Quotes about evening
page 12

“What can you do? More and more Americans are carrying a gun in the car. An ex-cop I know advises that if you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot, of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example.)
I frankly don't know what to make of such advice, but even in my little town of Jackson, Texas, I've urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self-defense. For the animals are coming.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

1992
October
Blast 'Em?
Ron Paul Political Report
2
http://www.tnr.com/sites/default/files/PR_Oct92_p2.pdf
Disputed, Newsletters, Ron Paul Political Report

Youth, Family, Cars, Animals

“Preparation is very important. The pitcher is going to do his job and prepare for you so you as a hitter must do the same. I always watch videotape of pitchers before the game and even sometimes during.”

Albert Pujols (1980) Dominican-American baseball player

When asked about the importance of preparation. http://sports.ign.com/articles/709/709384p1.html

Game

“I was solitary before, but now my solitariness becomes complete and awesome. Hence the dizziness, the vertigo. Like a statue on a plinth-that is how I live now. Jesus also was alone on the cross. I should not seek outside help to absolve me from my duty; my duty is too plain: decide, assume every responsibility for guiding others, even when it seems illogical and perhaps absurd. And to suffer alone… Me and God. The colloquy must be full and endless.”

Pope Paul VI (1897–1978) 262nd Pope of the Catholic Church

private note to himself of the solitude that infallibility and the papal office http://www.ucg.org/world-news-and-prophecy/hitlers-pope-the-roman-church-and-the-third-reich

God, Suffering, Help

“India's education had two aims, both organically linked. One was to strengthen our body and mind, our nerves and vitality. If the Indian teaching on this subject is followed faithfully, it ensures full, vigorous, healthy and long life. Similarly, it ensures health and unimpaired senses and a mind with undiminished powers. According to the Hindu Psychology, a man's mind and senses are powers of the soul. Therefore, they should be strengthened, widened, deepened, purified. "May I see and hear clearly and abundantly", is the repeated prayer in the, several Upanishads. Another variant of this prayer is: "May our eyes see the good, our ears hear the good." To see and hear and desire better, purer, finer and deeper is the first aim of Indian education. This means strengthening character, controlling desires and impulses, increasing powers of concentration and will. Not only this opens up our hidden powers, but this is even the basis of any fruitful life at all. If our senses and mind run their unbridled course, uninformed by any higher light, they will lead to self-destruction. But purified in the light of the soul, they become a blessing.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

On Hinduism (2000)

Life, Health, Education, Soul

“Everywhere soldiering entails the same busily empty monotony; hour after hour is mapped out in accordance with inflexible, antediluvian regulations, and even one's leisure does not seem to offer much in the way of variety. In the officers' mess the same faces, the same conversation; at the cafe the same games of cards and billiards.”

Stefan Zweig book Beware of Pity

Beware of Pity (1939)

Way, Game

“What is at stake here is precisely the problem of the fulfillment of desire: when we encounter in reality an object which has all the properties of the fantasized object of desire, we are nevertheless necessarily somewhat disappointed; we experience a certain this is not it; it becomes evident that the finally found real object is not the reference of desire even though it possesses all the required properties.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

106
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Disappointment, Problem, Reality

“And this is probably a good place for me to end by just saying that the issue of climate change is a perfect example of why young people have to lead. Because old people, they've created a mess, and then they'll be gone. And then you -- (applause) -- you're the ones who have to deal with it. And also what happens is old people get set in their ways. So the older you get, the more likely you are to say, that's how it's always been so that's how I'm going to keep on doing it -- even if there's a better way to do things. Young people, they're asking, well, why do I have to do it that way? Let's try it this way. And that kind of willingness to accept challenges and try things in a new way, to not be stuck in the past, or to look towards the future, that's what all of you represent.”

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

2014, Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative Town Hall Speech (November 2014)

People, Way, Change, Past

“I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Usenet

Universe

“A wise Government, allying itself with religion, would, as it were, consecrate society and sanctify the State. But how is this to be done? It is the problem of modern politics which has always most embarrassed statesmen. No solution of the difficulty can be found in salaried priesthoods and complicated concordats. But by the side of the State in England there has gradually arisen a majestic corporation wealthy, powerful, independent with the sanctity of a long tradition, yet sympathising with authority, and full of conciliation, even deference, to the civil power. Broadly and deeply planted in the land, mixed up with all our manners and customs, one of the main guarantees of our local government, and therefore one of the prime securities of our common liberties, the Church of England is part of our history, part of our life, part of England itself.”

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

Source: Speech in Aylesbury (14 November 1861), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume II. 1860–1881 (London: John Murray, 1929), p. 96

Life, Religion, History, Problem

“How dispiriting I find it, even after all my personal triumphs, that we must grow up and grow sad, that we must age, weaken, and in time go home to our long home in the ground, and that even golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust.”

Joseph Heller book God Knows

God Knows (1984)

Age, Sadness, Home, Girl

“We all share the guilt. We went along with everything, and we half-took the Nazis seriously instead of saying "to hell with you and your stupid nonsense". I misled my soldiers into believing this rubbish. I feel utterly ashamed of myself. Perhaps we bear even more guilt than these uneducated animals.”

Dietrich von Choltitz (1894–1966) German general

Quoted in History Channel 5-part series "The Wehrmacht" in the episode "The Crimes".

Stupidity, Feeling, Hell, Animals

“I am a libertine, but I am not a criminal nor a murderer, and since I am compelled to set my apology alongside my vindication, I shall therefore say that it might well be possible that those who condemn me as unjustly as I have been might themselves be unable to offset the infamies by good works as clearly established as those I can contrast to my errors. I am a libertine, but three families residing in your area have for five years lived off my charity, and I have saved them from the farthest depths of poverty. I am a libertine, but I have saved a deserter from death, a deserter abandoned by his entire regiment and by his colonel. I am a libertine, but at Evry, with your whole family looking on, I saved a child—at the risk of my life—who was on the verge of being crushed beneath the wheels of a runaway horse-drawn cart, by snatching the child from beneath it. I am a libertine, but I have never compromised my wife’s health. Nor have I been guilty of the other kinds of libertinage so often fatal to children’s fortunes: have I ruined them by gambling or by other expenses that might have deprived them of, or even by one day foreshortened, their inheritance? Have I managed my own fortune badly, as long as I have had a say in the matter? In a word, did I in my youth herald a heart capable of the atrocities of which I today stand accused?… How therefore do you presume that, from so innocent a childhood and youth, I have suddenly arrived at the ultimate of premeditated horror? No, you do not believe it. And yet you who today tyrannize me so cruelly, you do not believe it either: your vengeance has beguiled your mind, you have proceeded blindly to tyrannize, but your heart knows mine, it judges it more fairly, and it knows full well it is innocent.”

Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) French novelist and philosopher

This passage comes from a letter addressed to his wife. It was written during his imprisonment at the Bastille.
"L’Aigle, Mademoiselle…"

Life, Death, Children, Health

“They even say that an altar dedicated to Ulysses, with the addition of the name of his father, Laertes, was formerly discovered on the same spot, and that certain monuments and tombs with Greek inscriptions, still exist on the borders of Germany and Rhaetia.”

Tacitus book Germania

Source: Germania (98), Chapter 3

“Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization, and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan civilization. The wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was fundamentally nearer to us and appealed more to our senses and tastes than that of Rome and Greece, was trampled down ( — I do not say by what sort of feet — ) Why? Because it had to thank noble and manly instincts for its origin — because it said yes to life, even to the rare and refined luxuriousness of Moorish life! The crusaders later made war on something before which it would have been more fitting for them to have grovelled in the dust — a civilization beside which even that of our nineteenth century seems very poor and very "senile." […] Intrinsically there should be no more choice between Islam and Christianity than there is between an Arab and a Jew. The decision is already reached; nobody remains at liberty to choose here. Either a man is a Chandala or he is not…. “War to the knife with Rome! Peace and friendship with Islam!”: this was the feeling, this was the act, of that great free spirit, that genius among German emperors, Frederick II.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Antichrist

Sec. 60
The Antichrist (1888)

Life, Friendship, War, Peace

“Imagination has given figure and character to centaurs, satyrs, and down to all the fairy tribe; but titles baffle even the powers of fancy, and are a chimerical non-descript.”

Thomas Paine book Rights of Man

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

Imagination

“There is moderation even in excess.”

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

Book VI, Chapter 1.
Books, Coningsby (1844), Vivian Grey (1826)

“We warriors of light must be prepared to have patience in difficult times and to know the Universe is conspiring in our favor, even though we may not understand how.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Introduction, p. xi.
The Alchemist (1988)

Understanding, Light, Universe, Time

“Do not even flippantly badmouth anybody this week. Button it up.”

Tom Peters (1942) American writer on business management practices

November 2, 2010.
Tom Peters Daily, Weekly Quote

“Love and faith do not happen just with words alone. Living according to the Word is faith. The Bible is not just made up of holy words, but it is a message of miracles in which are fulfilled for me even today, and it is the guide for our lives. The Lord's Word is being delivered even today, and I will continue to carry out the work of the Lord everyday.”

Jung Myung Seok (1945) South Korean Leader of New Religious Movement, Poet, Author, Founder of Wolmyeongdong Center

Extracted from the Wolmyeongdong Website http://wmd.god21.net/WolMyeongDong/Founder

Love, Faith

“If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance with his instincts, he will accept it even on the slenderest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.”

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

Source: 1910s, Proposed Roads To Freedom (1918), Ch. VI: International relations, p. 97

Way

“As historical and social beings we find ourselves always already in a linguistically structured lifeworld. In the forms of communication through which we reach an understanding with one another about something in the world and about ourselves, we encounter a transcending power. Language is not a kind of private property. No one possesses exclusive rights over the common medium of the communicative practices we must intersubjectively share. No single participant can control the structure, or even the course, of processes of reaching understanding and self-understanding. How speakers and hearers make use of their communicative freedom to take yes- or no-positions is not a matter of their subjective discretion. For they are free only in virtue of the binding force of the justifiable claims they raise towards one another. The logos of language embodies the power of the intersubjective, which precedes and grounds the subjectivity of speakers.”

Jürgen Habermas (1929) German sociologist and philosopher

Habermas (2003) The Future of Human Nature. p. 10

World, Communication, Understanding, Freedom

“Did not Troyon tell me to enter the studio of Couture [in Paris]? It is needless to tell you how decided was my refusal to do so. I admit even that it cooled me, temporarily at least, in my esteem and admiration of Troyon.... and [I] after all, connected myself only with artists who were seeking.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

Quote from an interview with Thiebault-Sisson, 1900; as cited in Monet and His Muse: Camille Monet in the Artist's Life, Mary Mathews Gedo; University of Chicago Press, Sept. 2010, p. 10
1900 - 1920

“I have described at some length the application of Positive Rays to chemical analysis; one of the main reasons for writing this book was the hope that it might induce others, and especially chemists, to try this method of analysis. I feel sure that there are many problems in chemistry, which could be solved with far greater ease by this than any other method. The method is surprisingly sensitive — more so than even that of spectrum analysis, requires an infinitesimal amount of material, and does not require this to be specially purified; the technique is not difficult if appliances for producing high vacua are available.”

J. J. Thomson (1856–1940) British physicist

Rays of Positive Electricity (1913).
Quotes eat me

Books, Hope, Feeling, Problem

“There are one or two rules of thumb which are useful in distinguishing sadism from exciting adventure in the comics. Threat of torture is harmless, but when the torture it’s self is shown it becomes sadism. When a lovely heroine is show bound to the stake, comics followers are sure that the rescue will arrive just in the nick of time. The readers wish is to save the girl, not to see her suffer. A bound or chained person does not suffer even embarrassment in the comics, and the reader, therefore is not being taught to enjoy suffering.”

William Moulton Marston (1893–1947) American psychologist, lawyer, inventor and comic book writer

As quoted in Olive Richard Bryne's, "Don't laugh at the comics" Family Circle, Oct 25, 1940.

Love, Girl, Suffering, Time

“What sort of government is it that permits so many children to go to school hungry, without even a morsel of food in their stomachs? It cannot be! It must not be!”

Sadao Araki (1877–1966) Japanese general

Quoted in "They Shall Inherit the Earth" - Page 55 - by Otto Zoff, Anne Garrison - 1943

Children, School, Food

“I've been tryin' to get down to the Heart of the Matter
Because the flesh will get weak
And the ashes will scatter
So I'm thinkin' about forgiveness
Forgiveness
Even if you don't love me anymore.”

Don Henley (1947) American singer, lyricist, producer and drummer

"The Heart of the Matter"
Song lyrics, The End of the Innocence (1989)

Love, Forgiveness, Heart

“Perhaps they needn't even believe — it was enough that they needed angels, and the angels would return gladly.”

Paulo Coelho book The Valkyries

Source: The Valkyries (1992), p. 133.

Angels

“You put the government on the spot when you even mention Vietnam. They feel embarrassed — you notice that?… It's just a trap that they let themselves get into. … But they're trapped, they can't get out. You notice I said 'they.' They are trapped, They can't get out. If they pour more men in, they'll get deeper. If they pull the men out, it's a defeat. And they should have known that in the first place. France had about 200,000 Frenchmen over there, and the most highly mechanized modern army sitting on this earth. And those little rice farmers ate them up, and their tanks, and everything else. Yes, they did, and France was deeply entrenched, had been there a hundred or more years. Now, if she couldn't stay there and was entrenched, why, you are out of your mind if you think Sam can get in over there. But we're not supposed to say that. If we say that, we're anti-American, or we're seditious, or we're subversive…. They put Diem over there. Diem took all their money, all their war equipment and everything else, and got them trapped. Then they killed him. Yes, they killed him, murdered him in cold blood, him and his brother, Madame Nhu's husband, because they were embarrassed. They found out that they had made him strong and he was turning against them…. You know, when the puppet starts talking back to the puppeteer, the puppeteer is in bad shape….”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

January 1965, p. 217
Malcolm X Speaks (1965)

Men, Money, War, Feeling

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic and must remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”

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

Source: The German Ideology (1845-1846), Vol. 1, Part 1.

Fish

“Of course, I also encountered hostile reactions in campaigning. People called me names, even spat at me; I received more threats. The most remarkable people, to me, were those who apparently approved of everything I said but nonetheless wouldn't dream of voting for the Liberal Party. It reminded me of Somalia: they wouldn't vote outside their clan.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

Source: Infidel (2007), Ch. 15

Hostility, People, Dreams

“We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally.”

Marcel Proust book In Search of Lost Time

Nous désirons passionnément qu'il y ait une autre vie où nous serions pareils à ce que nous sommes ici-bas. Mais nous ne réfléchissons pas que, même sans attendre cette autre vie, dans celle-ci, au bout de quelques années, nous sommes infidèles à ce que nous avons été, à ce que nous voulions rester immortellement.
Pt. II, Ch. 2
In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol. IV: Cities of the Plain (1921-1922)

Life, Unfaithfulness, Passion, Waiting

“Back around 1971, I was playing in a bar in Chicago one night, and after the show, I was packing up my guitar and stuff, and I was walking out the door, and a little guy stopped me. And he said, "Arlo, before you leave, I wanna sing you a song." I said "Come on man, I don't wanna hear no songs. I hate songs. I don't even like my songs! Why should I like your songs?" I was just tired, I wanted to get out of there, I was being a butt-head. He said, "Arlo, I just wanna sing you one song." I said, "Tell you what. Buy me beer. I'll sit here and drink it. As long as it lasts, you can do whatever you want." He said, "That sounds like a good deal."”

Arlo Guthrie (1947) American folk singer

I said "It does?" It turned out to be one of the finer beers of my entire life.
Arlo talking about his first meeting with Steve Goodman, who would perform to him "The City of New Orleans" (Live in Sydney)

Life, Hate, Guy, Drink

“As a nation today, we have not rejected the sanctity of human life. The American people have not had an opportunity to express their view on the sanctity of human life in the unborn. I am convinced that Americans do not want to play God with the value of human life. It is not for us to decide who is worthy to live and who is not. Even the Supreme Court's opinion in Roe v. Wade did not explicitly reject the traditional American idea of intrinsic worth and value in all human life; it simply dodged this issue.”

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

1980s, First term of office (1981–1985), Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation (1983)

Life, God, People, Idea

“I am distinctly opposed to visibly arrogant and arbitrary extremes of government—but this is simply because I wish the safety of an artistic and intellectual civilisation to be secure, not because I have any sympathy with the coarse-grained herd who would menace the civilisation if not placated by sops. Surely you can see the profound and abysmal difference between this emotional attitude and the attitude of the democratic reformer who becomes wildly excited over the "wrongs of the masses". This reformer has uppermost in his mind the welfare of those masses themselves—he feels with them, takes up a mental-emotional point of view as one of them, regards their advancement as his prime objective independently of anything else, and would willingly sacrifice the finest fruits of the civilisation for the sake of stuffing their bellies and giving them two cinema shows instead of one per day. I, on the other hand, don't give a hang about the masses except so far as I think deliberate cruelty is coarse and unaesthetic—be it towards horses, oxen, undeveloped men, dogs, negroes, or poultry. All that I care about is the civilisation—the state of development and organisation which is capable of gratifying the complex mental-emotional-aesthetic needs of highly evolved and acutely sensitive men. Any indignation I may feel in the whole matter is not for the woes of the downtrodden, but for the threat of social unrest to the traditional institutions of the civilisation. The reformer cares only for the masses, but may make concessions to the civilisation. I care only for the civilisation, but may make concessions to the masses. Do you not see the antipodal difference between the two positions? Both the reformer and I may unite in opposing an unworkably arrogant piece of legislation, but the motivating reasons will be absolutely antithetical. He wants to give the crowd as much as can be given them without wrecking all semblance of civilisation, whereas I want to give them only as much as can be given them without even slightly impairing the level of national culture. … He works for as democratic a government as possible; I for as aristocratic a one as possible.”

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

But both recognise the limitations of possibility.
Letter to Woodburn Harris (25 February-1 March 1929), in Selected Letters II, 1925-1929 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 289-290
Non-Fiction, Letters

Men, Dogs, Feeling, Motivation

“Once you give people the idea that all this can be done by the State, and that it is somehow second-best or even degrading to leave it to private people…then you will begin to deprive human beings of one of the essential ingredients of humanity—personal moral responsibility. You will in effect dry up in them the milk of human kindness. If you allow people to hand over to the State all their personal responsibility, the time will come—indeed it is close at hand—when what the taxpayer is willing to provide for the good of humanity will be seen to be far less than what the individual used to be willing to give from love of his neighbour. So do not be tempted to identify virtue with collectivism. I wonder whether the State services would have done as much for the man who fell among thieves as the Good Samaritan did for him? …the role of the State in Christian Society is to encourage virtue, not to usurp it.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech at St Lawrence Jewry (30 March 1978) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103522 Leader of the Opposition

Love, People, Idea, Time

“Know your worth! People always act like they're doing more for you than you're doing for them. Ask yourself this question, "Why would they do that?" Obviously, you bring something to the table for them to even do business with you”

Kanye West (1977) American rapper, singer and songwriter

Source: Thank You and You're Welcome (2009), p.3-4

People, Question, Business

“Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking, hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links: some 'future' events may be linked to others, O. K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Transparent Things

Transparent Things (1972), Ch. 24.

Life, Future, Personality

“I am appalled by your bad judgment and astounded by your policies. Why are you so intent on giving aman, even to an enemy whom you have tested and found hostile and intransigent? It is not necessary to give aman to everyone without discrimination.… In any case, if [the Sindis] sincerely request aman and desist from treachery, they will surely stop fighting. Then income will meet expenditures and this long situation will be concluded.… It is acknowledged that all your procedures have been in accordance with religious law [bar jadah-yi shar] except for the one practice of giving aman. For you are giving aman to everyone without distinguishing between friend and foe.”

Muhammad bin Qasim (695–715) Umayyad general

From a letter by Hajjaj to Muhammad bin Qasim. MacLean, Religion and Society in Arab Sind, 39. As quoted in Spencer, Robert (2018). The history of jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS.

Hostility, Law, Fight, Sincerity

“The theories that I (and others) helped develop explained why unfettered markets often not only do not lead to social justice, but do not even produce efficient outcomes. Interestingly, there has been no intellectual challenge to the refutation of Adam Smith’s invisible hand: individuals and firms, in the pursuit of their self-interest, are not necessarily, or in general, led as if by an invisible hand, to economic efficiency. The only question that has been raised concerns the ability of government to remedy the deficiencies of the market. Within academia, a significant fraction of economists are involved with developing and expanding on the ideas of imperfect information (and imperfect markets) that I explored. For instance, Edmund Phelps, this year’s Nobel Prize winner, belongs to this "school" of thought. But in political discourse, simplistic “market fundamentalism” continues to exert enormous influence.”

Joseph E. Stiglitz (1943) American economist and professor, born 1943.

Interview on Bebbe Grillo's Blog http://www.beppegrillo.it/eng/2007/01/stiglitz.html, January 2007.

School, Justice, Idea, Question

“I find poetic links, the logic of poetry in cinema, extraordinarily pleasing. They seem to me perfectly appropriate to the potential of cinema as the most truthful and poetic of art forms. Certainly I am more at home with them than with traditional theatrical writing which links images through the linear rigid logical development of plot. That sort of fussily correct way of linking events usually involves arbitrarily forcing them into sequence in obedience to some abstract notion of order. And even when this is not so, even when the plot is governed by the characters, one finds that the links which hold it together rest on a facile interpretation of life's complexities.”

Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time

Sculpting in Time (1986)

Life, Truth, Art, Way

“Psychology is a more tricky field, in which even outstanding authorities have been known to run in circles, 'describing things which everyone knows in language which no one understands.”

Raymond Cattell (1905–1998) British-American psychologist

Source: The Scientific Analysis of Personality, 1965, p. 18

Understanding

“The most employment-intensive industry in the world is retail and our next generation needs these jobs. India has a strategy for the next generation of doctors, engineers and biotech graduates, etc. But for the country as a whole, what we need to resolve is how to create sensible jobs for undergraduates and or those even less educated”

Mukesh Ambani (1957) Indian business magnate

Mukesh Ambani on retail and SEZ plans

World, Education, Country

“I stood still, a prey to a thousand thoughts, stifled in the robe of the evening.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI

“Learn knowledge and science from him who teaches it, even if he doesn't practice what he preaches.”

Muhammad al-Baqir (677–733) fifth of the Twelve Shia Imams

Ibn Shu’ba al-Harrani, Tuhaf al-'Uqul, p. 299

Knowledge, Learning, Science

“As your Bujutsu [Martial Technique] training approaches perfection you will be able to detect the suki [opening/weakness] [in your enemy's technique], even before he can, and as if to satisfy some deficiency in him, you can fill the suki with your technique.”

Morihei Ueshiba (1883–1969) founder of aikido

Source: Budo Training in Aikido (1933), p. 26

Perfection, Training

“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Eight (12 August 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

Life, Fate, Sadness, Way

“I believe that material wealth is an exceedingly valuable servant, and a particularly abhorrent master, in our National life. I think one end of government should be to achieve prosperity; but it should follow this end chieﬂy to serve an even higher and more important end - that of promoting the character and welfare of the average man. In the long run, and inevitably, the actual control of the government will be determined by the chief end which the government subserves. If the end and aim of government action is merely to accumulate general material prosperity, treating such prosperity as an end in itself and not as a means, then it is inevitable that material wealth and the masters of that wealth will dominate and control the course of national action. If, on the other hand, the achievement of material wealth is treated, not as an end of government, but as a thing of great value, it is true—so valuable as to be indispensable—but of value only in connection with the achievement of other ends, then we are free to seek through our government, and through the supervision of our individual activities, the realization of a true democracy. Then we are free to seek not only the heaping up of material wealth, but a wise and generous distribution of such wealth so as to diminish grinding poverty, and, so far as may be, to equalize social and economic no less than political opportunity.”

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

1910s, The Progressives, Past and Present (1910)

Life, Democracy, Thinking, Wealth

“People ask what I am really trying to do with humor. The answer is, "I'm getting even." … For me, being funny is the best revenge.”

Art Buchwald (1925–2007) journalist, humorist, United States Marine

People, Revenge

“Long after Plato’s time the concept of the Ideas still represented the sphere of aloofness, independence, and in a certain sense even freedom, an objectivity that did not submit to ‘our’ interests.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 46.

Idea, Sense, Freedom, Time

“At the end of every television broadcast, the names of the people who worked on it are listed. Why, you may ask yourself sometimes, would so many people want to take credit for such a bad show? Well, its just like what's happened to the dollar. Credits in television suffer from inflation. There are more of them and they arent worth what they used to be, even on a good show.”

Andy Rooney (1919–2011) writer, humorist, television personality

[Andy Rooney, w:Andy Rooney, 6, Credits, Years of Minutes, 2003, PublicAffairs, 978-1586482114]

People, Suffering

“Certainly we are not going to say these things about the negro people publicly; we have no distinction between black or white, or demon or demigod, but at the same time, so long as one is demon or demigod, we have to behave in the proper way. Just like Caitanya Mahaprabhu; He had no distinction between a tiger and a man. He was so powerful that He could convert even a tiger to dance. But so far as we are concerned, we should not imitate and go to some tiger and try to make him dance! But still, tiger is equally eligible like a man. So, you can understand that these talks are not for the public, as they have not got the ability to understand. Basically we have not got hatred for anyone, but when one is demoniac or atheistic, we should try to avoid their company. A preacher’s business is to love God, to make friendship with devotees, to enlighten the innocent, and to avoid the demons. This principle we shall follow. But in higher devotional life, there is no such distinction.”

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977) Indian guru

Letter to Satsvarupa, San Francisco, 9 April, 1968 PrabhupadaBooks.com http://prabhupadabooks.com/letters/san_francisco/april/09/1968/satsvarupa?d=1 Quotes from other Sources, Quotes from other Sources: Racism and Homophobia

Love, Life, God, Friendship

“Let's be simple and calm,
Like the trees and streams,
And God will love us, making us
Us, even as the trees are trees
And the streams are streams,
And will give us greenness in the spring, which is its season,
And a river to go to when we end…
And he'll give us nothing more, since to give us more would make us less us.”

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

Sejamos simples e calmos,
Como os regatos e as árvores,
E Deus amar-nos-á fazendo de nós
Belos como as árvores e os regatos,
E dar-nos-á verdor na sua primavera,
E um rio aonde ir ter quando acabemos...
E não nos dará mais nada, porque dar-nos mais seria tirar-nos mais.
Alberto Caeiro (heteronym), O Guardador de Rebanhos ("The Keeper of Sheep"), VI — in A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, trans. Richard Zenith (Penguin, 2006)

Love, God, Spring, Tree

“Almost every evening [in their common early-Cubist years, in Paris], either I went to Braque's studio or Braque came to mine. Each of us had to see what the other had done during the day. We criticized each other's paintings. A canvas wasn't finished unless both of us felt it was.”

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

a remark of Picasso to Françoise Gilot, December 1948
Quote of Picasso, in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 311
Quotes, 1940's

Painting

“Remember, every business firm, like even a mom and pop grocery store, is a market imperfection. A firm is defined in economic theory as a market imperfection introduced to deal with transaction costs. And the sort of theory is that the imperfections, the firms, are kinda like little islands in a free market sea. But the problem with that is that the sea doesn't remotely resemble a free market, and the islands are bigger than the sea; so that raises some questions about the picture. But these market imperfections, like a firm, or a transnational corporation, or a strategic alliance among them, this is a form of administering interchanges. And there's a real question about whether we want to accept that. Why, for example, should the international socioeconomic system, or for that matter our own society, be in the hands of unaccountable private tyrannies? That's a decision, it's not a law of nature.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Talk titled "U.S. Foreign Policy in a Globalized World" at Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, March 13, 2000 https://web.archive.org/web/20021220030406/http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/ed270/multimedia.html. Quotes 2000s, 2000

Law, Moms, Question, Business

“All those rappers, they're the only glamorous people working in music now. The rock bands are rather drab, even the good ones. You definitely don't want to look at them. But some of those R&B people are very good.”

Bryan Ferry (1945) English musician

Source: Roxy Music legend Bryan Ferry unwinds in Paris, Talia Soghomonian, December 2002 http://www.musicomh.com/music/features/bryan-ferry.htm,

People, Music

“I cannot think of a single one, not even intelligence.”

Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) Italian physicist

When asked what characteristics Nobel prize winning physicists had in common. As quoted in Physics Today (October 1994), p. 70.

Intelligence, Thinking

““Sometimes, you know, when we meet people, it seems to me (…) [that] it's hard to gain access to a real conversation. It's almost like it takes one of us to just be real, even if it's to say "you know, I don't really know what to say to you." Or to say no. Sometimes you have to say no, or to set a boundary.””

Adyashanti (1962) Spiritual teacher

The Basic Teachings - Part 3: Orientation to the Teaching (2010), Wake Up San Francisco event (2015)

People

“If we consider the attitude of the Lord Himself, we understand that He accepted the free loving services of women for Himself and His Apostles and that women were among His disciples and most intimate confidants. Yet He did not grant them the priesthood, not even to His mother, Queen of Apostles, who was exalted above all humanity in human perfection and fullness of grace.”

Edith Stein (1891–1942) Jewish-German nun, theologian and philosopher

Essays on Woman (1996), The Separate Vocations of Man and Woman According to Nature and Grace (1932)

Love, Women, Confidence, Understanding

“Most of the time you don't even know they're there. Now, that's the scary thing. It's really strange and invading, but I'm still working it all out. I try to not let it bother me. And if I want to swim naked in my pool, I'm still going to do it. I certainly don't want to feel that I have to change everything in my life that I do to cater to them. I just won't let it happen.”

Heath Ledger (1979–2008) Australian actor

Speaking on his problems with the paparazzi, as quoted in the National Post (May 2001).

Life, Feeling, Change, Time

“I want to keep working 24*7. When I am not singing, I go into deep introspection mode and start asking myself, why I am not getting much songs. I feel even working 24*7 every day is less for me.”

Shreya Ghoshal (1984) Indian playback singer

Talked about changes in career after marriage http://www.hindustantimes.com/bollywood/i-feel-restless-when-i-m-not-singing-want-to-work-24-7-shreya-ghoshal/story-hAKs3O9xVa8bQXvZvKpXIP.html

Feeling, Singing

“It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. I don’t believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood, and this is a thing that even God—who knows all that can be known—seems powerless to change.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses (1992)

Love, God, History, Change

“Now I know I have already lost you. I have lost everything. Even so, I can't let you go forever and allow you to forget me without letting you know that I don't bear you any grudge, that I knew it from the start, I knew that I was going to lose you and that you would never see in me what I see in you. I want you to know that I loved you from the very first day and that I still love you, now more than ever, even if you don't want me to.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

La sombra del viento (The Shadow of the Wind) (2001)

Love, Forgetting

“He had no wish to obliterate anything he had written, but he would dearly have liked to revise it, envying painters, who are allowed to return to the same theme time and time again, clarifying and enriching until they have done all they can with it. A novelist is condemned to provide a succession of novelties, new names for characters, new incidents for his plots, new scenery; but, Mr Pinfold maintained, most men harbour the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters — Dickens and Balzac even — were flagrantly guilty.”

Evelyn Waugh book The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

Source: The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), Chapter 1

Men, Books, Time, Success

“If people really stopped and realized how much art and creative people move the world versus politics and religion, I mean it’s not even up for debate. An artist at least creates things, puts things into the world. Where as these other people are destroying things, taking things out of the world.”

Marilyn Manson (1969) American rock musician and actor

Interview on The Henry Rollins Show

People, World, Religion, Art

“Anxiety is the unwillingness to play even when you know the odds are for you.
Courage is the willingness to play even when you know the odds are against you.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

"Emotions", p. 36.
The Second Sin (1973)

Courage

“You can take my money from me; you can take my watch away; you can stripe me off my clothes; you may even can kill me. And yet, there is only a thing you will not be able to take away from me, no matter how hard you try: the fear I am feeling.”

Pedro Muñoz Seca (1879–1936) Spanish writer

Said in november 1936 during the summary trial in which he was condemned to death.
Source: http://www.abc.es/20081104/opinion-firmas/mataron-munoz-seca-20081104.html

Money, Fear, Feeling, Clothes

“Even if the things are against his faith and religion, it's not to be said: don't speak and shut up your mouth, for thus there won't be clearing of the religion. Vice Versa, in this case we say: speak as you want.”

Judah Loew ben Bezalel (1512–1609) Czech rabbi

Beer Hagola, Ch. 7

Faith, Religion

“I think the origin of all this clamour for tonality is not so much the need to sense a relationship to the tonic, as a need for familiar chords: let us be frank and say "for the triad"; and I believe I have good reason to say that just so long as a certain kind of music contains enough such triads, it causes no offence, even if in other ways it most violently clashes with the sacred laws of tonality.”

Alban Berg (1885–1935) Austrian composer

Quoted in Reich, Willi (1971). Schoenberg: A Critical Biography, p. 34. Translated by Leo Black.

Law, Music, Way, Thinking

“Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it.”

Stefan Zweig book The Post Office Girl

The Post Office Girl (published posthumously in 1982)

Distant

“Man needs dignity even more than he needs bread.”

Brunello Cucinelli (1953) Italian entrepreneur and philanthropist

“Wherefore a monk's whole attention should thus be fixed on one point, and the rise and circle of all his thoughts be vigorously restricted to it; viz., to the recollection of God, as when a man, who is anxious to raise on high a vault of a round arch, must constantly draw a line round from its exact centre, and in accordance with the sure standard it gives discover by the laws of building all the evenness and roundness required….”

John Cassian (360–435) Christian monk and theologian

Conferences VI

God, Law, Drawing

“For my part, while I am as convinced a Socialist as the most ardent Marxian, I do not regard Socialism as a gospel of proletarian revenge, nor even, primarily, as a means of securing economic justice. I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race.”

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

Source: 1930s, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (1935), Ch. 7: The Case for Socialism

Happiness, Justice, Revenge, Sense

“Mankind has become one, but not steadfastly one as communities or even nations used to be; not united through years of mutual experience, neither through possession of a single eye, affectionately called crooked, nor yet through a common native language, but, surpassing all barriers, through international broadcasting and print. An avalanche of events descends upon us — in one minute half the world hears of their splash. But the yardstick by which to measure those events and to evaluate them in accordance with the laws of unfamiliar parts of the world — this is not and cannot be conveyed via soundwaves and in newspaper columns. For these yardsticks were matured and assimilated over too many years of too specific conditions in individual countries and societies; they cannot be exchanged in mid-air. In the various parts of the world men apply their own hard-earned values to events, and they judge stubbornly, confidently, only according to their own scales of values and never according to any others.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Nobel lecture (1970)

Men, World, Law, Confidence

“And when the father who begat it perceived the created image of the eternal gods, that it had motion and life, he rejoiced and was well pleased; and he bethought him to make it yet more nearly like its pattern. Now whereas that is a living being eternally existent, even so he essayed to make this All the like to the best of his power. Now so it was that the nature of the ideal was eternal. But to bestow this attribute altogether upon a created thing was impossible; so he bethought him to make a moving image of eternity, and while he was ordering the universe he made of eternity that abides in unity an eternal image moving according to number, even that which we have named time. For whereas days and nights and months and years were not before the universe was created, he then devised the generation of them along with the fashioning of the universe. Now all these are portions of time, and was and shall be are forms of time that have come to be, although we wrongly ascribe them unawares to the eternal essence. For we say that it was and is and shall be, but in verity is alone belongs to it: and was and shall be it is meet should be applied only to Becoming which moves in time; for these are motions. But that which is ever changeless without motion must not become elder or younger in time, neither must it have become so in past nor be so in the future; nor has it to do with any attributes that Becoming attaches to the moving objects of sense: these have come into being as forms of time, which is the image of eternity and revolves according to number. Moreover we say that the become is the become, and the becoming is the becoming, and that which shall become is that which shall become, and not-being is not-being. In all this we speak incorrectly. But concerning these things the present were perchance not the right season to inquire particularly.”

Plato book Timaeus

38b, as quoted by R. D. Archer-Hind, The Timaeus of Plato (1888)
Timaeus

Life, God, Fashion, Nature

“I am not a dictator, I am the president. I know this has been some of the conventional wisdom floating around Washington, that somehow even though most people agree that I’m being reasonable, that most people agree I’m presenting a fair deal, the fact that they don’t take it means that I should somehow, you know, do a Jedi mind meld with these folks and convince them to do what’s right.”

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

Press conference March 1st http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/03/01/173240651/decrying-dumb-arbitrary-cuts-obama-says-we-will-get-through-this 2013

Wisdom, People

“It is important to focus more on what we need than on what we want, because much of what we want unnecessarily complicates our lives. The answer is to approach the Divinity in the mood of. "Thy will be done. Use me for Your purposes." Even higher than that sentiment is to request that God remove our free will so that we cannot even exercise it. We are then fully available for the Lord's service.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 4: Fire and Brimstone, Horns and Tail, p. 67

God, Exercises, Mood

“Even If they (children) fall during their play,
the nature, having come
under the spell of their creative sports,
doesn’t know when they again start to play so full of jest.
Believing that they fall unknowingly
the ground, mostly, does not even hurt them.”

Suman Pokhrel (1967) Nepali poet, lyricist, playwright, translator and artist

Children http://www.occupypoetry.net/children_1/ From Poetry

Children, Nature, Sport, Hurt

“I [[love the mystics…The mystic manages to strip himself of action, of facts, objectives and even the pastoral mission and rises until he reaches communion with the Beatitudes. Brief moments but which fill an entire life. ]] [Mystics] have been fundamental [to the church]. A religion without mystics is a philosophy.”

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

2010s, 2013, Interview in La Repubblica

Love, Life, Religion

“For all of ignorant people of a nation, even if their body is somehow strong, somehow grand, even then they can only make meaningless displays [of this "strength"]. [As for] the multitude of constituents and observers, however many may die from [this] sickness, this is [still] not to be considered as unfortunate.”

Lu Xun book Call to Arms

Lu Xun studied medicine before he became a writer. Once he saw on a film a Chinese being executed by Japanese while many other Chinese were watching this "spectacular event". This made him feel that saving the "souls" of people is more important than saving their bodies.
Source: From the preface of his work Na Han (Call to Arms) (1922)

People, Strong

“And, Even Now, You (Always Already) Inhere In Me--The "Who" and "What" That Is Only One--Beyond The Seeming "Two" Of body-mind and world. I Am You--As You Are (Always Already, and Non-Separately). Even When My Avatarically-Born Human Physical Body Has Died In This World, I Am Present and every where Alive--Because I Am Always Already Conscious As The Only One Who Always Already Is. I Am Joy!--and The Only Reason For It! I Am Love!--and The Only Person Of It! The Love Of Me Is The Heart-Secret I Have Come To Avatarically Reveal To The Heart Of everyone one Of Man (and To The Heart Of everyone one of all, and To The Heart Of The All Of all). Love Must Be Always Done (and, Thereby, Proved)--or Else The "Bright" Heart Of Love Is Darkened By Its Own Un-Love. And The Would-Be-"Brightest" Heart Of Love's Beloved Is Made Un-"Bright" (and Dark As Eternal Night) By All The Waiting-Time Of Un-Love's Day. Therefore, I Am here! I Am (Now, Forever) Avatarically Descended here--To Be The Constant Lover and The True Loved-One Of All and all”

Adi Da Samraj (1939–2008) American writer

and every one of all
Aham Da Asmi

Love, Secret, World, Lovers

“Even in love, people betray themselves. And when you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself. I would say a great part of human history is a history of self-betrayal and betrayal of others.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author

" Isaac Bashevis Singer's Universe http://www.nytimes.com/1978/12/03/archives/isaac-bashevis-singers-universe-errors-and-betrayals.html" by Richard Burgin in The New York Times (3 December 1978)

Love, People, History, Betrayal

“First, the shootings in Minnesota and Baton Rouge, and the protests, then the targeting of police by the shooter here -- an act not just of demented violence but of racial hatred. All of it has left us wounded, and angry, and hurt. It’s as if the deepest fault lines of our democracy have suddenly been exposed, perhaps even widened. And although we know that such divisions are not new -- though they have surely been worse in even the recent past -- that offers us little comfort.”

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

2016, Memorial Service for Fallen Dallas Police Officers (July 2016)

Democracy, Past, Hurt

““The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody,” she said, “would be to not be used for anything by anybody.”… “Thank you for using me,” she said to Constant, “even though I didn’t want to be used by anybody.””

Kurt Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan

Epilogue “Reunion with Stony” (pp. 310-311)
The Sirens of Titan (1959)

“[T]he most important position in a democracy is not the office of the President. The most important office is the office of citizen, because if you have citizens who are informed and know about other countries, and recognize that if we provide foreign aid to some distant country in Africa, that ultimately may make us healthier. And if you have a citizenry that recognizes that even if I have to pay slightly more in taxes — which nobody likes paying taxes -- but if I do, maybe I can provide that young child who lives in a poorer neighborhood an opportunity for a better life. And then because she has a job and a better life, she can pay taxes, and then everybody has more, and the society is better off. If you don't have citizens like that, then you're going to get leaders who think very narrowly and you'll be disappointed. So the job — one thing I always tell young people, don't just think that you elect somebody and then you expect them to solve all your problems and then you just sit back and complain when it doesn't happen. You have to work as a citizen also to provide the leaders the space and the direction to do the right thing. It's just as important for you to challenge ignorance or discrimination or people who are always thinking in terms of war”

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

it's just as important for you to do that as the President because I don't care how good the person, the leader you elect is, if the people want something different. In a democracy, at least, that's what's going to happen.
2016, Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative Town Hall (March 2016)

Life, War, People, Disappointment

“Of the complete biological inferiority of the negro there can be no question—he has anatomical features consistently varying from those of other stocks, & always in the direction of the lower primates... Equally inferior—& perhaps even more so—is the Australian black stock, which differs widely from the real negro... In dealing with these two black races, there is only one sound attitude for any other race (be it white, Indian, Malay, Polynesian, or Mongolian) to take—& that is to prevent admixture as completely & determinedly as it can be prevented, through the establishment of a colour-line & the rigid forcing of all mixed offspring below that line. I am in accord with the most vehement & vociferous Alabaman or Mississippian on that point … Other racial questions are wholly different in nature—involving wide variations unconnected with superiority or inferiority. Only an ignorant dolt would attempt to call a Chinese gentleman—heir to one of the greatest artistic & philosophic traditions in the world—an "inferior" of any sort... & yet there are potent reasons, based on wide physical, mental, & cultural differences, why great numbers of the Chinese ought not to mix into the Caucasian fabric, or vice versa. It is not that one race is any better than any other, but that their whole respective heritages are so antipodal as to make harmonious adjustment impossible. Members of one race can fit into another only through the complete eradication of their own background-influences—& even then the adjustment will always remain uneasy & imperfect if the newcomer's physical aspect froms a constant reminder of his outside origin. Therefore it is wise to discourage all mixtures of sharply differentiated races—though the color-line does not need to be drawn as strictly as in the case of the negro, since we know that a dash or two of Mongolian or Indian or Hindoo or some such blood will not actually injure a white stock biologically.... As a matter of fact, most of the psychological race-differences which strike us so prominently are cultural rather than biological. If one could take a Japanese infant, alter his features to the Anglo-Saxon type through plastic surgery, & place him with an American family in Boston for rearing—without telling him that he is not an American—the chances are that in 20 years the result would be a typical American youth with very few instincts to distinguish him from his pure Nordic college-mates. The same is true of other superior alien races including the Jew—although the Nazis persist in acting on a false biological conception. If they were wise in their campaign to get rid of Jewish cultural influences (& a great deal can be said for such a campaign, when the dominance of the Aryan tradition is threatened as in Germany & New York City), they would not emphasize the separatism of the Jew but would strive to make him give up his separate culture & lose himself in the German people. It wouldn't hurt Germany—or alter its essential physical type—to take in all the Jews it now has.”

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

However, that wouldn't work in Poland or New York City, where the Jews are of an inferior strain, & so numerous that they would essentially modify the physical type.
Letter to Natalie H. Wooley (22 November 1934), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 77
Non-Fiction, Letters

People, Youth, World, Family

“I am impressed by the great limitations of the human mind. How quick are we to learn, that is, to imitate what others have done or thought before. And how slow to understand, that is, to see the deeper connections. Slowest of all, however, are we in inventing new connections or even in applying old ideas in a new field.”

Frits Zernike (1888–1966) Dutch physicist

His Nobel lecture, "How I Discovered Phase Contrast" (11December 1953) http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1953/zernike-lecture.html

Idea, Understanding, Learning

“Our decisions are to a much greater extent dependent on our desire to conform to the standards of our class and environment than we are inclined to admit. A considerable proportion of our reasoning is merely an automatic function, so to speak, of influences and impressions which have become part of us, and anyone who has been brought up from childhood in the stern school of military discipline is particularly apt to succumb to the hypnotic and compulsive force exercised by an order of word of command; a force which is logically entirely incomprehensible and which irresistibly undermines his will. In the straitjacket of a uniform, even though fully aware of their absurdity, an officer will carry out his instructions lie a sleep-walker, unresistingly and almost unconsciously.”

Stefan Zweig book Beware of Pity

Beware of Pity (1939)

Lie, School, Exercises, Decision

“And I can't even go to the grocery store without some ones that's clean and a shirt with a team/It seems we living the American dream but people highest up got the lowest self esteem/The prettiest people do the ugliest things for the road to riches and diamond rings.”

Kanye West (1977) American rapper, singer and songwriter

All Falls Down
Lyrics, The College Dropout (2004)

People, Dreams

“To what extent you can, avoid bad deeds, even if everybody takes you as the agent of bad deeds.”

Ali Zayn al-Abidin (659–713) Great-grandson of the Prophet Muhammad

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.78, p. 161.
Religious wisdom

“Even though I'm president of the United States, my power is not limitless. So I can't dive down there and plug the hole. I can't suck it up with a straw. All I can do is make sure that I put honest, hard-working smart people in place … to implement this thing.”

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

Radio interview, Grand Isle, LA, June 11, 2010. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/06/obama-on-spill-i-cant-suck-it.html?hpid=news-col-blog 2010, 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill (April 2010)

People

“Governmental regulations all carry coercion to some degree, and even where they don't, they habituate man to expect teaching, guidance and help outside himself, instead of formulating his own.”

Wilhelm Von Humboldt (1767–1835) German (Prussian) philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the University of Berlin

As quoted in The Liberal Tradition in European Thought (1971) by David Sidorsky, p. 73

Help

“All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.”

Henri Bergson book Creative Evolution

Creative Evolution (1907), Chapter III. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911, p. 271

Death, Time, Animals

“10. Even in intake, the one steadfast thought is said to be the natural state. Nirvikalpa Samadhi will result when the sensory objects are not present.”

Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) Indian religious leader

The Science of the Heart

Nature

“I went to the artisans, for I was conscious that I knew nothing at all, as I may say, and I was sure that they knew many fine things of which I was ignorant, and in this they certainly were wiser than I was. But I observed that even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets; because they were good workmen they thought they knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom — therefore I asked myself on behalf of the oracle, whether I would like to be as I was, neither having their knowledge nor their ignorance, or like them in both; and I made answer to myself and the oracle that I was better off as I was.”

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

22d–e
Plato, Apology

Wisdom, Error, Knowledge

“Life today is an autopoietic, photosynthetic phenomenon, planetary in scale. A chemical transmutation of sunlight, it exuberantly tries to spread, to outgrow itself. Yet by reproducing, it maintains itself and its past even as it grows. Life transforms to meet the contingencies of its changing environment and in doing so changes that environment. By degrees the environment becomes absorbed into the processes of life, becomes less a static, inanimate backdrop and more and more like a house, nest, or shell—that is, an involved, constructed part of an organic being.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

What is Life? (1995)

Life, Change, Past, Parting

“I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious, but just… you know after a while you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations and you feel, haven't we outgrown all this? Do we have to listen to this?”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

The Atheism Tapes (2004)

Feeling

“Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.”

Federico Fellini (1920–1993) Italian filmmaker

On the autobiographical nature of his films, in The Atlantic (December 1965)

“As for your artificial conception of "splendid & traditional ways of life"—I feel quite confident that you are very largely constructing a mythological idealisation of something which never truly existed; a conventional picture based on the perusal of books which followed certain hackneyed lines in the matter of incidents, sentiments, & situations, & which never had a close relationship to the actual societies they professed to depict... In some ways the life of certain earlier periods had marked advantages over life today, but there were compensating disadvantages which would make many hesitate about a choice. Some of the most literarily attractive ages had a coarseness, stridency, & squalor which we would find insupportable... Modern neurotics, lolling in stuffed easy chairs, merely make a myth of these old periods & use them as the nuclei of escapist daydreams whose substance resembles but little the stern actualities of yesterday. That is undoubtedly the case with me—only I'm fully aware of it. Except in certain selected circles, I would undoubtedly find my own 18th century insufferably coarse, orthodox, arrogant, narrow, & artificial. What I look back upon nostalgically is a dream-world which I invented at the age of four from picture books & the Georgian hill streets of Old Providence.... There is something artificial & hollow & unconvincing about self-conscious intellectual traditionalism—this being, of course, the only valid objection against it. The best sort of traditionalism is that easy-going eclectic sort which indulges in no frenzied pulmotor stunts, but courses naturally down from generation to generation; bequeathing such elements as really are sound, losing such as have lost value, & adding any which new conditions may make necessary.... In short, young man, I have no quarrel with the principle of traditionalism as such, but I have a decided quarrel with everything that is insincere, inappropriate, & disproportionate; for these qualities mean ugliness & weakness in the most offensive degree. I object to the feigning of artificial moods on the part of literary moderns who cannot even begin to enter into the life & feelings of the past which they claim to represent... If there were any reality or depth of feeling involved, the case would be different; but almost invariably the neotraditionalists are sequestered persons remote from any real contacts or experience with life... For any person today to fancy he can truly enter into the life & feeling of another period is really nothing but a confession of ignorance of the depth & nature of life in its full sense. This is the case with myself. I feel I am living in the 18th century, though my objective judgment knows better, & realises the vast difference from the real thing. The one redeeming thing about my ignorance of life & remoteness from reality is that I am fully conscious of it, hence (in the last few years) make allowances for it, & do not pretend to an impossible ability to enter into the actual feelings of this or any other age. The emotions of the past were derived from experiences, beliefs, customs, living conditions, historic backgrounds, horizons, &c. &c. so different from our own, that it is simply silly to fancy we can duplicate them, or enter warmly & subjectively into all phases of their aesthetic expression.”

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

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 307
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long

Life, Books, Age, World

“No doubt the artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.”

Friedrich Schiller book On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Letter 9
On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

Time

“I sincerely hope, trust, and pray that this part of my journey will not seem as dull to you as it did to me at the time, or as it does to me now while I write of it. But now I come to think of it, it cannot seem as dull, for I had to walk that wretched thirty miles or so all the day long, whereas you have not even to read it; for I am not going to say anything more about it, but lead you straight to the end.Oh, blessed quality of books, that makes them a refuge from living! For in a book everything can be made to fit in, all tedium can be skipped over, and the intense moments can be made timeless and eternal.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Source: The Path to Rome (1902), p. 201

Books, Hope, Thinking, Time

Quotes about evening page 12

Quotes about evening
page 12