Quotes about emphasis

A collection of quotes on the topic of emphasis, people, other, time.

Quotes about emphasis

“Teachers should be able to help learners to efficiently communicate to other numerical ideas and to make connection with real-life problems in the areas chosen for their eventual career. Training only on subject matter is definitely not going to bring about this expertise. There must be more emphasis on coaching and facilitating techniques. In their normal practices, teachers must see very clearly where each individual learner stands on the learning continuum of that particular development, what problems and difficulties he or she is going to face and what lies ahead on that learning continuum to be walked by the learner. Teachers should be trained to be a master of how to help each and every learn to walk through the learning task. Going through the learning task is a necessary and essential aspect of teacher training but it is not sufficient to make them good and effective teachers.”

Sukavich Rangsitpol (1935) Thai politician

Teacher

Life, Making love, Communication, Idea

“Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

“The emphasis must not be on the right to abortion but on the right to privacy and reproductive control.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Interview, Ms. (New York), April 1974

“The idea that an advanced civilization need not rest on slavery is a relatively new idea, for instance; it is a good deal younger than the Christian religion. But even if Chesterton's dictum were true, it would only be true in the sense that a statue is contained in every block of stone. Ideas may not change, but emphasis shifts constantly. It could be claimed, for example, that the most important part of Marx's theory is contained in the saying: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying had? Who had paid any attention to it? Who had inferred from it — what it certainly implies — that laws, religions and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property relations? It was Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx who brought it to life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion — which, of course, is why they hate him so much.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

As I Please (25 February 1944) http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/eaip_01 "As I Please" (1943–1947)

Life, Hate, Religion, Law

“Not only were we practicing, we were nervous rehearsing, because he would sit in a chair with a belt in his hand, and if you didn't do it the right way, he would tear you up. Really get you…We were terrified of him. So terrified, I can't tell you. I don't think he realized how scared…scared…I mean SCARED. So scared that I would regurgitate. (with emphasis) Mmm-hmm. (reporter asks Michael what caused the reaction) His presence, just seeing him…And I was so fast, he wouldn't catch me half the time, but when he did, oh my God, it was bad.”

Michael Jackson (1958–2009) American singer, songwriter and dancer

On his father & the whippings he & his brothers would receive from him
Living with Michael Jackson (2002)

God, Way, Thinking, Tear

“Education, in general, should not be limited to the acquisition of knowledge and preparation for a career or in common parlance, "to make a better living." We must think in terms of a "better life," not only for the individual, but also for society as a whole. The educational system must, therefore, pay more attention, indeed the main attention, to the building of character, with emphasis on moral and ethical values.”

Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994) Hasidic rabbi

Endorsement of President Jimmy Carter's Education Program - Feb. 7, 1979.

Life, Education, Knowledge, Thinking

“The essential in Christianity, past, present and future, is loving Christ and one another, and if the Quaker finds God in the silence and the Salvation Army in the band, the Roman Catholic in the Mass and the Baptist in immersion; if the High Anglican likes incense and ceremonial, and the Methodist puts his emphasis on personal experience, the fellowship of the authentic class meeting and Charles Wesley’s hymns, why talk of disunity?”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.29

Love, God, Silence, Past

“The people of the country have taken to planning from the start – accepted it…At the top there were doubts, differences. Now The acceptance of planning is almost unanimous in the country. The importance of industrialization has always been accepted. Gandhiji’s emphasis on cottage industries…Cottage industries, however will not suffice.”

Gulzarilal Nanda (1898–1998) Prime Minister of India

In, p. 30.
Gulzarilal Nanda: A Life in the Service of the People

People, Country

“There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave: there are no voices, O Rhodopè! that are not soon mute, however tuneful: there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.”

Walter Savage Landor Imaginary Conversations

"Aesop and Rhodopè", I.
Imaginary Conversations (1824-1829)

Love, Passion

“It is asserted that beasts have no rights; the illusion is harboured that our conduct, so far as they are concerned, has no moral significance, or, as it is put in the language of these codes, that "there are no duties to be fulfilled towards animals." Such a view is one of revolting coarseness, a barbarism of the West, whose source is Judaism. In philosophy, however, it rests on the assumption, despite all evidence to the contrary, of the radical difference between man and beast,—a doctrine which, as is well known, was proclaimed with more trenchant emphasis by Descartes than by any one else: it was indeed the necessary consequence of his mistakes.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book On the Basis of Morality

Part III, Ch. VIII, 7, p. 218 https://archive.org/stream/basisofmorality00schoiala#page/218/mode/2up On the Basis of Morality (1840)

Animals

“The decline of narrative can be seen as an effect of the blossoming of techniques and technologies since the Second World War, Which has shifted emphasis from the ends of action to this means; it can also be seen as an effect of the redeployment of advanced liberal capitalism after its retreat under the protection of Keynesianism during the period of 1930-1960, a renewal that has eliminated the communist alternative and valorized the individual enjoyment of goods and services.”

Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) French philosopher

Source: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977), p.38

War, World

“As a people we claim the right to speak with peculiar emphasis for freedom and for fair treatment of all men without regard to differences of race, fortune, creed or color. We forfeit the right so to speak when we commit or condone such crimes as these of which I speak.”

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

1900s, Letter to Winfield T. Durbin (1903)

Men, People, Color, Freedom

“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

“Jung thought that Christianity had promised the cessation of suffering for 1,000 years, yet suffering went on unabated. At the same time, Christianity had put a lot of emphasis on spiritual development at the expense of material development.”

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

Concepts

Suffering, Time

“The extreme emphasis upon the accumulation of wealth as a symbol of success in our society militates against the completely effective control of institutionally regulated modes of acquiring a fortune.”

Robert K. Merton (1910–2003) American sociologist

Source: Social structure and anomie (1938), p. 59

Success, Wealth

“When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled (emphasis, again, not Darwin's).”

Charles Darwin book On the Origin of Species (1859)

Source: On the Origin of Species (1859), chapter XV: "Recapitulation and Conclusion", page 428 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=456&itemID=F391&viewtype=image, in the sixth (1872) edition Context: Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled (emphasis, again, not Darwin's).

“He died waiting for a doctor, in a building full of doctors. Nothing so dramatized for me the nature of a bureaucracy and its emphasis on procedures, rather than results.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Source: 2000s, A Personal Odyssey (2000), Ch. 5 : Halls of Ivy
Context: In the summer of 1959, as in the summer of 1957, I worked as a clerk-typist in the headquarters of the U. S. Public Health Service in Washington. The people I worked for were very nice and I grew to like them. One day, a man had a heart attack at around 5 PM, on the sidewalk outside the Public Health Service. He was taken inside to the nurse's room, where he was asked if he was a government employee. If he were, he would have been eligible to be taken to a medical facility there. Unfortunately, he was not, so a phone call was made to a local hospital to send an ambulance. By the time this ambulance made its way through miles of Washington rush-hour traffic, the man was dead. He died waiting for a doctor, in a building full of doctors. Nothing so dramatized for me the nature of a bureaucracy and its emphasis on procedures, rather than results.

Nature, Waiting

“First and foremost let us all resolve that in this country hereafter we shall place far less emphasis upon the question of right and much greater emphasis upon the matter of duty. A republic can't succeed and won't succeed in the tremendous international stress of the modern world unless its citizens possess that form of high-minded patriotism which consists in putting devotion to duty before the question of individual rights. This must be done in our family relations or the family will go to pieces”

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

1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)
Context: Now this is a declaration of principles. How are we in practical fashion to secure the making of these principles part of the very fiber of our national life? First and foremost let us all resolve that in this country hereafter we shall place far less emphasis upon the question of right and much greater emphasis upon the matter of duty. A republic can't succeed and won't succeed in the tremendous international stress of the modern world unless its citizens possess that form of high-minded patriotism which consists in putting devotion to duty before the question of individual rights. This must be done in our family relations or the family will go to pieces; and no better tract for family life in this country can be imagined than the little story called 'Mother', written by an American woman, Kathleen Norris, who happens to be a member of your own church.

World, Family, Question, Country

“I’ve learned so many things since then. I’ve changed in a way that involves elimination for the sake of evolution. There’s less emphasis on trying to figure things out. It’s about letting things be. I’m focusing on listening to the silence underneath everything. That’s what I try to connect with. I can listen to the silence right here, right now while we’re talking, and it feels so good. I’m in love with the silence.”

Erykah Badu (1971) American neo-soul singer

On how her viewpoint has changed since releasing the album Baduizm in “In Conversation: Erykah Badu” https://www.vulture.com/2018/01/erykah-badu-in-conversation.html in New York Magazine (Jan 2018)

Love, Making love, Way, Feeling

“Most of the people are placing too much emphasis of their happiness on price, rather than on value.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Happiness, People

“We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on "good" rather than on "time"….”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Time

“Why do we embroider everything we say

with special emphasis

when all we really need to do

is simply say what

needs to he said?

Of course

the fact is

that there is very little that needs

to be said.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: sifting through the madness for the word, the line, the way: New Poems

“What the hell are you? (Desiderius)
I'm her godfather, with a heavy emphasis on the god part. (Acheron)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Seize the Night

God, Hell, Parting

“There you have it: our lives in a nutshell. Emphasis on.
But if the above whipped your mind into a frenzy, here's something even more interesting: Fang started a blog. Not that he's self-absorbed or trendy or anything. Nope, not him.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports

“Cheeses crusty, got all musty, got damp on the stone of a peach,” I agreed. He looked blank, so I repeated it with proper emphasis. “ ChEEZ-zes crusty. Got Al -musty. Got DAMp on the StoneofapeaCH.”

Patricia Briggs book Iron Kissed

Source: Iron Kissed

“But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis.”

Nicholson Baker book The Anthologist

Source: The Anthologist

Life, Death, Thinking

“[Moishe] explained to me, with great emphasis, that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer….
And why do you pray, Moishe?' I asked him.
I pray to the God within me for the strength to ask Him the real questions.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Source: Night

God, Question

“So long as commerce specializes in business methods which take no account of human nature and social motives, so long may we expect strikes and sabotage to be the ordinary accompaniment of industry. Sabotage is essentially a protest of the human spirit against dull mechanism. And the emphasis which democracy places upon political methods tends to transform mere sporadic acts of sabotage into an organized conspiracy against society.”

Elton Mayo (1880–1949) Australian academic

Source: Democracy and freedom. 1919, p. 56

Democracy, Motivation, Business, Nature

“Grishkin is nice: her
Russian eye is underlined for emphasis;
Uncorseted, her friendly bust
Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.”

T.S. Eliot book Poems

"Whispers of Immortality"; "Grishkin" has been identified by Ezra Pound as having been "Serafima Astafieva" a Russian dancer.
Poems (1920)

“Consider some of the qualities of typical modernistic poetry: very interesting language, a great emphasis on connotation, "texture"; extreme intensity, forced emotion — violence; a good deal of obscurity; emphasis on sensation, perceptual nuances; emphasis on details, on the part rather than on the whole; experimental or novel qualities of some sort; a tendency toward external formlessness and internal disorganization — these are justified, generally, as the disorganization required to express a disorganized age, or, alternatively, as newly discovered and more complex types of organization; an extremely personal style — refine your singularities; lack of restraint — all tendencies are forced to their limits; there is a good deal of emphasis on the unconscious, dream structure, the thoroughly subjective; the poet's attitudes are usually anti-scientific, anti-common-sense, anti-public — he is, essentially, removed; poetry is primarily lyric, intensive — the few long poems are aggregations of lyric details; poems usually have, not a logical, but the more or less associational style of dramatic monologue; and so on and so on. This complex of qualities is essentially romantic; and the poetry that exhibits it represents the culminating point of romanticism.”

Randall Jarrell book Five Young American Poets

"A Note on Poetry," preface to The Rage for the Lost Penny: Five Young American Poets (New Directions, 1940) [p. 49]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Age, Dreams, Sense, Parting

“One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring. How many times, in my old days at The Nation magazine, did I hear wistful and semienvious ruminations? Where was the radical Firing Line show? Who will be our Rush Limbaugh? I used privately to hope that the emphasis, if the comrades ever got around to it, would be on the first of those and not the second. But the meetings themselves were so mind-numbing and lugubrious that I thought the danger of success on either front was infinitely slight.”

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

2004-06-21
Unfairenheit 9/11
Slate
1091-2339
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2004/06/unfairenheit_911.html
2000s, 2004

Hope, Problem, Time, Success

“There is a gap between industry and academia. Industry views academia as publication-focused: self-centered, lacking innovation, unaware of IP. Academia views industry as money-focused: driven by the bottom-line, innovating too quickly, product-focused. I would like to see more input from industry and emphasis on understanding 'innovation' to close this gap.”

Stephen F Bush

Stephen F. Bush, Director - Standardization Programs Development http://www.comsoc.org/blog/voice-new-ieee-comsoc-leadership-team Voices from the IEEE ComSoc Leadership Team

Money, Understanding

“We conceive the prominent element in present-day industrial management to be: the mental attitude that consciously applies the transference of skill to all the activities of industry. Here emphasis is placed upon the word all, for the restricted application of this principle to machines and tools has been highly developed for a long period. But its conscious application in a broad way to the production departments, and particularly to the workmen, we believe has been made during the last quarter of a century.”

Henry R. Towne (1844–1924) American engineer

Attributed to Henry R. Towne in: William Kent (1914) Investigating an Industry, p. 3-4
Comment: William Kent mentions the "The Engineer as an Economist," (1886) as the source.

Way

“In definitional terms, a process is simply a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specific output for a particular customer or market. It implies a strong emphasis on how work is done within an organization, in contrast to a product focus’s emphasis on what. A process is thus a specific ordering of work activities across time and space, with a beginning and an end, and clearly defined inputs and outputs: a structure for action.”

Thomas H. Davenport (1954) American academic

Process Innovation: Reengineering Work through Information Technology, 1993

Strong, Time

“…in our society… this has now become a propagandist system in which emphasis is put on the future… the ideology against which the young people of the 1950's and 1960's rebelled. Future preference: plan; study hard; save.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

People, Study, Future

“Known for centuries, a tenet of classical liberalism, the pacific nature of democracy has become largely forgotten or ignored in the last half-century. That democracy is inherently peaceful is now probably believed by no more than a few prominent peace researchers. In part this has been due to the intellectual defection of Western intellectuals from classical liberalism to some variant of socialism, with its emphasis on the competitive violence and bellicosity of capitalist freedoms. Many intellectuals, and in particularly European and Third World peace researchers, have come to believe that socialist equalitarianism is the answer to violence; others, particularly American liberals, believe that if the socialist are wrong, then at least democracies are no better than other political systems in promoting peace.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

“Political Systems, Violence, and War,” chap. 14 in "Approaches to Peace: An Intellectual Map", edit, W. Scott Thompson and Kenneth M. Jensen, Washington, D.C., United States Institute of Peace, 1991, pp. 347-370; and “The Politics of Cold Blood,” Society, Vol. 27 (November/December, 1989) pp. 32-40

World, Peace, Democracy, Nature

“According to a stagist conception of progressive history (which is usually blind to its implicit teleology), the work of figures like Foucault, Derrida and other cutting-edge French theorists is often intuitively affiliated with a form of profound and sophisticated critique that presumably far surpasses anything found in the socialist, Marxist or anarchist traditions. It is certainly true and merits emphasis that the Anglophone reception of French theory, as John McCumber has aptly pointed out, had important political implications as a pole of resistance to the false political neutrality, the safe technicalities of logic and language, or the direct ideological conformism operative in the McCarthy-supported traditions of Anglo-American philosophy. However, the theoretical practices of figures who turned their back on what Cornelius Castoriadis called the tradition of radical critique—meaning anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist resistance—surely contributed to the ideological drift away from transformative politics. According to the spy agency itself, post-Marxist French theory directly contributed to the CIA’s cultural program of coaxing the left toward the right, while discrediting anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, thereby creating an intellectual environment in which their imperial projects could be pursued unhindered by serious critical scrutiny from the intelligentsia.”

Gabriel Rockhill (1972) philosopher

"The CIA reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left" (2017)

History, Support, Falseness

“Miliband has acted strategically in leading the changes required in the three areas over which he has control: party organisation, the policy review, and his own leadership. In party terms, there is a far stronger emphasis on leadership development, and a greater role for organisers in strengthening and brokering the relationships necessary to re-establish Labour as a vital political force in people's daily lives. This is a neglected tradition, but the old bones are beginning to walk again. And it is not just an effective ground game: organising aligns campaigning with a better political position.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

The Guardian, What Labour Must Do Next https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/18/ed-miliband-right-to-ignore-blair-centre-transform

People, Game, Change

“It was once said by Abraham Lincoln that this Republic could not long endure half slave and half free; and the same may be said with even more truth of the black citizens of this country. They cannot remain half slave and half free. They must be one thing or the other. And this brings me to consider the alternative now presented between slavery and freedom in this country. From my outlook, I am free to affirm that I see nothing for the negro of the South but a condition of absolute freedom, or of absolute slavery. I see no half-way place for him. One or the other of these conditions is to solve the so-called negro problem. There are forces at work in both of these directions, and for the present that which aims at the re-enslavement of the negro seems to have the advantage. Let it be remembered that the labor of the negro is his only capital. Take this from him, and he dies from starvation. The present mode of obtaining his labor in the South gives the old master-class a complete mastery over him. I showed this in my last annual celebration address, and I need not go into it here. The payment of the negro by orders on stores, where the storekeeper controls price, quality, and quantity, and is subject to no competition, so that the negro must buy there and nowhere else–an arrangement by which the negro never has a dollar to lay by, and can be kept in debt to his employer, year in and year out–puts him completely at the mercy of the old master-class. He who could say to the negro, when a slave, you shall work for me or be whipped to death, can now say to him with equal emphasis, you shall work for me, or I will starve you to death… This is the plain, matter-of-fact, and unexaggerated condition of the plantation negro in the Southern States today.”

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

Speech http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-nations-problem/

Death, Truth, Way, Problem

“I find our modern emphasis on 'rights' somewhat overdone and misleading … It makes people forget that the other and more important side of rights is duty. And indeed the great historic codes of our human advance emphasised duties and not rights … The Ten Commandments in the Old Testament and … the Sermon on the Mount … all are silent on rights, all lay stress on duties.”

Jan Smuts (1870–1950) military leader, politician and statesman from South Africa

On the rights embodied in the United Nations Charter of which he drafted the Preamble, as cited in Antony Lentin, 2010, Jan Smuts – Man of courage and vision, p. 144. ISBN 978-1-86842-390-3

People, Forgetting

“He has a remarkable ear for intonation, a great sense of rhythm and what is most important, he has great style - style in my way of thinking is a matter of delivery, phrasing, pace, emphasis, and most of all presence.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Bing Crosby in Crosby, Bing. Liner notes for Attitude Dancing, United Artists Records, UAS29888, 1975. (M).

Way, Thinking, Sense

“The emphasis on sorcery reflected accusations by the authorities more than it did actual practice. Being threatened, the Church responded by virulent persecution.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 590

“(When asked about pop music) Pop music has become the largest farce in music history. It is soul-less, mechanical, and only made for the sole purpose of making the fastest dollar possible, with more emphasis on imagery than the music. I would much rather remain an independent recording artist who can dictate his own creativity and make it available to a smaller community of fans then sign with a major label under conditions of compromising my work just to sell lunch boxes and sound like every other thing out there. The only artists that have any longevity are the ones that pioneer a movement not follow a movement. The hundreds of following wannabes always get left in the dust or remain one-hit-wonders.”

Frank Klepacki (1974) American musician, video game music composer and sound director

Gameplay magazine

Music, Soul, History, Communication

“The current inclination of the company is to invest heavily … we test stuff and, when it works, we put a lot more emphasis on it. So, Google+ — all the signs are very positive, so now the whole company is ramping up on top of it.”

Eric Schmidt (1955) software engineer, businessman

With 'Millions' Of Users & Growing, Google+ Set To Power All Google Products http://searchengineland.com/with-millions-of-users-growing-google-set-to-power-all-google-products-85032 in Search Engine Land (9 July 2011).

“I accepted one branch of this philosophy, but eugenics without birth control seemed to me a house built upon sands. It could not stand against the furious winds of economic pressure which had buffeted into partial or total helplessness a tremendous proportion of the human race. The eugenists wanted to shift the birth control emphasis from less children for the poor to more children for the rich. We went back of that and sought first to stop the multiplication of the unfit. This appeared the most important and greatest step towards race betterment.”

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

Source: Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (1938), Chapter 30, "Now Is the Time for Converse", pp. 374-375.

Children, Birth, Appearance, Housing

“Because Europe was reacting against Islam it belittled the influence of Saracens and exaggerated its dependence on its Greek and Roman heritage. So today an important task for us is to correct this false emphasis and to acknowledge fully our debt to the Arab and Islamic world.”

William Montgomery Watt (1909–2006) Scottish historian

The influence of Islam on medieval Europe, Edinburgh University Press, 1973, p. 84

World, Dependency, Falseness

“Another aspect of the nineteenth century propaganda system is the increasing emphasis upon material desires.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

“When the classical worldview was applied to social science, the dominant notions turned out to be struggle for survival, the profit of the individual, with at best an assumed automatic coincidence of individual and societal good (through Adam Smith's "invisible hand"). When the systemic vision inspires the theories of social science, the values of competition are mitigated by those of cooperation, and the emphasis on individualistic work ethos is tempered with a tolerance of diversity and of experimentation with institutions and practices that foster man-man and man- nature adaptation and harmony.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: The systems view of the world (1996), p. 12.

Nature, Science

“… in economic political discussions there is a nearly infinite number of specific questions that may be asked. Besides the ones mentioned in section 3 consider for instance these: "Should we build a road between points A and B in the country?", "Should we promote investments that will give employment to many people, or should we on the contrary promote such investment which will save labour?"… "Should we put more emphasis on things that have up to now not been included in the statistical concept of the gross national product? For instance, should we try to avoid air-pollution and all the kinds of intoxications that may be caused by refuse and waste (a problem that must be studied in its totality as a problem of circulation of matter in society, much in the same way as we study interindustry relations in an input-output table)?“, “Should we assess economic value to an undisturbed nature?””

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

etc.
Source: 1970s and later, From Utopian Theory to Practical Applications, 1970, p. 29

People, Way, Question, Nature

“There is a widespread view that the war against jihadism and totalitarianism involves only differences of emphasis. In other words, one might object to the intervention in Iraq on the grounds that it drew resources away from Afghanistan - you know the argument. It's important to understand that this apparent agreement does not cover or include everybody. A very large element of the Left and of the isolationist Right is openly sympathetic to the other side in this war, and wants it to win. This was made very plain by the leadership of the "anti-war" movement, and also by Michael Moore when he shamefully compared the Iraqi fascist "insurgency" to the American Founding Fathers. To many of these people, any "anti-globalization" movement is better than none. With the Right-wingers it's easier to diagnose: they are still Lindberghians in essence and they think war is a Jewish-sponsored racket. With the Left, which is supposed to care about secularism and humanism, it's a bit harder to explain an alliance with woman-stoning, gay-burning, Jew-hating medieval theocrats. However, it can be done, once you assume that American imperialism is the main enemy. Even for those who won't go quite that far, the admission that the US Marine Corps might be doing the right thing is a little further than they are prepared to go - because what would then be left of their opposition credentials, which are so dear to them?”

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

"Love, Poverty and War" http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=C78DC231-4599-4745-9CA5-A398398916A0, FrontPageMagazine.com (2004-12-29). 2000s, 2004

Hate, War, People, Understanding

“The final result will be that the American people will ultimately prefer communities. They will cop out or opt out of the system. Today everything is a bureaucratic structure, and brainwashed people who are not personalities are trained to fit into this bureaucratic structure and say it is a great life--although I would assume that many on their death beds must feel otherwise. The process of copping out will take a long time, but notice: we are already copping out of military service on a wholesale basis; we are already copping out of voting on a large scale basis. …People are also copping out by refusing to pay any attention to newspapers or to what’s going on in the world, and by increasing emphasis on the growth of localism, what is happening in their own neighborhoods.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Life, Death, People, World

“It is the older generation who foster in a child an early and most unnecessary sense of guilt, of sinfulness and of wrongdoing. So much emphasis is laid upon petty little things that are not really wrong, but are annoying to the parent or teacher, that a true sense of wrong (which is the recognition of failure to preserve right relations with the group) gets overlaid and is not recognised for what it is.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: Education in the New Age (1954), p. 75

Failure, Parent, Sense, Teachers

“In teaching there can be too much emphasis on certainty and a proper appreciation of uncertainty is to be encouraged.”

Dennis Lindley (1923–2013) British statistician

6. Bayes Rule. p. 81.
Understanding Uncertainty (2006)

“It is likely that the emphasis upon the metaphysical and epistemological implications of the sociology of knowledge can be traced, in part, to the fact that the first proponents of this discipline stemmed largely from philosophical rather than scientific circles. The burden of further research is to turn from this welter of conflicting opinion to empirical investigations which may establish in adequate detail the uniformities pertaining to the appearance, acceptance and diffusion, or rejection and repression, development and consequences of knowledge and ideas.”

Robert K. Merton (1910–2003) American sociologist

Source: The Sociology of Knowledge, (1937), p. 503

Idea, Knowledge, Appearance, Parting

“We live in an age which eschews sentimentality as if it were a good deal more than the devil. (Actually, of course, a writer may be just as sentimental in laying undue emphasis on sexual crimes as on dying mothers: sentimental, like scientific, is an adjective that relates to method, not to matter.)”

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

"Ten Books," The Southern Review (Autumn 1935) [p. 8]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Age

“Yes, well I noticed that in your last issues' interviews with those Eastern teachers ["From light to Light," Jan. 1995], emptiness was mentioned a lot. I find that a wrong word. Because in God realisation and being one with God the Most High, the unspeakable one, there's no sense whatsoever of ever having done anything yourself. It is all done for you. It's by grace. And so it's not being empty, it's being emptied. There's a different emphasis or a different connotation to that.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Response to the question "You write, "Enlightenment is to be emptied (not empty) of feelings and thus at one with the purest sensation of divine being." What's the distinction here between being "emptied" and being "empty" of feelings?"
Love is not a feeling ~ The Interview (1995)

God, Sense, Light, Teachers

“All of my films constitute a reaction against mainstream cinema. Every serious form of art sees the receiver as a partner in the undertaking. In fact, that's one of the preconditions of humanistic thought. In cinema, this fact, which should be self-evident, has been overlooked and replaced by an emphasis on the commercial aspects of the medium.”

Michael Haneke (1942) Austrian film director and screenwriter

In response to the question, "You're well known for not wanting to impose interpretations on your films. Is this because you believe that audiences have become accustomed to being spoon-fed and told what to think?"
as interviewed by Richard Porton, "Collective Guilt and Individual Responsibility: An Interview with Michael Haneke," Cineaste, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Winter 2005), pp. 50-51

Art

“In a world in which training and functions of individuals and groups are growing more and more specialized the number of ways to accomplish any particular result increasing. Different design, different facilities, different equipment, different methods, and different organizational means are available to meet the needs of man. It is highly desirable that we have trained persons look at these varied possibilities to compare their effectiveness, and to point the way to sound engineering decisions. Systems Engineering Methods is directed towards the development of a broad systems engineering approach to help such people improve their decision-making capability. Although the emphasis is on engineering, the systems approach can also has validity for many other areas in which emphasis may be social, economic, or political.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. vii

People, World, Way, Decision

“Some of my friends good-humoredly – and some a little bit severely – have called me a 'mystic.' Well I'd like to say this about any w:mysticism I may suppose to have. If an arch-angel from heaven were to come, and were to start giving me, telling me, teaching me, and giving me instruction, I'd ask him for the text. I'd say, 'Where's it say that in the Bible? I want to know.' And I would insist that it was according to the scriptures, because I do not believe in any extra-scriptural teachings, nor any anti-scriptural teachings, or any sub-scriptural teachings. I think we ought to put the emphasis where God puts it, and continue to put it there, and to expound the scriptures, and stay by the scriptures. I wouldn't – no matter if I saw a light above the light of the sun, I'd keep my mouth shut about it 'til I'd checked with Daniel and Revelation and the rest of the scriptures to see if it had any basis in truth. And if it didn't, I'd think I'd just eaten something I shouldn't, and I wouldn't say anything about it. Because I don't believe in anything that is unscriptural or that is anti-scripture.”

Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897–1963) American missionary

What Difference Does the Holy Spirit Make?

God, Truth, Angels, Thinking

“The existing literature usually stresses the capacity of organizations to learn about and adapt to uncertain, changing environments. We think this emphasis is misplaced. The most important issues about the applicability of evolutionary-ecological theories to organizations concern the timing of changes. Learning and adjusting structure enhance the chance of survival only if the speed of response is commensurate with the temporal patterns of relevant environments.”

Michael T. Hannan (1943) US-American sociologist of Stanford University

Source: Organizational ecology, 1989, p. 70; About structural inertia.

Literature, Thinking, Learning, Change

“It normally happens that if you put two words together, or two syllables together, one of them will attract more weight, more emphasis, than the other. In other words, most so-called spondees can be read as either iambs or trochees.”

James Fenton (1949) poet

Source: An Introduction to English Poetry (2002), Ch. 5: The Iambic Pentameter (p. 28)

Reading

“Since I shall be indicating my disagreement with some of the points made by Professor Israel Kirzner, let me stress that I am in complete sympathy with his point of departure, namely, the emphasis on the dispersion of information among economic decision-making units (called by him, "Hayek's knowledge problem") and the consequent problem of transmission of information among those units.
Much of my own research work since the 1950s has been focused on issues in welfare economics viewed from an informational perspective. The ideas of Hayek (whose classes at the London School of Economics I attended during the academic year 1938-39) have played a major role in influencing my thinking and have been so acknowledged.”

Leonid Hurwicz (1917–2008) Russian-American economist and mathematician

Leonid Hurwicz, in "Economic Planning and the Knowledge Problem" : A Comment" in Cato Journal Vol. 4, (Fall 1984), p. 419

School, Idea, Departure, Knowledge

“The distinction between central and peripheral claims is applicable to many aspects of human sexuality. Consider, for instance, the emotion of jealousy. Evolutionary psychologists place a strong emphasis on sex differences in this domain. The standard claim is that men are more worried by a partner’s sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity, whereas women are more worried by a partner’s emotional infidelity… [However] the overwhelming trend is that most men and most women are extremely upset by both sexual and emotional infidelity. This suggests that the central EP claim regarding jealousy should be “Human beings evolved to experience jealousy in romantic relationships” rather than “Men and women evolved different patterns of jealousy.” The latter statement is true but should be considered a qualification to the former: a peripheral rather than a central claim. To stress the sex difference alone would be like observing that male elephants are bigger than females while steadfastly neglecting to mention that all adult elephants are large compared to most terrestrial animals. It would almost certainly foster an inaccurate view.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

(pp. 266-267)
The Ape that Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2013)

Women, Men, Jealousy, Sex

“The so-called natural sentiments of the average man are mostly the inherited prejudices of the once suppressed classes. The emphasis upon natural goodness is, psychologically speaking, unwillingness to submit such prejudices to wholesome self-criticism. Hence the democratic government tends to support each crowd in its delusion of infallibility. The crowd rationalizes its will to rule in terms of narrow and parochial ideas of righteousness and seeks to force conformity to such ideas upon all. The imagined vindication of the common man's notions of goodness is regarded as the ultimate triumph of righteousness. Hence democracy has always manifested a certain crusading spirit, and the democratic Utopia is envisaged as a sort of Roman peace with "righteousness" established by force rather than assent.”

Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941)

Source: The Conflict of the Individual and the Mass in the Modern World (1932), p. 22

Peace, Democracy, Imagination, Idea

“Although Black feminism and some currents of postmodernist theory share some common assumptions and common language, these are overshadowed by key differences that make them two distinct approaches to combatting oppression. Thus the concept of intersectionality has two different political foundations--one informed primarily by Black feminism and the other by postmodernism. More recent evolution of the post-structuralist approach to identity politics and intersectionality, which has a strong influence over today's generation of activists, places an enormous emphasis on changing individual behavior as the most effective way to combat oppression. This has given rise to the idea of individuals "calling out" interpersonal acts of perceived oppression as a crucial political act. More generally, intersectionality in postmodern terms, even among those who have no idea what postmodernism is.”

Sharon Smith (writer) (1956) American historian

A Marxist Case For Intersectionality (2017)

Way, Behavior, Idea, Strong

“The general misunderstanding of a work of art is often due to the fact that the key to its spiritual content and technical means is missed. Unless the observer is trained to a certain degree in the artistic idiom, he is apt to search for things which have little to do with the aesthetic content of a picture. He is likely to look for pure representational values when the emphasis is really upon music-like relationships.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Painting and Culture' p. 56
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Art, Music, Search, Training

“Socrates woke to the ideal of dispassionate intelligence, Jesus to the ideal of passionate yet self-oblivious worship. Socrates urged intellectual integrity, Jesus integrity of will. Each, of course, though starting with a different emphasis, involved the other.
Unfortunately both these ideals demanded of the human brain a degree of vitality and coherence of which the nervous system of the First Men was never really capable.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter I: Balkan Europe; Section 1, “The European War and After” (p. 17)

Men, Intelligence, Passion

“That is no easy thing for a General to say in public, and yet I have now said it publicly in Australia many times. It involves Liz Broderick, and it marked a watershed for me. I invariably recount it when I am asked to explain why I have placed so much emphasis on gender issues within the Army and why I committed a large part of my effort as Chief of the Australian Army to championing change.”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

Effort, Change, Time, Parting

“I think there's too much emphasis on beauty. I find it so limiting. I think just be yourself. Be who you are.”

Molly Shannon (1964) American actress

Interview on Cranky Critic http://www.crankycritic.com/qa/mollyshannon.html

Beauty, Thinking

“Use of the term visualization in the cartographic literature can be traced back at least four decades (Philbrick, 1953). It was the 1987 publication of a report by the U. S. National Science Foundation, however, that established a new meaning for this term in the context of scientific research (McCormick et al., 1987). The report, produced by a committee containing no cartographers, emphasized the role of computer display technology in prompting mental visualization - and subsequent insight. Scientific visualization has, thus, been defined as the use of sophisticated computing technology to create visual displays, the goal of which is to facilitate thinking and problem solving. Emphasis is not on storing knowledge but on knowledge construction.”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

Source: Exploratory cartographic visualization: advancing the agenda (1997), p. 2

Literature, Knowledge, Problem, Thinking

“It is irrelevant in that ethnies arc constituted, not by lines of physical descent, but by the sense of continuity, shared memory and collective destiny, i. e. by lines of cultural affinity embodied in distinctive myths, memories, symbols and values retained by a given cultural unit of population. In that sense much has been retained, and revived, from the extant heritage of ancient Greece. For, even at the time of Slavic migrations, in Ionia and especially in Constantinople, there was a growing emphasis on the Greek language, on Greek philosophy and literature, and on classical models of thought and scholarship. Such a ‘Greek revival’ was to surface again in the tenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as subsequently, providing a powerful impetus to the sense of cultural affinity with ancient Greece and its classical heritage. This is not to deny for one moment either the enormous cultural changes undergone by the Greeks despite a surviving sense of common ethnicity or the cultural influence of surrounding peoples and civilizations over two thousand years. At the same time in terms of script and language, certain values, a particular environment and its nostalgia, continuous social interactions and a sense of religious and cultural difference, even exclusion, a sense of Greek identity and common sentiments of ethnicity can be said to have persisted”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: National Identity (1991), p. 30: About Ethnic Change, Dissolution and Survival

People, Literature, Sense, Nostalgia

“The fundamentalist position on biblical interpretation, with its emphasis on the explicit, complete, final, and authoritarian nature of Scripture, is a very late, minority view quite out of step with the Western tradition.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 10, Western Civilization, p. 342

Nature

“vagueness is a 'romantic' value.... an emphasis on geometry is an emphasis on the 'known', on order and knowledge.”

Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) American painter

Quote of Ad Reinhardt in: Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 107
after 1967 - posthumous

Knowledge

“The scarcity of truth is atoned for by the abundance of affidavits; if a rumor be impugned, its veracity is easily strengthened by additional emphasis of affirmation, until at last "everybody says so," and then it is undeniable.”

Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804–1845) British author and journalist

"That what Everybody Says must be True".
Sketches from Life (1846)

Truth

“Today the poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our consciences by being branded as inferior or incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty.
The problem indicates that our emphasis must be twofold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)

People, Hope, Problem

“The economic problems of society are important. On the whole, we are meeting them fairly well. They are so personal and so pressing that they never fail to receive constant attention. But they are only a part. We need to put a proper emphasis on the other problems of society. We need to consider what attitude of the public mind it is necessary to cultivate in order that a mixed population like our own may dwell together more harmoniously and the family of nations reach a better state of understanding. You who have been in the service know how absolutely necessary it is in a military organization that the individual subordinate some part of his personality for the general good. That is the one great lesson which results from the training of a soldier. Whoever has been taught that lesson in camp and field is thereafter the better equipped to appreciate that it is equally applicable in other departments of life. It is necessary in the home, in industry and commerce, in scientific and intellectual development. At the foundation of every strong and mature character we find this trait which is best described as being subject to discipline. The essence of it is toleration. It is toleration in the broadest and most inclusive sense, a liberality of mind, which gives to the opinions and judgments of others the same generous consideration that it asks for its own, and which is moved by the spirit of the philosopher who declared that 'To know all is to forgive all.”

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

It may not be given to infinite beings to attain that ideal, but it is none the less one toward which we should strive.
1920s, Toleration and Liberalism (1925)

Life, Family, Home, Forgiveness

“It is worthy of emphasis that the United Nations exists not merely to preserve the peace but also to make change - even radical change - possible without violent upheaval. The United Nations has no vested interest in the status quo. It seeks a more secure world, a better world, a world of progress for all peoples. In the dynamic world society which is the objective of the United Nations, all peoples must have equality and equal rights. The rights of those who at any given time may be in the minority - whether for reasons of race, religion, or ideology - are as important as those of the majority, and the minorities must enjoy the same respect and protection. The United Nations does not seek a world cut after a single pattern, nor does it consider this desirable. The United Nations seeks only unity, not uniformity, out of the world's diversity.”

Ralph Bunche (1904–1971) American diplomat

Some Reflections on Peace in Our Time (1950)

People, World, Peace, Religion

“My obsession was the preservation of the Gaelic language so that there would be people left in the world who could hear its great songs as they really were. No poetry could be translated, still less could song poetry, and the great language of Gaelic song made me fanatical about the beauty of the Gaelic language and its astonishing ability to indicate shades and positions of emphasis with natural inversions and the use of particles.”

Sorley MacLean (1911–1996) Scottish poet

Sorley MacLean, 1982, quoted in Krause, Corinna. Eadar Dà Chànan: Self-Translation, the Bilingual Edition and Modern Scottish Gaelic Poetry https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/3453/Krause2007.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y Letters and interviews

People, World, Beauty, Nature

“The essential difference between est and Scientology is two-fold. The first has to do with Scientology’s emphasis on survival and its idea that the purpose of life is survival. est sees the purpose of life as wholeness or completion – truth – not survival…The other main difference between est and Scientology lies in the treatment of knowing. Ron Hubbard seems to have no difficulty in codifying the truth and in urging people to believe it. But I suspect all codifications, particularly my own. In presenting my own ideas, I emphasize their epistemological context. I hold them as pointers to the truth, not as the truth itself. I don’t think anyone ought to believe the ideas that we use in est. The est philosophy is not a belief system and most certainly ought not to be believed. In any case, even the truth, when believed, is a lie. You must experience the truth, not believe it.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

Interview with William Warren Bartley, cited in — [Bartley, William Warren, w:William Warren Bartley, Werner Erhard: the Transformation of a Man: the Founding of est, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1978, New York, 157, 0-517-53502-5]

Life, People, Truth, Lie

“From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the sub-human, surrender to the forces of evil.”

E. F. Schumacher book A Guide for the Perplexed

A Guide for the Perplexed

People, Truth, Evil

“Thoughtful conservatives are not unattracted to holistic providers' emphasis on self-care and personal responsibility. Thoughtful liberals and socialists are not unattracted to holistic providers' emphasis on environmental factors in disease. But neither left nor right has ever acknowledged that the holistic health movement carries within it the seeds of a whole new approach to a national health care program for this country, with its own coherent ideas about finance, delivery, research and education.”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

Source: New Options for America (1991), Chapter 13, "National Holistic Health Care Program: Too Sensible?," p. 100.

Health, Education, Disease, Idea

“[Boulding grasps the significance of sociobiology's emphasis on biogenetics] that there are biogenetic factors in learning capacity and potential can hardly be denied… [yet] biogenetically imposed limits to human learning… seem to be much more remote… than are the limitations imposed by the biogenetic structure.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 21 as cited in: W.R. Brown and M.J. Schaefermeyer (1980) "Progress in communication as a social science". In: Dan Nimmo eds. Communication Yearbook 4. p. 38

Learning

“The emphasis on flora, fauna, and beings makes the exhibit a most intriguing and artistic one for it brings forth those strange memories and psychic feelings that mystify and fascinate all of us.”

William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter

his remark in 1957
as cited in Abstract Expressionism, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 34
1950s

Feeling, Memory

“Christianity, with its strong emphasis on unity under one God (an emphasis that it shares with Islam), can seem an almost natural ally of empire—unless, of course, the prophetic-critical dimension of the biblical tradition, which the Jesus of the synoptics certainly represented, is allowed a hearing. But as the history of Christology in the West easily demonstrates, after the establishment of Christianity, the prophetic office of the Christ, based not only on Jesus’ teaching but (even more so) on his suffering at the hands of power, was definitely subdued in favor of his priestly and kingly offices. Triumphant peoples, successful peoples, possessing peoples—empires!—do not want crucified criminals as their chief cultic symbol, especially not when they themselves are the crucifiers … as they regularly are!”

Douglas John Hall (1928) Canadian theologian

"Where in the World Are We?" (2006)

God, People, History, Nature

“Cicero bent Greek ideas to his vision of the idealized Roman Republic, and his understanding of the mores—the morality and social attachments—of the gentlemanly statesmen who would hold power in a just republic. Readers familiar with Machiavelli’s Prince will hear curious echoes of that work in Cicero’s advice; curious because the pieties of Cicero’s advice to the would-be statesman were satirized by Machiavelli sixteen hundred years later. If his philosophy was Greek and eclectic, Cicero owed his constitutional theory to Polybius; he was born soon after Polybius died, and read his history. And Cicero greatly admired Polybius’s friend and employer Scipio the Younger. There are obvious differences of tone. Polybius celebrated Rome’s achievement of equipoise, while Cicero lamented the ruin of the republic. Cicero’s account of republican politics veers between a “constitutional” emphasis on the way that good institutions allow a state to function by recruiting men of good but not superhuman character, and a “heroic” emphasis on the role of truly great men in reconstituting the state when it has come to ruin. Cicero’s vanity was so notorious that everyone knew he had himself in mind as this hero—had he not saved the republic before when he quelled the conspiracy of Catiline?”

Alan Ryan (1940) British philosopher

On Politics: A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present (2012), Ch. 4 : Roman Insights: Polybius and Cicero

Men, Way, History, Idea

“Ever since the last great conflict the world has been putting a renewed emphasis, not on preparation to succeed in war, but on an attempt by preventing war to succeed in peace. This movement has the full and complete approbation of the American Government and the American people. While we have been unwilling to interfere in the political relationship of other countries and have consistently refrained from intervening except when our help has been sought and we have felt that it could be effectively given, we have signified our willingness to become associated with other nations in a practical plan for promoting international justice through the World Court. Such a tribunal furnishes a method of the adjustment of international differences in accordance with our treaty rights and under the generally accepted rules of international law. When questions arise which all parties agree ought to be adjudicated but which do not yield to the ordinary methods of diplomacy, here is a forum to which the parties may voluntarily repair in the consciousness that their dignity suffers no diminution and that their cause will be determined impartially, according to the law and the evidence. That is a sensible, direct, efficient, and practical method of adjusting differences which can not fail to appeal to the intelligence of the American people.”

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

1920s, Ways to Peace (1926)

War, People, World, Peace

“Many senior policemen put greater emphasis on maintaining 'order' than on upholding the law. In practice that meant failing to uphold the rights of individuals against the rule of the mob.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

The Path To Power (1995)

Law

“Let me lay emphasis on the opportunity now presented in the United States for observing and, if we are wise, aiding in what I think it fair to say is the grandest opportunity ever presented of developing the finest race the world has ever known out of the vast mingling of races brought here by immigration.”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

p, 125
The Training of the Human Plant (1907)

World, Thinking

“Kuhn cannot take seriously that “there is some one full, objective, true account of nature.” Does this mean that he does not take truth seriously? Not at all. […]
Kuhn did reject a simple “correspondence theory” which says true statements correspond to facts about the world. […]
In the wave of skepticism that swept American scholarship at the end of the twentieth century, many influential intellectuals took Kuhn as an ally in their denials of truth as a virtue. I mean the thinkers of the sort that cannot write down or utter the word true except by literally or figuratively putting quotation marks around it—to indicate how they shudder at the very thought of so harmful a notion. Many reflective scientists, who admire much of what Kuhn says about the sciences, believe he encouraged deniers.
It is true that Structure gave enormous impetus to sociological studies of science. Some of that work, with its emphasis on the idea that facts are “socially constructed” and apparent participation in the denial of “truth,” is exactly what conservative scientists protest against. Kuhn made plain that he himself detested that development of his work…”

Ian Hacking (1936) Canadian philosopher

Ian Hacking (2012), Introductory Essay, in 50th anniversary edition of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolution

Truth, World, Idea, Nature

“I propose to create an heroic, monumental style of composition simple enough to inspire all people, completely free from fads, artificial mannerisms and false sophistications, direct, forceful, sincere, always original but never unnatural. Music must be freed from decadence and stagnation. There has been too much emphasis on small things while the great truths have been overlooked. The superficial must be dispensed with. Music must become virile to express big things. It is not my purpose to supply a few pseudo intellectual musicians and critics with more food for brilliant argumentation, but rather to inspire all mankind with new heroism and spiritual nobility. This may appear to be sentimental and impossible to some, but it must be remembered that Palestrina, Handel, and Beethoven would not consider it either sentimental or impossible. In fact, the worthiest creative art has been motivated consciously or unconsciously by the desire for the regeneration of mankind.”

Alan Hovhaness (1911–2000) Armenian-American composer

Alan Hovhaness, 1940 Guggenheim Application http://www.hovhaness.com/hovhaness-biography.html

People, Truth, Food, Art

“Is it possible to understand what God's love means for the oppressed without making wrath an essential ingredient of that love? What could love possibly mean in a racist society except the righteous condemnation of everything racist? Most theological treatments of God's love fail to place the proper emphasis on God's wrath, suggesting that love is completely self-giving without any demand for obedience.”

James H. Cone (1938–2018) American theologian

Source: A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), p. 73

Love, God, Understanding

“The first part of "The Double Axe" was written during the war and finished a year before the war ended, and it bears the scars; but the poem is not primarily concerned with that grim folly. Its burden, as of some previous work of mine, is to present a philosophical attitude, which might be called Inhumanism, a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person. This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist, though two or three people have said so and may again. It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times; it has objective truth and human value. It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.”

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) American poet

Preface to The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948)

Love, Hate, War, People

“A society that put more emphasis on birth than ability was likely to breed ability out of its ruling class.”

Damon Knight book A for Anything

Source: A for Anything (1959), Chapter 19 (p. 190)

Birth

“At this point water-tight compartments of university specialization and theories founded on the selected isolation of facts easily break down. Specialized thinking is rarely a sufficient foundation for concrete decisions involving action. The social scientist cannot often form sound administrative judgments solely on the basis of elements which he has picked out simply because they relate directly to his particular specialty. The present emphasis on artificial subdivisions of knowledge and on specialized thinking and teaching in universities, technical schools, and colleges and the relative neglect of administrative problems involving action have a dangerously narrowing effect on graduates of these institutions. While we may and frequently do arouse the intellectual interest of students in a considerable variety of subjects intimately related to the civilization of which they are a part, we pay almost no attention to the web of cross ties among these subjects.”

Wallace Brett Donham (1877–1954) American academic

Source: "Training for Leadership in a Democracy", 1936, p. 65-70, as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 663

School, Knowledge, Problem, Thinking

“Of the radical and iconoclastic ideals preached in the early years of the revolution, all were discarded except those which helped the state to exert absolute control over the individual. Hence the idea of collective education and reduction of parental authority to the minimum continued to hold sway, but an end was put to "progressive" educational methods designed to promote initiative and independence. Strict discipline became once more the rule, and in this respect Soviet schools differed from Tsarist ones only in the immensely increased emphasis on indoctrination. In due course, puritanical sexual ethics were restored to favour.”

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

pg. 53
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume III: The Breakdown

Education, School, Idea, Parent

“The one function that T. V. news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if it were.”

David Brinkley (1920–2003) American journalist

as cited in One Man's America (2008), George F. Will, Random House, p. 118 (Chapter 15, Lingerie and Duct Tape) : ISBN 0307407861 9780307407863

“Why have some people produced Confucian and Anglo-Protestant ethics—with their mutual emphasis on graft and delayed gratification—while others have midwived Islamic and animistic values, emphasizing conformity, consensus, and control? Why have certain patterns of thought and action come to typify certain people in the first place? Such an investigation political correctness prohibits.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa
2010s, Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011)

People

“The earlier political thinkers used the term "organization" in the broadest sense of the term, that is, with reference to the widest aspects of the patterns of political forces in a given state. Thus a political society might be organized as a monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy, as a city-state, feudal state, a national state, imperial state, or a world state. Emphasis was also placed on the organs of organization. These came to be standardized in the course of time under the categories of legislative, executive, and judicial organs, the combination of which in some form of balance was held to be the indispensable basis of sound organization.”

Charles Edward Merriam (1874–1953) American political scientist

170 ; as cited in Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 220-1
Systematic Politics, 1943

World, Democracy, Sense, Time

“[Mussolini] was not a theoretician but a tactician, whose intellectual eclecticism, a blend of anarchism and Marxism, as well as his emphasis on violence, resembled the ideology of the Russian Socialists-Revolutionaries.”

Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 245

“Until recently, ecologists were content to describe how nature “looks” (sometimes by means of fantastic terms!) and to speculate on what she might have looked like in the past or may look like in the future. Now, an equal emphasis is being placed on what nature ‘does’, and rightly so, because the changing face of nature can never be understood unless her metabolism is also studied. This change in approach brings the small organisms into perspective with the large, and encourages the use of experimental methods to supplement the analytic. It is evident that so long as a purely descriptive viewpoint is maintained, there is very little in common between such structurally diverse organisms as sperma-tophytes, vertebrates and bacteria. In real life, however, all these are intimately linked functionally in ecological systems, according to well-defined laws. Thus the only kind of general ecology is that which I call a ‘functional ecology’, and this kind is of the greatest interest to all students of the subject, regardless of present or future specialisations.”

Eugene P. Odum (1913–2002) mathematician, ecologist, natural philosopher, and systems ecologist

Eugene Odum (1957) Fundamentals of Ecology. p. ix, cited in: Edward Goldsmith (1970-73/2013) Towards a Unified Science http://www.edwardgoldsmith.org/598/

Life, Law, Nature, Study