Quotes about conception
page 11

“An important object of the Journal should be the publication of papers dealing with attempts at statistical verification of the laws of economic theory, and further the publication of papers dealing with the purely abstract problems of quantitative economics, such as problems in the quantitative definition of the fundamental concepts of economics and problems in the theory of economic equilibrium.
The term equilibrium theory is here interpreted as including both the classical equilibrium theory proceeding on the lines of Walras, Pareto, and Marshall, and the more general equilibrium theory which is now beginning to grow out of the classical equilibrium theory, partly through the influence of the modern study of economic statistics. Taken in this broad sense the equilibrium problems include virtually all those fundamental problems of production, circulation, distribution and consumption, which can be made the object of a quantitative study. More precisely: The equilibrium theory in the sense here used is a body of doctrines that treats all these problems from a certain point of view, which is contrasted on one side with the verbal treatment of economic problems and on the other side with the purely empirical-statistical approach to economic problems”

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

Frisch (1927). as quoted in: Bjerkholt, Olav, and Duo Qin. A Dynamic Approach to Economic Theory: The Yale Lectures of Ragnar Frisch. Routledge, 2010: About "Oekonometrika"
1920

Law, Problem, Sense, Study

“.. it [painting art] has never been so truly realistic, so firmly attached to its own period as it is today. A kind of painting that is realistic in the highest sense is beginning to appear, and it is here today... The advertising billboard, dictated by modern commercial needs, that brutally cuts across a landscape.... this yellow or red poster shouting in a timid landscape, is the best of possible reasons for the new painting; it topples the whole sentimental literary concept and announces the advent of plastic contrast.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote, 1914, in 'Functions of Painting by Fernand Leger'; p. 12
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1910's, Contemporary Achievements in Painting, 1914

Art, Sense, Appearance, Painting

“One cannot take up a leading article in even the foremost papers dealing with foreign relations, without finding it assumed that European governments have the instincts of savages and the foresight of cattle-lifters. Are we to assume that the governments of the world, which presumably are directed by men as farsighted as bankers, are permanently to fall below the banker in their conception of enlightened self-interest?”

Norman Angell book The Great Illusion

The Great Illusion (1910)

Men, World

“What's the point of having metamodels, and why should you care? Because models must be stated in a way that yields a common understanding among all involved parties, we need a way to specify exactly what a model means. Metamodels allow you to do just that: They specify the concepts of the language you're using to specify a model.”

Stephen J. Mellor (1952) British computer scientist

Source: MDA Distilled. Principles of Model-Driven Architecture, 2003, p. 37.

Way, Understanding

“As it had been explained to David long ago, genetic diversity was very, very important. The more diverse the human gene pool was, the better were humanity’s chances of adapting to any new and unexpected conditions it might encounter, now that it was beginning to push outward into Space, to say nothing of surviving any unexpected natural disasters such as polar shifts or meteor strikes on Earth.
Unfortunately, humanity had been both unlucky and foolish. Out of the dozens of races that had once lived in the world, only a handful had survived into modern times. Some ancient races had been rendered extinct by war. Some had been simply crowded out, retreating into remote regions and forced to breed amongst themselves, which killed them off with lethal recessives.
That had been the bad luck. The foolishness had come when people began to form theories about the process of Evolution. They got it all wrong: most people interpreted the concept of “survival of the fittest” to mean they ought to narrow the gene pool, reducing it in size. So this was done, in genocidal wars and eugenics programs, and how surprised people were when lethal recessives began to occur more frequently! To say nothing of the populations who died in droves when diseases swept through them, because they were all so genetically similar there were none among them with natural immunities.”

Kage Baker book The Machine's Child

Source: The Machine's Child (2006), Chapter 29, “Still Another Morning in 500,000 BCE” (p. 330)

War, Bad luck, People, World

“Take of London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts, gas leaks 20 parts, dewdrops gathered in a brickyard at sunrise 25 parts; odor of honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix. The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville drizzle.”

O. Henry (1862–1910) American short story writer

"A Municipal Report"
Strictly Business (1910)

Parting

“Technology has always been a central variable in organizational theory, informing research and practice. Despite years of investigative effort there is little agreement on the definition and measurement of technology, and no compelling evidence on the precise role of technology in organizational affairs. I will argue that the divergent definitions and opposing perspectives associated with technological research have limited our understanding of how technology interacts with organizations, and that these incompatibilities cannot be resolved by mutual concession. What is needed is a reconstruction of the concept of technology, which fundamentally re-examines our current notions of technology and its role in organizations.”

Wanda Orlikowski American computer scientist

Source: "The duality of technology" 1992, p. 389

Understanding, Effort

“Pascal is called the founder of modern probability theory. He earns this title not only for the familiar correspondence with Fermat on games of chance, but also for his conception of decision theory, and because he was an instrument in the demolition of probabilism, a doctrine which would have precluded rational probability theory.”

Ian Hacking (1936) Canadian philosopher

Source: The Emergence Of Probability, 1975, Chapter 3, Opinion, p. 23.

Game, Decision, Chance

“The Declaration of Independence proclaimed to a world, organized politically and spiritually around the concept of the inequality of man, that the dignity of human personality was inherent in man as a living being. The Emancipation Proclamation was the offspring of the Declaration of Independence. It was a constructive use of the force of law to uproot a social order which sought to separate liberty from a segment of humanity.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Emancipation Proclamation Centennial Address (1962)

World, Law, Personality

“Among the fundamental values linked to women's actual lives is what has been called a 'capacity for the other.' Although a certain type of feminist rhetoric makes demands 'for ourselves,' women preserve the deep intuition of the goodness in their lives of those actions which elicit life, and contribute to the growth and protection of the other…. But, in the final analysis, every human being, man or woman, is destined to be 'for the other.'… Therefore, the promotion of women within society must be understood and desired as a humanization accomplished through those values, rediscovered thanks to women. Every outlook which presents itself as a conflict between the sexes is only an illusion and a danger; it would end in segregation and competition between men and women, and would promote a solipsism nourished by a false conception of freedom.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

Doctrinal document On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World, July 31, 2004
2003

Life, Women, Men, Sex

“An analysis of social relations in 2 parts: the properties of 2-person relations, and an extension of the chief concepts to the complex relations of larger groups. Beginning with the assumption that most social interactions must be reinforced to be repeated, the authors analyze 2-person matrices designed to express all the possible interactions and their outcomes in terms of rewards and costs to the participants. Also investigated are: the exogenous and endogenous determinants of rewards and costs, interactive interference and facilitation, formation and evaluation of the 2-person relation, power and dependence, norms and roles, tasks, and nonvoluntary relations. The chapters on larger groups take up interdependence, status, conformity, and group goals. 300-item bibliog”

John Thibaut (1917–1986) American social psychologist

Abstract
The social psychology of groups. 1959

Parting, Dependency, Personality

“Energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

address " What is Science? http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html", presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966), published in The Physics Teacher, volume 7, issue 6 (1969), p. 313-320

“No one can examine this record and escape the conclusion that in the great outline of its principles the Declaration was the result of the religious teachings of the preceding period. The profound philosophy which Jonathan Edwards applied to theology, the popular preaching of George Whitefield, had aroused the thought and stirred the people of the Colonies in preparation for this great event. No doubt the speculations which had been going on in England, and especially on the Continent, lent their influence to the general sentiment of the times. Of course, the world is always influenced by all the experience and all the thought of the past. But when we come to a contemplation of the immediate conception of the principles of human relationship which went into the Declaration of Independence we are not required to extend our search beyond our own shores. They are found in the texts, the sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy who were earnestly undertaking to instruct their congregations in the great mystery of how to live. They preached equality because they believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. They justified freedom by the text that we are all created in the divine image, all partakers of the divine spirit.”

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

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

God, People, World, Search

“The explicable requires the inexplicable. Experience requires the nonexperienceable. The obvious requires the mystical. This is a powerful group of paired concepts generated by the complementarity of conceptuality.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

501.13 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s05/p0000.html#501.10 1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

“One challenge is to agree on minimum criteria of good governance that are not perceived as a threat to cultural traditions and to draw on moral concepts that are indigenous to specific cultural settings. {{fix cite}”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009)

Drawing

“At fifteen years of age, when first my parents settled down in London (temporarily as they thought) I had never been in England, never had an English friend or English governess, or English tuition of any sort or kind. I did not speak one word of English. Then how did it all come about? Neo-Victorians and Neo-Georgians will put it down to destiny; others to predestination. I, in my humble way, put it down to the Will of God. And looking back on my long life and its many changes I can trace the links of my chain of life that began on the great plains of Hungary, continued through the heart of London, and find me now at this hour of writing this book in Monte Carlo jotting down all that I can remember of those links which led me one by one to the conception of my first literary work. If any one of those links had not been, if any turn of event in my life had been different, I would probably have ended my days in the country of my birth and known nothing of the happiness which comes from love, from the affection of friends (such as one meets in England) and from success in the work to which I devoted so many years of my life.”

Emma Orczy (1865–1947) Hungarian-British author of "The Scarlet Pimpernel"

Source: Links in the Chain of Life (1947), Ch. 1

Love, Life, God, Happiness

“Wundt initiated the first systematic psychological research programme. This achievement occurred at the same time as his elaboration of a philosophy of science which was anti-inductivist and stressed the priority of explanatory motives. Specifically psychological explanations depended on concepts of psychological causality as manifested in apperceptive or volitional processes. The major differences between the Wundtian and other models of psychological experimentation can be understood in the light of this general approach. Thus experimenters and subjects had to be enlightened collaborators and the role of introspection was more significant in an explanatory than in a purely observational context. Wundt's special requirements for the psychological experiment led him to reject other early models as exemplified by the hypnotic experiment in which the experimenter-subject relationship was closer to what was to become the norm in the twentieth century.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

Kurt Danziger, "Wundt's psychological experiment in the light of his philosophy of science." Psychological Research 42.1-2 (1980). p. 109; Summary

Motivation, Light, Science, Time

“Sraffa’s criticisms of the concept of capital also amount – at least in principle –to a deadly blow to the foundations of the so-called ‘neo-classical synthesis’. Combining Keynes’ thesis on the possibility of fighting unemployment by adopting adequate fiscal and monetary policies with the marginalist tradition of simultaneous determination of equilibrium quantities and prices as a method to study any economic problem, this approach has in the last few decades come to constitute the dominant doctrine in textbooks the whole world over. It is only thanks to increasing specialisation in the various fields of economics, often invoked as the inevitable response to otherwise insoluble difficulties, that the theoreticians of general equilibrium are able to construct their models without considering the problem of relations with the real world that economists are supposed to be interpreting, and that the macroeconomists can pretend that their ‘one commodity models’ constitute an acceptable tool for analysis. For those who believe that the true task facing economists, hard as it may be, is to seek to interpret the world they live in, Sraffa’s ‘cultural revolution’ still marks out a path for research that may not (as yet) have yielded all it was hoped to, but is certainly worth pursuing.”

Alessandro Roncaglia (1947) Italian economist

Source: Piero Sraffa: His life, thought and cultural heritage (2000), Ch. 1. Piero Sraffa

World, Hope, Problem, Study

“For the longest time, I didn't know the name of anyone in Led Zeppelin. I didn't care about what they looked like or ate. I wanted to listen, not read about them. I've always had that philosophy. I never started playing drums to get chicks or money or anything else. Long before I had concepts of those things, I wanted to be a drummer. That's the basic concept of what I do. I'm a drummer. I play drums. We are artists as drummers, and people should realize that. Not everyone can sit down and use all four of your limbs simultaneously to create something out of wood and plastic. We're creating something beautiful, and it may not sound pretty, but if you listen with the right ear, it sounds very pretty. If you try and listen to a song without drums, you haven't got anything.”

John Dolmayan (1973) Lebanese-born Armenian–American songwriter and drummer

[Artist Features: Steal This Article: John Dolmayan, Weiss, David, May 2003, http://drummagazine.com/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=241, 2007-01-08]

Money, People, Beauty, Time

“In short, greatly as I admire all that has been said here to-night, gladly and gratefully as I recognise the genuinely philosophic temper and the authentic philosophic place it all most certainly has, I am still moved to say that my honoured colleagues, in this their common underlying conception, have to my mind all "missed the mark and come short of the glory of God." They have not seized nor expressed the complete Ideal of the Reason.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The City of God and the True God as its Head (In Royce’s “The Conception of God: a Philosophical Discussion Concerning the Nature of the Divine Idea as a Demonstrable Reality”), p.89

God, Night

“In the subjectivist view, when ‘reason’ is used to connote a thing or idea rather than an act, it refers exclusively to the relation of such an object or concept to a purpose, not to the object or concept itself. It means that the thing or the idea is good for something else. There is no reasonable aim as such, and to discuss the superiority of one aim over another in terms of reason becomes meaningless. From the subjective approach, such a discussion is possible only if both aims serve a third and higher one, that is, if they are means, not ends.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 6.

Idea

“A stylized version of our IKEA present. It is talking about very simple concepts. We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created.”

David Fincher (1962) American film director

About Fight Club
Gavin Smith goes one-on-one with David Fincher (1999)

Fight

“The stakeholder concept was originally defined as "those groups without whose support the organization would cease to exist." The list of stakeholders originally included shareowners, employees, customers, suppliers, lenders and society. Stemming from the work of Igor Ansoff and Robert Stewart (in the planning department at Lockheed) and, later Marion Doscher and Stewart at SRI, the original approach served an important information function in the SRI corporate planning.”

R. Edward Freeman (1951) American academic

R. Edward Freeman (2010) Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. p. 32

Support

“Among the various paradigmatic changes in science and mathematics in this century, one such change concerns the concept of uncertainty. In science, this change has been manifested by a gradual transition from the traditional view, which insists that uncertainty is undesirable in science and should be avoided by all possible means, to an alternative view, which is tolerant of uncertainty and insists that science cannot avoid it. According to the traditional view, science should strive for certainty in all its manifestations (precision, specificity, sharpness, consistency, etc.); hence, uncertainty (imprecision, nonspecificity, vagueness, inconsistency, etc.) is regarded as unscientific. According to the alternative (or modem) view, uncertainty is considered essential to science; it is not only an unavoidable plague, but it has, in fact, a great utility.”

George Klir (1932–2016) American computer scientist

Source: Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic (1995), p. 1.

Mathematics, Science, Change

“Let’s take a look at the 25th variation of the second part. Here Bach meets us in his highest and deepest personal and human form: it’s like in the Art of Fugue in the unfinished fugue No. 20, where Bach confronts us with his personal signature. It was he himself, who, after he had been occupied during his whole life with symbols, with numbers, with the mastering of structural and formal problems and renewals, now he saw himself confronted with a personal view into mirror. He now shows us a human being in his whole conception of life. The composer of “Come, oh sweet death” now is confessing, “Oh sweet death, how bitter is your prickle.””

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Life, Death, Art, Problem

“Today our main problem is that of organized complexity. Concepts like those of organization, wholeness, directiveness, teleology, control, self-regulation, differentiation and the like are alien to conventional physics. However, they pop up everywhere in the biological, behavioural and social sciences, and are, in fact, indispensable for dealing with living organisms or social groups. Thus, a basic problem posed to modern science is a general theory of organization.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Von Bertalanffy (1956) "General System Theory". In: General Systems, Yearbook of the Society for General Systems Research, vol. 1, 1956.
1950s

Problem, Science

“Carnap calls such concepts as point, straight line, etc., which are given by implicit definitions, improper concepts. Their peculiarity rests on the fact that they do not characterize a thing by its properties, but by its relation to other things. Consider for example the concept of the last car of a train. Whether or not a particular car falls under this description does not depend on its properties but on its position relative to other cars. We could therefore speak of relative concepts, but would have to extend the meaning of this term to apply not only to relations but also to the elements of the relations.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

Cars, Dependency, Training

“Put in a nut-shell, my thesis amounts to this. The repeated attempts made by Rudolf Carnap to show that the demarcation between science and metaphysics coincides with that between sense and nonsense have failed. The reason is that the positivistic concept of 'meaning' or 'sense' (or of verifiability, or of inductive confirmability, etc.) is inappropriate for achieving this demarcation — simply because metaphysics need not be meaningless even though it is not science. In all its variations demarcation by meaninglessness has tended to be at the same time too narrow and too wide: as against all intentions and all claims, it has tended to exclude scientific theories as meaningless, while failing to exclude even that part of metaphysics which is known as 'rational theology'.”

Karl Popper (1902–1994) Austrian-British philosopher of science

Ch 11. "The Demarcation between Science and Metaphysics." (Summary, p. 253)
Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963)

Sense, Science, Time, Parting

““That the historic systems of philosophy, not only those which have been directly influenced by the historic systems of religion and theology, but also those which have originated more or less in opposition to these, or in correction of them, are unequal to meeting the conditions essential to the existence of a moral order and to the possibility of a moral life in individuals, will appear plainly upon a brief analysis of their leading conceptions.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Appendix B: The System in its Ethical Necessity and its Practical Bearings

Life, Religion, Appearance

“The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has a difficult job living with his civilian bosses, the Secretary of Defense and the President, striving to convince them in terms they can understand matters that he views as military necessity, and, in General Wheeler's case, within the concept of one thing at a time. One thing at a time was all he could hope to accomplish. Since Vietnam was the visible part of the iceberg, the part he knew was perturbing his civilian bosses, Vietnam rather than the strategic reserve was the context in which to present the request for additional troops. If he could gain authority to raise the troops, exactly what was to be done with them could be decided once the troops were actually available.”

William Westmoreland book A Soldier Reports

Source: A Soldier Reports (1976), p. 357.

Hope, Understanding, Time, Parting

“The concept of the « struggle for existence » has been applied to microbial interrelationships in nature in a manner comparable to the effects assigned by Darwin to higher forms of life. It has also been suggested that the ability of a microbe to produce an antibiotic substance enables it to survive Giom. in competition for space and for nutrients with other microbes. Such assumptions ppear to be totally unjustified on the basis of existing knowledge. Before we proceed with a discussion of the formation and activities of antibiotics under natural conditions, we must consider certain fundamental aspects of the problem of antibiotic production under controlled laboratory or factory conditions… All the discussion of a "struggle for existence" in which antibiotics are supposed to play a part, is merely a figment of the imagination, and an appeal to the melodramatic rather than the factual.”

Selman Waksman (1888–1973) American scientist, biochemist, microbiologist who discovered Streptomycin and many antibiotics

As quoted by the Instituto di Microbiologia, (1956). Giornale Di Microbiologia. Volume 2; in proceedings of the First European Symposium on the Biochemistry of Antibiotics

Life, Imagination, Nature, Knowledge

“As Prince Bismarck, in the ’60s, wanted to move the “Acheron” of socialism, … it was of course not love for socialism or knowledge of socialism that led Prince Bismarck to do this. He understood nothing about socialism at that time, and never did understand anything about it down to his death; in fact, he never had any conception of the moving forces of political and social life at all. There probably never lived at any time in any country a “statesman” who was less scientific, who had less knowledge, and who relied so purely on experience and a sort of half-gambler, half-peddler cunning, as Bismarck. Those offers to socialists place in the clearest light the untruthfulness of Prince Bismarck’s claim that he always regarded the social democracy as incompatible with the existence of the state. Bismarck wanted to use socialism for the purpose of breaking up and dissolving the bourgeois liberal opposition, especially the Progressive party. This, in itself, is the most conclusive proof that he had no conception of the real nature of socialism. Of course the fate of the boy magician was repeated. The elemental force which was conjured up grew over the head of the dabbler, and he did not get the best of socialism; socialism got the best of him.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

Love, Life, Death, Fate

“In the postmodern tradition, the pseudo-academics behind the concept of white privilege have invented for themselves an artificial, political construct. Political constructs confer power on those who dream them up. For politics is the predatory process through which the figment of sick minds is weaponized.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"The Demonization Of Whites By Mrs. Bill Gates & Other Dangerous Idiots," https://constitution.com/the-demonization-of-whites-by-mrs-bill-gates-other-dangerous-idiots/ Constitution.com, June 8, 2018 2010s, 2018

Dreams

“Most Christians would say that evolution is one of God’s creative methods. But creationists reject that possibility outright, because the issue for them is not whether their God is true; but whether their dogma is true. It can’t be in any case. Even if current concepts of evolution were proven wrong tomorrow, Biblical creationism still couldn’t be true either, because it has already been disproved many times, many ways, and collapses on its own lack of merit. But of course believers can never admit that.”

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

"7th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8Q2Db17v5U, Youtube (February 27, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

God, Way, Time

“Ludicrous concepts…like the whole idea of a "war on terrorism". You can wage war against another country, or on a national group within your own country, but you can't wage war on an abstract noun. How do you know when you've won? When you've got it removed from the Oxford English Dictionary?”

Terry Jones (1942–2020) Welsh comedian, screenwriter, actor, film director and author

The Observer http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,901052,00.html, February 23, 2003.

War, Idea, Country

“Only the dialectical conception of … reality as a social process … dissolves the fetishistic forms necessarily produced by the capitalist mode of production and enables us to see them as mere illusions which are not less illusory for being seen to be necessary.”

György Lukács book History and Class Consciousness

Source: History and Class Consciousness (1968), p. 13

Reality

“The dominant concept in Aristotle's philosophy of nature is his notion of causation. …The final cause states that each substance has an inherent purpose. Thus there must be a purpose or design in the acorn such that it always grows into an oak tree. This aspect of existence is indicated by the word entelechy; this means the purpose that guides things to develop in one way rather than another.”

John Freely (1926–2017) American physicist

Source: Before Galileo, The Birth of Modern Science in Medieval Europe (2012), p. 291

Way, Nature, Tree

“A second part of criticisms [of our concept, Multitude], which relate closely to the first, focus on the economic conception of the multitude. … "You are really against the workers!" … Industrial labor has been displaced from its hegemonic position over other forms of labor by immaterial labor, which now tends to transform all sectors of production and society itself in line with its qualities. Industrial workers remain important, then, but within the context of this new paradigm. Here arises, then, but within the second criticism of this pair, that our argument of hegemony of immaterial labor replaces the old vanguard of industrial workers with a new vanguard of immaterial workers - Microsoft programmers leading us on the shining path. "You are just postmodern Leninist in sheep's clothing!" they cry. No, the hegemonic position of a form of production in the economy should not imply any political hegemony. Our argument about the hegemony of immaterial labor and the becoming common of all forms of labor is aimed instead at establishing that contemporary conditions tending to form a general communication and collaboration of labor that can be the basis of the multitude.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

(223)
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Communication, Parting, Cry, Clothes

“Yes! We believe in a higher principle than your virtue and the kind of morality you speak of so paltrily and without much conviction. We believe that there is no imperative or reward for virtue for the soul because it simply acts according to the necessity of its inherent nature. The moral imperative expresses itself in an ought and presupposes the concept of an evil next to that of good. P. 43”

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) German philosopher (idealism)

Philosophy and Religion 1804)

Soul, Nature, Evil

“The object of this edict is to enlighten the present and future citizens of Chandigarh about the basic concepts of planning of the city so that they become its guardians and save it from whims of individuals.”

Le Corbusier (1887–1965) architect, designer, urbanist, and writer

"The Edict of Chandigarh," 1959

Future

“Understanding the concept of competency is a prerequisite to understanding his integrated model of management.”

Richard Boyatzis (1946) American business theorist

Source: Competent manager (1982), p. 10.

Understanding

“In training Biu Jee we are taught to be free. The first forms tell us about normal situations. Biu Jee is for the abnormal situations. The ideas in Biu Jee sometimes will contradict normal Ving Tsun (Wing Chun) ideas in order to allow the person to survive in a bad situation. We are told to do what is necessary to survive and so there are no limitations. Styles have different concepts and objectives. With Ving Tsun (Wing Chun) we want to attack our opponent in a very direct and savage manner. Other styles will contradict this objective by attempting non-direct tactics. If we combine them our objectives can become confused in the heat of the fight. We will be less effective.”

Wong Shun Leung (1935–1997) martial artist

Wong Shun Leung's Answer on the Question of "Do you feel that Ving Tsun (Wing Chun) has any limitations ? Many students like to combine boxing with kicking , throwing and grappling on the ground to develop eclectic systems." Mixed Martial Arts Source: Interview with Wong Shun Leung, by: Rusper Patel http://www.gongsauwong.com/interview.php

Idea, Fight, Personality, Training

“There can be no immaculate conception of socialism.”

Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960) Welsh politician

Oft repeated: see John Campbell "Nye Bevan" (Richard Cohen Books, 1997)
1950s

“A man with taste is the same as a woman with taste. Man invents his home, woman - her dress. Being an artist means having an individual, distinct from all other people's perception and concept of every single thing. Being an artist does not mean possessing a faculty of combining lines and paints, being artful in this or that sort of art, but having a world inside oneself and individual forms to express it.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

1895 - 1905
Source: Lettres à un Inconnu, (Notebook II, p. 8) - Aux sources de l'expressionnisme. Presentation par Gabrielle Dufour-Kowalska. Klincksieck, 1999. p. 106

People, World, Art, Home

“Systems theory pursues the scientific exploration and understanding of systems that exist in the various realms of experience, in order to arrive at a general theory of systems: an organized expressing of sets of interrelated concepts and principles that apply to all systems.”

Béla H. Bánáthy (1919–2003) Hungarian linguist and systems scientist

Source: Systems Design of Education (1991), p. 31

Understanding

““[Thanksgiving is] my favorite holiday, I think. It's without a doubt my favorite American Holiday. I love Christmastime, Chanuka etc. But Thanksgiving is as close as we get to a nationalist holiday in America (a country where nationalism as a concept doesn't really fit). Thanksgiving's roots are pre-founding, which means its not a political holiday in any conventional sense. We are giving thanks for the soil, the land, for the gifts of providence which were bequeathed to us long before we figured out our political system. Moreover, because there are no gifts, the holiday isn't nearly so vulnerable to materialism and commercialism. It's about things -- primarily family and private accomplishments and blessings -- that don't overlap very much with politics of any kind. We are thankful for the truly important things: our children and their health, for our friends, for the things which make life rich and joyful. As for all the stuff about killing Indians and whatnot, I can certainly understand why Indians might have some ambivalence about the holiday (though I suspect many do not). The sad -- and fortunate -- truth is that the European conquest of North America was an unremarkable old world event (one tribe defeating another tribe and taking their land; happened all the time) which ushered in a gloriously hopeful new age for humanity. America remains the last best hope for mankind. Still, I think it would be silly to deny how America came to be, but the truth makes me no less grateful that America did come to be. Also, I really, really like the food.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

"Thanksgiving" http://web.archive.org/web/20041126231505/http://www.nationalreview.com:80/thecorner/04_11_24_corner-archive.asp (24 November 2004), The Corner, National Review 2000s, 2004

Love, Life, Children, Health

“The mental operation by which one achieves new concepts and which one denotes generally by the inadequate name of induction is not a simple but rather a very complicated process. Above all, it is not a logical process although such processes can be inserted as intermediary and auxiliary links. The principle effort that leads to the discovery of new knowledge is due to abstraction and imagination.”

Ernst Mach (1838–1916) Austrian physicist and university educator

3rd edition, p. 318ff, As quoted by Phillip Frank, Philosophy of Science: The Link Between Science and Philosophy (1957)
20th century, "Erkenntnis und Irrtum: Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung" (1905)

Imagination, Knowledge, Effort

“The importance of the lesson which this Society was formed to teach would be hard to overestimate. Its main purpose is to impress upon the people the necessity for reverence. This is the beginning of a proper conception of ourselves, of our relationship to each other, and our relationship to our Creator. Human nature cannot develop very far without it. The mind does not unfold, the creative faculty does not mature, the spirit does not expand, save under the influence of reverence. It is the chief motive of an obedience. It is only by a correct attitude of mind begun early in youth and carried through maturity that these desired results are likely to be secured. It is along the path of reverence and obedience that the race has reached the goal of freedom, of self-government, of a higher morality, and a more abundant spiritual life.”

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

1920s, Authority and Religious Liberty (1924)

Life, People, Youth, Motivation

“He transforms all concepts into incommunicable, solidified objects. To refute him is to become contaminated with unreality.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

On F. H. Bradley in "Avatars of the Tortoise"
Discussion (1932)

“Among the names of those who have led the great advance of the industrial arts during the past thirty years, that of Frederick Winslow Taylor will hold an increasingly high place. Others have led in electrical development, in the steel industry, in industrial chemistry, in railroad equipment, in the textile arts, and in many other fields, but he has been the creator of a new science, which underlies and will benefit all of these others by greatly increasing their efficiency and augmenting their productivity. In addition, he has literally forged a new tool for the metal trades, which has doubled, or even trebled, the productive capacity of nearly all metal-cutting machines. Either achievement would entitle him to high rank among the notable men of his day; — the two combined give him an assured place among the world's leaders in the industrial arts.
Others without number have been organizers of industry and commerce, each working out, with greater or less success, the solution of his own problems, but none perceiving that many of these problems involved common factors and thus implied the opportunity and the need of an organized science. Mr. Taylor was the first to grasp this fact and to perceive that in this field, as in the physical sciences, the Baconian system could be applied, that a practical science could be created by following the three principles of that system, viz.: the correct and complete observation oi facts, the intelligent and unbiased analysis of such facts, and the formulating of laws by deduction from the results so reached. Not only did he comprehend this fundamental conception and apply it; he also grasped the significance and possibilities of the problem so fully that his codification of the fundamental principles of the system he founded is practically complete and will be a lasting monument to its founder.”

Henry R. Towne (1844–1924) American engineer

Henry R. Towne, in: Frank Barkley Copley, Frederick W. Taylor, father of scientific management https://archive.org/stream/frederickwtaylor01copl, 1923. p. xii.

Men, World, Law, Art

“There is a massive central core of human thinking which has no history — or none recorded in histories of thought; there are categories and concepts which, in their most fundamental character, change not at all. Obviously these are not the specialities of the most refined thinking. They are the commonplaces of the least refined thinking; and are yet the indispensable core of the conceptual equipment of the most sophisticated human beings. It is with these, their interconnexions, and the structure that they form, that a descriptive metaphysics will be primarily concerned.”

P. F. Strawson (1919–2006) British philosopher

Source: Individuals (1959), p. xiv.

History, Thinking, Change

“I believe that the situation has now gone so far that it is impossible to conceive of an effective long-term solution in which the agenda at least does not include consideration of, and which is not in some way directed to finding a means of achieving, the aspirations envisaged half a century ago, of progress towards a united Ireland…A substantial term of years will be required before any concept of unification could become a reality, but the dream must be there. If men of moderation have nothing to hope for, men of violence will have something to shoot for.”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1971/nov/25/northern-ireland-1 in the House of Commons (25 November 1971) Leader of the Opposition

Men, Dreams, Hope, Way

“They’d lived all their life on Earth; they knew nothing but the Earth. They had never really touched an alien concept, and that was all this concept was. It was not really as slimy as it seemed. It was only alien. There were a lot of alien things that could make one’s hair stand up on end while in their proper alien context they were fairly ordinary.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 32 (p. 249)

Life

“A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts — for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work.”

Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 176

Music

“There is more selfishness and less principle among members of Congress, as well as others, than I had any conception [of], before I became President of the U. S.”

James K. Polk (1795–1849) American politician, 11th President of the United States (in office from 1845 to 1849)

Diary entry (16 December 1846).

Selfishness

“Many, and I think the determining, constitutive facts remain outside the reach of the operational concept. And by virtue of this limitation—this methodological injunction against transitive concepts which might show the facts in their true light and call them by their true name—the descriptive analysis of the facts blocks the apprehension of facts and becomes an element of the ideology that sustains the facts. Proclaiming the existing social reality as its own norm, this sociology fortifies in the individuals the “faithless faith” in the reality whose victims they are.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 119

Faith, Thinking, Reality, Light

“Let us confidently declare that Christian democracy is not liberal. Liberal democracy is liberal, while Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal: it is, if you like, illiberal. And we can specifically say this in connection with a few important issues – say, three great issues. Liberal democracy is in favour of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture; this is an illiberal concept. Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration; this is again a genuinely illiberal concept. And liberal democracy sides with adaptable family models, while Christian democracy rests on the foundations of the Christian family model; once more, this is an illiberal concept.”

Viktor Orbán (1963) Hungarian politician, chairman of Fidesz

Tusnádfürdő speech http://www.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/prime-minister-viktor-orban-s-speech-at-the-29th-balvanyos-summer-open-university-and-student-camp, 28 July 2018

Family, Democracy, Confidence

“…nothing short of a world state will be really effective in preventing war. As long as you rely for security on a number of national armaments you will have the difficulty as to who shall bell the cat in case of need, while you will have general staffs in all countries planning future wars. I want us to come out boldly for a real long-range policy which will envisage the abolition of the conception of the individual sovereign state. … A united navy to police the seas of the world could be attained and would incidentally bring enormous pressure to bear on Japan. The next thing would be an international air force and an international air service. … The basis of such a move would have to be a frank recognition that all states must surrender a large degree of sovereignty and that the Peace Treaties must be revised. On this basis one must then proceed to build up a world structure politically and economically. … This may sound very visionary but I am convinced that unless we see the world we want it is vain to try to build a permanent habitation for Peace and that temporary structures will catch fire very soon if we wait any longer.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to Tom Attlee (1 January 1933), quoted in W. Golant, 'The Emergence of C. R. Attlee as Leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party in 1935', The Historical Journal, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Jun., 1970), p. 323
Deputy Leader of the Opposition

War, World, Peace, Cats

“The fallacy of genetic determinism is to suppose that the genes "make" the organism. It is a basic principle of developmental biology that organisms undergo a continuous development from conception to death, a development that is the unique consequence of the interaction of the genes in their cells, the temporal sequence of environments through which the organisms pass, and random cellular processes that determine the life, death, and transformation of cells. As a result, even the fingerprints of identical twins are not identical. Their temperaments, mental processes, abilities, life choices, disease histories, and death certainly differ despite the determined efforts of many parents to enforce as great a similarity as possible.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

" The Confusion over Cloning http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/oct/23/the-confusion-over-cloning/," The New York Review of Books, 23 October 1997. Review of Cloning Human Beings: Report and Recommendations of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission by the National Bioethics Advisory Commission.

Life, Death, Disease, History

“One strength of the communist system of the East is that it has some of the character of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion. Unless the concept of peace based on law gathers behind it the force and zeal of a religion, it can hardly hope to succeed.”

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

"Atomic War or Peace" part II (1947)
1950s, Out of My Later Years (1950)

Peace, Religion, Law, Hope

“The laws of nature, as analyzed mathematically and descriptively by Ptolemy and Galen, bore an interesting, and perhaps not entirely accidental similarity to the law of nations and of nature, as discerned by a long succession of Roman jurists. …The concept of an objective law applicable to human affairs, yet operating in accord with Nature and Reason and apart both from divine revelation and from human whim or passion, was peculiar to Rome and societies descended from Rome.”

William H. McNeill book The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community

The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963)

Law, Mathematics, Nature, Passion

“The development (rather than the history) of operations research as a science consists of the development of its methods, concepts, and techniques. Operations research is neither a method nor a technique; it is or is becoming a science and as such is defined by a combination of the phenomena it studies.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1950s, The development of operations research as a science, 1956, p. 265, the lead paragraph ; Cited in: Joe Kelly (1969) Organizational behaviour. p. 26.

History, Study, Science

“Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience.”

Paul Churchland (1942) Canadian philosopher

Source: "Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes," 1981, p. 67; As cited in: Paul K. Mose (2002). Contemporary Materialism: A Reader, p. 21

Sense, Falseness

“I see the possibility of being 'made new' again and the gift of rebirth is all that lets anyone really live.... The great secret.... is never to get stuck, imprisoned in common social patterns. They always paralyse the real quality of life – the 'going onward' is all that matters, and the dead moments in one’s life through trying to be a unit in any society or social concept are terrifying really.”

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) American artist

letter to Adelaide Kuntz, September 7, 1933; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 168
1931 - 1943

Life, Secret, Dead

“We’ve been listening into and watching your planet’s radio and television transmissions ever since Reginald Fessenden proclaimed, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good willies’, back in 1906. Since then, our research at the University of Weagu Tafrid has focused primarily on the concept of human “celebrity.””

Yakoub Islam

Intergalactic Fame (29 July 2011)
Captain Jul's Mission Blog (2011 - 2013)

Men, God, Peace, Universe

“Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

A 713, B 741
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

Mathematics, Knowledge

“When the principle of hereditary dominion shall be extinguished in all the institutions of France; when government shall no longer be considered as property transmissible from sire to son, but as a trust committed for a limited time, and then to return to the people whence it came; as a burdensome duty to be discharged, and not as a reward to be abused; when a claim, any claim, to political power by inheritance shall, in the estimation of the whole French people, be held as it now is by the whole people of the North American Union — then will be the time for contemplating the character of Lafayette, not merely in the events of his life, but in the full development of his intellectual conceptions, of his fervent aspirations, of the labors and perils and sacrifices of his long and eventful career upon earth; and thenceforward, till the hour when the trump of the Archangel shall sound to announce that Time shall be no more, the name of Lafayette shall stand enrolled upon the annals of our race, high on the list of the pure and disinterested benefactors of mankind.”

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)

Oration on Lafayette (1834)

Life, People, Time

“After six years of war service, I rejoined Ilford Public Library service in 1946, and set about completing my F. L. A., begun in 1940. This service had a good tradition of assistance to readers, and when I joined the Metal Box C. in 1948, I soon realised how the skills required for a scientific and industrial research “information officer” depended on the basic techniques of librarianship, notably classification and cataloguing. The enhancement of these led to the development of higher levels, in literature searching, and, more particularly, in current awareness service and selective dissemination of information….
Meeting with S. R. Ranganathan in 1948 gave me a new view of classification as facet analysis plus traditional generic analysis and I applied this in schemes for Packaging, Occupational Safety and Health, and Education. This experience has suggested to me that facet analysis applied to any subject can reveal hitherto uncoordinated concepts - materials, processes, etc – and thus offer an indication of possible areas of future research. This could be a unique Information Science to the World Wide Web.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Douglas Foskett (2000-04) " From Librarianship to Information Science http://faculty.libsci.sc.edu/bob/scrapbook/foskett2.htm" at

War, Health, World, Education

“…during a period in history psychology was still a branch of academic philosophy. The psychological concepts developed by philosophers of mind, such as “dominant ideas” (akin to the automatic thoughts of Beck’s cognitive therapy) “habit and association” (a subjective precursor of Pavlovian conditioning), and “imitation and sympathy” (which we now call “role-modelling” and “empathy”), are repeatedly mentioned by Braid as the theoretical framework upon which his science of hypnotism, “neuro-hypnology”, was built. Braid’s friend and collaborator, Prof. William B. Carpenter, discusses the theoretical principles of this in his Principles of Mental Physiology (1889), especially in the chapter ‘Of Common Sense’ which concludes by quoting an approving letter from the philosopher John Stuart Mill sent to Carpenter in 1872. Mill agrees with Carpenter’s contention that “common sense”, by which he means a kind of intellectual intuition analogous to the ancient Greek concept of nous, is a combination of innate and acquired judgements, which have a “reflexive” or “automatic” quality and appear to consciousness as “self-evident” truths.”

James Braid (1795–1860) Scottish surgeon, hypnotist, and hypnotherapist

James Braid, in The Original Philosophy of Hypnotherapy (from The Discovery of Hypnosis) http://ukhypnosis.wordpress.com/category/james-braid-the-founder-of-hypnotherapy/page/2/.

Truth, Quotes, History, Idea

“The elucidation of the theory of centripetal and disturbing forces is necessarily less complete. Still… a general conception of the nature of the action of those forces… sufficient to preserve the student from the gross errors… may be obtained from explanations like those here offered. The methods of ascertaining the weight of the Earth and other bodies are… more difficult of explanation; yet… something may be done even in these.”

George Biddell Airy (1801–1892) English mathematician and astronomer

Introduction
Popular Astronomy: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Ipswich (1868)

Error, Nature

“I would like to clarify the answer published in my name in last month’s issue of Moment Magazine. First of all, the opinions published in my name are solely my own, and do not represent the official policy of any Jewish movement or organization. Additionally, my answer, as written, is misleading. It is obvious, I thought, that any neighbor of the Jewish people should be treated, as the Torah commands us, with respect and compassion. Fundamental to the Jewish faith is the concept that every human being was created in the image of G-d, and our sages instruct us to support the non-Jewish poor along with the poor of our own brethren. The sub-question I chose to address instead is: how should we act in time of war, when our neighbors attack us, using their women, children and religious holy places as shields. I attempted to briefly address some of the ethical issues related to forcing the military to withhold fire from certain people and places, at the unbearable cost of widespread bloodshed (on both sides!)—when one’s own family and nation is mercilessly targeted from those very people and places. Furthermore, some of the words I used in my brief comment were irresponsible, and I look forward to further clarifying them in a future issue. I apologize for any misunderstanding my words created.”

Manis Friedman (1946) American rabbi

Clarification of previous statement http://momentmagazine.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/a-statement-from-rabbi-friedman/ On the Israeli-Arab conflict

Women, War, Children, People

“During the 1950s and 1960s most of the work which was called cybernetics tended to focus on control systems in engineering or on applications of the concept of feedback in fields ranging from mathematics to sociology. At the 1970 meeting of the American Society for Cybernetics in Philadelphia Heinz von Foerster sought to redirect attention to the original interests which had led to the founding of the field of cybernetics. In a paper titled "Cybernetics of Cybernetics" he made a distinction between first order cybernetics, the cybernetics of observed systems, and second order cybernetics, the cybernetics of observing systems.”

Stuart A. Umpleby (1944) American scientist

Stuart A. Umpleby (1991) "Strategies for Winning Acceptance of Second Order Cybernetics." In George E. Lasker, et al. (eds.) Advances in Human Systems and Information Technologies. Windsor, Canada: International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics, 1992. pp. 97-196. (paper)

Mathematics

“On-the-job democracy isn't just a lofty concept but a better, more profitable way to do things. We all demand democracy in every other aspect of our lives and culture. People are considered adults in their private lives, at the bank, at their children's schools, with family and among friends--so why are they suddenly treated like adolescents at work? Why can't workers be involved in choosing their own leaders? Why shouldn't they manage themselves? Why can't they speak up--challenge, question, share information openly?”

Ricardo Semler book The Seven-Day Weekend

The Seven-Day Weekend (2004)

Children, People, School, Family

“Kuhn had the genius to find the words and sketch the concepts that made important old philosophical problems relevant to the public and newly discussable by philosophers. He had the strength of mind and commitment to lead the discussion. He could speak the truly incommensurable languages of physics, philosophy, and history, all necessary to frame and advance his epistemological quest. He wrote, as one of his admirers, Margaret Masterman, put it, in a "quasi-poetic style," sometimes veiled, sometimes with "rhetorical exaggeration," but always after careful and even painful thought. Or, to switch metaphors, he drew the portrait of science in the manner of the Impressionists. At a distance, where most viewers stand, the portrait appears illuminating, persuasive, and inspiring; close in, where historians and philosophers stare, it looks sketchy, puzzling, and richly challenging.”

John L. Heilbron (1934) American historian

Thomas Samuel Kuhn: 18 July 1922-17 June 1996 (1998)

Pain, History, Problem, Appearance

“If the progressing rationality of advanced industrial society tends to liquidate, as an “irrational rest,” the disturbing elements of Time and Memory, it also tends to liquidate the disturbing rationality contained in this irrational rest. Recognition and relation to the past as present counteracts the functionalization of thought by and in the established reality. It militates against the closing of the universe of discourse and behavior it renders possible the development of concepts which destabilize and transcend the closed universe by comprehending it as historical universe. Confronted with the given society as object of its reflection, critical thought becomes historical consciousness as such, it is essentially judgment. Far from necessitating an indifferent relativism, it searches in the real history of man for the criteria of truth and falsehood, progress and regression. The mediation of the past with the present discovers the factors which made the facts, which determined the war of life, which established the masters and the servants; it projects the limits and the alternatives. When this critical consciousness speaks, it speaks “le langage de la connaissance” (Roland Barthes) which breaks open a closed universe of discourse and its petrified structure. The key terms of this language are not hypnotic nouns which evoke endlessly the same frozen predicates. They rather allow of an open development; they even unfold their content in contradictory predicates. The Communist Manifesto provides a classical example. Here the two key terms, Bourgeoisie and Proletariat, each “govern” contrary predicates. The “bourgeoisie” is the subject of technical progress, liberation, conquest of nature, creation of social wealth, and of the perversion and destruction of these achievements. Similarly, the "proletariat” carries the attributes of total oppression and of the total defeat of oppression. Such dialectical relation of opposites in and by the proposition is rendered possible by the recognition of the subject as an historical agent whose identity constitutes itself in and against its historical practice, in and against its social reality. The discourse develops and states the conflict between the thing and its function, and this conflict finds linguistic expression in sentences which join contradictory predicates in a logical unit—conceptual counterpart of the objective reality. In contrast to all Orwellian language, the contradiction is demonstrated, made explicit, explained, and denounced.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 99-100

Life, War, Truth, Behavior

“I really have no claim to rank myself among fatalistic, materialistic, or atheistic philosophers. Not among fatalists, for I take the conception of necessity to have a logical, and not a physical foundation; not among materialists, for I am utterly incapable of conceiving the existence of matter if there is no mind in which to picture that existence; not among atheists, for the problem of the ultimate cause of existence is one which seems to me to be hopelessly out of reach of my poor powers. Of all the senseless babble I have ever had occasion to read, the demonstrations of these philosophers who undertake to tell us all about the nature of God would be the worst, if they were not surpassed by the still greater absurdities of the philosophers who try to prove that there is no God.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

1870s, On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and Its History (1874)

God, Nature, Problem, Reading

“In the main, the theme is emerging of the growth of freedom and law, of the rights of the individual, of the subordination of the State to the fundamental and moral conceptions of an ever-comprehending community. Of these ideas the English-speaking peoples were the authors, then the trustees, and must now become the armed champions. Thus I condemn tyranny in whatever guise and from whatever quarter it presents itself. All this of course has a current application.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to Maurice Ashley (12 April 1939) on his work on A History of the English Speaking Peoples, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 1063
The 1930s

People, Law, Communication, Idea

“In such fundamental considerations it would be surprising if many new concepts appear, for countless good minds have worked long on these matters over many years. Indeed, new original ideas should at first be suspect, though if they withstand examination they should be welcomed. My intent is not to create a new school or art form but to discern the pattern of a mosaic which lies hidden in the cluttered, colored marble chips of today's empirical facts.”

James Grier Miller (1916–2002) biologist

Source: Living Systems: Basic Concepts (1969), p. 126-127

School, Art, Color, Idea

“The Protestant churches generally hold that the elements of the sacrament are flesh and blood only in a tropical sense; they nourish our souls as meat and the juice of it would our bodies. But the Catholics maintain that they are literally just that; although they possess all the sensible qualities of wafer-cakes and diluted wine. But we can have no conception of wine except what may enter into a belief, either —
# That this, that, or the other, is wine; or,
# That wine possesses certain properties.
Such beliefs are nothing but self-notifications that we should, upon occasion, act in regard to such things as we believe to be wine according to the qualities which we believe wine to possess. The occasion of such action would be some sensible perception, the motive of it to produce some sensible result. Thus our action has exclusive reference to what affects the senses, our habit has the same bearing as our action, our belief the same as our habit, our conception the same as our belief; and we can consequently mean nothing by wine but what has certain effects, direct or indirect, upon our senses; and to talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being in reality blood, is senseless jargon. Now, it is not my object to pursue the theological question; and having used it as a logical example I drop it, without caring to anticipate the theologian's reply. I only desire to point out how impossible it is that we should have an idea in our minds which relates to anything but conceived sensible effects of things. Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects; and if we fancy that we have any other we deceive ourselves, and mistake a mere sensation accompanying the thought for a part of the thought itself. It is absurd to say that thought has any meaning unrelated to its only function. It is foolish for Catholics and Protestants to fancy themselves in disagreement about the elements of the sacrament, if they agree in regard to all their sensible effects, here or hereafter.
It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The final sentence here is an expression of what became known as the Pragmatic maxim, first published in "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12 (January 1878), p. 286

Soul, Motivation, Idea, Question

“What we need, then, is a new 'paradigm' - a new vision of reality; a fundamental change in our thoughts, perceptions, and values. The beginnings of this change, of the shift from the mechanistic to the holistic conception of reality, are already visible in all fields and are likely to dominate the present decade. The various manifestations and implications of this 'paradigm shift' are the subject of this book. The sixties and seventies have generated a whole series of social movements that all seem to go in the same direction, emphasizing different aspects of the new vision of reality. So far, most of these movements still operate separately and have not yet recognized how their intentions interrelate. The purpose of this book is to provide a coherent conceptual framework that will help them recognize the communality of their aims. Once this happens, we can expect the various movements to flow together and form a powerful force for social change. The gravity and global extent of our current crisis indicate that this change is likely to result in a transformation of unprecedented dimensions, a turning point for the planet as a whole.”

Fritjof Capra book The Turning Point

Preface.
The Turning Point (1982)

Books, Communication, Reality, Change

“If time is treated in modern physics as a dimension on a par with the dimensions of space, why should we a priori exclude the possibility that we are pulled as well as pushed along its axis? The future has, after all, as much or as little reality as the past, and there is nothing logically inconceivable in introducing, as a working hypothesis, an element of finality, supplementary to the element of causality, into our equations. It betrays a great lack of imagination to believe that the concept of "purpose" must necessarily be associated with some anthropomorphic deity.”

Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) Hungarian-British author and journalist

Epilogue
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959)

Imagination, Reality, Time, Past

“The ‘theory of control systems’ in engineering is now a well-developed subject, making use of some remarkably powerful concepts and methods of analysis, especially in relation to problems of stabilization and the prevention of unwanted oscillations.”

Arnold Tustin (1899–1994) British engineer

Source: The Mechanism of Economic Systems (1953), p. v

Problem

“The prevailing economic theory of business enterprise and behavior, the maximization of profit—which is simply a complicated way of phrasing the old saw of buying cheap and selling dear—may adequately explain how Richard Sears operated. But it cannot explain how Sears, Roebuck or any other business enterprise operates, nor how it should operate. The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 59 (1986 ; 45)

Way, Behavior, Business

““Organization theory,” a term that appeared in the middle of the twentieth century, has multiple meanings. When it first emerged, the term expressed faith in scientific research as a way to gain understanding of human beings and their interactions. Although scientific research had been occurring for several centuries, the idea that scientific research might enhance understanding of human behavior was considerably newer and rather few people appreciated it. Simon (1950, 1952-3, 1952) was a leading proponent for the creation of “organization theory”, which he imagined as including scientific management, industrial engineering, industrial psychology, the psychology of small groups, human-resources management, and strategy. The term “organization theory” also indicated an aspiration to state generalized, abstract propositions about a category of social systems called “organizations,” which was a very new concept. Before and during the 1800s, people had regarded armies, schools, churches, government agencies, and social clubs as belonging to distinct categories, and they had no name for the union of these categories. During the 1920s, some people began to perceive that diverse kinds of medium-sized social systems might share enough similarities to form a single, unified category. They adopted the term “organization” for this unified category.”

Philippe Baumard (1968) French academic

William H. Starbuck and Philippe Baumard (2009). "The seeds, blossoming, and scant yield of organization theory," in: Jacques Rojot et. al (eds.) Comportement organisationnel - Volume 3 De Boeck Supérieur. p. 15

People, School, Faith, Way

“Homer is the most simple in his style of all the great poets, and resembles most the style of the poetical parts of the Old Testament. They can have no conception of his manner, who are acquainted with him in Mr. Pope's translation only. An excellent poetical performance that translation is, and faithful in the main to the original. In some places, it may be thought to have even improved Homer. It has certainly softened some of his rudenesses, and added delicacy and grace to some of his sentiments. But withal, it is no other than Homer modernised. In the midst of the elegance and luxuriancy of Mr. Pope's language, we lose sight of the old bard's simplicity. I know indeed no author, to whom it is more difficult to do justice in a translation, than Homer.”

Hugh Blair (1718–1800) British philosopher

Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1784), Lecture XLIII: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey—Virgil's Aeneid.

Faith, Justice, Parting

“[V]oluntary exchange among individuals held morally responsible under the rule of law creates both prosperity and an unparalleled diversity of human choices. Such a model also has been a precondition of individuation and freedom. By contrast, regimes of central planning create poverty and occasion ineluctable developments toward totalitarianism and the worst abuses of power. Dynamic free-market societies, grounded in rights-based individualism, have altered the entire human conception of liberty and of dignity for formerly marginalized groups. The entire "socialist experiment," by contrast, ended in stasis; ethnic hatreds; the absence of even the minimal preconditions of economic, social, and political renewal; and categorical contempt for both individuation and minority rights. Our children do not know this true comparison.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2000s, Can There Be an "After Socialism"? (2003)

Children, Law, Freedom

“When the great religious and philosophical conceptions were alive, thinking people did not extol humility and brotherly love, justice and humanity because it was realistic to maintain such principles and odd and dangerous to deviate from them, or because these maxims were more in harmony with their supposedly free tastes than others. They held to such ideas because they saw in them elements of truth, because they connected them with the idea of logos, whether in the form of God or of a transcendental mind, or even of nature as an eternal principle.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 34.

Love, God, People, Truth

““Your concept is a tremendous network of inconsistencies.”
“In what way?” the countess said, not very much interested.
“It seems to be based on reverence for the young, and an extremely patient and protective attitude toward their physical and mental welfare. Yet you make them live in these huge caves, utterly out of contact with the natural world, and you teach them to be afraid of death—which of course makes them a little insane, because there is nothing anybody can do about death. It is like teaching them to be afraid of the second law of thermodynamics, just because living matter sets that law aside for a very brief period.”

James Blish book A Case of Conscience

Source: A Case of Conscience (1958), Chapter 12 (pp. 149-150)

Death, World, Law, Way

“I don’t have this concept that separates my art from my daily life. They are one thing to me. They are always one. How do you find the way to express yourself and how to communicate with others?”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, Ai Weiwei Does Not Feel Powerful, 2011

Life, Art, Way, Communication

“I don’t confuse abstract philosophical concepts with reality.”

Ann Leckie book Ancillary Justice

Source: Ancillary Justice (2013), Chapter 4 (p. 54)

Reality

“The ideas of nonequilibrium order and of the search for stability extend Darwin’s concept back to the prebiotic stage by redefining the “fittest.””

Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) physical chemist

Part 2; Cited in: Evgenii Rudnyi (2013).
Thermodynamics of Evolution (1972)

Search, Idea

“The concept of guilt is found most powerfully developed even in the most primitive communal forms which we know: … the man is guilty who violates one of the original laws which dominate the society and which are mostly derived from a divine founder; the boy who is accepted into the tribal community and learns its laws, which bind him thenceforth, learns to promise; this promise is often given under the sign of death, which is symbolically carried out on the boy, with a symbolical rebirth.”

Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian

Source: Between Man and Man (1965), p. 178

Death, Law, Boy, Communication

“The concept of intersectionality was first developed by Black feminists, not postmodernists. Black feminism has a long and complex history, based on the recognition that the system of chattel slavery and, since then, modern racism and racial segregation have caused Black women to suffer in ways that are never experienced by white women.”

Sharon Smith (writer) (1956) American historian

A Marxist Case For Intersectionality (2017)

Women, Way, History, Suffering

“What is essential to the idea of a slave? We primarily think of him as one who is owned by another. To be more than nominal, however, the ownership must be shown by control of the slave's actions — a control which is habitually for the benefit of the controller. That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labours under coercion to satisfy another's desires. The relation admits of sundry gradations. Remembering that originally the slave is a prisoner whose life is at the mercy of his captor, it suffices here to note that there is a harsh form of slavery in which, treated as an animal, he has to expend his entire effort for his owner's advantage. Under a system less harsh, though occupied chiefly in working for his owner, he is allowed a short time in which to work for himself, and some ground on which to grow extra food. A further amelioration gives him power to sell the produce of his plot and keep the proceeds. Then we come to the still more moderated form which commonly arises where, having been a free man working on his own land, conquest turns him into what we distinguish as a serf; and he has to give to his owner each year a fixed amount of labour or produce, or both: retaining the rest himself. Finally, in some cases, as in Russia before serfdom was abolished, he is allowed to leave his owner's estate and work or trade for himself elsewhere, under the condition that he shall pay an annual sum. What is it which, in these cases, leads us to qualify our conception of the slavery as more or less severe? Evidently the greater or smaller extent to which effort is compulsorily expended for the benefit of another instead of for self-benefit. If all the slave's labour is for his owner the slavery is heavy, and if but little it is light. Take now a further step. Suppose an owner dies, and his estate with its slaves comes into the hands of trustees; or suppose the estate and everything on it to be bought by a company; is the condition of the slave any the better if the amount of his compulsory labour remains the same? Suppose that for a company we substitute the community; does it make any difference to the slave if the time he has to work for others is as great, and the time left for himself is as small, as before? The essential question is—How much is he compelled to labour for other benefit than his own, and how much can he labour for his own benefit? The degree of his slavery varies according to the ratio between that which he is forced to yield up and that which he is allowed to retain; and it matters not whether his master is a single person or a society. If, without option, he has to labour for the society, and receives from the general stock such portion as the society awards him, he becomes a slave to the society.”

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist

The Man versus the State (1884), The Coming Slavery

Life, Food, Communication, Idea

“Politics is not a self-enclosed activity, organically generating a body of concepts internal to it. What counts as a set of ideas with a bearing on the political conflicts of a time varies according to epoch and region. Today it stretches far beyond the purview of political science, traditionally conceived. Philosophy, economics, history, sociology, psychology, not to speak of the earth and life sciences, and the arts, all intersect at different points with terrain of politics, in its classic definition.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Source: Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Foreword, p. xi

Life, Art, History, Idea

“The third category of which I come now to speak is precisely that whose reality is denied by nominalism. For although nominalism is not credited with any extraordinarily lofty appreciation of the powers of the human soul, yet it attributes to it a power of originating a kind of ideas the like of which Omnipotence has failed to create as real objects, and those general conceptions which men will never cease to consider the glory of the human intellect must, according to any consistent nominalism, be entirely wanting in the mind of Deity.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

Lecture II : The Universal Categories, §3. Laws: Nominalism, CP 5.62
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)

Men, Soul, Idea, Reality

“A one-world government is an absolutely terrible concept, because it sets up a system of an ultimate prize to be claimed by the most ruthless, most determined, and most power-hungry individuals. The hypothetical process of getting to that point is bad enough, but if the global governance enthusiasts ever succeed in establishing it, it's going to make the historical institutions of slavery and medieval serfdom look like freedom in comparison. The only peace it will bring to Mankind is the peace of the grave. The most effective way for individual Americans to respond is to continue to insist on the restoration of their Constitution and to remain steadfast in refusing demands that they give up their national sovereignty.”

Vox Day (1968) writer, actor, video game designer, blogger, far-right activist

A Conversation With Vox Day http://strike-the-root.com/conversation-with-vox-day (December 20, 2010)

World, Peace, Way, Freedom

“General systems theory, in a sense, is no news at all, as Von Foerster found out when he attempted to organize a conference of general systems people and anthropologists. In a sense, the situation is comparable to that found by the Committee for the Study of Mankind, in which a committee that included Robert Redfidd tried to get each discipline to consider its relationship to the concept of Mankind. Anthropologists replied, "we are related already," and so they were. Something similar may be said of attempts to date in mathematical anthropology. The kind of information that a computer program can finally provide, on a level of a particular culture, is simply a reflection of how detailed field work has been done, and to the careful field worker, on kinship, for example, it provides no illumination.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1970s, Changing Styles of Anthropological Work, 1973, p. 8

People, Mathematics, Sense, Study

“Creationists insist that mutations are very rare and are usually, if not always harmful. But the fact is that the vast majority of mutations are completely neutral. They’d have to be because, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, there is an overall average of 128 mutations per human zygote! So apparently, in creationist terms, “very rare” means “more than a hundred per person right from the point of conception”. Because those are just the mutations we start out with. Our cells will mutate again 30 more times over the course of our lives, and some of these subsequent mutations can be passed on to our children too –usually with no more effect than those we recognize as family traits.”

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

Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism Source: "8th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU-7d06HJSs, Youtube (March 22, 2008)

Children, Family, Time, Personality

“Statistics should be taught early so that the concepts are absorbed by the student's flexible, adaptable mind before it is too late.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Quotes about conception page 11

Quotes about conception
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