Quotes about fact
page 22

“The power of administrative bodies to make finding of fact which may be treated as conclusive, if there is evidence both ways, is a power of enormous consequence. An unscrupulous administrator might be tempted to say "Let me find the facts for the people of my country, and I care little who lays down the general principles."”

Charles Evans Hughes (1862–1948) American judge

"Important Work of Uncle Sam's Lawyers", American Bar Association Journal (April 1931), p. 238, reprinting an address to the Federal Bar Association, Washington, D.C. (February 11, 1931), where the chief justice spoke of the "extraordinary development of administrative agencies of the government and of the lawyer's part in making them work satisfactorily and also in protecting the public against bureaucratic excesses", according to the article's subtitle

People, Way, Country

“When I have contemplated these adjustments of business and editorial policy, it has always seemed to me that American newspapers are peculiarly representative of the practical idealism of our country. Quite recently the construction of a revenue statute resulted in giving publicity to some highly interesting facts about incomes. It must have been observed that nearly all the newspapers published these interesting facts in their news columns, while very many of them protested in their editorial columns that such publicity was a bad policy. Yet this was not inconsistent. I am referring to the incident by way of illustrating what I just said about the newspapers representing the practical idealism of America. As practical newsmen they printed the facts. As editorial idealists they protested that there ought to be no such facts available.”

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

1920s, The Press Under a Free Government (1925)

Way, Business, Country

“We are no better than the animals; in fact in a lot of ways we aren't as good.”

John Steinbeck book The Log from the Sea of Cortez

Source: The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951), Chapter 9

Way, Animals

“If we admit the existence of the prophetic mission, by putting the idea of possibility, which is in fact ignorance, in place of certainty, and make miracles a proof of the truth of man who claims to be a prophet it becomes necessary that they should not be used by a person, who says that they can be performed by others than prophets, as the Mutakallimun do.”

Averroes book On the Harmony of Religions and Philosophy

Part 2: The Advent of the Prophets; Opening sentence
On the Harmony of Religions and Philosophy

Truth, Idea, Personality

“The two dominant religions have fantastic rewards for those who cannot think, the intellectually conforming, unquestioning and obedient, even those who kill or are killed furthering their dogmas. They need to be told that the skeptical goods — the liberating promises of skeptical rationality — are by far more befitting and more beneficent to Africans than imaginary rewards either in the here and now or in the hereafter. Today the African continent has become the new battleground for the forces of a dark age. And we have to dislodge and defeat these forces if Africa is to emerge, grow, develop and flourish. To some people, the African predicament appears hopeless. The continent seems to be condemned, doomed and damned. Africa appears to be in a fix, showing no signs of change, transformation and progress. An African enlightenment sounds like a pipe dream. But I do not think this is the case — an African Age of Reason can be on the horizon! The fact is that there are many Africans who reason well and think critically.”

Leo Igwe (1970) Nigerian human rights activist

A Manifesto for a Skeptical Africa (2012)

People, Age, Religion, Dreams

“V. We complain that the Union cause has suffered, and is now suffering immensely, from mistaken deference to Rebel Slavery. Had you, Sir, in your Inaugural Address, unmistakably given notice that, in case the Rebellion already commenced were persisted in, and your efforts to preserve the Union and enforce the laws should be resisted by armed force, you would recognize no loyal person as rightfully held in Slavery by a traitor, we believe the Rebellion would therein have received a staggering if not fatal blow. At that moment, according to the returns of the most recent elections, the Unionists were a large majority of the voters of the Slave States. But they were composed in good part of the aged, the feeble, the wealthy, the timid--the young, the reckless, the aspiring, the adventurous, had already been largely lured by the gamblers and negro-traders, the politicians by trade and the conspirators by instinct, into the toils of Treason. Had you then proclaimed that Rebellion would strike the shackles from the slaves of every traitor, the wealthy and the cautious would have been supplied with a powerful inducement to remain loyal. As it was, every coward in the South soon became a traitor from fear; for Loyalty was perilous, while Treason seemed comparatively safe. Hence the boasted unanimity of the South--a unanimity based on Rebel terrorism and the fact that immunity and safety were found on that side, danger and probable death on ours. The Rebels from the first have been eager to confiscate, imprison, scourge and kill: we have fought wolves with the devices of sheep. The result is just what might have been expected. Tens of thousands are fighting in the Rebel ranks to-day whose, original bias and natural leanings would have led them into ours.”

Horace Greeley (1811–1872) American politician and publisher

1860s, The Prayer of the Twenty Millions (1862)

Death, Age, Fear, Law

“To believe that any action based on an ignorance of fact can possibly succeed, is to abandon the use of reason.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Give Me Liberty (1936)

“To live only for some unknown future is superficial. It is like climbing a mountain to reach the peak without experiencing its sides. The sides of the mountain sustain life, not the peak. This is where things grow, experience gained, and technologies are mastered. The importance of peak lies only in the fact that it defines the sides. So I went on towards the top, but always experiencing the sides. I had a long way to go but I was in no hurry. I went in little steps—just one step after another—but each step towards the top.”

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam book Wings of Fire

Source: Wings of Fire, p. 98.

Life, Way, Mountain, Future

“They aren't interested in the fact that whenever they kick up dirt, the dirt rubs off on every one of us.”

Irene Dunne (1898–1990) American actress

How To Get Along In Hollywood (1948)

“I am aware that the great Plato himself, and after him, a man posterior to him in date, though not in mind, I mean Iamblichus of Chalcis (who initiated us into other branches of philosophy, and also into this by means of his discourses), did both of them as far as hypothesis goes, take for granted the fact of a Creation and assumed the universe to have been, in a certain sense, the Work of Time, in order that the most important of the effects produced by this Power, may be reduced into a shape for examination.”

Julian (emperor) (331–363) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer

Upon the Sovereign Sun (362)

Sense, Universe, Time

“If a thousand [citizens] were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.”

Henry David Thoreau book Civil Disobedience

Civil Disobedience (1849)

“The great superiority of debating, as the schools should look upon it, lies in the fact that it adds to many of the elements of the present absorbing interest in athletics those educational values which contribute directly to the highest type of citizenship.”

William Trufant Foster (1879–1950) American economist

Source: Argumentation and debating, 1908, p. viii

Education, School

“A double problem arises: There is first the difficulty of, if not the impossibility of demonstrating the existence of any creator or designer at all. I think I say something uncontroversial when I say that no theologian has ever conclusively demonstrated that such a designer can or does or ever has existed. The most you can do, by way of the argument from design, is to infer him or her or it from an apparent harmony in the arrangements - and this was at a time when that was the very best that, so to speak, could be done. But religion goes a little further than this already rather impossible task, and expects us to believe as follows: that the speaker not only can prove the existence of a said entity, but can claim to know this entity's mind - in fact, can claim to know it quite intimately; can claim to know his or her personal wishes; can, in turn, tell you what you may do, in his name - a quite large arrogation of power, you will suddenly notice, is being granted to the speaker here. The speaker can tell you that he knows - he cannot tell you how - but he can tell you that he knows, for example, that heaven hates ham, that god doesn't want you to eat pork products; he can tell you that god has a very very strong view about with whom you may have sexual relations, indeed, how you may have sexual relations with others; he can indicate, perhaps a little less convincingly but no less firmly, that there are certain books or courses of study that you might want to avoid or treat with great suspicion.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Christopher Hitchens vs. Marvin Olasky, 14/05/2007 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMgMUHD_kPI?t=1m35s 2000s, 2007

God, Hate, Books, Religion

“The fact that black voters have voted over 90 percent Democratic for decades leaves them almost wholly without power. Democrats—paradigmatically, the Clintons—feint in their direction during general elections, trying to assure turnout and using them to bash Republicans as bigots and—in the usual fashion—as emblems of their own goodness.”

Crispin Sartwell (1958) American philosopher

White Liberals: We’re Not Racist (August 29, 2016)

Fashion

“I welcome an end to this all if that's what should be, I don't mind that. In fact, I would rather quit while I was ahead. There's no need in overstaying your welcome.”

River Phoenix (1970–1993) American actor, musician, and activist

E! Television (1988)

“I, like many members of my generation, was concerned with segregation and the repeated violation of civil rights. We were impatient with those (like President Kennedy) who took a cautious approach. How could we continue to countenance these injustices that had gone on so long? (The fact that so many people in the establishment seemed to do so — as they had accepted colonialism, slavery, and other forms of oppression — left a life-long mark. It reinforced a distrust of authority which I had had from childhood).”

Joseph E. Stiglitz (1943) American economist and professor, born 1943.

Autobiographical Essay (2001)

Life, People, Childhood

“The structure of a theoretical system tells us what alternatives are open in the possible answers to a given question. If observed facts of undoubted accuracy will not fit any of the alternatives it leaves open, the system itself is in need of reconstruction.”

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) American sociologist

Source: The structure of social action (1937), p. 9

Question

“The Vedic approach,” concludes Ram Swarup, “is perhaps the best. It gives unity without sacrificing diversity. In fact, it gives a deeper unity and a deeper diversity beyond the power of ordinary monotheism and polytheism. It is one with the yogic and the mystic approach… In this deeper approach, the distinction is not between a true One God and false Many Gods; it is between a true way of worship and a false way of worship. Wherever there is sincerity, truth and self-giving in worship, that worship goes to the true altar by whatever name we may designate it and in whatever way we may conceive it. But if it is not desireless, if it has ego, falsehood, conceit and deceit in it, then it is unavailing though it may be offered to the most true God, theologically speaking.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

The World As Revelation: Names of Gods (1980)

God, Truth, Way, Falseness

“We came up with the idea of people who are attracted to criminals, especially those who might write to a criminal in jail saying, “I understand you, I sympathize with what you’re going through,” and they just sort of pin all their hopes and dreams on somebody who they think is misunderstood but who is in fact rather dangerous. The fact that Harley might have gone from this intelligent, cool therapist to this crazed clown woman was both very interesting and very tragic to us. We thought that had the makings of a great Batman villain — like Batman himself, his villains start off human but then some tragedy happens and warps them into what they are today.”

Paul Dini (1957) writer

Paul Dini reflects on 25 years of Harley Quinn http://ew.com/books/2017/09/05/paul-dini-25-years-of-harley-quinn/ (September 5, 2017)

People, Dreams, Hope, Intelligence

“Purpose of counter-intelligence action is to disrupt [Black Panther Party] and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge. If facts are present it aids in the success of the proposal but the Bureau feels … that disruption can be accomplished without facts to back it up.”

J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972) American law enforcement officer and first director of the FBI

Memo (16 Sept. 1970).

Feeling, Intelligence, Success

“The abstract categories of imperialism are neither exempt from the need of a foundation, nor will the fact that they are coextensive with ordinary discourse provide them with the needed foundation.”

Silvia Federici (1942) Italian American scholar, teacher, and feminist activist

"Viet Cong Philosophy: Tran Duc Thao" (1970)

“I do not say the story is true, for I did not witness the happenings which it portrays, but the fact that in the telling of it to you I have taken fictitious names for the principal characters quite sufficiently evidences the sincerity of my own belief that it may be true.
The yellow, mildewed pages of the diary of a man long dead, and the records of the Colonial Office dovetail perfectly with the narrative of my convivial host, and so I give you the story as I painstakingly pieced it out from these several various agencies.
If you do not find it credible you will at least be as one with me in acknowledging that it is unique, remarkable, and interesting.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 1 : Out to Sea

Sincerity, Dead

“"So it's tempting to incorporate a smaller resolver library into qmail. […] I'd no longer be able to blame the BIND authors and vendors for the fact that attackers can easily use DNS to steal mail." [From the file "THOUGHTS" of the qmail distribution]”

Daniel J. Bernstein (1971) American mathematician, cryptologist and programmer

On testing

“Too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.”

Mortimer J. Adler book How to Read a Book

Source: How to Read a Book (1940, 1972), p. 4

Understanding, Sense

“When America's creditors consider our behavior they see total fiscal irresponsibility. They see a deluded country that acts as if it is a privilege for foreigners to lend to it, and a deluded country that believes that foreigners will continue to accumulate US debt until the end of time.The fact of the matter is that the US is bankrupt.”

Paul Craig Roberts (1939) American economist

"A Bankrupt Superpower" http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts03182008.html, CounterPunch (2008-03-18)

Behavior, Country

“Let us never imagine that faith can ever be furthered by suppressing doubt, let alone by suppressing evidence. All truth is one, and religion must be as eager as science to know the truth as far as man can perceive it. If something we have treasured as truth is really contradicted by unanswerable evidence, then in the name of the God of truth we must part with it however venerable it may be. Let us never suppose that we can take over faith from our parents without examination, or believe anything merely because another says it is true. But let us not be content with a static agnosticism which never rouses itself to make inquiry. Let us examine the evidence and then in complete loyalty to its trend make a leap both of intellect and will, and, committing ourselves, acting as if all were established, try out in life the faith that carries us on wings after the hard road of fact and reason stops.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.231

Life, God, Truth, Faith

“During a single week of July 1967, 164 Americans were killed and 2100 were wounded in city riots in the United States. We are truly fighting a two-front war and doing badly in both. Each war feeds on the other and, although the President assures us that we have the resources to win both wars, in fact we are not winning either.”

J. William Fulbright (1905–1995) American politician

"The Price of Empire" speech, to the meeting of the American Bar Association in Hawaii (August 1967), in Haynes Bonner Johnson and Bernard M. Gwertzman, Fulbright: The Dissenter (1968), p. 305.

War, Fight

“The only merit of which I personally am conscious was that of having pleased myself by my studies, and any results that may be due to my researches were owing to the fact that it has been a pleasure for me to become a physicist.”

John Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh (1842–1919) English physicist

On receiving the Order of Merit (1902)

Pleasure, Study, Personality

“Oh dear, oh dear, how stupid men are when they get an idea into their heads! I tell you he's a good dragon, and a friend of mine, and tells me the most beautiful stories you ever heard, all about old times and when he was little. And he's been so kind to mother, and mother'd do anything for him. And father likes him too, though father doesn't hold with art and poetry much, and always falls asleep when the dragon starts talking about style. But the fact is, nobody can help liking him when once they know him. He's so engaging and so trustful, and as simple as a child!”

Kenneth Grahame book The Reluctant Dragon

The Boy to St. George
Dream Days (1898), The Reluctant Dragon

Men, Stupidity, Beauty, Art

“[P]eople misunderstand Israel, and see it now in colonial, imperialist terms is because it’s a unique event in human history. The British colonization of North America, New Zealand, Australia, the Dutch in South Africa, they came to places that they had never been to. That’s colonialism. You put your people in there. You takeover. You marginalize the natives if you can. You may not succeed. In South Africa, that’s colonialism. So they see the Jews arriving in what’s called Palestine, and that’s the parallel, the only one they understand. They can’t put their heads around the fact that this is a people returning to their home. That they never gave up title to. They never gave up their longing for. It was repeated in their rituals three times a day, it wasn’t like once a year, let’s remember the homeland.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2010s, 2015, Interview with Bill Kristol (2015)

People, Home, History, Understanding

“The gist of my argument is that men like Kraepelin, Bleuler and Freud were not what they claimed or seem to be—namely, physicians or medical investigators; they were, in fact, religious-political leaders and conquerors. Instead of discovering new diseases, they extended, through psychiatry, the imagery, vocabulary, jurisdiction, and hence the territory of medicine to what they were not, and are not, diseases in the original Virchowian sense.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry (1979)

Men, Disease, Sense

“On the other hand, I view the whole matter from a cosmic perspective. I don't take a position. I believe that there are no more positions to take, no certainties, no facts. Many people find this confusing about my films; they say I am hiding out behind irony. But from a cosmic viewpoint, it is eternally unimportant whether one lives or not.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

In an interview in Die Zeit, 24 Nov 1989
Interviews

People

“Nevertheless, it remains conceivable that the measure relations of space in the infinitely small are not in accordance with the assumptions of our geometry [Euclidean geometry], and, in fact, we should have to assume that they are not if, by doing so, we should ever be enabled to explain phenomena in a more simple way.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

Memoir (1854) Tr. William Kingdon Clifford, as quoted by A. D'Abro, The Evolution of Scientific Thought from Newton to Einstein https://archive.org/details/TheEvolutionOfScientificThought (1927) p. 55.

Way

“If there was anyone who actually fit the category of conservative, if there was such a category of people, they would have a very easy way to deal with the fact that 60% of the children under 2 [in Nicaragua] are suffering probable brain damage. Namely, by paying their debts. Simple conservative principle. But that's beyond unthinkable. Compassionate conservatives might want to go beyond that, if they existed. But they're much more interested in making political capital over the fact that a woman in a vegetative state shouldn't be allowed to die in dignity.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Talk at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, March 22, 2005 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEvIDiVheys. Quotes 2000s, 2005

Children, People, Way, Suffering

“French identity, radically conceived, corresponds to a failed national project. Is it not, in fact, the supreme example of collective defeat in the modern period, and thus—concretely—of humiliation by capital?”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Sore Losers" https://www.urbanomic.com/document/sore-losers/ (2016) (original emphasis)

“Death has been the great leveler/ Of all honour, glory and name./ None can take anything with them/ To their tomb! Death! The sobering fact/ Of all our yearnings and longings!/ “What does it profit a man …”/ If he cannot take any of the things/ To his grave.”

Kuruvilla Pandikattu (1957) Indian philosopher

Death: Live It! p. 32.
Death: Live It! (2005)

Death

“Although the behavior that emerges is complex, the rules that guide it are necessarily simple. In fact, it is their simplicity that creates the freedom to behave in complicated adaptive, and surprising ways.”

Shona Brown (1960) businessperson

Source: Competing on the Edge, 1998, p. 18

Way, Behavior, Freedom

“The purpose of organizations is to exploit the fact that many (virtually all) decisions require the participation of many individuals for their effectiveness.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Source: 1970s-1980s, The Limits Of Organization (1974), Chapter 2, Organization And Information, p. 33

Decision

“Never has outright racism been so exciting or so chic — both here in America and abroad! Kumbaya! In fact, a German paper called him “the black JFK”, which is an insult to the late President Kennedy, who -- again, leaving aside the blatant racism here — was nowhere near as far left as Obama.”

Rachel Marsden (1974) journalist

On the candidacy of African-American US presidential candidate Barack Obama Barack Obama Has Little In Common With Europe http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=27669

“Of greater importance than this regulation of African clientship were the political consequences of the Jugurthine war or rather of the Jugurthine insurrection, although these have been frequently estimated too highly. Certainly all the evils of the government were therein brought to light in all their nakedness; it was now not merely notorious but, so to speak, judicially established, that among the governing lords of Rome everything was treated as venal--the treaty of peace and the right of intercession, the rampart of the camp and the life of the soldier; the African had said no more than the simple truth, when on his departure from Rome he declared that, if he had only gold enough, he would undertake to buy the city itself. But the whole external and internal government of this period bore the same stamp of miserable baseness. In our case the accidental fact, that the war in Africa is brought nearer to us by means of better accounts than the other contemporary military and political events, shifts the true perspective; contemporaries learned by these revelations nothing but what everybody knew long before and every intrepid patriot had long been in a position to support by facts. The circumstance, however, that they were now furnished with some fresh, still stronger and still more irrefutable, proofs of the baseness of the restored senatorial government--a baseness only surpassed by its incapacity--might have been of importance, had there been an opposition and a public opinion with which the government would have found it necessary to come to terms. But this war had in fact exposed the corruption of the government no less than it had revealed the utter nullity of the opposition. It was not possible to govern worse than the restoration governed in the years 637-645; it was not possible to stand forth more defenceless and forlorn than was the Roman senate in 645: had there been in Rome a real opposition, that is to say, a party which wished and urged a fundamental alteration of the constitution, it must necessarily have now made at least an attempt to overturn the restored senate. No such attempt took place; the political question was converted into a personal one, the generals were changed, and one or two useless and unimportant people were banished. It was thus settled, that the so-called popular party as such neither could nor would govern; that only two forms of government were at all possible in Rome, a -tyrannis- or an oligarchy; that, so long as there happened to be nobody sufficiently well known, if not sufficiently important, to usurp the regency of the state, the worst mismanagement endangered at the most individual oligarchs, but never the oligarchy; that on the other hand, so soon as such a pretender appeared, nothing was easier than to shake the rotten curule chairs. In this respect the coming forward of Marius was significant, just because it was in itself so utterly unwarranted. If the burgesses had stormed the senate-house after the defeat of Albinus, it would have been a natural, not to say a proper course; but after the turn which Metellus had given to the Numidian war, nothing more could be said of mismanagement, and still less of danger to the commonwealth, at least in this respect; and yet the first ambitious officer who turned up succeeded in doing that with which the older Africanus had once threatened the government,(16) and procured for himself one of the principal military commands against the distinctly- expressed will of the governing body. Public opinion, unavailing in the hands of the so-called popular party, became an irresistible weapon in the hands of the future king of Rome. We do not mean to say”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 3, pg 163, Translated by W.P. Dickson.
The History of Rome - Volume 3

Life, War, People, Truth

“You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: 'now, you are free to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.' You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe you have been completely fair… This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity—not just legal equity but human ability—not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

LBJ in the Commencement Address at Howard University http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/sources/ps_bakke.html on June 4, 1965 on affirmative action. 1960s

Freedom

“Reclamation. Our country has a well defined policy of reclamation established under statutory authority. This policy should be continued and made a self-sustaining activity administered in a manner that will meet local requirements and bring our and lands into a profitable state of cultivation as fast as there is a market for their products. Legislation is pending based on the report of the Fact Finding Commission for the proper relief of those needing extension of time in which to meet their payments on irrigated land, and for additional amendments and reforms of our reclamation laws, which are all exceedingly important and should be enacted at once.”

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

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

Law, Time, Country

“As we have seen, the explicit part of the circular issued by the West Bengal government in 1989 in effect was that there must be no negative reference to Islamic rule in India. Although these were the very things which contemporary Islamic writers had celebrated, there must be no reference to the destruction of the temples by Muslim rulers, to the forcible conversion of Hindus, to the numerous other disabilities which were placed on the Hindu population. Along with the circular, the passages which had to be removed were listed and substitute passages were specified. The passages which were ordered to be deleted contained, if anything, a gross understatement of the facts. On the other hand, passages which were sought to be inserted contained total falsehoods: that by paying jizyah Hindus could lead ‘normal lives’ under an Islamic ruler like Alauddin Khalji! A closer study of the textbooks which are today being used under the authority of the West Bengal government shows a much more comprehensive, a much deeper design than that of merely erasing the cruelties of Islamic rule.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Study, Parting

“The fact is, growing hemp for industrial purposes would make it a very useful plant. It can be a fiber for clothing, a source of paper, even an alternative fuel. Canada is already using hemp this way. I simply don't see that cannabis grows wild on earth just so humans can eradicate it.
Of course, the work of eradicating marijuana creates jobs within law enforcement. If we made it legal, and taxed it like we do tobacco and alcohol, maybe those law enforcement people could start paying more attention to murders and terrorism. I also think it's time for people to rise up against the prescription drug industry, the biggest opponent of legalization. You have to remember that they don't want anything out there that they can't make a profit from. Marijuana is a weed, and that means you can grow it, essentially free. This doesn't sit well with the pharmaceutical industry, and I think our Food and Drug Administration is nothing but a puppet whose strings the industry pulls.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

Source: Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! (2008), Ch. 10 (p. 190)

People, Alcohol, Law, Food

“Let me highlight the fact, then, that a mistrust of outsiders – as manifested by and in states for thousands of years – is very different from an ideology asserting that one uniquely pure race is morally superior to all others. Such thinking was by no means the norm even in European fascism. It runs directly counter to Marx.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, North Korea's State Loyalty Advantage (December 2011)

Thinking

“We know ourselves what difficult times we live in. We know equally, and we are conscious of the fact, that with us—all of us at home and overseas—there rests the responsibility whether this form of government will remain, or whether it will fail. It is therefore good that we who meet from all corners of the world to take counsel with one another, should, at any rate among ourselves, hold this torch of freedom alight, and alive, until other nations come to see our ways.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Empire Parliamentary Association's Conference in Westminster Hall (4 July 1935); published in This Torch of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses (1935), pp. 5-6.
1935

World, Way, Home, Freedom

“Pretty woman, he thought. Pretty little black-skinned woman. Who wanted to kill for love, die for love. The pride, the conceit of these doormat women amazed him. They were always women who had been spoiled children. Whose whims had been taken seriously by adults and who grew up to be the stingiest, greediest people on earth and out of their stinginess grew their stingy little love that ate everything in sight. They could not believe or accept the fact that they were unloved; they believed that the world itself was off balance when it appeared as though they were not loved. Why did they think they were so lovable? Why did they think their brand of love was better than, or even as good as, anybody else's? But they did. And they loved their love so much they would kill anybody who got in its way.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

Song of Solomon (1977)

Love, Women, Children, People

“I think that the cultivation of the humane letters has the most distinct bearing on the cultivation and appreciation of science. Science is nothing without imagination; and imagination is most readily kept fresh by literature. What little good there is a mere descriptive person, and in the small facts which with painful toil he accumulates. But let these facts be welded together by thought, their bearing traced by imagination, experiments devised by the mind projecting itself in advance of them, and the plodder is likely to become the great discoverer.”

Jacob Mendes Da Costa (1833–1900) American physician

Da Costa, Jacob M. The Higher Professional Life: Valedictory Address to the Graduating Class of Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia. Philadelphia, PA: J.B. Lippincott & Co, 1883.

Pain, Imagination, Literature, Thinking

“Most effects in psychology are relatively unimportant. That is, most variables, considered in isolation, have relatively little impact on behavior. This doesn't mean… that we should all abandon psychology and become plumbers instead. The small magnitude of most effects in psychology is itself a discovery of psychology. One might argue, in fact, that it is one of the great metadiscoveries of the field. Most variables have little impact, and thus most of the phenomena studied by psychologists are products of a multiplicity of variables.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2013), p. 251

Behavior, Study

“The most effective censorship is not, in fact, legal; in a democracy—as Tocqueville pointed out in Democracy in America—it is public opinion.”

Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998) American historian

Source: Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent (1954), p. 15

Democracy

“I don't think there is any doubt, if there ever was... that Saddam Hussein does have weapons of mass destruction. Biological weapons that they discovered were very clear evidence of not only the fact that he had them, but that he had lied and that he is continuing to lie.”

Paul Martin (1938) 21st Prime Minister of Canada

Calgary Herald, March 7, 2003

Lie, Thinking

“The real issues I don't think most people touch. The Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the important things, like the fact that he wouldn't ban landmines.”

Tom Lehrer (1928) American singer-songwriter and mathematician

Sydney Morning Herald interview (2003)

People, Thinking

“A [further] aspect [of homosexuality] is the hatred of God’s reality, an insistence on wars against reality, in living in a world of make believe. As a result, the theater is the natural element of these people. Some scholars, again not Christian, have pointed out there has been by-and-large a strong homosexual control of the theater, in varying degrees in different times, from the days of the Romans. But part and parcel of this homosexual control of the theater has been the delight in prostituting women, in using them and abusing them for the sheer delight of showing their contempt for them. Now this is homosexual culture, described by people who are not hostile to it, and in fact sometimes have some good things to say for it.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Homosexuality (n. d.)

Women, God, Hostility, War

“Obama is going to be out playing golf. He might be on one of my courses. I would invite him, I actually would say. I have the best courses in the world, so I'd say, you what, if he wants to — I have one right next to the White House, right on the Potomac. If he'd like to play, that's fine. In fact, I'd love him to leave early and play, that would be a very good thing.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2015, Presidential Bid Announcement (June 16, 2015)

Love, World, Housing

“The fact that we arrived here via an immensely long string of species that originated in something like Pikaia rather than some other crepuscular blob is a wonderful scientific story, but it is hardly material to our present condition.”

Simon Conway Morris (1951) British palaeontologist

Source: The Crucible of Creation (1998), p. 14.

“It is a fact not to be disputed, that the aristocracy have not "progressed " in proportion to the other classes. A young nobleman of the present day has not a better education than his ancestor in the time of Elizabeth.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Education, Time

“Ridicule parts social life like an invisible paling; and we are all of us afraid of the other. To this may be in great measure attributed the difference that exists between an author's writings and his conversation. The one is often sad and thoughtful, while the other is lively and careless. The fact is, that the real character is shown in the first instance, and the assumed in the second.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Life, Sadness, Parting

“A tidal wave of trucks and carts moved slowly, inexorably toward the now open gate, bumping and clanging into each other as they squeezed through. The investigator jumped out of the way, and as he stood there observing the passage of this hideous insect, with its countless twisting, shifting sections, he experienced a strange and powerful rage. The birth of that rage was followed by spasms down and around his anus, where irritated blood vessels began to leap painfully, and he knew he was in for a hemorrhoid attack. This time the investigation would go forward, hemorrhoids or no, just like the old days. That thought took the edge off his rage, lessened it considerably, in fact. There's no avoiding the inevitable. Not mass confusion, not hemorrhoids. Only the sacred key to a riddle is eternal. But what was it this time?”

Mo Yan book The Republic of Wine

Source: The Republic of Wine (1992), Chapter I, Section 1

Way, Birth, Rage, Time

“Making drawings to indicate the many elements in any human situation is something which has characterized SSM from the start. Its rationale lies in the fact that the complexity of human affairs is always a complexity of multiple interacting relationships; and pictures are a better medium than linear prose for expressing relationships. Pictures can be taken in as a whole and help to encourage holistic rather than reductionist thinking about a situation.”

Peter Checkland (1930) British management scientist

Source: Systems thinking, systems practice: includes a 30-year retrospective, 1999, p. 16

Thinking, Help, Drawing

“I was born on the planet Earth, into the middle of the twentieth century, that period in the history of the race when man succeeded in casting off many of the inhibitions and taboos laid upon him by tradition, reveled for a brief time, and then discovered that it didn’t make a bloody bit of difference that he had. He was still just as dead when he died, and he was still faced with every life-death problem that had confronted him before, compounded by the fact that Malthus was right.”

Roger Zelazny Isle of the Dead

Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 4 (p. 72)

Life, Death, History, Problem

“There are two ways of considering society. According to some, the development of human associations is not subject to providential, unchangeable laws. Rather, these associations, having originally been organized in a purely artificial manner by primeval legislators, can later be modified or remade by other legislators, in step with the progress of social science. In this system the government plays a preeminent role, because it is upon it, the custodian of the principle of authority, that the daily task of modifying and remaking society devolves.According to others, on the contrary, society is a purely natural fact. Like the earth on which it stands, society moves in accordance with general, preexisting laws. In this system, there is no such thing, strictly speaking, as social science; there is only economic science, which studies the natural organism of society and shows how this organism functions.”

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

Source: The Production of Security (1849), p. 15-16

Law, Way, Nature, Study

“Anti-Semitism is not based on strictly religious grounds and is not directed against the Jewish faith as such. However, all German Christians resent and denounce the fact that the Jews have been the chief advocates of atheism. They have influenced the workers' children through the Communist youth organizations, of which they are the leading spirit…”

Ernst Hanfstaengl (1887–1975) German businessman

Quoted in "Nazis in the News" - Mar 5, 1933

Children, Youth, Faith

“There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the greater. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Often misquoted as: Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.
Source: Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter I-V, Chapter III, Part I

Men, Freedom, Strong, Passion

“Now if you see that it is inconceivable that anything should exist, it is evident that at least one inconceivable fact is there. That is to say, that which exists is not limited to the conceivable. Since the inconceivable is there, it is impossible to set any limit to the quantity of inconceivableness which may be present in the situation. Now were the existence of anything consistently to remind you of the fact of inconceivability, since it is impossible to live without interacting with a large number of existing things, it would be impossible for you to feel in the same way about the conceivable.”

Celia Green (1935) British philosopher

Advice to Clever Children (1981)

Way, Feeling

“It is a fact that Lyndon Johnson and his curious crew seem to believe that progress in this country is best served simply and directly through the ever-expanding gift power of the everlastingly growing Federal Government. One thing we all know, and I assure you I do: that's a much easier way to get votes than my way. It always has been. It's political Daddyism, and it's as old as demagogues and despotism.”

Barry Goldwater (1909–1998) American politician

As quoted in "The Underdog Underdog" in TIME magazine (November 6, 1964).

Way, Country

“I think the movement contributed to this nation a sense of universal freedom. Precisely because women saw our movement in the sixties, stimulated them to want their rights. The fact that students saw the movement of the sixties created a student movement in this country. The fact that the people were against the war in Vietnam, saw us go into the street and win, made it possible for them to have the courage to go into the street and win, and the lesson that I would like to see from this is, that we must now find a way to deal with the problem of full employment, and as surely as we were able to bring about the Civil Rights Act, the voter rights act--the Voting Rights Act, I mean the education act, and the housing act, so is it possible for all of us now to combine our forces in a coalition, including Catholic, Protestant, Jew and labor and blacks and Puerto Ricans and Mexican-Americans and all other minorities, to bring about the one thing that will bring peace internally to the United States. And that is that any man who wants a job, or any woman who wants a job, shall not be left unemployed.”

Bayard Rustin (1912–1987) American civil rights activist and gay rights activist

Eyes on the Prize interview http://digital.wustl.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=eop;cc=eop;rgn=main;view=text;idno=rus0015.0145.091, Interview with Bayard Rustin, conducted by Blackside, Inc. in 1979, for Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years (1954-1965). Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection. (1979)

Women, War, People, Education

“The point I am trying to make clear is the fact that if we are to see a resurgence of life and power in our beloved Society we must open the way for vital, kindling, inspiring persons to visit, or better still to live in, the communities where there are, or ought to be, meetings.”

Rufus M. Jones (1863–1948) American writer

What Will Get Us Ready (1944)

Life, Way, Communication, Personality

“Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 191)

Thinking, Reality

“It is a fact that throughout my reign, representatives of the Red Cross were allowed to visit the kingdom's prisons at liberty. Our penitentiaries were open to all official investigators. Every prisoner's lawyer knew the details of the charges against his client, and had time in which to prepare his defence and find the necessary witnesses. Finally, a condemned man had the right of appeal, after which I often excercised my right of pardon. It is no longer like this. The so-called "Islamic tribunals" are an insult to the elevated principles of the Koran.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

Page 199
Publications, The Shah's Story (1980), On Islam and the Islamic Revolution

Time

“In order to hold your faith intact be sure it's kept unsullied by fact.”

Donald E. Westlake (1933–2008) American novelist

Don't Ask (1993)

Faith

“When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror — for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us — the dignity of man.”

Harold Pinter (1930–2008) playwright from England

Art, Truth & Politics (2005)

Truth, Hope, Thinking, Change

“Real love is only possible in the freedom of society; and freedom is only possible when love is a reality. The subjection of sex-relations to legal conventions is an intolerable bondage, but of course it is a bondage inescapable as long as people are slaves to a merely physical desire. The two slaveries in fact form a sort of natural counterpoise, the one to the other. When love becomes sufficient of a reality to hold the sex-passion as its powerful yet willing servant, the absurdity of Law will be at an end.”

Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) British poet and academic

Love's Coming of Age (1896)

Love, People, Law, Sex

“Much of what we do as adults is based on this imitative absorption during our childhood years. Frequently we imagine that we are behaving in a particular way because such behaviour accords with some abstract, lofty code of moral principles, when in reality all we are doing is obeying a deeply ingrained and long 'forgotten' set of purely imitative impressions (along with out carefully concealed instinctive urges) that makes it so hard for societies to change their customs and their 'beliefs'. Even when faced with exciting, brilliantly rational new ideas, based on the application of pure, objective intelligence, the community will still cling to its old home-based habits and prejudices. This is the cross we have to bear if we are going to sail through our vital juvenile 'blotting-paper' phase of rapidly mopping up the accumulated experiences of previous generations. We are forced to take the biased opinions along with the valuable facts.”

Desmond Morris book The Naked Ape

(2010), p. 86
The Naked Ape (1967)

Way, Home, Imagination, Intelligence

“Athena's great problem was that she was a woman of the twenty-second century living in the twenty-first, and making no secret of the fact, either. Did she pay a price? She certainly did. But she would have paid a still higher price if she had repressed her natural exuberance. She would have been bitter, frustrated, always concerned about "what other people might think," always saying, "I'll just sort these things out, then I'll devote myself to my dream," always complaining "that the conditions are never quite right."”

Paulo Coelho book The Witch of Portobello

Deidre O'Neill, known as Edda, p. 11.
The Witch of Portobello (2007)

People, Secret, Dreams, Nature

“Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday… The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

The Ayn Rand Letter (1971–1976)

Holiday

“The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers. […]They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

White Noise (1984)

Love, Women, Men, Secret

“Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact. To the extent that the proclamation of emancipation is not fulfilled in fact, to that extent we shall have fallen short of assuring freedom to the free.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Memorial Day speech (1963)

Men, Education, Justice, Color

“I believe that we probably have lost the culture war. That doesn't mean the war is not going to continue, and that it isn't going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in general, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important.Therefore, what seems to me a legitimate strategy for us to follow is to look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness, or by other enemies of our traditional culture. I would point out to you that the word "holy" means "set apart," and that it is not against our tradition to be, in fact, "set apart." You can look in the Old Testament, you can look at Christian history. You will see that there were times when those who had our beliefs were definitely in the minority and it was a band of hardy monks who preserved the culture while the surrounding society disintegrated.What I mean by separation is, for example, what the homeschoolers have done. Faced with public school systems that no longer educate but instead "condition" students with the attitudes demanded by Political Correctness, they have seceded. They have separated themselves from public schools and have created new institutions, new schools, in their homes.”

Paul Weyrich (1942–2008) American political activist

Letter to Amy Ridenour, National Center for Public Policy Research http://www.nationalcenter.org/Weyrich299.html (1999-02-16)

War, Education, School, Way

“The fact that you know the questions,” he said, a mite grudgingly, “tends to make me think you might really know the answers.”

Avram Davidson book Masters of the Maze

Source: Masters of the Maze (1965), Chapter 7 (p. 100)

Question, Thinking

“There was, sometimes, a de facto alliance between this president and pope. But relations were not so close that they could be taken for granted by the president's men. In fact, the documents reveal a continuous scurrying to shore up Vatican support for U. S. policies.”

Mark Riebling (1963) American writer

Freedom's Men: The Cold War Team of Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan (2005)

Men, Support

“In principle, every social situation involves strategic interaction among the participants. Thus, one might argue that proper understanding of any social situation would require game-theoretic analysis. But in actual fact, classical economic theory did manage to sidestep the game-theoretic aspects of economic behavior by postulating perfect competition, i. e., by assuming that every buyer and every seller is very small as compared with the size of the relevant markets, so that nobody can significantly affect the existing market prices by his actions.”

John Harsanyi (1920–2000) hungarian economist

Source: "Games with Incomplete Information," 1997, p. 136

Behavior, Game, Understanding, Perfection

“To the old Union they had said that the Federal power had no authority to interfere with slavery issues in a state. To their new nation they would declare that the state had no power to interfere with a federal protection of slavery. Of all the many testimonials to the fact that slavery, and not states rights, really lay at the heart of their movement, this was the most eloquent of all.”

William C. Davis (1946) American historian

Source: Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002), pp. 97–98

Heart

“This is a difficult goal to present to teachers, coming as it does at a time when education is under attack from many quarters. But our society is changing rapidly and the difficulties of foreseeing what kinds of skills future generations will require are increasing. Although we have so far depended on the rational, left half of the human brain to plan our children's future and to solve the problems they might encounter on the way to that future, the onslaught of profound change is shaking our confidence in technological thinking and in the old methdods of education. Without abandoning training in tradtional verbal and computational skills, concerned teachers are looking for teaching techniques that will enchance children's intuitive and creative powers, thus preparing students to meet new challenges with flexibility, inventiveness, and imagination and with the ability to grasp complex arrays of interconnected ideas and facts, to perceive underlying patterns of events, and to see old problems in new ways.”

Betty Edwards (1926) American artist

Source: The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979), p.196

Children, Education, Way, Confidence

“Yes, it is absurd [to say that without God, murder is permissible], because even according to your sacred fables Moses murdered an Egyptian and then looked around to make sure no one saw him before trying to conceal the body, and the same goes for the myth of Cain and Abel, where Cain lied about killing his brother. Both of these characters obviously already knew that murder was wrong a long time before the story of the Ten Commandments, and this might be because Hammurabi had already established the code of law many centuries earlier than these myths found their way into the Bible, or it might be that, like most social animals, even superstitious savages understood that you shouldn't kill or maim other members of your own society (unless your religion commands it). One minute, God supposedly says "thou shalt not kill", and the next minute He orders His own people to kill every man and his brother, except of course for Moses's brother who really should have been the only one who was killed in that story. But somehow he was spared and promoted to priest instead; saved by nepotism. Then God told them all to kill all their neighbors, every man, woman and child, including the infants and the unborn. But the fact is that murder is still wrong, regardless of what God has to say about it, and there is still no justification when God allegedly commands His prophets to plunder communities and commit genocide.”

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

Youtube, Other, The Damn Commandments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u3z69YpLx0 (January 7, 2015)

God, People, Religion, Law

“Some argue that the Bible doesn’t really say some of the things we can prove that it does, while others are convinced that it clearly does say things that it doesn’t really even hint at anywhere. For example, the idea that there was no death before “the fall”. The Bible doesn’t say that. In fact, it says there was death before the fall, because Adam and Eve had to ingest and digest living cells in order to survive, the very definition of what it means to be an animal. The only way around that was to eat of the fruit of the tree of eternal life, which directly contradicts the creationist’s interpretation, because it wouldn’t need to be there if they already had eternal life. It is an obvious metaphor representing a choice, perhaps between innocence and responsibility. That too is an interpretation. But it was obviously not an actual deciduous plant!”

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

"3rd Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnj7PlqmJ5o, Youtube (December 10, 2007) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Life, Death, Way, Idea

“Thirty percent of Republicans believe the scourge of the Earth is Mexican immigration. What's the reason for why I don't have a job? Well, make, make Mexican immigration the scapegoat for that. I understand why there's that sentiment. And there's a logic to the fact that they're coming over. They're taking our jobs. They're taking, you know, they're siphoning off our welfare system. When the reality is anything but. They are not taking jobs that U. S. citizens want. They're the cream of the crop when it comes to workers. And they are contributing to the economy.”

Gary Johnson (1953) American politician, businessman, and 29th Governor of New Mexico

2016, Interview with CNBC's John Harwood (August 22, 2016)

Understanding, Reality

“The rich are inebriate in another way and cannot contrive to grasp these frenzied longings for security. To be rich is another form of intoxication: it spells forgetfulness. In fact, that is what one wants riches for: to forget.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

Way, Forgetting

“It is essential to realize at this point that the formalism to be developed, although we cast it initially primarily in the framework of natural systems, is in fact applicable to any situation in which a class of objects is associated with real numbers, or in fact classified or indexed by any set whatever. It is thus applicable to any situation in which classification, or recognition, or discrimination is involved; indeed, one of the aims of our formalism is to point up the essential equivalence of the measurement problem in physics with all types of recognition or classification mechanisms based on observable properties of the objects being recognized or classified.”

Robert Rosen (1934–1998) American theoretical biologist

Source: Fundamentals of measurement and representation of natural systems. (1978), Ch. 2. The Basic Formalism; Quoted in: Mikulecky, Donald C. " Robert Rosen: the well‐posed question and its answer‐why are organisms different from machines? http://www.people.vcu.edu/~mikuleck/PPRISS3.html." Systems Research and Behavioral Science 17.5 (2000): 419-432.

Nature, Problem

“In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Letters and Social Aims, Quotation and Originality
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“When I say I am free, I merely state a fact. If you are an adult, you are free from infancy. I am free from all description and identification. (…).”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Freedom
Source: I am That, P.152.

“Hindu maxim that theory, speculations, [and] dogma change from time to time as the facts become better understood.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Change, Time

“Ancient scriptures tell us that man is more than the physical body. In fact, we have two bodies: the physical and the astral, or subtle. But we are the soul! According to the ancient Vedic scriptures of India, the size of the soul is 1/10,000 the tip of a strand of hair. It is located in the heart region and is the actual life force. The physical, as well as the astral or subtle body, acts as a covering or costume that the soul wears in its journey throughout the material sphere. As we pass from costume to costume or from body to body through the process known as reincarnation, the impressions of previous lives imprint themselves on the subtle body and are carried with us during each lifetime. In the dream state, activity in the subtle body becomes more dominant than activity in the physical body. Our dream experiences are often impressions accumulated from many lifetimes.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: Dreams: A State of Reality, p. 18-19

Life, Dreams, Soul, Heart

“What makes art interesting is the fact that anyone can realize it as soon as the idea has been formulated. That’s the point.”

Lawrence Weiner (1942) American artist

" Art Dictionary: Lawrence Weiner, A Sculptor of Language http://www.hatjecantz.de/lawrence-weiner-5098-1.html," at hatjecantz.de. 2012.

Art, Idea

“Furthermore, we are instructed, when we do come across instances of temple destruction, as in the case of Aurangzeb, we have to be circumspect in inferring what has happened and why…. the early monuments – like the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque in Delhi – had to be built in ‘great haste’, we are instructed…Proclamation of political power, alone! And what about the religion which insists that religious faith is all, that the political cannot be separated from the religious? And the name: the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque, the Might of Islam mosque? Of course, that must be taken to be mere genuflection! And notice: ‘available materials were assembled and incorporated’, they ‘clearly came from Hindu sources’ – may be the materials were just lying about; may be the temples had crumbled on their own earlier; may be the Hindus voluntarily broke their temples and donated the materials? No? After all, there is no proof they didn’t! And so, the word ‘plundered’ is repeatedly put within quotation marks!
In fact, there is more. The use of such materials – from Hindu temples – for constructing Islamic mosques is part of ‘a process of architectural definition and accommodation by local workmen essential to the further development of a South Asian architecture for Islamic use’. The primary responsibility thus becomes that of those ‘local workmen’ and their ‘accommodation’. Hence, features in the Qutb complex come to ‘demonstrate a creative response by architects and carvers to a new programme’. A mosque that has clearly used materials, including pillars, from Hindu temples, in which undeniably ‘in the fabric of the central dome, a lintel carved with Hindu deities has been turned around so that its images face into the rubble wall’ comes ‘not to fix the rule’. ‘Rather, it stands in contrast to the rapid exploration of collaborative and creative possibilities – architectural, decorative, and synthetic – found in less fortified contexts.’ Conclusions to the contrary have been ‘misevaluations’. We are making the error of ‘seeing salvaged pieces’ – what a good word that, ‘salvaged ’: the pieces were not obtained by breaking down temples; they were lying as rubble and would inevitably have disintegrated with the passage of time; instead they were ‘salvaged ’, and given the honour of becoming part of new, pious buildings – ‘seeing salvaged pieces where healthy collaborative creativity was producing new forms’.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Faith, Religion, Error, Lying

“Whereas an Otaku is a true connoisseur of the culture, showing the same reverence and respectful distance which any true expert shows to their chosen field of expertise, the Weeaboo is like a socially awkward adolescent, ineptly trying to gain the social acceptance of Japanese people — because their unfortunate mental disorder has caused them to believe they are, in fact, Japanese.”

Alexei Maxim Russell (1976) Canadian writer

from The Japanophile's Handbook.

People

“Works of art are analytic propositions. That is, if viewed within their context – as art – they provide no information whatsoever about any matter of fact. A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist’s intention, that is, he is saying that that particular work of art is art, which means, is a definition of art.”

Joseph Kosuth (1945) American conceptual artist

Art after Philosophy, 1969

Art

“Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

"The Will to Believe" p. 205 http://books.google.com/books?id=Moqh7ktHaJEC&pg=PA205 1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

“Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925)

Religion, Waiting

“History, too, is meaningful only by indicating some transcendent purpose beyond the actual facts. … To venture a statement about the meaning of historical events is possible only when their telos becomes apparent.”

Karl Löwith (1897–1973) German philosopher

Meaning in History (1949), p. 5

History

“At the same time, as Hayek maintained elsewhere, the facts of the social sciences do not lend themselves to the same degree of prediction, or explanation, as the facts of the natural sciences—it is for this reason that there are degrees of prediction or explanation. Prediction may be expressed numerically, moreover, “not as a unique value or magnitude but as a range,” narrow in the natural sciences and potentially very broad in the social sciences. In the social sciences, Hayek modified the conception of a numerical range to a “range of phenomena to expect.””

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

This was his concept of pattern prediction, or explanation of the principle, broad, general predictions.
Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

Nature, Science, Time

Quotes about fact page 22

Quotes about fact
page 22