Quotes about container
page 7

“A number of frail girls… prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.”

Thomas Pynchon book The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 1

World, Girl

“In each and every one of us lies a message. It is inscribed in an ancient code, its beginnings lost in the mists of time. Decrypted, the message contains instructions on how to make a human being. Nobody wrote the message; nobody invented the code. They came into existence spontaneously. Their designer was Mother Nature herself, working only within the scope of her immutable laws and capitalizing on the vagaries of chance. The message isn't written in ink or type, but in atoms, strung together in an elaborately arranged sequence to form DNA, short for deoxyribonucleic acid. It is the most extraordinary molecule on Earth.”

Paul Davies (1946) British physicist

Source: The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life (1999), Ch. 1: 'The Meaning of Life', p. 41

Law, Nature, Chance, Time

“The parks do not belong to one state or to one section…. The Yosemite, the Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon are national properties in which every citizen has a vested interest; they belong as much to the man of Massachusetts, of Michigan, of Florida, as they do to the people of California, of Wyoming, and of Arizona. Who will gainsay that the parks contain the highest potentialities of national pride, national contentment, and national health? A visit inspires love of country; begets contentment; engenders pride of possession; contains the antidote for national restlessness…. He is a better citizen with a keener appreciation of the privilege of living here who has toured the national parks”

Stephen Mather

FAMOUS QUOTES CONCERNING THE NATIONAL PARKS https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/hisnps/NPSThinking/famousquotes.htm

Love, People, Health, Country

“It is one thing, then, to say, "The Bible contains the religion revealed by God," and quite another to say, "Whatever is contained in the Bible is religion, and was revealed by God." If the latter be accepted, metaphor and allegory become literal statements and the errors and absurdities of bibliolatry follow.”

Lionel Trilling (1905–1975) American academic

Source: Matthew Arnold (1939), Ch. 11: Joy Whose Grounds Are True

God, Religion, Error

“God not only told them what to do and how to live before the Flood, He also told them what to eat. He gave them a perfect diet. God said, I want you to eat the herbs. Kids, eat your vegetables, the fruit, and the seeds (Genesis 1:29). We don't do that much. We eat the hamburger, french fries, and Coke. God said eat the fruit, vegetables, and seeds. When you eat the fruit, you should eat the seed. When you eat a peach, eat the seed. You say that thing's hard. Well, crack it open with a hammer. The seed is inside the hull, okay. […] Now be sure to get organically grown seeds, not the ones grown on steroids and pesticides. But the seeds contain a bitter substance called cyanide. That'll give you a pucker that'll last about an hour and a half. […] But these seeds contain a vitamin called vitamin B-17 which is half cyanide. You say, oh, that's poison. Oh, it's not either! […] So the cyanide found in the seeds is mixed with benzaldehyde. Both are poison, but together they're harmless. Until they bump into a cancer cell!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Garden of Eden

God, Perfection

“Our planet, the Earth, is, as far as we know, unique in the universe. It contains life. Even in its most barren stretches, there are animals. Around the equator, where those two essentials for life, sunshine and moisture, are most abundant, great forests grow. And here plants and animals proliferate in such numbers that we still have not even named all the different species. Here, animals and plants, insects and birds, mammals and man live together in intimate and complex communities, each dependent on one another. Two thirds of the surface of this unique planet are covered by water, and it was here indeed that life began. From the oceans, it has spread even to the summits of the highest mountains as animals and plants have responded to the changing face of the Earth.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Opening narration
The Living Planet (1984)

Life, Mountain, Communication, Bird

“I approached the problem of utility measurement in 1923 during a stay in Paris. There were three objects I had in view :
:(I) To point out the choice axioms that are implied when we think of utility as a quantity, and to define utility in a rigorous way by starting from a set of such axioms;
:(II) To develop a method of measuring utility statistically;
:(III) To apply the method to actual data.
The results of my study along these lines are contained in a paper “Sur un Problème d’Économic Pure”, published in the Series Norsk Matematisk Forenings Skrifter, Serie I, Nr 16, 1926. In this paper, the axiomatics are worked out so far as the static utility concept is concerned. The method of measurement developed is the method of isoquants, which is also outlined in Section 4 below. The statistical data to which the method was applied were sales and price statistics collected by the “Union des Coopérateurs Parisien”. From these data I constructed what I believe can be considered the marginal utility curve of money for the “average” member of the group of people forming the customers of the union. To my knowledge, this is the first marginal utility curve of money ever published.”

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

Frisch (1932) New Methods of Measuring Marginal Utility. Mohr, Tübingen. p. 2-3: Quoted in: Dagsvik, John K., Steinar Strøm, and Zhiyang Jia. " A stochastic model for the utility of income http://www.ssb.no/a/publikasjoner/pdf/DP/dp358.pdf." (2003). 1930s

Money, People, Way, Knowledge

“O Spirit of litigation, know,
When we keep silent in this season,
The stem of multiple lilies grew
Too large to be contained by reason”

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) French Symbolist poet

"Prose" (1885).
Observations

Season

“It's a Cuban thing. But he ate very well — lots of organic steak. When he was diagnosed, the doctors told him he'd had cancer for six years. This dated back to around the time of Chernobyl, when he was in Wales doing a gig and it was raining. He got absolutely soaked to the skin. He then drove five hours up to the north of Scotland, still wearing the wet jacket. Later, he read in a newspaper that the sheep in the part of Wales where he had been performing had been killed because the rain contained fallout from the disaster. His cancer was right across the back of his shoulders, where the rain had first hit him. He reckoned it was that which caused it.”

Sienna Guillory (1975) British actress

An uphill challenge fit for two Article http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/main.jhtml?xml=/health/2004/05/05/hsien05.xml. telegraph.co.uk. May 5, 2004. Guillory speaks about her father, Cuban guitarist Isaac Guillory.

Time, Reading, Parting

“The leaves of these [larch] trees are like those of the pine; timber from them comes in long lengths, is as easily wrought in joiner's work as is the clearwood of fir, and contains a liquid resin, of the color of Attic honey, which is good for consumptives.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter IX, Sec. 17

Color, Tree

“I have carefully and regularly perused the Holy Scriptures, and am of opinion that the volume contains more sublimity, purer morality, more important history, and finer strains of eloquence, than can be collected from all other books, in whatever language they may have been written.”

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

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 31.

Books, History

“There are two suffixes in our language (and similar ones in other European languages) which suggest organized knowledge. One is the venerable, academic "ology," that reminds one of university curricula and scholarship. The other is the energetic and somewhat mysterious "ics," which has a connotative flavor of magic. Where "ology" suggests academic isolation (ichthyology, philology) "its" suggests a method of attack on life’s problems. It contains a faint throwback to the ancient dreams of the philosopher’s stone and of "keys" to the riddles of the universe. Ancient words ending in "ics" are mathematics and metaphysics. Of more recent origin are economics, statistics, semantics, and cybernetics.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

1950, p. 12 (1952, p. 123) lead paragraph
1950s, "What is Semantics?", 1950

Life, Dreams, Mathematics, Knowledge

“While there may exist no more than the normal extent of disagreement about the meaning of particular terms or theses contained in these works, there is a startling degree of divergence about the central view, the basic political attitude of Machiavelli.”

Isaiah Berlin book Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas

Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (1980), The Originality of Machiavelli (1971)

“The Imagination has always called for a return to the truest fundamentalism contained in the question "What does it mean to be a human being?" Needless to say, this is a question that deserves the deepest and most patient development. It will have to suffice for the present to say that our reigning social reality forbids— structurally, politically, violently— the broad posing of this question.”

Curtis White (1951) American academic

"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"

Imagination, Question, Reality

“King Lear is undoubtedly the greatest play ever written by Shakespeare — or anybody else for that matter. Hamlet is certainly great, but it doesn't contain as many elements of humanity as we see in Lear.”

Paul Scofield (1922–2008) English actor

Quoted in Royah Nikkhah, "Scofield's Lear voted the greatest Shakespeare performance" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/08/22/nbard22.xml, Telegraph.co.uk (2004-08-22)

“I was never able to understand how it was that here and there the welfare of the Fatherland had to be sacrificed to mere petty party interests, and from the point of view of political conviction felt myself most at home in the shade of that tree which was firmly rooted in the ethico-political soil of the epoch of our great and venerable Emperor. That epoch, with what I regarded as its wonderful glories, seemed to have become part of me, and I adhered firmly to its ideals and principles. The course of events in the present war have hardly been of a kind to make me particularly enthusiastic about the developments of later times. A powerful, self-contained State in Bismarck's sense was the world in which I preferred my thoughts to move. Discipline and hard work within the Fatherland seemed to me better than cosmopolitan imaginings. Moreover, I fail to see that any citizen has rights on whom equal duties are not imposed.”

Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934) Prussian-German field marshal, statesman, and president of Germany

Out of My Life (London: Cassell, 1920), pp. 236-237
Retirement

War, World, Home, Imagination

“.. wherever you are, you find the sun, a blade of grass, the spirals of the dragonfly. Courage consists of staying at home, close to nature, which could not care less about our disasters. Each grain of dust contains the soul of something marvellous.”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

Miró admonished art-critic w:Georges Duthuit
1915 - 1940
Source: 'Où allez-vous Miró?' (Where do you go, Miró), Georges Duthuit in Cahiers d'Art 11, nos. 8-10, 1936

Art, Home, Soul, Courage

“First Theory.—There is no Providence at all for anything in the Universe; all parts of the Universe, the heavens and what they contain, owe their origin to accident and chance; there exists no being that rules and governs them or provides for them. This is the theory of Epicurus…”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.17

Universe, Chance, Parting

“Everything has altered its dimensions, except the world we live in. The more we know of that, the smaller it seems. Time and distance have been abridged, remote countries have become accessible, and the antipodes are upon visiting terms. There is a reunion of the human race; and the family resemblance now that we begin to think alike, dress alike, and live alike, is very striking. The South Sea Islanders, and the inhabitants of China, import their fashions from Paris, and their fabrics from Manchester, while Rome and London supply missionaries to the ‘ends of the earth,’ to bring its inhabitants into ‘one fold, under one Shepherd.’ Who shall write a book of travels now? Livingstone has exhausted the subject. What field is there left for a future Munchausen? The far West and the far East have shaken hands and pirouetted together, and it is a matter of indifference whether you go to the moors in Scotland to shoot grouse, to South America to ride and alligator, or to Indian jungles to shoot tigers-there are the same facilities for reaching all, and steam will take you to either with the equal ease and rapidity. We have already talked with New York; and as soon as our speaking-trumpet is mended shall converse again. ‘To waft a sigh from Indus to the pole,’ is no longer a poetic phrase, but a plain matter of fact of daily occurrence. Men breakfast at home, and go fifty miles to their counting-houses, and when their work is done, return to dinner. They don’t go from London to the seaside, by way of change, once a year; but they live on the coast, and go to the city daily. The grand tour of our forefathers consisted in visiting the principle cities of Europe. It was a great effort, occupied a vast deal of time, cost a large sum of money, and was oftener attended with danger than advantage. It comprised what was then called, the world: whoever had performed it was said to have ‘seen the world,’ and all that it contained. The Grand Tour now means a voyage round the globe, and he who has not made it has seen nothing.”

Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796–1865) Canadian-British politician, judge, and author

The Season-Ticket, An Evening at Cork 1860 p. 1-2.

Men, Money, Books, World

“This means that if in a city seven accidents occur each week, then (assuming that all possible distributions are equally likely) practically all weeks will contain days with two or more accidents, and on the average only one week out of 165 will show a uniform distribution of one accident per day.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter II, Elements Of Combinatorial Analysis, p. 32.

“There is an over-informing force which ultimately brings all the ideas together, and does not allow one idea alone to run away with India. And, that has been demonstrated again and again in terms of conflicting ideologies, conflicting social systems, political systems, all these somehow have been contained in an overall framework.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Shri K. R. Narayanan President of India in Conversation with N. Ram on Doordarshan and All India Radio

Idea

“Never. We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us; they don’t disappear from our lives. We are merely in different rooms. For example, I can’t see who is in the next carriage, but it contains people traveling in the same time as me, as you, as everyone. The fact that we can’t speak to them or know what’s going on in that other carriage is completely irrelevant. They are there. So what we call ‘life’ is a train with many carriages. Sometimes we’re in one, sometimes we’re in another, and sometimes we cross between them, when we dream or allow ourselves to be swept away by the extraordinary.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Aleph (2011)

Love, Life, People, Dreams

“I want to defend society and its inhabitants from all ideologies, science included. All ideologies must be seen in perspective. One must not take them too seriously. One must read them like fairy-tales which have lots of interesting things to say but which also contain wicked lies, or like ethical prescriptions which may be useful rules of thumb but which are deadly when followed to the letter.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend (1924–1994) Austrian-born philosopher of science

How To Defend Society Against Science (1975)

Science, Reading

“Repression is the response of an increasingly desperate imperialist ruling clique to contain an otherwise uncontrollable and growing popular disaffection leading ultimately, we think, to the revolutionary transformation of society.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

If They Come in The Morning (1971)

Thinking

“Every object in the Universe with a temperature above absolute zero radiates in the infrared, so this part of the spectrum contains a great deal of information.”

Frank J. Low (1933–2009) American astronomer

[Low, Frank, 2001, May, Obituary: Frederick Gillett (1937-2001), Nature, 411, 6840, 906]

Universe, Parting

“If a prophecy is to be called infallible, I fairly demand that it should state beforehand legibly, clearly, and distinctly that which no man could previously have known, and that the same should thereafter take place at the time appointed, but that it should not take place because it has been predicted. If, however, such a prophecy can only be verified through allegorical interpretations of words and interpretation of words and things; if it be only composed of dark and dubious words, and the expressions it contains are commonplace, vague, and uncertain; if the matter was thought probable, or was foreseen by human cunning; if it occurs because it was predicted; if the words used refer to some other matter and are only applied to the prophecy by a quibble; if it is only written down after the event has occurred; if a prophetic book or passage is given out to be older than it is; or lastly, if the thing predicted does not take place at all, then the prophecy is either doubtful or false.”

Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) German philosopher

Source: Fragments from Reimarus: Consisting of Brief Critical Remarks on the Object of Jesus and His Disciples as Seen in the New Testament, pp. 76–77

Books, Time, Falseness

“I want a poetry that can learn as much from popular culture as from serious culture. A poetry that seeks the pleasure and emotionality of the popular arts without losing the precision, concentration, and depth that characterize high art. I want a literature that addresses a diverse audience distinguished for its intelligence, curiosity, and imagination rather than its professional credentials. I want a poetry that risks speaking to the fullness of our humanity, to our emotions as well as to our intellect, to our senses as well as our imagination and intuition. Finally I hope for a more sensual and physical art — closer to music, film, and painting than to philosophy or literary theory. Contemporary American literary culture has privileged the mind over the body. The soul has become embarrassed by the senses. Responding to poetry has become an exercise mainly in interpretation and analysis. Although poetry contains some of the most complex and sophisticated perceptions ever written down, it remains an essentially physical art tied to our senses of sound and sight. Yet, contemporary literary criticism consistently ignores the sheer sensuality of poetry and devotes its considerable energy to abstracting it into pure intellectualization. Intelligence is an irreplaceable element of poetry, but it needs to be vividly embodied in the physicality of language. We must — as artists, critics, and teachers — reclaim the essential sensuality of poetry. The art does not belong to apes or angels, but to us. We deserve art that speaks to us as complete human beings. Why settle for anything less?”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Paradigms Lost," interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum (Spring 1995)
Interviews

Pleasure, Hope, Art, Music

“When humus remains constantly damp, without, however, being covered with water, it forms a very unpleasant smelling acid, which is more particularly, characterized by the property which it possesses of colouring blue litmus paper into red. This circumstance has long been known, and it is the reason that land and meadows which are not properly drained, and which exhibit these phenomena, are called sour. We have carefully examined these facts, and have endeavoured to discover the peculiar constitution of this acid. At first, we were inclined to regard it as being of a distinct nature, and having carbon for its base; but we have since become convinced that it is generally composed of acetic acid, and occasionally contains a portion of the phosphoric. This latter always adheres so firmly to the humus that it cannot be separated from it either by boiling or washing. The liquid in which the humus is boiled certainly acquires a slight acid flavour, but the greater part of the acid remains attached to the humus.
This acid or sour humus it not at all of a fertilizing nature; on the contrary, it is prejudicial to vegetation* Where it is very strong and pervades the whole of the humus, the soil only produces reeds, rushes, sedge, and other useless, unpalatable plants; and whenever these abound, it may be inferred that the soil contains a great deal of sour or acid humus… There are various means of getting rid of this baneful property, and rendering the humus fertile. It is well known that with the aid of alkalies, ashes, lime, and marl, humus may be deprived of its acidity, and rendered easily soluble… Heaths do not thrive where this humus does not exist, and when they have established themselves in one particular spot, they suffer few other plants to appear. This humus may be changed by a dressing composed of marl, lime, or ammonia; and where this has been mixed with the soil, the heaths, &c., speedily perish.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

Source: The Principles of Agriculture, 1844, Section III: Agronomy, p. 343-4, as cited in Ruffin (1852, p. 85).

Nature, Strong, Suffering, Water

“The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.”

David Hilbert (1862–1943) German prominent mathematician

Quoted in Constance Reid, "Hilbert" (1970)

Art, Mathematics

“Each act of aggression, each new expedition of conquest is prefaced by a pronouncement containing a moral justification and an assurance to the victims of the imperial aggression that all is being done for their benefit.”

Richard F. Pettigrew (1848–1926) American politician

Imperial Washington (1922), pp. 346-347

“Changes in the structure of society are not brought about solely by massive engines of doctrine. The first flash of insight which persuades human beings to change their basic assumptions is usually contained in a few phrases.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Section 5: A Note on Ruskin's Writings on Society and Economics
Ruskin Today (1964)

Change

“The longer a line, the more of the time element it contains. Distance is time whereas a surface is apprehended more in terms of the moment.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Exact Experiments in the Realm of Art (1927)
1921 - 1930

Time

“Vacuum stands and remains a mathematical space. A cube placed in a vacuum would not displace anything, as it would displace air or water in a space already containing those fluids.”

Robert Grosseteste (1175–1253) English bishop and philosopher

Commentarius in VIII Libros Physicorum Aristoteles (c. 1230-1235)

Mathematics, Water

“It was the fact that our Declaration of Independence containing these immortal truths was the political action of a duly authorized and constituted representative public body in its sovereign capacity, supported by the force of general opinion and by the armies of Washington already in the field, which makes it the most important civil document in the world. It was not only the principles declared, but the fact that therewith a new nation was born which was to be founded upon those principles and which from that time forth in its development has actually maintained those principles, that makes this pronouncement an incomparable event in the history of government. It was an assertion that a people had arisen determined to make every necessary sacrifice for the support of these truths and by their practical application bring the War of Independence to a successful conclusion and adopt the Constitution of the United States with all that it has meant to civilization.”

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

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

War, People, Truth, World

“Unlike the current occupant of the White House, he has no difficulty in orally extemporising a series of grammatical English sentences, each containing a main verb.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

endorsing Barack Obama, Telegraph Column, October 21, 2008
2000s, 2008

Housing

“In the latter part of the seventeenth century, there were several eminent men in England who were greatly in advance of the age in which they lived, and strenuously exerted themselves to discover and promulgate the true principles of Geology. Among these Dr. Martin Lister, physician to Queen Anne, was one of the most distinguished. This accomplished naturalist in his great work on shells… figures and describes many fossil shells as real animal productions, and carefully compares them with recent species. He also recognised the distinction of strata by the organic remains they contain; and to him the honour is due of having first suggested the construction of geological maps…”

Gideon Mantell (1790–1852) British scientist and obstetrician

The Medals of Creation or First Lessons in Geology (1854)

Men, Age, Animals, Parting

“There are certain common privileges of a writer, the benefit whereof, I hope, there will be no reason to doubt; particularly, that where I am not understood, it shall be concluded, that something very useful and profound is couched underneath; and again, that whatever word or sentence is printed in a different character, shall be judged to contain something extraordinary either or wit of sublime.”

Jonathan Swift book A Tale of a Tub

Preface
A Tale of a Tub (1704)

Hope

“The first need of the situation was a centre round which Hindus could rally, and from which Hindu resistance to the Islamic invasion could be directed. The effectiveness of such a centre was demonstrated first in Mewar under Maharana Pratap, secondly in the South under Vijayanagara, thirdly in Maharashtra under Shivaji, and lastly in the Punjab under Banda Bahadur. But these centres crystallised too late. A nationwide centre established earlier could have contained Islamic imperialism at the borders of Bharatavarsha, or defeated and driven it out from wherever it had secured a foothold. Chandragupta, Vikramaditya, and Skandagupta had headed such a centre, and saved the motherland by hurling back the barbarians as soon as they came.”

Sita Ram Goel book The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1994)

“A proposed profile of UML—Executable UML—supports creating a complete and implementation-neutral self-contained expression of application functionality. Steven J. Mellor and Marc J. Balcer define this profile in their book Executable UML: A Foundation for Model-Driven Architecture”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

The Limits of Software

Books, Support

“A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Une oeuvre où il y a des théories est comme un objet sur lequel on laisse la marque du prix. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, part VII: Time Regained, chapter III, "An Afternoon Party at the House of the Princesse de Guermantes" ( French version http://web.archive.org/web/20010708070436/http://gallica.bnf.fr/proust/TempsRetrouve.htm and English translation http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/p96t/chapter3.html). Misattributed

Art

“The present book is not a methodology of mathematics in the sense that I will systematically show how some teaching matter should taught; it is not even a systematic analysis of subject matter. I hardly ever refer to well-organized classroom experiments evaluated by statistical methods, nor do I cite experimental results of developmental psychology or the psychology of learning. Maybe the most striking feature is that this book contains few quotations. I will try to justify all these features.”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Source: Mathematics as an Educational Task (1973), p. v;As cited in: Ben Wilbrink (2013)

Books, Mathematics, Sense, Learning

“We do not mechanically connect the sensation of white with the idea of light, any more than we connect the sensation of black with the idea of darkness. We admit that a black jewel, even if of a dead black, may be more luminous than the white or pink satin of its case. Loving light, we refuse to measure it, and we avoid the geometrical ideas of the focus and the ray, which imply the repetition-contrary to the principle of variety which guides us-of bright planes and sombre intervals in a given direction. Loving colour, we refuse to limit it, and subdued or dazzling, fresh or muddy, we accept all the possibilities contained between the two extreme points of the spectrum, between the cold and the warm tone.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Du Cubisme (1912)

Love, Idea, Light, Dead

“Anas reported that the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, "A morning spent in the way of Allah or an evening is better than this world and everything it contains."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 7, hadith number 1288
Sunni Hadith

World, Peace, Way

“Consider, for example, the opening declaration of every Islamic prayer: "Allah-o-Akbar". What does that mean? There can be no doubt that the second word of the declaration likens the character of Allah to a matrix which contains all and gives existence to the infinite, to space, to time, to the Universe, to all active and passive forces imaginable, to life and to the soul.”

Aga Khan III (1877–1957) 48th Imam of the Nizari Ismaili community

Memoirs of Aga Khan: World Enough & Time (1954)

Life, Soul, Imagination, Universe

“"Is this really a Polar ship?" people asked;… our paper-supply which was in all respects as fine and elegant as it could be:… From one of the largest houses in Christiania we had a complete set of kitchen utensils and breakfast and dinner services, all of the best kind…. We carried an extraordinarily copious library; presents of books were showered upon us in great quantities. I suppose the Fram's library at the present moment contains at least 3,000 volumes.”

Roald Amundsen (1872–1928) Norwegian polar researcher, who was the first to reach the South Pole

Sydpolen (The South Pole) (1912)

People, Books, Housing

“If so, her motion must be influenced by it; perhaps she is retained in her orbit thereby. However, though the power of gravity is not sensibly weakened in the little change of distance, at which we can place ourselves from the centre of the earth, yet it is very possible that, so high as the moon, this power may differ much in strength from what it is here. To make an estimate what might be the degree of this diminution, he considered with himself that, if the moon be retained in her orbit by the force of gravity, no doubt the primary planets are carried round the sun by the like power. And, by comparing the periods of the several planets with their distances from the sun, he found that if any power like gravity held them in their courses, its strength must decrease in the duplicate proportion of the increase of distance. This he concluded by supposing them to move in perfect circles concentrical to the sun, from which the orbits of the greatest part of them do not much differ. Supposing therefore the power of gravity, when extended to the moon, to decrease in the same manner, he computed whether that force would be sufficient to keep the moon in her orbit. In this computation, being absent from books, he took the common estimate, in use among geographers and our seamen before Norwood had measured the earth, that 60 English miles were contained in one degree of latitude on the surface of the earth. But as this is a very faulty supposition, each degree containing about 691/2 of our miles, his computation did not answer expectation; whence he concluded, that some other cause must at least join with the action of the power of gravity on the moon. On this account he laid aside, for that time, any farther thoughts upon this matter.”

Henry Pemberton (1694–1771) British doctor

Republished in: Stephen Peter Rigaud (1838) Historical Essay on the First Publication of Sir Newton's Principia http://books.google.com/books?id=uvMGAAAAcAAJ&pg=RA1-PA49. p. 50-51 Preface to View of Newton's Philosophy, (1728)

Books, Change, Time, Sun

“It would be not only useless, but dangerous, to enumerate a number of rights which are not intended to be given up; because it would be implying, in the strongest manner, that every right not included in the exception might be impaired by the government without usurption; and it would be impossible to enumerate every one. Let any one make what collection or enumeration of rights he pleases, I will immediately mention twenty or thirty more rights not contained in it.”

James Iredell (1751–1799) one of the first Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States

July 28, 1788, p. 150.
North Carolina's Debates, in Convention, on the adoption of the Federal Constitution (1787)

“The word 'listen' contains the same letters as the word 'silent.”

Alfred Brendel (1931) Austrian pianist, poet, and author

Cited in: Karen Offord. Dare to Dream: Your Journey of a Lifetime, 2014, p. 115.

“2d. Saving space: (a) By the utilization of the large volume of space contained in the slopes of roofs… (b) by the reduction of floor thickness… (c) by the utilization of space (as on shipboard) for lockers, cupboards, closets, etc… (d) by the use of thin partitions… and (e) by elimination of corridors… so that the least possible area may be required for communication.”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Introduction
Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)

Communication

“The methods of the Bernoullis and of Taylor, were held, at the time of their invention, to be most complete and exact. Several imperfections, however, belong to them. They do not apply to problems involving three or more properties; nor do they extend to cases involving differentials of a higher order than the first: for instance, they will not solve the problem, in which a curve is required, that with its radius of curvature and evolute shall contain the least area. Secondly, they do not extend to cases, in which the analytical expression contains, besides x, y, and their differentials, integral expressions; for instance, they will not solve the second case proposed in James Bernoulli's Programma if the Isoperimetrical condition be excluded; for then the arc s, an integral, since it =\int \! dx \sqrt(1+\frac{dy^2}{dx^2}), is not given. Thirdly, they do not extend to cases, in which the differential function, expressing the maximum should depend on a quantity, not given except under the form of a differential equation, and that not integrable; for instance, they will not solve the case of the curve of the quickest descent, in a resisting medium, the descending body being solicited by any forces whatever.”

Robert Woodhouse (1773–1827) English mathematician

A Treatise on Isoperimetrical Problems, and the Calculus of Variations (1810)

Problem, Time, Dependency

“Work and play are an artificial pair of opposites, because the best kind of play contains an element of work, and the most productive kind of work must include something of the spirit of play.”

Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986) American journalist

Pieces of Eight (1982)

“The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation's history — the very ring-bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny. Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation's destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1850s, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? (1852)

History, Gratitude

“What the structure of Rawls’s argument indicates is a more fundamental feature of his thought. This is an amphibious world, which contains just enough land of real social reference to avoid the tricky deeps of first philosophy (the gesture is roughly: let’s start out from where we’re at – in other words, Bush–Clinton country), while floating carefully enough on the waters of abstraction to avoid contact with the ground of actual political change (for example: what has happened in the US since the 1970s). The result is a kind of political cabotage, a critique of existing society that clings nervously to its shores. Readers of Rawls might well ask: where is the actual justice in the United States that corresponds to the ideal construct he offers us, if it is based on ‘plain truths widely accepted by citizens’?”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Source: Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Ch. 4. "Designing Consensus, John Rawls" (1994), p. 108-9

Truth, World, Justice, Water

“We do not know nature; causes hidden in her breast might have produced everything. In your turn, observe the polyp of Trembley: does it not contain in itself the causes which bring about regeneration? Why then would it be absurd to think that there are physical causes by reason of which everything has been made, and to which the whole chain of this vast universe is so necessarily bound and held that, nothing which happens, could have failed to happen,—causes, of which we are so invincibly ignorant that we have had recourse to a God, who, as some aver, is not so much as a logical entity? Thus to destroy chance is not to prove the existence of a supreme being, since there may be some other thing which is neither chance nor God—I mean, nature. It follows that the study of nature can make only unbelievers; and the way of thinking of all its more successful investigators proves this.”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

As quoted by Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine (1747) Tr. Gertrude Carman Bussey https://books.google.com/books?id=GKYLAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA125 (1912) Pensées Philosophiques (1746)

God, Way, Nature, Thinking

“An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners' names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

“It was an axiom of "containment" that no part of the known world could be considered neutral. "Neutralism" was among the Cold Warriors' gravest curse words, applied with caustic hostility to India and even France. Those who were not with were against, subjected to intense economic and ideological — and sometimes military — pressure to fall into line.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"How Neo-Conservatives Perish" (1990).
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)

Hostility, World, Parting

“One voice in the Great Conversation itself announces this modern point of view. In the closing paragraph of his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume writes: "When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume… let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."… the positivists of our own day, would commit to burning or, what is the same, to dismissal from serious consideration… Those books… argue the case against the kind of positivism that asserts that everything except mathematics and experimental science is sophistry and illusion…. The Great Conversation… contains both sides of the issue.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Books, Mathematics, Understanding, Science

“The … false ideal … [that is] tokenism—which is commonly guised as Equal Rights, and which yields token victories—deflects and shortcircuits gynergy, so that female power, galvanized under deceptive slogans of sisterhood, is swallowed by The Fraternity. This method of vampirizing the Female Self saps women by giving illusions of partial success while at the same time making Success appear to be a far-distant, extremely difficult to obtain "elusive objective." When the oppressed are worn out in the game of chasing the elusive shadow of Success, some "successes" are permitted to occur—"victories" which can easily be withdrawn when the victim's energies have been restored. Subsequently, women are lured into repeating efforts to regain the hard-won apparent gains…. [¶] Thus tokenism is insidiously destructive of sisterhood, for it distorts the warrior aspect of Amazon bonding both by magnifying it and by minimizing it. It magnifies the importance of "fighting back" to the extent of making it devour the transcendent be-ing of sisterhood, reducing it to a copy of comradeship. At the same time, it minimizes the Amazon warrior aspect by containing it, misdirecting and shortcircuiting the struggle. [¶] This is a demonically double-sided trap, for of course reforms, such as legalization of abortion, aid many women in desperate situations. However, because the "changes" that are achieved are victories in a vacuum, that is, in a totally oppressive social context, they do not essentially free the Female Self but instead function to hide both the fact of continuing oppression and the possibilities for better options and for more radical freedom…. The Labrys of the A-mazing Female Mind must cut through the coverings of these double-sided/multiple-sided situations, dis-covering the context, identifying the more radical problems, yet neglecting none.”

Mary Daly (1928–2010) American radical feminist philosopher and theologian

Source: Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978–1990), pp. 375–376 (fnn. omitted, fn. at "apparent gains." giving as examples the Equal Rights Amendment, affirmative action, and abortion & fn. at "more radical freedom." stating "the fact that Lesbians/Spinsters have no need of abortions, unless forcibly raped").

Women, Game, Problem, Effort

“The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Source: (1940), XVII

Time

“Those who want to burn books are either afraid of the ideas contained within the covers or they haven't the courage to stand up for the views which they themselves profess to hold.”

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

Speech, Saskatchewan Legislature, February 17, 1954.

Books, Idea, Courage

“One of the distinct features of XP is the lack of any documentation whatsoever, except for the code itself. This is a contraposition to the modeling techniques like the Unified Modeling Language (UML), which strongly focus on documentation. XP takes an extreme position there, not even documenting the architecture of the system. Often, it is very difficult to extract the overall structure, behavior or interactions with the environment from the code. The code is a rather detailed and fragile representation of the system’s tasks. Even though the code contains all necessary information about the system, this information is often burdened with details and it is tedious to extract the aspects one is interested in. Therefore, it would be useful to have a more compact system representation. The UML does provide a number of notations that are suited for this purpose. However, the tools so far are not capable of supporting UML in such a manner that it can be well-integrated with the approach of Extreme Programming.”

Bernhard Rumpe (1967) German computer scientist

Source: Executable Modeling with UML. A vision or a Nightmare (2002), p. 698

Behavior, Support

“A substance showing resonance between two or more valence-bond structures does not contain molecules with the configurations and properties usually associated with these structures.”

Linus Pauling (1901–1994) American scientist

The Nature of Chemical Bond (1939), Ch 14. A Summarizing Discussion of Resonance and Its Significance for Chemistry.

“Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10−12gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world.”

Michael Denton book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis

Source: Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1986), p. 250

World

“The preface to the French edition of that work contains the following passage: "To me the French edition of my work is not a mere translation, but a transcription of ideas into a language in which it should have been written in the first place… I proudly acknowledge… my master. His words are among the most brilliant recollections of my youth; his piercing wisdom and potent prose have inspired my efforts of a riper age. To the memory of Henri Poincaré, the intellectual giant who was the first to recognize the role which the idiosyncrasies of the race play in the evolution of scientific ideas, I dedicate this book.”

Tobias Dantzig (1884–1956) American mathematician

Preface
Henri Poincaré, Critic of Crisis: Reflections on His Universe of Discourse (1954)

Wisdom, Books, Youth, Age

“The astral perisprit is contained and confined within the physical body as ether in a bottle, or magnetism in magnetized iron. It is a centre and engine of force, fed from the universal supply of force, and moved by the same general laws which pervade all nature and produce all cosmical phenomena. Its inherent activity causes the incessant physical operations of the animal organism and ultimately results in the destruction of the latter by overuse and its own escape. It is the prisoner, not the voluntary tenant, of the body.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled, Volume I, Chapter VI

Law, Nature, Universe, Animals

“There are three kinds of writing in economics: Greek-letter, up-and-down, and airport. Greek-letter writing formal, theoretical, mathematical is how professors communicate. Like any academic field, economics has its fair share of hacks and phonies, who use complicated language to hide the banality of their ideas; it also contains profound thinkers, who use the specialized language of the discipline as an efficient way to express deep insights. […] Up-and-down economics is what one encounters on the business pages of newspapers, or for that matter on TV. It is preoccupied with the latest news and the latest numbers, hence its name. […] Finally, airport economics is the language of economics bestsellers. These books are most prominently displayed at airport bookstores, where the delayed business traveler is likely to buy them. Most of these books predict disaster: a new great depression, the evisceration of our economy by Japanese multinationals, the collapse of our money. A minority have the opposite view, a boundless optimism: new technology or supply-side economics is about to lead us into an era of unprecedented economic progress. Whether pessimistic or optimistic, airport economics is usually fun, rarely well informed, and never serious.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Preface
The Age of Diminished Expectations (1990; 1994; 1997)

Money, Books, Way, Travel

“The Sultan himself joined in the pursuit, and went after them as far as the fort called Bhimnagar [Nagarkot, modern Kangra], which is very strong, situated on the promontory of a lofty hill, in the midst of impassable waters. The kings of Hind, the chiefs of that country, and rich devotees, used to amass their treasures and precious jewels, and send them time after time to be presented to the large idol that they might receive a reward for their good deeds and draw near to their God. So the Sultan advanced near to this crow's fruit, ^ and this accumulation of years, which had attained such an amount that the backs of camels would not carry it, nor vessels contain it, nor writers hands record it, nor the imagination of an arithmetician conceive it. The Sultan brought his forces under the fort and surrounded it, and prepared to attack the garrison vigorously, boldly, and wisely. When the defenders saw the hills covered with the armies of plunderers, and the arrows ascending towards them like flaming sparks of fire, great fear came upon them, and, calling out for mercy, they opened the gates, and fell on the earth, like sparrows before a hawk, or rain before lightning. Thus did God grant an easy conquest of this fort to the Sultan, and bestowed on him as plunder the products of mines and seas, the ornaments of heads and breasts, to his heart's content. … After this he returned to Ghazna in triumph; and, on his arrival there, he ordered the court-yard of his palace to be covered with a carpet, on which he displayed jewels and unbored pearls and rubies, shining like sparks, or like wine congealed with ice, and emeralds like fresh sprigs of myrtle, and diamonds in size and weight like pomegranates. Then ambassadors from foreign countries, including the envoy from Tagh^n Khan, king of Turkistin, assembled to see the wealth which they had never yet even read of in books of the ancients, and which had never been accumulated by kings of Persia or of Rum, or even by Karun, who had only to express a wish and Grod granted it.”

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) Sultan of Ghazni

About the capture of Bhimnagar, Tarikh Yamini (Kitabu-l Yamini) by Al Utbi, in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. p. 34-35 Also quoted in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts.
Quotes (971 CE to 1013 CE)

God, Books, Fear, Imagination

“We know that the Egyptian priests were aware, not only that the soil beneath the plains of the Nile, but that also the hills bounding the great valley, contained marine shells; and it could hardly have escaped the observation of Eastern philosophers, that some soils were filled with fossil remains, since so many national works were executed on a magnificent scale by oriental monarchs in very remote eras.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.2, p. 8
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

“Current evidence suggests that teosinte was first tended for its green ears and sugary pith by hunter-gatherers as an occasional rainy-season food in small “garden” populations away from its homeland, and not for its abundant grain-containing, hard fruitcases, which easily mass-collected but useless as food, are as yet unknown from the archeological record. A rare grain-liberating teosinte mutation (probably expressed in only one “founder” plant, a mazoid “Eve”), which exposed the encased grain for easy harvest, was soon recognized as useful, collected and planted (or self-planted). Thus maize was started on its way to a unique horticultural domestication that is not comparable to that of the temperate Old World mass-selected agricultural grains.”

Hugh Iltis (1925–2016) Czech-American botanist and environmentalist

[January 2000, Homeotic Sexual Translocations and the Origin of Maize (Zea mays, Poaceae): A New Look at an Old Problem, Economic Botany, 54, 1, 7–42, 10.1007/BF02866598] (quote from p. 7)

World, Food, Way, Season

“I have said that mathematics is the oldest of the sciences; a glance at its more recent history will show that it has the energy of perpetual youth. The output of contributions to the advance of the science during the last century and more has been so enormous that it is difficult to say whether pride in the greatness of achievement in this subject, or despair at his inability to cope with the multiplicity of its detailed developments, should be the dominant feeling of the mathematician. Few people outside of the small circle of mathematical specialists have any idea of the vast growth of mathematical literature. The Royal Society Catalogue contains a list of nearly thirty-nine thousand papers on subjects of Pure Mathematics alone, which have appeared in seven hundred serials during the nineteenth century. This represents only a portion of the total output, the very large number of treatises, dissertations, and monographs published during the century being omitted.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A (1910), p. 283; Cited in: Moritz (1914, 108-9): Modern mathematics.

People, Youth, Feeling, History

“When we say 'This flag (Muslim League's flag) is the flag of Islam' they think we are introducing religion into politics - a fact of which we are proud. Islam gives us a complete code. It is not only religion but it contains laws, philosophy and politics. In fact, it contains everything that matters to a man from morning to night. When we talk of Islam we take it as all embracing word. We do not mean any ill. The foundation of our Islamic code is that we stand for liberty, equality and fraternity.”

Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948) Founder and 1st Governor General of Pakistan

Address to the Gaya Muslim League Conference in January 1938

Religion, Law, Thinking, Night

“[In order to define the distinction between a grant and an exchange transaction, Boulding has used the net worth criterion] If there is no decrease in the net worth of either party, the transaction is exchange; if there is, it contains some grant element and is an explicit or implicit grant.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1970s, The Economy of Love and Fear, 1973, p. 88 as cited in: Omicron Delta Epsilon, Omicron Chi Epsilon (1997) The American economist. Vol. 41-42. p. 20

“When I was nine years old, I stumbled upon a book that contained photos of preborn children who had been killed in the 1st trimester by suction abortion. Even at that age, I could plainly see that abortion involves killing a child and does tremendous violence to its mother. As I grew older, I began to research abortion's impact on our nation, and its effects on the mother -- injuries, infertility, life-long depression and guilt, and even the likelihood for that guilt to manifest itself in physical or emotional abuse of later children. I also studied the lives of those who fought human rights abuses, from slavery to the Nazi extermination of the Jews to the civil rights movement, and activists and advocates like Martin Luther King, Jr., St Teresa of Calcutta, William Wilberforce, and Sophie Scholl.”

Lila Rose (1988) American anti-abortion activist

Life, Children, Books, Age

“Almost one year has now passed since the horrifying events in Mina, as a result of which several thousand people tragically lost their lives- under the hot sun with thirsty lips- and this happened on the day of Eid while they were in the clothes of ihram. Shortly before that, another group of people were crushed to death in Masjid ul-Haraam while they were worshiping and performing, is also obvious and incontrovertible. The heartless and murderous Saudis locked up the injured with the dead in containers- instead of providing medical treatment and helping them or at least quenching their thirst. They murdered them.”

Ali Khamenei (1939) Iranian Shiite faqih, Marja' and official independent islamic leader

2016, Hajj hijacked by oppressors, Muslims should reconsider management of Hajj (September 2015)

Death, People, Sun, Help

“But neither approach seems to lead to the kind of answer which those who ask the question are seeking. What they seem to want to know is—Are the Modern Greeks the same as the Ancient Greeks? Are their racial and national characteristics the same? Do the Modern Greeks behave in the same kind of way as the Ancient Athenians, Spartans, and Corinthians behaved? If one looks among the Modem Greeks will one find the equivalents of Pericles and Sophocles and Plato? By their nature such questions are vague and contain within them a host of assumptions—about human nature, genetics and race, the influence of environment on behaviour, and the reliability of our knowledge of ancient history—all of which are questionable and some of which are simply unfounded.”

William St Clair (1937) author

Source: That Greece Might Still be Free (1972), p. 15-16.

Way, History, Question, Nature

“The definition of self-respect contains a clause to include pitiless contempt for some other class. … English society is impregnated from top to bottom with this spirit. The supreme satisfaction is to be able to despise one's neighbor and this fact goes far to account for religious intolerance. It is evidently consoling to reflect that the people next door are headed for hell.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Ch, 3.
The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929)

People, Hell

“House Bill No. 5237 passed by the House of Representatives on third and final reading yesterday identifies three (3) classifications of projects contained in this measure, Mr. President. First are the projects that have remained unpaid and outstanding after being declared unconstitutional in the Supreme Court ruling on the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF). These projects, amounting to a total of P1,902,744,124 were commenced or completed prior to the Supreme Court’s PDAF ruling and are all valid obligations incurred by the government.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the Supplemental Appropriations for FY 2014

Reading, Housing

“At midday the daily food of all Spaniards was the puchero or cocido, as the dish is really called which the foreigners call pot-pourri or olla podrida. This contains principally yellow chick-peas, with a little bacon, some potatoes or other vegetables and normally also small pieces of beef or sausage, all boiled in one pot at a very slow fire; the liquid of the same makes the substantial broth that is served first.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

Source: Persons and Places (1944), p. 14

Food

“The Muslim Majilis Mushawarat, which is the united front of Muslim organizations in India, includes… educated Muslims… and orthodox Muslims… The election manifesto of the Mushawarat … contained a 9-point charter of demands which can only be interpreted as asserting that Muslim Indians constituted a 'sovereign' society.”

Hamid Dalwai (1932–1977) Indian social reformer, thinker and writer

Muslim politics, p.80, quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2014). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p. 364-6

Education

“On the question of the "origin of species" Mr. Haughton enlarges considerably; but his chief arguments are reduced to the setting-up of "three unwarrantable assumptions," which he imputes to the Lamarckians and Darwinians, and then, to use his own words, "brings to the ground like a child's house of cards." The first of these is "the indefinite variation of species continuously in the one direction." Now this is certainly never assumed by Mr. Darwin, whose argument is mainly grounded on the fact that variations occur in every direction. This is so obvious that it hardly needs insisting on. In every large family there is almost always one child taller, one darker, one thinner than the rest; one will have a larger nose, another a larger eye: they vary morally as well; some are more poetical, others more morose; one has a genius for numbers, another for painting. It is the same in animals: the puppies, or kittens, or rabbits of one litter differ in many ways from each other - in colour, in size, in disposition; so that, though they do not "vary continuously in one direction," they do vary continuously in many directions; and thus there is always material for natural selection to act upon in some direction that may be advantageous. […] I will only, in conclusion, quote from it a short paragraph which contains an important truth, but which may very fairly be applied in other quarters than those for which the author intended it: - "No progress in natural science is possible as long as men will take their rude guesses at truth for facts, and substitute the fancies of their imagination for the sober rules of reasoning."”

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist

"Remarks on the Rev. S. Haughton's Paper on the Bee's Cell, And on the Origin of Species" (1863).

Men, Truth, Family, Way

“When finally our Constitution was adopted, it contained specific provision that the President and members of the Congress and of state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officials, should be qualified for the discharge of their office by oath or affirmation. By the statute law of the United States, and I doubt not by all States, such oaths are administered by a solemn appeal to God for help in the keeping of their covenants. I scarcely need to refer to the fact that the houses of the Congress, and so far as I know the state legislatures, open their daily sessions with prayer. The foundation of our independence and our Government rests upon our basic religious convictions. Back of the authority of our laws is the authority of the Supreme Judge of the World, to whom we still appeal for their final justification.”

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

1920s, Authority and Religious Liberty (1924)

God, World, Law, Help

“You will want a book which contains not man's thoughts, but God's — not a book that may amuse you, but a book that can save you — not even a book that can instruct you, but a book on which you can venture an eternity — not only a book which can give relief to your spirit, but redemption to your soul — a book which contains salvation, and conveys it to you, one which shall at once be the Saviour's book and the sinner's.”

John Selden (1584–1654) English jurist and scholar of England's ancient laws and constitution, and of Jewish law

as reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 29.

God, Books, Soul

“We are in the position of the man who has only two ambitions in life. One is to invent the universal solvent which will dissolve any solid substance, and the second is to invent the universal container which will hold any liquid. Whatever this inventor does, he will be frustrated.”

Norbert Wiener book The Human Use of Human Beings

VII. Communication, Secrecy, and Social Policy. p. 129
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)

Life, Universe

“He was the more surprised to see that Sumner invited a renewal of old relations. He found himself treated almost confidentially. Not only was he asked to make a fourth at Sumner's pleasant little dinners in the house on La Fayette Square, but he found himself admitted to the Senator's study and informed of his views, policy and purposes, which were sometimes even more astounding than his curious gaps or lapses of omniscience.

On the whole, the relation was the queerest that Henry Adams ever kept up. He liked and admired Sumner, but thought his mind a pathological study. At times he inclined to think that Sumner felt his solitude, and, in the political wilderness, craved educated society; but this hardly told the whole story. Sumner's mind had reached the calm of water which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contained nothing but itself.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Education, Thinking, Solitude, Study

“Bathed in his currents of liquid helium, self-contained, immobile, vastly well informed by every mechanical sense: Shalmaneser.
Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.“”

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

tracking with closeups (32) “The Cool and Detached View“
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

Imagination, Sense, Christ

“Looking carefully, one discovers at last that this gorgeous combination of all the hues of Paradise contains or hides a Last Judgment [....]

To the Virgin and her suppliants, as to us, who though outcasts in other churches can still hope in hers, the Last Judgment was not a symbol of God's justice or man's corruption but of her own infinite mercy. The Trinity judged, through Christ;— Christ loved and pardoned, through her. She wielded the last and highest power on earth and in hell. In the glow and beauty of her nature, the light of her Son's infinite love shone as the sunlight through the glass, turning the Last Judgement itself into the highest proof of her divine and supreme authority. The rudest ruffian of the middle-ages, when he looked at this Last Judgment, laughed, for what was the Last Judgment to her! An ornament, a play-thing, a pleasure! a jewelled decoration which she wore on her breast! Her chief joy was to pardon; her eternal instinct was to love; her deepest passion was pity! On her imperial heart the flames of hell showed only the opaline colors of heaven. Christ the Trinity might judge as much as he pleased, but Christ the Mother would rescue; and her servants could look boldly into the flames.”

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

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Love, God, Pleasure, Age

“Suppose we took a thousand negatives and made a gigantic montage: a myriad-faceted picture containing the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city – that would be my favorite picture.”

Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) American photographer

Popular Photography, February 1940.

Sadness, Past, Future

“[About Francis of Assisi] I saw St. Francis at first in his old age, at prayer and sickly, of an indescribable cheerfulness and purity and humility. Everything in him, everything that constituted his life, all his difficulties, are now transfigured and have become translucent. And this happened through prayer. The things that occupy him no longer contain anything at all that is purely personal, not a trace of annoyance or injury or resentment for the unjust things inflicted on him. God alone is left, as well as perfect service in the indescribable happiness of one who serves and in uninterrupted contemplation.”

Adrienne von Speyr (1902–1967) Swiss doctor and mystic

Book of All Saints (1966)

Life, God, Happiness, Age

“I have tried to make clear in this brief sketch of the nature of deductively formulated theories, at least as they occur in economics, that, although their origin lies in common observation and introspection, nevertheless they are capable of a purely mathematical development through the exact statement of a of a set of postulates which, however, since they must inevitably contain assumptions about human behaviour, require to be tested by reference to actual events.”

Richard Stone (1913–1991) British economist, Nobel Memorial Prize winner

Source: The Role of Measurement in Economics. 1951, p. 14-15

Mathematics, Nature

“Books … hold within them the gathered wisdom of humanity, the collected knowledge of the world's thinkers, the amusement and excitement built up by the imaginations of brilliant people. Books contain humor, beauty, wit, emotion, thought, and, indeed, all of life. Life without books is empty.”

Isaac Asimov book Puzzles of the Black Widowers

Puzzles of the Black Widowers (1990), pp. 74-75
General sources

Life, Wisdom, People, Books

“Now, there is no harm in a teapot, even if it contains tea, if it is let alone.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses, 12:28 (April 7, 1867)
Young discusses the Mormon prohibition against drinking coffee and tea, known as the Word of Wisdom.
1860s

Tea

“Maithripala Sirisena: I must say very clearly there is no allegations regarding 'war crimes', there were war crime allegations during the early stages. But at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, mainly in the proposals presented in September, there were no war crime allegations against us. They contained allegations of Human Rights violations only. When you consider the facts surrounding the allegations of human rights violations, we're committed as a member of the UN to implementing the main points and proposals. But within that commitment, we will always act in accordance with the sovereignty of our country and in accordance with our constitution. For this work, we can obtain foreign technology in certain areas. In terms of people we definitely do not need outsiders. We have an unbiased independent judiciary in this country. We have a Criminal Investigation Department and other institutions that can carry out unbiased investigations in this regard.”

Maithripala Sirisena (1951) Sri Lankan politician, 7th President of Sri Lanka

Talk to Al Jazeera - Sri Lankan president: No allegations of war crimes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udGmG-eqJ6o

War, People, Country

“Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.”

Hannah Arendt book The Life of the Mind

Source: The Life of the Mind (1971/1978), p. 12.

Thinking

“Protocols: What also indeed is, in substance, a loan, especially a foreign loan? A loan is an issue of government bills of exchange containing a percentage obligation commensurate to the sum of the loan capital. If the loan bears a charge of 5 percent, then in twenty years the State vainly pays away in interest a sum equal to the loan borrowed, in forty years it is paying a double sum, in sixty treble and all the while the debt remains an unpaid debt.
from this calculation it is obvious that with any form of taxation per head the State is bailing out the last coppers of the poor taxpayers in order to settle accounts…; instead of collecting
Graves: These two books were written 40 years apart from each other…why is the same interest rate employed by the “Protocols?””

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Surely they must have changed during all that time.
Raslovlev: Very revealing…eh?
Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.85

Books, Change, Time

“MAJOR URWICK and Dr. Metcalf have rendered a conspicuous service by editing this collection of Mary Follett’s lectures on business management. They contain teaching which was of importance when the lectures were delivered, and which many people felt should be preserved in a collated form and given a wider public. The circumstances of today have increased that importance. Many people are being called upon to fill new administrative posts, and these lectures teach the principles which should underly all administrative method.”

Seebohm Rowntree (1871–1954) British philanthropist industrialist and sociologist writer

Seebohm Rowntree, "Preface" to Mary Parker Follett with Henry C. Metcalf, and Lyndall Urwick (eds.). Dynamic administration: the collected papers of Mary Parker Follett. Harper & Brother Publishing, 1942

People, Business