Quotes about existence
page 42

“The hopelessness of the Turkish Government should make me witness with delight its being swept out of the countries which it tortures. Next to the Ottoman Government nothing can be more deplorable and blameworthy than jealousies between Greek and Slav and plans by the States already existing for appropriating other territory. Why not Macedonia for the Macedonians as well as Bulgaria for the Bulgarians and Serbia for the Serbians?”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Letter quoted in Mr. Gladstone and The Balkan Confederation in The Times (6 February 1897)
1890s

Jealousy, Country

“It seems that the evolutionist must conclude, along with the writer Vladimir Nabokov, that ‘our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness’. Brains that think otherwise – brains that deny they are brains and believe instead that they are eternal souls - are brains that hold false beliefs about themselves.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 150

Soul, Thinking, Light, Falseness

“The amount of suffering and pain caused by the tyranny of human beings over other animals (particularly in food production) far exceeds that caused by sexism, racism, or any other existing form of discrimination, and for this reason, the animal liberation movement is the most important liberation movement on the face of the planet today.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 278

Pain, Food, Suffering, Animals

“I am a man for whom the visible world exists.”

Théophile Gautier Paris

Je suis un homme pour qui le monde visible existe.
Remark, May 1, 1857, reported in the Journal des Goncourts (Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1888) vol. 1, p. 182; translation from Joanna Richardson Théophile Gautier: His Life & Times (London: Max Reinhardt, 1958) p. 14.

World

“Because anarchism is in its essence an anti-dogmatic and unstructured cluster of related attitudes, which does not depend for its existence on any enduring organization, it can flourish when circumstances are favourable and then, like a desert plant, lie dormant for seasons and even for years, waiting for the rains that will make it burgeon. Unlike an ordinary political faith, in which the church-party becomes the vehicle of the dogma, it does not need a movement to carry it forward…”

George Woodcock (1912–1995) Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, an essayist and literary critic

Postscript (July 1973) http://www.ditext.com/woodcock/postscript.html Anarchism : A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1962)

Lie, Faith, Waiting, Dependency

“The knower is the Purusa (the conscious principle) who cognizes the reflection from the Will-to-know by conjunction. The knowable consists of all the characteristics present in the essence of the Will-to know. This, then the knowable behaves like a magnet. It is useful only when placed here. On account of its capacity of knowability, it becomes the possession of the lord, the Purusa, who is of the nature of power of knowing. It becomes the object of the act of enjoyment, in as much as although by nature independent, it becomes dependent on another, existing as it does for fulfilling the object of that other…. The conjunction therewith is the cause, by giving that up is secured the complete remedy of pain, in as much as that is found to be the cause of removal the real thing, the cause of pain.”

Vyasa central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions

in p. 125.
Sources, The Yoga Darsana Of Patanjali With The Sankhya Pravacana Commentary Of Vyasa

Pain, Nature, Dependency

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

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

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

“It is only through the discovery of History — more precisely by the awakening of the historical consciousness in Judaeo-Christianity and its propagation by Hegel and his successors — it is only through the radical assimilation of the new mode of being represented by human existence in the world that myth could be left behind. But we hesitate to say that mythical thought has been abolished. As we shall soon see, it managed to survive, though radically changed (if not perfectly camouflaged). And the astonishing fact is that, more than anywhere else it survives in historiography!”

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher

Source: Images and Symbols (1952), p. 113.

World, History, Change

“I have transcended that phase in my intellectual growth where I discover humour in simple freakishness. What exists is real; therefore it is tragic, since wherever lives must die. Only fantasy, the vapours rising from sheer nonsense, can now excite my laughter.”

Jack Vance Lyonesse Trilogy

Source: Lyonesse Trilogy (1983-1989), The Green Pearl (1985), Chapter 5, section 3 (p. 430)

Laughter

“It does not pay a man to exist until the age of Methuselah by making his days indolent and useless. The more this is reflected upon, the more the reflector will desire to undertake meaningful and useful actions, the more they will have lived.”

Frederick II of Prussia book Anti-Machiavel

Source: Anti-Machiavel, Chapter XIV

Age

“Today, in the highly-developed capitalistic nation of the United States, the only people who could be classed as proletariat under Marx's definition would be those who own no land, have no savings deposits, no social security, no retirement benefits, no life insurance, no corporate securities and no government bonds, for all these represent the ownership of productive wealth or of money, funds over and beyond the immediate needs of consumption. Such a class of propertyless proletariat does exist in the United States just as there has been one in all nations and in all ages, but the significant thing is that the proletariat in the United States is such a small minority that Marx would scarcely want to claim it. Under American capitalism wealth has been more widely distributed among the people than in any large nation in secular history. This has reduced the property-less class which Marx had in mind to little more than a fringe of the population.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Life, Money, People, Age

“The three major Middle Eastern religions are significantly different in their relations with the state and their attitudes to political power. Judaism was associated with the state and was then disentangled from it; its new encounter with the state at the present time raises problems which are still unresolved. Christianity, during the first formative centuries of its existence, was separate from and indeed antagonistic to the state with which it only later became involved. Islam from the lifetime of its founder was the state, and the identity of religion and government is indelibly stamped on the memories and awareness of the faithful from their own sacred writings, history, and experience.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Return of Islam (1976)

Faith, Religion, History, Problem

“As a race of scientists and thinkers,” she concluded, “we cannot claim with absolute certainty that Teot Yon’s personality is now beyond Heaven’s gates or inside Satan’s stewpot or about to enter the embryo of a bull. Some of us subscribe to the Afterworld Hypothesis, some to less cheerful views. We all know that as an empirical event Teot Yon’s existence is over, and it is time for his molecules to become air and ash and after that—where will his drifting pieces go and what new things will they help to form? Let the transformation begin!”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 19 (p. 234)

Time, Help, Personality

“Three technical aspects of thermonuclear weapons have made thermonuclear war a peril to the very existence of humanity. These aspects are: the enormous destructive power of a thermonuclear explosion, the relative cheapness of rocket-thermonuclear weapons, and the practical impossibility of an effective defense against a massive rocket-nuclear attack.”

Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist

Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, The Threat of Nuclear War

War

“Israel is there, it is part of the United Nations and we do not deny its existence. But we still have rights and land there which have been usurped and until these matters are dealt with we will withhold our recognition.”

Khaled Mashal (1956) Palestinian terrorist

Khaled Mashal cited in Hamas leader acknowledges 'reality' of Israel http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1987305,00.html at Theguardian.com, 10 January, 2007: Hamas accepts the existence of the state of Israel but will not officially recognise it until the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. 2007

Parting

“The governments hated the peace party even more than each other, since their existence now depended on war.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter III: America and China; Section 2, “The Conflict” (p. 50)

Hate, War, Peace, Dependency

“We are frankly amused to think that many a novice may perhaps pay for his too literal comprehension of the remarks of one cubist, and his faith in the existence of an Absolute Truth, by painfully juxtaposing the six faces of a cube or the two ears of a model seen in profile.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Du Cubisme (1912)

Truth, Faith, Thinking

“The great powers have dominated the destiny of the Islamic countries for years and… installed the Zionist cancerous tumor in the heart of the Islamic world… Many of the problems facing the Muslim world are due to the existence of the Zionist regime.”

Ali Khamenei (1939) Iranian Shiite faqih, Marja' and official independent islamic leader

August 19, 2012 speech marking Eid al-Fitr, the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan http://www.timesofisrael.com/khamenei-israeli-a-malignant-zionist-tumor/ 2012

World, Problem, Heart, Country

“It is not the profession of religion which creates the obligation for the performance of duty; for that existed before any such profession was made. The profession of religion only recognises the obligation.”

Albert Barnes (1798–1870) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 200.

Religion

“Arrow’s general impossibility theorem does not disprove the existence of the Bergsonian social welfare function, neither does it disprove the existence of the Benthamite hedonistic function.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

Kotaro Suzumura, An interview with Paul Samuelson: welfare economics,“old” and “new”, and social choice theory (2005)
New millennium

“What makes our existence meaningful is highly subjective and ultimately determined by sustainable neurochemical gratification.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.28

“Is it not remarkable that the common repute which we all give to attorneys in the general is exactly opposite to that which every man gives to his own attorney in particular? Whom does anybody trust so implicitly as he trusts his own attorney? And yet is it not the case that the body of attorneys is supposed to be the most roguish body in existence?”

Anthony Trollope Miss Mackenzie

Miss Mackenzie (1865), Ch. 17

“We do know from the numbers of people who have come out already--and from the anger that we know exists in the communities where we live--that people want to fight. They don't necessarily know how to fight or what to do. But they want to, and that's important because it means people want things to be different, and that's an important starting place to work with. For people who want to do something, and do it now, this means we have to be both patient in terms of how larger movements develop, but also urgent about doing the work of organizing for the things we can do now. Movements aren't built by waiting for the struggle to develop and build itself--it's based on what we do today.”

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (1950) American academic and author

The fight against racism doesn't stop here (2013)

People, Communication, Waiting, Fight

“If consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said, nothing more than a flash of light between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing more execrable than existence.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), I : The Man of Flesh and Bone

Light

“Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit — the cosmos? The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge. From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals. … This star, our own good earth, made many a successful journey around the heavens ere man was made, and whole kingdoms of creatures enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere man appeared to claim them. After human beings have also played their part in Creation's plan, they too may disappear without any general burning or extraordinary commotion whatever.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: A Thousand-Mile Walk To the Gulf, 1916, chapter 6: Cedar Keys, pages 160-161

Pain, Star, Knowledge, Universe

“The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space.”

Julian Jaynes book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Book III, Chapter 2, p. 355
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)

“Each individual imagines that he can exist, live, think, and act for himself, and believes that he himself is the thinking principle of his thoughts; whereas in truth he is but a single ray of the ONE universal and necessary Thought.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), p. 21

Truth, Imagination, Thinking, Universe

“I believe that the nature of man is a contradiction rooted in the conditions of human existence that requires a search for solutions, which in their turn create new contradictions and now the need for answers.
I believe that every answer to these contradictions can really satisfy the condition of helping man to overcome the sense of separation and to achieve a sense of agreement, of unity, and of belonging.
I believe that in every answer to these contradictions, man has the possibility of choosing only between going forward or going back; these choices, which are translated into specific actions, are means toward the regressing or toward the progressing of the humanity that is in us.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Credo (1965)

Search, Nature, Sense, Help

“Such is the real distribution of duties, responsibilities, and expenses. Yet people are given to thinking and speaking of the National Government as 'the Government'. They demand more from it than it was ever intended to provide; and yet in the same breath they complain that Federal authority is stretching itself over areas which do not concern it. On one side, there are demands for more amendments to the Constitution. On the other, there is too much opposition to those that already exist.”

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, Thinking

“A man and a woman who, in their young days, agree to have done with sentimental life thereby renounce the search for adventure, the intoxication of new encounters, and the amazing refreshment produced by falling in love again. Their most vital source of energy is cut off; they are doomed to premature insensibility. Their life, scarcely begun, is finished. Nothing can break the monotony of an existence made up of burdens and duties. No further hope, no surprises, no conquests. Their one love will soon be tainted by the cares of housekeeping and the children's education. They will reach old age without ever having known the joys of youth. Marriage destroys romantic love which alone could justify it.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

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

Love, Life, Marriage, Children

“I started to introduce letters into my pictures [his first collage art]. These were forms which could not be deformed, because, being two-dimensional, they existed outside three-dimensional space; their inclusion in a picture allowed a distinction to be made between objects which were situated in space and those which belonged outside space”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

the letters
Source: posthumous quotes, Braque', (1968), p. 68

Art

“What are some principles worth living by? Ask a roomful of people, and you will get a roomful of answers. There already exists a code of principles established thousands of years ago and adhered to by people from a variety of religious backgrounds. It has been accepted as a basis for appropriate behavior. Fortunately, no one has copyrighted the Ten Commandments.Although some attempts have been made to prohibit these principles from being displayed, they have survived through the ages. They are the foundation of our laws and commonly accepted codes of human behavior.”

Mike Huckabee (1955) Arkansas politician

[2007-06-01, Character Makes a Difference: Where I'm From, Where I've Been, and What I Believe, B&H Publishing, 9780805446777, 7935510M, 74, http://books.google.com/books?id=Tis1PI_QlecC&pg=PA74]

People, Age, Law, Behavior

“It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment, or the courage, to pay the price…. One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover, and yet demand no easy return of love. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963)

Love, Pain, World, Search

“All who have ever written on government are unanimous, that among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777)

People

“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

"Statement to the Court Upon Being Convicted of Violating the Sedition Act" (18 September 1918) http://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1918/court.htm Federal Court statement (1918)

Women, Men

“The national polities of the modern world maintain their existence by deliberately fostered craving and fear…. The “free world” has become economically dependent on a fantastic system of stimulation of greed which cannot be fulfilled, sexual desire which cannot be satiated and hatred which has no outlet…. They create populations of “preta” — hungry ghosts, with giant appetites and throats no bigger than needles. The soil, the forests and all animal life are being consumed by these cancerous collectivities; the air and water of the planet is being fouled by them.”

Gary Snyder (1930) American poet

"Buddhism and the Coming Revolution" (1961, 1969)

Life, World, Fear, Water

“There exists a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.”

Daniel Inouye (1924–2012) American politician from Hawaii, Medal of Honor recipient and World War II veteran

Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition (Iran-Contra hearings) (1987) Video of Inouye's excerpt http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbFphX5zb8w Daniel K. Inouye: Reference of excerpt http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Daniel-K.-Inouye The Mission of Sheltron: Reference http://www.sheltron.us/sheltron/introduction.html

Law, Idea

“The effort necessary to remain uncorrupted in an environment where fear is an integral part of everyday existence is not immediately apparent to those fortunate enough to live in states governed by the rule of law. Just laws do not merely prevent corruption by meting out impartial punishment to offenders. They also help to create a society in which people can fulfil the basic requirements necessary for the preservation of human dignity without recourse to corrupt practices. Where there are no such laws, the burden of upholding the principles of justice and common decency falls on the ordinary people. It is the cumulative effect on their sustained effort and steady endurance which will change a nation where reason and conscience are warped by fear into one where legal rules exist to promote man's desire for harmony and justice while restraining the less desirable destructive traits in his nature.”

Aung San Suu Kyi book Freedom from Fear

Freedom from Fear (1991)

People, Fear, Justice, Law

“Truth means the fulfilment of our self; and moral law means following the law of our being. Truth is the beginning and end (the substance) of material existence. Without truth there is no material existence. It is for this reason that the moral man values truth.
Truth is not only the fulfilment of our own being; it is that by which things outside of us have an existence. The fulfilment of our being is moral sense. The fulfilment of the nature of things outside of us is intellect. These, moral sense and intellect, are the powers or faculties of our being. They combine the inner or subjective and outer or objective use of the power of the mind. Therefore, with truth, everything done is right.”

Zisi (-481–-402 BC) Chinese philosopher

Source: The Doctrine of the Mean, p. 124

Truth, Law, Nature, Sense

“Geology has joined biology in lowering mankind's self-esteem. Geology suggests how mankind's existence is contingent upon the geological consent of the planet.”

George Will (1941) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author

from a review of Simon Winchester’s Krakatoa (2003), as quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of American Quotations (rev. 2005), ed. Rawson & Miner, Oxford University Press, p. 600: ISBN 0195168232
2000s

“The "human rights" advertised by the imperialists are privileges of the rich, privileges to do anything on the strength of money. The imperialists do not recognize the right of unemployed people to work, or the right of orphans or people without support to eat and survive, for instance, as human rights. As they do not grant working people elementary rights to existence and as they pursue anti-popular policies and policies of racial and national discrimination and colonialism, the imperialists have no right to speak about human rights. The imperialists are the most heinous enemy of human rights.”

Kim Jong-il (1941–2011) General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea

"Socialism is a Science" http://www.korea-dpr.com/lib/106.pdf, article in Rodong Sinmun (1 November 1994)

Money, People, Support

“It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along its shores.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

"American Literature" in Papers on Literature and Art (1846), p. 122.

Life, Books, Literature, Idea

“Although a century and a half measured in comparison with the length of human experience is but a short time, yet measured in the life of governments and nations it ranks as a very respectable period. Certainly enough time has elapsed to demonstrate with a great deal of thoroughness the value of our institutions and their dependability as rules for the regulation of human conduct and the advancement of civilization. They have been in existence long enough to become very well seasoned. They have met, and met successfully, the test of experience.”

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

1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)

Life, Time, Dependency, Season

“Our minds fall very readily under the spell of such unmitigated words as Purity and Chastity. Only death beyond decay, absolute non-existence, can be Pure and Chaste. Life is impurity, fact is impure. Everything has traces of alien matter; our very health is dependent on parasitic bacteria; the purest blood in the world has a tainted ancestor, and not a saint but has evil thoughts…. This stupidity, this unreasonable idealism of the common mind, fills life to-day with cruelties and exclusions, with partial suicides and secret shames. But we are born impure, we die impure; it is a fable that spotless white lilies sprang from any saint's decay, and the chastity of a monk or nun is but introverted impurity. We have to take life valiantly on these conditions and make such honour and beauty and sympathy out of our confusions, gather such constructive experience, as we may…. Life is that, and abstinence is for the most part a mere evasion of life.”

H. G. Wells (1866–1946) English writer

Source: First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and Rule of Life http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4225 (1908), Ch.3, section 20, Of Abstinences and Disciplines

Life, Death, Health, Secret

“It cannot but occur to every person's observation, that as long as parties exist in the country (and perhaps it is for the good of the country that parties should exist to a certain degree, because they keep ministers on their guard in their conduct), they will have their friends and adherents. A great political character, who held a high situation in this country some years ago, but who is now dead, used to say that ministers were the better for being now and then a little peppered and salted. And while these parties exist, they will have their friendships and attainments, which will sometimes dispose them to wander from argument to declamation.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

Holt's Case (1793), 22 How. St. Tr. 1234.

Friendship, Personality, Dead, Country

“Why do I think that Turing's paper "On computable numbers" is so important? Well, in my opinion it's a paper on epistemology, because we only understand something if we can program it, as I will explain in more detail later. And it's a paper on physics, because what we can actually compute depends on the laws of physics in our particular universe and distinguishes it from other possible universes. And it's a paper on ontology, because it shows that some real numbers are uncomputable, which I shall argue calls into question their very existence, their mathematical and physical existence.”

Gregory Chaitin (1947) Argentinian mathematician and computer scientist

"Epistemology as information theory: From Leibniz to Omega." https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0506552 arXiv preprint math/0506552 (2005). p. 3

Law, Mathematics, Understanding, Question

“The Pyrenees have ceased to exist.”

Louis XIV of France (1638–1715) King of France and Navarra, from 1643 to 1715

Il n'y a plus de Pyrénées.
On his grandson becoming King of Spain, quoted in Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751), ch.28

“Mere absurdity has never prevented the triumph of bad ideas, if they accord with easily aroused fantasies of an existence freed of human limitations.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

All Sex, All the Time.
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Idea

“XML is crap. Really. There are no excuses. XML is nasty to parse for humans, and it's a disaster to parse even for computers. There's just no reason for that horrible crap to exist.”

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

Linus Torvalds - Google+ (As a reply in the comments section), Torvalds, Linus, 2014-03-06, 2014-03-07 https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/X2XVf9Q7MfV, 2010s, 2014

“Although inanimate things remain our most tangible evidence that the old human past really existed, the conventional metaphors used to describe this visible past are mainly biological.”

George Kubler (1912–1996) American art historian

Source: The Shape of Time, 1982, p. 33; as cited in Lee (2001, p. 58)

Past

“By this action, the Government has proved that so long as it exists, none of us are truly free. Government and freedom are mutually exclusive. So if we value freedom, there's only one conclusion. It's time to get rid of this leftover relic we call Government.”

Max Barry book Jennifer Government

Source: Jennifer Government (2003), Chapter 53, page 202

Freedom, Time

“A pattern has an integrity independent of the medium by virtue of which you have received the information that it exists. Each of the chemical elements is a pattern integrity. Each individual is a pattern integrity. The pattern integrity of the human individual is evolutionary and not static.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

Pattern Integrity 505.201 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s05/p0400.html#505 1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

“As long as Property exists, it will accumulate in Individuals and Families. As long as Marriage exists, Knowledge, Property and Influence will accumulate in Families.”

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

Letter to Thomas Jefferson (16 July 1814)
1810s

Marriage, Family, Knowledge

“Our existence has a hectic quality. It is as though mobilization [circa 1937, the pre-war years in his country Austria] were imminent. Each one of us is suffering; we are all constantly worried as to how we are going through the next day. In spite of all this, we [Wotruba and his wife] have an unquenchable lust for life.”

Fritz Wotruba (1907–1975) Austrian sculptor (23 April 1907, Vienna – 28 August 1975, Vienna)

Source: The Human Form: Sculpture, Prints, and Drawings, 1977, p. 21.

Life, War, Suffering, Country

“To have loved and lost, either by that total disenchantment which leaves compassion as the sole substitute for love which can exist no more, or by the slow torment which is obliged to let go day by day all that constitutes the diviner part of love — namely, reverence, belief, and trust, yet clings desperately to the only thing left it, a long-suffering apologetic tenderness — this lot is probably the hardest any woman can have to bear.”

Dinah Craik (1826–1887) English novelist and poet

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 10

Love, Suffering, Parting

“Bombacci had once been a friend and disciple of Lenin and revived the story that, according to Lenin, Mussolini had been the one serious socialist in Italy. No doubt the Duce was influenced by Bombacci when he called fascism of Salò [Italian Social Republic] the only truly socialist government in existence—with the possible exception of Soviet Russia.”

Denis Mack Smith (1920–2017) British historian

Source: Mussolini, 1983, p. 312

“Not everyone is concerned with the deep future,” Manfred interrupts. “It’s important! If we live or die, that doesn’t matter—that’s not the big picture. The big question is whether information originating in our light cone is preserved, or whether we’re stuck in a lossy medium where our very existence counts for nothing. It’s downright embarrassing to be a member of a species with such a profound lack of curiosity about its own future, especially when it affects us all personally! I mean, if there’s going to come a time when there’s nobody or nothing to remember us then what does –”
“Manfred?”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

He stops in midsentence, his mouth open, staring dumbly.
Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 8 (“Elector”), pp. 347-348

Question, Light, Time, Future

“Whoever hasn’t yet arrived at the clear realization that there might be a greatness existing entirely outside his own sphere and for which he might have absolutely no feeling; whoever hasn’t at least felt obscure intimations concerning the approximate location of this greatness in the geography of the human spirit: that person either has no genius in his own sphere, or else he hasn’t been educated to the level of the classic.”

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

Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), “Critical Fragments,” § 36

Education, Feeling, Personality

“I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos – in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever – was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

The Fuller Memorandum (2010)
The Laundry Files

God, Truth, Waiting

“The head of a free nation's government must direct towards obscure and shifting objectives the actions of a group of people who are not compelled to obey him by anything except the fear of anarchy, which fear does not exist in times f social peace. He can do nothing without being criticized by opponents whose desire to put someone in his place makes them the more pitiless. His lieutenants are not respectful assistants; they are his equals and his eventual successors.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

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

People, Fear, Peace, Time

“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”

Jean-Luc Godard (1930) French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic

Quoted in: Richard Roud, Godard, introduction (1970).

Life, Art, Literature, Painting

“When I look for my existence, I do not look for it in myself.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Cuando busco mi existencia, no la busco en mí.
Voces (1943)

“Only humans have the ability to know that God exists, yet still deny His existence.”

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

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

God

“The real struggle today, just as in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, is between a view of the world termed liberalism or radicalism, for which the primary object of government and of foreign policy is peace, freedom of trade and intercourse, and economic wealth and that other view, militarist or rather diplomatic, which thinks in terms of power, prestige, national or personal glory, the imposition of a culture and hereditary or racial prejudice. To the good English radical, the latter is so unreal, so crazy in its combination of futility and evil, that he is often in danger of forgetting or disbelieving its actual existence.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

published in Manchester Guardian (1922); in Collected Writings, Volume 17, p. 370

World, Peace, Thinking, Freedom

“I despise women who rely on men entirely for their own existence.”

Lindsey Davis book Enemies at Home

Enemies at Home

Women, Men

“The self that does not survive scrutiny is the subject of experience in each present moment—the feeling of being a thinker of thoughts inside one's head, the sense of being an owner or inhabitant of a physical body, which this false self seems to appropriate as a kind of vehicle. Even if you don't believe such a homunculus exists—perhaps because you believe, on the basis of science, that you are identical to your body and brain rather than a ghostly resident therein—you almost certainly feel like an internal self in almost every waking moment. And yet, however one looks for it, this self is nowhere to be found. It cannot be seen amid the particulars of experience, and it cannot be seen when experience itself is viewed as a totality. However, its absence can be found—and when it is, the feeling of being a self disappears.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: 2010s, Waking Up (2014), p. 92

Feeling, Sense, Science, Falseness

“Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on. It is also, as we have suggested before, rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

2000s, After Theory (2003)

Love, Death, Truth, Religion

“All we can say is that, as the result of a process which went on from the fourth century to about the eighth, a standard type of text was produced, which is found in the vast majority of the manuscripts that have come down to us. At least ninety-six per cent of the extant manuscripts of the Greek New Testament are later than the eighth century; and of those only a handful preserve traces of the other types of text which were in existence before the adoption of the standard text, and out of which it was created.”

Frederic G. Kenyon (1863–1952) British palaeographer and biblical and classical scholar

Source: The Story Of The Bible, Chapter IV, From manuscript To Print, p. 39

“Life is the continuation of existence, yet no thing endures. We are all patterns, seeking to propagate. Patterns which bring other patterns into being, then vanish, as if we’ve never been.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Source: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 16 (p. 281)

Life

“Russia does not have in its possession any trustworthy data that supports the existence of nuclear weapons or any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we have not received any such information from our partners as yet.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

News conference http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,810093,00.html with then British Prime Minister Tony Blair, October 2002. 2000 - 2005

Support

“There is never a rational reason for a man to rejoice that a certain pretty girl exists and that he has found her. The experience, however, is universal.”

Murray Leinster (1896–1975) Novelist, short story writer

Source: Time Tunnel (1964), Chapter 2 (p. 19).

Girl, Universe

“Happy are they who live in the dream of their own existence, and see all things in the light of their own minds; who walk by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world has not entered! They have not been "hurt by the archers", nor has the iron entered their souls. The world has no hand on them.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"Mind and Motive"
Winterslow: Essays and Characters (1850)

Youth, World, Faith, Dreams

“If stability and efficiency required that there existed markets that extended infinitely far into the future — and these markets clearly did not exist — what assurance do we have of the stability and efficiency of the capitalist system?”

Joseph E. Stiglitz (1943) American economist and professor, born 1943.

Autobiographical Essay (2001)

Future

“Canada regards herself as responsible to all mankind for the peculiar ecological balance that now exists so precariously in the water, ice and land areas of the Arctic archipelago. We do not doubt for a moment that the rest of the world would find us at fault, and hold us liable, should we fail to ensure adequate protection of that environment from pollution or artificial deterioration.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

House of Commons Debate (24 October 1969)

World, Water

“The science of human nature belongs to people who are not afraid to live independent lives. They alone have the flexible access to experience which can bring human wisdom and strength into being, and once these assets exist, they will send forth their influence with an authority that cannot be resisted, unmindful of artificial man made boundaries, reaching anywhere in the world.”

Paul Rosenfels (1909–1985) American sociologist

A Renegade Psychiatrist's Story

Wisdom, People, World, Nature

“Eons and unimaginable eons ago, before mankind existed on earth, only the waters existed. There was no land. And from the slime there sprang up a race of beings which dwelt in the sunken abysses of the ocean, inhuman creatures that worshipped Dagon, their god. When eventually the waters receded and great continents arose, these beings were driven down to the lowest depths. Their mighty kingdom, that had once stretched from pole to pole, was shrunken as the huge land masses lifted. Mankind came — but from whence I do not know — and civilizations arose. … These things hate man, for they feel that man has usurped their kingdom. Their greatest hope is to sink the continents again, so that the seas will roll over all the earth, and not a human being will survive. Their power will embrace the whole world, as it once did eons ago. They are not human, you see, and they worship Dagon. They want no other gods worshipped on Earth. Ishtar, dark Eblis, even Poseidon of the sunlit seas....”

Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) American author

Short fiction, The Spawn Of Dagon (1938)

God, Hate, World, Hope

“The big mistake most commonly made today is that when we speak of transportation we think only of persons and goods. We forget the existence of water, clean or otherwise, moving in pipes, of gas, oil, electricity, messages, the telephones etc. The result is that we waste a lot of space and Networks.”

Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis (1914–1975) Greek architect

Source: Building Entopia - 1975, Chapter 21, The system of Networks, p. 286

Thinking, Water, Personality, Forgetting

“Evaluations, in essence, are… ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate.”

Gilles Deleuze book Nietzsche and Philosophy

Source: Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), p. 1

Way

“Ideas, as the raw material from which knowledge is produced, exist in superabundance, but that makes the production of knowledge more difficult rather than easier.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Source: 1980s–1990s, Knowledge and Decisions (1980; 1996), Ch. 1 : The Role of Knowledge

Idea, Knowledge

“As there are many to whom the beauty and harmony of economic laws are hidden, and to whom the inspiring thought of a social order in which there should be work for all, leisure for all, and abundance for all — in which all might be at least as true, as generous and as manful as they wish to be — is shut out by the deference paid to economic authorities who have as it were given bonds not to find that for which they profess to seek, so there are many to-day to whom any belief in the spiritual element, in the existence of God and in a future life, is darkened or destroyed, not so much by difficulties they themselves find, but by what they take to be the teachings of science.”

Henry George (1839–1897) American economist

Conclusion : The Moral of this Examination
A Perplexed Philosopher (1892)

Life, God, Law, Beauty

“Looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking most closely all the species of the same group together, must assuredly have existed; but the very process of natural selection constantly tends, as has been so often remarked, to exterminate the parent forms and the intermediate links. Consequently evidence of their former existence could be found only amongst fossil remains”

Charles Darwin book On the Origin of Species (1859)

. Source: On the Origin of Species (1859), chapter VI: "Difficulties on Theory", page 179 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=197&itemID=F373&viewtype=side

Nature, Parent, Time

“The little honesty that exists among authors is discernible in the unconscionable way they misquote from the writings of others.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

Essays, On Authorship and Style

Way

“In its essence, the right of self-determination means that individuals and peoples should be in control of their destinies and should be able to live out their identities, whether within the boundaries of existing States or through independence.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order on the right of self determination http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IntOrder/Pages/Reports.aspx. 2015, Report submitted to the UN General Assembly

People

“Formerly, it may be said, my whole being was possessed by egoism. All my manifestations and experiencings flowed from my vanity. The meeting with Father Giovanni killed all this, and from then on there gradually arose in me that "something" which has brought the whole of me to the unshakable conviction that, apart from the vanities of life, there exists a "something else" which must be the aim and ideal of every more or less thinking man, and that it is only this something else which may make a man really happy and give him real values, instead of the illusory "goods" with which in ordinary life he is always and in everything full.”

G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) influential spiritual teacher, Armenian philosopher, composer and writer

All and Everything: Meetings with Remarkable Men (1963)

Life, Thinking, Happiness

“The way in which our society does do honor to its indubitably great men … is a study in immunizing people against their virus. … They are the menagerie of Very Important People who exist only for ceremonial occasions. … The effectually prevents the two practical uses that we could make of them. We neither take seriously the simple, direct, fearless souls that they invariably are, whether humble or arrogant, to model ourselves after them because they make more sense as human beings; nor do we have recourse the them to help us when we have need of exceptional purity, magnanimity, profundity, or imagination.”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 152.

Men, People, Way, Soul

“lf l am not mistaken, the words "art" and "artist" did not exist during the Renaissance and before: there were simply architects, sculptors, and painters, practicing a trade.”

M. C. Escher (1898–1972) Dutch graphic artist

1950's, On Being a Graphic Artist', 1953

Art

“The work itself will cover a wide field including clearance of slums, which for adequate reasons cannot be undertaken by private capital; in rural housing of several kinds, where, again, private capital is unable to function; in rural electrification; in the reforestation of the great watersheds of the Nation; in an intensified program to prevent soil erosion and to reclaim blighted areas; in improving existing road systems and in constructing national highways designed to handle modern traffic; in the elimination of grade crossings; in the extension and enlargement of the successful work of the Civilian Conservation Corps; in non-Federal works, mostly self-liquidating and highly useful to local divisions of Government; and on many other projects which the Nation needs and cannot afford to neglect.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, State of the Union address (1935)

Success, Housing

“This is the predicament of man. All souls descend a ladder form heaven to the world. Then the ladders are taken away. Once they are in this world, they are called upon from heaven to rise, to come back. It is a call that goes out again and again. Each soul seeks the ladder in order to ascend above; but the ladder cannot be found. Most people make no effort to ascend, claiming, how can one rise to heaven without a ladder? However, there are souls which resolve to leap upwards without a ladder. So they jump and fall down. They jump and fall down, until they stop. Wise people think that since no ladder exists, there must be another way. We must face the challenge and act. Be what it may, one must leap until God, in His mercy, makes exultation come about.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

"No Religion is an Island", p. 266
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

God, People, World, Way

“The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment.”

Bernard d'Espagnat (1921–2015) French physicist and philosopher

in The Quantum Theory and Reality, by [Bernard d'Espagnat, Scientific American, November, 1979, 158] http://www.sciam.com/media/pdf/197911_0158.pdf

World

“I believe that the existing power structures in Europe and Northeast Asia are not sustainable through 2020.”

John Mearsheimer book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

Source: The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), Chapter 10, Great Power Politics in the Twenty First Century, p. 385

“Doubts about the existence of free will and individuals are nothing new, of course. More than 2,000 years ago thinkers in India, China and Greece argued that ‘the individual self is an illusion’. Yet such doubts don’t really change history much unless they have a practical impact on economics, politics and day-to-day life. Humans are masters of cognitive dissonance, and we allow ourselves to believe one thing in the laboratory and an altogether different thing in the courthouse or in parliament. Just as Christianity didn’t disappear the day Darwin published On the Origin of Species, so liberalism won’t vanish just because scientists have reached the conclusion that there are no free individuals.”

Yuval Noah Harari book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Life, History, Change

“Science is not sacrosanct. The mere fact that it exists, is admired, has results is not sufficient for making it a measure of excellence. Modern science arose from global objections against earlier views and rationalism itself, the idea that there are general rules and standards for conducting our affairs, affairs of knowledge included, arose from global objections to common sense.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Against Method

Source: Against Method (1975), p. 223.

Idea, Knowledge, Sense, Science

“Before we try to destroy someone else, we should first pass judgment on ourselves. Before finding fault with others, we must first pass judgment upon ourselves. Before we backbite others, we must first pass judgment upon our selves. Before we lie about others, we must first judge ourselves. Before we hurt the heart of another, we must first pass judgment on ourselves. Like that, we have to pass judgment on our thoughts and on all actions done by our eyes, ears, nose, hands, and mouth. The guilty ones are within our own body and mind. These are our qualities which exist in our actions. All these qualities exist within us, do they not? So we have to pass judgment on them. That is the state of Iman-Islam. That is what is called Islam. To first see the fault in yourself and then to pass judgment and correct yourself is true justice. Those who perform that justice are in the religion of truth. They are the leaders of the religion of truth. They are in the state of Iman-Islam. They are the true believers.”

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (1900–1986) Sri Lankan Sufi leader

Benefit to All (undated)

Truth, Lie, Religion, Justice

“To be alive is to feel the joy of being./ In spite of the sorrows and joys of life/ The primary joy is that of being./ That of my existence. / That I exist is the most fundamental experience is joy for me!/ I, who do not deserve to, really exist./ I, who need not, do exist!/ I, who may not, do exist.”

Kuruvilla Pandikattu (1957) Indian philosopher

Death: Live It! p. 130.
Death: Live It! (2005)

Life, Feeling, Joy

“Here, on the other hand, with an ingenuity that should take an entrepreneurial schemer’s breath away, there has evolved the following proposition: that a legal job no sooner comes into existence than it generates, immediately and of necessity, a job for a competitor. Page 118”

Renata Adler (1938) American author, journalist and film critic

Pitch Dark (1983)

“Must I not here express my wonder that any one should exist who persuades himself that there are certain solid and indivisible particles carried along by their own impulse and weight, and that a universe so beautiful and so admirably arrayed is formed from the accidental concourse of those particles? I do not understand why the man who supposes that to have been possible should not also think that if a countless number of the forms of the one and twenty letters, whether in gold or any other material, were to be thrown somewhere, it would be possible, when they had been shaken out upon the ground, for the annals of Ennius to result from them so as to be able to be read consecutively,—a miracle of chance which I incline to think would be impossible even in the case of a single verse.”
Hic ego non mirer esse quemquam, qui sibi persuadeat corpora quaedam solida atque individua vi et gravitate ferri mundumque effici ornatissimum et pulcherrimum ex eorum corporum concursione fortuita? Hoc qui existimat fieri potuisse, non intellego, cur non idem putet, si innumerabiles unius et viginti formae litterarum vel aureae vel qualeslibet aliquo coiciantur, posse ex is in terram excussis annales Enni, ut deinceps legi possint, effici; quod nescio an ne in uno quidem versu possit tantum valere fortuna.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Book II, section 37
De Natura Deorum – On the Nature of the Gods (45 BC)

Beauty, Understanding, Thinking, Universe

“It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback. Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine. In both cases these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead. The information is then turned into a new form available for the further stages of performance. In both the animal and the machine this performance is made to be effective on the outer world. In both of them, their performed action on the outer world, and not merely their intended action, is reported back to the central regulatory apparatus. This complex of behavior is ignored by the average man, and in particular does not play the role that it should in our habitual analysis of society; for just as individual physical responses may be seen from this point of view, so may the organic responses of society itself. I do not mean that the sociologist is unaware of the existence and complex nature of communications in society, but until recently he has tended to overlook the extent to which they are the cement which binds its fabric together.”

Norbert Wiener book The Human Use of Human Beings

Source: The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), p. 26-27 as cited in: Felix Geyer, Johannes van der Zouwen, (1994) " Norbert Wiener and the Social Sciences http://www.critcrim.org/redfeather/chaos/024Weiner.htm", Kybernetes, Vol. 23 Iss: 6/7, pp.46 - 61

World, Behavior, Communication, Nature

“Jesus is said to have said on the cross, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" Because Jesus was insane and the God he thought would rescue him did not exist. And he died on that cross like a fool. He fancied himself the son of God and he could barely convince twelve men to follow him at a time when the world was full of superstition.”

Cenk Uygur (1970) Turkish-American online news show host

"If You're a Christian, Muslim or Jew - You are Wrong", The Huffington Post (23 October 2005) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/if-youre-a-christian-musl_b_9349.html

Men, God, World, Fools

“We were at last in Monte Cristo's country, fairly into the country of the fabulous, where extravagance ceases to exist because everything is extravagant, and where the wildest dreams come true.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

Source: Willa Cather in Europe (1956), Ch. 12 (6 September 1902) near Marseilles, France.

Dreams, Country

“Knowledge must be so absorbed into the mind that it ceases to exist in a separate, objective way.”

Carl von Clausewitz book On War

On War (1832), Book 2

Way, Knowledge

Quotes about existence page 42

Quotes about existence
page 42