Quotes about consistency (1784 quotes, page 8)

“Archytas of Tarentum found the two mean proportionals by a very striking construction in three dimensions, which shows that solid geometry, in the hands of Archytas at least, was already well advanced. The construction was usually called mechanical, which it no doubt was in form, though in reality it was in the highest degree theoretical. It consisted in determining a point in space as the intersection of three surfaces: (a) a cylinder, (b) a cone, (c) an "anchor-ring" with internal radius = 0.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

Achimedes (1920)

Reality

“Everybody's daily life consists of problems arising from what you decided yesterday. Managers understand that. Mathematicians want to solve a theorem, publish the results and walk away clean. Managers never walk away clean. The real world is a very dirty place.
Clarity is supposed to be the objective of science. I disagree. I think the objective of science is confusion, because confusions carries you into problems.”

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

C. West Churchman cited in: Peter R. Horner (1993). "TIMS Turns 40," in: OR/MS Today, Vol. 20, No. 2, p. 40-43
1980s and later

Life , World , Understanding , Problem

“Personally I'm very much opposed to Hamas' policies in almost every respect. However, we should recognize that the policies of Hamas are more forthcoming and more conducive to a peaceful settlement than those of the United States or Israel. … So, for example, Hamas has called for a long-term indefinite truce on the international border. There is a long-standing international consensus that goes back over thirty years that there should be a two-state political settlement on the international border, the pre-June 1967 border, with minor and mutual modifications. That's the official phrase. Hamas is willing to accept that as a long-term truce. The United States and Israel are unwilling even to consider it… The demand on Hamas by the United States and the European Union and Israel […] is first that they recognize the State of Israel. Actually, that they recognize its right to exist. Well, Israel and the U. S. certainly don't recognize the right of Palestine to exist, nor recognize any state of Palestine. In fact, they have been acting consistently to undermine any such possibility. The second condition is that Hamas must renounce violence. Israel and the United States certainly do not renounce violence. The third condition is that Hamas accept international agreements. The United States and Israel reject international agreements. So, though the policies of Hamas are, again in my view, unacceptable, they happen to be closer to the international consensus on a political peaceful settlement than those of their antagonists, and it's a reflection of the power of the imperial states - the United States and Europe - that they are able to shift the framework, so that the problem appears to be Hamas' policies, and not the more extreme policies of the United States and Israel… And we must remember that in their case it's not just policies. It's not words - it's actions.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Interview on LBC TV, May 23, 2006 http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=1152
Quotes 2000s, 2006

Peace , Problem , Appearance , Personality

“God thus includes the world; he is, in fact, the totality of world parts, which are indifferently causes and effects. Now AR [absolute perfection in some respects, relative perfection in all others] is equally far from either of these doctrines; thanks to its two-aspect view of God, it is able consistently to embrace all that is positive in either deism or pandeism. AR means that God is, in one aspect of himself, the integral totality of all ordinary causes and effects, but that in another aspect, his essence (which is A), he is conceivable in abstraction from any one or any group of particular, contingent beings (though not from the requirement and the power always to provide himself with some particulars or other, sufficient to constitute in their integrated totality the R aspect of himself at the given moment).”

Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) Philosopher

Source: Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (1941), P. 348.

God , World , Parting , Perfection

“[I]f we demonstrate this moving principle, if we show that matter, far from being as indifferent as it is supposed to be, to movement and to rest, ought to be regarded as an active, as well as a passive substance, what resource can be left to those who have made its essence consist in extension?”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) French physician and philosopher

Source: The Natural History of the Soul (1745), Ch. V Concerning the Moving Force of Matter

Indifference

“Were a language ever completely "grammatical" it would be a perfect engine of conceptual expression. Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak.”

Edward Sapir (1884–1939) American linguist and anthropologist

Source: Language (1921), p. 39

Perfection

“In the religious age, the religious hierarchy wields power; in the political age, the ruler, nobles and commoners; in the economic, the hierarchy of wealth. The development of Europe during the last six centuries has consisted in the progressive shifting of the hierarchy of power from one set of functions to another.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 132

Age , Wealth

“Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walking

Walking (June 1862)

Life

“Unlike with other armies of the world who pledge to defend their monarch or their homeland, our oath of service links our military to the protection and defense of the Constitution and the obedience to the President under the condition of adherence to orders. In effect, through that oath the U. S. military defends our people's security while also defending ideas, ideals and the rule of law. Throughout a career, every soldier, from private to general, undergoes training in history, legal processes and values. That training complements what we do on rifle ranges or in field exercises. Soldiers have terrific skills, and they are thinking protectors of the American way of life. I was in combat for more than three years of my career; during that time, I saw some horrible things and many of those revisit me in dreams. There is evil in man, and in battle. But in the U. S. military; while there have been occasion where soldiers needed to be disciplined for violating the laws or the regulations; overwhelmingly and consistently the actions of my brothers and sisters in arms has made me very proud.”

Mark Hertling (1953) United States Army general

As quoted in "A soldier's view on Trump" http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/04/opinions/donald-trump-military-hertling/index.html CNN, 4 March 2016

Life , People , World , Law

“The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy. Consistency was in itself distinction, and what was talent but the art of being completely whatever it was that one happened to be?”

Henry James book The Next Time

"The Next Time," The Yellow Book, vol. VI (July 1895).

Art , Success

“The inductive-reasoning system I have described above consists of a multitude of “elements” in the form of belief-models or hypotheses that adapt to the aggregate environment they jointly create. Thus it qualifies as an adaptive complex system. After some initial learning time, the hypotheses or mental models in use are mutually co-adapted. Thus we can think of a consistent set of mental models as a set of hypotheses that work well with each other under some criterion—that have a high degree of mutual adaptedness. Sometimes there is a unique such set, it corresponds to a standard rational expectations equilibrium, and beliefs gravitate into it. More often there is a high, possibly very high, multiplicity of such sets. In this case we might expect inductive reasoning systems in the economy—whether in stock-market speculating, in negotiating, in poker games, in oligopoly pricing, in positioning products in the market—to cycle through or temporarily lock into psychological patterns that may be non-recurrent, path-dependent, and increasingly complicated. The possibilities are rich.”

W. Brian Arthur (1946) American economist

Source: Inductive Reasoning and Bounded Rationality (The El Farol Problem) (1994), p. 8

Game , Thinking , Learning , Time

“I cannot see why it is necessary that every deduction from algebra should be bound to certain conventions incident to an earlier stage of mathematical learning, even supposing them to have been consistently used up to the point in question. I should not care if any one thought this treatise unalgebraical, but should only ask whether the premises were admissible and the conclusions logical.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

Advertisement, p.3
The Differential and Integral Calculus (1836)

Mathematics , Question , Learning

“[M]ost of our structures in the past consisted of individual members having relatively small transverse dimensions as compared with their length, and in such members stress analysis is much more simple. …[M]any modern structures consist of frameworks of this type, and frequently the word "structure" refers specifically to assemblies consisting of linear elements.”

Eduardo Torroja (1899–1961) Spanish architect

Philosophy of Structures (1958)

Past

“Confronted, when the weather is fine and I am in propitious emotional circumstances, with certain landscapes, certain works of art, certain human beings, I know, for the time being, that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world. On other occasions, skies and destiny being inclement, I am no less immediately certain of the malignant impersonality of an uncaring universe. Every human being has had similar experiences. This being so, the sensible thing to do would be to accept the facts and frame a metaphysic to fit them. But with that talent for doing the wrong thing, that genius for perversity, so characteristically human, men have preferred, especially in recent times, to take another course. They have either denied the existence of these psychological facts; or if they have admitted them, have done so only to condemn as evil all such experiences as cannot be reconciled in a logical system with whatever particular class of experiences they have chosen, arbitrarily, to regard as "true" and morally valuable. Every man tries to pretend that he is consistently one kind of person and does his best consistently to worship one kind of God. And this despite the fact that he experiences diversity and actually feels himself in contact with a variety of divinities.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

“One and Many,” pp. 3–4
Do What You Will (1928)

Men , God , World , Art

“First we notice an investigation which Prof. Planck of Berlin published in 1899. His aim was that it should fit the observed facts of radiation, and show why the energy of bodies was not wholly transformed into radiation. …his investigation seemed to show that continuity had to be given up, suggesting that in the last resort changes in the universe do not consist of continuous motions in space and time, but in some way are discontinuous.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Way , Universe , Change , Time

“It is amusing to think how much conservative ingenuity has been wasted in the defence of the House of Lords by men who were desperately endeavouring to prove that the House of Lords consisted of clever men. There is one really good defence of the House of Lords […] and that is, that the House of Lords, in its full and proper strength, consists of stupid men. It really would be a plausible defence of that otherwise indefensible body to point out that the clever men in the Commons, who owed their power to cleverness, ought in the last resort to be checked by the average man in the Lords, who owed their power to accident.”

G. K. Chesterton book Heretics

Heretics (1905)

Men , Stupidity , Thinking , Housing

“IN THE last half century a larger and larger proportion of our experience, of what we read and see and hear, has come to consist of pseudo‑events. We expect more of them and we are given more of them. They flood our consciousness. Their multiplication has gone on in the United States at a faster rate than elsewhere. Even the rate of increase is increasing every day. This is true of the world of education, of consumption, and of personal relations.”

Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American historian

Source: The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 12.

World , Education , Reading , Personality

“I’m motivated every single day to go to the rink because of what she brings. I know that she brings her best every day. With brilliant people, with being so creative, it’s hard to imagine you’d just be so steady. That last thing, that’s the consistency.”

Scott Moir (1987) Canadian figure skater

Scott Moir, Interview with Kristina Rutherford for Sportsnet.ca (January 2018)
Partnership with Tessa Virtue, Scott Moir about Virtue

People , Imagination , Motivation

“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

Letter to John F. Kennedy (2 March 1962), printed in Galbraith's Ambassador's Journal (1969)

Art

“Some years ago I found myself in discussion with a friend who entertained the notion that the general tendency of things in this world is towards equilibrium, the result of which would be peace and blessedness to the human race. My notion, was that equilibrium meant… death. No motive power is to be got from heat, save during its fall from a higher to a lower temperature, as no power is to be got from water save during its descent from a higher to a lower level. Thus also life consists, not in equilibrium, but in the passage towards equilibrium. In man it is the leap from the potential through the actual to repose.”

John Tyndall (1820–1893) British scientist

p, 125
New Fragments (1892)

Life , Death , World , Peace

“The poetic act consists in suddenly seeing that an idea splits into a number of motives of equal value and in grouping them; they rhyme.”

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) French Symbolist poet

L'acte poétique consiste à voir soudain qu'une idée se fractionne en un nombre de motifs égaux par valeur et à les grouper; ils riment.
"Crise de Vers", La Revue Blanche (September 1895) as translated in Mallarmé : The Poet and his Circle ([1999] 2005) by Rosemary Lloyd, p. 231.
Observations

Motivation , Idea

“The processes that may be employed, to give to portions of inert matter, precise movements resembling those of organized beings, are innumerable, as they consist of an indefinite number and variety of cords pulleys, toothed-wheels, nails, screws, levers, inclined-planes, as well as agencies of air, water, fire, light, &c., combined in endless modes to produce a desired effect Ingenuity has been long exercised on such combinations, chiefly for public amusement or mystification, without any object of utility.”

Andrew Ure (1778–1857) Scottish doctor and chemist

Source: The Philosophy of Manufactures, 1835, p. 9

Exercises , Light , Water

“What neurology tells us is that the self consists of many components, and the notion of one unitary self may well be an illusion.”

V.S. Ramachandran book The Tell-Tale Brain

Source: The Tell-Tale Brain (2010), p. 247

“In all these products, whether iron bridges, locomotives, automobiles, telescopes, cottages, airport-hangars, funicular railways, skyscrapers, or children's toys, the will towards a new style expresses itself. The similarity of these examples to the new creations in art consists in the same striving for clear, pure form which expresses truth in the objects.”

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

Quote from 'The will to Style', in Dutch art-magazine De Stijl February-March 1922; as quoted in 'Theo van Doesburg', Joost Baljeu, Studio Vista, London 1974, p. 123
1920 – 1926

Children , Truth , Art

“Critical theory … values Freud as a non-ideological thinker and theoretician of contradictions—contradictions which his successors sought to escape and mask. … “The greatness of Freud,” wrote Adorno, “consists in that, like all great bourgeois thinkers, he left standing undissolved such contradictions and disdained the assertion of pretended harmony where the thing itself is contradictory. He revealed the antagonistic character of the social reality.” … A parallel can be established between Marx’s judgment on Ricardo and the post-Ricardians. To Marx, Ricardo was the classic and best representative of bourgeois economics since he articulated the contradictions of bourgeois society without glossing them over.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), pp. 27-28

Reality

“An essential distinction exists between two stages in the process of advancing our knowledge of the laws of physical phenomena; the first stage consists in observing the relations of phenomena, whether of such as occur in the ordinary course of nature, or of such as are artificially produced in experimental investigations, and in expressing the relations so observed by propositions called formal laws. The second stage consists in reducing the formal laws of an entire class of phenomena to the form of a science; that is to say, in discovering the most simple system of principles, from which all the formal laws of the class of phenomena can be deduced as consequences.”

William John Macquorn Rankine (1820–1872) civil engineer

Source: "Outlines of the Science of Energetics," (1855), p. 121; Lead paragraph: Section "What Constitutes A Physical Theory"

Law , Nature , Knowledge , Science

“My agenda, pre-Trump, is the same agenda post-Trump. I am so glad that we have a president in the White House who wants to accomplish the things that the people of the state of Arizona, and people around this country, want to accomplish, I will be focused on things like border security, stopping illegal immigration, stopping rewarding people who came here illegally, and repealing Obamacare. I will be making sure the tax code is corrected, fair, and stimulates the economy’s growth — as well as making sure that America is energy independent. Those are things I have been fighting for since the first time I ran for the Arizona State Senate, trying to affect those things at the state level, and they are things that have been consistent even in my pre-political life.”

Kelli Ward (1969) American politician

Interview: Dr. Kelli Ward On Her Comments About Replacing John McCain https://bigleaguepolitics.com/interview-dr-kelli-ward-comments-replacing-john-mccain/ (July 21, 2017)

Life , People , Time , Fight

“On the side adverse to the Government are found…in profuse abundance, station, title, wealth, social influence, the professions, or the large majority of them—in a word, the spirit and power of class. These are the main body of the opposing host. Nor is that all. As knights of old had squires, so in the great army of class each enrolled soldier has, as a rule, dependents. The adverse host, then, consists of class and the dependents of class. But this formidable army is in the bulk of its constituent parts the same…that has fought in every one of the great political battles of the last 60 years, and has been defeated. We have had great controversies before this great controversy—on free trade, free navigation, public education, religious equality in civil matters, extension of the suffrage to its present basis. On these and many other great issues the classes have fought uniformly on the wrong side, and have uniformly been beaten by a power more difficult to marshal, but resistless when marshalled—by the upright sense of the nation.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Address to the electors of Midlothian, Daily Review (3 May 1886), quoted in The Times (4 May 1886), p. 5.
1880s

Education , Sense , Parting , Dependency

“The concept of "niche," initially borrowed by biologists from early social science, plays a central role in ecological theory… The niche… consists of all those combinations of resource levels at which the population can survive and reproduce itself.”

Michael T. Hannan (1943) US-American sociologist of Stanford University

Source: "The Population Ecology of Organizations," 1977, p. 946

Science

“Another good reducing exercise consists in placing both hands against the table edge and pushing back.”

Robert Quillen (1887–1948) American journalist

Quoted by Alexander Woollcott in "The Sage of Fountain Inn," http://books.google.com/books?id=_ZxXAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Another+good+reducing+exercise+consists+in+placing+both+hands+against+the+table+edge+and+pushing+back%22&pg=PA100#v=onepage Cosmopolitan magazine (September 1933)

Exercises

“…by the term Hypnotism, or Nervous Sleep, I mean a peculiar condition of the nervous system, into which it may be thrown by artificial contrivance, and which differs, in several respects, from common sleep or the waking condition. I do not allege that this condition is induced through the transmission of a magnetic or occult influence from my body into that of my patients; nor do I profess, by my processes, to produce the higher [i. e., supernatural] phenomena of the Mesmerists. My pretensions are of a much more humble character, and are all consistent with generally admitted principles in physiological and psychological science. Hypnotism might therefore not inaptly be designated, Rational Mesmerism, in contra-distinction to the Transcendental Mesmerism of the Mesmerists. [ Braid, Observations on Trance or Human Hibernation, 1850, 'Preface.”

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

In The Discovery of Hypnosis: The Complete Writings of James Braid, the Father ... http://books.google.co.in/books?id=Vs35STwQYQoC&pg=PA200&lpg=PA200, p. 200.

Sleep , Science

“If it is the drive of our time, after freedom of thought is won, to pursue it to that perfection through which it changes to freedom of the will in order to realize the latter as the principle of a new era, then the final goal of education can no longer be knowledge, but the will born out of knowledge, and the spoken expression of that for which it has to strive is: the personal or free man. Truth consists in nothing other than man's revelation of himself, and thereto belongs the discovery of himself, the liberation from all that is alien, the uttermost abstraction or release from all authority, the re-won naturalness. Such thoroughly true men are not supplied by school; if they are there, they are there in spite of school.”

Max Stirner book The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 21

Men , Truth , Education , School

“Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.”

Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834) French general and politician

Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789)

Exercises , Nature , Freedom

“Saying that what we call our “selves” consist only of our bodies and that reason, soul, and love arise only from the body, is like saying that what we call our body is equivalent to the food that feeds the body. It is true that my body is only made up of digested food and that my body would not exist without food, but my body is not the same as food. Food is what the body needs for life, but it is not the body itself. The same thing is true of my soul. It is true that without my body there would not be that which I call my soul, but my soul is not my body. The soul may need the body, but the body is not the soul.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: Path of Life (1909), p. 12

Love , Life , Food , Soul

“The core of the Syrian tragedy consists of the fact that Assad and ISIS represent the two faces of the same coin. Both want the Syrian people, or what is left of them inside the country, scripted out of the equation. Both have enough of a popular base to hang on for some more time even if they did not receive succor from the outside which they regularly do. At the same time neither is strong enough or is ever likely to have the popular base to impose its agenda on Syria.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Opinion: The Syrian Orphan and a Club of Cynics http://english.aawsat.com/2015/09/article55345155/opinion-the-syrian-orphan-and-a-club-of-cynics, Ashraq Al-Awsat (18 Sep, 2015).

People , Strong , Time , Country

“I have lately spent some Thoughts relative to the Nature of Light, whether it be subject to the common Laws of Motion. In this particular Newton seems to contradict himself. For in his Principia Sect. 14th he applies the common Laws of Motion to account for Reflection and Refraction, as he does also in one Part of his Optics where he proves the Sine of Incid. to Sine Refr, in a given in a given Ratio. But in another Part he says, “nothing more is requisite for producing all the Variety of Colours and Degrees of Refrangibility than that the Rays of Light be Bodies of different Sizes, the least of which may make Violet, and the Greatest the Red"; this manifestly is not consistent with the Theory of Motion applied to Bodies, where the Magnitude of the Bodies is of no Consequence. Now it is evident that if the common Theory of Motion can be applied to Light, the Red Light must have had the greatest Velocity before Incidence, as it suffers the least Deviation, for if the Vels of all the Difft colour'd Light were equal before Incidence, they must by Newton's Principia Sect. Sect. 8. Prop. 1. have continued equal after, and therefore must have suffered the same Deviation. The Determination of this Point seems to be of considerable Importance, as we so often apply the Theory of Motion to Light.”

Samuel Vince (1749–1821) British mathematician, astronomer and physicist

As quoted in: Russell McCormmach (2011) Weighing the World: The Reverend John Michell of Thornhill. p. 193

Law , Nature , Light , Suffering

“There has never been superadded to these vices of mine the withering, embalming vice of consistency.”

Henry Fountain Ashurst (1874–1962) United States Senator from Arizona

"Arizona's Pioneer Senator". New York Times (June 1, 1962)

“A universe that displays local phenomena but upon a non-local reality is the only sort of world consistent with known facts and Bell's proof.”

Nick Herbert (1936) American physicist

Source: Quantum Reality - Beyond The New Physics, Chapter 12, Bell's Interconnectedness Theorem, p. 230

World , Reality , Universe

“When our ancestors discovered the trick of consistently producing sharp stone flakes, it constituted a major breakthrough in human prehistory. …The modest flake… is a highly effective implement for cutting through all but the toughest of hides… the humans who made and used these simple stone flakes thereby availed themselves of a new energy source—animal protein.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

The Origin of Humankind (1994)

Animals

“At fourteen months he began speaking in sentences, short and of his own structure, but sentences. The subjects of his conversation, or, rather, his statements, were consistently egocentric. Normal again—no one expects an infant to write essays on the beauties of altruism.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Beyond This Horizon

Source: Beyond This Horizon (1948; originally serialized in 1942), Chapter 14, “—and beat him when he sneezes”, p. 131

Beauty

“I can give her no greater power than she has already," said the woman; "don't you see how strong that is? How men and animals are obliged to serve her, and how well she has got through the world, barefooted as she is. She cannot receive any power from me greater than she now has, which consists in her own purity and innocence of heart. If she cannot herself obtain access to the Snow Queen, and remove the glass fragments from little Kay, we can do nothing to help her.”

Hans Christian Andersen book The Snow Queen

The Snow Queen, Sixth Story
Fairy Tales (1835)

Men , World , Strong , Help

“Some intellectuals’ downplaying of objective reality and enduring criteria extends beyond social, scientific, or economic phenomena into art, music, and philosophy. The one over-riding consistency across all these disparate venues is the self-exaltation of the intellectuals. Unlike great cultural achievements of the past, such as magnificent cathedrals, which were intended to inspire kings and peasants alike, the hallmark of self-consciously “modern” art and music is its inaccessibility to the masses and often even its deliberate offensiveness to, or mockery of, the masses.
Just as a physical body can continue to live, despite containing a certain amount of microorganisms whose prevalence would destroy it, so a society can survive a certain amount of forces of disintegration within it. But that is very different from saying that there is no limit to the amount, audacity and ferocity of those disintegrative forces which a society can survive, without at least the will to resist.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Source: 2010s, Intellectuals and Society (2010), Ch. 22 : The Influence of Intellectuals

Art , Music , Reality , Past

“It is a sad fact that on this earth at this late date there are still two worlds, "the privileged world" and "the forgotten world". The privileged world consists of the affluent, developed nations, comprising twenty-five to thirty percent of the world population, in which most of the people live in a luxury never before experienced by man outside the Garden of Eden. The forgotten world is made up primarily of the developing nations, where most of the people, comprising more than fifty percent of the total world population, live in poverty, with hunger as a constant companion and fear of famine a continual menace.”

Norman Borlaug (1914–2009) American biologist

From his 1970 Nobel Lecture

Hunger , People , World , Sadness

“For the people. And truly I desire their Liberty and Freedom as much as any Body whomsoever. But I must tell you, That their Liberty and Freedom, consists in having of Government; those Laws, by which their Life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having a share in government (Sir) that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things, and therefore until they do that, I mean, that you do put the people in that liberty as I say, certainly they will never enjoy themselves.
Sirs, It was for this that now I Have come here. If I would have given way to an Arbitrary way, for to have all Laws changed according to the power of the Sword, I needed not to have come here; and therefore, I tell you, (and I pray God it be not laid to your charge) That I Am the Martyr of the People.”

Charles I of England (1600–1649) monarch of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland

On the scaffold before his execution. ( 30 January, 1649 http://anglicanhistory.org/charles/charles1.html).

Life , God , People , Law

“Marx sees Epicurus as a destroyer of the Greek myths and as a philosopher bringing to light the break-up of a tribal community. His system destroyed the visible heaven of the ancients as a keystone of political and religious life. Marx allies himself, so to speak, with Epicurean atheism, which he regards at this stage as a challenge by the intellectual é lite to the cohorts of common sense. ‘ As long as a single drop of blood pulses in her world-conquering and totally free heart, philosophy will continually shout at her opponents the cry of Epicurus: "Impiety does not consist in destroying the gods of the crowd but rather in ascribing to the gods the ideas of the crowd."’”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

Source: Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume I, The Founders, pp. 102-3

Life , God , World , Communication

“Only men of considerable vanity write books; consistently therewith, I worried lest the world were exchanging an irreplaceable author for a more easily purchased diplomat.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Foreword p. vii
The New Industrial State (1967)

Men , Books , World

“In the progress of the work he founded a Collegium Biblieum, or Bible club, consisting of his colleagues Melanchthon, Bugenhagen (Pommer), Cruciger, Justus Jonas, and Aurogallus. They met once a week in his house, several hours before supper. Deacon Georg Rörer (Rorarius), the first clergyman ordained by Luther, and his proof-reader, was also present; occasionally foreign scholars were admitted; and Jewish rabbis were freely consulted. Each member of the company contributed to the work from his special knowledge and preparation. Melanchthon brought with him the Greek Bible, Cruciger the Hebrew and Chaldee, Bugenhagen the Vulgate, others the old commentators; Luther had always with him the Latin and the German versions besides the Hebrew. Sometimes they scarcely mastered three lines of the Book of Job in four days, and hunted two, three, and four weeks for a single word. No record exists of the discussions of this remarkable company, but Mathesius says that "wonderfully beautiful and instructive speeches were made."
At last the whole Bible, including the Apocrypha as "books not equal to the Holy Scriptures, yet useful and good to read," was completed in 1534, and printed with numerous woodcuts.
In the mean time the New Testament had appeared in sixteen or seventeen editions, and in over fifty reprints.
Luther complained of the many errors in these irresponsible editions.
He never ceased to amend his translation. Besides correcting errors, he improved the uncouth and confused orthography, fixed the inflections, purged the vocabulary of obscure and ignoble words, and made the whole more symmetrical and melodious.
He prepared five original editions, or recensions, of his whole Bible, the last in 1545, a year before his death.
The edition of 1546 was prepared by his friend Rörer, and contains a large number of alterations, which he traced to Luther himself. Some of them are real improvements, e. g., Die Liebe höret nimmer auf, for, Die Liebe wird nicht müde (1 Cor. 13:8). The charge that he made the changes in the interest of Philippism (Melanchthonianism), seems to be unfounded.”

Philip Schaff (1819–1893) American Calvinist theologian

Luther's Bible club

Death , Books , Beauty , Error

“As always, when the opportunity arose, Joe took a long, astute look at the girl whom, if he could have managed it, he would have had as his mistress, or, even better, his wife. It did not seem possible that Wendy Wright had been born out of blood and internal organs like other people. In proximity to her he felt himself to be a squat, oily, sweating, uneducated nurt whose stomach rattled and whose breath wheezed. Near her he became aware of the physical mechanisms which kept him alive; within him machinery, pipes and valves and gas-compressors and fan belts had to chug away at a losing task, a labor ultimately doomed. Seeing her face, he discovered that his own consisted of a garish mask; noticing her body made him feel like a low-class windup toy. All her colors possessed a subtle quality, indirectly lit. Her eyes, those green and tumbled stones, looked impassively at everything; he had never seen fear in them, or aversion, or contempt. What she saw she accepted. Generally she seemed calm. But more than that she struck him as being durable, untroubled and cool, not subject to wear, or to fatigue, or to physical illness and decline. Probably she was twenty-five or -six, but he could not imagine her looking younger, and certainly she would never look older. She had too much control over herself and outside reality for that.”

Philip K. Dick book Ubik

Source: Ubik (1969), Chapter 5 (pp. 58-59)

People , Fear , Color , Feeling

“Ever since the last great conflict the world has been putting a renewed emphasis, not on preparation to succeed in war, but on an attempt by preventing war to succeed in peace. This movement has the full and complete approbation of the American Government and the American people. While we have been unwilling to interfere in the political relationship of other countries and have consistently refrained from intervening except when our help has been sought and we have felt that it could be effectively given, we have signified our willingness to become associated with other nations in a practical plan for promoting international justice through the World Court. Such a tribunal furnishes a method of the adjustment of international differences in accordance with our treaty rights and under the generally accepted rules of international law. When questions arise which all parties agree ought to be adjudicated but which do not yield to the ordinary methods of diplomacy, here is a forum to which the parties may voluntarily repair in the consciousness that their dignity suffers no diminution and that their cause will be determined impartially, according to the law and the evidence. That is a sensible, direct, efficient, and practical method of adjusting differences which can not fail to appeal to the intelligence of the American people.”

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

1920s, Ways to Peace (1926)

War , People , World , Peace

“Owen believed in common archetypes rather than a common ancestor, and his conduct presents an archetype of the modern creation scientists, except that they submit to peer review rarely, (if ever) and none of them are experts in anything. They’ve never produced any research indicative of their position. They cannot substantiate any of their assertions, and they’ve never successfully refuted anyone else’s hypotheses either. But every argument of evidence they’ve ever made in favor of creation has been refuted immediately and repeatedly. All they’ve ever been able to do was criticize real science, and even then the absolute best arguments they’ve ever come up with were all disproved in a court of law with mountains of research standing against their every allegation. Yet creationists still use those same ridiculous rationalizations because they will never accept where their beliefs are in error! Their only notable strength is how anyone can be so consistently proven to be absolutely wrong about absolutely everything, 100% of the time, for such a long time, and still make-believe theirs is the absolute truth. More amazing still is how often they will actually lie in defense of their alleged truth. Every publication promoting creation over any avenue of actual science contains misquotes, misdefinitions, and misrepresented misinformation, while their every appeal to reason is based entirely on erroneous assumptions and logical fallacies. There is a madness to their method, but it is naught but propaganda.”

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

"12th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TkY7HrJOhc Youtube (April 19, 2008)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Truth , Lie , Law , Error

“The quantum theory, as it is now constituted, presents us with a very great challenge, if we are at all interested in such a venture, for in quantum physics there is no consistent notion at all of what the reality may be that underlies the universal constitution and structure of matter. Thus, if we try to use the prevailing world view based on the notions of particles, we discover that the 'particles' (such as electrons) can also manifest as waves, that they move discontinuously, that there are no laws at all that apply in detail to the actual movements of individual particles and that only statistical predictions can be made about large aggregates of such particles. If on the other hand we apply the world view in which the world is regarded as a continuous field, we find that this field must also be discontinuous, as well as particle-like, and that it is as undermined in its actual behaviour as is required in the particle view of relation as a whole.”

David Bohm book Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Quotes about consistency page 8

Quotes about consistency
page 8