Quotes about element (1813 quotes, page 2)

“The large corporations, commonly called trusts, though organized in one State, always do business in many States, often doing very little business in the State where they are incorporated. There is utter lack of uniformity in the State laws about them; and as no State has any exclusive interest in or power over their acts, it has in practice proved impossible to get adequate regulation through State action. Therefore, in the interest of the whole people, the Nation should, without interfering with the power of the States in the matter itself, also assume power of supervision and regulation over all corporations doing an interstate business. This is especially true where the corporation derives a portion of its wealth from the existence of some monopolistic element or tendency in its business. There would be no hardship in such supervision; banks are subject to it, and in their case it is now accepted as a simple matter of course. Indeed, it is probable that supervision of corporations by the National Government need not go so far as is now the case with the supervision exercised over them by so conservative a State as Massachusetts, in order to produce excellent results. When the Constitution was adopted, at the end of the eighteenth century, no human wisdom could foretell the sweeping changes, alike in industrial and political conditions, which were to take place by the beginning of the twentieth century. At that time it was accepted as a matter of course that the several States were the proper authorities to regulate, so far as was then necessary, the comparatively insignificant and strictly localized corporate bodies of the day. The conditions are now wholly different and wholly different action is called for. I believe that a law can be framed which will enable the National Government to exercise control along the lines above indicated; profiting by the experience gained through the passage and administration of the Interstate-Commerce Act. If, however, the judgment of the Congress is that it lacks the constitutional power to pass such an act, then a constitutional amendment should be submitted to confer the power.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, First Annual Message to Congress (1901)

Wisdom , People , Law , Exercises

“We may lay it down as an incontestible axiom, that, in all the operations of art and nature, nothing is created; an equal quantity of matter exists both before and after the experiment; the quality and quantity of the elements remain precisely the same; and nothing takes place beyond changes and modifications in the combination of these elements. Upon this principle the whole art of performing chemical experiments depends: We must always suppose an exact equality between the elements of the body examined and those of the products of its analysis.”

Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) French chemist

Source: Elements of Chemistry (1790), p. 226

Art , Nature , Change , Dependency

“This is a study of the public administration movement from the viewpoint of political theory and the history of ideas. It seeks to review and analyze the theoretical element in administrative writings and to present the development of the public administration movement as a chapter in the history of American political thought.”

Dwight Waldo (1913–2000) American political scientist

Preview; lead paragraph
The Administrative State, 1948

History , Idea , Study

“Islam is in its origins an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert’s worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism. These countries can be easily set on the boil.”

V.S. Naipaul (1932–2018) Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Nepalese ancestry

Prologue
Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998)

People , Religion , History , Idea

“Some sixty years ago, Pope Pius XII, in a memorable address to anaesthesiologists and intensive care specialists, stated that there is no obligation to have recourse in all circumstances to every possible remedy and that, in some specific cases, it is permissible to refrain from their use… The specific element of this criterion is that it considers “the result that can be expected, taking into account the state of the sick person and his or her physical and moral resources”. It thus makes possible a decision that is morally qualified as withdrawal of “overzealous treatment”.
Such a decision responsibly acknowledges the limitations of our mortality, once it becomes clear that opposition to it is futile. “Here one does not will to cause death; one’s inability to impede it is merely accepted” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 2278). This difference of perspective restores humanity to the accompaniment of the dying, while not attempting to justify the suppression of the living. It is clear that not adopting, or else suspending, disproportionate measures, means avoiding overzealous treatment; from an ethical standpoint, it is completely different from euthanasia, which is always wrong, in that the intent of euthanasia is to end life and cause death.
The anguish associated with conditions that bring us to the threshold of human mortality, and the difficulty of the decision we have to make, may tempt us to step back from the patient. Yet this is where, more than anything else, we are called to show love and closeness, recognizing the limit that we all share and showing our solidarity.
Let each of us give love in his or her own way—as a father, a mother, a son, a daughter, a brother or sister, a doctor or a nurse. But give it!”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

Message of His Holiness Pope Francis to the Participants in the European Regional Meeting of the World Medical Association, From the Vatican, 7 November 2017 https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/pont-messages/2017/documents/papa-francesco_20171107_messaggio-monspaglia.html
2010s, 2017

Love , Life , Death , Way

“Common elements of creativity are originality and imagination. Creativity is intertwined with the freedom to design, to invent and to dream. In engineering and science a creative idea is useful only if it meets three conditions: the constraint of the natural laws, the constraint of cost, and the constraint of technical feasibility.”

Martin Lewis Perl (1927–2014) American scientist

Essay on Creativity in Science and Engineering

Law , Dreams , Imagination , Idea

“It is only by the amplification of titles that you can often touch and satisfy the imagination of nations; and that is an element which Governments must not despise.”

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

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1876/mar/09/second-reading-1 in the House of Commons (9 March 1876) on the Royal Titles Act that bestowed on Queen Victoria the title "Empress of India".
1870s

Imagination

“Thus, while I thought myself employed only in forming a Nomenclature, and while I proposed to myself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, my work transformed itself by degrees, without my being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the Elements of Chemistry.”

Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) French chemist

Source: Elements of Chemistry (1790), p.xiv

“The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down…. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality.”

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) playwright from the United States

The New York Times (9 May 1984)

Season

“The theory of "defeating" opportunist elements by the ideological struggle within the Party, the theory of "overcoming" these elements within the confines of a single party, is a rotten and dangerous theory, which threatens to condemn the Party to paralysis and chronic infirmity, threatens to leave the Party a prey to opportunism, threatens to leave the proletariat without a revolutionary party, threatens to deprive the proletariat of its main weapon in the fight against imperialism. Our Party could not have emerged on to the broad highway, it could not have seized power and organised the dictatorship of the proletariat, it could not have emerged victorious from the civil war, if it had had within its ranks people like Martov and Dan, Potresov and Axelrod. Our Party succeeded in achieving internal unity and unexampled cohesion of its ranks primarily because it was able to in good time to purge itself of the opportunist pollution, because it was able to rid its ranks of the Liquidators and Mensheviks. Proletarian parties develop and become strong by purging themselves of opportunists and reformists, social-imperialists and social-chauvinists, social-patriots and social-pacifists.”

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Source: The Foundations of Leninism, Ch.8

War , People , Strong , Time

“What, however, is our relation to revolution? Civil war is the most severe of all forms of war. It is unthinkable not only without violence against tertiary figures but, under contemporary technique, without murdering old men, old women and children… There is no impervious demarcation between ‘peaceful’ class struggle and revolution. Every strike embodies in an unexpanded form all the elements of civil war.”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia

Their Morals and Ours (1938)

Women , Men , War , Children

“Now you see that the hope and the desire of returning home and to one's former state is like the moth to the light, and that the man who with constant longing awaits with joy each new spring time, each new summer, each new month and new year — deeming that the things he longs for are ever too late in coming — does not perceive that he is longing for his own destruction. But this desire is the very quintessence, the spirit of the elements, which finding itself imprisoned with the soul is ever longing to return from the human body to its giver. And you must know that this same longing is that quintessence, inseparable from nature, and that man is the image of the world.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.

World , Hope , Home , Soul

“Unhappiness makes people vulnerable, incessant suffering unjust. Just as in the relations between a creditor and a debtor there is always an element of the disagreeable that can never be overcome, for the very reason that the one is irrevocably committed to the role of giver and the other to that of receiver, so in a sick person a latent feeling of resentment at every obvious sign of consideration is always ready to burst forth.”

Stefan Zweig book Beware of Pity

Beware of Pity (1939)

People , Feeling , Suffering , Personality

“To know the quantum mechanical state of a system implies, in general, only statistical restrictions on the results of measurements. It seems interesting to ask if this statistical element be thought of as arising, as in classical statistical mechanics, because the states in question are averages over better defined states for which individually the results would be quite determined. These hypothetical 'dispersion free' states would be specified not only by the quantum mechanical state vector but also by additional 'hidden variables' - 'hidden' because if states with prescribed values of these variables could actually be prepared, quantum mechanics would be observably inadequate.”

John S. Bell (1928–1990) Northern Irish physicist

On the problem of hidden variables in quantum mechanics (1966)

Question

“If you are wise, mingle these two elements: do not hope without despair, or despair without hope.”
Si sapis, alterum alteri misce: nec speraveris sine desperatione nec desperaveris sine spe.

Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist

Alternate translation: Hope not without despair, despair not without hope. (translated by Zachariah Rush).
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter CIV: On Care of Health and Peace of Mind, Line 12

Hope , Despair

“As we begin to plan for a new human society, we need to foster common values about clean air, water, and other elements of self-sustenance. These, along with a complete inventory of Earth's resources, will form the basis for a holistic approach to cybernated decision-making.”

Jacque Fresco (1916–2017) American futurist and self-described social engineer

Source: The Best That Money Can't Buy: Beyond Politics, Poverty, & War (2002), p. 54.

Decision , Water

“Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and self-interest.”

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

Speech at Springfield, Illinois (26 June 1857)
1850s, Speech on the Dred Scott Decision (1857)

Spring , Sense

“In a world that has been thoroughly permeated by the structures of the social order, a world that so overpowers every individual that scarcely any option remains but to accept it on its own terms, such naiveté reproduces itself incessantly and disastrously. What people have forced upon them by a boundless apparatus, which they themselves constitute and which they are locked into, virtually eliminates all natural elements and becomes “nature” to them.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 12

People , World , Nature

“Inconceivable events and conditions form a class apart from all other story elements, and cannot be made convincing by any mere process of casual narration. They have the handicap of incredibility to overcome; and this can be accomplished only through a careful realism in every other phase of the story, plus a gradual atmospheric or emotional build-up of the utmost subtlety. The emphasis, too, must be kept right—hovering always over the wonder of the central abnormality itself. It must be remembered that any violation of what we know as natural law is in itself a far more tremendous thing than any other event or feeling which could possibly affect a human being. Therefore in a story dealing with such a thing we cannot expect to create any sense of life or illusion of reality if we treat the wonder casually and have the characters moving about under ordinary motivations. The characters, though they must be natural, should be subordinated to the central marvel around which they are grouped. The true "hero" of a marvel tale is not any human being, but simply a set of phenomena. Over and above everything else should tower the stark, outrageous monstrousness of the one chosen departure from Nature. The characters should react to it as real people would react to such a thing if it were suddenly to confront them in daily life; displaying the almost soul-shattering amazement which anyone would naturally display instead of the mild, tame, quickly-passed-over emotions prescribed by cheap popular convention. Even when the wonder is one to which the characters are assumed to be used, the sense of awe, marvel, and strangeness which the reader would feel in the presence of such a thing must somehow be suggested by the author.... Atmosphere, not action, is the thing to cultivate in the wonder story. We cannot put stress on the bare events, since the unnatural extravagance of these events makes them sound hollow and absurd when thrown into too high relief. Such events, even when theoretically possible or conceivable in the future, have no counterpart or basis in existing life and human experience, hence can never form the groundwork of an adult tale. All that a marvel story can ever be, in a serious way, is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood. The moment it tries to be anything else it becomes cheap, puerile, and unconvincing. Therefore a fantastic author should see that his prime emphasis goes into subtle suggestion—the imperceptible hints and touches of selective and associative detail which express shadings of moods and build up a vague illusion of the strange reality of the unreal—instead of into bald catalogues of incredible happenings which can have no substance or meaning apart from a sustaining cloud of colour and mood-symbolism. A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis toward something to which they can be true; namely, certain wistful or restless moods of the human spirit, wherein it seeks to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural laws.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

"Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction", Californian 3, No. 3 (Winter 1935): 39-42. Published in Collected Essays, Volume 2: Literary Criticism edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 178
Non-Fiction

Life , People , Law , Way

“Nature consists of the elements given by the senses. Primitive man first takes out of them certain complexes of these elements that present themselves with a certain stability and are most important to him. The first and oldest words are names for "things". … The sensations are no "symbols of things". On the contrary the "thing" is a mental symbol for a sensation-complex of relative stability. Not the things, the bodies, but colours, sounds, pressures, times (what we usually call sensations) are the true elements of the world.”

Ernst Mach (1838–1916) Austrian physicist and university educator

Source: 20th century, The Analysis of Sensations (1902), p. 23, as quoted in Lenin as Philosopher: A Critical Examination of the Philosophical Basis of Leninism (1948) by Anton Pannekoek, p. 454

World , Nature , Sense , Time

“Over the next three years, governments will have to choose whether or not to adopt this new people-centric framework for development. The temptation for political leaders to retreat to a safer, more conventional approach will mean a strong global grassroots campaign will thus be necessary to build pressure for adoption of these groundbreaking and transformative elements recommended in the report.”

Tawakkol Karman (1979) Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

2000s, Youth Q&A on the U.N. High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Agenda Report (2009)

People , Strong

“Cubism is no different from any other school of painting. The same principles and the same elements are common to all. The fact that for a long time cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it, means nothing. I do not read English, and an English book is a blank to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist, and why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Source: 1920s, "Picasso Speaks" (1923), p. 319.

People , Books , School , Understanding

“Africa’s progress will depend on unleashing economic growth -- not just for the few at the top, but for the many, because an essential element of dignity is being able to live a decent life. That begins with a job. And that requires trade and investment.”

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

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

Life , Dependency

“What a wonderful work Wagner has done for humanity in translating the toil of life into the readable script of music! For those who seek the tale of other worlds his magic is silent; but earth-travail under his wand becomes instinct with rhythmic song to an accompaniment of the elements, and the blare and crash of the bottomless pit itself.”

Margaret Barber book The Roadmender

Source: The Roadmender (1902), Chapter II

Life , World , Music

“…reciprocity is barter. I always understood that barter was the last effort of civilization that it was exactly that state of human exchange that separated civilization from savagery; and if reciprocity is only barter, I fear that would hardly help us out of our difficulty. My noble friend read some extracts from the speeches of those who had the misfortune to be in Parliament at that time, and he honoured me by reading an extract from the speech I then made in the other House of Parliament. That was a speech in favour of reciprocity, and indicated the means by which reciprocity could be obtained. That is to say…by the negotiation of a treaty of commerce, by reciprocal exchange and the lowering of duties, the products of the two negotiating countries would find a freer access and consumption in the two countries than they formerly possessed. But when he taunts me with his quotation of some musty phrases of mine 40 years ago, I must remind him that we had elements then on which treaties of reciprocity could be negotiated. At that time, although the great changes of Sir Robert Peel had taken place, there were 168 articles in the tariff which were materials by which you could have negotiated, if that was a wise and desirable policy, commercial treaties of reciprocity. What is the number you now have in the tariff? Twenty-two. Those who talk of negotiating treaties of reciprocity…have they the materials for negotiating treaties of reciprocity? You have lost the opportunity. I do not want to enter into the argument at the present moment; but England cannot pursue that policy.”

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

Speech in the House of Lords (29 April 1879), reported in The Times (30 April 1879), p. 8.
1870s

Fear , Effort , Change , Time

“At puberty, the elements of an unsuperstitious sexual morality ought to be taught. Boys and girls should be taught that nothing can justify sexual intercourse unless there is mutual inclination… Boys and girls should be taught respect for each other's liberty; they should be made to feel that nothing gives one human being rights over another, and that jealousy and possessiveness kill love. They should be taught that to bring another human being into the world is a very serious matter, only to be undertaken when the child will have a reasonable prospect of health, good surroundings, and parental care. But they should also be taught methods of birth control, so as to insure that children shall only come when they are wanted. Finally, they should be taught the dangers of venereal disease, and the methods of prevention and cure. The increase of human happiness to be expected from sex education on these lines is immeasurable.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1920s, What I Believe (1925)

Love , Children , Health , World

“The horse carries the rider with power and speed. But the rider controls the horse. Talent carries the artist to great heights with power and speed. But the artist directs his talent. That is the element of 'consciousness', of 'calculation' in the work – or whatever else one chooses to call it.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Source: 1916 -1920, Autobiography', 1918, p. 31

Horse , Speed

“By these recent successes the re-inauguration of the national authority — reconstruction — which has had a large share of thought from the first, is pressed much more closely upon our attention. It is fraught with great difficulty. Unlike a case of a war between independent nations, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with. No one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any other man. We simply must begin with, and mould from, disorganized and discordant elements. Nor is it a small additional embarrassment that we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves as to the mode, manner, and means of reconstruction.”

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

1860s, Last public address (1865)

War , People , Success

“There's an inherent limit to the stress that any material can bear. Water has its boiling point, metals their melting points. The elements of the spirit behave the same way. Happiness can reach a pitch so great that any further happiness can't be felt. Pain, despair, humiliation, disgust, and fear are no different. Once the vessel is full, the world can't add to it.”

Stefan Zweig book The Post Office Girl

The Post Office Girl (published posthumously in 1982)

Pain , World , Fear , Way

“The only thing of interest in a refuted system is the personal element. It alone is what is forever irrefutable.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Source: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (posthumous), p. 25

Personality

“…there are always three elements [of psychoanalysis] at work: the manifest dream-text, the latent dream-content or thought and the unconscious desire articulated in the dream. This desire attaches itself to the dream, it interlaces itself in the interspace between the latent thought and the manifest text; it is therefore not 'more concealed, deeper' in relation to the latent thought, it is decidedly more 'on the surface,' consisting entirely of the signifier's mechanisms, of the treatment to which the latent content is submitted.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

6
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Dreams

“The lion laying with the lamb is the idea that is either projected back in time, saying that there was a time, or maybe that there will be a time when the horrors of life are no longer necessary for life itself to exist. And the horrors of life are of course that everything eats everything else, and that everything dies, and that everything is born, and that the whole place is a charnal house. It's a catastrophe from beginning to end. This is the vision of it being other than that. There's a strong idea that human beings can interact with reality in such a way so that the tragic and evil elements of it can be mitigated, so that we can move closer to a state of being where we have the benefits of existence without the catastrophe that seems to go along with it.”

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

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifi5KkXig3s "Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death"

Life , Way , Idea , Reality

“It is a woman's outstanding characteristic that she can do anything for the love of a man. But those women who can achieve something important for the love of a thing are most exceptional, because this does not really agree with their nature. Love for a thing is a man's prerogative. But since masculine and feminine elements are united in our human nature, a man can live in the feminine part of himself, I and a woman in her masculine part. None the less the feminine element in man is only something in the background, as is the masculine element in woman. If one lives out the opposite sex in oneself one is living in one's own background, and one's real individuality suffers. A man should live as a man and a woman as a woman.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Source: "Woman in Europe" (1927), P. 243

Love , Women , Sex , Nature

“I'm not anything like Brad Pitt or Antonio Banderas, but maybe it's the taboo element of my image, which is almost deathlike, that attracts them. I should be the last person that [people] should be attracted to.”

Marilyn Manson (1969) American rock musician and actor

As quoted in CMJ (January 1997).
1990s

People , Personality

“The good fighter does "what has to be done" and does not let himself be troubled by any scepticism. […] Given the ineptitude of the existing political groups, which, as is well known, have often forced qualified elements to move away from them, and given that what would have been desirable did not occur, which is to say, a political party as a mere force of manoeuvre in the present time, but absolutely disciplined and controlled by a superordinated group, owner of a precise inner doctrine not to be paraded in the common political struggle—given these things, the only possibilities seem to me to be those of more diffuse activity : to win, and influence with direct contacts, personalities, if possible, holding a post of command, not so much in the world of the political schemers as in that of the army, of officialdom and of business.”

Julius Evola (1898–1974) Italian philosopher and esotericist

Interview with Julius Evola, in Ordine Nuovo (1964) https://web.archive.org/web/20140405141542/http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id20.html

World , Business , Time , Personality

“One of the main reasons for my interest early on in the art and technology relationship was that during my studies of movement and light in art I was struck by the technical components in this art. Contrary to most, if not all, specialists in the field who put the stress on purely plastic issues and in the first place on the constructivist tradition, I was convinced that the technical and technological elements played a decisive part in this art. One almost paradoxical experience was my encounter with the kinetic artist and author of the book Constructivism, George Rickey, and my discovery of the most subtle technical movements in his mobile sculptures. But what seemed to me still more decisive for my option towards the art and technology problematic was the encounter in the early 1950s with artists like Nicholas Schöffer and Frank Malina whose works were based on some first hand or second hand scientific knowledge and who effectively or symbolically employed contemporary technological elements that gave their works a prospective cultural meaning. The same sentiment prevailed in me when I encountered similar artistic endeavors from the 1950s onwards in the works of Piotr Kowalski, Roy Ascott and many others which confirmed me in the aesthetic option I had taken, particularly when I discovered that this option was not antinomic (contradictory) to another aspect of the creative works of the time, i. e. spectator participation.”

Frank Popper (1918) French art historian

Source: Joseph Nechvatal. in: " Origins of Virtualism: An Interview with Frank Popper http://www.mediaarthistory.org/refresh/Programmatic%20key%20texts/pdfs/Popper.pdf," in: Media Art History, 2004.

Books , Art , Knowledge , Decision

“I suppose when my unknown elements are found, more people will pay us attention.”

Dmitri Mendeleev (1834–1907) Russian chemist and inventor

An Outline of the System of the Elements

People

“It always demands a far greater degree of courage for an individual to oppose an organized movement than to let himself be carried along with the stream — individual courage, that is, a variety of courage that is dying out in these times of progressive organization and mechanization. During the war practically the only courage I ran across was mass courage, the courage that comes of being one of a herd, and anyone who examines this phenomenon more closely will find it to be compounded of some very strange elements: a great deal of vanity, a great deal of fear — yes, fear of staying behind, fear of being sneered at fear of independent action, and fear, above all, of taking up a stand against the mass enthusiasm of one's fellows.”

Stefan Zweig book Beware of Pity

Beware of Pity (1939)

War , Fear , Courage , Time

“Part of the charm of synthetic organic chemistry derives from the vastness of the intellectual landscape along several dimensions. First, there is the almost infinite variety and number of possible target structures that lurk in the darkness waiting to be made. Then, there is the vast body of organic reactions that serve to transform one substance into another, now so large in number as to be beyond credibility to a non-chemist. There is the staggering range of reagents, reaction conditions, catalysts, elements, and techniques that must be mobilized in order to tame these reactions for synthetic purposes. Finally, it seems that new information is being added to that landscape at a rate that exceeds the ability of a normal person to keep up with it. In such a troubled setting any author, or group of authors, must be regarded as heroic if through their efforts, the task of the synthetic chemist is eased.”

Elias James Corey (1928) American chemist

Foreword of Name Reactions in Heterocyclic Chemistry (2004) by Jie Jack Li

Effort , Waiting , Parting , Personality

“The tendency of our perceptions is to emphasise increasingly the objective elements in an impression, unless we have some special reason, as artists have, for doing the opposite.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics (1927)
1920s

“All the elements will be seen mixed together in a great whirling mass, now borne towards the centre of the world, now towards the sky; and now furiously rushing from the South towards the frozen North, and sometimes from the East towards the West, and then again from this hemisphere to the other.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

"Of Water, which flows turbid and mixed with Soil and Dust; and of Mist, which is mixed with the Air; and of Fire which is mixed with its own, and each with each."
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XX Humorous Writings

World

“Elements of empirical language are manipulated in their rigidity, as if they were elements of a true and revealed language. The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Source: Jargon der Eigentlichkeit [Jargon of Authenticity] (1964), p. 7

“At dinner, he told us that he was much better, and we pointed out to him, about this, that, for some time however, he had not been out, and had been working eight, ten, or twelve hours a day. "That is just it," said he: "work is my element; I was born and made for it. I have found the limits of my legs; I have found the limits of my eyes; but I have never been able to find the limits of my labour."”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

A dîner, il nous disait qu'il se trouvait beaucoup mieux, et nous lui avons fait observer, à ce sujet, que, depuis quelque temps néanmoins, il ne sortait plus, et travaillat huit, dix, douze heures par jour.
«C'est cela même,» disait-il: «le travail est mon élément; je suis né et construit pour le travail. J'ai connu les limites de mes jambes, j'ai connu les limites de mes yeux; je n'ai jamais pu connaître celles de mon travail.»
Mémorial de Sainte Hélène, Volume 6, p. 272 https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=qSliAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA272
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“This is Nietzsche’s twofold struggle: against those who remove values from criticism, contenting themselves with producing inventories of existing values or with criticizing things in the name of established values (the “philosophical labourers”, Kant and Schopenhauer, BGE 211); but also against those who criticise or respect values by deriving them from simple facts, from so-called “objective facts” (the utilitarians, the “scholars”, BGE Part 6). In both cases philosophy moves in the indifferent element of the valuable in itself or the valuable for all. Nietzsche attacks both the “high” idea of foundation which leaves values indifferent to their origin and the idea of simple causal derivation or smooth beginning which suggests an indifferent origin for values. Nietzsche substitutes the pathos of difference or distance (the differential element) for both the Kantian principle of universality and the principle of resemblance dear to the utilitarians. “It was from the height of this pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for them; what did utility matter?””

Gilles Deleuze book Nietzsche and Philosophy

GM I 2 p. 26
Source: Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), p. 2

Idea , Universe , Parting , Indifference

“Either one or the other [ analysis or synthesis ] may be direct or indirect. The direct procedure is when the point of departure is known-direct synthesis in the elements of geometry. By combining at random simple truths with each other, more complicated ones are deduced from them. This is the method of discovery, the special method of inventions, contrary to popular opinion.”

André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836) French physicist and mathematician

André-Marie Ampè, in André-Marie Ampère: Enlightenment and Electrodynamics http://books.google.co.in/books?id=QWZKQWB-sbQC&pg=PA159, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 159

Truth , Departure

“The normal present connects the past and the future through limitation. Contiguity results, crystallization by means of solidification. There also exists, however, a spiritual present that identifies past and future through dissolution, and this mixture is the element, the atmosphere of the poet.”

Novalis book Blüthenstaub

Fragment No. 109
Blüthenstaub (1798)

Past , Future

“The soul, being a harmony, can never utter a note at variance with the tensions and relaxations and vibrations and other affections of the strings out of which she is composed; she can only follow, she cannot lead them? …And yet do we not now discover the soul to be doing the exact opposite—leading the elements of which she is believed to be composed; almost always opposing and coercing them in all sorts of ways throughout life… threatening and reprimanding the desires, passions, fears, as if talking to a thing which is not herself…”

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

Plato, Phaedo

Life , Fear , Way , Soul

“The basic pleasure in the phonetic elements of a language and in the style of their patterns, and then in a higher dimension, pleasure in the association of these word-forms with meanings, is of fundamental importance. This pleasure is quite distinct from the practical knowledge of a language, and not the same as an analytic understanding of its structure. It is simpler, deeper-rooted, and yet more immediate than the enjoyment of literature.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

English and Welsh (1955)

Pleasure , Literature , Understanding , Knowledge

“I didn't like the music business and I didn't like me. There's an element of falseness about the whole thing. Even things like doing an interview. It's not as though we just met in the pub and are having a chat — it's part of a process. If you do it all day, every day for years, you end up thinking: 'Who the hell am I?' I was lucky enough to make some money, enough to let me kick back. It was a great experience and it was nice to have a couple of No.1s but the best thing about it was that the money I made allowed me to have freedom and choice in my life.”

Rick Astley (1966) British singer and songwriter

As quoted in Metro (3 September 2004)

Life , Money , Music , Hell

“True anarchy is the generative element of religion. Out of the annihilation of all existing institutions she raises her glorious head, as the new foundress of the world.”

Novalis (1772–1801) German poet and writer

Wahrhafte Anarchie ist das Zeugungselement der Religion. Aus der Vernichtung alles Positiven hebt sie ihr glorreiches Haupt als neue Weltstifterin empor...
English translation as quoted in The Dublin Review Vol. III (July-October 1837); The original German is quoted http://www.jlrweb.com/whiterose/leaffourger.html from the Fourth Leaflet http://www.jlrweb.com/whiterose/leaffoureng.html of the White Rose (1942)
Variant translation: True anarchy is the generative element of religion. Out of the annihilation of every positive element she lifts her gloriously radiant countenance as the founder of a new world.

World , Religion

“Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 282
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Como nunca podemos conhecer todos os elementos de uma questão, nunca a podemos resolver.

Problem

“[L]et us assign the figures that have come into being in our theory to fire and earth and water and air. To earth let us give the cubical form; for earth is least mobile of the four and most plastic of bodies: and that substance must possess this nature in the highest degree which has its bases most stable. Now of the triangles which we assumed as our starting-point that with equal sides is more stable than that with unequal; and of the surfaces composed of the two triangles the equilateral quadrangle necessarily is more stable than the equilateral triangle… Now among all these that which has the fewest bases must naturally in all respects be the most cutting and keen of all, and also the most nimble, seeing it is composed of the smallest number of similar parts… Let it be determined then… that the solid body which has taken the form of the pyramid [tetrahedron] is the element and seed of fire; and the second in order of generation let [octahedron] us say to be that of air, and the third [icosahedron] that of water. Now all these bodies we must conceive as being so small that each single body in the several kinds cannot for its smallness be seen by us at all; but when many are heaped together, their united mass is seen…”

Plato book Timaeus

Section 55e–56c, Tr. R. D. Archer-Hind, The Timaeus of Plato (1888) pp. 199-201. https://books.google.com/books?id=q2YMAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA199
Timaeus

Nature , Water , Parting

“I am probably the least sensuous of all living beings; being almost exclusively visual and quasi-abstract in imagination, and tending to view and enjoy all things as a passive, detached, and sometimes remote spectator. Those arts which appeal most to the ideational imagination—the sense of drama, pageantry, historic flux, collective organisation, or escape from the natural limitations of time, space, and natural law—are undoubtedly those which appeal chiefly to me. Even my strong love of architectural and decorative beauty is probably largely dependent upon the historical bearings of the forms and motifs in which I delight. I am not wholly insensible to abstract form, but seem to relish the associative element in art more instantly and acutely than the lyrical or mathematical element... I don't really revel in anything unless it reminds me of something else either real or visionary—unless it opens up visual avenues of linked pseudo-recollections leading to sensations of ego-expansion and liberation... usually bringing in the element of time, somehow based on the past, and harbouring hints of an elusive, intangible kind of adventurous expectancy.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Virgil Finlay (25 September 1936), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 310
Non-Fiction, Letters

Love , Law , Beauty , Art

“In the visible world, the Milky Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded. They divide their time between labour designed to postpone the moment of dissolution for themselves and frantic struggles to hasten it for others of their kind.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Dreams and Facts https://users.drew.edu/jlenz/br-dreams.html (1919)
1910s

World , Way , Water , Time

“What canst thou see elsewhere which thou canst not see here? Behold the heaven and the earth and all the elements; for of these are all things created.”

Thomas à Kempis book The Imitation of Christ

Book I, ch. 20.
The Imitation of Christ (c. 1418)

“It is not Germany that will turn Bolshevist but Bolshevism that will become a sort of National Socialist. Besides, there is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuine revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will…. Our spirit is so strong, and the power of our magnificent movement to transform souls so elemental, that men are remodeled against their will… A social revolution would lend me new, unsuspected powers. I do not fear permeation with revolutionary Communist propaganda.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: The Voice of Destruction (1940), pp. 131-132

Men , Fear , Feeling , Soul

“Modern Christianity must always reckon with the possibility of having to abandon the historical figure of Jesus. Hence it must not artificially increase his importance by referring all theological knowledge to him and developing a ‘christo-centric’ religion: the Lord may always be a mere element in ‘religion’, but he should never be considered its foundation. (p. 402)”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

The Quest of the Historical Jesus 2nd edition (1913)

Religion , Knowledge

“A party should not contain utterly incongruous elements, radically divided on the real issues, and acting together only on false and dead issues insincerely painted as real and vital. It should not in the several States as well as in the Nation be prostituted to the service of the baser type of political boss. It should be so composed that there should be a reasonable agreement in the actions taken by it both in the Nation and in the several States.
Judged by these standards, both of the old parties break down.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

"Platform Insincerity" in The Outlook, Vol. 101, No. 13 (27 July 1912), p. 660
1910s

Painting , Falseness , Dead

“My abandonment of former beliefs was, however, never complete. Some things remained with me, and still remain: I still think that truth depends upon a relation to fact, and that facts in general are nonhuman; I still think that man is cosmically unimportant, and that a Being, if there were one, who could view the universe impartially, without the bias of here and now, would hardly mention man, except perhaps in a footnote near the end of the volume; but I no longer have the wish to thrust out human elements from regions where they belong; I have no longer the feeling that intellect is superior to sense, and that only Plato's world of ideas gives access to the 'real' world. I used to think of sense, and of thought which is built on sense, as a prison from which we can be freed by thought which is emancipated from sense. I now have no such feelings. I think of sense, and of thoughts built on sense, as windows, not as prison bars. I think that we can, however imperfectly, mirror the world, like Leibniz's monads; and I think it is the duty of the philosopher to make himself as undistorting a mirror as he can. But it is also his duty to recognize such distortions as are inevitable from our very nature. Of these, the most fundamental is that we view the world from the point of view of the here and now, not with that large impartiality which theists attribute to the Deity. To achieve such impartiality is impossible for us, but we can travel a certain distance towards it. To show the road to this end is the supreme duty of the philosopher.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1950s, My Philosophical Development (1959), p. 213

Truth , World , Travel , Feeling

“The challenge is to understand the psyche of somebody like that. There is no true genius or revolutionary ideas, I don’t think, without some element of compulsiveness or madness or obsession, and that’s certainly indicative of Howard Hughes. Understanding his obsessive-compulsive disorder was really the key for me for opening up who this man was.”

Leonardo DiCaprio (1974) American actor and film producer

http://www.popmonk.com/actors/leonardo-dicaprio/quotes-leonardo-dicaprio.htm

Idea , Understanding , Thinking , Madness

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated, a child humanized or de-humanized.”

Haim Ginott (1922–1973) psychologist

Quoted in Fair isn't always equal: assessing & grading in the differentiated classroom By Rick Wormeli, p. 9

Life , Mood , Decision , Teachers

“Now the trickiest catch in the negro problem is the fact that it is really twofold. The black is vastly inferior. There can be no question of this among contemporary and unsentimental biologists—eminent Europeans for whom the prejudice-problem does not exist. But, it is also a fact that there would be a very grave and very legitimate problem even if the negro were the white man's equal. For the simple fact is, that two widely dissimilar races, whether equal or not, cannot peaceably coexist in the same territory until they are either uniformly mongrelised or cast in folkways of permanent and traditional personal aloofness. No normal being feels at ease amidst a population having vast elements radically different from himself in physical aspect and emotional responses. A normal Yankee feels like a fish out of water in a crowd of cultivated Japanese, even though they may be his mental and aesthetic superiors; and the normal Jap feels the same way in a crowd of Yankees. This, of course, implies permanent association. We can all visit exotic scenes and like it—and when we are young and unsophisticated we usually think we might continue to like it as a regular thing. But as years pass, the need of old things and usual influences—home faces and home voices—grows stronger and stronger; and we come to see that mongrelism won't work. We require the environing influence of a set of ways and physical types like our own, and will sacrifice anything to get them. Nothing means anything, in the end, except with reference to that continuous immediate fabric of appearances and experiences of which one was originally part; and if we find ourselves ingulphed by alien and clashing influences, we instinctively fight against them in pursuit of the dominant freeman's average quota of legitimate contentment.... All that any living man normally wants—and all that any man worth calling such will stand for—is as stable and pure a perpetuation as possible of the set of forms and appearances to which his value-perceptions are, from the circumstances of moulding, instinctively attuned. That is all there is to life—the preservation of a framework which will render the experience of the individual apparently relevant and significant, and therefore reasonably satisfying. Here we have the normal phenomenon of race-prejudice in a nutshell—the legitimate fight of every virile personality to live in a world where life shall seem to mean something.... Just how the black and his tan penumbra can ultimately be adjusted to the American fabric, yet remains to be seen. It is possible that the economic dictatorship of the future can work out a diplomatic plan of separate allocation whereby the blacks may follow a self-contained life of their own, avoiding the keenest hardships of inferiority through a reduced number of points of contact with the whites... No one wishes them any intrinsic harm, and all would rejoice if a way were found to ameliorate such difficulties as they have without imperilling the structure of the dominant fabric. It is a fact, however, that sentimentalists exaggerate the woes of the average negro. Millions of them would be perfectly content with servile status if good physical treatment and amusement could be assured them, and they may yet form a well-managed agricultural peasantry. The real problem is the quadroon and octoroon—and still lighter shades. Theirs is a sorry tragedy, but they will have to find a special place. What we can do is to discourage the increase of their numbers by placing the highest possible penalties on miscegenation, and arousing as much public sentiment as possible against lax customs and attitudes—especially in the inland South—at present favouring the melancholy and disgusting phenomenon. All told, I think the modern American is pretty well on his guard, at last, against racial and cultural mongrelism. There will be much deterioration, but the Nordic has a fighting chance of coming out on top in the end.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to James F. Morton (January 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 253
Non-Fiction, Letters, to James Ferdinand Morton, Jr.

Life , World , Penalty , Way

“If we wanted to establish the reality of a social system as a complex of mutually dependent elements, why not begin by studying a system small enough so that we could, so to speak, see all the way around it, small enough so that all the relevant observations could be made in detail and at first hand?”

George C. Homans (1910–1989) American sociologist

The Human group, 1950

Way , Reality , Study , Dependency

“I am not a Hindu,
Nor a Muslim am I!
I am this body, a play
Of five elements; a drama
Of the spirit dancing
With joy and sorrow.”

Kabir (1440–1518) Indian mystic poet

Azfar Hussain translations

Joy , Dance

“If Hitler had not thrown the Communists into camps in 1933, there would have been civil war and bloodshed. The Communists would have revolted against the legally-elected government. The greatest danger of civil war in Germany came in 1932, when it was clearly a choice between Communism and National Socialism. So Paul von Hindenburg and the other conservative bourgeois elements chose Hitler. So did I, and I would do it again if a choice between Communism and Nazism arose.”

Karl Dönitz (1891–1980) President of Germany; admiral in command of German submarine forces during World War II

To Leon Goldensohn, May 2, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.

War , Communication

“Yes, but water decomposed into its primitive elements… and decomposed doubtless, by electricity, which will then have become a powerful and manageable force, for all great discoveries, by some inexplicable law, appear to agree and become complete at the same time. Yes, my friends, I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable. Some day the coalrooms of steamers and the tenders of locomotives will, instead of coal, be stored with these two condensed gases, which will burn in the furnaces with enormous calorific power. There is, therefore, nothing to fear. As long as the earth is inhabited it will supply the wants of its inhabitants, and there will be no want of either light or heat as long as the productions of the vegetable, mineral or animal kingdoms do not fail us. I believe, then, that when the deposits of coal are exhausted we shall heat and warm ourselves with water. Water will be the coal of the future!”

Jules Verne book The Mysterious Island

Part II, ch. XI
The Mysterious Island (1874)

Fear , Law , Light , Water

“In the ancient notion of love, on the other hand, there is an element of anxiety. The noble fears the descent to the less noble, is afraid of being infected and pulled down. The “sage” of antiquity does not have the same firmness, the same inner certainty of himself and his own value, as the genius and hero of Christian love.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1961), p. 92

Love , Fear

“It has been the error of schools to teach astronomy, and all the other sciences and subjects of natural philosophy, as accomplishments only; whereas they should be taught theologically, or with reference to the Being who is the Author of them: for all the principles of science are of divine origin. Man cannot make, or invent, or contrive principles; he can only discover them, and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author.
When we examine an extraordinary piece of machinery, an astonishing pile of architecture, a well-executed statue, or a highly-finished painting where life and action are imitated, and habit only prevents our mistaking a surface of light and shade for cubical solidity, our ideas are naturally led to think of the extensive genius and talent of the artist. When we study the elements of geometry, we think of Euclid. When we speak of gravitation, we think of Newton. How, then, is it that when we study the works of God in creation, we stop short and do not think of God? It is from the error of the schools in having taught those subjects as accomplishments only and thereby separated the study of them from the Being who is the Author of them.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

1790s, Discourse to the Theophilanthropists (1798)

Life , God , School , Error

“There is only one element that can break the Afrikaner … and that is the Afrikaner himself.”

P. W. Botha (1916–2006) South African prime minister

Speaking to the House of Assembly on 26 April 1984. Excerpt from a quote by Andrew Donaldson, Sunday Times, 5 November 2006

“There is rarely a creative man who does not have to pay a high price for the divine spark of his greatest gifts…the human element is frequently bled for the benefit of the creative element and to such an extent that it even brings out the bad qualities, as for instance, ruthless, naive egoism (so-called "auto-eroticism"), vanity, all kinds of vices-and all this in order to bring to the human I at least some life-strength, since otherwise it would perish of sheer inanition.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Psychology and Poetry (June 1930)

Life

“The moment a robber sees a policeman he is terrified. A policeman is a terrorist for the robber. Similarly every Muslim should be a terrorist for the antisocial elements of society, such as thieves, dacoits [bandits] and rapists. Whenever such an anti-social element sees a Muslim, he should be terrified”

Zakir Naik (1965) Islamic televangelist

Context: [Clarifying statement above]: Every Muslim should be a terrorist. A terrorist is a person who causes terror. The moment a robber sees a policeman he is terrified. A policeman is a terrorist for the robber. Similarly every Muslim should be a terrorist for the antisocial elements of society, such as thieves, dacoits [bandits] and rapists. Whenever such an anti-social element sees a Muslim, he should be terrified. It is true that the word ‘terrorist’ is generally used for a person who causes terror among the common people. But a true Muslim should only be a terrorist to selective people, i. e. anti-social elements, and not to the common innocent people. In fact, a Muslim should be a source of peace for innocent people.

On Osama Bin Laden, October 1, 2009. http://barthsnotes.com/2013/05/26/spotlight-on-greenwich-university-islamic-society-in-wake-of-murder/

“Ninety percent of the theory of Impressionist painting is in.... Ruskin's Elements.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

Quote attributed to Claude Monet, talking to a British journalist in 1900, by Wynford Dewhurst in 'What is impressionism?', Contemporary Review, March 1991; Cited in: John Ruskin (2012) The Elements of Drawing. p. viii
1900 - 1920

Painting

“One of the crucial elements to the analysis of morality is iterability. You can't play a degenerating game, because it degenerates, obviously. You want to play a game that at least remains stable across time. God, if you could really get your act together, maybe it could slowly get better. And of course, that's what you would hope for your family, right? That's what you're always trying to do, unless you're completely hell-bent on revenge and destruction. Is there a way that we can continue to play together that will make playing together even better the next day?”

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

Other

God , Family , Hope , Way

“Banks are an almost irresistible attraction for that element of our society which seeks unearned money.”

J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972) American law enforcement officer and first director of the FBI

News summaries (7 April 1955).

Money

“Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.”

John Updike book Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux (1969)

Time

“When, early in the war, Gen. Fremont attempted military emancipation, I forbade it, because I did not then think it an indispensable necessity. When a little later, Gen. Cameron, then Secretary of War, suggested the arming of the blacks, I objected, because I did not yet think it an indispensable necessity. When, still later, Gen. Hunter attempted military emancipation, I again forbade it, because I did not yet think the indispensable necessity had come. When, in March, and May, and July 1862 I made earnest, and successive appeals to the border states to favor compensated emancipation, I believed the indispensable necessity for military emancipation, and arming the blacks would come, unless averted by that measure. They declined the proposition; and I was, in my best judgment, driven to the alternative of either surrendering the Union, and with it, the Constitution, or of laying strong hand upon the colored element. I chose the latter. In choosing it, I hoped for greater gain than loss; but of this, I was not entirely confident. More than a year of trial now shows no loss by it in our foreign relations, none in our home popular sentiment, none in our white military force, — no loss by it any how or any where. On the contrary, it shows a gain of quite a hundred and thirty thousand soldiers, seamen, and laborers. These are palpable facts, about which, as facts, there can be no cavilling. We have the men; and we could not have had them without the measure.”

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

1860s, "If Slavery Is Not Wrong, Nothing Is Wrong" (1864)

Men , War , Hope , Color

“Therefore, we should devote ourselves as a preparative to preparedness, alike in peace and war, to secure the three elemental things:”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)
Context: Therefore, we should devote ourselves as a preparative to preparedness, alike in peace and war, to secure the three elemental things: one, a common language, the English language; two, the increase in our social loyalty citizenship absolutely undivided, a citizenship which acknowledges no flag except the flag of the United States and which emphatically repudiates all duality of intention or national loyalty; and third, an intelligent and resolute effort for the removal of industrial and social unrest, an effort which shall aim equally at securing every man his rights and to make every man understand that unless he in good faith performs his duties he is not entitled to any rights at all.

War , Peace

“I, too, have made it a lifelong task of mine to add a cultural element to my work, which should result in uniting countries and reconciling their people.”

Otto Lilienthal (1848–1896) German aviation pioneer

Letter to Moritz von Egidy (c. January 1894) - Original German text online http://www.lilienthal-museum.de/olma/l1852.htm
Context: I, too, have made it a lifelong task of mine to add a cultural element to my work, which should result in uniting countries and reconciling their people. Our experience of today's civilisation suffers from the fact that it only happens on the surface of the earth. We have invented barricades between our countries, custom regulations and constraints and complicated traffic laws and these are only possible because we are not in control of the 'kingdom of the air', and not as 'free as a bird'.
Numerous technicians in every state are doing their utmost to achieve the dream of free, unlimited flight and it is precisely here where changes can be made which would have a radical effect on our whole way of life. The borders between countries would lose their significance, because they could not be closed off from each other. Linguistic differences would disappear, as human mobility increased. National defence would cease to devour the best resources of nations as it would become impossible in itself. And the necessity of resolving disagreements among nations in some other way than by bloody battles would, in its turn, lead us to eternal peace.
We are getting closer to this goal. When we will reach it, I do not know.

People , Country

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

Edward Bernays book Propaganda

Source: Propaganda (1928), p. 37 
Context: The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Intelligence , Country

“All those… who discourse concerning nature, always subject a certain other nature of… elements, to the infinite… But no one of those who make the elements to be finite introduces infinity. Such, however, as make infinite elements, as Anaxagoras and Democritus, say that the infinite is continuous by contact. …Rationally, too, do all philosophers consider the infinite as a principle; for it cannot be in vain, nor can any other power be present with it than that of a principle: for all things are either the principle, or from the principle; but of the infinite there is no principle, since otherwise it would have an end. …it is also unbegotten and uncorruptible, as being a certain principle: for… end is the corruption of everything. …It likewise appears to comprehend and govern all things, as those assert who do not introduce other causes beside the infinite… It would seem also that this is divine: for it is immortal and indestructible, as Anaximander says, and most of the physiologists.”

Aristotle book Physics

Book III, Ch. IV, pp. 152-155.
Physics

Nature , Appearance

“These are some of the questions which are thrown at the impudent wretch who dares to criticize the special positions of the sciences. The questions reach their polemical aim only if one assumes that the results of science which no one will deny have arisen without any help from non-scientific elements,”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Against Method

Pg. 304.
Against Method (1975)
Context: Is it not a fact that a learned physician is better equipped to diagnose and to cure an illness than a layman or the medicine-man of a primitive society? Is it not a fact that epidemics and dangerous individual diseases have disappeared only with the beginning of modern medicine? Must we not admit that technology has made tremendous advances since the rise of modern science? And are not the moon-shots a most and undeniable proof of its excellence? These are some of the questions which are thrown at the impudent wretch who dares to criticize the special positions of the sciences. The questions reach their polemical aim only if one assumes that the results of science which no one will deny have arisen without any help from non-scientific elements, and that they cannot be improved by an admixture of such elements either. "Unscientific" procedures such as the herbal lore of witches and cunning men, the astronomy of mystics, the treatment of the ill in primitive societies are totally without merit. Science alone gives us a useful astronomy, an effective medicine, a trustworthy technology. One must also assume that science owes its success to the correct method and not merely to a lucky accident. It was not a fortunate cosmological guess that led to progress, but the correct and cosmologically neutral handling of data. These are the assumptions we must make to give the questions the polemical force they are supposed to have. Not a single one of them stands up to closer examination.

Question , Science , Help

“In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux.”

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

1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)
Context: In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.

“The hypothesis has been proposed that all mental events and experiences, in fact the whole of the outer and inner sensory experiences, are a composite of elemental or unitary mental experiences at all levels of intensity.”

John C. Eccles book How the Self Controls Its Brain

He here refers to his proposal in "A unitary hypothesis of mind-brain interaction in the cerebral cortex" (1990); published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B 240, p. 433 - 451
How the Self Controls Its Brain (1994)
Context: The hypothesis has been proposed that all mental events and experiences, in fact the whole of the outer and inner sensory experiences, are a composite of elemental or unitary mental experiences at all levels of intensity. Each of these mental units is reciprocally linked in some unitary manner to a dendron … Appropriately we name these proposed mental units 'psychons.' Psychons are not perceptual paths to experiences. They are the experiences in all their diversity and uniqueness. There could be millions of psychons each linked uniquely to the millions of dendrons. It is hypothesized that it is the very nature of psychons to link together in providing a unified experience.

“When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created,”

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

Section 2, paragraph 58.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
Context: When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

People , Idea

“Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, though both the indestructible element and the trust may remain permanently hidden from him.”

Franz Kafka book The Zürau Aphorisms

50
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)
Context: Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, though both the indestructible element and the trust may remain permanently hidden from him. One of the ways in which this hiddenness can express itself is through faith in a personal god.

“The occupation with things of the mind has by now itself become “practical,” a business with strict division of labor, departments and restricted entry. The man of independent means who chooses it out of repugnance for the ignominy of earning money will not be disposed to acknowledge the fact. For this he is punished. He … is ranked in the competitive hierarchy as a dilettante no matter how well he knows his subject, and must, if he wants to make a career, show himself even more resolutely blinkered than the most inveterate specialist. The urge to suspend the division of labor which, within certain limits, his economic situation enables him to satisfy, is thought particularly disreputable: it betrays a disinclination to sanction the operations imposed by society, and domineering competence permits no such idiosyncrasies. The departmentalization of mind is a means of abolishing mind where it is not exercised ex officio, under contract. It performs this task all the more reliably since anyone who repudiates this division of labor—if only by taking pleasure in his work—makes himself vulnerable by its standards, in ways inseparable from elements of his superiority.”

Theodor W. Adorno book Minima Moralia

E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 1
Minima Moralia (1951)
Context: The son of well-to-do parents who … engages in a so-called intellectual profession, as an artist or a scholar, will have a particularly difficult time with those bearing the distasteful title of colleagues. It is not merely that his independence is envied, the seriousness of his intentions mistrusted, that he is suspected of being a secret envoy of the established powers. … The real resistance lies elsewhere. The occupation with things of the mind has by now itself become “practical,” a business with strict division of labor, departments and restricted entry. The man of independent means who chooses it out of repugnance for the ignominy of earning money will not be disposed to acknowledge the fact. For this he is punished. He … is ranked in the competitive hierarchy as a dilettante no matter how well he knows his subject, and must, if he wants to make a career, show himself even more resolutely blinkered than the most inveterate specialist. The urge to suspend the division of labor which, within certain limits, his economic situation enables him to satisfy, is thought particularly disreputable: it betrays a disinclination to sanction the operations imposed by society, and domineering competence permits no such idiosyncrasies. The departmentalization of mind is a means of abolishing mind where it is not exercised ex officio, under contract. It performs this task all the more reliably since anyone who repudiates this division of labor—if only by taking pleasure in his work—makes himself vulnerable by its standards, in ways inseparable from elements of his superiority. Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game.

Money , Pleasure , Way , Exercises

“Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds, and formed and fought the battle through, under the constant hot fire of a disciplined, proud, and pampered enemy. Did we brave all them to falter now?”

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

now, when that same enemy is wavering, dissevered, and belligerent? The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail — if we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise counsels may accelerate, or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later, the victory is sure to come.
1850s, The House Divided speech (1858)

Hostility

“That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing.”

V.S. Naipaul (1932–2018) Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Nepalese ancestry

"Two Worlds," Nobel lecture (7 December 2001) http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2001/naipaul-lecture-e.html
Context: I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem strange that a man who has dealt in words and emotions and ideas for nearly fifty years shouldn't have a few to spare, so to speak. But everything of value about me is in my books. Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will — with luck — come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise. That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing.

“The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty

On Certainty (1969)
Context: 105. All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments; no it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.

Life , Departure

“Let him remember that many before now have tried to chastise a wrongdoer, and failing to punish their enemy have not even saved themselves; while many who have trusted in force to gain an advantage, instead of gaining anything more, have been doomed to lose what they had. Vengeance is not necessarily successful because wrong has been done, or strength sure because it is confident; but the incalculable element in the future exercises the widest influence, and is the most treacherous, and yet in fact the most useful of all things, as it frightens us all equally, and thus makes us consider before attacking each other.”

Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War

Book IV, 4.62-[3]-[4]
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book IV

Exercises , Confidence , Success , Future

“The earth is not in the centre of the Sun's orbit nor at the centre of the universe, but in the centre of its companion elements, and united with them.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XV Astronomy
Context: The earth is not in the centre of the Sun's orbit nor at the centre of the universe, but in the centre of its companion elements, and united with them. And any one standing on the moon, when it and the sun are both beneath us, would see this our earth and the element of water upon it just as we see the moon, and the earth would light it as it lights us.

Universe , Sun

“A constant element of enjoyment must be mingled with our studies, so that we think of learning as a game rather than a form of drudgery, for no activity can be continued for long if it does not to some extent afford pleasure to the participant.”

Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, and theologian

Letter to Christian Northoff (1497), as translated in Collected Works of Erasmus (1974), p. 114

Pleasure , Game , Thinking , Study

“The relations, therefore, between state and citizens are completely reversed by the fascist doctrine. Instead of the liberal-democratic formula, ‘society for the individual,’ we have, ‘individuals for society’ with this difference, however: that while the liberal doctrines eliminated society, fascism does not submerge the individual in the social group. It subordinates him but does not eliminate him, the individual as a part of his generation ever remaining an element of society however transient and insignificant he may be.”

Alfredo Rocco (1875–1935) Italian politician and jurist

Source: The Political Doctrine of Fascism (1925), p. 111

Parting , Relation ships

“It is not Germany that will turn Bolshevist but Bolshevism that will become a sort of National Socialism. Besides, there is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuine revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will. … Our spirit is so strong, and the power of our magnificent movement to transform souls so elemental, that men are remodeled against their will. … A social revolution would lend me new, unsuspected powers. I do not fear permeation with revolutionary Communist propaganda.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Source: Disputed, Hitler Speaks (1940), pp. 131-132.

Soul , Strong , Fear , Making love

“Leninism is warlike from head to foot. War is impossible without cunning, without subterfuge. without deception of the enemy. Victorious war cunning is a constituent element of Leninist politics. But at the same time, Leninism is supreme revolutionary honesty toward the party and the working class. It admits of no fiction, no bubble-blowing, no pseudo-grandeur.”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia

The New Course (1924)

War , Time , Victory

“For to disagree with three-fourths of the British public on all points is one of the first elements of sanity, one of the deepest consolations in all moments of spiritual doubt.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

The English Renaissance of Art https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/wilde/oscar/english-renaissance-of-art/ (1882)

“Marx may be wrong in some of his statements, or his theory of value; this I am not competent to judge. But he seems to me to have possessed quite an extraordinary degree of insight into social phenomena, and this insight was apparently due to the scientific method he adopted. This method, applied to past history as well as current events, helps us in understanding them far more than any other method of apporach, and it is because of this that the most revealing and keen analysis of the changes that are taking place in the world today come from Marxist writers. It is easy to point out that Marx ignored or underrated certain subsequent tendencies, like the rise of a revolutionary element in the middle class, which is so notable today. But the whole value of Marxism seems to me to lie in its absence of dogmatism, in its stress on a certain outlook and mode of approach, and in its attitude to action. That outlook helps us in understanding the social phenomena of our own times, and points out the way of action and escape.”

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) Indian lawyer, statesman, and writer, first Prime Minister of India

Autobiography (1936; 1949; 1958)

Time , History , Understanding , Past

“As this conviction grew upon me, I was filled with a new excitement and my depression at the non-success of civil disobedience grew much less. Was not the world marching rapidly towards the desired consummation? There were grave dangers of wars and catastrophes, but at any rate we were moving. There was no stagnation. Our national struggle became a stage in the longer journey, and it was as well that repression and suffering were tempering our people for future struggles and forcing them to consider the new ideas that were stirring the world. We would be the stronger and the more disciplined and hardened by the elimination of the weaker elements. Time was in our favour.”

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) Indian lawyer, statesman, and writer, first Prime Minister of India

Autobiography (1936; 1949; 1958)

Time , Success , War , Future

“But, as I have told you, this Five Year Plan brought much suffering, and difficulties and dislocation. And people paid a terrible price willingly and accepted the sacrifices and sufferings for a few years in the hope of a better time afterwards; some paid the price unwillingly and only because of the compulsion of the Soviet Government. Among those who suffered most were the kulaks or richer peasants. With their great wealth and special influence, they did not fit into the new scheme of things. They were capitalistic elements which prevented the collective farms from developing on socialist lines. Often they opposed this collectivization, sometimes they entered the collectives to weaken them from inside or to make undue personal profit out of them. The Soviet Government came down heavily on them. The Government was also very hard on many middle-class people whom it suspected of espionage and sabotage on behalf of its enemies. Because of this, large numbers of engineers were punished and sent to gaol.”

Jawaharlal Nehru book Glimpses of World History

Glimpses of World History (1949)

Time , Personality , Wealth , Suffering

“Fundamental to this idea of art (conceptual art) is the understanding of the linguistic nature of all art propositions, be they past or present, and regardless of the elements used in their construction.”

Joseph Kosuth (1945) American conceptual artist

note: Without this understanding a 'conceptual' form of presentation is little more than a manufactured stylehood, and such art we have with increasing abundance.
'Joseph Kosuth: Introductory note by the American editor', in Art-Language Vol.1 Nr.2, Art & Language Press, Chipping Norton (February 1970), p.3.

Understanding , Past , Nature , Art

Quotes about element page 2

Quotes about element
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