Quotes about determination
page 13

Montesquieu photo

“In every government there are three sorts of power: the legislative; the executive in respect to things dependent on the law of nations; and the executive in regard to matters that depend on the civil law.
By virtue of the first, the prince or magistrate enacts temporary or perpetual laws, and amends or abrogates those that have been already enacted. By the second, he makes peace or war, sends or receives embassies, establishes the public security, and provides against invasions. By the third, he punishes criminals, or determines the disputes that arise between individuals. The latter we shall call the judiciary power, and the other, simply, the executive power of the state.
When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.
Again, there is no liberty if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive. Were it joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control; for the judge would be then the legislator. Were it joined to the executive power, the judge might behave with violence and oppression.
There would be an end of every thing, were the same man, or the same body, whether of the nobles or of the people, to exercise those three powers, that of enacting laws, that of executing the public resolutions, and of trying the causes of individuals.
The executive power ought to be in the hands of a monarch, because this branch of government, having need of dispatch, is better administered by one than by many: on the other hand, whatever depends on the legislative power, is oftentimes better regulated by many than by a single person.
But, if there were no monarch, and the executive power should be committed to a certain number of persons, selected from the legislative body, there would be an end of liberty, by reason the two powers would be united; as the same persons would sometimes possess, and would be always able to possess, a share in both.”

Book XI, Chapter 6.
The Spirit of the Laws (1748)
Source: Esprit des lois (1777)/L11/C6 - Wikisource, fr.wikisource.org, fr, 2018-07-07 https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Esprit_des_lois_(1777)/L11/C6,

James Bradley photo
Joseph Nye photo

“The best hope for the future is to ask what is being determined as well as who determines it.”

Joseph Nye (1937) American political scientist

Source: Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (6th ed., 2006), Chapter 6, Intervention, Institutions, and Regional and Ethnic Conflicts, p. 169.

Aaron Ramsey photo

“I am determined and focussed on overcoming this injury and hope to be back fitter and stronger than before.”

Aaron Ramsey (1990) Welsh association football player

TheGuardian http://www.theguardian.com/football/2010/mar/05/aaron-ramsey-arsenal-injury-quotes Quotes about the double fracture of his right leg sustained on 27 February 2010 in a challenge with Stoke City's Ryan Shawcross, who was sent off for the offence (Published 5 March 2010)

Fernand Léger photo
Hillary Clinton photo
Martin Niemöller photo

“One thing is clear, the president of North Vietnam is not a fanatic. He is a very strong and determined man, but capable of listening, something that is very rare in a person of his position.”

Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor

On Ho Chi Minh. as quoted in Martin Niemöller, 1892-1984 (1984) by James Bentley, p. 225

William Luther Pierce photo
George Peacock photo
Carl Schmitt photo
Henry Adams photo
Charles Baudelaire photo

“Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, and coldly determined to seek the means of expressing passion in the most visible manner. In this dual character, be it said in passing, we find the two distinguishing marks of the most substantial geniuses, extreme geniuses.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Delacroix était passionnément amoureux de la passion, et froidement déterminé à chercher les moyens d'exprimer la passion de la manière la plus visible. Dans ce double caractère, nous trouvons, disons-le en passant, les deux signes qui marquent les plus solides génies, génies extrêmes.
L’œuvre et la vie d’Eugène Delacroix http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/L%27%C5%92uvre_et_la_vie_d%27Eug%C3%A8ne_Delacroix#III [The Life and Work of Eugène Delacroix] (1863), published in Curiosités esthétiques (1868)

Alfred Jodl photo

“The Pact of Munich is signed. Czechoslovakia as a power is out. The genius of the Führer and his determination not to shun even a world war have again won victory without the use of force. The hope remains that the incredulous, the weak and the doubters have been converted and will remain that way.”

Alfred Jodl (1890–1946) German general

Munich Conference, September 29, 1938. Quoted in "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany" - Page 422 - by William Lawrence Shirer - Germany - 1990.

Margaret Thatcher photo
Pierre Corneille photo

“The fate of States decides theirs:
Clauses of treaties determine their affections.”

Le destin des Etats est arbitre du leur,
Et l'ordre des traités règle tout dans leur cœur.
Rodogune, act III, scene iv.
Rodogune (1644)

Jean-Étienne Montucla photo

“Mathematics and philosophy are cultivated by two different classes of men: some make them an object of pursuit, either in consequence of their situation, or through a desire to render themselves illustrious, by extending their limits; while others pursue them for mere amusement, or by a natural taste which inclines them to that branch of knowledge. It is for the latter class of mathematicians and philosophers that this work is chiefly intended j and yet, at the same time, we entertain a hope that some parts of it will prove interesting to the former. In a word, it may serve to stimulate the ardour of those who begin to study these sciences; and it is for this reason that in most elementary books the authors endeavour to simplify the questions designed for exercising beginners, by proposing them in a less abstract manner than is employed in the pure mathematics, and so as to interest and excite the reader's curiosity. Thus, for example, if it were proposed simply to divide a triangle into three, four, or five equal parts, by lines drawn from a determinate point within it, in this form the problem could be interesting to none but those really possessed of a taste for geometry. But if, instead of proposing it in this abstract manner, we should say: "A father on his death-bed bequeathed to his three sons a triangular field, to be equally divided among them: and as there is a well in the field, which must be common to the three co-heirs, and from which the lines of division must necessarily proceed, how is the field to be divided so as to fulfill the intention of the testator?"”

Jean-Étienne Montucla (1725–1799) French mathematician

This way of stating it will, no doubt, create a desire in most minds to discover the method of solving the problem; and however little taste people may possess for real science, they will be tempted to try iheir ingenuity in finding the answer to such a question at this.
Source: Preface to Recreations in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. (1803), p. ii; As cited in: Tobias George Smollett. The Critical Review: Or, Annals of Literature http://books.google.com/books?id=T8APAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA410, Volume 38, (1803), p. 410

Charles Lyell photo
Gottfried Feder photo
Bernhard Riemann photo
Ludwig Feuerbach photo
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis photo
Dejan Stojanovic photo

“The world contained in a seed is determined by its program.”

“Blooming,” p. 35
Circling: 1978-1987 (1993), Sequence: “A Conversations with Atoms”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi photo
Johann Gottlieb Fichte photo
Ernst Mach photo
Karel Zeman photo

“Man has created a grandiose world of technology, of which dread and fear are often the result… Fortunately, events in the world and our way of life are not determined by technology alone.”

Karel Zeman (1910–1989) Czech film director, artist and animator

Člověk si vytvořil grandiózní svět techniky, z kterého jde často hrůza a strach... Naštěstí to není jen technika, která určuje dění světa a způsob života.
Quoted on the website of the Karel Zeman Museum in Prague (in English http://www.muzeumkarlazemana.cz/en/karel-zeman/quotes and Czech http://www.muzeumkarlazemana.cz/cz/karel-zeman/citaty).

George Eliot photo
Judith Krug photo

“A librarian is not a legal process. There is not librarian in the country — unless she or he is a lawyer — who is in the position to determine what he or she is looking at is indeed child pornography.”

Judith Krug (1940–2009) librarian and freedom of speech proponent

" Libraries vs. Police in a Suit Sparked by Porn; Kent Case Centers on People's Rights and Protections http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/82432_library13.shtml" by Jeffrey M. Barker, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (August 13, 2002)

Isoroku Yamamoto photo
Aleister Crowley photo

“I invoked Aiwaz, was shown a phantasm of Baphomet, and suddenly determined to recognize this for Him!”

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

Source: Magical Record of the Beast 666: The Diaries of Aleister Crowley 1914-1920 (1972), p. 140

Eben Moglen photo
Michel Foucault photo
Kurt Lewin photo
Walter Benjamin photo
Hans Reichenbach photo
Alfred P. Sloan photo
Matthieu Ricard photo
Bell Hooks photo
George Holmes Howison photo
Jared Polis photo
Samuel Gompers photo

“The labor movement is a movement of the working people, for the working people, by the working people, governed by ourselves, with its policies determined by ourselves…”

Samuel Gompers (1850–1924) American Labor Leader[AFL]

Gompers, Samuel. Proceedings of the Convention. Washington, D.C.: American Federation of Labor, 1923, p. 37.

Richard Feynman photo
Wassily Kandinsky photo

“If until now colour and form were used as inner agents, it was mainly done subconsciously. The subordination of composition to geometrical form is no new idea (cf. the art of the Persians). Construction on a purely spiritual basis is a slow business, and at first seemingly blind and unmethodical. The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul, so that it can weigh colours in its own scale and thus become a determinant in artistic creation. If we begin at once to break the bonds that bind us to nature and to devote ourselves purely to combination of pure colour and independent form, we shall produce works that are mere geometric decoration, resembling something like a necktie or a carpet. Beauty of form and colour is no sufficient aim by itself, despite the assertions of pure aesthetes or even of naturalists obsessed with the idea of "beauty". It is because our painting is still at an elementary stage that we are so little able to be moved by wholly autonomous colour and form composition. The nerve vibrations are there (as we feel when confronted by applied art), but they get no farther than the nerves because the corresponding vibrations of the spirit which they call forth are weak. When we remember however, that spiritual experience is quickening, that positive science, the firmest basis of human thought is tottering, that dissolution of matter is imminent, we have reason to hope that the hour of pure composition is not far away. The first stage has arrived.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote from Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky, Munich, 1912; as cited in Kandinsky, Frank Whitford, Paul Hamlyn Ltd, London 1967, p. 15
1910 - 1915

Ervin László photo
Serzh Sargsyan photo
David Crystal photo
Jacques Ellul photo
Serzh Sargsyan photo
James M. McPherson photo
Edward Said photo
Alain Aspect photo
Enoch Powell photo

“…the power to control the supply of money, which is one of the fundamental aspects of sovereignty, has passed from government into other hands; and therefore new institutions must be set up which will in effect exercise some of the major functions of government. They would set the level of public expenditure, and settle fiscal policy, the exercise of taxing and borrowing powers of the state, since these are indisputedly the mechanism by which the money supply is determined. But they would do more than this. They would be supreme over the economic ends and the social structure of society: for by fixing prices and incomes they would have to replace the entire automatic system of the market and supply and demand—be that good or evil—and put in its place a series of value judgments, economic or social, which they themselves would have to make…There is a specific term for this sort of polity. It is, of course, totalitarian, because it must deliberately and consciously determine the totality of the actions and activities of the members of the community; but it is a particular kind of totalitarian regime, one, namely, in which authority is exercised and the decisions are taken by a hierarchy of unions or corporations—to which, indeed, on this theory the effective power has already passed. For this particular kind of totalitarianism the Twentieth Century has a name. That name is "fascist."”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Leamington (18 September 1972), quoted in The Times (19 September 1972), p. 12
1970s

Wen Jiabao photo

“The speed of the fleet is not determined by the fastest vessel; rather it is determined by the slowest one.”

Wen Jiabao (1942) former Premier of the People's Republic of China

Wen Jiabao (2007) cited in: Joseph Kahn, China isn't looking to replace U.S., prime minister says http://web.archive.org/web/20070317185030/http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/16/news/beijing.php, The International Herald Tribune, 16 March 2007

Chester W. Nimitz photo
James A. Garfield photo
Voltairine de Cleyre photo
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Martin Heidegger photo
Karl Barth photo
Ingrid Newkirk photo
George Holmes Howison photo

“It might pertinently be said that determinism and freedom are of course compatible enough when they are merely viewed as the two reciprocal aspects of self-activity in a single mind, but that the real difficulty is to reconcile the self-determinisms in different free minds.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.326-7

Mike Tyson photo
Bill Moyers photo
Elon Musk photo

“Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

What Elon Musk Taught Me About Growing A Business https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-elon-musk-taught-me-growing-business-dharmesh-shah/ (16 October 2017)

Fausto Cercignani photo

“Your will cannot always choose the path; very often the route is determined by chance or by the will of others.”

Fausto Cercignani (1941) Italian scholar, essayist and poet

Examples of self-translation (c. 2004), Quotes - Zitate - Citations - Citazioni

Jean Paul Sartre photo
George Marshall photo

“In the Middle Ages, people were born and baptized into the Church. But the Church was the corpus mysticum and it depended upon one's own free will whether one wanted to be a living or a dead member of the Mystical Body of Christ. The cry "traitor" was only raised against those who broke the solemn oath of allegiance, not those who chose to go ways different from their status of birth. The Connêtable Charles de Bourbon who served with Charles V, or Marshal Moritz of Saxony, the great general under Louis XV were hardly considered to be traitors. Soldiers picked out the countries they wanted to serve. Prospective monks chose their orders. There were no "traitors to the proletariat" or "traitors to democracy." Today we live in an age of increased predestination and decreased free will, where Calvin, Freud, Marx, Luther, Darwin, Dewey, and the host of racial biologists have laid down the inexorable laws of anthropological, religious, psychological, environmental, and sociological determinism with no hope for escape. We are merely exhorted to make a virtue out of necessity and to be loyal to our prison and prisoners. Every attempt from our side to escape the artificial shell or to use our dormant remainders of free will to destroy the chains is branded as treason and punished accordingly by State or Society or even by both.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Pg 133, emphasis in the original
The Menace of the Herd (1943)

Anthony Kennedy photo

“The respondents in this case insist that a difficult question of public policy must be taken from the reach of the voters, and thus removed from the realm of public discussion, dialogue, and debate in an election campaign. Quite in addition to the serious First Amendment implications of that position with respect to any particular election, it is inconsistent with the underlying premises of a responsible, functioning democracy. One of those premises is that a democracy has the capacity—and the duty—to learn from its past mistakes; to discover and confront persisting biases; and by respectful, rationale deliberation to rise above those flaws and injustices. That process is impeded, not advanced, by court decrees based on the proposition that the public cannot have the requisite repose to discuss certain issues. It is demeaning to the democratic process to presume that the voters are not capable of deciding an issue of this sensitivity on decent and rational grounds. The process of public discourse and political debate should not be foreclosed even if there is a risk that during a public campaign there will be those, on both sides, who seek to use racial division and discord to their own political advantage. An informed public can, and must, rise above this. The idea of democracy is that it can, and must, mature. Freedom embraces the right, indeed the duty, to engage in a rational, civic discourse in order to determine how best to form a consensus to shape the destiny of the Nation and its people.”

Anthony Kennedy (1936) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, 572 U. S. ____, (2016), plurality opinion.

Don Soderquist photo

“I’ve come to realize that beliefs and values together determine how a company operates and whether it reaches its full potential.”

Don Soderquist (1934–2016)

Don Soderquist “ Live Learn Lead to Make a Difference https://books.google.com/books?id=s0q7mZf9oDkC&lpg=pg=PP1&dq=Don%20Soderquist&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false, Thomas Nelson, April 2006 p. 120.
On Putting Your Values First

Koenraad Elst photo
Nayef Al-Rodhan photo

“What makes our existence meaningful is highly subjective and ultimately determined by sustainable neurochemical gratification.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.28

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker photo
Will Rogers photo

“I doubt if a charging elephant, or a rhino, is as determined, or hard to check, as a socially ambitious mother.”

Will Rogers (1879–1935) American humorist and entertainer

Daily Telegram #1808, Mr. Rogers' Heart Goes Out To Our Envoy To St. James's (10 May 1932) in The New York Times, 11 May 1932 http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0A15FA3E5A13738DDDA80994DD405B828FF1D3
Daily telegrams

Swami Vivekananda photo
Samuel Gompers photo
George W. Bush photo
Elizabeth I of England photo