Quotes about direction (3056 quotes, page 9)

“Only those who are subjective, one-sided and superficial in their approach to problems will smugly issue orders or directives the moment they arrive on the scene, without considering the circumstances, without viewing things in their totality (their history and their present state as a whole) and without getting to the essence of things (their nature and the internal relations between one thing and another). Such people are bound to trip and fall.”

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

On Practice (1937)

People , History , Nature , Problem

“So the future depends not only on what we do but on what other powers do. Will they join in the nuclear arms race or save their resources for later, more renumerative uses? Will they increase their productivity while we succumb to inflation and its social and economic consequences? Will they live in harmony at home while we remain riven by factionalism and terrorized by crime? Most important of all, will they choose their goals wisely and pursue them relentlessly while we flounder in aimlessness or exhaust ourselves in internecine struggles? These matters are quite as important as the decline of absolute American power in determining the equilibrium of international relations in the 1970s. One thing is sure: the international challenge tends to merge more and more with the domestic challenge until the two become virtually indistinguishable. The threats from both sources are directed at the same sources of national power which provide strength both for our national security and for our domestic welfare. It is clear, I believe, that we cannot overcome abroad and fail at home, or succeed at home and succumb abroad. To progress toward the goals of our security and welfare we must advance concurrently on both foreign and domestic fronts by means of integrated national power responsive to a unified national will.”

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

Closing words, p. 421-422
Swords and Plowshares (1972)

Home , Future , Dependency

“I think we need to do much more with our tech companies to prevent ISIS and their operatives from being able to use the Internet to radicalize, even direct people in our country and Europe and elsewhere. But we also have to intensify our air strikes against ISIS and eventually support our Arab and Kurdish partners to be able to actually take out ISIS in Raqqa, end their claim of being a Caliphate.”

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

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), First presidential debate (September 26, 2016)

People , Support , Thinking , Country

“…it was Darwin’s chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable, are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence rather than their occurrence which becomes highly improbable. … Let the reader … attempt to calculate the prior probability that a hundred generations of his ancestry in the direct male line should each have left at least one son. The odds against such a contingency as it would have appeared to his hundredth ancestor (about the time of King Solomon) would require for their expression forty- four figures of the decimal notation; yet this improbable event has certainly happened.”

Ronald Fisher (1890–1962) English statistician, evolutionary biologist, geneticist, and eugenicist

Retrospect of criticisms of the theory of natural selection. In Evolution as a Process, eds. J.S.Huxley, A.C.Hardy and E.B.Ford, London: Allen and Unwin, 1954.
1950s

Nature , Light , Appearance , Science

“Pride is an established conviction of one’s own paramount worth in some particular respect, while vanity is the desire of rousing such a conviction in others, and it is generally accompanied by the secret hope of ultimately coming to the same conviction oneself. Pride works from within; it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this appreciation indirectly, from without.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Vol. 1, Ch. 4, § 2
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Secret , Hope

“Better than big business is clean business.
To an honest man the most satisfactory reflection after he has amassed his dollars is not that they are many but that they are all clean.
What constitutes clean business? The answer is obvious enough, but the obvious needs restating every once in a while.
"A clean profit is one that has also made a profit for the other fellow."
This is fundamental moral axiom in business. Any gain that arises from another's loss is dirty.
Any business whose prosperity depends upon damage to any other business is a menace to the general welfare.
That is why gambling, direct or indirect, is criminal, why lotteries are prohibited by law, and why even gambling slot-machine devices are not tolerated in civilized countries. When a farmer sells a housekeeper a barrel of apples, when a milkman sells her a quart of milk, or the butcher a pound of steak, or the dry-goods man a yard of muslin, the housekeeper is benefited quite as much as those who get her money.
That is the type of honest, clean business, the kind that helps everybody and hurts nobody. Of course as business becomes more complicated it grows more difficult to tell so clearly whether both sides are equally prospered. No principle is automatic. It requires sense, judgment, and conscience to keep clean; but it can be done, nevertheless, if one is determined to maintain his self-respect. A man that makes a habit, every deal he goes into, of asking himself, "What is there in it for the other fellow?" and who refuses to enter into any transaction where his own gain will mean disaster to some one else, cannot go for wrong.
And no matter how many memorial churches he builds, nor how much he gives to charity, or how many monuments he erects in his native town, any man who has made his money by ruining other people is not entitled to be called decent. A factory where many workmen are given employment, paid living wages, and where health and life are conserved, is doing more real good in the world than ten eleemosynary institutions.
The only really charitable dollar is the clean dollar. And the nasty dollar, wrung from wronged workmen or gotten by unfair methods from competitors, is never nastier than when it pretends to serve the Lord by being given to the poor, to education, or to religion. In the long run all such dollars tend to corrupt and disrupt society.
Of all vile money, that which is the most unspeakably vile is the money spent for war; for war is conceived by the blundering ignorance and selfishness of rulers, is fanned to flame by the very lowest passions of humanity, and prostitutes the highest ideal of men; zeal for the common good; to the business of killing human beings and destroying the results of their collective work.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), Clean Business

Life , Men , Money , War

“Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come in to existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need. The need is for felt experience - intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

1951; as cited in 'Robert Motherwell, American Painter and Printmaker' https://www.theartstory.org/artist-motherwell-robert-life-and-legacy.htm#writings_and_ideas_header, on 'Artstory'
1950s

Art

“No one has ever used historical examples, near or remote, with the detail, precision, and directness to be found in every page of Shaw.”

Jacques Barzun (1907–2012) Historian

Source: Bernard Shaw in Twilight (1943), IV

“.. But there is better. Simplicity, being direct. Everything else is just a game, just building castles in the sky... Basically I don't think of anything when I paint. I see colours. I strive with joy to convey them on to my canvas just as I see them. They arrange themselves as they choose, any old way. Sometimes that makes a picture. I'm brainless animal. Very content if I could be just that..”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 158-159, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

Way , Game , Thinking , Animals

“Organisations are viewed as systems which utilise energy in a patterned, directed effort to alter the condition of basic materials in a predetermined manner.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1960s, "Hospitals: technology, structure and goals", 1965, p. 913

Effort

“For all species, including our own, the true figure of life is a perching bird, a passerine, alert and nervous in every part, ready to dart off in an instant. Life is always poised for flight. From a distance it looks still, silhouetted against the bright sky or the dark ground; but up close it is flitting this way and that, as if displaying to the world at every moment its perpetual readiness to take off in any of a thousand directions.”

Jonathan Weiner (1953) American nonfiction writer

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 7, Twenty-Five Thousand Darwins

Life , World , Way , Bird

“"Come on," says Cato. He thrusts a spear into the hands of the boy from District 3, and they head off in the direction of the fire. The last thing I hear as they enter the woods is Cato saying, "When we find her, I kill her in my own way, and no one interferes."
Somehow I don't think he's talking about Rue. She didn't drop a nest of tracker jackers on him.”

Suzanne Collins (1962) American television writer and novelist

Cato, p. 217
The Hunger Games trilogy, The Hunger Games (2008)

Way , Boy , Thinking

“Where is Christ, the King? In heaven, to be sure. Thither it behooves you, soldier of Christ, to direct your course. Forget all earthly delights. A soldier does not build a house; he does not aspire to possession of lands; he does not concern himself with devious, coin-purveying trade. … The soldier enjoys a sustenance provided by the king; he need not furnish his own, nor vex himself in this regard.”

Basil of Caesarea (329–379) Christian Saint

Source: Ascetical Works, p. 9

Christ , Housing , Forgetting

“The Christianity of the first centuries recognized as productions of good art, only legends, lives of saints, sermons, prayers, and hymn-singing evoking love of Christ, emotion at his life, desire to follow his example, renunciation of worldly life, humility, and the love of others; all productions transmitting feelings of personal enjoyment they considered to be bad, and therefore rejected … This was so among the Christians of the first centuries who accepted Christ teachings, if not quite in its true form, at least not yet in the perverted, paganized form in which it was accepted subsequently.
But besides this Christianity, from the time of the wholesale conversion of whole nations by order of the authorities, as in the days of Constantine, Charlemagne and Vladimir, there appeared another, a Church Christianity, which was nearer to paganism than to Christ's teaching. And this Church Christianity … did not acknowledge the fundamental and essential positions of true Christianity — the direct relationship of each individual to the Father, the consequent brotherhood and equality of all people, and the substitution of humility and love in place of every kind of violence — but, on the contrary, having founded a heavenly hierarchy similar to the pagan mythology, and having introduced the worship of Christ, of the Virgin, of angels, of apostles, of saints, and of martyrs, but not only of these divinities themselves but of their images, it made blind faith in its ordinances an essential point of its teachings.
However foreign this teaching may have been to true Christianity, however degraded, not only in comparison with true Christianity, but even with the life-conception of the Romans such as Julian and others, it was for all that, to the barbarians who accepted it, a higher doctrine than their former adoration of gods, heroes, and good and bad spirits. And therefore this teaching was a religion to them, and on the basis of that religion the art of the time was assessed. And art transmitting pious adoration of the Virgin, Jesus, the saints, and the angels, a blind faith in and submission to the Church, fear of torments and hope of blessedness in a life beyond the grave, was considered good; all art opposed to this was considered bad.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What is Art? (1897)

Love , Life , God , People

“Bad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with law, and when it is shown to us that a person is serving an illegal sentence our obligation is to direct that proper steps be taken to correct the wrong done, without regard to the character of a particular defendant or to the possible effect on others who might also want to challenge the legality of their sentences as they have the right to do 'at any time' under Rule 35. If it has any relevance at all, the fact that there may be other prisoners in this country's jails serving illegal sentences would seem to me to make it all the more imperative that we grant appropriate relief in this case rather than search for some obviously dubious excuse to deny this petitioner's claim.”

Hugo Black (1886–1971) U.S. Supreme Court justice

Dissenting in Green v. United States, 365 U.S. 301, 309-310 (1961).

Men , Law , Search , Time

“Out of all this I have gradually developed the notion that psychology is pretty much confined to the paradigms it employs and, while you can take off in a great many directions and travel a considerable distance in any of them — as indeed we have with stimulus-response psychology — there is no harm in consorting with a strange paradigm now and then. Indeed the notion has occurred to me that psychology may best be regarded as a collection of paradigms wooed by exphysicists, ex-physiologists, and ex-preachers, as well as a lot of other intellectual renegades. Even more recently it has struck me that this is the nature of man; he is an inveterate collector of paradigms.”

George Kelly (psychologist) (1905–1967) American psychologist and therapist

"The autobiography of a theory," 1963

Travel , Nature

“Nowhere is patriarchy's iron fist as naked as in the oppression of animals, which serves as the model and training ground for all other forms of oppression. Its three basic strategies — the club, the yoke, and the leash — operate similarly in the oppression of women and minorities. The club strategy is to kill animals for gain, sadistic pleasure, and the "affirmation of manhood." It is domination through brute force. The yoke strategy is to domesticate animals to carry burdens and pull vehicles; supply eggs, wool, and milk; and provide flesh and skins. It is domination through enslavement. The leash strategy is to tame animals to provide the psychic benefits of direct rule of master over pet. It is domination through deceit. … It is a surprisingly close progression from hunting animals to hunting and torturing people — catching and lynching blacks or "smoking out" Jews during the Holocaust.”

Aviva Cantor (1940) Author, journalist and lecturer

"The Club, the Yoke, and the Leash: What We Can Learn From the Way a Culture Treats Animals," in Ms. magazine, Vol. 12 https://books.google.it/books?id=Z2gpAAAAYAAJ, No. 2 (August 1983).

Women , People , Pleasure , Animals

“It is almost as difficult to make a man unlearn his errors as his knowledge. Mal-information is more hopeless than non-information; for error is always more busy than ignorance. Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one, on which we must first erase. Ignorance is contented to stand still with her back to the truth; but error is more presumptuous, and proceeds in the same direction. Ignorance has no light, but error follows a false one. The consequence is, that error, when she retraces her footsteps, has further to go, before she can arrive at the truth, than ignorance.”

Charles Caleb Colton (1777–1832) British priest and writer

Vol. I; I
Lacon (1820)

Truth , Error , Business , Knowledge

“Man is not dead when he is cold, stiff, pulseless, breathless, and even showing signs of decomposition; he is not dead when buried, nor afterward, until a certain point is reached. That point is, when the vital organs have become so decomposed, that if reanimated, they could not perform their customary functions; when the mainspring and cogs of the machine, so to speak, are so eaten away by rust, that they would snap upon the turning of the key. Until that point is reached, the astral body may be caused, without miracle, to reenter its former tabernacle, either by an effort of its own will, or under the resistless impulse of the will of one who knows the potencies of nature and how to direct them. The spark is not extinguished, but only latent — latent as the fire in the flint, or the heat in the cold iron.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume I, Chapter XIII

Nature , Effort , Dead

“Many leaders are in the first instance executives whose primary duty is to direct some enterprise or one of its departments or sub-units…
It remains true that in every leadership situation the leader has to possess enough grasp of the ways and means, the technology and processes by means of which the purposes are being realized, to give wise guidance to the directive effort as a whole…
In general the principle underlying success at the coordinative task has been found to be that every special and different point of view in the group affected by the major executive decisions should be fully represented by its own exponents when decisions are being reached. These special points of view are inevitably created by the differing outlooks which different jobs or functions inevitably foster. The more the leader can know at first hand about the technique employed by all his group, the wiser will be his grasp of all his problems…
But more and more the key to leadership lies in other directions. It lies in ability to make a team out of a group of individual workers, to foster a team spirit, to bring their efforts together into a unified total result, to make them see the significance of the particular task each one is doing in relation to the whole.”

Ordway Tead (1891–1973) American academic

Source: The art of leadership (1935), p. 115; as cited in: William Sykes " Visions Of Hope: Leadership http://www.openwriting.com/archives/2012/08/leadership_2.php." Published on August 12, 2012.

Way , Problem , Decision , Effort

“Are you aware of your inner signals? Do you trust them? Do you have the focus of control over your life in your own hands? Take this from me, the more decisions you can make avoiding external pressures, which will constantly try to manipulate and immobilise you, the better your life will be, the better your society will become. The entire nation will benifit from having strong, inner-directed people as their leaders.”

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam book Wings of Fire

Source: Wings of Fire, p. 175.

Life , People , Decision , Strong

“In the burning and devastated cities, we daily experienced the direct impact of war. It spurred us to do our utmost…the bombing and the hardships that resulted from them did not weaken the morale of the populace.”

Albert Speer (1905–1981) German architect, Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi Germany

Source: Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (1970), p. 363

War

““Continuous attention must be directed to the behaviour of others and ourselves, trying to pinpoint the creative aspect, the contribution towards the good, the opening towards a greater value, the courage of having decided against the majority. It will seem to us that the moral contribution of the ones who have made themselves the instruments of prejudice and privileges is small, and instead it is great the contribution of those who try to awaken the conscience of everyone, even with their own personal sacrifice.”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Hymn

Courage , Personality

“To sum up [Trotsky wrote], "the road to Socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the Slate … The State, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i. e. the most ruthless form of State, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction" ([The Defence of Terrorism] p. 157). It would be difficult indeed to put the matter more plainly. The state of the proletarian dictatorship is depicted by Trotsky as a huge permanent concentration camp in which the government exercises absolute power over every aspect of the citizens’ lives and in particular decides how much work they shall do, of what kind and in what places. Individuals are nothing but labour units. Compulsion is universal, and any organization that is not part of the state must be its enemy, thus the enemy of the proletariat. All this, of course, is in the name of an ideal realm of freedom, the advent of which is expected after an indefinite lapse of historical time.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

pg. 512
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume II, The Golden Age

Life , Exercises , Freedom , Universe

“In New Directions for Organization Theory, Jeffrey Pfeffer offers a comprehensive analysis and overview of the field of organization theory and its research literature. This work traces the evolution of organization studies, particularly its more recent history, and highlights the principle concepts and controversies characterizing the study of organizations. Pfeffer argues that the world of organizations has changed in several important ways, including the increasing externalization of employment and the growing use of contingent workers; the changing size distribution of organizations, with a larger proportion of smaller organizations; the increasing influence of external capital markets on organizational decision-making and a concomitant decrease in managerial autonomy; and increasing salary inequality within organizations in the US compared both to the past and to other industrialized nations. These changes and their public policy implications make it especially important to understand organizations as social entities. But Pfeffer questions whether the research literature of organization studies has either addressed these changes and their causes or made much of a contribution to the discussion of public policy…”

Jeffrey Pfeffer (1946) American academic

Book abstract.
New Directions for Organization Theory, 1997

World , Way , History , Literature

“In the 8th Grade I found I had a voice for opera, so I followed that path a little, but my impulse has always been an actor, I have always liked cinema, and let's face it, opera singers are just bad actors! I didn't want to translate myself in that direction. My heroes were people like Spencer Tracy, Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Marvin, Richardson, Caine, all those sort.”

Robert Davi (1953) American actor and jazz singer

People

“Organizations are goal-directed, boundary-maintaining, activity systems.”

Howard E. Aldrich (1943) American sociologist

Source: Organizations and Environments, 1979, p. 4

“In 1945 I really believed that by the year 1952 no American could hear the name of Roosevelt without a shudder or utter it without a curse. You see; I was wrong. I was right about the inevitability of exposure. Like the bodies of the Polish officers who were butchered in Katyn Forest by the Bolsheviks (as we knew at the time), many of the Roosevelt regime's secret crimes were exposed to the light of day. The exposures were neither so rapid or so complete as I anticipated, but their aggregate is far more than should have been needed for the anticipated reaction. Only about 80 per cent of the secret of Pearl Harbor has thus far become known, but that 80 per cent should in itself be enough to nauseate a healthy man. Of course I do not know, and I may not even suspect, the full extent of the treason of that incredible administration. But I should guess that at least half of it has been disclosed in print somewhere: not necessarily in well-known sources, but in books and articles in various languages, including publications that the international conspiracy tries to keep from the public, and not necessarily in the form of direct testimony, but at least in the form of evidence from which any thinking man can draw the proper and inescapable deductions. The information is there for those who will seek it, and enough of it is fairly well known, fairly widely known, especially the Pearl Harbor story, to suggest to anyone seriously interested in the preservation of his country that he should learn more. But the reaction never occurred. And even today the commonly used six-cent postage stamp bears the bloated and sneering visage of the Great War Criminal, and one hears little protest from the public.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"What We Owe Our Parasites", speech (June 1968); Free Speech magazine (October and November 1995)
1960s

War , Secret , Books , Thinking

“Engineering is the art of directing the great sources of power in nature for the use and convenience of man.”

Thomas Tredgold (1788–1829) engineer

Thomas Tredgold (1828), used in the Royal Charter of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) published in: The Times, London, article CS102127326, 30 June 1828.

Art , Nature

“He started his building programme with the Jami Hazrat mosque Thereafter he decided to build a second minar opposite to the lofty minar of the Jami Masjid, which minar is unparalleled in the world. He ordered the circumference of the new minar to be double that of the old one. People were sent out in all directions in search of stones. Some of them broke the hills into pieces. Some others proved sharper than steel in breaking the temples of the infidels. Wherever these temples were bent in prayers, they were made to do prostration.”

Alauddin Khalji (1266–1316) Ruler of the Khalji dynasty

Khazainul-Futuh by Amir Khusru, quoted in Khalji Kalina Bharata, Persian texts translated into Hindi by S.A.A. Rizvi, Aligarh, 1955. p. 156-157 ff
Quotes from the Khazainul-Futuh

People , World , Search

“In each case, the concept of chosenness played a central role. For Greeks and Armenians, the myth of ethnic election was both direct and transmitted. It was an act of God who had singled out a special community of His faithful to live according to His holy laws and receive His special blessings, the blessings being conditional on the holding of correct beliefs and the performance of sacred obligations. As with the Jews, the overriding purpose was to become a holy people beloved of God, a people of priests worthy of the status and location which God had bestowed on the community. But, unlike the Jews, Armenians and Greeks saw their election as a reward for receiving the true faith rejected by the Jews. They were therefore required to supplant the Jews as the chosen people, and become the heirs of a people who had fallen from grace. In this sense, the chosen status of Greeks and Armenians was a legacy from the Jewish people, and only much later did the Orthodox community of true believers become imbued with Greek culture and a sense of Greek-speaking community, and to the outside world Orthodoxy became synonymous with Greek culture and origins.”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: Myths and Memories of the Nation (1999), Chapter: Greeks, Armenians and Jews.

God , People , World , Faith

“The average person is in the habit of saying, "The older I get" and he thereby calls the attention of his mind to the idea that he is getting older. In brief, he compels his mind to believe that he is getting older and older, and thereby directs the mind to produce more and more age. The true expression in this connection is, "The longer I live." This expression calls the mind's attention to the length of life, which will, in turn, tend to increase the power of that process in you that can prolong life. When people reach the age of sixty or seventy, they usually speak of "the rest of my days," thus implying the idea that there are only a few more days remaining. The mind is thereby directed to finish life in a short period of time, and accordingly, all the forces of the mind will proceed to work for the speedy termination of personal existence. The correct expression is "from now on," as, that leads thought into the future indefinitely without impressing the mind with any end whatever.”

Christian D. Larson (1874–1962) Prolific author of metaphysical and New Thought books

Source: Your Forces and How to Use Them (1912), Chapter 6, p. 91–2

Life , People , Age , Idea

“The most beautiful discoveries since the Renaissance, indeed since the beginnings of all science, are the laws governing light, whether moving through a uniform medium, or being reflected from an opaque surface, or changing direction upon entering another transparent medium.”

Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters

Accord de différentes loix de la nature qui avoient jusqu’ici paru incompatibles (1744)

Law , Beauty , Light , Science

“The modern reading of ancient literature involves a mode of reception that is not merely scholarly or antiquarian. Instead, aesthetic experience allows for a direct relationship between reader and work, despite the historical distance. Today’s consumer cannot participate in the ancient economy by trying to use an Athenian coin as legal tender; but today’s reader can participate in the ancient literary imagination though an authentic engagement with the Homeric text (no matter how much contemporary circumstances necessarily also enter into that encounter with the ancient text). Thus the historicist imperative of periodization evidently stands at odds with the potential for immediacy associated with literary reception and aesthetic experience.”

Russell Berman (1950) American academic

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 14.

Imagination , Literature , Reading

“This conflict has been going on for too long. It is essential that the parties start new direct negotiations and negotiate a sustainable peace, with the support of the Quartet. The path will be arduous, no doubt, but the objective is worth it, for the Israelis and the Palestinians and the entire region: an independent, democratic, contiguous and viable State of Palestine, living side by side with the State of Israel in peace and security.”

Henri of Luxembourg (1955) Grand Duke (head of state) of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

Address to the United Nations (26 September 2012)
Crisis in Syria

Peace , Support

“An explanation of a phenomenon is regarded, apparently instinctively, as the most general possible when it is a mechanical explanation. The "mechanism" of the process is the ultimate goal of experiment. Now this mechanism in general lies beyond the range of the senses; either by reason of their limitations, as in the case of the atomic structure of matter, or by the very nature of the supposed mechanism, as in the theory of the ether. The only way to bridge the gap between the machinery of the physical process and the world of sense-impressions is to think out some consequence of that mechanism. This we will call the hypothesis. The hypothesis, resting still on the mechanical basis, is yet beyond the range of direct experimental investigation; but if, by mathematical reasoning, a consequence of the hypothesis can be deduced, this will often lie within the range of experimental inquiry, and thus a test of the soundness of the original mechanical conception may be instituted.”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

Introduction
Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students (1911)

Lie , World , Way , Mathematics

“I've always been a fan of the [Rocky] films, even the fifth, that I know some people didn't care for, I've always enjoyed them. I thought they were great. It really just got into the underdog story and how if you have your mind in the right direction, and your heart is full of the right kind of stuff, you'll succeed and you'll triumph over adversity, over really anything.”

Milo Ventimiglia (1977) American actor

"Interview: Milo Ventimiglia Gets In the Ring For Rocky Balboa", MovieWeb (13 December 2006) https://movieweb.com/interview-milo-ventimiglia-gets-in-the-ring-for-rocky-balboa/.

People , Heart

“Frances Egan, the school nurse, left her nutrition charts long enough to tell me there was nothing that could have been done. "Evelyn had a rough time with her father," she said. "Once she came in beaten black and blue."
"What did you do for her?"
"I gave her a cup of tea."
"Tea? Why tea, for heaven's sake?"
"Why? Because I know all about it," she said, shaking with anger. "I know more than anyone here what goes on outside — poverty, disease, dope, degeneracy — yet I'm not supposed to give them even a band-aid. I used to plead, bang on my desk, talk myself hoarse arguing with kids, parents, welfare, administration, social agencies. Nobody really heard me. Now I give them tea. At least, that's something."
"But you're a nurse," I said helplessly.
She showed me the Directive from the Board posted on her wall: THE SCHOOL NURSE MAY NOT TOUCH WOUNDS, GIVE MEDICATION, REMOVE FOREIGN PARTICLES FROM THE EYE…
Are we, none of us, then, allowed to touch wounds? What is the teacher's responsibility? And if it begins at all, where does it end?”

Bel Kaufmanová book Up the Down Staircase

Part V, ch. 26 (Sylvia Barrett)
Up the Down Staircase (1965)

Disease , School , Parent , Teachers

“Inequalities of wealth, unjustly established, have assuredly injured the nation in which they exist during their establishment; and, unjustly directed, they injure it yet more during their existence. But inequalities of wealth justly established, benefit the nation in the course of their establishment; and, nobly used, aid it yet more by their existence.”

John Ruskin book Unto This Last

Essay II: page 280.
Unto This Last (1860)

Wealth

“It was a historic event. Not unfortunately because of its scale. Unpleasant to think about, but in terms of the scale it’s not that unusual. I did say it’s the worst, probably the worst instant human toll of any crime. And that may be true. But there are terrorist crimes with effects a bit more drawn out that are more extreme, unfortunately. Nevertheless, it’s a historic event because there was a change. The change was the direction in which the guns were pointing. That’s new. Radically new.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Quotes 2000s, 2001, The New War Against Terror, 2001

Thinking , Change

“I like to direct landscapes just as I like to direct actors and animals.”

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

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

Animals

“Lincoln sees American democracy as a last stand, what he calls the last, best hope. And if this goes down, we may so discredit the whole notion of democracy that no one will ever want to go this way again, and so this is the test. It’s a test of whether or not we’ll have this new birth of freedom, if we’ll finally shuck off these last husks of aristocracy and move forward in the direction of democracy. That for him is the vital issue.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

Hope , Way , Democracy , Birth

“Krugman's whole attack is directed at a statement made neither by Arthur nor by Cassidy. Krugman has not read Cassidy's piece with any care nor has he bothered to review what Arthur has in fact said.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

from Kenneth J. Arrow" http://www.pkarchive.org/cranks/Brian.html"Letter (1998)
1970s-1980s

Reading

“Quoting an unnamed writer: "To this day," she writes, "I cannot understand dallying with religion and the commandments of God. The very instant I heard my Father's cry calling unto me, my heart bounded in recognition. I ran, I stretched forth my arms, I cried aloud, 'Here, here I am, my Father.' Oh, happy child, what should I do? 'Love me', answered my God. 'I do, I do," I cried passionately. 'Come unto me,' called my Father. 'I will,' my heart panted. Did I stop to ask a single question? Not one. It never occurred to me to ask whether I was good enough, or to hesitate over my unfitness, or to find out what I thought of his church, or… to wait until I should be satisfied. Had I not found my God and my Father? Did he not love me? Had he not called me? Was there not a Church into which I might enter?… Since then I have had direct answers to prayer — so significant as to be almost like talking with God and hearing his answer. The idea of God's reality has never left me for one moment."”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Lecture III, "The Reality of the Unseen"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Love , God , Religion , Quotes

“Debate for the sake of debate is an intellectualized form of masculine competition in a world badly in need of visceral, direct masculinity… Explanations and apologies to outsiders are the issue of flaccid, failing and feminine cultures.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

pg 121
Becoming A Barbarian (2016)

World

“The brain is encased in the head, the part of the body which in most walking, flying or swimming animals is the leading end of the moving body (with few exceptions: starfish, cuttlefish, humans, penguins when they are not swimming). The obvious risks which this localization entails are apparently compensated by the advantage of direct short connections with the sense organs localized in or on top of the head (olfaction, taste, vision, audition, vestibular sense), which together with the brain could be seen as something like the cockpit of the animal, or the pilot if one prefers.”

Valentino Braitenberg (1926–2011) Italian-Austrian neuroscientist

Valentino Braitenberg (2007) " Brain http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Brain". Scholarpedia, 2(11):2918.

Sense , Animals , Parting , Flying

“In the same directive he raised the question – this was in the middle of 1934 – that now that Hitler had come to power it was quite clear that his, Trotsky’s line on the impossibility of building up socialism in one country alone had been completely justified, that war was inevitable, and that if we Trotskyites wished to preserve ourselves as a political force of some sort, we must in advance, having adopted a defeatist position, not merely passively observe and contemplate, but actively prepare the way for this defeat. But in order to do so, cadres must be formed, and cadres could not be formed by talk alone. Therefore the necessary wrecking activities must be carried on now. I recall that Trotsky said in this directive that without the necessary support from foreign states, a government of the bloc could neither come to power nor hold power. It was therefore a question of arriving at the necessary preliminary agreement with the most aggressive foreign states, like Germany and Japan, and the he, Trotsky, on his part had already taken the necessary steps in establishing contacts both with the Japanese and the German governments.”

Georgy Pyatakov (1890–1937) Bolshevik revolutionary leader

Georgy Pyatakov at the Moscow trial. As quoted in Mario Sousas Klasskampen under 1930-talet i Sovjetunionen, pg 28.

War , Way , Question , Support

“The staff officer must be kept in his place. But this does not mean that he must be kept down, that he must be discouraged, that his initiative and imagination must be checked. On the contrary, all these characteristics should be encouraged. The important question is, through what channel are they to be directed? They should, of course, Bow through the responsible operating executive, not around him.
This process may be described in terms of the following sequence: the staff official makes a recommendation; it is approved by the responsible executive who, in his authoritative capacity, announces to those below him in the hierarchy that the recommendation is going to be adopted. Thereafter there are many details in connection with putting it into effect that can be carried out more effectively by the staff official than by the line official and with a saving of time to the latter. So long as the subordinates in the hierarchy are aware that this delegation is authorized and that the staff officer is not acting independently, unification of managerial responsibility is not impaired and there is no loss of influence and responsibility in the part of the executive.”

Marshall E. Dimock (1903–1991) American writer

Source: "The Meshing of Line and Staff", 1945, pp. 102-104, as cited in Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 306-7

Imagination , Question , Loss , Time

“For the machine, because of the way it is built, can work only in a given direction, no matter who pulls its levers.”

Rudolf Rocker book Nationalism and Culture

Source: Nationalism and Culture (1937), Ch. 12 "Social Problems of Our Time"

Way

“Our anti-Mammonistic battle, which is ranged above the other two battle-fronts, is directed against the world-encompassing financial power, that is, against the permanent financial and economic bleeding and exploitation of our people through large loan capital. This battle however is, on the other hand, also a powerful intellectual struggle against the soul-destroying materialistic spirit of egoism and avarice with all its concomitant corrupting manifestations in all fields of our public, economic and cultural life.”

Gottfried Feder (1883–1941) German economist and politician

Source: The German State on a National and Socialist Foundation (1923), p. 57

Life , People , World , Soul

“What you need is good management with farmer power. Good management gives this power the right direction and thrust. Nothing can stop the farmers then. Least of all the Multi national Companies|MNCs]].”

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

Quote, Amul builder Verghese Kurien's best quotes and pictures from Economic Times archives

“We must first awake before we can walk in the right direction. We must discover our illusions before we can even realize that we have been sleepwalking. The least and the most we can hope for is that each of us may penetrate the unknown jungle of images in which we live our daily lives. That we may discover anew where dreams end and where illusions begin. This is enough. Then we may know where we are, and each of us may decide for himself where he wants to go.”

Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American historian

Source: The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 261.

Dreams , Hope

“The fact that black voters have voted over 90 percent Democratic for decades leaves them almost wholly without power. Democrats—paradigmatically, the Clintons—feint in their direction during general elections, trying to assure turnout and using them to bash Republicans as bigots and—in the usual fashion—as emblems of their own goodness.”

Crispin Sartwell (1958) American philosopher

White Liberals: We’re Not Racist (August 29, 2016)

Fashion

“Lucidity of mind, like the rays of the sun, can have no effect except by the continuity of a direct line; it can divine only on condition of not breaking that line; the curvettings of chance bemuddle it.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

La lucidité, de même que les rayons du soleil, n’a d’effet que par la fixité de la ligne droite, elle ne devine qu’à la condition de ne pas rompre son regard; elle se trouble dans les sautillements de la chance.
Source: A Bachelor's Establishment (1842), Ch. IV.

Chance , Sun

“If you have a grateful heart (which is a miracle amongst you statesmen), show it by directing the bearer to the best wine in town, and pray let not this highest point of sacred friendship be performed slightly, but go about it with all due deliberation and care, as holy priests to sacrifice, or as discreet thieves to the wary performance of burglary and shop-lifting. Let your well-discerning palate (the best judge about you) travel from cellar to cellar and then from piece to piece till it has lighted on wine fit for its noble choice and my approbation.”

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647–1680) English poet, and peer of the realm

Letter to the diplomat Henry Savile (1673-1674).
Other

Friendship , Travel , Light , Wine

“Would it be too bold to imagine that, in the great length of time since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions and associations, and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!”

Erasmus Darwin book Zoonomia

Zoönomia, vol. 1 (1794).

Age , World , Imagination , History

“From the beginning I could not believe that the “efficient market” hypothesis was dependent on a pure Brownian motion white noise or any truly random random walk. Place a minuscule colloidal molecule on a horizontal table that covers unlimited acres. Bombard it from every direction with thousands of minute atoms; and then if you wait long enough that original molecule can have traveled a billion miles in one direction. That’s truly a random Bachelier-Einstein walk, but not my notion of economic fluctuations.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

New millennium, An Enjoyable Life Puzzling Over Modern Finance Theory, 2009

Travel , Waiting , Dependency

“My country has been influenced by the core Buddhist values of non-violence, loving kindness, compassion, equanimity and mindfulness. With this sense of direction, our Government has committed itself "Towards a new Sri Lanka", guided by a vision of peace, where every Sri Lankan citizen may live with dignity and self-respect, in freedom and without fear, free of want, and where every child may enjoy childhood and grow up with hope and expectation.”

Mahinda Rajapaksa (1945) Prime Minister of Sri Lanka

Mahinda Rajapaksa; Address to the United Nations General Assembly, September 20, 2006.

Love , Fear , Peace , Hope

“The problem of directing a user to stored information, some of which may be unknown to him, is the problem of "information retrieval"… In information retrieval, the addressee or receiver rather than the sender is the active party. Other differences are that communication is temporal from one epoch to a later epoch in time, though possibly at the same point in space; communication is in all cases unidirectional; the sender cannot know the particular message that will be of later use to the receiver and must send all possible messages; the message is digitally representable; a "channel" is the physical document left in storage which contains the message; and there is no channel noise because all messages are presumed to be completely accessible to the receiver. The technical goal is finding in minimum time those messages of interest to the receiver, where the receiver has available a selective device with a finite digital scanning rate.”

Calvin Mooers (1919–1994) American computer scientist

Calvin Mooers (1950). " Information retrieval viewed as temporal signaling http://www.mathunion.org/ICM/ICM1950.1/Main/icm1950.1.0565.0576.ocr.pdf#page=8". Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians. Vol. 1, S.572-573

Communication , Problem , Time

“We are obliged to conclude that the Declaration of Independence represented the movement of a people. It was not, of course, a movement from the top. Revolutions do not come from that direction. It was not without the support of many of the most respectable people in the Colonies, who were entitled to all the consideration that is given to breeding, education, and possessions. It had the support of another element of great significance and importance to which I shall later refer. But the preponderance of all those who occupied a position which took on the aspect of aristocracy did not approve of the Revolution and held toward it an attitude either of neutrality or open hostility. It was in no sense a rising of the oppressed and downtrodden. It brought no scum to the surface, for the reason that colonial society had developed no scum. The great body of the people were accustomed to privations, but they were free from depravity. If they had poverty, it was not of the hopeless kind that afflicts great cities, but the inspiring kind that marks the spirit of the pioneer. The American Revolution represented the informed and mature convictions of a great mass of independent, liberty-loving, God-fearing people who knew their rights, and possessed the courage to dare to maintain them.”

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)

Love , God , Hostility , People

“We need to marshal and direct our energy toward building this nation into a peaceful, prosperous and proud bequest to our children.”

Epeli Ganilau (1951) Fijian politician

Guest speech to the conference of the Fiji Labour Party, Lautoka, 30 July 2005

Children , Peace

“Victor's unfortunate choice it was always to mis-see, to mis-hear, to misjudge. He read softness into her because of the softness of her voice, when she was only remembering. His was the self-centered chaos of childhood. All looks and thoughts, loves and hatreds, were directed at him. Softness was softness towards him, weakness was weakness in the face of his strength. He preheard answers and listened not. He was full-coloured and brilliant—all outside of him was pale.”

John Steinbeck book Burning Bright

Act One: The Circus
Burning Bright (1950)

Love , Reading , Childhood

“The dinosaur world I grew up in was classical. They were universally seen as scaley herps that inhabited the immobile continents. There was no hint that birds were their direct descendents. Being reptiles, dinosaurs were cold-blooded and rather sluggish except perhaps for the smaller more bird-like examples. They all dragged their tails. Forelimbs were often sprawling. Leg muscles were slender in the reptilian manner. Intellectual capacity was minimal, as were social activity and parenting; the Knight painting of a Triceratops pair watching over a baby threatened by the Tyrant King was a notable exception. Hadrosaurs and especially sauropods were dinosaurian hippos, the latter perhaps too titanic to even emerge on land, and if they did so were limited by their bulk to lifting one foot of the ground at a time. Suitable only for the lush, warm and sunny tropical climate that enveloped the world from pole to pole before the Cenozoic, a cooling climate and new mountain chains did the obsolete archosaurs in, leaving only the crocodilians. Dinosaurs and the bat-winged pterosaurs were merely an evolutionary interlude, a period of geo-biological stasis before things got really interesting with the rise of the energetic and quick witted birds and especially mammals, leading with inexorable progress to the apex of natural selection: Man. It was pretty much all wrong. Deep down I sensed something was not quite right. Illustrating dinosaurs I found them to be much more reminiscent of birds and mammals than of the reptiles they were supposed to be. I was primed for a new view.”

Gregory Scott Paul (1954) U.S. researcher, author, paleontologist, and illustrator

Autobiography, part I http://gspauldino.com/part1.html, gspauldino.com

World , Mountain , Nature , Bird

“My work has threads of ideas from all over the place. I try to crystallise them in something simple and direct that the viewer can then take where they want.”

Cornelia Parker (1956) English artist

Source: Mark Hudson. "Cornelia Parker Interview." in: Telegraph. June 24, 2010

Idea

“Will I ever get to where I'm going?
If I do, will I know when I'm there?
If the wind blew me in the right direction,
Would I even care?
I would.”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

Lyrics, Make Yourself (1999)

“I believe in the American Constitution. I favor the American system of individual enterprise, and I am opposed to any general extension of government ownership, and control. I believe not only in advocating economy in public expenditure, but in its practical application and actual accomplishment. I believe in a reduction and reform of taxation, and shall continue my efforts in that direction.”

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

From his formal acceptance of the Republican party’s nomination for President (14 August 1924), as quoted in Coolidge: An American Enigma (1998), by Robert Sobel, Regnery Publishing, p. 292.
1920s

Effort

“This priesthood became a closed group, able to control enormous wealth and incomes, and concerned very largely with the study of the solar and astronomical periodicities on which there influence was originally based. With the surplus thus created, the priesthood was able to command human labor in huge amounts and to direct this labor from the simple tillage of the peasant peoples to the diversified and specialized activities that constitute civilized living.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 7, Mesopotamian Civilization, p. 213

People , Study , Wealth

“Anti-Semitism is not based on strictly religious grounds and is not directed against the Jewish faith as such. However, all German Christians resent and denounce the fact that the Jews have been the chief advocates of atheism. They have influenced the workers' children through the Communist youth organizations, of which they are the leading spirit…”

Ernst Hanfstaengl (1887–1975) German businessman

Quoted in "Nazis in the News" - Mar 5, 1933

Children , Youth , Faith

“A solution of newly appearing economic problems, and in particular those connected with the scientific-technical revolution often cannot be based on existing methods but needs new ideas and approaches. Such one is the problem of the protection of nature. The problem of economic valuation of technical innovations efficiency and rates of their spreading cannot be solved only by the long-term estimation of direct outcomes and results without accounting peculiarities of new industrial technology, its total contribution to technical progress.”

Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) Russian mathematician

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

Idea , Nature , Problem , Appearance

“An end to wars, peace among the nations, the cessation of pillaging and violence — such is our ideal, but only bourgeois sophists can seduce the masses with this ideal, if the latter is divorced from a direct and immediate call for revolutionary action.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

"The Question of Peace" (July–August 1915) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/jul/x02.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 293.
1910s

War , Peace

“The art of seeing Nature, or in other words, the art of using Models, is in reality the great object, the point to which all our studies are directed.”

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

Discourse no. 12; vol. 2, p. 104.
Discourses on Art

Art , Nature , Reality , Study

“Paris with its multitude of art directions calls continuously to the deepest penetration and recognition of your inner essence. Only in this way it is possible to create work that refers the time span.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

in his letter to H. E. Kramer, 25-10-1926, as quoted in: Bram van Velde, A Tribute, Municipal Museum De Lakenhal Leiden, Municipal Museum Schiedam, Museum de Wieger, Deurne 1994, p. 44 (English translation: Charlotte Burgmans)
1920's

Art , Way , Time

“Allowance of the freedom of choices in direction, either for the group or individuals particularly in the near future”

Carl R. Rogers (1902–1987) American psychologist

Carl Rogers on Personal Power (1977)
Source: page 113

Freedom , Future

“In America the architect has a direct and continuing relationship with technology. Perhaps this is why he does not ask more from technology than it can offer. In our country [Russia] it is still impossible to have such urban complexes as are found in Paris, Chicago, or Berlin. It is through technology that we can build a bridge to all the most recent achievements, which is what made it possible for our country to pass directly from the hoe to the tractor without having to travel the long path of historical development. That is why we want to introduce the most modern methods of building and construction into our country — and why we see the works and designs of both the 'formalists' and the 'constructivists' as a radical experiment in the manipulation of construction.”

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

Quote from: 'Basic Premises'
1926 - 1941, Rußland: Die Rekonstruktion der Architektur in der Sowjetunion' (1929)

Travel , Country

““Men afraid may see demons in the familiar, and direct their fear of the insensible to a fear of the sensible.”
“Thought-lacking!”
“So it is; but it is what folk do.””

Michael Flynn book Eifelheim

Source: Eifelheim (2006), Chapter XXIII (p. 399)

Men , Fear

“As the crash was occurring, I remember that I felt no fear although I was obviously concerned for the people in cars that were headed in my direction. I simply just acknowledged to myself that I've had a good life and I would soon have to say goodbye to all of it in a matter of seconds.”

Jeremy Soule (1975) American composer

Attributed

Life , People , Fear , Cars

“I am sick of talking about What and Why I am doing. I have always believed that the WORK is the word. Action is seen less clearly through reason. There are no shortcuts to directness.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

around 1965
Quote from Robert Rauschenberg, The early 1950s, Walter Hopps, Houston Fine Art Press, 1991
1960's

“A couple things that we do know about theropods—the ones that most closely related to birds—is that they brooded their nests. If you go deeper in the tree, what you see is that for sauropods, we have no direct evidence that they returned to the nest after the eggs were laid. Most of the evidence for that comes from an excavation in Argentina called Auca Mahuevo. What’s thought with sauropods is that they’d just lay a bunch of eggs and leave them alone—the turtle model. Few of those would ever reach adulthood.”

Mark Norell (1957) American paleontologist

As quoted in "How Dinosaurs Loved: An Interview with Dr. Mark Norell on Dino Relations" http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/t-rexxx-how-dinosaurs-lived-loved-and-tasted-q-a-with-dr-mark-norell-american-museum-of-natural-history, Vice (March 20, 2012)

Bird , Tree , Adulthood

“He went to Los Angeles to do the work even though he hated the city; it was full of happy homogeneous people without structure or direction. While on the bus to work, it seemed to him Los Angeles went on long after it had already made its point.”

Gregory Benford (1941) Science fiction author and astrophysicist

White Creatures, p. 170 (Originally published in New Dimensions 5, edited by Robert Silverberg), 1975
In Alien Flesh (1986)

Hate , People , Angels , Happiness

“We shall have to share out the fruits of technology among the whole of mankind. The notion that the direct and immediate producers of the fruits of technology have a proprietary right to these fruits will have to be forgotten. After all, who is the producer? Man is a social animal, and the immediate producer has been helped to produce by the whole structure of society, beginning with his own education.”

Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) British historian, author of A Study of History

Surviving the Future (1971), Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 95.

Education , Help , Animals

“At its 10th December Conference in Geneva the Future of Human Rights Forum endorsed new structures and mechanisms to advance the realization of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly 65 years ago. Among important initiatives discussed by a high level panel was the creation of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly aimed at empowering world citizens and giving them direct participation in the political processes that affect them. Democracy lives from consultation and participation and a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly can meaningfully advance this goal.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

2013 Future of Human Rights Forum http://dezayasalfred.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/2013-future-of-human-rights-forum/.
2013

World , Democracy , Universe , Future

“The most extraordinary aspect of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not so much the history of its inception as that of its reception. That this fake was produced by a number of secret services and police of at least three countries, assembled from a collage of different texts, is by now a well-known fact-and Will Eisner tells it in full, taking into account the most recent research.
In one of my essays I identify other sources that scholars had not taken into account: for example, the Protocols “Jewish plan” for conquering the world follows, almost literally at times, the Jesuit plan as told by Eugene Sue first in Le juif errant, (1844-45) and later in Les myst’eres du people (1849-57)-the similarities are so great that one is tempted to conclude that Maurice Holy himself (the French satirist whose pamphlet Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, published in 1864, is considered to be the direct predecessor of the Protocols, and who is a figure in Eisner’s The Plot) had been inspired by Sue’s novels.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Umberto Eco, p. v
The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

People , Secret , World , History

“At this display the elder and less attractive of the maidens fled, uttering loud and continuous cries of apprehension in order to conceal the direction of her flight.”

Ernest Bramah (1868–1942) English author

The Encountering of Six within a Wood
Kai Lung's Golden Hours (1922)

“There as elsewhere a cruel universe combined to crush a child. As though three or four vigorous brothers and sisters, with the best will, were not enough to crush any child, every one else conspired towards an education which he hated. From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics, and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame. Rarely has the boy felt kindly towards his tamers. Between him and his master has always been war. Henry Adams never knew a boy of his generation to like a master, and the task of remaining on friendly terms with one's own family, in such a relation, was never easy.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Life , Hate , War , Education

“The moment with Hawkeye is all about mutual attraction, expressed without filter from him, and a surrendering of social guardedness from Cora. She accepts his directness as her own.”

Madeleine Stowe (1958) American actress

Mohican Press interview (2005)

“Philosophy and religion are enemies, and because they are enemies they have need of one another. There is no religion without some philosophical basis, no philosophy without roots in religion. … the attacks which are directed against religion from a presumed scientific or philosophical point of view are merely attacks from another but opposing religious point of view.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VI : In the Depths of the Abyss

Religion

“What had already been done for music by the end of the eighteenth century has at last been begun for the pictorial arts. Mathematics and physics furnished the means in the form of rules to be followed and to be broken. In the beginning it is wholesome to be concerned with the functions and to disregard the finished form. Studies in algebra, in geometry, in mechanics characterize teaching directed towards the essential and the functional, in contrast to apparent. One learns to look behind the façade, to grasp the root of things. One learns to recognize the undercurrents, the antecedents of the visible. One learns to dig down, to uncover, to find the cause, to analyze.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

1921 - 1930
Source: 'Bauhaus prospectus 1929'; as quoted in Artists on Art, from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 444

Art , Music , Mathematics , Study

“Schizophrenia is caused by a personality fragment that is broken off, so to speak, from the primary acting personality; operating often in direct opposition to it, but in any case, operating as a secondary personality.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 94, quoting from Seth Session 15

Personality

“Direct, participatory and responsive democracy has been shown to be conducive to achieving a more just world order. Only such an approach will allow progressing from predator societies to human rights oriented societies.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

“Much more than periodic voting” – UN Independent Expert calls for more direct democracy worldwide http://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=20482&LangID=E.
2016, “Much more than periodic voting” – UN Independent Expert calls for more direct democracy worldwide

World , Democracy

“I believe that it is possible by means of horizontal and vertical lines, constructed 'consciously' but not 'calculating', guided by a higher intuition and brought to harmony and rhythm – I believe that these fundamental aesthetic shapes – where necessary supplemented by lines in other directions or curved lines, make it possible to arrive at a work of art which is as strong as it is true. For anyone who sees more deeply, there is nothing vague about this; it is only vague for the superficial observer of nature. And 'chance' must be as far removed as 'calculation'. And for the rest it seems to me that it is necessary to keep breaking off the horizontal or vertical line: for if these directions were not countered by others, they would themselves come to signify something 'specific' and thus human.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote of Mondrian in a letter to H. P. Bremmer, Paris 29 January 1914; ; as cited in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 81
1910's

Art , Nature , Strong , Chance

“The Greeks were the classicists of antiquity, and they are still today the preeminent classicists. What marked all they did, the classic stamp, is a direct simplicity in expressing the significance of actual life. It was there the Greek artists and poets found what they wanted. The unfamiliar and the extraordinary were on the whole repellent to them, and they detested every form of exaggeration. Their desire was to express truthfully what lay at hand, which they saw as beautiful and full of meaning. But that was not the Roman way. When not directly under Greek guidance, the Roman did not perceive beauty in every-day matters, or indeed care to do so. Beauty was unimportant to him. Life in his eyes was a very serious and a very arduous business, and he had no time for what he would have thought of as a mere decoration of it.”

Edith Hamilton (1867–1963) American teacher and writer

Source: The Roman Way (1932), Ch. 10

Life , Beauty , Way , Business

“Some big businessmen did contribute to the Nazi election funds but German capitalism cannot be regarded, on the evidence, as having collectively brought fascism to power in any direct sense. Fascism in Germany was a mass movement brought to power through collusion with a bankrupt but traditional elite, not as the puppet of big business.”

Richard Overy (1947) British historian

Source: The Nazi economic recovery 1931-1938 (1996), p. 55

Business , Sense

“The direction of the world overwhelms me at this time. In the long run, all the continents (yellow, black and brown) will spill over onto Old Europe. They are hundreds and hundreds of millions. They are hungry and they are not afraid to die. We no longer know how to die or how to kill. We could preach, but Europe believes in nothing. So, we must wait for the year 1000 or a miracle. For my part, I find it harder and harder to live before a wall.”

Albert Camus (1913–1960) French author and journalist

Correspondance: 1932-1960, p.220, Gallimard, 1981. Letter to Jean Granier, 1957 https://books.google.com.br/books?id=56VcAAAAMAAJ&q=le+train+du+monde+m%27accable+en+ce+moment.+a+longue+%C3%A9ch%C3%A9ance,+tous+les+continents+(jaune,+noir+et+bistre)&dq=le+train+du+monde+m%27accable+en+ce+moment.+a+longue+%C3%A9ch%C3%A9ance,+tous+les+continents+(jaune,+noir+et+bistre)&hl=pt-BR&sa=X&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAWoVChMIqfiA3aHcyAIVgw6QCh3IngRL

World , Time , Waiting , Parting

“It is man’s pretence that because he has choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

1980s

Fear , Motivation , Freedom

“If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.”

Quentin Crisp (1908–1999) writer, Actor

Manners from Heaven (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1984), ch. 2, p. 21
Manners from Heaven (1984)

Life , Family , Star

“When all this is eliminated, what really remains? In place of the representative bodies created by general, popular elections, Lenin and Trotsky have laid down the soviets as the only true representation of political life in the land as a whole, life in the soviets must also become more and more crippled. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously – at bottom, then, a clique affair – a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

the postponement of the Soviet Congress from three-month periods to six-month periods!

Chapter Six, "The Problem of Dictatorship"
The Russian Revolution (1918)

Life , Reality , Sense , Freedom