Quotes about expression
page 37

Sandra Fluke photo
Marcelo Tas photo

“Luiza (his oldest daughter) expressed this option in college. At the time, talked with her and school counselors. It was important to let the choice be hers and that any pressure was accompanied by homophobic colleagues. Fortunately, there was no question about their most serious option. That, remember, is personal.”

Marcelo Tas (1959) Brazilian actor

In a news magazine Alfa, talks about his daughter being gay. Vote em mim, Ronaldo Bressane, September 12, 2010, Alfa, Portuguese http://web.archive.org/web/20101006030234/http://revistaalfa.abril.com.br/cultura-e-sociedade/cultura-entretenimento/vote-em-mim/,

Yoko Ono photo

“I thank Pussy Riot for standing firmly in their belief for Freedom of Expression, and making all women of the world proud to be women.”

Yoko Ono (1933) Japanese artist, author, and peace activist

As quoted in "Scores of musicians urge Russia to release Pussy Riot" at Amnesty International (22 July 2013) http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/scores-musicians-urge-russia-release-pussy-riot-2013-07-22

Jean Froissart photo

“His chapters inspire me with more enthusiasm than even poetry itself. And the noble canon, with what true chivalrous feeling he confines his beautiful expressions of sorrow to the death of the gallant and high-bred knight, of whom it was a pity to see the fall, such was his loyalty to his king, pure faith to his religion, hardihood towards his enemy, and fidelity to his lady-love!”

Jean Froissart (1337–1405) French writer

Ah, benedicite! how he will mourn over the fall of such a pearl of knighthood, be it on the side he happens to favour, or on the other. But, truly, for sweeping from the face of the earth some few hundreds of villain churls, who are born but to plough it, the high-born and inquisitive historian has marvellous little sympathy.
Claverhouse, in Walter Scott's Old Mortality (1816), ch. 35.
Criticism

Man Ray photo
Pedro Albizu Campos photo
Gordon B. Hinckley photo

“Our lives are the only meaningful expression of what we believe and in Whom we believe. And the only real wealth, for any of us, lies in our faith.”

Why do I say this? Faith in a Divine Being, in the Almighty, is the great moving power that can change our lives. With it comes the only lasting comfort and peace of mind. God is our Eternal Father, and He lives. I don't understand the wonder of His majesty; I can't comprehend His glory. But I know that He is intensely interested in our welfare and involved in our lives, that I can speak with Him in prayer, and that He will hear and listen.
Standing for Something: Ten Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes.

Russell Brand photo
Cormac McCarthy photo
Harry Turtledove photo
Andrea Dworkin photo
Andrea Dworkin photo
Daniel Defoe photo
William McKinley photo
Josefa Iloilo photo

“I welcome the democratic process allowing all sections of society to express their views on the proposed legislation. The debate taking place is, in itself, helping the nation to understand that reconciliation is a difficult but necessary process.”

Josefa Iloilo (1920–2011) President of Fiji

on the government's controversial plans to set up a Commission empowered to compensate victims and pardon perpetrators of the political upheaval of 2000
Speech opening Parliament, 1 August 2005 (excerpts)

John Muir photo
Dag Hammarskjöld photo
Prem Rawat photo
Teal Swan photo
Robert Greene photo
Teal Swan photo
E.E. Cummings photo
Tracey Thorn photo
Charles Darwin photo

“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

Letter https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-2814.xml to Asa Gray, 22 May 1860
Other letters, notebooks, journal articles, recollected statements

Audre Lorde photo
Peter Hammill photo

“Re-awakening isn't easy when you're tired.
Don't push me: I was taught self-expression
when I was a child”

Peter Hammill (1948) British musician

"Re-awakening" on Fool's Mate (1971)

E.E. Cummings photo
Thomas Carlyle photo

“there is a great free human heart in this man. The common speech of him has a rugged nobleness, idiomatic, expressive, genuine; gleams here and there with beautiful poetic tints.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Priest

“We might express this as "all persons are I" or rather as "you and I are the same person."”

Arnold Zuboff (1946) American philosopher

" An Introduction to Universalism http://nsl.com/misc/zuboff/zuboff1.htm" p. 5

Winnie Byanyima photo

“Feminism, human rights and zero discrimination are values deeply rooted across the world: they express our humanity, our recognition that I am because you are. And they are central to the struggle to beat AIDS. Let us beat AIDS. It can be done.”

Winnie Byanyima (1959) Ugandan aeronautical engineer, politician and diplomat

Press statement on the Zero Discrimination Day, Message from the UNAIDS Executive Director on Zero Discrimination Day and International Women’s Day https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/pressreleaseandstatementarchive/2020/march/2020-zdd-exd-message, UNAIDS

June Downey photo
Thich Nhat Hanh photo
Emmanuel Macron photo

“This evening, we know that at least one police officer was killed, and another injured. This imponderable problem, this menace will be part of our daily lives for the years to come. I express all my support in this regard for our police forces and the forces of law and order. I am thinking of the victim's family.””

Emmanuel Macron (1977) 25th President of the French Republic

20 April 2017 https://www.facebook.com/EmmanuelMacron/posts/1951134895119087/
2017
Original: (fr) Ce soir, on sait qu'au moins un policier a été tué, qu’un autre a été blessé. Cet impondérable, cette menace fera partie du quotidien des prochaines années. Je témoigne toute ma solidarité à l’égard de nos forces de police, de nos forces de l’ordre. J'ai une pensée pour la famille de la victime.

Michel Henry photo
Michel Henry photo

“The culture is the whole of the enterprises and of the practices in which the abundance of life expresses itself, they all have as motivation the 'load', the 'over' which disposes inwardly the living subjectivity as a force ready to give unstintingly itself and constraint, under the load, to do it.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Michel Henry, La Barbarie, éd. Grasset, 1987, p. 172
Books on Culture and Barbarism, Barbarism (1987)
Original: (fr) La culture est l'ensemble des entreprises et des pratiques dans lesquelles s'exprime la surabondance de la vie, toutes elles ont pour motivation la « charge », le « trop » qui dispose intérieurement la subjectivité vivante comme une force prête à se prodiguer et contrainte, sous la charge, de le faire.

Michel Henry photo

“How capitalism finds its substance and its essence in the living work, in such a way that it comes exclusively from it, can't go without it, lives only drawing at each time its life from that of the worker, life that then becomes his own, this is what expresses in the whole work of Marx the theme of vampire. "Capitalism is dead work which, such as a vampire, animates itself only in sucking the living work and the more it pumps, the more its life is cheerful."”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Michel Henry, Marx II. une philosophie de l’économie, éd. Gallimard, coll. « Nrf », 1976, p. 435
Books on Economy and Politics, Marx. A Philosophy of Human Being (1976)
Original: (fr) Comment le capital trouve sa substance et son essence dans le travail vivant, de telle manière qu’il provient exclusivement de lui, ne peut se passer de lui, ne vit que pour autant qu’il puise à chaque instant sa vie dans celle du travailleur, vie qui devient ainsi la sienne, c’est ce qu’exprime à travers toute l’œuvre de Marx le thème du vampire. « Le capital est du travail mort qui, semblable au vampire, ne s’anime qu’en suçant le travail vivant et sa vie est d’autant plus allègre qu’il en pompe davantage ».

Dean Ornish photo
Philip Roth photo

“Immediate reality is outside that window; so big it is, so much of it, everything entangled in everything else...What large thought Sabbath was struggling to express? Is he asking, "Whatever did happen to my own true life?"”

Was it taking place elsewhere? But how then can looking out of this window be so gigantically real? Well, that is the difference between the true and the real. We don't get to live in the truth. That's why Nikki ran away. She was an idealist, an innocent, touching, talented illusionist who wanted to live in the truth. Well, if you found it, kid, you're the first. In my experience the direction of life is toward incoherence — precisely what you would never confront. Maybe that was the only coherent thing you could think to do: die to deny incoherence.
Sabbath's Theater (1995)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer photo

“Jesus Christ has to suffer and be rejected. … Suffering and being rejected are not the same. Even in his suffering Jesus could have been the celebrated Christ. Indeed, the entire compassion and admiration of the world could focus on the suffering. Looked upon as something tragic, the suffering could in itself convey its own value, its own honor and dignity. But Jesus is the Christ who was rejected in his suffering. Rejection removed all dignity and honor from his suffering. It had to be dishonorable suffering. Suffering and rejection express in summary form the cross of Jesus. Death on the cross means to suffer and to die as one rejected and cast out. It was by divine necessity that Jesus had to suffer and be rejected. Any attempt to hinder what is necessary is satanic. Even, or especially, if such an attempt comes from the circle of disciples, because it intends to prevent Christ from being Christ. The fact that it is Peter, the rock of the church, who makes himself guilty doing this just after he has confessed Jesus to be the Christ and has been commissioned by Christ, shows that from its very beginning the church has taken offense at the suffering of Christ. It does not want that kind of Lord, and as Christ's church it does not want to be forced to accept the law of suffering from its Lord.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Discipleship (1937), Discipleship and the Cross, p. 84

Thomas Hylland Eriksen photo

“Many social scientists, including anthropologists, have been interested in the power inherent in gender relations, often described through the idiom of female oppression. It can be argued that men usually tend to exert more power over women than vice versa. In most societies, men generally hold the most important political and religious positions, and very often men control the formal economy. In some societies, it may even be prescribed for women to cover their body and face when they appear in the public sphere, and, paradoxically, these practices sometimes become more common as their societies become more modern. On the other hand, women are often capable of exerting considerable informal power, not least in the domestic sphere. Anthropologists cannot state unequivocally that women are oppressed before they have investigated all aspects of their society, including how the women (and men) themselves perceive their situation. One cannot dismiss the possibility that certain women in western Asia (the Middle East) see the ‘liberated’ western woman as more oppressed – by professional career pressure, demands to look good and other expectations – than themselves.
When studying societies undergoing change, which perhaps most anthropologists do today, it is important to look at the value conflicts and tensions between different interest groups that are particularly central. Often these conflicts are expressed through gender relations.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1962) Norwegian social anthropologist and professor

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 2 : Key Concepts

Thomas Hylland Eriksen photo
Georg Simmel photo

“Money expresses all qualitative differences of things in terms of "how much?"”

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) German sociologist, philosopher, and critic

Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability. All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. All things lie on the same level and differ from one another only in the size of the area which they cover.
The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903)

John Jay photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Benjamin Creme photo
Benjamin Creme photo
John Allen Paulos photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Norman Solomon photo
Elizabeth of the Trinity photo

“Remain in Me." It is the Word of God who gives this order, expresses this wish. Remain in Me, not for a few moments, a few hours which must pass away, but "remain...”

Elizabeth of the Trinity (1880–1906) French Carmelite nun and mystic

permanently, habitually, Remain in Me, pray in Me, adore in Me, love in Me, suffer in Me, work and act in Me.

First Day, 3
Heaven in Faith (1906)

Marilyn Ferguson photo

“According to Confucian writings, wise individuals, wanting good government, looked first within, seeking precise words to express their hitherto unvoiced yearnings, "the tones given off by the heart."”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

Once they were able to verbalize the intelligence of the heart they disciplined themselves. Order within the self led first to harmony within their own households, then the state, and finally the empire.
The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Seven, Right Power

Shaun Chamberlin photo

“All our thoughts and beliefs are somehow hollow until they find expression in action.”

The Transition Timeline: for a local, resilient future, (2009), p. 167 http://www.darkoptimism.org/books.html#TheTransitionTimeline

Arun Shourie photo

“Caste is real. The working class is real. Being a Naga is real. But ‘India is just a geographical expression!’ Similarly, being a Muslim of course is real – Islam must be seen and talked of as one block of granite – ... But Hinduism? Why, there is no such thing: it is just an aggregation, a pile of assorted beliefs and practices – ... And anyone who maintains anything to the contrary is a fascist out to insinuate a unity, indeed to impose a uniformity, where there has been none. That is what our progressive ideologues declaim, as we have seen. In a word, the parts alone are real. The whole is just a construct. India has never been one, these ideologues insist – disparate peoples and regions were knocked together by the Aryans, by the Mughals, by the British for purposes of empire. Anyone who wants to use that construct – India – as the benchmark for determining the sort of structure under which we should live has a secret agenda – of enforcing Hindu hegemony.
This is the continuance of, in a sense the culmination of, the Macaulay-Missionary technique. The British calculated that to subjugate India and hold it, they must undermine the essence of the people: this was Hinduism, and everything which flowed from it. Hence the doggedness with which they set about to undermine the faith and regard of the people for five entities: the gods and goddesses the Hindus revered; the temples and idols in which they were enshrined; the texts they held sacred; the language in which those texts and everything sacred in that tradition was enshrined and which was even in mid-nineteenth-century the lingua franca – that is, Sanskrit; and the group whose special duty it had been over aeons to preserve that way of life – the Brahmins. The other component of the same exercise was to prop up the parts – the non-Hindus, the regional languages, the castes and groups which they calculated would be the most accessible to the missionaries and the empire – the innocent tribals, the untouchables.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud (1998)

Roberta Flack photo

“I didn’t try to be a soul singer, a jazz singer, a blues singer – no category…My music is my expression of what I feel and believe in a moment.”

Roberta Flack (1937) American singer

On her career trajectory in “Roberta Flack: 'My music is my expression of what I feel in a moment'” https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jan/21/roberta-flack-interview-music-grammys in The Guardian (2020 Jan 21)

Joanna Trollope photo

“For all that somebody gets dumped every nanosecond in the world, you don’t want to be lumped in with everybody else – you want it to be expressed as poignantly and vividly as you feel it yourself…A cliche is only a cliche if it’s happening in someone else’s life.”

Joanna Trollope (1943) British writer

On how people react to her characters in “Joanna Trollope on families, fiction and feminism: ‘Society still expects women to do all the caring’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/02/joanna-trollope-on-families-fiction-and-feminism-society-still-expects-women-to-do-all-the-caring in The Guardian (2020 Mar 2)

William Quan Judge photo
Michael Greger photo
Joyce Brothers photo

“In strong families, positive strokes out-number negative broadsides by a wide margin. Members regularly express appreciation: "Thanks for fixing the drainpipe." "You look so nice in that dress." "The dinner was great."”

Joyce Brothers (1927–2013) Joyce Brothers

Criticism is offered gently. After all, strong families figure, if we can be kind to strangers, why not to one another?
10 Keys to a Strong Family (2002)

Ted Bundy photo

“I have known people who ... radiate vulnerability .... Their facial expressions say 'I am afraid of you.'”

Ted Bundy (1946–1989) American serial killer

These people invite abuse ... By expecting to be hurt, do they subtly encourage it?

In a 1977 letter to girlfriend Elizabeth Kloepfer, quoted in Kendall, Elizabeth (September 1981). The Phantom Prince: My Life With Ted Bundy (Hardcover, 1st ed.). Seattle: Madrona. page 167

Coraline Ada Ehmke photo

“Values that are expressed but that don't change behavior are not really values, they are lies that you tell yourself.”

Coraline Ada Ehmke technologist, activist, and transgender feminist

Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub https://where.coraline.codes/blog/my-year-at-github/ (July 5, 2017)

Ulysses S. Grant photo

“I feel that we are on the eve of a new era, when there is to be great harmony between the Federal and Confederate. I cannot stay to be a living witness to the correctness of this prophecy; but I feel it within me that it is to be so. The universally kind feeling expressed for me at a time when it was supposed that each day would prove my last, seemed to me the beginning of the answer to "Let us have peace."”

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

The expression of these kindly feelings were not restricted to a section of the country, nor to a division of the people. They came from individual citizens of all nationalities; from all denominations — the Protestant, the Catholic, and the Jew; and from the various societies of the land — scientific, educational, religious or otherwise. Politics did not enter into the matter at all.
I am not egotist enough to suppose all this significance should be given because I was the object of it. But the war between the States was a very bloody and a very costly war. One side or the other had to yield principles they deemed dearer than life before it could be brought to an end. I commanded the whole of the mighty host engaged on the victorious side. I was, no matter whether deservedly so or not, a representative of that side of the controversy. It is a significant and gratifying fact that Confederates should have joined heartily in this spontaneous move. I hope the good feeling inaugurated may continue to the end.

Conclusion
1880s, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885)

Jan Mankes photo

“..Painting never means just never picturing the material things, but it is a psychological function, an expression of how his mind [of the artist] responds to things. So that is quite a difference with: painting is showing the beauty of things.”

Jan Mankes (1889–1920) Dutch painter

translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek

(original Dutch: citaat van Jan Mankes, in het Nederlands:) Schilderen is.. ..nooit een afbeelding geven der stoffelijke zaken, maar een psychische functie, een uiten hoe zijn geest [van de kunstenaar] reageert ten opzichte der dingen. Dat is dus een heel verschil met: schilderen is de schoonheid der dingen laten zien.

Quote of Jan Mankes in a letter to his maceneas A.A.M. Pauwels in The Hague; as cited by J.R. de Groot in 'De bekoring van het gewone - Het werk van Jan Mankes https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_ons003199001_01/_ons003199001_01_0014.php', p. 102
undated quotes

Hendrik Willem Mesdag photo

“That splendid, head, in which everything is said that can be said; color, line, tone, expression; the slightly advanced head, with the soft, almost human eyes, I never enter my studio in the morning without my eye falling upon this creature and wishing it 'Good Morning.'”

Hendrik Willem Mesdag (1831–1915) painter from the Northern Netherlands

note of H.W. Mesdag, published in the exhibition catalogue of Corporation Gallery of London, the Guildhall, in 1903; as cited in the catalogue of The American Art Galleries Madison Square South, New York, 3 March 1920 https://ia601600.us.archive.org/29/items/b1470642/b1470642.pdf

remark about the painting 'Ramskop' of Matthijs Maris, painted c. 1860 https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/26605, which Mesdag bought and hanged in his house for many years
after 1880

William Bartram photo

“Should I say, that the river (in this place) from shore to shore, and perhaps near half a mile above and below me, appeared to be one solid bank of fish, of various kinds, pushing through this narrow pass of San Juan's into the little lake, on their return down the river, and that the alligators were in such incredible numbers, and so close from shore to shore, that it would have easy to have walked across on their heads, had the animals been harmless? What expressions can sufficiently declare the shocking scene that for some minutes continued, whilst this mighty army of fish were forcing the pass? During this attempt, thousands, I may say hundreds of thousands, of them were caught and swallowed by the devouring alligators. I have seen an alligator take up out of the water several great fish at a time, and just squeeze them betwixt his jaws, while the tails of the great trout flapped about his eyes and lips, ere he had swallowed them. The horrid noise of their closing jaws, their plunging amidst the broken banks of fish, and rising with their prey some feet upright above the water, the floods of water and blood rushing out of their mouths, and the clouds of vapor issuing from their wide nostrils, were truly frightful.”

William Bartram (1739–1823) American naturalist

[Van Doren, Mark, The travels of William Bartram, An American Bookshelf, volume 3, 118–119, 1928, New York, Macy-Masius, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b281934&view=1up&seq=124]
Travels of William Bartram (1791)

Savitri Devi photo
I. A. Richards photo

“The chief lesson to be learnt from it is the futility of all argumentation that precedes understanding. We cannot profitably attack any opinion until we have discovered what it expresses as well as what it states.”

I. A. Richards (1893–1979) English literary critic and rhetorician

[Richards, I. A., Principles of Literary Criticism, 1924]
Principles of Literary Criticism

“The expression of negative emotions gives rise to endless pain and suffering.”

Leon MacLaren (1910–1994) British philosopher

Adago, John. East Meets West (p. 150)

Ada Lovelace photo

“[...] engine is the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity.”

Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) English mathematician, considered the first computer programmer

As quoted by Rosen, Kenneth H. (2013). Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications, McGraw-Hill, ISBN 9780071315012. p.29.

Alex Grey photo
Fernando Chui photo

“In facing this disaster, we admit we have not done enough, there is space for improvement. Here I represent the Macau government in expressing our apologies to the residents.”

Fernando Chui (1957) Chief Executive of Macau (2009-2019)

Fernando Chui (2017) cited in " Macau leader Fernando Chui apologises to residents over Typhoon Hato havoc https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/battered-macau-and-hong-kong-clean-up-after-typhoon-hato-pounds-region-leaving-trail" on The Straits Times, 24 August 2017

Rodrigo Duterte photo

“Just because you’re a journalist you are not exempted from assassination, if you’re a son of a bitch. Freedom of expression cannot help you if you have done something wrong...The constitution can no longer help you if you disrespect a person.”

Rodrigo Duterte (1945) Filipino politician and the 16th President of the Philippines

Duterte endorses killing corrupt journalists https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/788543/duterte-endorses-killing-corrupt-journalists(June 1, 2016)

Duterte says killing of corrupt Philippines journalists justified https://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/31/asia/philippines-duterte-journalists/index.html(June 1, 2016)

Walter Reuther photo

“Only in an atmosphere of freedom can the creative genius of the human spirit find full expression.”

Walter Reuther (1907–1970) Labor union leader

Address before the Indian Council of World Affairs, New Delhi, India, April 5, 1956, as quoted in Walter P Reuther: Selected Papers (1961), by Henry M. Christman, p. 135
1950s, Address before the Indian Council on World Affairs (1956)

Francis Bacon photo

“The perpetuity by generation is common to beasts; but memory, merit, and noble works, are proper to men. And surely a man shall see the noblest works and foundations have proceeded from childless men; which have sought to express the images of their minds, where those of their bodies have failed.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. Verulam Viscount St. Albans (1625), Of Parents and Children

Kim Novak photo

“It was a tool for me. I could express what I was feeling, whether it's good feelings or bad feelings. In that case it was bad feelings. But it was like all of a sudden, 'Who cares what Donald Trump or anyone else thinks of you?'”

Kim Novak (1933) American actress

Source: CBS Sunday Morning interview (2020)
Context: Answering the question "What did painting do for you after you came home from the Oscars?"

Ibn Hazm photo
Arthur Stanley Eddington photo
Alice Meynell photo

“[Indian Muslims are taught] “to vote communally, think communally, listen only to communal election speeches, judge the delegates communally...express their grievances communally.”

Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000) Canadian academic

W.C. Smith, 'Modern Islam in India': as quoted in Arun Shourie. “Falling Over Backwards.”
Modern Islam in India: A Social Analysis (1943, 1946, 1963), Victor Gollancz, London, ISBN 0-8364-1338-5

Edmund Burke photo

“I tell you again that the recollection of the manner in which I saw the Queen of France in the year 1774 and the contrast between that brilliancy, Splendour, and beauty, with the prostrate Homage of a Nation to her, compared with the abominable Scene of 1789 which I was describing did draw Tears from me and wetted my Paper. These Tears came again into my Eyes almost as often as I lookd at the description. They may again. You do not believe this fact, or that these are my real feelings, but that the whole is affected, or as you express it, 'downright Foppery.'”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

My friend, I tell you it is truth—and that it is true, and will be true, when you and I are no more, and will exist as long as men—with their Natural feelings exist.
Letter to Philip Francis (20 February 1790), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789–December 1791 (1967), p. 91
1790s

Lila Downs photo
Lila Downs photo

“I feel a spiritual sense, and that sense is a connection between generations. Some of the lyrics are about connecting intuitively with Mother Earth, sometimes with our evil nature, sometimes with our goodness. I love to connect with my ancestors. Also, I need to express these concerns that are a part of my generation.”

Lila Downs (1968) Mexican American singer-songwriter

On striking a balance between traditional and contemporary issues in “Lila Downs Reminds Us of the Strength Women Bring to Latin America and its History” https://sheshredsmag.com/lila-downs-14/ in She Shreds (2018 May 3)
Music and culture

Helena Roerich photo
Dorothy Thompson photo

“The idea of the State being a sort of apotheosis of the People, their ultimate expression and good, was invented for the modern age by the German philosopher, Hegel, and both Karl Marx, the father of Communism, and Mussolini, the inventor of Fascism,…”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
Source: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
p. 102

Dorothy Thompson photo

“A great many people say that there is a great battle going on in the world: between Fascism and Communism. Fascism is represented as Capitalism in its ultimate and final form, when it controls the state wholly. Communism is represented as the final expression of democracy. But this theory was invented by fascists and communists. To a democrat, looking on, it seems like a sham battle.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
Source: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
pp. 29-30

Enoch Powell photo

“Have you ever wondered, perhaps, why opinions which the majority of people quite naturally hold are, if anyone dares express them publicly, denounced as 'controversial, 'extremist', 'explosive', 'disgraceful', and overwhelmed with a violence and venom quite unknown to debate on mere political issues? It is because the whole power of the aggressor depends upon preventing people from seeing what is happening and from saying what they see.The most perfect, and the most dangerous, example of this process is the subject miscalled, and deliberately miscalled, 'race.'”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

The people of this country are told that they must feel neither alarm nor objection to a West Indian, African and Asian population which will rise to several millions being introduced into this country. If they do, they are 'prejudiced', 'racialist'... A current situation, and a future prospect, which only a few years ago would have appeared to everyone not merely intolerable but frankly incredible, has to be represented as if welcomed by all rational and right-thinking people. The public are literally made to say that black is white. Newspapers like the Sunday Times denounce it as 'spouting the fantasies of racial purity' to say that a child born of English parents in Peking is not Chinese but English, or that a child born of Indian parents in Birmingham is not English but Indian. It is even heresy to assert the plain fact that the English are a white nation. Whether those who take part know it or not, this process of brainwashing by repetition of manifest absurdities is a sinister and deadly weapon. In the end, it renders the majority, who are marked down to be the victims of violence or revolution or tyranny, incapable of self-defence by depriving them of their wits and convincing them that what they thought was right is wrong. The process has already gone perilously far, when political parties at a general election dare not discuss a subject which results from and depends on political action and which for millions of electors transcends all others in importance; or when party leaders can be mesmerised into accepting from the enemy the slogans of 'racialist' and 'unChristian' and applying them to lifelong political colleagues...</p><p>In the universities, we are told that education and the discipline ought to be determined by the students, and that the representatives of the students ought effectively to manage the institutions. This is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but it is nonsense which it is already obligatory for academics and journalists, politicians and parties, to accept and mouth upon pain of verbal denunciation and physical duress.</p><p>We are told that the economic achievement of the Western countries has been at the expense of the rest of the world and has impoverished them, so that what are called the 'developed' countries owe a duty to hand over tax-produced 'aid' to the governments of the undeveloped countries. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but it is nonsense with which the people of the Western countries, clergy and laity, but clergy especially—have been so deluged and saturated that in the end they feel ashamed of what the brains and energy of Western mankind have done, and sink on their knees to apologise for being civilised and ask to be insulted and humiliated.</p><p>Then there is the 'civil rights' nonsense. In Ulster we are told that the deliberate destruction by fire and riot of areas of ordinary property is due to the dissatisfaction over allocation of council houses and opportunities for employment. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but that has not prevented the Parliament and government of the United Kingdom from undermining the morale of civil government in Northern Ireland by imputing to it the blame for anarchy and violence.</p><p>Most cynically of all, we are told, and told by bishops forsooth, that communist countries are the upholders of human rights and guardians of individual liberty, but that large numbers of people in this country would be outraged by the spectacle of cricket matches being played here against South Africans. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but that did not prevent a British Prime Minister and a British Home Secretary from adopting it as acknowledged fact.</p>
Source: The "enemy within" speech during the 1970 general election campaign; speech to the Turves Green Girls School, Northfield, Birmingham (13 June 1970), from Still to Decide (1972), pp. 36-37

Enoch Powell photo

“For the unbroken life of the English nation over a thousand years and more is a phenomenon unique in history. ... Institutions which elsewhere are recent and artificial creations, appear in England almost as works of nature, spontaneous and unquestioned. The deepest instinct of the Englishman—how the word “instinct” keeps forcing itself in again and again!—is for continuity; he never acts more freely nor innovates more boldly than when he most is conscious of conserving or even of reacting. From this continuous life of a united people in its island home spring, as from the soil of England, all that is peculiar in the gifts and the achievements of the English nation, its laws, its literature, its freedom, its self-discipline. ... And this continuous and continuing life of England is symbolised and expressed, as by nothing else, by the English kingship. English it is, for all the leeks and thistles and shamrocks, the Stuarts and the Hanoverians, for all the titles grafted upon it here and elsewhere, “her other realms and territories”, Headships of Commonwealths, and what not. The stock that received all these grafts is English, the sap that rises through it to the extremities rises from roots in English earth, the earth of England's history.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech to the Royal Society of St George (22 April 1961), quoted in A Nation Not Afraid. The Thinking of Enoch Powell (1965), pp. 145–146

Rebecca West photo

“Language is the most formless means of expression. Its capacity to describe concepts without physical or visual references carries us into an advanced state of abstraction.”

Ian Wilson (conceptual artist) (1940–2020) American artist, born 1940

Source: Conceptual Art, (1984), as cited in: " Ian Wilson, plug in #47; exhibition 27/09/2008 - 08/03/2009 http://vanabbemuseum.nl/en/programme/detail/?tx_vabdisplay_pi1%5Bptype%5D=18&tx_vabdisplay_pi1%5Bproject%5D=349 at Van Abbemuseum.nl, The Netherlands.

Annie Besant photo

“There is a Path which leads to that which is known as Initiation, and through Initiation to the Perfecting of Man; a Path which is recognized in all the great religions, and the chief features of which are described in similar terms in every one of the great faiths of the world. You may read of it in the Roman Catholic teachings as divided into three parts: (1) The Path of Purification or Purgation; (2) the Path of Illumination; and (3) the Path of Union with Divinity. You find it among the Mussulmans in the Sufi — the mystic — teachings of Islam, where it is known under the names of the Way, the Truth and the Life. You find it further eastward still in the great faith of Buddhism, divided into subdivisions, though these can be classified under the broader outline. It is similarly divided in Hinduism; for in both those great religions, in which the study of psychology, of the human mind and the human constitution, has played so great a part, you find a more definite subdivision. But really it matters not to which faith you turn; it matters not which particular set of names you choose as best attracting or expressing your own ideas; the Path is but one; its divisions are always the same; from time immemorial that Path has stretched from the life of the world to the life of the Divine.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Source: Initiation, The Perfecting of Man (1923)

Annie Besant photo

“A man who is a spiritual man--a religious teacher--regards the universe from the standpoint of the Spirit from which everything is seen as coming from the One. When he stands, as it were, in the centre, and he looks from the centre to the circumference, he stands at the point whence the force proceeds, and he judges of the force from that point of radiation and he sees it as one in its multitudinous workings, and knows the force is One; he sees it in its many divergencies, and he recognises it as one and the same thing throughout. Standing in the centre, in the Spirit, and looking outwards to the universe, he judges everything from the standpoint of the Divine Unity and sees every separate phenomenon, not as separate from the One but as the external expression of the one and the only Life. But science looks at the thing from the surface. It goes to the circumference of the universe and it sees a multiplicity of phenomena. It studies these separated things and studies them one by one. It takes up a manifestation and judges it; it judges it apart; it looks at the many, not at the One; it looks at the diversity, not at the Unity, and sees everything from outside and not from within: it sees the external difference and the superficial portion while it sees not the One from which every thing proceeds.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Source: Essays and Addresses, Vol. III- Evolution and Occultism (1913)

Prevale photo

“Music is the pure expression of one's soul.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) La musica è la pura espressione della propria anima.
Source: prevale.net