Quotes about doe
page 68

“Gay and straight men have much more in common than do gay men with lesbians or straight men with straight women. Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he he just falls back into her and is swallowed up. This is the agonizing myth-pattern in the comic, matricidal Psycho (1960), one of the hauntingly emblematic films of our time.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 23

Women, Men, Time

“Tom Strong and the rest of the ABC bunch leave me cold for a lot of reasons. First—and I realize this is purely subjective, but what isn’t?—I find a smugness, a condescension that reads to me as nostalgia being done by someone who is not in the least bit nostalgic. Almost as if Moore sits down to write and flips his brain 180°, so he’s not really writing what he feels or what he likes, just the exact opposite of what he would usually write.

Also, there is the whole pastiche/homage/whatever thing. I find this really annoying. Not just when Moore does it. I can look back on elements of my own work and be annoyed at myself for going down that path. I only did it on rare occasions, tho. Moore has turned it into a career. So much so, that in the post-Watchmen era I have trouble calling to mind much that he has done that was not based on someone else’s previous work. I am not the most original guy on the block, but at least when I do Superman, I do Superman.

I suppose a lot of this could simply be the bad taste his earlier work left for me. All that tearing down and “deconstructionism.””

John Byrne (1950) American author and artist of comic books

All that revealing of the flaws and feet of clay, not a bit of which has served the industry in any positive way, and, in fact, has left huge scars across it, like the ones left in the landscape by open pit mining.
Alan Moore

Way, Guy, Feeling, Tear

“It is dangerous these days for a male to write even glancingly on feminist themes. Did anyone attack Margaret Atwood’s right to extrapolate religio-machismo in The Handmaid’s Tale? Women writers appear vouchsafed insight into the souls of men—credit that seldom flows the other way. It is a sexist and offensive assumption, which does not advance understanding.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Afterword (p. 561)
Glory Season (1993)

Women, Men, Way, Soul

“Edward Smith: Why is it more of a pleasure to do 30 or 40 pictures than to do just one?
Andy Warhol: Then I can, uh, listen to my soundabout which looks just like the thing that I'm wearing now, and you can listen to opera and stuff like that.
Edward Smith: Does that mean you don't have to think when you're painting?
Andy Warhol: No, you can listen to really good music.
Edward Smith: So, what, painting is an excuse to listen to really good music?
Andy Warhol: Oh, yeah.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

1975 - 1987, BBC interview (1981)

Pleasure, Music, Thinking, Painting

“Does not everyone who describes something he has experienced believe basically that whatever happens to him has some sort of relevance.”

Max Frisch (1911–1991) Swiss playwright and novelist

Sketchbook 1946-1949

“All humans are created unequal. You are bigger and stronger than Pop; I am bigger and stronger than Hilda. I have the least years of experience; Pop has the most. Pop is a super-genius…but he concentrates so hard that he forgets to eat…unless he has a nursemaid to watch him—as Mama did, as I did, as Hilda now does. You, sir, are the all-around most competent man I’ve ever met, whether driving a duo, or dancing, or telling outrageous tales. Three of us have eight or nine earned degrees…but Aunt Hilda with none is a walking encyclopedia from insatiable curiosity and extraordinary memory. We two are baby factories and you two are not—but two men can impregnate fifty women—or five hundred. There is no end to the ways that we four are unequal.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Number of the Beast

Source: The Number of the Beast (1980), Chapter XXXI : “—the first ghosts ever to search for an obstetrician.”, p. 321

Women, Men, Way, Memory

“As Justice Stevens explains, “ ‘objective evidence, though of great importance, [does] not wholly determine the controversy, for the Constitution contemplates that in the end our own judgment will be brought to bear on the question of the acceptability of the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment.’ ” (quoting Atkins v. Virginia). “I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty” Purer expression cannot be found of the principle of rule by judicial fiat. In the face of Justice Stevens’ experience, the experience of all others is, it appears, of little consequence. The experience of the state legislatures and the Congress—who retain the death penalty as a form of punishment—is dismissed as “the product of habit and inattention rather than an acceptable deliberative process.” The experience of social scientists whose studies indicate that the death penalty deters crime is relegated to a footnote. The experience of fellow citizens who support the death penalty is described, with only the most thinly veiled condemnation, as stemming from a “thirst for vengeance.””

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

It is Justice Stevens’ experience that reigns over all.
Baze v. Rees (2008) (concurring).
2000s

Death, Justice, Penalty, Quotes

“The Court has no fears for the safety of the Christian religion. It does not believe that the rock upon which Christianity stands can ever be shaken.”

Sir John Bayley, 1st Baronet (1763–1841) British judge

Trial of Mary Ann Carlile (1821), 1 St. Tr. (N. S.) 1050.

Fear, Religion

“He who does not fill his world with phantoms remains alone.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Quien no llena su mundo de fantasmas, se queda solo.
Voces (1943)

World

“Ideas and techniques known in quantum electrodynamics have been applied to the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory of superconductivity. In an approximation which corresponds to a generalization of the Hartree-Fock fields, one can write down an integral equation defining the self-energy of an electron in an electron gas with phonon and Coulomb interaction. The form of the equation implies the existence of a particular solution which does not follow from perturbation theory, and which leads to the energy gap equation and the quasi-particle picture analogous to Bogolyubov's.”

Yoichiro Nambu (1921–2015) American physicist

[Quasi-particles and gauge invariance in the theory of superconductivity, Physical Review, 117, 3, February 1960, 648–663, 10.1103/PhysRev.117.648]

Idea

“It is important, therefore, to understand at the outset the simplicity of this book - what it can accomplish and what it cannot. What it does try to do is to isolate certain psychological factors and to demonstrate rigorously by quantitative scientific methods that these factors are generally important in economic development.”

David C. McClelland (1917–1998) American psychological theorist

Source: The Archiving Society, 1961, p. ix

Books, Understanding

“Whether God can make the past not to have been?
Objection 1: It seems that God can make the past not to have been. For what is impossible in itself is much more impossible than that which is only impossible accidentally. But God can do what is impossible in itself, as to give sight to the blind, or to raise the dead. Therefore, and much more can He do what is only impossible accidentally. Now for the past not to have been is impossible accidentally: thus for Socrates not to be running is accidentally impossible, from the fact that his running is a thing of the past. Therefore God can make the past not to have been.
Objection 2: Further, what God could do, He can do now, since His power is not lessened. But God could have effected, before Socrates ran, that he should not run. Therefore, when he has run, God could effect that he did not run.
Objection 3: Further, charity is a more excellent virtue than virginity. But God can supply charity that is lost; therefore also lost virginity. Therefore He can so effect that what was corrupt should not have been corrupt. On the contrary, Jerome says (Ep. 22 ad Eustoch.): "Although God can do all things, He cannot make a thing that is corrupt not to have been corrupted." Therefore, for the same reason, He cannot effect that anything else which is past should not have been.
I answer that, As was said above (Q[7], A[2]), there does not fall under the scope of God's omnipotence anything that implies a contradiction. Now that the past should not have been implies a contradiction. For as it implies a contradiction to say that Socrates is sitting, and is not sitting, so does it to say that he sat, and did not sit. But to say that he did sit is to say that it happened in the past. To say that he did not sit, is to say that it did not happen. Whence, that the past should not have been, does not come under the scope of divine power. This is what Augustine means when he says (Contra Faust. xxix, 5): "Whosoever says, If God is almighty, let Him make what is done as if it were not done, does not see that this is to say: If God is almighty let Him effect that what is true, by the very fact that it is true, be false": and the Philosopher says (Ethic. vi, 2): "Of this one thing alone is God deprived---namely, to make undone the things that have been done."
Reply to Objection 1: Although it is impossible accidentally for the past not to have been, if one considers the past thing itself, as, for instance, the running of Socrates; nevertheless, if the past thing is considered as past, that it should not have been is impossible, not only in itself, but absolutely since it implies a contradiction. Thus, it is more impossible than the raising of the dead; in which there is nothing contradictory, because this is reckoned impossible in reference to some power, that is to say, some natural power; for such impossible things do come beneath the scope of divine power.
Reply to Objection 2: As God, in accordance with the perfection of the divine power, can do all things, and yet some things are not subject to His power, because they fall short of being possible; so, also, if we regard the immutability of the divine power, whatever God could do, He can do now. Some things, however, at one time were in the nature of possibility, whilst they were yet to be done, which now fall short of the nature of possibility, when they have been done. So is God said not to be able to do them, because they themselves cannot be done.
Reply to Objection 3: God can remove all corruption of the mind and body from a woman who has fallen; but the fact that she had been corrupt cannot be removed from her; as also is it impossible that the fact of having sinned or having lost charity thereby can be removed from the sinner.”

Thomas Aquinas book Summa Theologica

Summa Theologica Question 25 Article 6 http://www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa.FP_Q25_A4.html Summa Theologica (1265–1274), Unplaced by chapter

God, Nature, Time, Past

“To be a gentleman does not depend upon the tailor or the toilet. Good clothes are not good habits. A gentleman is just a gentle-man, — no more, no less; a diamond polished, that was first a diamond in the rough.”

William Croswell Doane (1832–1913) American bishop

Address at Burlington College, reported in Horace Mann, The Common School Journal (1847), p. 191.

Dependency, Clothes

“It does not escape me that I am blessed to be included in this tale of a billion human conflicts and singular resolution.”

Donald Miller (1971) American writer

Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)

“The nature of this melancholy becomes clearer, once one asks the question, with whom does the historical writer of historicism actually empathize. The answer is irrefutably with the victor. Those who currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

VII, often misquoted as "History is written by the victors"
(1940)

Question, Nature, Time, Victory

“The question to ask believers is this: “Does it really matter whether what you believe about God is true—or don’t you care?” If it does matter, then you must justify your beliefs; if it doesn’t, then you must justify belief itself.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 63

God, Question

“His father was a Butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father's Trade, but when he kill'd a Calfe he would doe it in high style, and make a Speech.”

John Aubrey book Brief Lives

"William Shakespeare"
Brief Lives

Exercises, Boy

“All that I will say is that in 1939 I voluntarily returned from Australia to this country to serve as a private soldier in the war against Germany and Nazism. I am the same man today… It does not follow that because a person resident in this country is not English that he does not enjoy equal treatment before the law and public authorities. I set my face like flint against discrimination.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Reacting to Tony Benn's speech that "the flag hoisted at Wolverhampton [Powell's constituency] is beginning to look like the one that fluttered over Dachau and Belsen" (3 June 1970), from Simon Heffer, Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell (Phoenix, 1999), p. 556.
1970s

War, Law, Personality, Country

“Harry Dresden: The freaking Council never does anything quickly, and I had a bad feeling that tempus was fugiting furiously.”

Jim Butcher The Dresden Files

Source: The Dresden Files, Changes (2010), Chapter 10

Feeling

“…But they accuse us of being terrorists. Terrorists, because when the Palestinian mother welcomes her martyred son, she wishes to receive him as a corpse. She does not want him to be alive…. The wish of the Palestinian mother is to see the body of her son the martyr…”

Ibrahim Mudeiris

Preaching Poison http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/stalinsky200403190914.asp (March 2004)

“Real love has nothing to do with lust or self-centeredness. In real love, you are not important; the other is important. In love, the other is not your instrument to fulfil your selfish desires; you are an instrument of the Divine with the intention of doing good in the world. Love does not sacrifice others; love gives joyfully of itself. Love is selfless—but not the enforced selflessness of women being pushed into the background, treated as objects. In real love, you do not feel worthless; on the contrary, you expand and become one with everything—all-encompassing, ever blissful.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

The Awakening of Universal Motherhood (2002)

Love, Women, World, Feeling

““It is the principle of Business, which is more fundamental than the law of gravity. Wherever you go in the galaxy, you can find a food business, a housebuilding business, a war business, a peace business, a governing business, and so forth. And, of course, a God business, which is called ‘religion,’ and which is a particularly reprehensible line of endeavor. I could talk for a year on the perverse and nasty notions that the religions sell, but I’m sure you’ve heard it all before. But I’ll just mention one matter, which seems to underlie everything the religions preach, and which seems to me almost exquisitely perverse.”
“What’s that?” Carmody asked.
“It’s the deep, fundamental bedrock of hypocrisy upon which religion is founded. Consider: no creature can be said to worship if it does not possess free will. Free will, however, is free. And just by virtue of being free, is intractable and incalculable, a truly Godlike gift, the faculty that makes a state of freedom possible. To exist in a state of freedom is a wild, strange thing, and was clearly intended as such. But what do the religions do with this? They say, ‘Very well, you possess free will; but now you must use your free will to enslave yourself to God and to us.’ The effrontery of it! God, who would not coerce a fly, is painted as a supreme slavemaster! In the face of this, any creature with spirit must rebel, must serve God entirely of his own will and volition, or must not serve him at all, thus remaining true to himself and to the faculties God has given him.”
“I think I see what you mean,” Carmody said.
“I’ve made it too complicated,” Maudsley said. “There’s a much simpler reason for avoiding religion.”
“What’s that?”
“Just consider its style—bombastic, hortatory, sickly-sweet, patronizing, artificial, inapropos, boring, filled with dreary images or peppy slogans—fit subject matter for senile old women and unweaned babies, but for no one else. I cannot believe that the God I met here would ever enter a church; he had too much taste and ferocity, too much anger and pride. I can’t believe it, and for me that ends the matter. Why should I go to a place that a God would not enter?””

Robert Sheckley book Dimension of Miracles

Source: Dimension of Miracles (1968), Chapter 13 (pp. 88-89)

Women, God, War, Peace

“Even though you can destroy a man, destroying him does not make him cease to exist. On the contrary, if I can put it this way, he begins to exist all the more. These are paradoxes no tyrant can deal with. The scythe swings, and at once the grass starts to grow back. Cut again and the grass grows faster than ever. A very comforting law of nature.”

Ryszard Kapuściński (1932–2007) Polish historian

Attributed to an anonymous Iranian in Shah of Shahs, Vintage International edition, p. 3

Law, Way, Nature, Grass

“Life, in a body whose order and state of affairs can make it manifest, is assuredly, as I have said, a real power that gives rise to numerous phenomena. This power has, however, neither goal nor intention. It can do only what it does; it is only a set of acting causes, not a particular being. I was the first to establish this truth at a time when life was still thought to be a principle, an archeia, a being of some sort.”

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) French naturalist

Système Analytique des Connaissances Positives de l'Homme (1820), as quoted in Lamarck, the Mythical Precursor: A Study of the Relations Between Science and Ideology (1982) by Madeleine Barthélemy Madaule, p. 102.

Life, Truth, Time

“God does have this self-serving habit of putting all blame for His own mistakes on other people, doesn't He? He picks someone arbitrarily, unbidden, right out of the blue so to speak, and levies upon them tasks of monumental difficulty for which we don't always measure up in every particular, then charges US for HIS error in selecting imperfectly. He tends to forget that we are no more infallible than He is.”

Joseph Heller book God Knows

God Knows (1984)

God, People, Error, Forgetting

“Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.”

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

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God

Faith

“Philippe Durance: … How does one become Michel Crozier?
Michel Crozier: I'm going to give you an absurd answer. One becomes Michel Crozier by accident. I never had a vision of what I wanted to do, nor what I was going to become. I suppose there were a certain number of opportunities which presented themselves, but I hadn't expected any of them.
My first revelation was in America. I was living and working in United States with the aid of a scholarship which I hadn't really requested and just sort of fell into my lap by luck. There were even a few colleagues who said that there must have been an error. That was 1947 and at that time, I considered myself a poet. I didn't know anything about sociology, and I had a grant to study the labour movement in the United States. I discovered both. I forgot how to be a poet and I became passionate for what I had to do. Without any preparation, I interviewed heaps of union members. That allowed me to write a book on American labour unions [1951] and pass my doctoral thesis… So, I found myself to be a sociologist.”

Michel Crozier (1922–2013) French sociologist

Michel Crozier in: " The Foresight Interviews Michel Crozier, sociologist and member of the Institute Philippe Durance http://en.laprospective.fr/dyn/anglais/memoire/interview_croziereng.pdf," at en.laprospective.fr, translated by Adam Gerber July 2007

Books, Error, Study, Passion

“In all cases, wherein the mind feels itself in danger of being confounded by variety, it is sure to rest upon a few strong points, or perhaps upon a single instance. Amongst a multitude of proofs, it is one that does the business. If we observe in any argument, that hardly two minds fix upon the same instance, the diversity of choice shows the strength of the argument, because it shows the number and competition of the examples. There is no subject in which the tendency to dwell upon select or single topics is so usual, because there is no subject, of which, in its full extent, the latitude is so great, as that of natural history applied to the proof of an intelligent Creator.”

William Paley (1743–1805) Christian apologist, natural theologian, utilitarian

Source: Natural Theology (1802), Ch. 27 : Conclusion.

Feeling, History, Intelligence, Business

“The president, comparing him to a kid in the back of a classroom, I think, is very indicative of the president’s lack of appreciation of who Vladimir Putin is. He’s an old KGB colonel that has no illusions about our relationship, does not care about a relationship with the United States, continues to oppress his people, continues to act in an autocratic fashion.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

As quoted in "McCain: Obama's 'slouch' comment dismissive of Putin" http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/08/11/mccain-obamas-slouch-comment-dismissive-of-putin/, (11 August 2013), The Washington Post 2010s, 2013

People, Fashion, Thinking

“The beat must not be like a tyrannical hammer, impeding or urging on, but must be to the music what the pulse-beat is to the life of man. There is no slow tempo in which passages do not occur that demand a quicker motion, so as to obviate the impression of dragging. Conversely there is no presto that does not need a quiet delivery by many places, so as not to throw away the chance of expressiveness by hurrying… Neither the quickening nor the slowing of the tempo should ever give the impression of the spasmodic or the violent. The changes, to have a musical-poetic significance, must come in an orderly way in periods and phrases, conditioned by the varying warmth of the expression. We have in music no signs for all this. They exist only in the sentient soul. If they are not there, then there is no help to be had from the metronome – which obviates only the grosser errors – nor from these extremely imperfect precepts of mine.”

Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826) German composer

quoted in Harold C. Schonberg, The Great Conductors (1981) ISBN 0671208349

Life, Music, Way, Error

“It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expence, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expence, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book II, Chapter III, p. 381.

People, Law

“By what modus operandi does credit restriction attain this result? In no other way than by the deliberate intensification of unemployment.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Essays in Persuasion (1931), The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill (1925)

Way

“Under the roof of one controversial assumption about physics, we discuss five big questions that can be addressed using concepts from a modern understanding of digital informational processes. The assumption is called finite nature. The digital mechanics model is obtained by applying the assumption to physics. The questions are as follows: 1. What is the origin of spin? 2. Why are there symmetries and CPT (charge conjugation, parity, and time reversal)? 3. What is the origin of length? 4. What does a process model of motion tell us? 5. Can the finite nature assumption account for the efficacy of quantum mechanics?”

Edward Fredkin (1934) American physicist and computer scientist, a pioneer of digital physics

Five big questions with pretty simple answers, IBM Journal of Research and Development, 48, 1, January 2004, 31–45 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5388918/,

Understanding, Question, Nature, Time

“I was attracted to Romanesque sculptures, to the complete re-invented figures and the freedom with which the Romanesque artist constructed them. He does not copy, he creates in a totally anti-Renaissance fashion can say that in Romanesque sculpture I have found a starting point for distortion.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Kunst und Zeugnis, Dora Vallier, Zürich 1967, p. 67
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1960's

Fashion, Freedom

“If you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does that technical work.”

Michael E. Gerber (1936) American business writer

Michael Gerber (1986), E, Myth, cited in: Manager's magazine, 1986. p. 57

Understanding, Business

“Most artists, whether in religion, music, literature, painting, or what not, are shopkeepers in disguise. They hide their shop as much as they can, and keep pretending that it does not exist, but they are essentially shopkeepers and nothing else.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

The Artist and the Shopkeeper
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XI - Cash and Credit

Religion, Music, Literature, Painting

“I want to know, for example, why beauty exists," she [Gabrielle] said, "why nature continues to contrive it, and what is the link between the life of a lightning storm with the feelings these things inspire in us? If God does not exist, if these things are not unified into one metaphorical system, then why do they retain for us such symbolic power? Lestat calls it the Savage Garden, but for me that is not enough.”

Anne Rice book The Vampire Lestat

The Vampire Lestat (1985)

Life, God, Beauty, Feeling

“If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.”

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

“The Obscurity of the Poet”, p. 4
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Reading, Help

“In the meantime, it just makes it a little harder to smile. But so does the world.”

Amy Goodman (1957) American broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter and author

Whom the Bell's Palsy Tolls http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071030_for_whom_the_bells_palsy_tolls/For (referring to her fall 2007 bout of Bell's Palsy).

World, Smile

“The killer of souls does not kill a hundred souls. He kills his own soul a hundred times.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

El matador de almas no mata cien almas; mata una alma sola, cien veces.
Voces (1943)

Soul, Time

“It is evident that the relation to God with which the Bible is concerned does not have its source in the purple depths of the subconscious, and cannot be identical with what the deep-sea psychical research of our day describes in the narrower or broader sense as libido fulfilment.”

Karl Barth (1886–1968) Swiss Protestant theologian

p, 125
The Word of God and the Word of Man (1928)

God, Sense, Sea

“Unlike Islamic fundamentalists, the BJP does not claim to possess a blueprint. It shall have to struggle to evolve an Indian approach to modern problems.”

Girilal Jain (1924–1993) Indian journalist

Page 105, The Hindu Phenomenon, ISBN 81-86112-32-4.
On Hindutva

Problem

“Does a population have informed consent when a ruling minority acts in secret to ignite a war, doing this to justify the existence of the minority's forces? […] failure to provide full information for informed consent on such an issue represents an ultimate crime.”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

"From The Trial of Trials", p. 246
The Bureau of Sabotage series, The Dosadi Experiment (1977)

War, Secret, Failure

“[R]elative lack of popularity is not as important as the lack of popularity of a president in South Korea, where there is no bedrock state support to keep people patriotic even when they dislike a leader. But we Americans are more like the North Koreans in that regard. Does our patriotism rise and fall depending on who is in the White House? If we don’t like a president, do we start finding America’s enemies more likeable? No. We should therefore not assume that Kim Jong Un’s relative lack of stature means that support for the state is weakening.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Interview with Joshua Stanton (August 2017)

People, Support, Housing, Dependency

“The evident problem with democracy today is that the state is pre-empting – or 'crowding out', as the economists say – our moral judgments. Rulers are adding moral judgments to the expanding schedule of powers they exercise. Nor does the state deal merely with principles. It is actually telling its subjects to do very specific things. Yet decisions about how we live are what we mean by 'freedom,' and freedom is incompatible with a moralizing state. That is why I am provoked to ask the question: can the moral life survive democracy?”

Kenneth Minogue (1930–2013) Australian political theorist

Introduction p. 3-4
The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life

Life, Exercises, Democracy, Question

“The Justice Department's conclusion that Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 does not prohibit discrimination based on actual or perceived capacity to transmit AIDS to others has been assailed as legally or medically flawed, mean-spirited, and antagonistic toward the gay community. The criticisms are misplaced. The Department's sober examination of the Rehabilitation Act reveals a commendable dedication to the rule of law and the belief that Congress, not bureaucrats, should be the foremost architect of national public policy. … The gay community and other political minorities, as the foremost beneficiaries of the rule of law, should applaud, not condemn, the Department's opinion. By refusing to usurp policy making power from Congress, the Justice Department acted in the highest tradition of executive restraint.”

Bruce Fein (1947) American lawyer

AIDS in the workplace; the administration's impeccable logic http://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/13/business/aids-in-the-workplace-the-administration-s-impeccable-logic.html, The New York Times (July 13, 1986)

Justice, Law, Communication

“Who isn’t frustrated and does not prove it by his actions — if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance.”

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet

Introduction
The Wedge (1944)

Age, Art

“For to those who have not the means within themselves of a virtuous and happy life every age is burdensome; and, on the other hand, to those who seek all good from themselves nothing can seem evil that the laws of nature inevitably impose. To this class old age especially belongs, which all men wish to attain and yet reproach when attained; such is the inconsistency and perversity of Folly! They say that it stole upon them faster than they had expected. In the first place, who has forced them to form a mistaken judgement? For how much more rapidly does old age steal upon youth than youth upon childhood? And again, how much less burdensome would old age be to them if they were in their eight hundredth rather than in their eightieth year? In fact, no lapse of time, however long, once it had slipped away, could solace or soothe a foolish old age.”
Quibus enim nihil est in ipsis opis ad bene beateque vivendum, eis omnis aetas gravis est; qui autem omnia bona a se ipsi petunt, eis nihil potest malum videri quod naturae necessitas afferat. quo in genere est in primis senectus, quam ut adipiscantur omnes optant, eandem accusant adeptam; tanta est stultitiae inconstantia atque perversitas. obrepere aiunt eam citius quam putassent. primum quis coegit eos falsum putare? qui enim citius adulescentiae senectus quam pueritiae adulescentia obrepit? deinde qui minus gravis esset eis senectus, si octingentesimum annum agerent, quam si octogesimum? praeterita enim aetas quamvis longa, cum effluxisset, nulla consolatione permulcere posset stultam senectutem.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

section 4 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2007.01.0039%3Asection%3D4 Cato Maior de Senectute – On Old Age (44 BC)

Life, Men, Happiness, Youth

“Truth does not consist in minute accuracy of detail; but in conveying a right impression.”

Henry Alford (1810–1871) English churchman, theologian, textual critic, scholar, poet, hymnodist, and writer

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 603.

Truth

“It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Failure

“In speaking of the work of machines and of natural forces we must, of course, in this comparison eliminate anything in which activity of intelligence comes into play. The latter is also capable of the hard and intense work of thinking, which tries a man just as muscular exertion does.”

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) physicist and physiologist

"On the Conservation of Force" (1862), p. 280
Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects (1881)

Intelligence, Nature, Thinking

“In America, where many peoples are held together largely by their sense of opportunities and their hope of reward, the subject is of the gravest concern. The attitude and reactions of the native-born American who believes in Americanization, and the one who does not, with all shades of opinion and of feeling lying between the two extremes, are to be considered. There is the man who comes here to stay and the one who in- tends to return. There is the racial solidarist bent upon reestablishing his own race here with as few changes as possible. There is the race which hates another, and for its own independent reasons tries to block its progress in the new land. We have to reckon with a situation created by men who are representatives of powerful foreign corporations, who will spend their lives here, make their homes here, and who never intend to become part of America. There are leaders who manipulate their people in the interest of the country of their origin, as well as those genuinely interested in serving America. In addition, there are factions in each race having no desire to unite with one another; there are races opposed to healing their own differences of centuries ago; and there are groups passionately devoted to their own culture and ideals, to which in their opinion nothing can compare.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Men, Hate, People, Hope

“Spiritual mastery is never easy. It takes much more time and personal application than physical development does. Spirtual mastery, however, is the path we are all on. Some of us simply do not choose to believe it.”

Scott Shaw (1958) American actor

The Warrior is Silent

Time, Personality

“Exactly what useful work did those stockbrokers do to gain their enormous wealth, other than to exploit the people who work in industry, to take their money away and to make no useful contribution to society? Does the hon. Gentleman think that the working people of London are so stupid as not to realise that stockbrokers are parasites?”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Question http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1988/jul/12/inequalities-in-london in the House of Commons (12 July 1988). 1980s

Money, People, Stupidity, Thinking

“The Brahmans who were custodians of the idols and idol-houses, and “teachers of the infidels”, also received their share of attention from the soldiers of Allãh. Our citations contain only stray references to the Brahmans because they have been compiled primarily with reference to the destruction of temples. Even so, they provide the broad contours of another chapter in the history of medieval India, a chapter which has yet to be brought out in full. The Brahmans are referred to as magicians by some Islamic invaders and massacred straight away. Elsewhere, the Hindus who are not totally defeated and want to surrender on some terms, are made to sign a treaty saying that the Brahmans will be expelled from the temples. The holy cities of the Hindus were “the nests of the Brahmans” who had to be slaughtered before or after the destruction of temples, so that these places were “cleansed” completely of “kufr” and made fit as “abodes of Islam”. Amîr Khusrû describes with great glee how the heads of Brahmans “danced from their necks and fell to the ground at their feet”, along with those of the other “infidels” whom Malik Kãfûr had slaughtered during the sack of the temples at Chidambaram. Fîrûz Shãh Tughlaq got bags full of cow’s flesh tied round the necks of Brahmans and had them paraded through his army camp at Kangra. Muhmûd Shãh II Bahmanî bestowed on himself the honour of being a ghãzî, simply because he had killed in cold blood the helpless BrãhmaNa priests of the local temple after Hindu warriors had died fighting in defence of the fort at Kondapalli. The present-day progressives, leftists and dalits whose main plank is anti-Brahminism have no reason to feel innovative about their ideology. Anti-Brahminism in India is as old a the advent of Islam. Our present-day Brahmin-baiters are no more than ideological descendants of the Islamic invaders. Hindus will do well to remember Mahatma Gandhi’s deep reflection--“if Brahmanism does not revive, Hinduism must perish.””

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

Feeling, History, Teachers, Dance

“Existential psychotherapy is the movement which, although standing on one side on the scientific analysis owed chiefly to the genius of Freud, also brings back into the picture the understanding of man on the deeper and broader level — man as the being who is human. It is based on the assumption that it is possible to have a science of man which does not fragmentize man and destroy his humanity at the same moment as it studies him. It unites science and ontology.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Existence (1958), p. 36; also published in The Discovery of Being : Writings in Existential Psychology (1983), Part II : The Cultural Background, Ch. 5 : Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud, p. 87

Understanding, Study, Science

“Gödel's theorem shows conclusively that in pure mathematics reductionism does not work. To decide whether a mathematical statement is true, it is not sufficient to reduce the statement to marks on paper and to study the behavior of the marks. Except in trivial cases, you can decide the truth of a statement only by studying its meaning and its context in the larger world of mathematical ideas.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

Truth, World, Behavior, Mathematics

“The truly great writer does not want to write. He wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

Life, World, Imagination

“The objective of social change might concern the nutritional standard of consumption, the economic standard of living, the type of group relation, the output of a factory, the productivity of an educational team. It is important that a social standard to be changed does not have the nature of a “thing” but of a “process.””

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1940s, Quasi-Stationary Social Equilibria and the Problem of Permanent Change, 1947, p. 39.

Education, Nature, Change

“To a linguist, the phenomenon is familiar: the euphemism treadmill. People invent new "polite" words to refer to emotionally laden or distasteful things, but the euphemism becomes tainted by association and the new one that must be found acquires its own negative connotations. "Water closet" becomes "toilet" (originally a term for any body care, as in "toilet kit"), which becomes "bathroom," which becomes "rest room," which becomes "lavatory." … The euphemism treadmill shows that concepts, not words, are in charge. Give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name.”

Steven Pinker (1954) psychologist, linguist, author

We will know we have achieved equality and mutual respect when names for minorities stay put. The game of the name, Baltimore Sun, 1994-04-06, http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_04_03_newyorktimes.pdf, 1994-04-03, 2011-01-19 http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1994-04-06/news/1994096202_1_dutch-words-language,

People, Color, Water

“Undue enmity with enemies does not serve the interests of the system. Enemies must be dealt with wisely and prudently.”

Yousef Saanei (1937) Iranian grand ayatollah

Remarks on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/mar/15/20070315-111357-5226r/?page=all March 2007. 2007

“At 20, reflecting on Cus D'Amato: "Cus was my father but he was more than a father. You can have a father and what does it mean?—it doesn't really mean anything. Cus was my backbone…. He did everything for my best interest…. We'd spend all our time together, talk about things that, later on, would come back to me. Like about character, and courage. Like the hero and the coward: that the hero and the coward both feel the same thing, but the hero uses his fear, projects it onto his opponent, while the coward runs. It's the same thing, fear, but it's what you do with it that matters.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

http://www.usfca.edu/~southerr/boxing/tyson.html On his family

Fear, Feeling, Courage, Time

“Good breeding doesn't mean that you won't spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won't notice when someone else does.”

Anton Chekhov book The House with the Mezzanine

The House with the Mezzanine (1896)

“That you are regularly facing challenges does not make you an unbeliever. Don’t measure your Christian life by your situation.”

T. B. Joshua (1963) Nigerian Christian leader

On Christians facing challenges - "TB Joshua Tells Fans On Facebook How To Identify Pastors Who Are Intruders" https://www.360nobs.com/2014/06/t-b-joshua-tells-fans-on-facebook-how-to-identify-pastors-who-are-intruders/ 360 Nobs, Nigeria (June 2 2014)

Life

“Since only actions aimed at perceived benefit to others were, to Aristotle's mind, morally approved, actions solely for personal gain must be bad. That commercial considerations may not have affected the daily activities of most people does not mean however that over any prolonged period their very lives did not depend on the functioning of a trade that enabled them to buy essentials. That production for gain which Aristotle denounced as unnatural had -- long before his time -- already become the foundation of an extended order far transcending the known needs of other persons.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

Source: 1980s and later, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), p. 46

People, Time, Dependency, Personality

“If the multitude does not understand or understands only with difficulty several laws that are immediately necessary to its life, how can it be imagined by someone that it -which in a democracy must be led through itself-could understand the most difficult natural laws; or that it would know intuitively the most subtle and imperceptible norms of human leadership, norms that project beyond itself, its life, its life's necessities, or which do not apply directly to it but to a more superior entity, the nation?”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

Life, Law, Democracy, Imagination

“Logic teaches us that on such and such a road we are sure of not meeting an obstacle; it does not tell us which is the road that leads to the desired end. For this, it is necessary to see the end from afar, and the faculty which teaches us to see is intuition. Without it, the geometrician would be like a writer well up in grammar but destitute of ideas.”

Henri Poincaré book Science and Method

La logique nous apprend que sur tel ou tel chemin nous sommes sûrs de ne pas rencontrer d'obstacle ; elle ne nous dit pas quel est celui qui mène au but. Pour cela il faut voir le but de loin, et la faculté qui nous apprend à voir, c'est l'intuition. Sans elle, le géomètre serait comme un écrivain qui serait ferré sur la grammaire, mais qui n'aurait pas d'idées.
Part II. Ch. 2 : Mathematical Definitions and Education, p. 130
Science and Method (1908)

Idea

“The secret virtues which lie hid in salt confirm the same. For salt whiteneth all thinges, it hardeneth all thinges, it preserveth all thinges, it giveth favour to all thinges, it is that masticke which gleweth all thinges together, it gathereth and knitteth all minerall matters, and of manie thousand peeces it maketh one masse. This salt giveth sounde to all thinges, and without the sounde no metall will wring in his shirle voyce. Salt maketh men merrie, it whiteneth the flesh, and it giveth beautie to all reasonable creatures, it entertayneth that love and amitie which is betwixt the male and female, through the great vigour and stirring uppe which it provoketh in the engendering members; it helpeth to procreation, it giveth unto creatures their voyce, as also unto metalles. * * * * * And it is salt that maketh all seedes to flourish and growe, and although the number of men is verie small, which can give any true reason whie dungue shoulde doe anie good in arable groundes, but are ledde thereto more by custome than anie philosophicall reason, nevertheless it is apparaunt that no dungue, which is layde uppon barraine groundes, could anie way enrich the same, if it were not for the salt which the straw and hay left behinde them by their putrifaction.”

Hugh Plat (1552–1608) writer

As cited in: Robert Kemp Philp (1859, p. 73)
The Jewell House of Art and Nature, 1594

Love, Men, Lie, Secret

“In the case of a novel, or any imaginative work, especially if the tone is poetic, my own preference is for ending with a touch of symbolism which shall leave the reader brooding. A fine novel, a well-written story, "proves" nothing. Certain characters have played their parts, life goes on, and the final passage may be allowed to remain with one foot in the air, as is the case with some of Chopin's conclusions. But there is no absolute rule in such matters, and there are epic novelists who like to end on a powerful crescendo, as Ravel does in Bolero, or Dvorak in the New-World Symphony. Composition has features which are common to all the arts, and the author can learn as much about his business in the concert hall as in the library.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

The Art of Writing

Life, World, Art, Imagination

“Society tends to slough off the problems of aging, illness, and death, tends to push them off to the side because other things seem more pressing. Making a lot of money is more important. Having fulfilling relationships is more important. Whatever. And the big issues in life — the fact that you're headed for the sufferings and indignities that come with an aging, ill, or dying body — get pushed off, pushed out of the way. "Not yet, not yet, maybe some other time." And of course when that other time does arrive and these things come barging in, they won't accept your "not yet," won't be pushed out anymore. If you haven't prepared yourself for them, you'll really be up the creek, at a total loss.”

Thanissaro Bhikkhu (1949) Theravadin Buddhist Monk and Scholar

"Meditation: The How and the Why" (2003)

Life, Death, Money, Age

“In the heart of the sphere of everything that keeps changing, there one thing that never changes—life. Life is the one thing that stays with me until the very end. Today, people may like me. Tomorrow, they may not. But my life is still there. It is not subject to good and bad. Human beings are the thinkers—homo sapiens—the ones with the brains. We can think about things, and in our thoughts, everything keeps changing. In our moods, everything keeps changing. Yet, in our beings, there is the heart, and the heart does not change because it is consistent with only one thing. Our needs on the outside change all the time, but the heart's need never changes. It is consistently the same, and always will be.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Hong Kong, China May 6, 1990
1990s

Life, People, Mood, Thinking

“I thanked the President [George W. Bush] for the steadfastness and resolve with which he's tackling the very complicated problems in the Middle East and Iraq, as well as the Israel-Palestinian issue…. It's critical for us in Southeast Asia that America does that…. because it affects America's standing in Asia and the world, and also the security environment in Asia because extremists, the jihadists, watch carefully what's happening in the Middle East and take heart, or lose heart, depending on what's happening.”

Lee Hsien Loong (1952) Prime Minister of Singapore

President Bush Welcomes Prime Minister Lee of Singapore to the White House http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070504-3.html# May 4, 2007

World, Problem, Heart, Dependency

“What's the point anyway — Of suffering, dying? It teaches us to live, boy. A man who does not struggle does not live, he survives.”

Oriana Fallaci book A Man

A Man (1979)

Boy, Suffering

“In physics, I sprung on him as we sat in the Taco Bell drive-through, what does the capital letter W stand for?”

Sarah Dessen book Dreamland

Dreamland (2000)

“He answered some governors who had written to recommend an increase in the burden of provincial taxation, with: "A good shepherd shears his flock; he does not flay them."”
Praesidibus onerandas tributo provincias suadentibus rescripsit boni pastoris esse tondere pecus, non deglubere.

Sueton book The Twelve Caesars

Source: The Twelve Caesars, Tiberius, Ch. 32

“This (precognitive ability) steers the cell through mazes of probabilities, while allowing it to retain knowledge of its own greater fulfillment -- the ideas of itself, which is always alive in any given period of your time. On a different kind of scale, then, each individual has the same sort of idealized version of the self, and so does each species. Here I mean each species, and I am not simply referring to mankind. Obviously these are not apparent to the physical senses, yet they are strong energy centers that to some degree stimulate the physical senses toward activity. To that degree, then, there are indeed "tree gods," gods of the forest, and "gods of being" connected with each person.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The “Unknown” Reality: Volume One, (1977), p. 117; Session 691

God, Idea, Knowledge, Sense

“O illustrious Kshattri, Bhimasena is missing! Where has he gone? The other brothers have all come back from the gardens, only Bhima of mighty arms does not come home! Duryodhana likes him not. The w:KauravaKaurava is crooked and malicious and low-minded and imprudent. He coveteth the throne openly. I am afraid he may have in a fit of anger slain my darling. This afflicts me sorely, indeed, it burns my heart.”

Kunti character from Indian epic Mahabharata

The Mahabharata/Book 1: Adi Parva/Section CXXIX

Home, Affliction, Heart, Anger

“Be diligent with your hands, for godliness does not lead to idleness.”

Ann Lee (1736–1784) English Shaker leader

The Communistic Societies of the United States (1875)

“The gentleman knows that whatever is imperfect and unrefined does not deserve praise. … He makes his eyes not want to see what is not right, makes his ears not want to hear what is not right, makes his mouth not want to speak what is not right, and makes his heart not want to deliberate over what is not right. … For this reason, power and profit cannot sway him, the masses cannot shift him, and nothing in the world can shake him.”

Xun Zi (-313–-238 BC) Ancient Chinese philosopher

Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 260
An Exhortation to Learning

World, Heart

“The book of Philippine history is far from finished. However, does every sentence in our country’s story need to be finished with a period?”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2015, Speech: Declaration as Vice Presidential Candidate

Books, History, Country

“The soul that does not consider the question of the body’s self-sufficiency cannot make itself self-sufficient.”

Apollonius of Tyana (15–100) Ancient Greek philosopher

to Euphrates, Epp. Apoll. 82
Letters

Soul, Question

“It always saddens me to think that after all I am not yet a proper musician; but I have more aptitude for the calling than probably many of the younger generation have as a rule. It gets knocked out of you. Boys should be allowed to indulge themselves in jolly music; the serious kind comes of its own accord, although the lovesick does not. How lucky is the man who, like Mozart and others, goes to the tavern of an evening and writes some fresh music. For he lives while he is creating.”

Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) German composer and pianist

Letter to Clara Schumann (12 February 1856) as quoted in Johannes Brahms : A Biography (1997) by Jan Swafford, p. 153

Music, Boy, Thinking

“He who knows the truth and does not speak it is a miserable coward.”

Julius Streicher (1885–1946) German politician

Alternate version: He who knows the truth and does not speak it truly is a miserable creature.
Quoted in "Julius Streicher" - Page 211 - By Randall L. Bytwerk

Truth