Quotes about closing
page 24

“I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote Search. There was no carefully designed work plan. There was no theory that I was out to prove. I went out and talked to genuinely smart, remarkably interesting, first-rate people. I had an infinite travel budget that allowed me to fly first class and stay at top-notch hotels and a license from McKinsey to talk to as many cool people as I could all around the United States and the world.
I went to see Karl Weick, who had totally influenced my life. I had read his work a thousand times, and I'd never met him. I went to Oslo to talk with Einar Thorsrud, who had studied empowerment on oil tankers. I went to the Tavistock Institute in London, where the leading thinkers on organizational development were looking at why people work together effectively in team configurations under certain circumstances.
Word of the meeting got back to McKinsey USA, and I was invited to give a presentation to the top management of PepsiCo… The time was drawing near for the Pepsi presentation to take place. One morning at about 6, I sat down at my desk overlooking the San Francisco Bay from the 48th floor of the Bank of America Tower, and I closed my eyes. Then I leaned forward, and I wrote down eight things on a pad of paper. Those eight things haven't changed since that moment. They were the eight basic principles of Search.”

Tom Peters (1942) American writer on business management practices

Tom Peters (2001) "Tom Peters's True Confessions" in Fast Company, December 2001 ( online http://www.fastcompany.com/44077/tom-peterss-true-confessions, Nov 31, 2001).

Life, People, World, Travel

“A breakdown of management into its basic functions — development, production and marketing — revealed that the character of the functions, their chronological sequence, the closeness with which they had to be integrated and their relative importance to the success and survival of the business, all depended upon the system of techniques in the firm concerned.”

Joan Woodward (1916–1971) British sociologist

Source: Management and technology, Problems of Progress Industry, 1958, p. 21-22

Business, Success, Dependency

“I look out the window sometimes to seek the color of the shadows and the different greens in the trees, but when I get ready to paint I just close my eyes and imagine a scene.”

Grandma Moses (1860–1961) American artist

As quoted in TIME magazine, Vol. 52 (1948)

Color, Imagination, Tree, Painting

“Enjoy most: the prospect of having an impact on the public debate. Irritating liberals is a close second.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

Asked "What do you enjoy most about your life as a best-selling author and columnist?"
2006, Human Events interview (2006)

“The night will close the door & fasten my anchor within the veil and I shall go away to sleep.”

Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661) Scottish Reformed theologian

Letter 333
Letters of Samuel Rutherford (Andrew Bonar)

Sleep, Night

“It was abundantly clear from his letters that, virtually to the end, he remained deeply interested in national and world events. Yet he never ceased to engage in self-deprecating humor. I have a file containing a decade of correspondence with my dear friend. It is a file that I will keep. Max's death on April 19 was not unexpected and I am sure he would have viewed it as merciful. At the moving funeral service at Fort Meyer, Ambassador Philip Bonsal, a respected diplomat and longtime friend of the Taylors', spoke eloquently of General Taylor's "example", and correctly said that his friendship would remain a constant treasure in the lives of all of us who knew him. His younger son Tom's superb tribute brought tears to the eyes of most of us. He emphasized the closeness of the Taylor family- a closeness not often found in the lives of the world's great leaders. It typifies the mind and spirit that I was privileged to know. Maxwell Taylor's place in history will be a large one.”

Lewis F. Powell, Jr. (1907–1998) American judge

As quoted in General Maxwell Taylor: The Sword and the Pen (1989) by John Martin Taylor, p. xiv.
1980s

Death, Friendship, World, Family

“A man can be aroused to anger as easily as he is aroused to rut. The two emotions are closely linked. Anger and lust. So the warrior is aroused in battle and fights to dominate.”

David Gemmell book Quest for Lost Heroes

Source: Drenai series, Quest for Lost Heroes, Ch. 11

Fight, Anger

“At the same time we would most like to run the film back and see how the sanctuaries close again and the lights go out and the great powers of nature are once again met with deserved reverence. One can fell an oak in twenty seconds; but in order to become what it now is, it grew for a century.... Progress is but a word without sense, and the cow, which keeps the world alive, will not move faster than three kilometers per hour in the future, either.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote, 1950, in: Fernand Léger - The Later Years, catalogue ed. Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 15
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1950's

World, Nature, Sense, Light

“In sculpture the projection of the fasciculi must be accentuated, the foreshortening forced, the hollows deepened; sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump, not of clear, well-smoothed, unmodelled figures. Ignorant people, when they see close-knitted true surfaces, say that 'it is not finished.' No notion is falser than that of finish unless it be that of elegance; by means of these two ideas people would kill our art. The way to obtain solidity and life is by work carried out to the fullest, not in the direction of achievement and of copying détails, but in that of truth in the successive schemes. The public, perverted by académie préjudices, confounds art with neatness. The simplicity of the 'École' is a painted cardboard ideal, A cast from life is a copy, the exactest possible copy, and yet it has neither motion nor eloquence. Art intervenes to exaggerate certain surfaces, and also to fine down others. In sculpture everything depends upon the way in which the modelling is carried out with a constant thought of the main line of the scheme, upon the rendering of the hollows, of the projections and of their connections; thus it is that one may get fine lights, and especially fine shadows that are not opaque. Everything should be emphasised according to the accent that it is desired to render, and the degree of amplification is personal, according to the tact and the temperament of each sculptor; and for this reason there is no transmissible process, no studio recipe, but only a true law. I see it in the antique and in Michael Angelo. To work by the profiles, in depth not by surfaces, always thinking of the few geometrical forms from which all nature proceeds, and to make these eternal forms perceptible in the individual case of the object studied, that is my criterion. That is not idealism, it is a part of the handicraft. My ideas have nothing to do with it but for that method; my Danaids and my Dante figures would be weak, bad things. From the large design that I get your mind deduces ideas.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 61-63

Life, People, Truth, Law

“While I am certainly not asking you to close your eyes to the experiences of earlier generations, I want to advise you not to conform too soon and to resist the pressure of practical necessity. Free imagination is the inestimable prerogative of youth and it must be cherished and guarded as a treasure.”

Felix Bloch

In his Nobel Prize Banquet Speech http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1952/bloch-speech.html, December 10, 1952.

Youth, Imagination

“The administration, through senior Air Force officials, wants the U. S. to achieve military supremacy in outer space. Dominating all earth from outer space will have an out-of-world price tag, perhaps more than $1 trillion.A question: Why reach for the stars with guns in our hands? Are there weapons of mass destruction on Mars?Yesterday 28 Members of Congress signed on to H. R. 2420, a bill to stop the weaponization of space, urging the President to sign an international treaty to ban such weapons. If we work together towards creating peace on earth, we would not bring war to the high heavens.While some fantasize about being "masters of the universe," there are 45 million Americans without health insurance. Corporations are reneging on pension obligations. Social Security is under attack. We are headed towards a $400 billion annual budget deficit, a $600 billion trade deficit, an $8 trillion national debt. The cost of the war in Iraq is over $200 billion. While we build new bases in Iraq, we close them in the United States.Earth to Washington, D. C. Earth to Washington, D. C. D. C., call home.”

Dennis Kucinich (1946) Ohio politician

Speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, Congressional Record (19 May 2005) http://frwebgate1.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/waisgate.cgi?WAISdocID=239723145903+0+0+0&WAISaction=retrieve.

War, Health, World, Peace

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

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

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

Life, War, World, Feeling

“Humor has been the balm of my life, but it's been reserved for those close to me, not part of the public Lana.”

Lana Turner (1921–1995) American actress

On the role of humor in her personal life, p. 10.
Autobiography

Life, Parting

“He painted till the lamps grew dim, his hand
Scarce conscious what it wrought; at length his lids
Closed in a heavy slumber, and he dream'd
That a fair creature came and kissed his brow,
And bade him follow her: he knew the look,
And rose. Awakening, he found himself
Kneeling before the portrait:—'twas so fair
He deemed it lived, and press'd his burning lips
To the sweet mouth; his soul pass'd in that kiss,—
Young Guido died beside his masterpiece!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Painter. from The London Literary Gazette: 15th November 1823 Poetic Sketches. Fourth Series. Sketch I.
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Soul, Kiss, Painting

“As graduation neared, neither my classmates nor I could know, of course, that World War II was in the offing. It was destined to expose us to trying and often tragic events. My roommate, Billy Hulse, a flier, disappeared on a training mission over the Great Lakes, his body never recovered. A close friend, Frank Oliver, died in the fighting in Normandy soon after the invasion. Buist Dowling killed in Normandy while leading a patrol. One of the better football players, Jock Clifford, killed as a regimental commander on Okinawa. Bill Priestly, aide to the high commissioner of the Philippines, electing to stay when the fighting started on the islands, also killed. Those and more.”

William Westmoreland book A Soldier Reports

Source: A Soldier Reports (1976), p. 13.

War, World, Fight, Football

“When a woman responds to mistreatment by protesting "I'm a human being!" or "I want to be treated with respect, not like some animal," what is she suggesting about the acceptable ways of treating other animals? Perhaps because comparisons between women and nonhuman animals so often entail sexism, many women are anxious to distance themselves from other animals. Feminists, especially, recognize that negative "animal" imagery has advanced women's oppression. However, if our treatment and view of other animals became caring, respectful, and just, nonhuman-animal metaphors would quickly lose all power to demean. Few women have confronted how closely they mirror patriarchal oppressors when they too participate in other species' denigration. Women who avoid acknowledging that they are animals closely resemble men who prefer to ignore that women are human.”

Joan Dunayer American activist

" Sexist Words, Speciesist Roots https://books.google.it/books?id=iJSuTkFlpyIC&pg=PA11", in Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, edited by Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 19.

Women, Men, Way, Animals

“A sad event and worthy of Memory,
Who draws forth men from their (closed) sepulchres,
Befell that piteous maid, and pitiful
Who, after she was dead was (crowned) queen.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

O caso triste, e dino da memória,
Que do sepulcro os homens desenterra,
Aconteceu da mísera e mesquinha
Que depois de ser morta foi Rainha.

Stanza 118, lines 5–8 (tr. Ezra Pound); of Inês de Castro.
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto III

Men, Sadness, Memory, Drawing

“Wild Things is lurid trash, with a plot so twisted they're still explaining it during the closing titles. It's like a three-way collision between a softcore sex film, a soap opera and a B-grade noir. I liked it. Movies such as this either entertain or offend audiences; there's no neutral ground. Either you're a connoisseur of melodramatic comic vulgarity, or you're not. You know who you are. I don't want to get any postcards telling me this movie is in bad taste. I'm warning you: It is in bad taste. Bad taste elevated to the level of demented sleaze.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/wild-things-1998 of Wild Things (20 March 1998) Reviews, Three star reviews

Sex, Way

“the hollow voice
Of that old crone, the only living sound;
Her face, on which mortality has writ
Its closing, with the wan and bony hand,
Raised like a spectre's—and yourself the while,
Cold from the midnight chill, and white with fear,
Your large blue eyes darker and larger grown
With terror's chain'd attention, and your breath
Suppress'd for very earnestness.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Ancestress (Spoken by Jaromir to Bertha)
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)

Fear

“I cannot be grasped in the here and now. For I reside just as much with the dead as with the unborn. Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual. But not nearly close enough. The end has met the beginning.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

German original version: Diesseitig bin ich gar nicht fassbar. Denn ich wohne grad so gut bei den Toten, wie bei den Ungeborenen. Etwas näher dem Herzen der Schöpfung als üblich. Und noch lange nicht nahe genug.
Quote from Exhibition catalogue, Galerie Goltz, Munich, published in the gallery's house journal Der Ararat (May 1920). These words were later used as Klee's epitaph in 1940.
Variant translation: I cannot be understood at all on this earth. For I live as much with the dead as with the unborn. Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual. But not nearly close enough.
As quoted in Paul Klee: His Work and Thought (1991) by Marcel Franciscono, p. 5
1916 - 1920

Heart, Dead

“Logical empiricism holds the view, notwithstanding some its assertions, that the forms of knowledge and consequently the relations of man to nature and to other men never change. According to rationalism, too, all subjective and objective potentialities are rooted in insights which the individual already possesses, but rationality uses existing objects as well as the active inner striving and ideas of man to construct standards for the future. In this regard, it is not so closely associated with the present order as is empiricism.”

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) German philosopher and sociologist

Source: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 148.

Men, Idea, Nature, Knowledge

“Get close to grass and you’ll see a star.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

“Star in the Grass,” p. 46
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: "Forgotten Place”

Star, Grass

“Twenty years ago I had been invited to a seminar on Hurdles To Secularism… There were four or five Muslim participants present in that seminar…. They were invited to speak next. But they all smiled and said that they had nothing to add to what their ‘Hindu brethren’ had already said so ‘loudly and so lucidly’. And then all of a sudden I saw some fireworks from the same silent and satisfied Islamic fraternity. They had all stood up, shaking with uncontrollable rage, and were shouting at the same time, “He is lying!” They were pointing their fingers at the gentleman who had been invited to speak by the president, and who had said only a few sentences…. This was the late Hamid Dalwai. I had heard of him. But this was the first time I saw him. He was a tall man with a slight stoop, a smiling face, and a rather relaxed self-possession. He was saying, “All that has been said about Hindu communalism today is nothing new. We have heard it for the nth time. The intention of the working paper of this seminar, however, was to highlight for the first time what has so far been ignored by all progressive people who swear by secularism. What I want to expose today is Muslim communalism which has already divided the motherland, and which is still strong enough to poison our body-politic…”
It was at this point that the Muslim gentlemen had stood up and started shouting… All hell now broke loose as the Islamic fraternity stood up again, and started shouting that they had not come to the seminar to be insulted by “a hired hoodlum of the RSS fascists”. JP could restrain them no more, and declared the proceedings closed with a note of anguish in his voice.”

Hamid Dalwai (1932–1977) Indian social reformer, thinker and writer

About Hamid Dalwai at a seminar. Goel, S. R. (1994). Defence of Hindu society.
About

People, Smile, Communication, Lying

“Wisdom … never closes her school of thought but always opens her doors to those who thirst for the sweet water of discourse, and pouring on them an unstinted stream of undiluted doctrine, persuades them to be drunken with the drunkenness which is soberness itself.”

Philo (-15–45 BC) Roman philosopher

13.
Every Good Man is Free

Wisdom, School, Water

“We have heard from the opposite Bench several very animated appeals to this House, and several constitutional lectures as to our duties. The noble Earl the late Foreign Secretary (the Earl of Clarendon) went so far, as I understood him, as to tell us that we must watch public opinion more closely, and pay greater attention to the majorities in the other House of Parliament. My Lords, it occurs to me to ask the noble Earl whether he has considered for what purpose this House exists, and whether he would be willing to go through the humiliation of being a mere echo and supple tool of the other House in order to secure for himself the luxury of mock legislation? I agree with my noble Friend the noble Earl (the Earl of Derby) below me that it were better not to be than submit to such a slavery.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1868/jun/26/debate-resumed-second-night in the House of Lords (26 June 1868) 1860s

Animals, Housing

“For when I construct lines and colour combinations on a flat surface, it is with the aim of portraying 'universally beauty' as consciously as possible. Nature (or that which I see) inspires me, provides me – as it does every painter – with the emotion by which I am moved to create something, but I want to approach the truth as closely as possible, abstracting everything until I come to the foundation – still only an outward foundation! – of things. It is for me a clear truth that one does not want to say something 'specific', it is then that one says what is most specific: the truth (which is of great universality).”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in a letter to H. P. Bremmer, Paris 29 January 1914; ; as cited in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 81
1910's

Truth, Beauty, Nature, Universe

“How are men and women to think about their maleness and their femaleness in this twentieth century, in which so many of our old ideas must be made new? Have we over-domesticated men, denied their natural adventurousness, tied them down to machines that are after all only glorified spindles and looms, mortars and pestles and digging sticks, all of which were once women's work? Have we cut women off from their natural closeness to their children, taught them to look for a job instead of the touch of a child's hand, for status in a competitive world rather than a unique place by a glowing hearth? In educating women like men, have we done something disastrous to both men and women alike, or have we only taken one further step in the recurrent task of building more and better on our original human nature?”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1940s, Male and Female (1949), p. 1; Start of first chapter entitled "The Significance of the Questions We Ask"

Women, Men, Children, World

“For me, abstraction is real, probably more real than nature. I'll go further and say that abstraction is nearer my heart. I prefer to see with closed eyes.”

Josef Albers (1888–1976) German-American artist and educator

Quoted in: Arts/Canada, Vol. 23 (1966), p. 46

Nature, Heart

“Men and women can never be close. They can hardly speak to one another in the same language. But are compelled, forever, to try, and therefore even in defeat there is no peace.”

Margaret Drabble book The Middle Ground

The Middle Ground (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980) p. 236

Women, Men, Peace

“I realized, then, that I had stood without intending to. Flight reaction, I said to myself. Instinctive. Upon experiencing close adversaries. The lizard part of the brain.”

Philip K. Dick The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

Page 158
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)

Parting

“Every morning during certain seasons of the year, the thrushes and blackbirds on all the lawns throughout the country draw out of their holes an astonishing number of worms; and this they could not do, unless they lay close to the surface.”

Charles Darwin book The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms

Source: The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (1881), Chapter 1: Habits of Worms, p. 16. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=31&itemID=F1357&viewtype=image

Drawing, Country, Season

“In so far as gaining citizenship rights and opportunities for the unfettered development of the African people, who will deny that thirty years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately and modestly at a closed and barred door?”

Albert Lutuli (1898–1967) South African politician

The Road to Freedom is via the Cross (1952)

Life, People

“I say this as an opponent of nuclear power, if I had my way, we would close down every nuclear power plant in this country as soon as we could, safely, but the problem is we have low-level waste. And to turn our backs on that problem and ignore that problem and to say that it will go away is wrong. The environmental debate today should be what is the safest way of disposing of low-level radioactive waste, and I would argue strongly that the passage of this legislation and depositing it in a safer location in Texas is the direction that we should go.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Speaking at the House of Representatives on the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact, in 7 October 1997. https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/1997/10/7/house-section/article/h8512-1?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22%5C%22all+that+Texas+and+Maine+and+Vermont+are+asking+for+today%5C%22%22%5D%7D&r=1 1990s

Way, Problem, Country

“The great fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake. The sun rose out of it, the day began there; it was like an open door that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you would soon be free.”

Willa Cather book The Professor's House

Book I, Ch. 1
The Professor's thoughts on Lake Michigan
The Professor's House (1925)

Life, Sun

“We live in and by the law. It makes us what we are: citizens and employees and doctors and spouses and people who own things. It is sword, shield, and menace: we insist on our wage, or refuse to pay our rent, or are forced to forfeit penalties, or are closed up in jail, all in the name of what our abstract and ethereal sovereign, the law, has decreed. And we argue about what it has decreed, even when the books that are supposed to record its commands and directions are silent; we act then as if law had muttered its doom, too low to be heard distinctly. We are subjects of law's empire, liegemen to its methods and ideals, bound in spirit while we debate what we must therefore do.”

Ronald Dworkin Law's Empire

Law's Empire (1986), Preface

People, Books, Law, Penalty

“In early 1981 one of the most important moments in my life occurred. I entered a vivisection lab … In one of the cages, I saw a young Alaskan malamute … The dog tried to lick my face through the bars. Maybe he thought I had come to save him. I saw the infected stitches in the belly, oozing pus and blood. I saw the filthy, encrusted tube that was draining fluid out of his stomach. And as I held him, I saw the rotted stitches start to come apart and his guts start to spill out. As gently as I could, I let him down onto the floor of the cage and placed my hand on him, trying to comfort him in those last few moments of his life. I was still holding him when at last he took his final struggling breaths and died. It seemed to take a lifetime. I was close to tears as I looked at the body, and I thought, this isn’t science — this is madness. Standing there, looking at that gentle animal lying dead in a bloody cage, I made a promise to him and to myself, that I would never forget him, that I would keep on fighting vivisection until it was ended.”

Chris DeRose (1948) American actor and activist

"Chris DeRose: Vegan Easy Challenge Ambassador", interview with VeganEasy.org (2011) https://web.archive.org/web/20111012130026/http://veganeasy.org/Chris-DeRose.

Life, Dogs, Lying, Tear

“We cannot fathom why people would stand across the street, easily a hundred feet away, when they could be so close, near us.
‘Suckers.’ I tell Toph, thumbing toward those watching from so far away. It is important, I feel, that the boy knows what suckers look like.”

Dave Eggers (1970) memoirist, novelist, short story writer, editor, publisher

A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius (2000)

People, Feeling, Boy

“The great problems of the world - social, political, economic and theological - do not concern me in the slightest…If all the Armenians were to be killed tomorrow and if half of Russia were to starve to death the day after, it would not matter to me in the least. What concerns me alone is myself and the interests of a few close friends.”

George Jean Nathan (1882–1958) American drama critic and magazine editor

Living Authors, H. W. Wilson (1932)

Death, World, Problem

“This is not the way it has been done. We would never surprise each other … It's not to say that there's not important information that we could discuss or would be discussed in secret or closed session, but I'm astounded by this. I don't really know what the tenor of this is, what is the justification for it and why this extreme approach was used.”

Trent Lott (1941) United States Senator from Mississippi

On the closure of the Senate to discuss intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq (1 November 2005), as quoted in The Associated Press (1 November 2005).
2000s

Secret, Way

“Teller’s irascible behavior forced him out of the mainstream but not out of the lab, thanks to Oppenheimer who didn’t think we should be without geniuses, even those whose enormous egos caused serious friction. As bright and innovative as Teller was, his overall performance during the war left a lot to be desired. He was not content to be part of a team effort (like yours truly) and preferred to work off to the side on new and different and sometime pretty far-out ideas (like yours truly). This caused considerable resentment. After all there was a war going on and most people thought future nuclear weapon concepts should be worked on sometime in the future, after we had finished our primary assignment. Edward’s behavior was like a colonel on a planning staff during a military campaign who tells his commanding general that he’d like to plan for the next war. That would be the end of the colonel, who would be demoted and shipped off to some base in the Aleutian Islands.
[5]Oppenheimer, however, realized that guys like Teller, despite their shortcomings, were necessary to have around; one never knows when a guy like that can be worth his weight in gold, which to the best of my recollection never happened with Teller. So an arrangement was worked out where Teller and a handful of like-minded theoretical physicists, willing to put up with his domineering ways, formed a small group dedicated to doing what they pleased, realizing their efforts stood precious little chance of impacting on the project.
[5]The one idea dearest to Teller’s heart was the H-bomb. He and a couple of his cronies applied themselves to devising various schemes on designing such a weapon. All of them turned out to be impractical and most of them unworkable. Which never slowed him down in the slightest for reasons we’ll never know nor will he. I’ve known Edward for a very long time and although I’ve never known him well, one thing about him became clear to me from the very beginning: he was a creature possessed. By what? Again, who knows? Many, if not most, who have read about his life and what he has done, plus those who have known him directly and observed him close at hand and at great length, would say by Satan (which has been said all over the world about me). I wouldn’t go along with that and although I have seen Teller give some of the most impassioned statements morally defending his positions, some of which I have found deeply moving and thoroughly convincing, I would not say that the God I’ve been told exists has had a tight hold on him. If Edward has been possessed by anyone it’s been himself. I’d say the same for myself, and I’ve given you some reasons why, but hardly all of them. I don’t know all of them and would be ashamed to tell you if I did.”

Samuel T. Cohen (1921–2010) American physicist

F*** You! Mr. President: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb (2006)

Life, God, War, People

“One cannot look too closely at and weigh in too golden scales the acts of men hot in their political excitement.”

Henry Hawkins, 1st Baron Brampton (1817–1907) British judge

Ex parte Castioni (1890), 60 L. J. Rep. (N. S.) Mag. Cas. 33.

Men

“Still got your eyes closed, Rach?' she called. 'You should have stayed in Brisbane where it's safe!”

Susan Ruth Johnson (1959)

Page 346.
Hungry Ghosts (1996)

“One of the century’s most famous intellectual pronouncements comes at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” Reading this for the first time I was puzzled and continued to be throughout much of the essay, since despite the work’s persuasive logic and eloquence there was a lot that eluded me, and I always came back to grapple vainly with the initial hypothesis, unable to deal with the premise that anyone should come close to wishing to kill himself in the first place. A later short novel, The Fall, I admired with reservations; the guilt and self-condemnation of the lawyer-narrator, gloomily spinning out his monologue in an Amsterdam bar, seemed a touch clamorous and excessive, but at the time of my reading I was unable to perceive that the lawyer was behaving very much like a man in the throes of clinical depression. Such was my innocence of the very existence of this disease.”

William Styron book Darkness Visible

Source: Darkness Visible (1990), II

Life, Disease, Question, Problem

“I could not get my feelings straight. I did not believe in evil as an active force, only as a matter of viewpoint, yet I had seen enough to make me question my philosophy. If the Lady were not evil incarnate, then she was as close as made no difference.”

Glen Cook The Black Company

Source: The Black Company (1984), Chapter 6, “Lady” (p. 205)

Feeling, Question, Evil

“No one can be a true mystic who is not thoroughly versed in the ways of nature. The more nature is attracted by spiritual favors, the more it is inclined to make itself the master of them. Nature always mingles its own spirit with the spirit of God. unless we keep a close watch over it, it will always remain so. Natures most subtle snare is to lead us to confuse what is licit with what is expedient. When we doubt the inspiration of an impulse, whether from grace or nature, we should picture a similar object which is without doubt acceptable to nature. If this representation pleases us, it is a sign that the first inclination also comes from nature and is consequently to be rejected.”

John of St. Samson (1571–1636)

From, Light on Carmel: An Anthology from the Works of Brother John of Saint Samson, O.Carm.

God, Way, Nature

“In most British enterprises senior executives worked closely in the same office building, located in or near the largest plant, having almost daily personal contact with, and thus directly supervising middle and often lower-level managers. Such enterprises had no need for the detailed organization charts and manuals that had come into common use in large American and German firms before 1914. In these British companies, selection to senior positions and to the board depended as much on personal ties as on managerial competence. The founders and their heirs continued to have a significant influence on top-level decision-making even after their holdings in the enterprise were diminished.”

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (1918–2007) American historian

Source: The Visible Hand (1977), p. 242.

Decision, Dependency, Personality

“It’s time for us to wake up and face the truth, that we are a captive species on a prison planet, but the fact that we are so close to understanding the science of our imprisonment means that we are also just beginning to touch the key that locks the door, and if we are strong, if we defy and defeat the sinister forces that rule us now, we have a chance at last to unlock this place and do what we are able to do, that we are richly capable of doing, that those who love us—and they are out there, too—have hoped and sought that we should do from time immemorial.”

Whitley Strieber (1945) American writer

Whitley Strieber The Danger of Being Right http://www.unknowncountry.com/journal/?id=190 unknowncountry.com June 16, 2016

Love, Truth, Hope, Understanding

“This is a war," Leamas replied. "It's graphic and unpleasant because it's fought on a tiny scale, at close range; fought with a wastage of innocent life sometimes, I admit. But it's nothing, nothing at all beside other wars – the last or the next.”

John le Carré (1931) British novelist and spy

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963)

Life, War

“I am late with the new Doris Lessing [The Golden Notebook]. I make no apology: it has taken me a long time to read (568 pages of close print) and at the end of it all I feel cheated. This talented writer has attempted an experiment which has failed, essayed a scale which is beyond her…. This is a book of revolt – political, social, sexual. Anna [the heroine] became a Communist in South Africa, seeing in Communism a "moral energy" not to be found in other creeds or in the long-entrenched privileged class. Anna is also concerned with being a "free woman" – rebelling against traditional male dominance – and with achieving maximal erotic fulfilment…. There is no doubt about the great moral virtues here – intelligence, honesty, integrity – but it is the aesthetic virtues that seem to be lacking. The characters do not really interest us: when we have dialogue it is strangely unnatural … Mrs Lessing’s old singleness of vision, her strength as a writer, is not to be found here. [Review in the English provincial newspaper the Yorkshire Post, 1962]”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

People, Joseph Conrad, Doris Lessing

Books, Feeling, Intelligence, Communication

“All these actions will require sacrifice on the part of every one of us if we are to get over this dangerous period without intolerable risk. The simplest form of this sacrifice would be the payment of more taxes to support a larger defense budget. It is difficult to estimate how much money will be required to close the gap of our inferiority at the maximum possible rate, but I would suggest that we are talking in terms of a budget between $50 and $55 billion a year for the next five years. Once the gap is closed, subsequent budgets will not need be so high. This requirement for a bigger budget will exist regardless of any transitory shift in Soviet attitude and behavior. There is no living with communism as an inferior.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: The Uncertain Trumpet (1960), p. 178-179

Money, Behavior, Communication, Support

“A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light.
And closed them beneath the kisses of Night.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

The Sensitive Plant http://www.kalliope.org/digt.pl?longdid=shelley2003060601 (1820), Pt. I, st. 1

Kiss, Light, Night

“Prices perform three functions in organizing economic activity: first, they transmit information; second, they provide an incentive to adopt those methods of production that are least costly and thereby use available resources for the most highly valued pur poses; third, they determine who gets how much of the product—the distribution of income. These three functions are closely in terrelated.”

Milton Friedman book Free to Choose

Source: Free to Choose (1980), Ch. 1 "The Power of the Market", p. 14

“Schwartz closed his eyes. “My grandmother told me never to get mixed up with economists. Their thinking is muddy and their breath is bad, she said. She also warned me against Yale men. Perverts of the intellect, she called them. So here I am cooped up on an interstellar ship with five hundred alien creatures and one fellow human, and he has to be an economist from Yale.””

Robert Silverberg (1935) American speculative fiction writer and editor

Short fiction, Schwartz Between the Galaxies (1974)

Men, Thinking

“I used to pay attention to the clouds in the sky... I paid close attention for a month to see if they ever repeated. They don't repeat. And I don't think life does either. It's continually various. That's the truth about life.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

Denise Spranger, in 'Center of Attention', Taos News/Tempo Magazine, Mar. 21–27, 2002, p. 22
after 2000

Life, Truth, Thinking

“Go at it boldly, and you'll find unexpected forces closing round you and coming to your aid.”

Basil King (1859–1928) Canadian writer

Source: The Conquest of Fear (1921), Chapter I : Fear And The Life-Principle, § XI, p. 29; sometimes paraphrased: "Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid."

“Standing on my watch-tower I am commanded, if I see aught of evil coming, to give warning. I solemnly declare that I do discern evil approaching; I see a storm collecting in the heavens; I discover the commotion of the troubled elements; I hear the roar of a distant wind — heaven and earth seem mingled in the conflict — and I cry to those for whom I watch, "A storm! A storm! Get you into the ark or you are swept away. "Oh! what is it I see? I see a world convulsed and falling to ruins — the sea burning like oil — nations rising from under ground — the sun falling — the damned in chains before the bar, and some of my poor hearers among them! I see them cast from the battlements of the judgment scene. My God! the eternal pit has closed upon them forever!”

Edward Dorr Griffin (1770–1837) American academic administrator

Sermons, vol. II (1839), sermon XXXIX: "The Watchman".

God, World, Distant, Evil

“The last subject to which I am desirous to direct your attention as to a means of self-improvement, is that of philanthropic exertion for the good of others. I allude here more particularly to the efforts which you may be able to make for the benefit of those whose social position is inferior to your own. It is my deliberate conviction, founded on long and anxious consideration of the subject, that not only might great positive good be effected by an association of earnest young men, working together under judicious arrangements for this common end, but that its reflected advantages would overpay the toil of effort, and more than indemnify the cost of personal sacrifice. And how wide a field is now open before you! It would be unjust to pass over unnoticed the shining examples of virtues, that are found among tho poor and indigent There are dwellings so consecrated by patience, by self-denial, by filial piety, that it is not in the power of any physical deprivation to render them otherwise than happy. But sometimes in close contiguity with these, what a deep contrast of guilt and woe! On the darker features of the prospect we would not dwell, and that they are less prominent here than in larger cities we would with gratitude acknowledge; but we cannot shut our eyes to their existence. We cannot put out of sight that improvidence that never looks beyond the present hour; that insensibility that deadens the heart to the claims of duty and affection; or that recklessness which in the pursuit of some short-lived gratification, sets all regard for consequences aside. Evils such as these, although they may present themselves in any class of society, and under every variety of circumstances, are undoubtedly fostered by that ignorance to which the condition of poverty is most exposed; and of which it has been truly said, that it is the night of the spirit,—and a night without moon and without stars. It is to associated efforts for its removal, and for the raising of the physical condition of its subjects, that philanthropy must henceforth direct her regards. And is not such an object great 1 Are not such efforts personally elevating and ennobling? Would that some part of the youthful energy of this present assembly might thus expend itself in labours of benevolence! Would that we could all feel the deep weight and truth of the Divine sentiment that " No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.”

George Boole (1815–1864) English mathematician, philosopher and logician

George Boole, "Right Use of Leisure," cited in: James Hogg Titan Hogg's weekly instructor, (1847) p. 250; Also cited in: R. H. Hutton, " Professor Boole http://books.google.com/books?id=pfMEAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA153," (1866), p. 153 1840s

Men, Happiness, Truth, Youth

“Halloween is so close I can practically taste the children's tears.”

Frances Bean Cobain (1992) American artist

18 September 2013 https://twitter.com/alka_seltzer666/status/380346681117507584 Twitter https://twitter.com/alka_seltzer666 posts

Children, Tear

“For myself, I refuse mentally to close the canon as if inspiration had run out! Why should we follow traditional thought more than modern thought?”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.65

“Among the problems of the known string theories, as a theory of hadrons, was the fact that the spectrum of open strings contains massless spin 1 particles, and the spectrum of closed strings contains a massless spin 2 particle (as well as other massless particles), but there are no massless hadrons. In 1974, Joël Scherk and I decided to take string theory seriously as it stood, rather than forcing it to conform to our preconceptions. … Specifically, Scherk and Schwarz (1974) proposed trying to interpret string theory as a unified quantum theory of all forces including gravity. Neveu and Scherk (1972) had shown that string theory incorporates the correct gauge invariances to ensure agreement at low energies (compared to the scale given by the string tension) with Yang-Mills theory. Yoneya (1973,1974) and Scherk and Schwarz (1974) showed that it also contains gauge invariances that ensure agreement at low energies with general relativity.”

John Henry Schwarz (1941) American theoretical physicist

[Schwarz, J. H., The early history of string theory and supersymmetry, 2012, https://arxiv.org/abs/1201.0981]

Problem, Gauge

“Reading what they never wrote,
Just fifteen minutes, huddle up their work,
And with a well-bred whisper close the scene.”

William Cowper The Task

Source: The Task (1785), Book II, The Timepiece, Line 411.

Reading

“With me, everything turns into mathematics.
More closely translated as: but in my opinion, all things in nature occur mathematically.”
Mais apud me omnia fiunt Mathematicè in Natura

René Descartes (1596–1650) French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist

""Mais"" is French for ""but"" and the ""but in my opinion"" comes from the context of the original conversation. apud me omnia fiunt Mathematicè in Natura is in latin. Sometimes the Latin version is incorrectly quoted as Omnia apud me mathematica fiunt. Sources: Correspondence with Mersenne http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3aDescartes_-_%C5%92uvres,_%C3%A9d._Adam_et_Tannery,_III.djvu/48 note for line 7 (1640), page 36, Die Wiener Zeit http://books.google.com/books?id=9Xh3fVZLCycC&pg=PA532&lpg=PA532&dq=%22Omnia+apud+me+mathematica+fiunt%22+original+zitat&source=bl&ots=CgQOrveRiM&sig=WFHwIK20r5vRZ66FwCaxo857LCU&hl=de&sa=X&ei=_Wf2UcHlJYbfsgaf1IHABg#v=onepage&q=%22Omnia%20apud%20me%20mathematica%20fiunt%22%20original%20zitat&f=false page 532 (2008); StackExchange Math Q/A Where did Descartes write... http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/454599/where-did-descartes-write-with-me-everything-turns-into-mathematics?noredirect=1#comment978229_454599

Mathematics, Nature

“Since the Gothic, European sculpture had become overgrown with moss, weeds – all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape. It has been Brancusi's special mission to get rid of this overgrowth, and make us once more shape-conscious. To do this he has had to concentrate on very simple direct shapes, to keep his sculpture, as it were, one-cylindered, to refine and polish a single shape to a degree almost too precious.... it may now be no longer necessary to close down and restrict sculpture to the single form unit. We can now begin to open out. To relate and combine together several forms of varied sizes, sections, and directions into one organic whole.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Source: 1925 - 1940, The sculptor speaks' (1937), p. 250

“The Islamic doctrine of slavery was closely linked with the doctrine of the inescapable struggle between believers and unbelievers… and Pagans were routinely sold into slavery if they had the misfortune of being captured by Muslims.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

Elst, Indigenous Indians, 375, 381. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1994). Muslim slave system in medieval India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
1990s

“We are not interested in excommunicating anyone. The game of sociology goes on in a spacious playground. We are just describing a little more closely those we would like to tempt to join our game.”

Peter L. Berger (1929–2017) Austrian-born American sociologist

Source: Invitation to Sociology (1963), Chapter 1

Game

“My first lesson in relativity:.. we had a still life set-up to paint. Suddenly I saw that the pitcher was so big [his hands outside the shape of a pitcher, then close in] and the glass was so big. From that time on everything was all right. [Tobey is remembering his Saturday morning painting class]”

Mark Tobey (1890–1976) American abstract expressionist painter

A Tobey Profile, quoted by Belle Krasne, Art Digest, 26 Oct. 15, 1951
1950's

Life, Time, Painting

“It would be pleasant to believe that the age of pessimism is now coming to a close, and that its end is marked by the same author who marked its beginning: Aldous Huxley. After thirty years of trying to find salvation in mysticism, and assimilating the Wisdom of the East, Huxley published in 1962 a new constructive utopia, The Island. In this beautiful book he created a grand synthesis between the science of the West and the Wisdom of the East, with the same exceptional intellectual power which he displayed in his Brave New World. (His gaminerie is also unimpaired; his close union of eschatology and scatology will not be to everybody's tastes.) But though his Utopia is constructive, it is not optimistic; in the end his island Utopia is destroyed by the sort of adolescent gangster nationalism which he knows so well, and describes only too convincingly.
This, in a nutshell, is the history of thought about the future since Victorian days. To sum up the situation, the sceptics and the pessimists have taken man into account as a whole; the optimists only as a producer and consumer of goods. The means of destruction have developed pari passu with the technology of production, while creative imagination has not kept pace with either.
The creative imagination I am talking of works on two levels. The first is the level of social engineering, the second is the level of vision.”

Dennis Gabor (1900–1979) Nobel Prize-winning physicist and inventor of holography

In my view both have lagged behind technology, especially in the highly advanced Western countries, and both constitute dangers.
Source: Inventing the Future (1963), p. 18-19

Wisdom, Books, Age, World

“The danger of a closed mind is that it can also leave good things like love, compassion and reason on its outside.”

Lennox Lewis (1965) British-Canadian boxer

Lennox Lewis (From his Twitter account)

Love

“The slave-owner is at times visited with a nightmare. He finds that his free will, in spite of its freedom, is thwarted, not by a superior will but by things-in-themselves – by inferior wills, accidents, mistakes, and his own ignorance. Yet he is still unable to conceive his will except as being thwarted like that of his slave’s by another will, and since he the master is so thwarted, might not even the world’s master and his – God Himself – be thwarted in his volition by some grand over-riding will, by Will-in-Itself? This is the slaveowning conception of Moira, or Fate, a comparatively late development reaching its noblest expression in Greek tragedy. This Fate, in spite of its closeness to bourgeois determinism, betrays its slave-owning parentage by the fact that it is always visualised as a consciously forseeing Will, and always as thwarting, not determining human wills as well as events, but interfering with human wills by means of events.”

Christopher Caudwell (1907–1937) British Marxist literary critic, journalist and writer

Further Studies in a Dying Culture (1949), Chapter IV: Consciousness: A Study in Bourgeois Psychology

God, Fate, World, Freedom

“I know more about Virdon than any other player because we're so close in the outfield and I think it would be a big mistake to trade him. Virdon is an underrated outfielder. I know. He doesn’t get the headlines because he makes everything look so easy. He would be a hard man to replace. Many times I look up on a tough chance and there’s Virdon near me in case something goes wrong. He is always backing me up on the one side and Bob Skinner on the other. If you don’t want to take my word for it how valuable Virdon is, ask some of our pitchers. Virdon has kept quite a few in the big leagues with his fielding. That's how good he is.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "Virdon Would Be Difficult to Replace" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=y0YqAAAAIBAJ&sjid=3k4EAAAAIBAJ&pg=7014%2C1844348 by Les Biederman, in The Pittsburgh Press (August 20, 1962) Baseball-related, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1962</big>

Thinking, Chance, Time

“But we, the great, the valiant, and the wise,
When once the seal of death has closed our eyes,
Lost in the hollow tomb obscure and deep,
Slumber, to wake no more, one long unbroken sleep!”

Moschus Ancient Greek poet

'The Epitaph on Bion', tr. R. Polwhele, lines 129–132
The Idylliums of Moschus, Idyllium III

Death, Sleep

“Yeah, I support my troops
They wave black flags
They wear black masks
All the roads are closed
Smoke is rising from the fields
The monsters left their cages
An angel set them free.”

Tom Morello (1964) American guitarist and singer-songwriter

Flesh Shapes The Day.
Lyrics

Angels, Support

“But first me behoveth to tell you as anent my feebleness, wretchedness and blindness. — I have said in the beginning: And in this all my pain was suddenly taken from me: of which pain I had no grief nor distress as long as the Fifteen Shewings lasted following. And at the end all was close, and I saw no more. And soon I felt that I should live and languish; and anon my sickness came again: first in my head with a sound and a din, and suddenly all my body was fulfilled with sickness like as it was afore. And I was as barren and as dry as I never had comfort but little. And as a wretched creature I moaned and cried for feeling of my bodily pains and for failing of comfort, spiritual and bodily.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Fifteenth Revelation, Chapter 66

Pain, Feeling

“An underestimated element in poetry, that reading aloud makes clear, is the pause. I mean especially the force of a pause or a couple of pauses close together, contrasted with a longer unit of grammar.”

Robert Pinsky (1940) American poet, editor, literary critic, academic.

Article-Poems Aloud April 2009
Other

Reading

“In concept a feedback system is a closed system. Its dynamic behavior arises within its internal structure. Any action which is essential to the behavior of the mode being investigated must be included inside the system boundary.”

Jay Wright Forrester (1918–2016) American operations researcher

Source: Principles of Systems (1968), p. 4-1 as cited in: Richardson, George P. " Reflections on the foundations of system dynamics http://obssr.od.nih.gov/issh/2012/files/Richardson%202011.pdf." System Dynamics Review 27.3 (2011): 219-243.

Behavior

“I myself was, for nearly six years, in such close touch with the Malay language that it affected my English and still affects my thinking. When I wrote a novel called A Clockwork Orange, no European reader saw that the Malay word for "man" – orang – was contained in the title (Malay students of English invariably write "orang squash"…”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1973)

Thinking

“With clink of hammers closing rivets up.”

Colley Cibber Richard III

Act V, scene 3. Similar thought in William Shakespeare, King Henry V.
Richard III (altered) (1700)

“When we take all these circumstances into consideration, it is but natural that the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence should open with a reference to Nature's God and should close in the final paragraphs with an appeal to the Supreme Judge of the world and an assertion of a firm reliance on Divine Providence. Coming from these sources, having as it did this background, it is no wonder that Samuel Adams could say "The people seem to recognize this resolution as though it were a decree promulgated from heaven."”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)

God, People, World, Nature

“We are all familiar with the passionate and closely argued appeal against censorship by the outstanding Soviet writer A. Solzhenitsyn. He as well as G. Vladimov, G. Svirsky, and other writers who have spoken out on the subject have clearly shown how incompetent censorship destroys the living soul of Soviet literature, but the same applies of course to all other manifestations of social thought, causing stagnation and dullness and preventing fresh and deep ideas.
Such ideas, after all, can arise only in discussion, in the face of objections, only if there is a potential possibility of expressing not only true but also dubious ideas. This was clear to the philosophers of ancient Greece and hardly anyone nowadays would have any doubts on that score. But after fifty years of complete domination over the minds of an entire nation, our leaders seem to fear even allusions to such a discussion.”

Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist

Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, The Threat to Intellectual Freedom

Fear, Soul, Literature, Idea

“Only a year after the collapse of the Third Reich a strangely conclusive piece of evidence can be advanced to support the claim that "fanatical", this key National Socialist term, never really had the sting taken out of it by excessive use. For although scraps of the LTI surface all over the place in contemporary language, "fanatical" has disappeared. From this one can safely conclude that either consciously or subconsciously people remained aware of the real facts of the case all through those twelve years, namely, that a confused state of mind, equally close to sickness and criminality, was for twelve years [of Nazi rule] held to be the greatest virtue.”

Victor Klemperer book LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii

Source: LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii (The Language of the Third Reich) (1947), p. 61.

People, Support

“[My mother] closed the school the next day [after a visit from Castro's soldiers], because she knew that the purpose of education was the broadening and opening of children's minds. And she couldn't be a party to the systematic closing of minds, borders, freedoms and ideals.”

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

address to LULAC (July 1, 2005)
2007, 2008

Children, Education, School, Freedom

“It was a conspiracy hatched on the part of Christian Missionaries and their fellow travellers to demean our gods and goddesses. It has been thrashed. We have decided to honour all those who raised their voice against the insult of our gods and goddesses in the university itself on October 18. All these people will be mobilised so that they could keep a close watch over the university syllabus.”

Dinanath Batra (1930) Indian school teacher

Supporting the removal of the essay Three Hundred Ramayanas from the Delhi University's syllabus, as quoted in " The rule of unreason http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl2823/stories/20111118282312500.htm", The Frontline (November 2011)

God, People, Travel, Universe

“The current language Pāṇini describes is very close in structure to the late Vedic found in certain Brāhmaṇa texts. As noted earlier, scholars have recognized other varieties of Sanskrit. Epic Sanskrit is so called because it is represented principally in the two epics, Mahābhārata (“Great Epic of the Bhārata Dynasty”) and Rāmāyaṇa (“Romance of Rāma”). In the latter the term saṃskṛta ‘adorned, cultivated, purified (by grammar)’ is encountered, possibly for the first time with reference to the language. The date of composition for the core of early Epic Sanskrit is considered to be in the centuries just preceding the Common Era.”

Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian

Prof. George Cardona in:"Indo-Aryan languages".

Time

“One evening I came to have a discussion with my father on the subject how long unbelievers are tormented in Hell. I maintained that no sinner could be so guilty that God would let him suffer longer than a thousand years. Father said that they would suffer for a thousand times a thousand years. We would not give up the argument. I became so irritated... I returned home to make my piece with him. He had gone to bed so I quietly opened his bedroom door. He was on his knees in front of the bed, praying... I closed the door and went to my own room but I could not get to sleep.... eventually I took out my drawing block and started to draw. I drew my father kneeling by his bed, with the light from the bedside lamp casting a yellow glow over his nightshirt. I fetched my paintbox and colored it in. Finally I achieved the right pictorial effect, and I was able to go to bed happy and slept soundly.”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

after 1930
Source: 'Close Up of a Genius', Rolf E. Stenersen; Sem and Stenersen, Oslo 1946, pp. 10 – 11

God, Happiness, Color, Home

“On the other hand, we have come out of the latest contest more confused than ever before, so much so that while a highly humanitarian national culture gets condemned as a narrow and militant communalism, an ideology of totalitarian terror gets registered as a religion, a closed and theocratic creed struts about as secularism, and a fanatic fraternity addicted to frequent rounds of violence passes for a “poor and persecuted minority.””

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

The situation is far from reassuring.
History of Heroic Hindu Resistance to Early Muslim Invaders (1984; 2001)

Religion, Communication

““My feet they are sore, and my limbs they are weary;
Long is the way, and the mountains are wild;
Soon will the twilight close moonless and dreary
Over the path of the poor orphan child.Why did they send me so far and so lonely,
Up where the moors spread and grey rocks are piled?
Men are hard-hearted, and kind angels only
Watch o’er the steps of a poor orphan child.Yet distant and soft the night breeze is blowing,
Clouds there are none, and clear stars beam mild,
God, in His mercy, protection is showing,
Comfort and hope to the poor orphan child.Ev’n should I fall o’er the broken bridge passing,
Or stray in the marshes, by false lights beguiled,
Still will my Father, with promise and blessing,
Take to His bosom the poor orphan child.There is a thought that for strength should avail me,
Though both of shelter and kindred despoiled;
Heaven is a home, and a rest will not fail me;
God is a friend to the poor orphan child.””

Charlotte Brontë book Jane Eyre

Bessie's song (Ch. 3)
Jane Eyre (1847)

Men, God, Hope, Angels

“The Open Source Definition is clear enough, and it is quite clear that the typical non-free program does not qualify. So you would think that "Open Source company" would mean one whose products are free software (or close to it), right? Alas, many companies are trying to give it a different meaning.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

1990s, Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source" (1998)

Thinking

“But while at the bottom of the national life the slime was thus constantly accumulating more and more deleteriously and deeply, so much the more smooth and glittering was the surface, overlaid with the varnish of polished manners and universal friendship. All the world interchanged visits; so that in the houses of quality it was necessary to admit the persons presenting themselves every morning for the levee in a certain order fixed by the master or occasionally by the attendant in waiting, and to give audience only to the more notable one by one, while the rest were more summarily admitted partly in groups, partly en masse at the close—a distinction which Gaius Gracchus, in this too paving the way for the new monarchy, is said to have introduced. The interchange of letters of courtesy was carried to as great an extent as the visits of courtesy; "friendly" letters flew over land and sea between persons who had neither personal relations nor business with each other, whereas proper and formal business-letters scarcely occur except where the letter is addressed to a corporation. In like manner invitations to dinner, the customary new year's presents, the domestic festivals, were divested of their proper character and converted almost into public ceremonials; even death itself did not release the Roman from these attentions to his countless "neighbours," but in order to die with due respectability he had to provide each of them at any rate with a keepsake. Just as in certain circles of our mercantile world, the genuine intimacy of family ties and family friendships had so totally vanished from the Rome of that day that the whole intercourse of business and acquaintance could be garnished with forms and flourishes which had lost all meaning, and thus by degrees the reality came to be superseded by that spectral shadow of "friendship," which holds by no means the least place among the various evil spirits brooding over the proscriptions and civil wars of this age.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 4, Pt. 2, Translated by W.P. Dickson.
On Roman Friendship in the last ages of the Republic.
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

Life, Death, Friendship, War

“It was unbelievable! My family and close friends were sitting together till quite late in the night. People outside the gate just kept standing, hordes and hordes of them. It was overwhelming. I kept going out to meet them at half-hour intervals. But it just wasn't enough.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Quotable quotes by Amitabh Bachchan.

People, Family, Night

“Any cleric or monk who seduces young men or boys, or who is apprehended in kissing or in any shameful situation, shall be publicly flogged and shall lose his clerical tonsure. Thus shorn, he shall be disgraced by spitting in his face, bound in iron chains, wasted by six months of close confinement, and for three days each week put on barley bread given him toward evening. Following this period, he shall spend a further six months living in a small segregated courtyard in custody of a spiritual elder, kept busy with manual labor and prayer, subjected to vigils and prayers, forced to walk at all times in the company of two spiritual brothers, never again allowed to associate with young men.”

Peter Damian (1007–1072) reformist monk

Letter 31:38. To Pope Leo IX, A.D. 1049. The Fathers of the Church, Medieval Continuation, Peter Damian: Letters 31-60, Owen J. Blum, tr., Catholic University of America Press, ISBN 081320707X ISBN 9780813207070, vol. 2, p. 29. http://books.google.com/books?id=3PkYNcU0k94C&pg=PA29&dq=%22Any+cleric+or+monk+who+seduces%22&hl=en&ei=lrZHTP3EHcL78Aac2uDWBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22Any%20cleric%20or%20monk%20who%20seduces%22&f=false

Men, Boy, Business, Kiss

“We think the more detailed and exhaustive our plans, the more likely the future will actually mirror our vision. But it rarely even comes close.”

Tim Hurson (1946) Creativity theorist, author and speaker

Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking

Thinking, Future

“During Muslim rule in India, foreign and Indian Muslims were freely bestowed jobs and gifts. Foreign Muslims were most welcome here. They came in large numbers and were well provided for. Muhammad Tughlaq was specially kind to them, as averred by Ibn Battutah. He writes that "the countries contiguous to India like Yemen, Khurasan and Fars are filled with anecdotes about… his generosity to the foreigners in so far as he prefers them to the Indians, honours them, confers on them great favours and makes them rich presents and appoints them to high offices and awards them great benefits". He calls them aziz or dear ones and has instructed his courtiers not to address them as foreigners. 'The sultan ordered for me," writes Ibn Battutah, "a sum of six thousand tankahs, and ordered a sum of ten thousand for Ibn Qazi Misr. Similarly, he ordered sums to be given to all foreigners (a'izza) who were to stay at Delhi, but nothing was given to the metropolitans."… There are scores of instances of Muhammad Tughlaq's generosity to foreigners…. The point to note here is that under Sultan Muhammad so much wealth was awarded to so many deserving and undeserving foreign Muslims that at the close of his reign the Delhi treasury had become bankrupt. There was also the loss of popularity because "the people of India hate the foreigners (Persians, Turks, Khurasanis) because of the favour the sultan shows them."”

Muhammad bin Tughluq (1290–1351) Turkic Sultan of Delhi

Ibn Battutah, trs. Mahdi Husain, p. 105-140. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 5

Hate, People, Loss, Country

“His legions of stoned admirers probably really thought he took a hundred hits of acid before sitting down to write. But the craftsmanship those close to him saw as he agonized over his words spoke to how much went into making it look like a breeze.”

William McKeen (1954) American academic

Source: Outlaw Journalist (2008), Chapter 17, Homecoming, p. 324

“That’s behind me. Same as with everything else in my life, though, I approached what I learned with eyes and ears half-closed. It’s only now I realise how dangerous and destructive Christian culture has become. If there was ever any love in it, it’s been bled out. Three major religions preach Holy War: Shintoism, Islam, and Christianity. Christianity is the only one hypocritical enough simultaneously to enjoin its followers to turn the other cheek and suffer fools gladly and the rest of it. Look at the record. Germany was a Christian country almost exactly one hundred times as long as it was Nazi. Did the Nazis undo in twelve years all the church had done in twelve centuries? No, they built on it. Hitler was a baptised Catholic and never excommunicated. When he was enlisting the support of the bishops in 1933 he promised to do nothing to the Jews that the church had not already, and kept his promise.”

John Brunner book The Stone That Never Came Down

Source: The Stone That Never Came Down (1973), Chapter 16 (p. 124)

Love, Life, War, Religion

“There's nothing like the waiting room of any office of the governmentor its allies to remind you of how lucky you are. You enter a nonplace, nontime. You sit on battered chairs in murky blues and greens that nobody ever names as their favorite color. You stare at the signs that have no bearing on you, nonspecific communiqués from the land that punctuation forgot. You wait until the waiting loses all sense of direction or purpose, until you become like a stone deposited in a field millenia ago by a careless glacier. You are here. This is all you have ever known. In the meantime you are stripped of any sense of individuality, of the idea that you might be different from anyone else in the room except by virtue of your particular problem; and so you become the problem, defensively, accepting it as identity, until it swells and suppurates and becomes all you are. As a species we'll tolerate being close to others, but not so close, and not in those circumstances and when we feel so small: we become rows of dry, fretting eyes, hating everyone around us and sincerely wishing our neighbor dead so we can move up one place in the line.Or maybe it was just me.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Source: The Lonely Dead (2004), Ch. 5

Hate, Color, Feeling, Idea