Quotes about expectation (2984 quotes, page 22)

“Kings live in Palaces, and Pigs in sties,
And youth in Expectation. Youth is wise.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

"Habitations"
Sonnets and Verse (1938)

Youth

“Now shall the promises made to Christ by God the Father before the foundation of the world, the promises of the covenant of redemption, be fully accomplished. Christ shall now have perfectly obtained the joy set before Him, for which He undertook those great sufferings in His state of humiliation. Now shall all the hopes and expectations of the saints be fulfilled. The state of the church before was progressive and preparatory; but now she is arrived at her most perfect state of glory. All the glory of the church on earth is but a faint shadow of this her consummate glory in heaven.”

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

A History of the Work of Redemption including a View of Church History (1839).

God , World , Hope , Suffering

“As we survey the various stages of evolution, from the simplest one-cell creatures up to man. we see a steady improvement in the methods of learning and adaptation to a hostile world. Each step in learning ability gives better adaptation and greater chance of survival. We are carried a long way up the scale by innate reflexes and rudimentary muscular learning faculties. Habits indeed, not rational thought, assist us to surmount most of life's obstacles. Most, but by no means all; for learning in the high mammals exhibits the unexplained phenomenon of "insight," which shows itself by sudden changes in behavior in learning situations -- in sudden departures from one method of organizing a task, or solving a problem, to another. Insight, expectancy, set, are the essentially "mind-like" attributes of communication, and it is these, together with the representation of concepts, which require physiological explanation. At the higher end of the scale of evolution, this quality we call "mind" appears more and more prominently, but it is at our own level that learning of a radically new type has developed -- through our powers of organizing thoughts, comparing and setting them into relationship, especially with the use of language. We have a remarkable faculty of forming generalizations, of recognizing universals, of associating and developing them. It is our multitude of general concepts, and our powers of organizing them with the aid of language in varied ways, which forms the backbone of human communication, and which distinguises us from the animals.”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

Source: Hebb, D. O., The Organization of Behavior, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1949.
Source: On Human Communication (1957), On Cognition and Recognition, p. 304

Life , Hostility , World , Way

“Unfortunately… the ADA language was designed by experts, and it shows all the non-humane features you can expect from them. It is… a typical Computer Science hacking job—do not try and understand what you are doing, just get it running. As a result of this poor psychological design… although a government contract may specify the programming be in ADA, probably over 90% will be done in FORTRAN, debugged, tested, and then painfully, by hand, be converted to a poor ADA program, with a high probability of errors!”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)

Error , Understanding , Science

“The first step is that we need to revisit the validity of Newton’s universal law of gravitation. Starting in the 1980s, Mordehai Milgrom at the Weizmann Institute in Israel showed that a small generalisation of Newton’s laws can yield the observed dynamics of matter in galaxies and in galaxy clusters without dark matter. This approach is broadly known as MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics). Milgrom’s correction allows gravitational attraction to fall off with distance more slowly than expected (rather than falling off with the square of distance as per Newton) when the local gravitational acceleration falls below an extremely low threshold. This threshold could be linked to other cosmological properties such as the ‘dark energy’ that accounts for the accelerating expansion of the Universe. These links suggest a deeper fundamental theory of space, time and matter, which has not yet been formulated.”

Pavel Kroupa (1963) Australian astrophysicist

[Pavel Kroupa, Has dogma derailed the scientific search for dark matter?, aeon.co, November 2016, https://aeon.co/ideas/has-dogma-derailed-the-scientific-search-for-dark-matter]

Law , Universe , Time

“For all that she’d had no great expectations for it, sex was turning out to be even more squalid, tawdry, and cynical than she had suspected it would.”

Michael Swanwick book The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 10 (p. 172)

Sex

“I was one of the first people to almost actually vomit over hearing the use of the phrase "family values" and I pride myself on never having fallen for the idea that Barbara Bush was sweet and grandmotherly. I met Barbara Bush and, as I expected, she was a tank with eyes, not a nice person at all and why should that blow anybody away?”

Paula Poundstone (1959) American comedian

Hey Paula!, Mother Jones, March/April 1993, 2008-04-03 http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/1993/03/poundstone.html,

People , Family , Idea , Personality

“Quantum physicists today are reconciled to randomness at the individual event level, but to expect causality to underlie statistical quantum phenomena is reasonable. Suppose a person shakes an ink pen such that ink spots are formed on a white wall, in what appears for all intents and purposes, randomly. Let us further suppose the random ink spots accumulate to form precise pictures of different known persons' faces every time. We will not regard the overall result to be a happenchance; we are apt to suspect there must be a "method" to the person who is shaking the ink pen.”

Ravi Gomatam (1950) Indian academic

R.Gomatam’s response http://www.bvinst.edu/gomatam/pub-2006-01%20original.htm to Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg's article "Einstein's Mistakes" published in Physics Today, Volume 59, Issue 4, Letters http://www.physicstoday.org/resource/1/phtoad/v59/i4/p10_s1?bypassSSO=1, October, 2005.

Appearance , Time , Personality

“I think a lot of people have unreasonable expectations because they never stop to consider what life actually has to offer them. They're always looking for some great epiphany from the skies. They never stop to consider the fact which human beings find hardest to recognize: "Maybe I'm not worthy of an epiphany."”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

"You Should Face Up to Your Death, Says Author".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

Life , People , Thinking

“The difference principle, for example, requires that the higher expectations of the more advantaged contribute to the prospects of the least advantaged.”

John Rawls book A Theory of Justice

Source: A Theory of Justice (1971; 1975; 1999), Chapter II, Section 16, pg. 95

“Black life expectancy is much lower than white and they do their best to kill us before we are even born. We are burned alive in fire-trap tenements. Our brothers and sisters OD daily from heroin and methadone. Our babies die from lead poisoning. Millions of Black people have died as a result of indecent medical care. This is murder. But they have got the gall to call us murderers.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

To My People (July 4, 1973)

Life , People , Sister , Baby

“Memory for playing a musical piece… involves a process very much like that for music listening… through establishing standard schemas and expectation. In addition, musicians use chunking… tying information together into groups, and remembering the group as a whole rather than individual pieces.”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Music , Memory

“As one might expect, the gunman’s fondness for Confederate heritage has become a focus of discussion. We’ve had people calling for the banning of Confederate flags as symbols of hate while certain defenders of Confederate heritage, sometimes after offering perfunctory statements of regret, rush to disassociate their cause from this mass murder or to offer other explanations for the gunman’s behavior. That’s to be expected, and it is to be regretted. We’ve had far too much discussion of the Confederate flag, both by people who hate it and people who love it, that trivialize the whole matter by turning it into a screaming match between extremes. Thoughtful commentary flounders in such environments, precisely because both sides will assail it. It's Sunday. If you haven’t already done so, think about the victims and their families and friends. Pray for those who have suffered. And think before you respond.”

Brooks D. Simpson (1957) American historian

2010s, Charleston: White Supremacy, Black Lives, and Red Blood (June 2015)

Love , Hate , People , Family

“The basis of the [scientific] method is a belief in natural uniformity – if two events are regularly connected in our observations we can conclude that they obey a universal law. But this is not a conclusion we reach by observation. No amount of evidence can demonstrate the existence of laws of nature, since new experience can always overturn them. Science rests on the belief that the future will be like the past; but that belief is rationally groundless. This is not a new line of thinking. David Hume argued that the expectation that the future will be like the past, which is the basis of induction, is a matter of habit. Hume wanted to show that since miracles transgress known laws of nature it was unreasonable to accept reports of them, in the Bible or anywhere else. But his arguments against induction showed that the laws of nature could not in fact be known, so events that seemed impossible could happen at any time. The upshot was that faith in miracles returned by the back door of sceptical doubt.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Cross-correspondences (p. 68)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

Faith , Law , Nature , Thinking

“Everywhere in the world people were expecting the latter coming of one or another kickshaw messiah who would remove the discomforts which they themselves were either too lazy or too incompetent to deal with; and nobody had anything whatever to gain with electing for peculiarity among one's fellow creatures and a gloomier outlook.
Even Coth saw that.”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

Book Five : "Mundus Vult Decepi", Ch. XXVII : Fond Motto of a Patriot
The Silver Stallion (1926)

People , World

“the same year in which I began Latin, I made my first commencement in the Greek poet with the Iliad. After I had made some progress in this, my father put Pope's translation into my hands. It was the first English verse I had cared to read, and it became one of the books in which for many years I most delighted: I think I must have read it from twenty to thirty times through. I should not have thought it worth while to mention a taste apparently so natural to boyhood, if I had not, as I think, observed that the keen enjoyment of this brilliant specimen of narrative and versification is not so universal with boys, as I should have expected both a priori and from my individual experience.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)

https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/10/mode/1up p. 10

Nature , Reading , Universe , Time

“I know what women expect, and give it to them without disagreeable argument; they'll get it anyway.”

E. W. Howe (1853–1937) Novelist, magazine and newspaper editor

Source: Ventures in Common Sense (1919), p35.

Women

“Let's be clear: all professions look bad in the movies. And there's a good reason for this. Movies don't portray career paths, they conscript interesting lifestyles to serve a plot. So lawyers are all unscrupulous and doctors are all uncaring. Psychiatrists are all crazy, and politicians are all corrupt. All cops are psychopaths, and all businessmen are crooks. Even moviemakers come off badly: directors are megalomaniacs, actors are spoiled brats. Since all occupations are portrayed negatively, why expect scientists to be treated differently?”

Michael Crichton (1942–2008) American author, screenwriter, film producer

"Ritual Abuse, Hot Air, and Missed Opportunities: Science Views Media" http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote01.html - Speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Anaheim, California (25 January 1999)

“I've always been careful to put out the very best work I can. One of the things I value the most is the love and faith that people have given me over the years, so I try to live up to their expectations and my own standards of what I'm capable of.”

Jackie DeShannon (1941) American singer-songwriter

Swingin' Chicks of the 60s http://www.swinginchicks.com/jackie_deshannon.htm (September 2000)

Love , People , Faith

“The usual thing — the statistically normal thing — is for the speaker to tell the graduating class that they are going out into a world torn by dissent, racked by problems of unprecedented knottiness and difficulty, and headed for the abyss of destruction unless the graduating class shoulders its burden and does something splendid to put everything right. The speaker generally admits that he is at the end of his tether: he is old, and broken on the wheel of Fate; his decrepitude and his wounds have been received in this great battle with the world's problems. Nothing — absolutely nothing — is to be expected of him in the future. From his failing hands he throws the torch; he plants the task of setting the world right square on the graduating class. He says that he does it with confidence. But he is usually so gloomy that one wonders how much his confidence is worth. Sometimes one gets the impression that immediately after Convocation he is going home to die.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

What Will the Age of Aquarius Bring
One-Half of Robertson Davies (1977)

Fate , World , Home , Confidence

“The fundamental thing in all this is that every workman who is expected by society to remain independent of public relief and capable of self-support must be guaranteed, in so far as that is possible, an opportunity for obtaining those necessaries essential to physical efficiency. Such a standard is the basis of almost everything; for, unless men can retain their physical efficiency, they must degenerate.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Poverty (1912), p. 6-7

Men , Support

“In the status game, then, the working-class child starts out with a handicap and, to the extent that he cares what the middle-class persons think of him or has internalised the dominant middle-class attitudes toward social class position, he may be expected to feel some 'shame.”

Albert K. Cohen (1918–2014) American criminologist

Source: Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang, 1955, p. 110

Feeling , Game , Thinking , Personality

“You're proving to be a merciless ghost, Papa. I should have expected it, knowing you as I do, Joanna said. Her tears were coming faster now. "What do you mean to do, Papa? Shall you haunt me for the rest of my days?" Her voice broke; kneeling on the icy tiles before John's coffin, she wept bitterly.”

Sharon Kay Penman book Here Be Dragons

Here Be Dragons (1985), Book 1

Tear

“The scope of time ahead which inﬂuences present behavior, and is therefore to be regarded as part of the present life-space, increases during development. This change in time perspective is one of the most fundamental facts of development. Adolescence seems to be a period of particularly deep change in respect to time perspective. The change can be partly described as a shift in scope. Instead of days, weeks, or months, now years ahead are considered in certain goals. Even more important is the way in which these future events influence present behavior. The ideas of a child of six or eight in regard to his occupation as an adult are not likely to be based on sufficient knowledge of the factors which might help or interfere with the realization of these ideas. They might be based on relatively narrow but definite expectations or might have a dream or playlike character. In other words, "ideal goals" and "real goals" for the distant future are not much distinguished, and this future has more the fluid character of the level of irreality. In adolescence a definite differentiation in regard to the time perspective is likely to occur. Within those parts of the life-space which represent the future, levels of reality and irreality are gradually being differentiated.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Kurt Lewin (1939) "Field theory and experiments in social psychology" in: American Journal of Sociology. Vol 44. p. 879.
1930s

Life , Dreams , Way , Behavior

“Where the progressive enlightenment sees political ideals, the dark enlightenment sees appetites. It accepts that governments are made out of people, and that they will eat well. Setting its expectations as low as reasonably possible, it seeks only to spare civilization from frenzied, ruinous, gluttonous debauch. From Thomas Hobbes to Hans-Hermann Hoppe and beyond, it asks: How can the sovereign power be prevented—or at least dissuaded—from devouring society? It consistently finds democratic 'solutions' to this problem risible, at best.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"The Dark Enlightenment" http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/ (2012), Part 1

People , Problem

“Let me end this chapter by suggesting that religion has done something for science. The latter came to full flower in its modern form in seventeenth-century Europe. Have you ever wondered why that's so? After all the ancient Greeks were pretty clever and the Chinese achieved a sophisticated culture well before we Europeans did, yet they did not hit on science as we now understand it. Quite a lot of people have thought that the missing ingredient was provided by the Christian religion. Of course, it's impossible to prove that so - we can't rerun history without Christianity and see what happens - but there's a respectable case worth considering. It runs like this.
The way Christians think about creation (and the same is true for Jews and Muslims) has four significant consequences. The first is that we expect the world to be orderly because its Creator is rational and consistent, yet God is also free to create a universe whichever way God chooses. Therefore, we can't figure it out just by thinking what the order of nature ought to be; we'll have to take a look and see. In other words, observation and experiment are indispensable. That's the bit the Greeks missed. They thought you could do it all just by cogitating. Third, because the world is God's creation, it's worthy of study. That, perhaps, was a point that the Chinese missed as they concentrated their attention on the world of humanity at the expense of the world of nature. Fourth, because the creation is not itself divine, we can prod it and investigate it without impiety. Put all these features together, and you have the intellectual setting in which science can get going.
It's certainly a historical fact that most of the pioneers of modern science were religious men. They may have had their difficulties with the Church (like Galileo) or been of an orthodox cast of mind (like Newton), but religion was important for them. They used to like to say that God had written two books for our instruction, the book of scripture and the book of nature. I think we need to try to decipher both books if we're to understand what's really happening.”

John Polkinghorne (1930) physicist and priest

page 29-30.
Quarks, Chaos & Christianity (1995)

Men , God , People , Books

“There were many reasons why we did not gain complete success at Arnhem. The following in my view were the main ones. First. The operation was not regarded at Supreme Headquarters as the spearhead of a major Allied movement on the northern flank designed to isolate, and finally to occupy, the Ruhr - the one objective in the West which the Germans could not afford to lose. There is no doubt in my mind that Eisenhower always wanted to give priority to the northern thrust and to scale down the southern one. He ordered this to be done, and he thought that it was being done. It was not being done. Second. The airborne forces at Arnhem were dropped too far away from the vital objective - the bridge. It was some hours before they reached it. I take the blame for this mistake. I should have ordered Second Army and 1st Airborne Corps to arrange that at least one complete Parachute Brigade was dropped quite close to the bridge, so that it could have been captured in a matter of minutes and its defence soundly organised with time to spare. I did not do so. Third. The weather. This turned against us after the first day and we could not carry out much of the later airborne programme. But weather is always an uncertain factor, in war and in peace. This uncertainty we all accepted. It could only have been offset, and the operation made a certainty, by allotting additional resources to the project, so that it became an Allied and not merely a British project. Fourth. The 2nd S. S. Panzer Corps was refitting in the Arnhem area, having limped up there after its mauling in Normandy. We knew it was there. But we were wrong in supposing that it could not fight effectively; its battle state was far beyond our expectation. It was quickly brought into action against the 1st Airborne Division.”

Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein (1887–1976) British Army officer, Commander of Allied forces at the Battle of El Alamein

Concerning Operation Market Garden in his autobiography, 'The Memoirs of Field Marshal Montgomery' (1958)

War , Peace , Time , Success

“"Remember that, Carter. Nobody double-crosses Archie Costello and gets away with it. When you least expect it, revenge will come." Without a further word, Archie stepped across the driveway, in front of the car, under the spotlight, and up to his front door. Then he was gone into the house. He left Carter there, shaken, not only by the prospect of Archie's revenge sometime in the future but what he had almost done. He'd almost turned traitor against Obie. Which meant being a traitor a second time. Not once but twice. Christ, he thought, what have I become?”

Robert Cormier book Beyond the Chocolate War

Source: Beyond the Chocolate War (1985), p. 209

Cars , Revenge , Time , Future

“Ireland stands at your bar expectant, hopeful, almost suppliant. Her words are the words of truth and soberness. She asks a blessed oblivion of the past, and in that oblivion our interest is deeper than even hers. …She asks also a boon for the future; and that boon for the future, unless we are much mistaken, will be a boon to us in respect of honour, no less than a boon to her in respect of happiness, prosperity, and peace. Such, Sir, is her prayer. Think, I beseech you, think well, think wisely, think, not for the moment, but for the years that are to come, before you reject this Bill.”

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

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1886/jun/07/second-reading-adjourned-debate in the House of Commons (7 June 1886) introducing the Home Rule Bill
1880s

Truth , Peace , Hope , Thinking

“Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

The Times Online http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article6854221.ece, (30 September 2009)
2000s

People , Thinking

“Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“An Unread Book”, p. 47
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Art , Music , Change , Perfection

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Misattributed to various people, including Albert Einstein and Mark Twain. An early occurrence was used as a teaching reference at University of California, Irvine in social science lectures in the later 1960s. Also found in a 1981 text from Narcotics Anonymous.
Misattributed

“As I worked in the mountains, I will continue to work for the sacred fatherland with heart and soul in any kind of duty for which the fatherland employs me and any kind of task the fatherland expects from me.”

Yane Sandanski (1872–1915) Bulgarian revolutionary

Source: Yeni Asır, No. 1306, 31 July 1908, p. 1; Cited in: Hacısalihoğlu, Mehmet. " Yane Sandanski as a political leader in Macedonia in the era of the Young Turks http://ceb.revues.org/1192." Cahiers balkaniques 40 (2012).
Context: This was Sandanski’s answer to the question: “You have been used to living in the mountains for years. What kind of job will you do now?”

Soul , Mountain , Heart

“If you have a portable surveillance and tracking device, please turn it off. They have already tracked you in here, they already know you are listening to me; so, there is no need for you to keep it on. And by the way, these portable tracking devices emit signals for tracking purposes even when they are apparently switched off; the only way to stop them is to take out all the batteries. And if they want to listen, they don't have to do it through your portable surveillance device, I expect recordings will be posted they can listen to those, and they are even welcome to come and attend. So there is absolutely no reason why your portable tracking and surveillance device has to be on.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

After a mobile phone rang at his talk at Moscow State University (3 March 2008)
2000s

Way

“Working in this field I felt that I had begun a task methodologically and technically sound and necessary, the broader elaboration of which could not be expected for decades. Nevertheless it soon became clear that though these problems are difficult, they are by no means impossible to solve. One had only to clear out a number of hoary philosophical prejudices and to set his scientific goal high enough to arrive at explanation and prediction. Today it can no longer be doubted that the questions set, for example, by psychoanalysis are readily accessible to experimental clarification if only appropriate methods and concepts are employed.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, A Dynamic Theory of Personality, 1935, p. v-vi.

Question , Problem

“Expect neither reward nor beatitude. Return noble waves for ignoble.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Diary of an Unknown (1988)

““Outlier” is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be outlier. And while we have a very good understanding of why summer days in Paris are warm or hot, we know a good deal less about why a summer day in Paris might be freezing cold. In this book I’m interested in people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Malcolm Gladwell (2010) in: " Q and A with Malcolm http://gladwell.com/outliers/outliers-q-and-a-with-malcolm/," at gladwell.com, quoted in: Kate Vitasek (2011). The Vested Outsourcing Manual, p. 364

Women , Men , People , Lie

“It would be an unsound fancy and self-contradictory to expect that things which have never yet been done can be done except by means which have never yet been tried.”

Francis Bacon book Novum Organum

Aphorism 6
Novum Organum (1620), Book I

“Years ago, I had an experience with a playground bully. (…) This bully was after me and he was gonna do this, he was gonna do that, all the other kids were terrified of this bully. And he came to me one night, just before immediately the school was over, and he said to me "Icke, I'm beating you up tonight, you're gonna meet me here." And he expected me to run. And I said "alright", and I took him on. I never threw a punch! He was trying to hit me and trying to hit me, and I was just, you know, a bit like Neo in The Matrix, only at normal speed. Cause he was all front! He was all front! His power in that playground perception of his power. Look him in the eye, "come on then, let's have ya", gone. Finished! Over! And that night, his power of that playground disappeared, cause people realized he was a fraud as the word got out.”

David Icke (1952) English writer and public speaker

Source: Icke's 2016 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkcqBQyCVD8 on the Richie Allen Show (starts at 01:39:49)

People , School , Fraud , Speed

“The idea of not having a Deity that he could not comprehend had long been one of Roswell Gardiner's favourite rules of faith. He did not understand by this pretending dogma, that he was, in any respect, of capacity equal to comprehend with that of the Divine Being, but simply that he was not to be expected or required to believe in any theory which manifestly conflicted with his knowledge and experience, as both were controlled by the powers of induction he had derived directly from his Creator. In a word, his exception was one of the most obvious of the suggestions of the pride of reason, and just so much in direct opposition to the great law of regeneration, which has its very gist in the converse of this feeling --Faith.”

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) American author

The Sea Lions or The Lost Sealers (1849)

Faith , Law , Feeling , Idea

“He always violated your expectations. … He was a character.”

M. H. Abrams (1912–2015) American literary theorist

On Robert Frost
Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)

“Now, so far as we may ascribe any great historic result to a single cause, it is the cotton-gin which has thwarted the Constitution and defeated the expectation of our fathers. The cotton-gin — which in seven years saw a crop twenty times as large as before; the cotton-gin, which enabled a man to pick a thousand pounds of cotton in a day instead of one pound — has seemed also to pick the moral perceptions out of the minds of a great many sober and kindly people; to pick all the intention, the spirit, the humanity, the meaning, the very soul, out of the Constitution of the United States, making it not the charter of equal freedom to all who are subject to it, but a mere commercial band by which a part of the population are compelled, directly or indirectly, to hold another part in slavery.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

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

People , Soul , Freedom , Time

“People have been taught to expect far more from government than from freedom.”

James Bovard (1956) American journalist

From The Bush Betrayal (Palgrave, 2004) http://www.jimbovard.com/Epigram%20page%20Bush%20Betrayal.htm

People , Freedom

“To put it quite clearly: we have an economic programme. Point No. 13 in that programme demands the nationalisation of all public companies, in other words socialisation, or what is known here as socialism. … the basic principle of my Party’s economic programme should be made perfectly clear and that is the principle of authority… the good of the community takes priority over that of the individual. But the State should retain control; every owner should feel himself to be an agent of the State; it is his duty not to misuse his possessions to the detriment of the State or the interests of his fellow countrymen. That is the overriding point. The Third Reich will always retain the right to control property owners. If you say that the bourgeoisie is tearing its hair over the question of private property, that does not affect me in the least. Does the bourgeoisie expect some consideration from me?… Today’s bourgeoisie is rotten to the core; it has no ideals any more; all it wants to do is earn money and so it does me what damage it can. The bourgeois press does me damage too and would like to consign me and my movement to the devil.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Hitler's interview with Richard Breiting, 1931, published in Edouard Calic, ed., “First Interview with Hitler, 4 May 1931,” Secret Conversations with Hitler: The Two Newly-Discovered 1931 Interviews, New York: John Day Co., 1971, pp. 31-33. Also published under the title Unmasked: Two Confidential Interviews with Hitler in 1931, published by Chatto & Windus in 1971
1930s

Money , Feeling , Communication , Question

“I'm glad that I've played every position on the team, because I feel that I know more about the game and what to expect of the other fellows. Lots of times I hear men being roasted for not doing this or that when I know, from my all round experience, that they couldn't have been expected to do it. It's a pity some of our critics hadn't learned the game from every position.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

From "Learn Every Job On Team, Babe's Tip to Success—And Marry" http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1920/08/24/page/11/ by Ruth (as told to Pegler), in The Chicago Tribune (August 24,1920), p. 11; reprinted as "The Game I Enjoyed Most" https://books.google.com/books?id=SAAlxi-0EZYC&pg=PA79 in Playing the Game: My Early Years in Baseball, p. 79

Men , Feeling , Game , Learning

“We cannot understand spiritual realities by scholarship alone. Although study is important, the path to spiritual realization is through dedicated, selfless service. As we offer service to others with no expectation of reward, the Lord in the heart becomes more available to us and provides for our needs—because we have removed the veils that hide the truth.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume III: Solace for the Heart in Difficult Times (Hari-Nama Press, 2000), Chapter 8 - How To Strengthen Ourselves

Truth , Understanding , Reality , Study

“A lady once asked him how he came to define 'pastern', the knee of a horse: instead of making an elaborate defence, as might be expected, he at once answered, "Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance."”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

1755, p. 82
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I

Horse

“I have achieved the 'sacred' pilgrimage to Ktaadn MT – exceeding all my expectations so far that I am sort of helpless with words. I feel as if I have seen God for the first time, and find him so nonchalantly solemn.”

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) American artist

Quote in his letter to Adelaide Kuntz, October 24, 1939; as cited in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 130
1931 - 1943

God , Feeling , Time

“[Tablets] have not risen to expectations. Apple, the lead market maker in the category, has recently flipped from an emerging market strategy to a cash cow strategy with its latest reduced-price iPad offering, suggesting it now believes that tablets are on life support.”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

Why Fake News on PC and Printer Death Is Dangerous http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/unfiltered-opinion/why-fake-news-on-pc-and-printer-death-is-dangerous.html in IT Business Edge (6 April 2017)

Life , Support

“Many Frenchmen see their society as drifting in uncertain waters without an anchor. They are concerned by increasingly powerless elected governments, distant bureaucrats who intervene in every aspect of people’s lives, and an economic system that promises much but delivers little. The advocates of Western decline claim that Europeans no longer believe in anything and are thus doomed to lose the fight against homegrown Islamists who passionately believe in the little they know of Islam. A note of comedy is injected into this tragedy by people like President Hollande who keep repeating that the terror attacks had “nothing to do with Islam.” Is Hollande an authority on what is and what is not Islam? Talking heads repeat ad nauseam that France is not at war against Islam. OK. However, part of Islam is certainly at war against France, and the rest of the civilized world, including a majority of Muslims across the globe. One’s enemy is not whom one wants him to be but whom he wants to be. The Charlie killers saw themselves as jihadis, and it is only in seeing them as such that one could start dealing with them in an effective way. In designating them as Islamists, one is not “at war against Islam.” Millions of French are expected to take part in marches across the country today to pay respect to the 17 people, including 10 journalists, who were killed in the attacks. There is going to be just one slogan: “We are all Charlie.” Do they believe it? The French would do well to remember that, once all is said and done, they still live in one of the few countries in the world where they can think and say what they like, a state of bliss a majority of Muslims across the globe could only dream of. And, the prophets of decline notwithstanding, that is something worth living and fighting for.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

What happens to Western values if no one stands up against Islam? http://nypost.com/2015/01/11/what-happens-to-western-values-if-no-one-stands-up-against-islam/, New York Post (January 11, 2015).
New York Post

War , People , World , Dreams

“In all these various instances of stigma… the same sociological features are found: an individual who might have been received easily in ordinary social intercourse possesses a trait that can obstrude itself upon attention and turn those of us whom he meets away from him, breaking the claim that his other attributes have on us. He posses a stigma, an undesired differentness from what we had anticipated. We and those who do not depart negatively from the particular expectations at issue I shall call the normals.
The attitude we normals have toward a person with a stigma, and the actions we take in regard to him, are well known, since these responses are what the benevolent social action is designed to soften and ameliorate. By definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human. On this assumption we exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if unthinkingly, reduce his life chances. We construct a stigma-theory, an ideology to explain his inferiority and account for the danger he represents, sometimes rationalizing an animosity based on other differences, such as those of social class.”

Erving Goffman book Stigma

Erving Goffman (1963), Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, p. 5-6, ISBN 1439188335
1950s-1960s

Life , Exercises , Chance , Personality

“She would have come from Paradise and complained to God that the apple wasn’t a winesap at all, but a great big pulpy Washington Delicious; and after the Ark she would have said that there had not been the animals, the spring rains, and the nice long ocean-voyage the prospectus from the travel agency had led her to expect—and that she had been most disappointed at not finding on Mount Ararat Prometheus.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1, p. 9

God , Disappointment , Travel , Spring

“How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?”

William Golding book Lord of the Flies

Source: Lord of the Flies (1954), Ch. 3: Huts on a Beach

“Merriment is always the effect of a sudden impression. The jest which is expected is already destroyed.”

Samuel Johnson The Idler

No. 58 (May 26, 1759)
The Idler (1758–1760)

“You always expect a sheep to have five legs.”

Agnolo Firenzuola (1493–1543) Italian poet and litterateur

Act II., Scene V. — (M. Bovina).
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 259.
La Trinuzia (published 1549)

“Depend upon it, as long as the church is living so much like the world, we cannot expect our children to be brought into the fold.”

Dwight L. Moody (1837–1899) American evangelist and publisher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 145.

Children , World , Dependency

“Now, given that picture of a rapid change of society, one would expect to see a rapid evolution of the institutions charged with preparing the young for it. We do not see this. We see a much slower rate of evolution of the school and that means we're seeing a bigger and bigger gap between school and society. This gap is what I believe is responsible for the deterioration of performance in our schools and our educational systems. Because the children can see this; they can see that school is irrelevant. They feel that the pace of school and the mood of the school culture is out of sync with the society in which they live. And so it becomes harder and harder to get them to buy into the idea that school is satisfying their needs, that school is a bridge to the 21st century, as our political leaders keep on reiterating.”

Seymour Papert (1928–2016) MIT mathematician, computer scientist, and educator

The 11th Colin Cherry Memorial Lecture on Communication http://www.connectedfamily.com/frame4/cf0413seymour/recent_essays/cf0413_cherry_3.html (1998)

Children , Education , School , Feeling

“I was talking to a friend about it recently and I told him that the thing about making that film that upset me most was how cruel Lars is to the woman he is working with. Not that I can't take it, because I'm pretty tough and completely capable of defending myself, but because my ideals of the ultimate creator were shattered. And my friend said "What did you expect? All major directors are "sexist", a maker is not necessarily an expert in human rights or female/male equality!
My answer was that you can take quite sexist film directors like Woody Allen or Stanley Kubrick and still they are the one that provide the soul to their movies. In Lars von Trier's case it is not so and he knows it. He needs a female to provide his work soul. And he envies them and hates them for it. So he has to destroy them during the filming. And hide the evidence. What saves him as an artist, though, is that he is so painfully honest that even though he will manage to cover up his crime in the "real" world (he is a genius to set things up that everybody thinks it is just his female-actress-at-the-moment imagination, that she is just hysterical or pre-menstrual), his films become a documentation of this "soul-robbery.”

Björk (1965) Icelandic singer-songwriter

Breaking the Waves is the clearest example of that.
bjork."
From the www.bjork.com http://www.bjork.com 4um, posted by Björk in response to a question about her conflict with director Lars von Trier during the production of Dancer in the Dark.
Other quotes

Hate , World , Soul , Imagination

“Slowly, but with no doubt or hesitation whatever, and in something of a solemn expectancy, the two animals passed through the broken tumultuous water and moored their boat at the flowery margin of the island.”

Kenneth Grahame book The Wind in the Willows

Source: The Wind in the Willows (1908), Ch. 7

Water , Animals

“Prudence, and experience, suggested she expect the worst.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Omega (2003), Chapter 3 (p. 46)

“Being born in New York City, tends to lead to big expectations, expectations that I only started to realize after I had left.”

Joseph Pisani (1971) American artist and photographer

Television Interview, Aeschbacher April 4, 2008, Swiss Television SF1

“Interviewer: As a captain, there are naturally different kinds of challenges… did you find the expectations of yourself change too much?”

Kumar Sangakkara (1977) Sri Lankan cricketer

Nature , Change

“I did not want this struggle. Since January, 1933, when Providence entrusted me with the leadership of the German Reich, I had an aim before my eyes which was essentially incorporated in the program of our National Socialist party. I have never been disloyal to this aim and have never abandoned my program… Only when the entire German people become a single community of sacrifice can we expect and hope that Almighty God will help us. The Almighty has never helped a lazy man. He does not help the coward. He does not help a people that cannot help itself. The principle applies here, help yourselves and Almighty God will not deny you his assistance.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Radio broadcast from Berlin, 3 October 1941. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/adolf-hitler-broadcast-to-the-german-people-on-the-winter-help-scheme-october-1941
1940s

God , People , Hope , Communication

“Vyshinsky: "And did you expect any other fate than to be utilised by Fascism and then thrown away like a useless rag?"”

Grigori Sokolnikov (1888–1939) Soviet diplomat

Fate

“I picked up a newspaper today and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it just was Henny Penny -- "The sky is falling." I've never seen anything like it! And here is a country that's being liberated, here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they're free. And all this newspaper could do, with eight or 10 headlines, they showed a man bleeding, a civilian, who they claimed we had shot —one thing after another.
From the very beginning, we were convinced that we would succeed, and that means that that regime would end. And we were convinced that as we went from the end of that regime to something other than that regime, there would be a period of transition. And, you cannot do everything instantaneously; it's never been done, everything instantaneously. We did, however, recognize that there was at least a chance of catastrophic success, if you will, to reverse the phrase, that you could in a given place or places have a victory that occurred well before reasonable people might have expected it, and that we needed to be ready for that; we needed to be ready with medicine, with food, with water. And, we have been.
Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here.”

Donald Rumsfeld (1932) U.S. Secretary of Defense

DOD news briefing following the fall of Baghdad (11 April 2003) http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030411-secdef0090.html

People , Food , Freedom , Water

“And he who in all things recognises himself as the servant of GOD may count on a sufficiency from GOD for all manner of need, and look with confident expectation to GOD to really prosper him in whatever he does.”

James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) Missionary in China

(J. Hudson Taylor. A Ribband of Blue and Other Bible Studies. London: China Inland Mission, n.d., 49).

God , Confidence

“The art of will-making chiefly consists in baffling the importunity of expectation.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On Will-Making"
Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Art

“Kennaston could find in the past — even he, who was privileged to view the past in its actuality, rather than through the distorting media of books and national pride — no suggestion as to what, if anything, he was expected to do while his physical life lasted, or to what, if anything, this life was a prelude. Yet that to-day was only a dull overture to to-morrow seemed in mankind an instinctive belief. All life everywhere, as all people spent it, was in preparation for something that was to happen to-morrow.”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 27 : Evolution of a Vestryman

Life , People , Books , Past

“To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

2010s, Lying (2011)

Lie , Communication

“And I hear from time to time people say, hey, wait a second, we have civil liberties we have to worry about. But don't forget the most important civil liberty I expect from my government is my right to be kept alive, and that's what we're going to have to do.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

Fox News, Republican Presidential Candidate Debate, Durham, NH, 2007-09-05
2007 campaign for Republican nomination for United States President

People , Time , Waiting , Forgetting

“Animals themselves cannot plead their cause, and those who plead it for them have no obvious financial or other selfish interest in the issue, although many may have “vested” their emotions in it. When we turn to special gain from maintaining existing practices, special loss if they were to be changed, we find a large number of groups whose views might be discounted. Butchers, furriers, hunters, cattlemen, chicken farmers, scientific experimenters on animals would, unless compensated, all have to suffer significant personal loss if we were to change our practices. They cannot therefore be expected to see the moral issue without the distortion of special interest. The scientists might claim that in their case their own interest coincides with a universal human interest, but I think the butcher and the furrier could make a similar claim[. ]”

Annette Baier (1929–2012) New Zealand philosopher

Source: Knowing Our Place in the Animal World, pp. 63-64

Thinking , Suffering , Universe , Change

“You mustn't expect prime ministers to enjoy themselves. If they do, they mustn't show it – the population would be horrified.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

Interview, November, 1976.[citation needed]
Post-Prime Ministerial

“Competition with women is almost always a net loss of honor for a man. Men don't consider competition between men and women to be "apples to apples." I don't think women do either… What does a man have to gain? He shows no courage by entering the ring with a woman. He is expected to win. If he does, his victory is shallow and unsavory. He gains no honor in beating a woman- the idea is offensive even to a modern man's vestigial sense of chivalry.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

Pg 75
A Sky Without Eagles (2014)

Women , Men , Idea , Courage

““You want a motive, William? I’ve got a motive. Vengeance may not be a pretty word, but it’s what’s expected of us.”
“Right!” said Sverre. “We owe it to all those millions of dead people to make more millions of dead people. Be careful how you rewrite strategic doctrine, General, or you’ll come out of this war without a single medal.””

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

Source: This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), Chapter 7, “In Which Our Hero Makes a Strategic Decision and Acquires a Reason Not to Curse God and Die” (p. 80)

War , People , Motivation , Dead

“Apollonius then asked him [Iarchas] whether they knew themselves also, thinking that he, like the Greeks, would regard self-knowledge as a difficult matter. But the other, contrary to Apollonius' expectations, corrected him and said: "We know everything, just because we begin by knowing ourselves; for no one of us would be admitted to this philosophy unless he first knew himself." And Apollonius remembered what he had heard Phraotes say, and how he who would become a philosopher must examine himself before he undertakes the task; and he therefore acquiesced in this answer, for he was convinced of its truth in his own case also.”

Philostratus book Life of Apollonius of Tyana

Book 3, § 18.
Life of Apollonius of Tyana

Truth , Knowledge , Thinking

“Corps, division, and post commanders will afford all facilities for the completion of the Negro regiments now organizing in this department. Commissioners will issue supplies, and quarter-masters will furnish stores, on the same requisitions and returns as are required for other troops. It is expected that all commanders will especially exert themselves in carrying out the policy of the Administration, not only in organizing colored regiments and rendering them efficient, but also in removing prejudices against them.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

Order to corps, division, and post commanders https://books.google.com/books?id=wqJBAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA9&lpg=PA9&dq=%22but+also+in+removing+prejudices+against+them%22+%22grant%22&source=bl&ots=zG336mXnGl&sig=GPSCXL3D9zfrVo9I7G2ZcBv2j_o&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCgQ6AEwA2oVChMI3KSiwcSkxwIVi6CACh1v9gF-#v=onepage&q=%22but%20also%20in%20removing%20prejudices%20against%20them%22%20%22grant%22&f=false, Milliken's Bend, Louisiana.
1860s

Color

“From a rational standpoint, it might be expected that man should be far more willing to express financial confidence in his skills rather than risking his earnings on the mindless meanderings of chance. Experience, however, has strongly indicated the reverse proposition to hold true.”

Richard Arnold Epstein (1927) American physicist

Source: The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic (Revised Edition) 1977, Chapter Ten, Games Of Pure Skill And Competitive Computers, p. 337

Confidence , Chance

“In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

The United States (1971)

“I, who had never had planted single seed in the estate was expected to enjoy the comfort of a beautiful farm house, while those who had toiled there all their lives had only the meanest hovels.”

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

Baba Amte: A Vision of New India

Beauty , Housing

“(Asked by John King about the political climate that existed in Washington at the time, and criticism of the Department of Justice under his management) Listen I don't expect an apology from men like Chuck Schumer, and I would put him and other individuals who were attacking me at the top of the list contributing to the low, low public perception of Congress, the integrity of Congress quite frankly.”

Alberto Gonzales (1955) 80th United States Attorney General

http://johnkingusa.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/23/gonzales-i-feel-angry/ July 23, 2010.

Men , Justice , Time

“To the last moment of his breath
On hope the wretch relies;
And e'en the pang preceding death
Bids expectation rise.”

Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) Irish physician and writer

Act II.
The Captivity, An Oratorio (1764)

Death , Hope

“Thus, the way Romila Thapar equates Mahmud Ghaznavi with Harsha of Kashmir (twelfth century) as being both temple plunderers, can be shown up to be in gross conflict with the contemporary testimonies about the two….. Romila Thapar's explanation that Ghaznavi's behaviour was essentially the same as Harsha's, can only rest on an utter incompetence in reading the source material, or in a deliberate attempt to distort history. What is more, if at all one wants to compare Harsha's behaviour with that of the Muslim rulers, one should face the connection that the contemporary historian Kalhan explicitly makes. Commenting on Harsha's temple plundering, he writes :"Prompted by the Turks in his employ, he behaved like a Turk"…. Kalhan is simply saying that the very idea that a temple need not be respected, was borrowed by Harsha from the Muslim Turks. These already had a well-established reputation for temple desecration, and that is a fact to which the Nehruvian historians prefer not to draw the readers' attention….. So, here we have a case of a history professor who does not realize that the proofs he cites have hardly any logical connection with the thesis he proposes; or who is so assured about his eminence that he doesn't expect readers to notice the faulty reasoning.”

Harsha of Kashmir

Koenraad Elst 1991: Ayodhya and after: issues before Hindu society.

Way , History , Idea , Reading

“Winter Light — suppose we discuss that now?… The film is closely connected with a particular piece of music: Stravinski's A Psalm Symphony. I heard it on the radio one morning during Easter, and it struck me I'd like to make a film about a solitary church on the plains of Uppland. Someone goes into the church, locks himself in, goes up to the altar, and says: 'God, I'm staying here until in one way or another You've proved to me You exist. This is going to be the end either of You or of me!' Originally the film was to have been about the days and nights lived through by this solitary person in the locked church, getting hungrier and hungrier, thirstier and thirstier, more and more expectant, more and more filled with his own experiences, his visions, his dreams, mixing up dream and reality, while he's involved in this strange, shadowy wrestling match with God.
We were staying out on Toro, in the Stockholm archipelago. It was the first summer I'd had the sea all around me. I wandered about on the shore and went indoors and wrote, and went out again. The drama turned into something else; into something altogether tangible, something perfectly real, elementary and self-evident.
The film is based on something I'd actually experienced. Something a clergyman up in Dalarna told me: the story of the suicide, the fisherman Persson. One day the clergyman had tried to talk to him; the next, Persson had hanged himself. For the clergyman it was a personal catastrophe.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

Jonas Sima interview 
Bergman on Bergman (1970)

God , Dreams , Music , Way

“…against which we should direct all our force, the navy of France: in the destruction of her marine we might see some hope of recovering America; but while our army remained in that country, we were to expect nothing from its operations. On the continent of Europe, it might be employed; there we might contend with France, in a manner that would make her feel that her own consequence was at stake. But the old Whig system of alliances on the continent had been given up, and we were left to fight all our battles by ourselves. If these alliances were renewed, France might then be taught, that rashness, not prudence, had made her enter into the American confederacy…America…might be won in Europe, while England might be ruined in America.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Speech in the House of Commons (14 December 1778), reprinted in the The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803. Vol. XX (London: 1814), p. 79.
1770s

Hope , Feeling , Fight , Country

“Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say "hey, that almost works for me", and they'll get involved in the project.”

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

Source: Linux Times, 2004-10-25 http://web.archive.org/web/20050404020308/http://www.linuxtimes.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=145,

People , Way , Thinking , Help

“Eliminative materialism also doubts that the correct neuroscientific account of human capacities will produce a neat reduction of our common-sense framework, but here the doubts arise from a quite different source. As the eliminative materialists see it, the one-to-one match-ups will not be found, and our common-sense psychological framework will not enjoy an intertheoretic reduction, because our common-sense psychological framework is a false and radically misleading conception of the causes of human behavior and the nature of cognitive activity. On this view, folk psychology is not just an incomplete representation of our inner natures; it is an outright misrepresentation of our internal states and activities. Consequently, we cannot expect a truly adequate neuroscientific account of our inner lives to provide theoretical categories that match up nicely with the categories of our common-sense framework. Accordingly, we must expect that the older framework will simply be eliminated, rather than be reduced, by a matured neuroscience.”

Paul Churchland (1942) Canadian philosopher

Source: Matter and Consciousness, 1984/1988/2013, p. 43; Partly cited in: Advances in Descriptive Psychology (2006), p. 43

Behavior , Nature , Sense , Falseness

“Can you nei do her, numb? asks Dolph, suspecting the answer know. Oikkont, ken you, ninny? asks Kev, expecting the answer guess.”

James Joyce book Finnegans Wake

286.25-27
Finnegans Wake (1939)

“Our first necessity, if India is to survive and do her appointed work in the world, is that the youth of India should learn to think,—to think on all subjects, to think independently, fruitfully, going to the heart of things, not stopped by their surface, free of prejudgments, shearing sophism and prejudice asunder as with a sharp sword, smiting down obscurantism of all kinds as with the mace of Bhima. (…) When there is destruction, it is the form that perishes, not the spirit—for the world and its ways are forms of one Truth which appears in this material world in ever new bodies…. In India, the chosen land, [that Truth] is preserved; in the soul of India it sleeps expectant on that soul's awakening, the soul of India leonine, luminous, locked in the closed petals of the ancient lotus of love, strength and wisdom, not in her weak, soiled, transient and miserable externals. India alone can build the future of mankind. (…) Ancient or pre-Buddhistic Hinduism sought Him both in the world and outside it; it took its stand on the strength and beauty and joy of the Veda, unlike modern or post-Buddhistic Hinduism which is oppressed with Buddha's sense of universal sorrow and Shankara's sense of universal illusion,—Shankara who was the better able to destroy Buddhism because he was himself half a Buddhist. Ancient Hinduism aimed socially at our fulfilment in God in life, modern Hinduism at the escape from life to God. The more modern ideal is fruitful of a noble and ascetic spirituality, but has a chilling and hostile effect on social soundness and development; social life under its shadow stagnates for want of belief and delight, sraddha and ananda. If we are to make our society perfect and the nation is to live again, then we must revert to the earlier and fuller truth.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

1910-1912
India's Rebirth

Love , Life , Wisdom , God

“That learning process has been likened to the challenge of having someone open a fire hydrant and expect you to swallow it all.”

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

Source: Take The Risk (2008), p. 94

Learning

“A radical change occurred in the state of my consciousness. I was fifteen then. I made up my mind that my life would take a new turn. I was aspiring for a future which would have some valuable significance. I went to Lahore with a feeling of eager expectation. A cousin of my father had joined the Forman Christian College (Lahore) two years earlier. He arranged my admission and guided my first steps”

Gulzarilal Nanda (1898–1998) Prime Minister of India

In, p. 10.
Gulzarilal Nanda: A Life in the Service of the People

Life , Feeling , Change , Future

“High expectations are a powerful driving force, helping you become better than you already are. Sometimes you need to go one step further and step out on faith, even when you don’t have history or research to predict success. As the biblical writer said: ‘Now faith is being sure of what you hope for and certain of what you do not see’ (Heb. 11:1). Yes, past performance is the greatest predictor of future performance—but if we lived by that credo alone, no one would do anything bold and new. Sometimes we need good, old-fashioned faith.”

Don Soderquist (1934–2016)

Don Soderquist “ The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World's Largest Company https://books.google.com/books?id=mIxwVLXdyjQC&lpg=PR9&dq=Don%20Soderquist&pg=PR9#v=onepage&q=Don%20Soderquist&f=false, Thomas Nelson, April 2005, p. 105.
On Striving for Excellence

Faith , Hope , History , Fashion