2016, Presidential transition of Donald Trump (November 2016)
Las Vegas CityLife, August 9, 2007 http://www.lvcitylife.com/articles/2007/08/10/ae/stage/iq_15893857.txt
Interviews, Print Interviews
Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God with Steve Olson (2010)
Source: A Burnt Child (1948), p. 135
Interview with ShortList, 2015 http://www.shortlist.com/entertainment/sport/lionel-messi-talks-champions-league-copa-america
“When I'm happy I am sad, but everything's good
It's not that complicated, I'm just misunderstood.”
Missundaztood, written by Pink and Linda Perry
Song lyrics, Missundaztood (2001)
Empire magazine interview, 1994.
Speech during the commemorations of D-Day, 06/06/2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/10883074/D-Day-anniversary-Queen-stirred-by-commemorations.html
http://www.popmonk.com/actors/leonardo-dicaprio/quotes-leonardo-dicaprio.htm
“It is important to do everything with passion, it embellishes life enormously.”
Главное, делайте всё с увлечением, это страшно украшает жизнь.
in a letter to his niece Maya Bessarab, as quoted by her in [Lev Landau, biography, Moscovskiy Rabochiy (Moscow Worker), 1971]
Connections (1979), 10 - Yesterday, Tomorrow and You
As quoted in "Nate Diaz discusses win over Conor McGregor" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg6NkqFPOyY (5 March 2016), UFC on FOX, FOX
Everything Has Changed, written by Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran.
Song lyrics, Red (2012)
As quoted in "It's Monica Mania" by Richard Corliss in TIME (10 March 2003) http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1004378,00.html
“Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.”
Last published words With Oppenheimer on an Autumn Day, Look, Vol. 30, No. 26 (19 December 1966)
Pure Theory of Law (revised ed., 1960), 1. The “Pure” Theory
The Bridges, as quoted in The Old Bridge of Mostar and Increasing Respect for Cultural Property in Armed Conflict (2012) by Jadranka Petrovic, p. 65
R.U.R. (1920)
"Michael Jackson - Life in the magical kingdom" - Rolling Stone (February 17, 1983) http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/michael-jackson-life-in-the-magical-kingdom-19830217
"Michael Jackson - Life in the Magical Kingdom" Rolling Stone 1983
Quote, This time the struggle is for our freedom (1971)
A desert blessing, an ocean curse. What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers."
Augustus "Gus" Waters, p. 310-313
The Fault in Our Stars (2012)
Popcorn in Paradise (1980)
YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VIPZ3dHD4Y&feature=player_embedded
Ram Lila Grounds, Delhi, India, October 29, 1966 (translated from Hindi) - Published in Divine Light (UK) April 1, 1973, Volume 2, Issue 7
1960s
"'I'm a little bit of a nerd'", interview with The Guardian (7 June 2009) https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/jun/07/interview-daryl-hannah.
“Everything is on loan in life—everything.”
Agnelli: The Rules of the Game, Vanity Fair (1991)
R.U.R. (1920)
Source: Mind is a Myth (1987), Ch. 4: There Is Nothing To Understand
Interview, 1991 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuJL8fKtTj8
Only You Can Save Mankind (1992)
Corot's description of the beginning of a day in Switzerland, Château de Gruyères, 1857; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963
1850s
Letter to Capito, January 1, 1526 (Staehelin, Briefe ausder Reformationseit, p. 20), ibid, p. 249-250
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 173.
“Time is the wisest of all things that are; for it brings everything to light.”
As quoted in Diogenes Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, I, 35
As quoted in God’s Laughter (1992) by Gerhard Staguhn, p. 152
Talking about drugs, quoted in **
Audioslave Era
“I'm not young enough to know everything.”
J. M. Barrie The Admirable Crichton, Act I (1903)
The Admirable Crichton (1903)
KCRW – Man In The Moon (January 4, 1994)
From Interviews
My Twisted World (2014), Final Days
Primetime interview (Jan 2004)
from the book Blue Star Love by By Maia Chrystine Nartoomid. http://safehaven.0catch.com/quotes.htm,originally
in the German army during world War 1. (1914-1918)
Quote from Otto Dix, 1891-1969, exhibition catalogue, London: Tate Gallery, 1992, pp. 17–18; cf. pp. 27–28; as cited by Roy Forward, in 'Education resource material: beauty, truth and goodness in Dix's War' https://nga.gov.au/dix/edu.pdf, p. 9
“Being a dad changes everything for the better and I’m really enjoying it.”
Interview with TyC Sports, 2014 http://www.insidespanishfootball.com/101179/messi-being-a-dad-changes-everything-for-the-better/
“I have everything. Everything I have, I've worked for.”
As quoted in "Nate Diaz discusses win over Conor McGregor" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg6NkqFPOyY (5 March 2016), UFC on FOX, FOX
“In war, groping tactics, half-way measures, lose everything.”
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
Henri Fayol (1916) cited in: Russell C. Swansburg (1996) Management and Leadership for Nurse Managers, p. 1
Vibe "Justin Bieber on Photo Shoots, Puberty, 2Pac & Drake" http://www.vibe.com/article/justin-bieber-photo-shoots-puberty-2pac-drake, 22 July 2010
“Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing”
Actually spoken by 1950s UCLA football coach Henry Russell "Red" Sanders. Lombardi always denied he had said this although it is close to something he did say: "Winning isn't a sometime thing; it's an all the time thing."
Misattributed
The original quote attributed to Picasso in 1951 quotes him as saying that 'even if he were imprisoned, he would draw on the dust-covered prison walls and on the floor, with his fingers dripped in his own spit' (see above). This expansion appears to derive from an interview given by actor Dustin Hoffman to the L.A. Times in 2001.
http://articles.latimes.com/2001/mar/04/entertainment/ca-32985
Disputed
“Lea Michele: From Gleek to Do-Gooder,” interview with Shape (July 2012) http://www.shape.com/celebrities/interviews/lea-michele-gleek-do-gooder.
“For as children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things that children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true. This terror, therefore, and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of daylight, but by the aspect and law of nature.”
Nam veluti pueri trepidant atque omnia caecis
in tenebris metuunt, sic nos in luce timemus
interdum, nilo quae sunt metuenda magis quam
quae pueri in tenebris pavitant finguntque futura.
hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest
non radii solis neque lucida tela diei
discutiant sed naturae species ratioque.
Book II, lines 55–61 (tr. Rouse)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)
Bennington College address (1970)
Context: I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty — and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine.
Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.
Review of Their Finest Hour by Winston Churchill, New Leader (14 May 1949)
Context: It is difficult for a statesman who still has a political future to reveal everything that he knows: and in a profession in which one is a baby at 50 and middle-aged at seventy-five, it is natural that anyone who has not actually been disgraced should feel that he still has a future.
“A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating”
As quoted in Shoptalk: learning to write with writers (1990), edited by Donald Morison Murray<!-- Cook Publishers -->
General sources
Context: A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating. You're there now doing the thing on paper. You're not killing the goose, you're just producing an egg. So I don't worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It's a matter of just sitting down and working. I have never had the problem of a writing block. I've heard about it. I've felt reluctant to write on some days, for whole weeks, or sometimes even longer. I'd much rather go fishing, for example, or go sharpen pencils, or go swimming, or what not. But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, 'Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write.' There's no difference on paper between the two.
from fr. 17
Variant translations:
But come! but hear my words! For knowledge gained/Makes strong thy soul. For as before I spake/Naming the utter goal of these my words/I will report a twofold truth. Now grows/The One from Many into being, now/Even from one disparting come the Many--/Fire, Water, Earth, and awful heights of Air;/And shut from them apart, the deadly Strife/In equipoise, and Love within their midst/In all her being in length and breadth the same/Behold her now with mind, and sit not there/With eyes astonished, for 'tis she inborn/Abides established in the limbs of men/Through her they cherish thoughts of love, through her/Perfect the works of concord, calling her/By name Delight, or Aphrodite clear.
tr. William E. Leonard
On Nature
Context: But come, hear my words, since indeed learning improves the spirit. Now as I said before, setting out the bounds of my words, I shall speak twice over. As upon a time One came to be alone out of many, so at another time it divided to be many out of One: fire and water and earth and the limitless vault of air, and wretched Strife apart from these, in equal measure to everything, and Love among them, equal in length and breadth. Consider [Love] in mind, you, and don't sit there with eyes glazing over. It is a thing considered inborn in mortals, to their very bones; through it they form affections and accomplish peaceful acts, calling it Joy or Aphrodite by name.
3 May 1944
The Diary of a Young Girl (1942 - 1944)
Context: I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as keen, otherwise the people of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There is an urge and rage in people to destroy, to kill, to murder, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown, will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.
Variant translation: On our crowded planet there are no longer any internal affairs! ...
Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: I have understood and felt that world literature is no longer an abstract anthology, nor a generalization invented by literary historians; it is rather a certain common body and a common spirit, a living heartfelt unity reflecting the growing unity of mankind. State frontiers still turn crimson, heated by electric wire and bursts of machine fire; and various ministries of internal affairs still think that literature too is an "internal affair" falling under their jurisdiction; newspaper headlines still display: "No right to interfere in our internal affairs!" Whereas there are no INTERNAL AFFAIRS left on our crowded Earth! And mankind's sole salvation lies in everyone making everything his business; in the people of the East being vitally concerned with what is thought in the West, the people of the West vitally concerned with what goes on in the East. And literature, as one of the most sensitive, responsive instruments possessed by the human creature, has been one of the first to adopt, to assimilate, to catch hold of this feeling of a growing unity of mankind. And so I turn with confidence to the world literature of today — to hundreds of friends whom I have never met in the flesh and whom I may never see.
Friends! Let us try to help if we are worth anything at all! Who from time immemorial has constituted the uniting, not the dividing, strength in your countries, lacerated by discordant parties, movements, castes and groups? There in its essence is the position of writers: expressers of their native language — the chief binding force of the nation, of the very earth its people occupy, and at best of its national spirit.
‘Human beings never submit to human beings.’ Even slaves practice their mean retaliations. Human beings cannot conceive of any mean retaliations. Human beings cannot conceive of any means of survival except of a single then-and-there contest. They speak of duty to one’s country and such like things, but the object of their effort is invariably the individual, and, even once the individual’s needs have been met, again the individual comes in. The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This is how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror of the illusion of the ocean called the world. I learned to behave rather aggressively, without the endless anxious worrying I knew before, responding as it were to the needs of the moment.
Third Notebook: Part One
No Longer Human
“If I worried about everything that everyone said, I would not be a good artist.”
Context: Grace Jones said this to me when I met her. I washed her feet, and I looked up at her and she said, "No matter what you do in your life, don’t you ever let anybody take your creative people away from you." And what my creative friends always remind me of is they say, "Only value the opinion of those that you respect. And anyone that you don’t respect, pay no mind to their opinion about you or anything else." And that’s how I live my life. If I worried about everything that everyone said, I would not be a good artist.
Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Context: People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Spacetime Tsunami http://www.deoxy.org/t_sunami.htm, Interview with Carla Sinclair, bOING bOING #10.
Context: I think that people don't understand. As the Firesign Theater used to say, 'Everything you know is wrong.' But that is a very liberating understanding, because if everything you know is wrong, then all the problems you thought were insoluble can be framed differently. And there's a way to take the world apart and put it back unrecognizably. We don't really understand what consciousness is at the really deep levels. With some of the tryptamine hallucinogens, you see into possibilities where questions like, 'are you alive?' 'are you dead?' 'are you you?' seem to have been transcended. I think people have a very narrow conception of what is possible with reality, that we're surrounded by the howling abyss of the unknowable and nobody knows what's out there.
Article on Philosophy, Vol. 25, p. 667, as quoted in Main Currents of Western Thought : Readings in Western European Intellectual History from the Middle Ages to the Present (1978) by Franklin Le Van Baumer
Variant translation: Reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian. Grace moves the Christian to act, reason moves the philosopher. Other men walk in darkness; the philosopher, who has the same passions, acts only after reflection; he walks through the night, but it is preceded by a torch. The philosopher forms his principles on an infinity of particular observations. … He does not confuse truth with plausibility; he takes for truth what is true, for forgery what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable what is probable. … The philosophical spirit is thus a spirit of observation and accuracy.
L'Encyclopédie (1751-1766)
Context: Reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian.
Grace causes the Christian to act, reason the philosopher. Other men are carried away by their passions, their actions not being preceded by reflection: these are the men who walk in darkness. On the other hand, the philosopher, even in his passions, acts only after reflection; he walks in the dark, but by a torch.
The philosopher forms his principles from an infinity of particular observations. Most people adopt principles without thinking of the observations that have produced them, they believe the maxims exist, so to speak, by themselves. But the philosopher takes maxims from their source; he examines their origin; he knows their proper value, and he makes use of them only in so far as they suit him.
Truth is not for the philosopher a mistress who corrupts his imagination and whom he believes to be found everywhere; he contents himself with being able to unravel it where he can perceive it. He does not confound it with probability; he takes for true what is true, for false what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable what is only probable. He does more, and here you have a great perfection of the philosopher: when he has no reason by which to judge, he knows how to live in suspension of judgment...
The philosophical spirit is, then, a spirit of observation and exactness, which relates everything to true principles...
Wear and Tears (tableu of a ageless world)
Specters of Marx (1993)
Context: The time is out of joint. The world is going badly. It is worn but its wear no longer counts. Old age or youth-one no longer counts in that way. The world has more than one age. We lack the measure of the measure. We no longer realize the wear, we no longer take account of it as of a single age in the progress of history. Neither maturation, nor crisis, nor even agony. Something else. What is happening is happening to age itself, it strikes a blow at the teleological order of history. What is coming, in which the untimely appears, is happening to time but it does not happen in time. Contretemps. The time is out of joint. Theatrical speech, Hamlet's speech before the theater of the world, of history, and of politics. The age is off its hinges. Everything, beginning with time, seems out of kilter, unjust, dis-adjusted. The world is going very badly, it wears as it grows, as the Painter also says at the beginning of Timon of Athens (which is Marx's play, is it not). For, this time, it is a painter's speech, as if he were speaking of a spectacle or before a tableau: "How goes the world?-It wears, sir, as it grows.
As quoted in Out of the Mouths of Mathematicians : A Quotation Book for Philomaths (1993) by Rosemary Schmalz.
Context: I have never proceeded from any Genus supremum of the actual infinite. Quite the contrary, I have rigorously proved that there is absolutely no Genus supremum of the actual infinite. What surpasses all that is finite and transfinite is no Genus; it is the single, completely individual unity in which everything is included, which includes the Absolute, incomprehensible to the human understanding. This is the Actus Purissimus, which by many is called God.
I am so in favor of the actual infinite that instead of admitting that Nature abhors it, as is commonly said, I hold that Nature makes frequent use of it everywhere, in order to show more effectively the perfections of its Author. Thus I believe that there is no part of matter which is not — I do not say divisible — but actually divisible; and consequently the least particle ought to be considered as a world full of an infinity of different creatures.
“Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words.”
Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience. Through art we are sometimes visited — dimly, briefly — by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking.
Like that little looking-glass from the fairy-tales: look into it and you will see — not yourself — but for one second, the Inaccessible, whither no man can ride, no man fly. And only the soul gives a groan...
7 February 1945.
Disputed, The Testament of Adolf Hitler (1945)
Context: The white races did, of course, give some things to the natives, and they were the worst gifts that they could possibly have made, those plagues of our own modern world-materialism, fanaticism, alcoholism and syphilis. For the rest, since these peoples possessed qualities of their own which were superior to anything we could offer them, they have remained essentially unchanged. Where imposition by force was attempted, the results were even more disastrous, and common sense, realizing the futility of such measures, should preclude any recourse to their introduction. One solitary success must be conceded to the colonizers: everywhere they have succeeded in arousing hatred, a hatred that urges these peoples, awakened from their slumbers by us, to rise and drive us out. Indeed, it looks almost as though they had awakened solely and simply for that purpose! Can anyone assert that colonization has increased the number of Christians in the world? Where are those conversions en masse which mark the success of Islam? Here and there one finds isolated islets of Christians, Christians in name, that is, rather than by conviction; and that is the sum total of the successes of this magnificent Christian religion, the guardian of supreme Truth! Taking everything into consideration, Europe's policy of colonization has ended in a complete failure.
“Divinity reveals herself in all things… everything has Divinity latent within itself.”
As translated by Arthur Imerti (1964)
The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (1584)
Context: Divinity reveals herself in all things... everything has Divinity latent within itself. For she enfolds and imparts herself even unto the smallest beings, and from the smallest beings, according to their capacity. Without her presence nothing would have being, because she is the essence of the existence of the first unto the last being.
"Charles Dickens" (1939)
Context: Dickens's attitude is easily intelligible to an Englishman, because it is part of the English puritan tradition, which is not dead even at this day. The class Dickens belonged to, at least by adoption, was growing suddenly rich after a couple of centuries of obscurity. It had grown up mainly in the big towns, out of contact with agriculture, and politically impotent; government, in its experience, was something which either interfered or persecuted. Consequently it was a class with no tradition of public service and not much tradition of usefulness. What now strikes us as remarkable about the new moneyed class of the nineteenth century is their complete irresponsibility; they see everything in terms of individual success, with hardly any consciousness that the community exists.
"My Pet Theory" on the second disc of the twin CD version
The MOFO Project/Object (2006)
Context: The '60s was really stupid … It was a type of merchandising, Americans had this hideous weakness, they had this desire to be OK, fun guys and gals, and they haven't come to terms with the reality of the situation: we were not created equal. Some people can do carpentry, some people can do mathematics, some people are brain surgeons and some people are winos and that's the way it is, and we're not all the same. This concept of one world-ism, everything blended and smoothed out to this mediocre norm that everybody downgrades themselves to be is stupid. The '60s was merchandised to the public at large... My pet theory about the '60s is that there is a sinister plot behind it... The lessons learnt in the '60s about merchandising stupidity to the American public on a large scale have been used over and over again since that time.
Overcoming a Personal Holocaust, Alfred Freddy Krupa (in the article by Ante Vranković), Life As A Human (Canada), 2019
2010s
Source: The Warrior Within : The Philosophies of Bruce Lee (1996), p. 77, spoken by Cord, the protagonist of the unproduced film The Silent Flute
Thoughts of Prince Andrew Bk XII, Ch. 16
War and Peace (1865–1867; 1869)
“Give the Devil His Due”, 1st November 2014, https://youtube.com/XbiADYVORGE
Interview with Euronews' Claudio Rocco in 2011; as quoted in " Science says 'ciao' to Italy's Margherita Hack: the 'lady of the stars'", euronews.com (1 July 2013) https://www.euronews.com/2013/07/01/science-says-ciao-to-italy-s-margherita-hack-the-lady-of-the-stars.
My Twisted World (2014), 19-22, UC Santa Barbara, Building to Violence
Interview by Andrea Di Marcantonio
A Collection of Essays, pp. 65-66
Charles Dickens (1939)
Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 10
“The male has a negative Midas Touch - everything he touches turns to shit.”
Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. 5 (hyphen (not en- or em-dash) so in original).
[McKenzie, Joi-Marie, Why Author Jason Reynolds Writes For The Youngest Generation, https://www.essence.com/entertainment/author-jason-reynolds/, Essence, 10 March 2020, February 12, 2020]
1930s, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (1932)
