Quotes about definition
page 15

“Since most subjects studied in school consist largely of theories… language education must include not only the serious study of what truth and falsehood mean in the context of a subject, but also what is meant by a fact, an inference, an assumption, a judgment, a generalization… In this way students will be learning both the language of a subject and the methods of inquiry in that subject, since inquiry consists of nothing else but the generation of questions, the invention of definitions and metaphors, the separation of facts from inferences, the forming of generalizations…”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)

Truth, Education, School, Way

“Atheism … in its philosophic aspect refuses allegiance not merely to a definite concept of God, but it refuses all servitude to the God idea, and opposes the theistic principle as such. Gods in their individual function are not half as pernicious as the principle of theism which represents the belief in a supernatural, or even omnipotent, power to rule the earth and man upon it. It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power.”

Emma Goldman (1868–1940) anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches

The Philosophy of Atheism (1916)

God, Idea, Fight

“I decide that the East has definitely spoiled me for women.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

Women

“It is a fact that humans are multicellular eukaryotes with an internal digestive tract. It is also a fact that these criteria match the biological definition of an animal. But because I’m talking to a philosopher, we even have to argue the definition of “definition”. “A good definition explains concisely what something means“, “a statement expressing the essential nature of something“, “a statement of what a thing is“. So any multicellular eukaryote with an internal digestive tract is in fact an animal by definition. Once we determine that the criteria apply, we have no choice to deny the definition connected with that, especially not when the definition is deliberately well-established by expertise as this one is, rather than being an “accident of language” such as the apologist asserted.”

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

Patheos, Philosophistry http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2017/04/12/philosophistry/ (April 12, 2017)

Nature, Animals

“If I had had my way the English would not have got off so lightly at Dunkirk. But my hands were tied by direct orders from Hitler himself. While the English were clambering into the ships off the beaches, I was kept uselessly outside the port unable to move. I recommended to the Supreme Command that my five Panzer divisions be immediately sent into the town and thereby completely destroy the retreating English. But I received definite orders from the Führer that under no circumstances was I to attack, and I was expressly forbidden to send any of my troops closer than ten kilometres from Dunkirk. At this distance I sat outside the town watching the English escape, while my tanks and infantry were prohibited from moving. This incredible blunder was due to Hitler's personal idea of generalship.”

Gerd von Rundstedt (1875–1953) German Field Marshal during World War II

Quoted in "Hitler's Generals" - Page 191 - by Correlli Barnett - History - 2003

Way, Idea, Personality

“It follows that the more definition is given, the more omniscient the management must be, so that no functions are left whole or partly undischarged, no person is overburdened with undelegated responsibility, or left without the authority to do his job properly.”

Tom Burns (1913–2001) British sociologist

Source: The Management of Innovation, 1961, p. 123

Personality

“The longer my production moves in a definite direction, the less gaily it progresses. But just now something new seems to be happening to the stream: it is broadening into a lake. I hope it will not lack a corresponding depth. I was the faithful image of a part of art history; I moved towards Impressionism and beyond it. I don't want to say that I grew out of it; I hope this is not so... In lucid moments, I now have a clear view of twelve years of the history of my inner self. First the cramped self, that self with the big blinkers, then the disappearance of the blinkers and the self, now gradually the re-emergence of a self without blinkers. It is good that one didn't know this in advance.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (1911), Diary # 899; as cited by Francesco Mazzaferro, in 'The Diaries of Paul Klee Part Four', : Klee as an Expressionist and Constructivist Painter http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.nl/2015/05/paul-klee-ev27.html 1911 - 1914

Faith, Hope, Art, History

“My monochrome pictures are not my definite works, but the preparation for my works. They are the left-overs from the creative processes, the ashes. My pictures, after all, are only the title-deeds to my property which I have to produce when I am asked to prove that I am a proprietor.”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

In 1957; p. 35
before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

“In 1932 many dark clouds still hung round the horizon. In 1933, although the outlook was distinctly brighter, there was no settled feeling that we were about to enjoy a spell of fine weather. To-day the atmosphere is distinctly brighter. The events of the last 12 months have shown gratifying evidence that the efforts of His Majesty's Government are bearing fruit…If you look to what I might call the telltale statistics, the unemployment figures and statistics of such things as retail trade, consumption of electricity, transport, iron and steel production and house building, in every case you see a definite revival of activity…If I might borrow an illustration from the titles of two well-known works of fiction, I would say that we have now finished the story of "Bleak House" and that we are sitting down this afternoon to enjoy the first chapter of "Great Expectations."”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Budget speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1934/apr/17/financial-statement in the House of Commons (17 April 1934) Chancellor of the Exchequer

Feeling, Effort, Housing, Weather

“The biggest thing I learned was, especially the way I operate and how I am as a person, if I'm going to do a creative endeavor, I need to have full, complete control. Top to bottom. And with my book and website, I always had that. With the website, definitely, with the book, basically, with the movie…I didn't in a lot of ways. Nils and I, we had a lot of control, more control probably than almost any first time movie makers do within a normal studio system. We were in the middle between independent and not, because someone else paid for everything, and they kind of let us do what we wanted, but then once the movie was done creatively, it went in a direction that I did not want it to go, and there was nothing I could really do about it. It's hard enough to swim in that movie current by yourself, but when you've got weights tied to you and someone pulling you in a different direction, it's almost impossible. You need to pick a direction and go with it. If you're going to be a big studio movie, go be that, and if you're going to go be a rogue independent film, go be that. We had different people with different levels of authority on the movie that pulled us in different directions, and it just doesn't work. Either be in control or let someone else do it, but don't…too many chefs. I'm going to be better next time. Failure instructs, failure improves. Failure shouldn't deter you, unless you're just bad at it.”

Tucker Max (1975) Internet personality; blogger; author

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC6zdVKoNr8 (March 2010).

People, Books, Way, Failure

“Larry is different than people think. He really loves the game and is really smart. He has the innate ability to focus on what's important and has a great feel for players. He knows how to deal with people. He's direct and definite. I think the players appreciate that.”

Larry Bird (1956) basketball player and coach

Donnie Walsh — reported in Sam Smith (February 8, 2004) "Bird sets fast pace - Hall of Fame player and former coach Larry Bird finds 'every day's exciting' in his first go-around as general manager of the Indiana Pacers", Chicago Tribune, p. 11.
About

Love, People, Feeling, Game

“Do you think that you're beautiful?
Inside or outside? Mmmmm… outside I don't think about that too much because I realise that's all very superficial. I'm more concerned about inside, and inside I think I'm alright… I'm OK inside. I don't think I'm perfect and I don't call myself beautiful but I'm definitely not ugly inside. I've got friends who aren't that so called pleasant to look at but inside I think they're beautiful.”

Kim Wilde (1960) English pop singer

[http://www.kimwilde.com/articles/1981/00244/ New Musical Express (19 September 1981)
Interviews

Beauty, Thinking, Perfection

“By definition, if prose is a river, poetry is a fountain.”

Michael Longley (1939) poet

'Poetry Ireland Review' Summer 1999

“I think that my first poetic impulse is for music; second a definite conception with the ring of the universe…”

Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931) American poet

A Poet in America (1935)

Music, Thinking, Universe

“We definitely condemn the incident where women were attacked, but the pub culture must stop. It is because of this that youth in the country have taken to drinking in a big way.”

Anbumani Ramadoss (1968) Indian politician

On the 2009 Mangalore pub attack, as quoted in " Pub culture against Indian ethos, must stop: Ramadoss http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Pub-culture-against-Indian-ethos-must-stop-Ramadoss/articleshow/4054517.cms", The Times of India (30 January 2009)

Women, Youth, Way, Drink

“Stephen Sommers certainly knew what he was doing. Indiana Jones is a hardened cynical guy with a heart of mush and Stephen created an Indiana Jones-lite, one who was a jocular guy willing to take a pie to the face, handle a gun, work in a fist fight, and handle all the requirements of an action hero. Brendan has the unique ability to take a pie to the face, let himself be in a situation where he feels overwhelmed, and then survive. This was definitely in the wheel house of Indiana Jones and always has been. It was quite conscious on Stephen’s part and now I’ve dome something different with it.”

Rob Cohen (1949) American film director, producer and writer

Director Rob Cohen Resurrects 'The Mummy' http://www.newsarama.com/254-director-rob-cohen-resurrects-the-mummy.html (June 25, 2008)

Guy, Feeling, Heart, Fight

“Love, too, now has its adequate definition: it is the all-directing intelligence which includes in its recognition a world of beings accorded free and seen as sacred, — the primary and supreme act of intelligence, which is the source of all other intelligence, and whose object is that universal circle of spirits which, since the time of the Stoics, has so pertinently been called the City of God. Its contemplation of this sole object proper to it was fitly named by Dante and the great scholastics the Vision Beatific.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.361

Love, God, World, Intelligence

“Have you ever asked yourselves why Mafias from all over the world are constantly opening restaurants, cafes or shops? Because this type of commercial activity has huge amounts of cash coming in. A Mafioso businessman’s number one priority is not to make money, but to hand out receipts in order to justify money that he already has. In Italy, where tax avoidance is extremely high, we know that when a shopkeeper is reluctant to give you a receipt he or she is almost definitely committing an offence, but almost definitely not a Mafioso. Businesses run by the Mafia will always give you a receipt. And the Russian Mafia, in the years of the wavering ruble, safely stored away its money in London’s luxury homes, fuelling London’s property bubble with dirty money. The fictitious buying and selling of property is one of organised crime’s favourite ways of laundering money. … This is how entire neighbourhoods in London are becoming unoccupied, turning into investments’ empty spaces. Money moves in, and people move out.”

Roberto Saviano (1979) Italian journalist, writer and essayist

Dirty Money in London event (2016)

Money, People, World, Way

“There were sometimes in our own ranks comrades who thought themselves cleverer and more capable of judging various questions than was done in the definite decisions of our World Party. Here I stress with the greatest emphasis: our relations with the Comintern, this close, indestructible, firm confidence between the C. P. G. and the C. I. and its Executive—this is one of our Party, the inner-political struggles and disputes in the past and of the higher political maturity of our Party generally.”

Ernst Thälmann (1886–1944) leader of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) during much of the Weimar Republic

Ernst Thälmann in address to the KPD Party on the October Conference, 1932; as cited in: Wilhelm Pieck. " Ernst Thaelmann, Fifty Years Old https://www.marxists.org/archive/pieck/1936/07/thaelmann.htm," The Communist Review, Vol. 3, No. 7, July 1936, pp. 12-17.

World, Confidence, Question, Decision

“Just as mainstream literature shows us how our contemporaries view the present, and historical fiction shows us how they view the past (not, of course, what the present or the past were actually like), so speculative fiction shows us how they view the future. I happen to believe that my contemporaries' view of the past is not very important; but their view of the present is quite definitely important, and their view of the future is vital.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

"The Right of Things to Come", presentation for the Science Fiction Research Association (1978), as published in Castle of Days (1992)
Nonfiction

Literature, Past, Future

“It is customary to define psychiatry as a medical specialty concerned with the study, diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses. This is a worthless and misleading definition. Mental illness is a myth. Psychiatrists are not concerned with mental illnesses and their treatments. In actual practice they deal with personal, social and ethical problems in living.
I have argued that, today, the notion of a person "having a mental illness" is scientifically crippling. It provides professional assent to a popular rationalization — namely that problems in living experienced and expressed in terms of so-called psychiatric symptoms are basically similar to bodily diseases.
Moreover, the concept of mental illness also undermines the principle of personal responsibility, the ground on which all free political institutions rest.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Conclusions.
The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961)

Disease, Problem, Study, Personality

“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

“It's definitely a different world. Smoking is bad for your voice, for sure, but you learn to function in that world of bad. Now I'm in better shape, and I'm much more physical onstage, but I have to watch getting winded. Once I'm winded, I don't sing right. I would have smoked three cigarettes already during this interview”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

laughs Responding to whether quitting smoking has helped his voice.** Rolling Stone - Q&A: Chris Cornell, 2005-14-07, 2006-07-03 http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/audioslave/articles/story/7482813/qa_chris_cornell, Audioslave Era

World, Learning, Singing

“The way towards 'wisdom' or towards 'freedom' is the way towards your inner being. This is the simplest definition of metaphysics.”

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher

Attributed in The Little Book of Romanian Wisdom (2011) edited by Diana Doroftei and Matthew Cross.

Wisdom, Way, Freedom

“The problem is one in the general physiology of society. The continuance of life and health for any individual depends on maintenance of a moving organic equilibrium within certain definite limits of tolerance. The daily work of the world is done by individuals living their specialized economic and social lives within a moving equilibrium… But specialized progress brought uneven social and economic developments and serious maladjustment. General equilibrium is lost. The limits of tolerance, the margins of safety, are exceeded.”

Wallace Brett Donham (1877–1954) American academic

Source: "The Failure of Business Leadership and the Responsibility of the Universities", 1933, p. 423; as cited in: Wallace Donham http://www.eoht.info/page/Wallace+Donham at Hmolpedia, 2015

Life, Health, World, Problem

“All is well, thank God… but victory will not be complete, definitive or stable, as long as Masonry is in our Spain. And how will it disappear? What to do? Ask Mussolini.”

Francisco Franco (1892–1975) Spanish general and dictator

Statement in El defensor de Córdoba (2 October 1936), as cited by Agustín Celis http://www.agustincelis.com/id64.htm

God, Victory

“The behaviourist motto is "cure the symptoms and you have eliminated the neurosis." Consequently, the behaviour therapist's approach is straightforward. He deals with definite complaints of patients such as fears of certain situations, tics, or obsessional thoughts, which are considered by him to be bad habits. His remedy for them is to use definite and explicit retraining procedures.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Source: Models of Mental Illness (1984), p. 138, partly cited in: Erica Cockrell (2013) " Psychodynamic Therapy http://specialstudentpopulations.weebly.com/theoretical-perspectives.html" at specialstudentpopulations.weebly.com

Fear

“Signac, definitively won over and who had just modified the paintings 'The Milliner', [1885] and 'Appreteuse et garnisseuse Modes' [exhibited in May 1886], Rue de Caire, p. 174J, following my technique at the same time as I was finishing the 'Jatte'... You'll agree that there's a nuance here and that if I was unknown in [18]85 [ Félix Fénéon did not mention Seurat in his article as leader / initiator of Neo-Impressionism I nonetheless existed, I and my vision that you have described in an impersonal fashion so superbly, aside from one or two insignificant details.”

Georges Seurat (1859–1891) French painter

version B of the 'Letter to Félix Fénéon', June 1890
Quotes from version B of his letter to Félix Fénéon, Seurat provided more important information
Quotes, 1881 - 1890, Letter to Félix Fénéon', June 1890

Fashion, Time, Painting

“If a is any definite number, then all numbers of the system R fall into two classes, A1 and A2, each of which contains infinitely many individuals; the first class A1 comprises all numbers a1 that are < a, the second class A2 comprises all numbers a2 that are > a; the number a itself may be assigned at pleasure to the first or second class, being respectively the greatest number of the first class or the least of the second. In every case the separation of the system R into the two classes A1, A2 is such that every number of the first class A1 is less than every number of the second class A2.”

Richard Dedekind (1831–1916) German mathematician

p, 125
Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen (1872)

Pleasure

“It has been a continuing theme of this book that our commitment to any approach to the problems of existence (the overcoming of the world, the humanization of the world, and the struggle with the world first among them) can enjoy no definitive justification. Its demands always exceed, immeasurably, its grounds for making them. It says, “Follow me.” It can never give a conclusive reason to do so. All that it can do is to make an incomplete argument and a defeasible appeal. It cannot escape the circularity in all our large-scale transformative projects: for better or worse, each of them is a partly self-fulfilling prophecy. If it is embraced and it works, it remakes part of experience in its image.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger The Religion of the Future

Source: The Religion of the Future (2014), p. 298-9

Books, World, Problem, Parting

“The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.”

Marc Bloch (1886–1944) French historian, medievalist, and historiographer

“For Bréal, semantics was the science the subject matter of which was study of the cause and structure of the processes of changes in meanings of words: expansion and contraction of meanings, transfer of meanings, elevation and degradation of their value, etc.
Such a delineation of semantics as a branch of linguistics is maintained to this day, for all the differences between the various schools in linguistics. Such degree of uniformity is not confined to the definition of semantics alone. Not all authors give such a definition; some of them approach the issue from a different point of view as regards general classification… but all schools of linguistics engage in the study of the meanings of words and their changes. Thus all of them, in one way or another, engage in semantics as understood by Breal.”

Adam Schaff (1913–2006) Polish Marxist philosopher and theorist

Source: Introduction to semantics, 1962, p. 4

School, Way, Study, Science

“To me a Tory is a person who believes that authority is vested in institutions—that's a carefully honed definition. We have made the law, not for extraneous reasons, not because it conforms with a priori specifications; it has been made by a particular institution in a particular way and can be changed by that institution in a particular way. A Tory therefore reposes the ultimate authority in institutions—he is an example of collective man.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Interviewed in Winter 1992, quoted in Naim Attallah, Asking Questions (Quartet Books, 1996), pp. 354-5
1990s

Law, Way, Change, Personality

“[S]cience is often regarded as the most objective and truth-directed of human enterprises, and since direct observation is supposed to be the favored route to factuality, many people equate respectable science with visual scrutiny—just the facts ma'am, and palpably before my eyes. But science is a battery of observational and inferential methods, all directed to the testing of propositions that can, in principle, be definitely proven false. […] At all scales, from smallest to largest, quickest to slowest, many well-documented conclusions of science lie beyond the strictly limited domain of direct observation. No one has ever seen an electron or a black hole, the events of a picosecond or a geological eon.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Muller Bros. Moving & Storage", pp. 200–201
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

People, Truth, Lie, Science

“The art of management has been defined, "As knowing exactly what you want men to do, and then seeing that they do it in the best and cheapest way." No concise definition can fully describe an art, but the relations between employers and men form without question the most important part of this art. In considering the subject, therefore, until this part of the problem has been fully discussed, the remainder of the art may be left in the background.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) American mechanical engineer and tennis player

Source: Shop Management, 1903, p. 1343.

Men, Art, Way, Question

“Love is total acceptance of everything. It means then that you have to accept everything, tolerate everything, it means that there is no discrimination with respect to good and evil, right and wrong. This is the modern definition of love, and of course it is thoroughly anti Christian.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Hybridization and the Law (n. d.)

Love, Evil

“In these days little need exists for extolling the blessings of our Federal Union. Its benefits are known and recognized by all its citizens who are worthy of serious attention. No one thinks now of attempting to destroy the Union by armed force. No one seriously considers withdrawing from it. But it is not enough that it should be free from attack — it must be approved and supported by a national spirit. Our prime allegiance must be to the whole country. A sentiment of sectionalism is not harmless because it is unarmed. Resistance to the righteous authority of Federal law is not innocent because it is not accompanied by secession. We need a more definite realization that all of our country must stand or fall together, and that it is the duty of the Government to promote the welfare of each part and the duty of the citizen to remember that he must be first of all an American.”

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

1920s, Freedom and its Obligations (1924)

Law, Support, Thinking, Parting

“Cybernetics is concerned primarily with the construction of theories and models in science, without making a hard and fast distinction between the physical and the biological sciences. The theories and models occur both in symbols and in hardware, and by 'hardware* we shall mean a machine or computer built in terms of physical or chemical, or indeed any handleable parts. Most usually we shall think of hardware as meaning electronic parts such as valves and relays. Cybernetics insists, also, on a further and rather special condition that distinguishes it from ordinary scientific theorizing: it demands a certain standard of effectiveness. In this respect it has acquired some of the same motive power that has driven research on modern logic, and this is especially true in the construction and application of artificial languages and the use of operational definitions. Always the search is for precision and effectiveness, and we must now discuss the question of effectiveness in some detail. It should be noted that when we talk in these terms we are giving pride of place to the theory of automata at the expense, at least to some extent, of feedback and information theory.”

Frank Honywill George (1921–1997) British psychologist

Source: The Brain As A Computer (1962), p.2

Search, Motivation, Question, Thinking

“Every generation expands its definition of equality. Previous generations fought for the vote and civil rights. They had the New Deal and Great Society. Now it’s our time to define a new social contract for our generation.”

Mark Zuckerberg (1984) American internet entrepreneur

Harvard Graduation Speech (2017)

Time

“Truth is really whatever can be shown to correspond to reality. Truth is what the facts are essentially. Facts are after all points of data that you can verify to be accurate. A lot of people hate these definitions because it completely undermines their theology. They can’t make the assertions that they want to by saying anything is the absolute truth, because under the definition of either word no you don’t!”

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

Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist https://conatusnews.com/interview-aron-ra-past-president-atheist-alliance-america/, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)

Hate, People, Truth, Reality

“The concept of organizational goals, like the concepts of power, authority, or leadership, has been unusually resistant to precise, unambiguous definition. Yet a definition of goals is necessary and unavoidable in organizational analysis. Organizations are established to do something; they perform work directed toward some end.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1970s, Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View, 1970, p. 133

“I suppose that corruption by definition is a deviation, a perversion from the intended path.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

“I do believe that on a whole, women are definitely smarter than men…I also believe that dogs are smarter than women. (woman in audience says “Not buying that”) No? That one, you don’t believe it? You believe that I didn’t do a series of tests? You are right to not believe it, because I’m going to go ahead and admit that I do not believe what I just said, it was what’s described as a 'joke.'”

David Cross (1964) American comedian, writer and actor

Um, I’ll be telling a bunch of them here tonight.
It's Not Funny

Women, Men, Dogs

“[T]he Christian philosopher of to-day has larger capacities and fuller knowledge than the Israelite of the time of Moses. What the one accepted as literal truth the other cannot accept save as a myth or figure. The children of Israel received without idealisation the statements of their great lawgiver. To them the tables of the law were true tablets of stone, prepared, engraved, broken, and re-engraved; while the graving tool which thus inscribed the law was held undoubtingly to be the finger of God. To us such conceptions are impossible. We may by habit use the words, but we attach to them no definite meaning.”

John Tyndall (1820–1893) British scientist

p, 125
New Fragments (1892)

God, Children, Truth, Law

“If an interaction is too weak to be detectable or to exert influence in any way, then by any operational definition, it doesn’t exist.”

Isaac Asimov book The Gods Themselves

Section 3, Chapter 12, p. 257
The Gods Themselves (1972)

Way

“"Science worships skepticism," I wrote, "unless skepticism is applied to science, its hypotheses, procedures, or methods. What we need are more skeptics who are not afraid to judge the claims of science with the same fine discrimination used to examine other alternate disciplines and fields of endeavor. Like The New York Times, science publishes 'all the news that's fit to print,' meaning all of the news that fits into the officially accepted view of reality. That news is already censored, and yet we're supposed to live our lives in accordance with that official definition of experience.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981), p. 129

Reality, Science, Time

“The dictionary definition of communication […] includes the communication of goods and supplies. […] But transport of goods is not communication in the sense we are adopting here, and does not raise the same subtle and difficult questions. What "goods" do we exchange when we send messages to one another?”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

"… symbols do not carry meaning as trucks carry coal. Their function is to select from alternatives within a given context." (paraphrased by Ernst Gombrich in his Inaugural Lecture at University College London in February 1957, and quoted in memory of Colin Cherry. http://www.gombrich.co.uk/showdoc.php?id=27 Reddy, Michael J. (1979). "The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language," in: Andrew Ortony ed., Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge University Press. (See: Metalanguage) The 'transmission' view of communication, as criticized in favor of the 'ritual' view by James Carey (1985) in: Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin-Hyman). Source: On Human Communication (1957), What Is It That We Communicate?, p. 9

Communication, Question, Sense

“The President put the interest of the PNP as an organization first before his personal friendship and preferences. I commend him for that. However, he still did not name a permanent PNP Chief in order to provide STABILITY and DIRECTION in the PNP, at this difficult time. I urge him to appoint at the soonest. Further, I would have wanted him TO SEND A CLEARER AND TOUGHER MESSAGE to the MILF and to have given DEFINITE instructions to the OPAPP, the GRP panel, and the DOJ insofar as ensuring that justice is exacted from those who brutally and mercilessly massacred the 44 SAF members.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Escudero, F. [Francis]. (2015, February 6). Retrieved from Official Facebook Page of Francis Escudero https://www.facebook.com/senchizescudero/posts/10153052428415610/ 2015, Facebook

Friendship, Justice, Time, Personality

“Augustine's description of Ambrose's silent reading (including the remark that he never read aloud) is the first definite instance recorded in Western literature.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

The Silent Readers, p. 43.
A History of Reading (1996)

Literature, Reading

“Thus, it was quite natural that a synthesis would arise between this new socialism [fascism], which discovered the nation as a revolutionary agent, and the nationalist movement, which also rebelled against the old world of conservatives, against the aristocrats and the bourgeois, and against social injustices and which believed that the nation would never be complete until it had integrated the proletariat. A socialism for the whole collectivity and a nationalism that, severed from conservatism, proclaimed itself as being by definition the messenger of unity and unanimity thus came together to form an unprecedented weapon of war against the bourgeois order and liberal democracy.”

Zeev Sternhell (1935) Israeli historian

Source: The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, 1994, pp. 27-28

War, World, Democracy, Nature

“I definitely have a sexual ego thing. But if I'm suggestive, it's in a nice way. Luckily, no one's ever been hurt…a few girls have passed out, that's all.”

Andy Gibb (1958–1988) British–Australian singer

Tributes, People, March 15, 1999, 2008-12-25 http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20063644,00.html,

Way, Girl, Hurt

“We may summarize the main line of this complexly meandering tale as a list of ironies - invoking the technical definition of irony as a statement where, for humorous or sarcastic effect, the intended meaning of a word becomes directly opposite to the usual sense…”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"The Tallest Tale", p. 313
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Sense

“(On DC: One Million) I just read it again and liked it a lot. Comics were definitely happier, breezier and more confident in their own strengths before Hollywood and the Internet turned the business of writing superhero stories into the production of low budget storyboards or, worse, into conformist, fruitless attempts to impress or entertain a small group of people who appear to hate comics and their creators.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

http://www.newsarama.com/comics/100831-Morrison-Superman8.html
On comics

Hate, People, Confidence, Business

“Since UFO stands for "unidentified flying object", the word ufology means approximately "knowledge about unknown flying objects", and is therefore a "science" whose content is void by definition. Similar considerations hold for parapsychology.”

Lucio Russo (1944) Italian historian and scientist

1.3, "Science", p. 15n
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

Knowledge, Science, Flying

“The leader is one who knows with greater than average strength of intuition what he wants to get done and where he wants to go. 'The world stands aside to let pass the man who knows whither he is going.'
This means that he possesses clarity and precision as to the objectives, purposes or aims that he desires for himself and his group, and that he holds these deeply enough and permanently enough to see them well on the way to being realized. Purposefulness to be effective requires that the aims are: (1) definite; (2) readily communicable to others; (3) potentially attractive to others; and (4) vigor¬ously, persistently and enthusiastically sustained by the leader.”

Ordway Tead (1891–1973) American academic

Source: The art of leadership (1935), p. 91; as cited in: William Sykes " Visions Of Hope: Leadership http://www.openwriting.com/archives/2012/08/leadership_2.php." Published on August 12, 2012.

World, Way

“Planning is one of the many catchwords whose present popularity is roughly proportionate to the obscurity of its definition.”

Chester Barnard book The Functions of the Executive

Source: The Functions of the Executive (1938), p. 112

“Believers use the word “believe” differently than rationalists do. Y’all have a whole different lexicon. For example, the definition of “rational” is being endowed with the capacity to reason, being reasonable, agreeable to reason, and able to be reasoned with. But if you compare this to the statement of faith published by creationist organizations, where they proudly reject reason and admit that no amount of proof will ever change their minds, then you should see that they don’t meet any of those criteria. Religious belief is irrational by definition, being “not governed by or according to reason”, which is why faith is a belief that is not dependent on evidence. Likewise, for believers, “belief” is a conscious act of deliberate intent, of mind over matter, the power of positive thought, which enabled Sean Spicer to think “we can disagree with facts.””

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

No, only the religious mind could even think that. Patheos, Correspondence with a Creationist http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2017/06/06/correspondence-with-a-creationist/ (June 6, 2017)

Faith, Thinking, Change, Dependency

“The fact that there simply is 5,000 times more sun power than our consumption needs makes me very optimistic. It's a fantastic resource. We have the ingenuity to send man to the moon, so we definitively have the ingenuity to tap the sun's resources.”

Derek Abbott (1960) Physicist, engineer

On energy supply and solar power

Time, Sun

“All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.”

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

Vol. VI, par. 191
Collected Papers (1931-1958)

“International Jews.
In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia) Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemborg (Germany) and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.
Graves: This was written by Winston Churchill, a highly regarded M. P. in England…so, I need hardly remind you that it will take strong evidence to prove the “Protocols” ‘’’a fake!’’’
Raslovlev: At an old bookshop I got a copy of “The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu,” by Maurice Joly, 1864.
I examined what I had. It was obvious that the “Protocols of Zion” was copied from it.
Graves: How did you get this?
Raslovlev: I bought this book from a friend, formerly of the Okhrana, our secret agents in France. They ordered the plagiarism!
When the Bolsheviks came in, we left with what we could take out with us.
How much is it worth to you, or your paper, Mr. Graves?
Graves: Hmm…can’t say yet! …Is Geneva really the place of publication??
Raslovlev: I do know that the “Protocols of Zion: was intended to prove to the Tsar that the Revolt in Russia was a Jewish Plot…it was written by an Okhrana agent…a plagiarist, Mathieu Golovinski!
When it was first published in Russia round 1902, its publisher, Dr. Nilus, claimed it to be notes stolen from an 1897 Zionist congress by French agents!
Graves: But that congress was convened by Theodore Herzl to promote a Jewish state. It was not a secret meeting…Dr. Nilus’s claim is a lie!
Raslovlev: Yes, it is indeed! Let me show you…we will compare the “Protocols” with Joly’s Book.
Raslovlev: Set them side by side Graves, and you will see obvious plagiarism of Joly’s “dialogue!”
Graves: I see…be patient while I go through it…yes! Yes! Yes!”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), pp. 70-73

Men, People, Lie, Secret

“There is no need at present to produce new definitions of anarchism — it would be hard to improve on those long since devised by various eminent dead foreigners. Nor need we linger over the familiar hyphenated anarchisms, communist- and individualist- and so forth; the textbooks cover all that. More to the point is why we are no closer to anarchy today than were Godwin and Proudhon and Kropotkin and Goldman in their times.”

Bob Black (1951) American anarchist

Anarchism And Other Impediments To Anarchy (1985)

Time, Dead

“I don't think it's an accurate definition of morality.”

Matt Dillahunty (1969) American activist

Episode 803 (March 3, 2013)
The Atheist Experience

Thinking

“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

“You can verbalize what happens to these animals a thousand times, but [when] you see it, it definitely clicks in—and it did for me. … I’m an animal lover. I was definitely one of those people who wore fur years ago. I was looking online and I [saw] how these animals are tortured and skinned, and you don’t really realize the hurt and the pain they go through just for fashion. I want to be a voice for them. I think that parents should show what’s done to these animals. People who do wear fur, I would like for them to do the research for themselves.”

Evelyn Lozada (1975) American reality show participant, model, spokesmodel.

"Cross Fur off Your Shopping List With Evelyn Lozada" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBiicjOS80A, video interview with PETA (11 December 2012).

Pain, People, Lovers, Fashion

“There are some silly canards that die hard and some that should have been buried long ago such as 'Those that can, do; those as cannot, teach," or the definition of a Professor as a man whose job is to tell students how to solve the problem of life, which he himself has tried to avoid by becoming a Professor; or the more hurtful one that a Professor is a text book wired for sound.”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Teachers & Education

Life, Books, Problem, Hurt

“Mark: Hayley I know that during this last week there's been a little, um, sort of non-verbal tension between us and it's never really been about you as a person. It's definitely not because you as a person, there's so much to admire. There really is. Your heart and your will is just enormous and there are so many people who have had hits without having classically great recording voices and they've done it on the strength of their spirit and the strength of their heart and you've got all of that and heaps.”

Hayley Jensen (1983) Australian singer

Australian Idol, Final Performances, Final 9

People, Heart, Personality

“De Bellaigue is at pains to portray Mossadegh as — in the words of the jacket copy — “one of the first liberals of the Middle East, a man whose conception of liberty was as sophisticated as any in Europe or America.” But the trouble is, there is nothing in Mossadegh’s career — spanning half a century, as provincial governor, cabinet minister, and finally prime minister — to portray him as even remotely a lover of liberty. De Bellaigue quotes Mossadegh as saying that a trusted leader is “that person whose every word is accepted and followed by the people.” To which de Bellaigue adds: “His understanding of democracy would always be coloured by traditional ideas of Muslim leadership, whereby the community chooses a man of outstanding virtue and follows him wherever he takes them.” Word for word, that could have been the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s definition of a true leader. Mossadegh also made a habit of appearing in his street meetings with a copy of the Koran in hand. According to de Bellaigue, Mossadegh liked to say that “anyone forgetting Islam is base and dishonourable, and should be killed.” During his premiership, Mossadegh demonstrated his dictatorial tendency to the full: Not once did he hold a full meeting of the council of ministers, ignoring the constitutional rule of collective responsibility. He dissolved the senate, the second chamber of the Iranian parliament, and shut down the Majlis, the lower house. He suspended a general election before all the seats had been decided and chose to rule with absolute power. He disbanded the high council of national currency and dismissed the supreme court. During much of his tenure, Tehran lived under a curfew while hundreds of his opponents were imprisoned. Toward the end of his premiership, almost all of his friends and allies had broken with him. Some even wrote to the secretary general of the United Nations to intervene to end Mossadegh’s dictatorship. But was Mossadegh a man of the people, as de Bellaigue portrays him? Again, the author’s own account provides a different picture. A landowning prince and the great-great-grandson of a Qajar king, Mossadegh belonged to the so-called thousand families who owned Iran. He and all his children were able to undertake expensive studies in Switzerland and France. The children had French nannies and, when they fell sick, were sent to Paris or Geneva for treatment. (De Bellaigue even insinuates that Mossadegh might have had a French sweetheart, although that is improbable.) On the one occasion when Mossadegh was sent to internal exile, he took with him a whole retinue, including his cook… As a model of patriotism, too, Mossadegh is unconvincing. According to his own memoirs, at the end of his law studies in Switzerland, he had decided to stay there and acquire Swiss citizenship. He changed his mind when he was told that he would have to wait ten years for that privilege. At the same time, Farmanfarma secured a “good post” for him in Iran, tempting him back home.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"Myths of Mossadegh" https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/302213/myths-mossadegh/page/0/1, National Review (June 25, 2012).

Pain, Children, People, Family

“There are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our “human capital” in economic terms) to create something new, whether that’s a takeout app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth.But there is also a second way to make money. That’s the rentier way: by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at others’ expense, using his power to claim economic benefit.”

Rutger Bregman (1988) Dutch journalist, writer and historian

"No, wealth isn’t created at the top. It is merely devoured there"

Money, Way, Knowledge, Wedding

“Practically all theorists agree that entrepreneurship involves, by definition, taking risks of some kind.”

David C. McClelland (1917–1998) American psychological theorist

Source: The Archiving Society, 1961, p. 210

“There's definitely, definitely, definitely, no logic to human behaviour
...
There's no map
And a compass
Wouldn't help at all”

Björk (1965) Icelandic singer-songwriter

"Human Behaviour" (single; 1993)
Songs

Help

“I know that I have the ability to achieve the object of my Definite Purpose in life, therefore, I DEMAND of myself persistent, continuous action toward its attainment, and I here and now promise to render such action.”

Napoleon Hill book Think and Grow Rich

Source: Think and Grow Rich (1938), p. 54

Life

“With an a natural affinity for the epigram genre, I am, so to speak, a short breathed man and have an almost unthoughtout preference for brief definitive statements.”

J. V. Cunningham (1911–1985) American writer

Interview quoted in Timothy Steele 'Introduction & Commentary-Poetry of J V Cunningham'
General

Nature

“Both men and women are conceived as merely capable of response to a situation that their society has already defined for them as sexual, and so the Arapesh feel that it is necessary to chaperon betrothed couples who are too young… with their definition of sex as a response to an external situation rather than as spontaneous desire, both men and women are regarded as helpless in the face of seduction. Parents warn their sons even more than they warn their daughters against permitting themselves to get into situations in which someone can make love to them.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 140

Love, Women, Men, Making love

“The really deep divergence between the humanistic and scientific sensibilities is one of temporality. Very nearly by definition, the scientist knows that tomorrow will be in advance of today. A twentieth-century schoolboy can manipulate mathematical and experimental concepts inaccessible to a Galileo or a Gauss. For a scientist the curve of the future is positive. Inevitably, the humanist looks back.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"Tomorrow".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Mathematics, Future

“We show that it is natural to introduce the concept of black-hole entropy as the measure of information about a black-hole interior which is inaccessible to an exterior observer. Considerations of simplicity and consistency, and dimensional arguments indicate that the black-hole entropy is equal to the ratio of the black-hole area to the square of the Planck length times a dimensionless constant of order unity. A different approach making use of the specific properties of Kerr black holes and of concepts from information theory leads to the same conclusion, and suggests a definite value for the constant.”

Jacob Bekenstein (1947–2015) Mexican-Israeli physicist

[Black Holes and Entropy, Phys. Rev. D, 7, 8, 2333–2346, 15 April 1973, 10.1103/PhysRevD.7.2333]

Nature, Time

“…the famous assertion by Einstein that the length of a rod depends on its velocity and on the chosen definition of simultaneity. …is based on the fact that we do not measure the length of the rod, but its projection on a system at rest. How the length of the projection depends on the choice of simultaneity can be illustrated by reference to a photograph taken through a focal-plane shutter. Such a shutter… consists of a wide band with a horizontal slit, which slides down vertically. Different bands are photographed successively on the film. Moving objects are therefore strangely distorted; the wheels of a rapidly moving car for instance, appear to be slanted. The shape of the objects in the picture will evidently depend on the speed of the shutter. Similarly, the length of the moving segment depends on the definition of simultaneity. One definition of simultaneity differs from another because events that are simultaneous for one definition occur successively for another. What may be a simultaneity projection of a moving segment for one definition is a "focal-plane shutter photograph" for another.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

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

Cars, Appearance, Success, Dependency

“I could become a Gold Glove-caliber shortstop. Not as talented as Vizquel, but definitely on par with Jeter.”

Ichiro Suzuki (1973) Japanese baseball player

Brad Lefton. "Ichiro takes leadership role for Team Japan" http://www.seattletimes.com/sports/ichiro-takes-leadership-role-for-team-japan/. Seattle Times. March 1 2009.

“If philosophy aims at being a theoretical mode of thought and speech, can it have a rhetorical character and be expressed in rhetorical forms? The answer seems obvious. Theoretical thinking, as a rational process, excludes every rhetorical element because pathetic influences—the influences of feeling—disturb the clarity of rational thought. …
To prove means to show something to be something, on the basis of something. To have something through which something is shown and explained definitively is the foundation of our knowledge. Apodictic, demonstrative speech is the kind of speech which establishes the definition of a phenomenon by tracing it back to ultimate principles, or archai. It is clear that the first archai of any proof and hence of knowledge cannot be proved themselves because they cannot be the object of apodictic, demonstrative, logical speech; otherwise they would not be the first assertions. Their nonderivable, primary character is evident from the fact that we neither can speak nor comport ourselves without them, for both speech and human activity simply presuppose them. But if the original assertions are not demonstrable, what is the character of the speech in which we express them? Obviously this type of speech cannot have a rational-theoretical character….
Basic premises cannot have an apodictic, demonstrative character and structure but are thoroughly indicative….
Arche … cannot have a rational but only a rhetorical character. Thus the term "rhetoric" assumes a fundamentally new significance; "rhetoric" is not, nor can it be the art, the technique of an exterior persuasion; it is rather the speech which is the basis of the rational thought.”

Ernesto Grassi (1902–1991) Italian philosopher

Source: Rhetoric as Philosophy (1980), pp. 18-19

Art, Feeling, Knowledge, Thinking

“II. Thesis. In order that decision by arbitrary power may be possible in spite of completely definite laws of the action of ideas, one must assume that the psychic mechanism itself has, or at least in its development acquires, the peculiar property of inducing the necessity of these laws. Antithesis. No one can, in case of affairs, abandon the conviction that the future is co-determined by his transactions.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

Antimonies
Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

Law, Idea, Decision, Future

“I think the Canadian people have a right to know: Why, when your primary objective was to get unfettered and secure access into the American Market we didn't get it. Why you didn't put clauses in to protect our social programs in this negotiation we'll have on the definition of subsidies where the heavy weight of the American Republic will be put in against us. Why did that not happen? Why also, did we get a situation where we surrendered our Energy policy to the United States, something which they'd been trying to achieve since 1956? Why did we abandon our farmers? Why did we open our Capital Markets so that a Canadian Bank can be bought up and we don't have reciprocal rights into the American Market at all? And why did you remove any ability to control the Canadian ownership of our businesses? These are questions that Canadians deserve to have an answer to, and we have not had an opportunity in six hours to deal with them in a way that would make you come out of your shell!”

John Turner (1929) 17th Prime Minister of Canada

People, Way, Question, Business

“Questions and answers click into each other like cogs of a machine. Each person has nothing but quite definite tasks. The various professions are concentrated at definite places. One eats while in motion. Amusements are concentrated in other parts of the city. And elsewhere again are the towers to which one returns and finds wife, family, gramophone, and soul. Tension and relaxation, activity and love are meticulously kept separate in time and are weighed out according to formulae arrived at in extensive laboratory work. If during any of these activities one runs up against a difficulty, one simply drops the whole thing; for one will find another thing or perhaps, later on, a better way, or someone else will find the way that one has missed. It does not matter in the least, but nothing wastes so much communal energy as the presumption that one is called upon not to let go of a definite personal aim. In a community with energies constantly flowing through it, every road leads to a good goal, if one does not spend too much time hesitating and thinking it over. The targets are set up at a short distance, but life is short too, and in this way one gets a maximum of achievement out of it. And man needs no more for his happiness; for what one achieves is what moulds the spirit, whereas what one wants, without fulfillment, only warps it. So far as happiness is concerned it matters very little what one wants; the main thing is that one should get it. Besides, zoology makes it clear that a sum of reduced individuals may very well form a totality of genius.”

Robert Musil book The Man Without Qualities

The Man Without Qualities (1930–1942)

Love, Life, Happiness, Family

“In the spirit of faith let us begin each day, and we shall be sure to "redeem the time" which it brings to us, by changing it into something definite and eternal. There is a deep meaning in this phrase of the apostle, to redeem time. We redeem time, and do not merely use it. We transform it into eternity by living it aright.”

James Freeman Clarke (1810–1888) American theologian and writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 583.

Faith, Change, Time

“God forgives; forgives not capriciously, but with wise, definite, Divine prearrangement; forgives universally, on the ground of an atonement, and on the condition of repentance and faith.”

Richard Salter Storrs (1821–1900) American Congregational clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 440.

God, Faith, Forgiveness, Universe

“The fact that a reasonable hypothesis has not been rigorously proved does not mean that it should be summarily dismissed. It only means that we need more appropriate research for putting it to the test. I believe such definitive research is entirely possible but has not yet been done. So all we are left with are various lines of evidence, no one of which is definitive alone, but which, viewed all together, make it a not unreasonable hypothesis that genetic factors are strongly implicated in the average Negro-white intelligence difference. The preponderance of the evidence is, in my opinion, less consistent with a strictly environmental hypothesis than with a genetic hypothesis, which, of course, does not exclude the influence of environment or its interaction with genetic factors.”

Arthur Jensen (1923–2012) professor of educational psychology

p. 82 of How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? (1969) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_Can_We_Boost_IQ_and_Scholastic_Achievement%3F, the invited paper that created much hostility towards Jensen.

Intelligence

“The Greeks, who were apparently strong on visual aids, originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier. The signs were cut or burnt into the body and advertised that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor — a blemished person, ritually polluted, to be avoided, especially in public places. Later, in Christian times, two layers of metaphor were added to the term : the first referred to bodily signs of holy grace that took the form of eruptive blossoms on the skin; the second, a medical allusion to this religious allusion, referred to bodily signs of physical disorder. Today the term is widely used in something like the original literal sense, but is applied more to the disgrace itself than to the bodily evidence of it. Furthermore, shifts have occurred in the kinds of disgrace that arouse concern. Students, however, have made little effort to describe the structural preconditions of stigma, or even to provide a definition of the concept itself. It seems necessary, therefore, to try at the beginning to sketch in some very general assumptions and definitions.”

Erving Goffman book Stigma

Source: 1950s-1960s, Stigma, 1963, p. 1-2 Lead paragraph

Sense, Effort, Strong, Time

“With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

Quoted in New York Post (30 June 1955)
Letters and interviews

“On June 22nd, [1633, ] in the morning, in the great hall of the Convent of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, Galileo was found guilty of holding a false doctrine. He went down on his knees and both abjured and condemned his own errors. He swore never to argue such doctrines again. It was thus definitely confirmed that the sun did rotate around the earth…Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. Saint Mary Over Minerva. Power over wisdom.”

John Ralston Saul The Doubter's Companion

"Wisdom"
The Doubter's Companion (1994)

Wisdom, Error, Sun, Falseness

“The statement is made with certainty: a festival that does not get its life from worship, even though the connection in human consciousness be ever so small, is not to be found. To be sure, since the French Revolution, people have tried over and over to create artificial festivals without any connection with religious worship, or even against such worship, such as the "Brutus Festival" or "Labor Day," but they all demonstrate, through the forced and narrow character of their festivity, what religious worship provides to a festival. […] Clearer than the light of day is the difference between the living, rooted trees of genuine cultic festival and our artificial festivals that resemble those "maypoles," cut at the roots, and carted here and there, to be planted for some definite purpose. Of course we may have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that we are only at the dawn of an age of artificial festivals. Were we [in Germany] prepared for the possibility that the official forces, and especially the bearers of political power, would artificially create the appearance of the festive with so huge an expense in external arrangements? And that this seductive, scarcely delectable appearance of artificial "holidays" would be so totally lacking in the essential quality, that true and ultimate harmony with the world? And that such holidays would in fact depend on the suppression of that harmony and derive their dangerous seduction from that very fact?”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

In the three rhetorical questions that end this quote, Pieper alludes to the Nazis' elaborately stage-managed "festivals", in particular the Nuremberg Rally, the subject of Leni Riefenstahl's classic propaganda documentary, Triumph of the Will.
Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), Leisure, the Basis of Culture, pp. 51–52

Life, People, Age, World