Quotes about collection
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“The experience and ideas of contemporary science lead us to the only integral, the only monistic understanding of the universe. It appears before us as an in nitely unfolding fabric of all types of forms and levels of organization, from the unknown elements of ether to human collectives and star systems. All these forms, in their interlacement and mutual struggle, in their constant changes, create the universal organizational process, in nitely split in its parts, but continuous and unbroken in its whole.”

Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) Physician, philosopher, writer

Source: Essays in tektology, 1980, p. 6

Star, Idea, Understanding, Universe

“All there is, Consciousness. And the mind is merely a reflection of that Consciousness. Mind is a collection of thoughts which arise and are not disposed of, they are collected. Mind is merely a collection of thoughts, or a collection of impressions which makes up this "me," this self image. That image is made up of various thoughts and impressions not all the thoughts and impressions, but only selected thoughts and impressions. Therefore, the "me" as a self-image is an inaccurate image."”

Ramesh Balsekar (1917–2009) Indian guru

“I have never really understood the objection to art which is specifically made for a gallery or museum, and so cannot be collected by an individual or taken home. It is rather like saying that all music should be confined to the chamber work or novels to the short story.”

Nicholas Serota (1946) British curator

The Dimbleby Lecture 2000

Art, Music, Home

Akbar (1542–1605) 3rd Mughal Emperor

Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh by Abdul Qadir Badaoni, vol. II, p. 307. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 2

People, Error, Business

“There are signs that the system of collective security established in San Francisco nearly 50 years ago [at the founding of the UN] is finally beginning to work as conceived. . . We are on the way to achieving a workable international system.”

Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1922–2016) 6th Secretary-General of the United Nations

Cited in the Awake! magazine 1996, 4/22; article: Is a World Without War Possible?
1990s

Way

“I beg you, if I die, don't let me go piecemeal into the public collections, my work would not be fairly judged. I want to get in complete or not at all... Please, please, promise me one thing, never let my things go into a museum piecemeal.”

Edouard Manet (1832–1883) French painter

remark to his friend Antonin Proust; as cited in: Manet by Himself, p. 304; as quoted in The private lives of the Impressionists Sue Roe; Harpen Collins Publishers, New York 2006, p. 241
Antonin Proust had recently become minister of Arts in France
1876 - 1883

“To err is human. AI software modeled after humans will inevitably make mistakes. It is fine as long as the software learns from its errors and improves itself, which is something that humans ought to learn from AI. Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, wrote in "Case of Voluntary Ignorance" in Collected Essays (1959): "That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach."”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

Men, World, Error, History

“I've always been kind of obsessed with Frida Kahlo, so I was really into the idea of getting something that belonged to her. And then from Frida Kahlo I found out about Tina Modotti and then I started collecting her stuff and Edward Weston, and one person always leads to another person with me, because for me it started with Diego Rivera, then it went to Frida Kahlo, then it went to Tina, and Edward and… Also, if you're into Picasso, and you want to find out about him and that whole area of art and European culture, then you start reading about Man Ray and the surrealists and Andre Breton, and all of a sudden you're in that whole world and you start having interests in other people. It's like a disease.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Aperture Magazine 1999 http://allaboutmadonna.com/madonna-interviews-articles/aperture-magazine-summer-1999

People, World, Disease, Art

“What constitutes a state?
Men who their duties know,
But know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain.
And sovereign law, that state's collected will,
O'er thrones and globes elate,
Sits empress, crowning good, repressing ill.”

William Jones (1746–1794) Anglo-Welsh philologist and scholar of ancient India

Ode in Imitation of Alcæus, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "Neither walls, theatres, porches, nor senseless equipage, make states, but men who are able to rely upon themselves", Aristides, Orations (Jebb's edition), vol. i. (trans. by A. W. Austin); By Themistocles alone, or with very few others, does this saying appear to be approved, which, though Alcæus formerly had produced, many afterwards claimed: "Not stones, nor wood, nor the art of artisans, make a state; but where men are who know how to take care of themselves, these are cities and walls."—Ibid. vol. ii.

Men, Law

“What Americans were really objecting to had nothing to do with constitutional principles. their objection was not to Parliament's constitutional right to levy certain kinds of taxes as opposed to others, but to its effort to collect any.”

Bernard Bailyn book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter V, TRANSFORMATION, p. 218.

Effort

“The great error of the wisest known nations of antiquity, the Greeks and Romans, was the preference invariable given to the imagined interests of an imaginary existence called the state or country, and the real interests of the real existences, or human beings, upon whom, individually and collectively, their laws could alone operate. Another error was the opposition in which they invariably placed the interests of their own nation to the interests of all other nations; and a third and greater error, was the elevating into a virtue this selfish preference of their own national interests, under the name of patriotism. The moderns are growing a little wise on these matters, but they are still very ignorant.”

Frances Wright (1795–1852) American activist

Independence Day speech (1828)

Law, Error, Imagination, Selfishness

“Self-determination is an expression of the individual and collective right to democracy.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order on the right of self determination http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IntOrder/Pages/Reports.aspx. 2015, Report submitted to the UN General Assembly

Democracy

“I love the whole story of why something happened when it did and that’s what I put into the collections.”

Anna Sui (1964) American fashion designer

New York Times Interview (November 11, 2010)

Love

“Security can be found in renunciation of ownership over people, money, and real assets; to gain, keep or protect that which others need for periods of legitimate access. A lending library enables people to help themselves to information; a locked-up book collection is useful only to the person who owns it.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 14.2

Money, People, Books, Help

“With few exceptions, the bulk of the collected lesion evidence up through the 1950s into the early '60s converged to support the picture of a leading, more highly evolved and intellectual left hemisphere and a relatively retarded right hemisphere that by contrast, in the typical righthander brain, is not only mute and agraphic but also dyslexic, word-deaf and apraxic, and lacking generally in higher cognitive function.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

Nobel lecture (1981)

Support

“The modern state is largely a mechanism for transferring funds from one person to another. What we economists call public goods are provided by the state but are now only a part of it. The United States is not as far along in this procedure as many other countries, but in our case the federal government pays out in various types of transfers a significant percent of the amount it collects in taxes. Most of the European countries are even more dominated by the legacy of Bismarck.”

Gordon Tullock (1922–2014) American economist

Public Goods, Redistribution and Rent Seeking (2005), Ch. 5 The legacy of Bismarck

Parting, Personality, Country

“Shahjahan was even otherwise interested in making converts. Professor Sri Ram Sharma has collected facts and figures of Hindus converted to Islam from the works of Qazvini, Lahori, Salih, Mohsin Fani, Khafi Khan, etc. during Shajahan’s reign… The following is the summary of what he says. “Early in his reign Shahjahan had appointed a Superintendent of converts to Islam, thus setting up a department for the special purpose of making converts. The one common practice was to make terms with the criminals… The Hindus of the Punjab, Bhimbar, Bhadauri and Sirhind… were all offered remission of their sentences provided they accepted the ‘true faith’. When the war with the Portuguese started, of the 400 prisoners taken a few became Muslims. The rest were kept in prison with orders that whenever they expressed willingness to embrace Islam, they were to be converted, liberated and given daily allowances. An order was issued in the seventh year of his reign that if a Hindu wanted to be converted to Islam, his family should not place any obstacles in his way… Under Shahjahan, apostasy from Islam had again become a capital crime.””

Shah Jahan (1592–1666) 5th Mughal Emperor

Lal, K. S. (1990). Indian muslims: Who are they, citing Sharma, Sri Ram, The Religious Policy of the Mughal Emperors, Asia Publishing House (Bombay, 1962).

War, Family, Faith, Way

“"Urban problems" are increasingly becoming a political issue as the socialization of the means of production is accompanied by the increasing socialization of the means of consumption or, if one prefers, from the moment collective facilities begin to play a strategic role in the structure and rhythms of everyday life.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: Urban renewal and social conflict in Paris, 1972, p. 93

Life, Problem

“Have you yet read Miss Martineau’s and Mr. Atkinson’s new work, Letters on the Nature and Development of Man? If you have not, it would be worth your while to do so. Of the impression this book has made on me, I will not now say much. It is the first exposition of avowed atheism and materialism I have ever read; the first unequivocal declaration of disbelief in the existence of a God or a future life I have ever seen. In judging of such exposition and declaration, one would wish entirely to put aside the sort of instinctive horror they awaken, and to consider them in an impartial spirit and collected mood. This I find difficult to do. The strangest thing is, that we are called on to rejoice over this hopeless blank — to receive this bitter bereavement as great gain — to welcome this unutterable desolation as a state of pleasant freedom. Who could do this if he would? Who would do this if he could? Sincerely, for my own part, do I wish to know and find the Truth; but if this be Truth, well may she guard herself with mysteries, and cover herself with a veil. If this be Truth, man or woman who beholds her can but curse the day he or she was born. I said however, I would not dwell on what I thought; rather, I wish to hear what some other person thinks,--someone whose feelings are unapt to bias his judgment. Read the book, then, in an unprejudiced spirit, and candidly say what you think of it. I mean, of course, if you have time — not otherwise.”

Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) English novelist and poet

Charlotte Brontë, on Letters on the Nature and Development of Man (1851), by Harriet Martineau. Letter to James Taylor (11 February 1851) The life of Charlotte Brontë

Life, God, Truth, Books

“About 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

Speech at the University of Washington, as reported in "Gates, Buffett a bit bearish" CNET News (2 July 1998) http://archive.is/20130102062335/http://news.com.com/2100-1023-212942.html 1990s

People

“[on having a gay child] And the Three Wise Drag Queens would come, bearing gifts of 1000-thread-count sheets, hair products by Frédéric Fekkai, and a copy of the Immaculate Collection.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Tours and CDs, Revolution Tour

“Our generation can change this. We know what the problems are and we know what the solutions are, but we have to demand that our elected officials and business leaders take action. At the federal and state level, we have to fight efforts to repeal equal pay laws. We have to support increases in the minimum wage. And we have to demand that the United States join our global competitors in giving workers paid leave. All these issues affect our individual financial health and the strength of our collective economy.”

Sandra Fluke (1981) American women's rights activist and lawyer

CNN, (April 17, 2012).
Articles

Health, Law, Business, Support

“The second observation is that poetry is a universal human art. Despite post-modern theories of cultural relativism that assert there are no human universals, there exists a massive and compelling body of empirical data, collected and documented by anthropologists, linguists, and archeologists that demonstrates there is no human society, however isolated, that has not developed and employed poetry as a cultural practice. Most of this poetry, of course, has been oral poetry. Many of these cultures never developed writing. But the fact remains—and it is a demonstrable fact, not mere opinion—that every society has developed a special class of speech, shaped by apprehensible patterns of sound, namely, poetry”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

9-10
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

Art, Universe

“It is important to note that humans are a subset of apes, being members of the taxonomic superfamily Hominoidea. This is no arbitrary classification, but one that is objectively verifiable through phylogenetics. This is a fact that can be proven regardless what you would rather believe. Yet no religion either accounts for this fact nor even acknowledges it, as it stands against all their collective mythology.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, The Cow http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2016/01/22/the-cow/ (January 22, 2016)

Religion

“Of all kind of authors there are none I despise more than compilers, who search every where for shreds of other men's works, which they join to their own, like so many pieces of green turf in a garden: they are not at all superior to compositors in a printing house, who range the types, which, collected together, make a book, towards which they contribute nothing but the labours of the hand. I would have original writers respected, and it seems to me a kind of profanation to take those pieces from the sanctuary in which they reside, and to expose them to a contempt they do not deserve. When a man hath nothing new to say, why does not he hold his tongue? What business have we with this double employment?”

Montesquieu (1689–1755) French social commentator and political thinker

No. 66.
Lettres Persanes (Persian Letters, 1721)

Men, Books, Search, Business

“Given the network-externality characteristic of international monetary arrangements, reforming them is necessarily a collective endeavor. But the multiplicity of countries creates negotiating costs.”

Barry Eichengreen Introduction

Source: Globalizing Capital (2008), Chapter 1. Introduction

Country

“Then there's the law that any person found carrying a Swanhook, the same being neither a Swanherd in good standing nor accompanied by two certified Swanherds, or Swannerds (or Swanners, or Swanmasters), of known probity, should cough up thirteen shillings fourpence, three shillings fourpence going to the informer and the rest to the King. This looked like a fine bit of legislation until it developed that you can't collect from such people. They haven't got it. That's why they're out stealing Swans.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

Swan-Upping, Indeed!
How to Attract the Wombat (1949)

People, Law, Personality

“It is no longer economy aiming at individual profit, but economy concerned with collective interest.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

Mussolini, Four Speeches on the Corporate State, Laboremus, Roma, 1935, p. 38
1930s

“Let no one charge us with capricious inconsistency in our actions against Albinus, and let no one think that I am disloyal to this alleged friend or lacking in feeling toward him. 2. We gave this man everything, even a share of the established empire, a thing which a man would hardly do for his own brother. Indeed, I bestowed upon him that which you entrusted to me alone. Surely Albinus has shown little gratitude for the many benefits I have lavished upon him. 3. Now |87 he is collecting an army to take up arms against us, scornful of your valor and indifferent to his pledge of good faith to me, wishing in his insatiable greed to seize at the risk of disaster that which he has already received in part without war and without bloodshed, showing no respect for the gods by whom he has often sworn, and counting as worthless the labors you performed on our joint behalf with such courage and devotion to duty. 4. In what you accomplished, he also had a share, and he would have had an even greater share of the honor you gained for us both if he had only kept his word. For, just as it is unfair to initiate wrong actions, so also it is cowardly to make no defense against unjust treatment. Now when we took the field against Niger, we had reasons for our hostility, not entirely logical, perhaps, but inevitable. We did not hate him because he had seized the empire after it was already ours, but rather each one of us, motivated by an equal desire for glory, sought the empire for himself alone, when it was still in dispute and lay prostrate before all. 5. But Albinus has violated his pledges and broken his oaths, and although he received from me that which a man normally gives only to his son, he has chosen to be hostile rather than friendly and belligerent instead of peaceful. And just as we were generous to him previously and showered fame and honor upon him, so let us now punish him with our arms for his treachery and cowardice. 6. His army, small and island-bred, will not stand against your might. For you, who by your valor and readiness to act on your own behalf have been victorious in many battles and have gained control of the entire East, how can you fail to emerge victorious with the greatest of ease when you have so large a number of allies and when virtually the entire army is here. Whereas they, by contrast, are few in number and lack a brave and competent general to lead them. 7. Who does not know Albinus' effeminate nature? Who does not know that his way |88 of life has prepared him more for the chorus than for the battlefield? Let us therefore go forth against him with confidence, relying on our customary zeal and valor, with the gods as our allies, gods against whom he has acted impiously in breaking his oaths, and let us be mindful of the victories we have won, victories which that man ridicules.”

Septimius Severus (145–211) Emperor of Ancient Rome

Herodian, Book 3, Chapter 6.

Life, God, Hate, Hostility

“Another great writer who led me on It this stage was Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. I had read all his novels but had never been able to understand why he had been honoured as a rishi. I myself was a novelist and had already written several humane stories. I thought that a novelist dealt with the dimensions of human character and mapped the heights it could scale and the depths to which it could sink. Why should we foist the title of a rishi on this poor fellow? That way rishis will be available a dime a dozen. My doubts about Bankim Chandra being a rishi were removed when I read the second volume of his Collected Works in Bengali. His insights into the innermost core of Hindu culture were a revelation. His Ramayaner Alochona made me see the monstrosities of modern Indology, more than ever before. I immediately translated this masterpiece into Hindi.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

How I became a Hindu (1982)

Way, Understanding, Reading

“The status of women up to now has been compared to that of a slave; women have been tied to the home, and only socialism can save them from this. They will only be completely emancipated when we change from small-scale individual farming to collective farming and collective working of the land.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 28, pp. 180–182.
Collected Works

Women, Home, Change

“Neurosis was caused by our attempt to separate physical and metaphysical levels, to set them up in opposition to each other, thus engaging in an internecine war. If it is true that we do live on several levels simultaneously- drama and action, past and present, personal and collective- we are given ways to unify them: one by religion, the other by art. Separating such levels is only necessary when they conflict, and separation is a result of conflict. Seeing how these levels can work together in harmony is the task of our contemporary writers.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

War, Religion, Art, Way

“When my son is taping for his permanent collection, he sits there and pauses his machine and when he is finished with it, he has a marvelous Clint Eastwood movie and there is no sign of a commercial. It is a brand new movie and he can put three of those on one 6-hour tape.”

Jack Valenti (1921–2007) President of the MPAA

Testimony to the US House of Representatives (1982)

“All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”

Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) New Zealand-born British chemist and physicist

As quoted in Rutherford at Manchester (1962) by J. B. Birks
Unsourced variants:
That which is not measurable is not science. That which is not physics is stamp collecting.
Physics is the only real science. The rest are just stamp collecting.
That which is not measurable is not science. — (which is also attributed to Lord Kelvin)

Science

“Now, consciousness. That’s a fun thing, isn’t it? Product of an arms race between predators and prey. If you watch a cat creeping up on a mouse, you’ll be able to impute to the cat intentions that are most easily explained by the cat having a theory of mind concerning the mouse—an internal simulation of the mouse’s likely behavior when it notices the predator. Which way to run, for example. And the cat will use its theory of mind to optimize its attack strategy. Meanwhile, prey species that are complex enough to have a theory of mind are at a defensive advantage if they can anticipate a predator’s actions. Eventually this very mammalian arms race gave us a species of social ape that used its theory of mind to facilitate signaling—so the tribe could work collectively—and then reflexively, to simulate the individual’s own inner states. Put the two things together, signaling and introspective simulation, and you’ve got human-level consciousness, with language thrown in as a bonus—signaling that transmits information about internal states, not just crude signals such as ‘predator here’ or ‘food there.”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 9 (“Survivor”), p. 397

Food, Way, Behavior, Cats

“In Boresko, the government, though imperial, grants the people some power. They collect annually, and, marching to the palace, signify to the emperor their wishes, which he is constrained to respect. To march at the head of such a procession confers power and influence, and those who thus march are called political leaders.”

Alexander Bryan Johnson (1786–1867) United States philosopher and banker

The Philosophical Emperor, a Political Experiment, or, The Progress of a False Position: (1841)

People

“The new governmental reason does not deal with what I would call the things in themselves of governmentality, such as individuals, things, wealth, and land. It no longer deals with these things in themselves. It deals with the phenomena of politics, that is to say, interests, which precisely constitute politics and its stakes; it deals with interests, or that respect in which a given individual, thing, wealth, and so on interests other individuals or the collective body of individuals. … In the new regime, government is basically no longer to be exercised over subjects and other things subjected through these subjects. Government is now to be exercised over what we could call the phenomenal republic of interests. The fundamental question of liberalism is: What is the utility value of government and all actions of government in a society where exchange determines the value of things?”

Michel Foucault book The Birth of Biopolitics

Lecture 2, January 17, 1979, pp. 45-46
The Birth of Biopolitics (1978)

Exercises, Question, Wealth

“Collect, process, organize & review what has your attention, so you can stop half-trying to be doing all that, constantly.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

15 March 2012 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/180374838857318400 Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

“Men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is this true of legally constituted states, invested with all this seeming moral authority of parliaments and congresses and courts of justice! The destructive capacity of an individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the state and the destructive capacity necessarily expands too. Collective righteousness is far more ungovernable than any individual pursuit of revenge. That was a point well understood by Woodrow Wilson, who warned: 'Once lead this people into war and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.”

Paul Johnson (1928) journalist, historian and speechwriter from England

Modern Times (1983).

Men, War, People, Justice

“The key insight of the approach is to consider that social action takes place in arenas, what may be called fields, domains, sectors, or organized social spaces… Fields contain collective actors who try to produce a system of domination in that space. To do so requires the production of a local culture that defines local social relations between actors.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: The architecture of markets, 2001, p. 15

“Extreme states of being, whether individual or collective, were once purposefully motivated. Some of those purposes no longer have meaning (expiation, salvation). The well-being of communities is no longer sought through means of doubtful effectiveness, but directly, through action. Under these conditions, extreme states of being fell into the domain of the arts, and not without a certain disadvantage. Literature (fiction) took the place of what had formerly been the spiritual life; poetry (the disorder of words) that of real states of trance. Art constituted a small free domain, outside action: to gain freedom it had to renounce the real world. This is a heavy price to pay, and most writers dream of recovering a lost reality. They must then pay in another sense, by renouncing freedom.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

The Bataille Reader (1997), p. 340

Life, World, Dreams, Art

“As all the aims of the religious Emperor were directed to the spreading of the law of Islam and the overthrow of the practices of the infidels, he issued orders to the high diwani officers that from Wednesday, the 2nd April 1679 / 1st Rabi I, in obedience to the Quranic injunction, “till they pay commutation money (Jizyah) out of their hand and they be humbled”, and in agreement with the canonical tradition, Jizyah should be collected from the infidels (zimmis) of the capital and the provinces. Many of the honest scholars of the time were appointed to discharge the work (of collecting Jizyah). May God actuate him (Emperor Aurangzeb) to do that which He loves and is pleased with, and make his future life better than the present.”

Aurangzeb (1618–1707) Sixth Mughal Emperor

2nd April 1679 (Maasir-i-‘Alamgiri, p. 175, Tr. J.N. Sarkar), quoted in Shourie, Arun (2014). Eminent historians: Their technology, their line, their fraud. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India : HarperCollins Publishers.
Quotes from late medieval histories, 1670s

Love, Life, Money, God

“As we have already glimpsed and will continue to discover, we are able to expand our awareness beyond the perceived limitations of our own person and access the dimensions of a transpersonal consciousness. As we open ourselves to the realization of the in-formed universe, this shift in our collective awareness heralds a resolution of the schisms that have divided us for so long—both among and within us”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Ervin Laszlo, Jude Currivan (2008) CosMos. p. 101.

Universe, Personality

“It was very competitive in the '60s. And everybody caught the bug, y'know? It was like a “competitive bug.” And, as far as I could see, everybody was turning everybody on. … The Beatles were a part of that whole “competition” thing. Rubber Soul blew my mind. It really made me wanna record; it made me wanna cut. It sounds like a collection of songs that belong together, and it was an uplifting feeling. So I thought I'd make a collection of songs — called Pet Sounds — together. That's how I got that idea. … I'm proud of it. I think it's a very everlasting album. I'm very proud of the love that went into it. A lot of love went into that album. And people pick up on that too, and they really like it 'cause they feel the love.”

Brian Wilson (1942) American musician, singer, songwriter and record producer

Bassics interview (1999)

Love, People, Feeling, Soul

“They say use it, channel it. Do it, like there will be a sign, be an artist, you're so creative, do anything, you've got to do it, use it. Then, things like, and you've got to collect yourself, too. I mean, you know, make your hair more about yourself, self-respect. But I mean, ridiculous. You know why my doctor got so mad this time? He said, that scene, remember in the LSD bit, the only time I had it in that, sleeping with what's-his-name and having that sex bit go on while, it was very strange-mannered, but I certainly wasn't mortified. I mean, I humanly might be a little mortified knowing that a thousand other human beings would think it mortifying, but basically, me. So he thought that was a total lack of self-respect, which is wrong. Totally wrong.”

Edie Sedgwick (1943–1971) Socialite, actress, model

Edie : Girl On Fire (2006)

Sex, Thinking, Sleep, Time

“I didn't know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only thing I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt like I could see through to something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

The Secret Life of Bees (2002)

Beauty, Way, Feeling, Thinking

“The logical thing to do, when the next war comes, is to recruit an army from all those of whatever age or sex who are unable to pass certain basic intelligence tests. This would be a good way of getting rid of a lot of the stupid people who cumber the earth; probably there would be a high percentage of scientists, Civil Servants, uplifters and minor prophets in an armed force collected in such a way. But if every country adopted this method the country with the biggest population of boobs, yahoos and ninnies would win, and I am not entirely sure that we have overall superiority in this respect, though we seem bound in that direction.”

Robertson Davies book The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

War, People, Age, Stupidity

“As he (the gnani) gets older he grows more and more happy and peaceful. After all, he is going home. Like a traveller nearing his destination and collecting his luggage, he leaves the train without regret. (…) The mist of bodily existence is lifting – the burden of the body is growing less from day to day. (…) Every sensation is contemplated in perfect equanimity. There is no desire for it, nor refusal. It is as it is and he looks at it with a smile of affectionate detachment. (…) He is alone, but he is all. He is not even a being. He is the beingness of all beings. (…).”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Bliss and happiness
Source: I am That, P.180-1.

Happiness, Peace, Smile, Travel

“Power and money reign supreme in our nation today. Universities count for nothing, and scholarship and ideas count for even less. Love, truth, and sacrifice are meaningless concepts, while betrayal and collective amnesia are taken as a matter of course.”

Liu Xiaobo (1955–2017) Chinese literary critic, writer, professor, and human rights activist

No Enemies, No Hate: Selected Essays and Poems

Love, Money, Truth, Idea

“I understand that it is the wish of the Editor of this collection of essays that each contributor should describe his own system of philosophy. Were I to interpret this demand literally I could not contribute anything at all, for two excellent reasons. In the first place, I have nothing worth calling a system of philosophy of my own, and there is no other philosopher of whom I should be willing to reckon myself a faithful follower. If this be a defect I see no likelihood of its ever being cured. Secondly, if I had a system of my own, I should doubt the propriety of "pushing" my crude philosophical wares in competition with the excellent products of older firms with well-earned reputations.”

C. D. Broad (1887–1971) English philosopher

From Critical and Speculative Philosophy (1924)

Faith, Understanding

“Bayle turned to watch the drifting mists along the shore and thought: In three days we have eaten with this Captain four times, talked with him about navigation, his three families, his collection of miniature clay idols, and have all decided he is a deep and impressive, if somewhat absentminded man. Yes, save I take this same ship returning, I may never see him again. Strange are the ways of travel.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

Section 3 (p. 179)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

Family, Way, Travel, Time

“Nobody is entitled to someone else's money, that is the bottom line. People think they are entitled to it because they think they paid into it, nobody paid into anything, it was a fraud. Every single dollar that the gov collected in social security taxes, has already been spent, there is nothing there, there is no money, so the only money the government gets to make current payment is the money it can take from people who are still working. Its a transfer from the working poor in many cases to the retired rich. We don't have the money, I feel bad for the fact people made promises we can't keep, I feel bad for the people that invested with Bernie Madoff and lost their money, but its the same principle, its the same Ponzi scheme. We have to put an end to it, we have to find real solution to these problems because if we keep on denying that they exist and keep on spending money, we're going to destroy the value of everyone's benefits.”

Peter D. Schiff (1963) American entrepreneur, economist and author

RTC, Avon, CT, 10th May 2010

Money, People, Feeling, Fraud

“The American city should be a collection of communities where every member has a right to belong. It should be a place where every man feels safe on his streets and in the house of his friends. It should be a place where each individual’s dignity and self-respect is strengthened by the respect and affection of his neighbors. It should be a place where each of us can find the satisfaction and warmth which comes from being a member of the community of man. This is what man sought at the dawn of civilization. It is what we seek today.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

Special message to the Congress on the nation's cities (March 2, 1965); reported in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965, book 1, p. 240.
1960s

Feeling, Communication, Housing

“O Nation, collect your compassion. Weep! For one of your shining lights is entombed in darkness. Weep! O ye officers and soldiers, whom he loved and led to military glory. Weep! O ye farmers and ye Poor, for your improver and benefactor has become a prey to worms. Come water his tomb with your tears.”

James Morris III (1752–1820) American writer

Memorial service for George Washington held in South Farms, Connecticut, 22 February 1880. As quoted in [Strong, Barbara Nolen, The Morris Academy: Pioneer in Coeducation, Morris Bicentennial Committee, 1976, Torrington, 31, http://books.google.com/books?id=nrCYGQAACAAJ&dq]

Love, Tear, Light, Water

“Plato is correct about democracy. It is essentially mob rule. And once the mob gets an idea into its collective head, it’s almost impossible to get it out, or modify it in any way. In an era of mass communication and irresponsible media, it can be a deadly characteristic.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 32 (p. 289)

Way, Democracy, Communication, Idea

“I adopted the theory of Reincarnation when I was twenty six. Religion offered nothing to the point. Even work could not give me complete satisfaction. Work is futile if we cannot utilise the experience we collect in one life in the next. When I discovered Reincarnation it was as if I had found a universal plan. I realised that there was a chance to work out my ideas. Time was no longer limited. I was no longer a slave to the hands of the clock. Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives. Some are older souls than others, and so they know more. The discovery of Reincarnation put my mind at ease. If you preserve a record of this conversation, write it so that it puts men’s minds at ease. I would like to communicate to others the calmness that the long view of life gives to us.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

Interview in the San Francisco Examiner (26 August 1928)

Life, Men, Religion, Soul

“People define themselves in terms of both unique individualizing attributes and collective attributes of the groups to which they belong.”

Christian Homburg (1962) German academic

Christian Homburg, Jan Wieseke, and Wayne D. Hoyer. "Social identity and the service-profit chain." Journal of Marketing 73.2 (2009). p. 54

People

“A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men… nine men out of ten are superstitious, nineteen out of twenty believe in the evil eye, and ninety-eight out of a hundred are afraid of spiders. They forgive us — oh! for many things, but not for the absence in us of their own feelings.”

Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi

Aunt Alicia
Gigi (1945)

Men, Feeling, Forgiveness, Evil

“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. What is a good book about short line in ballad metre? The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.”

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

Interview at Skidmore College Aug 1995,published 'Paris Review' no 144 Fall 1997
The Art of Poetry - interview 1995 with Downing & Kunitz

Books, Study, Learning

“[Ackoff also developed the circular organization concept. This structure is a democratic hierarchy with three essential characteristics:]
(1) the absence of an ultimate authority, the circularity of power;
(2) the ability of each member to participate directly or through representation in all decisions that affect him or her directly; and
(3) the ability of members, individually or collectively, to make and implement decisions that affect no one other than the decision maker or decision-makers.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Ackoff’s (1994) The Democratic Corporation: A Radical Prescription for Recreating Corporate America and Rediscovering Success. p. 117 cited in: Stuart A. Umpleby and Eric B. Dent. (1999) "The Origins and Purposes of Several Traditions. in Systems Theory and Cybernetics". in Cybernetics and Systems: An International Journal, Vol 30. pp. 79-103.
1990s

Decision

“Now, it is unquestionable that language, and consequently the system of concepts which it translates, is the product of a collective elaboration. What it expresses is the manner in which society as a whole represents the facts of experience. The ideas which correspond to the diverse elements of language are thus collective representations. Even their contents bear witness to the same fact. In fact, there are scarcely any words among those which we usually employ whose meaning does not pass, to a greater or less extent, the limits of our personal experience. Very frequently a term expresses things which we have never perceived or experiences which we have never had or of which we have never been the witness. Even when we know some of the objects which it concerns, it is only as particular examples that serve to illustrate the idea which they would never have been able to form by themselves. Thus there is a great deal of knowledge condensed in the word which I never collected, and which is not individual; it even surpasses me to such an extent that I cannot even completely appropriate all its results. Which of us knows all the words of the language he speaks and the entire signification of each?”

Émile Durkheim book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

Source: The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1912, p. 434

Idea, Knowledge, Personality

“The raw data or information collected for studies using thematic analysis is a person's own words or actions or observable aspects of his or her life in an organization or culture.”

Richard Boyatzis (1946) American business theorist

Source: Transforming qualitative information (1998), p. xii.

Life, Study, Personality

“Anything negative about the country or the regime will be rapidly erased from the collective memory. This memory deletion is being carried out by censoring newspapers, magazines, television news, the Internet and anything that preserves memories.”

Yan Lianke (1958) Chinese novelist and satirist

"On China's State-Sponsored Amnesia"

Memory, Country

“Better than big business is clean business.
To an honest man the most satisfactory reflection after he has amassed his dollars is not that they are many but that they are all clean.
What constitutes clean business? The answer is obvious enough, but the obvious needs restating every once in a while.
"A clean profit is one that has also made a profit for the other fellow."
This is fundamental moral axiom in business. Any gain that arises from another's loss is dirty.
Any business whose prosperity depends upon damage to any other business is a menace to the general welfare.
That is why gambling, direct or indirect, is criminal, why lotteries are prohibited by law, and why even gambling slot-machine devices are not tolerated in civilized countries. When a farmer sells a housekeeper a barrel of apples, when a milkman sells her a quart of milk, or the butcher a pound of steak, or the dry-goods man a yard of muslin, the housekeeper is benefited quite as much as those who get her money.
That is the type of honest, clean business, the kind that helps everybody and hurts nobody. Of course as business becomes more complicated it grows more difficult to tell so clearly whether both sides are equally prospered. No principle is automatic. It requires sense, judgment, and conscience to keep clean; but it can be done, nevertheless, if one is determined to maintain his self-respect. A man that makes a habit, every deal he goes into, of asking himself, "What is there in it for the other fellow?" and who refuses to enter into any transaction where his own gain will mean disaster to some one else, cannot go for wrong.
And no matter how many memorial churches he builds, nor how much he gives to charity, or how many monuments he erects in his native town, any man who has made his money by ruining other people is not entitled to be called decent. A factory where many workmen are given employment, paid living wages, and where health and life are conserved, is doing more real good in the world than ten eleemosynary institutions.
The only really charitable dollar is the clean dollar. And the nasty dollar, wrung from wronged workmen or gotten by unfair methods from competitors, is never nastier than when it pretends to serve the Lord by being given to the poor, to education, or to religion. In the long run all such dollars tend to corrupt and disrupt society.
Of all vile money, that which is the most unspeakably vile is the money spent for war; for war is conceived by the blundering ignorance and selfishness of rulers, is fanned to flame by the very lowest passions of humanity, and prostitutes the highest ideal of men; zeal for the common good; to the business of killing human beings and destroying the results of their collective work.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), Clean Business

Life, Men, Money, War

“"Learning organizations" [are] organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.”

Peter M. Senge (1947) American scientist

The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990)

People, Thinking, Learning

“Out of all this I have gradually developed the notion that psychology is pretty much confined to the paradigms it employs and, while you can take off in a great many directions and travel a considerable distance in any of them — as indeed we have with stimulus-response psychology — there is no harm in consorting with a strange paradigm now and then. Indeed the notion has occurred to me that psychology may best be regarded as a collection of paradigms wooed by exphysicists, ex-physiologists, and ex-preachers, as well as a lot of other intellectual renegades. Even more recently it has struck me that this is the nature of man; he is an inveterate collector of paradigms.”

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

"The autobiography of a theory," 1963

Travel, Nature

“The chief object of the present work is, as its title indicates, to furnish to the student examples by which to illustrate the processes of the Differential and Integral Calculus. In this respect it will be seen to agree with Professor Peacock's Collection of Examples; and indeed if a second edition of that excellent work had been published I should not have undertaken the task of making this compilation. But as Professor Peacock informed me that he had not leisure to superintend the publication of a second edition of his "Examples" which had been long out of print, I thought that I should do a service to students by preparing a work on a similar plan, but with such modifications as seemed called for by the increased cultivation of Analysis in this University.”

Duncan Gregory (1813–1844) British mathematician

p. iii http://books.google.com/books?id=h7JT-QDuAHoC&pg=PR3; Lead paragraph of the Preface; Highlighted section cited in: Patricia R. Allaire and Robert E. Bradley. " Symbolical algebra as a foundation for calculus: DF Gregory's contribution http://poncelet.math.nthu.edu.tw/disk5/js/history/gregory.pdf." Historia Mathematica 29.4 (2002): p. 408 Examples of the processes of the differential and integral calculus, (1841)

Universe

“The report from the Justice Department presents two sets of immediate recommendations – for the Ferguson Police Department and the Municipal Court. These recommendations include the implementation of a robust system of true community policing; increased tracking, review and analysis of Ferguson Police Department stop, search, ticketing and arrest practices; increased civilian involvement in police decision-making; and the development of mechanisms to effectively respond to allegations of officer misconduct. They also involve changes to the municipal court system including modifications to bond amounts and detention procedures; an end to the use of arrest warrants as a means of collecting owed fines and fees; and compliance with due process requirements. Ensuring meaningful, sustainable and verifiable reform will require that these and other measures be part of a court-enforceable remedial process that includes involvement from community stakeholders as well as independent oversight in order to remedy the conduct we have identified, to address the underlying culture we have uncovered, and to restore and rebuild the trust that has been so badly eroded.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Justice, Search, Communication, Decision

“The Class of 1858, to which Henry Adams belonged, was a typical collection of young New Englanders, quietly penetrating and aggressively commonplace; free from meannesses, jealousies, intrigues, enthusiasms, and passions; not exceptionally quick; not consciously skeptical; singularly indifferent to display, artifice, florid expression, but not hostile to it when it amused them; distrustful of themselves, but little disposed to trust any one else; with not much humor of their own, but full of readiness to enjoy the humor of others; negative to a degree that in the long run became positive and triumphant. Not harsh in manners or judgment, rather liberal and open-minded, they were still as a body the most formidable critics one would care to meet, in a long life exposed to criticism.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Life, Hostility, Jealousy, Passion

“The temptation before 1933 was to believe in Hitler as a savior, to believe in a national rebirth. The path to National Socialism led through a wasteland of personal fears, collective anxiety, and resentments. The temptation was to surrender oneself to a dictator, to believe in a miracle. Hitler evoked human will and divine providence. The religious-mystical element in National Socialism was uncannily appealing to unpolitical people, to unrealistic people at odds with their world and accustomed perhaps to the dream of heroic irrationalism. The temptation was to abandon oneself to national delirium— despite (or even because of) the threat of violence.”

Theodore Zeldin (1933) English academic

An Intimate History of Humanity (1994)

People, World, Fear, Dreams

“Today more than ninety per cent of all large animals are domesticated. Consider the chicken, for example. Ten thousand years ago it was a rare bird confined to small niches of South Asia. Today billions of chickens live on almost every continent and island, bar Antarctica. The domesticated chicken is probably the most widespread bird in the annals of planet Earth. If you measure success in terms of numbers, chickens, cows and pigs are the most successful animals ever. Alas, domesticated species paid for their unparalleled collective success with unprecedented individual suffering.”

Yuval Noah Harari (1976) Israeli historian

Introduction to Animal Liberation

Bird, Suffering, Success, Animals

“Knowledge can be considered as a collection of information, or as an activity, or as a potential. If we think of it as a collection of information, then the analogy of a computer's memory is helpful, for we can say that knowledge about something is like the storage of meaningful and true strings of symbols in a computer.”

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

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Design of Inquiring Systems (1971), p. 9; cited in Daniel J. Power (2004) Decision Support Systems: Frequently Asked Questions. p. 23

Knowledge, Thinking, Memory, Help

“Next we have the Vārttikas or "Notes" of Kātyāyana (probably third century B. C.) on 1245 of Pāṇini's rules, and, somewhat later, numerous grammatical Kārikās or comments in metrical form: all this critical work was collected by Patanjali in his Mahābhāshya or "Great Commentary," with supplementary comments of his own. He deals with 1713 rules of Pāṇini.”

Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian

Appendix A History of Sanskrit Literature

“[W]here’s the massive, collective condemnation about this recent Tennessee case? I’m quite sure that, once again, the left will find a way to make Samson the victim, and the young church usher, Robert Caleb Engle, the assailant. It’s just another example of how things have become upside down in America — and how we’ve all become pawns in the dangerous and delusional game being waged by the progressive, socialist left.”

Allen West (politician) (1961) American politician; retired United States Army officer

2010s, I'd like to see MORE football player protests — NOT less (27 September 2017)

Way, Game

“Wilson's analytical theory assumed that the natural and inevitable tendency in any system of government is to have recourse to some sovereign body that will exercise "ultimate supremacy" and have the last say in making collective decisions. It is in this sense that we speak of a government as have a monopoly over the legitimate exercise of authority and use of force in society. Indeed, much of contemporary political science is based on this presumption.”

Vincent Ostrom (1919–2012) American academic, educator and political scientist

Vincent Ostrom (2008), The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration, p. 87; Cited in: " Vincent Ostrom on Woodrow Wilson and Political Monism http://discoursesonliberty.blogspot.nl/2012/04/vincent-ostrom-on-woodrow-wilson-and.html" at discoursesonliberty.blogspot.nl, 2012/04

Exercises, Nature, Decision, Sense

“When I am designing, I make a selection of music that will be the inspiration behind the whole collection… I will be blasting that music—it becomes a journey I take in my brain to transfer that sound to the clothing.”

Anna Sui (1964) American fashion designer

Interview Magazine (December 15, 2010)

Music, Clothes

“The NSA and GCHQ … are obsessed with searching out any small little crevice on the planet where some forms of communication may be taking place without them being able to invade it. … They are obsessed with finding ways to invade the systems of online, onboard internet services and mobile phone services, because the very idea that human beings can communicate even for a few moments without them being able to collect and store and analyze and monitor what it is that we're saying is simply intolerable.”

Glenn Greenwald (1967) American journalist, lawyer and writer

CCC 2013 keynote, December 2013 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/27/greenwald_30c3/

Way, Search, Communication, Idea

“The ethnic composition of the population - and the particular mixture of nationalities, languages and cultures - is a matter of importance to all nations. The selection of immigrants should not be seen primarily as a test of which nationalities are best. It is more important to select immigrants with an eye to the collective effect on the nation. An immigration policy is not a symbol, a banner, of a nation's attitude to other peoples or races; and to reject potential immigrants is in no way to doubt the worthiness of their nationality or culture.”

Geoffrey Blainey book All for Australia

All for Australia (1984)

People, Way

“Having for their object the Science of Man, present difficulties exceedingly great, and, to merit confidence, must be collected upon a scale far too extended to be attempted by an individual philosopher.”

Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist

Introductory
A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties (1842)

Confidence, Science

“Arms trade. If there was a legitimate trade, they'd sell those things - guns and bombs - in a supermarket. It would be like a cosmetics demonstration, and you'd have a little bit of shopping music in the background. And so, here's our arms trade demonstrator. 'Hello, and welcome to our new "Twilight of the World" range - our stunning new collection for nuclear winter. Now, for those persistent racial problems, why not try our new ethnic cleanser, "Pogrom"? Apply vigorously to the affected area, and then wipe off the face of the earth. For persistent outbreaks, to eliminate those last spots of resistance, why not try our new "I Can't Believe It's Not a Kalashnikov"? Go on, leaders, treat yourself. Tell yourself "I want it, I need it, I'll have it". Now, for those particularly sensitive areas, why not try our new range, "U. N."? It's entirely cosmetic; it does nothing. Apply half-heartedly with our new hand-wringing cream. Now, people often come up to me and say "Can you save my face?" Well, I can. So for those secret little deals - those secret little Iraqi liaisons - why not try "Embargo", the mark of the middleman? Now, for a touch of mystery, why not visit the "Missing Body Shop"? Collect your free nail remover and watch your problems disappear. Now, you're probably sitting there thinking "Oh, I'm such a hideous old blood-soaked dictator of a thing; nobody will deal with me". How wrong you are! We are sole suppliers to the US government of "Turn-a-Blind-Eye Liner" - use always in conjunction with "Oil of Kuwaiti", a touch of "Massacre" and blusher. Oh, you won't need that. I'm Marlene from the House of Charnel. Thank you for your time and patience. And for that finishing touch - for those romantic evenings when you really want to take the enemy out - why not try our stunning new nerve gas, "Paralyse" by Calvin Klein.' (Linda Live 1993)”

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

Stand-up

People, Secret, World, Music

“Anything done for the first time unleashes a demon. (Cover and title of Cerebus #65, August 1984, collected in Church & State I, p. 7 and 273)”

Dave Sim (1956) Canadian cartoonist, creator of Cerebus

Usually quoted with "Anything" unspaced (as in the title p. 7), sometimes quoted spaced (as in the art p. 273, as "Any thing done for the first time unleashes a demon.") because the cover art http://www.comics.org/issue/175338/ piles "Any" and "thing" (though they are joined, the leg of the "y" being also the bar of the "t"). Compare to a quote misattributed to Emily Dickinson: "Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon." (origin and date unknown, also attributed to Dave Sim) Church & State volume I (1987)

Time

“French identity, radically conceived, corresponds to a failed national project. Is it not, in fact, the supreme example of collective defeat in the modern period, and thus—concretely—of humiliation by capital?”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Sore Losers" https://www.urbanomic.com/document/sore-losers/ (2016) (original emphasis)

“His imperial fancy has laid all Nature under tribute, and has collected riches from every scene of the creation and every walk of art.”

Robert Hall (1764–1831) British Baptist pastor

On Burke; Apology for the Freedom of the Press, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Art, Nature

“If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without norm. Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existence, but they no longer need to impose their speech (or are henceforth unable to); and the postliteracy of the late capitalist world reflects not only the absence of any great collective project but also the unavailability of the older national language itself.”

Fredric Jameson (1934) American academic

Source: Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Chapter 1: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

World, Idea, Country

“We have not collected an account of the killed and wounded, but we judge our loss amounts to between two and three hundred, and that of the enemy, to much more.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (August 1778)

Loss

“A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation's board of directors; it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, band-playing, voice-screaming medieval get-together of greed, practical lust, compromised idealism, career-advancement, meeting, feud, vendetta, conciliation, of rabble-rousers, fist fights (as it used to be), embraces, drunks (again as it used to be) and collective rivers of animal sweat.”

Norman Mailer book The Presidential Papers

The Presidential Papers (1963)

Animals, Horse, Fight

“The duty on British teas was slight. Americans might have paid the duty without increasing the price of their much prized luxury; ministers might have collected the same duty in England to the advantage of the Exchequer. That Britain should have insisted on this peppercorn in acknowledgement of her right, that America should have refused it in vindication of her liberty, may be taken as a high tribute from two eminently practical peoples to the power of abstract ideas.”

Carl L. Becker (1873–1945) American historian

The Eve of the Revolution (1918)

People, Idea, Tea

“Any new dominant communications medium leads to a new information ecology in society that inevitably changes the way ideas, feelings, wealth, power and influence are distributed and the way collective decisions are made.”

Al Gore (1948) 45th Vice President of the United States

Quotes, The Assault on Reason (2007)

Way, Feeling, Communication, Idea

“I went around to the little schoolhouses, talking like a professor, explaining our platform. We were lucky if the collection gave us enough for gas to get to the next place. We encouraged questions, and people asked us if it was true we were going to take their farms, like the Soviets in Russia, and did we believe in God.”

Tommy Douglas (1904–1986) Scottish-born Canadian politician

On his earliest political campaigning, quoted in Tommy Douglas (1983) by Doris French Shackleton, p. 68.

God, People, Question

“My attitude is one of unswerving devotion to myself. I am single-minded in my pursuit of money, fame and power. I also collect spoons.”

Shaun Micallef (1962) Australian actor

Money

“It has been showcased as a tool exclusively meant for disbursement of subsidies and we do not realise that it can also be used for mass surveillance. Can the government … assure us that this Aadhaar card and the data that will be collected under it – biometric, biological, iris scan, finger print, everything put together – will not be misused as has been done by the NSA in the U. S.?”

Tathagata Satpathy (1956) Indian politician

On the Aadhaar project, as quoted in " India's billion-member Aadhaar biometric database raises privacy fears http://in.reuters.com/article/india-aadhaar-privacy-fears-idINKCN0WI2JW" Reuters (16 March 2016)

“Auschwitz existed within history, not outside of it. The main lesson I learned there is simple: We Jews should never, ever become like our tormentors … Since 1967 it has become obvious that political Zionism has one monolithic aim: Maximum land in Palestine with a minimum of Palestinians on it. This aim is pursued with an inexcusable cruelty as demonstrated during the assault on Gaza. The cruelty is explicitly formulated in the Dahiye doctrine of the military and morally supported by the Holocaust religion.I am pained by the parallels I observe between my experiences in Germany prior to 1939 and those suffered by Palestinians today. I cannot help but hear echoes of the Nazi mythos of "blood and soil" in the rhetoric of settler fundamentalism which claims a sacred right to all the lands of biblical Judea and Samaria. The various forms of collective punishment visited upon the Palestinian people -- coerced ghettoization behind a "security wall"; the bulldozing of homes and destruction of fields; the bombing of schools, mosques, and government buildings; an economic blockade that deprives people of the water, food, medicine, education and the basic necessities for dignified survival -- force me to recall the deprivations and humiliations that I experienced in my youth. This century-long process of oppression means unimaginable suffering for Palestinians.”

Hajo Meyer (1924–2014) Dutch physicist

" An Ethical Tradition Betrayed http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hajo-meyer/an-ethical-tradition-betr_b_438660.html," huffingtonpost.com, Jan. 27, 2010. Retrieved on March 27, 2010.

Pain, People, Youth, Education

“Thus finally we must abandon even the title. It is not the proletariat that is being formed into a class: it is a variety of persons some of whom are separated from the system of production. Processes of forming workers into a class do not take place in a vacuum; rather, they are inextricably tied to the totality of processes through which collectivities appear in struggle at particular moments of history. And the outcomes of these processes, while not arbitrary, are not determined uniquely by the structure of social relations. More than one outcome lies within the limits set by those relations.”

Adam Przeworski (1940) Polish-American academic

"Proletariat into a Class: The Process of Class Formation from Karl Kautsky’s The Class Struggle to Recent Controversies", Politics & Society (1977)

History, Appearance, Personality

“With Allah's permission, I have been on the throne for 57 years. Even though various events I witness throughout my reign, I never felt this worry with the relations between race and religion that is becoming frail. … If the people love peace like me, whereupon use these opportunity and collective rights with gentility.”

Abdul Halim of Kedah (1927–2017) King of Malaysia

2016 Sultan of Kedah 87th birthday http://www.utusan.com.my/berita/nasional/hubungan-kaum-agama-semakin-rapuh-1.49543#ixzz5NDUW59jY, 18/1/2015

Love, People, Peace, Religion

“The human is a narrative being. We construct emotional machines, so-called “stories”, to communicate, to share the world in which we live and make it collectively experienceable. And we are pretty good at doing that. Since the primordial soup at some point mendelized into primate brains, we have either been fleeing from big cats or telling others about our escapes from the clutches of big cats. Sitting around the campfire, interpreting and breaking down the world, charging it with aura. Initially this was all very mythopoeic, and slowly it became more differentiated. But even in the post-Enlightenment age, world interpretations are not necessarily particularly rational. Good stories sell well, and the best stories are the ones that hit you in the gut, regardless of whether they would hold up to a Wikipedia check or not.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

via Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2016/04/14/the-story-of-traceroute-about.html

Age, World, Communication, Cats

““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.”
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.”

Michael Swanwick book The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 15 (p. 263)

Lie, Sadness, Smile, Feeling

“People search for the meaning of life, but this is the easy question: we are born into a world that presents us with many millennia of collected knowledge and information, and all our predecessors ask of us is that we not waste our brief life ignoring the past only to rediscover or reinvent its lessons badly.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

" Knowledge and Information http://naggum.no/erik/knowledge.html".

Life, People, World, Search

“The Big-Media collective is slow, stupid and shackled by ideology. Reality must bite them before they'll recognize it, much less report it.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"President Pinicchio’s Growing Proboscis" http://www.wnd.com/2013/10/president-pinocchios-growing-proboscis WorldNetDaily.com, October 31, 2013. 2010s, 2013

Stupidity, Reality

“The term 'capital' has two quite different meanings in economics: a sum of money, and a collection of machinery.”

Steve Keen (1953) Australian economist

Source: Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001), Chapter 6, The Holy War Over Capital, p. 130

Money

“Receptively it [the work as human action] is limited by the limitations of the perceiving eye. The limitation of the eye is its inability to see even a small surface equally sharp at all points. The eye must "graze" over the surface, grasping sharply portion after portion, to convey them to the brain which collects and stores the impressions.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

I.13 Productive | Receptive, p. 33
1921 - 1930, Pedagogical Sketch Book, (1925)

Quotes about collection page 4

Quotes about collection
page 4