Quotes about degree
page 5

“The God idea is growing more impersonal and nebulous in proportion as the human mind is learning to understand natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively correlates human and social events.”

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

The Philosophy of Atheism (1916)

God, Idea, Understanding, Nature

“We must examine the degree to which we coddle middle-class girls. There is something sick about it. The girls I see on campuses are often innocuous, with completely homogenized personalities, miserable, anorexic and bulimic. The feminist movement teaches them that it's men's fault, but it isn't. These girls go out into the world as heiresses of all the affluence in the universe. They are the most pampered and most affluent girls on the globe. So stop complaining about men. You're getting all the rewards that come with the nice-girl persona you've chosen. When you get into trouble and you're batting your eyes and someone is offending you and you are too nice to deal with it, that's a choice. Assess your persona. Realize the degree to which your niceness may invoke people to say lewd and pornographic things to you — sometimes to violate your niceness. The more you blush, the more people want to do it. Understand your part of it and learn to parry. Sex talk is a game. The girls in the Sixties loved it. If you don't want some professor to call you honey, tell him.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Playboy interview (May 1995)

Love, Men, People, World

“A person examining too nearly a small portion of a very large circle… would see in this detached portion merely a certain quantity of physical points, grouped in a more or less irregular manner, and so, indeed, as to seem as if they had been arranged by chance… But, placing himself at a greater distance, the eye embraces of necessity a greater number of points, and already a degree of regularity is observable… and by removing still farther from the object, the observer loses sight of the individual points, no longer observes any accidental or odd arrangements amongst them, but discovers at once the law presiding over their general arrangements, and the precise nature of the circle so traced.”

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

Introductory
A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties (1842)

Law, Nature, Chance, Personality

“Diseases, a paralysis of the left side, a monstrous right hand tremor strengthened by the efforts by the needle [for engraving] and caused by previous excesses with alcohol, prevent me from doing any calligraphic craftsmanship. A constant effort to achieve my goal - I've never reached the degree hoped - has exacerbated my life, and every job has ended with the depression of having to go on with this life.”

Lovis Corinth (1858–1925) German painter

Quote, 1923; in Lovis Corinth, Selbstbiographie, L. Corinth; Hirzel, Leipzig, 1926, p. 194; as quoted in: German Artists' Writings in the XX Century - Lovis Corinth, Autobiographic Writings. Part two http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.nl/2014/10/german-artists-writings-in-xx-century.html

Life, Alcohol, Disease, Hope

“That no human ruler can claim the same degree of allegiance that God claims; that God's kingship or suzerainty relativizes all human regimes; that all human political arrangements, even the most just and humane, fall short of the kingdom of God: these are ideas that have reverberated over the centuries and into our own time.”

Jon D. Levenson (1949) American biblical scholar

The Love of God (2016), pp. 9-10

God, Idea, Time

“The structural viewpoint considers the roles people play, rather than the nature of the personalities in these roles. It deals with the structures in which roles are performed— the relationship of groups to each other, such as sales and production, and the degree of centralization or decentralization.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1970s, Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View, 1970, p. 2

People, Nature, Personality

“It is difficult to assess how much this gambling spirit is active in the minds of individual investors. If it is, even to a small degree, it is relevant to our discussion since it makes investors prone to imitation and herding because they invest on little information. It may also explain the anomalously large volatility of prices and their potential instabilities.”

Didier Sornette (1957) French scientist

Source: Why Stock Markets Crash - Critical Events in Complex Systems (2003), Chapter 4, Positive Feedbacks, p. 114.

“Khamenei is certainly better educated than the late Khomeini. At least he can speak and write correct Persian and Arabic, something the late Ayatollah never managed. From available evidence Khamenei also has a better knowledge of Islam and its history than Khomeini did. Nevertheless, Khamenei has never been accepted as a theologian or Islamic scholar, but as a political leader, bestowing on him a degree of dangerous ambiguity. That ambiguity enables him to hit much higher than his weight by using his political position as long as the going is good. However, the slightest sign that his political power may be on the wane or seriously challenged could expose him as a prophet without armor. And that, in the context of Iran’s violent politics, created of the same substance as angels or not, is a dicey situation to be in, to say the least.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

The Supreme Guide and the Substance of the Angels http://english.aawsat.com/2015/08/article55344963/the-supreme-guide-and-the-substance-of-the-angels, Ashraq Al-Awsat (31 Aug, 2015).

Education, Angels, History, Knowledge

“Whatever time thy golden eyelids ope
They travel to a hope;
Not only backward from these low degrees
To starry dynasties,
But, looking far where now the silence owns
And rules from empty thrones,
Thou seest the enchanted halls of heaven burn
For joy at our return.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Hope, Travel, Silence, Time

“My brother Fairchild has just bought himself an "electronic janitor", a costly device which, I understand, keeps his house at an even temperature of 70 degrees without any effort on his part whatsoever. I don't know quite how it works, but it has something to do with molecules and the quantum theory.”

Robertson Davies book The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

Understanding, Effort, Parting, Housing

“We must not underrate our adversary; the U. S. soldier has technical capacity and is backed by weapons and resources of such magnitude that render him frightful. He lacks the essential ideological motivation which his bitterest enemies of today — the Vietnamese soldiers — have in the highest degree. We will only be able to overcome that army by undermining their morale — and this is accomplished by defeating it and causing it repeated sufferings.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Message to the Tricontinental (1967)

Motivation, Suffering

“To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.”

E. F. Schumacher book A Guide for the Perplexed

A Guide for the Perplexed

People, Soul, Evil

“When the Shah departed towards the close of the day, a false rumour was spread through the town that he had been severely wounded by a shot from a matchlock, and thus were sown the seeds from which murder and rapine were to spring. The bad characters within the town collected in great bodies, and, without distinction, commenced the work of plunder and destruction…. On the morning of the 11th an order went forth from the Persian Emperor for the slaughter of the inhabitants. The result may be imagined; one moment seemed to have sufficed for universal destruction. The Chandni chauk, the fruit market, the Daribah bazaar, and the buildings around the Masjid-i Jama’ were set fire to and reduced to ashes. The inhabitants, one and all, were slaughtered. Here and there some opposition was offered, but in most places people were butchered unresistingly. The Persians laid violent hands on everything and everybody; cloth, jewels, dishes of gold and silver, were acceptable spoil…. But to return to the miserable inhabitants. The massacre lasted half the day, when the Persian Emperor ordered Haji Fulad Khan, the kotwal, to proceed through the streets accompanied by a body of Persian nasakchis, and proclaim an order for the soldiers to resist from carnage. By degrees the violence of the flames subsided, but the bloodshed, the devastation, and the ruin of families were irreparable. For a long time the streets remained strewn with corpses, as the walks of a garden with dead flowers and leaves. The town was reduced to ashes, and had the appearance of a plain consumed with fire. All the regal jewels and property and the contents of the treasury were seized by the Persian conqueror in the citadel. He thus became possessed of treasure to the amount of sixty lacs of rupees and several thousand ashrafis… plate of gold to the value of one kror of rupees, and the jewels, many of which were unrivalled in beauty by any in the world, were valued at about fifty krors. The peacock throne alone, constructed at great pains in the reign of Shah Jahan, had cost one kror of rupees. Elephants, horses, and precious stuffs, whatever pleased. the conqueror’s eye, more indeed than can be enumerated, became his spoil. In short, the accumulated wealth of 348 years changed masters in a moment.”

Nader Shah (1688–1747) ruled as Shah of Iran

About Shah’s sack of Delhi, Tazrikha by Anand Ram Mukhlis. A history of Nâdir Shah’s invasion of India. In The History of India as Told by its own Historians. The Posthumous Papers of the Late Sir H. M. Elliot. John Dowson, ed. 1st ed. 1867. 2nd ed., Calcutta: Susil Gupta, 1956, vol. 22, pp. 74-98. https://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/h_es/h_es_tazrikha_frameset.htm

Pain, People, World, Family

“If the Lord has you saved, you're saved, ok? You can't get out of God's hand. Then this 300 degree below zero ice meteor came flying through the solar system. Some of it broke apart. It made craters on Mercury and craters on the Moon. Four of the planets today still have rings around them. And the rings around these planets are made of rock and ice. Very interesting. Now Walt Brown thinks some of the craters on the Moon were formed when the fountains of the deep broke open and rocks went flying up out of Earth's gravitational pull, drifted around for a while, and clobbered into the Moon. He may be right on that. I don't know but it's interesting. He thinks the comets came from Earth, and water on Mars came from Earth, when the fountains of the deep broke upon. You could read about it for yourself if you would like. The super cold snow would land mostly around the north and south poles because super cold ice is not only affected by the magnetic field, it is easily statically charged. […] As this ice meteor came flying towards the earth it broke apart, pieces would settle in around the poles mostly, causing the earth to wobble for a few hundred years. Or maybe even a few thousand years. The canopy of water overhead collapsed, then it rained 40 days, the water underneath the bottom, under the crust came shooting to the surface, and the water kept going up for 150 days. And everybody drowned. It probably took six or eight months to kill everybody during that flood. We all get the idea, "Well it rained and everybody died first day."”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

No, it took a long time for people to die. People would be running and fighting for higher ground. As that got more and more rare as the water keeps coming up, and up, and up, for 150 days, the water increased. By the way, they are still discovering chunks of ice flying around in space.
Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Hovind theory

God, People, Way, Idea

“The determination of strategy also requires consideration of what alternative is preferred by the chief executive and perhaps by his immediate associates as well, quite apart from economic considerations. Personal values, aspirations, and ideals do, and in our judgment quite properly should, influence the final choice of purposes. Thus, what the executives of a company want to do must be brought into the strategic decision.
Finally, strategic choice has an ethical aspect—a fact much more dramatically illustrated in some industries than in others. Just as alternatives may be ordered in terms of the degree of risk that they entail, so may they be examined against the standards of responsibility that the strategist elects. Some alternatives may seem to the executive considering them more attractive than others when the public good or service to society is considered. What a company should do thus appears as a fourth element of the fateful decision we have called strategic”

Kenneth R. Andrews (1916–2005) Business scholar

Source: Quote, The Concept of Strategy, 1971, p. 38, cited in: Gastón de los Reyes, Jr. "Introduction (as presented) to The Concept of Strategy 40 Years Later." August 15, 2011, at lgst.wharton.upenn.edu.

Fate, Decision, Appearance, Personality

“I’m just saying that right now we could all use a degree of perspective. Because this is not the end of the world.”

Alastair Reynolds book The Prefect

Source: The Prefect (2007), Chapter 13 (p. 191)

World

“Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe. The painter's art is more confined, and has nothing that corresponds with, or perhaps is equivalent to, this power and advantage of leading the mind on, till attention is totally engaged. What is done by Painting, must be done at one blow; curiosity has received at once all the satisfaction it can ever have.”

Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) English painter, specialising in portraits

Discourse no. 8, delivered on December 10, 1778; vol. 1, p. 247.
Discourses on Art

Art, Painting

“We all know- or at least we are told continually- that we are a divided people. And we know there's a degree of truth in it. We have too often allowed our differences to prevail among us. We have too often allowed ambitious men to play off those differences for political gain. We have too often retreated behind our differences when no one really tried to lead us beyond them. But all our differences hardly measure up to the values we all hold in common… I am running for the Senate because… I want to make the system work again, and I am convinced that is what all Americans really want.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Pages xvi-xvii
2000s, Promises to Keep (2008)

Men, People, Truth

“Artists and religionists are never far apart, they go to the sources of revelation for what they choose to experience and what they report is the degree of their experiences. Intellect wishes to arrange — intuition wishes to accept.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

A Second Outline in Portraiture (1936), as quoted in Marsden Hartley, Gail R. Scott - Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York, p. 167
1930s

“It is impossible for the behavior of a single, isolated individual to reach a high degree of rationality. The number of alternatives he must explore is so great, the information he would need to evaluate them so vast that even an approximation to objective rationality is hard to conceive. Individual choice takes place in rationality is hard to conceive… Actual behavior falls short in at least three ways, of objective rationality:”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947

Way, Behavior

“Before we continue our story we must stop to ask, “What is a castle?” Once a castle was defined simply as the fortified and self-sufficient dwelling of an individual feudal lord. Today we know that castles had many functions, both practical and symbolic. The castle was a new ar chitectural form—part fortress, part residence, part statehouse, part the atrical stage. Furthermore, every castle was different, depending on the wealth of the builder, the reason for the castle (control of territory, bor der, coastlines), the local geography (availability of naturally defensible sites), the knowledge of the master builder or patron, the available ma terials, the degree of urgency (speed), and finally the building traditions of the region (the techniques the workmen knew and used). In short, there is no such thing as a typical castle; a castle was a very special build ing whose form and function answered the needs of people living in Eu rope from the eleventh through the fifteenth century.”

Marilyn Stokstad (1929–2016) art historian

Overview: Castles in Context
Medieval castles (2005)

People, Nature, Knowledge, Parting

“The distinction between true and false consciousness, real and immediate interest still is meaningful. But this distinction itself must be validated. Men must come to see it and to find their way from false to true consciousness, from their immediate to their real interest. They can do so only if they live in need of changing their way of life, of denying the positive, of refusing. It is precisely this need which the established society manages to repress to the degree to which it is capable of “delivering the goods” on an increasingly large scale, and using the scientific conquest of nature for the scientific conquest of man.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. xlv-xlvi

Life, Men, Way, Nature

“I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything. There are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask "Why are we here?" I might think about it a little bit, and if I can't figure it out then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn't frighten me.”

Richard Feynman book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Source: No Ordinary Genius (1994), p. 239, from interview in "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" (1981): video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEwUwWh5Xs4&t=48m10s

Way, Feeling, Thinking, Universe

“For me there’s no good or bad, as long as I’m feeling everything to the greatest degree, whether it’s sadness or happiness.”

Paz de la Huerta (1984) American actress

Blackbookmag interview http://www.blackbookmag.com/movies/paz-de-la-huerta-bares-all-1.28620

Sadness, Feeling, Happiness

“An examination of our terms, such as competition, rivalry, emulation, etc., reveals that the traditional perspective remains inscribed in the language. Competitors are fundamentally those who run or walk together, rivals who dwell on opposite banks of the same river, etc…The modern view of competition and conflict is the unusual and exceptional view, and our incomprehension is perhaps more problematic than the phenomenon of primitive prohibition. Primitive societies have never shared our conception of violence. For us, violence has a conceptual autonomy, a specificity that is utterly unknown to primitive societies. We tend to focus on the individual act, whereas primitive societies attach only limited importance to it and have essentially pragmatic reasons for refusing to isolate such an act from its context. This context is one of violence. What permits us to conceive abstractly of an act of violence and view it as an isolated crime is the power of a judicial institution that transcends all antagonists. If the transcendence of the judicial institution is no longer there, if the institution loses its efficacy or becomes incapable of commanding respect, the imitative and repetitious character of violence becomes manifest once more; the imitative character of violence is in fact most manifest in explicit violence, where it acquires a formal perfection it had not previously possessed. At the level of the blood feud, in fact, there is always only one act, murder, which is performed in the same way for the same reasons in vengeful imitation of the preceding murder. And this imitation propagates itself by degrees. It becomes a duty for distant relatives who had nothing to do with the original act, if in fact an original act can be identified; it surpasses limits in space and time and leaves destruction everywhere in its wake; it moves from generation to generation. In such cases, in its perfection and paroxysm mimesis becomes a chain reaction of vengeance, in which human beings are constrained to the monotonous repetition of homicide. Vengeance turns them into doubles.”

René Girard book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

Source: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), p. 11-12.

Way, Distant, Time, Perfection

“That air and harmony of shape express,
Fine by degrees, and beautifully less.”

Matthew Prior (1664–1721) British diplomat, poet

Henry and Emma; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“To a very high degree the measure of success in battle leadership is the ability to profit by the lessons of battle experience.”

Lucian Truscott (1895–1965) Recipient of the Purple Heart medal

Quoted in Command Missions, A Personal Story, New York, 1954,
ISBN 0-89141-364-2

Success

“Mathematicks therefore is a Science which teaches or contemplates whatever is capable of Measure or Number as such. When it relates to Number, it is called Arithmetick; but when to measure, as Length, Breadth, Depth, Degrees of Velocity in Motion, Intenseness or Remissness of Sounds, Augmentation or Diminution of Quality, 6tc. it is called Geometry.”

Jacques Ozanam (1640–1718) French mathematician

Source: A Mathematical Dictionary: Or; A Compendious Explication of All Mathematical Terms, 1702, p. 1, The Introduction

Science

“Each individual of whatever species, and each consciousness, whatever its degree, automatically seeks to enhance the quality of life itself - not only for itself but for all of reality as well.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 893, Page 194
Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Volume One (1986)

Life, Reality

“Satiation, like any state of vitality, always contains a degree of impudence, and that impudence emerges first and foremost when the sated man instructs the hungry one.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (October 20, 1891)
Letters

“"High" and "low" are completely arbitrary and artificial distinctions that some bloated assholes invented to make life more complicated. Comics are considered "low", but when Roy Lichtensein comes and picks out one panel of a comic, projects and paints it on a canvas then it's suddenly "high" art? Give me a break. The only thing that I care about in art is quality, intensity. Is a work of art capable of touching and moving me? Does it cause an emotional impact on me? Does it startle, surprise, upset, excite me? Does it make me think? Does it inspire me? Does it stimulate my imagination? Does it change the way I view the world to some degree?”

Gottfried Helnwein (1948) Austrian photographer and painter

Interview by Michal Szyksznian http://www.gottfried-helnwein-interviews.com/interviews/celebritarian.html, celebritarian.pl, 2009

Life, World, Art, Way

“It is above all the impersonal and economically rationalized (but for this very reason ethically irrational) character of purely commercial relationships that evokes the suspicion, never clearly expressed but all the more strongly felt, of ethical religions. For every purely personal relationship of man to man, of whatever sort and even including complete enslavement, may be subjected to ethical requirements and ethically regulated. This is true because the structures of these relationships depend upon the individual wills of the participants, leaving room in such relations for manifestations of the virtue of charity. But this is not the situation in the realm of economically rationalised relationships, where personal control is exercised in inverse ratio to the degree of rational differentiation of the economic structure.”

Max Weber (1864–1920) German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist

Source: Sociology of Religion (1922), pp. 216-217

Religion, Exercises, Dependency, Personality

“And finally after months of really a cold war [between his father and him] he made a very generous agreement with me that if I would get a Ph. D. so that I would be equipped to teach in a college as an economic insurance, he would give me fifty dollars a week for the rest of my life to do whatever I wanted to do on the assumption that with fifty dollars I could not starve but it would be no inducement to last. So with that agreed on Harvard then - it was actually the last year - Harvard still had the best philosophy school in the world. And since I had taken my degree at Stanford in philosophy, and since he didn't care what the Ph. D. was in, I went on to Harvard.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

'Oral history interview with Robert Motherwell', 1971 Nov. 24 - 1974 May 1, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
after 1970

Life, War, World, School

“The postulation of a principle of causality, “to every effect there is a cause,” has been a continuing central problem for philosophy (Popper, 1972). Its role as a source of contention in modern science (Jauch, 1973) is epitomized by Einstein’s remark that, “I can’t believe that God plays dice.” Many of the arguments about the application of the principle are very relevant to systems science and to problems of system identification and machine learning, on the one hand, and to epistemology and behavioural psychology, on the other. In current system science the theory of causal deterministic systems is most well developed and generally applied, while the theory of modeling with alternative structures, e. g., stochastic automata, indeterminate automata, products of asynchronous automata, etc., has not been developed to the same degree.”

Brian R. Gaines (1938) British computer scientist

Introduction.
On the Complexity of Causal Models (1977)

God, Problem, Learning, Science

“Progress in every country depends mainly on the education of its people. Without education, we are a nation of children. The difference between one man and another, apart from birth and social position, consists in the extent of knowledge, general and practical, acquired by him. We may safely assume that man in all countries within certain limits start with the same degree of intelligence. A civilised nation is distinguished from an uncivilised one by the extent of its acquired intelligence and skill.”

Mokshagundam Visveshvaraya (1860–1962) Indian engineer, scholar, statesman and the Diwan of Mysore

Quoted in The Most Celebrated Indian Engineer:Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, 22 November 2013, Official web site of Government of India: Vigyan Prasar http://www.vigyanprasar.gov.in/dream/feb2000/article1.htm,

Children, People, Education, Intelligence

“The question was what's happening to the individual in America? Is the individual going the way of the environment, being destroyed? In other words, were we becoming the creatures of the machine?
That was the way people thought in the '60s. Now maybe that's passé today but that's the kind of thing people thought about. Are we turning into machines? They wanted to rebel against that.
Their rebellion cannot be called a success by any means, far from it. Those of us who tried are very grateful that we tried to the degree we did. Anybody who achieved any success against the machine feels good about it.”

Charles A. Reich (1928–2019) American lawyer

The Greening of America turns 40 (2010)

People, Way, Feeling, Question

“The whole world is burdened with young fogies. Old men with ossified minds are easily dealt with. But men who look young, act young, and everlastingly harp on the fact they are young, but who nevertheless think and act with a degree of caution which would be excessive in their grandfathers, are the curses of the world.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949)

Men, World, Thinking

“There are basically two types of creationists; the professional or political creationists; these are the activists who lead the movement and who will regularly deliberately lie to promote their propaganda; and the second type which are the innocently-deceived followers commonly known as “sheep”. I know lots of intellectual Christians, but I can’t get any of them to actually watch the televangelists, because they either already know how phony they are, or they don’t want to find out. But that only allows a radical fringe to claim support from they masses they now also claim to represent. So there’s nothing to stop them. Professional creationists are making money hand over fist with faith-healing scams or bilking little old ladies out of prayer donations, or selling books and videos at their circus-like seminars where they have undeserved respect as powerful leaders. All of them feign knowledge they can’t really possess, and some of them claim degrees they’ve never actually earned… Were it not for this con, they’d have to go back to selling used cars, wonder drugs, and multi-level marketing schemes. They will never change their minds no matter what it costs anyone else.”

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

"1st Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnJX68ELbAY, Youtube (November 11, 2007) <br class="br">Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Money, Lie, Books, Faith

“The highest degree of consciousness, the crassest form of 'false consciousness' always manifests itself when the conscious mastery of economic phenomena appears to be at its greatest.”

György Lukács book History and Class Consciousness

Source: History and Class Consciousness (1968), p. 64

Appearance, Falseness

“Stim was a medium she ordinarily avoided, something in her personality conflicting with the required degree of passivity.”

William Gibson book Count Zero

On Marly Krushkhova, in Ch. 23
Count Zero (1986)

Personality

“Acosta: This whole notion of they have to learn English before they get to the United States, are we just going to bring in people from Great Britain and Australia?
Miller: I am shocked at your statement, that you think only people from Great Britain and Australia would know English. It actually reveals your cosmopolitan, er, bias, to a shocking degree, that in your mind… No, this an amazing moment…
Acosta: It sounds like you're trying to engineer the racial and ethnic flow of people into this country through this policy.
Miller: Jim, that is one of the most outrageous, insulting, ignorant and foolish things you've ever said, and for you that's still a really… The notion that you think that this is a racist bill is so wrong and so insulting.”

Stephen Miller (1985) political advisor for policy

Exchanges with CNN's Jim Acosta https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0izucPBY4k during a briefing on legislation that would seek to curtail legal immigration and create a new points-based green card system (2 August 2017) <br class="br">2010s

People, Thinking, Learning, Country

“Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in. I suppose we all realize the degree to which fear and resentment of what is new is really a lament for the memories of our childhood.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

1960s, Presidential Address, 1969

Youth, World, Fear, Memory

“The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)

Love, Sense

“The powers, and faculties, and principles that are necessary fully to comprehend all that we see and all that surrounds us, exist and have been bestowed on man by his beneficent Creator. Still, it is only by slow degrees that he is to become their master, acquiring knowledge, step by step, as he has need of its services, and learns how to use it. Such seems to be the design of Providence, which is gradually opening to our inquiries the arcana of nature, in order that we may convert their possession into such uses as will advance its own wise intentions. Happy are they who feel this truth in their character of individuals! Thrice happy the nations which can be made to understand, that the surest progress is that which is made on the clearest principles, and with the greatest caution! The notion of setting up anything new in morals, is as fallacious in theory as it will be found to be dangerous in practice.”

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) American author

Source: Oak Openings or The bee-hunter (1848), Ch. XXI

Truth, Feeling, Understanding, Nature

“Your body must become familiar with its death — in all its possible forms and degrees — as a self-evident, imminent, and emotionally neutral step on the way towards the goal you have found worthy of your life.”

Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961) Swedish diplomat, economist, and author

Markings (1964)

Life, Death, Way

“For in every country of the world, I believe, the avarice and injustice of princes and sovereign states, abusing the confidence of their subjects, have by degrees diminished the real quantity of metal, which had been originally contained in their coins.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book I, Chapter IV, p. 34.

World, Confidence, Country

“Management is a far more homely business than its would be scientists suggest, more closely allied to cookery than any other human activity. Like cooking, it rests on a degree of organisation and on adequate resources. But just as no two chefs run their kitchens the same way, so no two managements are the same.”

Robert Heller (1932–2012) British magician

Source: The Naked Manager (1972), p. 12

Way, Home, Business, Cooking

“We are commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves, and I believe that to love ourselves means to extend to those various selves that we have been along the way the same degree of compassion and concern that we would extend to anyone else.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Telling Secrets (1991)

Love, Way

“Oft on the dappled turf at ease
I sit, and play with similes,
Loose types of things through all degrees.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

To the Same Flower (the Daisy), st. 2 (1805).

“It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men; nay, it is vain to expect that strength of natural affection which would make them good wives and mothers. Whilst they are absolutely dependent on their husbands they will be cunning, mean, and selfish.”

Mary Wollstonecraft book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Source: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Ch. 9

Women, Men, Nature, Dependency

“You of course appreciate that this industry of ours the automotive industry is today the greatest in the world. Three or four years ago it passed, in volume, steel and steel products, the next largest industry. This means, expressed otherwise, that upon its prosperity depends the prosperity of many millions of our citizens and the degree to which it has become stabilized in turn has a tremendous influence on the stabilization of industry as a whole, and therefore on the prosperity and happiness of still many more of our citizens. Directly and indirectly, this industry distributes hundreds of millions of dollars annually to those who are connected with it, in one way or another, as workers. It also distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in the aggregate to those who have invested in its securities. The purchasing power of this total aggregation, as you must appreciate, is tremendous.
I believe that if you questioned many of your readers as to the present position of the automotive industry, they would tell you that it is growing by leaps and bounds. I believe further you would sense uncertainty as to what is going to happen in the industry when the so-called state of saturation is reached. I do not know whether you appreciate it or not, but the industry has not grown very much during the past three or four years. It is practically stabilized at the present time.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Alfred P. Sloan in The Turning Wheel, 1934, p. 331-2: Speech by President Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., delivered to representatives of the automotive press at the Proving Ground on September 28, 1927.

World, Way, Question, Sense

“A great department of thought must have its own inner life, however transcendent may be the importance of its relations to the outside. No department of science, least of all one requiring so high a degree of mental concentration as Mathematics, can be developed entirely, or even mainly, with a view to applications outside its own range. The increased complexity and specialisation of all branches of knowledge makes it true in the present, however it may have been in former times, that important advances in such a department as Mathematics can be expected only from men who are interested in the subject for its own sake, and who, whilst keeping an open mind for suggestions from outside, allow their thought to range freely in those lines of advance which are indicated by the present state of their subject, untrammelled by any preoccupation as to applications to other departments of science. Even with a view to applications, if Mathematics is to be adequately equipped for the purpose of coping with the intricate problems which will be presented to it in the future by Physics, Chemistry and other branches of physical science, many of these problems probably of a character which we cannot at present forecast, it is essential that Mathematics should be allowed to develop freely on its own lines.”

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

Source: Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A (1910), p. 286; Cited in: Moritz (1914, 106): Modern mathematics.

Life, Men, Mathematics, Knowledge

“Secretary-General Annan spoke for all of us … when he said that ethnic cleansers and mass murderers can find no refuge in the United Nations, no source of comfort or justification in its charter. We must do more to make these words real. Of course, we must approach this challenge with some considerable degree of humility. It is easy to say, "Never again," but much harder to make it so. Promising too much can be as cruel as caring too little. But difficulties, dangers, and costs are not an argument for doing nothing. When we are faced with deliberate, organized campaigns to murder whole peoples or expel them from their land, the care of victims is important but not enough. We should work to end the violence.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

Remarks to the 54th Session of the United Nations General Assembly (September 21, 1999)
1990s

People

“It was a doctrine old as the common law, maintained by our Anglo-Saxon ancestors centuries before it was planted in the American Colonies, that taxation and representation were inseparable correlatives, the one a duty based upon the other as a right But the neglect of the government to provide a system which made the Parliamentary representation conform to the increase of population, and the growth and decadence of cities and boroughs, had, by almost imperceptible degrees, disfranchised the great mass of the British people, and placed the legislative power in the hands of a few leading families of the realm. Towards the close of the last century the question of Parliamentary reform assumed a definite shape, and since that time has constituted one of the most prominent features in British politics. It was found not only that the basis of representation was unequal and unjust, but that the right of the elective franchise was granted to but few of the inhabitants, and was regulated by no fixed and equitable rule. Here I may quote from May's Constitutional History: 'In some of the corporate towns, the inhabitants paying scot and lot, and freemen, were admitted to vote; in some, the freemen only; and in many, none but the governing body of the corporation. At Buckingham and at Bewdley the right of election was confined to the bailiff and twelve burgesses; at Bath, to the mayor, ten aldermen, and twenty-four common-councilmen; at Salisbury, to the mayor and corporation, consisting of fifty-six persons. And where more popular rights of election were acknowledged, there were often very few inhabitants to exercise them. Gatton enjoyed a liberal franchise. All freeholders and inhabitants paying scot and lot were entitled to vote, but they only amounted to seven. At Tavistock all freeholders rejoiced in the franchise, but there were only ten. At St. Michael all inhabitants paying scot and lot were electors, but there were only seven. In 1793 the Society of the Friends of the People were prepared to prove that in England and Wales seventy members were returned by thirty-five places in which there were scarcely any electors at all; that ninety members were returned by forty-six places with less than fifty electors; and thirty-seven members by nineteen places having not more than one hundred electors. Such places were returning members, while Leeds, Birmingham, and Manchester were unrepresented; and the members whom they sent to Parliament were the nominees of peers and other wealthy patrons. No abuse was more flagrant than the direct control of peers over the constitution of the Lower House. The Duke of Norfolk was represented by eleven members; Lord Lonsdale by nine; Lord Darlington by seven; the Duke of Rutland, the Marquis of Buckingham, and Lord Carrington, each by six. Seats were held in both Houses alike by hereditary right.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1860s, Oration at Ravenna, Ohio (1865)

People, Family, Law, Quotes

“Bit by bit, as the legend unfolds, the reader gets a more accurate picture of the human race. By degrees, one gains the conviction that here is a race which can be little more than pure fantasy. It is not the kind of race which could rise from humble beginnings to the eminence of culture with which it is gifted in these tales. Its equipment is too poor.
So far it lack of stability has become apparent. Its preoccupation with a mechanical civilization rather than with a culture based on some of the sounder, more worthwhile concepts of life indicates a lack of basic character.
And now, in this tale, we learn of the limited communications which it possessed, a situation which certainly is not conducive to advancement. Man’s inability to understand and appreciate the thought and the viewpoint of another man would be a stumbling block which no amount of mechanical ability could overcome.”

Clifford D. Simak book City

Notes on the Fifth Tale (p. 119)
City (1952)

Life, Communication, Understanding, Learning

“Cruel though it may sound, we must see to it that the patient's suffering, to a degree that is in some way or other effective, does not come to an end prematurely. If, owing to the symptoms having been taken apart and having lost their value, his suffering becomes mitigated, we must re-instate it elsewhere in the form of some appreciable privation; otherwise we run the danger of never achieving any improvements except quite insignificant and transitory ones”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Freud (1919) Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy. cited in: Jürgen Habermas (1972) Knowledge and Human Interests. p. 234
1910s

Way, Suffering

“I don't think you understand what the word cool means…. Being cool is about not participating in traditionally enjoyable experiences and creating the illusion that happiness can be found in alternative, less enjoyable experiences. The degree to which other people around you try to emulate your alternative lifestyle and fail determines how cool you are. You're only as cool as people wish they were.”

Ze Frank (1972) American online performance artist

http://www.zefrank.com/wiki/index.php/the_show:_06-13-06
"The Show" (www.zefrank.com/theshow/)

People, Understanding, Thinking, Happiness

“We have found that the degree of monopoly is likely to increase somewhat during depressions.”

Michał Kalecki (1899–1970) Polish economist

Source: Theory of Economic Dynamics (1965), Chapter 2, Distribution of National Income, p. 31

“There is always hope, we can always love, we can always be kind; we have neither excuse or loss by degree of suffering.”

Ysabella Brave (1979) American singer

"Facebook" (20 November 2017)

Love, Hope, Suffering, Loss

“It is all work and forgotten work, this peopled, clothed, articulate-speaking, high-towered, wide-acred World. The hands of forgotten brave men have made it a World for us; they,— honour to them; they, in spite of the idle and the dastard. This English Land, here and now, is the summary of what was found of wise, and noble, and accordant with God's Truth, in all the generations of English Men. Our English Speech is speakable because there were Hero-Poets of our blood and lineage; speakable in proportion to the number of these. This Land of England has its conquerors, possessors, which change from epoch to epoch, from day to day; but its real conquerors, creators, and eternal proprietors are these following, and their representatives if you can find them: All the Heroic Souls that ever were in England, each in their degree; all the men that ever cut a thistle, drained a puddle out of England, contrived a wise scheme in England, did or said a true and valiant thing in England.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

Men, God, People, Truth

“The only distinction that democracies reward is a high degree of conformity.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

Source: Epigrams, p. 358

Democracy

“For art, the intervention of capital always signals a further degree of mediation. To say that art is commodified is to say that a mediation, or standing-in-between, has occurred, & that this betweenness amounts to a split, & that this split amounts to "alienation". Improv music played by friends at home is less "alienated" than music played "live" at the Met, or music played through media (whether PBS or MTV or Walkman). In fact, an argument could be made that music distributed free or at cost on cassette via mail, is less alienated than live music played at some huge We Are The World spectacle or Las Vegas niteclub, even though the latter is live music played to a live audience (or at least so it appears), while the former is recorded music consumed by distant & even anonymous listeners.”

Hakim Bey (1945) American political writer, poet and essayist

Immediatism (AK Press: 1994)

World, Art, Music, Home

“Without attachment to anything beyond its own abysmal exuberance, capitalism identifies itself with desire to a degree that cannot imaginably be exceeded (…)”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Critique of Transcendental Miserablism" (2007), in Fanged Noumena, pp. 624–5

Imagination

“The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XIII

Imagination, Dead

“[As graduates with] all the status and connections that degree confers, you don’t get to have no hands. No, you don’t get to be precious or cautious or cynical. No, not when the earth is warming and the oceans are rising. You don’t get to be cynical. Not when too many young people still languish in communities ripped apart by violence and despair. Not when women still make less than men for the same work. Not when millions of girls across the globe never set foot inside a school. (Applause.) No, not when many young people just like you — the men and women we honor this Memorial Day—have sacrificed their lives for your freedom to make your voice heard. You don’t get to have no hands.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2010s, Commencement speech for Oberlin College Prep graduates (2015)

Women, Men, People, School

“…have the power of directing or concentrating nervous energy, raising or depressing it in a remarkable degree, at will, locally or generally. That in this state, we have the power of exciting or depressing the force and frequency of the heart's action, and the state of circulation, or generally, in a surprising degree.”

James Braid (1795–1860) Scottish surgeon, hypnotist, and hypnotherapist

When he hypnotized a patient, in Neurypnology; or, The rationale of nervous sleep, considered in relation ... http://books.google.co.in/books?id=DMgDAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover.p.151.

Heart

“Freudian concepts exposed the fraud of the existence of the “individual.” To be absolutely clear here: the Freudian concepts expose the fraud, not so as to perpetuate it, but undo it. That is, unlike the mechanical behaviorists, the point was not to prove that the individual was an illusion; rather it was to show to what extent the individual did not yet exist. To critical theory, psychoanalysis demonstrates the degree to which the individual is de-individualized by society.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 30

Fraud

“A very eminent writer has observed, that "the conversion of the Gentile world, whether we consider the difficulties attending it, the opposition made to it, the wonderful work wrought to accomplish it, or the happy effects and consequences of it, may be considered as a more illustrious evidence of God's power, than even our Saviour's miracles of casting out devils, healing the sick, and raising the dead." Indeed, a miracle said to have been wrought without any attending circumstances to justify such an exertion of divine power, could not easily be rendered credible; and our author's argument proves no more. If it were related, that about 1700 years ago, a man was raised from the dead, without its answering any other end than that of restoring him to life, Iconfess that no degree of evidence could induce me tobelieve it; but if the moral government of God appeared in that event, and there were circumstances attending it which could not be accounted for by any human means, the fact becomes credible. When two extraordinary events are thus connected, the proof of one established the truth of the other. Our author has reasoned upon the fact as standing alone, in which case it would not be easy to disprove some of his reasoning; but the fact should be considered in a moral view - as connected with the establishment of a pure religion, and it then becomes credible. In the proof of any circumstance, we must consider every principle which tends to establish it; whereas our author, by considering the case of a man said to have been raised from the dead, simpli in a physical point of view, without any reference to a moral end, endavours to show that it cannot be rendered credible; and, from such principles, we may admit his conclusions without affecting the credibility of Christianity. The general principle on which he establishes his argument, is not the great foundation upon which the evidence of Christianity rests. He says, "Notestimony can be sufficient to establish a miracle, unless it be of such a kind, that the falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endavours to prove." Now this reasoning, at furthest, can only be admitted in those cases where the fact has nothing but testimony to establish it. But the proofs of Christianity do not rest simply upon the testimony of its first promulgators, and that of those who were affterwards the instruments of communicating it; but they rest principally upon the acknowledged and very extraordinary affects which were produced by the preaching of a few unlearned, obscure persons, who taught "Christ crucified;" and it is upon these indisuptable matters of ffact which we reason; and when the effects are totally unaccountable upon any principle which we can collect from the operation of human means, we must either admit miracles, or admit an effect without an adequate cause. Also, when the proof of any position depends upon arguments drawn from various sources, all concutring to establish its turh, to select some one circumstance, and atrempt to show that that alone is not sufficient to render the fact credible, and thence infer that it is not ture, is a conclusion not to be admitted. But it is thus that our author has endavoured to destroy the credibiliry of Christianity, the evidences of which depend upon a great variety of circumstances and facts which are indisputably true, all cooperating to confirm its truth; but an examination of these falls not whithin the plan here proposed. He rests all his arguments upon the extraordinary nature of the fact, considered alone by itself; for a common fact, with the same evidence, would immediately be admitted. I have endavoured to show, that the extraordinary nature, as much as the mosst common events are necessary to fulfill the usual dispensations of Providence, and therefore the Deity was then direted by the same motive as in a more ordinary case, that of affording us such assitance as our moral condition renders necessary. In the establishment of a pur religion, the proof of its divine origin may require some very extraordinary circumstances which may never afterwards be requisite, and accordingly we find that they have not happened. Here is therefore a perfect concistencty in the operation of the Deity, in his moral government, and not a violation of the laws of nature: Secondly, the fact is immediately connected with others which are indisputably true, and which, without the supossition of the truth of that fact, would be, at least, equally miraculous. Thus I conceive the reasoning of our author to be totally inconclusive; and the argumentss which have been employed to prove the fallacy of his conclusions, appear at the same time, fully to justify our belief in, and prove the moral certainty of, our holy religion.”

Samuel Vince (1749–1821) British mathematician, astronomer and physicist

Source: The Credibility of Christianity Vindicated, p. 27; As quoted in " Book review http://books.google.nl/books?id=52tAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA262," in The British Critic, Volume 12 (1798). F. and C. Rivington. p. 262-263

Life, God, Truth, World

“In psychotherapy, the impact of love feelings, technically called the transference, is held under some degree of control by the artificial device of interpreting the patient's feelings while establishing barriers to the psychological exposure of the therapist. The therapist is supposed to come to the relationship fully endowed with a stable set of established insights which will be adequate in a practical sense to any application which the patient's needs will require. The patient, on the other hand, is supposed to limit his interaction with the therapist to the areas where he is aware of psychic pain or where the therapist accepts communication in the name of therapeutic technique. If everything else is carefully excluded, neither participant will be called on to deal with areas of the unknown in themselves which would require creative personal investment.”

Paul Rosenfels (1909–1985) American sociologist

8. Psychotherapy and Social Welfare
Love and Power: The Psychology of Interpersonal Creativity (1966)

Love, Pain, Feeling, Communication

“The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions; for life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effect of prudence, or the want of it. By playing at Chess then, we may learn: 1st, Foresight, which looks a little into futurity, and considers the consequences that may attend an action … 2nd, Circumspection, which surveys the whole Chess-board, or scene of action: — the relation of the several Pieces, and their situations; … 3rd, Caution, not to make our moves too hastily…”

Benjamin Franklin book The Morals of Chess

"The Morals of Chess" (article) (1750).
1750s

Life, Game, Learning, Future

“Here are his earlier letters to me, that I've framed. I call them ‘my degrees’.”

Kamal Haasan (1954) Indian actor

The letters of appreciation he received from K. Balachander, in His Master's voice 1 September 2010 http://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/article607103.ece

“(Dr. Paul Johns, animal linguist, on cats) It seems their entire language consists of two phrases, uttered with varying degrees of intensity: "Hurry that dinner, willya" and "Everything here is mine."”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 35

Cats, Animals

“This difficulty — am I a mathematician because my degree says so? Am I an engineer because I'm interested in things? Am I a social scientist because I don't think there's a difference between the turbulence in stock markets in terms of unpredictability? At IBM I wouldn't have to worry about that. The names of departments were totally strange and totally meaningless, so it looked like a promising situation for a short time. As it turned out I was going to spend thirty-five years and twelve days at IBM, almost from the beginning to the day when IBM decided that successful research was no longer going to be carried on in that division.”

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

Segment 44
Peoples Archive interview

Thinking, Time, Success

“We resist hegemonic dominance of feminist thought by insisting that it is a theory in the making, that we must necessarily criticize, question, re-examine, and explore new possibilities. My persistent critique has been informed by my status as a member of an oppressed group, experience of sexist exploitation and discrimination, and the sense that prevailing feminist analysis has not been the force shaping my feminist consciousness. This is true for many women. There are white women who had never considered resisting male dominance until the feminist movement created an awareness that they could and should. My awareness of feminist struggle was stimulated by social circumstance. Growing up in a Southern, black, father-dominated, working class household, I experienced (as did my mother, my sisters, and my brother) varying degrees of patriarchal tyranny and it made me angry-it made us all angry. Anger led me to question the politics of male dominance and enabled me to resist sexist socialization. Frequently, white feminists act as if black women did not know sexist oppression existed until they voiced feminist sentiment. They believe they are providing black women with "the" analysis and "the" program for liberation. They do not understand, cannot even imagine, that black women, as well as other groups of women who live daily in oppressive situations, often acquire an awareness of patriarchal politics from their lived experience, just as they develop strategies of resistance (even though they may not resist on a sustained or organized basis). These black women observed white feminist focus on male tyranny and women's oppression as if it were a "new" revelation and felt such a focus had little impact on their lives. To them it was just another indication of the privileged living conditions of middle and upper class white women that they would need a theory to inform them that they were "oppressed." The implication being that people who are truly oppressed know it even though they may not be engaged in organized resistance or are unable to articulate in written form the nature of their oppression. These black women saw nothing liberatory in party line analyses of women's oppression. Neither the fact that black women have not organized collectively in huge numbers around the issues of "feminism" (many of us do not know or use the term) nor the fact that we have not had access to the machinery of power that would allow us to share our analyses or theories about gender with the American public negate its presence in our lives or place us in a position of dependency in relationship to those white and non-white feminists who address a larger audience.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Source: (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory, p. 10.

Women, People, Imagination, Understanding

“The acceptance of the legitimacy of the overt use of power comes hard in some segments of our citizenship. In some of the expressions of concern over our behavior in Vietnam, we are seeing curious aspects of our national character in this regard. They often contain a note of reluctance or of regret over the use of the vast power represented by the resources of the United States at home and abroad. In some quarters there seems to even be what amounts to a certain feeling of guilt arising from our possession of this power and an uneasiness about the morality of our conduct. One consequence of this attitude in the Vietnam situation is that our government must constantly defend its actions to critics and, in so doing, is often obliged to disclose its plans and purposes to a degree which must be vastly helpful to our opponents. Inevitably in a situation such as Vietnam, where we are using limited means to gain limited ends, it is essential to keep the adversary in doubt with regard to the full scope of our intentions.”

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

Source: Responsibility and Response (1967), p. 79

Behavior, Feeling, Home, Help

“Male privilege' is assuming one has the right to occupy any space or person by whatever means, with or without permission. It's a sense of entitlement that's unique to those who have been raised male in most cultures - it's notably absent in most girls and women. Male privilege is not something that's given to men in this culture; it's something that men take. It's not that women don't have the ability to have and wield this privilege; some do. It's that in most cases, this privilege is withheld from them culturally and emotionally. Male privilege is woven into all levels of the culture, from unearned higher wages to more opportunities in the workplace, from higher quality, less expensive clothing to better bathroom facilities. Male privilege extends into sexual harassment, rape, and war. Combine male privilege with capitalism (which rewards greed and acquisition) and the mass media (which, owned by capitalists, highlights only the reward of acquisition and makes invisible its penalties), and you have a juggernaut that needs stopping by any means. Male privilege is not the exclusive province of men; there are some few women who have a degree of this horrifying personality trait. Male privilege is, in a word, violence.”

Kate Bornstein (1948) American author, playwright, performance artist, and gender theorist

Source: Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us (1995), p. 108

Women, Men, War, Penalty

“Thus, all unknown quantities can be expressed in terms of a single quantity, whenever the problem can be constructed by means of circles and straight lines, or by conic sections, or even by some other curve of degree not greater than the third or fourth.
But I shall not stop to explain this in more detail, because I should deprive you of the pleasure of mastering it yourself, as well as of the advantage of training your mind by working over it, which is in my opinion the principal benefit to be derived from this science. Because, I find nothing here so difficult that it cannot be worked out by anyone at all familiar with ordinary geometry and with algebra, who will consider carefully all that is set forth in this treatise.”

René Descartes book La Géométrie

First Book
La Géométrie (1637)

Pleasure, Problem, Science, Training

“The general misunderstanding of a work of art is often due to the fact that the key to its spiritual content and technical means is missed. Unless the observer is trained to a certain degree in the artistic idiom, he is apt to search for things which have little to do with the aesthetic content of a picture. He is likely to look for pure representational values when the emphasis is really upon music-like relationships.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Painting and Culture' p. 56
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Art, Music, Search, Training

“I was born in Iowa. My mom was a social worker and my dad had an education degree but they decided to teach my siblings and me at home. However, Iowa was one of the last three states in the country where homeschooling was illegal. You could literally be taken away from your parents by the government for truancy. That experience as a child really burned into me how an intrusive government could completely change your life. My parents dragged me to the Capitol at 10 and I started working on my first campaign at 12. I still maintain my healthy fear of a big and burdensome government.”

Elijah Haahr (1982)

Up Close and Personal with Speaker Pro Tem Elijah Haahr https://themissouritimes.com/40993/close-personal-speaker-pro-tem-elijah-haahr/ (May 18, 2017)

Life, Education, Fear, Home

“Socrates woke to the ideal of dispassionate intelligence, Jesus to the ideal of passionate yet self-oblivious worship. Socrates urged intellectual integrity, Jesus integrity of will. Each, of course, though starting with a different emphasis, involved the other.
Unfortunately both these ideals demanded of the human brain a degree of vitality and coherence of which the nervous system of the First Men was never really capable.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter I: Balkan Europe; Section 1, “The European War and After” (p. 17)

Men, Intelligence, Passion

“It appears to me, that any explanation of the cheapness of manufactured articles, as consequent upon the division of labour, would be incomplete if the following principle were omitted to be stated.
That the master manufacturer, by dividing the work to be executed into different processes, each requiring different degrees of skill or of force, can purchase exactly that precise quantity of both which is necessary for each process; whereas, if the whole work were executed by one workman, that person must possess sufficient skill to perform the most difficult, and sufficient strength to execute the most laborious, of the operations into which the art is divided.”

Charles Babbage On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures

Source: On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 1832/1841, p. 175-6

Art, Appearance, Personality

“Coming back to Iraq, obviously the situation has been getting worse over time, but I think it is still salvageable. We now have a political process going on, and I think if one looks at the place and what's been happening there, one has to marvel at what has been accomplished. There is an old saying, no news is good news, and the media obviously work on the reverse principle: Good news is no news. Most of the good things that have happened have not been reported, but there has been tremendous progress in many respects. Three elections were held three fair elections in which millions of Iraqis stood in line waiting to vote and knowing they were risking their lives every moment that they did so. And all this wrangling that's going on now is part of the democratic process, the fact that they argue, that they negotiate, that they try to find a compromise. This is part of their democratic education.
So I find all this both annoying and encouraging. I see that more and more people are becoming involved in the political process. And there's one thing in Iraq in particular that I think is encouraging, and that is the role of women. Of all the Arab countries, with the possible exception of Tunisia, Iraq is the one where women have made most progress. I'm not talking about rights, a word that has no meaning in that context. I'm talking about opportunity, access. Women in Iraq had access to education, to higher education, and therefore to the professions, and therefore to the political process to a degree without parallel elsewhere in the Arab world, as I said, with the possible exception of Tunisia. And I think that the participation of women the increasing participation of women is a very encouraging sign for the development of democratic institutions.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Bernard Lewis (2006)

Women, People, World, Education

“Why should I not expect from the sign of the dream more than I expect from a degree of consciousness which is daily more acute? Can’t the dream also be used in solving the fundamental questions of life? Are these questions the same in one case as in the other and, in the dream, do these questions already exist? Is the dream any less restrictive or punitive than the rest? I am growing old and, more than that reality to which I believe I subject myself, it is perhaps the dream, the difference with which I treat the dream, which makes me grow old.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (Manifesto of Surrealism; 1924)

Life, Dreams, Question, Reality

“The method for practicing this ardent love is short and easy. Its subject is constant and loving aspiration. But to be perfect, aspiration must be practice so eagerly and continually that it becomes as easy as breathing. It has a number of degrees, all of which can be reduced to four. The first consists in offering oneself and all created things to God. As far as possible, this should be done in an abstract manner. The second degree consists in making requests of the divine Spouse, asking him for his gifts in him and for his own sake. The third degree consists in being resigned and completely conformed to him. This conformity is very lofty and perfect, and is characterized by a great love. Moreover, the soul also desires it for creatures who are capable of such exalted love. The fourth degree is that of unitive love which unites the soul to God. Here the souls yearns for him and pursues him with acts of love until he opens his loving and super essential bosom to it. Here it feast upon his immense beauty in great abundance and intoxication, eating and drinking at the table of the Blessed. But since this does not last very long, the soul soon returns to itself to feed upon its former spiritual fare. From this it derives renewed strength, until God again receives it into his bosom with the same effect.”

John of St. Samson (1571–1636)

From Prayer, Aspiration, and Contemplation

Love, God, Beauty, Soul

“von Humboldt (seeing a newspaper containing slanderous falsehoods against Jefferson on the President's desk) : Why do you not have the fellow hung who dares to write these abominable lies?
Jefferson : What! hang the guardians of the public morals? No, sir, — rather would I protect the spirit of freedom which dictates even that degree of abuse. Put that paper into your pocket, my good friend, carry it with you to Europe, and when you hear any one doubt the reality of American freedom, show them that paper, and tell them where you found it.
Humboldt : But is it not shocking that virtuous characters should be defamed?
Jefferson : Let their actions refute such libels. Believe me, virtue is not long darkened by the clouds of calumny; and the temporary pain which it causes is infinitely overweighed by the safety it insures against degeneracy in the principles and conduct of public functionaries. When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.”

Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) Prussian geographer, naturalist and explorer

Conversation reported in B.L. Rayner, Life of Jefferson (1834), p. 356. The exact date is not known, but the conversation took place in one of several meetings with the President during Humboldt's visit to Washington, D.C., from June 1 to June 27, 1804.

Pain, Reality, Freedom

“At first the tumbling had me totally disoriented. With each degree that I turned, the images around me would deform and change. Three given blobs might split or merge to two or five, while some other shape's angular facets would sprout interlocking crystals. It was a little like trying to make out a human body by watching a Carousel slideshow of three hundred sixty microtomed cross sections.”

Rudy Rucker (1946) American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author and philosopher

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 106

Change

“I have been deeply interested during the last ten years in the use of colour with form. I have applied oil colour – white, grey, and blues of different degrees of tone... I have been very influenced by the natural colour and luminosity in stones and woods and the change in colour as light travels over the surface contours. When I pierced the material tight through a great change seemed to take place in the concavities from which direct light was excluded. From this experience my use of colour developed.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

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

Travel, Nature, Light, Change

“Back in the mid-1990s I was researching strategy in the global electronics industry. I interviewed 20 to 30 executives, CEOs, and division managers and asked fairly simple questions. Which company was the leader in their market? How did that company become the leader? What’s their own company’s strategy?
I saw an interesting pattern. Most executives easily explained how companies became market leaders: Some sort of window of opportunity opened, and the leader was the company that was the first to successfully jump through that window. Not exactly the first mover but the first to get it right.
But when I asked these same executives about their own strategies, I heard a lot about doorknob polishing. They were doing 360-degree feedback, forming alliances, outsourcing, cutting costs, and so on. None of them even mentioned taking a good position quickly when the industry changes.”

Richard Rumelt (1942) American economist

About strategy starts with identifying changes, and companies taking position (1)
"McKinsey Quarterly interview," 2007

Question, Change

“Second, by this and other means we are driven to perceive, what is quite evident in itself, that instantaneous feelings flow together in a continuum of feeling, which has in a modified degree the peculiar vivacity of feeling and has gained generality. And in reference to such general ideas, or continua of feeling, the difficulties about resemblance and suggestion and reference to the external, cease to have any force.”

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

The Law of Mind (1892)

Feeling, Idea

“Cooling systems… need only supply a drop of from 10 to 20 degrees below that of the outside temperature. …greater cooling differentials… are a real injury to health.”

Ken Kern American writer

The Owner Built Home: A How-to-do-it Book (1972)

Health

“When I resided at Bath I had long been acquainted with the theory of optics and mechanics, and wanted only that experience so necessary in the practical part of these sciences. This I acquired by degrees at that place where in my leisure hours, by way of amusement, I made several two-foot, five-foot, seven-foot, ten-foot and twenty-foot Newtonian telescopes, beside others, of the Gregorian form, of eight, twelve, and eighteen inches, and two, three, five, and ten feet focal length. In this way I made not less than two hundred seven-foot, one hundred and fifty ten-foot, and about eighty twenty-foot mirrors, not to mention the Gregorian telescopes.”

William Herschel (1738–1822) German-born British astronomer, technical expert, and composer

Source: Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works (1880), Ch.4 "Life and Works" Footnote: At least one of these telescopes had the principal mirror made of glass instead of metal. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (1803).

Way, Science, Parting

“When national debts have once been accumulated to a certain degree, there is scarce, I believe, a single instance of their having been fairly and completely paid. The liberation of the public revenue, if it has ever been brought about at all, has always been brought about by bankruptcy; sometimes by an avowed one, but always by a real one, though frequently by a pretend payment.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book V, Chapter III, Part V, p. 1012.