Quotes about exception
page 9

“… Emma Morley wasn't such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgmental. Self-pitying, self righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she had always needed the most.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Confidence, Self-confidence

“Game over," you say, and I don't know which I take more exception to-- the fact that you say its over, or the fact that you say it's a game.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

Game

“It was almost enough to make me turn vegetarian, except for the pesky fact that I loved cheeseburgers.”

Rick Riordan book The Demigod Diaries

Source: The Demigod Diaries

Love

“You will continue to read stories of crookedness and corruption - of policemen who lie and steal, doctors who reap where they do not sew, politicians on the take. Don't be misled. They are news because they are the exceptions.”

Robert Fulghum book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Source: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Lie, Reading

“The clock is a conspiracy & a crime against humanity
and I would not own one
except I miss appointments without it.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Source: Story People: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas

“I was always a reluctant actor! I continue to be that. I announce a project, the camera rolls and I'm happy. I'm fortunate to be doing leading parts even now. Except for my mentor K. Balachander, for whom I can do even a walk-on part. When he directed his 100th film, I just walked in to do a small role. I just clowned around on camera.”

Kamal Haasan (1954) Indian actor

Aamir's choice of films makes Kamal Haasan happy

Parting, Happiness

“Over the years, she told me the same story, except for the ending, which grew darker, casting long shadows into her life, and eventually into mine.”

Amy Tan The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club (1989)

Life

“The Chinese system must be classified as a syllabic system of writing. More specifically, it belongs to the subcategory that I have labeled meaning-plus-sound syllabic systems or morphosyllabic systems. I use the term morphosyllabic in two senses. The first applies to the Chinese characters taken as individual units. Individual characters are morphosyllabic in the sense that they represent at once a single syllable and a single morpheme (except for the 11 percent or so of meaningless characters that represent sound only). In this usage the term is intended to replace the more widely used expressions logographic, word-syllabic, and morphemic, all of which are applied to individual characters taken as a unit. The second sense of the term refers to the structure of Chinese characters and is intended to draw attention to the fact that, in most cases, a character is composed of two elements, a phonetic grapheme which suggests the syllabic pronunciation of the full character, and a semantic element which hints at its meaning.”

John DeFrancis (1911–2009) American linguist

Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems (1989, pp. 115-116) http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/visible/index.html Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems (1989)

Sense, Drawing

“The common people (live in) poverty so great and miserable that the life of the people can be depicted or accurately described only as the home of stark want and the dwelling place of bitter woe… their houses are built of mud with thatched roofs. Furniture there is little or none, except some earthenware pots to hold water and for cooking…”

Francisco Pelsaert (1591–1630) Dutch merchant, commander of the ship Batavia

Pelsaert, quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
Jahangir’s India

Life, People, Home, Water

“a politician is an arse upon
which everyone has sat except a man”

E.E. Cummings book 1 × 1

Source: 1 x 1 (1944), X

“Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure — but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and the invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place. This law is not subject to the will of those, who by an obligation above them, and infinitely superior, are bound to submit their will to that law. The municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not morally at liberty at their pleasure, and on their speculations of a contingent improvement, wholly to separate and tear asunder the bands of their subordinate community, and to dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of elementary principles. It is the first and supreme necessity only, a necessity that is not chosen, but chooses, a necessity paramount to deliberation, that admits no discussion, and demands no evidence, which alone can justify a resort to anarchy. This necessity is no exception to the rule; because this necessity itself is a part too of that moral and physical disposition of things, to which man must be obedient by consent or force: but if that which is only submission to necessity should be made the object of choice, the law is broken, nature is disobeyed, and the rebellious are outlawed, cast forth, and exiled, from this world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Pleasure, World, Peace, Law

“What has art to do with those things [Revolution, socialism]? Art will never come except from some little disregarded corner where some isolated man is studying the mysteries of nature, fully assured that the answer which he ﬁnds and which is good for him is good also for humanity, whatever may be the number of succeeding generations.”

Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867) French painter (1812-1867)

as quoted by Romain Rolland in his book Millet, c. 1900; transl. Miss Clementina Black; published by Duckworth & Co, Londo / E. P. Dutton & Co, New York, 1919, p. 8
undated quotes

Art, Nature, Study

“Subsequent hearings have presented to the public a vapid and hollow charade, in which repetition of platitudes has replaced discussion of viewpoints and personal anecdotes have supplanted legal analysis. Such hearings serve little educative function, except perhaps to reinforce lessons of cynicism that citizens often glean from government. Neither can such hearings contribute toward an evaluation of the Court and a determination whether the nominee would make it a better or worse institution. A process so empty may seem ever so tidy — muted, polite, and restrained — but all that good order comes at great cost.”

Elena Kagan (1960) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

On hearings of nominees to the Supreme Court after the rejection of Judge Bork, in a review of The Confirmation Mess (1995).

Education, Personality

“Buddhas bear the same relation to sentient beings as water does to ice. Ice, like stone or brick, cannot flow. But when it melts it flows freely in conformity with its surroundings. So long as one remains in a state of delusion he is like ice. Upon realization he becomes as exquisitely free as water. And remember, there is no ice which does not return to water. So you will understand there is no difference between ordinary beings and Buddhas except for one thing - delusion. When it is dissolved they are identical.”

Bassui Tokushō (1327–1387) Japanese monk

Source: Letter to the abbess of Shinryu-ji https://sites.google.com/site/esabsnichtenglisch/bassui-tokusho-the-letters

Understanding, Water

“At the great Washington March of 1963, the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, John Lewis, speaking to the same enormous crowd that heard Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream," was prepared to ask the right question: "Which side is the federal government on?" That sentence was eliminated from his speech by organizers of the March to avoid offending the Kennedy Administration. But Lewis and his fellow SNCC workers had experienced, again and again, the strange passivity of the national government in the face of Southern violence, strange, considering how often this same government had been willing to intervene outside the country, often with overwhelming force.
John Lewis and SNCC had reason to be angry. John had been beaten bloody by a white mob in Montgomery as a Freedom Rider in the spring of 1961. The federal government had trusted the notoriously racist Alabama police to protect the Riders, but done nothing itself except to have FBI agents take notes. Instead of insisting that blacks and whites had a right to ride the buses together, the Kennedy Administration called for a "cooling-off period," a moratorium on Freedom Rides.”

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) author and historian

You Can't Be Neutral on A Moving Train (1994) Ch. 4: "My Name is Freedom": Albany, Georgia

Dreams, Spring, Question, Freedom

“The investigation of the form and brightness of the rings or rays surrounding the image of a star as seen in a good telescope, when a diaphragm bounded by a rectilinear contour is placed upon the object-glass, though sometimes tedious is never difficult. The expressions which it is necessary to integrate are always sines and cosines of multiples of the independent variable, and the only trouble consists in taking properly the limits of integration. Several cases of this problem have been completely worked out, and the result, in every instance, has been entirely in accordance with observation. These experiments… have seldom been made except by those whose immediate object was to illustrate the undulatory theory of light. There is however a case of a somewhat different kind; which in practice recurs perpetually, and which in theory requires for its complete investigation the value of a more difficult integral; I mean the usual case of an object-glass with a circular aperture. The desire of submitting to mathematical investigation every optical phænomenon of frequent occurrence has induced me to procure the computation of the numerical values of the integral that presents itself in this inquiry: and I now beg leave to lay before the Society the calculated table, with a few remarks upon its application.”

George Biddell Airy (1801–1892) English mathematician and astronomer

Star, Mathematics, Problem, Light

“Non-criminal sexual harassment on the job is not a problem for the virtuous woman except in the rarest of cases.”

Phyllis Schlafly (1924–2016) American activist

[United States Senate, 1981, Sex Discrimination in the Workplace, 1981: Hearings Before the Committee on Labor and Human Resources, GPO, 400, http://books.google.com/books?id=R7rhs0j5usMC&vid=0RN4WJjHbWpBe0fVoGYCgPj&dq=schlafly+congress+1981++virtuous&q=%22a+problem+for+the+virtuous+woman%22&pgis=1#search]

Problem

“There will come to my devotees those who will claim seeing (me). Verily, whosoever claims the seeing before the rising of al-Sufyānī and the Cry, is a liar and a forger; and there is no power except with Almighty Allah.”

Muhammad al-Mahdi (869–941) 12th and last Imam in Twelver Shia Islam

al-Tabarsi, Al-Ihtijaj, vol.2, p. 478
Religious-based Quotes

Cry

“A license cannot be revoked because a man is redheaded or because he was divorced, except for a calling, if such there be, for which redheadedness or an unbroken marriage may have some rational bearing. If a State licensing agency lays bare its arbitrary action, or if the State law explicitly allows it to act arbitrarily, that is precisely the kind of State action which the Due Process Clause forbids.”

Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965) American judge

Barsky v. Board of Regents, 347 U.S. 442, 470 (1954).
Judicial opinions

Marriage, Law

“I have looked attentively at chickens raised in this [battery] fashion, and to me they seem to be unhappy and in poor health. Their combs are dull and lifeless except for glaring and unnatural patches of color that appear occasionally … The battery chickens I have observed seem to lose their minds about the time they would normally be weaned by their mothers and off in the weeds chasing grasshoppers on their own account. Yes, literally, actually, the battery becomes a gallinaceous madhouse. The eyes of these chickens through the bars gleam like those of maniacs. Let your hand get within reach and it receives a dozen vicious peeks—not the love peck or the tentative peek of idle curiosity bestowed by the normal chicken, but a peck that means business, a peck for flesh and blood, for which in their madness they are thirsting.”

Roy Bedichek (1878–1959) American writer and naturalist

Adventures with a Texas Naturalist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Orig. pub. 1947), pp. 101 https://books.google.it/books?id=4WuzlD0hkSgC&pg=PA101-102.

Love, Health, Color, Fashion

“What do you mean, 'you don't need to buy it'? You don't need to do anything, except pay taxes and die.”

Sam Donaldson (1934) American journalist

As quoted in "Respek" http://www.listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=m1_FAsefZ6o (18 July 2004), Da Ali G Show. 2000s

“Now it was Liddle, jerking into motion as Wertz poised at the plate, and then the motion smoothed out and the ball came sweeping in to Wertz, a shoulder-high pitch, a fast ball that probably would have been a fast curve, except that Wertz was coming around and hitting it, hitting it about as hard as I have ever seen ball hit, on a high line to dead center field. For whatever it is worth, I have seen such hitters as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, Jimmy Foxx, Ralph Kiner, Hack Wilson, Johnny Mize, and lesser-known but equally long hitters as Wally Berger and Bob Seeds send the batted ball tremendous distances. None, that I recall, ever hit a ball any harder than this one by Wertz in my presence.”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

From A Day in the Bleachers (1955), p. 116; reprinted in The Greatest Baseball Stories Ever Told: Thirty Unforgettable Tales from the Diamond https://books.google.com/books?id=dj6_F7omJZcC&pg=PA151&dq=%22Now+it+was+Liddle%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAWoVChMIwoTj2c7GxwIVRDw-Ch2howea#v=onepage&q=%22Now%20it%20was%20Liddle%22&f=false (2001), edited by Jeff Silverman, p. 151 Sports-related

Jerk, Dead

“Andre Agassi, in his account of becoming an embittered prodigy, seems never to have liked tennis much, except as a vehicle for achievement. The kids who do like life inside the lines can find the flow within that green-and-white geometry.”

Adam Gopnik (1956) American journalist

How to Raise a Prodigy, The New Yorker (2018)

Life

“Anyone could see that this woman is living a nightmare. Except that she goes through her daily life wide awake, knowing that she could make a mistake at any moment.”

Núria Añó (1973) Catalan writer novelist

Presage

Life

“Normally, anyone disreputable enough to flatly affirm such positive proclamations without adequate support would lose the respect of his peers and be accused of outright fraud; anyone but a religious advocate that is. When allegedly holy men do the exact same thing, then its not called fraud anymore. Its called “revealed truth” instead. That’s quite a double-standard, innit? Like when some minister gets on stage at one of those stadium-sized churches -to state as fact who God is and what God is, and what he wants, hates, needs, won’t tolerate, or will do -for whom, how, and under what conditions; they don’t have any data to show they’re correct about any of it, yet they speak so matter-of-factly. Even when they contradict each other they’re all still completely confident in their own empty assertions! So why do none of these tens of thousands of head-bobbing, mouth-breathing, glassy-eyed wanna-believers have the presence of mind to ask, “how do you know that?” Well, for all those who never asked the question, here’s the answer; they don’t know that! There’s no way anyone could know these things. They’re making it up as they go along. These sermons are the best possible example of blind speculation; asserted as though it were truth and sold for tithe. If anyone or everyone else would be called liars for claiming such things without any evidentiary basis then why make exceptions for evangelists? For these charlatans are obviously liars too! The clergy are in the same category of questionable credibility as are commissioned salesmen, politicians, and military recruiters.”

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

"4th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80nhqGfN6t8, Youtube (December 25, 2007) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Men, God, Hate, Truth

“I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.”

James Joyce book Dubliners

"Araby"
Dubliners (1914)

“I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

April 15, 1778, p. 392
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol III

Love

“To be perfectly ignorant in all the Terms of them is only tolerable in those, who think their Tongues of as little Use to them, as generally their Understandings are. Those whom Necessity has obliged to get their Bread by Manual Industry, where some Degree of Art is required to go along with it, and who have had some Insight into these Studies, have very often found Advantages from them sufficient to reward the Pains they were at in acquiring them. And whatever may have been imputed (how justly I'm not now to determine) to some other Studies, under the Notion of Insignificancy and Loss of Time; yet these, I believe, never caused Repentance in any, except it was for their Remissness in the Prosecution of them. And though Plato's Censure, that those who did not understand the 117 Prop. of the 10th Element, ought not to be ranked among Rational Creatures, wax unreasonable and unjust: Yet to give a Man the Character of Universal Learning that is destitute of a competent Knowledge in the Mathematics, is no less so.”

Jacques Ozanam (1640–1718) French mathematician

Preface
A Mathematical Dictionary: Or; A Compendious Explication of All Mathematical Terms, 1702

Pain, Art, Mathematics, Understanding

“A man can enjoy a terrestrial paradise after eighty, but it is not to be obtained, except by strict temperance in food and drink, virtues acceptable to God, and friends to reason.”

Luigi Cornaro (1484–1566) Italian philosopher

Discourses on the Sober Life

God, Food, Drink

“Don't look up to heaven, for what will you see in the sky, except stars, luminous but cold, wholly insensitive to pity?”

Isaac Leib Peretz (1852–1915) Yiddish language author and playwright

Drei Matones, 1904–15. S. Liptzin. Peretz. Yivo, 1947, p. 187.

Star

“The free creativeness of mind is possible because, […] the world ultimately exists, not of material stuff, but of patterns, of organization, the evolution of which involves no absolute creation of an alien world of material from nothing. The purely structural character of reality thus helps to render possible and intelligible the free creativeness of life and mind, … The energy which is being dissipated by the decay of physical structure is being partly taken up and organized into life structures … Life and mind thus appear as products of the cosmic decline, … Our origin is thus accidental, our position is exceptional and our fate is sealed, with the inevitable running down of the solar system. Life and mind, […] are thus reduced to a very casual and inferior status in the cosmic order […] – a transient and embarrassed phantom in an alien, if not hostile universe. […] The human spirit is not a pathetic, wandering phantom of the universe, […] but meets with spiritual hospitality and response everywhere. Our deepest thoughts and emotions are but responses to stimuli which come to us not from an alien, but from an essentially friendly and kindred universe.”

Jan Smuts (1870–1950) military leader, politician and statesman from South Africa

Smuts expounding a confrontation of opposites in his presidential address to the British Association in September 1931, as cited by W. K. Hancock in SMUTS 2: The Fields of Force 1919-1950, p. 232-234

Life, Hostility, Fate, World

“I understand why other people would want to stay in B&Bs. They're pretty. They're personal. They're “quaint,” a polite way of saying “no TV.” They are “romantic,” i. e., every object large enough for a flower to be printed on it is going to have a flower printed on it. They're “cozy,” meaning that a guest has to keep her belongings on the floor because every conceivable flat surface is covered in knickknacks, except for the one knickknack she longs for, a remote control.”

Sarah Vowell book Assassination Vacation

Source: Assassination Vacation (2005), p. 2

People, Way, Flowers, Understanding

“Women are never supposed to have any occupation of sufficient importance not to be interrupted, except "suckling their fools "; and women themselves have accepted this, have written books to support it, and have trained themselves so as to consider whatever they do as not of such value to the world or to others, but that they can throw it up at the first "claim of social life." They have accustomed themselves to consider intellectual occupation as a merely selfish amusement, which it is their " duty " to give up for every trifler more selfish than themselves.”

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing

Cassandra (1860)

Life, Women, Books, World

“Some other Course therefore must be taken to promote the Search of Knowledge. Some other kind of Art for Inquiry than what hath been hitherto made use of, must be discovered; the Intellect is not to he suffer'd to act without its Helps, but is continually to be assisted by some Method or Engine, which shall be as a Guide to regulate its Actions, so as that it shall not be able to act amiss: Of this Engine, no Man except the incomparable Verulam hath had any Thoughts, and he indeed hath promoted it to a very good pitch; but there is yet somewhat more to be added, which he seem'd to want time to compleat. By this, as by that Art of Algebra in Geometry, 'twill be very easy to proceed in any Natural Inquiry, regularly and certainly: And indeed it may not improperly be call'd a Philosophical Algebra, or an Art of directing the Mind in the search after Philosophical Truths, for as 'tis very hard for the most acute Wit to find out any difficult Problem in Geometry. without the help of Algebra to direct and regulate the Acts of the Reason in the Process from the question to the quœsitum, and altogether as easy for the meanest Capacity acting by that Method to compleat and perfect it, so will it be in the inquiry after Natural Knowledge.”

Robert Hooke (1635–1703) English natural philosopher, architect and polymath

"The Present State of Natural Philosophy, and wherein it is deficient," The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke https://books.google.com/books?id=6xVTAAAAcAAJ (1705) ed., Richard Waller, pp. 6-7.

Truth, Art, Search, Question

“Don’t lose your temper,” said Ruell evenly. “It’s your worst fault, except for ignorance.”

Damon Knight book A for Anything

Source: A for Anything (1959), Chapter 7 (p. 88)

“Congress was right in not limiting, by its reconstruction acts, the right of suffrage to whites; but wrong in the exclusion from suffrage of certain classes of citizens and all unable to take its prescribed retrospective oath, and wrong also in the establishment of despotic military governments for the States and in authorizing military commissions for the trial of civilians in time of peace. There should have been as little military government as possible; no military commissions; no classes excluded from suffrage; and no oath except one of faithful obedience and support to the Constitution and laws, and of sincere attachment to the constitutional Government of the United States.”

Salmon P. Chase (1808–1873) Chief Justice of the United States

Letter to August Belmont (May 30, 1868), in J. W. Schuckers, The Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase, (1874). p. 585.

Peace, Faith, Law, Support

“It's a wonderful, wonderful opera, except that it hurts.”

Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth

Episode 2, Chapter 15
The Power of Myth (1988)

Hurt

“The Lord commands us to do good unto all men without exception, though the majority are very undeserving when judged according to their own merits. But scripture here helps us out with an excellent argument when it teaches us that we must not think of man’s real value, but only of his creation in the image of God to which we owe all possible honor and love.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Page 37.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

Love, Men, God, Thinking

“He deserved to die except that nothing deserves death.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Treason (1988)

Death

“Had the acute-angled rabble been all, without exception, absolutely destitute of hope and of ambition, they might have found leaders in some of their many seditious outbreaks, so able as to render their superior numbers and strength too much even for the wisdom of the Circles. But a wise ordinance of Nature has decreed that, in proportion as the working-classes increase in intelligence, knowledge, and all virtue, in that same proportion their acute angle (which makes them physically terrible) shall increase also and approximate to the comparatively harmless angle of the Equilateral Triangle. Thus, in the most brutal and formidable of the soldier class — creatures almost on a level with women in their lack of intelligence — it is found that, as they wax in the mental ability necessary to employ their tremendous penetrating power to advantage, so do they wane in the power of penetration itself.

How admirable is this Law of Compensation! And how perfect a proof of the natural fitness and, I may almost say, the divine origin of the aristocratic constitution of the States in Flatland! By a judicious use of this Law of Nature, the Polygons and Circles are almost always able to stifle sedition in its very cradle, taking advantage of the irrepressible and boundless hopefulness of the human mind. Art also comes to the aid of Law and Order. It is generally found possible — by a little artificial compression or expansion on the part of the State physicians — to make some of the more intelligent leaders of a rebellion perfectly Regular, and to admit them at once into the privileged classes; a much larger number, who are still below the standard, allured by the prospect of being ultimately ennobled, are induced to enter the State Hospitals, where they are kept in honourable confinement for life; one or two alone of the more obstinate, foolish, and hopelessly irregular are led to execution.”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART I: THIS WORLD, Chapter 3. Concerning the Inhabitants of Flatland

Life, Wisdom, Women, Law

“I grudged her nothing except my company. But it has gone further, like the degradation of rural England: this afternoon (Sunday in April) all the young men had women with them in far-flung cameradeie. If women ever wanted to be by themselves all would be well. But I don't believe they ever want to be, except for reasons of advertisement, and their instinct is never to let men be by themselves. This, I begin to see, is sex-war, and D. H. L. has seen it, in spite of a durable marriage, and is far more on the facts than Bernard Shaw and his Life Force.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 59

Life, Women, Men, Marriage

“John Philoponus (c. 490-570) of Alexandria… refuted Aristotle's theory that the velocities of falling bodies in a given medium are proportional to their weight, making the observation that "if one lets fall simultaneously from the same height two bodies differing greatly in weight, one will find that the ratio of the times of their motion does not correspond to the ratios of their weights, but the difference in time is a very small one." …He also criticized Aristotle's antiperistasis theory of projectile motion, which states that the air displaced by the object flows back to push it from behind. Instead Philoponus concluded that "some incorporeal kinetic power is imparted by the thrower to the object thrown" and that "if an arrow or a stone is projected by force in a void, the same will happen much more easily, nothing being necessary except the thrower."”

John Freely (1926–2017) American physicist

This is the famous "impetus theory," which was revived in medieval Islam and again in fourteenth century Europe, giving rise to the beginning of modern dynamics.
Source: Before Galileo, The Birth of Modern Science in Medieval Europe (2012), p. 8

Time

“The conventional mind is at best a petty piece of machinery. It is oyster-like in its functioning, or, perhaps better, clam-like. It has its little siphon of thought-processes forced up or down into the mighty ocean of fact and circumstance; but it uses so little, pumps so faintly, that the immediate contiguity of the vast mass is not disturbed. Nothing of the subtlety of life is perceived. No least inkling of its storms or terrors is ever discovered except through accident.”

Theodore Dreiser book The Financier

Source: The Financier (1912), Ch. XXX

Life

“With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Lecture "The Suicidal Impulse of the Business Community" (1983); cited in Filters Against Folly (1985) by Garrett Hardin ISBN 067080410X

“Is it wise to say to men of rank and property, who, from old lineage or present possessions have a deep interest in the common weal, that they live indeed in a country where, by the blessings of a free constitution, it is possible for any man, themselves only excepted, by the honest exertions of talents and industry, in the avocations of political life, to make him-self honoured and respected by his countrymen, and to render good service, to the slate; that they alone can never be permitted to enter this career? That they may indeed usefully employ themselves, in the humbler avocations of private life, but that public service they never can perform, public honour they never shall attain? What we have lost by the continuance of this system, it is not for man to know. What we may have lost can more easily be imagined. If it had unfortunately happened that by the circumstances of birth and education, a Nelson, a Wellington, a Burke, a Fox, or a Pitt, had belonged to this class of the community, of what honours and what glory might not the page of British history have been deprived? To what perils and calamities might not this country have been exposed? The question is not whether we would have so large a part of the population Catholic or not. There they are, and we must deal with them as we can. It is in vain to think that by any human pressure, we can stop the spring which gushes from the earth. But it is for us to consider whether we will force it to spend its strength in secret and hidden courses, undermining our fences, and corrupting our soil, or whether we shall, at once, turn the current into the open and spacious channel of honourable and constitutional ambition, converting it into the means of national prosperity and public wealth.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1813/mar/01/mr-grattans-motion-for-a-committee-on in the House of Commons in favour of Catholic Emancipation (1 March 1813). 1810s

Life, Men, Secret, Education

“Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no [Virginias]. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.”

Francis Pharcellus Church Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus (1897)

World, Faith, Sense, Light

“There are many reasons why the religion of Islam impoverishes western society, but the main one, in my opinion, is that it degrades and debases women, except, of course, for left-wing women, who happily degrade and debase themselves defending Islam, like turkeys defending Christmas. A woman in Islam needs to be covered from head to toe because men are not expected to exhibit any kind of basic self-control. I get a lot of correspondence from angry Muslim males and I've lost count of the number of times I've been told that western women are asking to be raped because of the way they dress. No other religion teaches people to think like this. Recently here in Britain, we've had a rash of Muslim gangs pimping and raping young girls in northern England. I do mean Muslim gangs, and not Asians, as the media keep reporting. There are no Sikhs or Hindus involved in this, and to call them Asians to avoid naming the real problem is a slander on Hindus and Sikhs. These men do it because they regard non-Muslim women as subhuman trash. And this poison is coming directly from their religion, a religion whose values are dictated and imposed by some of the most narrow-minded, psychotic human beings on this planet. And, coming as I do from an Irish Catholic background, believe me, that's saying something.”

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

"Name the poison" (22 June 2011) http://youtube.com/watch?v=sEsWO4xep44 2011

Women, Men, People, Religion

“Fancy what a game at chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own; if your knight could shuffle himself on to a new square by the sly; if your bishop, in disgust at your castling, could wheedle your pawns out of their places; and if your pawns, hating you because they are pawns, could make away from their appointed posts that you might get checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed of deducted reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own pawns. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt.
Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with the game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for his instruments. He thinks himself sagacious, perhaps, because he trusts no bond except that of self-interest; but the only self-interest he can safely rely on is what seems to be such to the mind he would use or govern. Can he ever be sure of knowing this?”

George Eliot book Felix Holt, the Radical

Start of Chapter 29 (at page 237)
Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)

Men, Hate, Imagination, Game

“This is our modern day mythology, this is American folklore and it's becoming international folklore. The ancient gods of Greece, Rome and Egypt still exist, except now they wear spandex and capes.”

Michael E. Uslan (1951) American film producer

Investing In Batman: 30 Years Later An Executive's Gamble On The Dark Knight Pays Off https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2012/07/14/investing-in-batman-30-years-later-an-executives-gamble-on-the-dark-knight-pays-off/#4d778877ed82 (July 14, 2012)

God

“The development of the human mind has practically extinguished all feelings, except a few sporadic kinds, [like] sound, colors, smells, warmth, etc., which now appear to be disconnected and separate.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The Law of Mind (1892)

Color, Feeling, Appearance

“Our country has a larger Army and a more powerful Navy, costing annually almost twice as much as it ever before had in time of peace. I am a thorough believer in a policy of adequate military preparation. We are constantly working to perfect our defenses in every branch, land forces, air forces, surface and submarine forces. That work will continue. Our Military Establishment of the Army and Navy, the National Guard, and the Reserve Corps is far superior to anything we have ever maintained before, except in time of war. In the past six years we have expended about $4,000,000,000 for this purpose. That ought to show results, and those who have correct information know that it does show results. The country can rest assured that if security lies in military force, it was never so secure before in all its history.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Toleration and Liberalism (1925)

War, Peace, History, Time

“Now there is little difference, except packaging, between a Mac and a Windows machine. Not no difference, but at home we have — along with six Macs (one for everybody plus my travelling iBook) — three PCs and one Linux box, and I can move from one to the other without having to think about it much. What used to be a night-and-day difference in usability has become a small increment in Apple's favor”

Jef Raskin (1943–2005) American computer scientist

or favour for you Brits
MacUser interview (2004)

Travel, Home, Thinking, Night

“Likewise, divine goodness granted me, afterward, the grace that from two there was made one, because I could not will anything except as he himself willed. How great is the mercy of the one who realized this union! -- it almost completely stabilized my soul. I possessed God so fully that I was no longer in my previous customary state but was led to find a peace in which I was united with God and was content with everything.”

Angela of Foligno (1248–1309) Italian saint

Source: The Memorial and Instructions, pp. 181-182

God, Peace, Soul

“Our nation is exceptional because it was built on the five most beautiful and powerful words in the English language, "I want to be free."”

Ted Cruz (1970) American politician

2010s, Speech at the Republican National Convention (July 20, 2016)

Beauty

“Even things without life that give sound, whether pipe or harp, except they give a distinction of sounds, how shall it be known what is piped or harped? For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? So likewise you, except you utter by the tongue plain speech, how shall it be known what is said? For you shall be speaking into the air.”

Paul of Tarsus book First Epistle to the Corinthians

1 Corinthians 14:7-9 (as quoted in Catholic Bible Douay-Rehims http://www.biblebible.com/text-bible/Catholic-Bible/1_corinthians_14.asp) First Epistle to the Corinthians

Life

“In this country political agitation is not likely to be soon lulled. We shall have no violence, I think, except in Ireland, and even there I hope appearances are rather less threatening than were supposed a short time ago. But we shall have, and ought to have, a powerful agitation in favour of a real Parliamentary Reform, and to gain this would be worth some time longer of commercial depression. We have deluded ourselves with the notion that we are a free people, and have a good government and a representative system, whilst in fact our representative system is for the most part a sham, and the forms of representation are used to consolidate the supremacy of the titled and proprietary class. All this will break down by and by. From all parts of the country we hear of preliminary meetings and new organisations, Associations and Leagues, etc. The middle and working classes are beginning to see that united they may win all they require; divided they are a prey to their insatiable enemies.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to Mrs. Priestman (23 April 1848), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 183.
1840s

People, Hope, Thinking, Appearance

“The whole prospect of Gaelic appals me, the more I think of the difficulties and the likelihood of its extinction in a generation or two. A … language with … no modern prose of any account, no philosophical or technical vocabulary to speak of, no correct usage except among old people and a few university students, colloquially full of gross English idiom lately taken over, exact shades of meanings of most words not to be found in any of its dictionaries and dialectally varying enormously (what chance of the appreciation of the overtones of poetry, except amongst a handful?) Above all, all economic, social and political factors working against it, and, with that, the notorious, moral cowardice of the Highlanders themselves.”

Sorley MacLean (1911–1996) Scottish poet

Sorley MacLean, June 1943, quoted in Krause, Corinna. "Translating Gaelic Scotland" https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/beae/ab4c968782c1c0eeb7ee0f9459d009fab52d.pdf and "Gaelic Scotland – A Postcolonial Site?" https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_41178_en.pdf Letters and interviews

People, Thinking, Universe, Chance

“"You must tell them that there must be a new union or there will be chaos," he [Shevardnadze] implored me. That evening, when I hosted republic leaders for dinner — a mixed group of presidents, prime ministers, and foreign ministers — I saw around the table and in the conversation a microcosm of the post-coup Soviet Union’s potential — and its problems. Whatever euphoria that they felt with their post-putsch independence declarations had given way to a marked degree of realism. "Independence sounds nice, but we have to live, and we have to be practical," observed the Prime Minister of Moldova, Valeriu Muravsky. That was the persistent theme that I heard from every one of the republic leaders, with the sole exception of the Georgian Prime Minister, Vissarion Gugushvili, though even he spoke of the need for economic cooperation once Georgian independence was recognized internationally.”

James Baker (1930) Former U.S. Secretary of State

The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace 1989-1992 (1995) by James Addison Baker, p. 531
1995

Way, Problem

“Perhaps,
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure

“"Was anyone hurt?"
"No one I am thankful to say," said Mrs. Beaver, "except two housemaids who lost their heads and jumped through a glass roof into the paved court."”

Evelyn Waugh book A Handful of Dust

First lines
A Handful of Dust (1934)

Hurt

“The voice which a Valmiki or a Vyasa would have raised for resistance to and destruction of the dasyu, marauder, and the ãtatãyî, gangster, is missing. Samartha Ramdas is the only exception.”

Sita Ram Goel book The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1994)

“A people that began to think as citizens rather than subjects might transcend underdevelopment on their own. Inalienable human right is unique in that it needs no superhuman guarantee; no 'fount' except itself. Only servility requires the realm (suggestive word) of illusion. Illusions, of course, cannot be abolished. But they can and must be outgrown.”

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

1990s, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

People, Thinking

“Unfortunately, people in office develop a rigidity or a false sense of prestige that the Government should not yield to pressure. I was no exception to it during my earlier career in charge of vital departments. Wisdom dawns when it is too late or the situation is beyond redemption.”

R. Venkataraman (1910–2009) seventh Vice-President of India and the 8th President of India

Source: Commissions and Omissions by Indian Presidents and Their Conflicts with the Prime Ministers Under the Constitution: 1977-2001, p. 161-62.

Wisdom, People, Sense, Falseness

“In his reign Hajib Toghantugeen, an officer of his government, proceeded in command of an army towards Hindoostan, and being appointed governor of Lahore, crossed the Ganges, and carried his conquests farther than any Mussulman had hitherto done, except the Emperor Mahmood. Like him he plundered many rich cities and temples of their wealth, and returned in triumph to Lahore, which now became in some measure the capital of the empire, for the Suljooks having deprived the house of Ghizny of most of its territory both in Eeran and Tooran, the royal family went to reside in India.”

Firishta (1560–1620) Indian historian

About Sultãn Mas‘ûd III of Ghazni (AD 1099-1151) Uttar Pradesh Tãrîkh-i-Firishta, translated by John Briggs under the title History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, first published in 1829, New Delhi Reprint 1981, Vol. I, p. 82

Family, Housing, Wealth

“Except in dreams, you're never really free.”

Warren Zevon (1947–2003) American singer-songwriter

"Desperados Under the Eaves"
Warren Zevon (1976)

Dreams

“John Howard Yoder makes the striking observation that after the Constantinian shift the meaning of the word "Christian" changes. Prior to Constantine it took exceptional courage to be a Christian. After Constantine it takes exceptional courage not to be counted as a Christian. … After the Constantinian establishment, Christians knew that God was governing the world in Constantine, but they had to take it on faith that within the nominally Christian mass there was a community of true believers. No longer could being a Christian be identified with church membership, since many "Christians" in the church had not chosen to follow Christ. Now to be a Christian is transmuted to "inwardness."”

Stanley Hauerwas (1940) American theologian

Source: Matthew (2006), p. 62 http://books.google.com/books?id=MbRzBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA62

God, World, Faith, Communication

“I do not dwell in the country, nor am I acquainted with the plough, but I think that whosoever doth not maintain the plough destroys the kingdom … Excepting Sir Thomas More's Utopia…you shall never find but the ploughman is chiefly provided for.”

Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury (1563–1612) English Earl

Speech http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1558-1603/member/cecil-robert-1563-1612 in the House of Commons (9 December 1601).

Thinking, Country

“Religion has never, in any period, sustained itself except by the instrumentality of the tongue of fire. Only where some men, more or less imbued with this primitive power, have spoken the words of the Lord, not with " the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth," have sinners been converted, and saints prompted to a saintlier life.”

William Arthur (minister) (1819–1901) Wesleyan Methodist minister and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 321.

Life, Wisdom, Men, Religion

“In the struggles for the Islamic order, all means are permissible except one: crime. No one has the right to defile the good name of Islam by the uncontrolled and superfluous use of force. The Islamic community should once more confirm that justice is one of its keystones… Formula: the aim justifies the means has become the cause of numberless crimes. A noble aim cannot command unworthy means.”

Alija Izetbegović (1925–2003) Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Source: The Islamic Declaration (1970), p. 49.

Justice, Communication

“The mass-man has very little spare time, does not live a life that appertains to a whole, does not want to exert himself except for some concrete aim which can be expressed in terms of utility; he will not wait patiently while things ripen; everything for him must provide some immediate gratification; and even his mental life must minister to his fleeting pleasures. That is why the essay has become the customary form of literature, why newspapers are taking the place of books… People read quickly and cursorily.”

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) German psychiatrist and philosopher

Der Massenmensch hat wenig Zeit, lebt kein Leben aus einem Ganzen, will nicht mehr die Vorbereitung und Anstrengung ohne den konkreten Zweck, der sie in Nutzen umsetzt; er will nicht warten und reifen lassen; alles muß sogleich gegenwärtige Befriedigung sein; Geistiges ist zu den jeweils augenblicklichen Vergnügungen geworden. Daher ist der Essay die geeignete Literaturform für alles, tritt die Zeitung an die Stelle des Buches... Man liest schnell.
Man in the Modern Age (1933)

Life, People, Pleasure, Books

“My early work in newspaper comics and comic books allowed me to entertain millions of readers weekly, but I always felt there was more to say. I pioneered the use of comics for instructional manuals for American soldiers, covering three major wars, and later used comics to educate grade school children. Both were heady responsibilities that I took very seriously. But I yearned to do still more with the medium. At an age when I could have "retired," I chose instead to create literary comics, than a decidedly oxymoronic term. Acceptance has not always been easy, but I have seen it arrive in my lifetime. It has been most gratifying to see the graphic novel and many of its exceptional creators gradually become an accepted part of the book world. I couldn't find a major publisher to take A Contract With God only a quarter century ago, and now graphic novels represent the book industry's fastest growing genre.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

XIX-XX, December 2004
A Contract With God (2004)

God, War, Children, Books

“Today, Psycho still holds up extraordinarily well (another reason why a remake seems pointless). With the exception of Halloween, no latter-day horror/thriller has been capable of generating as many goosebumps. The black-and-white photography is perfect for the film's tone and mood — the starkness of color would have blurred the nightmarish quality. The painstaking care with which [director Alfred] Hitchcock composed every scene is evident in the quality of the final product.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=669 of Psycho (1960). Three-and-a-half star reviews

Color, Mood, Perfection

“When the imagination and willpower are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins, without any exception.”

Emile Coué (1857–1926) French psychologist and pharmacist

Quoted in: Paul G. Thomas (1979) Psychofeedback: practical psychocybernetics. p. 84.

Imagination

“There's no solution except to break the power of Chiang Kai-shek by capturing Nanking. That is what I must do.”

Iwane Matsui (1878–1948) Japanese general

Quoted in "Tennou no guntai to Nankin jiken" by Yoshida Hiroshi - 1998 Aoki shoten, page 71.

“Prisoners do get shafted at every opportunity by BOP. Well, not every defendant; there are a few exceptions. But for the most part, BOP isn’t there to be nice to prisoners. They’re there to imprison them.”

Jay Leiderman (1971) lawyer

As stated in The Sabu Effect: An Interview with Jay Leiderman BY RAINCOASTER on AUGUST 22, 2014 http://thecryptosphere.com/2014/08/22/the-sabu-effect-an-interview-with-jay-leiderman/

Parting

“There is nothing so unreasonable as infancy, excepting the maturer stages of life.”

Jean Ingelow (1820–1897) British writer

Fated to be Free (1875)

Life

“I had by this time heard a number of his public speeches and was beginning to understand the pattern of their appeal. The first secret lay in his choice of words. Every generation develops its own vocabulary of catchwords and phrases, and these date thoughts and utterances. My own father talked like a contemporary of Bismarck, the people of my own age bore the stamp of Wilhelm II, but Hitler had caught the casual camaraderie of the trenches, and without stooping to slang, except for special effects, managed to talk like a member of his audience. In describing the difficulties of the housewife without enough money to buy the buy the food her family needed in the Viktualien Market he would produce just the phrases she would have used herself to describe her difficulties, if she had been able to formulate them. Where other national orators gave the painful impression of talking down to their audience, he had his priceless gift of expressing exactly their own thoughts.”

Ernst Hanfstaengl (1887–1975) German businessman

Quoted in "Hitler: The Missing Years" - Page 67 - by Ernst Hanfstaengl, John Toland - 1994

Money, Pain, People, Secret

“I am almost amazed that you consider a professional philosopher capable of no confusion in concepts and definitions. Such things are nowhere more at home than among philosophers who are not mathematicians, and Wolff was no mathematician, even though he made cheap compen- diums. Look around among the philosophers of today, among Schelling, Hegel, Nees von Esenbeck, and their like; doesn t your hair stand on end at their definitions? Read in the history of ancient philosophy what kinds of definitions the men of that day, Plato and others, gave (I except Aristotle). But even in Kant it is often not much better; in my opinion his distinction between analytic and synthetic theorems is such a one that either peters out in a triviality or is false.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 362

Men, Home, History, Reading

“He's (Michael Moore) going to wake up every day for the rest of his life, and he's going to tell us how he hates everything about this country except his right to hate it. And then we say that we love it and he's going to tell us what naive sheep we are and that he's the true patriot because he hates it and he sees all the problems in it. Yeah, right, Mike. You know something, if my yawn got any bigger they'd have to assign it a hurricane name, okay? Michael Moore simultaneously represents everything I detest in a human being and everything I feel obligated to defend in an American. Quite simply, it is that stupid moron's right to be that utterly, completely wrong.”

Dennis Miller (1953) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actor

The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (3 April 2003)

Love, Life, Hate, Stupidity

“I have no relationship with Putin. I don't think I've ever met him. I never met him. I don't think I've ever met him. … I have never spoken to him on the phone, no. I've speak -- I've spoken -- when we had the Miss Universe contest a number of years ago, we had Miss Universe in Moscow, in the Moscow area, he was invited. He wanted to come. He wasn't able to come. That would have been a time when I would have met him. … I don't know what it means by having a relationship. I mean he was saying very good things about me, but I don't have a relationship with him. I didn't meet him. I haven't spent time with him. I didn't have dinner with him. I didn't go hiking with him. I don't know -- and I wouldn't know him from Adam except I see his picture and I would know what he looks like.”

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

2010s, 2016, July, This Week Interview (July 30, 2016)

Thinking, Universe, Time

“Babe] also inspired me to become vegan. After having worked all morning with these extraordinary animals, I'd see their relatives on the lunch table. They had ham and duck, every animal except horse. That's when I said, "I've got to try to be a vegan." And for the most part, I have been vegan since 1994. [You were vegetarian before Babe. What inspired that change? ] I rode across the country on a motorcycle in 1975. I remember it was the worst time of year and bloody cold. When I was going through Texas, I went through the feedlots, which I had never seen before. It was a very sobering sight—heartbreaking and awful. It's a corporate system completely out of touch with what is sustainable, what is humane, what is compassionate. At the time, I didn't even know what a vegetarian was. I just thought, "I can't eat [animals] anymore."”

James Cromwell (1940) American actor and producer

"The Tale of an Unprejudiced Heart: An Interview with James Cromwell" http://www.humanesociety.org/news/magazines/2015/01-02/unprejudiced-heart-interview-with-babe-actor-james-cromwell.html by The Humane Society of the United States (17 December 2014)

Change, Time, Animals, Horse

“… "shagging" - a quasi-comical activity, like belching or farting, except it was more taboo and more necessary than these.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Friend of My Youth (2017)

“The [George W. ] Bush administration and the conservatives must stop promoting American popular culture because it is producing a blowback of Muslim rage. With a few exceptions, the right should not bother to defend American movies, music, and television. From the point of view of traditional values, they are indefensible. Moreover, why should the right stand up for the left's debased values? Why should our people defend their America? Rather, American conservatives should join the Muslims and others in condemning the global moral degeneracy that is produced by liberal values.”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

Introduction, p. 26
Books, The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left And its Responsibility for 9, 11 (2007)

People, Music, Rage

“My difficulty with working class writers is that they don't make the working class come alive—Leslie Halward is an exception, but as you imply he is not very important. They give me information and they give their comrades gratification, but that's all; gloom, indignation, aspiration in plenty, and plenty of stains on the tablecloth and coal-dust in the mine—but no living beings to experience them.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Letter 350, to John Lehmann, 21 December 1940
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“If an event really happened which was not a part of the uniformity of nature, it would have two properties: no evidence could give the right to believe it to any except those whose actual experience it was; and no inference worthy of belief could be founded upon it at all.
Are we then bound to believe that nature is absolutely and universally uniform? Certainly not; we have no right to believe anything of this kind. The rule only tells us that in forming beliefs which go beyond our experience, we may make the assumption that nature is practically uniform so far as we are concerned. Within the range of human action and verification, we may form, by help of this assumption, actual beliefs; beyond it, only those hypotheses which serve for the more accurate asking of questions.”

William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) English mathematician and philosopher

The Ethics of Belief (1877), The Limits Of Inference

Question, Nature, Universe, Help

“Sarva-dharma-samabhAva was unknown to mainstream Hinduism before Mahatma Gandhi presented it as one of the sixteen mahAvratas (great vows). in his booklet, MaNgala-PrabhAta. It is true that mainstream Hinduism had always stood for tolerance towards all metaphysical points of view and ways of worship except that which led to AtatAyI-AchAra (gangsterism). But that tolerance had never become samabhAva, equal respect for all points of view. The acharyas of the different schools of Sanatana Dharma were all along engaged in debates over differences in various approaches to Sreyas (the Great Good). No Buddhist acharya is known to have equated the way of the Buddha to that of the Gita and vice versa, for instance. It is also true that overawed by the armed might of Islam, and deceived by the tall talk of the sufis, some Hindu saints in medieval India had equated Rama with Rahim, Krishna with Karim, Kashi with Kaba, the Brahmana with the Mullah, pUjA with namAz, and so on. But, the sects founded by these saints had continued to function on the fringes of Hindu society while the mainstream followed the saints and acharyas who never recognized Islam as a dharma. In modern times also, movements like the Brahmo Samaj which recognised Islam and Christianity as dharmas had failed to influence mainstream Hinduism, while Maharshi Dayananda and Swami Vivekananda who upheld the Veda and despised the Bible and the Quran, had had a great impact. This being the hoary Hindu tradition, Mahatma Gandhi’s recognition of Christianity and Islam not only as dharmas but also as equal to Sanatana Dharma was fraught with great mischief. For, unlike the earlier Hindu advocates of Islam and Christianity as dharmas, Mahatma Gandhi made himself known and became known as belonging to mainstream Hinduism.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)

School, Way, Time

“The free Negro had rather more opportunity for economic advancement in the South than in the North. The Southerner was bothered by the race problem but knew how to handle the individual Negro, while the Northerner professed a benign interest in the race so long as its members were as remote as possible. Neither section was willing to grant equal rights in education, suffrage, or legal standing, while many states of all sections had laws prohibiting the immigration of free Negroes. Abraham Lincoln could not have maintained his standing in the Republican party had he not been a staunch supporter of the Illinois exclusion law and a firm opponent of political and social equality. It was most difficult for a Negro to get a job in the North, except at the most loathsome of tasks. Some Negroes, having been freed and sent to any Northern state which would receive them, became so miserable as to solicit a return to slavery.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

The Making of America (1986)

Education, Law, Support, Problem

“For me personally, the greatest art to date has been created in New York and the most uptight and conventional art in Berlin. Obviously, I am an exception to this rule!”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

living and working in Berlin
after 2010, Isa Genzken, the artist who doesn't do interviews' (2014)

Art, Personality

“God, I have said, is the fulfiller, or the reality, of the human desires for happiness, perfection, and immortality. From this it may be inferred that to deprive man of God is to tear the heart out of his breast. But I contest the premises from which religion and theology deduce the necessity and existence of God, or of immortality, which is the same thing. I maintain that desires which are fulfilled only in the imagination, or from which the existence of an imaginary being is deduced, are imaginary desires, and not the real desires of the human heart; I maintain that the limitations which the religious imagination annuls in the idea of God or immortality, are necessary determinations of the human essence, which cannot be dissociated from it, and therefore no limitations at all, except precisely in man’s imagination.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist

Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View Lectures on the Essence of Religion http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/lectures/index.htm (1851)

God, Religion, Imagination, Idea

“Note that nobody reads every post in linux-kernel. In fact, nobody who expects to have time left over to actually do any real kernel work will read even half. Except Alan Cox, but he's actually not human, but about a thousand gnomes working in under-ground caves in Swansea. None of the individual gnomes read all the postings either, they just work together really well.”

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

Post, Linux kernel mailing list, 2000-05-02, Google Groups, Torvalds, Linus, 2006-08-28 https://groups.google.com/d/msg/fa.linux.kernel/iQtWFALi4JA/eSzv64_tOvoJ, 2000s, 2000-04

Time, Reading

“It's one thing to remember history and to put up historical markers that get it right. It's quite another thing to commemorate someone and to name stuff for him. You don't learn anything from driving the Jefferson Davis Highway about Jefferson Davis except that he was a great man and should be honored. And it's precisely that last little bit - should be honored - that we need to take away from him.”

James W. Loewen (1942) American historian

As quoted in "Rejection Of Flag Exposes Larger Truths About The Confederacy" http://www.npr.org/2015/07/02/419554834/rejection-of-flag-exposes-larger-truths-about-the-confederacy (2 July 2015), by Robert Siegel, NPR 2015

History, Learning

“Hippocrates… is said to have proved the theorem that circles are to one another as the squares on their diameters, and it is difficult to see how he could have done this except by some form, or anticipation, of the method”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

of exhaustion
Achimedes (1920)

“One needs a medium. The best is, one is his own medium. But don't be serious because seriousness belongs to a passed time. This medium, called you yourself will tell you to take absolutely the wrong material. That is very good, because only the wrong material used in the wrong way, will give the right picture, when you look at it from the right angle. Or the wrong angle. That leads us to the new ism: Anglism. The first art starting from England [the country of Schwitters' forced stay, when he wrote this quote], except the former shapes of art.”

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) German artist

Source: 1940s, I is Style (2000), pp. 100-101 : in: 'That is my confession I have to make MERZ' (1940 – 1946), Kurt Schwitters.

Art, Way, Quotes, Time

“Wherever we look the dreadful disintegration of the bridges of life, the capillaries and the bodies they have created, is evident, which has been caused by the mechanical and mindless work of man, who has torn away the soul from the Earth's blood - water. The more the engineer endeavors to channel water, of whose spirit and nature he is today still ignorant, by the shortest and straightest route to the sea, the more the flow of water weighs into the bends, the longer its path and the worse the water will become. The spreading of the most terrible disease of all, of cancer, is the necessary consequence of such unnatural regulatory works. These mistaken activities - our work - must legitimately lead to increasingly widespread unemployment, because our present methods of working, which have a purely mechanical basis, are already destroying not only all of wise Nature's formative processes, but first and foremost the growth of the vegetation itself, which is being destroyed even as it grows. The drying up of mountain springs, the change in the whole pattern of motion of the groundwater, and the disturbance in the blood circulation of the organism - Earth - is the direct result of modern forestry practices. The pulse-beat of the Earth was factually arrested by the modern timber production industry. Every economic death of a people is always preceded by the death of its forests. The forest is the habitat of water and as such the habitat of life processes too, whose quality declines as the organic development of the forest is disturbed. Ultimately, due to a law which functions with awesome constancy, it will slowly but surely come around to our turn. Our accustomed way of thinking in many ways, and perhaps even without exception, is opposed to the true workings of Nature. Our work is the embodiment of our will. The spiritual manifestation of this work is its effect. When such work is carried out correctly, it brings happiness, but when carried out incorrectly, it assuredly brings misery.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Viktor Schauberger: Our Senseless Toil (1934)

Life, Death, People, Disease

“To fight a war, you must believe it can accomplish something. We fight this one to save John’s kingdom, or perhaps even to save all of mankind…but isn’t that what we always think? That all wars are useless—except the one we’re fighting now?”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, To Green Angel Tower (1993), Part 2, Chapter 13, “The Fallen Sun” (p. 314).

War, Thinking, Fight

“[Darwin’s] inquiry characteristically confines itself to the process of cumulative change. His results, as well as his specific determination of the factors at work in this process of cumulative change, have been questioned; perhaps they are open to all the criticisms levelled against them as well as a few more not thought of; but the scope and method given to scientific enquiry by Darwin and the generation whose spokesman he is has substantially not been questioned, except by that diminishing contingent of the faithful”

Thorstein Veblen book The Theory of Business Enterprise

Source: The Theory of Business Enterprise, 1904, p. 370

Faith, Question, Change

“In general, most animals are exclusively breast-fed until they have tripled their birth weight, which in human infants occurs around the age of one year. In no mammalian species, except for the human (and the domestic cat), is milk consumption continued after the weaning period. Calves thrive on cow milk. Cow milk is for calves.”

Frank Oski (1932–1996) American pediatrician

Source: Don't Drink Your Milk! (1983), p. 4

Age, Cats, Birth, Animals

“If they are unwilling to give, they should at least lend with all readiness and alacrity, not with the prospect of receiving anything back except the principal. … In place of the interest which they determine not to accept they receive a further bonus of the fairest and most precious things that human life has to give, mercy neighborliness, charity, magnanimity, a good report and good fame. And what acquisition can rival these? Nay, even the great king will appear as the poorest of men if compared with a single virtue. For his wealth is soulless, buried deep in store-houses and recesses of the earth, but the wealth of virtue lies in the sovereign part of the soul, and the purest part of existence.”

Philo (-15–45 BC) Roman philosopher

213.
On the Virtues

Life, Men, Soul, Appearance

“Exposing the children to multiple views (except those of Christians) and training them to supposedly be open-minded so that they can decide for themselves seem to be a common theme these days. As Christians, however, we are to “train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). We must give our children a strong biblical foundation of truth and equip them with answers. Yes, we can show them the other views out there in the world, but we also must show them why they are false and why God’s Word is true. We need to teach them clearly the difference between truth and error—between good and evil. We are not doing our duty as Christians if we are not striving to train them up in the fear of the Lord”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Psalm 34:11 "Church-Sponsored Evolution Camp" http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2014/07/13/church-sponsored-evolution-camp/, Around the World with Ken Ham (July 13, 2014) Around the World with Ken Ham (May 2005 - Ongoing)

God, Children, Truth, World

“When dealing with the distribution of powers between the General Government and the States, Chief Justice Marshall declared: 'When the American people created a national legislature, with certain enumerated powers, it was neither necessary nor proper to define the powers retained by the States. Those powers proceed, not from the people of America, but from the people of the several States, and remain after the adoption of the Constitution what they were before, except in so far as they may be abridged by that instrument.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

People, Justice

Quotes about exception page 9

Quotes about exception
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