Quotes about example (2174 quotes, page 21)

“Monstress, however, was the product of many different ideas; my grandmother’s experience of the Japanese occupation of China, for example, my desire to explore what it is to be monstrous. But it also had to do with women—more precisely the representation of women.”

Marjorie M. Liu (1979) American writer

On her work Monstress in “Marjorie Liu: Making a Monstress” https://www.guernicamag.com/making-a-monstress/ in Guernica (2016 Feb 15)

Idea , Women

“A great artist is born from a profound knowledge of the tradition and problems of painting. However, there are many works in which freshness and audacity surprise, as can be seen in popular art and in certain examples of modern art.”

Fernando Botero (1932–2023) Colombian artist

On the influence of culture on an artist in “Interview With Fernando Botero” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/interview-with-fernando-botero_b_6795782 in HuffPost (2017 Dec 6)

Knowledge , Problem , Painting , Art

“Forgiveness is not just a selfish pursuit of personal satisfaction or righteousness. It actually alleviates the amount of suffering in the world. As each one of us frees ourselves from clinging to resentments that cause suffering, we relieve our friends, family, and community of the burden of our unhappiness. This is not a philosophical proposal; it is a verifiable and practical truth. Through our suffering and lack of forgiveness, we tend to do all kinds of unskillful things that hurt others. We close ourselves off from love, for example, out of fear of further pains or betrayals. This alone—a lack of openness to the love shown to us—is a way that we cause harm to our loved ones. The closed heart lets no one in or out.”

Noah Levine (1971) American Buddhist teacher

The Heart of the Revolution (2011)

Forgiveness , Family , Betrayal , Selfishness

“The whole notion of loyalty inquisitions is a national characteristic of the police state, not of democracy. The history of Soviet Russia is a modern example of this ancient practice. I must, in good conscience, protest against any unnecessary suppression of our rights as free men. We must not burn down the house to kill the rats.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

Voicing opposition to the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950

Democracy , Housing , History , Loyalty

“It is crystal clear that once victorious, socialism can never tolerate the personality cult and its harmful consequences. The energetic measures taken by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to do away with the personality cult, and its consequence, set a brilliant example of unprecedented political boldness.”

Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) Vietnamese communist leader and first president of Vietnam

"Development of Ideological Unity Among Marxist Leninist Parties" (August 3, 1956)
1950's

Personality , Victory

“I think TV series, games, and general media have changed the way we tell stories. But books will remain. Technology has changed all the others arts: painting, theater, dancing, cinema, music. But literature is an absolutely intimate process between the writer’s voice and the reader’s mind, it is something so natural and strong that the only thing that technology could change is its support, its format, for example, if we read from a book or from an e-reader. But that doesn’t change the heart of literature.”

Samanta Schweblin (1978) Argentine writer

On the staying power of literature in “Samanta Schweblin on Revealing Darkness Through Fiction” https://lithub.com/samanta-schweblin-on-revealing-darkness-through-fiction/ in LitHub (2017 Jan 12)

Painting , Reading , Strong , Game

“The Society, founded upon the highest ethical and social principles, serves as an example for homosexuals to follow, and provides a dignified standard upon which the rest of society can base a more intelligent and accurate picture of the nature of homosexuality than currently obtains in the public mind. The Society provides the instrument necessary to work with civic minded and social valuable organizations, and supplies the means for the assistance of our people whoa re victimized daily as a result of our oppression. Only a Society providing an enlightened leadership can rouse the homosexuals - one of the largest minorities in America today - to take the actions necessary to elevate themselves from the social ostracism an unsympathetic culture has perpetrated upon them.”

Harry Hay (1912–2002) American gay rights activist

Mattachine Society Missions and Purposes"

Intelligence , People , Nature

“The folly of disallowing reconversions to Hinduism is a self-destructive one. How easily Hindus converting to Islam or Christianity merge in their new milieu. Yet the same facility is not available to a non-Hindu who might earnestly wish to return to his or her fold or adopt Hinduism as a matter of faith. This shackle seriously depletes our numbers and makes the Hindu community a ready preying ground for the conversion factories that are always looking at swelling their numbers, many times by stealth or inducements. I have nothing against those who convert to another faith by sheer conviction. But such examples are rare. Why should we not allow the enhancement of our numbers due to some antiquated idea that does not even have any scriptural sanction that we cannot convert to Hinduism?”

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) Indian pro-independence activist,lawyer, politician, poet, writer and playwright

V. D. Savarkar, quoted in Vikram Sampath - Savarkar, Echoes from a Forgotten Past, 1883–1924 (2019)

Faith , Time , Communication , Self-confidence

“In one hundred years of struggle, setbacks, and victories, the proletariat has learned how to fight and seize power with arms. The workers took it once in an embryonic form but were crushed with blood and fire. Nevertheless, we remember the Paris Commune, where those who were reviled are today heroes. And their example lives on, while their tormentors are forgotten.”

Abimael Guzmán (1934–2021) Peruvian communist

"We Are the Initiators" (1980)

Fight , Victory , Learning , Communication

“Oh that the truly terrible example I have just put before their eyes, provoking in their hearts a salutary repentance, might save me the grief of having to lament their fate! Let them recognize their errors! Let them make one simple step toward justice, and my lips will open only to bless them.”

Alessandro Cagliostro (1743–1795) Italian occultist

Cagliostro’s Letter to the English People (1787)

Justice , Fate , Error , Heart

“Innovation is important; it has transformed the lives of everyone in the world. And intellectual property laws can and should play a role in stimulating innovation. However, the contention that stronger intellectual property rights always boost economic performance is not in general correct. It is an example of how special interests—those who benefit from stronger intellectual property rights—use simplistic ideology to advance their causes.”

Joseph E. Stiglitz book Making Globalization Work

§4, p. 106
Making globalization work (2006)

World , Law

“The dictionary doesn’t have individual contributions. It’s like building a cathedral. The workers are unknown. But one of the things I tend to do is suggest that it might be interesting to have examples of things that aren’t from France. If it’s a wind, which we worked on recently, does it always have to be the mistral? What about the winds of elsewhere? How about zephyrs or siroccos? In French, there exists an enormous variety of classifications, proverbs, and witticisms about winds. There are winds that push ships as well as winds that come from the gut—the noisy, bodily winds of Rabelais. All shadings have to be in the dictionary.”

Dany Laferrière (1953) Haitian Canadian novelist and journalist

On working on a French-language dictionary as part his duties at the Académie française in “Dany Laferrière, The Art of Fiction No. 237” https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/7040/dany-laferriere-the-art-of-fiction-no-237-dany-laferriere in The Paris Review (Fall 2017)

Relation ships

“America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet on her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.... Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.”

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)

Independence Day address (1821)

Peace , Justice , Friendship , Search

“The negationist stand against the pre-existence of the Ayodhya temple was an extreme example of how the Humanities often serve to provide a scholarly veneer to theses that arise purely from political motives.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

Ch 19
2010s, On Modi Time (2015)

Motivation

“But the blot on the encyclopedia’s fair name is not just in the wrongness of the statement, but in its partisan and non-encyclopedic nature…. If Wikipedia wants to live up to its promise of being a reliable encyclopedic source, it will strike this and all sentences resembling it from its article on me. At most, it can use me as an example of how it was fooled by some of its all-too-partisan collaborators. Speaking of whom: the history page accompanying my page proves forever that some Wikipedia collaborators wanted to inflict on me the maximum harm possible, an attitude incompatible with work for an encyclopedia. Shouldn’t Wikipedia fire them and wipe out everything they wrote? Of course they can still contribute blogs and columns, by preference under their own full names, but they have proven themselves not to be encyclopedic authorities. …”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

http://koenraadelst.blogspot.com/2012/04/meera-nanda-against-hinduism-and-its.html
2010s, The argumentative Hindu (2012)

History , Fools , Nature

“The problem is this: Nature has assembled all these species on this planet. The human species is no more important than any other species on this planet. For some reason, man accorded himself a superior place in this scheme of things. He thinks that he is created for some grander purpose than, if I could give a crude example, the mosquito that is sucking his blood. What is responsible for this is the value system that we have created. And the value system has come out of the religious thinking of man. Man has created religion because it gives him a cover. This demand to fulfill himself, to seek something out there was made imperative because of this self-consciousness in you which occurred somewhere along the line of the evolutionary process. Man separated himself from the totality of nature.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

Description: from U.G Krishnamurti
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)

Religion , Nature , Self-confidence , Problem

“Seven decades ago, the warriors of D-day fought a sinister enemy who spoke of a thousand-year empire. In defeating that evil, they left a legacy that will last not only for a thousand years, but for all time—for as long as the soul knows of duty and honor; for as long as freedom keeps its hold on the human heart. To the men who sit behind me, and to the boys who rest in the field before me, your example will never, ever grow old. Your legend will never tire. Your spirit—brave, unyielding, and true—will never die. The blood that they spilled, the tears that they shed, the lives that they gave, the sacrifice that they made, did not just win a battle. It did not just win a war. Those who fought here won a future for our Nation. They won the survival of our civilization. And they showed us the way to love, cherish, and defend our way of life for many centuries to come. Today, as we stand together upon this sacred Earth, we pledge that our nations will forever be strong and united. We will forever be together. Our people will forever be bold. Our hearts will forever be loyal. And our children, and their children, will forever and always be free. May God bless our great veterans, may God bless our Allies, may God bless the heroes of D-day, and may God bless America. Thank you. Thank you very much.”

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

2010s, 2019, June, Remarks on the 75th Anniversary of D-Day in Colleville-sur-Mer, France

God , Soul , Time , Freedom

“The supporters of tariffs treat it as self-evident that the creation of jobs is a desirable end, in and of itself, regardless of what the persons employed do. That is clearly wrong. If all we want are jobs, we can create any number—for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again, or perform other useless tasks. Work is sometimes its own reward. Mostly, however, it is the price we pay to get the things we want. Our real objective is not just jobs but productive jobs—jobs that will mean more goods and services to consume.”

Milton Friedman book Free to Choose

Source: Free to Choose (1980), Ch. 2 “The Tyranny of Controls”, pp. 40-41

Support , People , Personality , Self-confidence

“Unfortunately, too many academics retreat into narrow specialisms, allow themselves to become adjuncts of the corporation, or align themselves with dominant interests that serve largely to consolidate authority rather than to critique its abuses. Refusing to take positions on controversial issues or to examine the role they might play in lessening human suffering, such academics become models of moral indifference and examples of what it means to disconnect learning from public life.”

Henry Giroux (1943) American academic

"Higher Education Under Siege: Implications for Public Intellectuals," Thought and Action (Fall 2006), p. 64

Indifference , Life , Suffering , Learning

“The best way to describe anyone is to give an example of the kind of thing he would do.”

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

In Joy Still Felt (1980), p. 499
General sources

Way

“Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write. Let every order and degree among the people rouse their attention and animate their resolution. Let them all become attentive to the grounds and principles of government, ecclesiastical and civil. Let us study the law of nature; search into the spirit of the British constitution; read the histories of ancient ages; contemplate the great examples of Greece and Rome; set before us the conduct of our own British ancestors, who have defended for us the inherent rights of mankind against foreign and domestic tyrants and usurpers, against arbitrary kings and cruel priests, in short, against the gates of earth and hell.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

1760s, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765)

Hell , Study , History , Law

“I do not believe that in the four administrations which have taken place, there has been a single instance of departure from good faith towards other nations. We may sometimes have mistaken our rights, or made an erroneous estimate of the actions of others, but no voluntary wrong can be imputed to us. In this respect England exhibits the most remarkable phaenomenon in the universe in the contrast between the profligacy of it’s government and the probity of it’s citizens. And accordingly it is now exhibiting an example of the truth of the maxim that virtue & interest are inseparable.”

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

It ends, as might have been expected, in the ruin of it’s people, but this ruin will fall heaviest, as it ought to fall on that hereditary aristocracy which has for generations been preparing the catastrophe. I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in it’s birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Letter to George Logan (12 November 1816). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-12_Bk.pdf, pp. 43-44
1810s

Universe , Truth , Faith , Departure

“It turns out you left something rather important off your career plan: for example, there’s no ticky-box on the diagram for HAVING A LIFE—TASK COMPLETED. And so you kept putting it off, and de-prioritized it, and put it off again until the law of conservation of shit-stirring dragged it front and centre and lamped you upside yer heid, as your clients might put it.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 1, “Liz: Red Pill, Blue Pill” (p. 16)

Life , Box , Law

“The theme of choice and the power of culture pops up in my stories often. Before Binti, the biggest example of this is in Who Fears Death when Onyesonwu must face the decision of whether or not to go through a ceremony that required cutting off her clitoris. To many readers, the fact that she even has to think about whether or not to do this is shocking. It’s not shocking to me at all, coming from the culture that I come from where the individual is often secondary to the community…”

Nnedi Okorafor (1974) Nigerian-American writer of fantasy and science fiction

On choice being reconciled with culture in her works in “Interview: A Conversation with Nnedi Okorafor” http://weirdfictionreview.com/2017/02/interview-conversation-nnedi-okorafor/ in Weird Fiction Review (2017 Feb 20)
Personal life

Communication , Thinking , Decision , Fear

“What the comedy club in Montreal is doing is not only ridiculous, but is a prime example of virtue signaling: making a gesture to trumpet your own ideological purity, but a gesture that has no effect on society and no mitigation of injustice.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" Accusations of cultural appropriation gone wild: Canadian comedy club bars white comedian with dreadlocks https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2019/01/16/accusations-of-cultural-appropriation-gone-wild-canadian-comedy-club-bars-white-comedian-with-dreadlocks/" January 16, 2019

Making love

“What people do with their leisure tells us a great deal about the nature of a society, what its values really are, for example, as opposed to what its members say its values are.”

Jack McDevitt book Infinity Beach

Source: Infinity Beach (2000), Chapter 32 (p. 476)

People , Nature

“Social and economic inequalities, for example inequalities of wealth and authority, are just only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular for the least advantaged members of society.”

John Rawls book A Theory of Justice

Source: A Theory of Justice (1971; 1975; 1999), p. 14.

Wealth

“The First Amendment to the United States Constitution encourages a diversity of religions but does not prohibit criticism of religion. In fact it protects and encourages criticism of religion. Religions ought to be subject to at least the same degree of skepticism as, for example, contentions about UFO visitations or Velikovskian catastrophism. I think it is healthy for the religions themselves to foster skepticism about the fundamental underpinnings of their evidential bases. There is no question that religion provides a solace and support, a bulwark in time of emotional need, and can serve extremely useful social roles. But it by no means follows that religion should be immune from testing, from critical scrutiny, from skepticism. It is striking how little skeptical discussion of religion there is in the nation that Tom Paine, the author of The Age of Reason, helped to found. I hold that belief systems that cannot survive scrutiny are probably not worth having.”

Carl Sagan book Broca's Brain

Source: Broca's Brain (1979), Chapter 23, “A Sunday Sermon” (p. 338)

Pain , Religion , Time , Question

“In becoming a turncoat, Hitler was far from unique. In fact, at the time Munich was full of turncoats. For example, some former members of the Red Army joined the Freikorps.”

Thomas Weber (historian) (1974) German historian

Source: Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (2017), p. 73

Time

“The man momentarily stands for the thought, but will not bear examination; and a society of men will cursorily represent well enough a certain quality and culture, for example, chivalry or beauty of manners, but separate them, and there is no gentleman and no lady in the group. The least hint sets us on the pursuit of a character, which no man realizes.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Nominalist and Realist

Beauty , Men

“So in addition to what I’ve quoted to you just now, in Prizren, I say particularly in this place and in this town, I want to tell you something that I consider to be the most important in this town, because in it, there are Serbs, Albanians, Muslims, Turks, Roma, and others. Every one of the ethnic groups, to a large proportion. That is why I believe that this town and this region should be an example of carrying out the policy of national equality of rights, a policy that would make it possible for all people to give — to live on a footing of equality and under humane conditions, that there should be a high degree of mutual understanding and that a joint life of all citizens should be built successfully.”

Slobodan Milošević (1941–2006) Yugoslavian and Serbian politician

Slobodan Milošević (2002) International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia https://www.icty.org/x/cases/slobodan_milosevic/trans/en/020516IT.htm

Understanding , People , Life , Making love

“The orthodox approaches, whether the authors think they have made derivations or assumptions, are just fine FAPP — when used with the good taste and discretion picked up from exposure to good examples.”

John S. Bell (1928–1990) Northern Irish physicist

Against 'measurement' (1990)

Thinking

“It is absurd to excite reason against the primary postulates of pure time, as, for example, continuity, etc., since they follow from laws prior and superior to which nothing is found, and since reason herself in the use of the principle of contradiction cannot dispense with the support of this concept, so primitive and original is it.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section III On The Principles Of The Form Of The Sensible World

Support , Time , Law

“We must not forget that the world needs to be fed. France and Germany, for example, use more than 50% of their territories for agriculture, while Brazil only uses 8% of its land for food production. 61% of our territory is preserved! Our policy is zero tolerance for crime, including environmental crimes. I reiterate that any initiative to help or support the preservation of the Amazon rainforest, or other biomes, must be treated in full respect of Brazilian sovereignty. We also reject attempts to instrumentalize environmental issues or indigenous policy in favor of foreign political and economic interests, especially those disguised as good intentions. We are ready to harness our full potential sustainably through partnerships and added value.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

Speech at the at the 74th UN General Assembly. Statement by Mr. Jair Messias Bolsonaro, President of the Federative Republic of Brazil http://statements.unmeetings.org/GA74/BR_EN.pdf. United Nations PaperSmart (24 September 2019).

Partnership , Food , Support , Forgetting

“To be sure, some humans were always doing silly things—but at what point had prime damfoolishness become commonplace? When for example, had the zombie-like professional models become accepted ideals of American womanhood?”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Year of the Jackpot

The Year of the Jackpot (p. 628)
Short fiction, Off the Main Sequence (2005)

“You look at the plan to increase the efforts to prop up the single currency with an ever denser system of integration, with more and more regulation about all sorts of social and economic issues which will impact directly on this country, I think the risk is increasingly in staying in the project. I think the best thing we can do is show a lead, show an example and strike out for freedom.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

Boris Johnson: EU exit 'win-win for us all' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-35783049, BBC News, 11 March 2016
2010s, 2016

Effort , Thinking , Country , Freedom

“In my opinion, they are not examples of real conversion. If a person through fear, compulsion, starvation or for material gain or consideration goes over to another faith, it is a misnomer to call it conversion. Most cases of mass conversion, of which we have heard so much during the past two years, have been to my mind false coin… I would, therefore, unhesitatingly re-admit to the Hindu fold all such repentants without much ado, certainly without any shuddhi… And as I believe in the equality of all the great religions of the earth, I regard no man as polluted because he has forsaken the branch on which he was sitting and gone over to another of the same tree. If he comes to the original branch, he deserves to be welcomed and not told that he had committed sin by reason of his having forsaken the family to which he belonged. In so far as he may be deemed to have erred, he has sufficiently purged himself of it when he repents of the error and retraces his step.”

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

Mahatma Gandhi, The Collected Works Volume 66, New Delhi, 1976, pp. 163-64. As quoted in Goel, S.R. History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)
Posthumous publications (1950s and later)

Family , Tree , Religion , Faith

“My sympathies are all with the Jews. I have known them intimately in South Africa. Some of them became life-long companions. Through these friends I came to learn much of their age-long persecution. They have been the untouchables of Christianity. The parallel between their treatment by Christians and the treatment of untouchables by Hindus is very close. Religious sanction has been invoked in both cases for the justification of the inhuman treatment meted out to them. Apart from the friendships, therefore, there is the more common universal reason for my sympathy for the Jews…. If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance but would have confidence that in the end the rest are bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.”

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

Mahatma Gandhi, Harijan, 26 November 1938. Quoted from Hinduism and Judaism compilation https://web.archive.org/web/20060423090103/http://www.nhsf.org.uk/images/stories/HinduDharma/Interfaith/hinduzion.pdf
1930s

Home , Sleep , Confidence , Imagination

“I feel just as much compulsion to be an architect, for example, as I do a musician. And I feel inestimably guilty that I cannot fulfil the vocation for which I was trained - that of an economist specialising in problems of underdevelopment. My sadness stems from the fact that I do not have several lifetimes to lead.”

Graeme Revell (1955) New Zealand musician

Unsettling The Score: Graeme Revell, from SPK to Hollywood https://www.pantograph-punch.com/post/unsettling-the-score-graeme-revell-from-spk-to-hollywood (March 2, 2014)

Training , Problem , Sadness , Feeling

“He’s one of the greatest artists and songwriters of all time, not only in my small town, but worldwide, and that always made me really proud. He set an example of how to do shit and set an example of what not to do, and I respected that, too. Chris had a part in steering a direction there; you don’t need this shit, you don’t need miscellaneous bullshit – you need the music. He was a very deep and emotional writer, and I feel like I have an affinity with writers like Chris. He didn’t pull any fucking punches at all and that’s never been my style, either.”

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

Jerry Cantrell quoted in ** Interview with Metal Hammer, July 19, 2018 https://www.pressreader.com/uk/metal-hammer-uk/20180719/283978948146853,

Music , Time , Feeling , Parting

“Origen taught that all souls were created at the beginning of creation as angelic spirits. In this condition they sinned and for their apostasy were transferred into material bodies. It was this view of preexistence which was proclaimed heretical. In any case, heresy thus condemned so long ago need not be regarded today as of major importance. Truth matters a great deal more and a condemned heresy may turn out to be a truth, as happened, for example, when a local church of Rome condemned Galileo’s heliocentric doctrine and forced him to recant. Galileo was right and the church in question was wrong. It is therefore quite legitimate for both clergy and laity of the Christian faith to preach and believe in both preexistence and reincarnation.”

Geoffrey Hodson (1886–1983) New Zealand occultist

Source: Reincarnation & Christianity https://www.theosophical.org/files/resources/articles/ReincarnationChristianity.pdf (1967)

Soul , Faith , Question , Truth

“It is not infrequently our custom to seek to cover our own blank ignorance of certain subjects with the confident assertion that nothing ever has been or can be really known… and our treatment of this question of the life after death is one of the worst examples of this habit. If popular theology had not most unhappily altogether lost sight of the cardinal doctrine of reincarnation, its· views on this subject of death would naturally be entirely different. A man who realizes that he has died many times before regards the operation more philosophically than one who believes it to be an absolutely new experience fraught with all kinds of vague· and awful possibilities.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: The Other Side of Death (1903), p. 42, (1903)

Confidence , Time , Question , Nature

“I have been concerned to find out that many of our best trained students who have completed the higher levels of education at university or polytechnic have no desire to join industry. Their preferences are to stay in academic life or to find their way into the civil service. There seems to be a need for more technological bias in science teaching that will lead towards practical applications in industry rather than towards academic studies. Or, to take other examples, why is it that such a high proportion of girls abandon science before leaving school? … Why is it that 30,000 vacancies for students in science and engineering in our universities and polytechnics were not taken up last year while the humanities courses were full?”

James Callaghan (1912–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; 1976-1979

Speech https://www.theguardian.com/education/thegreatdebate/story/0,,574645,00.html to Ruskin College, Oxford University (18 October 1976)
Prime Minister

School , Study , Girl , Universe

“As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. If, indeed, such men are separated from him by great differences in appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shews us how long it is before we look at them as our fellow-creatures. Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions. It is apparently unfelt by savages, except towards their pets. How little the old Romans knew of it is shewn by their abhorrent gladiatorial exhibitions. The very idea of humanity, as far as I could observe, was new to most of the Gauchos of the Pampas. This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings. As soon as this virtue is honoured and practised by some few men, it spreads through instruction and example to the young, and eventually through public opinion.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter III: "Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals — continued", pages 100-101 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=113&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image
The Descent of Man (1871)

Personality , Communication , Animals , Appearance

“We want no foreign examples to rekindle in us the flame of liberty. The example of our own ancestors is abundantly sufficient to maintain the spirit of freedom in its full vigour, and to qualify it in all its exertions. The example of a wise, moral, well-natured, and well-tempered spirit of freedom, is that alone which can be useful to us, or in the least degree reputable or safe. Our fabric is so constituted; one part of it bears so much on the other, the parts, are so made for one another, and for nothing else, that to introduce any foreign matter into it, is to destroy it.”

Edmund Burke book An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs

Source: An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), p. 471

Freedom , Parting , Nature

“Ho Chi Minh was, is and will be an eternal example.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

Speech (6 March 2003) http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/2003/esp/f060303e.html

“When you understand the basic change taking place in any one major area, it is easier to make sense of the others. This discovery of a new pattern transcends explanation. The shift is qual-itative, sudden, the result of neurological processes too rapid and complex to be tracked by the conscious mind. Although logical explanations can be laid out up to a point, the seeing of a pattern is not sequential but all-at-once. If a new concept does not click into place for you on first encounter, read on. As you move through the book you will come upon many related ideas, connections, examples, metaphors, analogies, and illustrative stories. In time, patterns will emerge, the shifts will occur. From the new perspective, old questions may seem suddenly irrelevant.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter One, The Conspiracy

Time , Reading , Understanding , Question

“Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence of archeology could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadores were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. The lowly Dasa of the Rig Veda, who had previously been thought of as primitive savages, were now reconstructed as members of a high civilization.”

Edmund Leach (1910–1989) British anthropologist

Sir Edmund Leach. "Aryan invasions over four millennia. In Culture through Time, Anthropological Approaches, edited by E. Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990, pp. 227-245.

Question , Horse , Thinking , Appearance

“Such men ever, whether they have some business to transact, or have taken upon them some office, or are in some critical conjuncture, put before their eyes the example of noble men, and consider what Plato would have done on the occasion, what Epaminondas would have said, how Lycurgus or Agesilaus would have dealt; that so, adjusting and re-modelling themselves, as it were, at their mirrors, they may correct any ignoble expression, and repress any ignoble passion.”

Plutarch book Moralia

Source: Moralia, How one may be aware of one's progress in virtue, XV

Passion , Business , Men

“Vasyl Slipak showed by his example an incredible will of Ukrainians to defend their native land. As a volunteer fighter, he demonstrated an example of patriotism and self-sacrifice to many, particularly our young people.”

Vasyl Slipak (1974–2016) Ukrainian opera singer

2018
Serhii VASYLIUK, front man of the band “Tin’ Sontsia”. Vasyl Slipak Park is sure to be! // The Day. — 2018. — 28 February. https://day.kyiv.ua/en/article/culture/vasyl-slipak-park-sure-be

Self-confidence , People

“Even more! He had a unique talent for languages and did not have to learn any. He never did any courses! When he came back from France, he spoke French. He would quickly learn the language of any country he came to – Polish, Spanish, German, Russian… This came very easily to him. He never spent as much time to learn a language as, for example, I did. I envied my brother in this case. Moreover, he not only spoke nut also wrote. The French praised his French very much. His ear for music must have helped him. Besides, he had a good natural memory. Hence were his broad communication and a career growth.”

Vasyl Slipak (1974–2016) Ukrainian opera singer

2017
Orest Slipak, the brother of singer. Brother about brother. The Day. Кyiv.ua. - 2017. - 27 April. https://day.kyiv.ua/en/article/topic-day/brother-about-brother

Time , Country , Help , Learning

“Ukraine this year celebrated 25 years of independence, but it was real independence only after the Maidan, when a real state started to form. Here we have an example of a person who left his career to fight. New heroes of the new Ukraine are being born.”

Vasyl Slipak (1974–2016) Ukrainian opera singer

Artyom Skoropadsky, a spokesman for Right Sector. Wassyl Slipak, Who Left Paris Opera for Ukraine War, Dies at 41 // The New York Times. - 2016. - June 30. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/world/europe/wassyl-slipak-who-left-paris-opera-for-ukraine-war-dies-at-41.html?_r=0

Fight , Personality

“For example, Italy and Soviet Russia, superficially considered, each seem to constitute a united people. But any scrutinising glance will perceive there tensions which will disintegrate the peoples of these two States immediately the outbreak of war permits them to explode.”

Erich Ludendorff (1865–1937) German Army officer and later Nazi leader in Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch

Der Totalkrieg (Berlin, 1933), quoted in W. W. Coole (ed.), Thus Spake Germany (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1941), p. 139

War , People

“Nobody knows what is going to happen because so much depends on an enormous number of variables, on simple hazard. On the other hand if you look at history retrospectively, then, even though it was contingent, you can tell a story that makes sense…. Jewish history, for example, in fact had its ups and downs, its, enmities and its friendships, as every history of all people has. The notion that there is one unilinear history is of course false. But if you look at it after the experience of Auschwitz it looks as though all of history—or at least history since the Middle Ages — had no other aim than Auschwitz…. This, is the real problem of every philosophy of history how is it possible that in retrospect it always looks as though it couldn’t have happened otherwise?”

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) Jewish-American political theorist

The New York Review of Books interview with the French writer Roger Errera (1978)

Friendship , History , Dependency , People

“There is beauty in art, in literature, in science, and in every triumph of intelligence, all of which I covet for my country; but there is a higher beauty still—in relieving the poor, in elevating the downtrodden, and being a succor to the oppressed. There is true grandeur in an example of justice, in making the rights of all the same as our own, and beating down the prejudice, like Satan, under our feet.”

Charles Sumner (1811–1874) American abolitionist and politician

Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, Volume 4, p. 500, also cited in W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), p. 592

Justice , Country , Beauty , Intelligence