Quotes about doe
page 40

“The 'physical' does not mean any particular kind of reality, but a particular kind of denoting reality, namely a system of concepts in the natural sciences which is necessary for the cognition of reality. 'The physical' should not be interpreted wrongly as an attribute of one part of reality, but not of the other; it is rather a word denoting a kind of conceptual construction, as, e. g., the markers 'geographical' or 'mathematical', which denote not any distinct properties of real things, but always merely a manner of presenting them by means of ideas.”

Moritz Schlick book Théorie générale de la connaissance

Source: Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre, 1925, p. 27 i. ; as cited in: Adam Schaff (1962). Introduction to semantics, p. 83

Mathematics, Idea, Nature, Reality

“Our prestige abroad, what other peoples think of us, is not of importance only to those Americans who work or travel abroad. The sign "Yankee go home" does not apply only to our diplomats, foreign-aid specialists, and military personnel who are stationed overseas.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1960, Speech at East Los Angeles College Stadium, Los Angeles, California

People, Travel, Home, Thinking

“My own mother is always telling us how well behaved our children are, but little does she know how we got them that way! She would turn grey if she knew, I cane her perfect grandson, but she loves the result.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

Cults, Sects and Questions (c. 1979)

Love, Children, Way, Perfection

““The intent of the Goddess is neither known nor knowable. She makes us dance, male and female, in ever-converging gyres that bring us ultimately each to our own destiny, and that destiny is always the same and never escapable. She does not tell us why.”
“You said there were no outside forces ordering our lives. That there was nothing but chance and random occurrence.”
He shrugged.
“You did!”
“The Goddess is unknowable and her aims unfathomable, unpredictable, and ineluctable. They might as well be random. We live our brief lives in ignorance and then we die. That’s all.””

Michael Swanwick book The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 7 (p. 101)

Chance, Dance

“A writer who does not write is nothing. One may as well be a fisherman who doesn't fish, a stripper who doesn't strip, or a beggar who doesn't beg.”

Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964) writer

7 December 2004
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2004

Fish

“A god that does not manifest in reality is indistinguishable from a god that does not exist.”

Matt Dillahunty (1969) American activist

Episode 692: "Buzzwords of Ignorance" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t25A6A_2uc, Channel Austin (January 16, 2011) The Atheist Experience

God, Reality

“The idea that women are the choosier sex is one of the best-known claims associated with EP [evolutionary psychology]. Ironically, another of the best-known claims associated with EP is an exception to this rule: On average, men are choosier than women when it comes to the physical attractiveness of a prospective mate. Even if we put this counterexample aside, though, the statement “females are choosier than males,” although true of many species, does not apply easily to our own. It is true that men may sometimes be more willing than women to lower their standards for a casual sexual partner. However, when it comes to the most important mating decisions of a man’s life — who he will marry, who he will have children with — the difference in choosiness is much smaller and maybe nonexistent. This fact of human life is even implicit in everyday folk psychology; the stereotype is that men will “sleep with anything that moves,” not that they will marry or have children with anything that moves. In long-term, committed relationships, men are about as choosy as women.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 157

Life, Women, Men, Children

“If the artist only reproduces superficial features as photography does, if he copies the lineaments of a face exactly, without reference to character, he deserves no admiration. The resemblance which he ought to obtain is that of the soul; that alone matters; it is that which the sculptor or painter should seek beneath the mask of features.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. VII. Of Yesterday and of to-day, p. 121

Soul

“Communist morals follow a simple formula. Anything which Promotes the communist cause is good; anything which hinders it is bad. Upon examination, that philosophy turns out to be a code of opportunism and expediency, or a code of no morals at all. Anyone who does not conform to the dictates of the Party as to what is good for Communism and what is not, is subjected to the most severe penalties under Articles 131 and 133 of the Soviet Constitution. Thus, the perfect example of "class" morality, which the Marxists attribute to the Judaic-Christian code, is to be found right in the Communist plan of action itself.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Penalty, Communication, Perfection

“The soul wills and yet does not will:
Its will belongs to Another.
It has eyes only for this beauty;
It no longer seeks to possess, as was its wont --
It lacks the strength to possess such sweetness.
The base of this highest of peaks
Is founded on nichil [nothing],
Shaped nothingness, made one with the Lord.”

Jacopone da Todi (1236–1306) Italian Franciscan mystic

The Lauds

Beauty, Soul

“If form follows function, as we know it does in this Universe, then consciousness will adapt to whatever form it requires in order to function. Hopefully, it will also develop its fundamental function; what that is may be debatable within many schools of thought, but it is indisputable that evolved thinking recognizes the universality of Life.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Source: Zero Gravity interview (2006), p. 75

Life, School, Thinking, Universe

“Fir: it contains a great deal of air and fire with very little moisture and the earthy, so that, as its natural properties are of the lighter class, it is not heavy. Hence, its consistence being naturally stiff, it does not easily bend under the load, and keeps its straightness when used in the framework. But it contains so much heat that it generates and encourages decay, which spoils it; and it also kindles fire quickly because of the air in its body, which is so open that it takes in fire and so gives out a great flame.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter IX, Sec. 6

Nature

“I must own your calculations & comparisons betwixt our different professions to be just, provided you remember that in mine a Man may do great things and starve in a garret if he does not conquer his Passions.”

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) English portrait and landscape painter

Quote in: Undated letters to Jackson, in The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough, ed. Mary Woodall, 1961
undated, Undated letters to William Jackson

Passion

“Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Love, World, Nature, Perfection

“In the course of time one does not feel even the existence of God. After attaining enlightenment one sees that gods and deities are all Maya.”

Sarada Devi (1853–1920) Hindu religious figure, spiritual consort of Ramakrishna

[Swami Tapasyananda, Swami Nikhilananda, Sri Sarada Devi, the Holy Mother; Life and Conversations, 297]

God, Feeling, Time

“All the time each one of us is hovering above an unfathomable abyss of potential calamities of every kind - sensed in that ever-throbbing pulse deep down in one's heart; as long as this chasm does not open up to devour one, the floating island in any guise whatever must surely be welcome. Wrong notion of God? Asiatic pessimism?”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57.

God, Sense, Time, Heart

“We are not, or at least I am not, seeking either to become natives (a compromised word in any case) or to mimic them. Only romantics or spies would seem to find point in that. We are seeking, in the widened sense of the term in which it encompasses very much more than talk, to converse with them, a matter a great deal more difficult, and not only with strangers, than is commonly recognized. "If speaking for someone else seems to be a mysterious process," Stanley Cavell has remarked, "that may be because speaking to someone does not seem mysterious enough." Looked at in this way, the aim of anthropology is the enlargement of the universe of humman discourse."”

Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) American anthropologist

Clifford Geertz. "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in The Interpretation of Culture. (1973) pp. 3-4.

Way, Sense, Universe

“.. art lies in the fine choice. The artist does not teach us to see facts: he teaches us to feel harmonies.”

Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922) painter from the United States

"Talks on the Appreciation of Art", The Delinator (Jan 1915)
Other

Art, Feeling

“It is preeminently the province of government to protect the weak. The average citizen does not lead the life of independence that was his in former days under a less complex order of society. When a family tilled the soil and produced its own support it was independent. It may be infinitely better off now, but it is evident it needs a protection which before was not required.”

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

1920s, Law and Order (1920)

Life, Family, Support

“My respect for Yle is now exactly zero, which of course does not differ from yours for me. So now we're even.”

Juha Sipilä (1961) Finnish businessman and politician (b. 1961)

After not responding to Yle news comment requests concerning the Talvivaara Mining Company (Terrafame) financing Sipilä began sending a series of some 20 emails that went on until after 11 pm with above comment. PM: "Confidence in Yle quite OK" http://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/pm_confidence_in_yle_quite_ok/9325396, YLE TV News, (30 November 2016)

“The “noble” person has a completely naïve and non-reflective awareness of his own value and of his fullness of being, an obscure conviction which enriches every conscious moment of his existence, as if he were autonomously rooted in the universe. This should not be mistaken for “pride.” Quite on the contrary, pride results from an experienced diminution of this “naive” self-confidence. It is a way of “holding on” to one’s value, of seizing and “preserving” it deliberately. The noble man’s naive self-confidence, which is as natural to him as tension is to the muscles, permits him calmly to assimilate the merits of others in all the fullness of their substance and configuration. He never “grudges” them their merits. On the contrary: he rejoices in their virtues and feels that they make the world more worthy of love. His naive self-confidence is by no means “compounded” of a series of positive valuations based on specific qualities, talents, and virtues: it is originally directed at his very essence and being. Therefore he can afford to admit that another person has certain “qualities” superior to his own or is more “gifted” in some respects—indeed in all respects. Such a conclusion does not diminish his naïve awareness of his own value, which needs no justification or proof by achievements or abilities. Achievements merely serve to confirm it. On the other hand, the “common” man (in the exact acceptation of the term) can only experience his value and that of another if he relates the two, and he clearly perceives only those qualities which constitute possible differences. The noble man experiences value prior to any comparison, the common man in and through a comparison. For the latter, the relation is the selective precondition for apprehending any value. Every value is a relative thing, “higher” or “lower,” “more” or “less” than his own. He arrives at value judgments by comparing himself to others and others to himself.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 54-55

Love, World, Way, Feeling

“If supersymmetry plays the role in physics that we suspect it does, then it is very likely to be discovered by the next generation of particle accelerators, either at Fermilab… or at CERN… Discovery of supersymmetry would be one of the real milestones in physics, made even more exciting by its close links to still more ambitious theoretical ideas. Indeed, supersymmetry is one of the basic requirements of "string theory," which is the framework in which theoretical physicists have had some success in unifying gravity with the rest of the elementary particle forces. Discovery of supersymmetry would would certainly give string theory an enormous boost.”

Edward Witten (1951) American theoretical physicist

Foreward, written June 30, 1999, to Supersymmetry: Unveiling the Ultimate Laws of Nature (2000) by Gordon Kane

Idea, Success

“In times like these, given the cultural and social context in which we are living, there may be a greater risk of reducing Christian hope to an ideology, to a group slogan or to outward appearances. Nothing is more contrary to Jesus' message! He does not want his disciples to "recite" a part, even that of hope. He wants them "to be" hope and they can only be hope if they remain united to him! He wishes each one of you, dear young friends, to be a small source of hope for your neighbour and, all together, to become an oasis of hope for the society in which you are integrated.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

In Homily for Holy mass on the fourth anniversary of the death of John Paul II http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20090402_anniv-morte-gpii_en.html (2 April 2009) 2009

Hope, Appearance, Time, Parting

“Unforgettably horrible is the naked body. It really does not have the slightest charm.”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Diary of Lady Murasaki

The Diary of Lady Murasaki

“It does not say much about the credibility of the Prime Minister for him to be saying publicly that the Christian churches support the bill after these deliberate acts of deception. (In response to Mataca's claim that Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase had misled a delegation of church leaders as to the true contents of the government's Reconciliation and Unity Bill, which Mataca and Ganilau both oppose).”

Epeli Ganilau (1951) Fijian politician

Reaction to comments from Archbishop Petero Mataca, 23 June 2005

Support

“But during all the long years this matter has been discussed, advocated, refuted, the people themselves—poor people especially—were blindly, desperately practicing family limitation, just as they are practicing it today. To them birth control does not mean what it does to us. To them it has meant the most barbaric methods. It has meant the killing of babies—infanticide,—abortions,—in one crude way or another.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

My Fight for Birth Control, 1931, page 133.

People, Family, Way, Birth

“Finding a mechanism does not bypass the problem of induction.”

Simon Blackburn (1944) British academic philosopher

Source: Think (1999), Chapter Six, Reasoning, p. 227

Problem

“I may say that Buddhism does indeed come closer in essence to reality than other religions. However, the Buddhist either have not gone far enough, or have gone too far, according to your viewpoint. If they have gone too far, then they have been so concerned with inner reality that they have become too tolerant of physical disease and disasters. If they have no gone far enough, then they have not followed through sufficiently so that these physical disasters could truly be suffered without pain.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 191
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 4

Pain, Disease, Religion, Reality

“Noah said "Nay; I'll make thee an offer,
The same as I did t'other day.
A penny a foot and a free ride.
Now, come on, lad, what does tha say?"

"Three ha'pence a foot," came the answer.
So Noah 'is sail 'ad to hoist,
And sailed off again in a dudgeon,
While Sam stood determined, but moist.”

Marriott Edgar (1880–1951) British poet

"Three Ha'pence a Foot", line 61.
Albert, 'Arold and Others (1938)

“[Chomsky] has now been impeached by his own standards, since scrutiny of the evidence does not bear him out on Serbia or Afghanistan or Iraq. It didn't bear him out on Cambodia either, though he was never a "Holocaust denier" or anything like it. And he has, I think, ceased to be of any use to young people who might pardonably doubt the official story.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2004 http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=C78DC231-4599-4745-9CA5-A398398916A0: On Noam Chomsky/Cambodia. 2000s, 2004

People, Thinking

“My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don't really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don't believe in God and they can prove He doesn't exist, and some other guys who can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it's about who is smarter, and honestly, I don't care.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

God, Faith, Guy, Time

“a) The definition of history? Every historian would agree, I think, that history is a kind of research or inquiry. What kind of inquiry it is I do not yet ask. The point is that generically it belongs to what we call the sciences: that is, the forms of thought whereby we ask questions and try to answer them. Science in general, it is important to realize, does not consist in collecting what we already know and arranging it in this or that kind of pattern. It consists in fastening upon something we do not know, and trying to discover it. Playing patience with things we already know may be a useful means towards this end, but it is not the end itself. It is at best only the means. It is scientifically valuable only in so far as the new arrangement gives us the answer to a question we have already decided to ask. That is why all science begins from the knowledge of our own ignorance: not our ignorance of everything, but our ignorance of some definite thing-the origin of parliament, the cause of cancer, the chemical composition of the sun, the way to make a pump work without muscular exertion on the part of a man or a horse or some other docile animal. Science is finding things out: and in that sense history is a science.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

Source: The Idea of History (1946), p. 9

Way, History, Question, Knowledge

“I have often had occasion to observe, that a warm blundering man does more for the world than a frigid wise man.”

Richard Cecil (clergyman) (1748–1810) British Evangelical Anglican priest and social reformer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 394.

World

“People are always asking, does God exist? Of course she does. The real question: what is she like?”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 4 (p. 69)

God, People, Question

“Because of that corporate life, transfusing you, giving to you and taking from you - conditioning you as it does in countless oblique and unapparent ways - you are still compelled to react in to many suggestions which you are no longer able to respect: controlled, to the last moment of your bodily existence and perhaps afterwords, by habit, custom, the good old average way of misunderstanding the world.”

Evelyn Underhill book Practical Mysticism

Source: Practical Mysticism (1914), Chapter X, The Mystical Life, p. 175-176

Life, World, Way

“Jealousy is always born with love but does not always die with it.”

François de La Rochefoucauld book Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

La jalousie naît toujours avec l'amour, mais elle ne meurt pas toujours avec lui.
Maxim 361.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Love, Jealousy

“Veracity does not consist in saying, but in the intention of communicating truth.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. IX

Truth, Communication

“I cannot see why we should expect an infinite God to do better in another world than he does in this. If he allows injustice to prevail here, why will he not allow the same thing in the world to come?”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

"To the Indianapolis Clergy." The Iconoclast (Indianapolis, IN) (1883)

God, World

“There’s an interesting debate that circulates so often, with one side arguing that actors are not activists, Hollywood does not get to be the arbiter of what is right and wrong. And the other side, which is if you have a platform and you don’t use it for good, then what is the point?. No, I’m not a politician, and no, I’m not a news source, but yes, I have people that are following me and I have a voice, and as long as I am doing my best to speak the truth, I’m fine with being on the right side of history! What I’m saying is, you are a part of history; you matter.”

Zoey Deutch (1994) American actress

Interview with Tidal Magazine, Issue 7 http://www.tidal-mag.com/magazine/girl-on-the-verge

People, Truth, History, Parting

“The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand my own pictures, does not mean that these pictures have no meaning; on the contrary, their meaning is so profound, complex, coherent, and involuntary that it escapes the most simple analysis of logical intuition. To describe my pictures in everyday language, to explain them, it is necessary to submit them to special analyses and preferably with the most ambitiously objective scientific rigour possible. Then all explanation arises a posteriori; once the picture already exists as phenomenon.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940, My Pictorial Struggle', S. Dali, 1935, Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', pp. 11-12

Understanding, Painting

“"It is a net," said Horseface, "useful for the fishing of the universe."
Enid crinkled up her face, staring at what he called a net. It was a flimsy thing and it had no shape.
"Certainly," she said, "you would not go fishing the universe in so slight a thing as this."
"Time means nothing to it," said Horseface, "nor does space. It is independent of both time and space except as it makes use of them."”

Clifford D. Simak Highway of Eternity

Highway of Eternity (1986)

Fish, Universe, Time

“Rewards and punishments are not opposites at all; they are two sides of the same coin. And it is a coin that does not buy very much.”

Alfie Kohn (1957) American author and lecturer

Source: Punished by Rewards, Chapter 4

“The absence of a golden rule for mattress flipping is a disappointment, but it does not pertend the demise of civilization. We can adapt; we can learn to live with it.”

Brian Hayes (scientist) (1900) American scientist, columnist and author

Source: Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008), Chapter 12, Group Theory In The Bedroom, p. 229

Disappointment, Learning

“Free will as I mentioned earlier certainly does operate, but you must remember that while it does operate, personalities on your plane are extremely limited as to choice. They can only choose to operate within their own camouflage pattern framework.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 36, Page 284
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 1

Personality

“Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of it is destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth that humanity derives from the program. When there is a deliberate choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction.
The reason a good citizen does not use such destructive means to become wealthier is that, if everyone did so, we would all become poorer from the mutual destructiveness. This is Kantian ethics; or, the Golden Rule. Since I do not like the consequences that result if everyone hoards information, I am required to consider it wrong for one to do so. Specifically, the desire to be rewarded for one's creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

1980s, GNU Manifesto (1985)

Money, World, Way, Parting

“There is little doubt that the planetary patina—including ourselves—is autopoietic. Life at the surface of the Earth seems to regulate itself in the face of external perturbation, and does so without regard for the individuals and species that compose it. More than 99.99 percent of the species that have ever existed have become extinct, but the planetary patina, with its army of cells, have continued for more than three billion years. …trillions of communicating, evolving microbes. The visible world is a late-arriving, overgrown portion of the microcosm, and it functions only because of its well-developed connection with the microcosm's activities.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors (1986)

Life, World, Communication

“Our enemies are getting stronger and stronger by the way, and we as a country are getting weaker. Even our nuclear arsenal doesn't work. It came out recently they have equipment that is 30 years old. They don't know if it worked. And I thought it was horrible when it was broadcast on television, because boy, does that send signals to Putin and all of the other people that look at us and they say, "That is a group of people, and that is a nation that truly has no clue. They don't know what they're doing. They don't know what they're doing."”

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

2010s, 2015, Presidential Bid Announcement (June 16, 2015)

People, Way, Boy, Country

“You should remember that my things are still intended to be paintings, that is to say, they are plastic representations, in and by themselves, not part of a building. Furthermore, they have been made in a small room. Also, that I use subdued colours for the time being, adapting myself to the present surroundings and to the outer world; this does not mean that I should not prefer a pure colouring. Otherwise you might think that I contradict myself in my work.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote of Mondrian in a letter to Theo van Doesburg, 13 Feb. 1917; as cited in 'Stijl' catalogue, 1951, p. 72; in De Stijl 1917-1931 - The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art, by H.L.C. Jaffé http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/jaff001stij01_01/jaff001stij01_01.pdf; J.M. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam 1956, pp 13-14 1910's

World, Thinking, Time, Parting

“Again, your being is never annihilated, but continues to develop its own existence in other ways. A portion of you has lived many lives upon this planet, but the "you" that you know is freshly here, and will never again encounter space and time in precisely the same way. The same applies to each life lived either before or after. Biologically you rest upon a heritage, however, and psychically the same applies. The soul, or this greater personage, does not simply send out an old self in new clothes time and time again, but each time a new, freshly-minted self that then develops and goes its own way. That self rides firmly, however, in the great flight of experience, and feels within itself all of those other fully unique versions that also fling their way into existence.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 724, p. 492
The “Unknown” Reality: Volume Two, (1979)

Life, Way, Feeling, Soul

“Instead of insanity eliminating the crime according to the original meaning of article 64, every crime and even every offense now carries within it, as a legitimate suspicion, but also as a right that may be claimed, the hypothesis of insanity, in any case of anomaly. And the sentence that condemns or acquits is not simply a judgement of guily, a legal decision that lays down punishment; it bears within it an assessment of normality and a technical prescription for a possible normalization Today the judge- magistrate or juror0 certainly does more than 'judge”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), pp. 20-21

Decision

“The statute in section 3(1) contains a definition of a “racial group”. It means a “group of persons defined by reference to colour, race, nationality or ethnic or national origins.” That definition is very carefully framed. Most interesting is that it does not include religion or politics or culture. You can discriminate for or against Roman Catholics as much as you like without being in breach of the law. You can discriminate for or against Communists as much as you please, without being in breach of the law. You can discriminate for or against the “hippies” as much as you like, without being in breach of the law. But you must not discriminate against a man because of his colour or of his race or of his nationality, or of “his ethnic or national origins.” … You must remember that it is perfectly lawful to discriminate against groups of people to whom you object - so long as they are not a racial group. You can discriminate against the Moonies or the Skinheads or any other group which you dislike or to which you take objection. No matter whether your objection to them is reasonable or unreasonable, you can discriminate against them - without being in breach of the law.’}}”

Alfred Denning, Baron Denning (1899–1999) British judge

Denning judged in the Court of Appeal at the time, and held that Sikhs were not a racial or ethnic group. His ruling was overturned in the House of Lords, notably by Ian Fraser, Baron Fraser of Tullybelton, who outlined seven points by which ethno-religious groups were to be defined.
Judgments

People, Religion, Law, Personality

“Is the Home Secretary aware that I was one of those Members there on Saturday and I was able to observe police officers spraying members of the crowd with red paint in order to identify them for later arrest, that the police were using agents provocateurs in the crowd and that at 9.10 during the evening, when there was complete quiet throughout the crowd, a completely unprovoked dragoon-like charge was mounted by the police straight into that crowd, seriously injuring a number of people? Does not the right hon. Gentleman believe that he should go and witness the scale and ferocity of police violence against innocent, peaceful people protesting against the theft of their jobs by the Murdoch empire?”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Question http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1987/jan/26/wapping-disturbances in the House of Commons (26 January 1987). 1980s

People, Peace, Home, Painting

“When I say that this phase is necessary, the word phase is perhaps not the most rigorous one. It is not a question of a chronological phase, a given moment, or a page that one day simply will be turned, in order to go on to other things. The necessity of this phase is structural; it is the necessity of an interminable analysis: the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself. Unlike those authors whose death does not await their demise, the time for overturning is never a dead letter.”

Jacques Derrida book Positions

Source: Positions (1982), p. 41-42

Death, Question, Time, Dead

“Because the — all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those — changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be — or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the — like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate — the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those — if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.”

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

4 February 2005
http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/muddled.asp
2000s, 2005

Idea, Sense, Change, Help

“The Church does not have technical solutions to offer and does not claim “to interfere in any way in the politics of States.” She does, however, have a mission of truth to accomplish, in every time and circumstance, for a society that is attuned to man, to his dignity, to his vocation. Without truth, it is easy to fall into an empiricist and sceptical view of life, incapable of rising to the level of praxis because of a lack of interest in grasping the values — sometimes even the meanings — with which to judge and direct it. Fidelity to man requires fidelity to the truth, which alone is the guarantee of freedom (cf. Jn 8:32) and of the possibility of integral human development. For this reason the Church searches for truth, proclaims it tirelessly and recognizes it wherever it is manifested. This mission of truth is something that the Church can never renounce. Her social doctrine is a particular dimension of this proclamation: it is a service to the truth which sets us free. Open to the truth, from whichever branch of knowledge it comes, the Church's social doctrine receives it, assembles into a unity the fragments in which it is often found, and mediates it within the constantly changing life-patterns of the society of peoples and nations”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2009, Cartias in Vertitate (29 June 2009)

Life, People, Truth, Way

“A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate's permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia. When a Catholic does not share a candidate's stand in favor of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2004 memorandum to Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington, D.C.
2003

Evil

“Does the brain control you or are you controlling the brain? I don't know if I'm in charge of mine.”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

Podcast Series 2 Episode 6
On Biology

“It is possible to relegate the epoch of the starting of the expansion to minus infinity, e. g. by using instead of the ordinary time the logarithm of the time elapsed since the beginning. But this is only a mathematical trick. We call zero minus infinity, but that only means that we allow the universe an infinite time to get well started on its course of expansion, but it does not make the time during which anything really happens any longer.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

Mathematics, Universe, Time

“Here are six popular theses in the philosophical and psychological literature on motivation:1. Motivation is present in the animal kingdom but does not extend throughout it.
2. Motivated beings have a capacity to represent goals and means to goals.
3. A motivation-encompassing attitude may have either a goal or a means as its object.
4. Motivation varies in strength.
5. The stronger an agent’s motivation to A is, in comparison to the agent’s motivation for alternative courses of action, the more likely the agent is to A, other things being equal.
6. Whenever agents act intentionally, there is something they are effectively motivated to do.Divergent conceptions of motivation may be at work in philosophical thought about motivational matters. My concern in this book is a notion of motivation consistent with (among other things) these six claims. Readers who accept all six claims are likely to be more interested in the result than those who do not, but I conjecture that most readers do accept all of these claims, on some reading or other. Also, readers who reject one or more of these theses or who believe that no acceptable conception of motivation is consistent with all of them will be offered good reason to change their minds!”

Alfred Mele (1951) American philosopher

Introduction
Motivation and Agency (2003)

Books, Literature, Motivation, Change

“Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own question, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?”

Paul R. Halmos (1916–2006) American mathematician

I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)

Question, Reading, Fight

“Humanism does not exist in itself, just as man taken in himself and for himself does not exist. Only concrete man exists, man set in a particular age, living in a particular country, belonging to a particular social class, representing a particular tradition and particular personal ideals.”

Adam Schaff (1913–2006) Polish Marxist philosopher and theorist

Adam Schaff (1947), cited in: Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio (2007) "Adam Schaff: from Semantics to Political Semiotics." 9th World Congress of IASS/AIS. 2007.

Age, Personality, Country

“[C++] certainly has its good points. But by and large I think it's a bad language. It does a lot of things half well and it’s just a garbage heap of ideas that are mutually exclusive. Everybody I know, whether it’s personal or corporate, selects a subset and these subsets are different. So it’s not a good language to transport an algorithm—to say, "I wrote it; here, take it." It’s way too big, way too complex. And it’s obviously built by a committee. Stroustrup campaigned for years and years and years, way beyond any sort of technical contributions he made to the language, to get it adopted and used. And he sort of ran all the standards committees with a whip and a chair. And he said "no" to no one. He put every feature in that language that ever existed. It wasn't cleanly designed—it was just the union of everything that came along. And I think it suffered drastically from that.”

Ken Thompson (1943) American computer scientist, creator of the Unix operating system

Ken Thompson; cited in
"Coders At Work", 2009

Way, Idea, Thinking, Suffering

““I know it stinks. The whole universe stinks, sometimes. Haven’t you discovered that yet?”
“It doesn’t have to stink!” Rawlins said sharply, his voice rising. “Is that the lesson you’ve learned in all those years? The universe doesn’t stink. Man stinks! And he does it by voluntary choice because he’d rather stink than smell sweet! We don’t have to lie. We don’t have to cheat. We could opt for honor and decency and—” Rawlins stopped abruptly. In a different tone he said, “I sound young as hell to you, don’t I, Charles?”
“You’re entitled to make mistakes,” Boardman said. “That’s what being young is for.”
“You genuinely believe and know that there’s a cosmic malevolence in the workings of the universe?”
Boardman touched the tips of his thick, short fingers together. “I wouldn’t put it that way. There’s no personal power of darkness running things, any more than there’s a personal power of good. The universe is a big impersonal machine. As it functions it tends to put stress on some of its minor parts, and those parts wear out, and the universe doesn’t give a damn about that, because it can generate replacements. There’s nothing immoral about wearing out parts, but you have to admit that from the point of view of the part under stress it’s a stinking deal.””

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 4, section 3 (p. 72)

Lie, Way, Hell, Learning

“Money will accomplish much in business, love and war but it isn't worth a cent in nature. You could plant all the doubloons lost in the Spanish Main on a New England farm and you would not raise a single ear of corn the more therefor. You could take the golden eagles of America and put them in the alfalfa fields of Indiana and you would not get a single blade more of grass. The moral is that nature has her own way of fixing valuation; and her valuation is the way of return made from the soil. She does not care the least what men may say, by way of trade and barter, that she is worth. Her worth in her own scales consists in her ability to produce something that will minister to the needs, the comforts and even to the luxuries of her children.”

Thomas R. Marshall (1854–1925) American politician who served as the 28th Vice President of the United States

Recollections of Thomas R. Marshall: A Hoosier Salad (1925), Chapter V

Love, Men, Money, War

“Is it the being tied to One that offends us? Why this ought rather to recommend it to us, and would really do so, were we guided by reason, and not by humor and brutish passion. He who does not make friendship the chief inducement of his choice, and prefer it before any other consideration does not deserve a good wife, and therefore should not complain if he goes without one…
The Christian institution of marriage provides the best that may be for domestic quiet and content, and for the education of children.”

Mary Astell (1666–1731) English feminist writer

As quoted in Women's Political & Social Thought: An Anthology, p. 112. Editors Hilda L. Smith, Berenice A. Carroll. Editorial Indiana University Press, 2000. ISBN 0253337585.

Friendship, Marriage, Children, Education

“It does not mean that my life will no longer experience setbacks.
But with the Dharma, setbacks are transformed into a cause for my growth.”

Richard Gombrich (1937) British Indologist

"When I say I'm a Buddhist"[citation needed]

Life

“No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

Source: Attributed from posthumous publications, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), Ch. 32, January 13, 1944.

Penalty, History, Motivation, Time

“After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the government then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence: it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book Four, Chapter VI.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Four

Men, People, Communication, Fashion

“The formulation "ways to faith" could be interpreted as implying that faith is a conclusion a person may come to after pondering certain facts about the world-facts about history, nature, or consciousness. If that were the case, one could lead a person to this conclusion by presenting these facts to him and pointing out their implications. I, however, do not regard religious faith as a conclusion. It is rather an evaluative decision that one makes, and, like all evaluations, it does not result from any information one has acquired, but is a commitment to which one binds himself. In other words, faith is not a form of cognition; it is a conative element of consciousness.”

Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994) israeli intellectual

"Judaism, Human Values and the Jewish State" (1995)

World, Faith, Way, History

“A slowly moving queue does not move uniformly. Rather, waves of motion pass down the queue. The frequency and amplitude of these waves is inversely related to the speed at which the queue is served.”

Anthony Stafford Beer (1926–2002) British theorist, consultant, and professor

Source: Management Science (1968), Chapter 4, An Alphabet of Models, p. 108.

Speed

“But then the question came up of just who would define what Defined Military Sites were. I received a letter – to my and to Arafat, at the same time – which said that Israel, and only Israel, would be the one to define what those are, the location of those military sites and their size. Now, they did not want to give me that letter, so I did not give the Hebron Agreement. I stopped the government meeting, I said: “I’m not signing.” Only when the letter came, in the course of the meeting, to my and to Arafat, only then did I sign the Hebron Agreement. Or rather, ratify it, it had already been signed. Why does this matter? Because at that moment I actually stopped the Oslo Accord.”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

Benjamin Natenyahu, Israeli settlement of Ofra, 2001, speaking to a family of West Bank settlers whose 10 year old son had just returned from the hospital after being injured in a Palestinian attack. http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2010/07/14/bibi-the-bamboozler-to-settlers-america-wont-get-in-our-way-its-easily-moved/,(Hebrew video source) http://news.nana10.co.il/Article/?ArticleID=731034 2000s, 2001

Question, Time

“.. the idea that an artist is nothing unless he accepts the total responsibility for everything that he does.... by making a responsible move that he makes a statement... You can make a picture out of truth.”

Clyfford Still (1904–1980) American artist

1960s
Source: 'A period of Exploration', McChesney, as quoted in The New York school – the painters & sculptors of the fifties, Irving Sandler, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978, p 35

Truth, Idea

“We are afraid of movement because it stands for decomposition – because we see our desintegration in movement. Continuous static movement marches on! It cannot be stopped. We are fooling ourselves if we close our eyes and refuse to recognize the change. Actually, decomposition does not exist! Decomposition does not exist! Decomposition is a state envisaged only by us because we do not want it to exist, and because we dread it.”

Jean Tinguely (1925–1991) Swiss painter and sculptor

Quotes, 1950's, Static static, static !, 1959

Fools, Change

“Did you hear about the high school football coach who got in trouble for letting his players have sex with his wife? How does that work? "Robinson! Get in there!"”

Larry the Cable Guy (1963) American stand-up comedian, actor, country music artist, voice artist

Tailgate Party (2009)

School, Sex, Football

“Morphy's principal strength does not rest upon his power of combination but in his position play and his general style…. Beginning with la Bourdonnais to the present, and including Lasker, we find that the greatest stylist has been Morphy. Whence the reason, although it might not be the only one, why he is generally considered the greatest of all.”

Paul Morphy (1837–1884) American chess player

José Raúl Capablanca, in Pablo Morphy by V. F. Coria and L. Palau.
About

““You like music, Mr. Gurgeh?” Hamin asked, leaning over to the man.
Gurgeh nodded. “Well, a little does no harm.””

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 2 (p. 277).

Music

“There can be knowledge of the diabolical, but no belief in it, for more of the diabolical than there is does not exist.”

Franz Kafka book The Zürau Aphorisms

99
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)

Knowledge

“I grant you that the artist does not see Nature as she appears to the vulgar, because his emotion reveals to him the hidden truths beneath appearances.
But, after all, the only principle in Art is to copy what you see. Dealers in esthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal. There is no recipe for improving nature.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. I. Realism in Art, p. 33

Truth, Art, Nature, Appearance

“Other times I am pestered by a recurrent visual image and this image will resonate with some tone-rhythm pattern, only after that does language start to come.”

Jan Zwicky (1955) Canadian philosopher

'Perfect Fluency' interview with Scott Rosenberg, University of Wyoming Campus, Oct. 2010.
Other

Time

“Contact with other artists has always been of great importance to me. When the artists I know best used to meet.... the talk was mostly of ideas in painting. There was an unconscious collaboration between artists. Whether you agreed or disagreed was of no consequence. It was exciting and you were compelled to paint over your head…. If your painting was criticized adversely, you either imitated someone to give it importance, or you simply suffered and painted harder to make your feelings on canvas convincing... What does happen when artists meet is that we are able to see more clearly the unfolding of character as time goes on.”

William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter

Quote from Baziotes' text for the symposium 'The Creative process', Art Digest Vol. 28, no 8, 15; January 1954, p. 33
Baziotes is referring here to the many art-debates and exchanges between the New York Abstract Expressionist artists
1950s

Feeling, Idea, Suffering, Time

“But are there not reasons against all this? Is there not such a law or principle as that of self-preservation? Does not every race owe something to itself? Should it not attend to the dictates of common sense? Should not a superior race protect itself from contact with inferior ones? Are not the white people the owners of this continent? Have they not the right to say what kind of people shall be allowed to come here and settle? Is there not such a thing as being more generous than wise? In the effort to promote civilization may we not corrupt and destroy what we have? Is it best to take on board more passengers than the ship will carry? To all this and more I have one among many answers, altogether satisfactory to me, though I cannot promise it will be entirely so to you. I submit that this question of Chinese immigration should be settled upon higher principles than those of a cold and selfish expediency. There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are eternal, universal and indestructible. Among these is the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular race, but belongs alike to all and to all alike. It is the right you assert by staying here, and your fathers asserted by coming here. It is this great right that I assert for the Chinese and the Japanese, and for all other varieties of men equally with yourselves, now and forever. I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity, and when there is a supposed conflict between human and national rights, it is safe to go the side of humanity. I have great respect for the blue-eyed and light-haired races of America. They are a mighty people. In any struggle for the good things of this world, they need have no fear, they have no need to doubt that they will get their full share. But I reject the arrogant and scornful theory by which they would limit migratory rights, or any other essential human rights, to themselves, and which would make them the owners of this great continent to the exclusion of all other races of men. I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races, but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours.”

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

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

Men, People, World, Fear

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

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

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

Way, Suffering

“The s and held as property by their husbands, something not exactly in line with progressive Western thinking. In some Muslim countries, women aren’t even allowed to decide what clothes to wear. To reveal even the smallest patch of skin is a crime. Religious freedom is often nonexistent under Islamic rule. In countries like Afghanistan and Iran, people who convert from Islam to another religion face public execution. So why does the American Left hate Christianity yet love Islam?”

Chuck Hustmyre (1963) American journalist

2000s, 2009, The Left's love affair with Islam (2009)

Love, Women, Hate, People

“Consent in virtue knit your hearts so fast,
That still the knot, in spite of death, does last;
For as your tears, and sorrow-wounded soul,
Prove well that on your part this bond is whole,
So all we know of what they do above,
Is that they happy are, and that they love.
Let dark oblivion, and the hollow grave,
Content themselves our frailer thoughts to have;
Well-chosen love is never taught to die,
But with our nobler part invades the sky.
Then grieve no more that one so heavenly shaped
The crooked hand of trembling age escaped;
Rather, since we beheld her not decay,
But that she vanish'd so entire away,
Her wondrous beauty, and her goodness, merit
We should suppose that some propitious spirit
In that celestial form frequented here,
And is not dead, but ceases to appear.”

Edmund Waller (1606–1687) English poet and politician

Upon the Death of My Lady Rich (1664).
Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham (1857)

Love, Death, Happiness, Age

“Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else?”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Eating Animals

Eating Animals (2009)

“This image of four spectra is taken from one of Huggins's publications. …You can see that the Comet Winnecke resembles olive oil more than it does Comet Brorsen.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

“I was cruising along on Tokyo Bay, and suddenly this was the answer, looming, the heaped remains of everything that goes down and does not come again to shore, life’s giant kitchen-midden, the rubbish heap that remains after all things pass, the place that stands in testament to the futility of all ideals and intentions, good or bad, the rock that smashes values, there, signalizing the ultimate uselessness of life itself, which must one day be broken upon it, not to rise, no, never, not ever, again.”

Roger Zelazny Isle of the Dead

Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 7 (p. 154)

Life

“The reason why lime makes a solid structure on being combined with water and sand seems to be this: that rocks, like all other bodies, are composed of the four elements. Those which contain a larger proportion of air, are soft; of water, are tough from the moisture; of earth, hard; and of fire, more brittle. Therefore, if limestone, without being burned, is merely pounded up small and then mixed with sand and so put into the work, the mass does not solidify nor can it hold together. But if the stone is first thrown into the kiln, it loses its former property of solidity by exposure to the great heat of the fire, and so with its strength burnt out and exhausted it is left with its pores open and empty. Hence, the moisture and air in the body of the stone being burned out and set free, and only a residuum of heat being left lying in it, if the stone is then immersed in water, the moisture, before the water can feel the influence of the fire, makes its way into the open pores; then the stone begins to get hot, and finally, after it cools off, the heat is rejected from the body of the lime.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter V, Sec. 2

Way, Feeling, Lying, Water

“To amuse is not to teach. The object of teaching is to erect a framework of knowledge in a child's mind and gradually to bring the child as near as may be to the average level of intelligence. Later in life the facts taught by experience and new discoveries will add themselves to this framework. It is wrong to attempt to upset this natural order and to appeal to a child's mind by diverting it with the spectacle of modern life. Teaching by means of pictures, radio, and the cinema is in itself ineffective; these methods must not be used unless they involve (and this is possible) some effort or special enthusiasm. That which is learned without difficulty is soon forgotten, and for the same reason, oral instruction which does not require the pupil's personal participation is almost always rather useless. Eloquence slides in and out of young minds. To listen is not to work.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Naturally this does not apply to the teaching of modern languages.
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Working

Life, Intelligence, Nature, Knowledge

“He makes his own paint and does not suffer from any erectile dysfunction or infection.”

Pricasso (1949) Australian painter

[The Star staff, Pricasso's the name, painting the game, 28 September 2012, 3, The Star, South Africa, Independent Online]
About

Suffering, Painting

“Economic interdependence does promote shared interests, but it also creates shared vulnerabilities. … In an adversial context, shared interests provide opportunities for exploitation, not mutual gain.”

Charles A. Kupchan (1958) American university teacher

Source: The End of the American Era (2002), Chapter three: "The False Promise of Globalization and Democracy"

“On entering life, then, young people meet with various collective opinions, more or less narrow-minded. The more the individual has it in him to become a real personality, the more he will resist following a herd. But even if an inner voice says to him; “Become thyself! Be thyself!” he hears its appeal with despondency. Has he a self? He does not know; he is not yet aware of it. He therefore looks about for a teacher, an educator, one who will teach him, not something foreign, but how to become his own individual self.
We had in Denmark a great man who with impressive force exhorted his contemporaries to become individuals. But Søren Kierkegaard’s appeal was not intended to be taken so unconditionally as it sounded. For the goal was fixed. They were to become individuals, not in order to develop into free personalities, but in order by this means to become true Christians. Their freedom was only apparent; above them was suspended a “Thou shalt believe!” and a “Thou shalt obey!” Even as individuals they had a halter round their necks, and on the farther side of the narrow passage of individualism, through which the herd was driven, the herd awaited them again one flock, one shepherd.
It is not with this idea of immediately resigning his personality again that the young man in our day desires to become himself and seeks an educator. He will not have a dogma set up before him, at which he is expected to arrive.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), pp. 9-10

Life, People, Education, Idea

“I'm not the man to say that failure's sweet,
Nor tell a chap to laugh when things go wrong;
I know it hurts to have to take defeat
An' no one likes to lose before a throng;
It isn't very pleasant not to win
When you have done the very best you could;
But if you're down, get up an' buckle in—
A lickin' often does a fellow good.”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

Hard Knocks, stanza 1, p. 44.
A Heap o' Livin' (1916)

Failure, Hurt

“…it is a revolution without any mandate from the people. (Cheers.) Now, gentlemen, it is in the first place a revolution in fiscal methods…this Budget is introduced as a Liberal measure. If so, all I can say is that it is a new Liberalism and not the one that I have known and practised under more illustrious auspices than these. (Cheers.) Who was the greatest, not merely the greatest Liberal, but the greatest financier that this country has ever known? (A voice, "Gladstone.") I mean Mr. Gladstone. (Cheers.) With Sir Robert Peel—he, I think, occupied a position even higher than Sir Robert Peel—for boldness of imagination and scope of financing Mr. Gladstone ranks as the great financial authority of our time. (Cheers.) Now, we have in the Cabinet at this moment several colleagues, several ex-colleagues of mine, who served in the Cabinet with Mr. Gladstone…and I ask them, without a moment's fear or hesitation as to the answer that would follow if they gave it from their conscience, with what feelings would they approach Mr. Gladstone, were he Prime Minister and still living, with such a Budget as this? Mr. Gladstone would be 100 in December if he were alive; but, centenarian as he would be, I venture to say that he would make short work of the deputation of the Cabinet that waited on him with the measure, and they would soon find themselves on the stairs and not in the room. (Laughter and cheers.) In his eyes, and in my eyes, too, as a humble disciple, Liberalism and Liberty were cognate terms. They were twin-sisters. How does the Budget stand the test of Liberalism so understood and of Liberty as we have always comprehended it? This Budget seems to establish an inquisition, unknown previously in Great Britain, and a tyranny, I venture to say, unknown to mankind…I think my friends are moving on the path that leads to Socialism. How far they are advanced on that path I will not say, but on that path I, at any rate, cannot follow them an inch. (Loud cheers.) Any form of protection is an evil, but Socialism is the end of all, the negation of faith, of family, of prosperity, of the monarchy, of Empire.”

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847–1929) British politician

Loud cheers.
Speech in Glasgow attacking the "People's Budget" (10 September 1909), reported in The Times (11 September 1909), pp. 7-8.

People, Fear, Family, Faith

“I, for one, have been singled out for particularly bilious and venomous assaults. These criticisms, as near as I can tell, and I admit that it is rare that I take notice of this calumny, have little to do with any particular opinion, though each opinion does provide one more occasion to criticize. Rather, the principal problem seems to be a deeper antecedent offense: I have no right to think the way I do because I'm black.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

Way, Problem, Thinking

“Trouble,” he chuckled. “What does a boy like you know about trouble? I was in trouble afore you were born. I been in trouble you don’t even got words for.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind (2007), Chapter 61, “Jackass, Jackass” (p. 454)

Boy

“Ay me, how many perils doe enfold
The righteous man, to make him daily fall!”

Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene

Canto 8, stanza 1
The Faerie Queene (1589–1596), Book I

“I didn't use the music from the scene in which Godzilla dies in GODZILLA - KING OF THE MONSTERS for the one in which he does actually meltdown because Godzilla was not what I was trying to focus on this time. Instead, I tried to focus on the dark side of humanity, which lead to the creation of atomic weapons, and Godzilla.”

Akira Ifukube (1914–2006) Japanese composer

As quoted by David Milner, "Akira Ifukube Interview III" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/ifukub3.htm, Kaiju Conversations (December 1995)

Music, Time

“Such close observations of apes and birds and dolphins remind us that humanity is part of a great animal kingdom. All species within this kingdom differ from one another in significant ways, to be sure, but the kingdom does not seem to be organized on the superior/inferior hierarchy. Species are merely different from one another; they are not better than, nor more or less advanced than, each other. The core experience of all animal life is strikingly similar.”

Hugh Downs (1921) American broadcaster

"ABC Radio Perspective on ABC News 20/20 on May 29, 1994"

Life, Way, Bird, Animals

“The real world with its common logic pushes us toward catastrophe. The artists seek in his work to free himself from this weight. Art is being transformed into politics, love into trade, education into an apparatus for stifling the mind. In the midst of such horrors, clearly only the dream within me has life. But how do other people live? -There is color, virginal expression - new, without a cage, without routine, without limit, a bath of sun and light. We must realize that nothing man does is of any value. The trouble is that people want to be paid. Only sick men can be artists. Their suffering pushes them into the accomplishment of deeds which reinvest the world with meaning. The sensitive man or the artist can only be a sick man in our civilized life, so full of lies. To think of art as a profession, how appealing!”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

Painting is man in the face of his downfall.
1960's
Source: Abstract Painting, Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co., 1964, p. 134

Love, Life, Men, People

Quotes about doe page 40

Quotes about doe
page 40