Quotes about extent
page 6

“No matter which comes first, the facts or the theory, the question to be addressed is the extent to which the theory is borne out by the facts. The strongest possible claim would be that the theory can be logically derived from the facts. That is, given the facts, the theory can be proven as a consequence of them. This strong claim cannot be substantiated.”

Alan Chalmers book What Is This Thing Called Science?

Source: What Is This Thing Called Science? (Third Edition; 1999), Chapter 4, Deriving theories from facts: induction, p. 41.

Question, Strong

“To the extent that bilateral investment treaties and free trade agreements lead to violations of human rights, they should be modified or terminated”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order on the adverse impacts of free trade and investment agreements on a democratic and equitable international order http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IntOrder/Pages/Reports.aspx. 2015, Report submitted to the UN General Assembly

“We must remember that the real problem is not how to produce some improvement in the condition of the working man— for that has to a certain extent been attained already— but how to secure his complete material independence.”

Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883) British economic historian

Source: Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884), p. 151

Problem

“At present, there are hundreds of thousands of prisoners in Germany of all nationalities and degrees, partly in camps, but for the most part, however, as workers…The dangers of inter-mixing and bastardizing of our people are extraordinarily grave. They lie to a great extent in the almost unlimited lack of knowledge throughout our nation of the problems of blood.”

Günther Pancke (1899–1973) German general

(3 July 1940). Quoted in "Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals" - Page 117 - 1953

People, Lie, Knowledge, Problem

“We are thus able to distinguish thinking as the function which is to a large extent linguistic.”

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) American linguist

Source: Language, thought and reality (1956), p. 66.

Thinking

“And now that I have allowed myself the jest to which in this two-sided life hardly any page can be too serious to grant a place, I part with the book with deep seriousness, in the sure hope that sooner or later it will reach those to whom alone it can be addressed; and for the rest, patiently resigned that the same fate should, in full measure, befall it, that in all ages has, to some extent, befallen all knowledge, and especially the weightiest knowledge of the truth, to which only a brief triumph is allotted between the two long periods in which it is condemned as paradoxical or disparaged as trivial. The former fate is also wont to befall its author. But life is short, and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book The World as Will and Representation

:s:The World as Will and Representation/Preface to the First Edition, last paragraph. Mostly quoted rather incorrectly as: All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. Und so, nachdem ich mir den Scherz erlaubt, dem eine Stelle zu gönnen, in diesem durchweg zweideutigen Leben kaum irgend ein Blatt zu ernsthaft seyn kann, gebe ich mit innigem Ernst das Buch hin, in der Zuversicht, daß es früh oder spät diejenigen erreichen wird, an welche es allein gerichtet seyn kann, und übrigens gelassen darin ergeben, daß auch ihm in vollem Maaße das Schicksal werde, welches in jeder Erkenntniß, also um so mehr in der wichtigsten, allezeit der Wahrheit zu Theil ward, der nur ein kurzes Siegesfest beschieden ist, zwischen den beiden langen Zeiträumen, wo sie als paradox verdammt und als trivial geringgeschätzt wird. Auch pflegt das erstere Schicksal ihren Urheber mitzutreffen.— Aber das Leben ist kurz und die Wahrheit wirkt ferne und lebt lange: sagen wir die Wahrheit. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Leipzig 1819. Vorrede. p.XVI books.google https://books.google.de/books?id=0HsPAAAAQAAJ&pg=PR16 The World as Will and Representation (1819; 1844; 1859)

Life, Fate, Truth, Books

“There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetousness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind.”

Joseph Conrad book Nostromo

Part Third: The Lighthouse, Ch. 9
Nostromo (1904)

Universe

“It is not until we tour the city that we learn the extent of destruction. We come across corpses every 100 to 200 yards. The bodies of civilians that I examined had bullet holes in their backs. These people had been presumably fleeing and were shot from behind.”

John Rabe (1882–1950) German businessman

13 December 1937 diary per Woods, John E. (1998). The Good Man of Nanjing: the Diaries of John Rabe. p. 67.

People, Learning

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

Norbert Wiener book The Human Use of Human Beings

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

World, Behavior, Communication, Nature

“There is still and must ever be a tremendous amount of manual labor, but to a large extent this has become specialized and too often would be designated correctly as drudgery. The opportunity for education of the mind, however, has greatly increased until it has become well-nigh universal. School and college athletics have become necessary. With the development of our industrial and commercial life, there are more and more those who are engaged in purely clerical activities. All of this makes it more necessary than ever that we should stimulate every possible interest in out of door health-giving recreation.”

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

1920s, The Democracy of Sports (1924)

Life, Health, Education, School

“In an earlier day, the rich lived at the expense of the poor, directly and unequivocally; in a modern economy, unproductive citizens increasingly live at the expense of productive ones—though in an equivocal way, since they are told, and believe, that they are disadvantaged and deserve more still. Today, in fact, a good half of the population of every modern nation is made up of people with little or no income, who are exempt from taxes and live, to a large extent, off the other half of the population, which pays taxes. If such a situation were to be radicalized, it could give rise to massive social conflict. The eminently plausible free-market thesis of exploitation by the unproductive would then have prevailed over the much less promising socialist thesis of the exploitation of labor by capital.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

The Grasping Hand (2010)

People, Way

“Much of the skill of the true mathematical physicist and of the mathematical astronomer consists in the power of adapting methods and results carried out on an exact mathematical basis to obtain approximations sufficient for the purposes of physical measurements. It might perhaps be thought that a scheme of Mathematics on a frankly approximative basis would be sufficient for all the practical purposes of application in Physics, Engineering Science, and Astronomy, and no doubt it would be possible to develop, to some extent at least, a species of Mathematics on these lines. Such a system would, however, involve an intolerable awkwardness and prolixity in the statements of results, especially in view of the fact that the degree of approximation necessary for various purposes is very different, and thus that unassigned grades of approximation would have to be provided for. Moreover, the mathematician working on these lines would be cut off from the chief sources of inspiration, the ideals of exactitude and logical rigour, as well as from one of his most indispensable guides to discovery, symmetry, and permanence of mathematical form. The history of the actual movements of mathematical thought through the centuries shows that these ideals are the very life-blood of the science, and warrants the conclusion that a constant striving toward their attainment is an absolutely essential condition of vigorous growth. These ideals have their roots in irresistible impulses and deep-seated needs of the human mind, manifested in its efforts to introduce intelligibility in certain great domains of the world of thought.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A (1910), pp. 285-286; Cited in: Moritz (1914, 229): Mathematics and Science.

Life, World, History, Intelligence

“I reject, as you know, the "philosophy of Marxism," dialectical materialism….The general Marxian theory of "universal history," to the extent that it has any empirical content, seems to me disproved by modern historical and anthropological investigation.Marxian economics seems to me for the most part either false or obsolete or meaningless in application to contemporary economic phenomena. Those aspects of Marxian economics which retain validity do not seem to me to justify the theoretical structure of the economics.Not only do I believe it meaningless to say that "socialism is inevitable" and false that socialism is "the only alternative to capitalism"; I consider that on the basis of the evidence now available to us a new form of exploitive society (which I call "managerial society") is not only possible but is a more probable outcome of the present than socialism….On no ideological, theoretic or political ground, then, can I recognize, or do I feel, any bond or allegiance to the Workers Party (or to any other Marxist party). That is simply the case, and I can no longer pretend about it, either to myself or to others.”

James Burnham (1905–1987) American philosopher

Burnham's Letter of Resignation, 1940

Feeling, History, Universe, Parting

“As the great words of freedom and fulfillment are pronounced by campaigning leaders and politicians, on the screens and radios and stages, they turn into meaningless sounds which obtain meaning only in the context of propaganda, business, discipline, and relaxation. This assimilation of the ideal with reality testifies to the extent to which the ideal has been surpassed. It is brought down from the sublimated realm of the soul or the spirit or the inner man, and translated into operational terms and problems. Here are the progressive elements of mass culture. The perversion is indicative of the fact that advanced industrial society is confronted with the possibility of a materialization of ideals. The capabilities of this society are progressively reducing the sublimated realm in which the condition of man was represented, idealized, and indicted. Higher culture becomes part of the material culture. In this transformation, it loses the greater part of its truth.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 57-58

Truth, Soul, Business, Problem

“The Kropotkins, the Perovskayas, the Breshkovskayas, and hosts of others repudiated wealth and station and refused to serve King Mammon. They went among the people, not to lift them up but themselves to be lifted up, to be instructed, and in return to give themselves wholly to the people. That accounts for the heroism, the art, the literature of Russia, the unity between the people, the mujik and the intellectual. That to some extent explains the literature of all European countries, the fact that the Strindbergs, the Hauptmanns, the Wedekinds, the Brieux, the Mirbeaus, the Steinlins and Rodins have never dissociated themselves from the people.”

Emma Goldman (1868–1940) anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches

Intellectual Proletarians (1914)

People, Art, Literature, Country

“I would query about what do you mean in terms of civil liberties. … Do we exchange information in ways we did not before? Absolutely. You can say that that is a -- to the extent that you exchange information between CIA, FBI, NSA and the like -- you could characterize that as somehow giving up liberties. But the fact of the matter is, it's understandable and absolutely necessary if you want to protect the security of the United States.”

Robert Mueller (1944) Sixth director of the FBI; American attorney

CNN Interview (2013)

Way, Understanding

“(To the extent that anyone but a Prolog programmer can understand \X totally. (And to the extent that a Prolog programmer can understand 'cut'.)”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

Usenet postings, 1997

Understanding

“As governor, I experienced the vitality of life in a booming and free Asian city, saw routinely the best and worst aspects of human nature, and was made to revisit some of the principles in which I have always believed but to which I had rarely given much thought previously. In the darker hours of occasionally fretful nights I found myself face to face with the moral dimensions of political action to a greater extent than ever before.”

Chris Patten book East and West

Chris Patten, East and West: The Last Governor of Hong Kong on Power, Freedom and the Future, Pan Books, second edition, 1999, page 3.

Life, Nature, Night

“I'm surprised at the extent of the bigotry. But it really plays out when companies or schools take a side and prohibit the other platform at all. We Mac users should be good even when the other side is bad. We should do what we can to accept the other platforms. All the best people in life seem to like LINUX.”

Steve Wozniak (1950) American inventor, computer engineer and programmer

"Letters-General Questions Answered" p. 1 http://www.woz.org/letters/general/01.html Woz.org files

Life, People, School

“All forms of Zionism hold the perception that a certain extent of anti-Semitism benefits the Zionist enterprise. To put it more sharply, anti-Semitism is the generator and ally of Zionism. Masses of Jews leave their place of residence only when their economic situation and physical safety are undermined. Masses of Jews are shoved to this country rather than being attracted to it. The yearning for the land of Zion and Jerusalem is not strong enough to drive millions of Jews to the country they love and make them hold on to its clods.”

Yaron London (1940) Israeli journalist, actor and songwriter

Why Israel isn’t shocked by anti-Semites in White House (November 21, 2016)

Love, Strong, Country

“At the point at which the concept of différance, and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity; etc.)- to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present (for example, in the form of the identity of the subject who is present for all his operations, present beneath every accident or event, self-present in its "living speech," in its enunciations, in the present objects and acts of its language, etc.)- become non pertinent. They all amount, at one moment or another, to a subordination of the movement of différance in favor of the presence of a value or a meaning supposedly antecedent to différance, more original than it, exceeding and governing it in the last analysis. This is still the presence of what we called above the "transcendental signified.”

Jacques Derrida book Positions

Source: Positions (1982), p. 29

Intelligence

“We are talking about an artist; and for the enjoyment of the artist the mask must be to some extent moulded on the face. What he makes outside him must correspond to something inside him; he can only make his effects out of some of the materials of his soul.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

The Dagger with Wings (1926)

Soul

“People I represent, to the extent of the opportunities which they have had, and considering how recently they have escaped from the oppression and wrongs committed upon them, are just as virtuous and hold just as many high characteristics as any class in the country.”

Joseph Hayne Rainey (1832–1887) politician

1873, Speech on Civil Rights Act (1873)

People, Country

“Let us bring the question to the test of experience and fact; and ask ourselves, considering our nature in its entire extent, what light we derive from a sustained and comprehensive view of its component parts, which may enable us to assert with certainty that we do or do not live after death.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

On a Future State (1815; publ. 1840)

Death, Question, Nature, Light

“He said, for example: "Many people working with the Ouija board or automatic writing receive messages that seem, or purport, to come from historic personages. Often, however, the material is vastly inferior to that which could have been produced by the person in question during his or her earthly existence. Any comparison with the material received to the written books or accounts already existing would immediately show glaring discrepancies. Yet in many instances, the Ouija board operator or the automatic writer is to some extent or other tuning in to a world view, struggling to open roads of perception free enough to perceive an altered version of reality, but not equipped enough through training and temperament, perhaps to express it....”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book (1976), p. 85

People, Books, World, Question

“Williams’s starting point is the immense pessimism of nineteenth-century men of letters…. One can explain this pessimism to some extent in terms of various social and political failures, especially in France…. But Dr Williams would rather look at the physically examinable, and he finds in the author’s disease the roots of what his book cover calls, with an admirable eye on the market, the horror of life….”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

Life, Men, Books, Disease

“I suppose if you isolate yourself to such an extent, you more or less must expect a series of emergencies.”

Jack Vance (1916–2013) American mystery and speculative fiction writer

Source: Short fiction, Rumfuddle (1973), Section 2 (p. 168)

“We're all zoo humans to some extent, even me.”

Erwan Le Corre (1971)

MovNat: Learning how to move as we were intended to, The Washington Post http://washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/movnat-learning-how-to-move-as-we-were-intended-to/2012/02/03/gIQABjNMRR_story.html?utm_term=.e68f6050d5d7_r=0

“But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion; or, it may be, his mere scepticism and no-religion: the manner it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World; and I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the kind of things he will do is.”

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

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

World, Religion, Feeling, Universe

“For the educational establishment… test scores are treated as indications of the extent to which the required ground covering has been done. …as educationally significant. However, while they may be prognostic of a child's ability to get through school… they do not provide us with an appraisal of the child's progress in the long process of becoming a generally educated human being -- the advance made toward a more skillful, thoughtful, and cultivated mind.”

Mortimer J. Adler (1902–2001) American philosopher and educator

Source: Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind (1990), p. 312

Education, School

“I think it's called Arte Povera. But it doesn't mean 'poor art'. It means the art which you would do out there if you were nobody at all. Aspects of this are street art and so forth. Earthworks interest me to the single extent that it means a great extension of the possibilities of materials. Dirt is a wonderful material to make things out of. And mud and rocks and things like this…”

Carl Andre (1935) American artist

Source: Artists talks 1969 – 1977, p. 26

Art, Thinking

“Little is known about the interface between separate marketing units and sales units. This article develops a multidimensional model of the marketing and sales interface. The model integrates a broad range of conceptual domains, including information sharing, structural linkages, power, orientations, and knowledge of marketing and sales. The authors empirically explore the conceptual model through a cross-industry study of 337 European Union–based companies. They identify five empirical archetypes of the marketing and sales interface. The taxonomy shows that the role and characteristics of marketing and sales vary a great deal. This finding challenges existing stereotypes about marketing and sales. Finally, the article explores organizational outcomes of the five configurations. The findings suggest that the most successful configurations are characterized by strong structural linkages between marketing and sales and a high extent of market knowledge in marketing.”

Christian Homburg (1962) German academic

Source: "Configurations of marketing and sales: a taxonomy", 2008, p. 133; Abstract

Knowledge, Study, Strong, Success

“The greater the extent of market dynamism, the greater is the positive impact of market-oriented behaviors on market performance.”

Christian Homburg (1962) German academic

Source: "A multiple-layer model of market-oriented organizational culture", 2000, p. 453

Behavior

“In the post-Vietnam War era the need for Communist abuses has been no less pressing than before. More facts have come to light on the scope of U. S. violence in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, the extent of which U. S. officials lied to the public with regard to their programs and methods, and the brazenness with which these officials defied treaty obligations and international law. Much as the government and the media tried to isolate the scoundrelism of Watergate from the much more profound immorality of the “secret” devastation of Cambodia, the linkage between the two could not be entirely concealed and therefore tended to discredit still further the campaign to bring “freedom” to South Vietnam. Counterrevolution, torture and official murder in Argentina, Guatemala, Chile, and other U. S. satellites was also reaching new peaks. Thus, if Cambodian terror did not exist, the Western propaganda systems would have had to invent it, and in certain respects it did […].”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, p. 19.

War, Secret, Law, Freedom

“I reject republicanism. At the head of races, above the elite, there is Monarchy. Not all monarchs have been good. Monarchy, however, has always been good. The individual monarch must not be confused with the institution of Monarchy, the conclusions drawn from this would be false. There can be bad priests, but this does not mean that we can draw the conclusion that the Church must be ended and God stoned to death. There are certainly weak or bad monarchs, but we cannot renounce Monarchy. The race has a line of life. A monarch is great and good, when he stays on this line; he is petty and bad, to the extent that he moves away from this racial line of life or he opposes it. There are many lines by which a monarch can be tempted. He must set them all aside and follow the line of the race. Here is the law of Monarchy.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

Life, Death, God, Law

“The use of isoquants to describe the production function did not develop to any great extent until the thirties.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1940s, The theory of the firm in the last ten Years, 1942, p. 800 cited in: P. Lloyd (2012) "The Discovery of the Isoquant - History of Political Economy"

“Believe me, I am still very surprised that I managed to make that film [Close-Up]. When I actually look back on that film, I really feel that I was not the director but instead just a member of the audience. Because the film made itself, to a large extent. The characters involved were very real, I wasn't directing the actors so much as being directed by them. So it was a very particular film.”

Abbas Kiarostami (1940–2016) Iranian film director, screenwriter, photographer and film producer

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/apr/28/hayfilmfestival2005.guardianhayfestival

Feeling

“There are different levels of organization in the occurrence of events. You cannot explain the events of one level in terms of the events of another. For example, you cannot explain life in terms of mechanical concepts, nor society in terms of individual psychology. Analysis can only take you down the scale of organization. It cannot reveal the workings of things on a higher level. To some extent the holistic philosophers are right.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Anatol Rapoport, General Systems, Vol. 14, (1969), p. 96; As cited in: Gordon Chen (1980) The General Theory of Systems Applied to Management and Organization, Volume 2, p. 590
1960s

Life

“Unless there is an obvious reason to do otherwise, most of use passively accept decision problems as they are framed and therefore rarely have an opportunity to discover the extent to which our preferences are frame-bound rather than reality-bound.”

Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow

Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Chapter 34, "Frames and reality", page 367 (ISBN 9780141033570).

Problem, Reality, Decision

“Ever since Darwin tied knots between human beings and the rest of the animal world, many people have frantically attempted to untie them again, declaring that even though our roots are in the animal world we have left them so far behind as to make any comparisons utterly meaningless. To some extent this is true, because the quality that makes us unique in the biological kingdom is the enormous capacity to learn.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

Origins (1977)

People, World, Learning, Animals

“You are for developing village industries and I favour both heavy industries and village industries. To the extent that you propose to advance village industries, I am at once with you. I can never persuade myself to take up a hostile attitude towards any constructive work, from any quarter, least of all towards work attempted by one with your brilliant historic achievements in public life…. I am in favour of heavy industries because heavy industries will save the money that is going out of the country in large sums every year; heavy industries are required to provide the local manufactures of machinery and equipment required by our railways and for defence forces and heavy industries are required also for supplying machinery and tools for the village industries themselves. I recommend more extended use of mechanical power because it produces results for the country much more rapidly than human power. The object is to get food and commodities required by our people for a decent standard of living as speedily as possible.”

Mokshagundam Visveshvaraya (1860–1962) Indian engineer, scholar, statesman and the Diwan of Mysore

In his reply to Gandhiji's letter, quoted in The Most Celebrated Indian Engineer:Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, 22 November 2013, Official web site of Government of India: Vigyan Prasar http://www.vigyanprasar.gov.in/dream/feb2000/article1.htm,

Life, Money, Hostility, People

“This is the reason why all attempts to obtain a deeper knowledge of the foundations of physics seem doomed to me unless the basic concepts are in accordance with general relativity from the beginning. This situation makes it difficult to use our empirical knowledge, however comprehensive, in looking for the fundamental concepts and relations of physics, and it forces us to apply free speculation to a much greater extent than is presently assumed by most physicists.”

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

1950s, On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation (1950)

Knowledge

“From this moment on, the child becomes a political object—to a certain extent, the living security deposit of enlightenment. The child is the “noble savage” in one’s own house. Through appropriate education care must be taken in the future that innocent children are not made into the same artificial social cripples the previous system produced. Children are already what the new bourgeois humans believe they want to become.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), pp. 55-56

Children, Education, Future, Housing

“There must be opportunities for judgment to mature. When, therefore, you increase your business to a very great extent, and the multitude of problems increase with its growth, you will find, in the first place, that the man at the head has a diminishing knowledge of the facts and, in the second place, a diminishing opportunity of exercising a careful judgment upon them.”

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) American Supreme Court Justice

Testimony before the United States Senate, Committee On Interstate Commerce (December 14, 1911).
Extra-judicial writings

Exercises, Business, Knowledge, Problem

“Please let me know to what extent you have used, or intend using, the pruning knife.”

John Tenniel (1820–1914) British illustrator, graphic humourist and political cartoonist

Urging Carroll to shorten Through the Looking-Glass; p. 14
M. N. Cohen & E. Wakeling, Lewis Carroll and his Illustrators (2003)

“Clearly, one can obfuscate one's ideas with a compiler language but it's harder. To some extent one is talking about what one wants rather than how one wants to do it. The trouble with machine code, of course, is that when you look at a random section of machine code you don't know what properties of the instructions the programmer really wanted to exploit.”

Fernando J. Corbató (1926–2019) American computer scientist

"PL/I as a Tool for System Programming" http://web.archive.org/web/20080206153039/http://home.nycap.rr.com/pflass/PLI/plisprg.html, Datamation, 15 (5), 6 May 1969, pp. 68–76

Idea

“Winning depended to a large extent on the determination of the troops and the officers. The certainty that we were going to win kept up everyone's spirits, from privates to generals.”

Georgy Zhukov (1896–1974) Marshal of the Soviet Union

Quoted in "Memoirs" - Page 167 - by Andreĭ Andreevich Gromyko, Harold Shukman - 1990

Dependency

“Since the 1970s, interest in economic methodology has grown dramatically, to the extent that it is now possible to view methodology as a clearly identifiable sub-discipline within economics.”

Roger Backhouse (economist) (1951) British economist

Roger Backhouse, New directions in economic methodology. Vol. 3. Psychology Press, 1994. p. 1

“The progress of botany, as of other sciences, comes from the interaction of so many factors that undue emphasis on any one can give a very distorted impression of the whole, but certainly among the most important of these for any given period are the prevailing ideas and intellectual attitudes, the assumptions and stimuli of the time, for often upon them depends the extent to which a particular study attracts an unbroken succession of men of industry and originality intent on building a system of knowledge and communicating it successfully to others of like mind.”

William T. Stearn (1911–2001) British botanist

Botanical Gardens and Botanical Literature in the Eighteenth Century, 1961

Men, Communication, Idea, Knowledge

“The Lieutenant Governor of Bengal was to the fullest extent responsible for not having made any preparation against the famine…The doctrines of political economy had been worshipped as a sort of "fetish" by officials who, because they believed that in the long run supply and demand would square themselves, seemed to have utterly forgotten that human life was short, and that men could not subsist without food beyond a few days. They mechanically left the laws of political economy to work themselves out while hundreds of thousands of human beings were perishing from famine.”

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

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1867/aug/02/motion-for-an-address in the House of Commons (2 August 1867) on the Orissa famine of 1866 1860s

Life, Men, Law, Food

“The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.”

Alan Kay (1940) computer scientist

1984 in Alan Kay's paper Inventing the Future which appears in The AI Business: The Commercial Uses of Artificial Intelligence, edited by Patrick Henry Winston and Karen Prendergast. As quoted by Eugene Wallingford in a post entiteled ALAN KAY'S TALKS AT OOPSLA http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2004-11.html#e2004-11-06T21_03_42.htm on November 06, 2004 9:03 PM at the website of the Computer Science section of the University of Northern Iowa. 1980s

Law, Way, Universe, Future

“That teaching according to which intellectual activity is worthy of esteem to the extent that it is practical and to that extent alone.”

Julien Benda (1867–1956) French essayist

Source: Treason of the Intellectuals (1927), p. 151

“It might seem daunting to think that effort and chance, as much as innate talent, are what counts. But I find it encouraging because, while our genetic makeup is out of our control, our degree of effort is up to us. And the effects of chance, too, can be controlled to the extent that by committing ourselves to repeated attempts, we can increase our odds of success.”

Leonard Mlodinow book The Drunkard's Walk

Source: The Drunkard's Walk, Chapter 8, The Order In Chaos, p. 162

Thinking, Effort, Chance, Success

“Dialectical logic undoes the abstractions of formal logic and of transcendental philosophy, but it also denies the concreteness of immediate experience. To the extent to which this experience comes to rest with the things as they appear and happen to be, it is a limited and even false experience. It attains its truth if it has freed itself from the deceptive objectivity which conceals the factors behind the facts — that is, if it understands its world as a historical universe, in which the established facts are the work of the historical practice of man.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 141

Truth, World, Understanding, Universe

“Nor is homosexuality without stake in this gendered sexual system. Putting to one side the obviously gendered content of expressly adopted roles, clothing, and sexual mimicry, to the extent the gender of a sexual object is crucial to arousal, the structure of social power that stands behind and defines gender is hardly irrelevant, even if it is rearranged.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon (1946) American feminist and legal activist

Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: "Pleasure under Patriarchy" (1989) Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 2 pp. 314-346

Clothes

“The Object of this Treatise is—(1) To point out to the student of Mathematics, who has not the advantage of a tutor, the course of study which it is most advisable that he should follow, the extent to which he should pursue one part of the science before he commences another, and to direct him as to the sort of applications which he should make. (2) To treat fully of the various points which involve difficulties and which are apt to be misunderstood by beginners, and to describe at length the nature without going into the routine of the operations.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

Source: On the Study and Difficulties of Mathematics (1831), Chapter I. Introductory Remarks on the Nature and Objects of Mathematics.

Mathematics, Nature, Study, Science

“The obstacles facing academic economists are formidable, for tenure and professional advancement still depend to a large extent on a willingness to comply with and to work within the tenets of orthodox theory.”

Paul Ormerod book The Death of Economics

Preface, p. x
The Death of Economics (1994)

Dependency

“Any journalist worth his salt, should have to study literature to some extent.”

D. V. Gundappa (1887–1975) Indian writer

In page=19
D.V. Gundappa,Sahitya Akademi

Literature, Study

“It is imperative to take the initiative, to build firewalls around Alberta, to limit the extent to which an aggressive and hostile federal government can encroach upon legitimate provincial jurisdiction.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

National Post, January 24, 2001, “Open Letter to Ralph Klein”
2001

Hostility

“We are now entering upon an important period of our development as a State. Our infancy as a Territorial Government has passed into history. Our early struggle as a young State of the Union has already turned the point of successful trial, and we now stand in the threshold of coming strength and power. With a territory ranking among the largest of the sisterhood, with a soil equal to the best, and a climate of a salubrity and healthfulness enjoyed by none other, with resources for the employment of industry of great variety and extent, it would seem difficult to predict for Oregon anything short of a most successful career. In fact, with a creditable management of public affairs, nothing stands in the way of our prosperity.”

La Fayette Grover (1823–1911) American politician

La Fayette Grover (September 14, 1870). Governor LaFayette Grover - Inaugural Address, 1870 http://records.sos.state.or.us/ORSOSWebDrawer/Recordpdf/6777835. Oregon State Archives, Oregon Secretary of State. Source: Inaugural Address of Gov. LaFayette Grover to the Legislative Assembly September 14, 1870, Salem, Oregon, T. Patterson, State Printer, 1870.

Health, Way, History, Success

“In my opinion a system of operations, to be efficient and successful, should be such as to give to the principal and responsible head of the running department a complete daily history of details in all their minutiae. Without such supervision, the procurement of a satisfactory annual statement must be regarded as extremely problematical. The fact that dividends are earned without such control, does not disprove the position, as in many cases the extraordinarily remunerative nature of an enterprise may ensure satisfactory returns under the most loose and inefficient management.
It may be proper here to remark, that in consequence of that want of adaptation before alluded to, we cannot avail ourselves to any great extent of the plan of organization of shorter lines in framing one for this, nor have we any precedent or experience upon which we can fully rely in doing so. Under these circumstances, it will scarcely be expected that we can at once adopt any plan of operations which will not require amendment and a reasonable time to prove its worth. A few general principles, however, may be regarded as settled and necessary in its formation, amongst which are:”

Daniel McCallum (1815–1878) Canadian engineer and early organizational theorist

Report of the Superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad to the Stockholders (1856)

History, Nature, Time, Success

“The disturbing element of the accident was the millions of people and their expectations. Their wishes, their prayers and their feelings. And the extent to which people had gone. And you have nothing, absolutely nothing to repay them. You just sit in your bed and you just enjoy the benefit of how the others have prayed. And lots of them who really went through physical penance, when you've actually sat back and enjoyed it.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Quotable quotes by Amitabh Bachchan.

People, Feeling

“He is a cool cat. I was surprised when he had a heart problem…People think my film with Mani, ‘Nayakan’, is my best work. To an extent it's true. But I'd like to think my best is yet to come.”

Kamal Haasan (1954) Indian actor

About Mani Ratnam, his son-in-law
Aamir's choice of films makes Kamal Haasan happy

People, Cats, Problem, Thinking

“The story of the Fall always fascinates me as a play ground, but I cannot find any profound meaning in it, because of my 'liberal' view of human nature: I cannot believe in a state of original innocence, still less in a profound meaning in it, and I am always minimising the conception and the extent of Sin and the sinfulness of sex.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Letter 396, to Eric Fletcher, 9 July 1951
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

Sex, Nature

“Over this country, when the giant Eagle flings the shadow of his wing, the land is darkened. So compact is it that the wing covers all its extent in one pause of the flight. The sea breaks on the pale line of the shore; to the Eagle's proud glance waves run in to the foot of the hills that are like rocks planted in green water.”

Hugh Walpole (1884–1941) New Zealand writer

Rogue Herries (1930) First lines

Water, Sea, Country

“When issues of events like these my father is waiting for, are hanging in the scales of fate, the mind has the advantage of changing the principle of expectation three times, without which it would not have power to see it out.Curiosity governs the first moment; and the second moment is all economy to justify the expense of the first — and for the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth moments, and so on to the day of judgment — 'tis a point of HONOUR.I need not be told, that the ethic writers have assigned this all to Patience; but that VIRTUE, methinks, has extent of domination sufficient of her own, and enough to do in it, without invading the few dismantled castles which HONOUR has left him upon the earth.”

Laurence Sterne book The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Book IX (1767), Ch. 10.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760-1767)

Fate, Change, Time, Waiting

“I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Testimony given before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor, Boston, Massachusetts (30 January 1978)

Love

“Not only the tools of manual labour, but also the tools of human thought — words — are subject to the laws of historical development. The history of the meanings of words is outside the area of interest of formal logic, and could not be fruitfully studied by the methods of that discipline.
The history of language in what is its most essential content is the history of language as a social instrument of thought; it is historical epistemology which cannot be studied within the scope of any other discipline.
The linguist is of necessity only marginally interested in all conventional terminology, whereas certain votaries of formal logic are inclined to investigate domains which are alien to linguistics and even to some extent in contradiction to its basic assumptions!”

Witold Doroszewski (1899–1976) Lexicographer and linguist

As cited in Schaff (1962;7).
"Comments on Semantics", 1952

Law, History, Study

“It is almost never when a state of things is the most detestable that it is smashed, but when, beginning to improve, it permits men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate their thoughts with each other, and to gauge by what they already have the extent of their rights and their grievances. The weight, although less heavy, seems then all the more unbearable.”

Alexis De Tocqueville (1805–1859) French political thinker and historian

Letter to Pierre Freslon, 23 September 1853 Selected Letters, p. 296 as cited in Toqueville's Road Map p. 103 http://books.google.com/books?id=fLL6Bil2gtcC&pg=PA103&dq=%22almost+never+when+a+state+of+things+is+the+most+detestable+that+it+is+smashed%22 1850s and later

Men, Communication, Gauge

“The crude product of nature, the object fashioned by the industry of man, acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality.”

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

The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954) [also published as Cosmos and History (1959)].

Fashion, Nature, Reality

“When I was a child the boys of the town never came near me except to make fun of me. I was almost always alone. Sometimes, finding me by chance among them, they hurled themselves against me, and not only with words. One day – and while he told me this his great eyes shone with an inner light - … they started to throw stones at me with more violence than usual, with the evilness which is found among children and the weak. I lost patience, and grabbing stones I too started to defend myself with such energy that my attackers were put to flight. Mario, I succeeded in beating them: I terrified them to such an extent that from that day they respected me and no longer annoyed me. I ran to my mother … and told her of my first victorious battle: she kissed me tenderly and it was the best prize that I could have wanted.”

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) Italian writer, politician, theorist, sociologist and linguist

Gramsci cited in Garuglieri's Garuglieri, 'Ricordo di Gramsci.' Societa, 691-701., 1946, p. 700.

Children, Boy, Kiss, Light

“The clause is an example of one of the most prevalent and damaging fallacies in this whole subject—the fallacy of supposing that the consequences that are apprehended from the massive substitution, in various parts of the country, for the indigenous population of a population from overseas are either due to what is called physical deprivation, poverty, and so on, or can be in any way alleviated, avoided or foreclosed by material provision…It is by no means true that the areas of maximum New Commonwealth immigrant entry—the locations of what Lord Radcliffe many years ago called "the alien wedge"—are characteristically or specifically coincident with the areas of greatest poverty and desuetude in our cities. In some cases the two coincide. Sometimes, naturally, this happens in the central and rundown areas—run down because they are central—that because they are central it is in those areas that major immigrant populations are found…Over and over again this easy illusion has been propounded, and as often experience has disposed of it. It is not because people are poor, to the extent that they are poor, and it is not because they live in the streets of the inner cities, in which the indigenous population of this country has lived—gradually improving, and in some cases rapidly improving over generations—that we apprehend what will be the consequence when one-third of some of the major cities and industrial areas of our country is in New Commonwealth occupation. It is because of human differences. It is because of the clash and contrast between two populations which contend for the same territory.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1976/jul/08/report-on-resources in the House of Commons (8 July 1976) 1970s

People, Way, Nature, Parting

“The great body of population dynamics, like those of the motion of the celestial bodies, can be solved—and what is most remarkable, there is a surprising analogy between the formulas employed in these calculations. I believe that I have achieved to some extent what I have long said about the possibility of founding a social mechanics on the model established by celestial mechanics—to formulate the motions of the social body in accordance with those of celestial bodies, and to find there again the same properties and laws of conservation.”

Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist

Astronomie élémentaire? (1834) as quoted by Theodore M. Porter, "From Quetelet to Maxwell: Social Statistics and the Origin of Statistical Physics" in The Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences: Some Critical and Historical Perspectives (2013) ed., I. Bernard Cohen

Law

“Well, I think it's a very good job. One of the most appealing things about it is that… it enables you to participate in some way and to some extent in the way the country is governed but you're able to maintain a private life as well.”

William H. Rehnquist (1924–2005) Chief Justice of the United States

As quoted in BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4212570.stm on his death. (4 September 2005). Books, articles, and speeches

Life, Way, Thinking, Country

“I told him, "We're all gay. It's just to what extent are you gay." He says, "That's bullshit, man, I ain't gay at all!" I'm like, "Yeah, you are and I'll prove it." He goes, "Fine, prove it." I'm like, "All right, do you like porn?" He says, "Yeah, I love porn, you know that." I'm, "Oh, o you only watch two women together?" He goes, "No, I'll watch a man and a woman making love." I said, "Oh, do you like the guy to have a tiny, half-flaccid penis?"”

Ron White (1956) American comedian

He said, "No, I like big, hard, throbbing co- (stunned pause, applause) ...I did not know that about myself."
You Can't Fix Stupid

Love, Women, Making love, Guy

“By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others. Further, it has co-ordinated the social development of the civilized countries to such an extent that, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

People, World, Decision, Country

“To the ignorant and bawling fanatics who stun you with their pother about liberty, political or civil liberty seems to be the principal end for which government ought to exist. But the final cause or purpose for which government ought to exist, is the furtherance of the common weal to the greatest possible extent.”

John Austin (legal philosopher) (1790–1859) legal philosopher

Source: The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832), p. 224

“My Lords, I rejoice that the grave has not closed upon me; that I am still alive to lift up my voice against the dismemberment of this ancient and most noble monarchy! Pressed down as I am by the hand of infirmity, I am little able to assist my country in this most perilous conjuncture; but, my Lords, while I have sense and memory, I will never consent to deprive the royal offspring of the House of Brunswick, the heirs of the Princess Sophia, of their fairest inheritance. Where is the man that will dare to advise such a measure? My Lords, his Majesty succeeded to an empire as great in extent as its reputation was unsullied. Shall we tarnish the lustre of this nation by an ignominious surrender of its rights and fairest possessions? Shall this great kingdom, that has survived, whole and entire, the Danish depredations, the Scottish inroads, and the Norman conquest; that has stood the threatened invasion of the Spanish Armada, now fall prostrate before the House of Bourbon? Surely, my Lords, this nation is no longer what it was! Shall a people, that seventeen years ago was the terror of the world, now stoop so low as to tell its ancient inveterate enemy, take all we have, only give us peace? It is impossible! …My Lords, any state is better than despair. Let us at least make one effort; and if we must fall, let us fall like men!”

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708–1778) British politician

Speech in the House of Lords (7 April 1778), quoted in William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (London: Aylott & Jones, 1848), pp. xv-xvi.

Men, People, World, Peace

“"Institutional economics" alone meets the demand for a generalized description of the economic order. Its claim is to explain the nature and extent of order amid economic phenomena, or those concerned with industry in relation to human well-being. In the words of Edwin Cannan, it attempts to tell "why all of us are as well off as we are" and "why some of us are better off than others." Such an explanation cannot properly be answered in formulas explaining the processes through which prices emerge in a market. Its quest must go beyond sale and purchase to the peculiarities of the economic system which allow these things to take place upon particular terms and not upon others.”

Walton Hale Hamilton (1881–1958) Yale Law Professor

Source: The Institutional Approach to Economic Theory, 1919, p. 311

Nature

“A culture where a) little girls are gang raped b) raped little girls are murdered in order to protect the community’s honour is dark barbarism of such an extent that is difficult for a Western person to understand. Further cognitive dissonance is caused for the tolerantly aware by maintaining their faith in the wonderfulness of the Islamic culture and, in general, the equality of all cultures. That’s why discussion of the actual subject is avoided like the plague, and attention is moved to something that has nothing at all to do with the subject, for example, to the under-representation of women in stock-listed companies, or domestic violence.”

Jussi Halla-aho (1971) Finnish Slavic linguist, blogger and a politician

Jussi Halla-aho (2012), published in the blog Gates of Vienna Some thoughts about honour violence http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.fr/2012/09/all-cultures-are-not-equal.html, September 01, 2012. (Note: J.H-A has never published anything in the G.o.V. Translations, publications and quotations have been made by other people) 2010 -

Women, Faith, Girl, Communication

“Alexander said, "I assure you I had rather excel others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion."”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Life of Alexander
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Knowledge

“First, most producers are employees of firms, not owners. Viewed from the vantage point of classical [economic] theory, they have no reason to maximize the profits of firms, except to the extent that they can be controlled by owners. Moreover, profit-making firms, nonprofit organizations, and bureaucratic organizations all have exactly the same problem of inducing their employees to work toward organizational goals. There is no reason, a priori, why it should be easier (or harder) to produce this motivation in organizations aimed at maximizing profits than in organizations with different goals. If it is true in an organizational economy that organizations motivated by profits will be more efficient than other organizations, additional postulates will have to be introduced to account for it.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Simon (1991) "Organizations and Markets:" in: Journal of Economic Perspectives. 5 (2 Spring 1991): p. 28.
1980s and later

Motivation, Problem

“Bush, a technical advisor to Roosevelt, published in 1945 an article in Atlantic Monthly which highlighted problems in the growth of knowledge, and proposed a technological solution based on his concept of memex, a multimedia personal computer: "Professionally, our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose…The difficulty seems to be not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record." (Bush, 1945) The world brain has continued for over fifty years to provide an active objective for the information systems community (Goodman, 1987), and memex is often quoted as having been realized fifty years later through the World Wide Web”

Brian R. Gaines (1938) British computer scientist

Berners-Lee, Cailliau, Luotonen, Nielsen and Secret, 1994
First paragraph
Convergence to the Information Highway (1996)

Secret, World, Quotes, Communication

“We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word "admire" then means "marvel at."”

B.F. Skinner book Beyond Freedom and Dignity

Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1972).

People

“Taking again as an example the need to appear perfect, I would be interested primarily in understanding what this trend accomplishes for the individual (eliminating conflicts with others and making him feel superior to others), and also what consequences the trend has on his character and his life. The latter investigation would make it possible to understand, for example, how such a person anxiously conforms with expectations and standards to the extent of becoming a mere automaton, and yet subversively defies them; how this double play results in listlessness and inertia; how he is proud of his apparent independence, yet actually is entirely dependent on the expectations and opinions of others; how he is terrified lest anyone should discover the flimsiness of his moral strivings and the duplicity which has pervaded his life; how this in turn has made him seclusive and hypersensitive to criticism.”

Karen Horney book New Ways in Psychoanalysis

New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939) pp. 281

Life, Feeling, Understanding, Appearance

“In order to be transmuted into knowledge, every perception is and must be ordered and organized into categories. The extent, however, to which we can organize and express our experience in such conceptual forms is, in turn, dependent upon the frames of reference which happen to be available at a given historical moment. The concepts which we have and the universe of discourse in which we move, together with the directions in which they tend to elaborate themselves, are dependent largely upon the historical-social situation of the intellectually active and responsible members of the group.”

Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) Hungarian sociologist

Ideology and Utopia (1929)

Knowledge, Universe, Dependency

“In which the technical apparatus of production and distribution (with an increasing sector of automation) functions, not as the sum-total of mere instruments which can be isolated from their social and political effects, but rather as a system which determines a priori the product of the apparatus as well as the operations of servicing and extending it. In this society, the productive apparatus tends to become totalitarian to the extent to which it determines not only the socially needed occupations, skills, and attitudes, but also individual needs and aspirations. It thus obliterates the Opposition between the private and public existence, between individual and social needs.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. xlvii

“When the underlying reality is particularly unpleasant, we minimize—numbing ourselves to the actual extent of the real story. We say, “Things can't possibly be as bad as people tell us,” because we don't want them to be that bad. This is a form of magical thinking, a way of shutting our eyes. Surely if things were that bad, somebody would do something about it. Withdrawal can take the form of removing our interest (another horror story about furry pets, yawn, yawn); or our wandering attention (understandably, since we are besieged by other equally pressing images of horror). Of course this reaction can be genuine: not everyone need become an activist in the cause to end animal suffering. And becoming a vegetarian may seem like going too far. In fact, it is not such a difficult step and could be legitimately seen as the very best form of activism.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Source: The Face on Your Plate (2009), Ch. 4, p. 161

People, Way, Understanding, Thinking

“One has been led to the conception of electrons, i. e. of extremely small particles, charged with electricity, which are present in immense numbers in all ponderable bodies, and by whose distribution and motions we endeavor to explain all electric and optical phenomena that are not confined to the free ether…. according to our modern views, the electrons in a conducting body, or at least a certain part of them, are supposed to be in a free state, so that they can obey an electric force by which the positive particles are driven in one, and the negative electrons in the opposite direction. In the case of a non-conducting substance, on the contrary, we shall assume that the electrons are bound to certain positions of equilibrium. If, in a metallic wire, the electrons of one kind, say the negative ones, are travelling in one direction, and perhaps those of the opposite kind in the opposite direction, we have to do with a current of conduction, such as may lead to a state in which a body connected to one end of the wire has an excess of either positive or negative electrons. This excess, the charge of the body as a whole, will, in the state of equilibrium and if the body consists of a conducting substance, be found in a very thin layer at its surface.
In a ponderable dielectric there can likewise be a motion of the electrons. Indeed, though we shall think of each of them as haying a definite position of equilibrium, we shall not suppose them to be wholly immovable. They can be displaced by an electric force exerted by the ether, which we conceive to penetrate all ponderable matter… the displacement will immediately give rise to a new force by which the particle is pulled back towards its original position, and which we may therefore appropriately distinguish by the name of elastic force. The motion of the electrons in non-conducting bodies, such as glass and sulphur, kept by the elastic force within certain bounds, together with the change of the dielectric displacement in the ether itself, now constitutes what Maxwell called the displacement current. A substance in which the electrons are shifted to new positions is said to be electrically polarized.
Again, under the influence of the elastic forces, the electrons can vibrate about their positions of equilibrium. In doing so, and perhaps also on account of other more irregular motions, they become the centres of waves that travel outwards in the surrounding ether and can be observed as light if the frequency is high enough. In this manner we can account for the emission of light and heat. As to the opposite phenomenon, that of absorption, this is explained by considering the vibrations that are communicated to the electrons by the periodic forces existing in an incident beam of light. If the motion of the electrons thus set vibrating does not go on undisturbed, but is converted in one way or another into the irregular agitation which we call heat, it is clear that part of the incident energy will be stored up in the body, in other terms [words] that there is a certain absorption. Nor is it the absorption alone that can be accounted for by a communication of motion to the electrons. This optical resonance, as it may in many cases be termed, can likewise make itself felt even if there is no resistance at all, so that the body is perfectly transparent. In this case also, the electrons contained within the molecules will be set in motion, and though no vibratory energy is lost, the oscillating particles will exert an influence on the velocity with which the vibrations are propagated through the body. By taking account of this reaction of the electrons we are enabled to establish an electromagnetic theory of the refrangibility of light, in its relation to the wave-length and the state of the matter, and to form a mental picture of the beautiful and varied phenomena of double refraction and circular polarization.
On the other hand, the theory of the motion of electrons in metallic bodies has been developed to a considerable extent…. important results that have been reached by Riecke, Drude and J. J. Thomson… the free electrons in these bodies partake of the heat-motion of the molecules of ordinary matter, travelling in all directions with such velocities that the mean kinetic energy of each of them is equal to that of a gaseous molecule at the same temperature. If we further suppose the electrons to strike over and over again against metallic atoms, so that they describe irregular zigzag-lines, we can make clear to ourselves the reason that metals are at the same time good conductors of heat and of electricity, and that, as a general rule, in the series of the metals, the two conductivities change in nearly the same ratio. The larger the number of free electrons, and the longer the time that elapses between two successive encounters, the greater will be the conductivity for heat as well as that for electricity.”

Hendrik Lorentz (1853–1928) Dutch physicist

Source: The Theory of Electrons and Its Applications to the Phenomena of Light and Radiant Heat (1916), Ch. I General principles. Theory of free electrons, pp. 8-10

Beauty, Way, Travel, Communication

“Rousseau … is aesthetically revolted by the trashiness of what, some twenty years ago, David Riesman called the 'other-directed' personality, which he saw becoming ever-more salient in our society. This is the personality whose whole being is attuned to catch the signals sent out by the consensus of his fellows and by the institutional agencies of the culture, to the extent that he is scarcely a self at all, but, rather, a reiterated impersonation.”

Lionel Trilling book Sincerity and Authenticity

Source: Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), p. 66

Personality

“A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.”

Gaston Bachelard book L'Eau et les Rêves

Introduction
L'eau et les rêves (Water and Dreams) 1942

“An international system consists of a group of interacting behavior units called "nations" or "countries," to which may sometimes be added certain supra-national organizations, such as the United Nations. Each of the behavior units in the system can be described in terms of a set of "relevant variables." Just what is relevant and what is not is a matter of judgment of the system-builder, but we think of such things as states of war or peace, degrees of hostility or friendliness, alliance or enmity, arms budgets, geographic extent, friendly or hostile communications, and so on. Having defined our variables, we can then proceed to postulate certain relationships between them, sufficient to define a path for all the variables through time. Thus we might suppose, with Lewis Richardson that the rate of change of hostility of one nation toward a second depends on the level of hostility in the second and that the rate of change of hostility of the second toward the first depends on the level of hostility of the first. Then, if we start from given levels of hostility in each nation, these equations are sufficient to spell out what happens to these levels in succeeding time periods.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1950s, National images and international systems, 1959, p. 120-121

Hostility, War, Peace, Behavior

“Everyone explains that discussions about Socialism are exceedingly obscure; this obscurity is due, to a large extent, to the fact that contemporary socialists use a terminology which no longer corresponds to their ideas.”

Georges Sorel book Reflections on Violence

Source: Reflections on Violence (1908), p. 47

Idea

“Jumbled black rocks adorned an otherwise pale, flat landscape of salmons and khakis. Mountains rose in distant ridges. Out there in the Namaqua sea, I found myself thinking of South Africa as an island. Like Robinson Crusoe, I was walking its perimeter, noting the extent of my domain, checking for cannibals, finding fresh water. Sure, there were 47 million others who might make such a claim, but theirs were no more valid than mine, only similar. Beating my drum, singing the land, proclaiming it mine from coast to coast.”

Justin D. Fox (1967) South African author, photojournalist, lecturer and editor

The Marginal Safari: Scouting the Edge of South Africa (2010)

Mountain, Thinking, Water, Distant

“Gentlemen, when I consider the objections put forward to the grant of self-government I can hardly keep my patience. What is it that they say? They say that we are not educated enough to get self-government. My answer is: whose fault is it? For the last 150 years you have been governing this country and yet you have not succeeded in educating the people of this country to such an extent that they may be fit for governing themselves.”

Chittaranjan Das (1870–1925) Indian politician and leader of the Swaraj Party

Speech delivered on 18th March 1918, at Rammurti’s pavilion at a meeting held to support the deputation to England. Source: Collected Works of Deshbandhu.
1918

People, Education, Patience, Country

“North Korea's future depends on a large extent on South Korea's future.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Interview with Chad O'Carroll (2012)

Future, Dependency

“You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a peculiar religious feeling of his own. But it is different from the religion of the naive man. For the latter God is a being from whose care one hopes to benefit and whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a feeling similar to that of a child for its father, a being to whom one stands to some extent in a personal relation, however deeply it may be tinged with awe. But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.”

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

1940s, The World As I See It (1949)

Life, God, Age, Fear

“The error in depicting critics of animal experiments as anti-science becomes clear when one begins to question the extent to which the purported scientific aims of these experiments are actually accomplished. For then it turns out that the experiments and not their critics are unscientific.”

Deborah Mayo American philosopher

Source: Against a Scientific Justification of Animal Experiments, p. 340