Quotes about classic
page 4

“Critical theory … values Freud as a non-ideological thinker and theoretician of contradictions—contradictions which his successors sought to escape and mask. … “The greatness of Freud,” wrote Adorno, “consists in that, like all great bourgeois thinkers, he left standing undissolved such contradictions and disdained the assertion of pretended harmony where the thing itself is contradictory. He revealed the antagonistic character of the social reality.” … A parallel can be established between Marx’s judgment on Ricardo and the post-Ricardians. To Marx, Ricardo was the classic and best representative of bourgeois economics since he articulated the contradictions of bourgeois society without glossing them over.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), pp. 27-28

Reality

“In the 1930s, when I started, Martha Graham was the only dancer doing anything modern, but she did it all to classical music. I couldn't see myself doing Swan Lake every night, and I wanted to develop a truly American style. The only dancer in the movies at that time with any success was Fred Astaire, but he did very small, elegant steps in a top hat, white tie, and tails.”

Gene Kelly (1912–1996) American dancer, actor, singer, director, producer and choreographer

Quoted in "Gene Kelly's Musical Memories"

Music, Time, Success, Night

“As an actor in Iceland, I found good training and colleagues in the National Theatre, and none of us could have predicted the kind of fame that LazyTown found globally. When you are an actor or do anything in the arts for a career, your life will take many unexpected twists and turns.Robbie was a product of many years of thinking and doing. What you see in the TV show is different from his first personality. One of the big challenges playing a part like Robbie is bringing the right kind of energy. You don't want to scare the littlest viewers but you have to bring a certain villain personality with humor.As many actors have said before me, being famous or well known can be nice or it can be a burden, it all depends on how you look at it. I love my fans - they have come along on this ride with me and have said too many nice things for me to ever count. I am grateful.There is no difference in preparing for Robbie Rotten or any classical serious role…. Every part you prepare for you have to be honest and truthful and wholly believe that the character exists – otherwise no one will accept your acting. Kids are a demanding audience and they KNOW when something is untruthful.”

Stefán Karl Stefánsson (1975–2018) Icelandic actor

Reddit AMA https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/57bkxj/i_am_stefan_karl_robbie_rotten_from_lazytown_and/ (13 October 2016)

Love, Life, Truth, Art

“One day Pierre Loeb said to me that the ideal picture is one which is completely clear in the artist's mind before he puts a mark on the canvas, and this was, at any rate in this period.... Léger's opinion. It is the basis on which classical art is built. Therefore the setting-down of the picture on the canvas is in itself something quite unimportant. This is connected with [Fernand] Léger's hatred of textural effects in painting. But I love these effects. I remember that I was once told off because I had applied a thick layer of color instead of the thin and even layer that Léger wanted. To him that was not painting but mere color. If he could have got a machine instead of a brush to apply the color, he would have done so.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

Quote in Jorn's letter, 1952; as cited on the website of the Jorn Museum 'Articles' by Jorn http://www.museumjorn.dk/en/article_presentation.asp?AjrDcmntId=255, his critical comment on the art teachings of Fernand Léger, which Jorn started to follow circa 1936, in Paris. 1949 - 1958, Various sources

Love, Art, Color, Painting

“As for more than twenty years my principal work has been devoted to the ancient literature of India, I cannot but feel a deep and real sympathy for all that concerns the higher interests of the people of that country. Though I have never been in India, I have many friends there, both among the civilians and among the natives, and I believe I am not mistaken in supposing that the publication in England of the ancient sacred writings of the Brahmans, which had never been published in India, and other contributions from different European scholars towards a better knowledge of the ancient literature and religion of India, have not been without some effect on the intellectual and religious movement that is going on among the more thoughtful members of Indian society. I have sometimes regretted that I am not an Englishman, and able to help more actively in the great work of educating and improving the natives. But I do rejoice that this great task of governing and benefiting India should have fallen to one who knows the greatness of that task and all its opportunities and responsibilities, who thinks not only of its political and financial bearings, but has a heart to feel for the moral welfare of those millions of human beings that are, more or less directly, committed to his charge. India has been conquered once, but India must be conquered again, and that second conquest should be a conquest by education. Much has been done for education of late, but if the funds were tripled and quadrupled, that would hardly be enough. The results of the educational work carried on during the last twenty years are palpable everywhere. They are good and bad, as was to be expected. It is easy to find fault with what is called Young Bengal, the product of English ideas grafted on the native mind. But Young Bengal, with all its faults, is full of promise. Its bad features are apparent everywhere, its good qualities are naturally hidden from the eyes of careless observers.... India can never be anglicized, but it can be reinvigorated. By encouraging a study of their own ancient literature, as part of their education, a national feeling of pride and self-respect will be reawakened among those who influence the large masses of the people. A new national literature may spring up, impregnated with Western ideas, yet retaining its native spirit and character. The two things hang together. In order to raise the character of the vernaculars, a study of the ancient classical language is absolutely necessary: for from it these modern dialects have branched off, and from it alone can they draw their vital strength and beauty. A new national literature will bring with it a new national life and new moral vigour. As to religion, that will take care of itself. The missionaries have done far more than they themselves seem to be aware of, nay, much of the work which is theirs they would probably disclaim. The Christianity of our nineteenth century will hardly be the Christianity of India. But the ancient religion of India is doomed — and if Christianity does not step in, whose fault will it be?”

Max Müller (1823–1900) German-born philologist and orientalist

Letter to the Duke of Argyll, published in The Life and Letters of Right Honorable Friedrich Max Müller (1902) edited by Georgina Müller

Life, People, Education, Religion

“Kong, I think represents a classic cinematic case of being misunderstood. And so, tapping into that is a very, very pure way of breaking down his character and then getting into him being this lonely protector, and the sad plight that he has is a totally different thing than we’ve seen before. Was it difficult? Sure, but it was necessary.”

Jordan Vogt-Roberts (1984) American film director

Interview: Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts on Resurrecting an Icon for KONG: SKULL ISLAND http://dailydead.com/interview-director-jordan-vogt-roberts-on-resurrecting-an-icon-for-kong-skull-island/ (March 9, 2017)

Sadness, Way, Thinking

“I'm trained quite classically but quite freely by my mum, so even when I was little, I had this rather freewheeling approach. When I trained more seriously in my late teens at college, it was: here are the notes, here is what is expected of you. I didn't mind because you need technique, particularly on the piano, which requires a lot of stamina. And it was natural that once I had done that, I would want to go beyond classical music. How can you be yourself if all you do is reproduce someone else's notes?”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

The Guardian - 05/10/2001
Childhood

Music, Nature, Training

“Alexander Bain was probably the first modern thinker whose primary concern was with psychology itself He has been credited with writing the first 'comprehensive treatise having psychology as its sole purpose'. His two-volume systematic work, The Senses and the Intellect (1855) and The Emotions and the Will (1859), was the standard British text for almost half a century, until Stout's replaced it. He also founded Mind (1876-), the first psychological journal in any country. His work requires close attention, because it is the meeting-point of experimental sensory-motor physiology and the association psychology. His influence on the conceptions of later workers was direct and extremely important. Ferrier studied classics and philosophy under Bain at Aberdeen (first class honours, 1863). When he and Jackson acknowledge their intellectual debts or make references to psychology, the names most often mentioned are Bain and Spencer-the figures whose work was the culmination of the association psychology in its traditional form.”

Robert Maxwell Young (1935–2019) American medical historian

Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century, 1970. p. 101

Sense, Study, Country

“Had I not been a classical singer, I would have loved to spend my entire life in a garage fine-tuning a Fiat or a Maruti.”

Bhimsen Joshi (1922–2011) Indian vocalist

His often repeated lines. Relentless riyaz- Bhimsen Joshis recipe for success, 29 November 2013, Deccan Herald http://archive.deccanherald.com/content/Nov52008/national2008110598978.asp?section=thirdcolumnupdatenews,

Love, Life

“Such is our ideal – not another museum, another bleak exhibition gallery, another classical building in which insulated and classified specimens of a culture are displayed for instruction, but an adult play-centre, a workshop where work is a joy, a source of vitality and daring experiment. We may be mocked for our naive idealism, but at least it will not be possible to say that an expiring civilisation perished without a creative protest.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

On the occasion of the opening of Forty Years of Modern Art (February 1948)
Literary Quotes

Joy

“It is significant that nothing resembling Platonism arose in China. Classical Chinese script is not ideographic, as used to be thought; but because of what A. C. Graham terms its 'combination of graphic wealth with phonetic poverty' it did not encourage the kind of abstract thinking that produced Plato's philosophy. Plato was what historians of philosophy call a realist - he believed that abstract terms designated spiritual or intellectual entities. In contrast, throughout its long history, Chinese thought has been nominalist - it has understood that even the most abstract terms are only labels, names for the diversity of things in the world. As a result, Chinese thinkers have rarely mistaken ideas for facts. Plato's legacy to European thought was a trio of capital letters - the Good, the Beautiful and the True. Wars have been fought and tyrannies established, cultures have been ravaged and peoples exterminated in the service of these abstractions. Europe owes much of its murderous history to errors of thinking engendered by the alphabet.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Deception: Plato and the alphabet (p. 57-8)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

War, People, World, Beauty

“Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it. Degas liked it not only because it provided an accurate record, but because the snapshot showed him a means of escape from the classical rules of design. Through it he learnt to make a composition without the use of formal symmetry.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 13: Degas

“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

“It was not easy. It was a classic case of the owner believing in the idea more than anyone else. But now when I look back, I feel thankful that we got no funding, else we'd have used all the money in lesser things. This forced us to re-invent ourselves from the ground up. The no-money module works”

Akshay Agrawal (1998) Serial Social Entrepreneur

A Class Apart - Mid Day 23rd October 2016 http://www.mid-day.com/articles/zomato-for-schools-mumbai-boy-akshay-agrawal-creates-website-to-rank-schools/17706190

Money, Feeling, Idea

“In many ways, it (capitalism) resembles classic medieval feudalism, displaying the same tendency to create endless hierarchies of lords, vassals, and retainers. In other ways—notably in its managerialist ethos—it is profoundly different. And the whole apparatus, rather than replacing old-fashioned industrial capitalism, is instead superimposed on top of it, blending together in a thousand points in a thousand different ways. Hardly surprising, then, that the situation seems so confusing that even those directly in the middle don’t really know quite what to make of it.”

David Graeber book Bullshit Jobs

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)

Way, Fashion

“Classical Sanskrit theatre flourished during the first nine centuries CE. Aphorisms on acting appear in the writings of Panini, the Sanskrit grammarian of the 5th century BCE, and references to actors, dancers, mummers, theatrical companies, and academies are found in Kautilya’s book on statesmanship, the Artha-shastra (4th century BCE).”

Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian

A.K. Ramanujan in: South Asian arts http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/556016/South-Asian-arts/65258/Modern-Indian-dance#ref532709, britannica.com, 17 March 2014

Books, Appearance

“I am just now not reading but devouring Captain Mahan's book and am trying to learn it by heart. It is a first-class book and classical on all points.”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Letter to an American friend (1893), quoted in John Rohl, Wilhelm II: The Kaiser's Personal Monarchy 1888-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 1003
1890s

Books, Learning, Reading, Heart

“Ashtadhyayi Sanskrit treatise on grammar was written in the 6th to 5th century BCE by the Indian grammarian Panini. This work set the linguistic standards for Classical Sanskrit. It sums up in 4,000 sutras the science of phonetics and grammar that had evolved in the Vedic religion. Panini divided his work into eight chapters, each of which is further divided into quarter chapters, beyond defining the morphology and syntax of Sanskrit language.”

Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian

Encyclopedia Britannica in: Panini Indian grammarian http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/441324/Panini, britannica.com.

Religion, Science

“This gathering of baseball's brightest stars will be an outstanding platform to grow the game internationally. As baseball continues to grow globally, more and more fans around the world have the opportunity to appreciate the grace and excitement of our great game. The first World Baseball Classic will bring a unique blend of enthusiasm to old and new fans alike.”

Bud Selig (1934) American baseball executive

World, Game, Star

“Anyone taking classics or history for the prestige is either at Oxford or stuck in 1909.”

Laura Penny (1975) Canadian journalist

Source: More Money than Brains (2010), Chapter One, Don't Need No Edjumacation, p. 13

History

“Knowledge accumulated during recent decades challenges and contradicts assumptions which are still axiomatic in conventional organizational theory. Unfortunately, those classical principles of organization — derived from inappropriate models, unrelated to the political, social, economic, and technological milieu, and based on erroneous assumptions about behavior — continue to influence our thinking about the management of the human resources of industry. Management's attempts to solve the problems arising from the inadequacy of these assumptions have often involved the search for new formulas, new techniques, new procedures. These generally yield disappointing results because they are adjustments to symptoms rather than causes. The real need is for new theory, changed assumptions, more understanding of the nature of human behavior in organizational settings.”

Douglas McGregor (1906–1964) American professor

Source: The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), p. 17 (2006: 24)

Disappointment, Behavior, Search, Understanding

“Vickery points out that the Kissinger-Nixon policy during the last two years of the war was a “major mystery,” for which he suggests an explanation that appears to us quite plausible. Referring to the “Sonnenfeldt Doctrine,” which holds that “pluralistic and libertarian Communist regimes will breed leftist ferment in the West,” he suggests that “when it became clear [to U. S. leaders] that they could not win in Cambodia, they preferred to do everything possible to ensure that the post-war revolutionary government be extremely brutal, doctrinaire, and frightening to its neighbors, rather than a moderate socialism to which the Thai, for example, might look with envy.” In short, though it was understood that the United States had lost the war in Cambodia (even though it was, quite clearly, still trying to win it in Vietnam), the destruction of rural Cambodia, by imposing the harshest possible conditions on the eventual victors, would serve two classic ends: retarding social and economic progress, and maximizing the brutality of the eventual victors. Then the aggressors would at least be able to reap a propaganda victory from the misery they had sown.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, pp. 218-219

War, Appearance, Victory, Envy

“It is now known that the truth or falsity of the continuum hypothesis and other related conjectures cannot be determined by set theory as we know it today. This state of affairs regarding a classical and presumably well-posed problem must certainly appear rather unsatisfactory to the average mathematician. One is tempted to look more closely and perhaps more critically at the foundations of mathematics. Although our present "Cantorian" mathematics is highly successful in its treatment of abstractions, one must not overlook the fact that from the very beginning the use of infinite processes was regarded with suspicion by many people.”

Paul Cohen (1934–2007) American mathematician

Set theory and the continuum hypothesis, p. 1. https://books.google.com/books?id=Z4NCAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA1 Courier Corporation, 2008 (Dover reprint). Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis (1966)

People, Truth, Mathematics, Problem

“Insulting the hijab is also hardly Islamophobic. Indeed many in the West see the hijab as a symbol of oppression against women, and in opposing it are simply standing up for classical liberal, Western values.”

Raheem Kassam (1986) British journalist and politician

BBC Says Opposing Shariah Law Is ‘Islamophobic’ http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/08/19/bbc-refusing-shariah-law-islamophobia/ (Aug 19, 2016)

Women

“To live classically and to realize antiquity practically within oneself is the summit and goal of philology.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Philosophical Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991) § 147

“The classic rationalists did not consider the members of an organization as human beings, but just as cogs in the machine. For them, workers were only hands. The human relations approach has shown how incomplete this rationale was. It has also made it possible to consider workers as creatures of feeling, who are moved by the impact of the so-called rational decisions taken above then, and will react to them. A human being, however, does not have only a hand a heart. He also had a head, which means that he is free to play his own game.”

Michel Crozier (1922–2013) French sociologist

Source: The Bureaucratic Phenomenon, 1954, p. 149.

Feeling, Game, Decision, Heart

“In this chapter I want to raise the question partly in jest but partly also in seriousness whether the concept of the image cannot become the abstract foundation of a new science, or at least a cross-disciplinary specialization. As I am indulging in the symbolic communication of an image of images I will even venture to give the science a name — Eiconics — hoping thereby to endow it in the minds of my readers with some of the prestige of classical antiquity. I run some risk perhaps of having my new science confused with the study of icons. A little confusion, however, and the subtle overtones of half-remembered associations are all part of the magic of the name.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Robert A. Solo (1994) commented: "Curiously, and quite independently of the publication of the The Image, there did occur in the 1950s and in the decades that followed a revolutionary transformation of the social and behavioral sciences associated with the term structuralism, which hinged on the concept and study of the image (call it cognitive structure, or paradigm, or episteme, or ideology). This was the case in the work of Jean Piaget in psychology, of Thomas Kuhn and Michael Foucault in the history and philosophy of science, of Noam Chomsky in linguistics, of Claude Levi Strauss in anthropology, and others. Though The Image was the first and in my view by far the finest American structuralist essay, it had no visible impact on economics... The economist's image of his world is alas very difficult to penetrate and even more difficult to change."
Source: 1950s, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, 1956, p. 128

Hope, Communication, Question, Study

“People get a lot of confusion, because they keep trying to think of quantum mechanics as classical mechanics”

Sidney Coleman (1937–2007) American physicist

Quantum Mechanics in Your Face http://www.physics.harvard.edu/about/video.html, a lecture given by Sidney Coleman at the New England sectional meeting of the American Physical Society (Apr. 9, 1994)

People, Thinking

“However, such myths developed earlier in the Byzantine periphery. In the heart of the Empire, it was really only in its final phase from 1261, under the Palaeologan emperors, after the chastening experience of the Sack of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204, and the subsequent period of ‘penance’ in the Nicene Empire, that we can begin to speak of a definite Greek ethnic component fuelled by strong anti-Latin sentiment, alongside the Universal Church and its mission to outsiders (see Raynes and Moss 1969: 33—6). In fact, a strong Greek ethnic sentiment had developed already at Nicaca. In John Armstrong’s words: At Nicaea after the Crusader conquest of Constantinople, the literati demanded that the emperor in-exile entitle himself king of the Hellenes”. Two centuries later the last emperor was mourned as Constantine the Hellene (Armstrong 1981: 179). For Armstrong, this was partly the result of a long-term homogenizing socialization process required for a powerful, integrated, and hierarchical central bureaucracy. But it was also due to Greek adherence to classical learning and literature, and to Byzantine unwillingness to accept the parity of Latin as a language of empire”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Armstrong 1982.: 178—8 I, 116—17
Chosen Peoples (2003)

Literature, Strong, Learning, Universe

“I truly wanted to be a character actor. People ask me, ‘When are you going to get the lead?’ and I say, ‘I don’t want the lead.’ I always use John Carradine – I don’t know why – but John Carradine to me was more of the classic character actor who would literally show up and do three lines in a big Hollywood movie and then have a bigger part in the sequel to The Invisible Man. That career is so great. That is part of my… I don’t know if it’s a set plan, but I always seem to follow that course.”

Kevin J. O'Connor (actor) (1963) American actor

Exclusive Interview: Kevin J O'Connor http://www.chud.com/14305/exclusive-interview-kevin-j-oconnor-there-will-be-blood-dvd/ (April 8, 2008)

People, Parting

“The great classic writers, it will be said, sought rather to proclaim universal truths than to leave their imprint on them.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

The Art of Writing

Truth, Universe

“Certainly we do not need quantum mechanics for macroscopic objects, which are well described by classical physics – this is the reason why quantum mechanics seems so foreign to our everyday existence.”

Alain Aspect (1947) French physicist

"Introduction: John Bell and the second quantum revolution" (2004)

“Any one who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On the Ignorance of the Learned" Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Education, Fools

“…experimental physics was particularly interested in the processes taking place inside the atom, and in this field the classical mechanics was failing conspicuously and completely. Perhaps its most spectacular failure was with the fundamental problem with the structure of the atom.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Failure, Problem

“The development of economics as a science which is always based on human beings, the creative actors and protagonists in all social processes and events (the subjectivist conception), is undoubtedly the most significant and characteristic contribution made by the Austrian School of economics, founded by Carl Menger. In fact Menger felt it vital to abandon the sterile objectivism of the classical (Anglo-Saxon) school whose members were obsessed with the supposed existence of external objective entities (social classes, aggregates, material factors of production, etc.). Menger held that economists should instead always adopt the subjectivist view of human beings who act, and that this perspective should invariably exert a decisive influence on the way all economic theories are formulated, in terms of their scientific content and their practical conclusions and results.”

Jesús Huerta de Soto (1956) professor of political economy and author

Jesús Huerta de Soto (2006), Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles, p. 267, Note 3,

School, Way, Decision, Science

“Nepotism. My brother’s son, André Fischer, was the drummer in the band Rufus, with Chaka Khan. Apparently, the arrangements I made for their early records were appreciated, so in the following years I was hired almost exclusively by black artists. I am surprised that my arrangements are now considered one of the prerequisites for a hit album. People feel that they make a song sound almost classical.”

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

On how a white American of German extraction became the orchestral 'sweetener' of choice for R&B artists, as quoted in "Clare Fischer: The Best Kept Secret in Jazz" http://www.artistinterviews.eu/?page_id=5&parent_id=22/

People, Feeling

“We have classical associations and great names of our own which we can confidently oppose to the most splendid of ancient times. Senate has not to our ears a sound so venerable as Parliament. We respect the Great Charter more than the laws of Solon. The Capitol and the Forum impress us with less awe than our own Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey…The list of warriors and statesmen by whom our constitution was founded or preserved, from De Montfort down to Fox, may well stand a comparison with the Fasti of Rome. The dying thanksgiving of Sydney is as noble as the libation which Thrasea poured to Liberating Jove: and we think with far less pleasure of Cato tearing out his entrails than of Russell saying, as he turned away from his wife, that the bitterness of death was past.”

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

' History https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55901/55901-h/55901-h.htm', Edinburgh Review (May 1828)

Death, Pleasure, Law, Confidence

“The subject matter of linguistics comprises all manifestations of human speech, whether that of savages or civilized nations, or of archaic, classical or decadent periods. In each period the linguist must consider not only correct speech and flowery language, but all other forms of expression as well. And that is not all: since he is often unable to observe speech directly, he must consider written texts, for only through them can he reach idioms that are remote in time or space.”

Ferdinand de Saussure book Course in General Linguistics

Source: Cours de linguistique générale (1916), p. 6

Time

“Song of the Immortals: An Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, trans. Yuanchong Xu (Beijing: New World Press, 1994), p. 54”

Wang Zhihuan (688–742) Chinese poet

References

World

“My family was musical on both sides. My father's family had a famous flautist and a classical pianist. My mother won a contest to be Shirley Temple's double -- she was the diva of the family. At 8, I learned how to play guitar. I used to play songs from the '20s, '30s and '40s in the kitchen for my grandmother. After my dad was a prisoner in Cuba for two years, we moved to Texas, where I was the only Hispanic in the class. I remember hearing "Ferry Cross the Mersey," by Gerry and the Pacemakers, and thinking, "that had bongos and maracas -- that was really a bolero." And the Beathles song, "Till There was You"… also Latin. I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band -- just for fun -- when I 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish. And as you know, we did that and we broke through. But we waited until 1993 to release "Mi Tierra" -- we wanted my fans to be rady for the traditional Cuban music. And then we kept adding: more Cuban influences, more Latin America. And, underneath it all, African drums and rhythm. The concept of "90 Millas" starts with the songs of the '40s. We invited 25 masters of Latin music -- giants on the cutting edge of creativity, musicians who pushed it out to the world, young Cuban artists and Puerto Ricans who are huge -- so we could blend cultures and generations. So it is like coming home, but not exactly to the old Cuba.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

www.huffingtonpost.com (September 7, 2007)
2007, 2008

World, Family, Music, Home

“Outside the big idea that there is art I don't think of other's paintings. But I defend the idea of art and know that it is made up of all these paintings. Classic pictures are objects that may or may not influence what you're doing, just like anything else. Like the radio... But it hasn't anything to do with your own art or the artist's intention.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

1950's, Is today's artist with or against the past, (1958)

Art, Idea, Thinking, Painting

“At the end of the bronze age a residue of Greek tribes stayed behind in Southern Macedonia[…] one of these, the "Makedones" occupied Aegae and expanded into the coastal plain of lower Macedonia which became the Kingdom of Macedon; their descendants were the Macedonians proper of the classical period and they worshipped Greek gods. The other Greek tribes became intermingled in upper Macedonia with Illyrians, Paeonians and Thracians[…] in the early 5th century the royal house of Macedon, the Temenidae was recognised as Greek by the Presidents of the Olympic Games. Their verdict was and is decisive. It is certain that the Kings considered themselves to be of Greek descent from Heracles son of Zeus. "Macedonian" was a strong dialect of very early Greek which was not intelligible to contemporary Greeks.”

N. G. L. Hammond (1907–2001) British classical scholar

"A History of Greece to 323 BC", Cambridge University, 1986 (p 516)

God, Age, Game, Intelligence

“Hayek’s practical political thought was flawed not where he postulated too small a role for government, but where he sanctioned too great a role. In his late work, Hayek the classical liberal became Hayek the libertarian.”

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

“Panini was a Sanskrit grammarian who gave a comprehensive and scientific theory of phonetics, phonology, and morphology. Sanskrit was the classical literary language of the Indian Hindus and Panini is considered the founder of the language and literature. It is interesting to note that the word "Sanskrit" means "complete" or "perfect" and it was thought of as the divine language, or language of the gods.”

Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian

An Analytical Study of 'Sanskrit' and 'Panini' as Foundation of Speech Communication in India and the World

God, Literature, Perfection

“In classical cultures, an ascended class had to justify itself before those now below in the social structure. But the culture revolution of our time has eliminated this need for class- as well as self-justification. Nevertheless, those below still seek to emulate the ascendant social class, without being convinced of its superiority.”

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) American sociologist

The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

Time

“And at that point, too, in Buddhist India as in Babylon, in Rome as in our own cities, a man's choice of the woman who is to be, not mother of his children as amongst peasants and primitives, but his own "companion for life", becomes a problem of mentalities. The Ibsen marriage appears, the "higher spiritual affinity" in which both parties are "free"—free, that is, as intelligences, free from the plantlike urge of the blood to continue itself, and it becomes possible for a Shaw to say "that unless Woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself." The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of "mutual understanding"….
At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms, and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements. This residue is the Fellah type.
If anything has demonstrated the fact that Causality has nothing to do with history, it is the familiar "decline" of the Classical, which accomplished itself long before the irruption of Germanic migrants. The Imperium enjoyed the completest peace; it was rich and highly developed; it was well organized; and it possessed in its emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius a series of rulers such as the Caesarism of no other Civilization can show. And yet the population dwindled, quickly and wholesale. The desperate marriage-and-children laws of Augustus—amongst them the Lex de maritandis ordinibus, which dismayed Roman society more than the destruction of Varus's legions—the wholesale adoptions, the incessant plantation of soldiers of barbarian origin to fill the depleted country-side, the immense food-charities of Nerva and Trajan for the children of poor parents—nothing availed to check the process.”

Oswald Spengler book The Decline of the West

Vol. II, Alfred A. Knopf, 1928, pp. 104–06 https://archive.org/stream/Decline-Of-The-West-Oswald-Spengler/Decline_Of_The_West#page/n573/mode/2up/search/depopulation The Decline of the West (1918, 1923)

Life, Marriage, Children, World

“Relativity distorted classical expectations in a way that Clavain still did not find entirely intuitive. Slam two objects towards each other, each with individual velocities just below light-speed, and the classical result for their closing velocity would be the sum of their individual speeds: just under twice the speed of light. Yet the true result, confirmed with numbing precision, was that the objects saw each other approach with a combined speed that was still just below the speed of light. Similarly, the relativistic closing velocity for two objects moving towards each other with individual speeds of one-half of light-speed was not light-speed itself, but eight-tenths of it. It was the way the universe was put together, and yet it was not something the human mind had evolved to accept.”

Alastair Reynolds book Redemption Ark

Source: Redemption Ark (2002), Chapter 26 (p. 463)

Way, Light, Universe, Speed

“Muslim fighters are commanded not to kill women, children, or the aged unless they attack first; not to torture or otherwise ill-treat prisoners; to give fair warning of the opening of hostilities or their resumption after a truce; and to honor agreements. … At no time did the classical jurists offer any approval or legitimacy to what we nowadays call terrorism. Nor indeed is there any evidence of the use of terrorism as it is practiced nowadays.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Source: Books, Islam: The Religion and the People (2008), p. 151.

Women, Hostility, Children, Age

“I am the one to whom you wrote in care of the Belgian Academy… Read no newspapers, try to find a few friends who think as you do, read the wonderful writers of earlier times, Kant, Goethe, Lessing, and the classics of other lands, and enjoy the natural beauties of Munich's surroundings. Make believe all the time that you are living, so to speak, on Mars among alien creatures and blot out any deeper interest in the actions of those creatures. Make friends with a few animals. Then you will become a cheerful man once more and nothing will be able to trouble you.
Bear in mind that those who are finer and nobler are always alone — and necessarily so — and that because of this they can enjoy the purity of their own atmosphere.
I shake your hand in heartfelt comradeship, E.”

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

Response to a letter from an unemployed professional musician (5 April 1933), p. 115
The editors precede this passage thus, "Early in 1933, Einstein received a letter from a professional musician who presumably lived in Munich. The musician was evidently troubled and despondent, and out of a job, yet at the same time, he must have been something of a kindred spirit. His letter is lost, all that survives being Einstein's reply....Note the careful anonymity of the first sentence — the recipient would be safer that way:" Albert Einstein: The Human Side concludes with this passage, followed by the original passages in German.
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)

Beauty, Nature, Thinking, Time

“Michael made his debut in John Carpenter's 1978 horror classic, Halloween, possibly the best scare movie to come along in the last twenty-five years. … [W]ith the release of the sixth (and hopefully final) movie to bear the Halloween moniker, we see how far the mighty have fallen. … In the final analysis, The Curse of Michael Myers is a horrific motion picture — just not in the way the film makers intended - Directed By Joe Chappelle.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=708 of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995). Zero star reviews

Way

“Do you remember that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, "How well he spoke"; but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, they said, "Let us march."”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

Introducing John F. Kennedy in 1960, as quoted in Adlai Stevenson and The World: The Life of Adlai E. Stevenson‎ (1977) by John Bartlow Martin, p. 549

People, Time

“Mussolini was a well-informed and convinced Marxist. His ultimate political convictions represent a reform of classical Marxism in the direction of a restoration of its Hegelian elements.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 333

“Melody as revealed in the greatest works of our classics is one of the most noble gifts which an invisible deity has bestowed on mankind.”

Richard Strauss (1864–1949) German composer and orchestra director

Recollections and Reflections

“The notion of a steady state has meant different things at different times in history. To the traditional or classical economist, the steady state takes the biophysical dimensions of the planet — including population and available resources — as given and adapts technology and tastes to these objective conditions.”

Herman E. Daly (1938) American economist

A steady-state economy, 2008

History, Time

“Now, if the principle of toleration were once admitted into classical education — if it were admitted that the great object is to read and enjoy a language, and the stress of the teaching were placed on the few things absolutely essential to this result, if the tortoise were allowed time to creep, and the bird permitted to fly, and the fish to swim, towards the enchanted and divine sources of Helicon — all might in their own way arrive there, and rejoice in its flowers, its beauty, and its coolness.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) Abolitionist, author

Source: Little Foxes (1865), Ch. 5.

Education, Beauty, Way, Flowers

“Undoubtedly the best language for the expression of this ‘unfathomable’ quality was music. The infinity of musical spheres of expression, independent of rationality, is often perceived as ‘unfathomable’ by listeners too. The formal principles of order seem to lie hidden deeper in this art than in others. In the twentieth century the great creative minds, when faced with Romantic artistic urges running riot which they believe must be overcome, or feel they have succeeded in overcoming, have stressed the importance of existing rules; they have followed traditional forms, or else, in their search for new ways to connect, have found and set up new formula-tions and principles. The young Schumann’s creative path led in the opposite direction, from classical forms, however deeply revered, to the freedom of subjective self-expression.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Lie, Art, Music, Way

“The pre-World War I works of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, "give a glimpse of a new universe of emancipated discourse, unfortunately quickly abandoned when Schoenberg returned to the classical musical shapes upon adopting the twelve-tone system."”

Elliott Carter (1908–2012) American composer

Elliott Carter (1977). The Writings of Elliott Carter, p.186. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Cited in Albright, Daniel (2004). Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226012670.

War, World, Music, Universe

“These classic models are everywhere mirrored in all universal systems, and in each they are the ideals from which all varieties and versions of themselves constantly emerge. They are, then, the source of all phenomenal life and represent the inner structure behind all life forms. They do not produce copies of themselves, however, but new creative eccentricities which, in turn, alter the models. They also appear as the biological working models of the genes and chromosomes, and they can be affected and changed at any time through mental experience. they are, in fact, instantly responsive to mental and psychic events, through the natural interchange between the psychological model accepted by the focus personality, and the reflections of that model through the entire body structure.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book (1976), p. 57-58

Life, Nature, Universe, Appearance

“.. the classical aesthetic offers us at the same time a method of thinking and a method of wanting to be, a moral and at the same time a psychology... The classical tradition as a whole, by the logic of the effort and the greatness of results, is in some way parallel with the religious tradition of humanity.”

Maurice Denis (1870–1943) French painter

Quote from Denis's essay 'Les Arts a Rome', 1898; as cited on Wikipedia: Maurice Denis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Denis - reference [22] Denis made Jan. 1895 his first visit to Rome, where the works of Raphael and Michaelangelo in the Vatican made a strong impression upon him. 1890 - 1920

Way, Thinking, Effort, Time

“The creation of a classical style was not so much the achievement of an ideal as the reconciliation of conflicting ideals-the striking of an optimum balance between them.”

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

Part I. Introduction. 3. The Origins of the Style
Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (Expanded edition, 1997)

“I have been aware from the outset (end of January 1959, the birthdate of the second paper in the citation) that the deep analysis of something which is now called Kalman filtering were of major importance. But even with this immodesty I did not quite anticipate all the reactions to this work. Up to now there have been some 1000 related publications, at least two Citation Classics, etc. There is something to be explained.
To look for an explanation, let me suggest a historical analogy, at the risk of further immodesty. I am thinking of Newton, and specifically his most spectacular achievement, the law of Gravitation. Newton received very ample "recognition" (as it is called today) for this work. it astounded - really floored - all his contemporaries. But I am quite sure, having studied the matter and having added something to it, that nobody then (1700) really understood what Newton's contribution was. Indeed, it seemed an absolute miracle to his contemporaries that someone, an Englishman, actually a human being, in some magic and un-understandable way, could harness mathematics, an impractical and eternal something, and so use mathematics as to discover with it something fundamental about the universe.”

Rudolf E. Kálmán (1930–2016) Hungarian-born American electrical engineer

Kalman (1986) " Steele Prizes Awarded at the Annual Meeting in San Antonio http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Extras/Kalman_response.html", Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 34 (2) (1987), 228-229.

Law, Way, Mathematics, Understanding

“Labour will try to convince you that it is sympathetic to business. Don’t believe such stories. The truth is that the party has a classic left-wing suspicion of business and the profit motive.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

Address to the annual conference of the Fiji Employers Federation, 2 September 2005

Truth, Motivation, Business

“A Streptichron (from the Classical Greek meaning to 'bend time') is an active packet facilitating prediction that implements any of the active mechanisms… The Streptichron can use this capability to refine its prediction as it travels through the network.”

Stephen F Bush

Bush, Stephen F., Active Networks and Active Network Management: A Proactive Management Framework, 2001, ISBN-13: 978-0306465604.

Travel, Time

“The entire thrust of neoclassical thought is to argue that the free market economy is an efficient system that will optimize utility for all mankind, if only government will get out of the way. It therefore departs from classical economists such as Adam Smith, who recognized the importance of governments for regulating markets and preventing monopolies.”

David Orrell (1962) Canadian mathematician

Source: The Other Side Of The Coin (2008), Chapter 9, Square Versus Oblong, p. 284

Way, Optimism

“An important object of the Journal should be the publication of papers dealing with attempts at statistical verification of the laws of economic theory, and further the publication of papers dealing with the purely abstract problems of quantitative economics, such as problems in the quantitative definition of the fundamental concepts of economics and problems in the theory of economic equilibrium.
The term equilibrium theory is here interpreted as including both the classical equilibrium theory proceeding on the lines of Walras, Pareto, and Marshall, and the more general equilibrium theory which is now beginning to grow out of the classical equilibrium theory, partly through the influence of the modern study of economic statistics. Taken in this broad sense the equilibrium problems include virtually all those fundamental problems of production, circulation, distribution and consumption, which can be made the object of a quantitative study. More precisely: The equilibrium theory in the sense here used is a body of doctrines that treats all these problems from a certain point of view, which is contrasted on one side with the verbal treatment of economic problems and on the other side with the purely empirical-statistical approach to economic problems”

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

Frisch (1927). as quoted in: Bjerkholt, Olav, and Duo Qin. A Dynamic Approach to Economic Theory: The Yale Lectures of Ragnar Frisch. Routledge, 2010: About "Oekonometrika"
1920

Law, Problem, Sense, Study

“Regarding the doll in the Purge, since it's one of my favorite moments in the series: The Custodians are the physical embodiment of a very vaporous notion -- human conscience. Does conscience really exist, or is it just a way of convincing ourselves that a center for moral judgment resides within us, thus lending our judgments a natural authority? As always, Trevor prefers to provide a tangible solution. He can't tolerate uncertainty. Whether it is real or not, Trevor understands the usefulness of the belief in conscience as a tool for practical ends, the improvement of society. In the end, the doll which emerges from the Custodian reveals to us that Trevor's artificial conscience, like the classical notion, is no more than a flimsy gimmick, a parlor trick, a plaything of the mind powered by a circular process. (Advocating the existence of conscience usually involves an appeal to our conscience). Notice that Trevor himself winds up the toy while in the train earlier in the episode.”

Peter Chung (1961) Korean-American animator

Response on LUSENET http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=003FAq

Way, Understanding, Nature, Training

“Since there was no infrared spectrometer, I managed to record routine infrared spectra of certain compounds here and there, in order to categorize group frequencies. One of these papers became a citation classic.”

C. N. R. Rao (1934) Indian chemist

About his initial years of his work in Indian Institute of science after his return from USA, p. 40
Climbing the Limitless Ladder: A Life in Chemistry (2010)

“Sraffa’s criticisms of the concept of capital also amount – at least in principle –to a deadly blow to the foundations of the so-called ‘neo-classical synthesis’. Combining Keynes’ thesis on the possibility of fighting unemployment by adopting adequate fiscal and monetary policies with the marginalist tradition of simultaneous determination of equilibrium quantities and prices as a method to study any economic problem, this approach has in the last few decades come to constitute the dominant doctrine in textbooks the whole world over. It is only thanks to increasing specialisation in the various fields of economics, often invoked as the inevitable response to otherwise insoluble difficulties, that the theoreticians of general equilibrium are able to construct their models without considering the problem of relations with the real world that economists are supposed to be interpreting, and that the macroeconomists can pretend that their ‘one commodity models’ constitute an acceptable tool for analysis. For those who believe that the true task facing economists, hard as it may be, is to seek to interpret the world they live in, Sraffa’s ‘cultural revolution’ still marks out a path for research that may not (as yet) have yielded all it was hoped to, but is certainly worth pursuing.”

Alessandro Roncaglia (1947) Italian economist

Source: Piero Sraffa: His life, thought and cultural heritage (2000), Ch. 1. Piero Sraffa

World, Hope, Problem, Study

“The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 64

Life, People, Truth, Education

“She still believes in classical economics, the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information doesn’t work that way.”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 2 (“Troubadour”), p. 72

Way

“One of the evident facts about the world is the stability of empty space-time. In classical general relativity we can explain this as a consequence of the positive energy theorem… the positive energy theorem must extend in some suitable form to any viable quantum theory of gravity.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

"Positive energy in quantum gravity" arXiv (Jun 10, 2014)

World, Time

“The mystery story is a kind of writing that need not dwell in the shadow of the past and owes little if any allegiance to the cult of the classics. It is a good deal more than unlikely that any writer now living will produce a better historical novel than Henry Esmond, a better tale of children than The Golden Age, a sharper social vignette than Madame Bovary, a more graceful and elegant evocation than The Spoils of Poynton, a wider and richer canvas than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. But to devise a more plausible mystery than The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Purloined Letter should not be too difficult. Nowadays it would be rather more difficult not to.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

Introduction
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)

War, Children, Age, Peace

“I’d like to think I have somehow connected or tapped to our collective subconscious, but in a sense I am just pulling ideas off the morning news. The real challenge is to make art out of these bits and pieces of our reality. I am a third-generation artist raised in the ghetto who was classically educated. This had its assets and liabilities.”

Joe Lewis (artist) (1953) American photographer

Walter Robinson. " Joe Lewis: Clairvoynace http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/robinson/robinson8-16-07.asp" at artnet.com, 2015.

Education, Art, Idea, Thinking

“A second conspicuous landmark… is the enunciation of the fundamental law of radioactive disintegration by Rutherford and Soddy in 1903. This law was in no sense a consequence or development of Planck's theories; indeed fourteen years were to elapse before any connection was noticed between the two. The new law asserted that the atoms of radioactive substances broke up spontaneously, and not because of any particular conditions or special happenings. This seemed to involve an even more startling break with classical theory than the new laws of Planck; radioactive break-up appeared to be an effect without a cause, and suggested that the ultimate laws of nature were not even causal.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Law, Nature, Sense, Appearance

“The two great conceptual revolutions of twentieth-century science, the overturning of classical physics by Werner Heisenberg and the overturning of the foundations of mathematics by Kurt Gödel, occurred within six years of each other within the narrow boundaries of German-speaking Europe. … A study of the historical background of German intellectual life in the 1920s reveals strong links between them. Physicists and mathematicians were exposed simultaneously to external influences that pushed them along parallel paths. … Two people who came early and strongly under the influence of Spengler's philosophy were the mathematician Hermann Weyl and the physicist Erwin Schrödinger. … Weyl and Schrödinger agreed with Spengler that the coming revolution would sweep away the principle of physical causality. The erstwhile revolutionaries David Hilbert and Albert Einstein found themselves in the unaccustomed role of defenders of the status quo, Hilbert defending the primacy of formal logic in the foundations of mathematics, Einstein defending the primacy of causality in physics. In the short run, Hilbert and Einstein were defeated and the Spenglerian ideology of revolution triumphed, both in physics and in mathematics. Heisenberg discovered the true limits of causality in atomic processes, and Gödel discovered the limits of formal deduction and proof in mathematics. And, as often happens in the history of intellectual revolutions, the achievement of revolutionary goals destroyed the revolutionary ideology that gave them birth. The visions of Spengler, having served their purpose, rapidly became irrelevant.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

Life, People, History, Mathematics

“I don't believe in remakes. I think original films are classics and one can't make it or match up to it (original film) the same way. And even if they do there will be comparisons…it's not a good idea”

Waheeda Rehman (1938) Indian actress

Quote, Waheeda Rehman not in favour of biopics and remakes

Way, Idea, Thinking

“It seems incredible that we should willingly trade certainty for quantum confusion and doubt. But, make no mistake, despite its simplicity, its appealing visual images and its resonance with our common understanding, classical physics failed. The quantum description was built amidst the ruins of the structure that preceded it, and it is therefore appropriate that we begin our journey from within this classical landscape.”

Jim Baggott (1957) British writer

Source: Beyond Measure (2004), Ch. 1 : An act of desperation

Understanding

“Tyranny produces two results, exactly opposite in character, and which are symbolized in those two great types of the slave in classical times — Epictetus and Spartacus. The one is hatred with its evil train, the other meekness with its Christian graces.”

Honoré de Balzac book Une fille d'Ève

La tyrannie produit deux effets contraires dont les symboles existent dans deux grandes figures de l'esclavage antique: Epictète et Spartacus, la haine et ses sentiments mauvais, la résignation et ses tendresses chrétiennes.
Source: A Daughter of Eve (1839), Ch. 3: The Story of a Happy Woman.

Evil, Time, Training

“He is capable of any crime, from reviling the Classics to diverting water courses.”

Ernest Bramah book Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat

The Story of Lin Ho and the Treasure of Fang-Tso
Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat (1928)

Water

“In the winter of 2008, Jenifer and I visited Chennai Mathematical Institute. This remarkable Institute is the creation of Seshadri. It is a unique blend of an American style liberal arts college with traditional Indian guru one-on-one teaching, adding physics, computer science, history and music to its maths curriculum. Only in India could an intellectual with no business or management experience, who spends all his spare time singing classical south Indian music, have been the catalyst for such a unique educational experiment.”

David Mumford (1937) American mathematician

[David Mumford, Passages to India, Mathematics Intelligencer, 2010, Hyderabad edition, 51-55, http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/beyond/papers/2010c--PassagesIndia-journal.pdf]

Education, Art, Music, History

“"The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African", Penguin Classics (1998) ISBN 0140436375.”

Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780) British composer, writer and grocer

References

“To anyone who is not an artist it must seem rather strange that Degas who could do anything — for whom setting down what he saw presented no difficulties at all — should have continued to draw the same poses year after year — often, it would seem, with increasing difficulty. Just as a classical dancer repeats the same movements again and again, in order to achieve a greater perfection of line and balance, so Degas repeats the same motifs, it was one of the things that gave him so much sympathy with dancers. He was continually struggling to achieve an idea of perfect form, but this did not prevent him looking for the truth in what might seem an artificial situation.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 13: Degas

Truth, Idea, Drawing, Perfection

“The new architecture has 'opened' the walls so that the separateness of interior and exterior is suppressed. Walls no longer sustain since the system of construction is based upon the use of columns. This results in a new type of ground plan, an open ground plan, which is totally different from classical ones, since interior space and exterior space are interrelated.”

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

Quote from Van Doesburg's unpublished writing, 'Fundamental principles', 1930; as cited in Theo van Doesburg, Joost Baljeu, Studio Vista, London 1974, p. 203
1926 – 1931

“During the relatively brief period in the late 1960s when economists were pondering the possible obsolescence of business cycles, the scholarly discipline of macroeconomics showed signs of becoming fragmented into speciality areas devoted to components of the then popular large-scale econometric models-for example, consumption, investment, money demand, and the Phillips curve. But more recently the revival of severe real world business cycles, together with the revolutions associated with Milton Friedman's monetarism and Lucas's classical equilibrium models, has brought about a revival of interest in economic analysis that focuses on a few broad aggregates summarizing activity in the economy as a whole-nominal and real income, the inflation rate, and the unemployment rate.”

Robert J. Gordon (1940) American economist

Source: The American Business Cycle, 1986, p. 2

Money, World, Business

“That classical theory had catastrophic implications for the constitution of matter was barely appreciated by Planck and others at the turn of the century, and played no substantial role in the development of quantum theory until Bohr's work 13 years later.
The lesson that could be drawn from this, and also from the development of general relativity, is that a crisis will only become creative if it is formulated in a mathematically precise manner. This conclusion has an echo in Bell's insistence on having quantum mechanics "fully formulated in mathematical terms, with nothing left to the discretion of the theoretical physicist", but what it really calls for is a critique of the "orthodox" theory fully formulated in mathematical terms with nothing left to the discretion of the critic.”

Kurt Gottfried (1929) American physicist

Does quantum mechanics carry the seeds of its own destruction? (1991)

Mathematics

“People think that painting is about color
It's mostly composition
It's composition that's the whole thing
The classic image-
Two late Tang dishes, one with a flower image,
one empty – the empty form goes all the way to heaven
It is the classic form – lighter weight.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

1970's, The Untroubled Mind', 1971

People, Color, Way, Flowers

“Lautrec was still satisfying his rather classical art-teacher Cormon in Paris. The unreal conventions of Cormon imposed and discouraged him, according to Henri Perruchot”

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) French painter

1879-1884, T-Lautrec, by Henri Perruchot

Art, Teachers

“We show that some known classical results have particularly simple derivations within the Ashtekar formalism. These include Witten's positive energy theorem…”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

"Positive energy in quantum gravity" arXiv (Jun 10, 2014)

“The potato seems like a Romantic (organic) object.... you can watch it growing if you don’t eat it. It is going to change – grow, rot, disappear. A pebble is like a Classical thing – it changes little if any... If it was big you could keep the dead down with it.... The Classical idea is not around much anymore. [Der Koning is comparing the Potatoes of Vincent Van Gogh to the Pebbles of Jean Arp.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

Artist Club, 22 February 1952, as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 102
1950's

Idea, Change, Dead

“If the progressing rationality of advanced industrial society tends to liquidate, as an “irrational rest,” the disturbing elements of Time and Memory, it also tends to liquidate the disturbing rationality contained in this irrational rest. Recognition and relation to the past as present counteracts the functionalization of thought by and in the established reality. It militates against the closing of the universe of discourse and behavior it renders possible the development of concepts which destabilize and transcend the closed universe by comprehending it as historical universe. Confronted with the given society as object of its reflection, critical thought becomes historical consciousness as such, it is essentially judgment. Far from necessitating an indifferent relativism, it searches in the real history of man for the criteria of truth and falsehood, progress and regression. The mediation of the past with the present discovers the factors which made the facts, which determined the war of life, which established the masters and the servants; it projects the limits and the alternatives. When this critical consciousness speaks, it speaks “le langage de la connaissance” (Roland Barthes) which breaks open a closed universe of discourse and its petrified structure. The key terms of this language are not hypnotic nouns which evoke endlessly the same frozen predicates. They rather allow of an open development; they even unfold their content in contradictory predicates. The Communist Manifesto provides a classical example. Here the two key terms, Bourgeoisie and Proletariat, each “govern” contrary predicates. The “bourgeoisie” is the subject of technical progress, liberation, conquest of nature, creation of social wealth, and of the perversion and destruction of these achievements. Similarly, the "proletariat” carries the attributes of total oppression and of the total defeat of oppression. Such dialectical relation of opposites in and by the proposition is rendered possible by the recognition of the subject as an historical agent whose identity constitutes itself in and against its historical practice, in and against its social reality. The discourse develops and states the conflict between the thing and its function, and this conflict finds linguistic expression in sentences which join contradictory predicates in a logical unit—conceptual counterpart of the objective reality. In contrast to all Orwellian language, the contradiction is demonstrated, made explicit, explained, and denounced.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 99-100

Life, War, Truth, Behavior

“Yeah they did, Bob. It was a classic final, and I think the old cliché? Football was the winner there; just a terrific match. Shattering defeat for the USA; so hard to take. But only the hardest heart, Julie? Would deny Japan that. I suppose you could have an inquest in the USA played so well for much of the game. Just seemed to get a little bit panicky when the finishing line was in reach. But, really that's? That's being a little bit picky, isn't it? Because they did ever so well here. I just think the ball had Japan's name on it. They were destined to win it. Uh, just a feeling? Bob, I think Japan won rather more than just a soccer match here.”

Ian Darke (1950) British association football and boxing commentator

Japan v. United States http://www.listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=yKYkxJ6TY0c (17 July 2011). 2010s, 2011, 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup

Feeling, Game, Thinking, Heart

“Politics is not a self-enclosed activity, organically generating a body of concepts internal to it. What counts as a set of ideas with a bearing on the political conflicts of a time varies according to epoch and region. Today it stretches far beyond the purview of political science, traditionally conceived. Philosophy, economics, history, sociology, psychology, not to speak of the earth and life sciences, and the arts, all intersect at different points with terrain of politics, in its classic definition.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Source: Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Foreword, p. xi

Life, Art, History, Idea

“It is only rigorous training and in depth study that make music mature into the realm of the classical.”

M. Balamuralikrishna (1930–2016) Carnatic vocalist, instrumentalist and playback singer

Source: Staff Reporter, Mangalampalli can't wait to come home http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/2003/03/01/stories/2003030108610300.htm, The Hindu, 1 March 2003.

Music, Study, Training

“The classical concept of 'physical entity', be it particle, wave, field or system, has become a problematic concept since the advent of relativity theory and quantum mechanics. The recent developments in modern quantum mechanics, with the performance of delicate and precise experiments involving single quantum entities, manifesting explicit non-local behavior for these entities, brings essential new information about the nature of the concept of entity.”

Diederik Aerts (1953) Belgian theoretical physicist

Aerts, D. (1998). " The entity and modern physics: the creation-discovery view of reality. http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/aerts/publications/1998EntModPhys.pdf" In E. Castellani (Ed.), Interpreting Bodies: Classical and Quantum Objects in Modern Physics (pp. 223-257). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Behavior, Nature

“The classical theory of probability was devoted mainly to a study of the gamble's gain, which is again a random variable; in fact, every random variable can be interpreted as the gain of a real or imaginary gambler in a suitable game.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter IX, Random Variables; Expectation, p. 212.

Game, Study

“Chopin absolutely was influenced by Bach. We know that before Chopin himself performed in concert, he didn’t play anything other than Bach. His own Preludes are a reference to the Well-Tempered Clavier of Bach, and all Chopin’s students had to play Bach. In whole, Chopin admired Bach most of all composers, and it was nothing less than the Well-Tempered Clavier itself that was his musical diary. I also have said that Chopin is the crowning and climax of piano-playing. It’s something so unique, all-affecting in emotionalism, musical architecture, and structure, that all past giants are present in it: Bach and Mozart. Chopin’s elegance is so singular, that again you need much experience to convey his music in the real and original style. The question of rubato is very sensitive: It’s nothing arbitrary, but much more something well calculated and well proportioned, something that is integrated in the classical strength of form, which is constructed on the profound knowledge of the polyphonic and contrapuntal structures of Bach and Mozart. Whether the Goldbergs may relate to this question? Absolutely! I again want to mention a certain and special term: jeu perlé.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Without this you can’t play Chopin, you can’t play Mozart, and lastly absolutely not the Goldbergs.
Talkings on Bach

Music, Question, Knowledge, Past

“In the generation (or two generations) before mine, the leading Indian historians (judged in terms of scholarly books and papers written and read) included Irfan Habib, R. S. Sharma, Ranajit Guha, Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, Amalendu Guha, Sumit Sarkar, and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, all of whom were influenced to a lesser or greater degree by Marxism; and Ashin Dasgupta, Dharma Kumar, Parthasarathy Gupta, Amales Tripathi, Rajat Kanta Rai, Mushirul Hasan, and Tapan Roychowdhury, all of whom were liberals. The leading political scientists included the liberals Rajni Kothari, Basheeruddin Ahmed and Ramashray Ray; the Marxists Javed Alam and Partha Chatterjee; and Ashis Nandy, an admirer of Tagore and Gandhi who like them stoutly resists being classified in conventional terms. The pre-eminent sociologists of that generation were M. N. Srinivas and André Béteille, both of whom would own the label ‘liberal’; and T. N. Madan, who while working on classically conservative themes such as family, kinship and religion would most likely see himself as a liberal too. Even the best-known or most influential economists of the 1960s and 1970 tended to be on the left of the spectrum, as the names of K. N. Raj, Amartya Sen, V. M. Dandekar, Amit Bhaduri, Krishna Bharadwaj, Pranab Bardhan, Prabhat and Utsa Patnaik, and Ashok Rudra (among others) signify.”

Ramachandra Guha (1958) historian and writer from India

[Guha, Ramachandra, Where Are The Conservative Intellectuals in India?, http://ramachandraguha.in/archives/where-are-the-conservative-intellectuals-in-india-caravan.html, Caravan, March 2015]

Books, Family, Religion, Reading

“There are certain devices that one uses in Romantic music that are appropriate only for Romantic or subsequent music. If you take those devices and apply them to earlier music, then it’s totally inappropriate, and it makes the Classical music sound silly. However, if you were to use what you might call ‘Classical devices’ on Romantic music, historically, that would be correct! It very often benefits Romantic music, which is sometimes rather disjunctive, rather shapeless in comparison with Classical symphonic or sonata form. Romantic music very often benefits from that tighter organization that you get from Classical music.”

Leon Fleisher (1928) American conductor and pianist

Interview with pianist Leon Fleisher http://www.examiner.com/article/interview-with-pianist-leon-fleisher by Elijah Ho (October 1, 2014)

Music

“Apart from this older generation, there is scarcely a modern mathematician who still adheres without reservation to the classical theory of probability. The majority have more or less accepted the frequency definition.”

Richard von Mises (1883–1953) Austrian physicist and mathematician

Third Lecture, Critical Discussion of the Foundations of Probability, p. 81
Probability, Statistics And Truth - Second Revised English Edition - (1957)

“Unfortunately, the optimistic view that "classical civilization" handed down certain fundamental works that managed to include the knowledge contained in the lost writings has proved groundless. In fact, in the face of a general regression in the level of civilization, it's never the best works that will be saved through an automatic process of natural selection.”

Lucio Russo (1944) Italian historian and scientist

1.1, "The Erasure of the Scientific Revolution", p. 8
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

Nature, Knowledge

Quotes about classic page 4

Quotes about classic
page 4