Quotes about constraint
page 2

“The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.”

Source: Couples (1968), Ch. 5

“Information systems, at any level of complexity above that of speech, necessarily involve technologies such as printing, telecommunications, or computers. However, to information science technical potentialities and constraints are of importance mainly in that they affect the social relations concerned.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Information Science in Theory and Practice (1987), p. 14.

Science

“Liberalism, which Luxemburg called by its more appropriate name—“opportunism”—is an integral component of capitalism. When the citizens grow restive, it will soften and decry capitalism’s excesses. But capitalism, Luxemburg argued, is an enemy that can never be appeased. Liberal reforms are used to stymie resistance and then later, when things grow quiet, are revoked on the inevitable road to capitalist slavery. The last century of labor struggles in the United States provides a case study for proof of Luxemburg’s observation.The political, cultural and judicial system in a capitalist state is centered around the protection of property rights. And, as Adam Smith pointed out, when civil government “is instituted for the security of property, [it] is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” The capitalist system is gamed from the start. And this makes Luxemburg extremely relevant as corporate capital, now freed from all constraints, reconfigures our global economy, including the United States’, into a ruthless form of neofeudalism.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

"Reform or Revolution" (2016)

Game, Reality, Study

“Decision making processes are aimed at finding courses of action that are feasible or satisfactory in the light of multiple goals and constraints.”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

Source: 1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947, p. 274.

Decision, Light

“The underlying reason for convergence seems to be that all organisms are under constant scrutiny of natural selection and are also subject to the constraints of the physical and chemical factors that severely limit the action of all inhabitants of the biosphere. Put simply, convergence shows that in a real world not all things are possible.”

Simon Conway Morris (1951) British palaeontologist

Source: The Crucible of Creation (1998), p. 202.

World, Nature

“Organizational forms — specific configurations of goals, boundaries, and activities — are the elements selected by environmental criteria, and change may occur either through new forms eliminating old ones or through the modification of existing forms. Environmental niches are distinct in combination of resources and other constraints that are sufficient to support organizational form. Organizational forms, then, are organized activity systems oriented toward exploiting the resources within a niche.
Selection pressures may favour or eliminate entire groups of organizations, such as industries, and the changing population distribution of organizations in a society reflects the operation of such selection pressures.”

Howard E. Aldrich (1943) American sociologist

Source: Organizations and Environments, 1979, p. 28

Support, Change

“In today’s Britain, the weakest among us are often assumed to be minority communities. In fact, the weakest among us are those minorities-within-minorities for whom the legal right to exit from their communities’ constraints amounts to nothing before the enforcement of cultural and religious shaming.”

Maajid Nawaz (1977) British activist

Source: On Blasphemy (2015), p. 2

Communication

“All souls are to strive after just that form of life with each other in which none will employ toward another any method of constraint, but will rely upon the moral action of the powers in the others' souls, just as God eternally does.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Right Relation of Reason to Religion, p.250

Life, God, Soul

“Further, as every law of nature implies the existence of an invariant, it follows that every law of nature is a constraint.”

W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) British psychiatrist

Source: An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), Part 2: Variety, p. 130

Law, Nature

“I think the reason it’s cheaper is, first of all, we are a private entity and we have a very lean system in here. What we have been able to do here at SpaceX is to cherry-pick, you know, the top one or two percent and give them, you know, capital to execute well and a clear mission, which is low cost, reliable access to space, and no other constraints.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science (2007)

Thinking

“Why have our standards fallen so low? Why do we have all these ugly things which nobody needs? Industrial manufacture and new materials have led to truly unlimited possibilities of forms. There are no longer any natural constraints which depend on materials such as wood and stone. We simply manufacture everything that is technically possible and lack new structures on which to base our decisions.”

Anselm Kiefer (1945) German painter and sculptor

(1986) n.p.
Structures are no longer valid', in "Ein Gespräch..."

Nature, Decision, Dependency

“No one can deny the suffering, fear, or panic, the terror or fright that can seize certain animals and that we humans can witness. … No doubt either, then, of there being within us the possibility of giving vent to a surge of compassion, even if it is then misunderstood, repressed, or denied, held at bay. … The two centuries I have been referring to somewhat casually in order to situate the present in terms of this tradition have been those of an unequal struggle, a war (whose inequality could one day be reversed) being waged between, on the one hand, those who violate not only animal life but even and also this sentiment of compassion, and, on the other hand, those who appeal for an irrefutable testimony to this pity. War is waged over the matter of pity. This war is probably ageless but, and here is my hypothesis, it is passing through a critical phase. We are passing through that phase, and it passes through us. To think the war we find ourselves waging is not only a duty, a responsibility, an obligation, it is also a necessity, a constraint that, like it or not, directly or indirectly, no one can escape. Henceforth more than ever. And I say “to think” this war, because I believe it concerns what we call “thinking.””

Jacques Derrida book The Animal That Therefore I Am

The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there.
Specters of Marx (1993), The Animal That Therefore I Am, 1997

Life, War, Fear, Thinking

“My presentation of a general theory of living systems will employ two sorts of spaces in which they may exist, physical or geographical space and conceptual or abstract space…
The characteristics and constraints of physical space affect the action of all concrete systems, living and nonliving… Physical space is a common space because it is the only space in which all concrete systems, living and nonliving, exist (though some may exist in other spaces simultaneously). Physical space is shared by all scientific observers, and all scientific data must be collected in it. This is equally true for natural science and behavioral science.”

James Grier Miller (1916–2002) biologist

Source: Living systems, 1978, p. 9-10; As cited in: Kenneth D. Bailey (1994) Sociology and the New Systems Theory: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis. p. 262

Behavior, Nature, Science

“In enterprise modelling, we want to define the actions performed within an enterprise, and define constraints for plans and schedules which are constructed to satisfy the goals of the enterprise. This leads to the following set of informal competency questions:”

Mark S. Fox (1952) Canadian computer scientist and Professor of Industrial Engineering

Temporal projection - Given a set of actions that occur at different points in the future, what are the properties of resources and activities at arbitrary points in time?
Planning and scheduling - what sequence of activities must be completed to achieve some goal? At what times must these activities be initiated and terminated?
Execution monitoring and external events - What are the effects of the occurrence of external and unexpected events (such as machine breakdown or the unavailability of resources) on a plan or schedule?
Time-based competition - we want to design an enterprise that minimizes the cycle time for a product. This is essentially the task of finding a minimum duration plan that minimizes action occurrences and maximizes concurrency of activities.
Source: Methodology for the Design and Evaluation of Ontologies (1995), p. 3-4

Question

“When looking at the two streams of research these men produced, it is tempting to characterize Buchanan as a somewhat romantic optimist holding the belief that the pursuits of selfish individuals can be channeled for the common good, if the right set of constitutional constraints are adopted, and believing that individuals are capable of designing constitutions that achieve this goal. Thus, some 35 years after the publication of The Calculus, we find Buchanan, in joint work with Roger Congleton (1998), accepting the fact that legislatures always will adopt the simple majority rule, and trying to design constitutional constraints that will lead to outcomes benefiting all members of the community under that rule.”

Dennis Mueller (1940) American economist

James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and The Calculus (2012)

Men, Communication, Selfishness

“Libertarians are often baffled at how those who appear so sensitive to constraints on choice, and to differences in bargaining power, when these derive from market factors, become so amazingly oblivious to the constraint on choice, and differential bargaining power, represented by the armed might of the state, empowered to enforce its demands by legalized violence.”

Roderick Long (1964) American philosopher

"Equality: the Unknown Ideal" (2001)

Appearance

“Partly what you need to do is decide what your highest value is. It's the star. What are you aiming for? You can decide. But there are some criteria. It should be good for you in a way that facilitates your moving forward. Maybe it should be good for you in a way that's also good for your family, as well as for the larger community. It should cover the domain of life. There's constraints on what you should regard as a value, but within those constraints you have the choice. You have choice. The thing is that people will carry a heavy load if they get to pick the load. And they think, 'well, I won't carry any load.' Ok, fine, but then you'll be like the slead dog that has nothing to pull. You'll get bored. People are pack animals. They need to pull against a wait. And that's not true for everyone. It's not true for conscientious people. For the typical person, they'll eat themselves up unless they have a load. This is why there's such an opiate epidemic among so many dispossessed white, middle aged, unemployed men in the U. S. They lose their job, and then they're done. They despise themselves. They develop chronic pain syndromes and depression. And the chronic pain is treated with opiates. That's what we're doing. And you should watch when you talk to young men about responsibility. They're so thrilled about it. It just blows me away. Really?! That's what the counter-culture is? Grow up and do something useful. Really? I can do that? Oh, I'm so excited by that idea. No one ever mentioned that before. Rights, rights, rights, rights. Jesus. It's appalling. People have had enough of that. And they better have, because it's a non-productive mode of being. Responsibility, man. That's where the meaning in life is.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Life, Men, Pain, People

“For the majority of contemporary Americans, the essence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness centers on a relentless personal quest to acquire, to consume, to indulge, and to shed whatever constraints might interfere with those endeavors.”

Andrew Bacevich (1947) United States Army officer

The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008).

Life, Happiness, Personality

“We do not desire that the unanimity of a jury should be the result of anything but the unanimity of conviction. It is true that a single juryman, or two or three constituting a small minority, may, if their own convictions are not strong and deeply rooted, think themselves justified in giving way to the majority. If is very true, if jurymen have only doubts or weak convictions, they may yield to the stronger and more determined view of their fellows; but I hold it to be of the essence of a juryman's duty, if he has a firm and deeply rooted conviction, either in the affirmative or the negative of the issue he has to try, not to give up that conviction, although the majority may be against him, from any desire to purchase his freedom from confinement or constraint, or the various other inconveniences to which jurors are subject.”

Sir Alexander Cockburn, 12th Baronet (1802–1880) Lord Chief Justice

Winsor v. The Queen (1866), L. R. 1 Q. B. Ca. 305.

Way, Thinking, Freedom, Strong

“Those of us concerned with developing new technology should consider ourselves to have a major undertaking to try to meet the expanding needs of the increasing number of people in the world with its finite resources and environments constraints.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Chestnut (1981) attributed in: Dr. Harold Chestnut: 1981 Honda Prize Laureate http://www.hondafoundation.jp/library/pdfs/ourdream_e.pdf in: Honda Prize Ecotechnology Quote

People, World

“As far as the game of marbles is concerned, there is therefore no contradiction between the egocentric practice of games and the mystical respect entertained for rules. This respect is the mark of a mentality fashioned, not by free cooperation between equals, but by adult constraint.”

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) Swiss psychologist, biologist, logician, philosopher & academic

Source: The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932), Ch. 1 : The Rules of the Game

Game, Fashion

“Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch (1967), who coined the label “contingency theory,” argue that different environments place differing requirements on organizations: specifically, environments characterized by uncertainty and rapid rates of change in market conditions or technologies present different challenges—both constraints and opportunities—to organizations than do placid and stable environments”

W. Richard Scott (1932) American sociologist

Source: Institutions and Organizations., 1995, p. 89 (2001: 103)

Change

“A niche is created by the intersection of resource constraints— an abstract resource space consisting of a unique combination of resources (information, access to materials, customers, and so on) that could permit a form to survive there. Forms thus either take advantage of a niche resource space" or fail.”

Howard E. Aldrich (1943) American sociologist

Source: Organizations and Environments, 1979, p. 40; cited in: Frank Marutollo (1990). Organizational Behavior in the Marine Corps. p. 33

“Inflation and Employment in capitalist countries, in my own view, the change is the other way around: the constraints on the pressure of demand tend to be excessive, with the result that unemployment is much greater than can be justified by the needs of resource-allocation, and the rate of economic growth is appreciably less than it could be.
The main reason for this is that the distribution of power and, ultimately, the distribution of incomes, changes in favor of labor the faster the economy grows and the nearer it is to full employment, and over a longer period it changes in favor of capital the greater the volume of unemployment. This is the real reason why the continuance of Keynesian policies after the war led to a recrudescence of long-discredited ideas that go by the name of “monetarism.” The main attraction of monetarism was not its intellectual simplicity— inflation is a matter of the money supply, period— but that it elevated the fear of inflation to the unique position which could not be justified by the experience of numerous countries who habitually suffer from it.”

Nicholas Kaldor (1908–1986) British/Hungarian economist

Nicholas Kaldor, Economics without Equilibrium (1985), p.37-38

Money, War, Fear, Way

“ Every individual word in a passage or poetry can no more be said to denote some specific referent than does every brush mark, every line in a painting have its counterpart in reality. The writer or speaker does not communicate his thoughts to us; he communicates a representation for carrying out, this function under the severe discipline of using the only materials he has, sound and gesture. Speech is like painting, a representation made out of given materials -- sound or paint. The function of speech is to stimulate and set up thoughts in us having correspondence with the speaker's desires; he has then communicated with us. But he has not transmitted a copy of his thoughts, a photograph, but only a stream of speech -- a substitute made from the unpromising material of sound. The artist, the sculptor, the caricaturist, the composer are akin in this [fact that they have not transmitted a copy of their thoughts], that they express (make representations of) their thoughts using chosen, limited materials. They make the "best" representations, within these self-imposed constraints. A child who builds models of a house, or a train, using only a few colored bricks, is essentially engaged in the same creative task.* Metaphors can play a most forceful role, by importing ideas through a vehicle language, setting up what are purely linguistic associations (we speak of "heavy burden of taxation," "being in a rut"). The imported concepts are, to some extent, artificial in their contexts, and they are by no means universal among different cultures. For instance, the concepts of cleanliness and washing are used within Christendom to imply "freedom from sin." We Westerners speak of the mind's eye, but this idea is unknown amongst the Chinese. that is, we are looking at it with the eyes of our English-speaking culture. A grammar book may help us to decipher the text more thoroughly, and help us comprehend something of the language structure, but we may never fully understand if we are not bred in the culture and society that has modeled and shaped the language. (p. 74)”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

See Gombrich in reference 348
On Human Communication (1957), Language: Science and Aesthetics

Books, Color, Communication, Idea

“[Constraint] is a relation between two sets, and occurs when the variety that exists under one condition is less than the variety that exists under another.”

W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) British psychiatrist

Source: An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), Part 2: Variety, p. 127

“In developing my account of consciousness, I have tried to obey a number of constraints. The first and most important is to take consciousness seriously. The easiest way to develop a "theory" of consciousness is to deny its existence, or to redefine the phenomenon in need of explanation as something it is not. This usually leads to an elegant theory, but the problem does not go away.”

David Chalmers book The Conscious Mind

The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (1996)

Way, Problem

“As long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens.”

David Mitchell (1969) English novelist

Interview "David Mitchell at Writers and Readers week, New Zealand" at ABC.net (30 March 2008) http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2008/2201562.htm

Way

“Corruption is the enemy of development. It must be got rid of. Both the government and the people at large must come together to achieve this national objective. You have always shown an ability to understand events happening around you; expressed your views and I am sure you will not fail in building a strong, progressive, cohesive and corruption-free India. These are totally unacceptable and must be opposed by one and all. The government, social organizations, NGOs and other voluntary bodies all have to work collectively. Therefore, their issues received my constant attention during my Presidency. Women have talent and intelligence but due to social constraints and prejudices, it is still a long distance away from the goal of gender equality. A paradigm shift, where, in addition to, physical inputs for farming, a focused emphasis placed on knowledge inputs, can be a promising way forward. This knowledge-based approach will bring immense returns particularly in rainfed and dryland farming areas. I believe economic growth should translate into the happiness and progress of all. Alongwith it, there should be development of art and culture, literature and education, science and technology. We have to see how to harness the many resources of India for achieving common good and for inclusive growth.”

Pratibha Patil (1934) 12th President of India

Patil's goodbye wish: A 'corruption-free India' https://in.news.yahoo.com/patils-goodbye-wish-corruption-free-india-143318154.html in: IANS India Private Limited By Indo Asian News Service, 24 July 2012. <br class="br">Goodybe Wish

Women, Happiness, People, Education

“In April of 1959, ten of this country's leading scholars forgathered on the campus of Purdue University to discuss the nature of information and the nature of decision… What interests do these men have in common?… To answer these questions it is necessary to view the changing aspect of the scientific approach to epistemology, and the striking progress which has been wrought in the very recent past. The decade from 1940 to 1950 witnessed the operation of the first stored- program digital computer. The concept of information was quantified, and mathematical theories were developed for communication (Shannon) and decision (Wald). Known mathematical techniques were applied to new and important fields, as the techniques of complex- variable theory to the analysis of feedback systems and the techniques of matrix theory to the analysis of systems under multiple linear constraints. The word "cybernetics" was coined, and with it came the realization of the many analogies between control and communication in men and in automata. New terms like "operations research" and "system engineering" were introduced; despite their occasional use by charlatans, they have signified enormous progress in the solution of exceedingly complex problems, through the application of quantitative ness and objectivity.”

Robert E. Machol (1917–1998) American systems engineer

Source: Information and Decision Processes (1960), p. vii

Men, Communication, Mathematics, Question

“Against God can nothing be more manifest than that a woman shall be exalted to reign above man; for the contrary sentence he has pronounced in these words: "Thy will shall be subject to thy husband, and he shall bear dominion over thee" (Gen. 3:16). As [though] God should say, "Forasmuch as you have abused your former condition, and because your free will has brought yourself and mankind into the bondage of Satan, I therefore will bring you in bondage to man. For where before your obedience should have been voluntary, now it shall be by constraint and by necessity; and that because you have deceived your man, you shall therefore be no longer mistress over your own appetites, over your own will or desires. For in you there is neither reason nor discretion which are able to moderate your affections, and therefore they shall be subject to the desire of your man. He shall be lord and governor, not only over your body, but even over your appetites and will." This sentence, I say, did God pronounce against Eve and her daughters, as the rest of the scriptures do evidently witness. So that no woman can ever presume to reign above man, but the same she must needs do in despite of God, and in contempt of his punishment and malediction.”

John Knox (1514–1572) Scottish clergyman, writer and historian

God, Daughters

“All the alleged key causes of SOE [State-Owned Enterprise] inefficiency—the principal-agent problem, the free-rider problem and the soft budget constraint—are, while real, not unique to state-owned enterprises. Large private-sector firms with dispersed ownership also suffer from the principal-agent problem and the free-rider problem. So, in these two areas, forms of ownership do matter, but the critical divide is not between state and private ownership—it is between concentrated and dispersed ownerships.”

Ha-Joon Chang book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

Source: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2008), Ch. 5: 'Man exploits man; Private enterprise good, public enterprise bad?', The pitfalls of privatization, p. 116

Problem, Suffering

“After 1909, Monet drastically enlarged his brushstrokes, disintegrated his images, and broke through the taming constraints and delicacy of Impressionism for good. Nineteen gnarly paintings, starting in 1909 and carrying through his final seventeen years, finish off the notion that Monet went happily ever after into lily-land.”

Jerry Saltz (1951) American art historian

In New York http://books.google.co.in/books?id=aEUfAQAAMAAJ Volume 43, Issues 14-21, New York Magazine Company, 2010, p. 1

Painting

“But we are not just witnessing a relativisation of time according to social contexts or alternatively the return to time reversibility as if reality could become entirely captured in cyclical myths. The transformation is more profound: it is the mixing of tenses to create a forever universe, not self-expanding but self-maintaining, not cyclical but random, not recursive but incursive: timeless time, using technology to escape the contexts of its existence, and to appropriate selectively any value each context could offer to the ever-present. I argue that this is happening now not only because capitalism strives to free itself from all constraints, since this has been the capitalist system’s tendency all along, without being able fully to materialize it. Neither is it sufficient to refer to the cultural and social revolts against clock time, since they have characterized the history of the last century without actually reversing its domination, indeed furthering its logic by including clock time distribution of life in the social contract. Capital’s freedom from time and culture’s escape from the clock are decisively facilitated by new information technologies, and embedded in the structure of the network society.
The transformation of time as surveyed in this chapter does not concern all processes, social groupings, and territories in our societies, although it does affect the entire planet. What I call timeless time is only the emerging, dominant form of social time in the network society, as the space of flows does not negate the existence of places. It is precisely my argument that social domination is exercised through the selective inclusion and exclusion of functions and people in different temporal and spatial frames.”

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

Source: The Rise of the Network Society, 1996, p. 433–434 as quoted in: Wayne Hope (2006) Global Capitalism and the Critique of Real Time http://www.sagepub.com/dicken6/Sociology%20Online%20readings/CH%202%20-%20HOPE.pdf. Sage publications. p. 289

Life, People, Exercises, History

“Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived. Truth is the light that gives meaning and value to charity. That light is both the light of reason and the light of faith, through which the intellect attains to the natural and supernatural truth of charity: it grasps its meaning as gift, acceptance, and communion. Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word “love” is abused and distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite. Truth frees charity from the constraints of an emotionalism that deprives it of relational and social content, and of a fideism that deprives it of human and universal breathing-space.”

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

2009, Cartias in Vertitate (29 June 2009)

Love, Truth, Faith, Way

“Software engineering concerns methods and techniques to develop large software systems. The engineering metaphor is used to emphasize a systematic approach to develop systems that satisfy organizational requirements and constraints.”

Hans van Vliet (1949) Dutch computer scientist

Source: Software Engineering: Principles and Practice, 2007, p. 2

“Interviewer: what do you think about polygamy? Is this Egypt's method of family planning?
Ali Gum'a: This is a storm in a teacup. Our statistics show that cases of polygamy do not exceed two percent. That's one thing. Mistresses and adultery have become widespread throughout the world, beginning with the heads of state here and there – and I don't want to mention specific Western countries – and culminating with illegitimate children, who are recognized, due to the constraints of reality. I'd like to know if this is preferable to having a rate of two percent [polygamy] among marriages, according to the reliable official statistics? What is this? Are we supposed to allow adultery and ban marriages? In my opinion, this is preposterous.
[…]
Interviewer: In Judaism, a man is permitted to have four wives?
Ali Gum'a: Of course! Moses has four wives, and so did Abraham…
Interviewer: But today, it is not permitted.
Ali Gum'a: Today, yesterday…what's the difference? To this day, Judaism permits polygamy. The Hindus permit polygamy. The Buddhists permit polygamy. There is not a single religion on the face of the earth that bans polygamy, but all religions agree that women are not allowed to have more than one husband.
[…]
Ali Guma: …in Islam, Allah permits us – just like in all religions – to marry several wives, and have things done out in the open. For whose benefit is all this? For the benefit of the woman, because a woman who is taken as a mistress remains in the shadows, and loses all her rights. The man does not owe her anything. But since [Allah] permits marrying another wife, she gains respect, status, and rights.”

Ali Gomaa (1951) Egyptian imam

citation needed

Women, Marriage, Children, World

“An enterprise must be viewed from several perspectives if it is to be fully described and understood (Barnett 1994; ESPIRIT Consortium AMICE 1991). Previous work in the development of architectures by the Automation & Robotics Research Institute (Presley et al. 1993) describes a five view approach. The Business Rule (or Information) View defines the entities managed by the enterprise and the rules governing their relationships and interactions. The Activity View defines the functions performed by the enterprise (what is done) while the Business Process View defines a time sequenced set of processes (how it is done). The resources and capabilities managed by the enterprise are defined in a Resource View. Finally, the Organization View is used to define how the enterprise organizes itself and the set of constraints and rules governing how it manages itself and its processes.”

Donald H. Liles (1947) American engineer

Source: Enterprise modeling within an enterprise engineering framework (1996), p. 994

Business, Time

“A great challenge lies ahead in the modeling and verification of systems that are subject to timing constraints.”

John A. Stankovic

Unsourced

Time

“The dilemma posed by a choice between rules and men largely begs the question. There are, to be sure, times when rules, constraints, commitments, contract or treaty provisions stand in the way and should be transcended because of force majeure, acts of God, some deus ex machina that makes clear that all bets are off. …
If one relies on men of responsibility to make the right choice in crisis among conflicting rules, or to follow an altogether different course for which no precedent exists, there is a danger of creating new precedents and new rules, which may be applied mistakenly under different circumstances. …
The alternative to rules—men, which of course includes women—begs another question. Men have different responsibilities, principles, understandings, interests.”

Charles P. Kindleberger (1910–2003) American economic historian

"Rules vs Men: Lessons from a Century of Monetary Policy", Originally published in Christoph Buchheim, Michael Hutter, and Harold James, eds., Zerrissene Zwischenkriegszeit Beiträge (1994), republished in Comparative Political Economy: A Retrospective (2003)

Women, Men, God, Way

“For me, as I later came to say, cybernetics is the art of creating equilibrium in a world of possibilities and constraints. This is not just a romantic description, it portrays the new way of thinking quite accurately. Cybernetics differs from the traditional scientific procedure, because it does not try to explain phenomena by searching for their causes, but rather by specifying the constraints that determine the direction of their development.”

Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010) German philosopher

Source: Partial Memories: Sketches from an Improbable Life, 2010, p. 136

World, Art, Way, Search

“As far as I'm concerned, some of the best literature of the last hundred years has come out of the genre tradition and of course the best of it challenges expectations just as the best of literary fiction challenges those expectations. But it's not that genre fiction is any more a constraint than mimetic fiction. So I see myself very much as a genre writer. I love the fantastic genres. I see what I'm doing as a development of them but very much a part of them. I never feel that I'm leaving them behind. I try and be as experimental and avant-garde and stretching as I can be but I don't see that as turning my back on the genre at all. Genre has always been able to encompass that.”

China Miéville (1972) English writer

interview with 3am http://www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/2003/feb/interview_china_mieville.html

Love, Feeling, Literature, Parting

“one's twentieth birthday. That day opened the door to a wider life: I reached out to grasp reality. But in fact it was reality which gripped me with its restrictions and constraints and rules which arrogantly claim to be the laws of life, of the universe. To be grown-up really meant resignation; one gave in (if ruefully), laughing a little at one's young dreams.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights p. 63 Diaries 1951-1952.

Life, Law, Dreams, Birthday

“When a constraint exists advantage can usually be taken of it.”

W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) British psychiatrist

Source: An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), Part 2: Variety, p. 130

“Traditionally, economic analysis treats the economic system as one of the givens. The term "design" in the title is meant to stress that the structure of the economic system is to be regarded as an unknown. An unknown in what problem? Typically that of ﬁnding a system that would be, in a sense to be speciﬁed, superior to the existing one. The idea of searching for a better system is at least as ancient as Plato’s Republic, but it is only recently that tools have become available for a systematic, analytical approach to such search procedures. This new approach refuses to accept the institutional status quo of a particular time and place as the only legitimate object of interest and yet recognizes constraints that disqualify naive Utopias.”

Leonid Hurwicz (1917–2008) Russian-American economist and mathematician

Leonid Hurwicz, " The design of mechanisms for resource allocation http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/hurwiczaer.pdf," The American Economic Review, (1973): 1-30.

Search, Idea, Problem, Sense

“It was difficult to sustain the illusion that education was of value for kids who would not live long enough to use it. They’d never take the standardized tests that they were prepping for. … Free from the constraints of racking up high test scores or getting into colleges, students could learn for learning’s sake—which was how it ought to be. The tick-tock curriculum had dissolved and been replaced by activities improvised from day to day by teachers and parents: hiking in the mountains, doing art projects about the Cloud Ark, talking with psychologists about death, reading favorite books. In one sense Amelia and her colleagues had never been more needed, never had such an opportunity to show their quality.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"The Casting of Lots"
Seveneves (2015), Part One

Death, Books, Education, Art

“Whereas some consequences of our actions occur as planned, others are unanticipated; social actions are not context-free but are constrained, and their outcomes are shaped by the setting in which they occur. Especially significant are the constraints on action that arise from commitments enforced by institutionalization. Because organizations are social systems, goals and procedures tend to achieve an established, value impregnated status. We say that they become institutionalized.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Source: TVA and the grass roots : a study in the sociology of formal organization, 1949, pp. 256-257

“I began to feel that it was time for me to retire at the end of production on GODZILLA VS. SPACE GODZILLA. I noticed that I was beginning to lack the three powers needed to play Godzilla. My physical power was diminishing because of my age, and my spiritual and performance powers were diminishing because of budgetary constraints and interpersonal problems. It was difficult for me to approach my work with enthusiasm and energy. It didn't matter how much kendo I did.”

Kenpachiro Satsuma (1947) Japanese actor

As quoted by David Milner, "Kenpachiro Satsuma Interview III" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/satsum3.htm, Kaiju Conversations (December 1995)

Age, Feeling, Problem, Time

“The value of global modelling has been severely restricted by poor appreciation of the constraints under which governments and politicians operate. Equally, the value of governments and politicians has been severely restricted by largely ignoring the very real but less immediate problems tackled by modellers.”

Eduard Pestel (1914–1988) scholar

E. Pestel (1982) Modellers and politicians. In: Futures, Volume 14, Issue 2, April 1982, pp. 122–128.

Problem

“A space of frequency of intermarriage among ethnic groups.
These conceptual and abstracted spaces do not have the same characteristics and are not subject to the same constraints as physical space. Each has characteristics and constraints of its own. These spaces may be either conceived of by a human being or learned about from others”

James Grier Miller (1916–2002) biologist

Source: Living Systems: Basic Concepts (1969), p. 53; About conceptual or abstracted spaces

Learning

“Mathematicians are there to find the constraints and to eliminate those things that aren't constraints… I know this will surprise many of you, but they are useful!”

Robert E. Machol (1917–1998) American systems engineer

Source: Mathematicians are useful (1971), p. 1

“The cultural invasion is like a leafy tree which prevents us from seeing our own sun, sky and stars. Therefore in order to be able to see the sky above our heads, our task is to cut this tree off at the roots. US imperialism understands very well the magic of communication through music and persists in filling our young people with all sorts of commercial tripe. With professional expertise they have taken certain measures: first, the commercialization of the so-called ‘protest music’; second, the creation of ‘idols’ of protest music who obey the same rules and suffer from the same constraints as the other idols of the consumer music industry – they last a little while and then disappear. Meanwhile they are useful in neutralizing the innate spirit of rebellion of young people. The term ‘protest song’ is no longer valid because it is ambiguous and has been misused. I prefer the term ‘revolutionary song’.”

Víctor Jara (1932–1973) Pro teacher, theatre director, poet, singer-songwriter, and political activist

In 1969 Jara commented about the distinction between the commercialised ‘protest song phenomenon’ imported into Chile and the nature of the New Chilean Song Movement (NCC).
Jara, Joan (1983). Victor: An Unfinished Song. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-224-02954-1. p. 121

People, Music, Star, Communication

“The range of emotions parents can arouse in their children – affection, rebellion, indifference, fear, adulation, their disturbing combinations – suggest a repertory of subjective universals, cutting in each individual case at random across cultures. What children know – as opposed to feel – about their parents, on the other hand, is likely to be a function of objective constraints that vary more systematically: tradition, place, life-span.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Debts 2. "An Anglo-Irishman In China: J.C. O’G. Anderson" (1998;2005)
Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Perry Anderson / Quotes / Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Debts 2. "An Anglo-Irishman In China, J.C. O’G. Anderson" (1998;2005)
Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005)

Life, Children, Fear, Feeling

“Deregulation freed corporations from legal constraints, and privatization empowered them to govern areas of society from which they had been previously been excluded. By the end of the century, the corporation had become the world's dominant institution.
Yet history humbles dominant institutions.”

Joel Bakan (1959) Canadian writer, musician, filmmaker and legal scholar

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 6, Reckoning, p. 139

World, History

“At the most abstract level, the relation between urbanism and microelectronics is scalar (fractal). The coming computers are closer to miniature cities than to artificial brains, dominated by traffic problems (congestion), migration / communications, zoning issues (mixed use), the engineering potential of new materials, questions of dimensionality (3D solutions to density constraints), entropy or heat / waste dissipation (recycling / reversible computation), and disease control”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

new viruses <br class="br"> "Implosion" https://web.archive.org/web/20121013194328/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/414/implosion (2011)

Disease, Communication, Question, Problem

“I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 8 “Killing Time” section VII (p. 269).

“What his vision of free commodity exchange omits are the constraints that governed the selection of particular commodities, and the political and military sanctions used to ensure the continuation of quiet asymmetrical exchanges that benefited one party while diminishing the assets of another.”

Eric Wolf (1923–1999) American anthropologist

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 11, The Movement of Commodities, p. 314.
Context: Where Adam Smith and David Ricardo had envisaged a growing worldwide division of labor, they had thought that each country would freely select the commodities it was most qualified to produce, and that each would exchange its optimal commodity for the optimal commodity of others. Thus in Ricardo's example, Britain would send Portugal its textiles, while Britons would consume Portuguese wines in turn. What his vision of free commodity exchange omits are the constraints that governed the selection of particular commodities, and the political and military sanctions used to ensure the continuation of quiet asymmetrical exchanges that benefited one party while diminishing the assets of another.

“If you think it is easy to violate social constraints, get onto a bus and sing out loud.”

Stanley Milgram (1933–1984) Social psychologist

Psychology in Today's World (1975), p. 314
Context: If you think it is easy to violate social constraints, get onto a bus and sing out loud. Full-throated song now, no humming. Many people will say it's easy to carry out this act, but not one in a hundred will be able to do it.
The point is not to think about singing, but to try to do it. Only in action can you fully realize the forces operative in social behavior. That is why I am an experimentalist.

Thinking, Singing

“All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good : they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it, and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule, and strictest tie of their order, there was but this one clause to be observed,
DO WHAT THOU WILT.
Because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition, by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude, wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden, and to desire what is denied us.”

Francois Rabelais book Gargantua and Pantagruel

Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Gargantua (1534), Ch. 57 : How the Thelemites were governed, and of their manner of living; the famous dictum of the abbey of Theleme presented here, "Do what thou wilt" (Fais ce que voudras), evokes an ancient expression by St. Augustine of Hippo: "Love, and do what thou wilt." The expression of Rabelais was later used by the Hellfire Club established by Sir Francis Dashwood, and by Aleister Crowley in his The Book of the Law (1904): "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."
Chapter 58 : A prophetical Riddle.

Life, Men, Pleasure, Law

“The relations between parents and children are certainly not only those of constraint. There is spontaneous mutual affection, which from the first prompts the child to acts of generosity and even of self-sacrifice, to very touching demonstrations which are in no way prescribed.”

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) Swiss psychologist, biologist, logician, philosopher & academic

Source: The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932), Ch. 2 : Adult Constraint and Moral Realism 
Context: The relations between parents and children are certainly not only those of constraint. There is spontaneous mutual affection, which from the first prompts the child to acts of generosity and even of self-sacrifice, to very touching demonstrations which are in no way prescribed. And here no doubt is the starting point for that morality of good which we shall see developing alongside of the morality of right or duty, and which in some persons completely replaces it.

Children, Way, Parent

“Serving one's country as a military man is rewarding experience. It is nevertheless a life of constraint. A military man serves within carefully prescribed limits, be it as enlisted man, junior officer, battalion commander, division commander, even senior field commander in time of war. The freedom to speak out in the manner of the private citizen, journalist, politician, legislator has no part in the assignment. Perhaps this is one reason why generals who have hung up their uniforms traditionally turn to the pen, seek an opportunity for free expression that they have long denied themselves, to report to the people they have served.”

William Westmoreland book A Soldier Reports

From the Preface
A Soldier Reports (1976)
Context: Serving one's country as a military man is rewarding experience. It is nevertheless a life of constraint. A military man serves within carefully prescribed limits, be it as enlisted man, junior officer, battalion commander, division commander, even senior field commander in time of war. The freedom to speak out in the manner of the private citizen, journalist, politician, legislator has no part in the assignment. Perhaps this is one reason why generals who have hung up their uniforms traditionally turn to the pen, seek an opportunity for free expression that they have long denied themselves, to report to the people they have served. In these pages I have tried to exercise that prerogative that in the end is mine, while at the same time seeking to make an objective and constructive contribution to the history of a dramatic era. In the idiom of the time, I have tried to tell it like it was. This is my personal story, yet inevitably it represents more than that; for my story is inextricably involved with the stories of those who served with me during thirty-six years in the United States Army- from wooden-wheeled artillery to antiballistic missile, from horse to spaceship, from volunteer army to draftee army in three wars and back to volunteer army. My story is particularly involved with the stories of those who served with such valor and sacrifice in the Republic of Vietnam. My hope is that in telling my story I have in some manner done justice to theirs, that I have to some degree contributed to an appreciation by the American people of arduous, imaginative, valiant service in spite of alien environment, hardship, restriction, frustration, misunderstanding, and vocal and demonstrative opposition.

Life, War, People, Freedom

“Liberty is the power of choice within the latitude left between the direct constraint of natural forces and the authority accepted as legitimate. The latitude should be sufficiently wide for liberty to be more than a fiction, but it should include only what is innocent and should never be wide enough to permit certain kinds of crime.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation (1943), Statement Of Obligations
Context: The human soul has need of consented obedience and of liberty.
Consented obedience is what one concedes to an authority because one judges it to be legitimate. It is not possible in relation to a political power established by conquest or coup d'etat nor to an economic power based upon money.
Liberty is the power of choice within the latitude left between the direct constraint of natural forces and the authority accepted as legitimate. The latitude should be sufficiently wide for liberty to be more than a fiction, but it should include only what is innocent and should never be wide enough to permit certain kinds of crime.

Nature

“There are therefore three types of behavior: motor behavior, egocentric behavior (with external constraint), and cooperation.”

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) Swiss psychologist, biologist, logician, philosopher & academic

Source: The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932), Ch. 1 : The Rules of the Game, § 8 : Conclusions : Motor Rules and the Two Kinds of Respect 
Context: A second prefatory question faces us: that of society and the individual. We have sought to contrast the child and the civilized adult on the ground of their respective social attitudes. The baby (at the stage of motor intelligence) is asocial, the egocentric child is subject to external constraint but has little capacity for cooperation, the civilized adult of to-day presents the essential character of cooperation between differentiated personalities who regard each other as equals.
There are therefore three types of behavior: motor behavior, egocentric behavior (with external constraint), and cooperation. And to these three types of social behavior there correspond three types of rules: motor rules, rules due to unilateral respect, and rules due to mutual respect.
But here again, one must beware of laying down the law: for things are motor, individual and social all at once. As we shall have occasion to show, rules of cooperation are in some respects the outcome of the rules of coercion and of the motor rules. On the other hand, coercion is applied during the first days of an infant's life, and the earliest social relations contain the germs of cooperation. Here again, it is not so much a question of these successive features themselves as of the proportions in which they are present. Moreover, the way in which conscious realization and the time-lag from one level to another come into play is a further bar to our arranging these phenomena in a strict sequence, as though they made a single appearance and then disappeared from the scene once and for all.

Behavior

“But it may be urged, on the other side, that Liberty is not the sum or substitute for of all things men ought to live for... to be real it must be circumscribed... advancing civilisation invests the state with increased rights and duties, and imposes increased burdens and constraints on the subject... a highly instructed and intelligent community may perceive the benefit of compulsory obligations which, at a lower stage, would be thought unbearable... liberal progress is not vague or indefinite, but aims at a point where the public is subject to no restrictions but those of which it feels the advantage... a free country may be less capable of doing much for the advancement of religion, the prevention of vice, or the relief of suffering, than one that does not shrink from confronting great emergencies by some sacrifice of individual rights, and some concentration of power... the supreme political object ought to be sometimes postponed to still higher moral objects. My argument involves no collision with these qualifying reflections. We are dealing, not with the effects of freedom, but with its causes. ...influences which brought arbitrary government under control, either by the diffusion of power, or to an appeal to an authority which transcends all government, and among these influences the greatest philosophers of Greece have no claim to be reckoned.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

Men, Religion, Feeling, Intelligence

“It is difficult to paint the light, the various, the inconstant character of Gallienus, which he displayed without constraint, as soon as he became sole possessor of the empire. There were, however, a few short moments in the life of Gallienus, when, exasperated by some recent injury, he suddenly appeared the intrepid soldier and the cruel tyrant; till, satiated with blood, or fatigued by resistance, he insensibly sunk into the natural mildness and indolence of his character.In every art that he attempted, his lively genius enabled him to succeed; and as his genius was destitute of judgment, he attempted every art, except the important ones of war and government. He was a master of several curious, but useless sciences, a ready orator, an elegant poet, a skilful gardener, an excellent cook, and most contemptible prince... There were, however, a few short moments in the life of Gallienus, when, exasperated by some recent injury, he suddenly appeared the intrepid soldier and the cruel tyrant; till, satiated with blood, or fatigued by resistance, he insensibly sunk into the natural mildness and indolence of his character.”

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English historian and Member of Parliament

Vol. 1, Chap. 10.
The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire: Volume 1 (1776)

Life, War, Art, Nature

“In the midst of increasing mechanization and technological organization, propaganda is simply the means used to prevent these things from being felt as too oppressive and to persuade man to submit with good grace. When man will be fully adapted to this technological society, when he will end by obeying with enthusiasm, convinced of the excellence of what he is forced to do, the constraint of the organization will no longer be felt by him; the truth is, it will no longer be a constraint, and the police will have nothing to do. The civic and technological good will and the enthusiasm for the right social myths — both created by propaganda — will finally have solved the problem of man.”

Jacques Ellul book Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes

Vintage, p. xviii
Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1962)

Truth, Problem

“There are many undiscovered Mozarts, Beethovens, Einsteins, Shakespeares, Lincolns, and Washingtons out there today who do not have the freedom or the opportunity to explore their talents due to economic, political, and other constraints.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

The Transhumanism Handbook, 2019

Freedom

“I love the short story: I love its flexibility, its distillation of language, the pressure it exerts on the moment. A story demands that the reader look closely. And yet, despite the intensity and constraints, a story can be surprisingly capacious…”

Kirstin Valdez Quade American writer

On why she loves writing short stories in “Kirstin Valdez Quade: How I Write” https://www.writermag.com/writing-inspiration/author-interviews/kirstin-valdez-quade/ in The Writer (2017 Apr 21)

Love, Making love

“Because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition, by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude, wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden, and to desire what is denied us.”

Francois Rabelais book Gargantua and Pantagruel

Men, Nature

“Despite his caricature as being indecisive, he was one of the most decisive leaders this nation has seen. On all crucial issues, he took decisions that have continued to shape India’s rise over the last two decades. Manmohan Singh may be touted as the father of Indian economic reforms; but as Singh has himself acknowledged, it was Rao who fathered the process. Singh was an economic technocrat with little understanding of political constraints. It was Rao who shielded Singh from the left wing of his own party, a flank that had left no stone unturned in opposing the economic liberalization programme. Rao made economic reforms politically tenable at a time when his own party was out to scuttle his most ambitious undertaking. How ironical, then, that today the same Congress-wallahs try to take credit for India’s economic success without acknowledging Rao’s role.”

P. V. Narasimha Rao (1921–2004) Indian politician

Harsh V. Pant in: "Give Narasimha Rao his due".

Understanding, Decision, Time, Success

“Today freedom also means the freedom to hate, it means the freedom to say anything, it means the freedom to disparage people, to dehumanize people, to believe in the culture of cruelty, to believe that kindness is not a virtue but a liability. Freedom has been extended into a discourse of violence and hate, which is really part of a larger cultural apparatus that has so undermined the relationship between freedom and justice, freedom and equality, freedom and social responsibility that those terms drop out and freedom becomes in a sense a liability with respect to what a democratic socialist country might look like. The other side of this is that there is a really demonic notion of freedom that seems to suggest we’re all equal and we can all make all of the choices that we want — it’s up to us. In other words, it suggests that choice in this one-dimensional sense of market freedom is defined without constraints. So you are free to sleep under a bridge at night, or you’re free to sleep in the Ritz. Well, that’s just nonsense. It seems to me that choice only becomes meaningful when people have the capacity to make real choices. That’s what freedom really is about in an economic and political sense.”

Henry Giroux (1943) American academic

Interview with Media For Us, 2019

Hate, People, Making love, Justice

“The thought of being under absolute compulsion, the plaything of another, is unendurable for a human being. Hence, if every way of escape from the constraint is taken from him, there is nothing left for him to do but to persuade himself that he does the things he is forced to do willingly, that is to say, to substitute devotion for obedience.”

Simone Weil book Gravity and Grace

… It is by this twist that slavery debases the soul: this devotion is in fact based on a lie, since the reasons for it cannot bear investigation. … Moreover, the master is deceived too by the fallacy of devotion.
Source: Gravity and Grace (1947), p. 142 (1972 edition)

Way

“We arrived at five great Epochs of the Earthly Life of the Human Race, which are the only possible Epochs thereof, and thoroughly exhaust the whole of this Life:–First, That in which human affairs are governed by Reason as Instinct without violence or constraint. Second, That in which this Instinct has become weaker, and now only manifests itself in a few chosen Individuals, and thereby becomes an External Ruling Authority in reference to all the rest. Third, That in which this Authority is thrown off; and, with it, Reason in every shape which it has yet assumed. Fourth, That in which Reason in the shape of Science appears among men. Fifth, That in which Art associates itself with this Science, in order to mold Human Life with a firmer and surer hand into harmony with Science, and in which the ordering of all the relations of Man according to Reason is, by means of this Art, freely accomplished, the object of the Earthly Life attained, and our Race enters upon the higher spheres of Eternity.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), p. 64

Life, Men, Art, Appearance

“It is on this step that depends the fact that one can call upon the subject to re-enter himself in the unconscious—for, after all, it is important to know who one is calling. It is not the soul, either mortal or immortal, which has been with us for so long, nor some shade, some double, some phantom, nor even some supposed psycho-spherical shell, the locus of the defences and other such simplified notions. It is the subject who is called— there is only he, therefore, who can be chosen. There may be, as in the parable, many called and few chosen, but there will certainly not be any others except those who are called. In order to understand the Freudian concepts, one must set out on the basis that it is the subject who is called—the subject of Cartesian origin. This basis gives its true function to what, in analysis, is called recollection or remembering. Recollection is not Platonic reminiscence —it is not the return of a form, an imprint, a eidos of beauty and good, a supreme truth, coming to us from the beyond. It is something that comes to us from the structural necessities, something humble, born at the level of the lowest encounters and of all the talking crowd that precedes us, at the level of the structure of the signifier, of the languages spoken in a stuttering, stumbling way, but which cannot elude constraints whose echoes, model, style can be found, curiously enough, in contemporary mathematics.”

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist

Of the Network of Signifiers
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho Analysis (1978)

Truth, Beauty, Way, Soul

“The change of religion in Scotland, eager and vehement as it was, raised an epidemical enthusiasm, compounded of sullen scrupulousness and warlike ferocity, which, in a people whom idleness resigned to their own thoughts, and who conversing only with each other, suffered no dilution of their zeal from the gradual influx of new opinions, was long transmitted in its full strength from the old to the young, but by trade and intercourse with England, is now visibly abating, and giving way too fast to their laxity of practice and indifference of opinion, in which men, not sufficiently instructed to find the middle point, too easily shelter themselves from rigour and constraint.”

Samuel Johnson book A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

p. 8. https://books.google.com/books?id=-6JfAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA8 <br class="br">A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775)

Men, People, Religion, Way

“You are born into a generation that defines who you are more than you can imagine. Your generation wants to separate itself from the previous one and set a new tone for the world. In the process, it forms certain tastes, values, and ways of thinking that you as an individual internalize. As you get older, these generational values and ideas tend to close you off from other points of view, constraining your mind. Your task is to understand as deeply as possible this powerful influence on who you are and how you see the world. Knowing in depth the spirit of your generation and the times you live in, you will be better able to exploit the zeitgeist. You will be the one to anticipate and set the trends that your generation hungers for. You will free your mind from the mental constraints placed on you by your generation, and you will become more of the individual you imagine yourself to be, with all the power that freedom will bring you.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 17 : Seize the Historical Moment
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

Hunger, World, Way, Imagination

“The culture is the whole of the enterprises and of the practices in which the abundance of life expresses itself, they all have as motivation the 'load', the 'over' which disposes inwardly the living subjectivity as a force ready to give unstintingly itself and constraint, under the load, to do it.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Michel Henry, La Barbarie, éd. Grasset, 1987, p. 172
Books on Culture and Barbarism, Barbarism (1987)
Original: (fr) La culture est l'ensemble des entreprises et des pratiques dans lesquelles s'exprime la surabondance de la vie, toutes elles ont pour motivation la « charge », le « trop » qui dispose intérieurement la subjectivité vivante comme une force prête à se prodiguer et contrainte, sous la charge, de le faire.

Life, Motivation

“[I]f suffering is bad for animals when we cause it, it is also bad for them when other animals cause it. That suffering is bad for those who experience it is not a human prejudice; nor is an effort to prevent wild animals from suffering a moralistic attempt to police the behavior of other animals. Even if we are not morally required to prevent suffering among animals in the wild for which we are not responsible, we do have a moral reason to prevent it, just as we have a general moral reason to prevent suffering among human beings that is independent both of the cause of the suffering and of our relation to the victims. The main constraint on the permissibility of acting on our reason to prevent suffering is that our action should not cause bad effects that would be worse than those we could prevent.”

Jeff McMahan (philosopher) (1954) American philosopher

" The Meat Eaters http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/the-meat-eaters/", The New York Times, 19 Sept. 2010

Bad luck, Behavior, Effort, Suffering

“There...is the necessity for freedom of speech and the arts. We have to scrutinize all the advances of society to judge whether they are cruel or frustrate cruelty, and for that purpose we must hear the evidence of all persons affected by their operation and of all persons qualified by experience or learning or speculative gifts to form an interesting opinion on what those operations might be. It is therefore necessary that all classes of men should be given the fullest opportunity to express themselves without constraint, not only out of admiration for an abstraction , but as a practical measure toward human survival. It is also necessary that the artist, of whatsoever kind, should be free to anatomize the spirit, so that we can comprehend the battlefield that is this life, and which are the troops of light and which of darkness, and what light may be, and darkness.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

Source: "I Believe", in I Believe : The Personal Philosophies of Certain Eminent Men and Women Of Our Time edited by Clifton Fadiman. New York : Simon and Schuster, 1939.

Life, Men, Art, Freedom