Quotes about difference
page 43

“Individualism, isolation, alienation. The poet is not only different from society, he is as different as possible from other poets; all this differentness is exploited to the limit—is used as subject matter, even. Each poet develops an elaborate, “personalized”, bureaucratized machinery of effect; refine your singularities is everybody’s maxim.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

of modernism; “The End of the Line”, p. 81
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Personality

“During the past three decades numerous empirical studies of economic behavior have been carried out and their theoretical foundation has been clarified. There was a rapid development and articulation of data, theory, and methodology. A new discipline of behavioral economics was emerging [which] consists of the empirical investigations of the behavior of businessmen and consumers in one country in one time. Generalizations about economic behavior emerge gradually by comparing behavior observed under different circumstances.”

George Katona (1901–1981) American psychologist

George Katona, and James N. Morgan (1980). Essays on behavioral economics. Univ of Michigan Survey Research. p. 3

Behavior, Study, Time, Past

“The first half of the 20th century in the United States and much of the world was an era when racial and ethnic differences determined even the most uncontrived actions. Stepping into a restaurant, boarding a train, engaging in sexual relationships, or running or voting for a public office were all ruled by notions of differences between groups.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(History and the World, p. 121).
Book Sources, The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois (2003)

World, Training

“The vegan diet in the western industrial society is important to me because I feel that if you open yourself up to eating dairy and meat then you’re taking part in basically a holocaust for animals. You know it’s very different if you’re in some tribal situation where people are fishing — like how we used to live. Maybe we would have eaten meat sometimes. But this kind of American idea we have of traditional eating is the cause of so much torture and misery. I don’t want to eat that – it’s gross. Animals are my friends and so it feels weird to eat them.”

Daniela Sea (1977) American filmmaker, actor, and musician

" Farm Sanctuary Exclusive: Daniela Sea Won't Take Part In An Animal Holocaust http://www.ecorazzi.com/2008/12/09/farm-sanctuary-exclusive-daniela-sea-wont-take-part-in-an-animal-holocaust/", interview with Ecorazzi (9 December 2008).

People, Feeling, Idea, Fish

“Once again there appears to be a considerable difference of opinion. I wanted a series with distinction, I have no interest in a series which is purely and uniquely suspenseful but makes no comment about anything. But all they seem to want is maniacs in a cemetery. When I complain they pat me on the head, condescend, and hope I go away. When I was on the Twilight Zone I took the bows, but I also took the brickbats, because when it was bad it was usually my fault, but when it's bad on the Night Gallery, I had nothing to do with it, yet my face is on it all the time.”

Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter

Rod Serling: American Masters.
Other

Hope, Appearance, Time, Night

“Different men are moved or left cold by lines according to the difference in their natures. What moves you is beautiful to you.”

Robert Henri (1865–1929) American painter

citation needed

Men, Beauty, Nature

“This spectrum is of the type known in spectroscopy as a line-spectrum. Its appearance is that of a group of bright lines on a dark background, indicating that the radiation divides itself between a number of clearly defined frequencies, and that there is no radiation in between. Before Bohr's explanation appeared, these frequencies had been supposed to belong to some sort of vibration taking place in the hydrogen atom - like frequencies of the musical note which is heard when a bell or piano wire is made to vibrate. It now became clear that they had an entirely different origin. The energy exhibited in the spectrum was not liberated by a vibration, or any kind of continuous motion, but by the sudden jump of an electron to an orbit of lower energy, and its frequency was determined by the compulsion put upon it to form a single quantum.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Music, Appearance

“In each of the cathedral churches there was a bishop, or an archbishop of fools, elected; and in the churches immediately dependent upon the papal see a pope of fools. These mock pontiffs had usually a proper suit of ecclesiastics who attended upon them, and assisted at the divine service, most of them attired in ridiculous dresses resembling pantomimical players and buffoons; they were accompanied by large crowds of the laity, some being disguised with masks of a monstrous fashion, and others having their faces smutted; in one instance to frighten the beholders, and in the other to excite their laughter: and some, again, assuming the habits of females, practised all the wanton airs of the loosest and most abandoned of the sex. During the divine service this motley crowd were not contended with singing of indecent songs in the choir, but some of them ate, and drank, and played at dice upon the altar, by the side of the priest who celebrated the mass. After the service they put filth into the censers, and ran about the church, leaping, dancing, laughing, singing, breaking obscene jests, and exposing themselves in the most unseemly attitudes with shameless impudence. Another part of these ridiculous ceremonies was, to shave the precentor of fools upon a stage erected before the church, in the presence of the populace; and during the operation, he amused them with lewd and vulgar discourses, accompanied by actions equally reprehensible. The bishop, or the pope of fools, performed the divine service habited in the pontifical garments, and gave his benediction to the people before they quitted the church. He was afterwards seated in an open carriage, and drawn about to the different parts of the town, attended by a large train of ecclesiastics and laymen promiscuously mingled together; and many of the most profligate of the latter assumed clerical habits in order to give their impious fooleries the greater effect; they had also with them carts filled with ordure, which they threw occasionally upon the populace assembled to see the procession. These spectacles were always exhibited at Christmas-time, or near to it, but not confined to one particular day.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 345
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Festival of Fools

People, Fools, Sex, Fashion

“His grace,
Sit nature, fortune, motion, time and place. ]] From whence with grace and goodness compassed round,
He ruleth, blesseth, keepeth all he wrought,
Above the air, the fire, the sea and ground,
Our sense, our wit, our reason and our thought,
Where persons three, with power and glory crowned,
Are all one God, who made all things of naught,
Under whose feet, subjected to his grace,
Sit nature, fortune, motion, time and place.This is the place, from whence like smoke and dust
Of this frail world the wealth, the pomp and power,
He tosseth, tumbleth, turneth as he lust,
And guides our life, our death, our end and hour:
No eye, however virtuous, pure and just,
Can view the brightness of that glorious bower,
On every side the blessed spirits be,
Equal in joys, though differing in degree.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Sedea colà, dond'egli e buono e giusto
Dà legge al tutto, e 'l tutto orna e produce
Sovra i bassi confin del mondo angusto,
Ove senso o ragion non si conduce.
E della eternità nel trono augusto
Risplendea con tre lumi in una luce.
Ha sotto i piedi il Fato e la Natura,
Ministri umíli, e 'l moto, e chi 'l misura; E 'l loco, e quella che qual fumo o polve
La gloria di qua giuso e l'oro e i regni,
piace là su, disperde e volve:
Nè, Diva, cura i nostri umani sdegni.
Quivi ei così nel suo splendor s'involve,
Che v'abbaglian la vista anco i più degni;
D'intorno ha innumerabili immortali
Disegualmente in lor letizia eguali.
Canto IX, stanzas 56–57 (tr. Edward Fairfax)
Max Wickert's translation:
He sat where He gives laws both good and just
to all, and all creates, and all sets right,
above the low bounds of this world of dust,
beyond the reach of sense or reason's might;
enthroned upon Eternity, august,
He shines with three lights in a single light.
At His feet Fate and Nature humbly sit,
and Motion, and the Power that measures it,and Space, and Fate who like a powder will
all fame and gold and kingdoms here below,
as pleases Him on high, disperse or spill,
nor, goddess, cares she for our wrath or woe.
There He, enwrapped in His own splendour, still
blinds even worthiest vision with His glow.
All round Him throng immortals numberless,
unequally equal in their happiness.
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

Life, Death, God, World

“In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle towards the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfactions, refusals, decisions, which also cannot be fully self-conscious, at least on the aesthetic plane. The result of his struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not aware of.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

1951 - 1968, The Creative Act', 1957

Pain, Decision, Effort

“If they think you're a hero, they're wrong. After you die, you don't get to be Beowulf or Perseus or Rama any more. Whole different set of rules. Chess, not checkers. Go, not chess. You understand?”

Neil Gaiman book Fragile Things

From the Monarch in the Glenn
Fragile Things (2006)

Understanding, Thinking

“This country does not discriminate. No president, no officer in this country should hold office that has any hint of treating people differently because of the color of their skin or where they came from and that kind of thing. We believe in equality and fair treatment and that's the moral principle that we adhere to as a nation.”

Jeff Sessions (1946) Former United States Attorney General

Interview with Matt Murphy http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2016/03/jeff_sessions_on_donald_trump.html (2016)

People, Color, Country

“Today’s despisers of free speech have their roots in a different ideology from the tribal sort that was used to justify slaveholding and Puritanism. This newer ideology began with Karl Marx—or rather, with the struggle of Marxist intellectuals to explain the failure of the European proletariat to rise in violent revolution at the outbreak of World War I. Rather than joining in solidarity with the working classes of other nations, European workers rallied in dismaying numbers to their national flags, exhausted themselves in a four-year killing spree that beggared all previous descriptions of war, and then succumbed to waves of populist fascism. The only revolution that Marxists could tease out of the charnel house of the Great War was a coup d’état in the most backward and least industrially developed empire of Europe and, even then, only by the substitution of what Vladimir Lenin called a “vanguard” of Marxist elites rather than a spontaneous uprising of the workers.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Free Speech and Its Present Crisis (2018)

War, World, Failure, Housing

“To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realised as being true, that is called propaganda. In the beginning there is the understanding, this understanding uses propaganda as a tool to find those men, that shall turn understanding into politics. Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things from what I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. Those are found in other circumstances, I find them when thinking at my desk, but not in the meeting hall.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Speech on 9 January 1928 to an audience of party members at the "Hochschule für Politik", a series of training talks for Nazi party members in Berlin
1920s

Love, Women, Men, People

“On the question of the "origin of species" Mr. Haughton enlarges considerably; but his chief arguments are reduced to the setting-up of "three unwarrantable assumptions," which he imputes to the Lamarckians and Darwinians, and then, to use his own words, "brings to the ground like a child's house of cards." The first of these is "the indefinite variation of species continuously in the one direction." Now this is certainly never assumed by Mr. Darwin, whose argument is mainly grounded on the fact that variations occur in every direction. This is so obvious that it hardly needs insisting on. In every large family there is almost always one child taller, one darker, one thinner than the rest; one will have a larger nose, another a larger eye: they vary morally as well; some are more poetical, others more morose; one has a genius for numbers, another for painting. It is the same in animals: the puppies, or kittens, or rabbits of one litter differ in many ways from each other - in colour, in size, in disposition; so that, though they do not "vary continuously in one direction," they do vary continuously in many directions; and thus there is always material for natural selection to act upon in some direction that may be advantageous. […] I will only, in conclusion, quote from it a short paragraph which contains an important truth, but which may very fairly be applied in other quarters than those for which the author intended it: - "No progress in natural science is possible as long as men will take their rude guesses at truth for facts, and substitute the fancies of their imagination for the sober rules of reasoning."”

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist

"Remarks on the Rev. S. Haughton's Paper on the Bee's Cell, And on the Origin of Species" (1863).

Men, Truth, Family, Way

“The emotional stress is a complex network of unusual strains inherent in the combat situation. The stress is derived from different sources, which again mutually reinforce each other.”

Roy R. Grinker, Sr. (1900–1993) American psychiatrist and neurologist

Source: Men Under Stress, 1945, p. 33 cited in: David Goodman Mandelbaum -(1952) Soldier groups and Negro soldiers. p. 78

“Many a man, who has gone but a few miles from home, understands human nature better, detects motives and weighs character more sagaciously, than another who has travelled over the known world, and made a name by his reports of different countries. It is force of thought which measures intellectual, and so it is force of principle which measures moral greatness.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Self-Culture (1838)

World, Travel, Home, Motivation

“He knows the entire land, there is not a stain on him, he is blemishless, has vast administrative experience having served in various [c]abinets, and fulfilled his responsibilities to everyone's satisfaction, whether it was as the chief executive of the Delhi metropolitan council or as information and broadcasting minister or deputy prime minister. Advaniji rose from the ranks to become a mass leader, there's a world of difference between the two.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

2009, "The nation is waiting for a strong, experienced leader", 2009

World

“Insofar as our children resemble us, they are our most precious admirers, and insofar as they differ, they can be our most vehement distractors. From the beginning, we tempt them into imitation of us and long for what may be life's most profound compliment: their choosing to live according to our own system of values. Though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us.”

Andrew Solomon (1963) American journalist

Source: Far from the Tree, Ch. 1 Son, p 1-2.

Life, Children, Sadness, Parent

“We need not suppose that when power resides in an exclusive class, that class will knowingly and deliberately sacrifice the other classes to themselves: it suffices that, in the absence of its natural defenders, the interest of the excluded is always in danger of being overlooked: and, when looked at, is seen with very different eyes from those of the persons whom it directly concerns.”

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) British philosopher and political economist

Source: On Representative Government (1861), Ch. III: The Ideally Best Polity

Nature, Personality

“The United States in general conducts very strict security measures for everyone who wishes to visit it, which has been in place for quite a few years. It’s also important to know that during election campaigns many statements are made and many things are said, however afterwards governing the country would be something different, and will be subject to many factors.”

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (1954) Current President of Egypt

Remarks by al-Sisi responding to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump proposing to ban Muslim immigration to the US during an interview with CNN's Erin Burnett on 21 September 2016 http://time.com/4502537/egypt-sisi/ 2016

Country

“People keep framing this as a religious freedom issue, but there's a difference between practising your religion — which everyone has the right to do — and rubbing your religion in people's faces as a triumphalist political statement, which is what's happening here.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

Bad faith at Ground Zero http://youtube.com/watch?v=oJQ4bwGPRuk (28 August 2010)] 2010

People, Religion, Freedom

“Looking at the difference between pre- and post-Islamic Arabia, we are forced to ask whether history has ever witnessed a comparable moral advance among so many people in so short a time.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)

People, History, Time

“I was trying to show colour, but I realized at the private view that the public were prisoners of a preconceived point of view and that, confronted with all these surfaces of different colours, they responded far more to the inter-relationship of the different propositions, they reconstituted the elements of a decorative polychromy.”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

In 1956; p. 30
before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

“Such cultural homosexuality is an alienation more or less forced upon certain groups of Auden’s society by the form of their education and the nature of their social and financial conditions. Where the members of a class and a sex are taught, in a prolonged narcissistic isolation, to hero-worship themselves—class and sex; where—to a different class—unemployment is normal, where one’s pay is inadequate or impossible for more than one; where children are expensive liabilities instead of assets; where women are business competitors; where most social relationships have become as abstract, individualistic, and mobile as the relations of the labor market, homosexuality is a welcome asset to the state, one of the cheapest and least dangerous forms of revolution.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden’s Poetry”, pp. 127–128
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Women, Children, Education, Sex

“This is the Earth - our planet, home to millions of different species, but only one species dominates everything - human beings. There are nearly seven billion of us living on the Earth, and the human population is increasing by more than two people every second; two hundred thousand people every day; nearly eighty million people every year. Each additional life needs food, energy, water, shelter, and hopefully a whole lot more. m0s0-m0s43”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

Life, People, Food, Home

“Pricasso had a long line of people waiting to pay him to paint with his penis. The former builder said he had always been talented at drawing but five years ago came up with the idea of creating art with a different type of implement.”

Pricasso (1949) Australian painter

[Ellen Lutton, Sexpo draws crowds... and then they're painted, The Sun-Herald, Sydney, Australia, 7 March 2010, 25, Fairfax Media Publications Pty Limited.]
About

People, Art, Idea, Waiting

“Look what the Iraq Study Group came up with. You know, that was a totally nonpartisan group of, you know, 10 wise Americans, you know, some of them Republican, some of then Democrats from different, you know, experiences. They came out with a long list of recommendations. Now, you can say well, I wouldn't agree with that one or wouldn't agree with this one, but the fundamental point they made is that there is no military solution. There is only a political resolution and you've got to bring everybody into the game in order to move it forward, you know. And for whatever reason, this administration rejects that. They won't talk to bad people. That means they won't talk to the Iranians and the Syrians… If they're our enemies, then believe me, I think they are, because they certainly don't wish us any well outcome, then we need to know more about them. I think it's a sign of strength to get into a process with people who you are concerned about their motives, who's really calling the shots. This administration won't do that. So, to a certain extent we're flying blind.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Interview http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,244985,00.html with Greta van Susteren on FOX News (19 January 2007) Senate years (2001 – January 19, 2007)

People, Game, Motivation, Thinking

“Always Do Your Best. Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.”

Miguel Ángel Ruiz book The Four Agreements

The Four Agreements (1997)

Change, Positive

“It seems unfortunate that strong people are usually so disagreeable and overbearing that no one cares for them. In fact, to be different from your fellow creatures is always a misfortune. The Growleywogs knew that they were disliked and avoided by every one, so they had become surly and unsociable even among themselves.”

L. Frank Baum book The Emerald City of Oz

The Emerald City of Oz
Later Oz novels

People, Strong

“There is no such thing as morality—only varingly expedient conventions. What to one race is a crime, is virtue to another; crime in one era is virtue in another; even a crime in one class of society is at the same time and in the same society virtue in another class... It makes no difference whether people are called good or bad; we are all here; now; there is only one world in existence, and in it there prevail either expedient or inexpedient conditions for those who are alive.”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

the organist
Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

People, World, Time

“An election cannot give a country a firm sense of direction if it has two or more national parties which merely have different names but are as alike in their principles and aims as peas in the same pod.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, Fireside Chat in the night before signing the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938)

Sense, Country

“By this I refer to the fact that at the same time several people may each possess some portion of the rights to use the land. A may possess the right to grow wheat on it. B may possess the right to walk across it. C may possess the right to dump ashes and smoke on it. D may possess the right to fly an airplane over it. E may have the right to subject it to vibrations consequent to the use of some neighboring equipment. And each of these rights may be transferable. In sum, private property rights to various partitioned uses of land are "owned" by different persons.”

Armen Alchian (1914–2013) American economist

Source: Economic Forces at Work, 1977, p. 132-133

People, Time, Personality, Flying

“I have dedicated this book to the Soviet soldier. It is with his blood and sweat that the victory over the powerful enemy was gained. He knew how to face mortal danger, he displayed a supreme valour and heroism. There is no limit to the greatness of his exploit in the name of his Motherland. The Soviet soldier deserves that grateful humanity should erect him a monument to stand in the ages to come. Brilliant examples were set by officers of all ranks- from junior lieutenants to marshals- ardent patriots of their country, experienced and fearless organizers of the multi-million strong armed forces in military actions. Those who make a difference between the Soviet soldier and officer make a bad mistake, for equal in origin, way of thinking and acting, they are equally loyal to, and are true sons of, their Motherland.”

Georgy Zhukov (1896–1974) Marshal of the Soviet Union

p. 691

Books, Age, Way, Thinking

“In training Biu Jee we are taught to be free. The first forms tell us about normal situations. Biu Jee is for the abnormal situations. The ideas in Biu Jee sometimes will contradict normal Ving Tsun (Wing Chun) ideas in order to allow the person to survive in a bad situation. We are told to do what is necessary to survive and so there are no limitations. Styles have different concepts and objectives. With Ving Tsun (Wing Chun) we want to attack our opponent in a very direct and savage manner. Other styles will contradict this objective by attempting non-direct tactics. If we combine them our objectives can become confused in the heat of the fight. We will be less effective.”

Wong Shun Leung (1935–1997) martial artist

Wong Shun Leung's Answer on the Question of "Do you feel that Ving Tsun (Wing Chun) has any limitations ? Many students like to combine boxing with kicking , throwing and grappling on the ground to develop eclectic systems." Mixed Martial Arts Source: Interview with Wong Shun Leung, by: Rusper Patel http://www.gongsauwong.com/interview.php

Idea, Fight, Personality, Training

“It was a distinction without a difference.”

Avram Davidson (1923–1993) novelist

Vergil in Averno (1987)

“We have also sound houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmonies which you have not, of quarter sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep; likewise divers trembling and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which set to the ear to do further the hearing greatly. We have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and as if it were tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have also means to convey sounds in tubes and pipes, in strange lines and distances…”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

New Atlantis http://www.constitution.org/bacon/new_atlantis.htm (1627)

Music, Bird, Time, Help

“Speech and prose are not the same thing. They have different wave-lengths, for speech moves at the speed of light, where prose moves at the speed of the alphabet, and must be consecutive and grammatical and word-perfect. Prose cannot gesticulate. Speech can sometimes do nothing else.”

James Stephens (1882–1950) Irish writer

"Finnegans Wake", in James, Seamas & Jacques: Unpublished Writings (London: Macmillan, 1964) p. 161.

Light, Speed, Perfection

“Work is the antonym of free time. But not of leisure. Leisure and free time live in two different worlds. We have got into the habit of thinking them the same. Anybody can have free time. Free time is a realizable idea of democracy. Leisure is not fully realizable, and hence an ideal not alone an idea. Free time refers to a special way of calculating a special kind of time. Leisure refers to a state of being, a condition of man, which few desire and fewer achieve.”

Sebastian de Grazia book Of Time

Of Time, Work, and Leisure (1962)

World, Way, Democracy, Idea

“In a class system, the social hierarchy is based primarily upon differences in monetary wealth and income. Social classes are not sharply marked off from each other, nor are they demarcated by tangible boundaries. Unlike estates, they have no legal standing, individuals of all classes being in principle equal before the law. Consequently, there are no legal restraints on the movement of individuals and families from one class to another… Unlike caste, social classes are not organized, closed groups. Rather, they are aggregates of persons with similar amounts of wealth and property, and similar sources of income.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Class and society (1959), p. 15; as cited in: Ronald J. Samuda (1998) Psychological Testing of American Minorities: Issues and Consequences. p. 47.

Family, Law, Personality, Wealth

“In this vast country of ours, people profess different religions, speak different languages, dress differently and observe different customs; but we are one nation; the history of our struggle for independence and our faith in our future development are our common bonds.”

Lal Bahadur Shastri (1904–1966) The second Prime Minister of the Republic of India and a leader of the Indian National Congress party

People, Faith, Religion, History

“I am always afraid of quoting my own decisions; I do not think it is the right thing for a judge to do, but I often do refer to them when I can thereby avoid repeating in different words what I have said before.”

Arthur Kekewich (1832–1907) British judge

Bolton Partners v. Lambert (1889), L. R. 41 C. D. 300.

Quotes, Thinking, Decision

“Today, the power of women rings a bit differently and you can feel the shift.”

Gwyneth Paltrow (1972) American actress, singer, and food writer

Women, Feeling

“To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different; it takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination — and the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

Apple company event (October 1983) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J3FUOCRXPo 1980s

People, Imagination

“The new "ambiguity" means, in a way adjudged favorable to literary, poetic, intellectually and psychologically well-devised and praiseworthily executed linguistic performance, uncertainty of meaning, or difficulty for the interpreter in identifying just what the meaning in question is: it means the old meanings of ambiguity with a difference. It means uncertainty of meaning (of a word or combination of words) purposefully incorporated in a literary composition for the attainment of the utmost possible variety of meaning-play compressible within the verbal limits of the composition.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"On Ambiguity" in Rational Meaning and Supplementary Essays (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997).

Way, Question

“[T]he United States is history’s exception, not its rule. America is a great, evolving experiment of a constitutional republic in which peoples of all different races, religions, and ethnic backgrounds are equal under the law and see themselves as Americans first and members of tribes second — appearance and religion being incidental rather than essential to the American body politic.”

Victor Davis Hanson (1953) American military historian, essayist, university professor

2010s, America: One Nation, Indivisible (2015)

People, Religion, Law, History

“I believe that all religions are true and different religions are only the different ways to the same God.
For me God is the power of life and justice and when I am talking about God I am just talking about happiness to live and to enjoy life on earth. I feel that humanity should be one, that mankind should not be divided. The people should together work for much good. Well, this is my belief in God. Maybe I am not clear.”

Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926–2011) daughter of Joseph Stalin

"Svetlana Alliluyeva describes how she changed from Atheism", Daytona Beach Morning Journal, (May 20, 1967)

Life, God, Happiness, People

“You will find that there is no other difference of opinion as regards any portions of the Universe, except that the philosophers believe in the Eternity of the Universe and we believe in the Creation. Note this.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.25

Universe

“[T]he rules are different for you and always will be; that you must be composed at all times and never scrap in the muck laid down by your opponents because your moral purity is measured differently to theirs.”

Clementine Ford (writer) (1981) Australian feminist writer, broadcaster and public speaker

Clementine Ford: This is the personal price I pay for speaking out online http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/news-and-views/opinion/clementine-ford-this-is-the-personal-price-i-pay-for-speaking-out-online-20170713-gxaa6z.html, July 13 2017, in the Sydney Morning Herald 2017

Time

“Scientology, the word means study of life, study of knowledge, and that's where it is. It takes up all areas of life itself, things that are integral and maxims that are related to life and very existence. Let me give you an example. It's better if I take that, because it is such a broad-ranging subject covering so many different areas, the subject of communication. This is something that major breakthroughs exist in Scientology, being able to communicate in the world around you. And I think everybody would agree that this is an important subject. Well, there's an actual formula for communication which can be understood.”

David Miscavige (1960) leader of the Church of Scientology

Scientology Leader Gave ABC First-Ever Interview: David Miscavige, Scientology Leader and Best Man at Tom Cruise's Wedding, Spoke to ABC News' 'Nightline' in 1992, ABC News, November 18, 2006, 2010-07-03 http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=2664713,.

Life, World, Communication, Knowledge

“The more areas in which we (Taiwan and Mainland China) agree, the greater the chances of resolving our differences.”

Wu Po-hsiung (1939) Taiwanese politician

Wu Po-hsiung (2013) quoted in: " Taiwan, China should put aside disputes: KMT’s Wu http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2013/09/19/2003572505" in Taipei Times 19 September 2013. Statements were made during the visit of Yunnan Communist Party of China secretary, Qin Guangrong, and his delegation to Taiwan in September 2013. Wu lauds DPP’s China department (2012)

Chance

“When we look over the rest of the world, in spite of all its devastation there is encouragement to believe it is on a firmer moral foundation than it was in 1914. Much of the old despotism has been swept away, While some of it comes creeping back disguised under new names, no one can doubt that the general admission of the right of the people to self-government has made tremendous progress in nearly every quarter of the globe. In spite of the staggering losses and the grievous burden of taxation, there is a new note of hope for the individual to be more secure in his rights, which is unmistakably clearer than ever before. With all the troubles that beset the Old World, the former cloud of fear is evidently not now so appalling. It is impossible to believe that any nation now feels that it could better itself by war, and it is apparent to me that there has been a very distinct advance in the policy of peaceful and honorable adjustment of international differences. War has become less probable; peace has become more secure. The price which has been paid to bring about this new condition is utterly beyond comprehension. We can not see why it should not have come in orderly and peaceful methods without the attendant shock of fire and sword and carnage. We only know that it is here. We believe that on the ruins of the old order a better civilization is being constructed.”

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

1920s, Toleration and Liberalism (1925)

War, People, World, Fear

“The Croatian parliament elected me to be the Croatian member of the Presidency of Yugoslavia. I went to Belgrade, where first, for several months, I was not allowed to take up my duties because the Federal Assembly was unable to meet. After that, the Serbian bloc boycotted my election as president under… Finally, under pressure from the international community, I was elected president. Croatia adopted a decision on its independence. Croatia, in agreement with the international community, postponed its secession from Yugoslavia by three months. This time period had elapsed. Yugoslavia no longer existed. The federal institutions were no longer functioning. I returned to Zagreb, and that's precisely what I said. Because I [had not gone] to Belgrade to open up a house-painting business. I went there as a member of the Presidency of Yugoslavia. Since Yugoslavia no longer existed and the Presidency no longer existed, I had performed the tasks entrusted to me by the Croatian parliament and was reporting back, ready to take up a different office. What was I to do in Belgrade when the Presidency no longer existed?… The accused is a lawyer. He understands very well what I'm talking about. My 'task' was to represent Croatia in the Federal Presidency.”

Stjepan Mesić (1934) Former Croatian and Yugoslav president

ICTY Transcript, Page 10636 - Mesić's cross-examination by Slobodan Milošević at the ICTY on 2 October 2002, 8 April 2012 http://www.icty.org/x/cases/slobodan_milosevic/trans/en/021002IT.htm, Responding to an earlier quote in which he stated My task has come to an end. There is no more Yugoslavia. ("Moj posao je završen - Jugoslavije više nema") 5 December 1991 in the Croatian parliament having left the presidency of the Yugoslav presidency.

Communication, Understanding, Business, Decision

“In this book I am concerned with certain kinds of communication: communication between parents and children, between associates of the same status, between members of different societies and, through the mediation of various kinds of coding—tools, art, script, formulas, film—between cultures distant from each other in time and place. I shall be concerned to show that we must deal not only with evolutionary sequences, in which our ability to articulate and codify parts of the culture enormously increases our ability to intervene in the cultural process, but also with the coexistence at any period of history of earlier forms of communication side by side with later ones.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. xxxi

Children, Books, Art, History

“By the way, a shorter man earns less than a tall man. The blonde earns more than a brunette. They are different, and it should not be equalised. That’s all.”

Janusz Korwin-Mikke (1942) polish politician

Source: Good Morning Britain, 08 March 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NEqlfWSOrQ

Way

“I am attracted to a thug. I like that quality, but I like the other side of it, too. Because all guys who go around behaving in macho ways are really scared little girls. So you have to look beneath the surface. There's a difference between my ideal man and a man that I'm sexually attracted to, believe me. Therein lies the rub.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Aperture Magazine 1999 http://allaboutmadonna.com/madonna-interviews-articles/aperture-magazine-summer-1999

Way, Guy, Girl

““You fought for your freedom and won a different kind of prison. I will fight for mine—”
“You can’t fight me,” Tearle reminded him harshly.
“I know.” In the placid light, his face looked chilled and very weary. “But I can die.””

Patricia A. McKillip book Winter Rose

Source: Winter Rose (1996), Chapter 15, p. 145.

Freedom, Light, Fight

“I sort of sympathise with them looking for weapons of mass destruction, because I'm like that with scissors. Honestly, I just turn the house upside down. Of course the difference is, I know I have got some scissors.”

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

A Brief History of Timewasting, Room 101, The News Quiz

Housing

“The vast differences in power contributed to faulty social theories of these differences that are still with us today. When a society is economically dominant, it is easy for its members to assume that such dominance reflects a deeper superiority--whether religious, racial, genetic, cultural, or institutional--rather than an accident of timing or geography.”

Jeffrey D. Sachs book The End of Poverty

The End of Poverty" The End of Poverty, 2005

Time

“Even random differences in pay lead to the backward inference of differences in skill and hence to the development of unequal influence. It's an element of personal and office dynamics that can't be ignored.”

Leonard Mlodinow book The Drunkard's Walk

Source: The Drunkard's Walk, Chapter 10, The Drunkard's Walk, p. 211

Personality

“…he had the sense that they were both lonely, albeit in different ways. He was a solitary figure in a vast landscape while she was a face in a nameless crowd.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Dawson Cole, Chapter 5, p. 78
2009, The Best of Me (2011)

Way, Sense

“To an atheist […], there is no all-seeing all-loving god to keep us free from harm. But atheism is not a recipe for despair. I think the opposite. By disclaiming the idea of the next life, we can take more excitement in this one. The here and now is not something to be endured before eternal bliss or damnation. The here and now is all we have, an inspiration to make the most of it. So atheism is life-affirming, in a way religion can never be. Look around you. Nature demands our attention, begs us to explore, to question. Religion can provide only facile, ultimately unsatisfying answers. Science, in constantly seeking real explanations, reveals the true majesty of our world in all its complexity. People sometimes say "There must be more than just this world, than just this life". But how much more do you want? We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they’re never going to be born. The number of people who could be here, in my place, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. If you think about all the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here, the number of events that had to happen in order for you to exist, in order for me to exist. We are privileged to be alive and we should make the most of our time on this world.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

End of the part 2: "The Virus of Faith" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMUG6qd98wc The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

Love, Life, God, People

“Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.”

Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893–1986) Hungarian biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937

Attributed to Szent-Györgyi in: IEEE (1985) Bridging the present and the future: IEEE Professional Communication Society conference record, Williamsburg, Virginia, October 16-18, 1985. p. 14.

Thinking

“There is no such thing as a Scientific Mind. Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics. What sort of mind or temperament can all these people be supposed to have in common? Obligative scientists must be very rare, and most people who are in fact scientists could easily have been something else instead.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

"Hypothesis and Imagination" (Times Literary Supplement, 25 Oct 1963)
1960s

People, Way

“Only Boris concerns me. When I used to watch Have I Got News For You, which as a kid I was proud to watch, full stop, I loved it when Boris Johnson came on. I didn't know who he was or what he did, I didn't think about it, I just liked him. I liked his voice, his manner, his name, his vocabulary, his self-effacing charm, humour and, of course, his hair. He has catwalk hair. Vogue cover hair, Rumplestiltskin spun it out of straw, straight-out-of-bed, drop-dead, gold-thread hair. He was always at ease with Deayton, Merton and Hislop, equal to their wit and always gave a great account of himself. "This bloke is cool," I thought. As I grew up I found out that he was an old Etonian, bully-boy, Spectator-editing Tory.
"That's weird," I thought. While I was busy becoming a world-class junkie, the man from HIGNFY became mayor. People like Boris Johnson; I like the HIGNFY Boris. He is the most popular politician in the country. Well, not in the country, on the television. There is a difference. Most people, of course, haven't met him, they've seen him on the telly. When I met Boris in his office, the nucleus of his dominion, I glanced at his library. Among the Wodehouses and the Euripides there were, of course, fierce economic tomes, capitalist manuals, bibles of domination. Eye-to-eye, the bumbling bonhomie appeared to be a lacquer of likability over a living obelisk of corporate power.”

Russell Brand (1975) British comedian, actor, and author

Russell Brand - The Guardian (2013)

Love, People, World, Boy

“Approaching Christianity as a brand explains why the majority of people who identify themselves as Christians live no differently than other Americans yet spend enormous amounts of money on Christian products.”

Skye Jethani

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

Money, People

“In some respects the use of sexual obsessions as a subject for literature resembles the use of a literary subject whose validity for fewer people would contest: religious obsessions. So compared, the familiar fact of pornography’s definite, aggressive impact upon its readers looks somewhat different. Its celebrated intention of sexually stimulating readers is really a species of proselytizing. Pornography that is serious literature aims to “excite” in the same way that books which render an extreme form of religious experience aim to “convert.””

Susan Sontag book Styles of Radical Will

“The Pornographic Imagination,” pp. 47-48
Styles of Radical Will (1966)

People, Books, Way, Literature

“Every day of our lives we are on the verge of making those changes that would make all the difference.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Change, Depressing

“It would be inaccurate to say that John Fowles is a middlebrow writer who sometimes hopes he is a highbrow: it has never occurred to him to believe otherwise. There is a difference, morally.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Opening lines of his review of Mantissa by John Fowles, p. 138
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

Hope

“Look at Mother Teresa. She spent her whole life being holy. She didn't benefit anyone in any real sense. She didn't work on stopping disease, helping poverty, doing anything that would relieve the condition of her countrymen. She just went around the city, picked up dying people, and took care of them while they died. It was a good thing, no doubt, but it meant no betterment, no progress, no help, no relief from pain. She longed to be holy. She wanted to be a saint. Now she's a saint.
Salk isn't a saint. But he did more for the human race than Mother Teresa did. He didn't long to be holy, which meant having faith, not asking questions, doing something unpleasant without thought or complaint. He longed to do good, which meant finding things out, asking hard questions, and thinking hard, deep thoughts. Goodness and holiness are two different things, unfortunately.”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Strange Horizons interview (2008)

Life, Pain, People, Disease

“The EU cannot be a world player. It is trying to mould 28 distinctly different member countries together to form and enact policy, whilst also looking to bring in new countries whose views and politics will not necessarily be a natural fit to what we have today, to the detriment of sections of its citizenship. This makes the EU look and act weakly, a trait that has been seized upon by Putin for one, and which has now led to intentionally breaking international law. Far from guaranteeing peace as envisaged at the outset, the EU brings us, both politically and physically, closer to new conflicts, at home and abroad.”

James Carver (1969) British MEP for UKIP

Why The EU Can't Be A World Player http://www.jamescarver.org/Why_The_EU_Cant_Be_A_World_Player--post--69.html (2013)

World, Peace, Law, Home

“My dear fellow citizens,
For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us.
I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

New Year's Address to the Nation (1990)

Happiness, Lie, Country

“They were chosen to die because somebody in our government thought that the world would be a better place to live if they weren’t around any more. Perhaps they thought it would make a difference, and maybe the world did get better for them because they received a promotion or a discrete commendation. But it didn’t change things much for the rest of us.”

Ross Thomas (1926–1995) 1926-1995 American writer

Cast a Yellow Shadow (1967)

World, Change

“I wanted to go everywhere. I would have started on a day’s notice for the North Pole or the South, to the jungle or the desert. It made not the slightest difference to me.”

Roy Chapman Andrews (1884–1960) American explorer, adventurer and naturalist

From 'Under a Lucky Star' published 1943 http://www.roychapmanandrewssociety.org/adventures.html

“Why, reader, truly, if they asked thee or me, Which way we meant to vote?—were it not our likeliest answer: Neither way! I, as a Tenpound Franchiser, will receive no bribe; but also I will not vote for either of these men. Neither Rigmarole nor Dolittle shall, by furtherance of mine, go and make laws for this country. I will have no hand in such a mission. How dare I! If other men cannot be got in England, a totally other sort of men, different as light is from dark, as star-fire is from street-mud, what is the use of votings, or of Parliaments in England?”

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

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

Men, Law, Way, Star

“…the policy of separate development can be tested by any unprejudiced person against the requirements of Christianity and morality, and it will be found to meet all those requirements. … for conditions such as those in South Africa there is no other policy[, for without it] you will have chaos and ultimately bring about the downfall of all population groups here in South Africa. South Africa's problems are unique and South Africa has chosen its solution. …we, the Whites, the Coloureds, the Asians and the Bantu, will work out our own solutions here in South Africa. …we instituted the policy of separate development, not because we considered ourselves better than others, not because we considered ourselves richer or more educated than others. We instituted the policy of separate development because we said we were different from others. We prize that otherness and are not prepared to relinquish it. … We have our land and we and we alone will have authority over it. We have our Parliament and in that Parliament we and we alone will be represented; that is why [during] this past session it was my pleasant privilege to … abolish Coloured representation in Parliament; and it has been abolished once and for all. … but one should also put something in its place. That is why the National Party … for the first time [has given] the Coloureds in the Republic a Coloured Persons Representative Council in their own political area [where they] can exercise their political rights in their own way and by their own people. That is morality, that is policy, that is standpoint. … We said you may not attend my university, but we did not leave it at that. We said we shall give you a university of your own. We said you may not attend my school but we said we shall give you a school of your own. That is morality, that is Christianity …”

John Vorster (1915–1983) politician from South Africa and seventh Prime Minister of South Africa

John Vorster in his Heilbron speech http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/extract-speech-made-heilbron-16-august-1968 on 16 August 1968, as quoted in sahistory.org.za

People, Education, School, Way

“Roger: I think it's different in the way of how they handle stuff. I don't think they were really trying to. They wouldn't want us on it if they didn't like our music, you know what I'm saying? They obviously want us to create what we create and then they do what they're going to do. It's more things like interviews and more videos and photo shoots.. things like that with a major label kind of brings to the table. Which I may or may not be into - but it's a cool chance.”

Roger Manganelli (1973) American musician

Music, Way, Photo, Thinking

“The new architecture has 'opened' the walls so that the separateness of interior and exterior is suppressed. Walls no longer sustain since the system of construction is based upon the use of columns. This results in a new type of ground plan, an open ground plan, which is totally different from classical ones, since interior space and exterior space are interrelated.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote from Van Doesburg's unpublished writing, 'Fundamental principles', 1930; as cited in Theo van Doesburg, Joost Baljeu, Studio Vista, London 1974, p. 203
1926 – 1931

“I recognize that the findings in our report may leave some to wonder how the department’s findings can differ so sharply from some of the initial, widely reported accounts of what transpired. I want to emphasize that the strength and integrity of America’s justice system has always rested on its ability to deliver impartial results in precisely these types of difficult circumstances – adhering strictly to the facts and the law, regardless of assumptions. Yet it remains not only valid – but essential – to question how such a strong alternative version of events was able to take hold so swiftly, and be accepted so readily.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Justice, Law, Question, Strong

“It is above all over the question of the State that socialists are divided. Two main currents can be discerned in the factions that exist among us which correspond to differences in temperament as well as in ways of thinking, but above all to the extent that one believes in the coming revolution.
There are those, on the one hand, who hope to achieve the social revolution through the State by preserving and even extending most of its powers to be used for the revolution. And there are those like ourselves who see the State, both in its present form, in its very essence, and in whatever guise it might appear, an obstacle to the social revolution, the greatest hindrance to the birth of a society based on equality and liberty, as well as the historic means designed to prevent this blossoming. The latter work to abolish the State and not to reform it.”

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

Source: The State — Its Historic Role (1897), I

Hope, Way, Birth, Question

“The Escalation programmers come from a completely different background, and the codebase is all STL this, boost that, fill-up-the-property list, dispatch the event, and delegate that. I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various “modern” C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion.”

John D. Carmack (1970) American computer programmer, engineer, and businessman

Quoted in "http://www.bethblog.com/" http://www.bethblog.com/2010/10/29/john-carmack-discusses-rage-on-iphoneipadipod-touch/

Game, Suffering

“This principle of unity of the whole along with respect for individual differences is symbolized … in the Mishkan, the Tabernacle.”

Norman Lamm (1927) American rabbi

Seventy faces: articles of faith (2002)

“Hitchens: I've got another question for you, which is this: How many religions in the world do you believe to be false?
Craig: I don't know how many religions in the world there are, so I can’t answer.
Hitchens: Well, could you name... fair enough. I'll see if I can't narrow that down. That was a clumsily asked question, I admit. Do you regard any of the world's religions to be false?
Craig: Excuse me?
Hitchens: Do you regard any of the world's religions to be false preaching?
Craig: Yes, I think—yes, certainly.
Hitchens: Would you name one, then?
Craig: Islam.
Hitchens: That's quite a lot.
Craig: Pardon me?
Hitchens: That's quite a lot.
Craig: Yes.
Hitchens: Do you, therefore—do you think it's moral to preach false religion?
Craig: No.
Hitchens: So religion is responsible for quite a lot of wickedness in the world right there?
Craig: Certainly.
Hitchens: Right.
Craig: I'd be happy to concede (laughs) that. I would agree with that.
Hitchens: So if I was a baby being born in Saudi Arabia today, would you rather it was me or a Wahhabi Muslim?
Craig: Would I be—you rather be what?
Hitchens: Would you rather it was me—it was an atheist baby or a Wahhabi baby?
(Audience and Dr. Craig laugh):
Craig: I-I don't have any preference as to whether you would be... (laughing)
Hitchens: You don’t? As bad as that, O. K. Are there any—I'm sorry. I've only got a few seconds. It's a serious question. I shouldn't squander it. Are there any Christian denominations you regard as false?
Craig: Certainly.
Hitchens: Could I know what they are?
Craig: Well, I am not a Calvinist, for example. I think that certain tenets of Reformed Theology are incorrect. I would be more in the Wesleyan Camp myself. But these are differences among brethren. These are not differences on which we need to put one another in some sort of a cage. So within the Christian camp, there's a large diversity of perspectives. I'm sure there are views that I hold that are probably false, but I'm trying my best to get my theology straight, trying to do the best job. But I think all of us would recognize that none of us agree on every point of Christian doctrine, on every dot and tittle.”

William Lane Craig (1949) American Christian apologist and evangelist

Craig vs Christopher Hitchens debate, Biola University, La Mirada, California, 4th April 2009 http://www.reasonablefaith.org/does-god-exist-craig-vs-hitchens-apr-2009#section_6

Happiness, World, Religion, Question

“The AmigaOS remains one of the great operating systems of the past 20 years, incorporating a small kernel and tremendous multitasking capabilities the likes of which have only recently been developed in OS/2 and Windows NT. The biggest difference is that the AmigaOS could operate fully and multitask in as little as 250K of address space. Even today, the OS is only about 1MB in size. And to this day, there is very little a memory-hogging CD-ROM-loading OS can do the Amiga can't. Tight code - there's nothing like it. I've had an Amiga for maybe a decade. It's the single most reliable piece of equipment I've ever owned. You can easily understand why so many fanatics are out there wondering why they are alone in their love of the thing. The Amiga continues to inspire a vibrant - albeit cultlike - not unlike which you have with Linux, the Unix clone.”

John C. Dvorak (1952) US journalist and radio broadcaster

"Inside Track", PC Magazine (22 October 1996)
1980s & 1990s

Love, Understanding, Memory, Past

“Today we can see many different forms of Buddhism, such as Zen and Theravada Buddhism. All these different aspects are practices of Buddha's teachings, and all are equally precious; they are just different presentations.”

Kelsang Gyatso (1931) Tibetan writer and lama

Modern Buddhism: The Path of Compassion and Wisdom (2011)

“I'm not a loud, extravagant person; I'm never going to be that and, to be honest, I don't want to be like that. I don't show off or boast, and it's pointless to think I'm going to be any different.”

Leona Lewis (1985) British singer-songwriter

Interview with Lina Das http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/showbiznews.html?in_article_id=488705&in_page_id=1773, Daily Mail, October 2007

Thinking, Personality

“The nature of the instability of an unregulated free-enterprise system is only now beginning to be clearly understood. Perhaps the degree of understanding already attained ensures that the grosser shortcomings have gone for ever, and to that extent the conflict between Capitalism and Communism is about issues that belong to the past. It may now be too late. The gods must smile to note how different the state of the world might have been if the progress of economic thought of the last twenty years had been advanced by even ten years.
The possibility of a stable economic life with full utilization of our resources is still not sufficiently assured, and it is extremely important that it should be so assured, and that the whole world should accept this as a fact. The work that is being done in econometrics is massive, and undaunted by mathematical difficulties, but it appears, at any rate as viewed from outside, to be unclear as to its aim.”

Arnold Tustin (1899–1994) British engineer

Source: The Mechanism of Economic Systems (1953), p. 1

Life, God, World, Smile

“I reproach myself for a gross error. But I would reproach myself more if I had persisted in an error after observations revealed it clearly to be that. I made a deal of money in the late 1940s on the bull side, ignoring Satchel Paige’s advice to Lot’s wife, “Never look back.” Rather I would advocate Samuelson’s Law: “Always look back. You may learn something from your residuals. Usually one’s forecasts are not so good as one remembers them; the difference may be instructive.” The dictum “If you must forecast, forecast often,” is neither a joke nor a confession of impotence. It is a recognition of the primacy of brute fact over pretty theory. That part of the future that cannot be related to the present’s past is precisely what science cannot hope to capture. Fortunately, there is plenty of work for science to do, plenty of scientific tasks not yet done.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

February 1985, in William Breit and Roger W. Spencer (ed.) Lives of the laureates
1980s–1990s

Money, Law, Hope, Error

“We do not need a large land force. The present size of our regular Army is entirely adequate, but it should continue to be supplemented by a National Guard and Reserves, and especially with the equipment and organization in our industries for furnishing supplies. When we turn to the sea the situation is different. We have not only a long coast line, distant outlying possessions, a foreign commerce unsurpassed in importance, and foreign investments unsurpassed in amount, the number of our people and value of our treasure to be protected, but we are also bound by international treaty to defend the Panama Canal. Having few fuelling stations, we require ships of large tonnage, and, having scarcely any merchant vessels capable of mounting five- or six-inch guns, it is obvious that, based on positions, we are entitled to a larger number of warships than a nation having these advantages.”

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

Speech on Armistice Day in Washington (11 November 1928), quoted in The Times (12 December 1928), p. 11.
1920s

People, Distant, Sea

“Character is what you are. Reputation is what others think you are. The reason that some fail to climb the ladder of success, or of leadership if you want to call it that, is that there is a difference between reputation and character. The two do not always coincide. A man may be considered to have sterling character. Opportunity might come to that man; but if he has the reputation for something he is not, he may fail that opportunity. I think character is the foundation of successful leadership.”

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

Quoted in Air Force Journal of Logistics, March 22, 2005, Notable quotes.(Lucien Truscott)(Brief Article)

Thinking, Success

“You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper.”

Edward de Bono (1933) Maltese physician

Source: Lateral Thinking : Creativity Step by Step (1970), p. 8.

“A cat is the ideal literary companion. A wife, I am sure, cannot compare except to her disadvantage. A dog is out of the question. It may do at a butcher's – it would be out of place in a bookseller's. A cat for a bookseller is a different creature temperamentally from the same animal at a fishmonger's or a baker's. In these shops the cat is a useful animal – I suppose it is employed to eat fish entrails or to keep down rats and mice – but in my shop its function is that of a familiar. It is at once decorative – contemplative – philosophical, and it begets in me great calm and contentment.”

William Darling (politician) (1885–1962) Scottish politician

Source: The Bankrupt Bookseller (1947), p. 48

Dogs, Cats, Question, Fish

“Present-day students are often puzzled at the apparent contradictions of Southern slavery. One hears, on the one hand, of the staid and gentle patriarchy, the wide and sleepy plantations with lord and retainers, ease and happiness; on the other hand one hears of barbarous cruelty and unbridled power and wide oppression of men. Which is the true picture? The answer is simple: both are true. They are not opposite sides of the same shield; they are different shields.”

W.E.B. Du Bois book The Negro

Source: The Negro (1915), Ch. XI: The Negro in the United States

Men, Happiness

“The core study of geography is the study of places, that is the analysis of the significant differences that distinguish the various areas of the world from each other. Among the differences that are significant to this areal differentiation, one of the more obvious are differences in landforms; one of the least obvious to the eye, but nonetheless important in molding the character of areas, are the differences in their political organization. In pursuing these and other separate topics, geographers "radiate out in diverse directions" "and for various distances, toward the cores of other disciplines."”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

As long as they realise where they are in reference to the central core, they may hope to understand each other purposes.
R. Hartshorne (1950) "The functional approach in political geography," Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol. 40 (2), p. 95

World, Hope, Understanding, Study

“Nothing is gained by a total denial of even sporadic cases of religious persecution and vandalism. But such cases were very few and their very paucity emphasizes and illuminates the great religious tolerance of the Indian people for more than two thousand years.’ … There is a great difference between local brawls as in the above case and a general policy by a community or a king of wholesale persecution.”

Pandurang Vaman Kane (1880–1972) Indian Indologist and Sanskrit scholar

About alleged cases of religious persecution by Hindus. P.V. Kane, History of the Dharmashastras, Ancient and Medieval Religious and Civil Law, Volume V, Part II, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona, 1977, p. 1011, note 1645a. quoted from Shourie, Arun (2014). Eminent historians: Their technology, their line, their fraud. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India : HarperCollins Publishers.

People, Communication

“He treated me as a man… He did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the color of our skins.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

About Abraham Lincoln (1864), as quoted in Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 https://books.google.com/books?id=cwVkgrvctCcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22Eric+Foner%22+%22Republicans%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiOwdup3aLLAhVK7SYKHZufDmUQ6AEIRjAH#v=onepage&q&f=false, by Eric Foner, p. 6 1860s

Color, Feeling

“The battles waged by our troops are part of a broader struggle between two dramatically different systems. Under one, a small band of fanatics demands total obedience to an oppressive ideology, condemns women to subservience, and marks unbelievers for murder. The other system is based on the conviction that freedom is the universal gift of Almighty God and that liberty and justice light the path to peace. This is the belief that gave birth to our nation. And in the long run, advancing this belief is the only practical way to protect our citizens.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2009, Farewell speech to the nation (January 2009)

Women, God, Peace, Justice

“The fallacy of genetic determinism is to suppose that the genes "make" the organism. It is a basic principle of developmental biology that organisms undergo a continuous development from conception to death, a development that is the unique consequence of the interaction of the genes in their cells, the temporal sequence of environments through which the organisms pass, and random cellular processes that determine the life, death, and transformation of cells. As a result, even the fingerprints of identical twins are not identical. Their temperaments, mental processes, abilities, life choices, disease histories, and death certainly differ despite the determined efforts of many parents to enforce as great a similarity as possible.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

" The Confusion over Cloning http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/oct/23/the-confusion-over-cloning/," The New York Review of Books, 23 October 1997. Review of Cloning Human Beings: Report and Recommendations of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission by the National Bioethics Advisory Commission.

Life, Death, Disease, History

“I rapidly discovered that Aristotle had known almost no mechanics at all. … How could his characteristic talents have deserted him so systematically when he turned to the study of motion and mechanics? Equally, if his talents had so deserted him, why had his writings in physics been taken so seriously for so many centuries after his death? … I was sitting at my desk with the text of Aristotle's Physics open in front of me… Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together. My jaw dropped, for all at once Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed, but of a sort I'd never dreamed possible. Now I could understand why he had said what he'd said, and what his authority had been. Statements that had previously seemed egregious mistakes, now seemed at worst near misses within a powerful and generally successful tradition. That sort of experience -- the pieces suddenly sorting themselves out and coming together in a new way -- is the first general characteristic of revolutionary change that I shall be singling out after further consideration of examples. Though scientific revolutions leave much piecemeal mopping up to do, the central change cannot be experienced piecemenal, one step at a time. Instead, it involves some relatively sudden and unstructured transformation in which some part of the flux of experience sorts itself out differently and displays patterns that were not visible before.”

Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) American historian, physicist and philosopher

Source: The Road Since Structure (2002), p. 16-17; from "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" (1982)

Death, Dreams, Way, Understanding

“Zoos mislead their visitors by the way the species are housed. Birds are in the Bird House, of course, and crocodiles are always segregated to the Reptile House with the other naked-skinned, scale-covered brutes. So the average visitor leaves the zoo firmly persuaded that crocodilians are reptiles while birds are an entirely different group defined by "unreptilian" characteristics - feathers and flight. But a turkey's body and a croc's body laid out on a lab bench would present startling evidence of how wrong the zoos are once the two stomachs were cut into. The anatomy of their gizzards is strong evidence that crocodilians and birds are closely related and should be housed together in zoological classification, if not in zoo buildings.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 127
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Way, Bird, Strong, Housing

Quotes about difference page 43

Quotes about difference
page 43