Quotes about everything
page 50

“The dead? But the dead have no rights. They are nothing; and nothing cannot own something. Where there is no substance, there can be no accident. This corporeal globe, and everything upon it, belong to its present corporeal inhabitants, during their generation. They alone have a right to direct what is the concern of themselves alone, and to declare the law of that direction; and this declaration can only be made by their majority. That majority, then, has a right to depute representatives to a convention, and to make the constitution what they think will be the best for themselves.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

1810s, Letter to H. Tompkinson (AKA Samuel Kercheval) (1816)

Law, Thinking, Dead

“Ammu,' Chacko said, his voice steady and deliberately casual, 'is it at all possible for you to prevent your washed-up cynicism from completely colouring everything?'
Silence filled the car like a saturated sponge. Washed-up cut like a knife through a small thing. The sun shone with a shuddering sigh. This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things (1997)

Family, Cars, Silence, Sun

“Before anything else the One must exist eternally; from his power derives everything that always is or will ever be. He is the Eternal and embraces all times. He knows profoundly all events and He himself is everything. He creates everything beyond any beginning of time and beyond any limit of place and space. He is not subject to any numerical law, or to any law of measure or order. He himself is law, number, measure, limit without limit, end without end, act without form.”

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

VIII 2, as quoted in The Acentric Labyrinth (1995) by Ramon Mendoza
De immenso (1591)

Law, Time

“…nothing in Nature stands still; everything strives and moves forward. If we could only view the first stages of creation, how the kingdoms of nature were built one upon the other, a progression of forward-striving forces would reveal itself in all evolution.”

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic

Book 5, as cited in Frank Teichmann (tr. Jon McAlice), "The Emergence of the Idea of Evolution in the Time of Goethe" http://www.waldorfresearchinstitute.org/pdf/BAIdeaEvolTeich.pdf Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-91)

Nature

“Sinuhe, my friend, we have been born into strange times. Everything is melting - changing its shape - like clay on a potter's wheel. Dress is changing, words, customs are changing, and people no longer believe in the gods - though they may fear them. Sinuhe, my friend, perhaps we were born to see the sunset of the world, for the world is already old, and twelve hundred years have passed since the building of the pyramids. When I think of this, I want to bury my head in my hands and cry like a child.”

Mika Waltari book The Egyptian

The Egyptian

God, People, World, Fear

“Everything the Almighty Creator has instituted on our globe occurs in such a wonderful order, that no thing subsists without the support of something else: The Globe itself, with all its Stones, Ore, and Gravel, is nourished and sustained by the Elements: Plants, Trees, Herbs, Grasses, and Mosses grow out of the Globe, and Animals eventually grow out of the plants. All of these are finally transformed back into their primary substances, the Earth feeding the Plant, the Plant the Worm, the Worm the Bird, and often the Bird the Beast of Prey; Then finally the Beast of Prey is consumed the Bird of Prey, the Bird of Prey by the Worm, the Worm by the Herb, the Herb by the Earth: Man indeed, who turns everything to his needs, is often consumed by the Beast, the Bird, or the Fish which preys on him, by the Worm or the Earth. It is thus that everything circulates.”

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

Carl Linnaeus, Nemesis Divina (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), ed. M. J. Petry.
Nemesis Divina (1734)

Support, Bird, Fish, Tree

“Of course we were in the spirit when we had the view, for no man can behold the face of an angel, except in a spiritual view, but we were in the body also, and everything was as natural to us, as it is at any time.”

David Whitmer (1805–1888) Book of Mormon witness

Letter of David Whitmer to Anthony Metcalf, March 1887. Quoted in Richard Lloyd Anderson, Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1981), p. 86.

Angels, Nature, Time

“The spiritual freedom, once relished and tasted/ Is ready to give up everything.”

Kuruvilla Pandikattu (1957) Indian philosopher

Source: Freedom: Foster It! p. 117. (2004)

Freedom

“Interviewer: Is it possible to abolish man's humanity?
Levi: Unfortunately, yes. Unfortunately, yes; and that is really the characteristic of the Nazi lager [concentration camp]. About the others, I don't know, because I don't know them; perhaps in Russia the same thing happens. It's to abolish man's personality, inside and outside: not only of the prisoner, but also of the jailer. He too lost his personality in the lager.
These are two different itineraries, but with the same result, and I would say that only a few had the good fortune of remaining aware during their imprisonment; some regained their awareness of the experience later, but during it, they had lost it; many forgot everything. They did not record their experiences in their mind. They didn't impress on their memory track. Thus it happened to all, a profound modification in their personality. Most of all, our sensibility lost sharpness, so that the memories of our home had fallen into second place; the memory of family had fallen into second place in face of urgent needs, of hunger, of the necessity to protect oneself against cold, beatings, fatigue… all of this brought about some reactions which we could call animal-like; we were like work animals.
It is curious how this animal-like condition would repeat itself in language: in German there are two words for eating. One is essen and it refers to people, and the other is fressen, referring to animals. We say a horse frisst, for example, or a cat. In the lager, without anyone having decided that it should be so, the verb for eating was fressen. As if the perception of the animalesque regression was clear to all.”

Primo Levi (1918–1987) Italian chemist, memoirist, short story writer, novelist, essayist

Interview http://www.inch.com/~ari/levi1.html with Daniel Toaff, Sorgenti di Vita (Springs of Life), a program on the Unione Comunita Israelitiche Italiane, Radiotelevisione Italiana [RAI] (25 March 1983); translated by Mirto Stone

Hunger, People, Family, Home

“Probably even more than the architecture I'd be drawn to landscape. That's my first love, landscape... All kinds of landscape, if it's not cluttered up and vandalised. Yesterday we went out to Blenheim, and I love the flatness and the trees. I like all kinds. And where I'm from, the central valley of Virginia, is not one of the most exciting landscapes in the world, but it's one of the most beautiful. It's very beautiful because it has everything. It has mountains, there are streams, there are fields, beautiful trees. And architecture sits very well in it... And I've always lived in the south of Italy, because it’s more excitable. It's volcanic. The land affects people naturally, that's part of the characteristics, for me, of a people, in a sense.”

Cy Twombly (1928–2011) American painter

Source: 2000 - 2011, Cy Twombly, 2000', by David Sylvester (June 2000), p. 173

Love, People, World, Beauty

“We seek to move from the self of separation to the self of relationship that knows that everything outside is also inside. Then we are not alone. This is not something we can accomplish in the normal sense of the word. It cannot be another achievement of the separate self. Rather, it is a gift we can receive—and it is a gift we can pass on.”

Charles Eisenstein (1967) American writer

Charles Eisenstein, The Longing for Belonging http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-eisenstein/indigeneity-and-belonging_b_8011302.html, Huffington Post, 20 August 2015

Sense

“I believe in God. When everything collapses, we grip the last hold, we look from the secure haven how the godless society of the old, holy Europe falls apart. May the game begin.”

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

Ich glaube an Gott. Wenn alles stürzt, fassen wir die letzte Planke und schauen vom sicheren Port, wie die entgötterte Gesellschaft des alten, heiligen Europa zusammenstürzt. Möge das Spiel beginnen.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

God, Game

“Don’t let yourself be destroyed by a force that was placed in our hearts in order to make everything better.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Aleph (2011)

Heart

“You guys are all into that born again thing, which is great. We do need to be born again, since Jesus said that to a guy named Nicodemus. But if you tell me I have to be born again to enter the kingdom of God, I can tell you that you just have to sell everything you have and give it to the poor, because Jesus said that to one guy too…[And he paused in the awkward silence. ] But I guess that’s why God invented highlighters, so we can highlight the parts we like and ignore the rest.”

Rich Mullins (1955–1997) American christian musician

The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical by Shane Claiborne

God, Guy, Silence, Parting

“We have a saying in the union: "If a fellow looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, the possibility is that he is a duck." That is the way with a Communist. If the guy does everything that the party does, the prospects are very good that he is a party member or fellow traveler.”

Walter Reuther (1907–1970) Labor union leader

Regarding Communists; hearing before the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare (1953)

Way, Travel, Guy

“What I lack is the spiritual basis which under girded Romantic painting. We have lost the feeling of God's omnipresence in Nature. For us, everything is empty. Yet, these paintings [of a. o. Caspar David Friedrich ] are still there. They still speak to us. We continue to love them, to use them, to have need of them.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 109, note 62

Love, God, Feeling, Nature

“Everything that happened prior to and during 2000 was premeditated, well planned with all the personal graffiti being churned out through government offices and business outlets … ludicrous paraphernalia designed to malign the former President's family's character. Some members of the 2000 and current Senate were openly telling the public that the Government was going to be changed soon. So what was the Fijian cause all about?”

Ateca Ganilau (1951) Fijian chief

Reconciliation, Tolerance, and Unity Bill, 24 July, 2005

Family, Business, Change, Personality

“I am someone who takes everything very literally. I simply do not understand irony, a defect I have had ever since I was able to think independently.”

Werner Herzog (1942) German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and opera director

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

Understanding, Thinking

“Coal in truth stands not beside, but entirely above, all other commodities. It is the material source of the energy of the country—the universal aid—the factor in everything we do. With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of earlier times.”

William Stanley Jevons book The Coal Question

The Coal Question (1865)

Truth, Universe, Time, Country

“The young district leader chose Baubaus wallpapers at my suggestion, although I had hinted that these were “Communist” wallpapers. He waved that warning aside with a grand gesture: “We will take the best of everything, even from the Communists.” In saying this he was expressing what Hitler and his staff had already been doing for years: picking up anything that promised success without regard for ideology…”

Albert Speer (1905–1981) German architect, Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi Germany

Source: Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (1970), p. 22

Success

“If a dancer dances - which is not the same as having theories about dancing or wishing to dance or trying to dance or remembering in his body someone else's dance - but if the dancer dances, everything is there.... our ecstasy in dance comes from the possible gift of freedom, the exhilarating moment that this exposing of the bare energy can give us. What is meant is not license, but freedom…”

Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) American dancer

1952 from the front-page of the website of the Merce Cunningham Trust http://www.mercecunningham.org/merce-cunningham/

Freedom, Dance

“After September 11th, we were told that money was the lifeblood of terrorists, and that we should do everything possible to block their access to financial resources…Today we are hearing a far different message: Bank of America, it’s everywhere terrorists want to be.”

Tom Tancredo (1945) American politician

Tancredo blasts bank policy http://www.thedenverdailynews.com/?page=details&id=6616&t=Archive (February 14, 2007).

Money

“After a considerable walk through the forest, where I became acquainted with several of the little lakes I am so fond of, I came to Hestehaven and Lake Carl. Here is one of the most beautiful regions I have ever seen. The countryside is somewhat isolated and slopes steeply down to the lake, but with the beech forests growing on either side, it is not barren. A growth of rushes forms the background and the lake itself the foreground; a fairly large part of the lake is clear, but a still larger part is overgrown with the large green leaves of the waterlily, under which the fish seemingly try to hide but now and then peek out and flounder about on the surface in order to bathe in sunshine. The land rises on the opposite side, a great beech forest, and in the morning light the lighted areas make a marvelous contrast to the shadowed areas. The church bells call to prayer, but not in a temple made by human hands. If the birds do not need to be reminded to praise God, then ought men not be moved to prayer outside of the church, in the true house of God, where heaven's arch forms the ceiling of the church, where the roar of the storm and the light breezes take the place of the organ's bass and treble, where the singing of the birds make up the congregational hymns of praise, where echo does not repeat the pastor's voice as in the arch of the stone church, but where everything resolves itself in an endless antiphony — Hillerød, July 25, 1835”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s

Men, God, Beauty, Bird

“Beginning a book is unpleasant. I’m entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to begin with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that’s finally everything. I type out beginnings and they’re awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it—that’s what I look for during the first months of writing something new. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive. Okay, I say to myself, that’s your beginning, start there; that’s the first paragraph of the book. I’ll go over the first six months of work and underline in red a paragraph, a sentence, sometimes no more than a phrase, that has some life in it, and then I’ll type all these out on one page. Usually it doesn’t come to more than one page, but if I’m lucky, that’s the start of page one. I look for the liveliness to set the tone. After the awful beginning come the months of freewheeling play, and after the play come the crises, turning against your material and hating the book.”

Philip Roth (1933–2018) American novelist

Paris Review Interview (1986)

Life, Hate, Books, Drawing

“There is a philosophical, or metaphysical position that can be taken–maybe its a scientific hypothesis–that the past cannot in fact exist. Everything that can possibly exist exists now. Things now may be expressive of some conceivable or describable past state of affairs, yes:but that's different from saying this this former state actually somehow exists in the form of "the past". Even in our memory[…]there is no past:no scenes preserved with all their sights and sounds. Merely fleeting states of mind, myriad points assembled for a moment to make a new picture (but "picture" is wrong too, too full, too fixed) of what we think are former states of things: things that once were, or may have been the case.”

John Crowley book Four Freedoms

Prelude
Four Freedoms (2009)

Thinking, Memory, Past

“Everything you can touch and depend on in our society goes back to science.”

Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer

[N1, Champs Science Bowl goes to NOHO, Daily News of Los Angeles, February 20, 2000, Amy Raisin, NewsBank]

Science, Dependency

“Been on the river thirty years, York. Rafted down to New Orleans when I was just a boy, and worked flatboats and keelboats both before steamers. I been a pilot and a mate and a striker, even a mud clerk. Been everything there is to be in this business, but one thing I never been, and that's a sharper.”

George Raymond Richard Martin book Fevre Dream

Abner Marsh to Joshua York when York questions his honesty, Fevre Dream (1982)

Boy, Business

“At the speed of light there is no sequence; everything happens at the same instant.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1970s, Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder (1976)

Light, Speed

“Can you make honey, from nothing? How about a glass of milk, from nothing? How about a living leaf? Can you make a living frog, or a cat, a horse or a cow, from nothing? How about an eye? Make me a fully functioning eye, using no materials. Can you? Of course you can't. You don't even have an intelligent answer for how those came about. You would probably say that evolution is responsible for everything, but that it didn't make it from nothing. It made it from gases in space. Then where did the gases come from? You have to keep saying that there was something in the beginning, because basic science says that nothing can come from nothing.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think (2009)

Intelligence, Cats, Science, Horse

“A key characteristic of the engineering culture is that the individual engineer’s commitment is to technical challenge rather than to a given company. There is no intrinsic loyalty to an employer as such. An employer is good only for providing the sandbox in which to play. If there is no challenge or if resources fail to be provided, the engineer will seek employment elsewhere. In the engineering culture, people, organization, and bureaucracy are constraints to be overcome. In the ideal organization everything is automated so that people cannot screw it up. There is a joke that says it all. A plant is being managed by one man and one dog. It is the job of the man to feed the dog, and it is the job of the dog to keep the man from touching the equipment. Or, as two Boeing engineers were overheard to say during a landing at Seattle, “What a waste it is to have those people in the cockpit when the plane could land itself perfectly well.” Just as there is no loyalty to an employer, there is no loyalty to the customer. As we will see later, if trade-offs had to be made between building the next generation of “fun” computers and meeting the needs of “dumb” customers who wanted turnkey products, the engineers at DEC always opted for technological advancement and paid attention only to those customers who provided a technical challenge.”

Edgar H. Schein (1928) Psychologist

Edgar H. Schein (2010). Dec Is Dead, Long Live Dec: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equiment Corporation. p. 60

People, Dogs, Loyalty

“Apple! Boy, what a story. No taxes paid, everything made abroad — yet everyone worships them. This new iPhone, there's nothing new in it. Just a golden color. What the hell, right? When people start playing with color, you know they're played out.”

Václav Smil (1943) Canadian geographer

This Is the Man Bill Gates Thinks You Absolutely Should Be Reading http://wired.com/2013/11/vaclav-smil-wired/all/1 in Wired (25 November 2013)

People, Color, Boy, Hell

“I'll say, ‘Hi, I'm Michelle Visage and I'm a drag queen' and that usually opens the door to the conversation. This is how I get my reputation. If you look on Google it'll say Michelle Visage is a man, the list goes on and on, but I am 100 per cent biological female, but RuPaul says it best when he says you're born naked and everything else is drag.”

Michelle Visage (1968) American singer, radio DJ, TV host

"Who is Michelle Visage? Everything you need to know about the Celebrity Big Brother contestant", Daily Mirror (7 January 2015) https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/who-michelle-visage-everything-you-4935427.

“Everything in the varying human affairs is due to chance, according to Aristotle, to the Divine Will alone according to the Ashariyah, to Divine Wisdom according to the Mu'tazilites, to the merits of man according to our opinion. It is therefore possible, according to the Ashariyah, that God inflicts pain on a good and pious man in this world, and eeps him forever in fire, which is assumed to rage in the world to come; they simply say it is the will of God. The Mu'tazilites would consider this an injustice, and therefore assume that every being, even an ant, that is stricken with pain, has compensation for it… and it is due to God's Wisdom, that a being is struck and afflicted in order to receive compensation. We, however, believe that all these human affairs are managed with justice; far be it from God to do wrong, to punish any one unless the punishment is necessary and merited. It is distinctly stated in the Law, that all is done in accordance with justice; and the words of our Sages generally express the same idea.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

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

Wisdom, God, Pain, World

“Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life, if you have enough metadata you don’t really need content…. [It’s] sort of embarrassing how predictable we are as human beings.”

Stewart Baker (1947) American lawyer

Quoted in: Alan Rusbridger " The Snowden Leaks and the Public http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/21/snowden-leaks-and-public/" at nybooks.com, November 21, 2013.

Life

“Without this ridiculous vanity that takes the form of self-display and is part of everything and everyone, we would see nothing, and nothing would exist.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Sin esa tonta vanidad que es el mostrarnos y que es de todos y de todo, no veríamos nada y no existiría nada. [[]]
Voces (1943)

Parting

“George Bush is just about everything that is repellent in politics… You have got this super-patriotic hawk who was a coward when his country was actually involved in a war and has the most venal and corrupt administration since President Harding in the 20s. He is not a legitimate president… This really is a completely unsupportable government and I look forward to it being overthrown as much as I looked forward to Saddam Hussein being overthrown.”

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

Remarks at a public meeting criticising George W. Bush (8 May 2003) , as quoted in "Mayor's Amazing Attack on Bush" by Ross Lydall in the Evening Standard (8 May 2003)

War, Country

“Nobody ever walked across the bridge, not on a night like this. The rain was misty enough to be almost fog-like, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhattan by night was reduced to a few sleepy, yellow lights off in the distance.
Some place over there I had left my car and started walking, burying my head in the collar of my raincoat, with the night pulled in around me like a blanket. I walked and I smoked and I flipped the spent butts ahead of me and watched them arch to the pavement and fizzle out with one last wink. If there was life behind the windows of the buildings on either side of me, I didn't notice it. The street was mine, all mine. They gave it to me gladly and wondered why I wanted it so nice and all alone.
There were others like me, sharing the dark and the solitude, but they were huddled in the recessions of the doorways not wanting to share the wet and the cold. I could feel their eyes follow me briefly before they turned inward to their thoughts again.
So I followed the hard concrete footpaths of the city through the towering canyons of the buildings and never noticed when the sheer cliffs of brick and masonry diminished and disappeared altogether, and the footpath led into a ramp then on to the spidery steel skeleton that was the bridge linking two states.
I climbed to the hump in the middle and stood there leaning on the handrail with a butt in my fingers, watching the red and green lights of the boats in the river below. They winked at me and called in low, throaty notes before disappearing into the night.
Like eyes and faces. And voices.
I buried my face in my hands until everything straightened itself out again, wondering what the judge would say if he could see me now. Maybe he'd laugh because I was supposed to be so damn tough, and here I was with hands that wouldn't stand still and an empty feeling inside my chest.”

Mickey Spillane book One Lonely Night

One Lonely Night (1951)

Life, Cars, Feeling, Solitude

““Don’t believe everything you hear about hell. Next time you run into some anti-hell propaganda, consider the source.”
“You inflict eternal punishment on people,” Julie countered.
“Merely because it’s our job. And remember, we persecute only the guilty, which puts us one up on most other institutions.””

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 9 (p. 162)

People, Hell, Time

“Actually, the father of mixed martial arts, if you will, was Bruce Lee. If you look at the way Bruce Lee trained, the way he fought, and many of the things he wrote, he said the perfect style was no style. You take a little something from everything. You take the good things from every different discipline, use what works, and you throw the rest away.”

Dana White (1969) President of the UFC

Dana White and the future of UFC (2004)

Art, Way, Perfection, Training

“I'm curious about everything - even things that don't interest me.”

Alex Trebek (1940) Canadian-American television personality

Jacobs, A.J. The Know-It-All, pg 102.

“Take a good look at this world, how riddled it is with huge, gaping holes, how full of Nothingness, the Nothingness that fills the bottomless void between the stars, how everything about us has become lined with it, how it darkly lurks behind each shred of matter. This is your work, envious one! And I hardly think the future generations will bless you for it…”

Stanisław Lem book The Cyberiad

In "How The World Was Saved"
The Cyberiad (1967)

World, Star, Thinking, Future

“I wanted to know the best of the life of one (Muhammad) who holds today an undisputed sway over the hearts of millions of mankind. I became more than ever convinced that it was not the sword that won a place for Islam in those days in the scheme of life. It was the rigid simplicity, the utter self-effacement of the Prophet the scrupulous regard for pledges, his intense devotion to his friends and followers, his intrepidity, his fearlessness, his absolute trust in God and in his own mission. These and not the sword carried everything before them and surmounted every obstacle.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Young India (23 September 1924) Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi http://www.gandhiserve.org/cwmg/VOL029.PDF, vol.29, "My Jail experiences", p. 133 1920s

Life, God, Heart

“Everything can be inherited except sterility.”

Matt Ridley (1958) economist

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 1. Human Nature

“[on President Barack Obama's performance in the 2012 Presidential Debate of Oct 3, 2012] Can I state the obvious here, since we all have theories? The obvious is he he didn't bring his game because he doesn't have a game. They have now blamed his performance on everything from strategic — he's a unifier — that's belied by his campaign, calling Mitt Romney everything from from a liar to a tax thief to a felon to a murderer to a dog abuser to a misogynist.”

Mary Matalin (1953) American political consultant

This is one of the most negative campaigns in history... ABC This Week (October 7, 2012) http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/week-1007-robert-gibbs-ed-gillespie-mitt-romney-17416989?tab=9482930&section=1206874&playlist=17417528

Dogs, History, Game

“For Linnaeus, Homo sapiens was both special and not special. […] Special and not special have come to mean nonbiological and biological, or nurture and nature. These later polarizations are nonsensical. Humans are animals and everything we do lies within our biological potential. […] [T]he statement that humans are animals does not imply that our specific patterns of behavior and social arrangements are in any way directly determined by our genes. Potentiality and determination are different concepts.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Ever Since Darwin

"Biological Potentiality vs. Biological Determinism", p. 251
Ever Since Darwin (1977)

Way, Behavior, Nature, Animals

“When I go back to school everyone asks a lot of questions. Then, after about a week, when I've answered everything, we get back to normal. I've never been one of the cool people at school, but then again, I don't get the people who are cool. It's not that I don't like them, it's just that they don't interest me.”

Daniel Radcliffe (1989) English actor

on being bullying at school http://www.flixster.com/actor/daniel-radcliffe/daniel-radcliffe-quotes

People, School, Question

“Patton looked like his father and had similar mannerisms. Their speech was somewhat alike as well. It was pretty evident that young Patton was the son of the old man. However, the impressive thing about George is that he didn't concern himself with his last name. He went out and made a career, earning everything on his own… He did a very good job in command of the 11th ACR and handled himself professionally. It's quite a burden the son of a senior officer has to carry and I must say, to his credit, he did it well. Because down through history, when you look at the sons of famous people, they were not all winners.”

William Westmoreland (1914–2005) United States Army general

On George S. Patton, IV, son of the famous World War II American general. As quoted in The Fighting Pattons (1997) by Brian M. Sobel, p. 129-130

People, History

“I think if I'd led an acceptably frivolous teenage life I wouldn't be singing in this group. I'm sure if you have a great time and get everything you want, all the friends you want, then you tend not to be so ambitious. If you're deprived of certain things it makes you very resilient and you kick very hard for what you want. And I wanted something very special because I'd led such an unspecial life previous to the Smiths.”

Morrissey (1959) English singer

From "Keep young and beautiful", interview by Bill Black, Sounds (19 November 1983).
In interviews etc., About himself and his work

Life, Thinking, Singing, Time

“I try to carry out the most precise and discriminative analyses I can in order to show in what ways things change, are transformed, are displaced. When I study the mechanisms of power, I try to study their specificity… I admit neither the notion of a master nor the universality of his law. On the contrary, I set out to grasp the mechanisms of the effective exercise of power; and I do this because those who are inserted in these relations of power, who are implicated therein, may, through their actions, their resistance, and their rebellion, escape them, transform them—in short, no longer submit to them. And if I do not say what ought to be done, it is not because I believe there is nothing to be done. Quite on the contrary, I think there are a thousand things to be done, to be invented, to be forged, by those who, recognizing the relations of power in which they are implicated, have decided to resist or escape them. From this point of view, my entire research rests upon the postulate of an absolute optimism. I do not undertake my analyses to say: look how things are, you are all trapped. I do not say such things except insofar as I consider this to permit some transformation of things. Everything I do, I do in order that it may be of use.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Quand j’étudie les mécanismes de pouvoir, j’essaie d’étudier leur spécificité… Je n’admets ni la notion de maîtrise ni l’universalité de la loi. Au contraire, je m’attache à saisir des mécanismes d’exercise effectif de pouvoir ; et je le fais parce que ceux qui sont insérés dans ces relations de pouvoir, qui y sont impliqués peuvent, dans leurs actions, dans leur résistance et leur rébellion, leur échapper, les transformer, bref, ne plus être soumis. Et si je ne dis pas ce qu’il faut faire, ce n’est pas parce que je crois qu’il n’y a rien à faire. Bien au contraire, je pense qu’il y a mille choses à faire, à inventer, à forger par ceux qui, reconnaissant les relations de pouvoir dans lesquelles ils sont impliqués, ont décidé de leur résister ou de leur échapper. De ce point de vue, toute ma recherche repose sur un postulat d’optimisme absolu. Je n’effectue pas mes analyses pour dire : voilà comment sont les choses, vous êtes piégés. Je ne dis ces choses que dans la mesure où je considère que cela permet de les transformer. Tout ce que je fais, je le fais pour que cela serve.
Dits et Écrits 1954–1988 (1976) Vol. II, 1976–1988 edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald, p. 911-912

Law, Way, Exercises, Optimism

“I have studied the Bible for about 50 years, or sometime more than that, but, of course, I have studied it more as I have become older than when I was but a boy. … I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there: some of the Bible is given illustratively. For instance: "Ye are the salt of the earth." I would not insist that man was actually salt, or that he had flesh of salt, but it is used in the sense of salt as saving God's people.”

William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) United States Secretary of State

Scopes Trial (1925), Day 7

God, People, Boy, Sense

“I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil. Everything we do is to improve it, if it happens in our day; if not, let us transmit to our descendants, together with our slaves, a pity for their unhappy lot and an abhorrence of slavery.”

Patrick Henry (1736–1799) attorney, planter, politician and Founding Father of the United States

As quoted in We Hold These Truths https://books.google.com/books?id=QQH6lsN4TIIC&pg=PA73&dq=%22I+believe+a+time+will+come+when+an+opportunity+will+be+offered+to+abolish+this+lamentable+evil.%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAmoVChMI6NiP0LjSxwIVBD0-Ch1EqwFq#v=onepage&q=%22I%20believe%20a%20time%20will%20come%20when%20an%20opportunity%20will%20be%20offered%20to%20abolish%20this%20lamentable%20evil.%22&f=false, by Randall Norman Desoto, p. 73 1770s, Letter to Robert Pleasants (1773)

Evil, Time

“Public opinion* is the unseen product of education and practical experience. Education, in turn, is the function, in co-operation, of the family, the church and the school. If the family fails in its guiding influence and discipline and if the church fails in its religious instruction, then everything is left to the school, which is given an impossible burden to bear. It is just this situation which has arisen in the United States during the generation through which we are still passing. In overwhelming proportion, the family has become almost unconscious of its chief educational responsibility. In like manner, the church, fortunately with some noteworthy exceptions, has done the same. The heavy burden put upon the school has resulted in confused thinking, unwise plans of instruction and a loss of opportunity to lay the foundations of true education, the effects of which are becoming obvious to every one. Fundamental dis cipline, both personal and social, has pretty well disappeared, and, without that discipline which develops into self-discipline, education is impossible.
What are the American people going to do about it? If they do not correct these conditions, they are simply playing into the hands of the advocates of a totalitarian state, for that type of state is at least efficient, and it is astonishing to how many persons efficiency makes stronger appeal than liberty.
Then, too, we have many signs of an incapacity to understand and to interpret liberty, or to distinguish it from license. There is a limit to liberty, and liberty ends where license begins. It is very difficult for many persons to understand this fact or to grasp its implications. If we are to have freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of the press, why should we not be free to say and think and print whatever we like? The answer is that the limit between liberty and license must be observed if liberty itself is to last. To suppose, as many individuals and groups seem to do, that liberty of thought and liberty of speech* include liberty to agitate for the destruction of liberty itself, indicates on the part of such persons not only lack of common sense but lack of any sense o humor. If liberty is to remain, the barrier between liberty and license must be recognized and observed.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

Liberty-Equality-Fraternity (1942)

People, Education, School, Family

“Where in the world did the idea come from that things left to themselves can improve with time? Who would start a crazy idea like that? This idea is the opposite of everything that we observe in the world today. For instance, all the highways in our nation today left to themselves decay, deteriorate, and fall apart. A house left to itself will become a wreck. It takes work and constant planning to make anything improve. Everything tends toward disorder.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Dissertation for doctor of philosophy in christian education (May 25, 1991)

World, Idea, Time, Housing

“There are two great rules of life: never tell everything at once.”

Ken Venturi (1931–2013) Professional golfer

Ken Venturi Official Site http://www.tourtalent.com/talent.asp?ID=Ken_Venturi Variation: Ken Venturi's Two Great Rules of Life: 1. Never tell everything at once. Source: Ken Venturi Official Site - exclusively represented by Tour Talent LLC.

Life

“I am not bloodthirsty. I am working for my country and the coming generations. I can't waste my time on a few young idiots. I don't believe the tortures attributed to the SAVAK are as common as people say, but I can't run everything. Besides, we have ways of using psychological pressure that are much more effective than torture… My people have every kind of freedom, except the freedom to betray.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

As quoted in Gérard de Villiers (1975), The Imperial Shah: An Informal Biography, page 259
Attributed

People, Way, Freedom, Time

“I sat day after day in my little room, waiting for inspiration to visit me, trying to invent a pseudonym that would express, in a combination of noble and striking sounds, our dream of artistic achievement, a pen name grand enough to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me.”

Romain Gary book Promise at Dawn

Promise at Dawn (1960) as quoted in "Great Pretenders" by Emma Garman in Tablet (31 October 2007) http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/906/great-pretenders/

Dreams, Feeling, Idea, Waiting

“Mr. Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.”

Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) English military and political leader

As quoted in Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762-1771) by Horace Walpole often credited as being the origin of the phrase "warts and all".
Variant: Paint me as I am. If you leave out the scars and wrinkles, I will not pay you a shilling.

Painting

“Passion is absolutely necessary to achieve any kind of long-lasting success. I know this from experience. If you don't have passion, everything you do will ultimately fizzle out or, at best, be mediocre.”

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

Trump 101 The Way to Success (2007), p. 2
2000s

Passion, Success

“When I was your age, my grandfather bought me a ruby bracelet. It was too big for me and would slide up and down my arm. It was almost a necklace. He later told me that he had asked the jeweler to make it that way. Its size was supposed to be a symbol of his love. More rubies, more love. But I could not wear it comfortably. I could not wear it at all. So here is the point of everything I have been trying to say. If I were to give a bracelet to you, now, I would measure your wrist twice.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), p. 79

Love, Age, Way

“The bureaucratic, though capitalistic, spirit of our governments tends towards a state socialism which, in fact, is only state capitalism, but which is dazzling and misleading for those who are easily deceived by external similarities and catch words. The German, or more accurately the Prussian, state socialism whose ideal is a military, landlord and police state, hates democracy above everything else. … It is to them something inherently political. But all politics is diametrically opposed to what is socialist. So by this trick logic we arrive at the conclusion which has gained footing here and there, even in social democratic circles, that democracy as savoring of politics has nothing in common with socialism, but on the contrary is opposed to it. … But the truth is that democracy is not a thing that is specifically political, and we must never forget that we are not merely a socialist party, but a social democratic party because we have perceived that socialism and democracy are inseparable.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

Hate, Truth, Democracy, Forgetting

“We don’t believe this because we want to! And why would we want to? We believe it because we can prove it really is true, and that applies to everyone whether you want to believe it or not. We’re not just saying you’ve descended from primates either; we’re saying you are a primate! Humans have been classified as primates since the 1700s when a Christian creationist scientist figured out what a primate was –and prompted other scientists to figure out why that applied to us. It wouldn’t be this way if different “kinds” of life had been magically-created unrelated to anything else; not unless God wanted to trick us into believing everything had evolved. Because the phylogenetic tree of life is plainly evident from the bottom up to any objective observer who dares compare the anatomy of different sets of collective life forms. But it can be just as objectively confirmed from the top down when re-examined genetically. This is why it is referred to as a “twin-nested hierarchy”. But there’s still more than that because the evident development of physiology and morphology can be confirmed biochemically as well as chronologically in geology and developmentally in embryology. Why should that be? And how do creationists explain why it is that every living thing fits into all of these daughter sets within parent groups, each being derived according to apparently inherited traits? They don’t even try to explain any of that, or anything else. They won’t because they can’t, because evolution is the only explanation that accounts for any of this, and it explains it all.”

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

"10th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MXTBGcyNuc, Youtube (June 5, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Life, God, Way, Parent

“It's time that glamour came back, everything has got a little bit beige in the last two years, I say bring back black!”

Siobhan Fahey (1958) singer and songwriter in Banarama and Shakespears Sister

G3 interview (2002)

Time

“The fact is, very few men are right in everything.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The Great Infidels (1881)

Men

“To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above.”

Ben Bernanke (1953) American economist

Speech given on Apr. 7, 2010 to the Dallas Regional Chamber of Commerce, "Economic Challenges: Past, Present and Future" http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20100407a.pdf. (See pages 13-14 of the speech transcript).

Education

“I get it now. I didn't get it then. That life is about losing and about doing it as gracefully as possible…and enjoying everything in between.”

Mia Farrow (1945) American actress, singer, humanitarian and former fashion model

On life experiences, quoted in NPR piece http://www.npr.org/2012/01/30/146083357/an-available-man-love-after-loss

Life

“It wasn't that I had to be first in everything, but I should have been number one.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story (1990), p. 72

“You humans act so strange. Everything you create is used to destroy.”

Luc Besson (1959) French film director, writer, and producer

The Fifth Element (1997)

“I used to think the secret to a happy ending was to bring down the curtain at the exact right time. A moment after happiness, then everything's all wrong, again.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Haunted (2005)
Variant: I used to think the secret to a happy ending was to bring down the curtain at the exact right time. A moment after happiness, then everything's all wrong, again.

Happiness, Secret, Thinking, Time

“If men went through menopause, we'd know everything about it, but we still don't even know if we should be taking hormones.”

Joycelyn Elders (1933) American pediatrician, public health administrator, and former Surgeon General of the United States

"Dr. Joycelyn Elders is so fucking cool", 2014-05-23, Jessica Valenti, w:Jessica Valenti, 2014-05-23, Feministing.com http://web.archive.org/web/20070713094431/http://feministing.com/archives/007116.html,

Men

“Leave it to Annie. She knew everything.”

Patricia Reilly Giff (1935) American children's writer

Source: Water Street (2006), Chapters 21-29, p. 162

“The control of an undertaking consists of seeing that everything is being carried out in accordance with the plan which has been adopted, the orders which have been given, and the principles which have been laid down. Its object is to point out mistakes in order that they may be rectified and prevented from recurring.”

Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism

Henri Fayol (1916) cited in: Ralph Currier Davis (1951) The fundamentals of top management. p. 157. This quote was already cited in multiple sources in 1938.

“When you are poor you don’t have any social respect or social worth because everything is defined in terms of money and how much of it you have. This is what capitalism does. It turns all values into commercial values, even the value of life itself.”

Kevin Rashid Johnson (1971) American prisoner and social activist

Defying the Tomb: Selected Prison Writings and Art of Kevin Rashid Johnson (2010)

Life, Money

“A depressing number of people seem to process everything literally. They are to wit as a blind man is to a forest, able to find every tree, but each one coming as a surprise.”

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

First published in the "Movie Answer Man" column (18 September 2005) http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050918/ANSWERMAN/509180304/1023

People, Tree

“Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book Three: All Hail and Hallelujah

Feeling, Thinking

“Everything and everybody is sooner or later identified, defined, and put in perspective. The truth as always is simultaneously better and worse than what the popular myth-making has it.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

Memories of the Depression (1981)

Truth

“Agreeable men are those who are interested in everything; men who accomplish things, who finish their tasks, are those who, during a given period of time, interest themselves in one thing only. In America these men are said to possess "single-track minds"' their tenacity and their obsession are sometimes boring, but they succeed, by repeated attacks, in demolishing the obstacles that hinder their progress.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

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

Men, Time

“He didn't want to learn another thing. Motionless, he constantly stared at the same spot, unseeing. He breathed as if the air were loam. …he no longer wanted to be quick. …he wanted to slow down until he died. …Outside the passage of time… until they'd think him dead. …The alterations of day and night would finally become just a flickering… John sucked in the air and held his breath. …everything would be as it had been before his birth. He would have never been.”

Sten Nadolny book The Discovery of Slowness

The Discovery of Slowness (1983, 1987)

Birth, Thinking, Learning, Time

“When I was dating Bert (McCracken), we were like two best friends. And we ended up doing everything together and it was so much fun. It was a really good time. And this (2003) has been such a horrible year for me that I sometimes thought I'd like to go back to that and be with Bert, but then I suddenly realised that's not what I wanted. I don't even know him as a person. And more than that, I don't even like him. It's like they say that you don't know the devil but you know he's evil. I know what that means — I don't know Bert but I know that I don't ever want to see him again.”

Bert McCracken (1982) American musician

Kelly Osbourne, in Harry Shaw, Bruce Kavanagh (2004) The Osbournes "Talking": The Osbournes in Their Own Words, Omnibus Press, ISBN 1844494047, p. 76.
About

Evil, Time, Personality

“Waiting for the sun to shine
And you know sometimes it gets so painful
Just like talking to yourself
When everything don't seem to have no rhyme or reason we all go
Do do loo do do, do do loo do do
Waiting for the sun to shine.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

(Straight to Your Heart) Like a Cannonball
Song lyrics, Tupelo Honey (1971)

Pain, Waiting, Sun

“The natural law of good communications takes the following, quite different, form in SA:
Everything worth saying
about anything worth saying something about
must be expressed in six or fewer pieces.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: Structured analysis (SA): A language for communicating ideas (1977), p. 18; Statement cited in: Peter Freeman, ‎Anthony I. Wasserman (1983), Tutorial on software design techniques. p. 98.

Law, Communication, Nature

“Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

It seems that this quote has only begun to be attributed to Einstein recently, the earliest published source located being the 2008 book Visualization for Dummies by Bernard Golden, p. 85 http://books.google.com/books?id=2ppZkdmpSlgC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA85#v=onepage&q&f=false. Before that it was often attributed to the physicist John Wheeler, who quoted the saying in Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information, p. 10 http://books.google.com/books?id=mdjsOeTgatsC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA10#v=onepage&q&f=false. In fact, this quip is much older; the earliest source located is Ray Cummings' 1921 short story "The Time Professor", which includes the passage https://books.google.com/books?id=sXpDAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA371#v=onepage&q=%22time%20is%20what%20keeps%20everything%20from%20happening%20at%20once%22&f=false: '"I do know what time is," Tubby declared. He paused. "Time," he added slowly -- "time is what keeps everything from happening at once ...".' Cummings repeated the quote in his 1922 science fiction novel The Girl in the Golden Atom, available on Project Gutenberg here http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21094 (according to Science-Fiction: The Early Years by Everett F. Bleiler, p. 171 http://books.google.com/books?id=KEZxhkG5eikC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA171#v=onepage&q&f=false, the novel was a composite of two earlier stories published in 1919 and 1920). Chapter V http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21094/21094-h/21094-h.htm#CHAPTER_V contains the following paragraph: The Big Business Man smiled. "Time," he said, "is what keeps everything from happening at once." The next-earliest source found for this quote is another book by Ray Cummings, The Man Who Mastered Time http://books.google.com/books?id=YdZEAAAAYAAJ&q=%22everything+from+happening+at+once%22#search_anchor from 1929, and no published examples of the quote from authors other than Cummings can be found until the 1962 Film Facts: Volume 5 where it appears on p. 48 http://books.google.com/books?id=sr0vAQAAIAAJ&q=%22everything+from+happening+at+once%22#search_anchor. So, it seems likely that Ray Cummings is the real originator of this saying. Misattributed

Way, Nature, Time

“SMITH & TINKER'S Patent Double-Action, Extra-Responsive, Thought-Creating, Perfect-Talking MECHANICAL MAN Fitted with our Special Clock-Work Attachment. Thinks, Speaks, Acts, and Does Everything but Live. Manufactured only at our Works at Evna, Land of Ev. All infringements will be promptly Prosecuted according to Law.”

L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) Children's writer, editor, journalist, screenwriter

Plate on back of Tik-Tok, in Ozma of Oz (1907), Ch. 4 : Tiktok the Machine Man
Later Oz novels

Law, Thinking, Perfection

“Correct me if I'm wrong here, but truth is something that arises out of the relationship between language and the world. If I look at a picture alone, it tells me nothing. In the previous incarnation of this lecture, I was going to put a picture of the Titanic and the Lusitania up on the screen. They look very, very similar - four smokestacks. They look almost identical. You look at either picture, true or false? Neither. Put a caption at the bottom of one of them, that changes everything. If you put in the caption, "This is the Lusitania," and the picture is a picture of the Lusitania, then the caption is true. However, the picture itself is neither true nor false. It's just a picture.”

Errol Morris (1948) American filmmaker and writer

Source: The Anti-Post-Modern Post-Modernist http://errolmorris.com/content/lecture/theantipost.html

Truth, World, Change, Falseness

“On the occasion of the International Women’s Day 2016, I call on all Filipino men, women and the LGBT community to be united as one powerful force in promoting and protecting the Filipino women’s physical and emotional health and overall well-being. As one collective group, we must all work to ensure that discrimination and violence against Filipino women, and all women all over the world, do not happen in any instance. Everyday, discrimination and violence against women in so many forms—visible and invisible, physical and verbal—take place. These acts have deep and lasting effects on the women’s health and well-being. On this day, let us also renew our resolve and commitment to uphold, advance and protect our achievements in making the Philippine society more sensitive to the issues affecting the lives of Filipino women. More work needs to be done to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment, factors seen by experts as associated with discrimination and violence. Let us do everything within our power and might to stop all forms of discrimination and violence against women, that their rights are protected and upheld, and that they optimally enjoy and achieve the possible maximum standard of physical and emotion health.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Escudero, F. [Francis]. (2016, March 8). Retrieved from Official Facebook Page of Francis Escudero https://www.facebook.com/senchizescudero/posts/10153923936700610/ 2016, Facebook

Women, Men, Health, World

“Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I,
I, sick with grief for the buried past,
I, smoldering on a slow fire,
having lost everything and forgotten all,
would be fated to commemorate a man
so full of strength and will and bright inventions,
who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

In Memory of M. B.

Pain, Fate, Past

“I tell the truth, but I don’t need to divulge everything.”

Eric Garcia (1972) An amazing author who has written several wonderful books!

Source: The Repossession Mambo (2009), Chapter 19 (p. 292)

Truth

“When someone sues a wealthy individual they are often met with layers of legal protection, and often find that the wealthy person actually owns nothing. They control everything, but own nothing.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

Personality

“As a matter of fact, however, no church rises with everything against it. Something is favorable to it, or it could not exist. If it succeeds and grows, it is absolutely certain that the conditions are favorable. If it spreads rapidly, it simply shows that the conditions are exceedingly favorable, and that the forces in opposition are weak and easily overcome.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Rome, or Reason? A Reply to Cardinal Manning. Part I. The North American Review (1888)

“The understanding of love comes with the knowledge that you are nothing. The greatest purity is nothing or nothingness - no thinking, no desiring, no imagining. You are then one with the moment and the great movement of life so nothing can happen that is not right. Every moment is perfect and everything that happens is eternally just.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Love, Life, Imagination, Understanding

“Do you think it inconsistent for someone who lacks belief in the stork to object when public schools teach middle schoolers that that’s where babies come from? Likewise no history class should ever confuse students by playing any movie with Mel Gibson’s name in the credits, because they’re wrong, and it’s wrong to mislead students. It would be inconsistent for one who loves and seeks knowledge of truth not to object to lies or challenge liars. Everything religion teaches is wrong. Although public schools are not teaching about the stork, some of them are teaching creationism, which is just as demonstrably absurdly wrong; In either case, it’s a criminal immoral disservice, and should be corrected.”

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

Patheos, Anti-theist Answers to Christian Questions http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2015/11/22/anti-theist-answers-to-christian-questions/ (November 22, 2015)

Love, Truth, School, Religion

“A conception of justice cannot be deduced from self evident premises or conditions on principles; instead, its justification is a matter of the mutual support of many considerations, of everything fitted together into one coherent view.”

John Rawls book A Theory of Justice

Source: A Theory of Justice (1971; 1975; 1999), Chapter I, Section 4, p. 21

Justice, Support

“After the Sixties there was a collapse in almost everything we believed in. It culminated in the biological disaster of AIDS — an answer to every one of us who preached free love. … AIDS is a price paid for sins committed in the Sixties, and by gay men who took free love to extremes throughout the Seventies and had unrestrained, decadent, pagan sex. I support paganism in all its forms, but a price must be paid. I believed in free love, too, but we were wrong. It wasn't the Pope who was the problem. It wasn't the struggle with old-fashioned moral codes that was the problem. It was nature. Nature said, "Guess what? If you're going to be that promiscuous, I will off you."”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

… I believe that nature rewards things that are in its best interest and punishes things that are not.
Playboy interview (May 1995)

Love, Men, Sex, Fashion

“Trump is going to go under an electron microscope. And everything I know about Donald Trump, and I know a fair bit about him going back to my Jersey days when he was operating in Atlantic City – that’s where I first kind of encountered him – he is one of the least likely people to survive an electron microscope into his life, I believe, and his business life of anybody. So, my instincts are strongly that they are going to find some stuff.”

Mike Murphy (political consultant) (1962) American political consultant

2010s, 2018, Interview with Bill Kristol (2018)

Life, People, Business

“He who desires everything, has nothing.”

Agnolo Firenzuola (1493–1543) Italian poet and litterateur

Chi tutto vuole, nulla non ha.
Act I., Scene II. — (Lucido Tolto).
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 273.
I Lucidi (published 1549)