Quotes about expectation (2984 quotes, page 15)

“I didn't expect such a huge reaction, but I knew I was doing something different to everything else that was happening at the time … People feel a very personal connection with the music.”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

The Times Magazine interview (2005)

People , Music , Feeling , Time

“I don’t know why I think this, but maybe I’ve got my best work ahead. Maybe I’ll be putting my teeth in the glass, and maybe it will be a very different kind of role, but I want to do something where I’m not driving a car or a truck, where it’s real. Something that people wouldn’t expect me to do. Probably a man in search of himself. But we’re always searching for ourselves anyway.”

Burt Reynolds (1936–2018) American actor, director and producer.

"Burt Reynolds Has Made Mistakes. But He Regrets Nothing." in The New York Times (23 March 2018)

People , Cars , Search , Thinking

“If the Lord sends us war, we have got to face it like men, but God forbid we should manufacture war, and use it as an escape from our domestic difficulties. You can't expect a blessing on that.”

John Buchan book The Path of the King

Source: The Path of the King (1921), Ch. XIV "The End of the Road", II

Men , God , War

“The person who, let us say, expects generosity from a bank, efficient flexibility from a government agency, open-mindedness from a religious institution will be disappointed. In each purview the notions represent immorality. The poor fool might as quickly discover love among the mantises.”

Jack Vance book The Book of Dreams

Quotations and text from the Demon Princes novels, The Book of Dreams

Love , Fools , Disappointment , Personality

“I did not expect them to try anything but I am alive at my age because I make a habit of being ready for trouble when it seems most unlikely.”

Glen Cook book Soldiers Live

Source: Soldiers Live (2000), Chapter 33, “Khatovar: Leave-taking” (p. 488)

Age

“When the Sachar Committee members met and asked me, “Mr. Modi what have you done for Muslims in Gujarat?” I told them: Nothing, I have done nothing for Muslims. But please go on to note that I have done nothing for Hindus or Jains or Sikhs either. I am responsible for 5.5 crore Gujaratis and whatever I do, is aimed at serving the interests of all these 5.5 crore people of my state. When the pure waters of Narmada flow into Sabarmati on account of our river linking project, do you expect me to measure how many litres are consumed by Hindus and how much water goes to Muslim households? My job is to ensure that every person, every household gets adequate supplies of clean drinking water. Please don’t expect me to adopt your divisive terminology and vision.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

Narendra Modi in interview, 2013, p75, quoted in Kishwar, Madhu (2014). Modi, Muslims and media: Voices from Narendra Modi's Gujarat. p.75
2013

People , Drink , Water , Personality

“I ask you not to expect all answers to all problems from me, even though you expect me to lead the way. I ask you not to expect me to solve all your problems, even though you voted for me to do that. I only ask you to join hands with me to be the best we can be, and together lay foundation for a future that is more secure and certain for our children and generations to come.”

Bukola Saraki (1962) Nigerian politician

Inaugural Address (2003)

Children , Way , Problem , Future

“The single most important stimulus to my thought came by chance when I took a course from Robert Redfield entitled "Folk Society." …His approach was to set up antithetical ideal types, expecting to locate any actual human community somewhere along the spectrum of opposites his fieldwork had suggested to him…. But in 1936 his typology had no time dimension. I was so strongly attracted to his scheme that it is scarcely an exaggeration to describe my subsequent intellectual effort as an attempt to explore the missing time dimension of social change as Redfield envisaged it, not in Yucatan but around the whole earth and across recorded time.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian's Memoir (2005)

Communication , Effort , Change , Chance

“Some day I would like to meet you as a fellow senator or representative in Washington, D. C. Whether that will ever be my lot none can now say. But for those who have the rightful desire and expectation, a way is usually opened. Let us hope that you and I, and many, many others like us, will be enabled someday, somewhere, somehow to contribute in some small way to the peace and progress of this world. There is nothing wrong with dreams provided foundations are put under them.”

Nile Kinnick (1918–1943) College football player

Letter to friend Loren Hickerson (December 13, 1941)

World , Peace , Dreams , Hope

“One who is not perturbed by misfortune, who is beyond comfort, attachment and fear, who considers gold as dust. He neither speaks ill of others nor feels elated by praise and shuns greed, attachments and arrogance. He is indifferent to ecstasy and tragedy, is not affected by honors or humiliations. He renounces expectations, greed. He is neither attached to the worldliness, nor lets senses and anger affect him. In such a person resides God.”

Guru Tegh Bahadur (1621–1675) The ninth Guru of Sikhism

Guru Tegh Bahadur, Sorath 633 (Translated by Gopal Singh), Tegh Bahadur (Translated by Gopal Singh) (2005). Mahalla nawan: compositions of Guru Tegh Bahādur-the ninth guru (from Sri Guru Granth Sahib): Bāṇī Gurū Tega Bahādara. Allied Publishers. pp. xxviii–xxxiii, 15–27. ISBN 978-81-7764-897-3.

God , Fear , Feeling , Sense

“At fourteen months he began speaking in sentences, short and of his own structure, but sentences. The subjects of his conversation, or, rather, his statements, were consistently egocentric. Normal again—no one expects an infant to write essays on the beauties of altruism.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Beyond This Horizon

Source: Beyond This Horizon (1948; originally serialized in 1942), Chapter 14, “—and beat him when he sneezes”, p. 131

Beauty

“Chinese medicine, oh, Chinese medicine! "But there are billions of Chinese, Chinese medicine must be working." Here's the skinny on Chinese medicine. A hundred years ago the average life expectancy in China was 30. The life expectancy in China at the moment is 73. And it's not feckin' tiger penis that turned it around for the Chinese. Didn't do much for the tiger, if you don't mind me pointing out.”

Dara Ó Briain (1972) Irish comedian and television presenter

Dara Ó Briain Talks Funny: Live in London (2008)

Life

“Girls can do anything. We do do anything and we expect to be treated as equals.”

Helen Clark (1950) 37th Prime Minister of New Zealand

Quoted in David Barber, Helen Clark, new chief of UN Development Programme," https://archive.is/20131125142737/www.monstersandcritics.com/news/asiapacific/news/article_1467092.php/PROFILE_Helen_Clark_new_chief_of_UN_Development_Programme_"PROFILE: Asia-Pacific News (26 March 2006)

Girl

“Playing for the country is an honour. The ultimate honour, in fact. If you want to look at it as pressure, you will find it very difficult to cope with the expectations of a billion people. I look at it as an opportunity, as being among the few who have been given this opportunity to make the country proud.”

Sania Mirza (1986) Indian tennis player

Source: Boria Majumdar I'll play with anyone for my country: Sania Mirza http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/london-olympics-2012/news/Ill-play-with-anyone-for-my-country-Sania-Mirza/articleshow/14740066.cms?referral=PM, The Times of India, 8 July 2012

People , Country

“Amongst the half-human progenitors of man, and amongst savages, there have been struggles between the males during many generations for the possession of the females. But mere bodily strength and size would do little for victory, unless associated with courage, perseverance, and determined energy. With social animals, the young males have to pass through many a contest before they win a female, and the older males have to retain their females by renewed battles. They have, also, in the case of mankind, to defend their females, as well as their young, from enemies of all kinds, and to hunt for their joint subsistence. But to avoid enemies or to attack them with success, to capture wild animals, and to fashion weapons, requires the aid of the higher mental faculties, namely, observation, reason, invention, or imagination. These various faculties will thus have been continually put to the test and selected during manhood; they will, moreover, have been strengthened by use during this same period of life. Consequently, in accordance with the principle often alluded to, we might expect that they would at least tend to be transmitted chiefly to the male offspring at the corresponding period of manhood.”

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

second edition (1874), chapter XIX: "Secondary Sexual Characters of Man", page 564 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=587&itemID=F944&viewtype=image
The Descent of Man (1871)

Life , Imagination , Fashion , Courage

“There is no doubt that America is a superpower of the world and we cannot ignore them. I think that Americans should gradually begin to adopt positive behavior rather than doing evil. They should not expect an immediate reaction in return for their positive measures. It will take time.”

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1934–2017) Iranian politician, Shi'a cleric and Writer

Remarks in an interview about Iran nuclear program and the United States http://regimechangeiran.blogspot.com/2005/05/rafsanjani-urges-us-to-begin-thaw-in.html (May 19, 2005)
2005

World , Behavior , Thinking , Evil

“Several inhabitants have been killed and wounded, and nearly sixty within a short time carried into confinement and robbed of their property, and unless some protection is afforded, those who are of ability and inclination will retire into the country, and others will make their peace. The ardor of the people, (which is to be lamented,) has abated in consequence of their distresses, so that very little opposition is to be expected from them.”

Abraham Davenport (1715–1789) American politician

Letter to George Washington, requesting military assistance against British attacks during the American Revolutionary War (August 1781).

People , Peace , Time , Country

“[Rose, taken out for the evening by Pinkie] She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present – she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation.”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

Memory , Past , Future , Heart

“For a decade, feminists have drilled their disciples to say, “Rape is a crime of violence but not of sex.” This sugar-coated Shirley Temple nonsense has exposed young women to disaster. Misled by feminism, they do not expect rape from the nice boys from good homes who sit next to them in class.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Rape and Modern Sex War, p. 51

Women , Sex , Home , Boy

“Knowledge of inner processes in body and mind is as helpful for one’s own preparation for death as it is for people who care for others who are dying. If one knows what to expect while dying, the conditions can be used and fears specifically removed.”

Lama Ole Nydahl (1941) Danish lama

Fearless Death: Buddhist Wisdom on the Art of Dying (2012)

Death , People , Fear , Knowledge

“Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations.”

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

Source: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), p. 109

Reality

“Our monopoly on violence and the particular place we occupy in our national psyche, demands that we must earn and maintain a high level of trust among our community. They are entitled to expect more of us than other institutions – and we keep telling ourselves that we are special – and custodians of the best of our military heritage. This places a very great burden on us, which warrants zero tolerance towards those who violate that fragile community trust.”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

Communication

“They held us in San Antonio … We had tents and blankets but no arms. We had food. But every minute we expected to be taken out and shot. Nobody said it aloud. Geronimo had been promised that he would not die by bullets (by Usen, the Apache God), but the rest had not.”

Geronimo (1829–1909) leader of the Bedonkohe Apache

Jasper Kanseah, a fellow captive, as quoted in Geronimo and the End of the Apache Wars (1990), by Charles Leland Sonnichsen, p. 101.
About

God , Food

“The difficult decisions first began in December 1964, when I refused to join a Progress Labor Party group preparing to go ‘underground.’ They ended with the most difficult choice—to leave the movement silently, quietly, as so many other had done before, or to risk the censure of those who had once been my friends and tell of the personal experience, political truths, and illegal activities that forced me to ‘split.’ The friends who were no longer friendly, the attempts at personal slander, the chorus that now sang out my name as the most dangerous enemy of all, the attempts to isolate me—all were expected. But the contemptuous and defamatory quality of the attacks were not, and the only thing one can say is that the Old and New Left have this something in common—they have no scruples when it comes to one who sways from their prescribed faith.”

Phillip Abbott Luce (1935–1998)

Source: The New Left: The Resurgence of Radicalism Among American Students (1966), p. 3

Truth , Faith , Decision , Personality

“The charge that Luther adapted the translation to his theological opinions has become traditional in the Roman Church, and is repeated again and again by her controversialists and historians.
In both cases, the charge has some foundation, but no more than the counter-charge which may be brought against Roman Catholic Versions.
The most important example of dogmatic influence in Luther's version is the famous interpolation of the word alone in Rom. 3:28 (allein durch den Glauben), by which he intended to emphasize his solifidian doctrine of justification, on the plea that the German idiom required the insertion for the sake of clearness. But he thereby brought Paul into direct verbal conflict with James, who says (James 2:24), "by works a man is justified, and not only by faith" ("nicht durch den Glauben allein"). It is well known that Luther deemed it impossible to harmonize the two apostles in this article, and characterized the Epistle of James as an "epistle of straw," because it had no evangelical character ("keine evangelische Art").
He therefore insisted on this insertion in spite of all outcry against it. His defense is very characteristic. "If your papist," he says,
The Protestant and anti-Romish character of Luther's New Testament is undeniable in his prefaces, his discrimination between chief books and less important books, his change of the traditional order, and his unfavorable judgments on James, Hebrews, and Revelation. It is still more apparent in his marginal notes, especially on the Pauline Epistles, where he emphasizes throughout the difference between the law and the gospel, and the doctrine of justification by faith alone; and on the Apocalypse, where he finds the papacy in the beast from the abyss (Rev. 13), and in the Babylonian harlot (Rev. 17). The anti-papal explanation of the Apocalypse became for a long time almost traditional in Protestant commentaries.
There is, however, a gradual progress in translation, which goes hand in hand with the progress of the understanding of the Bible. Jerome's Vulgate is an advance upon the Itala, both in accuracy and Latinity; the Protestant Versions of the sixteenth century are an advance upon the Vulgate, in spirit and in idiomatic reproduction; the revisions of the nineteenth century are an advance upon the versions of the sixteenth, in philological and historical accuracy and consistency. A future generation will make a still nearer approach to the original text in its purity and integrity. If the Holy Spirit of God shall raise the Church to a higher plane of faith and love, and melt the antagonisms of human creeds into the one creed of Christ, then, and not before then, may we expect perfect versions of the oracles of God.”

Philip Schaff (1819–1893) American Calvinist theologian

How Luther's theology may have influenced his translating

Love , God , Books , Faith

“I wish to know your Excellency's pleasure about my returning to camp. I expect Mrs. Greene will be put to bed every day. She is very desirous of my stay until that event; and, as she has set her heart so much upon it, I could wish to gratify her, for fear of some disagreeable consequences, as women sometimes, under such circumstances, receive great injury by being disappointed.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (September 1778)

Women , Pleasure , Fear , Disappointment

“You who represent the more recent accretions to our population, know how generously you have been received. You know how free and unquestioned has been your access to the opportunities of this land. You have been expected to do your honest share of the day's work in a community which ranked productive toil as a distinction rather than a degradation. We have all taken our chance on that condition. Because we have been willing to do so, we have been prospered in material things and, what is ever more worth while, in the things of the spirit. Generation after generation, from the beginnings of permanent settlement here, the country has been able to receive and absorb a great number of newcomers from the older countries. That was possible so long as there was cheap land for settlement, and the assurance that industry could put value into it.”

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

1920s, The Genius of America (1924)

Communication , Chance , Country

“Short of coming to their senses and abolishing the whole thing, we might expect that the rules for daylight saving time will remain the same for some time to come, but there is no guarantee. (We can only be glad there is no daylight loan time, or we would face decades of too much daylight, only to be faced with a few years of total darkness to make up for it.)”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

The Long, Painful History of Time http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html.

Sense , Time

“They’re just ordinary people,” Nancy said. “You can’t expect too much of them.”

Clifford D. Simak book All Flesh is Grass

Source: All Flesh is Grass (1965), Chapter 17 (p. 179)

People

“The idea that lack of paternal guidance can explain today's masculinity crisis doesn't make sense. I suspect rather that underneath the sons' charge that their fathers did not teach them how to be men lies another, unadmitted complaint — that their fathers taught them only too well how to be men, and they are choking on the lesson. These men, as boys, faced the age-old tradeoff: If you undergo the painful process of renouncing the "feminine" aspects of your humanity and follow your father into manhood (and what choice do you have, really?) you will share in the spoils of the superior half of the race. Now, as men, they find that the spoils are far more meager than expected. No wonder they feel betrayed.”

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist

"How Now, Iron Johns?", The Nation (13 December 1999) http://www.thenation.com/article/how-now-iron-johns/

Men , Pain , Age , Feeling

“Let me rejoice in the light which Thou hast imparted; let me serve Thee with active zeal, humbled confidence, and wait with patient expectation for the time in which the soul which Thou receivest shall be satisfied with knowledge.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 613

Soul , Confidence , Knowledge , Light

“McDonald: Now a lot of people find great comfort from religion. Not everybody is as you are – well-favored, handsome, wealthy, with a good job, happy family life. I mean, your life is good – not everybody's life is good, and religion brings them comfort.Dawkins: There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting – it might be more comforting, for all I know. But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

An Interview by Sheena McDonald (1995)

Life , People , Family , Religion

“He said that while one would like to say that God will punish those who do such things and that people often speak in just this way it was his experience that God could not be spoken for and that men with wicked histories often enjoyed lives of comfort and that they died in peace and were buried with honor. He said that it was a mistake to expect too much of justice in this world. He said that the notion that evil is seldom rewarded was greatly overspoken for if there were no advantage to it then men would shun it and how could virtue then be attached to its repudiation?”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

Men , God , People , World

“These are strange times, when we are healthier than ever but more anxious about our health. According to all the standard benchmarks, we've never had it so healthy. Longevity in the West continues to rise -- a typical British woman can now expect to live to seventy-nine, eight years more than just half a century ago, and over double the life expectation when Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837. Break the figures down a bit and you find other encouraging signs even in the recent past; in 1950, the UK experienced 26,000 infant deaths; within half a century that had fallen by 80 per cent. Deaths in the UK from infectious diseases nearly halved between 1970 and 1992; between 1971 and 1991 stroke deaths dropped by 40 per cent and coronary heart disease fatalities by 19 per cent -- and those are diseases widely perceived to be worsening.”

Roy Porter (1946–2002) British historian

Introduction, lead paragraph; as cited nytimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/p/porter-benefit.html 1998
The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (1997)

Life , Death , Health , Disease

“Our strength is now reduced from nine thousand to between four and five thousand. All our heavy cannon on garrison carriages, and heavy and superfluous stores of every kind, are removed to the main, and to the north end of the Island, where we intend to intrench and attempt to hold it, and wait the chance of events. General Hancock is gone to Boston to forward the repairs of the fleet, and to prepare the mind of the Count for a speedy return. How far he will succeed, I cannot pretend to say. I think it a matter of some doubt yet, whether the enemy will reenforce, or take off this garrison. If they expect a superior fleet from Europe, they will reenforce; but, if not, they will remove the garrison.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (August 1778)

Thinking , Chance , Waiting

“However, even those who expect deterrence to work might hesitate at introducing a new weapon system that increased the reliability of deterrence, but at the cost of increasing the possible casualties by a factor of 10, that is, there would then be one or two billion hostages at risk if their expectations fail. Neither the 180 million Americans nor even the half billion people in the NATO alliance should or would be willing to design and procure a security system in which a malfunction or failure would cause the death of one or two billion people. If the choice were made explicit, the United States or NATO would seriously consider "lower quality" systems; i. e., systems which were less deterring, but whose consequences were less catastrophic if deterrence failed. They would even consider such possibilities as a dangerous degree of partial or complete unilateral disarmament, if there were no other acceptable postures. The West might be willing to procure a military system which, if used in a totally irrational and unrealistic way, could cause such damage, but only if all of the normal or practically conceivable abnormal ways of operating the system would not do anything like the hypothesized damage. On the other hand, we would not let the Soviets cynically blackmail us into accommodation by a threat on their part to build a Doomsday Machine, even though we would not consciously build a strategic system which inevitably forced the Soviets to build a Doomsday Machine in self-defense.”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

The Magnum Opus; On Thermonuclear War

Death , People , Way , Failure

“Greece expects you not merely to die for her, for that is little, indeed; she expects you to conquer. That is why each one of you, even in dying, should be possessed by one thought alone – how to conserve your strength to the last so that those who survive may conquer.
And you will conquer, I am more than sure of this.”

Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936) Greek politician

Venizelos speaking to Greek sailors at the beginning of the First Balkan War.
Source: [Chester, S. M., Life of Venizelos, with a letter from His Excellency M. Venizelos, Constable, 1921, London, http://www.archive.org/download/lifeofvenizelosw00chesuoft/lifeofvenizelosw00chesuoft.pdf], p. 162

“A lot of the old movie stars couldn't act their way out of a box of wet tissue paper, but they were successful because they had distinctive personalities. They were predictable brands of breakfast cereal: on Wednesdays we had Quaker Oats and Gary Cooper; on Fridays we had Wheaties and Clark Gable. They were off-the-shelf products you expected always to be the same, actors and actresses with likable personalities who played themselves more or less the same role the same way every time out.”

Marlon Brando (1924–2004) American screen and stage actor

Way , Star , Time , Success

“That was the way things worked out: you got a certain fair share of good breaks from life, and you had no right to expect things your way every time.”

Algis Budrys book Who?

Source: Who? (1958), p. 96

Life , Way , Time

“It's a highly effective way of spreading ideas, information and content. Don't be distracted by the 140-character limit. A lot of the best tweets are links. It's instantaneous. Its reach can be immensely far and wide.Why does this matter? Because we do distribution too. We're now competing with a medium that can do many things incomparably faster than we can. It's back to the battle between scribes and movable type. That matters in journalistic terms. And, if you're trying to charge for content, it matters in business terms. The life expectancy of much exclusive information can now be measured in minutes, if not in seconds.”

Alan Rusbridger (1953) British newspaper editor

Alan Rusbridger (2010) " Why Twitter matters for media organisations http://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/nov/19/alan-rusbridger-twitter" theguardian.com, Friday 19 November 2010. As cited in: Megan Knight, ‎Clare Cook (2013) Social Media for Journalists: Principles and Practice. p. 77.
2010s

Life , Way , Idea , Business

“Disarmament conference. Many times I have expressed my desire to see the work of the Washington Conference on Limitation of Armaments appropriately supplemented by further agreements for a further reduction M for the purpose of diminishing the menace and waste of the competition in preparing instruments of international war. It has been and is my expectation that we might hopefully approach other great powers for further conference on this subject as soon as the carrying out of the present reparation plan as the established and settled policy of Europe has created a favorable opportunity. But on account of proposals which have already been made by other governments for a European conference, it will be necessary to wait to see what the outcome of their actions may be. I should not wish to propose or have representatives attend a conference which would contemplate commitments opposed to the freedom of action we desire to maintain unimpaired with respect to our purely domestic policies.”

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

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

War , Freedom , Time , Waiting

“People are not here to meet your expectations.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

Living, Loving, and Learning (1982)

People

“After half a century of co-operation – difficult, at times very difficult – a stage has been reached when both groups [i. e. Afrikaans and English-speaking whites] as never before are faced with a challenge to bury the past, to let it become the combined history of a unified volk/people. Today we are faced with threats for the future of our civilization, for our prosperity, for the contribution of the white man of Africa to the struggle of the white man of Europe and America to retain his hegemony in the world. Also to make Christianity victorious, sacrifices must be made, and nowhere is Christianity more threatened than in Africa. Sacrifices of sentiment is expected of everybody. There must not only be a union of provinces in South Africa. There must also be a union of hearts.”

Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966) Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 until his assassination in 1966

Verwoerd in 1963, as quoted and translated by J. J. Venter in H.F. Verwoerd: Foundational aspects of his thought, Koers 64(4) 1999: 415–442

People , World , History , Time

“I do like movies that take a toll on the audience. I want to work the subconscious. I want to involve you in ways in which you might not necessarily want to get involved. I want to play off those things that you're expecting to get when the lights go down and the 20th Century Fox logo comes up. There's an audience expectation and I'm interested in how movies play with--and off--that expectation. That's what I'm interested in.”

David Fincher (1962) American film director

Fightin Words (1999)

Way , Light

“The flow of information it promotes is free in one respect only. The flow is expected to be freely admitted to all the spaces that its providers desire to transmit to. Otherwise there is nothing free about the information. Quite the contrary. Information and message flows are already, and will continue to be, priced to exact the highest revenues extractable.”

Herbert Schiller (1919–2000) American media critic

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Two, Visions Of Global Electronic Mastery, p. 85

“I must learn how to express the gentle vibration of things, their roughened textures, their intricacies. I have to find an expression for that in my drawing, too, in the way I sketched my nudes here in Paris, only more original, more subtly observed. The strange quality of expectation that hovers over muted things [skin, Otto's Otto Modersohn forehead, fabrics, flowers]; I must try to get hold of the great and simple beauty of all that. In general, I must strive for the utmost simplicity united with the most intimate power of observation. That's where greatness lies.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

excerpt of her Journal, Paris, 1898; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, pp. 197-198
1898

Beauty , Way , Flowers , Learning

“There is much evidence that people are not rational, in the economist’s sense; nor do they take into account expectation, in the precise interpretation of that word. As a result economic theory often does not correspond with what happens in the market. Some would argue that we need descriptive economics. I would argue that all should be taught about probability, utility, and MEU (maximization of expected utility) and act accordingly.”

Dennis Lindley (1923–2013) British statistician

2. Stylistic Questions. p. 22.
Understanding Uncertainty (2006)

People , Sense

“It is advertised as “a seagoin’ comedy,” and anytime they go leaving off the final g that way, you know what to expect. p. 324”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918–1923 (2014) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25758762M/Dorothy_Parker_Complete_Broadway_1918-1923, Chapter 5: 1922

Way

“They say there is a young lady in [New Haven] who is beloved of that Great Being, who made and rules the world, and that there are certain seasons in which this Great Being, in some way or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight; and that she hardly cares for any thing, except to meditate on him— that she expects after a while to be received up where he is, to be raised up out of the world and caught up into heaven; being assured that he loves her too well to let her remain at a distance from him always. There she is to dwell with him, and to be ravished with his love and delight for ever. Therefore, if you present all the world before her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards it and cares not for it, and is unmindful of any pain or affliction. She has a strange sweetness in her mind, and singular purity in her affections; is most just and conscientious in all her conduct; and you could not persuade her to do any thing wrong or sinful, if you would give her all the world, lest she should offend this Great Being. She is of a wonderful sweetness, calmness, and universal benevolence of mind; especially after this Great God has manifested himself to her mind. She will sometimes go about from place to place, singing sweetly; and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure; and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always conversing with her.”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

Written in 1723; from The Works of President Edwards, vol. I, ed. Sereno B. Dwight, 1830.
The young woman described here was Sarah Pierrepont, who became Edwards' wife in 1727.

Love , God , Pain , Pleasure

“ Now, to use the famous metaphor by Alfred Korzybski in his Science and Sanity (1933), this verbal world ought to stand in relation to the extensional world as a map does to the territory it is supposed to represent. If a child grows to adulthood with a verbal world in his head which corresponds fairly closely to the extensional world that he finds around him in his widening experience, he is in relatively small danger of being shocked or hurt by what he finds, because his verbal world has told him what, more or less, to expect. He is prepared for life. If, however, he grows up with a false map in his head […] he will constantly be running into trouble, wasting his efforts, and acting like a fool. He will not be adjusted to the world as it is: he may, if the lack of adjustment is serious, end up in a mental hospital. (editor's link) ”

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), Maps and Territories, p. 31

Life , World , Fools , Effort

“I have never had great expectations of my performance or of a film. I try not to think about the outcome. If you look that far ahead, it sort of taints your choices as an actor. I try as hard as I can to believe that no one is ever going to see it and that it's not even a movie. Then you can allow yourself to bare more. Then, once a project is done, I tend to forget about it until it comes out.”

Heath Ledger (1979–2008) Australian actor

Interview remarks quoted by Honie Stevens, "Squaring the Ledger" https://archive.is/20121206021747/www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,22763328-5006011,00.html, The Daily Telegraph, November 18, 2007.

Thinking , Forgetting

“A client would admit that he had committed rape, and I was expected to obtain an acquittal. And worse still, when I succeeded, I was expected to attend the celebration party.”

Baba Amte (1914–2008) Indian freedom fighter, social worker

His defending a rape accused in the court in page=3
Baba Amte: A Vision of New India

“If you were an artist or novelist, or a poet or somebody like that, nobody would think it odd if you worked in your own home. In science there's none of this at all. I'm almost the only independent scientist in Britain. Everybody else works in large institutions, universities, or industrial labs. Why should one expect scientists to work that way?”

James E. Lovelock (1919) independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist

"The Man Who Named the World" (1990)

Way , Home , Thinking , Universe

“Democracy has failed to dampen the right/left ideological schism, which is historically rooted in the early years of separate state creation. And neither the right nor the left is fully able to provide a convincing alternative vision of how democracy in Korean society can robustly develop and thereby enhance its quality. The rightists/conservatives, who continue to retain their predominant power and influence over the state and civil society, still cling to an old-fashioned, outmoded black-and-white ideology derived from the Cold War period. That ideology can no longer provide a political vision and values and norms pertinent to the post-Cold War era as well as a democratized, highly modernized and globalized social environment. Thereby they have failed to play a leading role in enhancing autonomy of civil society vis-à-vis the state, respecting rule of law, and contributing to bringing social integration and inclusiveness.
On the other hand, the leftists have disappointed many people who expected that the entirely new generations which appeared on the political center stage in the course of democratization could play a decisive role in changing Korean politics. In recent years we have witnessed a growing disillusionment with the radical discourses and ideas as well as with their inability to develop a new type of party politics, deal with the socio-economic problems and provide a certain substantive model for ethical life.”

Choi Jang-jip (1943) South Korean political scientist

"The Fragility of Liberalism and its Political Consequences in Democratized Korea" (2009)

Life , War , People , Law

“Plowboy: You truly feel that all the major changes in history have been caused by science and technology?
Asimov: Those that have proved permanent—the ones that affected every facet of life and made certain that mankind could never go back again—were always brought about by science and technology. In fact, the same twin "movers" were even behind the other "solely" historical changes. Why, for instance, did Martin Luther succeed, whereas other important rebels against the medieval church—like John Huss—fail? Well, Luther was successful because printing had been developed by the time he advanced his cause. So his good earthy writings were put into pamphlets and spread so far and wide that the church officials couldn't have stopped the Protestant Reformation even if they had burned Luther at the stake.
Plowboy: Today the world is changing faster than it has at any other time in history. Do you then feel that science—and scientists—are especially important now?
Asimov: I do think so, and as a result it's my opinion that anyone who can possibly introduce science to the nonscientist should do so. After all, we don't want scientists to become a priesthood. We don't want society's technological thinkers to know something that nobody else knows—to "bring down the law from Mt. Sinai"—because such a situation would lead to public fear of science and scientists. And fear, as you know, can be dangerous.
Plowboy: But scientific knowledge is becoming so incredibly vast and specialized these days that it's difficult for any individual to keep up with it all.
Asimov: Well, I don't expect everybody to be a scientist or to understand every new development. After all, there are very few Americans who know enough about football to be a referee or to call the plays … but many, many people understand the sport well enough to follow the game. It's not important that the average citizen understand science so completely that he or she could actually become involved in research, but it is very important that people be able to "follow the game" well enough to have some intelligent opinions on policy.
Every subject of worldwide importance—each question upon which the life and death of humanity depends—involves science, and people are not going to be able to exercise their democratic right to direct government policy in such areas if they don't understand what the decisions are all about.”

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

Mother Earth News interview (1980)

Life , Death , People , World

“I have decided to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect something in return. We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American virtues.”

Betsy DeVos (1958) 11th United States Secretary of Education

in Roll Call, 1997 BETSY DEVOS, TRUMP’S BIG-DONOR EDUCATION SECRETARY http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/betsy-devos-trumps-big-donor-education-secretary, The New Yorker (November 23, 2016)

“We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of “sense” of what is going on. This “sense” is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves—looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly, that is too much to expect, but of having read them, of having “completed” them.”

Donald Barthelme book Snow White

Source: Snow White (1967), p. 106.

Books , Feeling , Sense , Reading

“All religions are ultimately cargo cults.
Adherents perform required rituals, follow
specific rules, and expect to be supernaturally
gifted with desired rewards—long life,
honor, wisdom, children, good health, wealth,
victory over opponents, immortality after
death, any desired rewards.”

Octavia E. Butler book Parable of the Talents

Source: Parable of the Talents (1998), Chapter 19 (p. 357)

Life , Death , Wisdom , Children

“The policy of affirmative action, however, was never able to distinguish someone like me (a graduate student of English, ambitious for a college teaching career) from a slightly educated Mexican-American who lived in a barrio and worked as a menial laborer, never expecting a future improved. Worse, affirmative action made me the beneficiary of his conditions.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Education , Future

“Just as other information should be available to those who want to learn and understand, program source code is the only means for programmers to learn the art from their predecessors. It would be unthinkable for playwrights not to allow other playwrights to read their plays, but only be present at theater performances where they would be barred even from taking notes. Likewise, any good author is well read, as every child who learns to write will read hundreds of times more than it writes. Programmers, however, are expected to invent the alphabet and learn to write long novels all on their own. Programming cannot grow and learn unless the next generation of programmers have access to the knowledge and information gathered by other programmers before them.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

" Programming http://naggum.no/erik/programming.html", cited in the preface of Physically Based Rendering (2004) by Matt Pharr and Greg Humphreys.

Art , Understanding , Knowledge , Learning

“The recurrence of certain themes in movies suggests that each generation wants romance restated in slightly new terms, and of course it’s one of the pleasures of movies as a popular art that they can answer this need. And yet, and yet — one doesn’t expect an educated generation to be so soft on itself, much softer than the factory workers of the past who didn’t go back over and over to the same movies, mooning away in fixation on themselves and thinking this fixation meant movies had suddenly become an art, and their art.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

Pleasure , Education , Art , Thinking

“One thing that leads us astray here is that the selector seems to be in a position of power. That makes him seem like a judge. If you regard someone judging you as a customer instead of a judge, the expectation of fairness goes away. The author of a good novel wouldn't complain that readers were unfair for preferring a potboiler with a racy cover. Stupid, perhaps, but not unfair.”

Paul Graham (1964) English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist

"Two Kinds Of Judgment", April 2007

Stupidity

“I have no health for a soldier, and as I have no expectation of serving my country in that way, I am spending my time in the old trifling manner, and am so taken with optics, that I do not know whether, if the enemy should invade this part of the country, as Archimedes was slain while making geometrical figures on the sand, so I should die making a telescope.”

David Rittenhouse (1732–1796) American astronomer

Letter to Thomas Barton (Sep 20, 1756) as quoted by Florian Cajori, The Teaching and History of Mathematics in the United States https://books.google.com/books?id=mELQAAAAMAAJ (1890) p. 39.

Health , Way , Time , Parting

“Text: Psalm 119:19. I am a stranger on the earth, hide not Thy command ments from me.
Are we what we dreamt we should be? No, but still the sorrows of life..., so much more numerous than we expected, the tossing to and fro in the world, they have covered it over, but it is not dead, it sleepeth.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote from van Gogh's first sermon, 29 October, 1876; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, p. 18
1870s

Life , World , Dead

“The “democratisation” of the ownership of shares, from which the bourgeois sophists and opportunist so-called “Social-Democrats” expect (or say that they expect) the “democratisation of capital”, the strengthening of the role and significance of small scale production, etc., is, in fact, one of the ways of increasing the power of the financial oligarchy.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Imperialism : The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch03.htm.
1910s

Way

“I treat all film roles one way: very seriously," exclaims Pleasence. "I never play anything tongue-in-cheek, though at times it might appear that way. I'm a professional actor who has no particular approach to acting. I get the part, I read the script. If I decide to do it, I learn the lines. People expecting a longwinded explanation on my approach will be disappointed. I have no theory about acting. There is no method, there is no way. I just do it.”

Donald Pleasence (1919–1995) British actor

INTERVIEW BY MARC SHAPIRO https://www.pleasence.com/articles/MADMAN.HTML (February 1989)

People , Disappointment , Way , Learning

“When asked why she thought there was deterioration in standards and expectations of art, she suggested it was the result of the fuss generated around young dancers, the pressures to perform at an early debut, and the indiscriminate acclaim given to young dancers before they had found their feet.”

Balasaraswati (1918–1984) Indian dancer

On her abhinaya (the art of expression'). Dance readings and musings Balasaraswati: Her Art and Life, 1 December 2013, Narthaki.com http://www.narthaki.com/info/bookrev/bkrev1a.html,
Quote

Art

“We cannot traffic in our principles, we can make no compromise, no agreement with the ruling system. We must break with the ruling system and fight it to a finish. It must fall that socialism may arise, and we certainly cannot expect from the ruling class that it will give to itself and its domination the death blow.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

Death , Fight

“If there really was one true god, it should be a singular composite of every religion’s gods, an uber-galactic super-genius, and the ultimate entity of the entire cosmos. If a being of that magnitude ever wrote a book, then there would only be one such document; one book of God. It would be dominant everywhere in the world with no predecessors or parallels or alternatives in any language, because mere human authors couldn’t possibly compete with it. And you wouldn’t need faith to believe it, because it would be consistent with all evidence and demonstrably true, revealing profound morality and wisdom far beyond contemporary human capacity. It would invariably inspire a unity of common belief for every reader. If God wrote it, we could expect no less. But what we see instead is the very opposite of that. Instead of only one religion leading to one ultimate truth, we have many different religions with no common origin, all constantly sharding into ever more deeply-divided denominations, seeking conflicting truths, and each somehow claiming divine guidance despite their ongoing divergence in every direction.”

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

"2nd Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFrkjEgUDZA&list=PL126AFB53A6F002CC&index=2, Youtube (November 24, 2007)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Wisdom , God , Truth , Books

“Indeed, even before the 11 September attacks, there was little evidence that the holocaust had ever ceased being used as a bulwark to defend the state interests of Israel and its atrocities against the Palestinians and neighboring Arab countries. This was not a spontaneous development but the result of design. Indeed, it had become a matter of course to expect Palestinian victims of Israeli terror to pay obeisance to the Jewish holocaust before, or even instead of, criticizing Israel.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Ibid.
"Deconstructing Holocaust Consciousness"

Country

“As for it's results, they have been, by the grace of Allah, positive and enormous, and have, by all standards, exceeded all expectations. This is due to many factors, chief among them, that we have found it difficult to deal with the Bush administration in light of the resemblance it bears to the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half which are ruled by the sons of kings and presidents.
Our experience with them is lengthy, and both types are replete with those who are characterised by pride, arrogance, greed and misappropriation of wealth. This resemblance began after the visits of Bush Sr to the region.
At a time when some of our compatriots were dazzled by America and hoping that these visits would have an effect on our countries, all of a sudden he was affected by those monarchies and military regimes, and became envious of their remaining decades in their positions, to embezzle the public wealth of the nation without supervision or accounting.
So he took dictatorship and suppression of freedoms to his son and they named it the Patriot Act, under the pretence of fighting terrorism. In addition, Bush sanctioned the installing of sons as state governors, and didn't forget to import expertise in election fraud from the region's presidents to Florida to be made use of in moments of difficulty.”

Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) founder of al-Qaeda

Full transcript of bin Ladin's speech http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2004/11/200849163336457223.html Aljazeera, (01 Nov 2004)
2000s, 2004

Hope , Fraud , Freedom , Light

“When a man comes through
He must do what he's supposed to do
When a man comes through.
He can't do what everyone expects him to.”

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

A New Kind of Man
Song lyrics, A Sense of Wonder (1985)

“We shall get a sufficient quantity of provisions over to-day for the garrison at Fort Washington. General Mifflin thinks it not advisable to pull the barracks down yet. lie has hopes of our army returning to that ground for winter-quarters. I think this would be running too great a risk to leave them standing in expectation of such an event.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (24 October 1776)

Lie , Hope , Thinking , Winter

“He thought for a moment, brought back from his reflections. "It was only possible for me to do it," he said, "because it was necessary. I either had to write the book or be reduced to despair; it was the only means of saving me from nothingness, chaos and suicide. The book was written under this pressure and brought me the expected cure, simply because it was written, irrespective of whether it was good or bad. That was the only thing that counted. And while writing it, there was no need for me to think at all of any other reader but myself, or at the most, here and there another close war comrade, and I certainly never thought then about the survivors, but always about those who fell in the war. While writing it, I was as if delirious or crazy, surrounded by three or four people with mutilated bodies — that is how the book was produced."”

Hermann Hesse book Journey to the East

Journey to the East (1932)

War , People , Books , Thinking

“"Am I correct in assuming that I address Lord Arthur?"
"Yes, I'm Arthur."
Emelena mumbled something that Arthur correctly thought was about expecting him to be taller, more impressive, have lightning bolts coming out of his eyes, and so on.”

Garth Nix (1963) Australian fantasy writer

Source: The Keys to the Kingdom series, Lady Friday (2007), p. 55.

“Expecting to be able to get rid of the competitive drive, first of all, flies in the face of human nature — and little girls certainly have this drive, as much as little boys do, or at least the little girls I have observed in my immediate family have it.”

Lynne Cheney (1941) Second Lady of the United States 2001–2009, writer and pundit

"The Truth & Lynne Cheney" http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0IUK/is_2001_Spring/ai_75453032/pg_1, interview, Women's Quarterly (Spring 2001).

Family , Girl , Boy , Nature

“If more people recognized the difference between friendship and mere attraction, and how love must partake of both to prosper, I expect there'd be more happy people.”

Sherwood Smith book Crown Duel

Crown Duel (Crown & Court #1 - 2, 1997)

Love , Friendship , People , Happiness

“Some of my best friends are men. It is simply that I think women are superior to men. There, I've said it. It's my dirty little secret. […]
The other day, a very wise friend of mine asked "Have you ever noticed that what passes as a terrific man would only be an adequate woman?" A Roman candle went off in my head; she was absolutely right. What I expect from my male friends is that there are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn't supposed to touch the bone.”

Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist

The New York Times. Living Out Loud, pp. 26-27 (1988)

Love , Women , Men , Secret

“What you hope for
Is that at some point of the pointless journey,
Indoors or out, and when you least expect it,
Right in the middle of your stride, like that,
So neatly that you never feel a thing,
The kind assassin Sleep will draw a bead
And blow your brains out.”

Richard Wilbur (1921–2017) American poet

"Walking to Sleep" (1969)

Hope , Feeling , Sleep , Drawing

“Although I am still in favour of a National Government in these difficult times, and shall probably be found in the great majority of cases in the Government Lobby, there are some issues that have arisen, or are likely to arise, upon which I am unable to give the Government the support which it has, perhaps, the right to expect from those receiving the Government Whip. It occurs to me, therefore, that it would perhaps be more satisfactory if I was no longer regarded as being among the supporters of the present Administration.”

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) British politician

"Mr H. Macmillan M.P.", The Times, 8 July 1936, p. 8.
Letter written on 29 June 1936 resigning the Government whip.
1920s-1950s

Support , Time

“ Of all forms of symbolism, language is the most highly developed, most subtle, and most complicated. It has been pointed out that human beings, by agreement, can make anything stand for anything. Now, human beings have agreed, in the course of centuries of mutual dependency, to let the various noises that they can produce […] stand for specified happenings in their nervous systems. We call that system of agreements language. For example, we who speak English have been so trained that, when our nervous systems register the presence of a certain kind of animal, we may make the following noise: "That's a cat." Anyone hearing us expects to find that, by looking in the same direction, he will experience a similar event in his nervous system -- one that will lead him to make an almost identical noise. Again, we have been so trained that when we are conscious of wanting food, we make the noise "I'm hungry."”

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

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Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), Language as Symbolism, pp. 26-27

Food , Cats , Animals , Dependency

“I have for so many years entertained a firm conviction that we were going to the dogs that I have got to be quite accustomed to the expectation.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Source: Letter to H. W. Acland (4 February 1867), from G. Cecil, The Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury. Volume I, p. 211

Dogs

“Americans are farcical when it comes to force majeure and money!
Two things that they worship.
You can't expect a democracy from a society like this.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

2010s, "Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia" (2013)

Money , Democracy

“For what do we now see in the country? We see a man who, as Senator of the United States, voted to tamper with the public mails for the benefit of slavery, sitting in the President's chair. Two days after he is seated we see a judge rising in the place of John Jay — who said, 'Slaves, though held by the laws of men, are free by the laws of God' — to declare that a seventh of the population not only have no original rights as men, but no legal rights as citizens. We see every great office of State held by ministers of slavery; our foreign ambassadors not the representatives of our distinctive principle, but the eager advocates of the bitter anomaly in our system, so that the world sneers as it listens and laughs at liberty. We see the majority of every important committee of each house of Congress carefully devoted to slavery. We see throughout the vast ramification of the Federal system every little postmaster in every little town professing loyalty to slavery or sadly holding his tongue as the price of his salary, which is taxed to propagate the faith. We see every small Custom-House officer expected to carry primary meetings in his pocket and to insult at Fourth-of-July dinners men who quote the Declaration of Independence. We see the slave-trade in fact, though not yet in law, reopened — the slave-law of Virginia contesting the freedom of the soil of New York We see slave-holders in South Carolina and Louisiana enacting laws to imprison and sell the free citizens of other States. Yes, and on the way to these results, at once symptoms and causes, we have seen the public mails robbed — the right of petition denied — the appeal to the public conscience made by the abolitionists in 1833 and onward derided and denounced, and their very name become a byword and a hissing. We have seen free speech in public and in private suppressed, and a Senator of the United States struck down in his place for defending liberty. We have heard Mr. Edward Everett, succeeding brave John Hancock and grand old Samuel Adams as governor of the freest State in history, say in his inaugural address in 1836 that all discussion of the subject which tends to excite insurrection among the slaves, as if all discussion of it would not be so construed, 'has been held by highly respectable legal authorities an offence against the peace of the commonwealth, which may be prosecuted as a misdemeanor at common law'. We have heard Daniel Webster, who had once declared that the future of the slave was 'a widespread prospect of suffering, anguish, and death', now declaring it to be 'an affair of high morals' to drive back into that doom any innocent victim appealing to God and man, and flying for life and liberty. We have heard clergymen in their pulpits preaching implicit obedience to the powers that be, whether they are of God or the Devil — insisting that God's tribute should be paid to Caesar, and, by sneering at the scruples of the private conscience, denouncing every mother of Judea who saved her child from the sword of Herod's soldiers.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Life , Death , Men , God

““I’ve been on my own before, Mather.” And I hadn’t been happy a moment. But happiness is a fleeting creature. It’s no birthright. Not anything I expect but something I accept when I tumble into it. Meantime, power will do nicely.”

Glen Cook Dreams of Steel

Source: Dreams of Steel (1990), Chapter 14 (p. 276)

Happiness

“I’ve always suspected that Judas was the most faithful of the apostles, and that his betrayal of Jesus was not a betrayal at all, simply a test to prove that Christ could not be betrayed. The way I see it, Judas hoped and expected that Christ would have worked some kind of miracle and turned away those soldiers when they came for him. Or perhaps he would not die on the cross. Or perhaps—well, never mind. In any case, Jesus didn’t do any of these things, probably because he was not capable of it. You see, I’ve also always believed that Christ was not the son of God, but just a very very good man, and that he had no supernatural powers at all, just the abilities of any normal human being. When he died, that’s when Judas realized that he had not been testing God at all—he’d been betraying a human being, perhaps the best human being. Judas’s mistake was in wanting too much to believe in the powers of Christ. He wanted Christ to demonstrate to everyone that he was the son of God, and he believed his Christ could do it—only his Christ wasn’t the son of God and couldn’t do it, and he died. You see, it was Christ who betrayed Judas—by promising what he couldn’t deliver. And Judas realized what he had done and hung himself. That’s my interpretation of it, Auberson—not the traditional, I’ll agree, but it has more meaning to me. Judas’s mistake was in believing too hard and not questioning first what he thought were facts. I don’t intend to repeat that mistake.”

David Gerrold book When HARLIE Was One

Section 37 (p. 216)
When HARLIE Was One (1972)

God , Faith , Hope , Way

“Thought based on images can be neither abstract nor critical. … again in this case intellectuals have worked out theories to justify the inevitable. For unconsciously, they could not avoid being subjected to the enormous weight of billions of images (just like other people). Yet consciously, they were well aware that maintaining the demands of critical and independent thought involves a complete break with the rest of humankind. This would make it impossible for them to play their role as genuine intellectuals. They must think like everyone else if they expect to be at all believed by the masses. Thus their conscious and unconscious minds agree in taking them down the path of thought that involves images, evidence, and emotivity.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 214
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

People , Thinking

“Nothing is what it seems, boy. Expect nothing and fear nothing, here or anywhere. There’s your first lesson.”

Susan Cooper (1935) English fantasy writer

Source: The Dark Is Rising (1965-1977), The Dark Is Rising (1973), Chapter 3 “The Sign-Seeker” (p. 36)

Fear , Boy

“Hall: Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is a wonderful country - I've been there umpteen times and it is being brought to extinction by Mugabe. The average life expectancy is 33, so if you are not dying from Aids, malnutrition, starvation, deprivation or stagnation, don your flannels, black up, play leather on willow. Mugabe as captain and witch doctor, imagine him out at Lord's casting a tincture of bats' tongues and gorillas' gonads.”

Stuart Hall (1929–2014) sociologist and cultural theorist

BBC Fighting Talk (2005)

Life , Imagination , Time , Country

“Having been a "Star Wars" fan my whole life, and having spent most of my life on the other side of the curb and in that fandom, it softens the blow a little bit. I'm aware through my own experience that, first of all, the fans are so passionate, they care so deeply — sometimes they care very violently at me on Twitter. But it's because they care about these things, and it hurts when you're expecting something specific and you don't get it from something that you love. It always hurts, so I don't take it personally if a fan reacts negatively and lashes out on me on Twitter. That's fine. It's my job to be there for that.”

Rian Johnson (1973) American writer, director and producer

December 2017 interview with Business Insider https://www.businessinsider.com/star-wars-rian-johnson-interview-about-the-last-jedi-fan-backlash-2017-12

Love , Life , War , Star

“It was nothing that I think any one of us took on because it was a gig that was available. It was something that felt like a true passion and something that every single person brought much more than any of us could have expected. … I do honestly feel honored to be part of this group.”

J. J. Abrams (1966) American film and television producer and director

On working on the production of Star Wars: The Force Awakens
The Fresno Bee interview (2015)

Feeling , Thinking , Passion , Parting

“But who can fathom the subtleties of the human heart? Certainly not those who expect from it only decorous sentiments and normal emotions.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Moon and Sixpence

Source: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Ch. 43, p. 154

Heart

“Based upon evidence such as already presented, it appears feasible to set up criteria by which to determine when assignable causes of variation in quality have been eliminated so that the product may then be considered to be controlled within limits. This state of control appears to be, in general, a kind of limit to which we may expect to go economically in finding and removing causes of variability without changing a major portion of the manufacturing process as, for example, would be involved in the substitution of new materials or designs.”

Walter A. Shewhart (1891–1967) American statistician

Source: Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product,1931, p. 24

Appearance , Change

“Any thief or criminal or robber who enters another country in order to steal should expect to be exposed to murder at any time. For the American forces to expect anything from me personally reflects a very narrow perception. Thousands of millions of Muslims are angry. The Americans should expect reactions from the Muslim world that are proportionate to the injustice they inflict.”

Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) founder of al-Qaeda

In response to the interviewer stating: 'What can the U.S. expect from you now?'
1990s, Time magazine interview (1998)

World , Time , Personality , Country

“I think it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons.”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

SRC (Students Representative Council) student paper, Sydney University, 1979.
Quoted in ABC Four Corners, "The Authentic Mr Abbott" http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2010/s2846485.htm on abc.net.au, March 15, 2010.
1979

Women , Thinking

“It seems reasonable to expect that beauty will emerge from a fusion of the individual character and culture of the potter, with the nature of his materials.”

Bernard Leach (1887–1979) British studio potter and art teacher

A Potters Book (1940) Faber & Faber,London 1978 (reprint of 1940) ISBN 978-0571109739

Beauty , Nature

“Believe it or not, the fact is that God is supreme and pure; people are lying on a bed of ignorance and dreams and doubts. They expect God Himself to come, they pray for it, they ask for it, they announce about it, but when He comes they fail to recognize Him. And not recognizing Him in His physical form, they cannot recognize Him within themselves. People have forgotten their Creator.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Johannesburg, South Africa, 29 April 1972 - quoted on p213 of "Who is Guru Maharaj Ji?" published by Bantam, 1973
1970s

God , People , Dreams , Lying

“There were times when other people said I was on the short list, but as time passed and nothing happened, I didn’t expect the recognition would come because people who were familiar with my work were slowly dying off.”

Leonid Hurwicz (1917–2008) Russian-American economist and mathematician

Quoted in: William Grimes, " Leonid Hurwicz, Nobel Economist, Dies at 90 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/business/26hurwicz.html?_r=0" at nytimes.com, June 26, 2008.

People , Time

“The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year… Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.”

Gordon Moore (1929) American businessman, co-founder of Intel and author of the eponym law

[1965, ftp://download.intel.com/museum/Moores_Law/Articles-Press_Releases/Gordon_Moore_1965_Article.pdf, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits, PDF, 4, Electronics Magazine, 3 February 2010]

“I have been expecting the bull of the benefice of Medole which your Excellency gave me for my son Pomponio last year, and seeing that the matter is delayed beyond measure, and what is worse, that I have not received the income of the benefice — I find myself in a state of great discontent. It would be greatly to my dishonour and infamy, if my boy should be forced to change the priest's dress, which he wears with so much pleasure, after all Venice has been made acquainted with the gift made to him of this benefice by your Excellency.”

Titian (1488–1576) Italian painter

In a letter of Titian to the Marquess Gonzaga of Mantua, from Venice, 12 July, 1531; published by Pungileoni in the 'Giornale Arcadico' in 1831 and reprinted in Cadorin, 'Dello Amore', p. 37; transl. J.A.Y. Crowe & G.B. Cavalcaselle
The gift made it possible that his son Pomponio could start a career in the catholic church. A fortnight later Titian's note has become humble and thankful, for the Duke has written him, to say that the benefice and its income are his
1510-1540

Pleasure , Boy , Change

Quotes about expectation page 15

Quotes about expectation
page 15