Quotes about down
page 8

“We burn a hot fire here; it melts down all concealment.”

Deputy Governor Danforth
The Crucible (1953)

“Well, now I've said it, my son was looking for God. I mean for a clear image of Him. He spent that whole blazing equatorial day in the crow's nest of the schooner watching that thing on the beach of the Encantadas till it was too dark to see it, and when he came back down the rigging, he said, Well, now I've seen Him!—and he meant God...”

Tennessee Williams Suddenly Last Summer

Mrs. Venable, Scene One
Suddenly Last Summer (1958)

God

“Small business is the gateway to opportunity for those who want a piece of the American dream. […] Well, wouldn't it be nice to hear a little more about the forgotten heroes of America-those who create most of our new jobs, like the owners of stores down the street; the faithfuls who support our churches, synagogues, schools, and communities; the brave men and women everywhere who produce our goods, feed a hungry world, and keep our families warm while they invest in the future to build a better America? That's where miracles are made, not in Washington, D. C.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Ronald Reagan: "Remarks at the National Conference of the National Federation of Independent Business ," June 22, 1983. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=41504 1980s, First term of office (1981–1985)

Women, Men, World, School

“Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.</b”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

“Forced Emigration,” New York Daily Tribune, 22 March 1853.

Life, Way, Housing

“Terrorists will never be able to defeat the United States. Their only hope is to terrorize us into changing who we are or our way of life. That’s why we Americans will never give in to fear. And it’s why this weekend we remember the true spirit of 9/11. We’re still the America of heroes who ran into harm’s way; of ordinary folks who took down the hijackers; of families who turned their pain into hope. We are still the America that looks out for one another, bound by our shared belief that I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper.
In the face of terrorism, how we respond matters. We cannot give in to those who would divide us. We cannot react in ways that erode the fabric of our society. Because it’s our diversity, our welcoming of all talent, our treating of everybody fairly — no matter their race, gender, ethnicity, or faith — that’s part of what makes our country great. It’s what makes us resilient. And if we stay true to those values, we’ll uphold the legacy of those we’ve lost, and keep our nation strong and free.
God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2016, Upholding the Legacy of Those We Lost on September 11th (September 2016)

Life, God, Pain, Fear

“I am returning this MBE in protest against Britain's involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam and against "Cold Turkey" slipping down the charts.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

Letter to Queen Elizabeth II sent in 1969 with his MBE, explaining why he was returning it. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-37787297

Support

“And at last we've got to the end of this ideal racecourse! Now that you accept A and B and C and D, of course you accept Z."
"Do I?" said the Tortoise innocently. "Let's make that quite clear. I accept A and B and C and D. Suppose I still refused to accept Z?"
"Then Logic would take you by the throat, and force you to do it!" Achilles triumphantly replied. "Logic would tell you, 'You can't help yourself. Now that you've accepted A and B and C and D, you must accept Z!' So you've no choice, you see."
"Whatever Logic is good enough to tell me is worth writing down," said the Tortoise. "So enter it in your notebook, please. We will call it
(E) If A and B and C and D are true, Z must be true.
Until I've granted that, of course I needn't grant Z. So it's quite a necessary step, you see?”

Lewis Carroll book What the Tortoise Said to Achilles

"I see," said Achilles; and there was a touch of sadness in his tone.
"What the Tortoise Said to Achilles", Mind, n.s., 4 (1895), pp. 278–80

Sadness, Help

“Anita had the mechanics of marriage down pat, even to the subtlest conventions. If her approach was disturbingly rational, systematic, she was thorough enough to turn out a credible counterfeit of warmth.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Player Piano

Source: Player Piano (1952), Chapter 1 (p. 25)

Marriage

“From the first appearance of man upon the earth, down to very recent times, the words "stranger" and "enemy" were quite or almost, synonymous. Long after civilized nations had defined robbery and murder as high crimes, and had affixed severe punishments to them, when practiced among and upon their own people respectively, it was deemed no offence, but even meritorious, to rob, and murder, and enslave strangers, whether as nations or as individuals. Even yet, this has not totally disappeared. The man of the highest moral cultivation, in spite of all which abstract principle can do, likes him whom he does know, much better than him whom he does not know. To correct the evils, great and small, which spring from want of sympathy, and from positive enmity, among strangers, as nations, or as individuals, is one of the highest functions of civilization.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1850s, Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (1859)

People, Spring, Appearance, Evil

“Twould ring the bells of Heaven
The wildest peal for years,
If Parson lost his senses
And people came to theirs,
And he and they together
Knelt down with angry prayers
For tamed and shabby tigers
And dancing dogs and bears,
And wretched, blind, pit ponies,
And little hunted hares.”

Ralph Hodgson (1871–1962) British writer

"The Bells of Heaven", p. 25.
Poems (1917)

People, Dogs, Sense, Dance

“Disgrace should be represented upside down, because all her deeds are contrary to God and tend to hell.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), X Studies and Sketches for Pictures and Decorations

God, Hell

“A servant, indeed, one will be able perhaps to bind down by fear; nay, not even for him, for he will soon leave you. But the partner of one's life, the mother of one's children, the foundation of one's every joy, one ought never to chain down by fear and threats, but with love and good temper. For what sort of union is that, where the wife trembles at her husband? And what sort of pleasure will the husband have if he dwells with his wife as with a slave? Yea, even though you suffer everything on her account, do not scold her; for neither did Christ do this to the Church.”

John Chrysostom (349–407) important Early Church Father

Homilies on Ephesians http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf113/Page_144.html, Homily XX

Love, Life, Children, Pleasure

“There's not a stupidest thing--I've dressed in women's clothes, I've dressed as a Nazi. I've gone onstage naked. I've gone on so drunk I didn't even know I did a show. I've done so many stupid things, but it's all part of Ozzy. I never pre-planned 99.9% of the things I've done. Some were drastically wrong, some were drastically right. I don't know if you saw the VH1 thing [VH1's Behind The Music Ozzy documentary] recently. In one hour, it's impossible to write my life down. I come from a rather large family, three older sisters and two younger brothers. On the documentary, they interviewed my sister and it was the first time I'd seen her in years. I've had a very, very unique life. I often sit back and remember when I had no money--when you're in the middle of it, you get depressed thinking it's going to last forever. All of a sudden, out of nowhere--a bolt of lightning--here I am! I'm very well-off; I've got property all over the place, I've had a very fruitful career. But I've never had a No.1 album in America. But I've lasted several generations and somebody says to me, "Do you notice any difference in the audience?"”

Ozzy Osbourne (1948) English heavy metal vocalist and songwriter

I've been doing it now for 30 years. Some of the fans are older, but I've picked up new fans along the way.

Launch.com, October 30, 1998

Life, Women, Money, Stupidity

“[Serafin was] an extraordinary coach, sharp as a vecchio lupo [old wolfe]. He opened a world to me, showed me there was a reason for everything, that even fiorature and trills… have a reason in the composer's mind, that they are the expression of the stato d'animo [state of mind] of the character — that is, the way he feels at the moment, the passing emotions that take hold of him. He would coach us for every little detail, every movement, every word, every breath. One of the things he told me — and this is the basis of bel canto — is never to attack a note from underneath or from above, but always to prepare it in the face. He taught me that pauses are often more important than the music. He explained that there was a rhythm — these are the things you get only from that man! — a measure for the human ear, and that if a note was too long, it was no good after a while. A fermata always must be measured, and if there are two fermate close to one another in the score, you ignore one of them. He taught me the proportions of recitative — how it is elastic, the proportions altering so slightly that only you can understand it…. But in performance he left you on your own. "When I am in the pit, I am there to serve you, because I have to save my performance." he would say. We would look down and feel we had a friend there. He was helping you all the way. He would mouth all the words. If you were not well, he would speed up the tempo, and if you were in top form, he would slow it down to let you breathe, to give you room. He was breathing with you, living the music with you, loving it with you. It was elastic, growing, living.”

Maria Callas (1923–1977) American-born Greek operatic soprano

Callas : The Art and the Life (1974)

Love, World, Music, Way

“As I could not and did not aspire to venture beyond my little plot of cultivated land, all I had left was the possibility of digging down, underneath, towards the roots. My own but also the world's, if I can be allowed such an immoderate ambition.”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

Nobel Lecture (1998)

World

“Oh father high in heaven — smile down upon your son
Who's busy with his money games — his women and his gun.”

Ian Anderson (1947) Scottish musician, leader of Jethro Tull

"Hymn 43"
Aqualung (1971)

Women, Money, Smile, Game

“There is violence and injustice in our world that must be confronted. We must confront it not by splitting apart but by standing together as free nations, as free people. I know that a call to arms can stir the souls of men and women more than a call to lay them down. But that is why the voices for peace and progress must be raised together.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2009, A World without Nuclear Weapons (April 2009)

Women, Men, People, World

“Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
They hung my black young lover
To a cross roads tree.”

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) American writer and social activist

"Song for a Dark Girl" (l. 1-4), from Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927)

Way, Lovers, Tree, Heart

“I sat down and leaned on my elbows. I thought of myself. Where was I now after all this? What was I going to do in life? I did not know. I would look about and would surely find something.
So, sitting there, I quietly indulged in hopes. I must have no more sadness, no more anguish and fever. If the rest of my life was to pass in calm, in peace, I must go far, far away from all those awful serious things, the sight of which was terrible to bear.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XV

Life, Sadness, Peace, Hope

“It seems to me, that if the matter of our sun and planets and all the matter of the universe, were evenly scattered throughout all the heavens, and every particle had an innate gravity towards all the rest, and the whole of space throughout which this matter was scattered was but finite, the matter on [toward] the outside of this space would, by its gravity, tend towards all the matter on the inside, and, by consequence, fall down into the middle of the whole space, and there compose one great spherical mass. But if the matter was evenly disposed throughout an infinite space it could never convene into one mass; but some of it would convene into one mass and some into another, so as to make an infinite number of great masses, scattered at great distances from one another throughout all that infinite space.”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

Four Letters to Bentley (1692) first letter

Universe, Sun

“If you die, I will lie down beside you and I will stay there until the end, without eating or drinking, you will rot in my arms and I will love you as carcass: for you love nothing if you do not love everything.”

Jean Paul Sartre book The Devil and the Good Lord

Act 10, sc. 2
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

Love, Lie, Drink

“The FBI is still gathering the facts about what happened in San Bernardino, but here is what we know. The victims were brutally murdered and injured by one of their coworkers and his wife. So far, we have no evidence that the killers were directed by a terrorist organization overseas, or that they were part of a broader conspiracy here at home. But it is clear that the two of them had gone down the dark path of radicalization, embracing a perverted interpretation of Islam that calls for war against America and the West. They had stockpiled assault weapons, ammunition, and pipe bombs. So this was an act of terrorism, designed to kill innocent people.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Address to the Nation by the President on San Bernardino (December 2015)

War, People, Home, Parting

“Throughout American history, there have been moments that call on us to meet the challenges of an uncertain world, and pay whatever price is required to secure our freedom. They are the soul-trying times our forbearers spoke of, when the ease of complacency and self-interest must give way to the more difficult task of rendering judgment on what is best for the nation and for posterity, and then acting on that judgment — making the hard choices and sacrifices necessary to uphold our most deeply held values and ideals. This was true for those who went to Lexington and Concord. It was true for those who lie buried at Gettysburg. It was true for those who built democracy’s arsenal to vanquish fascism, and who then built a series of alliances and a world order that would ultimately defeat communism. And this has been true for those of us who looked on the rubble and ashes of 9/11, and made a solemn pledge that such an atrocity would never again happen on United States soil; that we would do whatever it took to hunt down those responsible, and use every tool at our disposal – diplomatic, economic, and military — to root out both the agents of terrorism and the conditions that helped breed it.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

"A Way Forward in Iraq", Remarks to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (20 November 2006)
2006

Lie, World, Way, Democracy

“I think it's fair to say that maybe some point down the line, there might be a UK-U. S. trade agreement, but it's not going to happen anytime soon, because our focus is in negotiating with a big bloc, the European Union, to get a trade agreement done, and the UK is going to be in the back of the queue.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Remarks by the President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron in Joint Press Conference https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/04/22/remarks-president-obama-and-prime-minister-cameron-joint-press (22 April 2016). "Barack Obama: Brexit would put UK 'back of the queue' for trade talks" http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/22/barack-obama-brexit-uk-back-of-queue-for-trade-talks, The Guardian. 2016

Thinking

“The citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth's political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal, he is a traitor. That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him: it is his duty to agitate anyway, and it is the duty of others to vote him down if they do not see the matter as he does.”

Mark Twain book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Source: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), Ch. 13.

Peace, Thinking, Clothes

“By laying down the relativity postulate from the outset, sufficient means have been created for deducing henceforth the complete series of Laws of Mechanics from the principle of conservation of energy (and statements concerning the form of the energy) alone.”

Hermann Minkowski The Fundamental Equations for Electromagnetic Processes in Moving Bodies

The Fundamental Equations for Electromagnetic Processes in Moving Bodies (1907)

Law

“Let there be no fainting of heart and no depression, and also let there be no unforeseeing fury, no blindly-striking madness. We are at the beginning of a time of terrible trial. The passage is not to be easy, the crown is not to be cheaply earned. India is going down into the valley of the shadow of death, into a great horror of darkness and suffering. Let us realise that what we are now suffering, is a small part of what we shall have to suffer, and work in that knowledge, with resolution, without hysteria…. The first need at the present moment is courage, a courage which knows not how to flinch or shrink.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Bande Mataram, 1907
India's Rebirth

Death, Courage, Knowledge, Suffering

“What? I thought you came down right on the side of go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. 'The Law is the Law, Isabelle.' What was all that you were spouting?”

Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments

Jace to Alec, pg. 313
The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)

Law

“Socrates: Shall we set down astronomy among the objects of study? Glaucon: I think so, to know something about the seasons, the months and the years is of use for military purposes, as well as for agriculture and for navigation. Socrates: It amuses me to see how afraid you are, lest the common herd of people should accuse you of recommending useless studies.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Socrates as quoted by Plato. In Richard Garnett, Léon Vallée, Alois Brandl (eds.), The Universal Anthology: A Collection of the Best Literature (1899), Vol. 4, 111.
Attributed

People, Thinking, Study, Season

“And throughout this process, Michelle and I, we just have been your frontmen and women. We have been the face, sometimes the voice, out front on the TV screen or in front of the microphone, but this has never been about us. It has always been about you. And all the amazing things that happened over these last 10 years are really just a testament to you. In the same way that when we talk about our amazing military and our men and women in uniform, the military is not a thing. It's a group of committed patriots willing to sacrifice everything on our behalf. It works only because of the people in it. As cool as the hardware is, and we have cool hardware, as cool as the machines and weapons and satellites are, ultimately it comes down to remarkable people.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2017, Farewell to Staff Members (January 2017)

Women, Men, People, Way

“We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't often that we laughed, only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next.”

Mark Twain book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Ch. 12

Feeling, Star, Fish, Weather

“As we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands. Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks and twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages pose an enormous danger to civilians and must be stopped. But they do not threaten our national existence. That’s the story ISIL wants to tell; that’s the kind of propaganda they use to recruit. We don’t need to build them up to show that we’re serious, nor do we need to push away vital allies in this fight by echoing the lie that ISIL is representative of one of the world’s largest religions. We just need to call them what they are — killers and fanatics who have to be rooted out, hunted down, and destroyed.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2016, State of the Union address (January 2016)

War, Lie, World, Religion

“You can knock me down, but you better have a big rock to put me there… It's been tough, but that's alright. I am the oldest of ten kids and I am a survivor. I love this business so much, that there's no way I could think of retiring. When I'm 87, I'll still be walking on the Grand Ole Opry and singing "Here comes more tears to cry…". I still don't feel that I have the biggest record yet, or sang it the best. I think the best is yet to come, and that's the truth!”

Dottie West (1932–1991) American country music singer

From an interview with "The Nashville Network" in 1991, putting rumors aside that she might be retiring.

Love, Truth, Way, Feeling

“Because if we had gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anybody else with us. It would have been a U. S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq and took it over and took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world. And if you take down the central government in Iraq, you could easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have, the west. Part of eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim. Fought over for eight years. In the north, you've got the Kurds. And if the Kurds spin loose and join with Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq. The other thing is casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact that we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had, but for the 146 Americans killed in action and for the families it wasn't a cheap war. And the question for the president in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein was, how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? And our judgment was not very many, and I think we got it right.”

Dick Cheney (1941) American politician and businessman

Cheney, on not pushing on to Baghdad during the first Gulf War; C-SPAN 4-15-94 Interview on CNN http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0708/13/sitroom.03.html 1990s

War, World, Family, Question

“Though I sit down now, the time will come when you will hear me.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Maiden speech https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191843730.001.0001/q-oro-ed5-00003685 in the House of Commons (7 December 1837). Disraeli was being shouted down by other MPs. Compare: "I will be heard", William Lloyd Garrison, Salutatory of the Liberator 1830s

Time

“I would rather have been a French peasant and worn wooden shoes; I would rather have lived in a hut, with a vine growing over the door and the grapes growing and ripening in the autumn sun; I would rather have been that peasant, with my wife by my side and my children upon my knees, twining their arms of affection about me; I would rather have been that poor French peasant and gone down at last to the eternal promiscuity of the dust, followed by those who loved me; I would a thousand times rather have been that French peasant than that imperial personative of force and murder; and so I would —ten thousand thousand times.”

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

Soliloquy at the tomb of Napoleon (1882); noted to have been misreported as "I would rather be the humblest peasant that ever lived … at peace with the world than be the greatest Christian that ever lived" by Billy Sunday (May 26, 1912), as reported in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 52-53.

Love, Children, Shoe, Autumn

“International communism would entirely do away with all national and racial qualities which are founded in human nature itself; in property it sees the most primary cause of the break-down of world trade in the capitalist system. Accordingly it exploits this through an extensive and carefully organised and brutal system of action, setting aside personal values and sacrificing the individual to a hollow mass-idol that is only a travesty of actual life itself. At the same time it ignores and destroys all the idealistic and higher strivings of men and nations, through its own crass and empty materialist principles. On the other hand, National Socialism sees in all these things—in property, in personal values and in nation and race and the principles of idealism—these forces which carry on every human civilisation and fundamentally determine its worth.”

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

Speech at the Nazi party Congress at Nuremberg (September 1935) http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb58.htm 1930s

Life, Men, World, Communication

“The biggest threat to America today is not communism. It's moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that's happened during the Reagan administration is steering us right down that pipe … I really think that. … When you have a government that prefers a certain moral code derived from a certain religion and that moral code turns into legislation to suit one certain religious point of view, and if that code happens to be very, very right wing, almost toward Attila the Hun…”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

Crossfire debate on censorship (1986)

Religion, Communication, Thinking

“Whence had they come,
The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome?
What sacred drama through her body heaved
When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Parnell's Funeral and Other Poems http://worldebooklibrary.com/eBooks/WorldeBookLibrary.com/ytpafu.htm (1935). Supernatural Songs http://worldebooklibrary.com/eBooks/WorldeBookLibrary.com/ytpafu.htm#1_0_7

World

“What a born melancholiac I am! The only way I keep afloat is by working. Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down. And as usual, I feel that if I sink further I shall reach the truth. That is the only mitigation; a kind of nobility. Solemnity. Work, reading, writing, are all disguising; and relations with other people. Yes, even having children wold be useless.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Sunday 23 June, 1929
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

Children, People, Truth, Way

“The preacher's work is to throw sinners down in utter helplessness, that they may be compelled to look up to Him who alone can help them.”

Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) British preacher, author, pastor and evangelist

The Soul-Winner (1895)

Help

“So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.”

Edgar Allan Poe The City in the Sea

St. 2.
The City in the Sea (1831)

Death

“If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.”

Theodore Kaczynski book Industrial Society and Its Future

"Introduction", item 3
Industrial Society and Its Future (1995)

Pain

“Take our life from us. We laid it down. We got tired. We didn't commit suicide. We committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.”

Jim Jones (1931–1978) founder and the leader of the Peoples Temple

Source: Last words on " Death Tape http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/AboutJonestown/Tapes/Tapes/DeathTape/Q042fbi.html" FBI No. Q042 (18 November 1978)

Life, World, Suicide

“Remember me? I'm the one who burned your house down/But I'm out now/And this time I'm coming back to blow your house up/And I ain't gonna leave you with a window to jump out of!/Give me two fat tabs and three shrooms/And you won't see me like fat people in steam rooms/And when I'm going to hell and I'm getting ready to leave/I'ma put air in a bag and charge people to breathe!”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"Bad Meets Evil" (Track 19).
1990s, The Slim Shady LP (1999)

People, Hell, Time, Housing

“Poland reminds us that sometimes the smallest steps, however imperfect, can ultimately tear down walls, can ultimately transform the world.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, 25th Anniversary of Polish Freedom Day Speech (June 2014)

World, Tear

“Out of the unconscious you get ritual, dreams, drama, story, art, music, and that sort of buffers us. We have our little domain of competence, and we're buffered by the domain of fantasy and culture. That's really what you learn about when you come to university if you're lucky and the professors are smart enough to actually teach you something about culture instead of constantly telling you that it's completely reprehensible and that it should be destroyed. Why you would prefer chaos to order is beyond me. The only possible reason is that you haven't read enough history to understand exactly what chaos means. And believe me, if you knew what chaos means, you'd be pretty goddamn careful about tearing down the temple that you live in, unless you want to be a denizen of chaos. And some people do. That's when the impulses you harbor can really come out and shine. And so a little gratitude is in order, and that makes you appreciative of the wise king while being smart enough to know that he's also an evil tyrant. That's a total conception of the world. It's balanced. Yah, we should preserve nature, but it IS trying to kill us. YES our culture is tyrannical and oppresses people, but it IS protecting us from dying. And YES we're reasonably good people, but don't take that theory too far until you've tested yourself. That's wisdom, at least in part, and that's what these stories try to teach you.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

Wisdom, People, World, Dreams

“When I was a child of ten, I went on my bare knees by my bedside one night and promised God that I should devote my Life to an effort to free my country. I have kept the promise. I have helped to organise, to train, and to discipline my fellow-countrymen to the sole end that, when the time came, they might fight for Irish freedom. The time, as it seemed to me, did come, and we went into the fight. I am glad that we did. We seem to have lost; but we have not lost. To refuse to fight would have been to lose; to fight is to win. We have kept faith with the past, and handed on its tradition to the future. I repudiate the assertion of the Prosecutor that I sought to aid and abet England’s enemy. Germany is no more to me than England is. I asked and accepted German aid in the shape of arms and an expeditionary force; we neither asked for nor accepted German gold, nor had any traffic with Germany but what I state. My object was to win Irish freedom. We struck the first blow ourselves, but I should have been glad of an ally’s aid. I assume that I am speaking to Englishmen who value their freedom, and who profess to be fighting for the freedom of Belgium and Serbia. Believe that we too love freedom and desire it. To us it is more than anything else in the world. If you strike us down now, we shall rise again, and renew the fight. You cannot conquer Ireland; you cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed.”

Patrick Pearse (1879–1916) Irish revolutionary, shot by the British Army in 1916

Patrick Pearse at his court-martial.Publish by the 75th Anniversary Committee, Dublin, 1991.

Love, Life, God, Children

“I have been a consistent and strong opponent of this war. I have also tried to act responsibly in that opposition to ensure that, having made the decision to go into Iraq, we provide our troops, who perform valiantly, the support they need to complete their mission. I have also stated publicly that I think we have both strategic interests and humanitarian responsibilities in ensuring that Iraq is as stable as possible under the circumstances. Finally, I said publicly that it is my preference not to micromanage the Commander-in-Chief in the prosecution of war. Ultimately, I do not believe that is the ideal role for Congress to play. But at a certain point, we have to draw a line. At a certain point, the American people have to have some confidence that we are not simply going down this blind alley in perpetuity.
When it comes to the war in Iraq, the time for promises and assurances, for waiting and patience is over. Too many lives have been lost and too many billions have been spent for us to trust the President on another tried-and-failed policy, opposed by generals and experts, opposed by Democrats and Republicans, opposed by Americans and even the Iraqis themselves. It is time to change our policy. It is time to give Iraqis their country back, and it is time to refocus America's effort on the wider struggle against terror yet to be won.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Floor Statement on President's Decision to Increase Troops in Iraq (19 January 2007)
2007

War, People, Confidence, Support

“As for the exhortation with which Mr. ------ closes his letter, that I will not "go down to my husband's plantation prejudiced against what I am to find there," I know not well how to answer it. Assuredly I am going prejudiced against slavery, for I am an Englishwoman, in whom the absence of such a prejudice would be disgraceful.”

Fanny Kemble (1809–1893) English actress and writer

Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, ch. 1 (1863).

“Harry Dresden: There was a sound of impact, a raspy, dry scream, and the vampire went down hard. It lay on the ground like a butterfly pinned to a card, arms and legs thrashing uselessly. Its chest and collarbone had been crushed. By an entire frozen turkey. A twenty-pounder. The plucked bird must have fallen from an airplane overhead, doubtlessly manipulated by the curse. By the time it got to the ground, the turkey had already reached its terminal velocity, and was still hard as a brick. The drumsticks poked up above the vampire's crushed chest, their ends wrapped in red tinfoil. The vampire gasped and writhed a little more. The timer popped out of the turkey. Everyone stopped to blink at that for a second. I mean, come on. Impaled by a guided frozen turkey missile. Even by the standards of the quasi-immortal creatures of the night, that ain't something you see twice. "For my next trick," I panted into the startled silence, "anvils."”

Jim Butcher The Dresden Files

The Dresden Files, Blood Rites (2004)

Bird, Silence, Time, Night

“Despair itself if it goes on long enough, can become a kind of sanctuary in which one settles down and feels at ease.”

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869) French literary critic

Le désespoir lui-même, pour peu qu'il se prolonge, devient une sorte d'asile dans lequel on peut s'asseoir et reposer.

"Vie de Joseph Delorme" (1829), cited from Poésies completes de Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Charpentier, 1840) p. 16; Mardy Grothe Oxymoronica (London: HarperCollins, 2004) p. 201.

Feeling, Despair

“The minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod — and yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone and thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving.”

Mark Twain book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Source: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Ch. 5

“The undulation of these infinite numbers of mountains, whose snowy summits make them look as if covered by foam, recalled to my remembrance the surface of a storm-beaten ocean. If I looked towards the west, the ocean lay before me in all its majestic grandeur, a continuation as it were, of these fleecy hilltops. Where the earth ended and the sea began it was impossible for the eye to distinguish.

I soon felt that strange and mysterious sensation which is awakened in the mind when looking down from lofty hilltops, and now I was able to do so without any feeling of nervousness, having fortunately hardened myself to that kind of sublime contemplation. I wholly forgot who I was, and where I was. I became intoxicated with a sense of lofty sublimity, without thought of the abysses into which my daring was soon about to plunge me.”

Jules Verne book A Journey to the Center of the Earth

Les ondulations de ces montagnes infinies, que leurs couches de neige semblaient rendre écumantes, rappelaient à mon souvenir la surface d'une mer agitée. Si je me retournais vers l'ouest, l'Océan s'y développait dans sa majestueuse étendue, comme une continuation de ces sommets moutonneux. Où finissait la terre, où commençaient les flots, mon oeil le distinguait à peine.Je me plongeais ainsi dans cette prestigieuse extase que donnent les hautes cimes, et cette fois, sans vertige, car je m'accoutumais enfin à ces sublimes contemplations. Mes regards éblouis se baignaient dans la transparente irradiation des rayons solaires, j'oubliais qui j'étais, où j'étais, pour vivre de la vie des elfes ou des sylphes, imaginaires habitants de la mythologie scandinave; je m'enivrais de la volupté des hauteurs, sans songer aux abîmes dans lesquels ma destinée allait me plonger avant peu.
Source: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Ch. XVI: Boldly down the crater

Feeling, Mountain, Sense, Sea

“Global Classrooms are a cinch, with the help of Merrill Lynch.
When you put the org in Google, partnerships go truly gloooobal.
There is hope for Earth's salvation, with the Cisneros Foundation.
With Jay-Z there's double strife, life for children and water for life.
Human health will get ahead, with the valiant work of (RED).
For the poor and doing good, stays the job of Robin Hood.
UN stays on the front burner, thanks to our champ Ted Turner.
And whole revolutions stem, from the work of UNIFEM.
But tonight my special shout-out, goes to one I can't do without.
We have traveled up and down, Frisco, Atlanta, Chicago town.
Yes, the king of all the doers, is my trusty friend Bill Luers.”

Ban Ki-moon (1944) 8th Secretary-General of the United Nations

Ban at the 2008 Global Leadership Awards Gala, held October 1, 2008 http://www.unausa.org/site/pp.asp?b=260414 by the United Nations Association of the United States of America. It's a "lyric acknowledgment"—inspired by honoree Jay-Z—of the award winners, sung by Ban as a rap.

Life, Children, Health, Hope

“When a simple man who has no skill in dialectics believes an argument to be true which he afterwards imagines to be false, whether really false or not, and then another and another, he no longer has any faith left, and great disputers, as you know, come to think, at last that they have grown to be the wisest of mankind; for they alone perceive the utter unsoundness and instability of all arguments, or, indeed, of all things, which like the currents in the Euripus, are going up and down in never-ceasing ebb and flow.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Faith, Imagination, Thinking, Falseness

“Look not thou down but up!
To uses of a cup.”

Robert Browning Rabbi ben Ezra

Source: Dramatis Personae (1864), Rabbi Ben Ezra, Line 175.

“I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

Lie, Feeling

“Pointless but intense excitement holds us in TV dramas. We hear threatening music. A killer with a gun steals into the bedroom of a sleeping woman. More subliminal sounds of danger, pointlessly ominous. The woman wakes and runs into the kitchen for a knife. The cops are on the case. We watch as the criminal is pursued through night streets; shots, a death; a body falls from a roof. Then time is up, another drama begins. Now we are in a church. No, we are in a lecture hall; no again — a drawer opens in a morgue. A woman is looking for her kidnapped child. Then that ends, and we are on the veld with zebras and giraffes. Then with Lenin at a mass meeting. And suddenly we flash away to a cooking school; we are shown how to stuff a turkey. Next the Berlin Wall comes down. Or flags are burning. Or a panel is worrying about the rug crisis. More and more public themes, with less and less personal consciousness. Clearly, personal consciousness is shrinking.”

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer

"The Distracted Public" (1990), pp. 159-160
It All Adds Up (1994)

Death, School, Music, Sleep

“I went out into Downing Street a happy man. Of course it was partly because an old buffer like me enjoys feeling that he is still not quite out of things. But it was also pure patriotic joy that my country at such a time should have found such a leader. The furnace of war has smelted out all base metals from him.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

On his meeting with Winston Churchill, quoted in Harold Nicolson's diary (21 July 1943), Nigel Nicolson (ed.), Harold Nicolson: Diaries and Letters. 1939-1945 (London: Collins, 1967), p. 286.
1940s

War, Happiness, Feeling, Time

“I want to explain my environment to those who don't come any closer to it than the records they buy or the images they see on television. People want the truth. Even if they can't handle it, they want it. I let you know that I survived nine bullets not to sell records, but because it's the truth. Every time I sit down for an interview, I'm asked, "Well, 50, how did it feel to get shot nine times?" But those stories don't hold the weight, the pain, or the hope of my experience. It just can't. This is my mindset and these are the things that go on. This is why I say the rhymes that I say. This is what happened when I was trying to get rich before I died in Southside Queens.”

50 Cent (1975) American rapper, actor, businessman, investor and television producer

Extract of From Pieces to Weight: Once Upon a Time in Southside Queens http://aalbc.com/reviews/50_cent_interview.htm. Song lyrics, From Pieces to Weight: Once Upon a Time in Southside Queens (2005)

Pain, People, Truth, Hope

“I'm a keeper of [[sheep.
The sheep are my thoughts. ]]I'm a keeper of sheep.
The sheep are my thoughts
And each thought a sensation.
I think with my eyes and my ears
And with my hands and feet
And with my nose and mouth.To think a flower is to see and smell it,
And to eat a fruit is to know its meaning.That is why on a hot day
When I enjoy it so much I feel sad,
And I lie down in the grass
And close my warm eyes,
Then I feel my whole body lying down in reality,
I know the truth, and I'm happy.</p”

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher

Sou um guardador de rebanhos.
O rebanho é os meus pensamentos
E os meus pensamentos são todos sensações.
Penso com os olhos e com os ouvidos
E com as mãos e os pés
E com o nariz e a boca.
Pensar uma flor é vê-la e cheirá-la
E comer um fruto é saber-lhe o sentido.Por isso quando num dia de calor
Me sinto triste de gozá-lo tanto,
E me deito ao comprido na erva,
E fecho os olhos quentes,
Sinto todo o meu corpo deitado na realidade,
Sei a verdade e sou feliz.
Alberto Caeiro (heteronym), O Guardador de Rebanhos ("The Keeper of Sheep"), IX — in A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, trans. Richard Zenith (Penguin, 2006)

Happiness, Truth, Lie, Sadness

“When I came to Mogadishu…[t]here was one road built by the Italians. If you try to force me to stand down, I will leave the city as I found it. I came to power with a gun; only the gun can make me go.”

Siad Barre (1919–1995) Head of State of Somalia

As quoted by Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi (2001), Culture and customs of Somalia, p. 41

“Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded. These prison walls that this age of trade has built up round us, we can break down. We can still run free, call to our comrades, and marvel to hear once more, in response to our call, the impassioned chant of the human voice.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) French writer and aviator

1939 translation:
We can still run free, call to our comrades, and marvel to hear once more, in response to our call, the pathetic chant of the human voice.
Source: Terre des Hommes (1939), Ch. II : The Men, as quoted in The Lyric Self in Zen and E.E. Cummings (2015) by Michael Buland Burns and ‎Rima Snyder, p. 72

Life, Age

“When I think of our condition, my heart is heavy. I see men of my own race treated as outlaws and driven from country to country, or shot down like animals.”

Chief Joseph (1840–1904) Nez Percé Chieftain

Lincoln Hall Speech (1879)

Men, Thinking, Heart, Animals

“Deserted now the Imperial bowers
Save by some few poor lonely flowers…
One white-haired dame,
An emperor's flame,
Sits down and tells of bygone hours.”

Yuan Zhen

"At an Old Palace" (《行宫》), in Gems of Chinese Literature, trans. Herbert A. Giles
Variant translations:
Deserted now imperial bowers.
For whom still redden palace flowers?
Some white-haired chambermaids at leisure
Talk of the late emperor's pleasure.
"At an Old Palace", in Song of the Immortals: An Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, trans. Yuanchong Xu (Beijing: New World Press, 1994), p. 128
The ancient Palace lies in desolation spread.
The very garden flowers in solitude grow red.
Only some withered dames with whitened hair remain,
Who sit there idly talking of mystic monarchs dead.
"The Ancient Palace", as translated by W. J. B. Fletcher in Lotus and Chrysanthemum: An Anthology of Chinese and Japanese Poetry (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1934), p. 107

Flowers

“Without the support of your father (practically and metaphysically), without that behind you, without the knowledge of you as both a biological and cultural creature, with that depth of knowledge, you don't have the courage to do it, because you don't know what you are or what you could be. And so without that – because you're a historical creature, so you need all this collected wisdom, and all this dream-like information, and all this mythology and all this narrative, to inform you about what you are beyond what you see of yourself. And you're pummeled down, and people picked on you, and there's fifty things about you that are horrible, and you have a self-esteem problem, and you're sort of hunched over – you've got all these problems, and so it's not easy to see the divinity that lurks behind that. Unless you're aware of the heroic stories of the past – the metaphysics of consciousness – I don't think you can have the courage that regards yourself as the sort of creature that can stand up underneath that intense existential burden and move forward in courage and grace.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdrLQ7DpiWs "Biblical Series II: Genesis 1: Chaos & Order"

Wisdom, People, Dreams, Courage

“Therefore, I will now explain to you how to always behave humbly. Speak gently at all times, with your head bowed, your eyes looking down to the ground and your heart focusing on Hashem. Don't look at the face of the person to whom you are speaking. Consider everyone as greater than yourself. If he is wise or rich, you should give him respect. If he is poor and you are richer -- or wiser -- than he, consider yourself to be more guilty than he, and that he is more worthy than you, since when he sins it is through error, while yours is deliberate and you should know better!”

Ramban (1194–1270) Spanish rabbi and scholar

Iggeres HaRamban, translation by http://www.pirchei.com/specials/ramban/ramban.htm http://www.pirchei.com/specials/ramban/ramban.htm

Error, Time, Heart, Personality

“I sleep and I unsleep. On the other side of me, beyond where I lie down, the silence of the house touches infinity. I hear time falling, drop by drop, and no falling drop is heard falling.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 59
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Durmo e desdurmo.
Do outro lado de mim, lá para trás de onde jazo, o silêncio da casa toca no infinito. Oiço cair o tempo, gota a gota, e nenhuma gota que cai se ouve cair.

Lie, Sleep, Silence, Time

“The murderer smiles palely in wine,
Death's horror grips the sick.
Excoriated and naked, the nun prays
Before the Savior's agony on the cross.

The mother sings quietly in sleep.
Peacefully the child looks into the night
With eyes that are completely truthful.
In the whorehouse laughter rings.

By candlelight down in the cellar hole
The dead one paints with white hand
A grinning silence on the wall.
The sleeper whispers still.”

Georg Trakl (1887–1914) austrian poet

"Romance in the Night"

Death, Truth, Smile, Laughter

“If they were real men, following the tradition they would commit a hara-kiri and calm down at last. All they're doing is making noise”

Dmitry Rogozin (1963) Russian diplomat

in Twitter, referring to the Japanese complaint about PM Medvedev's visit to the Kuril islands. http://news.yahoo.com/japan-protests-russian-pm-visits-disputed-kuril-islands-053050767.html

Men

“It is a great deal easier to set a story afloat than to stop it. If you want truth to go round the world you must hire an express train to pull it; but if you want a lie to go round the world, it will fly: it is as light as a feather, and a breath will carry it. It is well said in the old proverb, "A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on." Nevertheless, it does not injure us; for if light as feather it travels as fast, its effect is just about as tremendous as the effect of down, when it is blown against the walls of a castle; it produces no damage whatever, on account of its lightness and littleness. Fear not, Christian. Let slander fly, let envy send forth its forked tongue, let it hiss at you, your bow shall abide in strength. Oh! shielded warrior, remain quiet, fear no ill; but, like the eagle in its lofty eyrie, look thou down upon the fowlers in the plain, turn thy bold eye upon them and say, "Shoot ye may, but your shots will not reach half-way to the pinnacle where I stand. Waste your powder upon me if ye will; I am beyond your reach."”

Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) British preacher, author, pastor and evangelist

Then clap your wings, mount to heaven, and there laugh them to scorn, for ye have made your refuge God, and shall find a most secure abode.
"No. 17: Joseph Attacked by the Archers (Genesis 49:23–24, delivered on Sunday 1855-04-01)" pp.130
Sermons delivered in Exeter Hall, Strand, during the enlargement of New Park Street Chapel, Southmark (1855)

God, Truth, Lie, World

“It is the nature of conquest to turn everything upside down.”

Thomas Paine book Rights of Man

Part 1.3 Rights of Man
1790s, Rights of Man, Part I (1791)

Nature

“I was behind a woman at the checkout counter who was looking at the magazines. She turned to me and goes, 'There he is again, that Leonardo DiCaprio. Don't you wish he'd just disappear?' I said, this is the moment where I either go, 'Do you know who I am?' or put my hat further down, pay for my corn-nuts and get out of there…. I choose to avoid that.”

Leonardo DiCaprio (1974) American actor and film producer

2005
http://www.flixster.com/actor/leonardo-di-caprio/leonardo-dicaprio-quotes

“I never go to where's a risk. I'm frightened of dangers down to boredom.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 96
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Nunca vou para onde há risco. tenho medo a tédio dos perigos.

“… bums and inferior people will likely support his egalitarian policies, whereas geniuses and superior people will not. For [this] reason… a democratic ruler undertakes little to actively expel those people whose presence within the country constitutes a negative externality (human trash which drives individual property values down).”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe book Democracy: The God That Failed

Source: Democracy: The God That Failed (2001), P.145

People, Support, Country

“I have a saying. 'Never judge a book by its cover'. I say that because I don't even know who Ozzy is. I wake up a new person every day. But if you've got a fantasy of Ozzy, who am I to say? I mean, if you think I sleep upside-down in the rafters and fly around at night and bite people's throats out, then that's your thing. But I can tell you now, all I ever wanted was for people to come to my concerts and have a good time. I don't want anyone to harm themselves in any way, shape or form-and my intentions are good whether people want to believe it or not. I'm not going to suddenly become a Jesus freak or anything. But I do have my beliefs and my beliefs are certainly not satanic.”

Ozzy Osbourne (1948) English heavy metal vocalist and songwriter

Rolling Stone Online, May 1997.

People, Books, Way, Thinking

“Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.”

Mark Twain book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Source: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Ch. 2

Life, Appearance

“The 'American Dream' of the middle class has all but disappeared, substituted with people struggling just to buy next week's groceries. Heaven forbid the car breaks down!”

Timothy McVeigh (1968–2001) American army soldier, security guard, terrorist

1990s, Letter to the Union-Sun & Journal (1992)

People, Dreams, Cars

“Revolution: Political movement which gets many people´s hopes up, let´s even more people down, makes almost everybody uncomfortable, and a few, extraordinarily rich. It is widely held in high regard.”

Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999) Argentine novelist

"Revolución: Movimiento político que ilusiona a muchos, desiluciona a más, incomoda a casi todos y enriquece extraordinariamente a unos pocos. Goza de firme prestigio."
Descanso de caminantes, 2001.

People, Hope

“to all the haters out there i wish u the best. U cant bring me down. I wake up everyday grateful 4 the opportunity and grateful to the fans”

Justin Bieber (1994) Canadian singer-songwriter, record producer, and actor

Message to his fans via Twitter https://twitter.com/justinbieber/status/12185092089, 14 April, 2010

“It is a cruel atmosphere down there, cruel and ruthless.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Hans Castorp on the world outside the sanatorium, in Ch. 5
The Magic Mountain (1924)

“Your rights reach down where all owners meet, in Hell's
Pointed exclusive conclave, at earth’s centre
(Your spun farm's root still on that axis dwells);
And up, through galaxies, a growing sector.”

William Empson (1906–1984) English literary critic and poet

"Legal Fiction", line 9; cited from John Haffenden (ed.) The Complete Poems (London: Allen Lane, 2000) p. 37.
The Complete Poems

Hell

“In this tree of humanity, with all of our branches and diversity, we all go back to the same root. We’re all one family -- we're all one tribe. And yet so much of the suffering in our world stems from our failure to remember that -- to not recognize ourselves in each other. We think because somebody’s skin is slightly different, or their hair is slightly different, or their religious faith is differently expressed, or they speak a different language that it justifies somehow us treating them with less dignity. And that becomes the source of so many of our problems. And we think somehow that we make ourselves better by putting other people down. And that becomes the source of so many of our problems. When we begin to see other as somehow less than ourselves -- when we succumb to these artificial divisions of faith or sect or tribe or ethnicity -- then even the most awful abuses are justified in the minds of those who are thinking in those ways. And in the end, abusers lose their own humanity, as well.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Remarks to the People of Africa (July 2015)

People, World, Family, Faith

“There are a few of us who could scarcely do more than we are doing of our own regular order of work, but there may yet be spare moments for little extra efforts of another sort which in the aggregate, in the run of a year, might produce a great total of real practical result. We must, like goldsmiths, carefully sweep our shops, and gather up the filings of the gold which God has given us in the shape of time. Select a large box and place in it as many cannon-balls as it will hold, it is after a fashion full, but it will hold more if smaller matters be found. Bring a quantity of marbles, very many of these may be packed in the spaces between the larger globes; the box is full now, but only full in a sense, it will contain more yet. There are interstices in abundance into which you may shake a considerable quantity of small shot, and now the chest is filled beyond all question, but yet there is room. You cannot put in another shot or marble, much less another cannon-ball, but you will find that several pounds of sand will slide down between the larger materials, and even then between the granules of sand, if you empty pondering there will be space for all the water, and for the same quantity several times repeated. When there is no space for the great there may be room for the little; where the little cannot enter the less can make its way; and where the less is shut out, the least of all may find ample room and verge enough.”

Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) British preacher, author, pastor and evangelist

"A Spur for a Free Horse" in The Sword and the Trowel (February, 1866) http://www.spurgeon.org/s_and_t/spur.htm

God, Way, Fashion, Question

“It remains to discuss briefly what general requirements may be justly laid down for the solution of a mathematical problem. I should say first of all, this: that it shall be possible to establish the correctness of the solution by means of a finite number of steps based upon a finite number of hypotheses which are implied in the statement of the problem and which must always be exactly formulated. This requirement of logical deduction by means of a finite number of processes is simply the requirement of rigor in reasoning.”

David Hilbert Mathematical Problems

Mathematical Problems (1900)

Mathematics, Problem

“The insight of a man certainly slows down his anger, and it is beauty on his part to pass over transgression.”

Solomon (-990–-931 BC) king of Israel and the son of David

Proverbs 19:11, New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures

Beauty, Parting, Anger

“The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold”

Sennacherib (-740–-681 BC) King of Assyria

Lord Byron, The Destruction of Sennacherib
About

Wolf

“Now that we're 18 days before the election, Mr. Severely Conservative wants you to think he was severely kidding about everything he said over the last year. He told folks he was the ideal candidate for the Tea Party, now he's telling folks, "What? Who me?" He's forgetting what his own positions are. And he's betting that you will too. I mean, he's changing up so much and backtrackin' and sidesteppin'. We've gotta name this condition that he's going though. I think it's called Romnesia. That's what it's called. I think that's what he's goin' through. Now, I'm not a medical doctor, but I do wanna go over some of the symptoms with you, because I wanna make sure nobody else catches it.You know, if you say you're for equal pay for equal work, but you keep refusing to say whether or not you'd sign a bill that protects equal pay for equal work, you might have Romnesia.If you say women should have access to contraceptive care, but you support legislation that would let your employer deny you contraceptive care, you might have a case of Romnesia.If you say you'll protect a woman's right to choose, but you stand up in a primary debate and say that you'd be delighted to sign a law outlying — outlawing that right to choose in all cases — man, you definitely got Romnesia.Now, this extends to other issues. If you say earlier in the year, "I'm gonna give a tax cut to the top 1%", and in a debate you say, "I don't know anything about giving tax cuts to rich folks", you need to get a thermometer, take your temperature, because you've probably got Romnesia.If you say that you're a champion of the coal industry when, while you were governor, you stood in front of a coal plant and said "This plant will kill you" —[audience: Romnesia! ] that's some Romnesia.And if you come down with a case of Romnesia and you can't seem to remember the policies that are still on your website, or the promises you've made over the six years you've been running for President, here's the good news: Obamacare covers pre-existing conditions. We can fix you up.. We've got a cure. We can make you well, Virginia. This is a curable disease.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Campaign rally http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/10/19/remarks-president-campaign-event-fairfax-va, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, 2012

Women, Disease, Law, Support

“The Esterhazy affair, thus, Mr. President, comes down to this: a guilty man is being passed off as innocent. For almost two months we have been following this nasty business hour by hour. I am being brief, for this is but the abridged version of a story whose sordid pages will some day be written out in full.”

Emile Zola J’accuse…!

J'accuse! (1898)

Business

“If religion be false, it is the basest imposition under heaven; but if the religion of Christ be true, it is the most solemn truth that ever was known! It is not a thing that a man dares to trifle with if it be true, for it is at his soul's peril to make a jest of it. If it be not true it is detestable, but if it be true it deserves all a man's faculties to consider it, and all his powers to obey it. It is not a trifle. Briefly consider why it is not. It deals with your soul. If it dealt with your body it were no trifle, for it is well to have the limbs of the body sound, but it has to do with your soul. As much as a man is better than the garments that he wears, so much is the soul better than the body. It is your immortal soul it deals with. Your soul has to live for ever, and the religion of Christ deals with its destiny. Can you laugh at such words as heaven and hell, at glory and at damnation? If you can, if you think these trifles, then is the faith of Christ to be trifled with. Consider also with whom it connects you—with God; before whom angels bow themselves and veil their faces. Is HE to be trifled with? Trifle with your monarch if you will, but not with the King of kings, the Lord of lords. Recollect that those who have ever known anything of it tell you it is no child's play. The saints will tell you it is no trifle to be converted. They will never forget the pangs of conviction, nor the joys of faith. They tell you it is no trifle to have religion, for it carries them through all their conflicts, bears them up under all distresses, cheers them under every gloom, and sustains them in all labour. They find it no mockery. The Christian life to them is something so solemn, that when they think of it they fall down before God, and say, "Hold thou me up and I shall be safe." And sinners, too, when they are in their senses, find it no trifle. When they come to die they find it no little thing to die without Christ. When conscience gets the grip of them, and shakes them, they find it no small thing to be without a hope of pardon—with guilt upon the conscience, and no means of getting rid of it. And, sirs, true ministers of God feel it to be no trifle. I do myself feel it to be such an awful thing to preach God's gospel, that if it were not "Woe unto me if I do not preach the gospel," I would resign my charge this moment. I would not for the proudest consideration under heaven know the agony of mind I felt but this one morning before I ventured upon this platform! Nothing but the hope of winning souls from death and hell, and a stern conviction that we have to deal with the grandest of all realities, would bring me here.”

Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) British preacher, author, pastor and evangelist

Religion—a Reality part II. Secondly, "It is not a vain thing"—that is, IT IS NO TRIFLE. (June 22nd, 1862) http://www.biblebb.com/files/spurgeon/0457.HTM

Life, Death, God, Truth

“And the sand all alive, all alive, as the hatched sea-turtles made their dash for the sea, while the birds hovered and swooped to attack and hovered and—swooped to attack! They were diving down on the hatched sea-turtles, turning them over to expose their soft undersides, tearing the undersides open and rending and eating their flesh.”

Tennessee Williams Suddenly Last Summer

Mrs. Venable, Scene One
Suddenly Last Summer (1958)

Bird, Tear, Sea

“You go up to a man, and you say, ‘How are things going, Joe?’ And he says, ‘Oh fine, fine—couldn’t be better.’ And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn’t be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody’s having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much.”

Kurt Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 3 “United Hotcake Preferred” (p. 69)

Hell, Time, Help

“We do not speak. We have gone down along the side of the river — slowly, as if we were climbing — towards the stone seat of the wall. The distances have altered. This seat, for instance, we meet it sooner than we thought we should, like some one in the dark; but it is the seat all right. The rose-tree which grew above it has withered away and become a crown of thorns.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XIX - Ghosts

Tree

“I'm not a princess,
This ain't a fairytale.
I'm not the one you'll sweep off her feet,
Lead her up the stairwell.
This ain't Hollywood,
This is a small town.
I was a dreamer before
You went and let me down.
Now it's too late for you and your white horse
To come around.”

Taylor Swift (1989) American singer-songwriter

White Horse, written by Taylor Swift and Liz Rose.
Song lyrics, Fearless (2008)

Fairytale, Horse, Princess

“There (in Mithilā) is settled the city of Janaka which is the crest-jewel (vasu) of the earth (vasumati); the upholder of the Karma as enunciated by the Brāhmaṇas (vasumukhamukhas – the mouths of Agni, who is the chief among the Vasus) and righteousness; the subduer of sins; the destroyer of sorrows; the pleasant destination; supremely spectacular; whose feet are bowed down to by all deities; the good nourisher of pure [forms of] abstention, love and devotion; the remover of doubts; the palace for the pleasure of Rāma; the birthplace of the paramour of the best amongst Raghus; and the cause of fear in [even] the son of Sūrya (Yama, the deity of death). ॥ 2.3 ॥”

Rāmabhadrācārya book Srisitaramakelikaumudi

tahaँ basa basumati basu basumukhamukha
nigadita nigama sukarama dharamadhura ।
durita damana dukha śamana sukha gamana
parama kamana pada namana sakala sura ॥
bimala birati rati bhagati bharana bhala
bharama harana hari haraṣa harama pura ।
giridhara raghubara gharani janama mahi
tarani tanaya bhaya janaka janakapura ॥
Srisitaramakelikaumudi

Love, Death, Pleasure, Fear

“The ancient dream of man to fly among the stars and go through the could and look down on the lands and seas has degenerated in its realization to the socialized and apathetic behavior of passengers who hardly look out the windows.”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 144.

Dreams, Behavior, Star, Flying