Quotes about degree
page 10

“A report of the Carnegie Foundation recommended the abolition of the undergraduate bachelor of science degree in education leading to the state certification of teachers. Schools of education should become research institutions at the graduate level of the university and not places for the training of schoolteachers. Those planning to enter the profession of teaching should have four years of general, liberal education at the college level, and then three years of practice teaching under supervision… the best teacher is one who learns in the process of teaching.”

Mortimer J. Adler (1902–2001) American philosopher and educator

Source: Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind (1990), p. 314

Education, School, Learning, Teachers

“The student of the Differential Calculus may… be brought to think it possible that the terms and ideas which that science requires may exist in his own mind in the same rude form as that of a straight line in the conceptions of a beginner in geometry. …he must be prepared to stop his course until he can form exact notions, acquire precise ideas, both of resemblance between those things which have appeared most distinct, and of distinction between those which have appeared most alike. To do this… formal definitions would be useless; for he cannot be supposed to have one single notion in that precise form which would make it worth while to attach it to a word. One reason of the great difficulty which is found in treatises on this subject… the tacit assumption that nothing is necessary previously to actually embodying the terms and rules of the science, as if mere statement of definitions could give instantaneous power of using terms rightly. We shall here attempt… a wider degree of verbal explanation than is usual with the view of enabling the student to come to the definitions in some state of previous preparation.”

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

The Differential and Integral Calculus (1836)

Idea, Thinking, Appearance, Science

“No one in this earthly prison of the body has sufficient strength of his own to press forward with a due degree of watchfulness, and the great majority [of Christians] are kept down with such great weakness that they stagger and halt and even creep on the ground, and so make very slight advances.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Page 22.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

“The child does not internalize the world of his significant others as one of many possible worlds… It is for this reason that the world internalized in primary socialization is so much more firmly entrenched in consciousness than worlds internalized in secondary socialization…. Secondary socialization is the internalization of institutional or institution-based ‘sub worlds’… The roles of secondary socialization carry a high degree of anonymity… The same knowledge taught by one teacher could also be taught by another… The institutional distribution of tasks between primary and secondary socialization varies with the complexity of the social distribution of knowledge”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 129-147

World, Knowledge, Teachers

“[Einstein's cosmological constant] is a name without any meaning. …We have, in fact, not the slightest inkling of what it's real significance is. It is put in the equations in order to give the greatest possible degree of mathematical generality.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932)

Mathematics

“Organizational culture consists of four distinguishable but interrelated components. They include shared basic values, behavioral norms, different types of artifacts, and behaviors… Values can be defined as "a conception, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic of a group, of the desirable which influences the selection from available modes, means, and ends of action." Norms differ from values by a higher degree of specificity and a higher relevance for actual behaviors (Katz and Kahn 1978, p. 43). The shared values within an organization form the basis for the development of these norms, which legitimate specific behaviors. More specifically, we define norms as expectations about behavior or its results that are at least partially shared by a social group (O'Reilly 1989; Thibaut and Kelley 1959). Artifacts include stories, arrangements, rituals, and language that are created by an organization and have a strong symbolic meaning (Schein 1992; Trice and Beyer 1993). The symbolic meaning of artifacts is more important than any instrumental function (Hatch 1993). In contrast, behaviors refer to organizational behavioral patterns with an instrumental function.”

Christian Homburg (1962) German academic

Source: "A multiple-layer model of market-oriented organizational culture", 2000, p. 450

Behavior, Strong

“An international system consists of a group of interacting behavior units called "nations" or "countries," to which may sometimes be added certain supra-national organizations, such as the United Nations. Each of the behavior units in the system can be described in terms of a set of "relevant variables." Just what is relevant and what is not is a matter of judgment of the system-builder, but we think of such things as states of war or peace, degrees of hostility or friendliness, alliance or enmity, arms budgets, geographic extent, friendly or hostile communications, and so on. Having defined our variables, we can then proceed to postulate certain relationships between them, sufficient to define a path for all the variables through time. Thus we might suppose, with Lewis Richardson that the rate of change of hostility of one nation toward a second depends on the level of hostility in the second and that the rate of change of hostility of the second toward the first depends on the level of hostility of the first. Then, if we start from given levels of hostility in each nation, these equations are sufficient to spell out what happens to these levels in succeeding time periods.”

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

Source: 1950s, National images and international systems, 1959, p. 120-121

Hostility, War, Peace, Behavior

“Taught to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject and contemptible Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the dignity of Man which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great and useful purposes.”

George Mason (1725–1792) American delegate from Virginia to the U.S. Constitutional Convention

Virginia Charters (1773)

Idea, Nature, Parting

“Optimism is the parent of despair, while pessimism allows the mind to accustom itself to the inevitable disappointments of human existence by degrees, just as some drugs induce a state of tolerance. Pessimists, moreover, have the better sense of humour, for they have a livelier apprehension of pretension and absurdity. In a meritocracy, furthermore, those who fail must either indulge in elaborate mental contortions to disguise reality from themselves or sink into a deep melancholy.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

British Medical Journal Views and Reviews: Desperate house calls (BMJ 2009;338:b212).

Disappointment, Optimism, Reality, Parent

“A neutral observer would have no difficulty in identifying instances of disconnect between government and people, most obviously in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes where civil society’s voices are muzzled and where peaceful protests are prohibited or severely suppressed,24 but also to a lesser degree in democracies, particularly “representative democracies” that do not genuinely represent, business-driven democracies and so-called “lobby-democracies”, where elected officials tend to be more responsive to the lobbies than to the population.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

United Nations General Assembly - Promotion of a democratic and equitable international order http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/IntOrder/A-68-284_en.pdf. <br class="br">2013

People, Peace, Democracy, Business

“As to Bonaparte, you know what my apprehensions always were, and I can not help thinking they are in a great degree verified. For though he may, and I hope he will, trounce the Austrians…yet it is impossible to deny that he has lost, or at least risqued the losing of an opportunity. Every man has his weak side, and I have always thought Bonaparte's was the thinking Austria more inclined to peace and more to be depended upon than She is. I hope to God he will not suffer from his errour.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Letter to R. Fitzpatrick (10 September 1800), quoted in L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 168.
1800s

God, Peace, Hope, Thinking

“A distinguished writer (Siméon Denis Poisson) has thus stated the fundamental definitions of the science:
:"The probability of an event is the reason we have to believe that it has taken place, or that it will take place."
:"The measure of the probability of an event is the ratio of the number of cases favourable to that event, to the total number of cases favourable or contrary, and all equally possible" (equally like to happen).
From these definitions it follows that the word probability, in its mathematical acceptation, has reference to the state of our knowledge of the circumstances under which an event may happen or fail. With the degree of information which we possess concerning the circumstances of an event, the reason we have to think that it will occur, or, to use a single term, our expectation of it, will vary.”

George Boole (1815–1864) English mathematician, philosopher and logician

Source: 1850s, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854), p. 243-4; As cited in: "George Boole (1815–64)" in: Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations, Edited by W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, January 2006

Mathematics, Knowledge, Thinking, Science

“Men possess virtues and We are ravished out of self by purified Love, even to the Face of God, freed and emptied of every event and illusion. This is the contemplative life of highest price. the Divine likeness in differing measure;
in greater or lesser degree have they found their own essence in the depth of themselves,
according to their dignity. But God fulfils all; and each, clearer or fainter, according to the measure of his love.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

An Anthology of Mysticism and Philosophy

Love, Life, Men, God

“The world needs specialists and highly trained people with advanced degrees, no question about it. But the world also needs diversity and versatility. It needs people who know as much about our value system as they do about our solar system system.”

Roger Smith (executive) (1925–2007) CEO

Roger B. Smith, chairman, General Motors Corporation, at Albion College, Mich. quoted in: U.S. News & World Report Vol 92 (1982). p. 66.

People, World, Question, Training

“Indeed some degree of affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body; we must overact our part in some measure, in order to produce any effect at all.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

" On Cant and Hypocrisy http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Hazlitt/CantHypocrisy.htm", London Weekly Review, (6 December 1828) <br class="br">Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)

Parting

“Not long ago the head of what should be a strictly scientific department in one of the major universities commented on the odd (and ominous) phenomenon that persons who can claim to be scientists on the basis of the technical training that won them the degree of Ph. D. are now found certifying the authenticity of the painted rag that is called the "Turin Shroud" or adducing "scientific" arguments to support hoaxes about the "paranormal" or an antiquated religiosity. "You can hire a scientist [sic]," he said, "to prove anything." He did not adduce himself as proof of his generalization, but he did boast of his cleverness in confining his own research to areas in which the results would not perturb the Establishment or any vociferous gang of shyster-led fanatics. If such is indeed the status of science and scholarship in our darkling age, Send not to ask for whom the bell tolls.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"The Price of the Head", Instauration magazine (March 1980)
1970s, 1980s

Age, Support, Universe, Science

“# The study of relations rather than "entities" with an emphasis on process and transition probabilities as the basis of a flexible structure of many degrees of freedom.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Sociology and modern systems theory (1967)

Study, Freedom

“The way to attain love is to love. A less excellent love leads to a greater love, and a greater love in turn leads to the highest love, as well as to the most excellent and ultimate fruits of active love. Each of these degrees has its own theory and practice. All of them, especially the last degrees, possess a simple, exalted, and singular contemplation of the divine Object, which constantly exerts a powerful influence on the soul and ravishes it with delight.”

John of St. Samson (1571–1636)

From The Goad, the Flames, the Arrows and the Mirror of the love of God

Love, Way, Soul

“I have a liking old
For thee, though manifold
Stories, I know, are told
Not to thy credit;
How one (or two at most)
Drops make a cat a ghost—
Useless, except to roast—
Doctors have said it:How they who use fusees
All grow by slow degrees
Brainless as chimpanzees,
Meagre as lizards;
Go mad, and beat their wives;
Plunge (after shocking lives)
Razors and carving knives
Into their gizzards.”

Charles Stuart Calverley (1831–1884) British poet

Ode to Tobacco.

Cats, Madness

“It is very possible for a teacher to be fluent in speech, earnest in manner, happy in his choice of illustration, and to be a very inefficient teacher, nevertheless. We are often apt to think it enough if we deliver a good lesson, and to forget that, after all, its value depends upon the degree in which it is really received and appropriated by the children. Now, in order to secure that what we teach shall really enter their minds, and be duly fixed and comprehended there, it is above all things necessary that we should be able to use effectively the important instrument of instruction to which our attention is now to be drawn.”

Joshua Girling Fitch (1824–1903) British educationalist

Joshua G. Fitch. The art of questioning https://archive.org/stream/artofquestioning00fitcrich#page/n7/mode/2up. 9th edition. Published 1879. pp. 78-79

Children, Thinking, Teachers, Dependency

“Most Illustrious, &c,— It was not necessary for your Excellency to remind me by letter or the gift of a rich cassock of the pictures, which I have altogether at heart, knowing as I do under what obligation I am for many kindnesses.... Many days have passed since I gave one of the pictures to the ambassador to send to your Excellency. Five others are in a fair way, which I shall finish on hearing that the first was satisfactory, or the reverse, regulating my work accordingly. And so I shall proceed by degrees to the end, when I shall hope to have well served your Excellency. In the meantime, it would be a great favour to me if your Excellency would liberate my benefice from the pension payable upon it, which, besides causing me a loss in money which I pay out yearly, creates not a little trouble and disturbance because of the persons with whom I am pestered, out of whose hands your Excellency alone can save me. I beg, I supplicate your Excellency to do this.... which alone would suffice to make me your Excellency's perpetual slave.”

Titian (1488–1576) Italian painter

In a letter to the Duke of Mantua, from Venice, 6 April 1537; as quoted by J.A.Y. Crowe & G.B. Cavalcaselle in Titian his life and times - With some account..., publisher John Murray, London, 1877, p. 421
1510-1540

Money, Hope, Way, Loss

“I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Section 1.14
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)

Pain, Faith, Thinking

“A reference framework is required in order to locate events in time and space. With some contractions and omissions, Figure 1.1 shows the conventional divisions for the classical and medieval periods. Even before the birth of the idea of nationality, it is quite acceptable to refer to specific countries, such as Greece and Italy, whose boundaries are well defined. It is also usual to refer to areas in which there is felt to have been some degree of cultural unity —— for example, the Roman Empire and Islam. Sometimes space and time are embraced by one image: the Roman Empire can mean either the first four centuries of our era or the area under Roman dominion. Used with care, these concepts have value for some historical purposes, but they can be very misleading. In the first place, we have to bear in mind the shifting of frontiers; in AD 750, for example, the Iberian peninsula was predominantly Muslim while Asia Minor was Christian — by 1450 the reverse was the case. Also, and this can be more serious, the conventional divisions are associated most closely with political and military realities, and often have little bearing on intellectual or social activities.”

Donald Hill (1922–1994) British historian and engineer

A History of Engineering in Classical and Medieval Times, (1985), 1. Introduction.

Idea, Birth, Reality, Time

“What is striking here is the degree to which the Russians were willing to undertake such an audacious and risky action against the most powerful nation on earth. That ought to be a warning to us, that if we thought that the Russians would not dare to so blatantly interfere in our affairs, we were wrong. And if we do not do our very best to understand how the Russians accomplished this unprecedented attack on our democracy and what we need to do to protect ourselves in the future, we will have only ourselves to blame.”

Adam Schiff (1960) American politician

Open Letter to the Committee Hearing Re: FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers

Democracy, Understanding, Future

“To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.”

Tom Stoppard Travesties

Carr, Act I
Travesties (1974)

War, World

“As in the case of the individual, not all the information which is available to the race at one time is accessible without special effort. There is a well-known tendency of libraries to become clogged by their own volume; of the sciences to develop such a degree of specialization that the expert is often illiterate outside his own minute specialty. Dr. Vannevar Bush has suggested the use of mechanical aids for the searching through vast bodies of material. These probably have their uses, but they are limited by the impossibility of classifying a book under an unfamiliar heading unless some particular person has already recognized the relevance of that heading for that particular book. In the case where two subjects have the same technique and intellectual content but belong to widely separated fields, this still requires some individual with an almost Leibnizian catholicity of interest.”

Norbert Wiener book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

VIII. Information, Language, and Society. p. 158.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)

Books, Search, Effort, Science

“In essence, the process model typically views society as a complex, multifaceted, fluid interplay of widely varying degrees and intentions and intensities of association and dissociation. The "structure" is abstract construct, not something distinct from the ongoing interactive process but rather a temporary, accommodative representation of it at any one time.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. 18 as cited in: D. Paul Johnson (2008) Contemporary Sociological Theory: An Integrated Multi-Level Approach. p. 472.

Time

“It must afford no small pleasure to a benevolent mind in the midst of a war, which daily makes so much havoc with the human species, to reflect, that the small-pox which once proved equally fatal to thousands, has been checked in its career, and in a great degree subdued by the practice of Inoculation.”

Benjamin Rush book The New Method of Inoculating for the Small-Pox

[Rush, Benjamin, 1792, The New Method of Inoculating for the Small-Pox, Parry Hall, Philadelphia]

War, Pleasure

“The publication of the book, Corporate Strategy, by H. Igor Ansoff was a major event in the 1965 world of management. As early as it came in this literature, the book represented a kind of crescendo in the development of strategic planning theory, offering a degree of elaboration seldom attempted since.”

Igor Ansoff (1918–2001) American mathematician

Henry Mintzberg (1994), The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, Prentice Hall, Hemel Hempstead. p. 43

Books, World, Literature

“Which looks like a mixture of lacrosse and second-degree manslaughter.”

David Feherty (1958) professional golfer, broadcaster, writer

Feherty describes GAA before Emerald Isle Classic, Sep 1, 2012 ( YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g4IZBfZ9FI)

“All humans are created unequal. You are bigger and stronger than Pop; I am bigger and stronger than Hilda. I have the least years of experience; Pop has the most. Pop is a super-genius…but he concentrates so hard that he forgets to eat…unless he has a nursemaid to watch him—as Mama did, as I did, as Hilda now does. You, sir, are the all-around most competent man I’ve ever met, whether driving a duo, or dancing, or telling outrageous tales. Three of us have eight or nine earned degrees…but Aunt Hilda with none is a walking encyclopedia from insatiable curiosity and extraordinary memory. We two are baby factories and you two are not—but two men can impregnate fifty women—or five hundred. There is no end to the ways that we four are unequal.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Number of the Beast

Source: The Number of the Beast (1980), Chapter XXXI : “—the first ghosts ever to search for an obstetrician.”, p. 321

Women, Men, Way, Memory

“Decision control is measured by the degree to which any one of the participants may unilaterally determine the outcome of the dispute. For example, where a third-party decisionmaker alone may order a resolution to be imposed, the decision-maker has total decision control. Control over the process refers to control over the development and selection of information that win constitute the basis for resolving the dispute.”

John Thibaut (1917–1986) American social psychologist

Source: "A theory of procedure." 1978, p. 546

Decision

“After earning the PhD degree and acquiring some relatively extensive experience in digital computers… It was time to leave the University. The result of an extensive search for the right job was a family move to Arlington Heights, Illinois, where it was a short commute to the Research Laboratories of the Pure Oil Company at Crystal Lake. I was given the title of Mathematical and Computer Consultant. The Labs were set in a beautiful campus, the professional personnel were eager to learn what I had to teach and to include me in many interesting projects where my knowledge and skills could be put to good use. I was encouraged to initiate my own program of research. I went to work with enthusiasm.
The corporate headquarters of Pure Oil were located in down town Chicago. Pure Oil had been trying to install an IBM 705 computer system for all their accounting needs including calculation of all data necessary for the management of exploration, drilling, refining and distribution of oil products and even royalties to shareholders in oil wells. Typical for those early days, the programming team was in deep difficulties and needed help; they lacked adequate resources and suitable training. The Executive Vice President of Pure Oil, when he heard that there was a computer expert already on the payroll at the Crystal Lake lab, ended our family blissful dream and I was reassigned to the down town office.”

A. Wayne Wymore (1927–2011) American mathematician

Systems Movement: Autobiographical Retrospectives (2004)

Family, Beauty, Dreams, Search

“Sandinistas are a democratically elected government which originally led a popular revolution to overthrow a dictatorship based on slavery…
US foreign policy could be best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I'll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. It can hardly be said to be a complicated foreign policy. What is interesting about it is that it is so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do. I find the ignorance in this country, Britain, and certainly the US, really quite deep. It is not only the Republican Party and government in the US which are responsible for this state of affairs, but I see the Democrats as only differing by degrees. While they say "no more military aid to the Contras"… they are still referring to an innate and deeply embedded assumption that they are talking about a Marxist-Leninist totalitarian dictatorship; gangsters, thugs, instructed from Moscow.”

Harold Pinter (1930–2008) playwright from England

Quoted in an interview http://www.haroldpinter.org/politics/politics_america.shtml, conducted by Andrew Graham-Yooll, South Magazine (May 1988)

Money, Kiss, Success, Country

“I have always been interested in oval or ovoid shapes. The first carvings were simple realistic oval forms of the human head or of a bird. Gradually my interest grew in more abstract values – the weight, poise and curvature of the ovoid as a basic form. The carving and piercing of such a form seems to open up an infinite variety of continuous curves in the third dimension, changing in accordance with the contours of the original ovoid and with the degree of penetration of the material. Here is a sufficient field for exploration to last a lifetime..”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Source: 1932 - 1946, The Studio 132:643', (1946), p. 279

Bird, Change

“In a free society a large degree of human activity is none of the government's business. We should make criminal what's going to hurt other people and other than that we should leave it to people to make their own choices.”

Barney Frank (1940) American politician, former member of the House of Representatives for Massachusetts

Frank commenting on legislation to remove federal criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use. CNN Newsroom : Rep. Barney Frank's Marijuana Bill http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0807/30/cnr.05.html (30 July 2008)]

People, Business, Hurt

“Any complex activity, if it is to be carried on with any degree of virtuosity, calls for appropriate gifts of intellect and temperament. If they are outstanding and reveal themselves in exceptional achievements, their possessor is called a 'genius.”

Carl von Clausewitz book On War

On War (1832), Book 1

“The Supreme has then not only spread life and movement throughout, and willed that its impress should be preserved, but has done more; for he has permitted man to associate in some degree with his work, and to modify it.”

Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist

Adolphe Quételet. 1981. Letters addressed to H.R.H. the Grand Duke of Saxe Coburg and Gotha, on the theory of probability. Arno Press, p. 134

Life

“The contrast between man's ideological capacity to move at random through material and metaphysical spaces and his physical limitations, is Uneven lengths and uneven angle-degrees of the point-rudder result in a deviating course. the origin of all human tragedy. It is this contrast between power and prostration that implies the duality of human existence. Half winged-half imprisoned, this is man!”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

IIII.37, The Arrow. p. 54
1921 - 1930, Pedagogical Sketch Book, (1925)

“Bonaparte's wish is Peace, nay that he is afraid of war to the last degree.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Letter to Charles Grey (12 December 1802), quoted in L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 201.
1800s

War, Peace

“I think I deserve this (honorary) law degree just because I have been sued so much... For those of you heading out into the world -- don't be scared, getting sued is the first sign of success. As long as you didn't do anything wrong -- don't worry about it. It's just part of this great country.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

speech after award of honorary law degree from Barry University (Miami, Florida) (22 May 2002)
2007, 2008

World, Law, Thinking, Success

“The West never came close to proletarian revolution. The Left likes to believe that it did. They like to argue that 'Franklin Roosevelt saved capitalism from itself'. This is another way of saying that John Maynard Keynes saved capitalism from itself. Both arguments are incorrect. Roosevelt and Keynes met only once. Roosevelt correctly assessed Keynes as a mathematician, not an economist. This was true. Keynes got his degree in mathematics, not economics. Roosevelt was the source of what we call Keynesianism, 1933-36, not Keynes, whose General Theory appeared in 1936. But scholars like to believe that academic arguments shape the world. They don't. They conform what has already begun to take root in the thinking and practices of the general public. When men decided that "thou shalt not steal" means "thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote," the Keynesian worldview was born. This view is dominant today. Marxism is dead. So is " means this: it is immoral to steal, with or without majority vote. This has nothing to do with the mode of production.”

Gary North (economist) (1942) American Christian Reconstructionist and economic historian

"Cultural Marxism Is an Oxymoron" http://www.garynorth.com/public/12623.cfm (1 July 2014), Gary North.

Men, World, Way, Mathematics

“This (precognitive ability) steers the cell through mazes of probabilities, while allowing it to retain knowledge of its own greater fulfillment -- the ideas of itself, which is always alive in any given period of your time. On a different kind of scale, then, each individual has the same sort of idealized version of the self, and so does each species. Here I mean each species, and I am not simply referring to mankind. Obviously these are not apparent to the physical senses, yet they are strong energy centers that to some degree stimulate the physical senses toward activity. To that degree, then, there are indeed "tree gods," gods of the forest, and "gods of being" connected with each person.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The “Unknown” Reality: Volume One, (1977), p. 117; Session 691

God, Idea, Knowledge, Sense

“I'd rather be in Las Vegas 104 degrees than New York 90 degrees, you know why? Legalized prostitution. In any weather that takes the edge off.”

Ray Romano (1957) American stand-up comedian

as "Patient #3" to Dr. Katz in Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist

Weather

“It is said that great leaders are born, not made. The saying is true to this degree, that no man can persuade people to do what he wants them to do, unless he genuinely likes people, and believes that what he wants them to do is to their own advantage.”

Bruce Fairchild Barton book The Man Nobody Knows

Source: The Man Nobody Knows (1924), Ch. 4 : His Method

People

“It is erroneous to consider the multiplication (or increase) of needs as a sign of progress, to think that it is necessary to arouse in the people still unpolished (or rough), new needs to bring them to a more civilised life. Similarly ("de même", Fr.) it is erroneous to expect (or want, or wish, - "vouloir," Fr.) to measure (or assess) the degree of culture of a man to the degree of refinement he make (or deploy, or unfold) in his methods ("modes", Fr.) of pleasure”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

"jouissance", Fr.
Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 48 - Gandhi wrote something that is almost word for word the same, in All men are brothers.

Life, People, Pleasure, Thinking

“Amazon society, as mythology, history, and universal male nightmare, represents a culture in which women reign culturally supreme because of their gender. Amazon societies are also important because women were trained to be warriors—military and, presumably, in other ways as well. ...

In Amazon societies, women were mothers and their society's only warriors; mothers and their society's only hunters; mothers and their society's only political and religious leaders. No division of labor based on sex seems to have existed in such societies. Although Amazon leaders existed and queens were elected, the societies seem to have been … ones in which any woman could aspire to and achieve full human expression.

In Amazon society, only men, when they were allowed to remain, were, in widely differing degrees, powerless and oppressed.”

Phyllis Chesler (1940) Psychotherapist, college professor, and author

Women and Madness (2005), pp. 335–336 (emphases in original), and see Women and Madness (1972), pp. 284–285 (similar text).
Women and Madness (1972, 2005)

Women, Men, Sex, Way

“Kit chuckled. “You, Bull Morgan, are a wicked judge of human character.”
“Hell, Kit, thought you’d figured it out by now: all human character is wicked. Just varies in degree is all.””

Robert Lynn Asprin (1946–2008) American science fiction and fantasy author

Source: Wagers of Sin (1996), Chapter 15 (p. 313)

Hell

“The fundamental difference between composing for a nobleman or a personal patron in general and working for the anonymous concert public is that the commissioned work is usually intended for a single performance, whereas the concert piece is written for as many repeats as possible. That explains not only the greater degree of care with which such a work is often composed but also the more exacting way in which the composer presents it. Now that it is possible to create works which would not be consigned to oblivion so quickly as commissioned works, he 76 sets out to create ‘immortal’ works. Haydn already composes much more cautiously and slowly than his predecessors. But even he writes over a hundred symphonies; Mozart writes only half as many and Beethoven only nine.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

Source: The Social History of Art, Volume III. Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism, 1999, Chapter 2. The New Reading Public

Way, Personality

“What do you suppose makes all men look back to the time of childhood with so much regret (if their childhood has been, in any moderate degree, healthy or peaceful)? That rich charm, which the least possession had for us, was in consequence of the poorness of our treasures.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

Lecture V, section 82.
The Eagle's Nest (1872)

Men, Peace, Time, Childhood

“In sculpture the projection of the fasciculi must be accentuated, the foreshortening forced, the hollows deepened; sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump, not of clear, well-smoothed, unmodelled figures. Ignorant people, when they see close-knitted true surfaces, say that 'it is not finished.' No notion is falser than that of finish unless it be that of elegance; by means of these two ideas people would kill our art. The way to obtain solidity and life is by work carried out to the fullest, not in the direction of achievement and of copying détails, but in that of truth in the successive schemes. The public, perverted by académie préjudices, confounds art with neatness. The simplicity of the 'École' is a painted cardboard ideal, A cast from life is a copy, the exactest possible copy, and yet it has neither motion nor eloquence. Art intervenes to exaggerate certain surfaces, and also to fine down others. In sculpture everything depends upon the way in which the modelling is carried out with a constant thought of the main line of the scheme, upon the rendering of the hollows, of the projections and of their connections; thus it is that one may get fine lights, and especially fine shadows that are not opaque. Everything should be emphasised according to the accent that it is desired to render, and the degree of amplification is personal, according to the tact and the temperament of each sculptor; and for this reason there is no transmissible process, no studio recipe, but only a true law. I see it in the antique and in Michael Angelo. To work by the profiles, in depth not by surfaces, always thinking of the few geometrical forms from which all nature proceeds, and to make these eternal forms perceptible in the individual case of the object studied, that is my criterion. That is not idealism, it is a part of the handicraft. My ideas have nothing to do with it but for that method; my Danaids and my Dante figures would be weak, bad things. From the large design that I get your mind deduces ideas.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 61-63

Life, People, Truth, Law

“[A]ngels made no complaint about any of the creatures that were created during the six days of Creation, except about Man. This is because he was created in God's image and consists of Upper and Lower together. When the angels saw it, they were startled and bewildered. How would the pure, spiritual soul descend from its sublime degree, and come and dwell in the same abode with this filthy, beastly body? (…) The answer that came to them is is that there is already a tower filled abundantly, and empty of guests. To fill it with guests, we need the existence of this human, made of Upper and lower together (…) Know that this tower, filled abundantly, implies all the pleasure and the goodness for which He has created the creatures.”

Yehuda Ashlag (1886–1954) Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and Kabbalist

Assorted Themes, On Creation

God, Pleasure, Angels, Soul

“The rule of our law is that the immediate cause, the causa proxima, and not the remote cause, is to be looked at: for, as Lord Bacon says: "It were infinite for the law to judge the causes of causes and their impulsions one of another; therefore it contenteth itself with the immediate cause, and judgeth of acts by that, without looking to any further degree."”

Colin Blackburn, Baron Blackburn (1813–1896) British judge

Sneesby v. Lancashire and Yorkshire Rail. Co. (1874), L. R. 9 Q. B. Ca. 267.

Law

“Presently I shall be introduced as 'this venerable old gentleman' and the axe will fall when they raise me to the degree of 'grand old man'. That means on our continent any one with snow-white hair who has kept out of jail till eighty.”

Stephen Leacock (1869–1944) writer and economist

On achieving fame in Canada.
Source: Three Score and Ten

“Who has studied the works of such men as Euler, Lagrange, Cauchy, Riemann, Sophus Lie, and Weierstrass, can doubt that a great mathematician is a great artist? The faculties possessed by such men, varying greatly in kind and degree with the individual, are analogous with those requisite for constructive art. Not every mathematician possesses in a specially high degree that critical faculty which finds its employment in the perfection of form, in conformity with the ideal of logical completeness; but every great mathematician possesses the rarer faculty of constructive imagination.”

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

Source: Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A (1910), p. 290. ; Cited in: Moritz (1914, 184): Mathematics as a fine art.

Men, Art, Imagination, Study

“The portion of the materia prima which is… is endowed with the intellectual faculty, possesses a special property by which each individual, according to the degree of his perfection, is enabled to manage, to calculate, and to discover what is conducive both to the temporary existence of the individual and to the preservation of the species. All other movements… by the individual members of the species are due to accident; they are not, according to Aristotle, the result of rule and management… Aristotle sees no difference between the falling of a leaf or a stone and the death of the good and noble people in the ship; nor does he distinguish between the destruction of a multitude of ants by an ox depositing on them his excrement and the death of worshippers killed by the fall of the house when its foundations give way.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

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

Death, People, Way, Housing

“Starting with the Minnesota twin study thirty-five years ago, and now with a mountain of data from twin, sibling, and adoption studies, we know that pretty much anything you can quantify about human personality, behavior, and intelligence is to some degree heritable, average-average at around the fifty percent level but sometimes much higher. We now in fact have a busy and exciting field of study called “behavioral genetics.” Given that all these traits are heritable, it follows from the ordinary laws of biology that different races will exhibit different statistical profiles on them. That’s not astonishing, mysterious, or horrible: It’s just first-floor-level science.”

John Derbyshire (1945) writer

John Derbyshire On Why Race Realism Makes More Sense Than “Magic Dirt” Theory http://www.vdare.com/articles/john-derbyshire-on-why-race-realism-makes-more-sense-than-magic-dirt-theory, VDARE, November 1, 2015.

Law, Behavior, Mountain, Intelligence

“Taste was his world. Rilke behaved as if art were taste elevated to the highest possible degree. The armigerous chatelaines who played hostess were happy to believe it, since the idea made them artists too.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Sergei Diaghilev, p. 172
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

World, Art, Idea, Happiness

“There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth… than that of the perfect dependence of the "moral" sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

The Portrait of a Lady.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

Life, Truth, Art, Spring

“Valuable vocational courses have vanished along with the further education colleges that once delivered them. Now all such colleges are universities, every other tutor is a professor and all get degrees which are supposed to be of equal value. But of course this is nonsense on stilts. A degree in golf-course management does not have the same value as a degree in physics.”

Melanie Phillips (1951) British journalist

http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles/archives/001420.html

Education, Universe

“In the languor of disease and the weariness of old age, the pleasures of the vain and empty distinctions of greatness disappear. To one, in this situation, they are no longer capable of recommending those toilsome pursuits in which they had formerly engaged him. In his heart he curses ambition, and vainly regrets the ease and the indolence of youth, pleasures which are fled for ever, and which he has foolishly sacrificed for what, when he has got it, can afford him no real satisfaction. In this miserable aspect does greatness appear to every man when reduced either by spleen or disease to observe with attention his own situation, and to consider what it is that is really wanting to his happiness. Power and riches appear then to be, what they are, enormous and operose machines contrived to produce a few trifling conveniencies to the body, consisting of springs the most nice and delicate, which must be kept in order with the most anxious attention, and which, in spite of all our care, are ready every moment to burst into pieces, and to crush in their ruins their unfortunate possessor. …
But though this splenetic philosophy, which in time of sickness or low spirits is familiar to every man, thus entirely depreciates those great objects of human desire, when in better health and in better humour, we never fail to regard them under a more agreeable aspect. Our imagination, which in pain and sorrow seems to be confined and cooped up within our own persons, in times of ease and prosperity expands itself to every thing around us. We are then charmed with the beauty of that accommodation which reigns in the palaces and economy of the great; and admire how every thing is adapted to promote their ease, to prevent their wants, to gratify their wishes, and to amuse and entertain their most frivolous desires. If we consider the real satisfaction which all these things are capable of affording, by itself and separated from the beauty of that arrangement which is fitted to promote it, it will always appear in the highest degree contemptible and trifling. But we rarely view it in this abstract and philosophical light. We naturally confound it, in our imagination with the order, the regular and harmonious movement of the system, the machine or economy by means of which it is produced. The pleasures of wealth and greatness, when considered in this complex view, strike the imagination as something grand, and beautiful, and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it.
And it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.”

Adam Smith book The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Chap. I.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part IV

Pain, Health, Pleasure, Youth

“May God give a blessed Laylat Al-Bara’ah to the whole Islamic World. May God give all Muslims faith in the degree of Haqq al-yaqîn (the total reality of Certainty), may God give them all the faith of the Prophets. May the decision for the system of the Mahdi, for the Unity of Islam be given insha’Allah in this night.”

Harun Yahya (1956) Turkish author

23 June 2013.
A9 TV addresses, 2013

God, World, Faith, Reality

“History is filled with examples of men and women who rendered highly effective performance without the conventional badges of accomplishment in terms of certificates, diplomas, or degrees. Diplomas and tests are useful servants, but Congress has mandated the commonsense proposition that they are not to become masters of reality.”

Warren E. Burger (1907–1995) Chief Justice of the United States from 1969 to 1986

Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424, 432 (1971).

Women, Men, History, Reality

“What is really meant when we talk of the need for men to make relationships a priority is that we would like to have the best of both worlds by preserving the qualities that make the young man a creative and dedicated technological person, while superimposing on that an equal competence in relationships. In fact, the psychological undertow that makes one possible, to the same degree makes the other impossible. … Achieving the ultimate in externalization and internalization at the same time is a psychological impossibility, because one exists to the degree that the other doesn't. You can't have the best of both worlds. You can only manipulate matters enough to give the temporary appearance of having the best of both worlds.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

We can send a man to the moon but we still can't handle relationships: exploring a misleading cliche, pp. 269–270
The Inner Male (1987)

Men, World, Appearance, Time

“We are carrying into the next decade many unresolved problems raised by Vietnam. How can a democracy such as ours defend its interests at acceptable cost and continue to enjoy the freedom of speech and behavior to which we are accustomed in time of peace? To a Communist enemy the Cold War is a total, unending conflict with the United States and its allies- without formal military hostilities, to be sure- but conducted with the same discipline and determination as a formal war. Unless we can learn to exercise some degree of self-discipline, to accept and enforce some reasonable standard of responsible civic conduct, and to remove the many self-created obstacles to the use of our power, we will be unable to meet the hard competition waiting for us in the decade of the 1970s.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: Swords and Plowshares (1972), p. 408

Hostility, War, Peace, Behavior

“To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Life of Milton
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Faith, Religion, Hope, Distant

“Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a person who has attained that union in greater or less degree; or who aims at and believes in such attainment.”

Evelyn Underhill book Practical Mysticism

Source: Practical Mysticism (1914), Chapter I, What Is Mysticism?, p. 23

Art, Reality, Personality

“Even discourse which does not acknowledge "musical coherence" as "intellectual communication" does not in fact succeed in treating it as anything else; it is only by locating their concerns in domains where the "musical" aspects of music are peripherally or not at all involved that musical discourses can circumvent the fact that when the "object of thought" consists of the contents of a musical composition just the recognition of the identities of any of these contents (or even of the undivided single identity of them taken all together as a "unit") involves (to varying degrees) the same considerations that are involved in a discourse that explicitly--and hence with a better chance of cognitive particularity--regards such a composition as an instance of communicative thought.”

Benjamin Boretz (1934) American composer

from Meta-Variations: studies in the foundations of musical thought Red Hook, N.Y. : Open Space, 1995.

Music, Communication, Chance

“Needless to deny that the normal London plumber is a dishonest man. We do not even allow ourselves to think so. That question, as to the dishonesty of mankind generally, is one that disturbs us greatly; — whether a man in all grades of life will by degrees train his honesty to suit his own book, so that the course of life which he shall bring himself to regard as soundly honest shall, if known to his neighbours, subject him to their reproof. We own to a doubt whether the honesty of a bishop would shine bright as the morning star to the submissive ladies who now worship him, if the theory of life upon which he lives were understood by them in all its bearings.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

The Plumber (1880)

Life, Books, Star, Question

“Being a bourgeoisie in a colonial and semi-colonial country and oppressed by imperialism, the Chinese national bourgeoisie retains a certain revolutionary quality at certain periods and to a certain degree--even in the era of imperialism--in its opposition to the foreign imperialists and the domestic governments of bureaucrats and warlords (instances of opposition to the latter can be found in the periods of the Revolution of 1911 and the Northern Expedition), and it may ally itself with the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie against such enemies as it is ready to oppose. In this respect the Chinese bourgeoisie differs from the bourgeoisie of old tsarist Russia. Since tsarist Russia was a military-feudal imperialism which carried on aggression against other countries, the Russian bourgeoisie was entirely lacking in revolutionary quality. There, the task of the proletariat was to oppose the bourgeoisie, not to unite with it. But China's national bourgeoisie has a revolutionary quality at certain periods and to a certain degree, because China is a colonial and semi-colonial country which is a victim of aggression. Here, the task of the proletariat is to form a united front with the national bourgeoisie against imperialism and the bureaucrat and warlord governments without overlooking its revolutionary quality.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On New Democracy (1940)

Country

“The phenomenal Celia Cruz [is missing]. But although she couln't be here physically [Cruz died in 2003], I felt her presence throughout the entire recording of the album. It's still impossible for me to feel like Celia's gone, simply because she is still so alive to me through her music and the friendship we shared for so many years. There were moments during this recording that felt to me like she was directing me to a degree or giving me ideas for where to go with the song.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

Reuters (July 23, 2007)
2007, 2008

Friendship, Music, Feeling, Idea

“Creativity requires risk. So do exploration and innovation. Anyone who thinks outside of the box is taking a risk. Leadership brings many risk. Courage is exercised in the face of risk. Invest involve risk. Decision-making always mean a certain degree of risk.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Take The Risk (2008), p. 161

Exercises, Courage, Thinking, Decision

“Among the various subjects of the inquiry, however, which, inconsequence of the vague use of language, are comprehended under the general title of metaphysics, there are some, which are essentially distinguished from the rest, both by the degree of evidence which accompanies their principles, and by the relation which they bear to the useful sciences and arts: and it has unfortunately happened, that these have shared in that general discredit, into which the other branches of metaphysics have fallen. To this circumstance is probably to be ascribed, the little progress which has hitherto been made in the PHILOSOPHY OF THE HUMAN MIND; a science, so interesting in its nature, and so important in its applications, that it could scarcely have failed, in these inquisitive and enlightened times, to have excited a very general attention, if it had not accidentally been classed, in the public opinion with the vain and unprofitable disquisitions of the schoolmen.”

Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) Scottish philosopher and mathematician

Source: Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 1792, p. 9; Lead paragraph (II)

Art, Nature, Science, Time

“To a degree, we have been attacking the problem by increasing purchasing power through higher wage scales and increased Social Security benefits. But these measures are exercised with restraint and come only as a consequence of organized struggles…Those at the lowest economic level, the poor white, the Negro, the aged, are traditionally unorganized and have little or no ability to force a growth in their consumer potential. They stagnate or become even poorer in relation to the larger society.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Address to Local 815, Teamsters and the Allied Trades Council (1967)

Age, Exercises, Problem

“Individuals who participate in interaction rituals are filled with emotional energy, in proportion to the intensity of the interaction. Durkheim called this energy “moral force,” the flow of enthusiasm that allows individuals in the throes of ritual participation to carry out heroic acts of fervor or self-sacrifice. I would emphasize another result of group-generated emotional energy: it charges up individuals like an electric battery, giving them a corresponding degree of enthusiasm toward ritually created symbolic goals when they are out of the presence of the group. Much of what we consider individual personality consists of the extent to which persons carry the energy of intense interaction rituals; at the high end, such persons are charismatic; a little less intensely, they are forceful leaders and the stars of sociability; modest charges of emotional energy make passive individuals; and those whose interaction ritual participation is meager and unsuccessful are withdrawn and depressed.”

Randall Collins (1941) American sociologist

Source: The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), p. 23

Star, Personality

“Peace is not so much a political mandate as it is a shared state of consciousness that remains elevated and intact only to the degree that those who value it volunteer their existence as living examples of the same. It does not end when jetliners are used as bombs to decimate skyscrapers, nor does it end when a father shoots to death his adolescent son and daughter. Peace ends with the unraveling of individual hope and the emergence of the will to worship violence as a healer of private and social dis-ease. It is, after all, not only nations and communities that need peace so desperately but individuals divided against other individuals and within themselves.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(p. 257, The American Poet Who Went Home Again).
Book Sources, The American Poet Who Went Home Again (2008)

Death, Peace, Hope, Communication

“A Christianity split into a diversity of ecclesiastical streams, the dualism implicit within its political agenda – nation-forming on the one side, universalism on the other was further accentuated. The classical eastern orthodox form stressing the power of the emperor was in principle universalist enough in its vision of Constantinople as the New Rome, but in practice Byzantium became a rather thoroughly Greek empire, alienating non-Greeks in Egypt, Syria or the west. This combined with its considerable degree of Caesaropapism led to the generation of a type of church-state relationship characteristic of eastern autocephalous churches of a highly nationalist type.”

Adrian Hastings (1929–2001) Roman Catholic priest, historian and author

Source: The construction of nationhood: ethnicity, religion, and nationalism (1997), p. 202; As cited in: Cristian Romocea (2011) Church and State: Religious Nationalism and State Identification in Post-Communist Romania . p. 90.

Universe

“I claim that many patterns of Nature are so irregular and fragmented, that, compared with Euclid — a term used in this work to denote all of standard geometry — Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity … The existence of these patterns challenges us to study these forms that Euclid leaves aside as being "formless," to investigate the morphology of the "amorphous."”

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician

As quoted in a review of The Fractal Geometry of Nature by J. W. Cannon in The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 91, No. 9 (November 1984), p. 594

Nature, Study

“Since the Gothic, European sculpture had become overgrown with moss, weeds – all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape. It has been Brancusi's special mission to get rid of this overgrowth, and make us once more shape-conscious. To do this he has had to concentrate on very simple direct shapes, to keep his sculpture, as it were, one-cylindered, to refine and polish a single shape to a degree almost too precious.... it may now be no longer necessary to close down and restrict sculpture to the single form unit. We can now begin to open out. To relate and combine together several forms of varied sizes, sections, and directions into one organic whole.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Source: 1925 - 1940, The sculptor speaks' (1937), p. 250

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quote from (MPC 3); as cited in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 167
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1951 - 1960

God, World, Nature, Reality

“I began my editorial career with the presidency of Mr. Adams, and my principal object was to render his administration all the assistance in my power. I flattered myself with the hope of accompanying him through [his] voyage, and of partaking in a trifling degree, of the glory of the enterprise; but he suddenly tacked about, and I could follow him no longer. I therefore waited for the first opportunity to haul down my sails.”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

Porcupine’s Gazette, No. 799 (13 January 1800).

Hope, Waiting

“O ye who are invested with the Bayán! Regard not yourselves as being like unto the people to whom the Qur’án or the Gospel or other Scriptures of old were given, since at the time of His manifestation ye shall stray farther from God than did they. If ye happen to shut yourselves out it would never cross your minds that ye were shut out from Him. It behooveth you to consider how the people unto whom the Qur’án was given were debarred from the Truth, for indeed ye will act in a like manner, thinking that ye are doers of good. If ye perceive the degree of your deprivation of God, ye will wish to have perished from the face of the earth and to have sunk into oblivion. The day will come when ye will earnestly desire to know that which would meet with the good-pleasure of God but, alas, ye shall find no path unto Him. Ye, even as camels that wander aimlessly, will not find a pasture wherein ye may gather and unite upon a Cause in which ye can assuredly believe. At that time God shall cause the Sun of Truth to shine forth and the oceans of His bounty and grace to surge, while ye will have chosen droplets of water as the object of your desire, and will have deprived yourselves of the plenteous waters in His oceans.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

XVI, 13
The Kitáb-I-Asmá

God, People, Pleasure, Truth

“All existing things upon this earth, which have knowledge of their own existence, possess, some in one degree and some in another, the power of thought, accompanied by perception, which is the awakening of thought by the effects of external objects upon the senses.”

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

Formal Logic (1847)

Knowledge, Sense

“In Hilary Term 1636, 7. I took the Degree of Batchelor of Arts; and in 1640, the Degree of Master of Arts, and then left Emanuel College; and the same year I entered into Holy Orders, ordained by Bishop Curle, then Bishop of Winchester. I then lived a Chaplain for about a year, in the house of Sr. Richard Darley, (an antient worthy Knight,) at Buttercramb in Yorkshire, and then, for two years more, with the Lady Vere, (the Widdow of the Lord Horatio Vere,) partly in London, and partly at Castlc-Hedingham in Essex, the antient seat of the Earls of Oxford.”

John Wallis (1616–1703) English mathematician

Dr. Wallis's Account of some Passages of his own Life (1696)

Art, Housing

“If I had neglected my duty in pursuit of pleasure, or if I had been wanting in respect to your Excellency, I would have put my hand upon my mouth, and been silent upon the occasion; but, as I am not conscious of being chargeable with either the one or the other, I cannot help thinking I have been treated with a degree of severity that I am in no respect deserving. And I would just observe here, that it is impossible for me to do my duty if I am always at head-quarters. I have ever given my attendance there as much as possible, both from a sense of duty and from inclination; but constant attendance is out of my power, unless I neglect all other matters; the propriety of which, and the consequences that will follow, I submit to your Excellency's consideration.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (July 1778)

Pleasure, Thinking, Sense, Help

“The power of attending to what is spoken, or in other words the power of listening, is one of the most useful habits that we can acquire; it keeps the mind active, and we can thus learn not only by hearing, but by reading and reflection, by fixing our minds steadily on the matter which we wish to master. It is… in a great degree, the sure means of success in all that we undertake; and if the power is not acquired early in life, great labour will be necessary to acquire it afterwards.”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

An Old Man's Thoughts on Many Things, Of Education I

Life, Learning, Reading, Success

“[H]e was now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be his puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were demanded by his study.
Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from the moment that his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his intellect.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

p, 125
"Ethan Brand" (1850)

Nature, Study

“The mode of appointment of the Chief Magistrate of the United States is almost the only part of the system, of any consequence, which has escaped without severe censure, or which has received the slightest mark of approbation from its opponents. The most plausible of these, who has appeared in print, has even deigned to admit that the election of the President is pretty well guarded.1 I venture somewhat further, and hesitate not to affirm, that if the manner of it be not perfect, it is at least excellent. It unites in an eminent degree all the advantages, the union of which was to be wished for.”

Alexander Hamilton Federalist Papers

No. 68
The Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

Appearance, Parting, Perfection

“In my search for these values I like to work both realistically and abstractly. In my drawing and painting I turn from one to the other as a necessity or impulse and not because of a preconceived design of action. When drawing what I see I am usually most conscious of the underlying principle of abstract form in human beings and their relationship one to the other. In making my abstract drawings I am most often aware of those human values which dominate the structure and meaning of abstract forms. Sculpture is the fusion of these two attitudes and I like to be free as to the degree of abstraction and realism in carving. The dominant feeling will always be the love of humanity and nature; and the love of sculpture for itself.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Source: 1961 - 1975, Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial autobiography', 1970, p. 285

Love, Feeling, Search, Nature

“But while at the bottom of the national life the slime was thus constantly accumulating more and more deleteriously and deeply, so much the more smooth and glittering was the surface, overlaid with the varnish of polished manners and universal friendship. All the world interchanged visits; so that in the houses of quality it was necessary to admit the persons presenting themselves every morning for the levee in a certain order fixed by the master or occasionally by the attendant in waiting, and to give audience only to the more notable one by one, while the rest were more summarily admitted partly in groups, partly en masse at the close—a distinction which Gaius Gracchus, in this too paving the way for the new monarchy, is said to have introduced. The interchange of letters of courtesy was carried to as great an extent as the visits of courtesy; "friendly" letters flew over land and sea between persons who had neither personal relations nor business with each other, whereas proper and formal business-letters scarcely occur except where the letter is addressed to a corporation. In like manner invitations to dinner, the customary new year's presents, the domestic festivals, were divested of their proper character and converted almost into public ceremonials; even death itself did not release the Roman from these attentions to his countless "neighbours," but in order to die with due respectability he had to provide each of them at any rate with a keepsake. Just as in certain circles of our mercantile world, the genuine intimacy of family ties and family friendships had so totally vanished from the Rome of that day that the whole intercourse of business and acquaintance could be garnished with forms and flourishes which had lost all meaning, and thus by degrees the reality came to be superseded by that spectral shadow of "friendship," which holds by no means the least place among the various evil spirits brooding over the proscriptions and civil wars of this age.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 4, Pt. 2, Translated by W.P. Dickson.
On Roman Friendship in the last ages of the Republic.
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

Life, Death, Friendship, War

“In ancient times there was no public education, except that of the forum, the theater, and the street, and the general degree of illiteracy was very high…. the early men of science were left very much to themselves and such a phrase as "the scientific culture of Alexandria in the third century B. C." does not cover any reality. In a sense, this is still true today; the real pioneers are so far ahead of the crowd (even a very literate crowd) that they remain almost alone…”

George Sarton (1884–1956) American historian of science

Preface.
A History of Science Vol.2 Hellenistic Science and Culture in the Last Three Centuries B.C. (1959)

Men, Education, Reality, Sense

“When the passions, such as joy, anger, grief, and pleasure, have not awakened, that is our central self, or moral being (chung). When these passions awaken and each and all attain due measure and degree, that is harmony, or the moral order (ho). Our central self or moral being is the great basis of existence, and harmony or moral order is the universal law in the world.
When our true central self and harmony are realised, the universe then becomes a cosmos and all things attain their full growth and development.”

Zisi (-481–-402 BC) Chinese philosopher

Variant translation: "Before joy, anger, sadness and happiness are expressed, they are called the inner self; when they are expressed to the proper degree, they are called harmony. The inner self is the correct foundation of the world, and harmony is the illustrious Way. When a man has achieved the inner self and harmony, the heaven and earth are orderly and the myriad things are nourished and grow thereby."
As translated by Lin Yutang in The Importance of Living (1937), pp. 143–144
Source: The Doctrine of the Mean, p. 104

Pleasure, World, Law, Universe

“The proponents of a mandatory retirement age and term limits have underestimated the degree to which the rational actor model applies to Justices. In making many decisions, as the empirical evidence demonstrates, Justices attempt to maximize their own preferences, whether based on policy considerations or other factors. The retirement decision is no exception. Scholars who dispute the applicability of the rational actor model to Justices have either not focused on the persuasive empirical evidence advanced by political scientists or have failed to consider all of the variables that touch upon judicial utility.”

David Stras (1974) American judge

The Incentives Approach to Judicial Retirement https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=550083013021092016089124092101123109019053019081050000104123078004026111095112098007032035042036057108108088070117116005124105087007061001121113115101118119116088029023111029064077104010121092024068066031005116087002001031092011074124095102105073&EXT=pdf (October 25, 2005)

Age, Justice, Decision

“It is true that we were cautious in our planning. There were many uncertainties about how well our Lunar module systems and our Pressure suit and backpack would match the engineering predictions in the hostile lunar environment. We were operating in a near perfect vacuum with the temperature well above 200 degrees Fahrenheit with the local gravity only one sixth that of Earth. That combination cannot be duplicated here on Earth, but we tried as best we could to test our equipment for those conditions. For example, because normal air conditioning is inadequate for lunar conditions, we were required to use cold water to cool the interior of our suits. We did not have any data to tell us how long the small water tank in our backpacks would suffice. NASA officials limited our surface working time to 2 and 3/4 hours on that first surface exploration to assure that we would not expire of hyperthermia.”

Neil Armstrong (1930–2012) American astronaut; first person to walk on the moon

Letter to Robert Krulwich (2010)

Hostility, Water, Time, Perfection

“When she got to an angle of about 60 degrees, there was a sullen sort of rumbling roar as her massive boilers all left their beds and went crashing down through the bulkheads and everything that stood in their way.Up to that moment, she had stood out as clear as clear with her rows of electric lights all burning. When the boilers broke away, she was, of course, plunged into absolute darkness though her huge black outline was still perfectly distinct up against the stars and sky.Slowly she reared up on end till, at last, she was absolutely perpendicular. Then quite quietly, but quicker and quicker, she seemed just to slide away under the surface and disappear.As she vanished, everyone around me on the upturned boat, as though they could hardly believe it, just said, "She's gone."”

Charles Lightoller (1874–1952) British sailor

Interview with the BBC, 1936

Star, Light

“It is quite clear to you that all the people see that lower kinds of creation could have been made in a different way from that in which they really are, and as they see this lower degree in many things they think that they must have been made by chance.”

Averroes book On the Harmony of Religions and Philosophy

On the Harmony of Religions and Philosophy

People, Way, Thinking, Chance

“Every one, though born of God in an instant, yet undoubtedly grows by slow degrees.”

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

Letter (27 June 1760), published in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley (1813) Vol. XVI, p. 109
As quoted in an 1856 edition of Works
General sources
Variant: Every one, though born of God in an instant, yea, and sanctified in an instant, yet undoubtedly grows by slow degrees.

God

“I actually think it will be interesting to listen to the President tonight. What I'd like him to do is report on his promises but there are forgotten promises and forgotten people. Over the last four years, the President has said that he was going to create jobs for the American people and that hasn't happened. He said he would cut the deficit in half and that hasn't happened. He said that incomes would rise and instead incomes have gone down. And I think this is a time not for him not to start restating new promises but to report on the promises he made. I think he wants a promises reset. We want a report on the promises he made. And that means let's hear some numbers. Let's hear 16. Sixteen trillion dollars of debt. This is very different than the promise he made. Let's hear the number 47. 47 million people in this country on food stamps. When he took office, 33 million people were on food stamps. Let's understand why it was he's been unsuccessful in helping alleviate poverty in this country. Why so many people have fallen from the middle class into poverty under this president. Let's have him explain to the American people the 50% number. Why 50% of college graduates can't find work or work that is consistent with their college degree. The President needs to report tonight on his promises rather than try and reset a whole series of new promises that he also won't be able to keep.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

2012-09-06
http://mittromneycentral.com/2012/09/06/romney-on-obamas-speech-tonight-americans-want-a-report-on-presidents-promises/
Romney on Obama’s Speech Tonight: Americans Want A Report On President’s Promises
Mitt Romney Central
2012

People, Food, Understanding, Thinking

“Above all, I am sure that Seth is my channel to revelational knowledge, and by this I mean knowledge that is revealed to the intuitive portion of the self rather than discovered by the reasoning faculties. Such revelational material is available to all of us, I believe, to some degree. From it springs the aspirations and achievements of our race. I think that revelational knowledge come first in the form of intuitions, dreams, hunches, or experiences such as mine, and that the intellect than (sic) uses the information provided. both are important.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Seth Material (1970), p. 293

Dreams, Spring, Knowledge, Thinking

“It requires a much higher degree of imagination to understand the electromagnetic field than to understand invisible angels. … I speak of the E and B fields and wave my arms and you may imagine that I can see them … [but] I cannot really make a picture that is even nearly like the true waves.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

volume II; lecture 20, "Solution of Maxwell's Equations in Free Space"; section 20-3, "Scientific imagination"; p. 20-9 to 20-10
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

Angels, Imagination, Understanding

Quotes about degree page 10

Quotes about degree
page 10