themselves, not to him, the noble rhetorician ought not to be judged by his manifest effect on others at all. Rather, he ought to be judged by the clarity and steadfastness with which he proclaims his counsel. Should not a single person heed his advice, the noble rhetorician would still have to be judged successful in proportion as he succeeds in perfecting his own language. … In the final analysis, what Karl Kraus sought was to purify himself by purifying his own language. He achieved his goal. He dies a semantic saint in a semantically satanic society.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: Anti-Freud (1990), pp. 56-57.

Men, Hell, Nature, Evil

“After having my daughter, I made a conscious effort to regain control of my health and my body. But I didn't want to do a crash diet. I was a mom now. I needed to change my ways and set an example for my child. … A year later (around November 2013), my husband and I decided we wanted to try a completely plant-based diet … And so the journey began that helped me get into the best shape of my life. Little did I know the long-lasting effects it would have. I thought, like with most diets, I would feel deprived and hate food, that I would miss out on restaurants and celebrations, that I would get headaches and be irritable, etc. I was wrong about all of that. It took a few days to adjust, but what I discovered was increased energy, better sleep, weight loss, improved digestion, clarity, and an incredibly positive feeling for my actions and the effects it would have on those around me and the environment.”

Beyoncé (1981) American singer, songwriter and actress

Foreword https://books.google.it/books?id=KfeoBAAAQBAJ&pg=PP10 to Marco Borges's The 22-Day Revolution, New York: Penguin, 2015

Life, Hate, Health, Food

“The dualistic-static form of thought which marks the European tradition attains its most radical expression in Descartes. Whatever lip service we pay to other ideas, and however certain we are of its falsity, after three centuries we still behave as if we lived in a Cartesian world. The static clarity of Cartesian thought inevitably fascinated and imposed on beings who were so badly in need of harmony and so ready to deny process in the search for it. The very clarity of the method exposes its own errors, but we are accustomed to them and like them, for they satisfy our vanity. It has been evident for a century that unity is necessary to thought, and that process is inherent in nature, but western man has preferred to perish in his dualism rather than give up the proud autonomy of reason and risk losing his identity in the universal process.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 214

World, Error, Search, Idea

“I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy -- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.”

Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord (1878–1943) German general

Stupidity, Decision

“All OO languages show some tendency to suck programmers into the trap of excessive layering. Object frameworks and object browsers are not a substitute for good design or documentation, but they often get treated as one. Too many layers destroy transparency: It becomes too difficult to see down through them and mentally model what the code is actually doing. The Rules of Simplicity, Clarity, and Transparency get violated wholesale, and the result is code full of obscure bugs and continuing maintenance problems.”

Eric S. Raymond book The Art of Unix Programming

The Art of Unix Programming: Unix and Object-Oriented Languages, Eric S. Raymond, 2003, 2014-08-06 http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/unix_and_oo.html,

Problem

“To approach Bach, one has to realize that 100 years after Bach’s death, Bach and his music totally had been forgotten. Even while he was still alive, Bach himself believed in the polyphonic power and the resulting symmetric architectures of well-proportioned music. But this had been an artificial truth - even for him. Other composers, including his sons, already composed in another style, where they found other ideals and brought them to new solutions. The spirit of the time already had changed while Bach was still alive. A hundred years later, it was Mendelssohn who about 1850 discovered Bach anew with the performance of the St. Matthew Passion. Now a new renaissance began, and the world learned to know the greatness of Bach. To become acquainted with Bach, many transcriptions were done. But the endeavors in rediscovering Bach had been - stylistically - in a wrong direction. Among these were the orchestral transcriptions of Leopold Stokowski, and the organ interpretations of the multitalented Albert Schweitzer, who, one has to confess, had a decisive effect on the rediscovery of Bach. All performances had gone in the wrong direction: much too romantic, with a false knowledge of historic style, the wrong sound, the wrong rubato, and so on. The necessity of artists like Rosalyn Tureck and Glenn Gould - again 100 years later - has been understandable: The radicalism of Glenn Gould pointed out the real clarity and the internal explosions of the power-filled polyphony in the best way. This extreme style, called by many of his critics refrigerator interpretations, however really had been necessary to demonstrate the right strength to bring out the architecture in the right manner, which had been lost so much before. I’m convinced that the style Glenn Gould played has been the right answer. But there has been another giant: it was no less than Helmut Walcha who, also beginning in the 1950, started his legendary interpretations for the DG-Archive productions of the complete organ-work cycle on historic organs (Silbermann, Arp Schnitger). Also very classical in strength of speed and architectural proportions, he pointed out the polyphonic structures in an enlightened but moreover especially humanistic way, in a much more smooth and elegant way than Glenn Gould on the piano. Some years later it was Virgil Fox who acquainted the U. S. with tours of the complete Bach cycle, which certainly was effective in its own way, but much more modern than Walcha. The ranges of Bach interpretations had become wide, and there were the defenders of the historical style and those of the much more modern romantic style. Also the performances of the orchestral and cantata Bach had become extreme: on one side, for example, Karl Richter, who used a big and rich-toned orchestra; on the other side Helmut Rilling, whose Bach was much more historically oriented.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Death, Truth, World, Music

“Death is utterly acceptable to consciousness and life. There has been endless time of numberless deaths, but neither consciousness nor life has ceased to arise. The felt quality and cycle to death has not modified the fragility of flowers, even the flowers within the human body. Therefore, one's understanding of consciousness and life must be turned to that utter, inclusive quality, that clarity and wisdom, that power and untouchable gracefulness this evidence suggests. We must cease to live in our superficial and divided way, seeking and demanding only consciousness and life in the present form we grasp, avoiding and resisting what appears to be the end of consciousness and life in death.”

Adi Da Samraj (1939–2008) American writer

The Knee of Listening

Life, Death, Wisdom, Way

“With a sudden clarity which went beyond the immediacy of his pain or sorrow, Sol Weintraub suddenly understood perfectly why Abraham had agreed to sacrifice Isaac, his son, when the Lord commanded him to do so.
It was not obedience.
It was not even to put the love of God above the love of his son.
Abraham was testing God.
By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham.”

Dan Simmons book The Fall of Hyperion

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 45 (p. 491)

Love, God, Pain, Heart

““Our ideas” are only partly our ideas. Most of our ideas are abbreviations or residues of the thought of other people, of our teachers (in the broadest sense of the term) and of our teachers’ teachers; they are abbreviations and residues of the thought of the past. These thoughts were once explicit and in the center of consideration and discussion. It may even be presumed that they were once perfectly lucid. By being transmitted to later generations they have possibly been transformed, and there is no certainty that the transformation was effected consciously and with full clarity. … This means that the clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas.”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

Source: What is Political Philosophy (1959), p. 73

People, History, Idea, Sense

“A leader's intelligence must have simplicity and clarity; action is difficult when the mind is full of complex theories and schemes. An over-organized industry wastes just as much money as one without organization - the transmission uses up all the motor's power. (For this reason small enterprises directed by one man have the better of larger trusts because their costs are less and the quality of their product higher.) A leader must have a few very simple ideas, acquired from experience and confirmed by putting them into practice. This structure created by experience will contain much exact knowledge for use in connection with a given action.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Leadership

Money, Intelligence, Idea, Knowledge

“A lack of moral clarity is also the tragedy that has befallen efforts to advance peace and security in the world. Promoting peace and security is fundamentally connected to promoting freedom and democracy.”

Natan Sharansky book The Case for Democracy

Preface, page xix.
The Case for Democracy (2004, with Ron Dermer)

World, Peace, Democracy, Effort

“As compassion deepens, we find ourselves developing a nobility of the heart. Increasingly, and often to our surprise, we respond to difficult situations with calmness, clarity and directness. A quiet fearlessness or confidence is present as we no longer fear that we will compromise our own integrity. We find, too, a joy, a joy which arises from the knowledge that our every act is meaningful and helpful to the world.”

Ken McLeod (1948) Canadian lama

Awakening Compassion http://www.unfetteredmind.org/awakening-compassion. Unfettered Mind http://www.unfetteredmind.org. (Topic: Practice)

World, Fear, Confidence, Knowledge

“The seeing of things as they really are — the seeing of a proportion veiled from other eyes (together with the power of expression), is what makes a man an artist. What makes him a great artist is a high fervour of spirit, which produces a superlative, instead of a comparative, clarity of vision.”

John Galsworthy (1867–1933) English novelist and playwright

Vague Thoughts On Art (1911)

“It is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity has a way of compounding difficulties and as we have seen, creating mistakes. My definition of elegance is the achievement of a given functionality with a minimum of mechanism and a maximum of clarity.”

Fernando J. Corbató (1926–2019) American computer scientist

Source: On Building Systems That Will Fail (1991), p. 80

Way

“As you become more awake you actually find yourself with less and less choice about what you do in any given situation. And you have less choice because you see more clearly. This is a very important point. Clarity doesn’t create more options. It eliminates options because you see that they aren’t appropriate or they don’t work.”

Ken McLeod (1948) Canadian lama

Then and Now http://www.unfetteredmind.org/jewel-ornament-buddhahood#sect12. Unfettered Mind http://www.unfetteredmind.org. (2008-07-08) (Topic: Awareness)

“One of the questions on which clarity of thinking is now most necessary is that of the relation between the methods of science and of Marxist philosophy. Although much has already been written on the subject, yet there is still an enormous amount of confusion and contradictory statement.”

John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) British scientist

J.D. Bernal (1937) "Dialectical Materialism and Modern Science" in: Science and Society, Volume II, No. 1, Winter 1937; Online ( here http://www.marxists.org/archive/bernal/works/1930s/dsams.htm) on Marxists Internet Archive (2002).

Question, Thinking, Science

“If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Obscurity of the Poet”, p. 4
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Reading, Help

“It is my contention that limited government is a floating abstraction which has never been concretized by anyone; that a limited government must either initiate force or cease being a government; that the very concept of limited government is an unsuccessful attempt to integrate two mutually contradictory elements: statism and voluntarism. Hence, if this can be shown, epistemological clarity and moral consistency demands the rejection of the institution of government totally, resulting in free market anarchism, or a purely voluntary society.”

Roy A. Childs, Jr. (1949–1992) American libertarian essayist and critic

“Objectivism and the State: An Open Letter to Ayn Rand,” 1969

“And at once I saw with great clarity that human beings possess two bodies. One is the physical body, the other -- just as real, just as self-contained -- is the emotional body. Like the physical body, the emotional body reaches a certain level of growth, and then stops. But it stops rather sooner than the physical body. So most of us possess the emotional body of a retarded adolescent.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Access to Inner Worlds (1990), p. 23

“One great lesson that we can learn from its systematic absence in the work of the grand theorists is that every self-conscious thinker must at all times be aware of — and hence be able to control — the levels of abstraction on which he is working. The capacity to shuttle between levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is a signal mark of the imaginative and systematic thinker.”

C. Wright Mills book The Sociological Imagination

The Sociological Imagination (1959)

Imagination, Learning, Time

“Every excellent company we studied is clear on what it stands for, and takes the process of value shaping seriously. In fact, we wonder whether it is possible to be an excellent company without clarity on values and without having the right sorts of values.”

Tom Peters book In Search of Excellence

Source: In Search of Excellence (1982), p. 280.

Study

“Gradually we began [ De Stijl-artists in The Netherlands, 1918] to present a closed front. By working there had been created not only a clarity in the collective consciousness of our group, but we had gained a certainty, which made it possible for us to define our collective attitude towards life and to perpetrate it according to the requirements of the period... As the world war [ World War I ] was coming to an end, we all came to feel the need of securing an interest in our efforts beyond the narrow boundaries of Holland.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote in Neue Schweizer Rundschau, 1929, p. 172 (Van Doesburg); as quoted in De Stijl 1917-1931 - The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/jaff001stij01_01/jaff001stij01_01_0003.php, J.M. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam, 1956, p. 17 Van Doesburg is looking back on the starting years of De Stijl-movement 1926 – 1931

Life, War, World, Feeling

“Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

John Updike, reviewing The Only Problem in New Yorker, July 23, 1984.

Color, Sun

“If the WormCam had shown nothing else, he thought, it was this, with pitiless clarity: that the lives of most humans had been miserable and short, deprived of freedom and joy and comfort, their brief moments in the light reduced to sentences to be endured.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The Light of Other Days

Source: The Light of Other Days (2000), Chapter 26

Freedom, Light, Joy

“People who lack the clarity, courage, or determination to follow their own dreams will often find ways to discourage yours. Live your truth and don't EVER stop!”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 152

People, Truth, Dreams, Way

“Israel, our great friend and the one true democracy in the Middle East has been snubbed and criticized by an administration that lacks moral clarity… President Obama has not been a friend to Israel. He has treated Iran with tender love and care and made it a great power.”

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

2010s, 2016, April, Foreign Policy Speech (27 April 2016)

Love, Democracy

“My foreign policy has three fundamental branches: first, confidence in our cause, a recognition that the principles America was based upon are not something we shrink from or apologize for, that we stand for those principles; the second is clarity in our purpose, which is that when we have a foreign policy objective, we describe it honestly and clearly to the American people, to Congress and to the people of the world; and number three is resolve in our might, that in those rare circumstances, those rare circumstances where we decide it's essential for us to apply military might, that we do so with overwhelming force, that we do so in the clarity of a mission, understanding the nature of the U. S. interest involved, understanding when the mission would be complete, what will be left when it is -- what will be left behind us when that mission has been -- has been terminated.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

televised remarks, , quoted in * 2012-09-12
What They Said, Before and After the Attack in Libya
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/09/12/us/politics/libya-statements.html
2012-09-18
2012

People, World, Confidence, Understanding

Quotes about clarity page 2

Quotes about clarity
page 2