Quotes about evening
page 81

“No honest historian can take part with — or against — the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Study, Parting

“As boys without bonds to their fathers grow older and more desperate about their masculinity, they are in danger of forming gangs in which they strut their masculinity for one another, often overdo it, and sometimes turn to displays of fierce, macho bravado and even violence.”

Frank Pittman (1935–2012) American psychiatrist

Source: Man Enough (1993), Ch. 5.

Boy

“Inherent in human beings are possibilities which we now can't even entertain. Before the space launch, space travel to many of us was the stuff of fantasy, of science fiction. We know what it is to explore the limits of what we consider to be a human being, but if we were to transform our understanding of ourselves, if we were to transform what we knew a human being to be, new possibilities of expression would open. We could function in a more creative way. In a more humane way. In the past we were transformed by the thrust of evolution or by accidental forces. This time we should transform ourselves with a conscious, committed degree of self-awareness.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

Interview with USA Today, "Mankind Must Find a New Self Awareness", Dan Neuharth and Miles White, December 14, 1982

Way, Travel, Understanding, Science

“Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

The Dilemma of Determinism (1884) republished in The Will to Believe, Dover, 1956, p. 149
1880s

Fashion, Freedom

“I am concerned about information and technical processes that affect the change in human behavior, the changing forms of interaction between people. Mankind is in a hectic state, and the concentration of people’s attention exclusively on their internal thinking processes is transformed into a permanent meditative state in which people remain even when they go out and appear in public. I’ve watched it many times. These changes will ultimately change humans, and such people as me or you, most probably, will cease to exist. There will be others, and we will most likely be the last of Homo sapiens.”

Nicholas Ovcharov (1988) Ukrainian writer and film director

"The Interaction: modern media art in Ukraine" in EMPR (19 March 2018) https://empr.media/culture/movie/the-inetraction-modern-media-art-in-ukraine/

People, Behavior, Thinking, Appearance

“.. whatever may have been the style and title, the sovereign ruler was there, and accordingly the court established itself at once with all its due accompaniments of pomp, insipidity, and emptiness. Caesar appeared in public not in the robe of the consuls which was bordered with purple stripes, but in the robe wholly of purple which was reckoned in antiquity as the proper regal attire, and received, sitting on his golden chair and without rising from it, the solemn procession of the senate. The festivals in his honour commemorative of birthday, of victories, and of vows, filled the calendar. When Caesar came to the capital, his principal servants marched forth in trips to great distances so as to meet and escort him. To be near to him began to be of such importance, that the rents rose in the quarter of the city where he lived. Personal interviews with him were rendered so difficult by the multitude of individuals soliciting audience, that Caesar found himself compelled in many cases to communicate even with his intimate friends in writing, and that persons even of the highest rank had to wait for hours in the ante-chamber. People felt, more clearly than was agreeable to Caesar himself, that they no longer approached a fellow-citizen. There arose a monarchical aristocracy, which was a remarkable manner at once new and old, and which had sprung out of the idea of casting into the shade the aristocracy of the oligarchy by that of the royalty, the nobility of the patriciate. The patrician body still subsisted, although without essential privileges as an order, in the character of a close aristocratic guild; but as it could receive no new gentes it had dwindled away more and more in the course of centuries, and in Caesar's time there were not more than fifteen or sixteen patrician gentes still in existence. Caesar, himself sprung from one of them, got the right of creating new patrician gentes conferred on the Imperator by decree of the people, and so established, in contrast to the republican nobility, the new aristocracy of the patriciate, which most happily combined all the requisites of a monarchichal aristocracy - the charm of antiquity, entire dependence on the government, and total insignificance. On all sides the new sovereignty revealed itself.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 4, Part 2. Translated by W.P. Dickson.
The New Court.
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

People, Communication, Idea, Birthday

“As for Lucrezia, there wasn't even a rumor in her own day that the strawberries at her Wednesday luncheons were dipped in sugar of lead and the other dishes tastefully sprayed with antimony, hellebore, corrosive sublimate, and deadly nightshade, all popular Renaissance flavors.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part III: Strange Bedfellows, Lucrezia Borgia

“Who is the loving person? The loving person is the person who loves him or herself. I say this so often, and people say, "Oh yes, you're so right," but they don't do it! You will never be able to love anyone else until you love yourself. Even With your Fat Thighs!”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

Speaking Of Love (1980)

Love, People, Personality

“On land you saw how the pride of Captain Pedel was so much humbled that he with his men, who are as foolish as himself, could not even bear the look of my men; and how, on the mere sight of my warriors, they threw down their arms and willingly awaited their well-deserved punishment with outstretched necks. Are these not sufficient proofs of your incompetency and inability to resist my forces?”

Koxinga (1624–1662) Chinese military leader

Formosa under the Dutch: described from contemporary records, with explanatory notes and a bibliography of the island, 1903, William Campbell, Kegan Paul, 424, Dec. 20 2011 http://books.google.com/books?id=OpdMq-YJoeoC&pg=PA423&dq=koxinga+formosa+always+belonged+to+china&hl=en&ei=vsjiTergDM3TgAekqbzKBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEQQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=same%20doom%20had%20they%20not%20taken%20to%20flight%20and%20gone%20out%20to%20sea.&f=false, Original from the University of Michigan(LONDON : KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO. LTD DRYDEN HOUSE, 43 GERRARD STREET, SOHO MDCCCCIII Edinburgh : T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty)

Men

“To explore the countercurrents of consciousness in a given circumstance—uncertain promises of other futures; to trace the struggle between spirit and structure in every domain of social and cultural life; to show how vision becomes embodied in institutions and practices and, in being embodied, is both undermined and corrected, but in any event transformed; to reveal how we forfeit our freedom to imagine and reconstruct, and then regain it, even against our will; to commandeer alien wisdom the better to criticize the established order and present experience; to give voice to what has lost a voice or not yet gained one; to display in every department of our experience, from the micro to the macro and from passion to calculation, the revolt of the infinite within us against the finite around us—all this is the work of the humanities when they recognize us for what we are and might become.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

124
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)

Life, Wisdom, Imagination, Freedom

“Art is like sex: when you're doing it, nothing else matters. Away from his desk the novelist can care deeply about the social, political, moral aspects of what he is writing but when he sits down to write, all those concerns fall away and nothing matters except the putting down of one carefully chosen word after another carefully chosen word, until a sentence is finished, then a paragraph, then a page, then a chapter, then a book. When I'm working I don't care about anything, not even myself. All my concentration is directed towards the making of the thing on the page. The rest is just stuff — even though it is the stuff of life.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200 (2009)

Life, Books, Art, Sex

“I got the idea [for Earthlings] because I was filming some public service announcements. It was mostly domestic animals, dogs and cats, and when they were killed on the street or euthanized in the shelters, they were put into this room that resembles a large refrigerator. But when I saw them piled up in there, it suddenly made me think of meat in a refrigerator. Even though they looked nothing like meat, there was this parallel – dead animals kept in a fridge – and that made me think of cows and chickens and pigs and eggs and milk, and so on. That was the beginning of Earthlings really, the first spark of inspiration.”

Shaun Monson American filmmaker

“Exclusive: Earthlings' Shaun Monson On New Iberia Research Center And More”, interview with Ecorazzi (25 March 2009) http://www.ecorazzi.com/2009/03/25/exclusive-earthlings-shaun-monson-on-new-iberia-research-center-and-more/.

Dogs, Cats, Idea, Thinking

“Those feats of deep cunning and brave flair—we’re all allotted a few of them, and we get no more, no matter what our longing is. And you know, you’re lucky if you even recognize when you’re having your best moments. Half the time your soul is looking the other way when they come. And you never grow wise enough to know what they were until you have passed the hope of of having more.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Part 1, “Come Then, Mortal. We Will Seek Her Soul,” Chapter 2 (p. 20)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

Hope, Way, Soul, Time

“I would say the main thing in any young kid's life is education. Even if a guy is prejudiced, he can be educated to understand why he is prejudiced. Education plays a great role in all life, whether you're black or white. You've got to go to high school, you've got to go to college. When you come out of college or high school, you can play sports. If you ever get hurt, they can't take that brain away from you, you've got that.”

Willie Mays (1931) Baseball player

Academy of Achievement Interview (1996)

Life, Education, School, Guy

“After thirty years of looking at new work in galleries and even newer work in studios, I am very familiar with the experience of being completely at a loss when confronting a new idea or image.”

Nicholas Serota (1946) British curator

The Dimbleby Lecture 2000

Idea, Loss

“I never even think about the physicality of roles, until honestly I get the gig and I think, 'OK, now what do I have to do in this one?' Like, I approach it thinking more about the character -- do I respond to it? Is it something I think I can play? Does it seem like it'll be fun?”

Halle Berry (1966) American actress

Betsy Pickle (November 21, 2003) "Berry's tough break - Actress stretches to physical max in 'Gothika'", The Knoxville News-Sentinel, p. 12.

Thinking

“We spent all our time lighting candles in the churches and praying for father's safe return. But even then [1961 and 1962], as a little girl, I knew that he was really in prison and that God had nothing to do with it. Since then I have never had any belief in religion.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

cubanet.org (May 15, 2000)
2007, 2008

God, Religion, Girl, Light

“Candy came from out on the Island
In the backroom she was everybody's darlin'
But she never lost her head
Even when she was giving head
She says, Hey babe
Take a walk on the wild side”

Lou Reed (1942–2013) American musician

Walk on the Wild Side Full lyrics online http://www.slangcity.com/songs/lou_reed.htm The title was inspired by Lou Reed being approached in 1970 for a musical based on Nelson Algren's 1956 novel A Walk on the Wild Side. Lyrics

“It is no shame to lose to me, mortal. Even among mythical creatures there are very few who can give a unicorn a good game."
"I am pleased that you were not wholly bored," Martin said. "Now will you tell me what you were talking about concerning the destruction of my species?”

Roger Zelazny book Unicorn Variation

"Oh, that," Tlingel replied.
Unicorn Variation (1982)

Game

“He considers [it's] insulting and false to say that gods are magical anthropomorphic immortals. But however insensitive that may seem, we cannot fairly dismiss all the hundreds of gods who were worshiped by millions of people for thousands of years. However we define what a god is, that definition must include every entity already universally accepted as a deity by those who worship it. My research in this area would have me submit that all gods are magical anthropomorphic immortals, because that description does seem to apply to all of them. They all have miraculous powers and human characteristics, and even if you can kill the body, they still exist and can still return in some other form, or the same form, or be literally born again as it was with Dionysus II. Even on the rare occasion that gods can be killed, none of them die from cancer or old age, and all of them survive for centuries. Even the immortals in movie, the Highlander could be killed–one particular way only. Otherwise, they’re immortal with human characteristics. Give them magic powers and they’d be gods.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, Philosophistry http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2017/04/12/philosophistry/ (April 12, 2017)

God, People, Age, Way

“But the divine mystery is inherent in the divine, a part of the nature of God, and can never disappear. And this means that it is still a mystery even to the mystic who has directly experienced it, nay, even to God Himself. That is why it is ineffable. The mystery and the ineffability of God are one and the same thing.”

Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.

p. 37

God, Nature, Parting

“My spirit was often bowed in awful reverence before the Most High, and covered with feelings of humility and tenderness; under which I had to believe that we ought to attend to Divine instruction, even in disposing of and governing the inferior part of his creation.”

Joshua Evans (Quaker minister) (1731–1798) American Quaker minister and abolitionist

Source: Journal, p. 27

Feeling, Parting

““You ask a question that cannot be answered without knowing the nature of the primal chaos from which being arose. Is Spiral Castle like a crystal, once shattered, forever destroyed? That is what I prefer to believe. Or is it like a still pond, whose mirrored surface may be shattered and churned, but which will inevitably restore itself as the waves die down? You may believe this if you choose. You can even believe—why not?—that the restored universe will be an improvement on the old. For me, so long as I have my vengeance I care not what comes after.”
“And us?”
“We die.” An involuntary rise in the dragon’s voice, a slight quickening of cadence, told her that she had touched upon some unclean hunger akin to but less seemly than battle-lust. “We die beyond any chance of rebirth. You and I and all we have known will cease to be. The worlds that gave us birth, the creatures that shaped us—all will be unmade. So comprehensive will be their destruction that even their pasts will die with them. It is an extinction beyond death that we court. Though the ages stretch empty and desolate into infinity and beyond, there will be none to remember us, nor any to mourn. Our joys, sorrows, struggles, will never have been.
“And even if there is a universe to come, it will know naught of us.””

Michael Swanwick book The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 19 (pp. 340-341)

Death, Hunger, Age, World

“The spirit of the Japanese nation is, by its nature, a thing that must be propagated over the seven seas and extended over the five continents. Anything that may hinder its progress must be abolished, even by force.”

Sadao Araki (1877–1966) Japanese general

Quoted in "Dragon in the Dust" - Page 229 - by Post Wheeler - 2007

Nature, Sea

“How could you disguise your own thoughts so even you didn't know what you were thinking?”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Homecoming saga, The Memory Of Earth (1992)

Thinking

“The capacity to accept suffering for the sake of goodness, truth and justice is an essential criterion of humanity, because if my own well-being and safety are ultimately more important than truth and justice, then the power of the stronger prevails, then violence and untruth reign supreme. Truth and justice must stand above my comfort and physical well-being, or else my life itself becomes a lie. In the end, even the “yes” to love is a source of suffering, because love always requires expropriations of my “I”, in which I allow myself to be pruned and wounded. Love simply cannot exist without this painful renunciation of myself, for otherwise it becomes pure selfishness and thereby ceases to be love.”

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

2007

Love, Life, Pain, Truth

“You conductors who are so proud of your power! When a new man faces the orchestra–from the way he walks up the steps to the podium and opens his score–before he even picks up his baton–we know whether he is the master or we.”

Franz Strauss (1822–1905) German composer and virtuoso horn player. Father of Richard Strauss

Harold C. Shonberg, The Great Conductors, ISBN 0671208349

Way

“We're all surrounded by words like air, and we all need them even though they are often invisible, just like air.”

Anu Garg (1967) Indian author

2002-11-28
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/28/technology/circuits/28garg.html?src=pm&pagewanted=all
A Word of the Day Keeps Banality at Bay
The New York Times
Katie Hafner

“When a woman get pregnant, it's an issue between her and her girlfriends. When a woman get pregnant, her and her girlfriends form an abortion tribunal, and they vote on the child like it was Survivor. Then the first girlfriend throws in her two cents: "Child, you should have that baby, that man got some good hair, it's wavy, it's wavy." Then second girlfriend throws in her two cents: "Girl, why are we even talking about this? Ain't we supposed to go to Cancun next weekend? Get rid of that baby." And that's how life is decided in America.”

Chris Rock (1965) American comedian, actor, screenwriter, television producer, film producer, and director

Never Scared (HBO, 2004)

Life, Girl, Baby

“The reduction of even sacred things into commodities explains why we exhibit so little reverence for God. In a consumer worldview he has no intrinsic value apart from his usefulness to us.”

Skye Jethani

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

God

“Whether you are young or old, what matters is the grace to continue living hereafter. A man may die young yet be satisfied with living but a wicked man is not satisfied even with long life.”

T. B. Joshua (1963) Nigerian Christian leader

On death - "Atta Mills Died A Martyr" http://ukzambians.co.uk/home/2012/08/01/atta-mills-died-a-martyr-tb-joshua/ UK Zambians" (August 1 2012)

Life

“Inner experience … is not easily accessible and, viewed from the outside by intelligence, it would even be necessary to see in it a sum of distinct operations, some intellectual, others aesthetic, yet others moral. … It is only from within, lived to the point of terror, that it appears to unify that which discursive thought must separate.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: L’Expérience Intérieure (1943), p. 9

Intelligence, Appearance

“By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air. It is our element. We live in it, we inhale it, we exhale it, and most of the time we do not even notice it. Instead of "I am afraid", we say, "I don't want to", or "I don't know how", or "I can't."”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

Speech at Queens College, City University of New York (March 12, 1975). "The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage", ch. 5, Our Blood (1976).

Women, Fear, Time

“What is seen and called the picture is what remains – an evidence. Even as one travels in painting towards a state of 'unfreedom' where only certain things can happen, unaccountably the unknown and free must appear. Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanished and the paint falls into positions that feel destined. The very matter of painting – its pigment and space – is so resistant to the will, so disinclined to assert its plane and remain still. Painting seems like impossibility, with only a sign now and then of its own light. Which must be because of the narrow passage from a diagramming to that other state – corporeality. In this sense, to paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

12 Americans, by Dorothy C.Miller, New York, 1956. p. 36
1950 - 1960

Travel, Feeling, Sense, Light

“The American Revolution began with certain latent hopes that it might turn into a genuine break with the State ideal. The Declaration of Independence announced doctrines that were utterly incompatible not only with the century-old conception of the Divine Right of Kings, but also with the Divine Right of the State. … If revolution is justifiable a State may even be criminal sometimes in resisting its own extinction.”

Randolph Bourne (1886–1918) American writer

¶9. Published under "The Development of the American State," The State https://mises.org/library/state (Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 1998), pp. 30–31. "The State" (1918), II

Hope

“America's most dangerous export was never nuclear weapons or Jerry Lewis—or even Baywatch reruns. It was, is, and probably always will be our fast-food outlets.”

Anthony Bourdain book The Nasty Bits

The Nasty Bits (2006)

Food

“Let us suppose there was a teacher of whom an historical record (or, at least, a widespread belief which is not basically disputable) reports that he was the first to expound publicly a pure and searching religion, comprehensible to the whole world. … Suppose that all he did was done even in the face of a dominant ecclesiastical faith which was onerous and not conducive to moral ends (a faith whose perfunctory worship can serve as a type of all the other faiths, at bottom merely statutory, which were current in the world at the time). Suppose, further, we find that he had made this universal religion of reason the highest and indispensable condition of every religious faith whatsoever … and this without further adding to this faith burdensome new ordinances or wishing to transform acts which he had initiated into peculiar holy practices, required in themselves as being constituent elements of religion. After this description one will not fail to recognize the person who can be referenced, not indeed as the founder of the religion which, free from every dogma, is engraved in all men’s hearts (for it does not have its origin in an arbitrary will), but as the founder of the first true church.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Book IV, Part 1, Section 1, “The Christian religion as a natural religion”
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793)

Men, World, Faith, Religion

“God knows, I’m hardly a sociologist. But I hope in the future for some form of reconciliation. Because I think all men are guilty. I’m not talking about rape and pillage. I’m not talking about Harveyesque. I’m talking about all of the spectrum. From an aggressive flirt. Or even just a flirty-flirt that has one sour note in it. Or what I think every man was guilty of, some form of omission in attitude, in his views. Are we really going to have only capital punishment? Because right now, that’s what we have. You get accused, you’re obliterated. Charlie Rose ceases to exist.”

Barry Diller (1942) American businessman

March 2018 interview with New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/24/style/barry-diller-iac.html

Men, God, Hope, Thinking

“BACALL: "I'm a total Democrat. I'm anti-Republican. And it's only fair that you know it. Even though…"
KING: "Wait a minute. Are you a liberal?"
BACALL: "I'm a liberal. The "L" word!"
KING: "Egads!"
BACALL: … I love it. Being a liberal is the best thing on earth you can be. You are welcoming to everyone when you're a liberal. You do not have a small mind… I'm total, total, total liberal and proud of it. And I think it's outrageous to say "The L word". I mean, excuse me. They should be damn lucky that they were liberals here. Liberals gave more to the population of the United States than any other group.”

Lauren Bacall (1924–2014) American actress, model

Larry King interview (2005)

Love, Thinking, Waiting

“Convicted fraud and pseudoscience charlatan, Mister Kent Hovind argues that what has already been directly-observed and shown to be certainly true is (in his opinion) impossible, and the only option he thinks is possible is that an imperceptible (and possibly imaginary) mystical being poofed everything out of nothing by magic. The irony is that what he proposes is physically impossible because it defies all natural laws, and it’s logically implausible since it has neither precedent nor parallel anywhere in reality to imply that it could still be true anyway. Where is there evidence anywhere that such a thing actually exists, or that anything even could have any of these abilities?”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"14th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYsnVMjG4lk Youtube (January 3, 2009) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Law, Fraud, Nature, Thinking

“Here's a movie that stretches out every moment for more than it's worth, until even the moments of inspiration seem forced. Since the basic idea of the movie is a good one and there are talented people in the cast, what we have here is a film shot down by its own forced and mannered style.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/raising-arizona-1987 of Raising Arizona (20 March 1987) Reviews, One-and-a-half star reviews

People, Idea

“There is room in the world, no doubt, and even in old countries, for a great increase of population, supposing the arts of life to go on improving, and capital to increase. But even if innocuous, I confess I see very little reason for desiring it. The density of population necessary to enable mankind to obtain, in the greatest degree, all the advantages both of co-operation and of social intercourse, has, in all the most populous countries, been attained. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it..”

John Stuart Mill book Principles of Political Economy

Principles of Political Economy (1848), Book IV, Chapter VI, §3, p. 516

Life, World, Hope, Art

“Oprah is rich, Bill Gates is wealthy. If Bill Gates woke up tomorrow with Oprah's money, he'd jump out a fuckin' window and slit his throat on the way down saying, "I can't even put gas in my plane!"”

Chris Rock (1965) American comedian, actor, screenwriter, television producer, film producer, and director

Never Scared (HBO, 2004)

Money, Way

“Even in America, the Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone — but never hustled.”

Henry Adams book The Education of Henry Adams

Ch. 35 http://books.google.com/books?id=-ThaAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Even+in+America+the+Indian+Summer+of+life+should+be+a+little+sunny+and+a+little+sad+like+the+season+and+infinite+in+wealth+and+depth+of+tone+but+never+hustled%22&pg=PA502#v=onepage. The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Life, Sadness, Summer, Wealth

“Regarding the spate of High School shootings of 1999: "in the Colorado shootings, the media seemed to change their tack a bit. Though they attached ghoulishly to it, covered it 24 hours a day and even gave it a logo like 'Horror in the Rockies', they did address issues of alienation and pain rather than just saying, 'oh, these aberrant teen-agers have to be stamped out.' After denigrating self-help ideas for the last 20 years, the media are beginning to look at the psychology and not just the police work."”

Roger Waters (1943) English songwriter, bassist, and lyricist of Pink Floyd

USA Today, 1999
Miscellaneous

Pain, School, Idea, Change

“Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; he had acute sensibility to the higher forces. Fire taught him secrets that no other animal could learn; running water probably taught him even more, especially in his first lessons of mechanics; the animals helped to educate him, trusting themselves into his hands merely for the sake of their food, and carrying his burdens or supplying his clothing; the grasses and grains were academies of study.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Secret, Education, Food, Study

“I think it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons.”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

SRC (Students Representative Council) student paper, Sydney University, 1979. Quoted in ABC Four Corners, "The Authentic Mr Abbott" http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2010/s2846485.htm on abc.net.au, March 15, 2010. 1979

Women, Thinking

“We all make mistakes - we fall in love with tenors and sopranoes even though tenors are as dumb as quarrelsome women, because high tones damage their brains.”

Waldemar Łysiak book Kielich

Kielich (2002)

Love, Women

“In the United States, … there prevails a simple faith that the formulae of the democratic state will solve all the social problems of humanity, even though their application be limited and hindered by an autocratic economic order.”

Harry F. Ward (1873–1966) American methodist minister

Source: The New Social Order (1920), pp. v-vi

Faith, Problem

“The fact that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional is not widely recognized, even though it has now been reported by many articles in the literature of genetics. The reason is in part that the knowledge is so new and in part because it raises awkward challenges to deeply held conventional wisdom.”

Nicholas Wade (1942) British writer

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (2014)

Wisdom, Literature, Knowledge, Parting

“I believe in the ability of focusing strongly in something, then you are able to extract even more out of it. It's been like this all my life, and it's been only a question of improving it, and learning more and more and there is almost no end. As you go through you just keep finding more and more. It's very interesting, it's fascinating.”

Ayrton Senna (1960–1994) Brazilian racing driver

Interview for Racing is in My Blood, 1991 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHuadnT588w

Life, Question, Learning

“Habituation to bargaining and to the competitive principles of business necessarily brings it about that pecuniary standards of efficiency invade (contaminate) the sense of workmanship; so that work, workmen, equipment and products come to be rated on a scale of money values, which has only a circuitous and often only a putative relation to their workmanlike efficiency or their serviceability. Those occupations and those aptitudes that yield good returns in terms of price are reputed valuable and commendable, — the accepted test of success, and even of serviceability, being the gains acquired. Workmanship comes to be confused with salesmanship, until tact, effrontery and prevarication have come to serve as a standard of efficiency, and unearned gain is accepted as the measure of productiveness.”

Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) American academic

Source: The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts, 1914, p. 349

Money, Business, Sense, Success

“They were afraid of dying but even more afraid to show it.”

Tim O'Brien book The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried (1990)

“In one Eastern Shore town, a teacher reported to work one morning to find that someone had smashed the windows of her schoolhouse. Other black schools across Maryland were burned to the ground. Teachers received death threats. One was even beaten by an angry mob. But despite the risks, understand, students flocked to these schools in droves, often walking as many as eight to ten miles a day to get their education. In fact, the educational association that founded Bowie State wrote in their 1864 report that — and this is a quote — “These people are coming in beyond our ability to receive them.” Desperately poor communities held fundraisers for these schools, schools which they often built with their own hands. And folks who were barely scraping by dug deep into their own pockets to donate money.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

Remarks at Bowie State University ceremony (17 May 2013) http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/17/remarks-first-lady-bowie-state-university-commencement-ceremony 2010s

Death, Money, People, Education

“The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps even something deeper like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works towards sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it’s true.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

White Noise (1984)

Life, Hostility, Happiness, World

“I was never a politician. I care about my country. I put God first. For the last seven-and-a-half years, I’ve seen this country led by a leader that’s made mistakes. I spoke my mind about it. But because I’m in the industry, you can’t talk about that. The media and the liberals act the way they act: The will back up the president until the end. It’s been interesting. I’ve had fantastic directors who have said officially to my agents and managers they will never hire me again. They will never even see me for projects. That’s unfair.”

Antonio Sabàto Jr. (1972) American actor and model

Antonio Sabato Jr. Says Hollywood is Blacklisting Him for Supporting Donald Trump http://variety.com/2016/film/news/antonio-sabato-jr-blacklisted-for-supporting-donald-trump-republican-1201829791/ (August 3, 2016)

God, Way, Country

“They rightly adminish us that Christ taught that our speech should be Yea, Yea, and Nay, Nayl yet they do not seem to me to understand it clearly, or if they do understand it to obeu it. For though in many places they should often have said Yea, it has never been Yea. When those leaders were banished, against whom we wrote as best we could, and asked for an oath they would not reply except to the effect that through the faith which they had in God they knew they would never return, and yet they soon returned. 'The Father,' each said, 'led me back through His will.' I know very well that it was the father - of lies who led them back; but they pretend to know it was the Heavenly Father. Here is something worth telling: when that George (whom they call a second Paul) of the House of Jacob [Blaurock], was cudgelled with rods among us even to the infernal gate and was asked by an officer of the Council to take oath and lift up his hands [in affirmation], he at first refused, as he had often done before and had persisted in doing. Indeed he had always said that he would rather die than take an oath. The officer of the Council then ordered him forthwith to lift his hands and make oath at once, 'or do you, policemen,' he said, 'lead him to prison.' But now persuaded by rods this George of the House of Jacob raised his hand to heven and followed the magistrate in the recitation of the aoth. So here you have the question confronting you, Catabaptists, whether that Pail of yours did or did not transgress the law. The law forbids to sweat about the least thing: he swore, so he transgressed the law. Hence this knot is knit: You would be speerated from the world, from lies, from those who walk not according to the resurection of Christ but in dead works? How then is it that you have not excommunicated that Apostate? Your Yea is not Yea with you nor your Nay, Nay, but the contrary; your Yea is Nay and your Nay, Yea. You follow neither Christ nor your own constitution.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

As quoted in ibid, p. 263-264

God, World, Faith, Law

“Our task as image-bearing, God-loving, Christ-shaped, Spirit-filled Christians, following Christ and shaping our world, is to announce redemption to a world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to a world that has discovered its brokenness, to proclaim love and trust to a world that knows only exploitation, fear and suspicion…The gospel of Jesus points us and indeed urges us to be at the leading edge of the whole culture, articulating in story and music and art and philosophy and education and poetry and politics and theology and even--heaven help us--Biblical studies, a worldview that will mount the historically-rooted Christian challenge to both modernity and postmodernity, leading the way…with joy and humor and gentleness and good judgment and true wisdom. I believe if we face the question, "if not now, then when?" if we are grasped by this vision we may also hear the question, "if not us, then who?"”

N.T. Wright (1948) Anglican bishop

And if the gospel of Jesus is not the key to this task, then what is?
The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is (2000)

Love, Wisdom, God, World

“It is doubtful whether the artist [unknown] altogether knew what he depicted here in this panel, and even more doubtful whether he could have expressed it in words. That which we praise here as well thought-out and cleverly arranged may, in fact, have been achieved by him unconsciously; for the artist was transformed by pure harmoniousness while executing this picture, and his feeling become his law. Only his disposition, his spiritual exaltation, could have brought forth such a fruit as this picture. Just as the pious man prays without speaking a word and the Almighty hearkens unto him, so the artist with true feeling paints and the sensitive man understands and recognizes it; while even the less sensitive gain some inkling of it.”

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) Swedish painter

cited in: Vaughan, William-Börsch-Supan, Helmut- Neidhardt, Hans Joachim, Caspar David Friedrich. 1774-1840. Romantic Landscape Painting in Dresden, London, The Tate gallery, 1972, p. 104
undated

Law, Feeling, Understanding, Painting

“Contrary to what is often thought, excessive hygiene, that is staying in an antibacterial environment, does not necessarily lead to a better health, sometimes it even causes health deterioration. Indirect proof may be that among children of rural backgrounds allergic diseases is less than in urban children. This is because children in the countryside are in contact with a lot more bacteria. You can see that exaggeration is unhealthy in every respect.”

Włodzimierz Ptak (1928–2019) immunologist

Borejza, Tomasz (January 2018): Trochę bakterii nie zaszkodzi https://www.tygodnikprzeglad.pl/troche-bakterii-zaszkodzi/. Przegląd (4/2018): pp. 54–55.

Children, Health, Disease

“What agents would choose in certain well- defined conditions of ignorance (in the “original position”) is, for Rawls, an important criterion for determining which conception of “justice” is normatively acceptable. Why should we agree that choice under conditions of ignorance is a good criterion for deciding what kind of society we would wish to have? William Morris in the late nineteenth century claimed to prefer a society of more or less equal grinding poverty for all (e. g., the society he directly experienced in Iceland) to Britain with its extreme discrepancies of wealth and welfare, even though the least well-off in Britain were in absolute terms better off than the peasants and fishermen of Iceland.” This choice seems to have been based not on any absolute preference for equality (or on a commitment to any conception of fairness), but on a belief about the specific social (and other) evils that flowed from the ways in which extreme wealth could be used in an industrial capitalist society.” Would no one in the original position entertain views like these? Is Morris’s vote simply to be discounted? On what grounds? The “veil of ignorance” is artificially defined so as to allow certain bits of knowledge “in” and to exclude other bits. No doubt it would be possible to rig the veil of ignorance so that it blanks out knowledge of the particular experiences Morris had and the theories he developed, and renders them inaccessible in the original position, but one would then have to be convinced that this was not simply a case of modifying the conditions of the thought experiment and the procedure until one got the result one antecedently wanted.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), pp. 87-88.

Justice, Way, Knowledge, Evil

“Art today can only be revolutionary, that is, it must aspire at the complete and radical reconstruction of society, even if for no other reason than to emancipate intellectual creation from the chains which obstruct it and to allow all mankind to rise to the heights that only geniuses could reach in the past.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Quote of Breton, from La Clé des Champs (1953); as cited by Thomas Molnar, The Decline of the Intellectual (1961)
after 1930

Art, Past

“Remember that vision on the Mount of Transfiguration; and let it be ours, even in the glare of earthly joys and brightnesses, to lift up our eyes, like those wondering three, and see no man any more, save Jesus only.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 66.

Joy

“Goodbye. You have gone to the place where we can never meet again
I can't accept the coldness of an eternal parting
I wish I could have heard you say
That surely, you had loved me
Only once, even if it were a lie”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Memorial Address ~Take 2 Version~
Lyrics, Memorial Address

Love, Lie, Parting

“I remember when I got a new device for my computer. I connected it to the landline phone plug(!), and the device called another device and sang a robot love song to it. That made the devices connect, and I could go online and exchange messages. That was one of the most important things that ever happened to me, breaking my isolation. It helped me to reach out to other folks all around the globe. Communication is key in nerd culture. But beware if that communication fails. You can create toxic troll wastelands! Not even robot love songs can help you with that!”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

via Film Threat http://filmthreat.com/interviews/johannes-grenzfurthner-is-kinda-nerdy/

Love, Communication, Help

“And if gunning over an intelligent handsome setter enriches my sport, certainly a hearthful of them on a winter evening or speckled faces peering out of our station wagon are things to value.”

George Bird Evans (1906–1998) American writer

The Upland Shooting Life (1971)

Intelligence, Sport, Winter

“Aristotle was guided by that which appears to be the nature of things. The Ashariyah refused to ascribe to God ignorance about anything… they preferred to admit the above-mentioned absurdities. The Mu'tazilites refused to assume that God does what is wrong and unjust; on the other hand, they would not contradict common sense and say that it was not wrong to inflict pain on the guiltless, or that the mission of the Prophets and the giving of the Law had no intelligible reason. They likewise preferred to admit the above-named absurdities. But they even contradicted themselves, because they believe on the one hand that God knows everything, and on the other that man has free will. By a little consideration we discover the contradiction.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.17

God, Pain, Law, Intelligence

“It was too much for me to handle, and I stopped caring about my life and my future. I even stopped caring about what people thought of me. I hid myself away in the online World of Warcraft, a place where I felt comfortable and secure.”

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

My Twisted World (2014), Pastimes

Life, People, World, Future

“No one, to my knowledge, has suggested that the image must accelerate and decelerate or that the relation among torque, angular momentum, and angular velocity has a,1 analogue in the mental rotation case. Of course it may tum our that it takes subjects longer to rotate an object that they imagine to be heavier, thus increasing the predictive value of the metaphor. But in that case it seems clearer that, even if it was predictive, the metaphor could nor be explanatory (surely, no one believes that some images are heavier than others and the heavier ones accelerate more slowly).”

Zenon Pylyshyn (1937) Canadian philosopher

Zenon W. Pylyshyn, "The rate of “mental rotation” of images: A test of a holistic analogue hypothesis." Memory & Cognition 7.1 (1979): 19-28; p. 19-20

Imagination, Knowledge

“In the most basic sense, imaginization invites a way of thinking. It encourages us to become our own theorists and to feel comfortable about acting on the basis our insights. It invites us to develop a skill that I believe we all have, even though we may not realize that this is the case. By recognizing this, and thinking creatively and intelligently about ourselves and our situations, we can 'push the envelope' on our realities and reshape them positively.”

Gareth Morgan (1943) Organizational theorist

Source: Imaginization (1993), p. 16, as cited in: Colin M. Beard, ‎John Peter Wilson (2006), Experiential Learning: A Best Practice Handbook for Educators and and Trainers. p. 272

Way, Feeling, Imagination, Intelligence

“Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Les discours sont des éléments ou des blocs tactiques dans le champ des rapports de force; il peut y en avoir de différents et même de contradictoires à l'intérieur d'une même stratégie; ils peuvent au contraire circuler sans changer de forme entre des stratégies opposées.
Vol I, pp. 101-102
History of Sexuality (1976–1984)

Change

“Today, the countries that had kept up a civilised relationship with Modi despite the US’s strictures—these include Japan, Singapore, Canada, Australia, Israel[, ] and even China—are happy with the knowledge that their transition to a new regime will be extra smooth. Nor will the others who changed their tune midway feel disadvantaged. It is only the US that invested politically in the witch-hunt against Modi that feels seriously threatened.”

Swapan Dasgupta (1955) Indian politician, journalist and columnist

"A mighty fall from a moral high ground", 2014

Happiness, Feeling, Knowledge, Change

“The Orestia shows that society is a defense against nature. Everything intelligible -- institutions, objects, persons, ideas -- is the result of Apollonian clarification, adjudication, and action. Western politics, science, psychology and art are creations of arrogant Apollo. Through every century, winning or losing, western mind has struggled to keep nature at bay. The Orestia’s sexist transition from matriarchy to patriarchy records the rebellion every imagination must make against nature. Without that rebellion, we as a species are condemned to regression or stasis. Even rebelling, we cannot get far. But vying with fate is godlike.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 101

Fate, Art, Imagination, Intelligence

“The statement is so frequently made that the differential calculus deals with continuous magnitude, and yet an explanation of this continuity is nowhere given; even the most rigorous expositions of the differential calculus do not base their proofs upon continuity but, with more or less consciousness of the fact, they either appeal to geometric notions or those suggested by geometry, or depend upon theorems which are never established in a purely arithmetic manner. Among these, for example, belongs the above mentioned theorem, and a more careful investigation convinced me that this theorem, or any one equivalent to it, can be regarded in some way as a sufficient basis for infinitesimal analysis. It then only remained to discover its true origin in the elements of arithmetic and thus at the same time to secure a real definition of the essence of continuity. I succeeded Nov. 24, 1858.”

Richard Dedekind (1831–1916) German mathematician

p, 125
Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen (1872)

Way, Time, Dependency

“Iron, after it is converted into gold by the touch of philosopher's stone, may be kept under the ground or thrown into a rubbish heap; it will always remain gold and will not return to its former condition. Similar is the state of the man whose soul has touched, even once, the feet of the Almighty Lord. Whether he dwells in the bustle of the world, or in the solitude of the forest, nothing ever contaminates him.”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

As quoted in Hindu Psychology : Its Meaning for the West (1946) by Swami Akhilananda, p. 204

World, Soul, Solitude

“The fact is nearly everyone forces God to fit into his own perception. Even Christians serve a God they perceive rather than the God who truly is. They limit Him according to those special needs of their own psyche. It's actually hard not to do that, but every time we do, it has consequences. Seeing God for who He truly is takes effort and always has one inevitable result that many people cannot accept: our understanding will always fall short.”

Sean Sellers (1969–1999) American murderer

Open Letter To Satanists

God, People, Understanding, Effort

“Well, I still don't get it,' she said. 'The way you talk, it sounds calculating or something. Too cold. Planning every tiny detail.' 'And that's bad?' 'No. Not exactly.' 'What then?' She made a shifting motion with her shoulders. 'I don't know, it just seem strange, sort of. How you've figured everything out, all the angles, except what it's for.' 'For us,' he said. 'I love you, Kath.' 'But it feels — I shouldn't say this — it feels manipulating.'… He talked about leading a good life, doing good things for the world. Yet even as he spoke, John realized he was not telling the full truth. Politics was manipulation. (p. 35)”

Tim O'Brien (1946) American novelist

In the Lake of The Woods (1994)

Love, Life, Truth, World

“Do we not all know that the cause of our casualties is the vicious intermeddling of too many of the citizens of the Northern States with the constitutional rights of the Southern States, cooperating with the discontents of the people of those states? Do we not know that the disregard of the Constitution, and of the security that it affords to the rights of States and of individuals, has been the cause of the calamity which our country is called to undergo? And now, war! war, in its direst shape — war, such as it makes the blood run cold to read of in the history of other nations and of other times — war, on a scale of a million of men in arms — war, horrid as that of barbaric ages, rages in several of the States of the Union, as its more immediate field, and casts the lurid shadow of its death and lamentation athwart the whole expanse, and into every nook and corner of our vast domain.

Nor is that all; for in those of the States which are exempt from the actual ravages of war, in which the roar of the cannon, and the rattle of the musketry, and the groans of the dying, are heard but as a faint echo of terror from other lands, even here in the loyal States, the mailed hand of military usurpation strikes down the liberties of the people, and its foot tramples on a desecrated Constitution.”

Franklin Pierce (1804–1869) American politician, 14th President of the United States (in office from 1853 to 1857)

Address to the Citizens of Concord, New Hampshire (4 July 1863).

Death, Men, War, People

“Even though New York is the safest big city in the nation, there are still far too many illegal guns on our streets. Nearly all of them arrive from out of state – and most are sold by a small group of rogue gun dealers who refuse to obey federal laws.”

Michael Bloomberg (1942) American businessman and politician, former mayor of New York City

http://www.mikebloomberg.com/en/issues/illegal_guns/mayor_michael_bloomberg_discusses_citys_efforts_to_stop_the_flow_of_illegal_guns_into_new_york
Gun Control

Law

“Are we making more mistakes now? I don't think so. Science is a high-risk activity. And when you do science—this is very important incidentally for the general public, and for policy makers—if you are not wasting some of your money, you are not doing good science. It's a funny way to say this. You've got to back high-risk opportunities. And high-risk opportunities means some fraction of them are going to fail. And I think in any science funding scenario, you've got to say, 10, 20, maybe even 30% of your funds are going to be invested in failures.”

Leon M. Lederman (1922–2018) American mathematician and physicist

Comments on need for failure in scientific research. From the Winding Your Way through DNA symposium http://www.accessexcellence.org/RC/CC/lederman.php at the University of California, San Francisco in 1992 (URL accessed on October 20, 2008)

Money, Way, Failure, Thinking

“Ever in this world saw I
Good men suffer grave torments,
But even more—
Enough to terrify—
Men who live out evil lives
Reveling in pleasure and in content.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Os bons vi sempre passar
No mundo graves tormentos;
E para mais me espantar,
Os maus vi sempre nadar
Em mar de contentamentos.
"Esparsa ao Desconcerto do Mundo", translation from Luís de Camões and the Epic of the Lusiads (1962) by Henry Hersch Hart, p. 111
Lyric poetry, Songs (redondilhas)

Men, Pleasure, World, Suffering

“Rather than protecting music as a sublimely meaningless activity that has managed to escape social signification, I insist on treating it as a medium that participates in social formation by influencing the ways we perceive our feelings, our bodies, our desires, our very subjectivities - even if it does so surreptitiously, without most of us knowning how. It is too important a cultural force to be shrouded by mystified notions of Romantic transcendence.”

Susan McClary (1946) American musicologist

"Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert's Music", Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (1994), ISBN 0415907527

Music, Way, Feeling

“[on KFC's Famous Bowls] I just want kind of a light brown hillock of glop. If you could put my lunch in a blender, and liquefy it, and then put it into a caulking gun and inject it right into my femoral artery, even better! But until you invent a lunch gun, I would like a failure pile in a sadness bowl!”

Patton Oswalt (1969) stand-up comedian

Werewolves and Lollipops (2007)

Sadness, Failure, Light

“John always went over the time limit and then answered one or two earlier questions unexpectedly, out of order, for nothing could prevent him from solving a problem, even if it had already become inappropriate.”

Sten Nadolny book The Discovery of Slowness

p, 125
The Discovery of Slowness (1983, 1987)

Question, Problem, Time

““This is the stuff which some Nazis wished to put into our churches,” whispered von Bek. “Pagan objects of worship which they claim are the symbols of a true German religion. They are almost as anti-Christian as they are anti-Semitic. It is as if they hate every system of thought which in any way questions their own mish-mash of pseudo-philosophy and mystical claptrap!” He stared at the altar in disgust. “They are the worst kind of nihilists. They cannot even see that they destroy everything and create nothing. Their invention is as empty as any inventions of Chaos I have seen. It has no true history, no concrete substance, no depth, no quality of intellect. It is merely a negation, a brutal denial of all Germany’s virtues.””

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Book 3, Chapter 2 (p. 637)
The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

Hate, Religion, Way, History

“O Friend! Don't even speak of war. Get rid of atomic weapons.
Become immortal with the help of the treasure of camaraderie. Practice control over the senses, compassion and charity in your heart and in your actions.
By doing so, the humanity in you will rise even above divinity. Worship Lord Dattatreya, who is Bahudhari (one who possesses many aspects or one who is of the form of the tune 'Bahudhari'), the One who bestows auspiciousness and peace.
Experience Truth, Knowledge and Bliss and become exalted.”

Ganapathy Sachchidananda Swamiji (1942) Indian guru

Jaya Jaya Bhuvi Divi Manava (2002)

War, Truth, Peace, Knowledge

“Aurangzeb's purpose in building those three mosques was the same intentionally offensive political purpose that moved the Russians to build their Orthodox cathedral in the city-centre at Warsaw. Those mosques were intended to signify that an Islamic government was reigning supreme, even over Hinduism's holiest of holy places. I must say that Aurangzeb had a veritable genius for picking out provocative sites. Aurangzeb and Philip II of Spain are a pair. They are incarnations of the gloomily fanatical vein in the Christian - Muslim - Jewish family of religions. Aurangzeb - poor wretched misguided bad man - spent a lifetime of hard labour in raising massive monuments to his own discredit. Perhaps the Poles were really kinder in destroying the Russians' self-discrediting monument in Warsaw than you have been in sparing Aurangzeb's mosques.”

Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) British historian, author of A Study of History

Arnold J. Toynbee in 'One World and India' (New Delhi, 1960) pp. 59-60

Family, Religion

“It is very likely that there are many, many planets carrying life, even intelligent life, throughout the universe, because there are so many stars. By sheer chance, even if those chances are small, a great many life forms and a great many intelligences may exist.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Interview http://americanindian.net/asimov.html in Southwest Airlines Magazine 1979) General sources

Life, Star, Intelligence, Universe

“Today the changes that are generating enormous inequality, progressively destroying "real jobs" with security and benefits, demanding longer and longer hours and at least two incomes per household as prerequisites for a minimally middle-class existence, and depriving people of control over their work even in the professional classes are taking place in the absence of any credible opposition to the free-market dogma that rules the day. On the contrary, the capitalist triumphalists are riding high on a wave of "prosperity" that has enriched a minority of the population while obscuring the long-term slippage of our standard of living and our quality of life.”

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist

"How Now, Iron Johns?", The Nation (13 December 1999)

Life, People, Change

“But it was amazing to see this man crying, and grateful to God for this, and to love this animal as if it was his child. Well, events took a turn for the bittersweet when he let me know last night that he's moving, out of town, even, and he's taking Has Wounds with him (and yes, he called her that.) And he wanted to thank me again. And my only reply was "what else could I have done, but more?" So — I should not ever see her again, I think — but had I not gotten the Grace to happen to come across this man, thanks to God, at my door, I would have assumed that she had died. So I'm very grateful that I got to see him, and we got to pray together and embrace each other, and know what really was going on, all this time we were afraid. Well, she was right next door for either one of us. And it was very funny too, that this man's name was Francisco, because it's very much a St. Francis story, with an animal, you know?”

Ysabella Brave (1979) American singer

Has wounds but still lives (2010)

Love, God, Thinking, Time

“Even though I think they're probably usually wrong, minority opinions in science are very useful. It keeps the whole process honest …”

Steven Novella (1964) American neurologist, skepticist

SGU, Podcast #227, November 25th, 2009 http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu/227 The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, Podcast, 2000s

Thinking, Science

“People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that to be found in reading a story.”

Stendhal book The Red and the Black

Les contemporains qui souffrent de certaines choses ne peuvent s'en souvenir qu'avec une horreur qui paralyse tout autre plaisir, même celui de lire un conte.
Vol. I, ch. XXVII
Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

People, Pleasure, Suffering, Reading

“Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. … The theory of special genius, according to which for instance, it is supposed that a musical genius should be a fool at other subjects, confuses genius with talent. … There are many kinds of talent, but only one kind of genius, and that is able to choose any kind of talent and master it.”

Otto Weininger book Sex and Character

Source: Sex and Character (1903), p. 112.

Fools, Music, Mathematics, Universe

“There are literally several levels of SCO being wrong. And even if we were to live in that alternate universe where SCO would be right, they'd still be wrong.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

[Kerstetter, Jim, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_05/b3868110_mz063.htm, Linus Torvalds: SCO Is 'Just Too Wrong', BusinessWeek Online, 2004-02-02, 2006-08-28]
2000s, 2000-04

Universe

“One night at Socko and a year of probation were no comparison to the punishment at home. My rehabilitation was one of the fastest in adolescent history. I had it coming, and it taught me that moral rehab is possible. I behaved during my term of probation and stopped all of my criminal activity. But I would always retain my strong impulse to challenge authority and to think and act on my own whenever possible. There is room for such types in America, even in the disciplined confines of the United States Army. I’m a big believer in the value of unconventional men and women. They are the innovators and risk takers. Apple, one of the world’s most creative and successful high-tech companies, lives by the vision of transformation through exception. “Here’s to the crazy ones,” Apple’s campaign says. “The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” If you talk to my colleagues, they’ll tell you that I’m cut from the same cloth. My military biography starts badly. I was a miserable dropout in my freshman year of college (1.2 GPA), enlisted in a delayed-entry Marine Corps program, went to work as a lifeguard at a local beach, and then came the first of several miracles: an Army ROTC scholarship. Little did I know that my rebellious activities, such as skipping class and sundry other mistakes, would lead me to playing basketball (which I was very good at) with an ROTC instructor who saw something in me. Not only that, he took surprising initiative.”

Michael T. Flynn (1958) 25th United States National Security Advisor

Introduction
The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies (2016)

Women, Men, People, World

“The gratitude of most men is but a secret desire to receive even greater benefits.”

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

La reconnaissance de la plupart des hommes n'est qu'une secrète envie de recevoir de plus grands bienfaits.
Variant translation: Gratitude is the lively expectation of favours yet to come.
Maxim 298. Compare: "The gratitude of place-expectants is a lively sense of future favours", attributed to Sir Robert Walpole.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Men, Secret, Gratitude