Quotes about experiment
page 50

“I know and share the many sorrows a human being can experience, but I do not cling to them; they pass through me, like life itself, as a broad eternal stream…and life continues…”

Etty Hillesum (1914–1943) Jewish diarist

Life

“…it’s important to remember though that when looking at these situations you
have to be able to see the difficulty anyone faces in a breakup and how hard
that experience is. No one want’s to be alone…but sometimes in life…in order to
be healthy.. it is paramount to your happiness. I truly do appreciate all the
love and support you have all given me over the years in every facet of my life.”

Andrew Biersack (1990) American singer-songwriter

Love, Life, Happiness, Making love

“Never allow yourself be controlled by three things: People, money and your past experiences.”

Ralph Smart

Money, People, Past

“Learn to trust your journey, even if you don’t understand it. Life is a learning experience.”

Ralph Smart

Life, Understanding, Learning

“The Total Activation of the Brain depends on the Total FOOD that upon the Digestive Process become the BLOOD that enables us to Think. THINK! Unless we just want to fill the stomach like the Lower Animal, then "enjoy" the Robotic Experience.”

Roy Littlesun (1934)

Food, Thinking, Animals, Dependency

“I have been a vegetarian for more than 40 years and, five years ago, I became a vegan. There are many wonderful gifts that have come out of this way of life. First, not only is it easier to maintain your ideal weight, but physical exercise turns out to be much more joyful, while raising metabolism and in turn making it easier to achieve your desired figure. Most importantly, your zest for life is enhanced … You have more energy, which makes you feel more at ease and puts you in a better mood. … Above all, it is a huge relief to get rid of the misery and torment of the slaughtered animals you otherwise would have eaten and to experience yourself in a free and peaceful manner. … We can meditate and pray for peace, and we can also eat peace. One does not exclude the other; on the contrary, a balanced vegetarian diet promotes deeper meditation which again enhances inner peace which, in my opinion, is a mandatory requirement for external peace.”

Ruediger Dahlke (1951) German physician and writer

" "Peace-Food – Eating Peace" https://www.dahlke.at/images/buecher/PeaceFood_eng_2015.pdf (2015) from his official website.

Life, Making love, Peace, Way

“Typography is two-dimensional architecture, based on experience and imagination, and guided by rules and readability. And this is the purpose of typography: The arrangement of design elements within a given structure should allow the reader to easily focus on the message, without slowing down the speed of his reading.”

Hermann Zapf (1918–2015) German type-designer, calligrapher, author and artist

Imagination, Reading, Speed

“The sense of right and wrong, the consciousness of justice in men, is not accidental . It grows up, irresistibly, by nature, out of what they experience as the fundamental conditions of their life. Society must live; so the relations of men must be regulated in such a way - it is this that law provides for - that the production of life-necessities may go on unimpeded. Right is what is essentially good and necessary for life. Not only useful for the moment, but needed generally good and necessary for life. Not only useful for the moment, but needed generally; not for the life. Not only useful for the moment, but needed generally; not for the life of single individuals, but for people at large, for the community; not for personal or temporal interests, but for the common and lasting weal. If the life-conditions change, if the system of production develops into new forms, the relations between men change, their feeling of what is right or new forms, the relations between men change, their feelings of what is right or wrong changes with them, and the law has to be altered.”

Antonie Pannekoek (1873–1960) Dutch astronomer and Marxist theorist

Section 1.2
Workers Councils (1947)

Life, Men, People, Justice

“I have travelled from one end of England to another, and as yet could find very few that could define unto me the object of their worship, or give me a character what that God is, so much professed by them; yet notwithstanding I could come into no city, town, nor village, but there I heard the name God under one form or another, worshipped that for God, which I had experience was no God: So that in the period of my pilgrimage, I concluded there was gods many, and lords many, although to me but one God: Therefore at my return, I was carried out by God to hold forth to the creature, the God yesterday, to day, and for ever.”

Laurence Clarkson (1615–1667) English theologian

A Single Eye, All Light, No Darkness; or Light and Darkness One (1650)

God, Travel

“We may be facing the greatest global challenge to liberal democratic constitutionalism since WWII. For those of us who live and work in the United States, but study the world, the myth of American exceptionalism has been punctured, and comparative experience has never been more important to mainstream legal and political analysis.”

Sujit Choudhry (1970) lawyer

"Five Questions with Sujit Choudhry" http://www.iconnectblog.com/2017/02/five-questions-with-sujit-choudhry/, I-CONnect (February 24, 2017)

World, Study

“I have often pondered over the roles of knowledge or experience, on the one hand, and imagination or intuition, on the other, in the process of discovery. I believe that there is a certain fundamental conflict between the two, and knowledge, by advocating caution, tends to inhibit the flight of imagination. Therefore, a certain naiveté, unburdened by conventional wisdom, can sometimes be a positive asset.”

Harish-Chandra (1923–1983) Indian American mathematician and physicist (1923–1983)

Harish-Chandra, cited in: Robert Langlands, "Harish-Chandra. 11 October 1923-16 October 1983." http://rsbm.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/31/198, in: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society of London, 31 (1985), 199-225.

Wisdom, Imagination, Knowledge

“Now, of cause like all real-life experience storie, this also begins once a polly tito.”

Stanley Unwin (comedian) (1911–2002) British comedian

Ogden's Nut Gone Flake (Small Faces album, 1968)

Life

“It is unthinkable for most people. Nuclear war is so outside your everyday experience it’s hard to get your mind around it. And if you can’t get your mind around it, you can’t talk about it and have a meaningful debate.”

Mick Jackson (director) (1943) film director

The Director of the Scariest Movie We've Ever Seen Still Fears Nuclear War the Most

War, People

“Although Christianity was an integral aspect of many early socialist movements – and in Britain remains so to this day – in general the Churches arranged themselves on the side of conservatism, partly as a result of their traumatic experience at the hands of democratic mobs in revolutionary France and elsewhere. This alliance of throne and altar duly broke down as the temporal power of the Churches was challenged by the nation states which vied for ultimate human loyalties.”

Michael Burleigh (1955) American historian and writer

Source: Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror (2006), p. xii

Loyalty

“A very simple experiment shows that a black surface is a better radiator, or pours out more energy when hot, than a surface which does not absorb fully, but reflects much of the radiation which falls upon it. If a platinum foil with some black marks on it be heated to redness, the marks, black when cold, are much brighter than the surrounding metal when hot; they are, in fact, pouring out much more visible radiation than the metal.”

John Henry Poynting (1852–1914) physicist

[Smithsonian Report for 1904, 185–193, Radiation in the solar system, https://books.google.com/books?id=2G1xpr2w4PUC&pg=PA186] (p. 185)

“Because he had seen much of life, his last and greatest work, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, is more than a collection of facts: it is a book of wisdom and experience, a treatise on the conduct of life, a commentary on human destiny.”

Walter Raleigh (professor) (1861–1922) British academic

p. 26 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b325850;view=1up;seq=32 Six Essays on Johnson (1910)

Life, Wisdom, Books

“Other qualities of bodies are connected with simple energy of motion and energy of position. Such is heat, which we find by experiment can be turned into work. Finding it convertible with energy, we call it a form of energy. ...But as to heat, it is further established by experiment that in this case the energy of motion does really persist as such. Thus a gas consists of molecules flying about with velocity, rotating and vibrating, and so having energy motion. All this energy of motion is what we call heat, and thus heat is a repetition of a known meaning of energy. Again, heat exists between a radiating body and the thing it warms; now the intermediate space is filled by the luminiferous ether, which, being elastic, has in its ultimate parts both energy of motion energy of position. In these forms the heat exists in the space in question.”

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

"Energy and Force" (Mar 28, 1873)

Question, Parting, Flying

“I specially wish you not to go away with the idea that the exercise of scientific thought is properly confined... When the Roman jurists applied their experience of Roman citizens to dealings between citizens and aliens, showing by the difference of their actions that they regarded the circumstances as essentially different, they laid the foundations of that great structure which has guided the social progress of Europe. That procedure was an instance of strictly scientific thought. When a poet finds that he has to move a strange new world which his predecessors have not moved; when, nevertheless, he catches fire from their flashes, arms from their armoury, sustentation from their foot-prints, the procedure by which he applies old experience to new circumstances is nothing greater or less than scientific thought. When the moralist studying the conditions of society and the ideas of right and wrong which have come down to us from a time when war was the normal condition of man and success in war the only chance of survival, evolves from them the conditions and ideas which must accompany a time of peace, when the comradeship of equals is the condition of national success; the process by which he does this is scientific thought and nothing else.”

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

Source: "On the Aims and Instruments of Scientific Thought" (Aug 19, 1872), pp. 156-157.

War, World, Peace, Exercises

“It is not theory, but actual statistical experience, which forces us to the conclusion that, however little we know of what will happen in the individual instance, yet the frequency of a large number of instances is distributed round the mode in a manner more and more smooth and uniform the greater the number of individual instances. When this distribution round the mode does not take place... then we assert that some cause other than chance is at work.”

Karl Pearson (1857–1936) English mathematician and biometrician

"The Chances of Death" (1895)

Chance

“The old Dances of Death supplied what fails so much in our modern life—an artistic representation appealing to all classes of at least one experience common to the whole of humanity.”

Karl Pearson (1857–1936) English mathematician and biometrician

"The Chances of Death" (1895)

Life, Death, Dance

“Both in Europe and in the Pacific long roads still lie ahead. But we are now fully entered on those roads, fortified with unity, power, and experience, imbued with confidence and determined to travel far and fast to victory.”

Ernest King (1878–1956) United States Navy admiral, Chief of Naval Operations

First Report, p. 93
U.S. Navy at War, 1941-1945: Official Reports to the Secretary of the Navy (1946)

Lie, Travel, Confidence, Victory

“It is not that there are different Purushas to experience but the same Purusha is experienced differently at different levels. There is the experience of Divinity at the level of purified manas, but the same is also experienced at the level of buddhi. ... In the first, the experience is more particularised; in the second it puts on a more universal aspect. ... Manas particularizes; buddhi generalises. In the movement from manas to buddhi, spirituality rises from a spiritual experience to a spiritual truth. .... One need not grade the two experiences but one should try to understand the difference between them. At the level of purified mans, there is faith, joy, sonship, prophethood, inspired utterances, luminous visions, chosen destinies, unique roles....”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Source: Meditations. Yogas, Gods, Religions (2000), p. 101 ff

Truth, Faith, Understanding, Universe

“I have attempted to write of my long association with George Patton as fairly and as honestly as I could. General Patton was one of my staunchest friends and the most unhesitatingly loyal of my commanders. He was a magnificent soldier, one whom the American people can admire not only as a great commander but as a unique and remarkable man. In recollecting our experiences together, I may offend those who prefer to remember Patton not as a human being but as a heroic-size statue in a public park. I prefer to remember Patton as a man, as a man with all the frailties and faults of a human being, as a man whose greatness is therefore all the more of a triumph.”

Omar Bradley (1893–1981) United States Army field commander during World War II

Source: A Soldier's Story (1951), p. xii

People

“Consider the fact that, in a few years, I shall be dead. This fact can seem depressing. But the reality is only this. After a certain time, none of the thoughts and experiences that occur will be directly causally related to this brain, or be connected in certain ways to these present experiences. That is all this fact involves. And, in that description, my death seems to disappear.”

Derek Parfit book Reasons and Persons

Source: Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 45

Death, Way, Reality, Relation ships

“If our so-called facts are changing shadows, they are shadows cast by the light of constant truth. So too in religion we are repelled by that confident theological doctrine … but we need not turn aside from the measure of light that comes into our experience showing us a Way through the unseen world.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Truth, World, Religion, Way

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

Marjorie M. Liu (1979) American writer

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

Women, Idea

“I think I have a sense of how things need to sound, how to pull an audience in with tone, timing, and pacing. That affects a lot of my writing, too, being hyper aware of how an audience might read something. I want what’s happening on the page to mimic what my body would do on stage. A lot of that came out in the audiobook. I think I would have struggled to record the audiobook without having stage experience because it’s a lot of work to maintain that kind of performance voice.”

Elizabeth Acevedo American poet and author

Source: On how she aimed to preserve the spoken word feel for her book The Poet X in “Debut Author Elizabeth Acevedo on 'The Poet X'” https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/76224-q-a-with-elizabeth-acevedo.html in Publishers Weekly (2018 Mar 6)

Thinking, Sense, Time, Reading

“I think the biggest challenge for people is to understand still that we are result of 500 years of enslavement. And that the process of education has been one to erase us. And it can erase you intellectually and convince you that you don’t exist. So it doesn’t matter the color you are phenotypically, you don’t see yourself. And the challenge is for us to see ourselves as rooted in one experience…”

Marta Moreno Vega (1942) Author, professor, arts administrator, expert in Yoruba culture, education and cultural activist on the African …

On the challenges facing a diaspora community in “The boundaries of how we think of the Global African Diaspora: AN INTERVIEW WITH Dr. Marta Moreno Vega” https://africasacountry.com/2018/04/the-boundaries-of-how-we-think-of-the-global-african-diaspora in Africa is a County (2018 Apr 5)

People, Education, Color, Understanding

“Puerto Rico in particular intertwines Caribbean Black Spanish. We dare to claim it. It is a source of pride and we are not linguistically crippled. My claim to fame is I can experiment, and sound intelligent with my linguistic experiments.”

Tato Laviera (1950–2013) Puerto Rican writer

On how he perceives Puerto Rico in “An Interview with Tato Laviera, the King of Nuyorican Poetical Migrations” https://www.latinorebels.com/2012/07/11/an-interview-with-tato-laviera-the-king-of-nuyorican-poetical-migrations/ in Latino Rebels (2012 Jul 11)

Intelligence

“I want to be so loud about the experience of killing each other. I want to tap into everyone’s senses, to touch on our human sensibility.”

Clemantine Wamariya (1988) Rwandan-American activist and author

On what she hopes The Girl Who Smiled Beads accomplishes in “A moment on ‘Oprah’ made her a human rights symbol. She wants to be more than that.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/a-moment-on-oprah-made-her-a-human-rights-symbol-she-wants-to-be-more-than-that/2018/04/18/f394dd0c-3d98-11e8-a7d1-e4efec6389f0_story.html in The Washington Post (2018 Apr 19)

Sense

“There was so much joy in the making of this film, despite the fact that it’s about such a sad, traumatic experience…We all felt like we were part of something so real and so necessary. It was a joy to go on set every day and tell these real people’s story. Doing this movie, I discovered that joy is not the negation of pain, but rather acknowledging the presence of pain and feeling happiness in spite of it.”

Lupita Nyong'o (1983) Mexican-Kenyan actress and film director

On making the film 12 Years a Slave in “LUPITA NYONG’O” https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/lupita-nyongo in Interview Magazine (2013 Nov 5)

Pain, Happiness, People, Sadness

“You say that, in the present state of science, it is wiser to have no opinion: well, I have an opinion, not a sentimental one, but a rational one, having acquired a right to it by twenty years of assiduous labour, and it would be wise in every impartial mind to share it. My opinion — nay more, my conviction — is that, in the present state of science, as you rightly say, spontaneous generation is a chimera ; and it would be impossible for you to contradict me, for my experiments all stand forth to prove that spontaneous generation is a chimera. What is then your judgment on my experiments? Have I not a hundred times placed organic matter in contact with pure air in the best conditions for it to produce life spontaneously? Have I not practised on these organic materia which are most favourable, according to all accounts, to the genesis of spontaneity, such as blood, urine, and grape juice? How is it that you do not see the essential difference between my opponents and myself? Not only have I contradicted, proof in hand, every one of their assertions, while they have never dared to seriously contradict one of mine, but, for them, every cause of error benefits their opinion. For me, affirming as I do that there are no spontaneous fermentations, I am bound to eliminate every cause of error, every perturbing influence, I can maintain my results only by means of most irreproachable experiments; their opinions, on the contrary, profit by every insufficient experiment and that is where they find their support.”

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) French chemist and microbiologist

Source: The Life of Pasteur (1902), p. 242; The first statement in bold in the above paragraph, as quoted from in Œuvres de Pasteur, Volume 7 (1939), Masson et cie, p. 539 reads:
Mon opinion, mieux encore, ma conviction, c'est que, dans l'état actuel de la science, comme vous dites avec raison, la génération spontanée est une chimère, et il vous serait impossible de me contredire, car mes expériences sont toutes debout, et toutes prouvent que la génération spontanée est une chimère

Life, Error, Support, Science

“Do you understand now the relationship between the question of spontaneous generation and the major problems that I listed in the beginning? But, gentlemen, in such a subject, rather than as poetry, pretty fancy and instinctive solutions, it is time for science, the true method resumes its duties and exercise. Here, it takes no religion, no philosophy, no atheism, no materialism, no spiritualism. I might even add: as a scholar, I do not mind. It is a matter of fact; I approached without a preconceived idea, too ready to declare, if the experiment had imposed upon me the confession, that there was a spontaneous generation, of which I am convinced today that those who assure it are blindfolded.”

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) French chemist and microbiologist

Soirées scientifiques de la Sorbonne (1864)
Original: (fr) Comprenez-vous maintenant le lien qui existe entre la question des générations spontanées et ces grands problèmes que j'ai énumérés en commençant? Mais, messieurs, dans un pareil sujet, assez de poésie comme cela, assez de fantaisie et de solutions instinctives; il est temps que la science, la vraie méthode reprenne ses droits et les exerce. Il n'y a ici ni religion, ni philosophie, ni athéisme, ni matérialisme, ni spiritualisme qui tienne. Je pourrais même ajouter : Comme savant, peu m'importe. C'est une question de fait; je l'ai abordée sans idée préconçue, aussi prêt à déclarer, si l'expérience m'en avait imposé l'aveu, qu'il existe des générations spontanées, que je suis persuadé aujourd'hui que ceux qui les affirment ont un bandeau sur les veux.

Religion, Exercises, Idea, Understanding

“Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.”

Peter Matthiessen book The Snow Leopard

"October 5", p. 42
The Snow Leopard (1978)

Life, Death, Money, Happiness

“Experience each moment as if it were the first sensation of its kind ever. Bring childlike interest and curiosity to your present-time experience.”

Noah Levine (1971) American Buddhist teacher

Against the Stream (2007)

Time

“Everything is impermanent. Every physical and mental experience arises and passes. Everything in existence is endlessly arising out of causes and conditions. We all create suffering for ourselves through our resistance, through our desire to have things different than the way they are - that is, our clinging or aversion.”

Noah Levine (1971) American Buddhist teacher

Against the Stream (2007)

Way, Suffering

“Do not teach principles that you do not practice. Resolve any contradiction between your direct experience and the words of the wise. Only then may you teach those principles.”

Govinda Bhagavatpada Indian philosopher advaita vendatna

The Himalayan Masters: A Living Tradition (2002)

“I was also interested in what it’s like to experience in a really vivid and authentic-seeming way agency and choice in a circumstance that you might later in your life view completely differently, because as much as you were experiencing agency and choice, you were actually in a radically disempowered situation you weren’t even experienced enough to recognize. That’s why I think consent is such a complicated issue.”

Susan Choi (1969) American novelist

On consent being a theme in her book Trust Exercise in “Trust, Serendipity, and Consent: An Interview with Trust Exercise Author Susan Choi” https://www.bookish.com/articles/interview-susan-choi-trust-exercise/ in Bookish (2019 Apr 16)

Life, Way, Thinking

“I have been taking these photographs as I am dead, and then I look back at these photographs to re-experience what it was like, as someone who experienced themselves as a dead person. And they’re the same. It’s very much the same experience, just one is visual and one is more verbal. Both are ways to get through a very difficult experience, and they’re also ways to remember it.”

Esmé Weijun Wang American writer

On using various mediums to highlight an experience in “Schizophrenia Terrifies: An Interview with Esmé Weijun Wang” https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/04/schizophrenia-terrifies-an-interview-with-esme-weijun-wang/ in The Paris Review (2019 Feb 4)

Way, Personality, Dead

“We do our characters a disservice by allowing them to be flat. Our role as novelists is to do our best to portray the nuance of a whole range of life experiences. It’s one of the things that fiction is uniquely positioned to do, to bring the reader into the interior life of people’s experiences that are wildly different than our own…”

Carolina de Robertis (1975) American writer

On creating rounded characters in “A Conversation with Carolina De Robertis on Immigration, Sexuality, and the True Origins of the Tango” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/conversation-carolina-de-robertis-immigration-sexuality-true-origins-tango/ in Los Angeles Review of Books (2016 Apr 20)

Life, People

“What do I believe? As an American I believe in generosity, in liberty, in the rights of man. These are social and political faiths that are part of me, as they are, I suppose, part of all of us. Such beliefs are easy to express. But part of me too is my relation to all life, my religion. And this is not so easy to talk about. Religious experience is highly intimate and, for me, ready words are not at hand. I am profoundly aware of the magnitude of the universe, that all is ruled by law, including my finite person. I believe in the infinite wisdom that envelops and embraces me and from which I take direction, purpose, strength.”

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

Essay in This I Believe : 2 (1952) edited by Edward R. Murrow, p. 142

Life, Wisdom, Faith, Religion

“I began to think about its double nature: on the one hand you have an organ in your body and on the other you have a symbol of love. From that time I started to pursue the image of a heart crossing the night from one body to another. It is a simple narrative structure but it’s open to a lot of things. I had the intuition that this book could give form to my intimate experience of death.”

Maylis de Kerangal (1967) French writer

On the heart as the focus for her book Mend the Living in “‘What is a heart? You have an organ in your body and you have a symbol of love’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/28/maylis-de-kerangal-interview-wellcome-prize-writing in The Guardian (2017 Apr 28)

Love, Death, Books, Making love

“Traumas, or very powerful, primal experiences, especially when they’re experienced by large numbers of people, have a tendency to affect everything they touch. At that border, it wasn’t just one person who died. It was many, untold numbers—mouths full of earth. I think when you have a massive collective experience like that, the trauma remains in the earth. I think the earth has a memory, trees have a memory, rivers have a memory. If we’re a little bit open to it, we pick it up…”

Kapka Kassabova (1973) author

On land holding the ghosts of trauma in “Mouths Full of Earth: An Interview with Kapka Kassabova” https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/09/12/mouths-full-of-earth-an-interview-with-kapka-kassabova/ in The Paris Review (2017 Sep 12)

People, Thinking, Tree, Memory

“As a child, I witnessed a great deal of violence and persecution as well as social unrest during The Cultural Revolution...This experience has made me understand the complexity of human nature and society—I’ve realized that the future of human civilization is also full of danger and uncertainty. Such understanding is manifested in my science fiction novels…”

Liu Cixin (1963) Chinese science fiction writer

On how his childhood experiences shaped his writings in “In the Author’s Universe: Interview with Sci-Fi Author Cixin Liu” https://vocal.media/futurism/in-the-authors-universe-interview-with-sci-fi-author-cixin-liu in Vocal (2016)

Understanding, Nature, Science, Future

“The issue over there being classes seems more a question of convenient conceptual scheme; the issue over there being centaurs, or brick houses on Elm Street, seems more a question of fact. But I have been urging that this difference is only one of degree, and that it turns upon our vaguely pragmatic inclination to adjust one strand of the fabric of science rather than another in accommodating some particular recalcitrant experience. Conservatism figures in such choices, and so does the quest for simplicity.”

Willard van Orman Quine Two Dogmas of Empiricism

"Two Dogmas of Empiricism"
From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (1953)

Question, Science, Housing

“Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle?”

Willard van Orman Quine Two Dogmas of Empiricism

"Two Dogmas of Empiricism"
From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (1953)

Law

“No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.”

Willard van Orman Quine Two Dogmas of Empiricism

"Two Dogmas of Empiricism"
From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (1953)

“Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill-founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism.”

Willard van Orman Quine Two Dogmas of Empiricism

"Two dogmas of Empiricism"
From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (1953)

Truth, Nature, Science, Parting

“Though ethics are arrived at by the group, they are meaningful only when applied by the individual himself. It is essential that Homosexuals begin to direct their thinking in this way. Ghetto walls ca be knocked down, but cooperation is essential. There are, however, difficulties to be overcome. Those in greatest need are sometimes the most reluctant to help each other or themselves, tending rather to think of personal experiences as things apart from mutual effort toward betterment.”

Harry Hay (1912–2002) American gay rights activist

Social Directions of the Homosexual (1951)

Way, Thinking, Effort, Help

“I never intended to write solely about Arab characters, or even primarily about them, but because they were such a big part of my first two novels and my memoir, people reckoned that was my main literary terrain. It wasn’t really a deliberate decision to move away from Arab characters in my later books, but more a desire to paint on a broader canvas, one that was closer to my day-to-day experience.”

Diana Abu-Jaber (1960) Novelist, short story writer, teacher

On character writing in “‘America is not the Final Word:’ An Interview with Diana Abu-Jaber” https://solsticelitmag.org/blog/america-not-final-word-interview-diana-abu-jaber/ in Solstice

People, Books, Decision, Parting

“The damage suffered by people I know and love is almost always based on the trauma of the only elder they had treating them badly or being interested only in their silence. And what you’re left with, by the grace of God and some miracle, is this inner self. Our experiences are painful and sometimes annihilating, and if we have the strength to crawl out of and excavate that wreckage, we have to ask ourselves how to describe the truth of it.”

Hilton Als (1961) writer, critic

On wrestling with the idea of “protecting your elders” in “Hilton Als, The Art of the Essay No. 3” https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/7178/hilton-als-the-art-of-the-essay-no-3-hilton-als in The Paris Review (Summer 2018)

Love, God, Pain, People

“He was only ten. It seemed to him that he could see them, the two of them, shadowy in the limbo from which time emerged and became time: the old bear absolved of mortality and himself who shared a little of it. Because he recognised now what he had smelled in the huddled dogs and tasted in his own saliva, recognised fear as a boy, a youth recognises the existence of love and passion and experience which is his heritage but not yet his patrimony, from entering by chance the presence of perhaps even merely the bedroom of a woman who has loved and been loved by many men.”

William Faulkner book Go Down, Moses

The Bear section 1 (p. 195)
Go Down, Moses (1942)

Love, Men, Youth, Fear

“There are so many stories to tell — we’re just as varied in experiences as white men, and it doesn’t look like people are sick of those stories yet. And I’m lucky enough to be in a position to tell these stories and share them.”

Maurene Goo

On being able to tell different stories about the Korean American experience in “’So Many Stories to Tell’: A Conversation with Maurene Goo” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/so-many-stories-to-tell-a-conversation-with-maurene-goo/ in Los Angeles Review of Books (2018 Aug 22)

Men, People

“Everyone should deserve that next chance to improve their lives, to contribute to their communities, to do better, and if my own personal experience serves as some form of motivation… then there will be some good that has come out of it.”

Beto O'Rourke (1972) American politician

[Beto O'Rourke, 2017, One-on-One with Evan Smith of Texas Tribune #TribFest17, https://www.facebook.com/betoorourke/videos/1424903200892719/, video, Austin, Texas, Facebook] When asked about his arrests in an interview with the Texas Tribune
2017

Communication, Motivation, Chance, Personality

“In attitude towards poverty, there is a considerable double standard. America more or less expects the Negro to be poor (and is convinced that things are getting better, a point to be dealt with in a later chapter). There is no emotional shock when people hear of the experience of these human beings in Chicago. The mind and the feelings, even of good-willed individuals, are so suffused with an unconscious racism that misery is overlooked.”

Michael Harrington book The Other America

Source: The Other America (1962), Ch. 2

People, Feeling

“I became a Hindu. I was very close to the Hindu ethic. It was a great spiritual experience. ... I believe a man can make his own destiny through his work and effort.”

Edmund Hillary (1919–2008) New Zealand mountaineer

Cited in Pioneer, 9/11/1990. Quoted from Elst, Koenraad (1991). Ayodhya and after: Issues before Hindu society.

Making love, Effort

“We live in a world in which individuals and businessmen… they want to do so unencumbered by national boundaries. At the same time, modern democracies, at least as much as other forms of government, long for autonomy; they want to control their own destinies in ways responsive to the needs of an electorate often concerned less with national than with local or sectorial interests. Yet, theory and experience indicate we can’t have it both ways, full integration and full autonomy.”

Paul Volcker (1927–2019) American economist

The political economy of the dollar

World, Way, Democracy, Time

“I bring everything I know to whatever I write, and I believe the same of other writers. A person’s complete life experience forms the basis of authorial voice, in my opinion. To hold back any part makes a narrative feel contrived.”

Tade Thompson British science fiction writer

On incorporating his medicine background into his writings in “Interview: Tade Thompson” http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-tade-thompson/ in Lightspeed Magazine (October 2017)

Life, Making love, Feeling, Parting

“A play is an ever-changing dynamic theatrical experience. Every director, cast, design team, audience and reader bring new life to a piece of dramatic literature. A play is not a fixed expression, but a revelation in a particular moment in time.”

Carmen Rivera (1964) American playwright

On her concept of plays in “Carmen Rivera” https://www.newschool.edu/drama/faculty/carmen-rivera/ (The New School Drama)

Life, Literature, Change, Time

“If you’re a playwright who doesn’t want to do people-on-a-couch plays, there are not a lot of avenues…You can go and do television, or you can stay and fight with organizations that aren’t really equipped to support work by people of color or experiment with form.”

Kristoffer Diaz American writer

On experimenting as a playwright in “Playwright Kristoffer Diaz steps into the ring” https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-xpm-2011-aug-21-la-ca-chad-deity-20110821-story.html in the Los Angeles Times (2011 Aug 21)

People, Color, Support, Fight

“Turning those revelations into art was a whole other thing…I did it, though — and that helped me realize my power, beyond the pain. Being able to illustrate those experiences for readers was a triumph, because it took everything to resist all the urges I have as a human being to present myself as good, or healed, or undamaged. I had to work against myself to make the memoir, and I ended up more empowered than I ever thought I could be.”

Terese Marie Mailhot (1983) First Nation Canadian writer, journalist, memoirist, teacher

On writing about her ordeals in “Why 'Heart Berries' Author Terese Marie Mailhot Doesn't Use The Word ‘Resilient’" https://www.bustle.com/p/why-heart-berries-author-terese-marie-mailhot-doesnt-use-the-word-resilient-8134108 in Bustle Magazine (2018 Feb 7)

Pain, Making love, Art, Help

“All stories that are centring queer kids and their experiences are all valid whether it’s dealing with the trials of having parents who aren’t as welcoming about it or parents who are totally chill about it, which is obviously the hope for all teenagers. I think there are some things that could be said too, especially culturally, like there’s a lot of stigma in the Puerto Rican community that fathers especially are so hyper masculine that they will always be uncomfortable with their children being gay…”

Adam Silvera (1990) American author

On addressing the full scope of queer experiences in “Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera Interview” https://thelittlecontemporarycorner.com/2018/11/20/becky-albertalli-and-adam-silvera-interview/ in The Little Contemporary Corner (2018 Nov 20)

Children, Hope, Communication, Thinking

“I have a strange love and affinity for South Texas and Texas in general. I carry a bit of dissonance for loving a place so many people outside of Texas hate. The reputation Texas has in places that I have lived is a rough one. The politics have skewed so far to the right and I’m usually in an environment that is mostly liberal so I find myself having to defend a place I no longer live in. But the Texas I know, the people I know, the experiences I’ve lived don’t always sync up with the image of Texas at the moment.”

Mando Alvarado actor

On his relationship with home state Texas in “SIN MUROS: INTERVIEW WITH “LIVING SCULPTURE” PLAYWRIGHT MANDO ALVARADO” https://thetheatretimes.com/sin-muros-interview-living-sculpture-playwright-mando-alvarado/ in The Theatre Times

Love, Hate, People, Making love

“Looking at, ie analyzing the so-called the visual elements of an image, we see the surface, the outer look of an artwork. All practical art education (the use of artistic elements, ie art grammar) is mainly focused on this surface analysis. Sometimes, through these elements, it tries to penetrate deep into the essence of the image, into what it initiated and created a work, into an experience (this is the primary task of theory, sociology, and art history). This is very difficult. There are works that undoubtedly suggest its depth and meaning, but there is, at least sometimes, the possibility of a mistake.”

Alfred Freddy Krupa (1971) Croatian contemporary painter, master draughtsman, book artist and art teacher, the pioneer of the New Ink Art m…

Aquarelle - Experiences of a Practitioner, Alfred Freddy Krupa , MB-Tisak (Croatia), 1994
1990s

Education, Art, History

“During all those years of experimentation and research, I never once made a discovery. All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention, pure and simple. I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable. Then it would be discarded at once and another theory evolved. This was the only possible way for me to work out the problem. … I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty was in constructing the carbon filament.... Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials used, until finally the shred of bamboo, now utilized by us, was settled upon.”

Thomas Edison (1847–1931) American inventor and businessman

On his years of research in developing the electric light bulb, as quoted in "Talks with Edison" by George Parsons Lathrop in Harper's magazine, Vol. 80 (February 1890), p. 425.
Variant:
Through all the years of experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. I start where the last man left off. … All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention pure and simple.
As quoted in Makers of the Modern World : The Lives of Ninety-two Writers, Artists, Scientists, Statesmen, Inventors, Philosophers, Composers, and Other Creators who Formed the Pattern of Our Century (1955) by Louis Untermeyer, p. 227.
1800s

Truth, Way, Problem, Light

“If the roused and insurgent consumers secure the means of production of the salt industry, in all probability they will confiscate this industry for their own profit, and their first thought will be, not to relegate it to free competition, but rather to exploit it, in common, for their own account. They will then name a director or a directive committee to operate the saltworks, to whom they will allocate the funds necessary to defray the costs of salt production. Then, since the experience of the past will have made them suspicious and distrustful, since they will be afraid that the director named by them will seize production for his own benefit, and simply reconstitute by open or hidden means the old monopoly for his own profit, they will elect delegates, representatives entrusted with appropriating the funds necessary for production, with watching over their use, and with making sure that the salt produced is equally distributed to those entitled to it. The production of salt will be organized in this manner.This form of the organization of production has been named communism.When this organization is applied to a single commodity, the communism is said to be partial.When it is applied to all commodities, the communism is said to be complete.But whether communism is partial or complete, political economy is no more tolerant of it than it is of monopoly, of which it is merely an extension.”

Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912) Belgian political economist and classical liberal theorist

Source: The Production of Security (1849), p. 31

Making love, Communication, Past

“An experiment about your next vacation will allow you to observe your attitude to your experiencing self: At the end of the vacation, all pictures and videos will be destroyed. Furthermore, you will swallow a potion that will wipe out all your memories of the vacation. How would this affect your vacation plans? How much would you be willing to pay for it, relative to a normally memorable vacation? My impression is that the elimination of memories greatly reduces the value of the experience.Imagine a painful operation during which you will scream in pain and beg the surgeon to stop. However, you are promised an amnesia-inducing drug that will wipe out any memory of the episode. Here again, my observation is that most people are remarkably indifferent to the pains of their experiencing self. Some say they don’t care at all. Others share my feeling, which is that I feel pity for my suffering self but not more than I would feel for a stranger in pain.I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”

Daniel Kahneman (1934) Israeli-American psychologist

Bias, Blindness and How We Truly Think (Part 4): Daniel Kahneman, bloomberg.com, 24 October 2011, 15 May 2014 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-27/bias-blindness-and-how-we-truly-think-part-4-daniel-kahneman.html, "Bias, Blindness and How We Truly Think" (2011)

Pain, People, Feeling, Suffering

“To an increasing number of practitioners, computer simulations rooted in mathematics represent a third way of doing science, alongside theory and experiment.”

Ivars Peterson (1948) Canadian mathematician

Source: The Mathematical Tourist: New and Updated Snapshots of Modern Mathematics (1998), Chapter 1, “Explorations” (p. 10)

Way, Mathematics, Science

“Nature is interested in only two things—to survive and to reproduce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is responsible for the boredom of man. So we have varieties of religious experience. You are not satisfied with your own religious teachings or games; so you bring in others from India, Asia or China. They become interesting because they are something new. You pick up a new language and try to speak it and use it to feel more important. But basically, it is the same thing.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

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

Feeling, Game, Nature

“It will thus be seen that every time a proposal for the reform of the constitution comes forth, the Muslims are there, ready with some new political demand or demands. The only check upon such indefinite expansion of Muslim demands is the power of the British Government, which must be the final arbiter in any dispute between the Hindus and the Muslims. Who can confidently say that the decision of the British will not be in favour of the Muslims, if the dispute relating to these new demands was referred to them for arbitration? The more the Muslims demand, the more accommodating the British seem to become. At any rate, past experience shows that the British have been inclined to give the Muslims more than what the Muslims had themselves asked.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)

Confidence, Decision, Relation ships, Time

“In the British vacuum of passive-aggressive public transport and mumbled apologies, Chris Martin’s stomach-ribbing charisma on stage can be as nauseating as doing star jumps right after lunch, and it’s not hard to see how the everlasting hate for Coldplay was born. But when we hate on them, are we just acknowledging that we want to experience more from life? Or are we negating the fact we feel these everyday – average, yet no less meaningful – emotions deep down, too? I think it’s a bit of both.”

Chris Martin (1977) musician, co-founder of Coldplay

Ryan Bassil, February 11 2016. source http://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/6w8v44/why-do-we-hate-coldplay

Life, Hate, Feeling, Star

“Men should always change diapers, it’s a very rewarding experience. It’s mentally cleansing. It’s like washing dishes, but imagine if the dishes were your kids, so you really love the dishes.”

Chris Martin (1977) musician, co-founder of Coldplay

http://zeenews.india.com/entertainment/celebrity/men-should-always-change-diapers-chris-martin_5266.html source

Love, Men, Making love, Imagination

“I consider it vitally important to preserve the democratic achievements which have been attained in the last few years. We have paid with all our history and tragic experience for these democratic achievements, and they are not to be abandoned, whatever the circumstances, and whatever the pretexts. Otherwise, all our hopes for the best will be buried.”

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

1990s, Resignation Address (1991)

Hope, History

“Unlike the general perception, Singh is not really a bureaucrat. My personal experience is that he is politically shrewd.”

Manmohan Singh (1932) 13th Prime Minister of India

I. G. Patel, 14th Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, as quoted "Manmohan is politically shrewd: Dr IG Patel" http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/manmohan-is-politically-shrewd-dr-ig-patel-104052001025_1.html, Business Standard (20 May 2004)

Personality

“A lot of people want to tell me their stories, and it’s not just the people who were alive back then. Though the play deals with AIDS, it’s about more than just the epidemic. It deals with things that plague gay men now. It’s very much about addiction, too. And the audience’s experiences run the gamut. And these audiences feel emboldened in the best way possible to not keep secrets. And they feel like they trust us enough to tell us their stories. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Matthew Lopez (playwright) (1978) American playwright

On the impact of The Inheritance in “PLAYWRIGHT MATTHEW LOPEZ WANTS TO HEAR YOUR STORIES” https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/matthew-lopez-the-inheritance-broadway-play-aids-gay-storytelling in Interview Magazine (2019 Nov 14)

Men, People, Secret, Beauty

“My plays are clean. Most plays have four, five vital moments in the play and the rest of the play is just getting to it. It’s just fill. I don’t know why, whether it’s just to create the sense that it’s real or that you have to spend two hours to experience the power (you have to see not just snapshots). But I find it very boring. I go to sleep when I see plays like that, and I go to sleep writing it…”

María Irene Fornés (1930–2018) American writer

On avoiding the typical play structures in “María Irene Fornés by Allen Frame” https://bombmagazine.org/articles/maria-irene-fornes/ in BOMB Magazine (1984 Oct 1)

Sense, Sleep

“I can only respond as an artist, because that’s what I am. I’m not going to become a politician all of a sudden. I am a politician in terms of the plays that I write, the way I embrace culture, the way I embrace characters that, in my particular case, have to do with the Latino world. And I embrace the Latino experience…”

Nilo Cruz (1960) American playwright

On whether he feels pressured to represent the Latino community after winning a Pulitzer in “Nilo Cruz by Emily Mann” https://bombmagazine.org/articles/nilo-cruz/ in BOMB Magazine (2004 Jan 1)

World, Way

“If the action of The Bridge Party moves at what might at times seems to be a snail’s pace, it is because I want the audience to experience the characters as full human beings, not as abstractions or stereotypes…”

Sandra Seaton Playwright and writer

On choosing her pacing (as quoted in the book Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women https://books.google.com/books?id=G1il9uQG3A8C&pg=PA319&lpg=PA319&dq; 1998)

Time

“Plays are events in time and space. Plays are music. Word music. Visual music. I’ve always thought of plays as a form of composition—of text and the architecture of the experience of the full-length evening…”

Caridad Svich (1963) American writer

On how she describes plays in “Making Invisible Stories Seen, Heard and Felt Interview with Caridad Svich” http://www.critical-stages.org/3/making-invisible-stories-seen-heard-and-felt-interview-with-caridad-svich/ in The IATC webjournal/Revue web de l'AICT – Autumn 2010: Issue No 3

Music, Time

“The Vietnam War was raging at that particular time, so I wanted to do a positive play about a country character who was yearning for his home, as I was doing at Christmas…I drew on my experience growing up in the country - plowing mules, cropping tobacco, bootleggers, going to church. The rest was my imagination. I wanted to do something that could be performed on the streets - I love street theater. And I wanted my character to have a conscience.”

Samm-Art Williams (1946) American playwright and screenwriter

On what inspired him to write the play Home in “Lyrical, Uplifting HOME by Samm-Art Williams Comes to ICT” https://www.broadwayworld.com/los-angeles/article/Lyrical-Uplifting-HOME-by-Samm-Art-Williams-Comes-to-ICT-20170915 in Broadway World: Los Angeles (2017 Sep 15)

Love, War, Making love, Home

“Unlike other comic book creators who were given either stateside or way-behind-lines assignments, and perhaps because Kirby understood Yiddish, the Jewish German dialect spoken by his family, he was sent as a scout behind enemy lines to draw maps. He endured and survived many harrowing violent experiences during his service, almost losing his feet to trench foot. He had no time for fascists or racists.”

Jack Kirby (1917–1994) American comic book artist, writer and editor

Randolph Hoppe, as qtd in Arturo Garcia, "Would Captain America’s Co-Creator Punch Nazis?" https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/01/24/captain-americas-co-creator-punch-nazis/, Snopes, (24 January 2017). About

Books, Family, Way, Time

“All pedagogy, when it matters, is contextual. Different kids come from different neighborhoods, they come from different experiences, they come from different classes, and they come from different backgrounds. Context always matters in an educational setting and matters of difference have to be addressed if you are going to connect with young people. In order for education to work, you have to make it meaningful, to make it critical, to make it transformative.”

Henry Giroux (1943) American academic

Interview with Media For Us, 2019

People, Education, Making love

“It is my own experience … that commentators are far more ingenious at finding meaning than authors are at inserting it.”

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

The Annotated Gulliver's Travels (1980), p. 16
General sources

“The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they have personally experienced; and their own experience is always indirect.”

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) American sociologist

"The Cultural Apparatus"
Power, Politics, and People (1963)

Men, World, Understanding, Personality

“The trend of employment is towards a high level, and a recurrence of chronic mass unemployment is most unlikely. The Keynesian techniques are now well understood, and there is no reason to fear a repetition of the New Deal experience of a government with the will to spend its way out of a recession, but frustrated in doing so by faulty knowledge. The political pressure for full employment is stronger than ever before; the experience of the inter-war years bit so deeply into the political psychology of the nation that full employment, if threatened, would always constitute the dominant issue at any election, and no right-wing party could now survive a year in office if it permitted the figures of unemployment which were previously quite normal.”

Anthony Crosland (1918–1977) British politician

'The Transition from Capitalism' in Richard Crossman (ed.), New Fabian Essays (Turnstile Press, 1952), pp. 39–40

War, Fear, Way, Knowledge

“I expect that soon the failure of the attempts to transform Russia into a Socialist community by methods of dictatorship will become apparent to all. The failure of the Communist experiment in Russia, however, does not mean the downfall of the Bolshevik regime. The two things are not necessarily linked together. Nay, they are mutually exclusive. The same backwardness that makes Socialism in Russia at the present time impossible favors the strengthening of despotism once it has taken root.”

Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) Czech-Austrian philosopher, journalist, and Marxist theoretician

Chap. IV, Democracy and Dictatorship “Marxism and Bolshevism: Democracy and Dictatorship,” (1934) http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1934/bolshevism/index.htm

Making love, Communication, Failure, Time

“Sophistication, that modern kind of sophistication that begs to differ, to be paradoxical, to invert, is not a possible attitude in Venice. In time, this becomes the beauty of the place. One gives up the struggle and submits to a classic experience. One accepts the fact that what one is about to feel or say has not only been said before by Goethe or Musset but is on the tip of the tongue of the tourist from Iowa who is alighting in the Piazzetta with his wife in her furpiece and jeweled pin. Those Others, the existential enemy, are here identical with oneself.”

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) American writer

Source: Venice Observed (1956), Ch. 1

Beauty, Feeling, Time

“Those things, thoughts, beings, acts, and instincts which help us to the pleasurable experiences of life we call good, and those which deprive us of pleasure or which bring upon us painful experiences we call bad. This is the supreme standard—Utility. Is the thing, thought, being, act, or impulse useful? Does it lead directly or indirectly to happiness and well-being? If it does, it is right, proper, and good. If it does not, it is wrong, improper, and bad.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), Contents of Ethics, p. 53

Life, Pain, Bad luck, Happiness

“The defect in this argument is that it assumes that the basis of ethics is life, whereas ethics is concerned, not with life, but with consciousness. The question ever asked by ethics is not, Does the thing live? but. Does it feel? It is impossible to do right and wrong to that which is incapable of sentient experience. Ethics arises with consciousness and is coextensive with it.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

We have no ethical relation to the clod, the molecule, or the scale sloughed off from our skin on the back of our hand, because the clod, the molecule, and the scale have no feeling, no soul, no anything rendering them capable of being affected by us [...] The fact that a thing is an organism, that it has organisation, has in itself no more ethical significance than the fact that it has symmetry, or redness, or weight.
Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Survival of the Strenuous, p. 169

Life, Feeling, Question

“We know what a lion looks like when painted by a man, but human eyes have never yet been allumined by the sardonic lineaments of a man painted by a lion. Being boiled alive in order to look well as corpses in store-windows, and having wooden pegs thrust into our muscles and left there to rot for a week or two to keep us in our agony from doing something desperate—we know what these experiences are like when they are delegated to lobsters, and we take no more serious part in them than to insure their infliction, but we are too fervent barbarians to bother our heads about what they are like from the crustacean point of view.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Conclusion", p. 233
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Psychical Kinship

Parting, Painting

“Man is a talkative and religious ape. He is an ape, but with a much greater amount of enterprise and with a greater likelihood of being found in every variety of climate. Like the anthropoid, man has a bald face and an obsolete tail. But he is distinguished from his arboreal relative by his arrogant bearing, his skilled larynx, and especially by the satisfaction he experiences in the contemplation of the image which appears when he looks in a mirror.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Man an Animal", p. 17
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Physical Kinship

Appearance

“If this ball is ever other than a globule of alloy, if the universe ever experiences the long longed for millennium of prophecy and hope, all must come thru the reformed and glorified gateway of the womb. Individual, or post-natal, reformation is, and must always be, more or less imperfect. It is powerless in determining the nature with which beings come into the world, and it is ineffectual in modifying it after it is determined.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Race Culture, p. 210

World, Hope, Nature, Universe

“The chief activities of beings, both human and non-human, are put forth, directly or indirectly, for the purpose of procuring food. The suppression, entire or partial, of one being by another for nutritive purposes is, therefore, the form of the most frequent and excessive egoism. The lowly forms of life—the worms, echinoderms, mollusks, and the like—are, for the most part, vegetarians. So, also, are prevalently the insects, birds, rodents, and ungulates. These creatures are not, as a rule, aggressively harmful to each other, chiefly indifferent. But upon these inoffensive races feed with remorseless maw the reptilia, the insectivora, and the carnivora. These being-eaters cause to the earth-world its bloodiest experiences. It is their nature (established organically by long selection, or, as in the case of man, acquired tentatively) to subsist, not on the kingdom of the plant, the natural and primal storehouse of animal energy, but on the skeletons and sensibilities of their neighbors and friends. The serpent dines on the sparrow and the sparrow ingulfs the gnat; the tiger slays the jungle-fowl and the coyote plunders the lamb; the seal subsists on fish and the ursus maritimus subsists on seal; the ant enslaves the aphidae and man eats and enslaves what can not get away from him. Life riots on life—tooth and talon, beak and paw. It is a sickening contemplation, But life everywhere, in its aspect of activity, is largely made up of the struggle by one being against another for existence—of the effort by one being to circumvent, subjugate, or destroy another, and of the counter effort to reciprocate or escape.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Preponderance of Egoism, pp. 123–125

Life, World, Food, Nature

“There is no sympathy, no consciousness of kind, no realization that the emotions experienced by that valiant little creature struggling to avoid the mouths of those instinct-maddened dogs are similar to the emotions they themselves would experience in an identical predicament.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Egoism and Altruism, pp. 117

Dogs

“Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: It transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural and the spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

These two statements are very similar, widely quoted, and seem to paraphrase some ideas in the essay "Religion and Science" (see below), but neither of the two specific quotes above been properly sourced. Notable Einstein scholars such as John Stachel and Thomas J. McFarlane (author of Buddha and Einstein: The Parallel Sayings) know of this statement but have not found any source for it. Any information on any definite original sources for these is welcome. This quote does not actually appear in Albert Einstein: The Human Side as is sometimes claimed. Only two sources from before 1970 can be found on Google Books. The first is The Theosophist: Volume 86 which seems to cover the years 1964 http://books.google.com/books?id=7pLjAAAAMAAJ&q=1964#search_anchor and 1965 http://books.google.com/books?id=7pLjAAAAMAAJ&q=1965#search_anchor. The quote appears attributed to Einstein on p. 255 http://books.google.com/books?id=7pLjAAAAMAAJ&q=%22natural+and+spiritual%22#search_anchor, with the wording given as "The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description." An identical quote appears on p. 284 http://books.google.com/books?id=YpsfAQAAIAAJ&q=%22dogmas+and+theology%22#search_anchor of The Maha Bodhi: Volume 72 published by the Maha Bodhi Society of India, which seems to contain issues from throughout 1964 http://books.google.com/books?id=YpsfAQAAIAAJ&q=%22volume+72%22#search_anchor. A number of phrases in the quote are similar to phrases in Einstein's "Religion and Science". Comparing the version of the quote in The Theosophist to the version of "Religion and Science" published in 1930, "a cosmic religion" in the first resembles "the cosmic religious sense" in the second; "transcend a personal God" resembles "does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God"; "covering both the natural and the spiritual" resembles "revealed in nature and in the world of thought"; "the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity" resembles "experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance"; and "Buddhism answers this description" resembles "The cosmic element is much stronger in Buddhism". These phrases appear in the same order in both cases, and the ones from "Religion and Science" are all from a single paragraph of the essay. Misattributed Variant: The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism.

God, Religion, Nature, Sense

“I said before, the most beautiful and most profound religious emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. And this mysticality is the power of all true science. If there is any such concept as a God, it is a subtle spirit, not an image of a man that so many have fixed in their minds. In essence, my religion consists of a humble admiration for this illimitable superior spirit that reveals itself in the slight details that we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

As quoted in The Private Albert Einstein (1992) by Peter A. Bucky and Allen G. Weakland, p. 86
Attributed in posthumous publications

God, Religion, Beauty, Science

“I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1940s, Why Socialism? (1949)

Life, Making love, Feeling, Nature

“The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1940s, Why Socialism? (1949)

Making love, Nature, Dependency

“And camcorders: here is technology gone berserk. Everywhere you go now, there’s some dick, some yo-yo, some putz with a camcorder, and he is going to tape…EVERYTHING! Doesn’t anyone in this country stop and LOOK AT THINGS anymore? Sort of take them in? Maybe even…remember them? Is that such a strange notion. Does experience need to be documented and brought home and saved on a shelf? And do people really watch this shit? Are people’s lives so bankrupt they sit at home looking at things they already DID?”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

"Free-Floating Hostility"
Back in Town (1996)

People, Home, Country

“I marvel at the complacency of Ministers in the face of the frightful experiences through which we have all so newly passed. I look with wonder upon our thoughtless crowds disporting themselves in the summer sunshine, and upon this unfocused, unheeding House of Commons, which seems to have no higher function than to cheer a Minister. But what is happening across the narrow seas? A terrible process is astir. Germany is arming.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

That mighty race who fought and almost vanquished the whole world is on the march again. The whole nation is inspired with the idea of retrieving and avenging their defeat in the Great War. They have arisen from the pit of disaster in monstrous guise. ... And we are still pestering France to disarm, and we are still disarmed ourselves!
'How I Would Procure Peace', Daily Mail (9 July 1934), quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, Volume 12: The Wilderness Years, 1929–1935 (Michigan: Hillsdale Press, 2012), p. 825, n. 3
The 1930s

Summer, Housing, Sea

Quotes about experiment page 50

Quotes about experiment
page 50