Quotes about development
page 36

“Since the late 1960s macroeconomic debates in the United States have centered on the competing interpretations of the new classical and new Keynesian macroeconomics. The initial new classical model developed in the early 1970s by Robert E. Lucas, Jr., combined market-clearing, imperfect information, and rational expectations. After much testing, it was eventually rejected in the late 1970s for failing to explain why business cycles lasted on average four years while information delays lasted only a few weeks. It was soon replaced by a second new classical approach, the Real Business Cycle (RBC) model, which was also based on continuous market clearing and competitive equilibrium, but now generated the business cycle through serially correlated procyclical technology shocks.”

Robert J. Gordon (1940) American economist

Robert J. Gordon, Are Procyclical Productivity Fluctuations a Figment of Measurement Error? (1992).

Business

“It is in the nature of exponential growth that events develop extremely slowly for extremely long periods of time, but as one glides through the knee of the curve, events erupt at an increasingly furious pace. And that is what we will experience as we enter the twenty-first century.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)

Nature, Time

“By social movements we mean a certain type of organisation of social practices, the logic of whose development contradicts the institutionally dominant social logic”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: Urban renewal and social conflict in Paris, 1972, p. 93

“Liberal philosophy, at this point, ceases to be empirical and British in order to become German and transcendental. Moral life, it now believes, is not the pursuit of liberty and happiness of all sorts by all sorts of different creatures; it is the development of a single spirit in all life through a series of necessary phases, each higher than the preceding one. No man, accordingly, can really or ultimately desire anything but what the best people desire. This is the principle of the higher snobbery; and in fact, all earnest liberals are higher snobs.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

"The Irony of Liberalism"
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

Life, Happiness, People

“We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

"The Energy Crisis — Why Our World Will Never Again Be the Same", in Redbook (1974); later in Progress As If Survival Mattered : A Handbook For A Conserver Society (1977) by Hugh Nash, p. 166
1970s

Life, Children, People, World

“To eliminate the discrepancy between men's plans and the results achieved, a new approach is necessary. Morphological thinking suggests that this new approach cannot be realized through increased teaching of specialized knowledge. This morphological analysis suggests that the essential fact has been overlooked that every human is potentially a genius. Education and dissemination of knowledge must assume a form which allows each student to absorb whatever develops his own genius, lest he become frustrated. The same outlook applies to the genius of the peoples as a whole.”

Fritz Zwicky (1898–1974) Swiss astronomer

Source: Fritz Zwicky, Morphological astronomy, The Observatory, Vol. 68, p. 121-143 (1948).

Men, People, Education, Knowledge

“Great ideas do not burst upon the world unannounced. They are reached by a gradual development over a length of time usually proportionate to their importance. This is especially true of the principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence. Three very definite propositions were set out in its preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed. If no one is to be accounted as born into a superior station, if there is to be no ruling class, and if all possess rights which can neither be bartered away nor taken from them by any earthly power, it follows as a matter of course that the practical authority of the Government has to rest on the consent of the governed. While these principles were not altogether new in political action, and were very far from new in political speculation, they had never been assembled before and declared in such a combination.”

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

1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)

Men, World, Idea, Nature

“You must develop one all-important ability — being able to enlist the help of other people. You have to reach a state where others want to help you. This includes giving credit…which will come back to you a hundredfold. Your reputation stems from what people say when you’re not present.”

Cecil Howard Green (1900–2003) American businessman

as quoted by Mike Carlowicz in WHOI Waypoints: Remembrance: Cecil Howard Green, Woods Hole Currents: Volume 10, Number 2, 2003 http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=14940

People, Help

“Happily common sense, though she is by nature the gentlest creature living, when she feels the knife at her throat, is apt to develop unexpected powers of resistance, and to send doctrinaires flying, even when they have bound her down and think they have her at their mercy.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 26

Feeling, Nature, Thinking, Sense

“[A good teacher] brings knowledge and his pupil into a vital relationship; and the object of teaching is to establish that relationship on an intelligible basis. This can only be done … by appealing to two qualities which are at the bottom of all knowledge, curiosity and observation. They are born with us, every child naturally develops them, and it is the duty of the teacher to direct them to proper ends.”

Mandell Creighton (1843–1901) English historian and ecclesiastic

Thoughts on Education: Speeches and Sermons (1902)

Intelligence, Nature, Knowledge, Teachers

“The right hon. Gentleman the Member for West Birmingham said, in future what are you going to tax when you will want more money? He also not merely assumed but stated that you could not depend upon any economy in armaments. I think that is not so. I think he will find that next year there will be substantial economy without interfering in the slightest degree with the efficiency of the Navy. The expenditure of the last few years has been very largely for the purpose of meeting what is recognised to be a temporary emergency. … It is very difficult for one nation to arrest this very terrible development. You cannot do it. You cannot when other nations are spending huge sums of money which are not merely weapons of defence, but are equally weapons of attack. I realise that, but the encouraging symptom which I observe is that the movement against it is a cosmopolitan one and an international one. Whether it will bear fruit this year or next year, that I am not sure of, but I am certain that it will come. I can see signs, distinct signs, of reaction throughout the world. Take a neighbour of ours. Our relations are very much better than they were a few years ago. There is none of that snarling which we used to see, more especially in the Press of those two great, I will not say rival nations, but two great Empires. The feeling is better altogether between them. They begin to realise they can co-operate for common ends, and that the points of co-operation are greater and more numerous and more important than the points of possible controversy.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in the House of Commons http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1914/jul/23/finance-bill on the day the Austrian ultimatum was sent to Serbia (23 July 1914); The "neighbour" mentioned is Germany. Chancellor of the Exchequer

Money, World, Feeling, Thinking

“Today, I would like to provide the American people with an update on the White House transition and our policy plans for the first 100 days. Our transition team is working very smoothly, efficiently, and effectively. Truly great and talented men and women, patriots indeed are being brought in and many will soon be a part of our government, helping us to Make America Great Again. My agenda will be based on a simple core principle: putting America First. Whether it's producing steel, building cars, or curing disease, I want the next generation of production and innovation to happen right here, in our great homeland: America – creating wealth and jobs for American workers. As part of this plan, I've asked my transition team to develop a list of executive actions we can take on day one to restore our laws and bring back our jobs. It's about time. These include the following: On trade, I am going to issue our notification of intent to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a potential disaster for our country. Instead, we will negotiate fair, bilateral trade deals that bring jobs and industry back onto American shores. On energy, I will cancel job-killing restrictions on the production of American energy – including shale energy and clean coal – creating many millions of high-paying jobs. That's what we want, that's what we've been waiting for. On regulation, I will formulate a rule which says that for every one new regulation, two old regulations must be eliminated, it's so important. On national security, I will ask the Department of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop a comprehensive plan to protect America's vital infrastructure from cyber-attacks, and all other form of attacks. On immigration, I will direct the Department of Labor to investigate all abuses of visa programs that undercut the American worker. On ethics reform, as part of our plan to Drain the Swamp, we will impose a five-year ban on executive officials becoming lobbyists after they leave the Administration – and a lifetime ban on executive officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. These are just a few of the steps we will take to reform Washington and rebuild our middle class. I will provide more updates in the coming days, as we work together to Make America Great Again for everyone.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

A Message from President-Elect Donald J. Trump https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xX_KaStFT8 (21 November 2016) 2010s, 2016, November

Women, Men, People, Disease

“Hey, that's not a bug, that's a feature! You know what the most complex piece of engineering known to man in the whole solar system is? Guess what – it's not Linux, it's not Solaris, and it's not your car. It's you. And me. And think about how you and me actually came about – not through any complex design. Right. "Sheer luck". Well, sheer luck, and:
• Free availability and crosspollination through sharing of "source code", although biologists call it DNA.
• A rather unforgiving user environment, that happily replaces bad versions of us with better working versions and thus culls the herd (biologists often call this "survival of the fittest").
• Massive undirected parallel development ("trial and error").
I'm deadly serious: we humans have never been able to replicate something more complicated than what we ourselves are, yet natural selection did it without even thinking. Don't underestimate the power of survival of the fittest. And don't ever make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit. Quite frankly, Sun is doomed. And it has nothing to do with their engineering practices or their coding style.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

2000s, 2000-04

Cars, Error, Intelligence, Nature

“For the corporation executives, the military metaphysic often coincides with their interest in a stable and planned flow of profit; it enables them to have their risk underwritten by public money; it enables them reasonably to expect that they can exploit for private profit now and later, the risky research developments paid for by public money. It is, in brief, a mask of the subsidized capitalism from which they extract profit and upon which their power is based.”

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) American sociologist

The Causes of World War Three (1960)

Money

“It is they [men of science] who hold the secret of the mysterious property of the mind by which error ministers to truth, and truth slowly but irrevocably prevails. Theirs is the logic of discovery, the demonstration of the advance of knowledge and the development of ideas, which, as the earthly wants and the passions of men remain almost unchanged, are the charter of progress, and the vital spark of history.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

The Study of History (1895)

Men, Truth, Secret, Error

“During the course of many years of investigation into the plant life of the world, creating new forms, modifying old ones, adapting others to new conditions, and blending still others, I have constantly been impressed with the similarity between the organization and development of plant and human life.”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

p, 125
The Training of the Human Plant (1907)

Life, World

“Marriage is a framework to preserve friendship. It is valuable because it gives much more room to develop than just living together. It provides a base from which a person can work at understanding himself and another person.”

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

"Dr. Robertson Davies".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

Friendship, Marriage, Understanding, Personality

“I had trouble at first, in the early 1900s, in selling Mr. Leland our roller bearings. He then taught me the need for greater accuracy in our products to meet the exacting standards of interchangeable parts. Mr. Leland came to the industry with a mature experience in general engineering and in gasoline engines, which he had long made for boats. One of his specialties was precision metalwork, which went back to his experience in toolmaking for a federal arsenal during the Civil War, and which he afterward developed in the Brown and Sharpe Company, machine-tool makers of Providence, Rhode Island. It has been called to my attention It has been called to my attention that Eli Whitney, long before, had started the development of interchangeable parts, a fact which suggests a line of descent from Whitney to Leland to the automobile industry.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 20 (in 1964 edition)

War, Parting

“In literature, science, art, philosophy, religion, in individual and above all in social and political life, we can observe how the line of the development of forces deviates from its original direction and goes, after a certain time, in a diametrically opposite direction, still preserving its former name.”

G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) influential spiritual teacher, Armenian philosopher, composer and writer

In Search of the Miraculous (1949)

Life, Religion, Art, Literature

“The consolidations need to be carried out with due regard to public interest and to the rights and established life of various communities in our country. It does not seem to me necessary that we endeavor to anticipate any final plan or adhere to an artificial and unchangeable project which shall stipulate a fixed number of systems, but rather we ought to approach the problem with such a latitude of action that it can be worked out step by step in accordance with a comprehensive consideration of public interest. Whether the number of ultimate systems shall be more or less seems to me can only be determined by time and actual experience in the development of such consolidations.”

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

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

Life, Communication, Problem, Time

“How ironic. In order to avoid the "nutty" theory of inversion, Gaskell invented the even odder notion of stomachs turning into brains with new guts forming below. No wonder then, that later biologists cast a plague on both speculative houses and opted instead for the obvious alternative: arthropods and vertebrates do not share the same anatomical plan at all, but rather represent two separate evolutionary developments of similar complexity from a much simpler common ancestor that grew neither a discrete gut nor a central nerve cord.”

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

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 327
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Housing

“Ruffed grouse dogs are bred, not born, and once born they are developed, not made.”

George Bird Evans (1906–1998) American writer

An Affair with Grouse (1982)

Dogs

“The best government rests on the people and not on the few, on persons and not on property, on the free development of public opinion and not on authority.”

George Bancroft (1800–1891) American historian and statesman

"The Office of the People in Art, Government and Religion" (1835), p. 421
Literary and Historical Miscellanies (1855)

People, Personality

“When a nation is invited to join in a union with another, the ignorant, bedazzled statesman might rush into it, young people enamored of beautiful ideas and lacking good sense might celebrate it, and venal or demented politicians might welcome it as a mercy and glorify it with servile words, but he who feels in his heart the anguish of the patria, he who watches and foresees, must investigate and must say what elements constitute the character of the nation that invites and the nation that is invited, and whether they are predisposed toward a common labor by common antecedents and habits, and whether or not it is probable that the fearsome elements of the inviting nation will, in the union it aspires to, be developed to the endangerment of the invited one.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

The Monetary Conference of the American Republics (1891)

People, Beauty, Feeling, Idea

“The initial inspiration for me to take up dancing came from seeing performances of Gauri Ammal when I was very young. If this lady had not brought the dance to such a stage of development, the combination of music and dance that I have attempted to realize would not have been possible.”

Balasaraswati (1918–1984) Indian dancer

Quoted in "Balasaraswati: Her Art and Life", pp=25-26
Quote

Music, Dance

“A man is a better citizen of the United States for being also a loyal citizen of his state, and of his city; for being loyal to his family, and to his profession or trade; for being loyal to his college or his lodge.... For only through the ennobling effect of its strivings can we develop the best that is in us and give to this country the full benefit of our great inheritance.”

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) American Supreme Court Justice

The Jewish Problem And How to Solve It (1915).
Extra-judicial writings

Family, Country

“Let us summarize these three points more concisely:
(a) The rejection of art as a mere emotional, individualistic, and romantic affair.
(b) 'Objective' work, undertaken with the silent hope that the end product will nevertheless eventually be regarded as a work of art.
(c) Consciously goal-directed work in architecture, which will have a concise artistic effect on the basis of well-preparated objective-scientific criteria.
Such an architecture will actively raise the general standard of living. This represents the dialectic of our development process, which purports to arrive at the affirmative by negation — a process similar to melting down old iron and forging it into new steel.”

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

Quotes from: 'Ideological Superstructure'
1926 - 1941, Rußland: Die Rekonstruktion der Architektur in der Sowjetunion' (1929)

Hope, Art

“It’s sad to say but agriculture remains to be a poor man’s sector. Despite being a huge asset to national development, agriculture has been the most neglected and least understood sector of the nation’s economy.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2015 Source: Sun Star Manila http://www.sunstar.com.ph/manila/local-news/2015/07/03/government-urged-grant-farmers-higher-wages-decent-living-416728

Sadness

“Our amendment earmarks $10 million out of the account called Army Research, Development, Test and Evaluation. The money would go to a research program administered by the Army Medical Research and Materiel Command in the DoD, for identifying the biological mechanisms behind the illnesses — particularly the neurological and immunological ones; the chronic disease effects; better diagnostic criteria for the illnesses; and identification of treatments. The MRMC will design a research plan for that purpose, relying heavily on the expertise outside DoD and the VA. It will be subject to peer review by experts, a significant number of which will be independent of DoD.$10 million will have a large impact on veterans who rely on the government to take care of them after they have taken care of us.I urge my colleagues to support the Kucinich-Shays-Sanders amendment. Vote 'yes' to restore research funding for Gulf War Illnesses.”

Dennis Kucinich (1946) Ohio politician

Speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, Congressional Record (20 June, 2005) http://frwebgate5.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/waisgate.cgi?WAISdocID=239772330196+0+0+0&WAISaction=retrieve.

Money, War, Disease, Support

“We believe that the developing crisis in the capitalist system, by which we mean both economic stagnation, and the social and political conflicts to which it gives rise, makes it possible to think in terms of developing a sizeable and serious revolutionary socialist party in a way that was not possible 20 or even 10 years ago.”

Anthony Crosland (1918–1977) British politician

The Times (8 September 1977).

Way, Thinking

“It is usually assumed that, in speaking, in the 1844 Manuscripts, of man’s “being reduced to the level of the animals,” and of man’s alienation from his “species-being” under the conditions of capitalist production, Marx is thinking in terms of an abstract conception of “man” as being alienated from his biological characteristics as a species. So, it is presumed, at this initial stage in the evolution of his thought, Marx believed that man is essentially a creative being whose “natural” propensities are denied by the restrictive character of capitalism. Actually, Marx holds, on the contrary, that the enormous productive power of capitalism generates possibilities for the future development of man which could not have been possible under prior forms of productive system. The organization of social relationships within which capitalist production is carried on in fact leads to the failure to realize these historically generated possibilities. The character of alienated labor does not express a tension between “man in nature” (non-alienated) and “man in society” (alienated), but between the potential generated by a specific form of society—capitalism—and the frustrated realization of that potential. What separates man from the animals is not the mere existence of biological differences between mankind and other species, but the cultural achievements of men, which are the outcome of a very long process of social development.”

Anthony Giddens (1938) British sociologist

Source: Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971), pp. 15-16.

Men, Failure, Nature, Thinking

“Aglionby Academy was the number one reason Blue had developed her two rules: One, stay away from boys because they were trouble. And two, stay away from Aglionby boys, because they were bastards.”

Maggie Stiefvater (1981) American writer

Blue
The Raven Cycle Series, The Raven Boys (2012)

Boy

“If Slumdog Millionaire projects India as a Third World, dirty-underbelly, developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations. It's just that the Slumdog Millionaire idea authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a Westerner, gets creative Golden Globe recognition. The other would perhaps not.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

In his blog, reported in Andrew Buncombe, "Slumdogs who seek success", The Independent (January 16, 2009), News, p. 30.

Pain, World, Idea

“David Galin, among other researchers, has pointed out that teachers have three main tasks: first, to train both hemispheres — not only the verbal, symbolic, logical left hemisphere, which has always been trained in the traditional education, but also the relational, holistic right hemisphere, which is largely neglected in today's schools; second, to train students to use the cognitive style suited to the tasks at hand; and third, to train students to be able to bring both styles — both hemispheres — to bear on a problem in an integrated manner.
When teachers can pair the complementary modes or fit one mode to the appropriate task, teaching and learning will become a much more precise process. Ultimately, the goal will be to develop both halves of the brain. Both modes are necessary for full human functioning and both are necessary for creative work of all kinds, whether writing or painting, developing a new theory in physics, or dealing with environmental problems.”

Betty Edwards (1926) American artist

Source: The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979), p.196

Education, School, Problem, Learning

“The Founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence that some truths are self-evident, and one of these is the fact that all men are created equal. Yet everyone knows that no two human beings are exactly alike in any respect. They are different when they are born. They plainly exhibit different natural skills. They acquire different tastes. They develop along different lines. They vary in physical strength, mental capacity, emotional stability, inherited social status, in their opportunities for self-fulfillment, and in scores of other ways. Then how can they be equal? The answer is, they can't, except in three ways. They can only be treated as equals in the sight of God, in the sight of the law, and in the protection of their rights. In these three ways all men are created equal. It is the task of society, as it is with God, to accept people in all their vast array of individual differences, but treat them as equals when it comes to their role as human beings. As members of society, all persons should have their equality guaranteed in two areas.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

The 5,000 Year Leap (1981)

Men, God, People, Truth

“What kind of development is it when the people lead shorter lives than before? They catch HIV/AIDS. Our children are beaten in school and won't go. Some become prostitutes. They are not allowed to hunt. They fight because they are bored and get drunk. They are starting to commit suicide. We never saw that before. Is this "development?"”

Roy Sesana (1950) Botswana activist

Source: Progress can kill http://assets.survival-international.org/static/lib/downloads/source/progresscankill/short_report.pdf, Botswana, 2005

Children, People, School, Suicide

“In developing our industrial strategy for the period ahead, we have the benefit of much experience. Almost everything has been tried at least once…The one constant element throughout this long history of policy has been the fact that these alternatives have been largely centrally decided and imposed and have been seen as problems of economics and management rather than as problems of politics and consent…Any constructive long-term industrial strategy must be developed by the longer, slower route of real consultation and power sharing, all done more openly. There is no alternative.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

Speech in the House of Commons (13 March 1974) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1974/mar/13/industry-and-energy 1970s

History, Problem

“… since the Second World War… the proton magnetometer has revolutionized measurements, satellites have given new impetus to magnetic surveying, discoveries of large mineral deposits have maintained activity in conventional magnetic prospecting, and geomagnetism has continued to play a central role in major scientific developments such as plate tectonics (where the time scale of reversals of the polarity of the Earth's magnetic field still provides the main source of information on the movement of the plates.)”

David Gubbins (1947) British university teacher

War, World, Time

“In the early 1970s,… economists began to embrace the Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH), according to which market participants’ expectations are “essentially the same as the predictions of the relevant economic theory” (Muth 1961: 316). What has been largely overlooked is that, … REH theorists presume that the role of market participants’ expectations in driving outcomes is not autonomous from the other components of the model. … Because REH models, by design, rule out an autonomous role for expectations, they are best viewed as derailing, rather than developing, the microfoundations approach.”

Roman Frydman (1948) American economist

"Which Way Forward for Macroeconomics and Policy Analysis?" 2013

“There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principal.”

Joseph Conrad book Nostromo

Part Third: The Lighthouse, Ch. 11
Nostromo (1904)

Peace, Justice, Law

“The statements of academic psychology often seem to imply that logical thinking is a continuous function of the mature person — that the sufficiently normal infant develops from syncretism and non-logic to logic and skilled performance. Such a description seems to be supported by much of the work of Piaget, of Claparede, and, with respect to the primitive, by Levy-Bruhl. If one examines the facts with care, either in industry or in clinic, one finds immediately that this implication, so flattering to the civilized adult, possesses only a modicum of truth. Indeed, one may go further and say that it is positively misleading.”

Elton Mayo (1880–1949) Australian academic

Source: The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilisation, 1945, p. 42; Partly cited in Urwick & Brech (1949, 216)

Truth, Support, Thinking, Personality

“Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity: men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.”

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

Pt. I, Bk. VII, ch. 4.
1830s, The French Revolution. A History (1837)

Men, Age

“Various threats come along with the development of information technologies. Connecting people with machines, such a cyborgization of societies, creates a new type of threats – such threats that bring us back a little bit to the Orwellian universe of Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which someone gets very strong tools to control everything. If every human being will be appropriately chipped and our nervous systems, or even our minds, will be incorporated into a global network – one can imagine that sooner or later someone would like to take these technological possibilities in order to get some unprecedented concentration of power and domination. The possibilities of direct physical control may be created, especially if we are connected to a network in a way that interferes with the structure of our nervous system – then we can imagine different possibilities of exerting direct influence. For now, this is the field of speculation.”

Zygmunt Vetulani (1950) Polish mathematician

Polish Press Agency (July 17, 2018): Polish Scientist warns against cyborgization perils https://polandinenglish.info/38094623/polish-scientist-warns-against-cyborgization-perils.

People, Way, Imagination, Strong

“I am a Muslim and I am an Indian, and I see no distinction between the two. I don't know why should I fear the nuclear deal. It is a deal between two countries which, I hope, will become two equals in the future. The enemies of Indian Muslims are not America or deals like these. The enemies are the same as the enemies of all those who are poor—poverty, hunger, lack of development and the absence of a voice.”

Omar Abdullah (1970) Indian politician

22 July 2008, Lok Sabha Give us a voice, says NC’s Omar Abdullah, floors House with own http://www.indianexpress.com/story/339280.html Indian Express, 23 July 2008.

Hunger, Fear, Hope, Future

“[This view is contrasted with all forms of Empiricism, by which it is] assumed that development is uniform across (cognitive) domains, and that the intrinsic properties of the initial state (of the mind) are homogeneous and undifferentiated - an assumption found across a spectrum reaching from Skinner to Piaget”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

who differ on much else
Source: Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s, Rules and Representations (1980), p. 3 as cited in: Jerry Fodor (1983).

“The development of air power in its broadest sense, and including the development of all means of combating missiles that travel through the air, whether fired or dropped, is the first essential to our survival in war.”

Hugh Trenchard, 1st Viscount Trenchard (1873–1956) Royal Flying Corps commander and first Royal Air Force Chief of the Air Staff

Given by Trenchard in 1946. As listed on Skygod.com - Great Aviation Quotes http://www.skygod.com/quotes/airpower.html

War, Travel, Sense

“Sports officials must work with more responsibility to develop sports. Even under the good governance government some Sports Ministry officials don't carry out their duties properly as they are influenced by money and power. It is always sports clubs, institutions and sports personnel who pay the price for all misconducts of officials. To change this trend sports authority must take the necessary steps.”

Arjuna Ranatunga (1963) Sri Lankan cricketer

Daily News, "Sports Ministry must act with more responsibility - Arjuna Ranatunga" http://www.dailynews.lk/?q=2016/02/18/sports/sports-ministry-must-act-more-responsibility-arjuna-ranatunga, February 18, 2016.

Money, Sport, Change

“I am a Socialist not through reading a textbook that has caught my intellectual fancy, nor through unthinking tradition, but because I believe that, at its best, Socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both rational and moral. It stands for co-operation, not confrontation; for fellowship, not fear. It stands for equality, not because it wants people to be the same but because only through equality in our economic circumstances can our individuality develop properly.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Hansard, House of Commons, 6th Series, vol. 45, col. 316.
Maiden speech as MP for Sedgefield, 6 July 1983.
1980s

People, Fear, Reading

“The fact that the super-markets and super shops have developed and serve wider areas of tens of thousands of people does not mean that we do not need smaller ones.”

Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis (1914–1975) Greek architect

Source: Building Entopia - 1975, Chapter 10, The neighborhood, p. 134

People

“In a Thumbnail Sketch here is [the Multiple Drafts theory of consciousness] so far:There is no single, definitive "stream of consciousness," because there is no central Headquarters, no Cartesian Theatre where "it all comes together" for the perusal of a Central Meaner. Instead of such a single stream (however wide), there are multiple channels in which specialist circuits try, in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating Multiple Drafts as they go. Most of these fragmentary drafts of "narrative" play short-lived roles in the modulation of current activity but some get promoted to further functional roles, in swift succession, by the activity of a virtual machine in the brain. The seriality of this machine (its "von Neumannesque" character) is not a "hard-wired" design feature, but rather the upshot of a succession of coalitions of these specialists.The basic specialists are part of our animal heritage. They were not developed to perform peculiarly human actions, such as reading and writing, but ducking, predator-avoiding, face-recognizing, grasping, throwing, berry-picking, and other essential tasks. They are often opportunistically enlisted in new roles, for which their talents may more or less suit them. The result is not bedlam only because the trends that are imposed on all this activity are themselves part of the design. Some of this design is innate, and is shared with other animals. But it is augmented, and sometimes even overwhelmed in importance, by microhabits of thought that are developed in the individual, partly idiosyncratic results of self-exploration and partly the predesigned gifts of culture. Thousands of memes, mostly borne by language, but also by wordless "images" and other data structures, take up residence in an individual brain, shaping its tendencies and thereby turning it into a mind.”

Daniel Dennett book Consciousness Explained

Source: Consciousness Explained (1991), p. 253–4.

Reading, Success, Animals, Parting

“This current of thought, which has developed mainly in the United States in the Protestant context, claims witchcraft as its own, which makes me boil. They start off with the principle that in the European countryside a tradition of black magic has survived as an aspect of Paganism. They claim to be bringing forth an organized, conscious religion which has survived through the centuries as an underground movement. This is a historical hallucination and, alas, they are founding a Pagan renaissance upon this decadence.”

Christopher Gérard (1962)

Pagan Power in Modern Europe (1999)

Religion

“First of all we forget that one of the most common forms of divorce in the Bible and in all of history has been divorce by death, by execution. We are not used to thinking of divorce in such terms, but consider this. In the Old Testament, if a man were guilty of adultery, or a woman, they were executed. And we saw last week as we studied the New Testament teaching that adultery is in terms of New Testament law still a crime that calls for death. Now it does not exist, and therefore special provisions were made for those social orders wherein no such offense incurred the death penalty. As a matter of fact this is how the penitential system developed.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, The Law of Divorce (n.d.)

Death, Law, Penalty, History

“In spite of the moderate usefulness of what the economist has to say on this subject… there is a cry for a cultural anthropologist or even a psychologist when the economist runs into sacred cows, extended families, traditional motivations, levels of achievement, and social morale, all of which may be more important to economic development than any of the traditional economic variables. We still await a true synthesis of the insights of economics with those of other social sciences in the area”

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

Kenneth Boulding (1961). "Contemporary economic research: . In Donald P. Ray (Ed.) Trends in social science. p..19 cited in: Erik Angner & George Loewenstein (2006) Behavioral Economics http://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/loewenstein/BehavioralEconomics.pdf 1960s

Family, Motivation, Science, Cry

“It would be inconvenient to interrupt the account of Menaechmus's solution of the problem of the two mean proportionals in order to consider the way in which he may have discovered the conic sections and their fundamental properties. It seems to me much better to give the complete story of the origin and development of the geometry of the conic sections in one place, and this has been done in the chapter on conic sections associated with the name of Apollonius of Perga. Similarly a chapter has been devoted to algebra (in connexion with Diophantus) and another to trigonometry”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

under Hipparchus, Menelaus and Ptolemy
A History of Greek Mathematics (1921) Vol. 1. From Thales to Euclid

Way, Problem

“We cannot develop unless we enjoy both internal and external freedom: even the freedom of thinking about freedom.”

Tigran Sargsyan (1960) Economist, politician

Speech (11 December 2010), at official site of the Government of the Republic of Armenia http://www.gov.am/en/speeches/1/item/3114/ 2010

Thinking, Freedom

“I have been surprised at the unanimity with which the notion of the unacceptability of a Doomsday Machine is greeted. I used to be wary of discussing the concept for fear that some colonel would get out a General Operating Requirement or Development Planning Objective for the device, but it seems that I need not have worried. Except by some scientists and engineers who have overemphasized the single objective of maximizing the effectiveness of deterrence, the device is universally rejected. It just does not look professional to senior military officers, and it looks even worse to senior civilians. The fact that more than a few scientists and engineers do seem attracted to the idea is disquieting, but as long as the development project is expensive, even these dedicated experts are unlikely to get one under way.”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

The Magnum Opus; On Thermonuclear War

Fear, Way, Idea, Universe

“Gifts can be dangerous and make a nation dependent on foreign aid. They can scuttle dairy development here.”

Verghese Kurien (1921–2012) Indian founder of dairy-cooperative Amul

In Quotations by 60 Greatest Indians, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology http://resourcecentre.daiict.ac.in/eresources/iresources/quotations.html, Quote

Dependency

“The difference between a good observer and one who is not good is that the former is quick to take a hint from the facts, from his early efforts to develop skill in handling them, and quick to acknowledge the need to revise or alter the conceptual framework of his thinking, The other — the poor observer — continues dogmatically onward with his original thesis, lost in a maze of correlations, long after the facts have shrieked in protest against the interpretation put upon them.”

Elton Mayo (1880–1949) Australian academic

Source: The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilisation, 1945, p. 116; Cited in Supervisory Management, (1963), Vol. 8, p. 58

Thinking, Effort

“To say that genetic differences are relevant to hetero- and homosexuality is not, however, to say that there are “genes for homosexuality” or even that there is a “genetic tendency to homosexuality.” This critical point can be illustrated by an example I owe to the philosopher of science, Elliott Sober. If we look at the chromosomes of people who knit and those who do not, we will find that with few exceptions, knitters have two X chromosomes, while people with one X and one Y chromosome almost never knit. Yet it would be absurd to say that we had discovered genes for knitting. The possession of two X chromosomes causes an embryo, with rare exceptions, to develop into an anatomical and physiological female, while the possession of a Y chromosome leads almost always to male development, and in our culture women are taught to knit while men are not. The beauty of this example is its historical (and geographical) contingency. Had we made the observations before the end of the eighteenth century (or even now in a few Irish, Scottish and Newfoundland communities), the result would have been reversed. Hand knitting was men’s work before the introduction of knitting machines around 1790, and was turned into a female domestic occupation only when mechanization made it economically marginal.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

Genes and Sexuality: An Exchange (1995)

Women, Men, People, Beauty

“In planning the idea of decentralization must be connected with routines of linking plans of rather autonomous parts of the whole system. Here one can use a conditional separation of the system by means of fixing values of flows and parameters transmitted from one part to another. One can use an idea of sequential recomputation of the parameters, which was successfully developed by many authors for the scheme of Dantzig-Wolfe and for aggregative linear models.”

Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) Russian mathematician

"Mathematics in Economics: Achievements, Difficulties, Perspectives," 1975

Idea, Wolf, Parting

“As a result our graduates leave us without having formed the habit of seeking wide generalizations related to diverse variables in the social situations which surround them. Because they lack both habits and methods which lead them to seek generalizations, they become, after they leave us, Specialists themselves and make decisions without the guides to action within their special fields which wider viewpoints might give. To develop them as we must, the artificial dividing lines between social sciences must in large measure be broken down. Specialized training must be both counteracted and supplemented by training which brings in the widest social implications. Otherwise men will not be trained to meet the problems faced by public and private administrators.
The only way these things can be attempted in our universities without resulting in a vast amount of sheer unrealistic sentimentality is, I believe, by paying more attention to the great intellectual field of administration.”

Wallace Brett Donham (1877–1954) American academic

Source: "Training for Leadership in a Democracy", 1936, p. 65-70, as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 663

Men, Way, Problem, Decision

“…the big picture of our spiritual growth is not an event but the development of the habit of relationship with God.”

John Townsend (1952) Canadian clinical psychologist and author

Where Is God (2009, Thomas Nelson publishers)

God

“Of all things to be learned, in school or out, languaging, as I prefer to call the process, is least like a mechanical skill. It is, in fact, the most intimate, integrated, emotion-laden learning we do. At no point can we separate what we know and what we are from how our linguistic powers develop…”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)

School, Learning

“If, on the other hand, the groups of underdeveloped countries, lured by the siren song of the vested interests of the developed powers which exploit their backwardness, contend futilely among themselves for the crumbs from the tables of the world's mighty, and break the ranks of numerically superior forces … our efforts will have been to no avail.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

On Development (1964)

World, Effort, Country

“China's dramatic rise as a global economic power is one of the most important developments at the current world-historical conjuncture. Many have wondered how the rise of China will shape the world-historical trajectory of the twenty-first century Will China become the next hegemonic power? If yes, what would the new China-centered global system look like? if not, what would be the implications for the existing world-system?”

Li Minqi (1969) Chinese economist

Source: The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy (2008), Chapter 1: Introduction to China and the Capitalist World-Economy

World

“Of the various plastic orientations developed over the past twenty-five years, abstract art is the most important, the most interesting... It is an extreme state which only a few creators and admirers are capable of achieving. The danger of this formula lies in the very elevation of its intention. Modelings, contrasts, objects have disappeared, leaving only very pure, very precise relations, and a few colors, a few lines; blank spaces, without depth. Add to this a respect for the vertical plane – thin, rigid, sharp. It is a true, incorruptible purism.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote, 1945 of Fernand Leger, in Abstract Painting, Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co., 1964, p. 33
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1940's

Art, Color, Past

“Since the advent of modernism, artists have been seeking to loosen the entanglement of work and subject, because they saw themselves pushed into a role that they did not necessarily want to occupy: one which offered freedom and independence on the upside, but in combination with isolation and powerlessness on the downside. While the workers of the Fordist factory developed collectivist strategies to pursue their goals, the particularities of the artist's existence – cast as productive eccentricity and manic-depressive individualism – made it more difficult for artists to organize to achieve their demands and improve their precarious living and working conditions. It was only with great difficulty that this group, condemned to autonomy, could free itself from the prison of its freedom.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

via Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2016/04/14/the-story-of-traceroute-about.html

Freedom

“Without deliberate planning on anyone's part, there have developed in our type of social system, and correspondingly in others, mechanisms which, within limits, are capable of forestalling and reversing the deep-lying tendencies for deviance to get into the vicious circle phase which puts it beyond the control of ordinary approval-disapproval and reward-punishment sanctions.”

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) American sociologist

Source: The social system (1951), p. 319-320 as cited in: Paul Gingrich (2002) " Functionalism and Parsons http://uregina.ca/~gingrich/n2202.htm," Sociology. 250. November 15-22, 2002

Lying, Parting

“Recite the Qur’an in such a way that your hearts develop a love for it and your skin becomes softened by it. However as soon as your hearts become indifferent to it (meaning that the Qur’an has no effect on you), then stop reciting it.”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Mustadrakul Wasa’il, Volume 4, Page 239
Shi'ite Hadith

Love, Way, Heart, Indifference

“In some respects, cities are bottom-up processes, but they are also top-down initiatives – and elites soon develop. Religion is older than the city, but the elites quickly build temples and turn themselves into priests. As they become more powerful the temples they build also have huge storehouses. What you see is that the man who has a surplus of material is the powerful man. This is because everyone is living hand-to-mouth, and if you have a bad harvest one year, well, you're stuffed.”

Richard Miles (historian) (1969) British historian and archaeologist

My bright idea: Civilisation is still worth striving for

Religion

“They study the characteristics of law, and instead of perpetual growth corresponding to that of the human race, they find its distinctive trait to be immobility, a tendency to crystallize what should be modified and developed day by day.”

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

Source: Law and Authority (1886), I
Context: Men who long for freedom begin the attempt to obtain it by entreating their masters to be kind enough to protect them by modifying the laws which these masters themselves have created!
But times and tempers are changed. Rebels are everywhere to be found who no longer wish to obey the law without knowing whence it comes, what are its uses, and whither arises the obligation to submit to it, and the reverence with which it is encompassed. The rebels of our day are criticizing the very foundations of society which have hitherto been held sacred, and first and foremost amongst them that fetish, law.
The critics analyze the sources of law, and find there either a god, product of the terrors of the savage, and stupid, paltry, and malicious as the priests who vouch for its supernatural origin, or else, bloodshed, conquest by fire and sword. They study the characteristics of law, and instead of perpetual growth corresponding to that of the human race, they find its distinctive trait to be immobility, a tendency to crystallize what should be modified and developed day by day.

Law, Study

“It was nearly inevitable that someone would turn to tribal Africa for some, at least, of this labor. It is paradoxical but true that a large measure of the labor that turned America into a sanctuary for freedom came from slavery. The slave trade that developed between North America and the west coast of Africa is one of the great horror stories of western civilization”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, God Bless America (2008), Slavery and the Human Story
Context: Slavery came to the English colonies in North America in the 17th century because the colonists found themselves in possession of a vast continent, needing only cultivation to make it the homes of millions of free, prosperous, God-fearing human beings. Those who came from Europe would be refugees from the tyranny and oppression of feudalism, divine right monarchy, and religious intolerance. But converting this vast wilderness into cultivated lands required labor. It was nearly inevitable that someone would turn to tribal Africa for some, at least, of this labor. It is paradoxical but true that a large measure of the labor that turned America into a sanctuary for freedom came from slavery. The slave trade that developed between North America and the west coast of Africa is one of the great horror stories of western civilization. It resulted also from the unlimited greed of the African chiefs who enslaved their brother Africans, and then sold them to white slave traders. They in turn sold them, for vast profits, into the new world.

Freedom

“In the same way he wills that his creation shall develop itself in time and space and sequence, but he creates these conditions as well as the events. He creates the whole, in one act, complete, unchangeable, and it is then unfolded like a rolling panorama with its predetermined contingencies.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)
Context: Creation was not successive; it was one instantaneous thought and act, identical with the will, and was complete and unchangeabble from end to end, including time as one of its functions. Thomas was as clear as possible on that point:— "Supposing God wills anything in effect, he cannot will not to will it, because his will cannot change." He wills that some things shall be contingent and others necessary, but he wills in the same act that the contingency shall be necessary. "They are contingent because God has willed them to be so, and with this object has subjected them to causes which are so." In the same way he wills that his creation shall develop itself in time and space and sequence, but he creates these conditions as well as the events. He creates the whole, in one act, complete, unchangeable, and it is then unfolded like a rolling panorama with its predetermined contingencies.Man's free choice — liberum arbitrium — falls easily into place as a predetermined contingency. God is the First Cause, and acts in all Secondary Causes directly; but while he acts mechanically on the rest of creation,— as far as is known,— he acts freely at one point, and this free action remains free as far as it extends on that line. Man's freedom derives from this source, but it is simply apparent, as far as he is a cause; it is a [... ] Reflex Action of the complicated mirror [... ] called Mind, and [... ] an illusion arising from the extreme delicacy of the machine.

Way, Time

“A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of quicksilver”

E.M. Forster book Aspects of the Novel

in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness; and the novel's success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject matter.
Source: Aspects of the Novel (1927), Chapter One: Introductory

“A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The House of the Seven Gables

Preface
The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
Context: Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works. Not to be deficient in this particular, the author has provided himself with a moral, — the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief; and he would feel it a singular gratification if this romance might effectually convince mankind — or, indeed, any one man — of the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms. In good faith, however, he is not sufficiently imaginative to flatter himself with the slightest hope of this kind. When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtile process than the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral as with an iron rod, — or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly, — thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.

Truth

“The phenomenon develops calmly, but it is invisible, unstoppable.”

Léon Foucault (1819–1868) French physicist

On his pendulum experiment, as quoted in Pendulum : Léon Foucault and the Triumph of Science (2003) by Amir D. Aczel
Context: The phenomenon develops calmly, but it is invisible, unstoppable. One feels, one sees it born and grow steadily; and it is not in one's power to either hasten it or slow it down. Any person, brought into the presence of this fact, stops for a few moments and remains pensive and silent; and then generally leaves, carrying with him forever a sharper, keener sense of our incessant motion through space.

“Many people hear voices without suffering any of the debilitating and dysfunctional effects associated with schizophrenia, some treat these as sources of inspiration of develop religious ideas around them, others become mediums or occultists.”

Peter J. Carroll (1953) British occultist

Source: The Apophenion (2008), p. 38-39
Context: An old joke puts its thus, "when a man speaks to a god its prayer, when a god speaks to a man its schizophrenia"... Many people hear voices without suffering any of the debilitating and dysfunctional effects associated with schizophrenia, some treat these as sources of inspiration of develop religious ideas around them, others become mediums or occultists.

People, Idea, Suffering

“And in this development lies the origin of civilization.”

Julian Jaynes book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Book I, Chapter 6, p. 126
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)
Context: The bicameral mind with its controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of language. And in this development lies the origin of civilization.

“If we proceed in this manner, there should develop a dynamic philosophy which knows no restrictions of time or space.”

George Marshall (1880–1959) US military leader, Army Chief of Staff

Essentials to Peace (1953)
Context: The points I have just discussed are, of course, no more than a very few suggestions in behalf of the cause of peace. I realize that they hold nothing of glittering or early promise, but there can be no substitute for effort in many fields. There must be effort of the spirit — to be magnanimous, to act in friendship, to strive to help rather than to hinder. There must be effort of analysis to seek out the causes of war and the factors which favor peace, and to study their application to the difficult problems which will beset our international intercourse. There must be material effort — to initiate and sustain those great undertakings, whether military or economic, on which world equilibrium will depend.
If we proceed in this manner, there should develop a dynamic philosophy which knows no restrictions of time or space. In America we have a creed which comes to us from the deep roots of the past. It springs from the convictions of the men and women of many lands who founded the nation and made it great. We share that creed with many of the nations of the Old World and the New with whom we are joined in the cause of peace.

Time

“A religious naturalist is a naturalist who has adopted the epic as a core narrative and goes on to explore its religious potential, developing interpretive, spiritual and moral/ethical responses to the story.”

Ursula Goodenough (1943) American biologist

"Exploring The Religious Naturalist Option", 13.7: Cosmos & Culture (23 November 2014) http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/11/23/366104014/exploring-the-religious-naturalist-option Context: Scientific inquiry has provisioned us with a mind-boggling new core narrative — the epic of evolution, the epic of creation, the universe story, big history, everybody's story — where humans and human cultures are understood to be emergent from and, hence, a part of nature. Naturalists adopt this account as their core narrative, with full recognition that these understandings will certainly deepen and may shift with further scientific inquiry. They adopt the story currently on offer and do not simply select features of the story that support preferred theories of nature. … A religious naturalist is a naturalist who has adopted the epic as a core narrative and goes on to explore its religious potential, developing interpretive, spiritual and moral/ethical responses to the story. Importantly, these responses are not front-loaded into the story as they are in the traditions. Therefore, the religious naturalist engages in a process, both individually and in the company of fellow explorers, to discover and experience them. These explorations are informed and guided by the mindful understandings inherent in our human traditions, including art, literature, philosophy and the religions of the world.

“Nations and regions within nations must be left free — and should be encouraged — to develop the local food economies that best suit local needs and local conditions.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

"A Bad Big Idea".
Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (1993)
Context: Anybody interested in solving, rather than profiting from, the problems of food production and distribution will see that in the long run the safest food supply is a local food supply, not a supply that is dependent on a global economy. Nations and regions within nations must be left free — and should be encouraged — to develop the local food economies that best suit local needs and local conditions.

Food

“[bible_banging]But what we've got going wrong is we've got a kind of bifurcation [in cultural development]:
You take your classified telephone directory, and open up "Churches", and have a ruler in your hand. And you will find that the longest space is occupied by authoritarian, Bible-banging churches. And these people are barbarians, who take the written word of the Bible literally. Because they need terribly, they have a personal need, for something to depend on. … The government realizes that there is a very large number of people like that; and therefore, to keep their votes, they have to pander to those kind of people. And these are the boys who never grew up; they always need Papa. … The trouble is that the boys who need Papa, are violent. They have the guns. And they are the types of people who like to be soldiers, policemen — tough guys. And therefore they have a great deal of power.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Interviewed on Les Hixon's show "In The Spirit" on WBAI New York (November 1972)

People, Guy, Boy, Dependency

“The most outstanding intellect of this generation, the greatest poet that the Hellenistic age produced, and historically one of the most important figures in the development of Graeco-Roman (and hence European) literature.”

Callimachus (-310–-240 BC) ancient poet and librarian

A. W. Bulloch, in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature (1989), edited by P. E. Easterling and B. M. W. Knox, vol. 1, part 4, p. 9
Criticism

Age, Literature

“Sensory stimulation is like a a nutrient—without it the brain does not develop or function normally.”

James W. Prescott (1930) American psychologist

"Before Ethics and Morality" (1972)
Context: The brain is highly immature at birth and is dependent upon sensory stimulation for normal growth, development, and function. Sensory stimulation is like a a nutrient—without it the brain does not develop or function normally.

“No one was required to believe in the gods as Christians believe in their creeds. Socrates had always been scrupulous in observance of every accepted principle and practice of community life. However, from his questioning he had developed a civic and personal morality founded on reason rather than custom.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

Plato: The Trial and Death of Socrates (pp. 50-51)
Classics Revisited (1968)
Context: No one was required to believe in the gods as Christians believe in their creeds. Socrates had always been scrupulous in observance of every accepted principle and practice of community life. However, from his questioning he had developed a civic and personal morality founded on reason rather than custom. He envisioned it as subject to continuous criticism and revaluation in terms of the ever-expanding freedom of morally autonomous but cooperating persons, who together made up a community whose characteristic aim was an organically growing depth, breadth, intensity of experience — experience finally of that ultimate reality characterized by Socrates as good, true and beautiful.
The accusers were right. This is a new religion which bears scant resemblance to the old. Civic piety is founded on the recognition of ignorance and the nurture of the soil until it becomes capable of true knowledge — which is a state of being, a moral condition called freedom. The Greek city-state, not to speak of the tribal community, knew nothing of freedom in this sense, but only the liberty that distinguished the free man from the slave.

Life, God, Communication, Question

“The writer has developed a “dynamical” approach to the study of cooperative games based upon reduction to non-cooperative form.”

John Nash (1928–2015) American mathematician and Nobel Prize laureate

"Non-cooperative Games" in Annals of Mathematics, Vol. 54, No. 2 (September 1951)
1950s
Context: The writer has developed a “dynamical” approach to the study of cooperative games based upon reduction to non-cooperative form. One proceeds by constructing a model of the preplay negotiation so that the steps of negotiation become moves in a larger non-cooperative game [which will have an infinity of pure strategies] describing the total situation. This larger game is then treated in terms of the theory of this paper [extended to infinite games] and if values are obtained they are taken as the values of the cooperative game. Thus the problem of analyzing a cooperative game becomes the problem of obtaining a suitable, and convincing, non-cooperative model for the negotiation.
The writer has, by such a treatment, obtained values for all finite two-person cooperative games, and some special n-person games.

Game, Study

“Quantum mechanics… developed through some rather messy, complicated processes stimulated by experiment. While it's a very rich and wonderful theory, it doesn't quite have the conceptual foundation of general relativity.”

Edward Witten (1951) American theoretical physicist

"Edward Witten" interview, Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (1992) ed. P.C.W. Davies, Julian Brown
Context: Quantum mechanics... developed through some rather messy, complicated processes stimulated by experiment. While it's a very rich and wonderful theory, it doesn't quite have the conceptual foundation of general relativity. Our problem in physics is that everything is based on these two different theories and when we put them together we get nonsense.

“In developing a full, deep and rich personality the individual ceases to be a mere cog or cipher, and makes his own particular contribution to evolutionary fulfilment.”

Julian Huxley (1887–1975) English biologist, philosopher, author

The New Divinity (1964)
Context: Human potentialities constitute the world's greatest resource, but at the moment only a tiny fraction of them is being realized. The possibility of tapping and directing these vast resources of human possibility provide the religion of the future with a powerful long-term motive. An equally powerful short-term motive is to ensure the fullest possible development and flowering of individual personalities. In developing a full, deep and rich personality the individual ceases to be a mere cog or cipher, and makes his own particular contribution to evolutionary fulfilment.

Personality

“Individually there has developed a widespread feeling of helplessness and despair, in the face of what seems to be an overwhelming mass of disparate social forces, going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it.”

David Bohm book Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980)
Context: The notion that all these fragments are separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion. Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today. Thus, as is now well known, this way of life has brought about pollution, destruction of the balance of nature, over-population, world-wide economic and political disorder and the creation of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for most of the people who live in it. Individually there has developed a widespread feeling of helplessness and despair, in the face of what seems to be an overwhelming mass of disparate social forces, going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it.

Feeling, Despair

“I'd like to see us create a different complex. And I'm going to be talking about foreign policy in a major speech tomorrow, but we need to create an agency that is not about waging war but about creating conditions for peace around the world. We need some people who will be advocates for peace, advocates for economic development abroad, not just advocates for better weapon systems. So we need to create countervailing power to the military-industrial complex.”

Wesley Clark (1944) American general and former Democratic Party presidential candidate

Interview with Laura Knoy, New Hampshire Public Radio (5 November 2003)
Context: I think General Eisenhower was exactly right, I think we should be concerned about the military-industrial complex. I think if you look at where the country is today you've consolidated all these defense firms into just a few large firms — like Halliburton — and with contracts and contacts at the top level of government. You've got most of the retired generals are one way or another associated with the defense firms — that's the reason that you'll find very few of them speaking out in any public way — I'm not. When I got out I determined I wasn't going to sell arms, I was going to do as little as possible with the Department of Defense because I just figured it was time to make a new start. But I think the military-industrial complex does wield a lot of influence — I'd like to see us create a different complex. And I'm going to be talking about foreign policy in a major speech tomorrow, but we need to create an agency that is not about waging war but about creating conditions for peace around the world. We need some people who will be advocates for peace, advocates for economic development abroad, not just advocates for better weapon systems. So we need to create countervailing power to the military-industrial complex.

War, People, World, Peace

“Steve Mellor and I independently came up with a characterization of the three modes in which people use the UML: sketch, blueprint, and programming language. By far the most common of the three, at least to my biased eye, is UML as sketch. In this usage, developers use the UML to help communicate some aspects of a system. As with blueprints, you can use sketches in a forward-engineering or reverse-engineering direction. Forward engineering draws a UML diagram before you write code, while reverse engineering builds a UML diagram from existing code in order to help understand it.”

Martin Fowler (1963) British programmer

Source: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language, 2004, p. 2

People, Communication, Understanding, Help

“One thing is certain, that the well-developed, well-integrated personality is the highest product of evolution, the fullest realization we know of in the universe.”

Julian Huxley (1887–1975) English biologist, philosopher, author

Transhumanism (1957)
Context: The personality may grievously fail in attaining any real wholeness. One thing is certain, that the well-developed, well-integrated personality is the highest product of evolution, the fullest realization we know of in the universe.

Universe, Personality

“An integral approach acknowledges that all views have a degree of truth, but some views are more true than others, more evolved, more developed, more adequate.”

Ken Wilber (1949) American writer and public speaker

Integral Spirituality in Real Life
Context: An integral approach acknowledges that all views have a degree of truth, but some views are more true than others, more evolved, more developed, more adequate. And so let's get that part out of the way right now: homophobia in any form, as far as I can tell, stems from a lower level of human development — but it is a level, it exists, and one has to make room in one's awareness for those lower levels as well, just as one has to include third grade in any school curriculum. Just don't, you know, put those people in charge of anything important.

Truth

“It was not easy to have the imagination to foresee that computers were to become one of the most important developments of the century.”

James H. Wilkinson (1919–1986) English mathematician

Oral history interview http://history.siam.org/wilkinson.htm by John C. Nash, SIAM History of Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing Project http://history.siam.org/,13 July 1984 Context: Very belatedly in 1947, Darwin [Sir Charles Darwin, great-grandson of the famous Charles Darwin] agreed to set up a very small electronics group [... ] It was not easy to have the imagination to foresee that computers were to become one of the most important developments of the century.

Imagination

“Freedom is the very essence of life, the impelling force in all intellectual and social development, the creator of every new outlook for the future of mankind. The liberation of man from economic exploitation and from intellectual and political oppression, which finds its finest expression in the world-philosophy of Anarchism, is the first prerequisite for the evolution of a higher social culture and a new humanity.”

Rudolf Rocker book Anarcho-Syndicalism

Source: Anarcho-Syndicalism (1938), Ch. 1 "Anarchism: Its Aims and Purposes"
Context: Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force. And this unintelligence of its objectives sets its stamp on its supporters also and renders them stupid and brutal, even when they were originally endowed with the best of talents. One who is constantly striving to force everything into a mechanical order at last becomes a machine himself and loses all human feeling.
It was from the understanding of this that modern Anarchism was born and now draws its moral force. Only freedom can inspire men to great things and bring about social and political transformations. The art of ruling men has never been the art of educating men and inspiring them to a new shaping of their lives. Dreary compulsion has at its command only lifeless drill, which smothers any vital initiative at its birth and can bring forth only subjects, not free men. Freedom is the very essence of life, the impelling force in all intellectual and social development, the creator of every new outlook for the future of mankind. The liberation of man from economic exploitation and from intellectual and political oppression, which finds its finest expression in the world-philosophy of Anarchism, is the first prerequisite for the evolution of a higher social culture and a new humanity.

Life, World, Freedom, Future

“We live in order to develop the superior qualities of man which are, as yet, for the most part latent.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Section 9 : Ethical Outlook
Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)
Context: I believe in the supreme excellence of righteousness; I believe that the law of righteousness will triumph in the universe over all evil; I believe that in the attempt to fulfil the law of righteousness, however imperfect it must remain, are to be found the inspiration, the consolation, and the sanctification of human existence.
We live in order to finish an, as yet, unfinished universe, unfinished so far as the human, that is, the highest part of it, is concerned. We live in order to develop the superior qualities of man which are, as yet, for the most part latent.

Parting

“Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous.”

Werner Herzog (1942) German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and opera director

Herzog on Herzog (2002)
Context: Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect.

Life, Children

“There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom you lay the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order; the firmest foundations for the development of individual character; and the best provision for the happiness of the nation at large.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in West Calder, Scotland (27 November 1879), quoted in W. E. Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches 1879 (Leicester University Press, 1971), p. 117.
1870s
Context: [My sixth principle is that] the foreign policy of England should always be inspired by the love of freedom. There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom you lay the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order; the firmest foundations for the development of individual character; and the best provision for the happiness of the nation at large.

Happiness, Idea, Freedom, Loyalty

“No one invented it on purpose, it was invented in a lucky accident. …By rights, string theory shouldn't have been invented until our knowledge of some of the areas that are prerequisite… had developed to the point that it was possible for us to have the right concept of what it is all about.”

Edward Witten (1951) American theoretical physicist

"Edward Witten" interview, Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (1992) ed. P.C.W. Davies, Julian Brown
Context: It's been said that string theory is part of the physics of the twenty-first century that fell by chance into the twentieth century. That's a remark that was made by a leading physicist about fifteen years ago.... String theory was invented essentially by accident in a long series of events, starting with the Veneziano model... No one invented it on purpose, it was invented in a lucky accident.... By rights, string theory shouldn't have been invented until our knowledge of some of the areas that are prerequisite... had developed to the point that it was possible for us to have the right concept of what it is all about.

Knowledge

“Having these Four Beginnings, but saying that they cannot develop them is to destroy themselves.”

Mencius (-372–-289 BC) Chinese philosopher

2A:6, as translated by Wing-tsit Chan in A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (1963), p. 65
Variant translation: The sense of compassion is the beginning of benevolence; the sense of shame the beginning of righteousness; the sense of modesty the beginning of decorum; the sense of right and wrong the beginning of wisdom. Man possesses these four beginnings just as he possesses four limbs. Anyone possessing these four and saying that he can not do what is required of him is abasing himself.
The Mencius
Context: The feeling of commiseration is the beginning of humanity; the feeling of shame and dislike is the beginning of righteousness; the feeling of deference and compliance is the beginning of propriety; and the feeling of right or wrong is the beginning of wisdom.
Men have these Four Beginnings just as they have their four limbs. Having these Four Beginnings, but saying that they cannot develop them is to destroy themselves.

Quotes about development page 36

Quotes about development
page 36