Quotes about combination

A collection of quotes on the topic of combination, combine, other, use.

Quotes about combination

“The child is a combination of the father and the mother. Therefore, he is the role model of his parents.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“Edison was by far the most successful and, probably, the last exponent of the purely empirical method of investigation. Everything he achieved was the result of persistent trials and experiments often performed at random but always attesting extraordinary vigor and resource. Starting from a few known elements, he would make their combinations and permutations, tabulate them and run through the whole list, completing test after test with incredible rapidity until he obtained a clue. His mind was dominated by one idea, to leave no stone unturned, to exhaust every possibility.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

Idea, Success

“Life is a combination of magic and pasta.”

Federico Fellini (1920–1993) Italian filmmaker

Life

“So many people are most miserable these days.
The reason they find it so difficult to be happy is that they always view the past to be better than it was, the present dramatically worse than it is, and the future less resolute than it will be.
The idea of happiness is foreign to them.
Is this not something that is innate because babies are born with
"tabula rasa" which refers to the epistemological idea that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that therefore all knowledge comes from experience or perception. However I don't disagree with the doctrine of Innatism which holds that the mind is born already in possession of certain knowledge.
A smile, for instance is natural and innate!
So it is a combination of the two schools of thought.”

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

Baby, Idea, Nature, Knowledge

“Hitler had the willpower of a demon and he needed it. If he didn't have such a strong willpower he couldn't have achieved anything. Don't forget, if Hitler had not lost the war, if he did not have to fight against the combination of big powers like England, America, and Russia — each one he could have conquered individually — these defendants and these generals would now be saying, 'Heil Hitler,' and would not be so damn critical.”

Hermann Göring (1893–1946) German politician and military leader

To Leon Goldensohn (24 May 1946)
The Nuremberg Interviews (2004)

War, Strong, Fight, Forgetting

“There is no art more akin to mysticism than architecture. Abstract, geometrical, musical and yet dumb, passionless, it depends entirely upon symbolism, form and suggestion. Simple lies, and the harmonious combination and numerical relations between these, present something mysterious and at the same time incomplete.”

Alexander Herzen book My Past and Thoughts

My Past and Thoughts(1852-1870)

Time, Dependency, Art, Music

“If Tehran insists on combining the Persian imperial tradition with contemporary Islamic fervor, then a collision with America — and, indeed, with its negotiating partners of the Six — is unavoidable. Iran simply cannot be permitted to fulfill a dream of imperial rule in a region of such importance to the rest of the world.”

Henry Kissinger (1923–2023) United States Secretary of State

"The Next Steps With Iran" in The Washington Post (31 July 2006), p. A15 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/30/AR2006073000546.html 2000s

World, Dreams

“Thus the social position of women is in this respect very similar to that of philosophers and of the working classes. And we now see why these three elements should be united. It is their combined action which constitutes the moral or modifying force of society.”

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) French philosopher

Source: A General View of Positivism (1848, 1856), p. 235

Women

“I can better understand the inert blindness & defiant ignorance of the reactionaries from having been one of them. I know how smugly ignorant I was—wrapped up in the arts, the natural (not social) sciences, the externals of history & antiquarianism, the abstract academic phases of philosophy, & so on—all the one-sided standard lore to which, according to the traditions of the dying order, a liberal education was limited. God! the things that were left out—the inside facts of history, the rational interpretation of periodic social crises, the foundations of economics & sociology, the actual state of the world today … & above all, the habit of applying disinterested reason to problems hitherto approached only with traditional genuflections, flag-waving, & callous shoulder-shrugs! All this comes up with humiliating force through an incident of a few days ago—when young Conover, having established contact with Henneberger, the ex-owner of WT, obtained from the latter a long epistle which I wrote Edwin Baird on Feby. 3, 1924, in response to a request for biographical & personal data. Little Willis asked permission to publish the text in his combined SFC-Fantasy, & I began looking the thing over to see what it was like—for I had not the least recollection of ever having penned it. Well …. I managed to get through, after about 10 closely typed pages of egotistical reminiscences & showing-off & expressions of opinion about mankind & the universe. I did not faint—but I looked around for a 1924 photograph of myself to burn, spit on, or stick pins in! Holy Hades—was I that much of a dub at 33 … only 13 years ago? There was no getting out of it—I really had thrown all that haughty, complacent, snobbish, self-centred, intolerant bull, & at a mature age when anybody but a perfect damned fool would have known better! That earlier illness had kept me in seclusion, limited my knowledge of the world, & given me something of the fatuous effusiveness of a belated adolescent when I finally was able to get around more in 1920, is hardly much of an excuse. Well—there was nothing to be done … except to rush a note back to Conover & tell him I'd dismember him & run the fragments through a sausage-grinder if he ever thought of printing such a thing! The only consolation lay in the reflection that I had matured a bit since '24. It's hard to have done all one's growing up since 33—but that's a damn sight better than not growing up at all.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Catherine L. Moore (7 February 1937), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 407-408
Non-Fiction, Letters

God, Age, World, Education

“Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.”

Alan Turing Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals

"Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals," section 11: The purpose of ordinal logics (1938), published in Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, series 2, vol. 45 (1939)
In a footnote to the first sentence, Turing added: "We are leaving out of account that most important faculty which distinguishes topics of interest from others; in fact, we are regarding the function of the mathematician as simply to determine the truth or falsity of propositions."
Context: Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning... The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings.

Exercises, Mathematics

“The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Secret, Learning, Past

“Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise. The gift of language combined with the gift of song was given to man that he should proclaim the Word of God through Music.”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

God, Music

“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Happy, Cute, Happiness

“Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Source: Communion: The Female Search for Love

Love, Knowledge

“Berlin says: "… You cannot combine full liberty with full equality—full liberty for the wolves cannot be combined with full liberty for the sheep…." …. Are women sheep ("led like sheep to the slaughter")? Must women become wolves? Is violence against women a direct result of the fact that there is no inevitable, painful, retaliatory consequence for hurting women?”

Andrea Dworkin book Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation

Source: Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation (2000), pp. 245–246.

Women, Pain, Hurt

“Salvation can be attained only through pure and unsullied love of God (combined with knowledge of His greatness).”

Madhvacharya (1199–1278) Hindu philosopher who founded Dvaita Vedanta school

Beginner’s Guide to Sri MadhvAchArya’s Life and Philosophy

Love, God, Knowledge

“I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.”

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

Internet meme commonly attributed to Stallman made by an unknown source.
Misattributed

People, Parting

“The principal means of realizing it will be the formation of an alliance between philosophers and the working classes, for which both are alike prepared by the negative and positive progress of the last five centuries. The direct object of their combined action will be to set in motion the force of Public Opinion.”

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) French philosopher

Source: A General View of Positivism (1848, 1856), p. 153

“There is synthesis when, in combining therein judgments that are made known to us from simpler relations, one deduces judgments from them relative to more complicated relations. There is analysis when from a complicated truth one deduces more simple truths.”

André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836) French physicist and mathematician

André-Marie Ampère in: André-Marie Ampère: Enlightenment and Electrodynamics http://books.google.co.in/books?id=QWZKQWB-sbQC&pg=PA158, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 158.

Truth

“Chemical analysis and synthesis go no farther than to the separation of particles one from another, and to their reunion. No new creation or destruction of matter is within the reach of chemical agency. We might as well attempt to introduce a new planet into the solar system, or to annihilate one already in existence, as to create or destroy a particle of hydrogen. All the changes we can produce, consist in separating particles that are in a state of cohesion or combination, and joining those that were previously at a distance.”

John Dalton book A New System of Chemical Philosophy

Source: A New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808), Ch. III. On Chemical Synthesis

Change

“Ethiopia has always held a special place in my own imagination and the prospect of visiting attracted me more strongly than a trip to France, England and America combined.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

On a 1961 conference held in Ethiopia, as quoted in Rivonia Unmasked (1965) by Strydom Lautz, p. 108; also in ‪Rolihlahla Dalibhunga Nelson Mandela : An Ecological Study‬ (2002), by J. C. Buthelezi, p. 172
1960s
Context: Ethiopia has always held a special place in my own imagination and the prospect of visiting attracted me more strongly than a trip to France, England and America combined. I felt I would be visiting my own genesis, unearthing the roots of what made me an African. Meeting the emperor himself would be like shaking hands with history.

Imagination

“Dialectics does not deny the syllogism, but teaches us to combine syllogisms in such a way as to bring our understanding closer to the eternally changing reality.”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia

Source: In Defense of Marxism (1942), p. 66
Context: Dialectical thinking is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion. Dialectics does not deny the syllogism, but teaches us to combine syllogisms in such a way as to bring our understanding closer to the eternally changing reality.

Way, Understanding, Reality, Change

“All that is done and said and thought and suffered upon the Earth combine together, and flow onward in one broad resistless current toward those great results to which they are determined by the will of God.
We build slowly and destroy swiftly. Our Ancient Brethren who built the Temples at Jerusalem, with many myriad blows felled, hewed, and squared the cedars, and quarried the stones, and car»ed the intricate ornaments, which were to be the Temples. Stone after stone, by the combined effort and long toil of Apprentice, Fellow-Craft, and Master, the walls arose; slowly the roof was framed and fashioned; and many years elapsed, before, at length, the Houses stood finished, all fit and ready for the Worship of God, gorgeous in the sunny splendors of the atmosphere of Palestine. So they were built. A single motion of the arm of a rude, barbarous Assyrian Spearman, or drunken Roman or Gothic Legionary of Titus, moved by a senseless impulse of the brutal will, flung in the blazing brand; and, with no further human agency, a few short hours sufficed to consume and melt each Temple to a smoking mass of black unsightly ruin.
Be patient, therefore, my Brother, and wait!
The issues are with God: To do,
Of right belongs to us.
Therefore faint not, nor be weary in well-doing! Be not discouraged at men's apathy, nor disgusted with their follies, nor tired of their indifference! Care not for returns and results; but see only what there is to do, and do it, leaving the results to God! Soldier of the Cross! Sworn Knight of Justice, Truth, and Toleration! Good Knight and True! be patient and work!”

Albert Pike book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. XIX : Grand Pontiff, p. 321

Men, God, Truth, Justice

“What I feel for you can’t be conveyed in phrasal combinations; It either screams out loud or stays painfully silent but I promise — it beats words. It beats worlds.”

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) New Zealand author

World, Feeling

“Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding”

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) American photographer and author

Variant: Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.

Relationship, Romantic, Love, Understanding

“For two personalities to meet is like mixing two chemical substances: if there is any combination at all, both are transformed.”

C.G. Jung book Modern Man in Search of a Soul

p. 49 http://books.google.com/books?id=U6lMnx8AQsYC&q=%22The+meeting+of+two+personalities+is+like+the+contact+of+two+chemical+substances+if+there+is+any+reaction+both+are%22+%22transformed%22&pg=PA49#v=onepage Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933) Variant: The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. Source: Psychological Reflections: A New Anthology of His Writings 1905-61

Personality

“Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

Truth

“Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.”

Alice Munro (1931) Canadian novelist

Source: The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose

“Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Life, Beauty, Question, Hurt

“Boredom and stupidity and patriotism, especially when combined, are three of the greatest evils of the world we live in.”

Robertson Davies book World of Wonders

Source: World of Wonders

Stupidity, World, Evil

“History sometimes reproduces, at a distance of many years, the same combinations of circumstances that generate great achievements. But nothing ever repeats itself in exactly the same way.”

Valerio Massimo Manfredi (1943) Italian writer and archaeologist

Source: Alexander: Child of a Dream

Way, History

“We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies and are under their almost constant fire. We have combined voluntarily, precisely for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not to retreat into the adjacent marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into a an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation.”

Vladimir Lenin book What Is to Be Done?

Source: What is to be Done? (1902), Chapter One, A. "What is 'Freedom of Criticism'?", Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
Source: What Is to Be Done?

Fight

“My Diego: Mirror of the night Your eyes green swords inside my flesh. waves between our hands. All of you in a space full of sounds — in the shade and in the light. You were called AUXOCHROME the one who captures color. I CHROMOPHORE — the one who gives color. You are all the combinations of numbers. life. My wish is to understand lines form shades movement. You fulfill and I receive. Your word travels the entirety of space and reaches my cells which are my stars then goes to yours which are my light.”

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Mexican painter

Life, Color, Travel, Star

“The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Justice, Problem

“Magrat had used a lot of powder to make her face pale and interesting. It combined with the lavishly applied mascara to give the guard the impression that he was looking at two flies that had crashed into a sugar bowl.”

Terry Pratchett book Wyrd Sisters

Source: Wyrd Sisters

“Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.”

Saul Bellow book Humboldt's Gift

Source: Humboldt's Gift

Death, Season

“When the medicine enters the body and stops the pain, the vibrations from the combined substances stop, and the various substances return to their original states, in which they emit their original vibrations. However, if these vibrations happen to damage other cell structures, then harmful side effects will result.”

Masaru Emoto (1943–2014) Japanese writer

Source: The Hidden Messages in Water

Pain

“Black hair and blue eyes are my favorite combination.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

“My ideal of a woman is a combination of sacrifice, care and purity at one place. Sacrifice without a hope for reward, without showing any dissatisfaction and purity like Ceaser’s wife, which does not bring any regret.”

Premchand (1880–1936) Hindi writer

He wrote many of his novels in Hindi on his avowed words, in page=90.
Portrayal of Women in Premchands Stories A Critique

Hope

“Acquisitiveness – the wish to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title to goods – is a motive which, I suppose, has its origin in a combination of fear with the desire for necessaries.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1950s, What Desires Are Politically Important? (1950)

Fear, Motivation

“Robin was an outgrowth of a conversation I had with Bob. As I said, Batman was a combination of Fairbanks and Sherlock Holmes. Holmes had his Watson. The thing that bothered me was that Batman didn't have anyone to talk to, and it got a little tiresome always having him thinking. I found that as I went along Batman needed a Watson to talk to. That's how Robin came to be. Bob called me over and said he was going to put a boy in the strip to identify with Batman. I thought it was a great idea”

Bill Finger (1914–1974) American comic strip and comic book writer

[Jim Steranko, The Steranko History of Comics, Supergraphics, Reading, Pa., 1970, ISBN 0-517-50188-0, p.44]
Variant: Robin was an outgrowth of a conversation I had with Bob. As I said, Batman was a combination of Fairbanks and Sherlock Holmes. Holmes had his Watson. The thing that bothered me was that Batman didn't have anyone to talk to, and it got a little tiresome always having him thinking. I found that as I went along Batman needed a Watson to talk to. That's how Robin came to be. Bob called me over and said he was going to put a boy in the strip to identify with Batman. I thought it was a great idea

Boy, Idea, Thinking

“Since everything that lives is obliged to expend and receive life, there is an exchange of modifications between the living creature and its environment.
And yet, once that vital necessity is satisfied, our species—a positively strange species—thinks it must create for itself other needs and tasks besides that of preserving life. … Whatever may be the origin or cause of this curious deviation, the human species is engaged in an immense adventure, an adventure whose objective and end it does not know. …
The same senses, the same muscles, the same limbs—more, the same types of signs, the same instruments of exchange, the same languages, the same modes of logic—enter into the most indispensable acts of our lives, as they figure into the most gratuitous. …
In short, man has not two sets of tools, he has only one, and this one set must serve him for the preservation of his life and his physiological rhythm, and expend itself at other times on illusions and on the labours of our great adventure. …
The same muscles and nerves produce walking as well as dancing, exactly as our linguistic faculty enables us to express our needs and ideas, while the same words and forms can be combined to produce works of poetry. A single mechanism is employed in both cases for two entirely different purposes.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Source: Regards sur le monde actuel [Reflections on the World Today] (1931), pp. 158-159

Life, Idea, Thinking, Sense

“A congress of the powers is deceit agreed on between diplomats — it is the pen of Machiavelli combined with the scimitar of Mahomet.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

“The refusal to allow a multiply-disadvantaged class to represent others who may be singularly-disadvantaged defeats efforts to restructure the distribution of opportunity and limits remedial relief to minor adjustments within an established hierarchy. Consequently, “bottom-up” approaches, those which combine all discriminatees in order to challenge an entire employment system, are foreclosed by the limited view of the wrong and the narrow scope of the available remedy. If such “bottom-up” intersectional representation were routinely permitted, employees might accept the possibility that there is more to gain by collectively challenging the hierarchy rather than by each discriminatee individually seeking to protect her source of privilege within the hierarchy. But as long as antidiscrimination doctrine proceeds from the premise that employment systems need only minor adjustments, opportunities for advancement by disadvantaged employees will be limited. Relatively privileged employ- ees probably are better off guarding their advantage while jockeying against others to gain more. As a result, Black women — the class of employees which, because of its intersectionality, is best able to challenge all forms of discrimination — are essentially isolated and often required to fend for themselves.”

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw book Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex

Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex (1989)

Women, Effort

“I had the endurance but not the brute strength that must be coupled with it. No woman has this combination. That's why I say none of my sex will ever accomplish that particular stunt.”

Annette Kellerman (1886–1975) Australian swimmer, vaudeville star, film actress and writer

Of swimming the English Channel; "Into Fame and Fortune", in The American Magazine, Vol. 83 (1917), p. 34

Sex

“There is constant sun, good weather all the time, the ocean like a slab of slate - there is nothing less picturesque than this combination.”

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painter from France

2 quotes on weather, in a letter to her sister Edma, Summer 1873; as cited in The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot, with her family and friends, Denish Rouart - newly introduced by Kathleen Adler and Tamer Garb; Camden Press London 1986, p. 43
1871 - 1880

Time, Sun, Weather

“If it were not my purpose to combine barbarian things with things Hellenic, to traverse and civilize every continent, to search out the uttermost parts of land and sea, to push the bounds of Macedonia to the farthest Ocean, and to disseminate and shower the blessings of the Hellenic justice and peace over every nation, I should not be content to sit quietly in the luxury of idle power, but I should emulate the frugality of Diogenes. But as things are, forgive me Diogenes, that I imitate Herakles, and emulate Perseus, and follow in the footsteps of Dionysos, the divine author and progenitor of my family, and desire that victorious Hellenes should dance again in India and revive the memory of the Bacchic revels among the savage mountain tribes beyond the Kaukasos…”

Alexander the Great (-356–-323 BC) King of Macedon

As quoted in "On the Fortune of Alexander" by Plutarch, 332 a-b

Family, Peace, Justice, Search

“The concrete is a combination of abstractions — not an arbitrary or subjective combination but one that corresponds to the laws of the movement of a given phenomenon.”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia

Source: In Defense of Marxism (1942), p. 147

Law

“Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.
Have we no tendency to the latter condition?
Let any one who doubts, carefully contemplate that now almost complete legal combination — piece of machinery so to speak — compounded of the Nebraska doctrine, and the Dred Scott decision.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1850s, The House Divided speech (1858)

Law, Decision

“Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

"Letter to Mr. B — ".

Pleasure, Music, Idea

“The aggregate capital appears as the capital stock of all individual capitalists combined. This joint stock company has in common with many other stock companies that everyone knows what he puts in, but not what he will get out of it.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Vol. II, Ch. XX, p. 437.
(Buch II) (1893)

Appearance

“Understanding who you serve is always a very important problem, and it only gets harder the more people that you serve. We try to pay a lot of attention to this by a combination of very rigorous quantitative and qualitative feedback. But if you’re serving 1.2 billion people, it’s very hard.”

Mark Zuckerberg (1984) American internet entrepreneur

nytimes.com http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/can-facebook-innovate-a-conversation-with-mark-zuckerberg/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

People, Understanding, Problem

“Music and silence… combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.”

Marcel Marceau (1923–2007) French mime and actor

US News & World R eport (23 February 1987)

Music, Silence

“Private property capitalism and egalitarian multiculturalism are as unlikely a combination as socialism and cultural conservatism. And in trying to combine what cannot be combined, much of the modern libertarian movement actually contributed to the further erosion of private property rights (just as much of contemporary conservatism contributed to the erosion of families and traditional morals). What the countercultural libertarians failed to recognize, and what true libertarians cannot emphasize enough, is that the restoration of private property rights and laissez-faire economics implies a sharp and drastic increase in social “discrimination” and will swiftly eliminate most if not all of the multicultural-egalitarian life style experiments so close to the heart of left libertarians. In other words, libertarians must be radical and uncompromising conservatives.”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe book Democracy: The God That Failed

Source: Democracy: The God That Failed (2001), P.207-08

Life, Family, Heart

“The vast individual and corporate fortunes, the vast combinations of capital which have marked the development of our industrial system, create new conditions, and necessitate a change from the old attitude of state and the nation toward property.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, Speak softly and carry a big stick (1901)

Change

“No one, I think, can deny that the depression of the agricultural interest is excessive. Though I can recall periods of suffering, none of them have ever equalled the present in its instances. … the agricultural interest is suffering from a succession of bad harvest, accompanied, for the first time, by extremely low prices. That is a remarkable circumstance that has never before occurred—a combination that has never before been encountered. In old days, when we had a bad harvest we had also the somewhat dismal compensation of higher prices; but now, when the harvests are bad the prices are lower rather than higher…nor is it open to doubt that foreign competition has exercised a most injurious influence on the agricultural interests of the country. The country, however, was perfectly warned that if we made a great revolution in our industrial system, that was one of the consequences that would accrue. I may mention that the great result of the returns we possess is this, that the immense importations of foreign agricultural produce have been vastly in excess of what the increased demands of our population actually require, and that is why the low prices are maintained…That is to a great degree the cause of this depression.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Speech in the House of Lords on the state of agriculture (28 March 1879), reported in The Times (29 March 1879), p. 8.
1870s

Exercises, Thinking, Suffering, Time

“It is just as ridiculous to get excited & hysterical over a coming cultural change as to get excited & hysterical over one's physical aging... There is legitimate pathos about both processes; but blame & rebellion are essentially cheap, because inappropriate, emotions... It is wholly appropriate to feel a deep sadness at the coming of unknown things & the departure of those around which all our symbolic associations are entwined. All life is fundamentally & inextricably sad, with the perpetual snatching away of all the chance combinations of image & vista & mood that we become attached to, & the perpetual encroachment of the shadow of decay upon illusions of expansion & liberation which buoyed us up & spurred us on in youth. That is why I consider all jauntiness, & many forms of carelessly generalised humour, as essentially cheap & mocking, & occasionally ghastly & corpselike. Jauntiness & non-ironic humour in this world of basic & inescapable sadness are like the hysterical dances that a madman might execute on the grave of all his hopes. But if, at one extreme, intellectual poses of spurious happiness be cheap & disgusting; so at the other extreme are all gestures & fist-clenchings of rebellion equally silly & inappropriate—if not quite so overtly repulsive. All these things are ridiculous & contemptible because they are not legitimately applicable... The sole sensible way to face the cosmos & its essential sadness (an adumbration of true tragedy which no destruction of values can touch) is with manly resignation—eyes open to the real facts of perpetual frustration, & mind & sense alert to catch what little pleasure there is to be caught during one's brief instant of existence. Once we know, as a matter of course, how nature inescapably sets our freedom-adventure-expansion desires, & our symbol-&-experience-affections, definitely beyond all zones of possible fulfilment, we are in a sense fortified in advance, & able to endure the ordeal of consciousness with considerable equanimity... Life, if well filled with distracting images & activities favourable to the ego's sense of expansion, freedom, & adventurous expectancy, can be very far from gloomy—& the best way to achieve this condition is to get rid of the unnatural conceptions which make conscious evils out of impersonal and inevitable limitations... get rid of these, & of those false & unattainable standards which breed misery & mockery through their beckoning emptiness.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 291
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long

Life, Pleasure, Youth, Age

“It is the power to combine that labour has the most effective safeguard against exploitation and the only lasting security against inhuman conditions.”

V. V. Giri (1894–1980) Indian politician and 4th president of India

Lakshmidhar Mishra in: Human Bondage: Tracing Its Roots in India http://books.google.co.in/books?id=WNuGAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA425, SAGE Publications India, 12 July 2011, p. 425 From his book On the “Labour Problems in Indian Industry”

“The certain way to victory…lies in making everything on Imperial soil contribute to the war effort…combining the total material and spiritual strength of the nation…”

Yoshijirō Umezu (1882–1949) Japanese general

Quoted in "Suicide Squads: Axis and Allied Special Attack Weapons of World War II" - Page 267 - by Richard O'Neill - History - 1981.

War, Way, Effort, Victory

“Some German words are so long that they have a perspective. Observe these examples:

Freundschaftsbezeigungen.
Dilletantenaufdringlichkeiten.
Stadtverordnetenversammlungen.
These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions. And they are not rare; one can open a German newspaper any time and see them marching majestically across the page,—and if he has any imagination he can see the banners and hear the music, too. They impart a martial thrill to the meekest subject. I take a great interest in these curiosities. "Whenever I come across a good one, I stuff it and put it in my museum. In this way I have made quite a valuable collection. When I get duplicates, I exchange with other collectors, and thus increase the variety of my stock. Here are some specimens which I lately bought at an auction sale of the effects of a bankrupt bric-a-brac hunter:

Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen.
Alterthumswissenschaften.
Kinderbewahrungsanstalten.
Unabhaengigkeitserklaerungen.
Wiederherstellungsbestrebungen.
Waffenstillstandsunterhandlungen.
Of course when one of these grand mountain ranges goes stretching across the printed page, it adorns and ennobles that literary landscape,—but at the same time it is a great distress to the new student, for it blocks up his way; he cannot crawl under it, or climb over it or tunnel through it. So he resorts to the dictionary for help; but there is no help there. The dictionary must draw the line somewhere,—so it leaves this sort of words out. And it is right, because these long things are hardly legitimate words, but are rather combinations of words, and the inventor of them ought to have been killed.”

Mark Twain book A Tramp Abroad

A Tramp Abroad (1880)

Music, Way, Imagination, Mountain

“A little while ago, I stood by the grave of the old Napoleon, a magnificent tomb, and I gazed upon the sarcophagus of rare and nameless marble, where rest at last the ashes of that restless man. I leaned over the balustrade and thought about the career of the greatest soldier of the modern world. I saw him walking upon the banks of the Seine, contemplating suicide. I saw him at Toulon—I saw him putting down the mob in the streets of Paris—I saw him at the head of the army of Italy—I saw him crossing the bridge of Lodi with the tri-color in his hand—I saw him in Egypt in the shadows of the pyramids—I saw him conquer the Alps and mingle the eagles of France with the eagles of the crags. I saw him at Marengo—at Ulm and Austerlitz. I saw him in Russia, where the infantry of the snow and the cavalry of the wild blast scattered his legions like winter's withered leaves. I saw him at Leipsic in defeat and disaster—driven by a million bayonets back upon Paris—clutched like a wild beast—banished to Elba. I saw him escape and retake an empire by the force of his genius. I saw him upon the frightful field of Waterloo, where Chance and Fate combined to wreck the fortunes of their former king. And I saw him at St. Helena, with his hands crossed behind him, gazing out upon the sad and solemn sea. I thought of the orphans and widows he had made—of the tears that had been shed for his glory, and of the only woman who ever loved him, pushed from his heart by the cold hand of ambition. And I said I would rather have been a French peasant and worn wooden shoes. I would rather have lived in a hut with a vine growing over the door, and the grapes growing purple in the kisses of the autumn sun. I would rather have been that poor peasant with my loving wife by my side, knitting as the day died out of the sky—with my children upon my knees and their arms about me—I would rather have been that man and gone down to the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust, than to have been that imperial impersonation of force and murder, known as 'Napoleon the Great.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Robert G. Ingersoll, The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child
About

Love, Fate, Children, World

“The Oxford group movement, imagining itself the mediator of Christ's salvation in a catastrophic age, is really an additional evidence of the decay in which we stand. Its religion manages to combine bourgeois complacency with Christian contrition in a manner which makes the former dominant. Its morality is a religious expression of a decadent individualism. Far from offering us a way out of our difficulties it adds to the general confusion. This is not the gospel's message of judgement and hope to the world. It is bourgeois optimism, individualism and moralism expressing itself in the guise of religion. No wonder the rather jittery plutocrats of our day open their spacious summer homes to its message!”

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) American protestant theologian

Source: Christianity and Power Politics (1936), Chapter 29: "Hitler and Buchman"

Age, World, Religion, Hope

“He’s like a pizza with the works. He’s a touch of Zorro, a dash of Dracula, a helping of the Shadow and a bunch of Sherlock Holmes all mixed together. Plus the cars and gadgets and that great hideout. You can’t miss with a combination like that. But you can’t recreate that same magic in a new character either. There’s only one Batman.”

Chuck Dixon (1954) American comic book writer

Chuck Dixon Interview https://www.cbr.com/chuck-dixon-interview/ (April 19, 2001)

Cars, Help

“It seems to me now that mathematics is capable of an artistic excellence as great as that of any music, perhaps greater; not because the pleasure it gives (although very pure) is comparable, either in intensity or in the number of people who feel it, to that of music, but because it gives in absolute perfection that combination, characteristic of great art, of godlike freedom, with the sense of inevitable destiny; because, in fact, it constructs an ideal world where everything is perfect and yet true.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Letter to Gilbert Murray, April 3, 1902
1900s

People, Pleasure, World, Art

“[According to Habermas, the genesis of the bourgeois public sphere resulted from a combination of early capitalist commercial development and the organization of territorial … Representative publicness involved a re-presenting or staging for the purposes of display and acclamation, hence] this publicness (or publicity) of representation was not constituted as a social realm, that is, as a public sphere; rather, it was something like a status attribute, if this term may be permitted.”

Jürgen Habermas book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Source: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1963/1991, p. 7 as cited in: Benedetto Fontana, Cary J. Nederman, Gary Remer (2004) Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy. p. 222

“Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Conversation of 1930
Similar to Wittgenstein's written notes of the "Big Typescript" published in Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993) edited by James Carl Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, p. 175: Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.
Personal Recollections (1981)

“Some American writer has said “the snakes in this district may be divided into one species—the venomous”. The same principle applies here. Postage-Stamp-Cases may be divided into one species, the “Wonderland”. Imitations of it will soon appear, no doubt: but they cannot include the two Pictorial Surprises, which are copyright.You don't see why I call them 'Surprises'? Well, take the Case in your left hand, and regard it attentively. You see Alice nursing the Duchess's Baby? (An entirely new combination, by the way : it doesn't occur in the book.) Now, with your right thumb and forefinger, lay hold of the little book, and suddenly pull it out. The Baby has turned into a Pig I If that doesn't surprise you, why, I suppose you wouldn't be surprised if your own Mother-in-law suddenly turned into a Gyroscope!”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing (1890)

Books, Law, Way, Appearance

“We have shown that socialism is an incoherent combination of thesis and antithesis, which contradict and destroy one another. Catholicism, on the contrary forms a great synthesis which includes all things in its unity, and infuses them in its sovereign harmony. It may be affirmed of Catholic dogmas, that, although they are diverse, they are one. Only an absolute negation can be opposed to this wonderful synthesis. The Catholic word is then invincible and eternal. Nothing can diminish its sovereign virtue.”

Juan Donoso Cortés (1809–1853) Spanish author, political theorist and diplomat

Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism (1879)

“We may lay it down as an incontestible axiom, that, in all the operations of art and nature, nothing is created; an equal quantity of matter exists both before and after the experiment; the quality and quantity of the elements remain precisely the same; and nothing takes place beyond changes and modifications in the combination of these elements. Upon this principle the whole art of performing chemical experiments depends: We must always suppose an exact equality between the elements of the body examined and those of the products of its analysis.”

Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) French chemist

Source: Elements of Chemistry (1790), p. 226

Art, Nature, Change, Dependency

“The composer does not sit around and wait for an inspiration to walk up and introduce itself…Making music is actually little else than a matter of invention aided and abetted by emotion. In composing we combine what we know of music with what we feel.”

George Gershwin (1898–1937) American composer and pianist

Isaac Goldberg Tin Pan Alley (New York: John Day, 1930) p. viii.

Music, Feeling, Waiting

“The relational model provides different categories, different underlying structures into which experience can be organized. Here the establishment of strong connections to others, in reality or in fantasy, is presumed to be primary. Forms of relationship are seen as fundamental, and life is understood largely as an array of metaphors for expressing and playing out relational patterns: discovery, penetration, domination, surrender, control, longing, evasion, revelation, envelopment, merger, differentiation, and so on. The body is still centrally important. Sexuality and bodily experiences are viewed as particularly apt arenas for this activity, since sexuality is enormously multiform and plastic. The number of different body parts, the variability of interactions, the poignancy of the sensations, the immense number of combinations — the almost infinite variety of human sexual possibilities make this an enormously fertile reservoir of metaphors for expressing different types of relationships, different configurations of connections, between self and others.”

Stephen Mitchell (1946–2000) American psychologist

Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 91

Life, Reality, Strong, Parting

“The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It's not even close. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined. Our troops are the finest fighting force in the history of the world. No nation dares to attack us or our allies because they know that's the path to ruin. Surveys show our standing around the world is high… When it comes to every important international issue, people of the world do not look to Beijing or Moscow to lead; they call us.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2016, State of the Union address (January 2016)

People, World, History, Fight

“Sir, than robbery, than piracy, than polygamy, slaveholding is worse. More criminal, more injurious to man, and consequently more offensive to God. Slaveholding has been justly designated as the sum of all villainy. Put every crime perpetuated among men into a moral crucible, and dissolve and combine them all, and the resultant amalgam is slaveholding. It has the violence of robbery.”

Owen Lovejoy (1811–1864) American politician

As quoted in His Brother's Blood: Speeches and Writings, 1838&ndash;64 https://books.google.com/books?id=qMEv8DNXVbIC&pg=PA192 (2004), edited by William Frederick Moore and Jane Ann Moore, pp. 192&ndash;193 1860s, Speech to the U.S. House of Representatives (April 1860)

Men, God

“The combined effects of the stars and of Jupiter appear to determine the main statistical features of the orbits of comets.”

Jan Oort (1900–1992) Dutch astronomer

[The structure of the cloud of comets surrounding the Solar System and a hypothesis concerning its origin, Bulletin of the Astronomical Institutes of the Netherlands, 11, 408, 91–110, 3 January 1950, 91, https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/6036/BAN_11_91_110.pdf?sequence=1]

Star, Appearance

“Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.”

Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist

Part 4 : The Masculinization of Wealth, p. 196
Moving Beyond Words (1994)

For women, Art

“The musician's technique, in fact, should be as protean as the actor's. The best method of attaining this is by combining the qualities of the artist and the technician. To do this it is essential, that in addition to concentrating upon musical technique, one should keep in touch with the other arts. They provide that general culture to the musician without which he will never become a great artist.”

Alfred Cortot (1877–1962) Franco-Swiss pianist and conductor

"Do Infant Prodigies Become Great Musicians?", Music & Letters (Apr., 1935)

Art, Music

“I have a great belief in spiritual force, but I think we have to realize that spiritual force alone has to have material force with it so long as we live in a material world. The two together make a strong combination.”

Eleanor Roosevelt My Day

17 May 1940
My Day (1935–1962)

World, Thinking, Strong

“Econometrics is the name for a field of science in which mathematical-economic and mathematical-statistical research are applied in combination. Econometrics, therefore, forms a borderland between two branches of science, with the advantages and disadvantages thereof; advantages, because new combinations are introduced which often open up new perspectives; disadvantages, because the work in this field requires skill in two domains, which either takes up too much time or leads to insufficient training of its students in one of the two respects.”

Jan Tinbergen (1903–1994) Dutch economist

Source: Econometrics, 1951, p. 3; Cited in: Econometrica: journal of the Econometric Society. (1953) p. 36

Mathematics, Science, Time, Training

“To plan to reserve cavalry for the finish of the battle, is to have no conception of the power of combined infantry and cavalry charges, either for attack or for defense.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

“As a man's conduct is controlled by public fact, so is her religion ruled by authority. The daughter should follow her mother's religion, the wife her husband's. Were that religion false, the docility which leads mother and daughter to submit to nature's laws would blot out the sin of error in the sight of Goddess. Unable to judge for themselves they should accept the judgment of father and husband as that of the church. While men unaided cannot deduce the rules of their faith, neither can they assign limits to that faith by the evidence of reason; they allow themselves to be driven hither and thither by all sorts of external influences, they are ever above or below the truth. Extreme in everything, they are either altogether reckless or altogether pious; you never find them able to combine virtue and piety. Their natural exaggeration is not wholly to blame; the ill-regulated control exercised over them by men is partly responsible. Loose morals bring religion into contempt; the terrors of remorse make it a tyrant; this is why women have always too much or too little religion. As a woman's religion is controlled by authority it is more important to show her plainly what to believe than to explain the reasons for belief; for faith attached to ideas half-understood is the main source of fanaticism, and faith demanded on behalf of what is absurd leads to madness or unbelief. Whether our catechisms tend to produce impiety rather than fanaticism I cannot say, but I do know that they lead to one or other. In the first place, when you teach religion to little girls never make it gloomy or tiresome, never make it a task or a duty, and therefore never give them anything to learn by heart, not even their prayers. Be content to say your own prayers regularly in their presence, but do not compel them to join you. Let their prayers be short, as Christ himself has taught us. Let them always be said with becoming reverence and respect; remember that if we ask the Almighty to give heed to our words, we should at least give heed to what we mean to say.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau book Emile, or On Education

Emile, or On Education (1762), Book V

Women, Men, Truth, Faith

“You will soon find that it is not his clothes but his political sense and energy that control. You will find that if you expect to do anything there will be mighty little temptation to try to treat the men with whom you are working on any basis save the fundamental democratic basis of what they amount to, and what you can show you amount to as compared to them. So that if you go into life to do anything, it is perfectly useless for me to tell you to get rid of snobbery, because you will have to. It is just as true in every other field as in politics. Every man who works in philanthropy and he can do nothing in philanthropy unless he combines a very earnest desire to accomplish what is decent with the determination to accomplish it in practical fashion […] if he goes into philanthropy and tries to do something in a college settlement, tries to do his part in working to disentangle the tangled knot of our social and civic life, he will find just as soon as he gets interested in his work he wont care and won't know who the people are who are with him except as he judges them by their fruits. The interest that you take in him is, can a given man accomplish something? If he can not, then let him give place to the man who can.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School (1904)

Life, Men, People, Fashion

“The mechanism of modern business is so delicate that extreme care must be taken not to interfere with it in a spirit of rashness or ignorance. Many of those who have made it their vocation to denounce the great industrial combinations which are popularly, although with technical inaccuracy, known as "trusts," appeal especially to hatred and fear. These are precisely the two emotions, particularly when combined with ignorance, which unfit men for the exercise of cool and steady judgment. In facing new industrial conditions, the whole history of the world shows that legislation will generally be both unwise and ineffective unless undertaken after calm inquiry and with sober self-restraint. […] All this is true; and yet it is also true that there are real and grave evils, one of the chief being over-capitalization because of its many baleful consequences; and a resolute and practical effort must be made to correct these evils. There is a widespread conviction in the minds of the American people that the great corporations known as trusts are in certain of their features and tendencies hurtful to the general welfare. This […] is based upon sincere conviction that combination and concentration should be, not prohibited, but supervised and within reasonable limits controlled; and in my judgment this conviction is right.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, First Annual Message to Congress (1901)

Men, People, World, Fear

“Combine general relativity and quantum theory into a single theory that can claim to be the complete theory of nature. This is called the problem of quantum gravity.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (2007)

Nature, Problem

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers — joined in the serious business of keeping our food, shelter, clothing and loved ones from combining with oxygen.”

Kurt Vonnegut book God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

"Eliot Rosewater" to a group of volunteer firemen.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965)

Love, Food, Business, Clothes

“Corporations are necessary to the effective use of the forces of production and commerce under modern conditions. We cannot effectively prohibit all combinations without doing far-reaching economic harm; and it is mere folly to do as we have done in the past—to try to combine incompatible systems—that is, to try both to prohibit and regulate combinations. Combinations in industry are the result of an imperative economic law which cannot be repealed by political legislation. The effort at prohibiting all combination has substantially failed. The only course left is active corporate regulation – that is, the control of corporations for the common good—the suppression of the evils that they work, and the retention, as far as maybe, of that business efficiency in their use which has placed us in the forefront of industrial peoples.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, The Progressives, Past and Present (1910)

People, Law, Business, Effort

“Either one or the other [ analysis or synthesis ] may be direct or indirect. The direct procedure is when the point of departure is known-direct synthesis in the elements of geometry. By combining at random simple truths with each other, more complicated ones are deduced from them. This is the method of discovery, the special method of inventions, contrary to popular opinion.”

André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836) French physicist and mathematician

André-Marie Ampè, in André-Marie Ampère: Enlightenment and Electrodynamics http://books.google.co.in/books?id=QWZKQWB-sbQC&pg=PA159, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 159

Truth, Departure

“Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Vol. I, Ch. 15 (last sentence), pg. 556.
(Buch I) (1867)

Wealth

“The first impulse came from the consideration of negatives in geometry; I was accustomed to viewing the distances AB and BA as opposite magnitudes. Arising from this idea was the conclusion that if A, B, and C are points of a straight line, then in all cases AB + BC = AC, this being true whether AB and BC are directed in the same direction or in opposite directions (where C lies between A and B). In the latter case AB and BC were not viewed as merely lengths, but simultaneously their considered since they were oppositely directed, Thus dawned the distinction between the sum of lengths and the sum of distances which were fixed in direction. From this resulted the requirement for establishing this latter concept of sum, not simply for the case where the distances were directed in the same or opposite directions, but also for any other case. This could be done in the most simple manner, since the law that AB + BC = AC remains valid when A, B, and C do not lie on a straight line.
This then was the first step which led to a new branch of mathematics… I did not however realize how fruitful and how rich was the field that I had opened up; rather that result seemed scarcely worthy of note until it was combined with a related idea.”

Hermann Grassmann (1809–1877) German polymath, linguist and mathematician

Ausdehnungslehre (1844)

Lie, Law, Mathematics, Idea

“For me, the roles are the secondary part of the whole process to me strangely. It's about who you're being directed by and who the other actors are. Whenever I read a script, I think, 'wow, that's a great story,' and invariably I want to play one of the other characters, and the process of working out how to play the character you're offered is to work out why you aren't playing the other characters in a way. Maybe that's why I play roles of various different sizes. The challenge is not necessarily always the lead role, but in this case [Blue Jasmine] it was all those things combined.”

Cate Blanchett (1969) Australian actress

2014 SBIFF - Cate Blanchett Discusses Selecting Roles, Woody Allen and Casting, Santa Barbara International Film Festival, 2 February 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9m9sMSGC5M,

Way, Thinking, Reading, Parting

“Some revolutions are inevitable. There are moral eruptions, just as the outbreak of volcanoes are physical eruptions. When the chemical combinations which produce them are complete, the volcanic eruptions burst forth, just as revolutions do when the moral factors are in the right state. In order to foresee them the trend of ideas must be understandingly observed.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

Idea

“I am essentially a recluse who will have very little to do with people wherever he may be. I think that most people only make me nervous—that only by accident, and in extremely small quantities, would I ever be likely to come across people who wouldn't. It makes no difference how well they mean or how cordial they are—they simply get on my nerves unless they chance to represent a peculiarly similar combination of tastes, experiences, and heritages; as, for instance, Belknap chances to do... Therefore it may be taken as axiomatic that the people of a place matter absolutely nothing to me except as components of the general landscape and scenery. Let me have normal American faces in the streets to give the aspect of home and a white man's country, and I ask no more of featherless bipeds. My life lies not among people but among scenes—my local affections are not personal, but topographical and architectural. No one in Providence—family aside—has any especial bond of interest with me, but for that matter no one in Cambridge or anywhere else has, either. The question is that of which roofs and chimneys and doorways and trees and street vistas I love the best; which hills and woods, which roads and meadows, which farmhouses and views of distant white steeples in green valleys. I am always an outsider—to all scenes and all people—but outsiders have their sentimental preferences in visual environment. I will be dogmatic only to the extent of saying that it is New England I must have—in some form or other. Providence is part of me—I am Providence—but as I review the new impressions which have impinged upon me since birth, I think the greatest single emotion—and the most permanent one as concerns consequences to my inner life and imagination—I have ever experienced was my first sight of Marblehead in the golden glamour of late afternoon under the snow on December 17, 1922. That thrill has lasted as nothing else has—a visible climax and symbol of the lifelong mysterious tie which binds my soul to ancient things and ancient places.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Lillian D. Clark (29 March 1926), quoted in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 186
Non-Fiction, Letters

Love, Life, People, Family

“In some ways I believe I epitomise the average New Zealander: I have modest abilities, I combine these with a good deal of determination, and I rather like to succeed.”

Edmund Hillary (1919–2008) New Zealand mountaineer

Sir Edmund Hillary : King Of The World

Way

“Combinations in industry are the result of an imperative economic law which cannot be repealed by political legislation. The effort at prohibiting all combination has substantially failed. The way out lies, not in attempting to prevent such combinations, but in completely controlling them in the interest of the public welfare.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, The New Nationalism (1910)

Law, Way, Effort

“The general, and at the same time dynamic, type of analysis still remains an unwritten chapter of economic theory, the claims of innumerable “model-builders” notwithstanding… The … theoretical approach, based on the combination of the complexities of a general interdependent system with the simplifying assumptions of static analysis, constitutes the background of this investigation.”

Wassily Leontief (1906–1999) Russian economist

Source: Structure of American economy, 1919-1929, 1941, p. 33, as cited in: Drejer, Ina. " The Role of Technological Linkages in a Leontief Scheme-From Static Structures to Endogenous Evolution of Technical Coefficients http://www.druid.dk/uploads/tx_picturedb/dw1999-340.pdf." Preparado para: DRUID Winter Conference, Holte (enero 1999). 1998.

Time

“In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1910s, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918)

Perfection

“When earth meets with fire and is dissolved by the keenness of it, it would drift about, whether it were dissolved in fire itself, or in some mass of air or water, until the parts of it meeting and again being united became earth once more; for it never could pass into any other kind. But when water is divided by fire or by air, it may be formed again and become one particle of fire and two of air: and the divisions of air may become for every particle broken up two particles of fire. And again when fire is caught in air or in waters or in earth, a little in a great bulk, moving amid a rushing body, and contending with it is vanquished and broken up, two particles of fire combine into one figure of air: and when air is vanquished and broken small, from two whole and one half particle one whole figure of water will be composed. Let us also reckon it once again thus: when any of the other kinds is intercepted in fire and is divided by it through the sharpness of its angles and its sides, if it forms into the shape of fire, it at once ceases from being divided…”

Plato book Timaeus

Section 57a, Tr. R. D. Archer-Hind, The Timaeus of Plato (1888) pp. 203-205. https://books.google.com/books?id=q2YMAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA203 Timaeus

Water, Parting

“The center of intellectual self-discipline as such is in the process of decomposition. The taboos that constitute a man’s intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check. What is true of the instinctual life is no less of the intellectual: the painter or composer forbidding himself as trite this or that combination of colors or chords, the writer wincing at banal or pedantic verbal configurations, reacts so violently because layers of himself are drawn to them. Repudiation of the present cultural morass presupposes sufficient involvement in it to feel it itching in one’s finger-tips, so to speak, but at the same time the strength, drawn from this involvement, to dismiss it. This strength, though manifesting itself as individual resistance, is by no means of a merely individual nature. In the intellectual conscience possessed of it, the social movement is no less present than the moral super-ego. Such conscience grows out of a conception of the good society and its citizens. If this conception dims—and who could still trust blindly in it—the downward urge of the intellect loses its inhibitions and all the detritus dumped in the individual by barbarous culture—half-learning, slackness, heavy familiarity, coarseness—comes to light. Usually it is rationalized as humanity, desire to be understood by others, worldly-wise responsibility. But the sacrifice of intellectual self-discipline comes much too easily to him who makes it for us to believe his assurance that it is one.”

Theodor W. Adorno book Minima Moralia

Das Zentrum der geistigen Selbstdisziplin als solcher ist in Zersetzung begriffen. Die Tabus, die den geistigen Rang eines Menschen ausmachen, oftmals sedimentierte Erfahrungen und unartikulierte Erkenntnisse, richten sich stets gegen eigene Regungen, die er verdammen lernte, die aber so stark sind, daß nur eine fraglose und unbefragte Instanz ihnen Einhalt gebieten kann. Was fürs Triebleben gilt, gilt fürs geistige nicht minder: der Maler und Komponist, der diese und jene Farbenzusammenstellung oder Akkordverbindung als kitschig sich untersagt, der Schriftsteller, dem sprachliche Konfigurationen als banal oder pedantisch auf die Nerven gehen, reagiert so heftig gegen sie, weil in ihm selber Schichten sind, die es dorthin lockt. Die Absage ans herrschende Unwesen der Kultur setzt voraus, daß man an diesem selber genug teilhat, um es gleichsam in den eigenen Fingern zucken zu fühlen, daß man aber zugleich aus dieser Teilhabe Kräfte zog, sie zu kündigen. Diese Kräfte, die als solche des individuellen Widerstands in Erscheinung treten, sind darum doch keineswegs selber bloß individueller Art. Das intellektuelle Gewissen, in dem sie sich zusammenfassen, hat ein gesellschaftliches Moment so gut wie das moralische Überich. Es bildet sich an einer Vorstellung von der richtigen Gesellschaft und deren Bürgern. Läßt einmal diese Vorstellung nach—und wer könnte noch blind vertrauend ihr sich überlassen—, so verliert der intellektuelle Drang nach unten seine Hemmung, und aller Unrat, den die barbarische Kultur im Individuum zurückgelassen hat, Halbbildung, sich Gehenlassen, plumpe Vertraulichkeit, Ungeschliffenheit, kommt zum Vorschein. Meist rationalisiert es sich auch noch als Humanität, als den Willen, anderen Menschen sich verständlich zu machen, als welterfahrene Verantwortlichkeit. Aber das Opfer der intellektuellen Selbstdisziplin fällt dem, der es auf sich nimmt, viel zu leicht, als daß man ihm glauben dürfte, daß es eines ist.
E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 8
Minima Moralia (1951)

Life, Color, Feeling, Nature