Quotes about everything (7883 quotes, page 43)

“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”

Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)

Presidential address to a joint session of Congress (12 August 1974)
Ford has also been quoted as having made a similar statement many years earlier, as a representative to the US Congress: "If the government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away everything you have."
"If Elected, I Promise…" : Stories and Gems of Wisdom by and About Politicians (1960) p. 193
Similar assertions have often been attributed to Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Some of the inspiration for such expressions may lie in "The Criminality of the State" by Albert Jay Nock in American Mercury (March 1939) where he stated: "You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you."
1970s, Address to Congress (12 August 1974)

“The correct understanding of life, let me tell you, is love despite everything. Love despite everything, that is the aim and object of life. Love, you see, is the only thing that pays in the long run, even though it might seem a dead loss in the short run.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Pétur Þríhross
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

Love , Understanding , Life , Dead

“Everything that used to be foreign to me, at the rational procedures in my profession, I now beging to resort to after all, from necessity, at least as a matter of experiment. Apparently I am becoming perfectly sober and small, perfectly unpoetic and unenthusiastic. I imagine a very small formal motif and try to execute it economically.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (July 1902), # 425, in The Diaries of Paul Klee - 1898-1918, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1968
1895 - 1902

Imagination

“But hereof be assured, that all is not lawful nor just that is statute by civil laws; neither yet is everything sin before God, which ungodly persons allege to be treason.”

John Knox (1514–1572) Scottish clergyman, writer and historian

John Knox pastoral, as quoted in The Breakers of the Yoke: Sketches and Studies of the Men ... by J. S. MacIntosh, p. 303

God , Law , Personality

“Upon encountering a new topic, try this: imagine that you are the first person ever to see the laboratory results on which it is based. Imagine that you must construct the new concepts and explanations to interpret these results, and that you will present and defend your conclusions before the scientific community. Be suspicious. Cross-check everything. Demand independent confirmations. Always remain, with Boyle, the “skeptical chemist.””

David W. Oxtoby (1951) President of Pomona college

Principles of Modern Chemistry (7th ed., 2012), Ch. 1 : The Atom in Modern Chemistry

Imagination , Communication , Personality

“Everything on Tubular Bells was done on the first take – it was lovely, so spontaneous. I had such a long time to prepare it, and I had just one little chance to do it, and now I listen to it and it has a lovely spontaneous energy. It's got mistakes, and I could easily have cut them out, but I left them on.”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

The Telegraph Interview, 10 june 2009

Love , Chance , Time

““That your solution to everything? Cut somebody’s throat?”
“Always slows them down.””

Glen Cook Dreams of Steel

Source: Dreams of Steel (1990), Chapter 10 (p. 258)

“I think globalization actually maintains and fosters various elements of national and cultural identities. I don’t think everything is being homogenized. If anything, your food, your culture, and your ethnicity might become part of the globalized world, and thus absorbed by other countries.”

Nouriel Roubini (1958) American economist

Quoted in Janera Soerel, "Talking to Nouriel Roubini," http://www.janera.com/janera_words.php?id=44 Janera (2007-05-02).

World , Food , Thinking , Parting

“I am ready to sacrifice everything in completing the unfinished agenda of our noble jihad…until there is no bloodshed in Afghanistan and Islam becomes a way of life for our people.”

Mohammed Omar (1959–2013) Founder and former leader of the Taliban

http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/review/people_full_story.asp?service_id=10285.

Life , People , Way

“As always, when the opportunity arose, Joe took a long, astute look at the girl whom, if he could have managed it, he would have had as his mistress, or, even better, his wife. It did not seem possible that Wendy Wright had been born out of blood and internal organs like other people. In proximity to her he felt himself to be a squat, oily, sweating, uneducated nurt whose stomach rattled and whose breath wheezed. Near her he became aware of the physical mechanisms which kept him alive; within him machinery, pipes and valves and gas-compressors and fan belts had to chug away at a losing task, a labor ultimately doomed. Seeing her face, he discovered that his own consisted of a garish mask; noticing her body made him feel like a low-class windup toy. All her colors possessed a subtle quality, indirectly lit. Her eyes, those green and tumbled stones, looked impassively at everything; he had never seen fear in them, or aversion, or contempt. What she saw she accepted. Generally she seemed calm. But more than that she struck him as being durable, untroubled and cool, not subject to wear, or to fatigue, or to physical illness and decline. Probably she was twenty-five or -six, but he could not imagine her looking younger, and certainly she would never look older. She had too much control over herself and outside reality for that.”

Philip K. Dick book Ubik

Source: Ubik (1969), Chapter 5 (pp. 58-59)

People , Fear , Color , Feeling

“The discourse of truth is quite simply impossible. It eludes itself. Everything eludes itself, everything scoffs at its own truth, seduction renders everything elusive. The fury to unveil the truth, to get at the naked truth, the one which haunts all discourses of interpretation, the obscene rage to uncover the secret, is proportionate to the impossibility of ever achieving this. …But this rage, this fury, only bears witness to the eternity of seduction and to the impossibility of mastering it.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

Source: 1980s, The Ecstasy of Communication (1987), p. 73

Truth , Secret , Rage

“The legend of King Midas has been generally misunderstood. Most people think the curse that turned everything the old miser touched into gold, leaving him unable to eat or drink, was a lesson in the perils of avarice. But Midas’s true sin was his failure to understand monetary economics. What the gods were really telling him is that gold is just a metal. If it sometimes seems to be more, that is only because society has found it convenient to use gold as a medium of exchange—a bridge between other, truly desirable, objects. There are other possible mediums of exchange, and it is silly to imagine that this pretty, but only moderately useful, substance has some irreplaceable significance.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

"The Gold Bug Variations", Originally published in Slate (Nov. 23, 1996)
The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From The Dismal Science (1998)

God , People , Imagination , Failure

“When people are afraid of the truth they've got nowhere to turn. All they have at their disposal is censorship and denial. And Swedish politicians are so deep in denial you can only feel pity for them, because you know that in some dark chamber of their subconscious these wretched people know what a terrible thing they're doing, and they know that history is going to revile them and their entire generation for it. But they just can't face up to it. Psychologically, they are simply not big enough as people to acknowledge, let alone confront, the enormity of their mistake. They've backed themselves into an ideological corner where their only option now is to double down on the insanity and brazen it out until the bitter end, while criminalising anyone who draws attention to it. Whatever social upheaval it may cause, and whatever the cost to Sweden's women, mass Islamic immigration must continue. Any restriction would be an admission that there's a problem, and that would fatally undermine everything they're so desperately pretending to believe in… If you say there's a problem, you'll be treated as a criminal – which means that there are now two problems. One: the Swedish people have an aggressive social cancer growing in their midst; and two: they're not allowed to talk about it.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Sweden Goes Insane" (19 May 2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_znVnOizU8
2014

Women , People , Truth , Feeling

“If it is only after that we understand what has come before, then we understand nothing. Thus we shall define the soul as follows: that which precedes everything.”

R. Scott Bakker book The Darkness That Comes Before

AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN
The Darkness That Comes Before (2004)

Soul , Understanding

“One gets as much information as a witness of activity from a fleeting glance [in the photo], like a quick look, sometimes in motion, as one does staring at the subject. Because even if you remain stationary your mind wanders, and it's that kind of activity that I would like to get into the photograph – a confirmation of the fact that everything is moving.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

1980's, I don't necessarily desire a perfect photography,' 1981

Photo

“It did not seem at all improbable to McCulloch now. The infinite fullness of time brings about everything, he thought: even intelligent lobsters, even a divine octopus.”

Robert Silverberg (1935) American speculative fiction writer and editor

Short fiction, Homefaring (1983)

Intelligence , Time

“I wanted work that didn't involve incredible assumptions about everything. I couldn't begin to think about the order of the universe or, the nature of American society. I didn't want work that was general or universal in the usual sense. I didn't want it to claim too much. Obviously the means and the structure couldn't be separate and couldn't even be thought of as two things joined. Neither word meant anything. A shape, a volume, a color, a surface is something itself. It shouldn't be concealed as part of a fairly different whole. The shapes and materials shouldn't be altered by their context.”

Donald Judd (1928–1994) artist

Donald Judd (1967), in: Perspecta 11 (1967), p. 44; Quoted in: James Fitzsimmons (1979) Art International. Vol 23. p. 69
1960s

Color , Nature , Thinking , Sense

“Your system of producing wealth, factories, mines, cooperatives will fall apart, like everything else, under the attacks of the people, in the delirious, popular boulimia.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) French writer

101
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

People , Wealth

“The mirror by the door was not a mirror by the door, it was an altar where he stood for only a moment to put on his cap before going out. The red rocking chair was a rocking of his own hips as he sat in the kitchen. Still, there was nothing of his — his own — that she could find. It was as if she were afraid she had hallucinated him and needed proof to the contrary. His absence was everywhere, stinging everything, giving the furnishings primary colors, sharp outlines to the corners of rooms and gold light to the dust collecting on table tops. When he was there he pulled everything toward himself. Not only her eyes and all her senses but also inanimate things seemed to exist because of him, backdrops to his presence. Now that he had gone, these things, so long subdued by his presence, were glamorized in his wake.”

Toni Morrison book Sula

Sula (1973)

Color , Sense , Light

“My experience with first-time directors is that they’re all extremely prepared, because I guess they’re worried. They spend weeks preparing everything, and they have to get used to the fact that once you get there, everything goes wrong and you have to make everything up.”

Matthew Broderick (1962) American film, stage and voice actor

"Matthew Broderick on John Hughes, the Never-Finished Margaret, and His New Film Wonderful World" by Kyle Buchanan, in Movieline (7 January 2010) http://www.matthewbroderick.net/interview/movieline100107.html

Time

“I have no idea whether my grandfather took notice of everything in it, or nothing. If he believed at all, he was just like those theologians who store their theology somewhere in a locked compartment of the brain, or rather, perhaps, like those travelers who carry a bottle of iodine in their luggage and take care to keep it tightly corked in case it leaks and ruins their belongings. To be honest, I think my grandfather Björn of Brekkukot would not have been significantly different if he had lived here in Iceland in pagan times, or if his home had been somewhere in the world where people never read from Vídalín's Book of Sermons but believed instead in the bull Apis, or the god Ra, or the bird Colibri.... "A Bible that costs half a hen? Pshaw!"”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

God , People , Books , World

“Money is the curse of mankind. It smothers the seed of everything great and good. Every penny is sticky with sweat and blood.... It poisons our own values and subjects us to the service of low and base instincts.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Nazi Culture by George L. Mosse (1966) p. 109
Attributed

Money

“I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read…I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.”

Don DeLillo (1936) American novelist, playwright and essayist

'Exile on Main Street: Don DeLillo's Undisclosed Underworld' by David Remnick, The New Yorker, September 15, 1997

World , Dreams , Imagination , Thinking

“I shall often discuss mathematical discoveries… I shall try to make up a likely story how the discovery could have happened. I shall try to emphasize the motives underlying the discovery, the plausible inferences that led to it… everything that deserves imitation.”

George Pólya (1887–1985) Hungarian mathematician

Induction and Analogy in Mathematics (1954)

Mathematics , Motivation

“Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole.”

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

Essays on Woman (1996), The Ethos of Woman's Professions (1930)

Parting

“We're not a family. We're the opposite of a family. We're people so lonely that when we're together we make a black hole of loneliness and everything else gets sucked down into it and is never seen again.”

Orson Scott Card book Homebody

Homebody (1998)

People , Family , Loneliness

“I want finally to thank Londoners for their solidarity. There are some places in the world where such an incident would have unleashed internal strife and physical violence. London has stood together, we haven’t had any problems of the sort you might see in other parts of the world and I think it says everything about what is right about this city.”

Ken Livingstone (1945) Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008

Press conference (8 July 2005)

World , Problem , Thinking , Parting

“History and geology show what an eyeblink it’s been since our current, comfortable culture came about. And yet that culture is using up absolutely everything at a ferocious rate.”

David Brin book Earth

Afterword (p. 656)
Earth (1990)

History

“"Freedom" awakens your rage against everything that is not you; "egoism" calls you to joy over yourselves, to self-enjoyment.”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Dover 2005, p. 163
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

Freedom , Rage , Joy

“What am I proud of, and what can I be proud of as an artist? Of the decision that separated and isolated me forever from everything ordinary.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Worauf bin ich stolz und darf ich stolz seyn als Künstler?Auf den Entschluss, der mich auf ewig von (29) allem Gemeinen absonderte und isolirte.
“Ideas,” Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), § 136

Decision

“Don't drink. And that's serious. For me, that's one, because I never wrote, I was never creative while drinking, and there were these periods of not drinking and just kind of white-knuckling it and writing and recording, and then drinking a lot and coming into the studio hung over and being in the studio drunk and never being able to do anything to the level or to the degree that I thought that I should be. I'm proud of everything that I did, but I think it was a lot more difficult than it needed to be.”

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

When asked what he would write in a letter to himself at the age of 18 ** What Would CHRIS CORNELL Tell Himself At 18? 'Don't Drink', Blabbermouth, 4 November 2011 http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/what-would-chris-cornell-tell-himself-at-18-don-t-drink/,
Soundgarden Era

Drink , Thinking

“Immediate reality is outside that window; so big it is, so much of it, everything entangled in everything else… What large thought Sabbath was struggling to express? Is he asking, "Whatever did happen to my own true life?" Was it taking place elsewhere? But how then can looking out of this window be so gigantically real? Well, that is the difference between the true and the real. We don't get to live in the truth. That's why Nikki ran away. She was an idealist, an innocent, touching, talented illusionist who wanted to live in the truth. Well, if you found it, kid, you're the first. In my experience the direction of life is toward incoherence—precisely what you would never confront. Maybe that was the only coherent thing you could think to do: die to deny incoherence.”

Philip Roth book Sabbath's Theater

Sabbath's Theater (1995)

Life , Truth , Thinking , Reality

“The right-of-reply issue has nothing to do with fearing media nor with the 2010 elections. Rather, it has everything to do with imposing unnecessary restraints on media.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2009, Statement: I Stand by the Side of Freedom

Fear

“Owen believed in common archetypes rather than a common ancestor, and his conduct presents an archetype of the modern creation scientists, except that they submit to peer review rarely, (if ever) and none of them are experts in anything. They’ve never produced any research indicative of their position. They cannot substantiate any of their assertions, and they’ve never successfully refuted anyone else’s hypotheses either. But every argument of evidence they’ve ever made in favor of creation has been refuted immediately and repeatedly. All they’ve ever been able to do was criticize real science, and even then the absolute best arguments they’ve ever come up with were all disproved in a court of law with mountains of research standing against their every allegation. Yet creationists still use those same ridiculous rationalizations because they will never accept where their beliefs are in error! Their only notable strength is how anyone can be so consistently proven to be absolutely wrong about absolutely everything, 100% of the time, for such a long time, and still make-believe theirs is the absolute truth. More amazing still is how often they will actually lie in defense of their alleged truth. Every publication promoting creation over any avenue of actual science contains misquotes, misdefinitions, and misrepresented misinformation, while their every appeal to reason is based entirely on erroneous assumptions and logical fallacies. There is a madness to their method, but it is naught but propaganda.”

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

"12th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TkY7HrJOhc Youtube (April 19, 2008)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Truth , Lie , Law , Error

“I make the most outrageous demands on my imagination and leave aside everything else, theory and nature study, as other people understand them. This is the only way I can work, drawing on nothing but my own faculty of imagination with I feed without stint – except in working hours.”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

Quote in Marc's letter to August Macke, 1910; as cited by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, pp. 127-28
1905 - 1910

People , Way , Imagination , Understanding

“All things are in the Universe, and the universe is in all things: we in it, and it in us; in this way everything concurs in a perfect unity.”

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) Italian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer

Cause, Principle, and Unity (1584)

Way , Universe , Perfection

“(introduction) This page is about me and why everything I like is great. If you disagree with anything you find on this page, you are wrong.”

Maddox (1978) American internet writer

The Best Page In The Universe. http://maddox.xmission.com/
The Best Page in the Universe

“Everything persecutes him; all things go against the guilty. No calamity by itself. Everything went badly with me, when I harboured revenge, but [I] changed, and left everything in God's hands: since then all happily.”

Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist

Nemesis Divina (1734)

God , Revenge , Change

“The next picture is a Goliath with four arms, reading a book, lofting a 1000-pound dumbbell, aiming a pistol at a target, painting a picture. The enemy can do everything. "He's a giant, seven feet tall with four arms, each with two biceps. Each arm can, of course, be used simultaneously."”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

pg: 11-12
The Worlds of Herman Kahn: the intuitive science of thermonuclear war.

Books , Reading , Painting

“I have long known of Mr. Shaw, read his plays and prefaces, and loved him. I admire heroic effort. Accomplishment I love. What I am about to say is no invention, and I am putting it down for whatever it may be worth to the historian of literature and for the student of influences of men on men, and because it is true and must therefore be made known. As a boy, charging pell-mell through literature, reading everything I could lay hands on in the Public Library of Fresno, I found many men to whom I felt deeply grateful — especially Guy de Maupassant, Jack London, and H. L. Mencken — but the first man to whom I felt definitely related was George Bernard Shaw. This is a presumptuous or fatuous thing to mention, perhaps, but even so it must be mentioned.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

Hello Out There (1941)

Love , Men , Guy , Boy

“Science in its amazing conquests, the mind in its almost infinite ways, have only limited, barred, and obstructed their search for a reality which doesn't exist, since everything is real and everything is unreal. What do I care if I fly like a sparrow or a finch if my mind remains that of the sparrow and the finch.”

Aldo Palazzeschi book Roma

Page 183, "1950"
Roma (1953)

Way , Search , Reality , Science

“I've been blessed with playing the drums and having a young mind and staying healthy. I’m a vegetarian, I take good care of myself. I'll be the last Skynyrd standing. All those guys smoke themselves to death. They all drank themselves to death, drugs. … I still have stainless steel from the knee down in my right leg; I have bone against bone against stainless steel against nerve ending. Every step I take is painful, but when I play drums I push everything away, I get into the zone and I do what I’m supposed to do. … I play Lynyrd Skynyrd music because that's who I am. Everything else has been taken from me, my reputation, my world, my money has all been stolen from me by people that I thought loved me. However they can't take away my ability to play drums.”

Artimus Pyle (1948) American musician

"Rock Survivor: Lynyrd Skynyrd drummer Artimus Pyle keeps the music alive his way" http://tbrnews.com/lifestyle/rock-survivor-lynyrd-skynyrd-drummer-artimus-pyle-keeps-the-music/article_1c30bfee-1501-11e3-8bdb-001a4bcf887a.html, interview with The Beach Reporter (4 September 2013).

Love , Death , Money , Pain

“My so-called foreign friends do neither me nor the situation nor themselves any good when they try to bring me into opposition to the allegedly impossible National Socialist economic theories and declare me to some extent the protector of economic reason. I can assure you that everything I say and do has the complete approval of the Fuhrer and that I would not say or do anything that does not have his approval.”

Hjalmar Schacht (1877–1970) German politician

Speech in Leipzig (4 March 1935), as quoted in The Trial of the Germans : An Account of the Twenty-Two Defendants Before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1997) by Eugene Davidson, p. 234.

“Though not as bad as most, he was going through that stage where he knew everything worth knowing and nothing his elders said—particularly if it bore any vaguely education hue—was worth hearing. He could not help that. It went with the age.
And I was my age and could not help saying things I knew would do no good.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 4 (p. 18)

Age , Education , Help

“There’s an emptiness inside her
And she’d do anything to fill it in.
And though it’s red blood bleeding from her now,
It’s more like cold blue ice in her heart.
She feels like kicking out all the windows,
And setting fire to this life.
She could change everything about her using colors bold and bright,
But all the colors mix together - to grey.”

Dave Matthews (1967) American singer-songwriter, musician and actor

Grey Street
Busted Stuff (2002)

Life , Color , Feeling , Change

“Disco is the best floor show in town. It's very democratic, boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else, all in one big mix.”

Truman Capote (1924–1984) American author

Quoted in The London Review of Books http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n01/hasl02_.html (6 January 2000)

Girl , Boy

“When you recognize that half of everything we're spending on law enforcement, the courts, and the prisons is drug related. What are we getting for that? Well, we're arresting one point eight million people a year in this country and we now have two point three million people behind bars in this country. We have the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world and isn't this America; liberty, personal freedom, and responsibility that goes along with that? I think that when it comes to drug policy, we've thrown that notion out the window.”

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

Statement from CNN Interview
YouTube
2011-04-21
http://youtu.be/VFf4P20cWmU
2012-02-24
2011

People , World , Law , Thinking

“I have believed in Scottish independence all my political life, I continue to believe in Scottish independence, I shall do everything I possibly can to contribute to that cause.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Life

“Open borders? […] That's a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. […] It would make everybody in America poorer. You're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a country called the United States or any other country, you have an obligation to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Interview with Ezra Klein (29 July 2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0
2010s, 2015

Love , People , World , Thinking

“For many of us, living under the Trump administration has cast everything into sharper relief: It’s as if we’ve all been given fancy polarized sunglasses with which to more clearly see the fault lines of the patriarchy. It’s no longer possible to ignore what was there all along.”

Lauren Duca (1991) American journalist

Sexism, Remembered and Forgotten (November 17, 2017)

“Forget about calories - everything makes thin people thinner, and fat people fatter.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

People , Forgetting

“Perhaps now more than at any other moment in the history of the world, society, government and statesmanship need to be based upon the highest code of morality and ethics. And in political terms, what is the highest code of morality? It is the subordination of everything to the well-being of mankind. But today we are faced with a situation where the well-being of mankind is not always the primary consideration. Many who are in places of high power think, rather, of controlling the world.”

Sukarno (1901–1970) first President of the Republic of Indonesia

Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference

World , History , Thinking

“The Buddha Fa” is an insight into all mysteries. It encompasses everything and leaves out nothing—from particles and molecules to the universe, from the even smaller to the even greater. It is an exposition of the characteristic of the universe, “Zhen-Shan-Ren,” (Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance) expressed at different levels with different layers of meaning. It is also what the Tao School calls the “Tao,” or what the Buddha School calls the “Fa.””

Li Hongzhi (1951) Chinese religious leader and dissident

Truth , School , Universe

“Relativity and… quantum… remain incomplete…. the main reason each is incomplete is the existence of the other. The mind calls for a third theory to unify all of physics, and for a simple reason. Nature is… "unified." …interconnected, in that everything interacts with everything else.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (2007)

Nature

“It's not that everything needs to have substance, but when nothing does then you know we’re living in a bankrupt society, an artistically bankrupt society, and that’s not okay. I think there’s room for forms of entertainment that are very light and frivolous and fun, but when those forms of entertainment, forms of "art" if you will, become presented as something more than that, and are believed to be something more than that, then we’ve got a lot of problems.”

Davey Havok (1975) American singer

Skinnie magazine, March 2010, p. 29

Art , Problem , Thinking , Light

“You’re still Brian Duffy. As much as you ever were. But you’re Arthur, too, and that kind of outshines everything else. Brandy and water tastes more like brandy than water, after all.”

Tim Powers book The Drawing of the Dark

Source: The Drawing of the Dark (1979), Chapter 13 (p. 178)

Water

“[BitCoin]'s the greatest scam of modern times. … the poor, the average mom-and-pop, the truck driver and the barber, who put their life savings into this, are going to lose their money, and be told to keep holding on, trust us, the value will go up. And they're gonna go bankrupt. They're gonna lose their life savings. … This is what happened with the dot-com boom, the grandma and grandpa lost their life savings. History is repeating itself. … We have these scamsters, basically, hyping the heck out of it, while all it's being used for is illegal money laundering. … It's simply gonna implode before you know it. And regular people who trust you are gonna lose their shirts. … Would you put your life savings into digital currency? You lose a password and you've lost everything. … They know it's gonna crash and burn. … it crashes and it goes to zero, and people lose their life savings. Don't do it. Get out of it, rather than losing everything you have. Yes, the price might increase, but more likely than not it's gonna be zero before you know it.”

Vivek Wadhwa American academic

Digital Gold or Ponzi Scheme? http://youtube.com/watch?v=mkSw04Guw0E on CNN (6 January 2018, 1045 EST)

Life , Money , People , History

“[About her vegan diet] I guess I'm a very compassionate person so hearing about animal abuse kind of triggered something in me that maybe I should try it… I'm really into health and fitness and wellness, so this kind of tied into it. I thought I was just going to do it until the (2010) Olympics, but then I didn't go to the Olympics, and then I ended up liking it so much, I think I'll be a vegan for the rest of my life. … My energy is so much better, I don't hit that wall at 2 o'clock or 3 o'clock in the afternoon, I sleep well, my skin is better, everything just feels well. And it transfers into my attitude, everything in my life has just become a lot calmer, everything I'm putting in me is clean and genuine and organic and in turn, the way I live my life has started to follow that path.”

Meagan Duhamel (1985) Canadian pair skater

" Canadian pairs champ Meagan Duhamel credits vegan diet for good health http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/02/07/canadian-pairs-champ-meag_n_1261130.html" by Lori Ewing, The Canadian Press, in The Huffington Post Canada (2 July 2012)

Life , Health , Way , Feeling

“Yet Moore is a silly and shady man who does not recognize courage of any sort even when he sees it because he cannot summon it in himself. To him, easy applause, in front of credulous audiences, is everything … If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture.”

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

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

Family , Hope , Way , Courage

“Create turf, save water. Those are the two main principles. And, you know, keep everything alive. Maintain a game habitat. That's important so that you have an entire system at work. Cattle are going to do better, oddly enough, if the birds are doing good and the deer are doing good. You try to manage the whole thing.”

Tommy Lee Jones (1946) American actor and film director

On his conservation principles.
Interview interview (1995)

Game , Bird , Water

“A painter who loves his art must be careful not to see too much of critics and men of letters. These gentlemen, however unconsciously, distort everything, thinking that they are explaining it—the artist's thought, sensibility, and intensions. They take away his strength, just as Delilah took away Samson's. They have no gift for nuances, and they have an instinctive aversion for everything that is beyond their reach and baffles them.”

Georges Rouault (1871–1958) French painter

Soliloques. (1944)
Quotes, 1940-1950

Love , Men , Art , Thinking

“I find this guy [Michael Berg] despicable. Everything in me says that. The want to be a better person today than I was yesterday says he's a dad, he's grieving, but I don't buy that. I'm sorry, I don't buy it. I think he is grieving, but I think he's a scumbag as well. I don't like this guy at all.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

The Glenn Beck Program
Premiere Radio Networks
2004-05-14
Clear Channel radio host railed against Nick Berg's father, called him a "scumbag"
Media Matters for America
2004-05-17
http://mediamatters.org/items/200405170002
Radio host who called Nick Berg's father "a scumbag" responded to MMFA report: "I think public opinion will grow closer and closer to mine"
Media Matters for America
2004-05-18
http://mediamatters.org/items/200405180002
2000s

Guy , Thinking , Personality

“…in Palau I seemed to be the perfect princess, this time I was competitive and sometimes the bad guy. I played competitively both times. I think there is a happy medium to me. I'm not perfect or horrible. I've always had to work hard for everything I've gotten in life. I went in to bust my butt and I hope people can respect me for that. I played the game the way it was designed to be played…”

Stephenie LaGrossa (1978) American television personality

"I Played the Game the Way It Was Designed to Be Played": An Interview with Survivor: Guatemala's Stephenie http://www.realitynewsonline.com/cgi-bin/ae.pl?mode=1&article=article5924.art&page=1, Reality News Online, 12 December 2005.

Life , People , Hope , Way

“I tried to tell which was Randall, but I could not; in their gowns and masks, they all looked the same, impersonal, interchangeable. That was not true of course. One of those four men had responsibility for everything, for the contact of all sixteen workers present. And responsibility for the seventeenth person in that room, the man whose heart was stopped.”

Michael Crichton book A Case of Need

A Case of Need (1968)

Men , Heart , Personality

“In a vision I beheld the fullness of God in which I beheld and comprehended the whole creation, that is, what is on this side and what is beyond the sea, the abyss, the sea itself, and everything else. And in everything that I saw, I could perceive nothing except the presence of the power of God, and in a manner totally indescribable. And my soul in an excess of wonder cried out: "This world is pregnant with God!" Wherefore I understood how small is the whole of creation -- that is, what is on this side and what is beyond the sea, the abyss, the sea itself, and everything else -- but the power of God fills it all to overflowing.”

Angela of Foligno (1248–1309) Italian saint

Source: The Memorial and Instructions, pp. 169-170

God , World , Soul , Sea

“Excessively precise economic analysis can lead to assessing everything in terms of its easily measurable melt value - the value that thieves get from stealing copper wiring from isolated houses, that vandals got from tearing down Greek temples for the lead joints holding the marble blocks together, that shortsighted timber companies get from liquidating their forests. The standard to insist on is live value. What is something worth when it's working?”

Stewart Brand book Whole Earth Discipline

Whole Earth Discipline (2009), page 277.

Tear , Housing

“Doctors and “consumers” are becoming locked within a fantasy that everyone has something wrong with them, everyone and everything can be cured.”

Roy Porter (1946–2002) British historian

Source: The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (1997), p. 14

“If you confine it, you're confining a whole thing. If you make it spontaneous, so that anything can happen, like we don't want to confine or restrict anything. What we can do, whatever we can let happen, you just let it happen…. we're taking sex, which is probably another half of American entertainment, sex and violence, and we're projecting it, and we're saying this is the way everything is right now. Biologically, everyone is male and female, so many male genes and so many female. And so what it is is we're saying "OK, what's the big deal. Why is everybody so up tight about sex?" About faggots, queers, things like that. That's the way they are…. People don't accept that they are both male and female, and people are afraid to break out of their sex thing because that's a big insecurity that's doing that. Consequently, people will make fun of us. We don't mind that, that's making them accept more, making fun that we accept that. The thing is this is the way we are. We think it's a gas…. We like reactions — a reaction is walking out on us, a reaction is throwing tomatoes at the stage, that's a healthy psychological reaction. Reaction's applauding, passing out or throwing up, and all of that is a reaction, and as much of that we can get, the better. I don't care how they react, as long as they react.”

Alice Cooper (1948) American rock singer, songwriter and musician

Interview in Poppin (September 1969).
Poppin (1969)

People , Sex , Way , Thinking

“Existential envy which is directed against the other person’s very nature, is the strongest source of ressentiment. It is as if it whispers continually: “I can forgive everything, but not that you are— that you are what you are—that I am not what you are—indeed that I am not you.” This form of envy strips the opponent of his very existence, for this existence as such is felt to be a “pressure,” a “reproach,” and an unbearable humiliation. In the lives of great men there are always critical periods of instability, in which they alternately envy and try to love those whose merits they cannot but esteem. Only gradually, one of these attitudes will predominate. Here lies the meaning of Goethe’s reflection that “against another’s great merits, there is no remedy but love.””

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 52-53

Love , Men , Forgiveness , Nature

“It was ordained that our earthly pilgrammage should be a struggle, and life would be a tame affair if everything went smoothly.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

January Chapter The Peverel Papers - A yearbook of the countryside ed Julian Shuckburgh Century Hutchinson 1986
The Peverel Papers

Life

“We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that it divided; but the men: — Divided into mere segments of men — broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished, — sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is — we should think that there might be some loss in it also. And the great cry that rises from our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, — that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads can be met only in one way: not by teaching nor preaching, for to teach them is but to show them their misery, and to preach at them, if we do nothing more than preach, is to mock at it. It can only be met by a right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour.”

John Ruskin book The Stones of Venice

Volume II, chapter VI, section 16.
The Stones of Venice (1853)

Life , Men , Beauty , Way

“A war is raging within me that burns everything. So I can begin again.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

quote 1982 - from CF, 48; p. 83
Karel Appel, a gesture of colour' (1992/2009)

War , Rage

“Vickery points out that the Kissinger-Nixon policy during the last two years of the war was a “major mystery,” for which he suggests an explanation that appears to us quite plausible. Referring to the “Sonnenfeldt Doctrine,” which holds that “pluralistic and libertarian Communist regimes will breed leftist ferment in the West,” he suggests that “when it became clear [to U. S. leaders] that they could not win in Cambodia, they preferred to do everything possible to ensure that the post-war revolutionary government be extremely brutal, doctrinaire, and frightening to its neighbors, rather than a moderate socialism to which the Thai, for example, might look with envy.” In short, though it was understood that the United States had lost the war in Cambodia (even though it was, quite clearly, still trying to win it in Vietnam), the destruction of rural Cambodia, by imposing the harshest possible conditions on the eventual victors, would serve two classic ends: retarding social and economic progress, and maximizing the brutality of the eventual victors. Then the aggressors would at least be able to reap a propaganda victory from the misery they had sown.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, pp. 218-219

War , Appearance , Victory , Envy

“Mindfulness is nonconceptual awareness. Another English term for sati is “bare attention.” It is not thinking. It does not get involved with thought or concepts. It does not get hung up on ideas or opinions or memories. It just looks. Mindfulness registers experiences, but it does not compare them. It does not label them or categorize them. It just observes everything as if it was occurring for the first time. It is not analysis that is based on reflection and memory. It is, rather, the direct and immediate experiencing of whatever is happening, without the medium of thought. It comes before thought in the perceptual process.”

Henepola Gunaratana (1927) Sri Lankan Buddhist monk

Source: Mindfulness in Plain English (2011), p. 134

Idea , Thinking , Memory , Time

“Once your mindset changes, everything on the outside will change along with it.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 16

Change

“Everything on Saturday morning [cartoons] moves alike—that's one of the reasons it's not animation. The drawings are different, but everybody acts the same way, their feet move the same way, and everybody runs the same way. It doesn't matter whether it's an alligator or a man or a baby or anything, they all move the same.”

Chuck Jones (1912–2002) American animator, cartoon artist, screenwriter, producer, and director of animated films

Adamson, "Witty Birds and Well-Drawn Cats", 64.

Way , Animals , Baby , Drawing

“I was just chucking these rocks over the garden wall, and I'd listen to this amazing crash from the greenhouse, next door, over, over in England, as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory Party, and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of, of power.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

Interviewed on Desert Island Discs http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00935b6, first broadcast on 30 October 2005, about his early journalistic career working for The Times and then as Brussels correspondent for The Daily Telegraph. In fact, rather than failing to beat another trainee to win a permanent position, he was sacked for falsifying a quotation http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6901161.stm.
2000s, 2005

Sense

“I haven't really touched machinery except for a few elementary mechanisms like levers and balances. You see nature and then you try to emulate it. But, of course, when I met Mondrian [Paris, 1930] I went home and tried to paint [for a while]. The basis of everything for me is the universe. The simplest forms in the universe are the sphere and the circle. I represent them by disks and then I vary them. My whole theory about art is the disparity that exists between form, masses and movement. Even my triangles are spheres, but they are spheres of a different shape.”

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) American artist

Question, Which has influenced you more, nature or modern machinery?
1950s - 1960s, interview with Alexander Calder', (1962)

Art , Home , Nature , Universe

“History shows hat wars are divided into two kinds, just and unjust. All wars that are progressive are just, and all wars that impede progress are unjust. We Communists oppose all unjust wars that impede progress, but we do not oppose progressive, just wars. Not only do we Communists not oppose just wars, we actively participate in them. As for unjust wars, World War I is an instance in which both sides fought for imperialist interests; therefore the Communists of the whole world firmly opposed that war. The way to oppose a war of this kind is to do everything possible to prevent it before it breaks out and, once it breaks out, to oppose war with war, to oppose unjust war with just war, whenever possible.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On Protracted Warfare (1938)
Original: (zh-CN) 历史上的战争分为两类，一类是正义的，一类是非正义的。一切进步的战争都是正义的，一切阻碍进步的战争都是非正义的。我们共产党人反对一切阻碍进步的非正义的战争，但是不反对进步的正义的战争。对于后一类战争，我们共产党人不但不反对，而且积极地参加。前一类战争，例如第一次世界大战，双方都是为着帝国主义利益而战，所以全世界的共产党人坚决地反对那一次战争。反对的方法，在战争未爆发前，极力阻止其爆发；既爆发后，只要有可能，就用战争反对战争，用正义战争反对非正义战争。

War , World , Way , History

“Everything in future will improve if you are making a spiritual effort now.”

Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936) Indian yogi and guru

Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

Effort , Future

“I could never imagine a movie being made from the way I had structured the book, it still feels miraculous that we made it this way without compromising the story, but everything has felt miraculous since I got that first phone call saying Martin Scorsese wants to make a movie out of 'Hugo.”

Brian Selznick (1966) American children's illustrator and writer

I recognize how lucky I am.
Brian Selznick: The author who inspired Martin Scorsese and Todd Haynes to make family films http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesneaks/la-ca-mn-0903-sneaks-brian-selznick-wonderstruck-20170903-story.html (September 1, 2017)

Books , Way , Feeling , Imagination

“The BB house works as a kind of twat amplifier, you see. Once harnessed within, someone who in normal life would merely strike me as a bit of a git quickly swells in negative stature, eventually coming to symbolise everything I hate about our cruel and godless universe.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

The Guardian, 3 June 2006 http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/columnists/story/0,,1788457,00.html
Guardian columns, Big Brother

Life , Hate , Universe , Housing

“The less you think you are, the more you bear. And if you think you are nothing, you bear everything.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Cuanto menos uno cree ser, más soporta. Y si cree ser nada, soporta todo.
Voces (1943)

Thinking

“We declare pragmatism to be bad, not indeed in its moral consequences (which, as a matter of fact, ought not to count in philosophy), but because it introduces into our fashion of thinking a degrading sophistry. Pragmatism, in its modern systematized form, would scarcely have been possible in earlier times. It has, however, become so since erudite scholars and original thinkers have deemed it fit to cater to a public incapable of taking a genuine interest in their researches and their speculations, a public which in the last resort wishes simply to amuse itself with these as it amuses itself with everything else, — the public of our modern democracies. We feel flattered by the plaudits of the crowd, and to procure these we are satisfied to get down to the level of those whom as thinkers we should disdain. Popular science, popular art, popular theology — only one thing was lacking — popular philosophy.”

Albert Schinz (1870–1943) American writer

Anti-Pragmatism; an Examination into the Respective Rights of Intellectual Aristocracy and Social Democracy (1909), p. xv.

Art , Feeling , Democracy , Fashion

“It took me more than a week to deduce from the evidence around me that everything before my waking up was a dream and everything afterward was reality. There was no basis for distinguishing the two other than the growing pile of new events that seemed to argue against the drunk experience. Little things appeared, like the locked door, the outside of which I could never remember seeing. And a slip of paper from the probate court telling me that some person was committed as insane. Did they mean me?”

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

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 7

Dreams , Reality , Appearance , Personality

“It seems to me that if a little flower could speak, it would tell simply what God has done for it without trying to hide its blessings. It would not say, under the pretext of a false humility, it is not beautiful and without perfume, that the sun has taken away its splendor and the storm has broken its stem when it knows that all this is untrue. The flower about to tell her story rejoices at having to publish the totally gratuitous gifts of Jesus. She knows that nothing in herself was capable of attracting the divine glances, and His mercy alone brought about everything that is good in her.”

Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) French Discalced Carmelite nun

Source: Story of a Soul (1897), Ch. I: Alençon, 1873–1877. As translated by Fr. John Clarke (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1976), p. 15.

God , Beauty , Flowers , Sun

“He had an answer to almost everything and he retired at an early age.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Early Retirement http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/early-retirement-2/
From the poems written in English

Age

“Everything I do and say and the way I do and say it annoys me.”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) American conservative author and commentator

As quoted in "William F. Buckley Jr., Rapier Wit Of the Right" in The Washington Post (28 February 2008) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/27/AR2008022703901.html.

Way

“People say, "Dinosaurs on the Ark? Now, Hovind, they are kind of big aren't they?" The big ones were big, but the little ones were little. You see Noah was 600 years old when he built that big boat. He was probably smart enough to know that you do not have to bring the biggest dinosaurs. You bring two babies, be sure to bring a pink one and a blue one that will be important later, okay. There are all kinds of reasons for bringing babies on the ark. You bring babies because they are smaller. The biggest dinosaur egg is smaller than a football. You bring babies because they weigh less, they eat less, they sleep a lot more, and they are a lot tougher. Do you know that when kids fall they bounce and then they get up and keep running? Adults fall down and break or they lay there a while. Plus you bring babies because after the flood they will live longer to produce the offspring. And that's the whole reason that you are bringing them. Why on earth would you bring big elephants on the ark? That would be stupid, for multiple reasons. Why would you bring a big giraffe? Just bring babies of everything.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), Dinosaurs and the Bible

People , Stupidity , Sleep , Football

“The street resembled fairgrounds deserted in haste. There was a little of everything: suitcases, briefcases, bags, knives, dishes, banknotes, papers, faded portraits. All the things one planned to take along and finally left behind. They had ceased to matter.
Open rooms everywhere. Gaping doors and windows looked out into the void. It all belonged to everyone since it no longer belonged to anyone. It was there for the taking. An open tomb.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

“[In 1932, Lionel Robbins declared economics ‘the science of choice’ (Robbins 1932). In the same year, when students at the University of Chicago opened their social sciences course reader, they read Knight’s response:] Such definitions come too near to saying that economics is the science of things generally, of everything that men are for practical reasons interested in. Such a definition is useless and misleading”

Frank Knight (1885–1972) American economist

Source: The Economic Organization, 1951, p. 4 as cited in: Ross B. Emmett (ed). The Elgar Companion to The Chicago School of Economics http://books.google.com/books?id=MaCciKWcDIAC&pg=PA54, 2008. p. 53

Men , Universe , Science , Reading

“Part of the problem with service in this country is we don't honor it like we once did. There's nothing wrong or evil about having a bad day. There's everything wrong with making others have to have it... with you.”

Neil Cavuto (1958) American television presenter

"Why do we tolerate awful people?" http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/neilcavuto/2004/05/29/11852.html, townhall.com, (May 29, 2004).

Problem , Evil , Parting , Country

“[M]ost of the pop music out today I consider to have become a homogenized product. It gets to the point that so much of what is going on is copying everything else that is out, because there is a businessman that knows what he has just sold millions of records with, and so he keeps trying to get every group that comes in to do it, you know. You know, you approach somebody who is well known as a booker or manager, and the first remark will be, "I love what you do, but you would have to change this to this, and that to that, and this to this, in order for me to be able to sell it." Well, by the time you've changed that, of course, it's like everything else that is out there. And when Prince first started sending me songs, I thought maybe that by the time I had done four arrangements that I would have started getting some sort of a repetitive something or other. I have been extremely surprised to find that each one is as different from the last as the next one is going to be different. Some of them are like little art songs. Some of them have dealt with heavy things like friendship and death. I mean, death of a friend. And yet, some of them are as baudy as…”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Radio interview, circa 1985, by Ben Sidran, as quoted in Talking Jazz With Ben Sidran, Volume 1: The Rhythm Section https://books.google.com/books?id=O3hZDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT456 (1992, 2006, 2014)

Love , Death , Friendship , Art

“When it's claimed, as it was last week on British television, that Muslims in Britain are victims of British intolerance — yeah right, 1600 mosques worth of intolerance so far, and still building — I think the truth is that, if they are victims of anything, it's Muslim intolerance, because if you are an ordinary Muslim, then surely the last thing you need is a bunch of Islamists speaking for you, because everything they do and say reflects back on you. When they try to force unwanted Islamic values into our education system, for example, or when one of their representatives crudely insults this country by comparing it with Nazi Germany, that reflects on all Muslims, because these people speak for all Muslims. Don't they? No? Well maybe somebody should tell them that.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Islam is not a victim" (20 July 2008) http://youtube.com/watch?v=5F5aCUNE4Z8
2008

People , Truth , Education , Thinking

“Donald Trump: Oh, well, if you look at the statistics, of people coming— I didn't say about Mexic— I say the illegal immigrants— if you look at the statistics on rape, on crime, on everything, coming in illegally into this country, they're mind-boggling. If you go to Fusion, you will see a story about 80% of the women coming in– I mean, you have to take a look at these stories. And you know who owns Fusion? Univision. It was in The Huffington Post. I said, let me get some of these articles because I've heard some horrible things. I deal a lot of talking with people on the border patrol. They're incredible people. They help our country.
Don Lemon: But I want some clarification–
Trump: No, but Don, all you have to do is go to Fusion and pick up the stories on rape, and it's unbelievable when you look at what's going on. So all I'm doing is telling the truth.
Lemon: I've read The Washington Post, I read the Fusion, I read The Huffington Post. And that's about women being raped, it's not about criminals coming across the border entering the country.
Trump: Somebody's doing the raping, Don, I mean, you know– I mean, somebody's doing it. You think it's women being raped, well who's doing the raping? Who's doing the raping? I mean how can you say such a thing. So, the problem is you have to stop illegal immigration coming across the border. You have to create a strong border. If you don't, we don't have a country.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2015-07-01 The Situation Room TV CNN http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/01/politics/donald-trump-immigrants-raping-comments/
2010s, 2015

Problem , Thinking , Reading , Strong

“And the same applies to the spouse. You know you love them, but you need to say it again and again. Like we got to the food, moments ago, and you need to say: "This food is – mashallah – it's really, really great". Even if the salt is a little bit more. Because sometimes, as I was saying, she spent so much time bringing it in front of us – and we are worried about how it's smelling, number one, and number two is we say, as we taste it, "The salt is too much, no?" What are you talking about? She just looks at you and her face flops. «I've been at it for three hours here, four hours I've been busy with this for so many months…» And what does she even say? "Next time I'll try a bit harder" – that's if she's a good woman; if not, she will say: "Never gonna cook this again!" It's typical. And if you have someone who is very witty: "The next time there's salt to be put in, I'll call you to put it." So we need to praise the cooking of our wives, we need to praise their dress code, especially… For example, I can let you know something that has worked, for some people. When you find some women, you know, they don't like to dress appropriately, so the husband sometimes wants to tell them something. There're two, three ways of doing it. You can either say, "This is very bad, I don't want you to wear this." And, you know, you might have a response. But if you want a response from the heart, what you do is, you tell them: "The other dress looked much better than this." You see, so you are praising one thing, and that praise is not there when the other thing is there. So, you have told them, in a way, that «this is what I really love». And go beyond the limits in praise – that's your wife, don't worry, you can say whatever you want, mashallah, in terms of goodness. Like the food, when you eat, even if it is a little bit this way or that way, just praise it, mashallah. See what it is. Praise the effort, at least. Let me tell you what has happened once. They say the imam in the mosque had said: "You need to praise the cooking of your wife". Just like I said now. So the man went home, and he had this meal, and he was looking at it, and looking at his wife, and smiling, all happy, mashallah, excited and everything. And when he finishes, he says: "Oh! It was awesome!" And the wife says, "What? I've been cooking for you for 21 years, you never said that! Today, when the food came from the neighbor, you want to say it was awesome?"”

Ismail ibn Musa Menk (1975) Muslim cleric and Grand Mufti of Zimbabwe.

"The Fortunate Muslim Family: Divine Solution to the Fragmented Family" (20 February 2012), lecture at the University of Malaya ( YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QaeZcV_azE)
Lectures

Love , Women , People , Food

“It is unwise to make education too cheap. If everything is provided freely, there is a tendency to put no value on anything. Education must always have a certain price on it; even as the very process of learning itself must always require individual effort and initiative.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

Address at the Centennial Celebration Banquet of the National Education Association http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/all_about_ike/quotes.html (4 April 1957)
1950s

Education , Effort , Learning

“I love the song ["Weird"] too. It is really weird when you listen to the beat and the words. It's about someone that she's still obsessed with. And everything he does is like he says this, but he does this. And he does this but he says this. It's all twisted around and backwards. She's not really sure who he is or what he does, but she likes it.”

Hilary Duff (1987) American actress and singer

"Hilary Duff comes clean" http://www.hilaryontheweb.com/news/2005/january/21012005_Hilary%20Duff%20comes%20clean.html. News Times. January 21 2005. Retrieved October 25 2006.
On "Weird", a song from Hilary Duff (2004).

Love

“Study void. Void is what makes everything possible. If there is no emptiness or open space in your life then very very few things are possible.”

Ken McLeod (1948) Canadian lama

Five Elements Five Dakinis http://www.unfetteredmind.org/five-elements-five-dakinis-9#FEFD090:33:46.8. Unfettered Mind http://www.unfetteredmind.org.. (2007-07-09) (Topic: Practice)

Life , Study

“Today we decide about metaphysics and about even more elevated things at philosophy conferences. For everything that is to be done these days we must first have a meeting, and here is how it works: people come together, constantly come together, and they all wait for one another to turn up so that the others will tell them how it is, and if it doesn’t get said, never mind, everyone has had their say. It may very well be that all the talkers who are having their say have understood little of the matter in question, but still we believe that if we accumulate all that misunderstanding something like understanding will leap forth at the end of the day. Thus there are people today who travel from one meeting to the next and who are sustained by the confidence that something is really happening, that they’ve actually done something; whereas, at bottom, they’ve merely ducked out of work, seeking in chatter a place to build a nest for their helplessness—a helplessness, it is true, that they will never understand.”

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) German philosopher

Gesamtausgabe, 20:376, as translated by David Farrell Krell in Portraits of American Continental Philosophers (1999), p. 101

People , Travel , Confidence , Understanding

Quotes about everything page 43

Quotes about everything
page 43