Quotes about end
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“Terrorism' is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence - our violence - which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale. Terror, terror, terror, terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news agency report, the soap-opera of the Devil, served up on prime-time or distilled in wearyingly dull and mendacious form by the right-wing 'commentators' of the America east coast or the Jerusalem Post or the intellectuals of Europe. Strike against Terror. Victory over Terror. War on Terror. Everlasting War on Terror. Rarely in history have soldiers and journalists and presidents and kings aligned themselves in such thoughtless, unquestioning ranks. In August 1914, the soldiers thought they would be home by Christmas. Today, we are fighting for ever. The war is eternal. The enemy is eternal, his face changing on our screens. Once he lived in Cairo and sported a moustache and nationalised the Suez Canal. Then he lived in Tripoli and wore a ridiculous military uniform and helped the IRA and bombed American bars in Berlin. Then he wore a Muslim Imam's gown and ate yoghurt in Tehran and planned Islamic revolution. Then he wore a white gown and lived in a cave in Afghanistan and then he wore another silly moustache and resided in a series of palaces around Baghdad. Terror, terror, terror. Finally, he wore a kuffiah headdress and outdated Soviet-style military fatigues, his name was Yassir Arafat, and he was the master of world terror and then a super-statesman and then again, a master of terror, linked by Israeli enemies to the terror-Meister of them all, the one who lived in the Afghan cave.”

Robert Fisk (1946) English writer and journalist

The Great War for Civilization (2005)

Hate, War, World, Home

“My grandfather once said, having watched me one entire afternoon, prancing and leaping and cavorting, "this child will either end up on stage or in jail." Fortunately, I took the easy route.”

Mary Tyler Moore (1936–2017) American actress, television producer

"Mary Tyler Moore" Interview by Diane Werts at Archive of American Television (23 October 1997) http://www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/mary-tyler-moore

“here was Kenilworth now heading the new department concerned with Personnel [-] one of those blank administrative constructs which offered no openings into the world of policy. A dead end. [-] he would soon develop the negative powers of obstruction which always derive from a sense of failure.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

Source: The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Mountolive (1958), IV

World, Failure, Sense, Dead

“Today, we celebrate with our Filipino Muslim brothers and sisters the end of their month-long fast.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Escudero, F. [Francis]. (2015, July 17). Retrieved from Official Facebook Page of Francis Escudero https://www.facebook.com/senchizescudero/posts/10153429805435610/ 2015, Facebook

Sister

“I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.”

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

I.
2010s, 2011, Mortality (2012)

Love, Light, Time

“The earth has become one big village, with telephones laid on from one end to the other, and air transport, both speedy and safe.”

Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) writer and painter

America and Cosmic Man (New York: Doubleday, [1948] 1949) p. 21.

“We know that the traditional African society was founded on principles of egalitarianism. In its actual workings, however, it had various shortcomings. Its humanist impulse, nevertheless, is something that continues to urge us towards our all-African socialist reconstruction. We postulate each man to be an end in himself, not merely a means; and we accept the necessity of guaranteeing each man equal opportunities for his development. The implications of this for socio-political practice have to be worked out scientifically, and the necessary social and economic policies pursued with resolution. Any meaningful humanism must begin from egalitarianism and must lead to objectively chosen policies for safeguarding and sustaining egalitarianism. Hence, socialism. Hence, also, scientific socialism.”

Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) Pan Africanist and First Prime Minister and President of Ghana

African Socialism Revisited http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/nkrumah/1967/african-socialism-revisited.htm, 1967.

“Certainly, the contradiction of tensions and divisions between the followers of different religious traditions, sadly, cannot be denied. However, is it not also the case that often it is the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends, that is the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence in society?”

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

" Meeting with Muslim religious leaders, members of the diplomatic corps and rectors of universities in Jordan http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2009/may/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20090509_capi-musulmani_en.html" (9 May 2009) 2009

Religion, Time

“I heard that these whites are coming to march again, they will announce a new date. I’m thinking national chair we must organise a counter-march and meet them half way. We cannot allow white people to do as they wish in this country, like they’re doing in Palestine. Let them announce the day they’re coming back. Let us meet them toe to toe, let us teach them who owns South Africa. We cannot be harassed in our own country during apartheid and be harassed in our own country during a democratic dispensation by a nonsense Afrikaner community. It must come to an end, let us meet them toe to toe.”

Julius Malema (1981) South African political activist

In response to the Black Monday protests, while addressing EFF members on 2 November 2017 outside the Israeli Embassy, Pretoria, How Malema plans to teach ‘nonsense’ Afrikaner community who really owns SA https://citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/1714102/watch-how-malema-plans-to-teach-nonsense-afrikaner-community-who-really-owns-sa/, Citizen reporter (2 November 2017)

People, Way, Communication, Thinking

“If we engraft the current meaning of the word "economy" (the avoiding of waste) upon its etymological meaning (the administration of a household), we shall arrive at "the administration of the affairs and resources of a household in such a manner as to avoid waste and secure efficiency" as our conception of "Economy." "Political" Economy would, by analogy, indicate the administration, in the like manner, of the affairs and resources of a State, regarded as an extended household or community, and regulated by a central authority; and the study of Political Economy would be the study of the principles on which the resources of a community should be so regulated and administered as to secure the communal ends without waste.”

Philip Wicksteed book The Common Sense of Political Economy

Page 14.
The Common Sense of Political Economy (1910), Systematic and Constructive (Book I), "Introductory: Administration of Resources and Choice Between Alternatives. Price and the Relative Scale" (ch. 1)

Communication, Study

“Here we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was. Here you can be something. Here's a place to build a home. It isn't the land-there's always more land. it's the idea that we all have value, you and me, we're worth something more than the dirt. I never saw dirt I'd die for, but I'm not asking you to come join us and fight for dirt. What we're all fighting for, in the end, is each other.”

Michael Shaara book The Killer Angels

Part I, CH 2: Chamberlain, p. 32
The Killer Angels (1974)

Home, Idea, Fight

“There was never a more loyal woman in the South after we were forced by our political leaders to go to battle to defend our rights in ownership of African slaves, but they called it "States' Rights," and all I owned was invested in slaves and my people were loyal and I stood by them to the end. Like General Lee I could not fight against my kindred in a struggle that meant life or death to them. Nevertheless I am now too near the borderland of eternity to withhold my matured conscientious and honest opinion. If there had been no slaves there would have been no war. To fight for the perpetuation of domestic slavery was a mistake. The time had come in the United States to wipe out this evil. The South had to suffer, and even when our preachers were leading in prayer for victory, during the war, and black-robed mothers and wives were weeping for their dead ones, who perished on the field of battle, I had questions in my own mind as to what would be the end of it.”

Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930) American politician

From Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth Felton, p. 86 http://www.google.com/books?id=gHsLIvQ_BN0C&dq=rebecca+latimer+felton&printsec=frontcover&source=in#PPA86,M1.

Life, Death, War, People

“I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council—a Labour council—hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I'm telling you - and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and with people's services. The people will not abide posturing.”

Neil Kinnock (1942) British politician

Source: Speech to the Labour Party Conference in Bournemouth (1 October 1985).

People

“As Adam Smith once said, "There is much ruin in a nation". Our basic structure of values and the interwoven network of free institutions will withstand much. I believe that we shall be able to preserve and extend freedom despite the size of the military programs and despite the economic powers already concentrated in Washington. But we shall be able to do so only if we awake to the threat that we face, only if we persuade our fellowmen that free institutions offer a surer, if perhaps at times a slower, route to the ends they seek than the coercive power of the state. The glimmerings of change that are already apparent in the intellectual climate are a hopeful augury.”

Milton Friedman book Capitalism and Freedom

Source: Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Ch. 13 Conclusion

Hope, Freedom, Change, Time

“It's time that six decades of separation (between Taiwan and Mainland China) and previous generations' confrontation be ended. Let the current and the future generations choose common development and jointly create a situation of mutual benefits.”

Eric Chu (1961) Taiwanese politician

Eric Chu (2009) cited in " Senior official urges "most broad-based" cross-Straits exchanges http://www.gov.cn/english/2009-05/17/content_1316846.htm" on The Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China, 17 May 2009.

Time, Future

“I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I'm not a scientist. I don't think I'm qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries.”

Marco Rubio (1971) U.S. Senator from state of Florida, United States; politician

2012
December
All Eyez on Him
Michael
Hainey
GQ
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/politics/201212/marco-rubio-interview-gq-december-2012?currentPage=2
Posed question: How old do you think the Earth is?
2010s, 2012

People, Age, Faith, History

“This is the core of the galaxy," Horseface said. "This is the very center of everything there is. A huge black hole eating up the galaxy. The end of everything.”

Clifford D. Simak Highway of Eternity

Highway of Eternity (1986)

“Art has no end in view save the emphasising and recording in the most effective way some strongly felt interest or affection.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Great Art and Sham Art
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part IX - A Painter's Views on Painting

Art, Way

“All my staff stood by me, the players stood by me, you stood by me, and your job now is to stand by our new manager. That’s important. My retirement doesn’t mean the end of my time at the club. I’ll now be able to enjoy watching them, rather than suffering with them. But, if you think about it, the last-minute goals, the comebacks, even the defeats, are all part of this great football club of ours. It’s been an unbelievable experience for all of us, so thank-you for that. I want to say thank-you to Manchester United. Not just the directors, coaching staff, medical staff, the players, the fans, but to all of you - you have been the most fantastic experience of my life. I’ve been very fortunate. I have been able to manage some of the greatest players in the country, let alone Manchester United. All the players here today have represented this club the proper way. They won the championship in a fantastic fashion, so well done to the players. To the players, I wish them every success in the future. You all know how good you are, you know the jersey you are wearing, you know what it means to everyone here and don’t ever let yourselves down.”

Alex Ferguson (1941) Scottish footballer and manager

Daily Mirror (12 May 2013) http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/manchester-united-manager-sir-alex-1885487].

Life, Way, Fashion, Thinking

“If the world did end. Would you be my apocalyptic friend?”

Ed Harcourt (1977) British musician

Until Tomorrow Then

World

“An end to wars, peace among the nations, the cessation of pillaging and violence — such is our ideal, but only bourgeois sophists can seduce the masses with this ideal, if the latter is divorced from a direct and immediate call for revolutionary action.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

"The Question of Peace" (July–August 1915) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/jul/x02.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 293. 1910s

War, Peace

“She no longer believes very strongly in belief… Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run. As happens when one writes: believing whatever has to be believed in order to get the job done.”

J.M. Coetzee book Elizabeth Costello

Elizabeth Costello (2003)

Idea

“Of all the religions ever devised by the great practical jokers of the race, [Christianity] is the one that offers most for the least money, so to speak, to the inferior man. It starts out by denying his inferiority in plain terms: all men are equal in the sight of God. It ends by erecting that inferiority into a sort of actual superiority: it is a merit to be stupid, and miserable, and sorely put upon—of such are the celestial elect. Not all the eloquence of a million Nietzsches, nor all the painful marshalling of evidence of a million Darwins and Harnacks, will ever empty that great consolation of its allure. The most they can ever accomplish is to make the superior orders of men acutely conscious of the exact nature of it, and so give them armament against the contagion.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

1940s–present, Introduction to Nietzsche's The Antichrist

Men, Money, God, Pain

“There were times when I wished I had been 'prenticed to a different trade. I was putting in seven hours a day on it. It was an odd life I was always hoping that the end of one thriller would not overtake me before I had finished the other.”

Margery Allingham (1904–1966) English writer of detective fiction

The Oaken Heart

Life, Hope, Time

“The consumer society is so all-pervasive today that it is easy to assume it has always existed. Yet in reality it is one of the more recent innovations that propelled the West ahead of the Rest. Its most striking characteristic is its seemingly irresistible appeal… The result is one of the greatest paradoxes of modern history: that an economic system designed to offer infinite choice to the individual has ended up homogenizing humanity.”

Niall Ferguson book Civilization: The West and the Rest

Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011)

History, Reality

“It's not a country – it's a world. It's impossible to see the limits... It's only in Russia that I had a similar impression, but it wasn't the same thing. In America you are confronted with a power in movement with force in reserve without end. An unbelievable vitality - a perpetual movement.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote from: Letter from France, vol. 84, No 4, April 1946, pp. 46-62
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1940's

World, Country

“When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror — for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us — the dignity of man.”

Harold Pinter (1930–2008) playwright from England

Art, Truth & Politics (2005)

Truth, Hope, Thinking, Change

“Real love is only possible in the freedom of society; and freedom is only possible when love is a reality. The subjection of sex-relations to legal conventions is an intolerable bondage, but of course it is a bondage inescapable as long as people are slaves to a merely physical desire. The two slaveries in fact form a sort of natural counterpoise, the one to the other. When love becomes sufficient of a reality to hold the sex-passion as its powerful yet willing servant, the absurdity of Law will be at an end.”

Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) British poet and academic

Love's Coming of Age (1896)

Love, People, Law, Sex

“Strictly speaking, no person who believes that wars between classes and nations are inevitable is fit to be in charge of the destiny of children. To believe in the unity of the human race and get children to believe it in early youth would mean the creation of that unity and the end of war.”

Dora Russell (1894–1986) author, feminist, socialist campaigner

Source: The Right to Be Happy (1927), Ch. V, p. 205

War, Children, Youth, Personality

“It is true that M. Fourier had the opinion that the principal end of mathematics was the public utility and the explanation of natural phenomena; but such a philosopher as he is should have known that the unique end of science is the honor of the human mind, and that from this point of view a question of number is as important as a question of the system of the world.”

Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (1804–1851) German mathematician

Letter to Legendre (July 2, 1830) in response to Fourier's report to the Paris Academy Science that mathematics should be applied to the natural sciences, as quoted in Science (March 10, 1911) Vol. 33 https://books.google.com/books?id=4LU7AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA359, p.359, with additional citations and dates from H. Pieper, "Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi," Mathematics in Berlin (2012) p.46

World, Mathematics, Question, Nature

“We are quickly approaching the end of the millennium and the 'magical' year 2000. Many futurologists in the sixties thought science and technology would offer man unprecedented possibilities for solving his problems. The fall of the Iron Curtain and the implosion of the Eastern Block also created, just a, few years ago, grand expectations. The dream did not come true, however. Rather than ending up in a technological paradise and a peace-loving world, we woke up in a torn world with virtually unsolvable environmental problems and agonising social conditions.”

Diederik Aerts (1953) Belgian theoretical physicist

Source: Perspectives on the World: an interdisciplinary reflection. (1995), p. i : Introduction

Love, World, Peace, Dreams

“…the end result of the adoption of permaculture strategies in any country or region will be to dramatically reduce the area of the agricultural environment needed by the households and the settlements of people, and to release much of the landscape for the sole use of wildlife and for re-occupation by endemic flora.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 1.3

People, Country

“The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers. […]They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

White Noise (1984)

Love, Women, Men, Secret

“No straight lines make up my life;
And all my roads have bends;
There's no clear-cut beginnings;
And so far no dead-ends.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Circle
Song lyrics, Sniper and Other Love Songs (1972)

Life, Dead

“An example of such emergent phenomena is the origin of life from non-living chemical compounds in the oldest, lifeless oceans of the earth. Here, aided by the radiation energy received from the sun, countless chemical materials were synthesized and accumulated in such a way that they constituted, as it were, a primeval “soup.” In this primeval soup, by infinite variations of lifeless growth and decay of substances during some billions of years, the way of life was ultimately reached, with its metabolism characterized by selective assimilation and dissimulation as end stations of a sluiced and canalized flow of free chemical energy.”

Reinout Willem van Bemmelen (1904–1983) Dutch geologist

Source: "The Scientific Character of Geology," 1961, p. 458, as cited in: Reinout Willem van Bemmelen - Today In Science History http://todayinsci.com/V/VanBemmelen_RW/VanBemmelenRW-Quotations.htm, 1999-2014

Life, Way, Sun

“Remember Milo's end,
Wedged in that timber which he strove to rend.”

Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon (1637–1685) Irish poet

Source: Essay on Translated Verse (1684), Line 87.

“In the end nobody knows how it's done — how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.”

David Hockney (1937) British artist

Interview with Martin Gayford, "Hockney and the secrets of the Old Masters" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2001/09/22/bagay22.xml The Telegraph(22 September 2001) 2000s

Art, Understanding

“Nazi political hegemony in the end prevented German capitalists form acting as capitalists.”

Richard Overy (1947) British historian

Source: War and Economy in the Third Reich (1994), p. 94

“It became evident to me long before the war was over that the effect of it, which would hit this country hardest in the years immediately succeeding, was the tragedy of the loss of the men who were just qualifying and getting ready to be the leaders of our younger men…There is nothing in the first twenty years after the war that can make good to this country the loss of so many men of that age. And that was an additional reason why we men who were middle-aged already when the war began should have banded ourselves together by the time the war ended under a vow to our better selves that we would give for the rest of our lives, as a thank-offering to the dead, nothing but the best services we could render to our country. It has become our lot not to seek the ease that we might legitimately seek, but to carry on to the end and help the next generation that is coming along—the generation that was too young to fight—help that to take its place as and when the time comes. It is, and it will be, a tremendous burden on the older men, but it is their proud contribution—the giving of the best they can to help a broken and a shattered world.”

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

Speech in Leeds (13 March 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 63-64.
1925

Men, War, Age, World

“Under Muhammad Tughlaq, wars and rebellions knew no end. Even an enhancement of land-tax ended in massacres in the Doab. Many more perished on the way when the capital was shifted to Daulatabad. His Qarachal expedition cost him a whole army. His expeditions to Bengal, Sind and the Deccan, as well as ruthless suppression of twenty-two rebellions, meant only depopulation.15 From all accounts it is certain that in the thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth century the loss of population was immense.”

Muhammad bin Tughluq (1290–1351) Turkic Sultan of Delhi

Lal, K. S. (1990). Indian Muslims, who are they.

War, Way, Loss

“Well folks! It su-u-u-ure looks like we're there! Every generation has thought, “It CAN'T get any worse! This MUST be the end of the world!” I sure don't have a crystal ball but I DO have a Bible I trust 100% (it has NEVER been wrong!) and I do have eyes to see and ears to hear what is going on. Based on my observations… I strongly suspect this is (finally and really) the beginning of the end. It is coming like a freight train and cannot be stopped.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 108

World, Training

“Trying to defeat an ideology by killing individuals is like trying to save a marriage with a blowjob. It might buy you some time, but in the end it'll just suck.”

Ze Frank (1972) American online performance artist

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/05/052406.html
"The Show" (www.zefrank.com/theshow/)

Marriage, Time

“Let us at least make the experiment; let us free ourselves from complicity in these awful crimes, let us set ourselves to try, each in our own small circle, to bring nearer that bright time of peace and love which is the dream and the earnest desire of every true-hearted and thinking man. At least we ought surely to be willing to do so small a thing as this to help the world onward towards that glorious future; we ought to make ourselves pure, our thoughts and our actions as well as our food, so that by example as well as by precept we may be doing all that in us lies to spread the gospel of love and of compassion, to put an end to the reign of brutality and terror, and to bring nearer the dawn of the great kingdom of righteousness and love when the will of our Father shall be done upon earth as it is in heaven.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: Vegetarianism and Occultism (1913), p. 40

Love, World, Peace, Food

“My dreams are over, I have ceased to cry
Against the fate that made men love my mouth
And left their spirits all too deaf to hear
The little songs that echoed through my soul.
I have no anger now. The dreams are done;
Yet since the Greeks and Trojans would not see
Aught but my body's fairness, till the end,
In all the islands set in all the seas,
And all the lands that lie beneath the sun,
Till light turn darkness, and till time shall sleep,
Men's lives shall waste with longing after me,
For I shall be the sum of their desire,
The whole of beauty, never seen again.”

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) American writer and poet

"Helen of Troy"
Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911)

Love, Men, Fate, Lie

“I will be the answer
At the end of the line.
I will be there for you,
Why take the time?
In the burning of uncertainty,
I will be your solid ground.
I will hold the balance
If you can't look down.”

Sarah McLachlan (1968) Canadian musician, singer, and songwriter

Answer
Song lyrics, Afterglow (2003)

Time

“He would be vigilant, but he would anticipate nothing, neither disaster nor revelation.
That was not to say he would give up looking to the future. True, he was just a Cuckoo: scared and weary and alone. But so, in the end were most of his tribe: it didn’t mean all was lost. As long as they could still be moved by a minor chord, or brought to a crisis of tears by scenes of lovers reunited; as long as there was room in their cautious hearts for games of chance, and laughter in the face of God, that must surely be enough to save them, at the last.
If not, there was no hope for any living thing.”

Clive Barker book Weaveworld

Part Nine “Into the Gyre”, Chapter v “A Fragile Peace”, Section 3 (p. 440)
Weaveworld (1987), BOOK TWO: THE FUGUE

God, Hope, Game, Lovers

“I find it very significant that no religious traditions, Islam included, is ever in a position, I think almost by definition, to put cruelty first in the order of its priorities of the terrible things that human beings can do. That is perfectly illustrated in the story of Abraham's sacrifice with his son. Because, of course, what the story's all about is faith, the importance, and the primacy of faith. … What is the essence of faith in the story is Abraham's willingness (a) not to question God about his command to sacrifice his son, and (b) to proceed slowly, deliberately, over a period of time -- three days, I think it was -- [and] march up the mountain, prepare the sacrifice, unquestioning, resolute. [It was] the perfect, as Kierkegaard put it, "night of faith" model, exemplar of faith. And [Abraham] is, in the Muslim tradition exactly that -- an exemplar of faith. That is the importance of Abraham to Muslims. … Had he faltered, his faith would have been less, a degree or so less. He didn't falter. God immediately stops it at the absolute last moment and, of course, the act is ended. But what the story is all about is how faith in God comes first, before anything else, and then follow various virtues, of which harm to other human beings surely has to be below faith. It seemed to me that that is something that the hijackers certainly took to heart.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/interviews/makiya.html, PBS Frontline (2002)

God, Faith, Mountain, Question

“These seem like bristles, and the hide is tough.
No claw or web here: each foot ends in hoof.”

Thom Gunn (1929–2004) English poet

Moly (l. 9-10)
Collected Poems by Thom Gunn (1994)

“Maximizing is not optimizing. Sustainable engagement wins, in the end.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

8 October 2010 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/26778825813 Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

Optimism

“Consider and act with reference to the true ends of existence. This world is but the vestibule of an immortal life. Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.”

Edwin Hubbell Chapin (1814–1880) American priest

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers, P. 6.

Life, World

“The end of the Neolithic age betokens almost as universal a re-orientation of life, almost as profound a revolution of economy and society, as its beginning. Then the break was marked by the transition from mere consumption to production, from primitive individualism to co-operation, now it is marked by the beginning of independent trade and handicrafts, the rise of cities and markets, and the agglomeration and differentiation of the population.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

The Social History of Art, Volume I. From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, 1999, Chapter II. Ancient Oriental Urban cultures

Life, Age, Universe

“There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death.”

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) American poet

"The Purse-Seine" (1937)

Life, Death

“Hindus and Moslems alike have achieved that End, where remains no mark of distinction.”

Kabir (1440–1518) Indian mystic poet

Songs of Kabîr (1915)

“Men knew that if they devirginized a woman, they could end up dead within twenty-four hours. These controls have been removed.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), The Rape Debate, Continued, p. 71

Men, Dead

“[Asuras] "There are means people and there are ends people. The means people create distinctions among means and call it morality. The ends people understand that in this world, in this system we're born into, anything that gets you what you want is a good thing."”

Michael Nava (1954) American writer

Source: The Burning Plain (1997), p.258 (Chapter 20)

People, World, Understanding

“Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.”

Iris Murdoch book The Nice and the Good

The Nice and the Good (1968), ch. 14, p. 127.
Murdoch attributed this opinion to her character Kate Gray. It was not her own.

“War is time that has marched through the mind, and is later presented in
such a way that boots are the be-all and end-all.
Thus it is important to teach the soldier exactly how to treat the ghosts, how
to address the fog, or
how time and space appear on paper to describe absolutely everything.
Do not say that was true in antiquity, as there the same sentence changed
many times, petrified into mountains,
precisely where it was open…”

Paavo Haavikko (1931–2008) Finnish poet and writer from 20th century

Paavo Haavikko, in: John Taylor (2010), Into the Heart of European Poetry. p. 329

War, Way, Mountain, Appearance

“He sang of love, with quiet blending,
Slow to begin, and never ending;
Of serious faith, and inward glee;
That was the song,—the song for me!”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

O Nightingale! Thou Surely Art, l. 17 (1807).

Love, Faith

“While standing on top of Everest, I looked across the valley, towards the other great peak, Makalu, and mentally worked out a route about how it could be climbed… it showed me that, even though I was standing on top of the world, it wasn’t the end of everything for me, by any means. I was still looking beyond to other interesting challenges.”

Edmund Hillary (1919–2008) New Zealand mountaineer

Foreword to Peak Performance : Business Lessons from the World's Top Sports Organizations (2000) by Clive Gibson, Mike Pratt, Kevin Roberts and Ed Weymes.

World

“When you've seen all of Ionesco's plays, I felt at the end, you've seen one of them.”

Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980) English theatre critic and writer

Review of Victims of Duty by Eugène Ionesco (1960), p. 36
Tynan Right and Left (1967)

“And he [Hannibal] probably believed, up to the very end, that everything might still come out right if he only had a few you-know-whats.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part II: Ancient Greeks and Worse, Hannibal

“It seems to me imperative to re-establish the true dualism—that between vital impulse and vital control—and to this end to affirm the higher will first of all as a psychological fact. The individual needs, however, to go beyond this fact if he is to decide how far he is to exercise control in any particular instance with a primary view to his own happiness: in short, he needs standards. To secure standards, at least critically, he cannot afford, like the Rousseauist, to disparage the intellect.”

Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) American academic and literary criticism

Source: "What I Believe" (1930), pp. 14-15

Happiness, Exercises

“To make you cry I’ll tell you about the twelve young impure men I saw executed at Dacca at the end of the Bangladesh war. They executed them on the field of Dacca stadium, with bayonet blows to the torso or abdomen, in the presence of twenty thousand faithful who applauded in the name of God from the bleachers. They thundered "Allah akbar, Allah akbar." Yes, I know: the ancient Romans, those ancient Romans of whom my culture is so proud, entertained themselves in the Coliseum by watching the deaths of Christians fed to the lions. I know, I know: in every country of Europe the Christians, those Christians whose contribution to the History of Thought I recognize despite my atheism, entertained themselves by watching the burning of heretics. But a lot of time has passed since then, we have become a little more civilized, and even the sons of Allah ought to have figured out by now that certain things are just not done. After the twelve impure young men they killed a little boy who had thrown himself at the executioners to save his brother who had been condemned to death. They smashed his head with their combat boots. And if you don’t believe it, well, reread my report or the reports of the French and German journalists who, horrified as I was, were there with me. Or better: look at the photographs that one of them took. Anyway this isn’t even what I want to underline. It’s that, at the conclusion of the slaughter, the twenty thousand faithful (many of whom were women) left the bleachers and went down on the field. Not as a disorganized mob, no. In an orderly manner, with solemnity. They slowly formed a line and, again in the name of God, walked over the cadavers. All the while thundering Allah–akbar, Allah–akbar. They destroyed them like the Twin Towers of New York. They reduced them to a bleeding carpet of smashed bones.”

Oriana Fallaci (1929–2006) Italian writer

Rage and the Pride">

Death, Women, Men, God

“Apple is balancing on a knife edge. I think we're looking at the end stage of a successful technology disruption on the classic pattern. The question is no longer whether Android can be stopped, but when Apple's market share will fall off a cliff. I think that could easily happen as soon as the next 90 days.”

Eric S. Raymond (1957) American computer programmer, author, and advocate for the open source movement

The Smartphone Wars: multicarrier breakout fail http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3152 in Armed and Dangerous (21 April 2011)

Question, Thinking, Success

“In the end, death came uniformly to all, and all extracted as much satisfaction from their dying as this essentially graceless process could afford.”

Jack Vance book The Last Castle

Source: The Last Castle (1966), Chapter 1, section 1

Death

“The man who truly loves his work returns to it after the briefest rest with a curious kind of voluptuousness. When he is completely absorbed in his job, the end of work seems like the end of life.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Working

Love, Life

“The complete encounter with the Lord will mark an end to history, but it will take place in history.”

Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928) Peruvian theologian

Source: A Theology of Liberation - 15th Anniversary Edition, Chapter Nine, Liberation And Salvation, p. 97

History

“The scholar and the world! The endless strife,
The discord in the harmonies of life!
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books;
The market-place, the eager love of gain,
Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain!”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

St. 23. Morituri Salutamus http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/longfellow/19229 (1875)

Love, Life, Pain, Books

“What had already been done for music by the end of the eighteenth century has at last been begun for the pictorial arts. Mathematics and physics furnished the means in the form of rules to be followed and to be broken. In the beginning it is wholesome to be concerned with the functions and to disregard the finished form. Studies in algebra, in geometry, in mechanics characterize teaching directed towards the essential and the functional, in contrast to apparent. One learns to look behind the façade, to grasp the root of things. One learns to recognize the undercurrents, the antecedents of the visible. One learns to dig down, to uncover, to find the cause, to analyze.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

1921 - 1930
Source: 'Bauhaus prospectus 1929'; as quoted in Artists on Art, from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 444

Art, Music, Mathematics, Study

“I just wanted to be the first one to fly for America, not because I'd end up in the pages of history books.”

Alan Shepard (1923–1998) American astronaut

Marcia Dunn, Associated Press Aerospace Writer (May 1, 1991) "Ex-Astronaut Recalls Thrill of 1st U.S. Space Flight", The Deseret News, p. A1.

Books, History, Flying

“For Christians, the rules are clear. They are under order to forgive. We must follow those orders, no matter how difficult they appear. If we do not forgive, God will not forgive us. That is the beginning and the end of it.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

Additional remarks about the proposed Reconciliation and Unity Commission, Address to the nation at the National Day of Prayer in Fiji combined church service http://www.fiji.gov.fj/publish/page_4615.shtml, Post Fiji Stadium, Suva, 15 May 2005

God, Forgiveness, Appearance

“When recalling historical experience, the testimony of ancient times, the proofs of the present reality, and the things that we are experiencing today, we begin to truly understand God's words: "They are the enemies; so beware of them. The curse of Allah be on them!" Ibn Taymiyyah was right in his description of these people when they repudiated the people of Islam. He said: This is why they cooperated with the infidels and the Tartars… They were the main cause of the invasion of Muslim countries by Genghis Khan… Some of them cooperated with the Tartars and Franks (European Crusaders)… some of them (Shiites) backed the Christians….. They (Shiites) harbor more evil and rancor against Muslims, big and small, devout and non-devout, than anyone else…. They enjoy repudiating and cursing Muslim leaders, especially the orthodox caliphs and the ulema (clerics). To them, anyone who does not believe in the infallible Imam (Al-Mahdi) is a nonbeliever in God and the prophet… whenever Christians and infidels triumphed over, it was a day of jubilation… This is the end of what Shaykh-al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah said about them. It is as if he is living among us today, an eyewitness of what is taking place, and saying… They always support infidels, including Jews and Christians. They help them in killing Muslims.”

Abu Musab Zarqawi (1966–2006) Jordanian jihadist

Zarqawi Letter February 2004 Coalition Provisional Authority English translation of terrorist Musab al Zarqawi letter obtained by United States Government in Iraq https://2001-2009.state.gov/p/nea/rls/31694.htm, (April 6, 2004)

God, People, Understanding, Support

“Every time I see a mirror I’m amazed. I end up wondering who’s taken over the outside of me. A disgusting old goat, from the look of him. The kind I used to snicker at when I was twenty. He scares me, Stance. He looks like a dying man. I’m trapped inside him, and I’m not ready to go.”

Glen Cook book The White Rose

Source: The White Rose (1985), Chapter 10, “Bomanz’s Story” (p. 497)

Time

“The head must bow, and the back will have to bend,
Wherever the darkey may go;
A few more days, and the trouble all will end,
In the field where the sugar-canes grow.
A few more days for to tote the weary load,—
No matter, 't will never be light;
A few more days till we totter on the road:—
Then my old Kentucky home, good-night!”

Stephen Foster (1826–1864) American songwriter

My Old Kentucky Home. As quoted at Anthology of American Poetry, by George Gesner, (1983).

Home, Light, Night

“The Declaration of Independence was a source of inspiration to believe in ideals that transformed us from Jews to Israelis. … I am asking today with deep sorrow: Can we, despite all our achievements, ignore the intolerable gap between what the Declaration of Independence promised and what was fulfilled, the gap between the idea and the realities of Israel? Does the condition of occupation and domination over another people fit the Declaration of Independence? Is there any sense in the independence of one at the expense of the fundamental rights of the other? Can the Jewish people whose history is a record of continued suffering and relentless persecution, allow themselves to be indifferent to the rights and suffering of a neighboring people? Can the State of Israel allow itself an unrealistic dream of an ideological end to the conflict instead of pursuing a pragmatic, humanitarian one based on social justice. I believe that despite all the objective and subjective difficulties, the future of Israel and its position in the family of enlightened nations will depend on our ability to realize the promise of the founding fathers as they canonized it in the Declaration of Independence. I have always believed that there is no military solution to the Jewish Arab conflict, neither from a moral nor a strategic one and since a solution is therefore inevitable I ask myself, why wait?”

Daniel Barenboim (1942) Israeli Argentine-born pianist and conductor

Statement at the Knesset upon receiving the Wolf Prize, May 9, 2004, transcript online https://electronicintifada.net/content/daniel-barenboims-statement-knesset-upon-receiving-wolf-prize-may-9-2004/5080 (16 May 2004) at The Electronic Intifada.

People, Family, Justice, Dreams

“Thus, because Christian morals leave animals out of consideration … therefore in philosophical morals they are of course at once outlawed; they are merely "things," simply means to ends of any sort; and so they are good for vivisection, for deer-stalking, bull-fights, horse-races, etc., and they may be whipped to death as they struggle along with heavy quarry carts. Shame on such a morality … which fails to recognize the Eternal Reality immanent in everything that has life, and shining forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun!”

Arthur Schopenhauer book On the Basis of Morality

Part II, Ch. VI, pp. 94 https://archive.org/stream/basisofmorality00schoiala#page/94/mode/2up-95 On the Basis of Morality (1840)

Life, Death, Reality, Sun

“I saw a picture of Prince William, HRH William, in the paper today. He's going bald. I reckon by the end of next year he will be bald and I'm glad about that. Because of his playboy prince status and that, it makes me feel insecure about my own looks.”

Russell Brand (1975) British comedian, actor, and author

6 Music Show

Feeling

“Last year I lose almost 20 pounds. When I go home end season I weigh only 163. I worry more 'bout bad back than I worry 'bout baseball. Now I feel goot. Ver goot. I sink I play one fitty games and I hit thee hunnert. I feel I hab goot season. Maybe fiteen home runs, nyenee RBIs, steal maybe dirty bases.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "The Great Outdoors: Drafted for $4,000, Clemente Becomes Bucs' Top Bargain; Now That His Back Ailment Is Cured, Outfielder Hopes He'll Hit .300 Again" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=xUEqAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Dk4EAAAAIBAJ&pg=7140%2C2566447 by Les Biederman, in The Pittsburgh Press (Thursday, April 10, 1958), p. 28 Baseball-related, <big><big>1950s</big></big>, <big>1958</big>

Feeling, Home, Game, Season

“Do you know freedom exists in a school book
Did you know madmen are running our prisons
Within a jail
Within a gaol
Within a white free protestant maelstrom
We're perched headlong on the edge of boredom
We're reaching for death on the end of a candle
We're trying for something that's already found us.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

An American Prayer (1978)

Death, Books, School, Freedom

“Remember when the British were defeated at Dunkirk during the Second World War? Well, in 1945 they were in Berlin. In other words, the fall of Puerto Argentino will not mean the end of conflict or our defeat. I therefore have no regrets. Indeed, I am not alone in believing that what we did on April 2 was right. All the Argentine people believe this.”

Leopoldo Galtieri (1926–2003) Argentine military dictator

Reportaje de Oriana Fallaci a Leopoldo F. Galtieri http://archivohistorico.educ.ar/content/reportaje-de-oriana-fallaci-leopoldo-f-galtieri#sthash.ZQrMQt2O.dpuf, Revista El porteño, August 1982

War, People, World

“I think there will always be challenges for women and men. There are always going to be male chauvenists but it's just a matter of women continuing to stand up for their rights and prove their worth. The world would end if women didn't start families, carry children, but that is no reason for them not to work, have careers, exist as a person rather than just a mother.”

Anastacia (1968) American singer-songwriter

Anastacia is my kind of girl! https://eu.marliesdekkers.com/en-it/maison-marlies/anastacia-is-my-kind-of-girl.html, MarlieDekkers.com, 2014. General Quotes

Women, Men, Children, World

“It is man’s pretence that because he has choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

1980s

Fear, Motivation, Freedom

“Desperation is the perfume of the young actor. It's so satisfying to have gotten rid of it. If you keep smelling it, it can drive you crazy. In this business a lot of people go nuts, go eccentric, even end up dead from it. Not my plan.”

Uma Thurman (1970) American actress and model

Interview with Laura Yorke. Reader's Digest. July 2006

People, Business, Dead

“Right after Andy died, we [Soundgarden] went to Europe, and it was horrible, because I couldn't talk about it, and there was no one who had loved him around. I wrote two songs, "Reach Down" and "Say Hello 2 Heaven". That was pretty much how I dealt with it. When we came back, I recorded them right away. They seemed different from what Soundgarden naturally does, and they seemed to fit together. They seemed like music he would like. I got the idea to release them as a single, and to get at least Stone and Jeff, or all of Love Bone, to play on it. I had the idea for a couple days, then, with an artist's lack of self-confidence, I decided it was a stupid idea. Somehow those guys heard the tape, and they were really, really excited. Stone and Jeff and our drummer, Matt, had been working on a demo for what ended up being Pearl Jam, so we had the idea that we would make an EP or a record, and maybe even do some of Andy's solo songs.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Temple of the Dog Era

Love, Stupidity, Music, Guy

“I think that we could agree on what kind of a world we would all want to build. it would be a world of independent nations, moving toward international community, each of which protected and respected the basic human freedoms. It would be a world which demanded of each government that it accept its responsibility to insure social justice. It would be a world of constantly accelerating economic progress — not material welfare as an end in itself, but as a means to liberate the capacity of every human being to pursue his talents and to pursue his hopes. It would, in short, be a world that we would be proud to have built.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

Day of Affirmation Address (1966)

World, Justice, Hope, Communication

“Men are made fools by the gleaming limbs of women, and, lo, in a minute they are become discolored carnelians. A trifle, a little, the likeness of a dream. And death comes as the end.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

(1945)

Death, Women, Men, Dreams

“I emphatically call your attention to the obvious fact that the primitive Christian doctrine is a specific demand for the suicide of our race, which survived from the end of the Roman Empire to the present only because our ancestors, of fresh barbarian stock, simply ignored in practice a large part of the pernicious doctrine, especially in northern Europe under essentially aristocratic régimes. Until the disintegration of Protestantism made it possible for any ambitious tailor, clever confidence man, or disgruntled housewife to have "revelations" and pitch the woo at lower classes to make themselves important or fleece the suckers, the professional holy men either contented themselves with telling our people they were "sinful" or used the common devices of theologians to conceal the import of the holy book.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

Even so, however, the Catholic dervishes are obviously responsible for the eventual dominance of mestizos in "Latin" America, and many similar misfortunes.
The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

Men, People, Books, Confidence

“The new vision of man and politics was never taken by its founders to be splendid. Naked man, gripped by fear or industriously laboring to provide the wherewithal for survival, is not an apt subject for poetry. They self-consciously chose low but solid ground. Civil societies dedicated to the end of self-preservation cannot be expected to provide fertile soil for the heroic and inspired. They do not require or encourage the noble. What rules and sets the standards of respectability and emulation is not virtue or wisdom. The recognition of the humdrum and prosaic character of life was intended to play a central role in the success of real politics. And the understanding of human nature which makes this whole project feasible, if believed in, clearly forms a world in which the higher motives have no place. One who holds the “economic” view of man cannot consistently believe in the dignity of man or in the special status of art and science. The success of the enterprise depends precisely on this simplification of man. And if there is a solution to the human problems, there is no tragedy. There was no expectation that, after the bodily needs are taken care of, man would have a spiritual renaissance—and this for two reasons: (1) men will always be mortal, which means that there can be no end to the desire for immortality and to the quest for means to achieve it; and (2) the premise of the whole undertaking is that man’s natural primary concern is preservation and prosperity; the regimes founded on nature take man as he is naturally and will make him ever more natural. If his motives were to change, the machinery that makes modern government work would collapse.”

Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician

“Commerce and Culture,” p. 284.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)

Life, Wisdom, Men, World

“Jealousy lives upon suspicion; and it turns into a fury or ends as soon as it passes from suspicion to certainty.”

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

La jalousie se nourrit dans les doutes, et elle devient fureur, ou elle finit, sitôt qu'on passe du doute à la certitude.
Maxim 32.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Jealousy

“The procrastinator dreads beginning, the workaholic, ending.”

James Richardson (1950) American poet

#147
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“While we talk, the sun is getting older. It will explode in 4.5 billion years. … In comparison everything else seems insignificant. Wars, conflicts, political tension, shifts in opinion, philosophical debates, even passions—everything’s dead already if this infinite reserve from which you now draw energy to defer answers, if in short thought as a quest, dies out with the sun. … The inevitable explosion to come, the one that’s always forgotten in your intellectual ploys, can be seen in a certain way as coming before the fact to render these ploys … futile. … In 4.5 billions years there will arrive the demise of your phenomenology and your utopian politics, and there’ll be no one there to toll the death knell or hear it. It will be too late to understand that your passionate, endless questioning always depended on a “life of the mind.” … Thought borrows a horizon and orientation, the limitless limit and the end without end it assumes, from the corporeal, sensory, emotional and cognitive experience of a quite sophisticated but definitely earthly existence. With the disappearance of the earth, thought will have stopped—leaving that disappearance absolutely unthought of. … The death of the sun is a death of mind. … There’s no sublation or deferral if nothing survives. … The sun, our earth, and your thought will have been no more than a spasmodic state of energy, an instant of established order, a smile on the surface of matter in a remote corner of the cosmos. … Human death is included in the life of the mind. Solar death implies an irreparably exclusive disjunction between death and thought: if there’s death, then there’s no thought.”

Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) French philosopher

Source: Thought Without a Body? (1994), pp. 286-289

Life, Death, War, Smile

“I try to go further on over the threshold where modern art ends and anthropological art has to start.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Quote by Furlang, 1974, p. 7; as quoted in Joseph Beuys and the Celtic Wor(l)d: A Language of Healing, Victoria Walters, LIT Verlag Münster, 2012, p. 206
1970's

Art

“I remember her standing in the tall grass and cattails
Away from the windows at the end of the day.
Watching the men from the landing in the tall hats & coat-tails.
She'd never look different, but something would change.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

A Mind with a Heart of Its Own, written with Jeff Lynne
Lyrics, Full Moon Fever (1989)

Men, Grass, Change

“The idea has grown up that the scientific approach can alone properly be said to be intellectual, whereas the approach of religion cannot, and that therefore the tendency of religion is to impede intellectuality. This is not to be wondered at in people for whom the word "intellectuality" implies no more than conformity to the scientific approach; but if the goal of intellectuality is not a better understanding of the origin, nature and end of man and of the universe, what is it? It is just such an understanding that religion claims to offer, and in so far as that claim is justified, religion, very far from impeding intellectuality, is an essential part of it.”

Walter James, 4th Baron Northbourne (1896–1982) British rower, agriculturalist and translater

Intellectual Freedom (1971)

People, Religion, Idea, Understanding

“At the Everyman Cinema there is a season of Satyajit Ray. He watches the Apu trilogy on successive nights in a state of rapt absorption. In Apu's bitter, trapped mother, his engaging, feckless father he recognizes, with a pang of guilt, his own parents. But it is the music above all that grips him, dizzyingly complex interplays between drums and stringed instruments, long arias on the flute whose scale or mode — he does not know enough about music theory to be sure which — catches at his heart, sending him into a mood of sensual melancholy that last long after the film has ended.”

J.M. Coetzee (1940) South African writer

Youth (2002)

Music, Mood, Parent, Success

“It is realized that if there is to be peace in the world, it must be attained through men and with man, in his nature and mores, just about as he now is. Intensive effort is exerted to reach the hearts and minds of men with the vital pleas for peace and human understanding, to the end that human attitudes and relations may be steadily improved. But this is a process of international education, or better, education for international living, and it is at best gradual. Men change their attitudes and habits slowly, and but grudgingly divorce their minds from fears, suspicions, and prejudices.”

Ralph Bunche (1904–1971) American diplomat

Some Reflections on Peace in Our Time (1950)

Men, World, Education, Fear

“Although 50 years of European peace since the end of World War II may augur well for the future, it must be remembered that there were also more than 50 year of peace between the Congress of Vienna and the Franco-Prussian War. Moreover, contrary to the hopes and assumptions of Jean Monnet and other advocates of European integration, the devastating American Civil War shows that a formal political union is no guarantee against an intra-European war.”

Martin Feldstein (1939–2019) American economist

"EMU and international conflict", 1997

War, World, Peace, Hope

“I think that the only way that we deal with Syria is to join hands with Russia to diplomatically bring that at an end. But when we’ve aligned ourselves with — when we’ve supported the opposition of the Free Syrian Army — the Free Syrian Army is also coupled with the Islamists. And then the fact that we’re also supporting the Kurds and this is — it’s just — it’s just a mess. And that this is the result of regime change that we end up supporting. And, inevitably, these regime changes have led a less-safe world. … That has to be the solution, is joining hands with Russia to bring — to bring this civil war to an end.”

Gary Johnson (1953) American politician, businessman, and 29th Governor of New Mexico

2016

War, World, Way, Support

“I observed, "Love is the fulfilling of the law, the end of the commandment." It is not only "the first and great" command, but all the commandments in one. "Whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, if there be any virtue, if there be any praise," they are all comprised in this one word, love.”

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

Wesley quoting his own sermon on "The Circumcision of the Heart" (1 January 1733) in the work A Plain Account Of Christian Perfection (Edition of 1777)
General sources

Love, Law

“Diseases, a paralysis of the left side, a monstrous right hand tremor strengthened by the efforts by the needle [for engraving] and caused by previous excesses with alcohol, prevent me from doing any calligraphic craftsmanship. A constant effort to achieve my goal - I've never reached the degree hoped - has exacerbated my life, and every job has ended with the depression of having to go on with this life.”

Lovis Corinth (1858–1925) German painter

Quote, 1923; in Lovis Corinth, Selbstbiographie, L. Corinth; Hirzel, Leipzig, 1926, p. 194; as quoted in: German Artists' Writings in the XX Century - Lovis Corinth, Autobiographic Writings. Part two http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.nl/2014/10/german-artists-writings-in-xx-century.html

Life, Alcohol, Disease, Hope

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Quotes about end
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