Quotes about contrary
page 9

“In the present decade, the U. S. economy has undergone its first major depression since the 1930’s, to the accompaniment of inflation rates in excess of 10 percent per annum. These events have been transmitted […] to other advanced countries and in many cases have been amplified. These events did not arise from a reactionary reversion to outmoded, 'classical' principles of tight money and balanced budgets. On the contrary, they were accompanied by massive government budget deficits and high rates of monetary expansion, policies which, although bearing an admitted risk of inflation, promised according to modern Keynesian doctrine rapid real growth and low rates of unemployment. That these predictions were wildly incorrect and that the doctrine on which they were fundamentally flawed are now simple matters of fact, involving no novelties of economic theory. The task now […] is to sort through the wreckage, determining which features of that remarkable intellectual event called the Keynesian Revolution can be salvaged and put to use and which others must be discarded.”

Robert Lucas Jr. (1937) American economist

As contained in The Rational Expectations Revolution: Readings From the Front Line https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0262631555, Preston J. Miller, MIT Press (reprint 1994), pp. 5-6 "After Keynesian macroeconomics" 1978

Money, Country

“I maintain that the frustration is an important, almost crucial, ingredient. I think that the best painting involves frustration. The point about the late Rembrandt [paintings] is not that it's satisfying but on the contrary that it is disturbing and frustrating. Because really, what he [Rembrandt] has done is to eliminate any plane - anything between that image and you. The Van Dyck [portrait] hasn't. It says [only] I'm a painting. The Rembrandt says: I am not a painting, I am a real man. But he is not a real man either. What is it then, that you are looking at?”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1950 - 1960, Interview with David Sylvester, BBC (March 1960), p. 97

Thinking, Painting

“…for ferocity there is nothing on Earth equal a Christian bishop hunting "heresy", as they call any opinion contrary to their own.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Source: 1960s, Julian (1964), Chapter 1, Priscus to Libanius, Athens March 380

“The scientistic sociologist wishes people to feel that he is just as empirical and thoroughgoing as the natural scientist, and that his conclusions are based just as relentlessly on observed data. The desire to present this kind of façade accounts, one may suspect, for the many examples and the extensive use of statistical tables found in the works of some of them. It has been said of certain novelists that they create settings having such a wealth of realistic detail that the reader assumes that the plot which is to follow will be equally realistic, when this may be far from the case. What happens is that the novelist disarms the reader with the realism of his setting in order that he may “get away with murder” in his plot. The persuasiveness of the scene is thus counted on to spill over into the action of the story. In like manner, when a treatise on social science is filled with this kind of data, the realism of the latter can influence our acceptance of the thesis, which may, on scrutiny, rest on very dubious constructs, such as definitions of units. Along with this there is sometimes a great display of scientific preciseness in formulations. But my reading suggests that some of these writers are often very precise about matters which are not very important and rather imprecise about matters which are. Most likely this is an offsetting process. If there are subjects one cannot afford to be precise about because they are too little understood or because one’s views of them are too contrary to traditional beliefs about society, one may be able to maintain an appearance of scientific correctness by taking great pains in the expressing of matters of little consequence. These will afford scope for a display of scholarly meticulousness and of one’s command of the scientific terminology.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“Concealed Rhetoric in Scientistic Sociology,” pp. 148-149.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

Pain, People, Feeling, Nature

“However arid and uninviting the prospect of a History of Medicine may appear at a distance, it will be found gradually to improve, and become full of interest wonder and animation as we proceed. …The History of Medicine is …the history of the human species, uncontaminated by those civil discords and fearful atrocities, those crimes and disorders which blot the page of other histories, and stamp man, created in the image of his maker, with the visage of a fiend and the heart of a brute. The History of Medicine, on the contrary, is the history of peace and good will, of endless harmony, and unceasing philanthropy. Instead of recording the desolations of war, and the growth of immorality—the deadly effects of human passions, and the bloody triumphs of senseless ambition—her province is to note the diminution of mortal suffering; and the only triumphs which she records are those obtained over sickness, death, and Sorrow.”

Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet (1788–1856) Scottish metaphysician (1788–1856)

The History of Medicine, Surgery, and Anatomy, from the Creation of the World, to the Commencement of the Nineteenth Century (1831), Vol. 1 https://books.google.com/books?id=ajBFAQAAMAAJ

Death, War, Fear, Peace

“Try to imagine that Minkowski cube, Ray said, as a block of liquid water freezing (as contrary as this seems) from the bottom up. The progression of the freeze represents at least our human experience of the march of time. What is frozen is past, immutable, changeless. What is liquid is future, indeterminate, uncertain. We live on the crystallizing boundary.”

Robert Charles Wilson book The Chronoliths

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 9 (pp. 114-115)

Imagination, Water, Time, Past

“As a public teacher of mere striplings, I am often amazed by the facility and absence of resistance with which the principles of the infinitesimal calculus are accepted and assimilated by the present race of learners. When I was young, a boy of sixteen or seventeen who knew his infinitesimal calculus would have been almost pointed at in the streets as a prodigy, like Dante, as a man who had seen hell. Now-a-days, our Woolwich cadets at the same age, talk with glee of tangents and asymptotes and points of contrary flexure and discuss questions of double maxima and minima, or ballistic pendulums, or motion in a resisting medium, under the familiar and ignoble name of sums.”

James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897) English mathematician

J. J. Sylvester. "Additional Notes to Prof. Sylvester's Exeter British Association Address", Collected Mathematical Papers, Vol. 2 (1908), pp. 717–718 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=miun.aas8085.0002.001;view=1up;seq=732

Age, Boy, Hell, Question

“Let me remind you that science is not necessarily wisdom. To know, is not the sole nor even the highest office of the intellect; and it loses all its glory unless it act in furtherance of the great end of man's life. That end is, as both reason and revelation unite in telling us, to acquire the feelings and habits that will lead us to love and seek what is good in all its forms, and guide us by following its traces to the first Great Cause of all, where only we find it pure and unclouded.
If science be cultivated in congruity with this, it is the most precious possession we can have— the most divine endowment. But if it be perverted to minister to any wicked or ignoble purpose — if it even be permitted to take too absolute a hold of the mind, or overshadow that which should be paramount over all, the perception of right, the sense of Duty — if it does not increase in us the consciousness of an Almighty and All-beneficent presence, — it lowers instead of raising us in the great scale of existence.
This, however, it can never do but by our fault. All its tendencies are heavenward; every new fact which it reveals is a ray from the origin of light, which leads us to its source. If any think otherwise, their knowledge is imperfect, or their understanding warped, or darkened by their passions. The book of nature is, like that of revelation, written by God, and therefore cannot contradict it; both we are unable to read through all their extent, and therefore should neither wonder nor be alarmed if at times we miss the pages which reconcile any seeming inconsistence. In both, too, we may fail to interpret rightly that which is recorded; but be assured, if we search them in quest of truth alone, each will bear witness to the other, — and physical knowledge, instead of being hostile to religion, will be found its most powerful ally, its most useful servant. Many, I know, think otherwise; and because attempts have occasionally been made to draw from astronomy, from geology, from the modes of the growth and formation of animals and plants, arguments against the divine origin of the sacred Scripture, or even to substitute for the creative will of an intelligent first cause the blind and casual evolution of some agency of a material system, they would reject their study as fraught with danger. In this I must express my deep conviction that they do injury to that very cause which they think they are serving.
Time will not let me touch further on the cavils and errors in question; and besides they have been often fully answered. I will only say, that I am here surrounded by many, matchless in the sciences which are supposed so dangerous, and not less conspicuous for truth and piety. If they find no discord between faith and knowledge, why should you or any suppose it to exist? On the contrary, they cannot be well separated. We must know that God is, before we can confess Him; we must know that He is wise and powerful before we can trust in Him, — that He is good before we can love Him. All these attributes, the study of His works had made known before He gave that more perfect knowledge of himself with which we are blessed. Among the Semitic tribes his names betoken exalted nature and resistless power; among the Hellenic races they denote his wisdom; but that which we inherit from our northern ancestors denotes his goodness. All these the more perfect researches of modern science bring out in ever-increasing splendour, and I cannot conceive anything that more effectually brings home to the mind the absolute omnipresence of the Deity than high physical knowledge. I fear I have too long trespassed on your patience, yet let me point out to you a few examples.
What can fill us with an overwhelming sense of His infinite wisdom like the telescope? As you sound with it the fathomless abyss of stars, till all measure of distances seems to fail and imagination alone gauges the distance; yet even there as here is the same divine harmony of forces, the same perfect conservation of systems, which the being able to trace in the pages of Newton or Laplace makes us feel as if we were more than men. If it is such a triumph of intellect to trace this law of the universe, how transcendent must that Greatest over all be, in which it and many like it, have their existence! That instrument tells us that the globe which we inhabit is but a speck, the existence of which cannot be perceived beyond our system. Can we then hope that in this immensity of worlds we shall not be overlooked? The microscope will answer. If the telescope lead to one verge of infinity, it brings us to the other; and shows us that down in the very twilight of visibility the living points which it discloses are fashioned with the most finished perfection, — that the most marvellous contrivances minister to their preservation and their enjoyment, — that as nothing is too vast for the Creator's control, so nothing is too minute or trifling for His care. At every turn the philosopher meets facts which show that man's Creator is also his Father, — things which seem to contain a special provision for his use and his happiness : but I will take only two, from their special relation to this very district. Is it possible to consider the properties which distinguish iron from other metals without a conviction that those qualities were given to it that it might be useful to man, whatever other purposes might be answered by them. That it should. be ductile and plastic while influenced by heat, capable of being welded, and yet by a slight chemical change capable of adamantine hardness, — and that the metal which alone possesses properties so precious should be the most abundant of all, — must seem, as it is, a miracle of bounty. And not less marvellous is the prescient kindness which stored up in your coalfields the exuberant vegetation of the ancient world, under circumstances which preserved this precious magazine of wealth and power, not merely till He had placed on earth beings who would use it, but even to a late period of their existence, lest the element that was to develope to the utmost their civilization and energy migbt be wasted or abused.
But I must conclude with this summary of all which I would wish to impress on your minds—* that the more we know His works the nearer we are to Him. Such knowledge pleases Him; it is bright and holy, it is our purest happiness here, and will assuredly follow us into another life if rightly sought in this. May He guide us in its pursuit; and in particular, may this meeting which I have attempted to open in His name, be successful and prosperous, so that in future years they who follow me in this high office may refer to it as one to be remembered with unmixed satisfaction.”

Thomas Romney Robinson

Robinson in his 1849 adress, as quoted in the Report of the Nineteenth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science https://archive.org/stream/report36sciegoog#page/n50/mode/2up, London, 1850.

Love, Life, Wisdom, Men

“Despite people's claims to the contrary, I think that a proper application of skepticism when viewing religious claims does necessarily lead to atheism.”

Matt Dillahunty (1969) American activist

Episode 692: "Buzzwords of Ignorance" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t25A6A_2uc, Channel Austin (January 16, 2011) The Atheist Experience

People, Thinking

“Human nature does change, and the fact that we’ve developed tools to direct that change is quintessentially human. And it must be a nearly universal concomitant to technological growth everywhere in the universe; otherwise there would be no universe. Unless we’re the only technological intelligence in the universe, Julian pointed out; so far there’s no evidence to the contrary. Maybe our own existence is evidence that we’re the first creatures to evolve far enough to hit the reset button. Somebody does have to be first.
But maybe the first is always the last.”

Joe Haldeman book Forever Peace

Source: Forever Peace (1997), p. 205

Intelligence, Nature, Universe, Change

“When we see men of worth, we should think of equaling them; when we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

James Legge, translation (1893)
When you meet someone better than yourself, turn your thoughts to becoming his equal. When you meet someone not as good as you are, look within and examine your own self.
Dim Cheuk Lau translation (1979)
When you see a good person, think of becoming like her/him. When you see someone not so good, reflect on your own weak points.
As quoted in Liberating Faith : Religious Voices for Justice, Peace, and Ecological Wisdom (2003) by Roger S. Gottlieb, p. 24
The Analects, Chapter I, Chapter IV

Men, Thinking

“Muhammad seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh goads us. His teaching also contained precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free rein to carnal pleasure. In all this, as is not unexpected, he was obeyed by carnal men. As for proofs of the truth of his doctrine, he brought forward only such as could be grasped by the natural ability of anyone with a very modest wisdom. Indeed, the truths that he taught he mingled with many fables and with doctrines of the greatest falsity. He did not bring forth any signs produced in a supernatural way, which alone fittingly gives witness to divine inspiration; for a visible action that can be only divine reveals an invisibly inspired teacher of truth. On the contrary, Muhammad said that he was sent in the power of his arms—which are signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants. What is more, no wise men, men trained in things divine and human, believed in him from the beginning, Those who believed in him were brutal men and desert wanderers, utterly ignorant of all divine teaching, through whose numbers Muhammad forced others to become his followers by the violence of his arms. Nor do divine pronouncements on the part of preceding prophets offer him any witness. On the contrary, he perverts almost all the testimonies of the Old and New Testaments by making them into fabrications of his own, as can be seen by anyone who examines his law. It was, therefore, a shrewd decision on his part to forbid his followers to read the Old and New Testaments, lest these books convict him of falsity. It is thus clear that those who place any faith in his words believe foolishly.”

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) Italian Dominican scholastic philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church

Summa Contra Gentiles, I, 6.4 (trans. Anton C. Pegis)

Wisdom, Men, People, Pleasure

“They’ve got a kind of committee there,” he had said, “an office. Acceptable Doctrine, it’s called. Everyone on the committee is mostly concerned about what people believe. They’re running things, too; don’t let them tell you they aren’t. Truth doesn’t enter in. If they’ve decided something is doctrine, they’ll ignore all evidence to the contrary and lie to your face. You don’t want to run afoul of those types, do you? Not if you have questions to ask. No.”

Sheri S. Tepper book Grass

Source: Grass (1989), Chapter 10 (p. 191)

People, Truth, Lie, Question

“And when I say the world is governed by nothing but demons, who will continue to be demons until they have destroyed the world, I am not using profanities; on the contrary, demon is a scientific term, a formula covering a specific chemical composition without connotations from politics, religion, or moral philosophy.... Here among us on the lowest rung of the world of life, no attention is paid to books unless they are written by chemically analyzed demons, or at least for them. Poets and philosophers are respected in proportion to the contempt and disgust they feel for the creation of life. Give this day our daily war is the prayer of those who govern countries. Kill, kill, said the outlaw Skuggasveinn...”

Halldór Laxness book Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

Dr. Sýngmann
Kristnihald undir Jökli (Under the Glacier/Christianity at Glacier) (1968)

Life, War, Books, World

“How it happened that I in particular discovered the relativity theory, it seemed to lie in the following circumstance. The normal adult never bothers his head about space-time problems. Everything there is to be thought about it, in his opinion, has already been done in early childhood. I, on the contrary, developed so slowly that I only began to wonder about space and time when I was already grown up. In consequence I probed deeper into the problem than an ordinary child would have done.”

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

In Carl Seelig's Albert Einstein: A Documentary Biography (1956), Seelig reports that Einstein said this to James Franck, p. 71 http://books.google.com/books?id=VCbPAAAAMAAJ&q=%22how+it+happened%22#search_anchor. I sometimes ask myself how did it come that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up. Naturally, I could go deeper into the problem than a child with normal abilities. Variant translation which appears in Einstein: The Life and Times by Ronald W. Clark (1971), p. 27 http://books.google.com/books?id=6IKVA0lY6MAC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA27#v=onepage&q&f=false Attributed in posthumous publications

Lie, Problem, Time, Childhood

“I cannot myself believe that anyone in this Chamber, and very few in the community as a whole, would wish to reverse all our previous policies and choose stabilization rather than growth; and it would certainly go contrary to the other views expressed by honourable Members about the need to promote the further growth of trade and industry. Not only would we be fore-going the creation of additional wealth and what this can bring, and has brought, in social advance, but we would also, I believe, permanently damage that climate of economic activity which has taken us so far and so fast. This would be particularly unwise, I suggest, in the face of those relatively darker clouds referred to by Your Excellency.”

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

October 9, 1970, page 114.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

Communication, Wealth

“The new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied on with confidence and certainty.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte book Address to the German Nation

Addresses to the German Nation (1807), Second Address : "The General Nature of the New Education". Chicago and London, The Open Court Publishing Company, 1922, p. 20.

Education, Confidence, Decision, Freedom

“Art is not life, but in a sense something contrary to life, since life is transient and changing, while art is permanent.”

Daniel Bell book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Source: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Chapter 3, The Sensibility of the Sixties, p. 124

Life, Art, Sense, Change

“There are seven causes of inconsistencies and contradictions to be met with in a literary work. The first cause arises from the fact that the author collects the opinions of various men, each differing from the other, but neglects to mention the name of the author of any particular opinion. In such a work contradictions or inconsistencies must occur, since any two statements may belong to two different authors. Second cause: The author holds at first one opinion which he subsequently rejects: in his work, however, both his original and altered views are retained. Third cause: The passages in question are not all to be taken literally: some only are to be understood in their literal sense, while in others figurative language is employed, which includes another meaning besides the literal one: or, in the apparently inconsistent passages, figurative language is employed which, if taken literally, would seem to be contradictories or contraries. Fourth cause: The premises are not identical in both statements, but for certain reasons they are not fully stated in these passages: or two propositions with different subjects which are expressed by the same term without having the difference in meaning pointed out, occur in two passages. The contradiction is therefore only apparent, but there is no contradiction in reality. The fifth cause is traceable to the use of a certain method adopted in teaching and expounding profound problems. Namely, a difficult and obscure theorem must sometimes be mentioned and assumed as known, for the illustration of some elementary and intelligible subject which must be taught beforehand the commencement being always made with the easier thing. The teacher must therefore facilitate, in any manner which he can devise, the explanation of those theorems, which have to be assumed as known, and he must content himself with giving a general though somewhat inaccurate notion on the subject. It is, for the present, explained according to the capacity of the students, that they may comprehend it as far as they are required to understand the subject. Later on, the same subject is thoroughly treated and fully developed in its right place. Sixth cause: The contradiction is not apparent, and only becomes evident through a series of premises. The larger the number of premises necessary to prove the contradiction between the two conclusions, the greater is the chance that it will escape detection, and that the author will not perceive his own inconsistency. Only when from each conclusion, by means of suitable premises, an inference is made, and from the enunciation thus inferred, by means of proper arguments, other conclusions are formed, and after that process has been repeated many times, then it becomes clear that the original conclusions are contradictories or contraries. Even able writers are liable to overlook such inconsistencies. If, however, the contradiction between the original statements can at once be discovered, and the author, while writing the second, does not think of the first, he evinces a greater deficiency, and his words deserve no notice whatever. Seventh cause: It is sometimes necessary to introduce such metaphysical matter as may partly be disclosed, but must partly be concealed: while, therefore, on one occasion the object which the author has in view may demand that the metaphysical problem be treated as solved in one way, it may be convenient on another occasion to treat it as solved in the opposite way. The author must endeavour, by concealing the fact as much as possible, to prevent the uneducated reader from perceiving the contradiction.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Introduction

Men, Way, Intelligence, Understanding

“The central ideas of Christianity, an angry God and vicarious atonement, are contrary to every fact in nature, as also to the better aspirations of the human heart; they are, in our present stage of enlightenment, absurd, preposterous, and blasphemous propositions.”

Virchand Gandhi (1864–1901) Jain scholar who represented Jainism at the first World Parliament of Religions in 1893

Christian Missions: A Triangular Debate, Before the Nineteenth Century Club of New York (1895)

God, Idea, Nature, Heart

“we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavouring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations.*12 But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders. http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPlong30.html#dd12 Book IV, Chapter V”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Essay on the Principle of Population (1798; rev. through 1826)

Men, People, Disease, Nature

“Modern Imams must strive to ensure that no Muslim finds solace for terrorism in the Quran, they must cite the Quran as evidence that the murder of innocents is not permitted by good, believing Muslims, and must immediately refute all claims to the contrary.”

Mike Pompeo (1963) 70th United States Secretary of State, former Director of Central Intelligence Agency and former Congressman fro…

GOP lawmaker: US Muslim leaders 'complicit' in terrorist attacks http://thehill.com/video/house/304743-gop-lawmaker-silence-on-terror-attacks-makes-islamic-leaders-potentially-complicit (June 11, 2013)

“There be three speciall notes necessary to be obserued in the framing of our accustomed English Ryme. The first is, that one meeter or verse be aunswerable to an other, in equall number of feete or syllables, or proportionable to the tune whereby it is to be reade or measured. The seconde, to place the words in such sorte as none of them be wrested contrary to the naturall inclination or affectation of the same, or more truely the true quantity thereof. The thyrd, to make them fall together mutually in Ryme, that is, in wordes of like sounde, but so as the wordes be not disordered for the Rymes sake, nor the sence hindered.”

William Webbe

Discourse of English Poetrie http://www.bartleby.com/209/161.html, 1871 [1586], pp. 57–8.

Reading

“The sheer decibel level of unreason surrounding the issue of abortion in academic writing about animal rights tells us something interesting. It suggests that, contrary to what the utilitarians and feminists working this terrain wish, the dots between sympathy for animals and sympathy for unborn humans are in fact quite easy to connect—so easy, you might say, that a child could do it. … Since ethical vegetarianism as a practice appears commonly rooted in an a priori aversion to violence against living creatures, so does it often appear to begin in the young. … A sudden insight, igniting empathy on a scale that did not exist before and perhaps even a life-transforming realization—this reaction should indeed be thought through with care. It is not only the most commonly cited feature of the decision to become a vegetarian. It is also the most commonly cited denominator of what brings people to their convictions about the desperate need to protect unborn, innocent human life. … Despite those who act and write in their name, actual vegetarians and vegans are far more likely to be motivated by positive feelings for animals than by negative feelings for human beings. As a matter of theory, the line connecting the dots between “we should respect animal life” and “we should respect human life” is far straighter than the line connecting vegetarianism to antilife feminism or antihumanist utilitarianism.”

Mary Eberstadt American writer

"Pro-Animal, Pro-Life" https://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/06/pro-animal-pro-life, in First Things (June 2009).

Life, People, Feeling, Motivation

“Assume that the new elite were clearly and simply to proclaim its intentions which are to supplant the old elite; no one would come to its assistance, it would be defeated before having fought a battle. On the contrary, it appears to be asking nothing for itself, well knowing that without asking anything in advance it will obtain what it wants as a consequence of its victory.”

Vilfredo Pareto book Manual of Political Economy

page 92.
Manual of Political Economy

Appearance, Victory

“Little of the old establishment survives in modern industry: the emphasis is upon change and adaptability; the rate of change mounts to an increasing tempo. We have in fact passed beyond that stage of human organisation in which effective communication and collaboration were secured by established routines of relationship. For this change, physico-chemical and technical development are responsible. It is no longer possible for an industrial society to assume that the technical processes of manufacture will exist unchanged for long in any type of work. On the contrary, every industry is constantly seeking to change, not only its methods, but the very materials it uses; this development has been stimulated by the war.”

Elton Mayo (1880–1949) Australian academic

Source: The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilisation, 1945, p. 13; Partly cited in: Lyndall Urwick & Edward Brech (1949). The Making Of Scientific Management Volume III https://archive.org/stream/makingofscientif032926mbp#page/n241/mode/1up, p. 216

War, Communication, Change

“The small and imperfect mixture of representative government in England, impeded as it is by other branches, aristocratical and hereditary, shows yet the power of the representative principle towards improving the condition of man. With us, all the branches of the government are elective by the people themselves, except the judiciary, of whose science and qualifications they are not competent judges. Yet, even in that department, we call in a jury of the people to decide all controverted matters of fact, because to that investigation they are entirely competent, leaving thus as little as possible, merely the law of the case, to the decision of the judges. And true it is that the people, especially when moderately instructed, are the only safe, because the only honest, depositories of the public rights, and should therefore be introduced into the administration of them in every function to which they are sufficient; they will err sometimes and accidentally, but never designedly, and with a systematic and persevering purpose of overthrowing the free principles of the government. Hereditary bodies, on the contrary, always existing, always on the watch for their own aggrandizement, profit of every opportunity of advancing the privileges of their order, and encroaching on the rights of the people.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

1820s, Letter to A. Coray (1823)

People, Law, Decision, Science

“Beautiful things may be admired, if not loved," asserted the Tin Man. "Flowers are beautiful, for instance, but we are not inclined to marry them. Duty, on the contrary, is a bugle call to action, whether you are inclined to act, or not. In this case, I obey the bugle call of duty.”

L. Frank Baum book The Tin Woodman of Oz

The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918), Ch. 2 : The Heart of the Tin Woodman
Later Oz novels

Love, Beauty, Flowers

“[T]he job of mass entertainment is to cajole, seduce and flatter consumers to let them know that what they thought was right is right, and that their tastes and their immediate gratification are of the utmost concern of the purveyor. The job of the artist, on the other hand, is to say, wait a second, to the contrary, everything that we have thought is wrong. Let's reexamine it.”

David Mamet (1947) American playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and film director

Inteview by Richard Covington, Salon, October 25, 1997, 2013-06-17 http://www.upstartfilmcollective.com/portfolios/jcharnick/mamet-museum/salon-interview.html,

Waiting

“This is a fine saying of Plato: That he who is discoursing about men should look also at earthly things as if he viewed them from some higher place; should look at them… a mixture of all things and an orderly combination of contraries.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

VII, 48
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VII

Men

“We ought to regard the interests of the state as of far greater moment than all else, in order that they may be administered well; and we ought not to engage in eager rivalry in despite of equity, nor arrogate to ourselves any power contrary to the common welfare. For a state well administered is our greatest safeguard. In this all is summed up: When the state is in a healthy condition all things prosper; when it is corrupt, all things go to ruin.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Golden Sayings of Democritus

“Contrary to several conflicting stories, I got the name "Count" right in Kansas City in 1936 while at the Reno Club. I was known as Bill Basie at that time. One night, while we were broadcasting, the announcer called me to the microphone for those usual few words of introduction. He commented that Bill Basie was a rather ordinary name, and further that there were a couple of well-known bandleaders named Earl Hines and Duke Ellington. Then he said, "Bill, I think I'll call you Count Basie from now on. Is that all right with you?" I thought he was kidding, shrugged my shoulders and replied, "OK." Well that was the last time I was ever introduced as Bill Basie. From then on, it was Count Basie, and I never did lose that nickname. It's funny the way those things will stick.”

Count Basie (1904–1984) American jazz musician, bandleader, and composer

As quoted in Hear Me Talkin' to Ya : The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men who Made It (1966) by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, p. 301

Way, Thinking, Time, Night

“If you thought it was impossible for a film to contain less effective comedy than Date Movie, here's evidence to the contrary.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=595 of Epic Movie (2007). One-star reviews

“Nell teaches aspects of parenthood never understood before. If she cries or makes a mess or decides to be contrary (and these are relatively rare), it doesn't bother. There is always Chris's silence to compare it to. What is seen now so much more clearly is that although the names keep changing and the bodies keep changing, the larger pattern that holds us all together goes on and on. In terms of this larger pattern the lines at the end of this book still stand. We have won it. Things are better now. You can sort of tell these things.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Afterword (1984)

Books, Silence, Change

“"Will you be wanting to contest the divorce?" I asked Mrs. Davis.
"I should think not," she said calmly, "although I suppose on of us should, for the fun of the thing. An uncontested divorce always seems to me contrary to the spirit of divorce."”

Donald Barthelme book Sixty Stories

"At The End Of The Mechanical Age".
Sixty Stories (1981)

Thinking

“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

“International policy does not aim at exploiting local, specific conditions to widen zones of influence and create difficulties for another country. The goal of international policy is to insure universal fulfillment of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" and to prevent a sharpening of international tensions and a strengthening of militarist and nationalist tendencies.
Such a set of principles would in no way be a betrayal of the revolutionary and national liberation struggle, the struggle against reaction and counterrevolution. On the contrary, with the elimination of all doubtful cases, it would be easier to take decisive action in those extreme cases of reaction, racism, and militarism that allow no course other than armed struggle.”

Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist

Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, International Tensions And New Principles

Way, Decision, Universe, Betrayal

“I really like painting on unusual base, such as zinc plates, which are already subjected to rain. These are old plates, spoiled by time and weather. I paint very subtle paintings on such a ground. On the other hand, paintings on a sponge, which may seem harsh in terms of subject matter – are, contrary to appearances, very soft and pleasant. It is nice, for example, to move them and hang them.”

Tomasz Vetulani (1965) Polish artist

There is no threat. Weapons and colour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqfjr78Pyfs, video, Galeria Olympia, 23 Novmeber 2017 (in Polish)

Appearance, Time, Painting, Weather

“Experience teaches us that the eye may be subdued and forced into forming and disposing of objects even quite contrary to what it would naturally see them, by pre judgement of the mind or some other persuasive motive.”

William Hogarth book The Analysis of Beauty

The Analysis of Beauty (1753)

Motivation, Nature

“The vast majority of lameness in the domestic horse world cannot be understood properly or completely without considering the effects of abuse. Although many might argue to the contrary, most lameness among horses is really more an issue of ignorance, violence, and complicity than is of veterinary medicine; veterinar scools, clinics, and slaughterhouses are simply the processing stations that have to deal with it. What is not an issue here are injuries that stem from unfortunate accidents, where the horse enthusiasts made an honest miscalculation or innocently followed the bad advice of someome they trusted. What is of concern is abuse that results from neglect and bad intent.”

Jaime Jackson (1947) Horse hoof care professional

The Natural Horse (1997)

World, Horse

“Women in general are not interested in questions of principle as such, but at most only in so far as they affect particular personalities. They require the dramatic element to evoke their interest. With many men, on the contrary, though this element of course enhances interest, it is not the indispensable condition of interest.”

Ernest Belfort Bax (1854–1926) British barrister and journalist

To-Day magazine, October issue ‘No Misogyny But True Equality’ http://historyoffeminism.com/ernest-belfort-bax-no-misogyny-but-true-equality-1887-complete/ ‘No Misogyny But True Equality’ (1887)

Women, Men, Question, Personality

“Inextricably intertwined in the question was slavery, and it only became the more so in the years that followed. Socially and culturally the North and South were not much different. They prayed to the same deity, spoke the same language, shared the same ancestry, sang the same songs. National triumphs and catastrophes were shared by both. For all the myths they would create to the contrary, the only significant and defining difference between them was slavery, where it existed and where it did not, for by 1804 it had virtually ceased to exist north of Maryland. Slavery demarked not just their labor and economic situations, but power itself in the new republic.”

William C. Davis (1946) American historian

Source: Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002), p. 9

Question

“The war against Israel is not a war against Israel. It is a war against the West. It is jihad. Israel is simply receiving the blows that are meant for all of us. If there would have been no Israel, Islamic imperialism would have found other venues to release its energy and its desire for conquest. Thanks to Israeli parents who send their children to the army and lay awake at night, parents in Europe and America can sleep well and dream, unaware of the dangers looming. Many in Europe argue in favor of abandoning Israel in order to address the grievances of our Muslim minorities. But if Israel were, God forbid, to go down, it would not bring any solace to the West. It would not mean our Muslim minorities would all of a sudden change their behavior, and accept our values. On the contrary, the end of Israel would give enormous encouragement to the forces of Islam. They would, and rightly so, see the demise of Israel as proof that the West is weak, and doomed. The end of Israel would not mean the end of our problems with Islam, but only the beginning. It would mean the start of the final battle for world domination. If they can get Israel, they can get everything.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

2000s, Speech at the Four Seasons, New York (25 September 2008)

God, War, Children, World

“I am continually amused by the Communist argument that the United States tries to prevent the less-developed countries from industrializing in order to keep them subservient to herself. In our extended dealings with the American aid authorities, we have never found this to be the case; on the contrary, they have helped us with a wide variety of industrial projects, including those that compete directly with American industries. The Americans have enough sense to prefer strong and prosperous friends, and they realize that their most lucrative international trade is with other highly industrialized countries, not with weak and backward ones.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

Page 301
Publications, Mission for my Country (1961)

Sense, Strong, Help, Country

“This is the very contrary of dropping out. Most people can't wait to get home to their house or apartment and shut that door and turn on the TV. To me, that's dropping out.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

On his living at a Zen center, as quoted in Los Angeles Times (24 September 1995)

People, Home, Waiting, Housing

“It is a terrible and awesome thing when a man sets out to create all other men in his own image. Such became the goal and all consuming ambition of Karl Marx. Not that he would have made each man equal to himself; in fact, it was quite the contrary. The image he hoped to construct was a great human colossus with Karl Marx as the brain and builder and all other men serving him as the ears and eyes, feet and hands, mouth and gullet. In other words, Marx surveyed the world and dreamed of the day when the whole body of humanity could be forced into a gigantic social image which conformed completely to Marx's dream of a perfect society.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Men, World, Dreams, Hope

“Jefferson refused to pin his hopes on the occasional success of honest and unambitious men; on the contrary, the great danger was that philosophers would be lulled into complacence by the accidental rise of a Franklin or a Washington. Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.”

Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American historian

Source: The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948), Ch. 4, Part 1: Natural History and Political Science, p. 178.

Men, Hope, Success, Dependency

“I propose that it shall be no longer malum in se for a citizen to pummel, cowhide, kick, gouge, cut, wound, bruise, maim, burn, club, bastinado, flay, or even lynch a [government] jobholder, and that it shall be malum prohibitum only to the extent that the punishment exceeds the jobholder’s deserts. The amount of this excess, if any, may be determined very conveniently by a petit jury, as other questions of guilt are now determined. The flogged judge, or Congressman, or other jobholder, on being discharged from hospital — or his chief heir, in case he has perished — goes before a grand jury and makes a complaint, and, if a true bill is found, a petit jury is empaneled and all the evidence is put before it. If it decides that the jobholder deserves the punishment inflicted upon him, the citizen who inflicted it is acquitted with honor. If, on the contrary, it decides that this punishment was excessive, then the citizen is adjudged guilty of assault, mayhem, murder, or whatever it is, in a degree apportioned to the difference between what the jobholder deserved and what he got, and punishment for that excess follows in the usual course.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

"The Malevolent Jobholder," The American Mercury (June 1924), p. 156
1920s

Question

“But someone is bound to question … by what right I regard as Ideological State Apparatuses, institutions which for the most part do not possess public status, but are quite simply private institutions. As a conscious Marxist, Gramsci already forestalled this objection in one sentence. The distinction between the public and the private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law exercises its ‘authority’. The domain of the State escapes it because the latter is ‘above the law’: the State, which is the State of the ruling class, is neither public nor private; on the contrary, it is the precondition for any distinction between public and private. The same thing can be said from the starting-point of our State Ideological Apparatuses. It is unimportant whether the institutions in which they are realized are ‘public’ or ‘private’. What matters is how they function.”

Louis Althusser book Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays

Source: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1968), "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", p. 97

Law, Exercises, Question, Parting

“Children, by nature, are keen, passionate and curious. What was referred to as laziness is often merely an awakening of sensitivity, a psychological inability to submit to certain absurd duties, and a natural result of the distorted, unbalanced education given to them. This laziness, which leads to an insuperable reluctance to learn, is, contrary to appearances, sometimes proof of intellectual superiority and a condemnation of the teacher.”

Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright

Children, Education, Nature, Learning

“Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.”

Michael Crichton (1942–2008) American author, screenwriter, film producer

Aliens Cause Global Warming (2003)

World, Business, Science

“Well-beloved subjects, we thought that the clergy of our realm had been our subjects wholly, but now we have well perceived that they be but half our subjects, yea, and scarce our subjects: for all the prelates at their consecration make an oath to the pope, clean contrary to the oath that they make to us, so that they seem to be his subjects, and not ours.”

Henry VIII of England (1491–1547) King of England from 1509 until 1547

Speech to Parliament (11 May 1532), as quoted in Hall's Chronicle (1809), edited by Sir Henry Ellis, p. 788
Well-beloved subjects! we thought that the clergy of our realm had been our subjects wholly, but now, we have well perceived that they be but half our subjects; yea, and scarce our subjects, for all the prelates, at their consecration, take an oath to the Pope clean contrary to the oath they make to us, so that they seem to be his subjects and not ours.
Source: As quoted in English Constitutional History from the Teutonic Conquest to the Present Time (1905) by Thomas Pitt Taswell-Langmead, p. 332

“When has human fortune ever been regarded as something better than a crime, or been enjoyed in any other way than in secret, directly contrary to the laws of God and man?”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Arnas Arnæus
Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part II: The Fair Maiden

God, Secret, Law, Way

“Antony … used to say that it behooved a man to give all his time to his soul rather than his body, yet to grant a short space to the body through its necessities; but all the more earnestly to give up the whole remainder to the soul and seek its profit, that it might not be dragged down by the pleasures of the body, but, on the contrary, the body might be in subjection to the soul.”

Athanasius of Alexandria (295–373) Patriarch of Alexandria

§ 45
Life of Anthony of Egypt

Pleasure, Soul, Time

“ANARCHISM (from the Gr. ἅν, and άρχη, contrary to authority), the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government — harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being. In a society developed on these lines, the voluntary associations which already now begin to cover all the fields of human activity would take a still greater extension so as to substitute themselves for the state in all its functions. They would represent an interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees, local, regional, national and international temporary or more or less permanent — for all possible purposes: production, consumption and exchange, communications, sanitary arrangements, education, mutual protection, defence of the territory, and so on; and, on the other side, for the satisfaction of an ever-increasing number of scientific, artistic, literary and sociable needs. Moreover, such a society would represent nothing immutable. On the contrary — as is seen in organic life at large — harmony would (it is contended) result from an ever-changing adjustment and readjustment of equilibrium between the multitudes of forces and influences, and this adjustment would be the easier to obtain as none of the forces would enjoy a special protection from the state.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

Kropotkin's entry on "Anarchism" in the Encyclopædia Britannica (1910) http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/britanniaanarchy.html

Life, Education, Law, Communication

“The partition of Czechoslovakia under pressure from England and France amounts to the complete surrender of the Western Democracies to the Nazi threat of force. Such a collapse will bring peace or security neither to England nor to France. On the contrary, it will place these two nations in an ever weaker and more dangerous situation. … It is not Czechoslovakia alone which is menaced, but also the freedom and the democracy of all nations. The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small State to the wolves is a fatal delusion. The war potential of Germany will increase in a short time more rapidly than it will be possible for France and Great Britain to complete the measure necessary for their defence.”

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

Statement to the Press (21 September 1938), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), pp. 978-979
The 1930s

War, Peace, Democracy, Freedom

“I HAVE no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort. It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality. The experiences of the nursery, the school, the University, and of professional careers, are a chain of proofs to the contrary.”

Francis Galton Hereditary Genius

Hereditary Genius (1869; 2005), p. 56
Hereditary Genius (1869)

Children, School, Boy, Nature

“Whenever convictions are not arrived at by direct contact with the world and the objects themselves, but indirectly through a critique of the opinions of others, the processes of thinking are impregnated with ressentiment. The establishment of “criteria” for testing the correctness of opinions then becomes the most important task. Genuine and fruitful criticism judges all opinions with reference to the object itself. Ressentiment criticism, on the contrary, accepts no “object” that has not stood the test of criticism”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 67-68

World, Thinking

“Here is how [life] happens. We find something we want to do, if we are lucky, or something we need to do, if we are like most people. We use it as a way to obtain food, shelter, clothing, mates, comfort, a first folio of Shakespeare, model airplanes, American Girl dolls, a handful of rice, sex, solitude, a trip to Venice, Nikes, drinking water, plastic surgery, child care, dogs, medicine, education, cars, spiritual solace -- whatever we think we need. To do this, we enact the role we call "me," trying to brand ourselves as a person who can and should obtain these things.In the process, we place the people in our lives into compartments and define how they should behave to our advantage. Because we cannot force them to follow our desires, we deal with projections of them created in our minds. But they will be contrary and have wills of their own. Eventually new projections of us are dealing with new projections of them. Sometimes versions of ourselves disagree. We succumb to temptation — but, oh, father, what else was I gonna do? I feel like hell. I repent. I'll do it again… This has not been a conventional review. There is no need to name the characters, name the actors, assign adjectives to their acting. Look at who is in this cast. You know what I think of them. This film must not have seemed strange to them. It's what they do all day, especially waiting around for the director to make up his mind.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/synecdoche-new-york-2008 of Synecdoche, New York (5 November 2008) Reviews, Four star reviews

Life, People, Education, Food

“First, there is really no sign at all of any significant reduction in unemployment without a major change in policy…Unemployment has probably levelled out but at a totally unacceptable figure. Secondly, contrary to what the Secretary of State said, the post-oil surplus prospect—not merely the post-oil prospect, because the oil will take a long time to go, but the surplus, the big balance of payments surplus, which is beginning to decline quite quickly—still looks devastating…our balance of payments is now overwhelmingly dependent on this highly temporary and massive oil surplus. Our manufacturing industry is shrunken and what remains is uncompetitive…We have a manufacturing trade deficit of approximately £11 billion, all of which has built up in the past three to four years. This is containable by oil and by nothing else. Invisibles can take care of about £4 billion or £5 billion but they cannot do the whole job. As soon as oil goes into a neutral position we are in deep trouble. Should it go into a negative position, the situation would be catastrophic…To sell off a chunk of capital assets and to use the proceeds for capital investment in the rest of the public sector might just be acceptable. However, that is not what is proposed, and what is proposed cannot be justified on any reputable theory of public finance; and when it is accompanied by a Minister using the oil—which might itself be regarded as a capital asset; certainly it is not renewable—almost entirely for current purposes, it amounts to improvident finance on a scale that makes the Prime Minister's old friend General Galtieri almost Gladstonian.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1985/nov/12/industry-and-employment in the House of Commons (12 November 1985). 1980s

Change, Time, Past, Dependency

“I speak of them that shall be saved, for in this time God shewed me none other. But in all things I believe as Holy Church believeth, preacheth, and teacheth. For the Faith of Holy Church, the which I had aforehand understood and, as I hope, by the grace of God earnestly kept in use and custom, stood continually in my sight: willing and meaning never to receive anything that might be contrary thereunto. And with this intent I beheld the Shewing with all my diligence: for in all this blessed Shewing I beheld it as one in God’s meaning.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The First Revelation, Chapter 9

God, Faith, Hope, Time

“From '41 to '51
I was my folk's contrary son;
I bit my father's hand right through
And broke my mother's heart in two.”

John Masefield The Everlasting Mercy

Opening lines
The Everlasting Mercy (1919)

Heart

“Judging others by themselves, the English, who are blinded by their loyalty, have always thought that the Germans did not abide by their pledges inscribed in the Versailles Treaty because they had not frankly agreed to them… We, on the contrary, believe that if Germany, far from making the slightest effort to carry out the treaty of peace, has always tried to escape her obligations, it is because until now she has not been convinced of her defeat… We are also certain that Germany, as a nation, resigns herself to keep her pledged word only under the impact of necessity.”

Raymond Poincaré (1860–1934) 10th President of the French Republic

Letter to Charles de Saint-Aulaire, French ambassador to Britain (c. December 1922), quoted in Leopold Schwarzschild, World in Trance (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1943), p. 140.

Peace, Effort, Loyalty

“In the stupendous rush of change which is coming on the human world as a result of the present tornado of upheaval, ancient India's culture, attacked by European modernism, overpowered in the material field, betrayed by the indifference of her children, may perish for ever along with the soul of the nation that holds it in its keeping…. Each nation is a Shakti or power of the evolving spirit in humanity and lives by the principle which it embodies. India is the Bharata Shakti, the living energy of a great spiritual conception, and fidelity to it is the very principle of her existence…. To follow a law or principle involuntarily or ignorantly or contrary to the truth of one's consciousness is a falsehood and a self-destruction. To allow oneself to be killed, like the lamb attacked by the wolf, brings no growth, farthers no development, assures no spiritual merit. Concert or unity may come in good time, but it must be an underlying unity with a free differentiation, not a swallowing up of one by another or an incongruous and inharmonious mixture. Nor can it come before the world is ready for these greater things. To lay down one's arms in a state of war is to invite destruction and it can serve no compensating spiritual purpose…. India is indeed awaking and defending herself, but not sufficiently and not with the whole-heartedness, the clear sight and the firm resolution which can alone save her from the peril. Today it is close; let her choose,… for the choice is imperatively before her, to live or to perish.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

December, 1918
India's Rebirth

War, Children, Truth, World

“The Folkish State, conversely, must under no conditions annex Poles with the intention of wanting to make Germans out of them some day. On the contrary, it must muster the determination either to seal off these alien racial elements, so that the blood of its own Folk will not be corrupted again, or it must without further ado remove them and hand over the vacated territory to its own National Comrades.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

1920s, Zweites Buch (1928)

“and here I give it under my hand that I will most willingly begin upon a new canvas [after his first portrait of Lady Dartmouth was criticized and rejected]. But I only for the present beg your Lordship will give me leave to try an experiment upon that picture to prove the amazing effect of dress. I meant to treat it as a cast-off picture and dress it (contrary, I know, to Lady Dartmouth's taste) in the modern way; the worst consequence that can attend it will be her ladyship's being angry with me for a time. I am vastly out in my notion if the face does not immediately look like; but I must know if Lady Dartmouth powders or not in common. I only beg to know that and to have the [first] picture sent down [back] to me..”

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) English portrait and landscape painter

Quote from Gainborough's letter to Lord Dartmouth, 13 April 1771; as cited in Thomas Gainsborough, by William T, Whitley https://ia800204.us.archive.org/6/items/thomasgainsborou00whitrich/thomasgainsborou00whitrich.pdf; New York, Charles Scribner's Sons – London, Smith, Elder & Co, Sept. 1915, p. 74 1770 - 1788

Way, Time

“The Muslim Mashaikh were as keen on conversions as the Ulama, and contrary to general belief, in place of being kind to the Hindus as saints would, they too wished the Hindus to be accorded a second class citizenship if they were not converted. Only one instance, that of Shaikh Abdul Quddus Gangoh, need be cited because he belonged to the Chishtia Silsila considered to be the most tolerant of all Sufi groups. He wrote letters to Sultan Sikandar Lodi, Babur and Humayun to re-invigorate the Shariat and reduce the Hindus to payers of land tax and Jiziyah. To Babur he wrote,
“Extend utmost patronage and protection to theologians and mystics… that they should be maintained and subsidized by the state… No non-Muslim should be given any office or employment in the Diwan of Islam. Posts of Amirs and Amils should be barred to them. Furthermore, in confirmity with the principles of the Shariat they should be subjected to all types of indignities and humiliations. The non-Muslims should be made to pay Jiziyah, and Zakat on goods be levied as prescribed by the law. They should be disallowed from donning the dress of the Muslims and should be forced to keep their Kufr concealed and not to perform the ceremonies of their Kufr openly and freely… They should not be allowed to consider themselves equal to the Muslims.””

Abdul Quddus Gangohi (1456–1537) Sufi poet

Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 6

Law

“All dreads other than reverent dread that are proffered to us, though they come under the colour of holiness yet are not so true, and hereby may they be known asunder. — That dread that maketh us hastily to flee from all that is not good and fall into our Lord’s breast, as the Child into the Mother’s bosom, with all our intent and with all our mind, knowing our feebleness and our great need, knowing His everlasting goodness and His blissful love, only seeking to Him for salvation, cleaving to with sure trust: that dread that bringeth us into this working, it is natural, gracious, good and true. And all that is contrary to this, either it is wrong, or it is mingled with wrong. Then is this the remedy, to know them both and refuse the wrong.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Sixteenth Revelation, Chapter 74

Love, Nature

“He is very calm—very, very calm. Never raises his voice. Well-informed, contrary to the sense outside that he is ill-informed and isolated. And decisive.”

Kofi Annan (1938–2018) 7th Secretary-General of the United Nations

On Saddam Hussein, Press conference (24 February 1998)

Decision, Sense

“Evil does not approach us as pride any more, but on the contrary as slumber, lassitude, concealment of the "I." … It may make us so quickly contented, that any definitive fire will die down. The venomous, breathtaking frigid mist seems able … to harden hearts and fill them with envy, obduracy and resentment, with bloody scorn for the divine image and light, with all the causes of the only true original sin, which is not wanting to be like God.”

Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) German philosopher

Source: Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (1959), p. 62

God, Light, Evil, Heart

“The process which has led us to this result, and which might justifiably be called a Critique of all Scepticism, yields also the final impossibility of materialism in a still clearer way than we noticed before. We saw, some distance back, that the actual of sense could by no possibility be the source of consciousness, being, on the contrary, its mere phenomenon — its mere externalised presentation (picture-object) originated from within. But the hypothetical potential of sense, the assumed subsensible substance called matter, we have now seen to be precisely that self-contradiction talked of as the physical thing-in-itself, and it therefore disappears from the real universe along with that illusion. We have, then, a definitive Critique of all Materialism.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Later German Philosophy, p.170-1

Way, Sense, Universe

“Let us take first an absurd example: always preferring goods that come on Thursdays to those that come on Wednesdays, solely because of a preference for that particular day of the week. As we shall see, this is not contrary to the principles of rational choice, but it is certainly contrary to reason. The simple preference for Thursdays is a reason, but reason also demands the reason for that reason. And obviously there is none.”

Jon Elster (1940) Norwegian academic

Reason and Rationality (2009)

“One seeking to understand the recurrent ebb and flow of economic activity characteristic of the present day finds these numerous explanations both suggestive and perplexing. All are plausible, but which is valid? None necessarily excludes all the others, but which is the most important? Each may account for certain phenomena; does any one account for all the phenomena? Or can these rival explanations be combined in such a fashion as to make a consistent theory which is wholly adequate?
There is slight hope of getting answers to these questions by a logical process of proving and criticizing the theories. For whatever merits of ingenuity and consistency they may possess, these theories have slight value except as they give keener insight into the phenomena of business cycles. It is by study of the facts which they purport to interpret that the theories must be tested. But the perspective of the investigation would be distorted if we set out to test each theory in turn by collecting evidence to confirm or to refute it. For the point of interest is not the validity of any writer's views, but clear comprehension of the facts. To observe, analyze, and systematize the phenomena of prosperity, crisis, and depression is the chief task. And there is better prospect of rendering service if we attack this task directly, than if we take the round about way of considering the phenomena with reference to the theories.
This plan of attacking the facts directly by no means precludes free use of the results achieved by others. On the contrary, their conclusions suggest certain facts to be looked for, certain analyses to be made, certain arrangements to be tried. Indeed, the whole investigation would be crude and superficial if we did not seek help from all quarters. But the help wanted is help in making a fresh examination into the facts.”

Wesley Clair Mitchell (1874–1948) American statistician

Source: Business Cycles, 1913, p. 19-20; as cited in: Mary S. Morgan. The History of Econometric Ideas. p. 46

Hope, Way, Fashion, Understanding

“This new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and color. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and color, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary color.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

1910's, Natural Reality and Abstract Reality', 1919

Color, Idea, Nature, Appearance

“My conclusion is that contrary to popular belief, atheism is not primarily an intellectual revolt, it is a moral revolt. Atheists don't find God invisible so much as objectionable. They aren't adjusting their desires to the truth, but rather the truth to fit their desires. […] This is the perennial appeal of atheism: it gets rid of the stern fellow with the long beard and liberates us for the pleasures of sin and depravity. The atheist seeks to get rid of moral judgment by getting rid of the judge.”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

Source: Books, What's So Great about Christianity (2007), Ch. 23

God, Pleasure, Truth

“Europe is not re-entering its troubled wartime past—on the contrary, it is leaving it. Germany today, like the rest of Europe, is more conscious of its twentieth-century history than at any time in the past fifty years. But this does not mean that it is being drawn back into it. For that history never went away.”

Tony Judt book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

Introduction
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)

History, Time, Past

“My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“Piers Morgan: And I have to say that your views you espoused on this issue are bordering on bigotry, aren't they?
Rick Santorum: No. I think just because we disagree on public policy, which is what the debate has been about, which is marriage, doesn't mean that it's bigotry. Just because you follow a moral code that teaches something wrong doesn't mean that — are you suggesting that the Bible and that the Catholic Church is bigoted? Well, if that's what you believe, fine, I don't, I think that 2,000 — well, I shouldn't say, not fine, I don't think it's fine at all. I think that is — that's contrary to both what we've seen in 2,000 years of human history and Western civilization and trying to redefine something that has been — that is seen as wrong from the standpoint of the church and saying a church is bigoted because it holds that opinion that is biblically based I think is in itself an act of bigotry.”

Rick Santorum (1958) American politician

2011-08-31
Piers Morgan Tonight
CNN
Television, quoted in * Santorum: I Stand By My 'Man on Dog' Comment
Crooks and Liars
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/santorum-i-stand-my-man-dog-comment
2011-09-01

Marriage, History, Thinking

“…In that same period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the circulation of the blood, there were people with methods of analysis by which progress was being made! You can take every one of Spinoza's propositions and take the contrary propositions and look at the world--and you can't tell which is right. Sure, people were awed because he had the courage to take on these great questions, but it doesn't do any good to have the courage if you can't get anywhere with the question…”

Richard Feynman book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

From Omni interview, "The Smartest Man in the World" (1979) or from the book p. 195.
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999)

People, World, Courage, Question

“The American war is over; but this far from being the case with the American revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the drama is closed. It remains yet to establish and perfect our new forms of government and to prepare the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens for these forms of government after they are established and brought to perfection.”

Benjamin Rush (1745–1813) American physician, educator, author

Letter to Price, May 25, 1786

War, Perfection

“In the interest of the dictionaries of the future let me lay down the principle that the Demi-Monde, contrary to the common belief and in spite of what is printed, does not represent the ruck of courtesans, but the class of women that have lost caste.”

Alexandre Dumas, fils (1824–1895) French writer and dramatist, son of the homonym writer and dramatist

Établissons donc ici, pour les dictionnaires à venir, que le Demi-Monde ne représente pas, comme on le croit, comme on l'imprime, la cohue des courtisanes, mais la classe des déclassées.
Preface to Le Demi-Monde (1855), in Théatre complet de Al. Dumas fils (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1868-98) vol. 2, p. 9; translation from Albert D. Vandam Undercurrents of the Second Empire (London: William Heinemann, 1897) p. 246.

Women, Future

“If the war is lost, the nation will also perish. This fate is inevitable. There is no necessity to take into consideration the basis which the people will need to continue even a most primitive existence. On the contrary, it will be better to destroy these things ourselves, because this nation will have proved to be the weaker one and the future will belong solely to the stronger eastern nation (Russia). Besides, those who will remain after the battle are only the inferior ones, for the good ones have all been killed.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

To Albert Speer (1945), as quoted in "Defeat of Hitler: Enter the Bunker" http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/defeat/enter-bunker.htm (2010), The History Place 1940s

Fate, War, People, Future

“The strong appearance of design [in nature] allows a disarmingly simple argument: if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it's a duck. Design should not be overlooked simply because it's so obvious.”

Michael J. Behe (1952) American biochemist, author, and intelligent design advocate

" Design for Living http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/07/opinion/07behe.html", New York Times, 7 February 2005.

Nature, Strong, Appearance

“I have spent the greater part of my life in immediate contemplation of the most grotesque and horrible of the English innovations for the debasement of Ireland. I mean their education system. The English once proposed in their Dublin Parliament a measure for the castration of all Irish priests who refused to quit Ireland. The proposal was so filthy than although it duly passed the House and was transmitted to England with the warm recommendation at the Viceroy. it was not eventually adopted. But the English have actually carried out an even filthier thing. They have planned and established an education system which more wickedly does violence to the elemental human rights of Irish children than would an edict for the general castration of Irish males. The system has aimed at the substitution for men and women of mere Things. It has not been an entire success. There are still a great many thousand men and women in Ireland. But a great many thousand of what, by way of courtesy, we call men and women, are simply Things. Men and women. however depraved, have kindly human allegiances. But these Things have no allegiance. Like other Things. they are For sale. When one uses the term education system as the name of the system of schools. colleges, universities, and whatnot which the English have established in Ireland, one uses it as a convenient label, just as one uses the term government as a convenient label for the system of administration by police which obtains in Ireland instead of a government. There is no education system in Ireland. The English have established the simulacrum of an education system, but its object is the precise contrary of the object of an education system. Education should foster; this education is meant to repress. Education should inspire; this education is meant to tame. Education should harden; this education is meant to enervate. The English are too wise a people to attempt to educate the Irish in any worthy sense. As well expect them to arm us. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eoin_MacNeill Professor Eoin MacNeill] has compared the English education system in Ireland to the systems of slave education which existed in the ancient pagan republics side by side with the systems intended for the education of freemen. To the children of the free were taught all noble and goodly things which would tend to make them strong and proud and valiant; from the children of the slaves all such dangerous knowledge was hidden.”

Patrick Pearse (1879–1916) Irish revolutionary, shot by the British Army in 1916

The Murder Machine

Life, Women, Men, Children

“p>Romanticism is no sign of powerful instincts, but, on the contrary, of a weak, self-detesting intellect. They are all infantile, these Romantics; men who remain children too long (or for ever), without the strength to criticize themselves, but with perpetual inhibitions arising from the obscure awareness of their own personal weakness; who are impelled by the morbid idea of reforming society, which is to them too masculine, too healthy, too sober.”

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) German historian and philosopher

...
And these same everlasting "Youths" are with us again today, immature, destitute of the slightest experience or even real desire for experience, but writing and talking away about politics, fired by uniforms and badges, and clinging fantastically to some theory or other. There is a social Romanticism of sentimental Communists, a political Romanticism which regards election figures and the intoxication of mass-meeting oratory as deeds, and an economic Romanticism which trickles out from behind the gold theories of sick minds that know nothing of the inner forms of modern economics. They can only feel in the mass, where they can deaden the dull sense of their weakness by multiplying themselves. And this they call the Overcoming of Individualism.
The Hour of Decision (1933)

Men, Children, Idea, Personality

“This Mr. Dewhurst has not understood the Impressionist movement in the very least. All he sees in it is a technical method... He also says that before going to London we knew nothing whatsoever about light; but we have studies that prove the contrary. He omits the influence of Claude Lorrain, Corot, all the 18th-century painters, Chardin most of all. But what he fails to realize is that while Turner and Constable were of service to us, they confirmed our suspicion that those painters had not understood 'The Analysis of Shadows', which in the case of Turner are always a deliberate effect, a plain dark patch. As to the division of tones, Turner confirmed us its value as a method, but not as a means of accuracy or truth to nature. In any case, the 18th century was our tradition. It seems to me that Turner too, had looked at Claude Lorrain. I am even inclined to think there is a picture by Turner, 'Sunset', hung side by side with a Claude.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote in a letter to his son Lucien, 8 Mai 1903, as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock - , Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 149
Quote of Pissarro - referring to the writer of the book Impressionist Painting, it Genesis and Development, published in 1904
after 1900

Truth, Nature, Thinking, Study

“Trevor Huddleston: …what I still want to know from you, really, is why the presence of a coloured immigrant group is objectionable, when the presence of a non-coloured immigrant is not objectionable.
Enoch Powell: Oh no, oh no! On the contrary, I have often said that if we saw the prospect of five million Germans in this country at the end of the century, the risks of disruption and violence would probably be greater, and the antagonism which would be aroused would be more severe. The reason why the whole debate in this country on immigration is related to coloured immigration, is because there has been no net immigration of white Commonwealth citizens, and there could be no migration of aliens. This is merely an automatic consequence of the facts of the case; it is not because there is anything different, because there is anything necessarily more dangerous, about the alienness of a community from Asia, than about the alienness of a community from Turkey or from Germany, that we discuss this inevitably in terms of colour. It is because it is that problem.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

The Great Debate, BBC TV (9 September 1969), from Reflections of a Statesman. The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell (London: Bellew, 1991), pp. 399-400
1960s

Communication, Problem, Country

“If [Hitler's] proposal means that we should come to an understanding with Germany to dominate Europe I think this would be contrary to the whole of our history. You know the old fable of the jackal who went hunting with the tiger and what happened after the hunt was over. Thus Elizabeth resisted Philip II of Spain. Thus William III and Marlborough resisted Louis XIV. Thus Pitt resisted Napoleon, and thus we all resisted William II of Germany. Only by taking this path and effort have we preserved ourselves and our liberties, and reached our present position. I see no reason myself to change from this traditional view.”

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

Letter to Lord Rothermere (12 May 1935), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), pp. 648−649
The 1930s

History, Understanding, Thinking, Effort

“Feyerabend's Dadaesque rhetoric concealed a deadly serious point: the human compulsion to find absolute truths, however noble, too often culminates in tyranny. Feyerabend attacked science not because he truly believed that it had no more claim to truth than did astrology. Quite the contrary. Feyerabend attacked science because he recognized—and he was horrified by—its power, its potential to stamp out the diversity of human thought and culture. He objected to scientific certainty for moral and political, rather than for epistemological, reasons.”

John Horgan (journalist) (1953) American science journalist

Source: The End of Science (1996), p. 48

Truth, Science

“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances—what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book Two, Chapter VI.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Two

Men, Fate, Happiness, People

“A second principle of Americanization is identity of economic interest. At this time, after all America has united to win the war, one hesitates to turn a page so shameful in American history. And yet, if America reverts to its former industrial brutality and indifference, Americanization will fail. Identity of economic interest, generally speaking, has meant to the American getting the immigrant to work for him at as low a wage as possible, for as long hours as possible, and scrapping him at the end of the game, with as little compunction as he did an old machine. And the immigrant's successful fellow-countryman, elevated to be a private banker, a padrone, or a notary public, has shared the practices of the native American. Always the immigrant has been in positions of the greatest danger, and with less safeguards for his care. He has been called by number and nicknamed and ridiculed. Frequently trades-unions have excluded him from their benefits, compensation laws have discriminated against him, trades have been closed to him, until he has wondered in the bitterness of his spirit what American opportunity was and how he could pursue life, liberty, and happiness at his work. Whenever he has been discontented, the popular remedy has been higher wages or shorter hours, and rarely the expansion of personal relationships. Very little self-determination has been given to him; on the contrary he has been made a cog in a highly organized industrial machine. His spirit has been imprisoned in the hum of machinery. His special gifts have been lost, even as his lack of skill in mechanical work has injured delicate processes and priceless materials. His pride has been humiliated and his initiative stifled because he has been given little of the artisan's pleasure in seeing his finished product.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Life, War, Happiness, Pleasure

“The relation between physical sanitary laws and the national welfare is now hardly disputed. At this moment the cholera is stealthily feeling its terrible way along the edges of Europe to this country, and there is not an intelligent man who does not know that it is a divine vengeance upon uncleanliness. Let it seize the unclean city of New York, and it will riot in horror and devastation. Panic will empty the palaces, trade will stop in the warehouses. Those who can will flee, while the poor and wretched, poisoned in tenement-houses, will be huddled in heaps of agony and death. Does any man say that cholera is God's remedy for overpopulation? On the contrary, it is only the ghastly proof that God's laws of human health are disregarded. It is not a proclamation that the world is over-peopled; it is merely a warning for the world to provide decently for its population. God does not create men in his image to rot in tenement-houses, and he will make squalor and filth and misery plague-spots threatening the fairest prosperity, until that prosperity acknowledges in vast sanitary reforms that cleanliness is next to godliness. And if the dread pestilence now approaching our shores would frighten us into universal purgation of our foul cities, it would be seen at this moment hovering in the wintry air, not an angry demon, but a stem angel with a sword of fire to open the path of knowledge and humanity and civilization.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Death, Men, God, People

“Violence, contrary to popular belief, is not part of the anarchist philosophy. It has repeatedly been pointed out by anarchist thinkers that the revolution can neither be won, nor the anarchist society established and maintained, by armed violence. Recourse to violence then is an indication of weakness, not of strength, and the revolution with the greatest possibilities of a successful outcome will undoubtedly be the one in which there is no violence, or in which violence is reduced to a minimum, for such a revolution would indicate the near unanimity of the population in the objectives of the revolution. … Violence as a means breeds violence; the cult of personalities as a means breeds dictators--big and small--and servile masses; government--even with the collaboration of socialists and anarchists--breeds more government. Surely then, freedom as a means breeds more freedom, possibly even the Free Society! To Those who say this condemns one to political sterility and the Ivory Tower our reply is that 'realism' and their 'circumstantialism' invariably lead to disaster. We believe there is something more real, more positive and more revolutionary to resisting war than in participation in it; that it is more civilised and more revolutionary to defend the right of a fascist to live than to support the Tribunals which have the legal power to shoot him; that it is more realistic to talk to the people from the gutter than from government benches; that in the long run it is more rewarding to influence minds by discussion than to mould them by coercion.”

Vernon Richards (1915–2001) British activist

"Anarchism and violence" in What Is Anarchism?: An Introduction by Donald Rooum, ed. (London: Freedom Press, 1992, 1995) pp. 50-51.

War, People, Support, Freedom

“Powerful racial prejudices? That was not true of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, or Norwood P. Hallowell, or George T. Garrison, or many other abolitionists and sons of abolitionists who became officers in black regiments. Indeed, the contrary was true. They had spent much of their lives fighting the race prejudice endemic in American society, sometimes at the risk of their careers and even their lives. That is why they jumped at the chance of help launch an experiment with black soldiers which they hoped would help African Americans.”

James M. McPherson (1936) American historian

James M. McPherson. Drawn with the Sword : Reflections on the American Civil War] (1996), Princeton University: Oxford University Press. p. 91
1990s

Hope, Chance, Help, Fight

“Everyone who came in contact with Xavier seems to have agreed that he was a saint. Men might disagree with him; but in all the extensive records there is not a single word that runs contrary to the general verdict as to his saintliness. There are many references to the long hours that he spent in prayer and in rapt contemplation of his Lord. He disclaimed anything in the way of miraculous powers; in his devotions there was nothing that could be called mystical in any strict sense of that term. He seems to have followed the broad lines of medieval devotional practice, profoundly influenced by the Spiritual Exercises of his master Ignatius. Xavier, like Ignatius, was in all things a medieval man, untouched by any of the new currents of thought in theology or in the daily affairs of life. It is probable that, in the ten years of his sojourn in the East, he never possessed a Bible or even a New Testament. Apart from his breviary and his missal, his sole companion seems to have been the work of Marcus Marulus, Opus de religiose vivendi institutione, a thick book of 680 pages, published at Cologne in 1531. He seems rarely to have based his discourses directly on the Bible…”

Francis Xavier (1506–1552) Navarrese Basque Roman Catholic saint and missionary

Neill, S. (2004). A history of Christianity in India: The beginning to AD 1707. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Life, Men, Books, Way

“In response to his grandchildren holding dual passports in a way said to be contrary to law - "What is the big deal? Their mother is an Indian diplomat, so they used an Indian passport. The passports were duly kept in the custody of Indian mission in New York once they had received US passports… When we were taking the kids to the US, we were told as they were natural US citizens they should get US passports."”

Uttam Khobragade (1951) bureaucrat

Devyani's daughters' dual passports raise a stink http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/khobragade-daughters-dual-passports-raise-a-stink-mea-unaware/article1-1194794.aspx, Hindustan Times, 14 March 2014.

Law, Way, Nature

“The trouble is that you won't get the scientists to agree on a course of action. It is almost instinctive in science to accept contrary views, because disagreeing gives you guidance to experimental tests of ideas — your own and those offered by others….”

Frederick Seitz (1911–2008) American physicist

Explaining his opinion on why "the most beneficial kinds of research won't get done because the most politically attractive research will get the funding instead", in an interview for the George C. Marshall Institute http://www.marshall.org/article.php?id=21, (3 September 1997)

Idea, Science

“For us [the young artists in Vitebsk, before 1920] Suprematism did not signify the recognition of an absolute form which was part of an already completed universal system, on the contrary; here stood revealed for the first time in all its purity the clear sign and plan for a definite new world never before experienced - a world which issues forth from our inner being and which is only now in the first stages of its formation, for this reason the square [ Malevich's Black and Red Square ] of suprematism became a beacon.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

Quote from Lissitzky's essay of 1920, 'Suprematism in World Reconstruction'; as quoted by Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, trans. Helene Aldwinckle and Mary Whittall (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1968), p. 327
1915 - 1925

World, Universe, Time, Parting

“It is true that Judges, as the upholders of the Constitution and the laws, are least likely to err but the possibility of their acting contrary to the Constitution cannot be completely excluded.”

Mohammad Hidayatullah (1905–1992) 11th Chief Justice of India

Full Court Reference in Memory of The Late Justice M. Hidayatullah

Law

“No country of people's democracy has so many nationalities as this country has. Only in Czechoslovakia do there exist two kindred nationalities, while in some of the other countries there are only minorities. Consequently in these countries of people's democracy there has been no need to settle such serious problems as we have had to settle here. With them the road to socialism is less complicated than is the case here. With them the basic factor is the class issue, with us it is both the nationalities and the class issue. The reason why we were able to settle the nationalities question so thoroughly is to be found in the fact that it had begun to be settled in a revolutionary way in the course of the Liberation War, in which all the nationalities in the country participated, in which every national group made its contribution to the general effort of liberation from the occupier according to its capabilities. Neither the Macedonians nor any other national group which until then had been oppressed obtained their national liberation by decree. They fought for their national liberation with rifle in hand. The role of the Communist Party lay in the first place in the fact that it led that struggle, which was a guarantee that after the war the national question would be settled decisively in the way the communists had conceived long before the war and during the war. The role of the Communist Party in this respect today, in the phase of building socialism, lies in making the positive national factors a stimulus to, not a brake on, the development of socialism in our country. The role of the Communist Party today lies in the necessity for keeping a sharp lookout to see that national chauvinism does not appear and develop among any of the nationalities. The Communist Party must always endeavour, and does endeavour, to ensure that all the negative phenomena of nationalism disappear and that people are educated in the spirit of internationalism. What are the phenomena of nationalism? Here are some of them: 1) National egoism, from which many other negative traits of nationalism are derived, as for example — a desire for foreign conquest, a desire to oppress other nations, a desire to impose economic exploitation upon other nations, and so on; 2) national-chauvinism which is also a source of many other negative traits of nationalism, as for example national hatred, the disparagement of other nations, the disparagement of their history, culture, and scientific activities and scientific achievements, and so on, the glorification of developments in their own history that were negative and which from our Marxist point of view are considered negative. And what are these negative things? Wars of conquest are negative, the subjugation and oppression of other nations is negative, economic exploitation is negative, colonial enslavement is negative, and so on. All these things are accounted negative by Marxism and condemned. All these phenomena of the past can, it is true, be explained, but from our point of view they can never be justified. In a socialist society such phenomena must and will disappear. In the old Yugoslavia national oppression by the great-Serb capitalist clique meant strengthening the economic exploitation of the oppressed peoples. This is the inevitable fate of all who suffer from national oppression. In the new, socialist Yugoslavia the existing equality of rights for all nationalities has made it impossible for one national group to impose economic exploitation upon another. That is because hegemony of one national group over another no longer exists in this country. Any such hegemony must inevitably bring with it, to some degree or other, in one form or another, economic exploitation; and that would be contrary to the principles upon which socialism rests. Only economic, political, cultural, and universal equality of rights can make it possible for us to grow in strength in these tremendous endeavours of our community.”

Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman

Concerning the National Question and Social Patriotism http://www.marxists.org/archive/tito/1948/11/26.htm Speech held at the Slovene Academy of Arts and Sciences, November 26, 1948, Ljubljana Speeches

Fate, War, People, Education

Quotes about contrary page 9

Quotes about contrary
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