Quotes about collection
page 14

“If you imagine piety to consist in oppressing the people and terrorising the Hindus, you ought first to levy the faziya from Rana Raj Singh, who is the head of the Hindus. Then it will not be so very difficult to collect it from me, as I am at your service. But to oppress ants and flies is far from displaying valour and spirit.”

Shivaji (1627–1680) founder of Maratha Empire

Letter to Aurangzeb

People, Imagination

“Those who fancy that collectedness results from the collecting of wordly goods remain in perpetual distraction, whilst those who are convinced that amassing wealth is the cause of distraction renounce all wordly goods.”

Jami (1414–1492) Persian poet

Lawāih, p. 20
Lawāih

Wealth

“As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have an unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-conscious nothings.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)

God, People, World, Confidence

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

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

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

War, Peace

“Social hope means that hope is not limited to simply individual aspirations, that hope becomes a collective affair and is compatible with the assumption that people can collectively organize and in doing so they can imagine a different future. But more importantly, collectively in the name of hope, they can address the problems that prevent that future from emerging, and they can organize and become active through a mass social movement to make that hope possible. When we talk about social hope versus individualistic hope, we’re talking about a collective consciousness that is able in a sense to think otherwise in order to act otherwise — that’s the basic key here. I think there are promising movements all over the world.”

Henry Giroux (1943) American academic

Interview with Media For Us, 2019

People, World, Making love, Hope

“The animated contest of liberty is waiting for you, but you’ve got to take it in your hands. You’ve got to have a will to accept the truth and buck the system and the group collective. Do that and you’ll earn your way to the next level. This is the info war.”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

Donald Trump's Final Message to America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrNOo4ehlkg The Alex Jones Show (Oct 18, 2016) 2016

War, Truth, Way, Waiting

“I learn with great satisfaction that you are about committing to the press the valuable historical and State papers you have been so long collecting. Time and accident are committing daily havoc on the originals deposited in our public offices. The late war has done the work of centuries in this business. The last cannot be recovered, but let us save what remains; not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to a Mr. Hazard (18 February 1791) published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1853), Vol. 2, edited by Henry Augustine Washington, p. 211
1790s

War, Business, Learning, Time

“The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor — not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules.”

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

1940s, Why Socialism? (1949)

Faith, Communication, Evil

“There was not a single liberation movement in Africa that was not fighting for socialism. In fact, there was not a single liberation movement in the whole world that was fighting for capitalism. The whole thing boiled down to a simple equation: anything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, produced, and processed by working people. So why shouldn’t working people collectively own that wealth? Why shouldn’t working people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant that rich businessmen owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned it.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

Assata: In Her Own Words

People, World, Fight, Wealth

“America is not an idea or a collection of documents, but neither is it a closed ethnolinguistic set. It is a nation in which relations among the people and between the individual and the state are defined by the terms of citizenship.”

Kevin D. Williamson (1972) American writer

Trump's Omar Comments and Our Eroding Sense of Citizenship (2019)

People, Idea, Relation ships

“The new artist-society will consist of painters, sculptors and architects. The founders don’t intend that the character of the union will be determined by one single art movement. They believe that there is room for every important expression of this period and they intend the new union as a gathering place for the best young artists, who will collectively determine the character of the society.”

Charley Toorop (1891–1955) Dutch painter

translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek
(original Dutch: tekst in circulaire van Charley Toorop, in het Nederlands:) De nieuwe vereeniging zal bestaan uit schilders, beeldhouwers en architecten. De oprichters stellen zich niet op het standpunt, dat het karakter der vereeniging door één enkele kunstrichting bepaald wordt. Zy gelooven dat voor iedere belangrijke uiting van deze tyd plaats is en bedoelen de nieuwe vereeniging als verzamelplaats voor de beste jonge kunstenaars, die gezamenlyk het karakter van de vereeniging bepalen.
text of Charley Toorop, in a circular for possible members of the new artist-society 'A.S.B.', Amsterdam 8 Dec. 1926; in the Archive J.J.P. Oud, Nederlands Architectuur museum, Rotterdam
before 1930

Art

“The construction of short stories calls for a markedly different set of mind than work on a novel, and for me short stories are at once more interesting and more difficult to write than longer work. The comparative brevity of the story dictates more economical and accurate use of words and images, a limited palette of events, fewer characters, tighter dialogue, strong title and punctuation that works to move the story forward. If the writer is trying to illustrate a particular period or place, a collection of short stories is a good way to take the reader inside a house of windows, each opening onto different but related views—a kind of flip book of place, time and manners.”

Annie Proulx (1935) American novelist, short story and non-fiction author

On her short story collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories in “An Interview with Annie Proulx” https://www.missourireview.com/article/an-interview-with-annie-proulx/ in The Missouri Review (1999 Mar 1) Personal life and writing career

Books, Way, Strong, Relation ships

“Taking a close look at what is around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel. And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it, I love it very much, but I love it against my better judgment.”

Werner Herzog (1942) German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and opera director

Burden of Dreams (1982)

Love, Hate, Stupidity, Making love

“Society is much more than a collection of individuals acting together, even through the complex and subtle mechanisms of the free economy, for material advantage. It has an existence of its own; it thinks and feels; it looks inwards, as a community to its own members; it looks outwards as a nation, into a world populated by other societies, like or unlike itself. The Tory Party, with its deep sense of history, has always concerned itself especially with these two aspects of society, and I believe that the British people would instinctively and rightly reject a philosophy which offered them just an economic machine, however efficient and successful.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Bromley (24 October 1963), quoted in A Nation Not Afraid. The Thinking of Enoch Powell (B. T. Batsford Ltd, 1965), pp. 4–5
1960s

People, World, Feeling, History

“Feminism in the United States has never emerged from the women who are most victimized by sexist oppression; women who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually-women who are powerless to change their condition in life. They are a silent majority. A mark of their victimization is that they accept their lot in life without visible question, without organized protest, without collective anger or rage.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

p. 1 https://books.google.com/books?id=uvIQbop4cdsC&pg=PA1. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory

Life, Women, Question, Rage

“It really was a brutal place, Los Angeles, less a city than a collection of hostile villages united only in their mutual suspicion of each other and a susceptibility to disasters, natural and otherwise. Fires, floods, riots and earthquakes; it was looking more and more like Armageddon-by-the-Pacific.”

Michael Nava (1954) American writer

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, The Death of Friends (1996), p.81

Hostility, Angels, Nature

“I’ve been a conservative my entire life. … So you’d think that the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, would be a natural fit. It once was. But on Saturday, after speaking to this year’s gathering, I had to be escorted from the premises by several guards who seemed genuinely concerned for my safety. What happened to me at CPAC is the perfect illustration of the collective experience of a whole swath of conservatives since Donald Trump became the Republican nominee. We built and organized this party — but now we’re made to feel like interlopers.”

Mona Charen (1957) political writer

I'm Glad I Got Booed at CPAC (2018)

Life, Feeling, Nature, Thinking

“I am confident we can do a Brexit deal which puts jobs and prosperity first, that reassures employers that they will still be able to access the talent they need, that keeps our market for goods, services and capital open, achieves early agreement on transitional arrangements so trade can carry on flowing smoothly. The collective sigh of relief would be audible. The benefit to our economy would be huge.”

Philip Hammond (1955) British Conservative politician

Philip Hammond on Brexit: Prioritise jobs and living standards https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-40339331, BBC News, 20 June 2017 2017

Confidence, Self-confidence

“Yesterday, when asked about reparations, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered a familiar reply: America should not be held liable for something that happened 150 years ago, since none of us currently alive are responsible… This rebuttal proffers a strange theory of governance, that American accounts are somehow bound by the lifetime of its generations. But well into this century, the United States was still paying out pensions to the heirs of Civil War soldiers. We honor treaties that date back some 200 years, despite no one being alive who signed those treaties… But we are American citizens, and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975) writer, journalist, and educator

Ta-Nehisi Coates Makes the Case for Reparations at Historic Congressional Hearing, Democracy Now (20 June 2019)

War, Personality

“We may be a small party and a small country but we can stand tall if we stand together and if we stand up for our principles. Real independence means collectively lifting our people out of poverty leaving no-one behind, building a future based on hope not on fear.”

Leanne Wood (1971) Welsh Plaid Cymru politician

Plaid Cymru elect Leanne Wood as new leader https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-17381377, BBC News, 15 March 2012 2012

People, Fear, Hope, Future

“What this means is that liberalism had been poisoned by a false definition of liberty, one characterized by an unethical authoritarian demeanor, cast in rigid conformity to authority, obedience to rules, and slave-like submission to the collective, making individual subservient to the group. Instead of questioning authority or challenging state power, the apostles of illiberal positive rights idealize the State as a social panacea. To them, the state is everything, and almost nothing should be outside the state’s jurisdiction. This variant of creeping fascization infected Germany, Italy, and Russia in the first half of the 20th century.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the ‘Free Left’ and the ‘Statist Left', (2019), p. 5

Making love, Question, Falseness

“Turkey now understands that the collective punishment of the Kurds on the southeastern periphery affects freedoms and democratic culture across the country. What was limited to the Kurds has become the norm for Mr. Erdogan’s opponents elsewhere too. The only hope for a liberal, democratic future lies in our coming together to defeat the authoritarian regime.”

Selahattin Demirtaş (1973) Turkish Kurdish politician

I Am Running for President in Turkey. From My Prison Cell. (2018)

Hope, Understanding, Freedom, Future

“Your collection is not a woman. That’s only a metaphor—an abstraction! You’ll be dying for nothing, for a principle that nobody else can even comprehend.”

Michael Swanwick book The Iron Dragon's Daughter

As she spoke, Jane became convinced that she herself would never willingly die for a principle. She might feel guilty about it, but she’d smile and lie, knuckle under, pretend, anything, in order to survive. It made her feel a little sad to realize this, but also, at the same time, very adult.
Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 15 (p. 263)

“I did a lot of preaching this week. I had my sermons ready. The good part is the congregation was listening. I wish I had passed the collection plate. I would’ve made a lot of money. But I did it for free.”

Herm Edwards (1954) American football player, coach and analyst

Edwards, following a win against the Chargers in 2006. With Kansas City Source: Schraeger, Peter. Get ready to meet Herm http://web.archive.org/web/20070930032843/http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/6915026 FOXSports.com, 13 June 2007.

Money, Parting

“He was very sensitive about his particular views on national history and culture. Soon after Independence, both inside and outside India, Indian nationalism and culture were closely identified with Hinduism and its peculiar culture. After assuming the offices of Governor, Vice-President and President of the Republic, he regarded as his duty to present his above-mentioned viewpoint in an effective and moving manner. He wanted to keep the collective conscience alive on this view.”

Zakir Hussain (politician) (1897–1969) 3rd President of India

Source: About Zakir Hussain, Quest for Truth (1999), p. 339.

History

“What Swati Tirunal’s court introduced, as had Surfoji’s before and the Mysore and Vizianagaram courts later, was the idea of the court as a showpiece of culture, a collection of the best musicians from around the world.”

Swathi Thirunal Rama Varma (1813–1846) Maharajah of Travencore

In P.64
About Swathi Thirunal, Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of ...

World, Idea

“Imagine being told that it hadn’t mattered whether the Christians or the Moors got Spain! I can still remember my shock. I got over it fairly quickly, though, because by that time I had learned enough history to know that in the long run it never mattered a damn where any particular race of people planted its collective ass.”

Kage Baker book In the Garden of Iden

Source: In the Garden of Iden (1997), Chapter 5 (p. 45)

People, Imagination, History, Learning

“Sarojini Naidu repositioned her own title of Nightingale of India on to Subbalakshmi’s avian frame, it was because that daughter of Bengal saw the gift of song arriving and alighting on this daughter of India’s south, like a migratory bird from the collective genius of our music.”

M. S. Subbulakshmi (1916–2004) singer,Carnatic vocalist

Gopal Gandhi in his book [Gandhi, Gopal, Of a Certain Age: Twenty Life Sketches, http://books.google.com/books?id=Inp4jPFUHUkC&pg=PA164, 2011, Penguin Books India, 978-0-670-08502-6, 166]
About M.S.

Music, Bird, Daughters

“Even ten years back, Indian film producers may not have thought of this scale, as there is a business logic to this new model aided by neo-liberal economic policies; when films are available on DVDs alongside Internet-based web interface, the first two weeks box-office collections make all the difference.”

Rajinikanth (1950) Indian actor

Professor Harish
Decoding Rajinikanth

Making love, Business, Box

“Craft is something you learn by studying models. When a student asks, what is a good book about traditional iambic verse, The Collected Poems of Ben Jonson. What is an excellent book about free verse? The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams.”

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

What is a good book about short line in ballad metre? The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.
The Art of Poetry - interview 1995 with Downing & Kunitz

Books, Study, Learning

“The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses.”

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) American journalist

The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.
Source: Isaiah's Job (1936), II

Life, People, Making love, Law

“All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. … The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. … A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "The Land Ethic", p. 203-204.

Communication, Water, Change, Animals

“Without wasting an instant, must start the hair recovery task. The first operation is reduced to dismantling the siphon from the sink to see if the hair has become hooked in any of the rugosities of the drain. If it is not found, it is necessary to expose the section of pipe that goes from the siphon to the main drainage pipe. It is certain that in this part will appear many hairs and we will have to count on the help of the rest of the family to examine them one by one in search of the knot. If it does not appear, the interesting problem of breaking the pipe down to the ground floor will arise, but this means a greater effort, because for eight or ten years we will have to work in a ministry or trading house to collect enough money to buy the four departments located under the one of my elder cousin, all that with the extraordinary disadvantage of what while working during those eight or ten years, the distressing feeling that the hair is no longer in the pipes anymore can not be avoided and that only by a remote chance remains hooked on some rusty spout of the drain.”

Julio Cortázar book Historias de cronopios y de famas

Historias de Cronopios y de Famas (1962)

Money, Family, Feeling, Search

“Is there anything we cannot contrive to call the demands of the times, and is there anything that does not acquire a certain prestige by being the demand of the times? But for decisive religious categories to become the demand for the times is eo ipso a contradiction. “The times” is too abstract a category to be able as claimant to demand the decisive religious categories that belong specifically to individuality and particularity; loud collective demands en mass for what can be shared only by the single individual in particularity, in solitariness, in silence, cannot be made.”

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

Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review. By Soren Kierkegaard, 1846 edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong 1978 Princeton University Press P. 21
1840s, Two Ages: A Literary Review (1846)

Decision, Silence, Time

“Hegemonic powers often use assimilation as a tool when they are confronted with defiant ethnic groups. Language and culture are also carriers of potential resistance, which can be desiccated by assimilation. banning the native language and enforcing the use of a foreign language are effective tools. People who are no longer able to speak their native language will no longer cherish its characteristic, which are rooted in ethnic, geographic and cultural factors. Without the unifying element of language the uniting quality of collective ideas also disappear.”

Abdullah Öcalan (1949) Founder of the PKK

Source: The Political Thought of Abdullah Ocalan (2017), War and Peace in Kurdistan, p.10

People, Idea

“Every day in your lives, you are causing the expansion of yourself as well as the collective with your thought. And yet you still believe not in your perfection but instead in your unworthiness.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

Perfection

“I agree that it's very difficult to come to an absolute definition of what's moral and what is not. We are on our own, without a god, and we have to get together, sit down together and decide what kind of society do we want to live in. Do we want to live in a society where people steal, where people kill, where people don't pull their weight paying their taxes, doing that kind of thing? Do we want to live in a kind of society where everybody is out for themselves in a dog-eat-dog world? And we decide in conclave together that that's not the kind of world in which we want to live. It's difficult. There is no absolute reason why we should believe that that's true - it's a moral decision which we take as individuals - and we take it collectively as a collection of individuals. If you want to get that sort of value system from religion I want you to ask yourself - whereabouts in religion do you get it? Which religion do you get it from? They're all different. If you get it from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition then I beg you - don't get it from your holy book! Because the morality you will get from reading your holy book is hideous. Don't get it from your holy book. Don't get it from sucking up to your god. Don't get it from saying “oh, I'm terrified of going to hell so I'd better be good””

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

that's a very ignoble reason to be good. Instead - be good for good reasons. Be good for the reason that's you've decided together with other people the society we want to live in: a decent humane society. Not one based on absolutism, not one based on holy books and not one based on sucking up to.. looking over your shoulder to the divine spy camera in the sky. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roFdPHdhgKQ&t=59m29s Richard Dawkins vs. Jonathan Sacks - BBC's RE:Think Festival (2012)

God, People, Books, World

“It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.... Hell is a collection of individuals who spend their time working on a task they don't like and are not especially good at.... Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.... Nurses, garbage collectors, mechanics, it's obvious were they to vanish, results would be catastrophic.... A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble.... It's not clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.... Real productive workers are squeezed and exploited. The remainder are unemployed and a larger stratum paid to do nothing.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Dr. David Graeber, "Bullshit Jobs," Aug 2013

Stupidity, World, Making love, Hell

“If communication takes place between the artwork and the public, it is on the level of sensibility, through the emotions and their immanent modifications. It does not have anything to do with words, with collective, ideological or scientific representations, or with their critical, intellectual or literary formulations, in short, anything that is called culture. It is totally independent from that type of culture. This is why it is addressed to the group of people who ‘lack culture’. It is popular in the sense that it leads to what is most essential in each human being: one’s capacity to feel, to suffer and to love.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, Continuum, 2009, p. 73
Books on Culture and Barbarism, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky (1988)

Love, People, Making love, Feeling

“From every agglomeration of men, from every city, from every nation, there inevitably arises a collective force. Place this collective force at the service of liberty, let it rule by universal suffrage, the city becomes a commune, the nation becomes a republic. This collective force is not, of its nature, intelligent. Belonging to all, it belongs to no one; it floats about, so to speak, outside of the people.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Napoleon the Little (1852), Conclusion, Part First, II
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Men, People, Intelligence, Communication

“Sooner or later, if human society is to evolve—indeed, if it is to survive—we must match our lives to our new knowledge. For too long, the Two Cultures—the esthetic, feeling humanities and cool, analytical science—have functioned independently, like the right and left hemispheres of a split-brain patient. We have been the victims of our collective divided consciousness.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Six, Liberating Knowledge: News from the Frontiers of Science

Feeling, Knowledge, Science

“I preside over a government that is made up of three independent parties who have built consensus around the issues we will collectively pursue. The fact that we will work together collaboratively does not diminish the identities of those parties. There are a number of reasons why confidence and supply is a form of arrangement that will suit the needs of particular parties and why others will prefer coalition. I have no trouble, and I do not question my role or authority simply by allowing a party to speak to that issue themselves.”

Jacinda Ardern (1980) Prime Minister of New Zealand

On why the Greens are outside of cabinet.
Interview with Lisa Owen at Newshub Nation, 21 October 2017

Confidence, Question, Self-confidence

“Everything of importance is already known, a sage said—the only thing is to rediscover it. Much of the current excitement about healing is a kind of collective remembering, a homecoming to the old wives and old doctors.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eight, Healing Ourselves

“It is true that our collective military strength has been a deterrent to communist aggression. It is equally true, now that both sides possess the means of mass annihilation, that military might alone will not solve our problems or protect us from encirclement.”

Paul Hellyer (1923–2021) engineer, politician, writer

Problem

“If we see each other as obstacles to progress, our assumption is the first and greatest obstacle. Mistrust is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our old-paradigm consciousness has guaranteed its own dark expectations; it is our collective negative self-image.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Thirteen, The Whole- Earth Conspiracy

Self-confidence

“Of course, working people ultimately cannot rely upon the federal government or the state governments (whose purpose is to maintain the hegemony of the markets and the rule of capital) to fix this crisis in any equitable way. Only the working class has the power to make this happen through mass strikes and work actions. In order to act swiftly in the case of any layoffs, lockouts, or shutdowns, working people ultimately must organize themselves at their workplaces and in the streets, whether they are in a union or not, and be prepared to use their collective power to demand that all necessary resources be employed for the well being of the whole class with full compensation and benefits, that full back pay be provided to all workers upon returning to work, and that everyone has access to well compensated employment.”

James Dennis Hoff

Freeze Layoffs: Make the Capitalists Pay (March 23, 2020)

People, Making love, Way

“ALL D is always collectively stable.”

Robert Axelrod The evolution of cooperation

Chap. 3 : The Chronology of Cooperation
Proposition 5.
The Evolution of Cooperation (1984; 2006)

“For a nice strategy to be collectively stable, it must be provoked by the very first defection of the other player.”

Robert Axelrod The evolution of cooperation

Chap. 3 : The Chronology of Cooperation
Proposition 4.
The Evolution of Cooperation (1984; 2006)

“Any strategy which may be the first to cooperate can be collectively stable only when w is sufficiently large.”

Robert Axelrod The evolution of cooperation

Chap. 3 : The Chronology of Cooperation
Proposition 3.
The Evolution of Cooperation (1984; 2006)

“TIT FOR TAT is collectively stable if and only if, w is large enough. This critical value of w is a function of the four payoff parameters, T; R, P, and S.”

Robert Axelrod The evolution of cooperation

Chap. 3 : The Chronology of Cooperation
Proposition 2.
The Evolution of Cooperation (1984; 2006)

“Collectively, the more civilized men are, the more they are actors. They assume the appearance of attachment, of esteem for others, of modesty, and of disinterestedness, without ever deceiving anyone, because everyone understands that nothing sincere is meant. Persons are familiar with this, and it is even a good thing that this is so in this world, for when men play these roles, virtues are gradually established, whose appearance had up until now only been affected. These virtues ultimately will become part of the actor's disposition. To deceive the deceiver in ourselves, or the tendency to deceive, is a fresh return to obedience”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

.

Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 37
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)

Men, World, Understanding, Appearance

“Dictators may torture or kill us, but they shall not succeed in demoralizing the soul of our movement, in bringing it to a state where for the sake of saving its life it is willing to renounce its ideal. Our cause will conquer in spite of everything, for in economic life as well as in politics the highest ability to accomplish and to advance things belongs to communities and organizations of free men working in free cooperation. These free communities will far outstrip every collective body, every organization that is built on compulsion and that can be maintained only by brute force; and ultimately the communities based on oppression will perish.”

Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) Czech-Austrian philosopher, journalist, and Marxist theoretician

Chap. V, The Period of Dictatorship "Hitlerism and Social Democracy" (1934) https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1934/hitler/index.htm

Life, Men, Soul, Communication

“More than 99% of my wealth will go to philanthropy during my lifetime or at death. Measured by dollars, this commitment is large. In a comparative sense, though, many individuals give more to others every day.
Millions of people who regularly contribute to churches, schools, and other organizations thereby relinquish the use of funds that would otherwise benefit their own families. The dollars these people drop into a collection plate or give to United Way mean forgone movies, dinners out, or other personal pleasures. In contrast, my family and I will give up nothing we need or want by fulfilling this 99% pledge.
Moreover, this pledge does not leave me contributing the most precious asset, which is time. Many people, including — I’m proud to say — my three children, give extensively of their own time and talents to help others. Gifts of this kind often prove far more valuable than money.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

" My Philanthropic Pledge http://givingpledge.org/pdf/letters/Buffett_Letter.pdf" at The Giving Pledge (2010)

Death, Money, Children, People

“A country that promises it is committed to democracy has never faced the fact that in the enterprise we don’t have democracy. We have a tiny group of people making all the decisions. And that’s not a good idea. And maybe now we can face that the decisions they’ve made, individually and collectively, have plunged us into a situation where we cannot afford the luxury of not facing basic questions about how our economy is organized. We should have done it for the last 50 years. Maybe this new generation of young people coming into the Congress will begin that conversation and, hopefully, bring us along into a national debate on these subjects, which is long overdue.”

Richard D. Wolff (1942) American economist

We Need a More Humane Economic System—Not One That Only Benefits the Rich (December 26, 2018)

People, Making love, Democracy, Idea

“When the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem is applied to particular formal systems, we obtain as special cases: Every group, field, ordered field, etc., has a countable subsystem of the same type. A more spectacular result follows from applying the theorem to set theory (a system which we shall later formalize): There is a countable collection of sets, such that if restrict the membership relation to these sets alone, they form a model for set theory (more precisely all the true statements of set theory are true in this model). In particular, within this model which we may denote by M, there must be an uncountable set. This paradox, that a countable model can contain an uncountable set, is explained by noting that to say a set is uncountable merely asserts the nonexistence of a one-one mapping of the set with the set of integers. The "uncountable" set in M set actually has only countably many members in M, but there is no one-one correspondence \underline {within} M of this set with the set of integers.”

Paul Cohen (1934–2007) American mathematician

Set theory and the continuum hypothesis, pp. 19–20 https://books.google.com/books?id=Z4NCAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA19 Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis (1966)

Relation ships

“Germanic collectivity exists in linguistics but never existed anywhere else... [A]n "early Germanic world"... had no existence anywhere until it took form in the minds of scholars in sixteenth-century Europe and was thoughtlessly espoused by everyone else.”

Walter Goffart (1934) American historian

Source: Quotaes, Barbarian Tides (2010), p. 25

World

“Go down to City Hall and see what is on the agenda for the next council meeting—garbage collection, water supply, it does not matter which one—then go and learn everything you can about it. Read past reports, talk to people, learn the topic until you know it as well as anyone. Then when you get up to speak, or to make a suggestion for change, your voice will be heard because you are knowledgeable. That is how reform works.”

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) American Supreme Court Justice

According to daughter Elizabeth Brandeis Raushenbush, as told to biographer Melvin I. Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (2009), p. 130.
Attributed

People, Making love, Knowledge, Learning

“Life is a collection of moments. Mindfulness is beautification of the moments.”

Amit Ray (1960) Indian author

Mindfulness Living in the Moment - Living in the Breath (2015)

Life

“Looking back to the national anniversary this year and patriotism and national confidence shown by our young generation, the anniversary is possibly a "coming of age ceremonies" of Chinese society's collective maturity.”

Zhang Weiwei (professor) (1957) Chinese professor of international relations

(zh-CN) 回望今年的国庆盛典和我们年轻一代展现出的爱国激情和民族自信，这次庆典也可能就是中国社会走向集体成熟的一个“成人礼”。

https://m.guancha.cn/ZhangWeiWei/2019_10_04_520190.shtml

Age, Confidence, Self-confidence

“Don't say I'm insignificant
in the infinite,
don't say i'm alone in life,
you are a cosmic collection
that dances harmoniously.
You coexist with all beings,
visible and invisible
together, you are bound
from the energy
of the universe itself.”

alexis karpouzos

spirituality and wisdom

Life, Universe, Dance

“Our vast collections of knowledge and experience are just part of ego’s display, part of the grandiose quality of ego. We display them to the world and, in so doing, reassure ourselves that we exist, safe and secure, as “spiritual” people.”

Chögyam Trungpa book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

People, World, Knowledge, Parting

“…there are individual ways that we work our way through all of these systems that are corrosive and inescapable. But if there is a solution to the system itself, it’s at a collective level. It’s the level of policy and politics, it’s not at the level of individual choice.”

Jia Tolentino (1988) American writer and editor

On why her book Trick Mirror offers no solutions in “Jia Tolentino: What It’s Like Being the Most Talked About Millennial Writer” https://www.anothermag.com/design-living/11896/jia-tolentino-trick-mirror-book-interview-new-yorker-staff-writer-2019 in AnOther (2019 Sep 15)

Way

“…The responsibility, the burden, is much heavier for us. If we don’t exercise our collective imagination—and not just documentation —we’ll always be at a certain disadvantage. I think what literature could provide us with is showing other possibilities. What I fear most is homogeneity.”

Rawi Hage (1964) Canadian writer

On the burden of racialized writers to represent their communities in “‘What I Fear Most is Homogeneity’: An Interview with Rawi Hage” https://hazlitt.net/feature/what-i-fear-most-homogeneity-interview-rawi-hage in Hazlitt (2018 Sep 12)

Fear, Exercises, Imagination, Literature

“Contrary to what is usually thought, nationalism is a type of tribal-collectivism where individual identity is subjugated to a collective group identity, making it a perfect habitat for most species of socialism and fascism.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the ‘Free Left’ and the ‘Statist Left', (2019), p. 96

Making love, Perfection

“It's in your nature to accept advice readily
so don't fail in reaping benefit through me,
This collection of our thought is open to all:
so, read it and satisfy yourself completely.”

Abdul-Qādir Bedil (1644–1720) Persian writer,poet

Rubaʿiyat (Quatrains), Stanza
Source: Bedil: Selected Poems, p. 53

Nature, Reading

“The key thing about all the world’s big problems is that they have to be dealt with collectively. If we don’t get collectively smarter, we’re doomed.”

Douglas Engelbart (1925–2013) American engineer and inventor

Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/intelligence-in-the-internet-age/

World, Problem

“My dear young friends … I believe in you. I have grown increasingly convinced that your generation has the capacity to transform the dawning century into an era of peace and dialogue. You have the means of reconciling our fractured humanity with itself and with the natural world.… You are the first generation of truly global citizens. The problems that you face today were not created by you. My generation and that of your parents … are the problem generations. You must be the solution finding generation! Make good use of collective intelligence, based on sharing. And above all be the generation that acts. You have the capacity to lead humanity towards a renewed form of fraternity, justice and solidarity….”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

A Call for Revolution (2017-2018)

World, Making love, Peace, Justice

“Claiming all power for the purpose of prosperity and justice in society is conflicting to its own cause, rather authorizing individual authority is the just way toward a better society, because each individual has the right to decide about himself, and for collective decision making in society, all individual has the right to provide their input in it, after that majorities’ rule and minorities’ rights is the key to move forward, otherwise its destruction of society.”

Zaman Ali (1993) Pakistani philosopher

Source: https://books.google.com.pk/books?id=co3AzQEACAAJ&dq=inauthor:%22Zaman+Ali%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjVi-2e57jtAhWToVwKHUj0D3kQ6AEwAnoECAEQAg

Making love, Justice, Way, Decision

“Regarding the constant change of the world, visible to our coarse organs, as well as its dissolution, Buddhism points out that those dissolutions are temporary and periodical; for, according to the principle of evolution guided by the law of individual and collective Karma, the disappearing world will in turn manifest a new world with all its contents, just as our Universe was manifested from the primary substance—matter.”

Helena Roerich (1879–1955) Russian philosopher

Source: Foundations of Buddhism (1930)

World, Law, Universe, Change

“I think we should be snorkeling and swimming on reefs. Because I think people only develop a passion for protecting things if they know what is at risk. I would hardly be one to say that we shouldn’t go near them. That said, its important to manage tourism properly. If you have a lot of people going onto reefs, stepping on reefs, collecting things from reefs, breaking corals off, or throwing anchors on top of reefs, that’s not good. It’s important to properly manage the numbers of people and their behavior when they’re in water. It’s also important to make sure that the hotels that support that tourism have good water treatment for the sewage that they release, and that they aren’t also feeding this large population of visitors critically important reef fish. That is ecologically sound tourism. But you can’t just let it develop willy-nilly. It has to be managed carefully. Otherwise, you end up with lots of people and not much reef.”

Nancy Knowlton (1949) American biologist

Source: Nancy Knowlton https://web.archive.org/web/20081008104046/http://www.smithsonianmag.com:80/specialsections/ocean-hall/atm-qa-200809.html (September 2008)

People, Making love, Behavior, Support

“The Bible as a whole is not written systematically, however, but is a collection of books of history, historical metaphor, biography, law and poetry, all leading into one another without an apparent plan. The Books of the Prophets include both historical narrative and an anthology of Divine revelations. Those of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings tell the history of the Jewish people from Joshua’s conquest of the Holy Land to the destruction of the first temple by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon in 586 B.C. These Hebrew prophets were the conscience of the people; for in the face of powerful priests and raving multitudes they spoke up with one chief purpose in mind—to teach man “to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.””

Geoffrey Hodson (1886–1983) New Zealand occultist

(Micah 6: 8). Isaiah writes with dignity and power, condemning social systems which forget the needs of the poor. Amos, a “herdman and a gatherer of sycamore fruit” (Amos, 7: 14), declared God’s judgment upon the nations and upon Israel, also foretelling Israel’s restoration. Jeremiah dedicated himself to God, but was despised and persecuted by the people. He called for peace when nations prepared for war, and demanded an inward religion of sincerity at a time when priests were enforcing their orthodox codes.
The Hidden Wisdom In The Holy Bible (1963), Volume II

Love, God, People, Books

“There are those who collect and those who select.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

From the Aphorisms http://www.prevale.net/aphorisms.html page of the official website of Prevale Original: C'è chi colleziona e chi seleziona.

“I feel the world is the way it is because we don’t talk about ourselves ever. We don’t talk about how we feel, we don’t talk about how we experience things. And not knowing yourself is when you project your insecurities and your fears and your bullshit onto other people. And so that just kind of creates a whole collective where nobody’s aware of themselves, and if you don’t have self-awareness then how can we have collective awareness?”

Lauren Jauregui (1996) Cuban-American singer and songwriter

Fifth Harmony Was Just The Beginning For Lauren Jauregui, Nylon Magazine, September 5, 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtrtUi4Vmnw,

People, World, Fear, Way

“It is the place where Collectivist and Socialistic experiments are tried. It is the place where a new revolutionary spirit finds its instruments and collects its arms.”

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

On the London County Council; speech to the metropolitan division of the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations in the Queen's Hall, Langham Place (7 November 1894), quoted in The Times (8 November 1894), p. 4
1890s

“And my intention is to try to form a collection of many such things, which would not be quite unworthy of the title 'heads of the people.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

By working hard, boy, I hope to succeed in making something good. It isn't there yet, but I aim at it, and struggle for it. I want something serious, - some thing fresh - something with soul in it! Forward - forward - quote in his letter to brother Theo, from The Hague, The Netherlands, 3 Jan. 1883; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 257), pp. 20-21 1880s, 1883

People

“Suffice it to say that from the pure "gun" side of it, the Five-seveN is a fascinating design that deserves a place in modern gun collections, and which has written a fascinating and complex chapter in the evolution of modern handguns.”

Massad Ayoob (1948) American firearms and self-defence instructor

Defensive Handguns - The FN Five-seveN (2010)

“Democracy's premise rests on the notion that the collective wisdom of the majority will prove right more often than it's wrong; that given sufficient opportunity in the pursuit of happiness, your population will develop its talents, its intellect, its better judgment; that over time its capacity for discernment and self-correction will be enlarged.”

Ben Fountain (1958) American writer

Wisdom, Happiness, Democracy, Time

“Without religion − or without authentic religion − a human collectivity cannot survive in the long run; that is, it cannot remain human.”

Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher

[2003, The Play of Masks, World Wisdom, 12, 978-0-94153214-3]
Miscellaneous, Religion

Religion

“Revelation is the fulgurant irruption of a knowledge that comes, not from an individual or collective subconscious, but on the contrary from a supra-consciousness, which though latent in all beings nonetheless immensely surpasses its individual and psychological crystallizations.”

Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher

[2006, Light on the Ancient Worlds, World Wisdom, 117, 978-0-941532-72-3]
Miscellaneous, Revelation

Knowledge

“Success, however you define it, is achievable if you collect the right field-tested beliefs and habits.”

Timothy Ferriss book Tools of Titans

Success

“How to make a list? Collecting the data, that's the easy bit. Sorting it into categories is slightly more difficult. Shortening the list is the most difficult part. That a really difficult problem.”

Joe Armstrong (1950–2019) British computer scientist

The Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science

Problem, Parting

“Pray, meditate, and find a calming place to collect all your thoughts at the end of each day.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“I think any time you have an ensemble of actors, everyone’s objectives are unique and individual. So it’s hard for me to collectively say whether they were allies in this…. I do know that the way things got spun by the end changed my relationships with them.”

Daniel Dae Kim (1968) American actor

"Daniel Dae Kim Spoke Up to ‘Lost’ Creators Over Pilot’s Asian Stereotypes: ‘It Was a Land Mine’" in Indie Wire (12 April 2021) https://tvline.com/2021/04/12/daniel-dae-kim-hawaii-five-0-contract-dispute-interview/

Way, Thinking, Change, Time

“All creative thought and creative action is strictly personal. A committee, any collective, cannot think. It cannot act creatively. It can only act destructively. It can exercise brute force.”

Leonard E. Read (1898–1983) American academic

Leonard Read Journals, November 4, 1951 https://history.fee.org/leonard-read-journal/1951/leonard-e-read-journal-november-1951/

Exercises, Thinking, Personality

“I’m not particularly interested in collecting things, but there’s one sort of running motif in my life: despite my basic indifference, objects just seem to collect around me, of their own volition.”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

Source: Haruki Murakami official FB profile https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=440734884083102&set=a.294927818663810

Life, Indifference

“It has seen the people themselves taking increasing individual and collective action in order to obtain a world organization or government, a universal religion, or a universal language.”

Vera Stanley Alder (1898–1984) British artist

Source: Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950), Introduction p. I - XII

People, World, Religion, Universe

“I keep trying to resist the thought, but the thought keeps pushing its way back in: The Western world has sunk into madness. There are no solutions to anything. The talk of our politicians is the babbling of fools, but we keep electing them anyway. We are collectively insane.”

John Derbyshire (1945) writer

Source: Succouring the Poor https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/succouring-poor-john-derbyshire/, National Review, February 6, 2012.

World, Fools, Way, Madness

“It wasn’t a city anymore, it was a collection of broken places separated by war without politics or acquisition so not war at all really but something more pathological.”

China Miéville Embassytown

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 18 (p. 238)

War

“The issue, rather, is this: Are we prepared to embrace the undeniably vast potential of genetics to improve the human condition, individually and collectively? Most immediate, would we want the guidance of genetic information to design learning best suited to our children’s individual needs?”

James D. Watson (1928) American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist.

Coda: Our Genes and Our Future (p. 432)
Source: DNA: The Story of the Genetic Revolution (2003/2017)

Children, Learning

“I’m sure you know that apps are collecting your location data but are you aware that they are also selling this information to third parties? We need an Internet Bill of Rights so people know where their data is being used and how it’s being stored.”

Ro Khanna (1976) U.S. Representative from California

Source: Twitter post https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/1078458258833268736 (28 December 2018)

People

“When we come together, we try to search for a collective effort in spite of our differences. We are split and scattered by the ocean, but we must find ways to tackle our issues.”

Soane Patita Paini Mafi (1961) Tongan Roman Catholic cardinal

Source: Caritas Oceania: united by faith and the ocean https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2021-07/caritas-oceania-annual-forum-interview-cardinal-mafi-tonga.html (31 July 2021)

Way, Search, Effort

“I'da flipped every mattress, every rock and desert cactus.
Owned a collection of maps and followed my kids to the edge of the atlas. If someone ever moved 'em from me.”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"Headlights"
2010s, The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (2013)

“Petronius once told me that pathological murderers tend to start their killing sprees while they are children. Find a man who takes prostitutes off the streets as a personal vocation, and he'll probably have a set of neat jars with his childhood collection of dissected rats.”

Lindsey Davis book Nemesis

Nemesis (2010)

Children, Childhood, Personality

“I have been in the army since I was 17, but I never learned to swear. I think that swearing is good on a collective farm when the bulls do not obey. But with people you can't.”

Dmitry Yazov (1924–2020) Soviet minister of defence

"Дмитрий Язов рассказал "РГ" о жизни маршала на пенсии" https://rg.ru/2013/12/05/marshal.html (4 December 2013)

People, Thinking, Learning

“We must work together to create an America where everyone feels safe in their community, where children feel safe in their schools. And, of course, that responsibility that we collectively have to ensure that all people feel safe in their community is what brings us together today.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

2022, May 2022 Source: Remarks by President Biden and Vice President Harris at Signing of Executive Order to Advance Effective, Accountable Policing and Strengthen Public Safety (May 25, 2022) https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/05/25/remarks-by-president-biden-and-vice-president-harris-at-signing-of-executive-order-to-advance-effective-accountable-policing-and-strengthen-public-safety/

Children, People, School, Feeling

“[A] profit and loss statement is not simply a collection of figures, but rather—for the perceptive banker—a window into the nuts and bolts of the business, from its method of operation to its management philosophy.”

Henry Kaufman (1927) American economist

On Money and Markets (2000)

Business, Loss