Quotes about classic (772 quotes, page 5)

“Images produce an intellectual process different from the ancient one or the one developed by classical education. It goes without saying that this process is not completely new; of course, since sight existed, and since people themselves chose their images, they also thought by means of images and entered into this kind of thinking. But this was limited and not frequent, because images were not dominant. The new factor in our day comes from the effect of visual reproduction’s triumph over all else, which involves us in the domination of one form of thought. This supremacy is new, even though we are not dealing with a completely new form of thought.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 210
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

People , Education , Thinking

“I am an autodidact - that's why I use bigger words than I should. It's a classic sign.”

Mark Leckey (1964) British artist

Guardian interview (2008)

“Against all the retrogressive endeavors (Bohm, Schrödinger etc. and in some sense also Einstein) I am sure that the statistical character of the ψ-function and hence of nature’s laws – on which you insisted from the very beginning against Schrödinger’s resistance – will define the style of the laws at least for some centuries. It may be that later, e. g. in connection with the living processes, one will find something entirely new, but to dream of a way back, back to the classical style of Newton-Maxwell (and these are just dreams these gentlemen are giving themselves up to) seems to me hopeless, digressive, bad taste. And, we could add, it is not even a beautiful dream.”

Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) Austrian physicist, Nobel prize winner

Letter to Max Born, December 1954, in Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel mit Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg u.a, Springer, 1999, p. 887, as translated in J. Kofler and A. Zeilinger, "Quantum Information and Randomness", European Review, Vol. 18, No. 4, 2010, pp. 469–480

Law , Beauty , Dreams , Way

“[Henry] Kissinger has always been a paradox for me. I was profoundly impressed by his book about European politics in the first half of the last century. One of his main theses was that peace agreements are valueless if a major party to the conflict is left out and sees in the agreement a threat to its basic interests. If ever this rule were true – as it surely is – this is the case with the Palestinians in the Middle East conflict. It is also true for the Soviet Union. Yet once he became the political genius of the Nixon and Ford administrations, Kissinger behaved as if he had never read his own book – the classic example of power blinding the intellectual. He tried to make peace of some kind without the Palestinians, treating the rulers of the various Arab countries as so many Metternichs and Castlereaghs, trying to push the Soviets out of the Middle East altogether. I strongly suspected him of obstructing any real move towards peace, favoring the salami approach of little pieces of peace, so as to keep everybody screaming for American support and dependent on American protection. This was the famous step-by-step approach.”

Uri Avnery (1923–2018) Israeli writer

My Friend, the Enemy (1986) – Page 144

Books , Peace , Support , Reading

“The link between Betty Mahmoody’s “Not Without My Daughter” and Azar Nafisi’s [Reading Lolita in Tehran] is the link between two phases and modes of labor migration, the moral salvation that “the West” provides, and imperial hubris. What is paramount in all of these is the denigration of local cultures as the site of actual or potential resistance to imperial domination. There cannot be any politics of resistance, aesthetics of emancipation, or prose and poetry of agential autonomy in history for people around the world—nothing except a Starbucks Coffee version of the so-called “Western classics” to go and save them.”

Hamid Dabashi (1951) American academic

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=10707 Interview with Znet

People , World , History , Coffee

“The all-inclusiveness of the equilibrium concept in New Classicism warns against comparisons of EBCT and ABCT that ignore the radically different methodological contexts. For instance, the inevitable bust that figures importantly in ABCT cannot easily be translated into the language of EBCT. For the Austrians, "equilibrium bust" is a term at war with itself; for the New Classicists, "disequilibrium bust" can only mean an unexplainable downturn”

Roger Garrison (1944) American economist

cf. Lucas 1981, pp. 225 and 231
Page 95.
"New Classical and Old Austrian Economics", 1991

War

“It is understandable then that tragic heroes, unlike the baroque characters who had preceded them, could never be mad, and that inversely madness could never take on the tragic value we have known since Nietzsche and Artaud. In the classical epoch, tragic characters and the mad face each other without any possible dialogue or common language, for the one can only pronounce the decisive language of being, where the truth of light and the depths of night meet in a flash, and the other repeats endlessly an indifferent murmur where the empty chatter of the day is cancelled out by the deceptive lies of the shadows.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
History of Madness (1961)

Truth , Understanding , Decision , Light

“Anyone with a good classical education could learn Chinese by himself without difficulty.”

Arthur Waley (1889–1966) British academic

1968 remark, quoted in Japan Quarterly, Vol. XVIII, No. 1 (January-March 1971), p. 107

Education , Learning

“Some institutionalist lines of thought, arising particularly in economics and political science, retain very strong notions of society as made up of bounded, purposive, sovereign, and rational actors. In economics, these might be individuals or organizations, operating in market-like environments. In political science, they might be sovereign national-states operating in an almost anarchic environment. Institutionalism, in such schemes, involves the idea that some fundamental institutional principle must be in place before systems of such actors can effectively operate. The classic core principle required in economic versions is property rights (North & Thomas, 1973). In international relations theory it is the principle of nation-state sovereignty”

John W. Meyer (1935) Sociologist and professor at Stanford University

Krasner, 1999
Source: "Reflections on institutional theories of organization,." 2008, p. 790

Idea , Strong , Science

“The night-watchman state of classical liberalism would keep murderers out of the country, not in.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“Jihadists: a modest libertarian proposal” https://jungefreiheit.de/kolumne/2015/dschihadisten-ein-bescheidener-libertaerer-vorschlag/ Junge Freiheit, January 29, 2015.
2010s, 2015

Night , Country

“Quantum mechanics is weird. I don't understand it. Just live with it. You don't have to understand the nature of things in order to build cool devices…If you can figure out how to take advantage of this quantum multitasking, we can build computers that can do computations that no classical computer could do even if it were the size of the entire universe.”

Seth Lloyd (1960) American engineer

Seth Lloyd, cited in: Scott Dewing (2011) "Seth Lloyd on quantum computing" blog.insidethebox.org, 9/23/2011

Understanding , Nature , Universe

“I relate to everything. I'm not just jazz, Latin or classical. I really am a fusion of all of those; not today's fusion, but my fusion.”

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

As quoted in "He Arranges, Composes, Performs: Fischer, A Renaissance Man Of Music" http://articles.latimes.com/1987-05-14/entertainment/ca-8949_1_clare-fischer

“I’m very interested in the ‘Culture of Interpretation.’ I’m convinced that each great artist has his own personal style, but it is his artistic responsibility in developing this style to respond other interpretations, either prior or at the same time. I’m convinced that Rubinstein would have presented us another Chopin if Cortot had not existed. Cortot presented very romantic Chopin interpretations - really masterly, outstanding, but confused. Rubinstein’s immediate answer was a very classical Chopin. He was really the first to point out the classical line and structure in his oeuvre.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Time , Personality

“Another school opposed this dream with its summons to military adventure in Anatolia, and took its blueprint from a Western reading of classical antiquity. While conceding the demographic break with the ancient Greek world, the westernized intelligentsia claimed a continuing spiritual affinity between modem Western, secular ideals and those of classical Athens. Locating the modern Greeks through their cultural heritage of classical antiquity along an cast—west axis that stretched from Paris and London to Athens and Constantinople, the ‘Hellenic’ map differed profoundly from the ‘Byzantine’ one; for the Latter had a north—south axis from Moscow to Constantinople and Egypt, which aligned a re-nascent Byzantine Greece with Orthodox Russia as the protector of Eastern Christianity. There was a similar contrast in ethnic moralities. While the Byzantine conception of Greek revival envisaged a renewal of the Orthodox Christian virtues and ecclesiastical controls, the secular Hellenic vision advocated a ‘return’ to the qualities of rational enquiry, self-control and reflective choice which seemed to sum up the ethical message of ancient Greece.”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1987), p. 203.

World , School , Dreams , Reading

“The French joined the second China War on the pretext ‑ which was to become a classic excuse in China to cover political aggression ‑ that the execution of a missionary demanded punishment. In the treaties that were concluded with the Powers in 1858, the missionaries obtained the privilege of travelling freely all over China, together with a guarantee of toleration of Christianity and protection to Chinese Christians in the profession of their faith. Thus was Christianity not only identified with Europe, but reduced to the position of a diplomatic interest of Western Powers in their aggression against China. The missionaries were clothed with extra‑territoriality and given the right to appeal to their consuls and ministers in the `religious' interests of Chinese Christians. No greater disservice, as history was to show, could have been rendered by its proclaimed champions to the cause of the Church of Christ. It is also significant that out of the unconscionable indemnities exacted from China after the various wars, the churches received a considerable portion. The missions thus started by benefiting from the humiliations of China and by being identified in the eyes of the Chinese with aggressions against their country.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

War , Faith , Travel , History

“There can be no doubt that the existence of public tortures and executions were connected with something quite other than this internal organization. Rusche and Kirchheimer are right to see it as the effect of a system of production in which labour power, and therefore the human body, has neither the utility nor the commercial value that are conferred on them in an economy of an industrial type. Moreover, this ‘contempt’ for the body is certainly related to a general attitude to death; and, in such an attitude, one can detect not only the values proper to Christianity, but a demographical, in a sense biological, situation: the ravages of disease and hunger, the periodic massacres of the epidemics, the formidable child mortality rate, the precariousness of the bio-economic balances – all this made death familiar and gave rise to rituals intended to integrate it, to make it acceptable and to give a meaning to its permanent aggression. But in analysing why the public executions survived for so long, one must also refer to the historical conjuncture; it must not be forgotten that the ordinance of 1670 that regulated criminal justice almost up to the Revolution had even increased in certain respects the rigour of the old edicts; Pussort, who, among the commissioners entrusted with the task of drawing up the documents, represented the intentions of the king, was responsible for this, despite the views of such magistrates as Lamoignon; the number of uprisings at the very height of the classical age, the rumbling close at hand of civil war, the king’s desire to assert his power at the expense of the parlements go a long way to explain the survival of so severe a penal system.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), pp. 51

Death , Hunger , War , Age

“If I tried to imagine the public as a particular person (for although some better individuals momentarily belong to the public they nevertheless have something concrete about them, which holds them in its grip even if they have not attained the supreme religious attitude), I should perhaps think of one of the Roman emperors, a large well-fed figure, suffering from boredom, looking only for the sensual intoxication of laughter, since the divine gift of wit is not earthly enough. And so for a change he wanders about, indolent rather than bad, but with a negative desire to dominate. Every one who has read the classical authors knows how many things a Caesar could try out in order to kill time. In the same way the public keeps a dog to amuse it. That dog is the sum of the literary world. If there is some one superior to the rest, perhaps even a great man, the dog is set on him and the fun begins. The dog goes for him, snapping and tearing at his coat-tails, allowing itself every possible ill-mannered familiarity – until the public tires, and says it may stop. That is an example of how the public levels. Their betters and superiors in strength are mishandled – and the dog remains a dog which even the public despises. The leveling is therefore done by a third party; a non-existent public leveling with the help of a third party which in its significance is less than nothing, being already more than leveled.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

The Present Age 1846 by Søren Kierkegaard, translated by Alexander Dru 1962, p. 65-66
1840s, Two Ages: A Literary Review (1846)

World , Dogs , Way , Imagination

“It was no accident that I found my way to Götz at the time [c. 1960-62]. This 'Informal' element runs through every picture I've painted, whether it's a landscape, or a family painted from a photograph, or the Colour Charts or a Grey picture. And so now it is a pursuit of the same objectives by other means... As I now see it, all my paintings are 'Informal'.... except for the landscapes, perhaps... The 'Informal' is the opposite of the constructional quality of classicism – the age of kings, of clearly formed hierarchies.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 42, note 45 : quote on his period of Informal art

Age , Family , Way , Time

“We are at the classic-romantic barrier now, where on one side we see a cycle as it appears immediately—and this is an important way of seeing it—and where on the other side we can begin to see it as a mechanic does in terms of underlying form—and this is an important way of seeing things too. These tools for example—this wrench—has a certain romantic beauty to it, but its purpose is always purely classical. It's designed to change the underlying form of the machine.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 8

Beauty , Way , Appearance , Change

“Since the classical language has an easy grammar and limited vocabulary, a few months should suffice for the mastering of it.”

Arthur Waley (1889–1966) British academic

Japanese Poetry: The Uta (1919), Introduction, p. 8

“The international disputes which united and divided Luxemburg, Lenin, Lukács, Gramsci, Bordiga or Trotsky on these issues represent the last great strategic debate in the European workers’ movement. Since then, there has been little significant theoretical development of the political problems of revolutionary strategy in metropolitan capitalism that has had any direct contact with the masses. The structural divorce between original Marxist theory and the main organizations of the working class in Europe has yet to be historically resolved. The May-June revolt in France, the upheaval in Portugal, the approaching dénouement in Spain, presage the end of this long divorce, but have not accomplished it. The classical debates, therefore, still remain in many respects the most advanced limit of reference we possess today. It is thus not mere archaism to recall the strategic confrontations which occurred four or five decades ago. To reappropriate them, on the contrary, is a step towards a Marxist discussion that has the—necessarily modest—hope of assuming an ‘initial shape’ of correct theory today. Régis Debray has spoken, in a famous paragraph, of the constant difficulty of being contemporary with our present. In Europe at least, we have yet to be sufficiently contemporary with our past.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

"The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci", New Left Review (1976)

Hope , Problem , Past

“That Swinburne was altogether new to the three types of men-of-the-world before him; that he seemed to them quite original, wildly eccentric, astonishingly gifted, and convulsingly droll, Adams could see; but what more he was, even Milnes hardly dared say. They could not believe his incredible memory and knowledge of literature, classic, mediaeval, and modern; his faculty of reciting a play of Sophocles or a play of Shakespeare, forward or backward, from end to beginning; or Dante, or Villon, or Victor Hugo.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Men , World , Literature , Knowledge

“Alas, because I'm no longer innocent. We're civilized beings. Whether we like it or not, we have the cares and concerns of classical civilization in our bones. I want to express myself clearly when I paint. In people who feign ignorance there is a kind of barbarism even more detestable than the academic kind: it's no longer possible to be ignorant today. One no longer is. We come into the world armed with facility. Facility is the death of art and we must rid ourselves of it.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 155, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif': Cited in: George Pattison. God and Being: An Enquiry, (2011). p. 64

Death , People , World , Art

“What we hear about eternal inflation or the string landscape, seems somehow unavoidably to lead to some kind of multiverse. However, it seems to me there is a fundamental problem there. Once of course you have the multiverse, then you can start playing around and try to find probability or getting to the anthropic principle, or whatever. But the point is that the picture is essentially a classical one, and it is difficult to see that if you have many universes, coming essentially with an inflationary state, that there would not be plenty of horizons in this. Now the quantum mechanics of horizons is, I think, perfectly not understood. The simplest example is the black hole, where after all nobody knows really if the problem lies in the singularity or if it lies really already in the horizon.”

François Englert (1932) Belgian theoretical physicist

as quoted in: [Gross, David; Henneaux, Marc; Sevrin, Alexander, eds., The Theory of the Quantum World: Proceedings of the 25th Solvay Conference on Physics, Brussels, Belgium 19-22 October 2011, World Scientific, 2013, 309, https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Theory_of_the_Quantum_World.html?id=0o-6CgAAQBAJ&pg=PA309]

Problem , Thinking , Universe

“!-- Most of the effects described in classical magical tradition I believe I can duplicate with art, possibly drugs – or some other means of integrating myself more deeply with that sort of reality, that sort of consciousness – I believe I could do most of the things that are described in traditional magic. This opens up wider possibilities. It also enables me to understand myself on a deeper level. -->By accepting the idea of endless pantheons of gods, I somehow accept these creatures as being distinct and separate from me, and not as being, to some degree, higher functions of me. Iain Sinclair was asking me about this: he asked me ‘do you think they are inside you, or outside you?’ The only answer I could come up with was, the more I think about it the inside is the outside. That the objective world and the non-objective world are the same thing, to some degree. Ideaspace and this space are the same space. Just different ends of the scale. That’s not a very good explanation, but the best I can come up with so far.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

God , World , Art , Idea

“Although Keynes’s General Theory provides the foundation for much of our current understanding of economic fluctuations, it is important to remember that classical economics provides the right answers to many fundamental questions.”

N. Gregory Mankiw (1958) American economist

N. Gregory Mankiw]], Macroeconomics, Preview ; Cited in: David Colander (2005). 'The Stories Economists Tell. p. 182
2000s -

Understanding , Question

“The opera world was shocked! But the image is very classical. It's taken from Botticelli's portrait of Venus, who's standing in a seashell with her hair covering her body. It's very sensual. It represents the vulnerable side of me. Although I'm not wearing any clothes, it comes across very well.”

Sarah Brightman (1960) British soprano, musical theatre actress, and dancer

The Straits Times (Singapore) (2001); On the promotional photos for her Classics CD.

World , Clothes

“On one level, then, Cadbury can be seen as a classic example of Victorian industrial paternalism, albeit carried to greater lengths than in most other companies of the day. On another level, however, the Cadbury system resulted in a very strong, highly flexible organisation which, thanks to the strong levels of employee commitment and participation, could draw on a large bank of experience and intelligence to solve problems and undertake what amounted to continuous improvement. The employee participation system in particular meant that Cadbury was constantly upgrading its processes and products. Herbert Casson regarded Cadbury in the 1920s as one of the best-run companies in Britain, if not the world, and summed up the key to its success very succinctly: ‘At Cadbury, everybody thinks.”

Morgen Witzel (1960) Canadian historian, business theorist

Source: Fifty key figures in management, 2004, p. 39; Quote on the Cadbury company at the time Edward Cadbury was managing director.

World , Intelligence , Problem , Thinking

“Part of the downfall came early and on theoretical grounds, with the realization that real-world information lags for aggregate variables like the price level and money supply were much too short to rationalize the persistent multiyear deviations from equilibrium that seemed to characterize business cycles in most industrialized countries. The second dubious assumption, continuous market clearing, was viewed more critically once it was recognized that it was not an inextricable concomitant of rational expectations, especially when Stanley Fischer (1977) and Edmund Phelps and John Taylor (1977) showed that rational expectations could be embedded in a model containing real-world institutional features like multiperiod wage and price contracts to generate nonmarket-clearing behavior. Once Fischer and Phelps-Taylor had shown that rational expectations by itself was a necessary but not a sufficient condition to validate new-classical policy conclusions, the race was on to develop the new-Keynesian theory based on rational expectations and one or another institutional impediment to continuous market clearing.”

Robert J. Gordon (1940) American economist

"Fresh Water, Salt Water, and other Macroeconomic Elixirs", 1989

Money , World , Behavior , Business

“Our most urgent problem just now is how to preserve in a positive and critical form the soul of truth in the two great traditions, classical and Christian, that are crumbling as mere dogma.”

Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) American academic and literary criticism

Source: "English and the Discipline of Ideas" (1920), p. 69

Truth , Soul , Problem

“It is a commonplace of the classical literature on Empire, from Polybius to Montesquieu and Gibbon, that Empire is from its inception decadent and corrupt.”

Antonio Negri book Empire

201
Empire

Literature

“What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man!—To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion! To receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity; to be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries!”

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

On Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1831)

Men , Age

“As the natural sciences have developed to encompass increasingly complex systems, scientific rationality has become ever more statistical, or probabilistic. The deterministic classical mechanics of the enlightenment was revolutionized by the near-equilibrium statistical mechanics of late 19th century atomists, by quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, and by the far-from-equilibrium complexity theorists of the later 20th century. Mathematical neo-Darwinism, information theory, and quantitative social sciences compounded the trend. Forces, objects, and natural types were progressively dissolved into statistical distributions: heterogeneous clouds, entropy deviations, wave functions, gene frequencies, noise-signal ratios and redundancies, dissipative structures, and complex systems at the edge of chaos.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Statistical Mentality" https://web.archive.org/web/20110718052233/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/index.php/article/detail/522/statistical-mentality (2011)

Mathematics , Nature , Science

“These individual actions are really trans-actions instead of either individual behavior or the "exchange" of commodities. It is this shift from commodities and individuals to transactions and working rules of collective action that marks the transition from the classical and hedonic schools to the institutional schools of economic thinking. The shift is a change in the ultimate unit of economic investigation. The classic and hedonic economists, with their communistic and anarchistic offshoots, founded their theories on the relation of man to nature, but institutionalism is a relation of man to man. The smallest unit of the classic economists was a commodity produced by labor. The smallest unit of the hedonic economists was the same or similar commodity enjoyed by ultimate consumers. One was the objective side, the other the subjective side, of the same relation between the individual and the forces of nature. The outcome, in either case, was the materialistic metaphor of an automatic equilibrium, analogous to the waves of the ocean, but personified as "seeking their level." But the smallest unit of the institutional economists is a unit of activity -- a transaction, with its participants. Transactions intervene between the labor of the classic economists and the pleasures of the hedonic economists, simply because it is society that controls access to the forces of nature, and transactions are, not the "exchange of commodities," but the alienation and acquisition, between individuals, of the rights of property and liberty created by society, which must therefore be negotiated between the parties concerned before labor can produce, or consumers can consume, or commodities be physically exchanged.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

"Institutional Economics," 1931

Pleasure , School , Behavior , Nature

“[The poll tax] was a classic case of a good idea being entrusted to Chris Patten and becoming a terrible failure.”

Norman Tebbit (1931) English politician

On the BBC (16 November, 2000). http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1025000/audio/_1026366_tebbit.ram

Idea , Failure

“I felt exactly like the man in the advertisement who has not devoted fifteen minutes a day to the study of the classics. If only (I thought) I had devoted fifteen minutes a day to the cultivation of the aesthetic attitude! I could bound Afghanistan.”

Burton Rascoe (1892–1957) American writer

"Contemporary Reminiscences" in Arts & Decoration, Vol. 26 (1927), p. 50

Study

“My analysis of living systems uses concepts of thermodynamics, information theory, cybernetics, and systems engineering, as well as the classical concepts appropriate to each level. The purpose is to produce a description of living structure and process in terms of input and output, flows through systems, steady states, and feedbacks, which will clarify and unify the facts of life.”

James Grier Miller (1916–2002) biologist

Source: Living Systems: Basic Concepts (1969), p. 126

Life

“In a lot of classical playing there isn't much expressiveness: I don't hear a voice in the playing. What I really admire about jazz musicians is that they develop a sound early on and it's unique to them. Classical players are screened from that by always playing other people's notes.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

The Times, 21/04/2006
On Classical Music

People

“Whoever hasn’t yet arrived at the clear realization that there might be a greatness existing entirely outside his own sphere and for which he might have absolutely no feeling; whoever hasn’t at least felt obscure intimations concerning the approximate location of this greatness in the geography of the human spirit: that person either has no genius in his own sphere, or else he hasn’t been educated to the level of the classic.”

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

Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), “Critical Fragments,” § 36

Education , Feeling , Personality

“The field equation may… be given a geometrical foundation, at least to a first approximation, by replacing it with the requirement that the mean curvature of the space vanish at any point at which no heat is being applied to the medium—in complete analogy with… the general theory of relativity by which classical field equations are replaced by the requirement that the Ricci contracted curvature tensor vanish.”

Howard P. Robertson (1903–1961) American mathematician and physicist

Footnote
Geometry as a Branch of Physics (1949)

“A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"Tomorrow".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Music

“We have reversed the usual classical notion that the independent "elementary parts" of the world are the fundamental reality, and that the various systems are merely particular contingent forms and arrangements of these parts. Rather, we say that inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality, and that relatively independent behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within this whole.”

David Bohm (1917–1992) American theoretical physicist

"On the Intuitive Understanding of Nonlocality as Implied by Quantum Theory", Foundations of Physics Vol 5 (1975)

World , Reality , Universe , Parting

“The recent flourishing of New Classical economics, and especially its Equilibrium Business Cycle Theory (EBCT), has given a fresh hearing to the Old—but still developing—Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT). While the New and the Old differ radically in both substance and methods, they exhibit a certain formal congruency that has captured the attention of both schools. The formal similarities between EBCT and ABCT invites a point-by-point comparison, but the comparison itself dramatizes differences between the two views in a way that adds to the integrity and plausibility of the Austrian theory.”

Roger Garrison (1944) American economist

Page 91.
"New Classical and Old Austrian Economics", 1991

School , Way , Business

“It is truly not the merit of the school if we do not come out selfish. Each sort of corresponding pride and every wind of covetousness, eagerness for office, mechanical and servile officiousness, hypocrisy, etc., is bound as much with extensive knowledge as with elegant, classical education, and since this whole instruction exercises no influence of any sort on our ethical behavior, it thus frequently falls to the fate of being forgotten in the same measure as it is not used: one shakes off the dust of the school.”

Max Stirner book The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 22

Fate , Education , School , Behavior

“We're really not very good about putting music in a social and political context, particularly classical music. It's all sort of above everything. But in South Africa, everything is politicised. You play a piece of classical music out there and you are making a real cultural statement. Or you play with a marimba band and you are saying something else. I think that's the way things should be. The way people write about music makes it seem completely devoid of social context. And audiences drift away as a result.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

Financial Times, 11/11/1999
On Classical Music

People , Music , Way , Thinking

“Indeed, we are face to face with a strange kind of Sikhism. The Sikh Gurus had worked and fought for the resurgence of Hinduism but now we are told that this resurgence is precisely the cause of Sikh uneasiness. Guru Govind Singh started sending Sikh Gyanis to Varanasi to learn Sanskrit and to study the Epics, the Puranas and other classics to understand the Adi Granth itself, but the neo-Akali ideologues find Sanskrit and these classics objectionable. Maharaja Ranjit Singh banned cow-killing in his kingdom and a hundred Sikhs were blown to smithereens by the British because they stood for cow-protection, but now it is an anathema to secularist Akali scholars. The fact is that it is not the old Sikhism of the Gurus but a new version of it which has been taking shape under the impact of very different ideological and political forces that we are meeting. This neo-Akalism is a child of self-alienation and spiritual illiteracy and it, is at odd not only with Hinduism but for that very reason with Sikhism itself.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Quoted from the preface by Ram Swarup in Gurbachan, S. T. S., & Swarup, R. (1991). Muslim League attack on Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab 1947.

Understanding , Study , Learning

“To understand the economy then is to comprehend how it is driven by the animal spirits. Just as Adam Smith’s invisible hand is the keynote of classical economics, Keynes’ animal spirits are the keynote to a different view of the economy — a view that explains the underlying instabilities of capitalism.”

Robert J. Shiller book Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism

George Akerlof and Robert Shiller. Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, 2009, Preface

Understanding , Animals

“Third and finally, poetry originated as a form of vocal music. It began as a performative and auditory medium, linked to music and dance and associated with civic ceremony, religious ritual, and magic. (The earliest poetry almost certainly served a shamanistic function.) Most aboriginal cultures did not distinguish poetry from song because the arts were so interrelated as to be porous. Nor did the classical Greek or Chinese cultures two or three millennia ago differentiate poetry from song”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

10
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

Art , Music , Dance

“Thus, by 1925, both Leninism and Fascism, variants of Marxism, had created political and economic systems that shared singular properties… Both sought order and disciple of entire populations in the service of an exclusivistic party and an ideology that found its origins in classical Marxism… Both created a kind of ‘state capitalism,’ informed by a unitary party, and responsible to a ‘charismatics’ leader.”

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

Source: Marxism, Fascism & Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism, (2008), p. 293

“He adapted the words to the capacity of the Germans, often at the expense of accuracy. He cared more for the substance than the form. He turned the Hebrew shekel into a Silberling, He used popular alliterative phrases as Geld und Gut, Land und Leute, Rath und That, Stecken und Stab, Dornen und Disteln, matt und müde, gäng und gäbe. He avoided foreign terms which rushed in like a flood with the revival of learning, especially in proper names (as Melanchthon for Schwarzerd, Aurifaber for Goldschmid, Oecolampadius for Hausschein, Camerarius for Kammermeister). He enriched the vocabulary with such beautiful words as holdselig, Gottseligkeit.
Erasmus Alber, a contemporary of Luther, called him the German Cicero, who not only reformed religion, but also the German language.
Luther's version is an idiomatic reproduction of the Bible in the very spirit of the Bible. It brings out the whole wealth, force, and beauty of the German language. It is the first German classic, as King James's version is the first English classic. It anticipated the golden age of German literature as represented by Klopstock, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller,—all of them Protestants, and more or less indebted to the Luther-Bible for their style. The best authority in Teutonic philology pronounces his language to be the foundation of the new High German dialect on account of its purity and influence, and the Protestant dialect on account of its freedom which conquered even Roman Catholic authors.”

Philip Schaff (1819–1893) American Calvinist theologian

Notable examples of Luther's renderings of Hebrew and Greek words

Age , Religion , Beauty , Literature

“The instrument of expansion of Classical civilization was a social organization, slavery.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 9, Classical Civilization, p. 270

“Most people in Britain did not enthusiastically engage in wage labor—at least so long as they had an alternative. To make sure that people accepted wage labor, the classical political economists actively advocated measures to deprive people of their traditional means of support.”

Michael Perelman (1939) American economist

Source: The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (2000), p. 2

People , Support

“We need to augment and amend the existing body of classical and neoclassical economic theory to achieve a more realistic picture of economic process.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Herbert A. Simon (1986) in Preface to: Gilad & Kaish (eds.), Handbook of Behavioral Economics, p. xvi.
1980s and later

“Classical poetry counts on people's similarity. It regards idea associations as unequivocal. This is a mistake. In any case, it rests on a fulcrum of idea associations: 'Above the peaks is peace.'... The poet counts on poetic feelings. And what is a poetic feeling? The whole poetry of peace / quiet stands or falls on the reader's ability to feel. Words are not judged here.”

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) German artist

1920s
Source: 'Consistent Poetry Art', Schwitters' contribution to 'Magazine G', No. 3, 1924, ed. Hans Richter; as quoted in I is Style, ed. Siegfried Gohr & Gunda Luyken, (commissioned by Rudi Fuchs, director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), NAI Publishers, Rotterdam 2000, p. 151.

People , Peace , Feeling , Idea

“I can't call them linear narratives, and I can't call them chronological in a traditional, classical sense; I'm sure there's plenty of stuff I borrow more from William Faulkner than William Shakespeare. I just find it funny that at this point, we see a collection of highly charged, highly potent symbols as referring back to a classical aesthetic, because to me they seem deeply connected to the pedestrian actuality of real life.”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Interview with Pitchfork (2006)

Life , Sense

“We are accustomed to talking of church and state, and a whole series of pairs of words that go with them lay and ecclesiastical, secular and religious, spiritual and temporal, and so on. These pairs of words simply do not exist in classical Islamic terminology, because the dichotomy that these words express is unknown. They are used in the modern languages. In Arabic, they borrow the terminology used by Christian Arabs. They are fortunate in having a substantial Christian population using Arabic, and they therefore have a good part of the modern terminology at their disposal, in their own language. In Turkish, Persian, Urdu and other languages of Islam, they had to invent new words.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Bernard Lewis (2006)

Parting

“In science, read, by preference the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern.”

Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) English novelist, poet, playwright, and politician

Caxtoniana: Hints on Mental Culture (1862)

Literature , Science , Reading

“Fanatic secularism is as dangerous to the world as fanatic religion. Love is the heart of all religions; the theme of all classical works of art and literature; the song of all devotees. Scientists know only what love does, not what love is. Love is to human hearts what the sun is to flowers.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

Love , World , Religion , Art

“One thing leads to another, and soon you are searching for answers to basic questions.Another time during lectures on Classical Logic, we were introduced to an “experimentum crucis”. It was illustrated by the deciding experiment of Fizeau on the speed of light in water as compared to its speed in air. Since wave theory predicts that speed in water is less, and corpuscular theory (with point particles) predicts it would be faster, this is supposed to have selected the wave theory is correct. But then how would one accommodate the photoelectric effect? Then it turns out that if the “corpuscle” of light had a finite size, corpuscular theory also predicts lower speed of light in water. But then one can ask how come photoelectric emission being prompt even in feeble light, how could the energy of a photon spread over π(λ/2)2 act as a whole and liberate a single photoelectron! This leads us to question the square of the amplitude being interpreted as the probability of the particle being formed in the immediate vicinity. How do probabilities enter quantum mechanics? Thus the questions (and the quest) go on.”

E. C. George Sudarshan (1931–2018) Indian physicist

in A Glance Back at Five Decades of Scientific Research, published in Particles and Fields: Classical and Quantum, Journal of Physics: Conference Series 87 (2007), IOP Publishing, p. 1-2.

Search , Question , Light , Water

“Transformers is so belabored that it makes Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End seem like a masterpiece of pacing. It makes that "classic" midsummer alien invasion movie, Independence Day, seem like a template for inventive plotting and solid character development. Even by Michael Bay standards, this movie is vapid. Yes, there are plenty of explosions, but those are a dime-a-dozen these days; even Discovery Channel's Mythbusters has them. Transformers isn't clean, big-budget fun; it's clean, big-budget tedium. For Transformers fans, I suppose this is a dream motion picture. For everyone else, it's a nightmare.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=591 of Transformers (2007).
One-and-a-half star reviews

World , Dreams

““True is it indeed, that without an Abiding and Active in us the transitory and sensible is impossible. As the case has been forcibly put in a saying that deserves to become classic, "Our unconditioned universality is the ground of our existence," — its ground, that is, at once its necessary condition and its sufficient reason.””

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Later German Philosophy, p.178

Universe

“Despite efforts to disguise his hatred of Israel in Islamic terms… Khamenei is more influenced by Western-style anti-Semitism than by classical Islam's checkered relations with Jews. His argument about territories becoming "irrevocably Islamic" does not wash, if only because of its inconsistency. He has nothing to say about vast chunks of former Islamic territory, including some that belonged to Iran for millennia, now under Russian rule. Nor is he ready to embark on Jihad to drive the Chinese out of Xinjiang, a Muslim khanate until the late 1940s. Israel, which in terms of territory accounts for one per cent of Saudi Arabia, is a very small fry. Khamenei's shedding of tears for "the sufferings of Palestinian Muslims" are also unconvincing. To start with, not all Palestinians are Muslims. And, if it were only Muslim sufferers who deserved sympathy, why doesn't the "Supreme Guide" beat his chest about the Burmese Rohingya and the Chechens massacred and enchained by Vladimir Putin, not to mention Muslims daily killed by fellow-Muslims across the globe?”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

The Ayatollah's Plan for Israel and Palestine http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6263/khamenei-israel-palestine, Gatestone Institute (July 31, 2015)

Tear , Effort , Suffering

“Of which liberalism does one wish to speak? I distinguish two principal forms of liberalism. For one…liberty is a right; for the other a duty. For one it is a gift; for the other a conquest… One liberalism conceives liberty rooted in the individual, and therefore opposes the individual to the State, a State understood as possessing no intrinsic value—but exclusively serving the well being and the improvement of the individual. The State is seen as a means, not an end. It limits itself to the maintenance of public order, excluding itself from the entirety of spiritual life—which, therefore, remains exclusively a sphere restricted to the individual conscience. That liberalism, historically, is classical liberalism—of English manufacture. It is, we must recognize, a false liberalism, containing only half the truth. It was opposed among us by Mazzini with a criticism, that I maintain, is immortal. But there is another liberalism, that matured in Italian and German thought, that holds entirely absurd this view of the antagonism between the State and the individual.”

Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) Italian neo-Hegelian Idealist philosopher and politician

Che cosa è il fascismo: Discorsi e polemiche (“What is Fascism?”), Florence: Vallecchi, (1925) pp. 42-45, 47-48, 49-51, 56,Origins and Doctrine of Fascism, A. James Gregor, translator and editor, Transaction Publishers, 2003, p. 63

Life , Truth , Falseness

“The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.”

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

Composition as Explanation (1926)

Art

“In the Napoleonic Museum in Arenenberg I was rather impressed just how richly clad in the costume of Antiquity the First Empire in fact was - dressed up even comically with its laurels and eagles and togas. Return to Rome wherever you look, though of course not to the Holy Roman Empire - to Caesar's Rome. But the French Revolution itself had fallen back on more or less genuine or imaginary classical models: Brutus and Tiberius Gracchus and Gaius Gracchus, the Gracchi, consuls and Roman virtues - even these revolutionaries couldn't resolve to start from scratch with something really new.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1957-59.

“The actual heart of quantum mechanics is that the objects in its equations are connected to the observations very differently than the classical counterparts have been.”

Luboš Motl (1973) Czech physicist and translator

https://motls.blogspot.com/2018/09/why-string-theory-is-quantum-mechanics.html
The Reference Frame http://motls.blogspot.com/

Heart

“Today that rarely happens. Most often the songs are used as a relief. They have nothing to do with the film per say. And all look almost the same. Just replace the central characters and a step here and there…choreography remains the same in most cases. So does the beat. We have so many classical dances and folk dances in the country but nobody seems to be using them.”

Waheeda Rehman (1938) Indian actress

Quote, Grace personified: Waheeda Rehman

Dance , Country

“General systems theory deals with the most fundamental concepts and aspects of systems. Many theories dealing with more specific types of systems (e. g., dynamical systems, automata, control systems, game-theoretic systems, among many others) have been under development for quite some time. General systems theory is concerned with the basic issues common to all these specialized treatments. Also, for truly complex phenomena, such as those found predominantly in the social and biological sciences, the specialized descriptions used in classical theories (which are based on special mathematical structures such as differential or difference equations, numerical or abstract algebras, etc.) do not adequately and properly represent the actual events. Either because of this inadequate match between the events and types of descriptions available or because of the pure lack of knowledge, for many truly complex problems one can give only the most general statements, which are qualitative and too often even only verbal. General systems theory is aimed at providing a description and explanation for such complex phenomena.”

Mihajlo D. Mesarovic (1928) Serbian academic

Mihajlo D. Mesarovic and Y. Takahare (1975) General Systems Theory, Mathematical foundations. Academic Press. Cited in: Franz Pichler, Roberto Moreno Diaz (1993. Computer Aided Systems Theory. p. 134

Game , Mathematics , Knowledge , Problem

“There is one quality I find in all the artists I admire most – men like Masaccio, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cézanne. I mean a disturbing element, a distortion, giving evidence of a struggle of some sort... Great Art is not Perfect. Here the disturbing element comes in. It is instructive to know that Rembrandt copied Mantegna, whose art is the extreme opposite of his own. Why did he do so? Because he was conscious that his own art lacked the classical element. He was aware of the opposite, and that makes him greater.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote in 'Conversations with Henri Moore', J.P. Hodin, in 'The Observer', 24 Nov. 1958
1955 - 1970

Men , Art , Perfection

“On the artist, Charley Patton, who changed him: What happened was I was going out on a Saturday night, so I went into my mam’s bedroom, she’s got a double mirror, really kitsch 50s. So I’m in there, doing that, and she’s got an old alarm clock where the radio comes on, but she never learned how to do it properly. And it came on. […] I remember it was ten past three in the afternoon and it was winter, it was getting dark, and it was when the BBC had just started doing Telstar live things from America. It was some station in Memphis - one of those classic names, ‘RK 51’ or whatever. […] On it came and there’s this record. The satellite thing was a bit cloudy and it was a 78 record and there was compression on the radio, so it was this strange kind of musical blur with this voice coming through: Charley Patton. […] On that night I told the bass player of one of the local bands that I’d heard this record and it sounded weird, it sounded like a violin. He said, ‘No, it’s not a violin, it’s a slide guitar.’ I thought, ‘What’s one of them?”

Chris Rea (1951) English singer-songwriter

2017

Music , Learning , Winter , Change

“Dynamic restlessness and concern with time would appear to go with high w Achievement and static "classicism" with low n Achievement, but on closer examination many flaws in the analogy are evident.”

David C. McClelland (1917–1998) American psychological theorist

Source: The Archiving Society, 1961, p. 301

Appearance , Time

“Money talk tends to be confusing. When people talk money, they usually think “wealth”, “costs”, “profit”, “income”, “gold”, “greed”, “time” (as in “time is money”), or something like that. In everyday discourse money symbolises capitalism, for better or worse: money as the life or evil force of the economy. As sings to us in the classical musical Cabaret: “Money makes the world go round… ”. The tune resonates when people exclaim “money” in response to the question what they are after in life, or when they say that everything people do ultimately revolves around money. All this talk is clear enough. The confusion enters when we observe the very same people who are so enthused about money, stubbornly suppress any reference to money when it comes to goods like the love for their partner, parents and children, friendship, science (truth!) and art (beauty!).”

Arjo Klamer (1953) Dutch columnist, economist and politician

Arjo Klamer, and Harry van Dalen. "The double-sidedness of money." Etnofoor 13.2 (2000): 89-103.

Love , Life , Money , Friendship

“If the movements of reflection in classical philosophy could be depicted in the structure of Homer's Odysseus, in which a wandering hero returns home via a thousand false paths across the whole world, in order there to be recognized by his woman, that is, by his "soul," then the reflections of modern thinking in no way still find their way back "home." They either move on the spot in essenceless flurries, drained of experience, or they drift on, like the eternal Jew or the Flying Dutchman, without hope of arriving, through the perpetually alien. … For the modern subject, a "vagabond in existence," there is no longer any return home.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 538

World , Hope , Way , Home

“Finally we should note the basic assumption of the classical laboratory-namely, that nature is neither capricious nor secretive. If nature were capricious, she would tell one observer one thing and another observer a quite different thing… Also nature is not secretive, in the sense that she will not forever hide certain aspects of her being…”

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

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Systems Approach and Its Enemies (1979), p. 57; as cited in: Carolyn Merchant (1982) "Isis' Consciousness Raised", in: Isis, Vol. 73, No. 3. (1982), pp. 398-409

Secret , Nature , Sense

“Marx set out to resolve the contradictions and to correct the errors in classical political economy. In this he thought he had succeeded very well. Judging by the sound and the fury of the controversy surrounding his interpretations, he either succeeded too well or deluded himself to the success of his enterprise.”

David Harvey (1935) British anthropologist

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 2, Production and Distribution, p. 39

Error , Success

“It has always seemed to me that the hard thing to understand is not quantum mechanics, but where classical mechanics comes from (in the sense of how it emerges from a “measurement”).”

Peter Woit (1957) American physicist

Not Even Wrong (blog)

Understanding , Sense

“The Modern Corporation has undermined the preconceptions of classic economic theory as effectively as the quantum undermined classic physics at the beginning of the 20th century.”

Gardiner C. Means (1896–1988) American economist

Source: The Corporate Revolution in America, 1957, p. 287

“Hayek sees that the zero-sum vision is fired by an implacable negative energy. It is not the concrete vision of some real alternative that animates the socialist critic of the capitalist order. It is hostility toward the actual, and in particular toward those who enjoy advantages within it. Hence the belief in equality remains vague and undefined, except negatively. For it is essentially a weapon against the existing order – a way of undermining its claims to legitimacy, by discovering a victim for every form of success. The striving for equality is, in other words, based in ressentiment in Nietzsche’s sense, the state of mind that Max Scheler identified as the principal motive behind the socialist orthodoxy of his day. It is one of the major problems of modern politics, which no classical liberal could possibly solve, how to govern a society in which resentment has acquired the kind of privileged social, intellectual, and political position that we witness today.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"Hayek and conservatism", in Edward Feser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek (2006)

Hostility , Way , Motivation , Problem

“I like looser clothes, which always prompts my mom to say something classic like, 'You have such a darling figure - show it off more!”

Megan Mullally (1958) American actress

Attributed

Moms , Clothes

“The systems view is the emerging contemporary view of organized complexity, one step beyond the Newtonian view of organized simplicity, and two steps beyond the classical world views of divinely ordered or imaginatively envisaged complexity.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 15.

World , Imagination

“This movement between alternative linguistic modes conceived as alternative descriptive protocols is, I would argue, a distinguishing feature of all the great classics of the ‘literature of fact.”

Hayden White (1928–2018) American historian

"The fictions of factual representation"

Literature

“The word addiction is used far too liberally in our society and I shy away from it. If I have any addiction, it would be nicotine. I would say alcohol is more of a compulsive habit for me. I have used different narcotics for roughly 20 years and I have always used them socially, sporadically and usually sparingly. I use cocaine occasionally and sometimes medicinally - before a third show Saturday, a bump of coke can make the difference between a strong performance and just phoning it in - and I've never developed any type of habit, never craved it the next day. I will use hallucinogens a few times a year as well, always in a safe environment. So far as an "early grave," I'm more concerned with quality of life. No sense in having a mint condition classic car if you're afraid to take it out of the garage. I look as sadly at people awash in hand-sanitizer and surgical masks in elevators as they might see me when I'm pouring booze down my head on stage.”

Doug Stanhope (1967) American stand-up comedian, actor, and author

On his drug use. Doug Stanhope interview http://markprindle.com/stanhope-i.htm, MarkPrindle.com, 2007
Miscellaneous

Life , People , Alcohol , Cars

“I did, and still do, think that New Classical Economics has quite a bit in common with the Austrians (so did Robert Lucas, and I am surprised to find that I did not refer to this in the early 1980s, so I was either careless or did not know about it until a bit later).”

David Laidler (1938) Canadian economist

"The 1974 Hayek–Myrdal Nobel Prize", in Hayek: A Collaborative Biography: Part 1 Influences from Mises to Bartley edited by Robert Leeson (2013)

Thinking

“My own prejudices are exactly the opposite of the functionalists’: “If you want to understand function, study structure,” I was supposed to have said in my molecular biology days. (I believe I was sailing at the time.) I think that one should approach these problems at all levels, as was done in molecular biology. Classical genetics is, after all, a black-box subject. The important thing was to combine it with biochemistry. In nature hybrid species are usually sterile, but in science the reverse is often true. Hybrid subjects are often astonishingly fertile, whereas if a scientific discipline remains too pure it usually wilts.”

Francis Crick (1916–2004) British molecular biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist; co-discoverer of the structure of DNA

What Mad Pursuit (1988)

Understanding , Nature , Problem , Thinking

“Classical musicians can sometimes get very hung up on the idea that there's a right way and there's a wrong way. You can see this destroy a lot of players. Jazz musicians have a way of understanding that there are a lot of different ways of doing things. That's what's great about them, they're so friendly. And they are so individualistic - that's why they can accept someone like me.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

The Independent, 03/04/1998
On Classical Music

Way , Idea , Understanding

“My desire to work is not stimulated by the classical proportions of Greek architecture, but by functional silos and hangars... The confusion of places, cluttered with art and culture chokes my inspiration. What stimulates and interests me is the natural noise of a busy city, and the practical lay-out of a harbor or factory which has come into being without consideration of any aesthetic principles.”

Fritz Wotruba (1907–1975) Austrian sculptor (23 April 1907, Vienna – 28 August 1975, Vienna)

Quote from 'Private Notebooks of Fritz Wotruba'; transl. Peter Foges & Haakon Chevalier – Neuchatel, Editions du Griffion, 1961.

Art , Business , Nature

“As a Macedonian [Philip] was looked down upon by the more refined Athenians, but they shared the same Hellenistic culture. How deep this went is evident in aesthetically the least spectacular, but politically the most explosive, of the finds in Vergina. In the Great Tumulus above Philip's tombs, which was raised by the invading Galatians in 274 BC, the archaeologists found fragments of no fewer than seventy-five funeral monuments, or stelai. The names on these were entirely Greek, save two which appeared to be Hellenised versions of Thracian and Phoenician names. The implication is that Philip's Macedonia was thoroughly Hellenised, an outpost of classical Greek culture.”

Robert Fox

The Inner Sea: The Mediterranean and its People, (Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 1991) pp. 229-230

Appearance

“If it weren’t for the masters we wouldn’t have audiences for Indian classical music across the world. As for taking their mission forward, we have a long way to go.”

Zakir Hussain (musician) (1951) Indian tabla player, musical producer, film actor and composer

Quote, I've never wanted to fit in Abbaji's shoes: Ustad Zakir Hussain

World , Music , Way

“I'm really concerned about the quality of education in the United States. I think it's going down, and I don't think we spend enough money on it. It's unhealthy for our society that we remove ourselves more and more every day from books, from reading, from writing. All areas of education need more emphasis. I think we're a bit lazy here in America. I believe in the ideal of the classic liberal education, and I also think athletics are very important to the education of young people.”

Tommy Lee Jones (1946) American actor and film director

Interview interview (1995)

Money , People , Books , Education

“A. D. Hall's (1962) classic account of the methodology was based on his experience with the Bell Telephone Laboratories. Hall sees systems as existing in hierarchies. In systems engineering, plans to achieve a general objective must similarly be arranged in a hierarchy, with the systems engineer ensuring the internal consistency and integration of the plans, The methodology itself ensures the optimization of the system of concern with respect to its objectives. This requires a number of steps, the most important being problem definition, choosing objectives, systems synthesis, systems analysis, systems selection, system development, and current engineering. With Hall, the system of concern is usually a physical entity.”

Mike Jackson (1951) systems scientist

Michael C. Jackson (1992) Systems Methodology for the Management Sciences. p. 74; About A.D. Hall (1962)

Optimism , Problem

“kummel and have deep conversations about Plato and Kant while listening to classical music. Or she would spend the entire morning in the bathtub, with bubble-bath up to her chin, reading Proust. If you wanted to talk to her you had to do it in the bathroom.”

Joan Vollmer (1923–1951) Common-law wife of William S. Burroughs

Joan's idea of a good time was to go to Child's at 110th Street and Broadway and sip
About

Music , Reading

“I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horror of sordid passion and — if he is lucky enough — know the love of an honest woman.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

Lecture at Oxford as quoted in Time (15 December 1961).
General sources

Love , Travel , Passion , Reading

“Fortunately, the less you have to rely on art materials – what are considered classic art materials which are all overpriced anyway – the more you can rely on materials at large in the culture and the more you should rely on them. The more free you are because you're not tied down to a higher-priced set of materials. That's the advantage of getting out in to the streets. I find that work I'm interested in now is made out of things which have been discarded by people – metals and things which I find in vacant lots. I don't want all of it. I want only certain kinds for certain purposes. But this is of interest to me now, just so I won't get into a trap where I have to work and continue with more and more expensive materials.”

Carl Andre (1935) American artist

Source: Artists talks 1969 – 1977, p. 25

People , Art

“For his contemporaries, Racine was a romantic, but for every age he is classical, that is to say, he is faultless.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

13 January 1857 (p. 337)
1831 - 1863, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)

Age

““I feel no moral compunction in the slightest at my so-called crime. If a man cannot retain control of his own body, then he deserves to lose it. I have observed, during a long and varied lifetime, that men will give their bodies to any rogue who asks, and will enslave their minds to the first voice that commands them to obey. This is why the vast majority of men cannot keep even their natural birthright of a mind and body, but choose instead to rid themselves of those embarrassing emblems of freedom.”
“That,” Detective Urdorf said, “is the classic apologia of the criminal.”
“That which you call a crime when one man does it,” Kraggash said, “you call government when many men do it. Personally, I fail to see the distinction; and failing to see it, I refuse to live by it.””

Robert Sheckley book Mindswap

Source: Mindswap (1966), Chapter 30 (pp. 141-142)

Men , Feeling , Nature , Freedom

“I want to move away from complexity. I've done my time as far as virtuosity and piles of notes are concerned. It's what puts me off a lot of contemporary classical music - there are so many notes. In fact, I think I'm moving away from classical music altogether. I'm not sure that in 10 years' time I'll be playing it at all.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

The Daily Telegraph, 18/11/2003
Musician's life

Music , Thinking , Time

“My dances were not like today’s, which have progressed with an Indian and Western combination or fusion which has become repetitive. You cannot tell one dance from the other. Everyone wants to be Michael Jackson. But I like some of them like that ‘Radha kaise na jale’ from Lagaan. I like classical stuff.”

Vyjayanthimala (1936) Indian actress, politician & dancer

Why Vyjayanthimala has 'nothing to say' about today's heroines

Dance

“I have been careful not to use either of the terms, 'emotional' or 'affective'. I have been equally careful not to invoke the notion of 'cognition'. The classic distinction which separates these two constructs has, in the manner of most classic distinctions that once were useful, become a barrier to sensitive psychological inquiry. When one so divides the experience of man, it becomes difficult to make the most of the holistic aspirations that may infuse the science of psychology with new life, and may replace the classicism now implicit even in the most 'behaviouristic' research.”

George Kelly (psychologist) (1905–1967) American psychologist and therapist

George A. Kelly, "Humanistic methodology in psychological research," In: B Maher (ed), Clinical Psychology and Personality: the Selected Papers of George Kelly, Wiley. 1969. p. 140.

Life , Science

“The classical mechanics had envisaged the world constructed of matter and radiation, the matter consisting of atoms and the radiation of waves. Planck's theory called for an atomicity of radiation similar to that which was so well established for matter. It supposed that radiation was not discharged from matter in a steady stream like water from a hose, but rather like lead from a machine-gun; it came off in separate chunks which Planck called quanta. This… carried tremendous philosophical consequences.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

World , Water

“Stalin, in turn, transformed Marxism into a rationale for national socialism… Leon Trotsky was equally quick to condemn the advocacy of socialism in one country, a commitment which further eroded classical Marxism.”

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

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 359

Country

Quotes about classic page 5

Quotes about classic
page 5