Quotes about fact
page 60

“Hector had always been known as a great shoemaker. In fact, customers from such far-off places as France claimed that Hector made the best shoes in the world. Yet for years, he had been frustrated with his small shoemaking business. Although Hector knew he was capable of making hundreds of shoes per week, he was averaging just 30 pairs. When a friend asked him why, Hector explained that while he was great at producing shoes, he was a poor salesman -- and terrible when it came to collecting payments. Yet he spent most of his time working in these areas of weakness.
So, Hector's friend introduced him to Sergio, a natural salesman and marketer. Just as Hector was known for his craftsmanship, Sergio could close deals and sell. Given the way their strengths complemented one another, Hector and Sergio decided to work together. A year later, this strengths-based duo was producing, selling, and collecting payment for more than 100 pairs of shoes per week -- a more than threefold increase.
While this story may seem simplistic, in many cases, aligning yourself with the right task can be this easy. When we're able to put most of our energy into developing our natural talents, extraordinary room for growth exists. So, a revision to the "You-can-be-anything-you-want-to-be" maxim might be more accurate.”

Tom Rath (1975) American author

StrengthsFinder 2.0, 2007
Source: Tom Rath, "The Fallacy Behind the American Dream," Business Journal, Feb. 8, 2007 (Excerpted from StrengthsFinder 2.0)

World, Shoe, Way, Business

“They were both more than twenty-seven in those enthusiastic years of nineteen hundred and thirty-five, yet neither had as much as ever kissed a girl. Not that kissing was much in favour in that district. Reading about lovers kissing, Tarry often reflected on the fact that he had never seen anyone kissing anyone, except poor old Peter Toole whom he once saw kissing a corpse in a wakehouse in the hope of getting a couple of glasses of whiskey.”

Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967) poet

p11
Prose, Tarry Flynn (1948)

Hope, Girl, Lovers, Kiss

“After writing the account given of the Savior’s ministry to the remnant of the seed of Jacob, upon this continent, it was easy to be seen, as the prophet said it would be, that darkness covered the earth and gross darkness the minds of the people. On reflecting further it was as easy to be seen that amid the great strife and noise concerning religion, none had authority from God to administer the ordinances of the Gospel. For the question might be asked, have men authority to administer in the name of Christ, who deny revelations, when His testimony is no less than the spirit of prophecy, and His religion based, built, and sustained by immediate revelations, in all ages of the world when He has had a people on earth? If these facts were buried, and carefully concealed by men whose craft would have been in danger if once permitted to shine in the faces of men, they were no longer to us; and we only waited for the commandment to be given ‘Arise and be baptized.”

Oliver Cowdery (1806–1850) American Mormon leader

Men, God, People, Age

“The excellent work of Tropfke is an example of the tendency to break away from the mere chronological recital of facts.”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

History of Mathematics (1923) Vol.1

“The fact is that building a pyramid is fairly easy, aside from the lifting. You just pile up stones in receding layers, placing one layer carefully upon another, and pretty soon you have a pyramid. You can't help it. In other words, it is not in the nature of a pyramid to fall down.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

Footnote: It probably could not fall down if it tried.
The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part I: It Seems There Were Two Egyptians, Cheops, or Khufu

Nature, Help

“The record of the race, hitherto accepted as the truth about ourselves, has been the story of facts and conditions as the male saw them – or wished to see them.... No secret has been so well-kept as the secret of what women have thought about life.”

Elizabeth Bisland Whetmore (1861–1929) American writer and journalist

On men and women, A Candle of Understanding.

Life, Women, Truth, Secret

“Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book II, Ch. 7
My Antonia (1918)

Life, Men, Winter, Weather

“The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

Hope

“The reader may ask why in this book string theory and supersymmetry have not been discussed. … The fact is that this book is about physics and this implies that the theoretical ideas discussed must be supported by experimental facts. Neither supersymmetry and string theory satisfy this criterion. They are figments of the theoretical mind.”

Martinus J. G. Veltman (1931) Dutch physicist

[Martinus Veltman, Facts and mysteries in elementary particle physics, World Scientific, 2003, 981238149X, 308, https://books.google.com/books?id=CNCHDIobj0IC&pg=PA308]

Books, Idea, Support

“Aristotle found support for his thesis in facts drawn from geopolitics or ‘natural law’. Greek superiority had to be proved demonstrably innate, a gift of nature. In one celebrated fragment he counsels Alexander to be ‘a hegemon [leader] of Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants’.”

Peter Green (1924) British historian

Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C.: A Historical Biography, page 58.

Law, Support, Nature

“Our patients are the ones who express and live out the subconscious and unconscious tendencies in the culture. The neurotic, or person suffering from what we now call character disorder, is characterized by the fact that the usual defenses of the culture do not work for him — a generally painful situation of which he is more or less aware…”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), Ch. 1 : Introduction : Our Schizoid World, p. 20

Pain, Suffering, Personality

“The appropriate emotion is shame — shame at our own dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others. When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The "working poor," as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.”

Barbara Ehrenreich (1941) American writer and journalist

Evaluation (p. 221)
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (2001)

Life, Children, Health, Home

“We are not empire builders. How important this fact is no American who has not lived in Asia can appreciate. It goes against our conscience, which is a very tender part of the American spirit. Therefore we are learning how to hold our allies, not by force of arms and government, but by mutual benefit and friendship. So much is already clear…
I am therefore hopeful. In spite of dismaying contradictions in individuals in our national scene, I feel the controlling spirit or our people, generous, decent, and sane. In this mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

Source: My Several Worlds (1954), p. 407, This has sometimes been quoted as "In a mood of faith and hope..."

Friendship, People, Books, Faith

“There’s no disputing the fact that I am politically conservative. But, ultimately, the question here is about fact patterns. Before the book was released, I took it to the investigative units at the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC News and Fox News. They independently verified large portions of the book on important narratives. As to the book itself, there are seven or eight minor revisions made. The reader is either going to conclude the Clintons operate in a parallel universe that is just filled with amazing coincidences, or, like lots of politicians, they have recognized that official power is a means to self-enrichment, and they have done it on steroids in a way no other political figure has in modern American political history.”

Peter Schweizer (1964) American writer

The Interview: Author Peter Schweizer on the Clintons’ wealth http://www.macleans.ca/politics/washington/the-interview-author-peter-schweizer-on-the-clintons-wealth/ (June 15, 2015)

Books, Way, History, Question

“This life, my dear bird, consists of a haphazard sequence of accidental meetings and partings, very few of which can ever be anticipated, avoided or fully understood. The element of sheer Chance, my friend, conflicting as it does with the first principles of Causation, denies any premeditated plan on the part of Destiny. Destiny, therefore, may only be defined as the sum total of one’s accumulated experiences, which are themselves accidental and purposeless. ‘Purpose,’ you deduce from this, is an interpretation imposed upon a sequence of events after the fact.”

Lin Carter book The Wizard of Zao

Source: The Wizard of Zao (1978), Chapter 4 (p. 50)

Life, Bird, Chance, Parting

““There’s something else, Mr. Muzzlehatch.”
“I’m sure there is. In fact there is everything else.””

Mervyn Peake book Titus Alone

Source: Titus Alone (1959), Chapter 47 (p. 893)

“In Christ's word there is both Christ's doctrine and Christ's heart, — the fact which He announces, and the feeling with which He proclaims it; and in order to be really Biblical, in order to be completely Christian, we must unite the two. If a man wants either, just to that extent Christ's word does not dwell in him.”

James Hamilton (1814–1867) Scottish minister and a prolific author of religious tracts

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 91.

Feeling, Heart, Christ

“My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance.”

Philip Warren Anderson (1923) American physicist

[New York Times, 2005-01-04, God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/science/04edgehed.html?pagewanted=3&ei=5090&en=ce9bddb9581db4d9&ex=1262581200&partner=rssuserland, 2006-08-22]
Anderson was describing his dislike for "string theory".

Fashion, Science

“The truth [is in his paintings]... When they have a similar structure to and are organized in as truthful a way as nature. When I look out of the window, then truth for me is the way nature shows itself in its various tones, colours and proportions. That's a truth and has its own correctness. This little slice of nature, and in fact any given piece of nature, represents to me an ongoing challenge, and is a model for my paintings.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

In an interview with Christiane Vielhaber, 1986; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Other subjects' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/other-aspects-6 <br class="br">1980's

Truth, Way, Nature, Painting

““Do you realize,” he asked, “that the whole purpose of civilization is to take the surprises out of life, so one can be bored to death? That a culture in which nothing unexpected ever happens is in what is called its Golden Age? That when nobody can even imagine anything happening unexpectedly, that they later fondly refer to that period as the Good Old Days?”
“I hadn’t thought of it in just those words, sir—”
“It is one of the most-avoided facts of life,” said the ambassador. “Government, in the local or planetary sense of the word, is an organization for the suppression of adventure. Taxes are, in part, the insurance premiums one pays for protection against the unpredictable.”

Murray Leinster book The Pirates of Zan

Source: The Pirates of Zan (1959), Chapter 2

Life, Death, Age, Imagination

“I thank and commend the Supreme Court for issuing the TRO and for upholding justice, truth and the fact that Senator Grace Poe is a candidate for President!”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Escudero, F. [Francis]. (2015, December 28). Retrieved from Official Facebook Page of Francis Escudero https://www.facebook.com/senchizescudero/posts/10153773901445610/ <br class="br">2015, Facebook

Truth, Justice

“I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life. … Every time I get totally discouraged with this country, I remind myself, "No, the fact is that finally we can really say what we think, and some extraordinary things have come out of that."”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Interview for French TV (1998)

Life, Feeling, Thinking, Sense

“Luther could not be ignorant of this mediaeval version. He made judicious use of it, as he did also of old German and Latin hymns. Without such aid he could hardly have finished his New Testament in the short space of three months. But this fact does not diminish his merit in the least; for his version was made from the original Hebrew and Greek, and was so far superior in every respect that the older version entirely disappeared. It is to all intents a new work.”

Philip Schaff (1819–1893) American Calvinist theologian

German versions of the Bible that preceded the Luther Bible
Source: Luther's use of the older German version was formerly ignored or denied, but has been proved by Professor Krafft of Bonn (1883).

“The character of the artist has to be responsive and lucky. Personally I have never been interested in a defensible reason post card for working achievement functionally is a delusion. To do a needed work short changes art. It seems to me that a great part Indian moccasins of urgency in working lies in the fact that one acts freely friends and associates may become more closely allied with you real soon.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

Quote from 'Note on Painting', Robert Rauschenberg, in Pop Art Redefined, October/November 1963, J. Rusell and Suzi Gablik, Praeger Publishers, New York, 1969
1960's

Art, Change, Parting, Personality

“To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

Sir Alfred Jules Ayer, in his "The Meaning of Life", collected in The Meaning of Life, and Other Essays (1990).
Misattributed

“I had been warned about Mr. Truman's quick and violent temper and prejudices, but he radiated nothing but courtesy and good humor during our meeting. He has an engaging personality, a quick and witty tongue, and I liked him from the start. At the conference itself, he seemed to take great pride in his historical knowledge, but, it seemed to me that in spite of his having read much, it was of a superficial character, encompassing facts without the logic and reasoning dictating those facts. Of the Far East he knew little, presenting a strange combination of distorted history and vague hopes that somehow, some way, we could do something to help those struggling against Communism.”

Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) U.S. Army general of the army, field marshal of the Army of the Philippines

Source: Reminiscences (1964), p. 361

Hope, Way, History, Communication

“I think almost everyone, including me, thought the election of our first black president would lead to new efforts to improve the dismal economic condition of African-Americans. In fact, Obama has seldom touched on the issue of race, and when he has he has emphasized the conservative themes of responsibility and self-help. Even when Republicans have suppressed minority voting, in a grotesque campaign to fight nonexistent voter fraud, Obama has said and done nothing.”

Bruce Bartlett (1951) American historian

2010s, Obama is a Republican (2014)

Fraud, Thinking, Effort, Help

“The marvelous is of necessity a lie, a distortion. At best it is a metaphor which leads to the truth. I think that I know what causes the World’s Pain, lady. Or at least I think I know what contributes to that Pain.”
“And what would that be, Ulrich von Bek?”
“By telling a single lie to oneself or to another, by denying a single fact of the world as it has been created, one adds to the World’s Pain. And pain, lady, creates pain. And one must not seek to become saint or sinner, God or Devil. One must seek to become human and to love the fact of one’s humanity.”
I became embarrassed. “That is all I have learned, lady.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

“It is all that Heaven demands,” she said.
Source: The von Bek family, The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 16 (p. 158)

Love, God, Pain, Truth

“In 5,000 years of recorded human history… neither in the east or in the west… has any society ever defined marriage as anything other than between men and women. Not one in 5000 years of recorded human history. That's an astounding fact and it isn't until the last 12 years or so that we have seen for the first time in recorded human history marriage defined as anything other than between men and between women.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

Kasie
Hunt
Michele Bachmann burns up Iowa, decries gay marriage
Politico
2011-04-11
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/52946.html
2011-04-15
2010s

Women, Men, Marriage, History

“I'll never be bothered if I don't have a hit because you look at the songs that are hits and they're none of my favourites. Just the fact that we do have fans waiting here, that's exciting enough.”

Bert McCracken (1982) American musician

Stephen Downie (May 20, 2005) "Second coming", The Courier-Mail, News Limited, p. 51.

Waiting

“Since most subjects studied in school consist largely of theories… language education must include not only the serious study of what truth and falsehood mean in the context of a subject, but also what is meant by a fact, an inference, an assumption, a judgment, a generalization… In this way students will be learning both the language of a subject and the methods of inquiry in that subject, since inquiry consists of nothing else but the generation of questions, the invention of definitions and metaphors, the separation of facts from inferences, the forming of generalizations…”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)

Truth, Education, School, Way

“In modern science, in fact, let alone modern systems theory, cause disappears wherever you have a very complex system of interrelated elements.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Walter F. Buckley (1970) in: Cry California. Vol 6. p. 28.

Science

“In the United States, there is constant news on this topic, but less than 1 percent of priests are guilty of acts of this type. The constant presence of these news items does not correspond to the objectivity of the information nor to the statistical objectivity of the facts.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

from "Cardinal Ratzinger Sees a Media Campaign Against Church," Zenit.org, December 3, 2002
2002

“The thing about herbs is that there is nothing supernatural or implausible about the fact that any particular herb can have a medicinal effect. But the truth of the matter is that herbs are drugs. There's nothing magical about them. The fact that they are "natural" is irrelevant — it's meaningless. They are drugs. They are drugs that have not been purified, identified, … and quantified. … Probably for most plants … there are hundreds of chemicals in there with varying degrees of potency.”

Steven Novella (1964) American neurologist, skepticist

SGU, Podcast #78 – January 15th, 2007 http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu/78 <br class="br">The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, Podcast, 2000s

Truth, Nature

“In fact the wives of the patriarchs, all untruthful, and one a kleptomaniac, but illustrate the law, that the cardinal virtues are seldom found in oppressed classes.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton book The Woman's Bible

The Woman's Bible (1898)

Law

“Be sure of the fact before you lose time in searching for a cause.”

James Burgh (1714–1775) British politician

The Dignity of Human Nature (1754)

Search, Time

“Systems science and technology constitute one aspect of systems thinking, but the humanities and arts make up the other. The fact that design plays such a large part in the systemic treatment of problems makes it apparent that art has a major role in it as well. Ethics and aesthetics are integral aspects of evaluating systems… the systems approach involves the pursuit of truth (science) and its effective use (technology), plenty (economics), the good (ethics and morality), and beauty and fun (aesthetics). To compare systems methodology with that of any of the so-called ‘hard’ disciplines—for example, physics—is to misunderstand the nature of systems. The worry is not that the systems approach is not scientific in the sense which physics or chemistry or biology is, but that some try to make it scientific in that sense. To the extent they succeed, they destroy it.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Ackoff (1999). "Disciplines, the two cultures and the scianities". Systems Research and Behavioral Science. 16 (6), p. 537. Cited in: Sherryl Stalinski (2005) A Systems View of Social Systems, Culture and Communities. Saybrook Graduate School. p. 5.
1990s

Truth, Beauty, Art, Nature

“Writers after Coase have referred to the authority structure of the firm as a "visible hand" that works in combination with Smith's invisible hand. The everyday fact that employers exercise power over their employees — not news to most employees — had been a central theme in Marx's economics, but it was (and generally continues to be) overlooked by most neoclassical economists. Early in his studies Coase noted the similarity between the hierarchical organization of capitalist firms, with their reliance on command relations, and the then-existing system of centralized economic planning in the Communist countries, where production was carried out in accordance with orders from higher authorities and where market competition played little role.”

Samuel Bowles (1939) American economist

Source: Understanding Capitalism: Competition, Command, and Change, 2005, p. 85

Exercises, Study, Country

“It is a fact that humans are multicellular eukaryotes with an internal digestive tract. It is also a fact that these criteria match the biological definition of an animal. But because I’m talking to a philosopher, we even have to argue the definition of “definition”. “A good definition explains concisely what something means“, “a statement expressing the essential nature of something“, “a statement of what a thing is“. So any multicellular eukaryote with an internal digestive tract is in fact an animal by definition. Once we determine that the criteria apply, we have no choice to deny the definition connected with that, especially not when the definition is deliberately well-established by expertise as this one is, rather than being an “accident of language” such as the apologist asserted.”

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

Patheos, Philosophistry http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2017/04/12/philosophistry/ (April 12, 2017)

Nature, Animals

“It is because simplicity and vastness are both beautiful that we seek by preference simple facts and vast facts; that we take delight, now in following the giant courses of the stars, now in scrutinizing the microscope that prodigious smallness which is also a vastness, and now in seeking in geological ages the traces of a past that attracts us because of its remoteness.”

Henri Poincaré book Science and Method

C’est parce que la simplicité, parce que la grandeur est belle, que nous rechercherons de préférence les faits simples et les faits grandioses, que nous nous complairons tantôt à suivre la course gigantesque des astres, tantôt à scruter avec le microscope cette prodigieuse petitesse qui est aussi une grandeur, tantôt à rechercher dans les temps géologiques les traces d’un passé qui nous attire parce qu’il est lointain.
Part I. Ch. 1 : The Selection of Facts, p. 23
Science and Method (1908)

Age, Beauty, Star, Past

“What you want is protection. You want to be safe. What the government does is to try to retaliate after the fact.”

Robert LeFevre (1911–1986) American libertarian businessman

Rampart Institute (Society for Libertarian Life edition), speech from 1978, p. 14.
Does Government Protection Protect (1979)

“We know all those facts about Florida and what Katherine Harris did, and the private firm that took African-Americans off the voting rolls and prohibited them from voting. But I've been surprised in this first week how many average Americans were not aware of all of the trickery and deceit that took place in the year before the election to fix it for George W. Bush.”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

"BuzzFlash Interviews Michael Moore" (13 March 2002)
2002

“I am not afraid to lose because politics is not the air I'm breathing. In fact, I long for the day when I'm no longer in politics and will live a quiet and less complicated life - I won't use the word simple because I'm living a simple life now.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Kap Maceda Aguila, "The Substance of Chiz", People Asia, 2006 June, p. 51, ISSN 0119-657X.
2006

Life

“The ideas that the colonists put forward, rather than creating a new condition of fact, expressed one that has long existed; they articulated and in so doing generalized, systematized, gave moral sanction to what had emerged haphazardly, incompletely and insensibly, from the chaotic factionalism of colonial politics.”

Bernard Bailyn book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter V, TRANSFORMATION, p. 162.

Idea

“Such abstruse ideas are totally alien to Chopin. The Romantic interweaving of music and literature that was characteristic of Schumann and Liszt was a negligible source of inspiration. Schumann dedicated Kreisleriana to Chopin, but in fact Chopin’s consciousness for classical strength and form had nothing in common with the exalted, torn, eccentric and confused character of the work.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Music, Literature, Idea

“I have been a vegetarian since I was fourteen for ethical reasons. I continued to eat eggs and dairy until I did some research on the dairy industry and discovered the horrific treatment of farm animals. … I went vegan about 3 ½ years ago [in late 2014]. It was a process that took time and patience. I wasn't perfect, in fact I struggled a lot during the first year. That said, once I educated myself on how and what to eat, it became much easier.”

Allie (wrestler) (1987) Canadian professional wrestler

"Allie, vegan wrestler" http://www.greatveganathletes.com/allie-vegan-wrestler, interview with GreatVeganAthletes.com (2018).

Education, Time, Animals, Perfection

“I have never concealed the fact and said it before the court in 1938 that I came from an anti-Semitic past and tradition… I ask only that you look at my life historically and take it as history. I believe that from 1933 I truly represented the Lutheran-Christian outlook on the Jewish question — as I revealed before the court — but that I returned home after eight years' imprisonment as a completely different person.”

Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor

Letter to a Dr. Weiner (1956), as quoted in Martin Niemöller, 1892-1984 (1984) by James Bentley, p. 334

Life, Home, History, Question

“The individualistic conception of the State as some external authority exercising a malign influence upon the life of the community is a travesty of fact. The State is that form of organised society which has evolved through the process of the ages, and represents the aptitude for freedom and self-government to which any people has attained. The policeman and the soldier, for example, who are at the call of the landlord or the employer when tenant or workman becomes turbulent, exist by the will and under the express authority of those same tenants and workmen, who constitute a preponderating majority in the State, and without whose consent neither soldier nor policeman could continue to exist.”

Keir Hardie (1856–1915) Scottish socialist and labour leader

Source: From Serfdom to Socialism (1907), p. 6-7

Life, People, Age, Exercises

“The reason no one has yet been able to come up with a good word to describe the homosexualist (sometimes known as gay, fag, queer, etc.) is because he does not exist. The human race is divided into male and female. Many human beings enjoy sexual relations with their own sex, many don't; many respond to both. This plurality is the fact of our nature and not worth fretting about.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

"Sex Is Politics" (1979).
1980s, The Second American Revolution (1983)

Sex, Nature

“The story of Rachel’s unique illness was no secret in Crawford, of course. The fact of it had spread through the college the first year of Rachel’s return and the entire town knew soon after. Crawford reacted in the fashion of small towns immemorial—some tongues wagged constantly, some people could not keep the pity and pleasure at someone else’s misfortune out of their voices and gazes—but mostly the community had folded its protective wings around the Weintraub family like an awkward mother bird shielding its young.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 4 (p. 286)

People, Pleasure, Secret, Family

“A woman saying yes to a date with a man is literally insane and ill-advised, and the whole species' existence counts on them doing it. I don't know how they…how do women still go out with guys, when you consider the fact that there is no greater threat to women than men? We're the number one threat to women. Globally and historically, we're the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women. We're the worst thing that ever happens to them. That's true! You know what our number one threat is? Heart disease.”

Louis C.K. (1967) American comedian and actor

Oh My God

Women, Men, Disease, Guy

“These who are represented here were men in whom courage had reached a high moral quality. They had been brave enough not to shrink from looking at facts and institutions. They had been honest enough to admit that they saw there much that was not good. They glossed over no wrongs, they hid away no skeletons. They did not pretend that wrong was right or ever could be right. They had put much thought to the lessons of hard experience, and had frankly acknowledged that they must deal with a crisis in the Nation's life. They were sure that union was a blessing, that slavery was a wrong, and that domestic war was the supreme human tragedy. This settled, they saw that one of three courses must be taken. They could have had peace with disunion, or they could have had peace and union, with slavery. Freedom with union, they saw at last, meant war. We know how they decided. We know at what fearful cost they supported their decision.”

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

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

Life, Men, War, Fear

“And this that you call solitude is in fact a big crowd.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

"The Shape and Society," p. 19
The Shape (2000), Sequence: “Happiness of Atoms”

Solitude

“More important than these two considerations was the fact that Russia was at no time concerned with the two policies ‑ the forcing of opium on China and the trade in human flesh ‑ which both the people and Government of China resented and which brought her untold humiliation. … In the `pig trade' ‑ that is, the forcible transportation of Chinese workers to plantations and mines again, in defiance of the orders of Government and of the protests of the people ‑ in this new slave trade, where sometimes forty per cent of those transported died on the way, all Western Powers including America were deeply involved. Russia, for whatever reason, was no party to it. It was these two, the `poison trade' and the `pig trade', that made the iron enter the soul of the Chinese and made them bitterly anti‑foreign.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

People, Way, Soul, Time

“In the practical sense the word principle may be applied to any underlying cause of more or less correlated facts in any particular field of investigation. The word principles, as applied to organization, is used by us strictly in the latter meaning.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: Onward Industry!, 1931, p. 17

Sense

“Some people say I make mistakes, I just say that in fact this is the secret of enjoying life. I hate monotony. Why don’t they leave me freedom of choice? People want to impose choices which aren’t necessarily mine. That’s the mistake people make.”

Bode Miller (1977) American alpine ski racer

Interview with Gazzetta dello Sport, 16 Feb. 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11385083/

Life, Hate, People, Secret

“The fact is that no contradictory aspect can exist in isolation. Without its opposite aspect, each loses the condition for its existence”

Mao Zedong book On Contradiction

On Contradiction (1937)

“The common root of modern science and Christian theology was Greek philosophy. The historical accident that caused the Christian religion to become heavily theological was the fact that Jesus was born in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire at the time when the prevailing culture was profoundly Greek.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

Religion, Science, Time, Parting

“There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability. The sternest comment that can be made against employers as a class lies in the fact that men of Ability usually succeed in showing their worth in spite of their employer, and not with his assistance and encouragement.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

The Philistine magazine, August 1901 http://books.google.com/books?id=xxI8AQAAMAAJ&q=%22There+is+something+that+is+much+more+scarce+something+finer+far+something+rarer+than+ability+It+is+the+ability+to+recognize+ability+The+sternest+comment+that+can+be+made+against+employers+as+a+class+lies+in+the+fact+that+men+of+Ability+usually+succeed+in+showing+their+worth+in+spite+of+their+employer+and+not+with+his+assistance+and+encouragement%22&pg=PA87#v=onepage <br class="br">"The Crying Need", in A Message to Garcia, and Thirteen Other Things (1901), p. 163 http://books.google.com/books?id=iSo3AAAAIAAJ&q=%22There+is+something+that+is+much+more+scarce+something+finer+far+something+rarer+than+ability+It+is+the+ability+to+recognize+ability+The+sternest+comment+that+can+be+made+against+employers+as+a+class+lies+in+the+fact+that+men+of+Ability+usually+succeed+in+showing+their+worth+in+spite+of+their+employer+and+not+with+his+assistance+and+encouragement%22&pg=PA163#v=onepage

Men

“Education can help us only if it produces “ whole men”. The truly educated man is not a man who knows a bit of everything, not even the man who knows all the details of all subjects (if such a thing were possible): the “ whole man” in fact, may have little detailed knowledge of facts and theories, he may treasure the Encyclopæ dia Britannica because “ she knows and he needn’ t”, but he will be truly in touch with the centre. He will not be in doubt about his basic convictions, about his view on the meaning and purpose of his life. He may not be able to explain these matters in words, but the conduct of his life will show a certain sureness of touch which stems from this inner clarity.”

E. F. Schumacher (1911–1977) British economist

Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973)

Life, Men, Education, Knowledge

“Mere gook rule: The deaths and injuries of lesser breeds who stand in our way may be ignored in law and policy-making; technically, the marginal cost of a dead gook (Arab, etc.) is zero. The rule is based on the fact that gooks do not value life and feel pain like we do; besides which, they stand in our way.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: Beyond Hypocrisy, 1992, Doublespeak Dictionary (within Beyond Hypocrisy), p. 153.

Life, Death, Pain, Law

“As Nozick acknowledges, a modern state should not feel morally constrained by property holdings which might have had a Lockean pedigree but in fact do not. In this regard it is interesting that one of the main uses of Lockean theory these days is in defending the property rights of indigenous people—where a literal claim is being made about who had first possession of a set of resources and about the need to rectify the injustices that accompanied their subsequent expropriation.”

Jeremy Waldron (1953) American lawyer

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – "Property and Ownership" http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/property/

People, Feeling

“Half a revolution is not better than none… It may, in fact, be worse.”

James A. Champy (1942) American businessman

Source: Reengineering management, 1995, p. 3

“It's tempting to give up—either to retreat to the ivory tower, or to start to play the policy entrepreneur game. After all, what is the use of sophisticated policy thinking or careful examination of the facts if simplistic ideas win every time?
One answer is simply that it would be wrong to give up. If the people with good ideas do not fight for them, they have no right to complain about the outcome.
But good ideas will still often lose to convenient nonsense. When that happens, every serious economist is ultimately sustained by a faith that the right ideas will eventually prevail.”

Paul Krugman book Peddling Prosperity

Epilogue
Peddling Prosperity (1994)

People, Faith, Game, Idea

“In the valley a bicycle is just as necessary as a pair of shoes, in fact more so. Because even if a man hasn’ t any shoes he can still ride a bicycle, whereas if he hasn’ t a bicycle he must surely travel on foot.”

Giovannino Guareschi (1908–1968) Italian journalist, cartoonist and humorist

The Bicycle
Don Camillo and the Prodigal Sun (1952)

Shoe, Travel

“We have here the problem of bigness. Its lesson should by now have been burned into our memory by Brandeis. The Curse of Bigness' shows how size can become a menace – both industrial and social. It can be an industrial menace because it creates gross inequalities against existing or putative competitors. It can be a social menace – because of its control of prices. Control of prices in the steel industry is powerful leverage on our economy. For the price of steel determines the price of hundreds of other articles. Our price level determines in large measure whether we have prosperity or depression – an economy of abundance or scarcity. Size in steel should therefore be jealously watched. In final analysis, size in steel is the measure of the power of a handful of men over our economy. That power can be utilized with lightning speed. It can be benign or it can be dangerous. The philosophy of the Sherman Act is that it should not exist. For all power tends to develop into a government in itself. Power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people, not in the hands of an industrial oligarchy. Industrial power should be decentralized. It should be scattered into many hands so that the fortunes of the people will not be dependent on the whim or caprice, the political prejudices, the emotional stability of a few self-appointed men. The fact that they are not vicious men but respectable and social minded is irrelevant. That is the philosophy and the command of the Sherman Act. It is founded on a theory of hostility to the concentration in private hands of power so great that only a government of the people should have it.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissenting, United States v. Columbia Steel Co., 334 U.S. 495 (1948)
Judicial opinions

Men, Hostility, People, Problem

“Another indication of the magnitude of the present transition is the fact that, as far as many statistical series related to activities of mankind are concerned, the date that divides human history into two equal parts is well within living memory.”

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

Source: 1960s, The meaning of the twentieth century: the great transition, 1964, p. 7

History, Memory, Parting

“The ideologies of the super-tribes exercised absolute power over all individual minds under their sway.
In civilized regions the super-tribes and the overgrown natural tribes created an astounding mental tyranny. In relation to his natural tribe, at least if it was small and genuinely civilized, the individual might still behave with intelligence and imagination. Along with his actual tribal kinsmen he might support a degree of true community unknown on Earth. He might in fact be a critical, self-respecting and other-respecting person. But in all matters connected with the super-tribes, whether national or economic, he behaved in a very different manner. All ideas coming to him with the sanction of nation or class would be accepted uncritically and with fervor by himself and all his fellows. As soon as he encountered one of the symbols or slogans of his super-tribe he ceased to be a human personality and became a sort of de-cerebrate animal, capable only of stereotyped reactions. In extreme cases his mind was absolutely closed to influences opposed to the suggestion of the super-tribe. Criticism was either met with blind rage or actually not heard at all. Persons who in the intimate community of their small native tribe were capable of great mutual insight and sympathy might suddenly, in response to tribal symbols, be transformed into vessels of crazy intolerance and hate directed against national or class enemies. In this mood they would go to any extreme of self-sacrifice for the supposed glory of the super-tribe. Also they would show great ingenuity in contriving means to exercise their lustful vindictiveness upon enemies who in favorable circumstances could be quite as kindly and intelligent as themselves.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter V: Worlds Innumerable; 2. Strange Mankinds (p. 62)

Hate, Exercises, Imagination, Intelligence

“Bare Attention first allows things to speak for themselves, without interruption by final verdicts pronounced too hastily. Bare Attention gives them a chance to finish their speaking, and one will thus get to learn that, in fact, they have much to say about themselves, which formerly was mostly ignored by rashness or was drowned in the inner and outer noise in which ordinary man normally lives. Because Bare Attention sees things without the narrowing and leveling effect of habitual judgments, it sees them ever anew, as it for the first time; therefore it will happen with progressive frequency that things will have something new and worthwhile to reveal. Patient pausing in such an attitude of Bare Attention will open wide horizons to one’s understanding, denied to the strained efforts of an impatient intellect. Owing to a rash or habitual limiting, labeling, misjudging, and mishandling of things, important sources of knowledge often remain closed.”

Nyanaponika Thera (1901–1994) German Buddhist monk

Source: The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 35

Understanding, Knowledge, Effort, Learning

“This morning, the Justice Department announced the conclusion of our investigation and released a comprehensive, 87-page report documenting our findings and conclusions that the facts do not support the filing of criminal charges against Officer Darren Wilson in this case. Michael Brown’s death, though a tragedy, did not involve prosecutable conduct on the part of Officer Wilson.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Death, Justice, Support, Parting

“I think that everybody tries to produce what Marshall McLuhan called a ‘counter environment.’ That is, you set yourself in opposition to the kind of mass tendencies which the media set up. That’s what’s so important about the humanities in the university…There’s something of a personal dialogue between one human being and another. And the fact that this dialogue is being carried out in the teeth of all the mass emotion techniques of the electronic media is a very important side of the humanities.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Canadian Energy: Dialogues on Creativity: Northrop Frye." Descant 12, no. 32-3 (1981).
"Quotes", Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008)

Thinking, Personality

“Concerning the night assault of Lord Asano's ronin, the fact that they did not commit seppuku at the Sengakuji was an error, for there was a long delay between the time their lord was struck down and the time when they struck down the enemy. If Lord Kira had died of illness within that period, it would have been extremely regrettable.”

Tsunetomo Yamamoto book Hagakure

Commentary on the tale of The Forty-Seven Samurai (or the "Forty-seven Ronin", or Akō Rōshi, the Akō "vendetta"), emphasizing his view that Bushido demands prompt action, and not delay, or concern about success and failure. Variant: "What if, nine months after Asano's death, Kira had died of an illness?"
Hagakure (c. 1716)

Error, Time, Night

“They who have been reading the capitalist newspapers realize what a capacity they have for lying. We have been reading them lately. They know all about the Socialist Party—the Socialist movement, except what is true. Only the other day they took an article that I had written—and most of you have read it—most of you members of the party, at least—and they made it appear that I had undergone a marvelous transformation. I had suddenly become changed—had in fact come to my senses; I had ceased to be a wicked Socialist, and had become a respectable Socialist, a patriotic Socialist—as if I had ever been anything else. What was the purpose of this deliberate misrepresentation? It is so self-evident that it suggests itself. The purpose was to sow the seeds of dissension in our ranks; to have it appear that we were divided among ourselves; that we were pitted against each other, to our mutual undoing. But Socialists were not born yesterday. They know how to read capitalist newspapers; and to believe exactly the opposite of what they read.
Why should a Socialist be discouraged on the eve of the greatest triumph in all the history of the Socialist movement? It is true that these are anxious, trying days for us all — testing days for the women and men who are upholding the banner of labor in the struggle of the working class of all the world against the exploiters of all the world; a time in which the weak and cowardly will falter and fail and desert. They lack the fiber to endure the revolutionary test; they fall away; they disappear as if they had never been. On the other hand, they who are animated by the unconquerable spirit of the social revolution; they who have the moral courage to stand erect and assert their convictions; stand by them; fight for them; go to jail or to hell for them, if need be — they are writing their names, in this crucial hour — they are writing their names in faceless letters in the history of mankind.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

The Canton, Ohio Speech, Anti-War Speech (1918)

Women, Men, World, History

“There is no doubt, and in this I agree with Milton Friedman, that once the Crash had occurred, the Federal Reserve System pursued a silly deflationary policy. I am not only against inflation but I am also against deflation! So, once again, a badly programmed monetary policy prolonged the depression! So, once again, a badly programmed monetary policy prolonged the depression. One consequence of this policy was, of course, the fact that confidence was destroyed.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

1960s–1970s, A Conversation with Professor Friedrich A. Hayek (1979)

Confidence

“It is not necessary to live in India to be a Hindu. In fact one must live in harmony with the land where one is located to be a true Hindu.”

David Frawley (1950) American Hindu teacher

How I Became A Hindu - My Discovery Of Vedic Dharma

“Perhaps this is the great weakness of all criticism, that it tends to take facts derived from the examination of unimportant works and applies them in making a judgement about a man whose whole importance rests in the successful work, where these facts do not exist.”

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist

Some Notes on Caravaggio (1956)

Success

“With the assistance of mathematics, I can see a property of the ninety-nine dimensional surfaces hidden from the naked eye. If an increase in the price of fertilizer alone always increases the amount the firm buys of caviar, from that fact alone I can predict the answer to the following experiment which I have never seen performed and upon which I have no observations: an increase in the price of caviar alone will increase the amount the firm buys of fertilizer. In thermodynamics such reciprocity or integrability conditions are known as Maxwell Conditions; in economics they are known as Hotelling conditions in honor of Harold Hotelling’s 1932 work.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

Source: 1950s–1970s, Maximum Principles in Analytical Economics, 1970, p. 67

Mathematics

“If, because of my schooling, I had grown culturally separated from my parents, my education finally had given me ways of speaking and caring about that fact.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Education, School, Way, Parent

“In this painting ['Moscow'], I was in fact in quest for a certain hour, which was and which remains always the most beautiful hour of the day in Moscow. The sun is already low and has reached its highest force, which it has searched all the day, to which it has aspired all the day... The sun dissolves all Moscow in a spot, which as a frenzied tuba makes entered into vibration all the inner being, the whole soul... Rendering this hour seemed the biggest, the most impossible of the happiness for an artist. These impressions renewed every sunny day. They brought me a joy which shattered me until the bottom of the soul, and which reached until ecstasy.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote from: 'Looks on the past', Wassily Kandinsky; published in der Sturm, Berlin 1913
1910 - 1915

Happiness, Beauty, Soul, Search

“Politeness does not interfere with facts, politeness is just another fact.”

Gertrude Stein book Paris France

Paris France (1940)

“We had then and still have to fight a two-front battle. Ranged against us on the one hand are those who denounce us for our alleged ‘departure from the principles of nationalism and socialism’, since we are championing ‘sectarian’ causes like those of oppressed castes and religious minorities. On the other hand are those who, in the name of defending the oppressed caste masses, in fact, isolate them from the mainstream of the united struggle of the working people irrespective of caste, communities and so on.”

E. M. S. Namboodiripad (1909–1998) Indian politician

On special role of caste in Indian society in page=12.
History, Society, and Land Relations: Selected Essays

People, Communication, Departure, Fight

“I crave to be understood because when a person writes about himself, he does not work in obscurity but a little too much in the light which he focuses on himself. To me the satisfaction comes from the fact that at least I have said something about myself in my own voice without ‘paraphrasing any hard truths’.”

Mohammad Hidayatullah (1905–1992) 11th Chief Justice of India

Source: Law in the Scientific Era, P.vii.

Truth, Light, Personality

“Our founding fathers knew that if we went this direction, there was no more moral compass and you won’t be able to explain to your children — you’ll have to face the fact that we lost holding the line on one of the most principle issues in the Bible, and that is sex is not about fun. If you want to have fun, read a book, go see a movie. Sex is about the procreation of children. It’s a sacred responsibility that is meant by God to have men and women commit their lifetime to children.”

Jerome Corsi (1946) American conservative author

"Tea party speaker: ‘Well, they want to call me a racist? Go ahead’" http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/28/tea-party-speaker-well-they-want-to-call-me-a-racist-go-ahead/ www.rawstory.com (2013-8-23)

Women, Men, God, Children

“In the most advanced areas of this civilization, the social controls have been introjected to the point where even individual protest is affected at its roots. The intellectual and emotional refusal “to go along” appears neurotic and impotent. This is the socio-psychological aspect of the political event that marks the contemporary period: the passing of the historical forces which, at the preceding stage of industrial society, seemed to represent the possibility of new forms of existence. But the term “introjection” perhaps no longer describes the way in which the individual by himself reproduces and perpetuates the external controls exercised by his society. Introjection suggests a variety of relatively spontaneous processes by which a Self (Ego) transposes the “outer” into the “inner.” Thus introjection implies the existence of an inner dimension distinguished from and even antagonistic to the external exigencies—an individual consciousness and an individual unconscious apart from public opinion and behavior. The idea of “inner freedom” here has its reality: it designates the private space in which man may become and remain “himself.” Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory. The manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical reactions. The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with the society as a whole. This immediate, automatic identification (which may have been characteristic of primitive forms of association) reappears in high industrial civilization; its new “immediacy,” however, is the product of a sophisticated, scientific management and organization. In this process, the “inner” dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking—the critical power of Reason—is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition. The impact of progress turns Reason into submission to the facts of life, and to the dynamic capability of producing more and bigger facts of the same sort of life. The efficiency of the system blunts the individuals' recognition that it contains no facts which do not communicate the repressive power of the whole. If the individuals find themselves in the things which shape their life, they do so, not by giving, but by accepting the law of things—not the law of physics but the law of their society.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 9-11

Life, Law, Way, Behavior

“He was listening, too, for it is through the eyes and ears that one learns. A spiderweb of facts can tie up the lion of action; not to know is bad; not to strive to know is worse.”

Andre Norton (1912–2005) American writer of science fiction and fantasy

Source: Dragon Magic (1972), Chapter 3, “Sirrush-Lau” (p. 84)

Learning

“Suppose two politicians are running for president, and one goes through the farm section and is asked, "What are you going to do about the farm question?" And he knows right away - bang, bang, bang. Now he goes to the next campaigner who comes through. "What are you going to do on the farm problem?" "Well, I don't know. I used to be a general, and I don't know anything about farming. But it seems to me it must be a very difficult problem, because for twelve, fifteen, twenty years people have been struggling with it, and people say that they know how to solve the farm problem. And it must be a hard problem. So the way I intend to solve the farm problem is to gather around me a lot of people who know something about it, to look at all the experience that we have had with this problem before, to take a certain amount of time at it, and then to come to some conclusion in a reasonable way about it. Now, I can't tell you ahead of time what solution, but I can give you some of the principles I'll try to use - not to make things difficult for individual farmers, if there are any special problems we will have to have some way to take care of them," etc., etc., etc.
Now such a man would never get anywhere in this country, I think. It's never been tried, anyway. This is in the attitude of mind of the populace, that they have to have an answer and that a man who gives an answer is better than a man who gives no answer, when the real fact of the matter is, in most cases, it is the other way around. And the result of this of course is that the politician must give an answer. And the result of this is that political promises can never be kept. It is a mechanical fact; it is impossible. The result of that is that nobody believes campaign promises. And the result of that is a general disparaging of politics, a general lack of respect for the people who are trying to solve problems, and so forth. It's all generated from the very beginning (maybe - this is a simple analysis). It's all generated, maybe, by the fact that the attitude of the populace is to try to find the answer instead of trying to find a man who has a way of getting at the answer.”

Richard Feynman book The Meaning of It All

lecture III: "This Unscientific Age"
The Meaning of It All (1999)

People, Way, Question, Problem

“There are many arguments about the role of religion in the history of this country. But the fundamental fact still remains that India has been a historic home to all the great religions of the world. I believe this pluralism and this ability to have an individual element in your religion is culturally specific to India…I came to India as an orthodox Christian thinking there was only one way to God. I now believe there are many ways to God and that came from living in India.”

Mark Tully (1935) British journalist

Source: " Former BBC-India Chief Highlights Multiple Paths to God http://hafsite.org/media/pr/former-bbc-india-chief-highlights-multiple-paths-god", hafsite.org, Hindu American Foundation (HAF), 19 October 2010

God, World, Religion, Way

“Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn’t worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it—the silence—meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.”

Philip K. Dick book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Source: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Chapter 2 (p. 20)

World, Way, Silence, Time

“The dullness of fact is the mother of fiction.”

Isaac Asimov book Fact and Fancy

Fact and Fancy (1962), p. 11
General sources

“Ridiculous as the idea may have been for her bluestocking mother to send brother and sister over alone like this, the fact was that Judy was protected as much by her curiosity as by her innocence. And then there was this other thing about her, too. You know all that razzle-dazzle about people being born in Original Sin and all that rot? Well, maybe it’s rot and maybe it isn’t. I mean I wouldn’t slit my throat from ear to ear, just because I’d found out for sure that most people are. But she wasn’t. That was the thing. She simply wasn’t.”

Elaine Dundy (1921–2008) American journalist, actress

I’m positive of that.
Part One, Two
The Dud Avocado (1958)

People, Idea, Sister

“The Chinese, the Indians, the Brazilians, and the Russians are all getting richer and stronger due to wealth creation. Yet the leaders of these countries, while they appreciate wealth creation as one way to gain power, have never given up on the conquest ethic as another way to gain power. In fact, they see wealth creation as away to increase their military power; then that power can be deployed to acquire more wealth through conquest. [Americans] no longer have the conquest ethic. But the Chinese do; they have never given it up. This is why the world still needs America. We remain the custodians of the idea that wealth should be obtained through invention and trade, not through forced seizure.”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

Source: Books, America: Imagine a World without Her (2014), Ch. 16

World, Way, Idea, Country

“Mother brings a child late to contact by half-an-hour; father then requires an extra half-hour the next week. This is getting silly. If, in fact, the father does not see the child at all, of course he should see the child on another occasion, but there are fathers who actually add up the minutes and produce it and say "Now I should have so much more contact because I lost five minutes last week and ten minutes the week before."”

Elizabeth Butler-Sloss (1933) English judge

Testimony before the Constitutional Affairs Committee http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmconst/uc1247-i/uc124702.htm, November 9, 2004

“I personally find Holocaust denial deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn’t intend to defend the intent of people who deny that. Our goal with fake news is not to prevent anyone from saying something untrue — but to stop fake news and misinformation spreading across our services. If something is spreading and is rated false by fact checkers, it would lose the vast majority of its distribution in News Feed. And of course if a post crossed line into advocating for violence or hate against a particular group, it would be removed. These issues are very challenging but I believe that often the best way to fight offensive bad speech is with good speech.”

Mark Zuckerberg (1984) American internet entrepreneur

As quoted in Mark Zuckerberg clarifies: ‘I personally find Holocaust denial deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn’t intend to defend the intent of people who deny that.’ https://www.recode.net/2018/7/18/17588116/mark-zuckerberg-clarifies-holocaust-denial-offensive (July 18, 2018) by Kara Swisher, Recode.

Hate, People, Way, Fight

“You often say to yourself in the course of your life that you ought to avoid having too much business, 'polypragmosyne' [incessant activity], and, more especially, that the older you get, the more you ought to avoid entering on new business. But it's all very well saying this, and giving yourself andothers good advice. The very fact of growing older means taking up a new business; all our circumstances change, and we must either stop doing anything at all or else willing and consciously take on the new role we have to play on life’s stage.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Maxim 259, trans. Stopp
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Life, Business, Change

“Hard systems viewpoints are basically those held by designers and engineers who are trying to create systems to meet an understood need in an effective and economic manner. Those in the soft camp caricature the approach as head-down, concerned with optimization, obsessed with quantitative metrics and highly pragmatic. So much so, in fact, that the term system thinking has been purloined by the soft camp as though they alone thought! The soft camp use the term engineer’s philosophy, not too endearingly, to describe the hard approach, in which the requirement is stated by a customer and the engineer satisfies the requirement without question.”

Derek Hitchins (1935) British systems engineer

Source: Putting systems to work (1992), p. 6; as cited in: Stuart Anderson (2006) "Heterogeneous Modelling of Evolution for Socio-technical Systems"

Optimism, Question, Thinking

“Being nice to people is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity (as opposed to other religions whose tenets are more along the lines of "kill everyone who doesn't smell bad and doesn't answer to the name Mohammed").”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2004

People, Religion

“Sometimes you hear the idea that the ego is so corrupt that anything it tries to do is going to be corrupted as well. That idea closes off all the doors except for one: the hope that somebody is going to come along and save you. But that hope is irresponsible. The responsible attitude is that you’re responsible for the actions of your mind. You really can choose. And fortunately your motives are not always corrupt. As the Buddha said, you can take advantage of the fact that you want true happiness, and develop some noble qualities out of that. The qualities of purity, compassion, and wisdom come from taking your desire for true happiness seriously.”

Thanissaro Bhikkhu (1949) Theravadin Buddhist Monk and Scholar

Conviction and Confidence (2010)

Wisdom, Happiness, Hope, Motivation

“It was a lousy plan, the only thing to commend it being the fact that all the alternatives were worse.”

Charles Stross book Singularity Sky

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 13, “Jokers” (p. 274)

“You may choose, if you wish, to parrot the line that Watergate was a "long national nightmare," but some of us found it rather exhilarating to see a criminal President successfully investigated and exposed and discredited. And we do not think it in the least bit nightmarish that the Constitution says that such a man is not above the law. Ford's ignominious pardon of this felonious thug meant, first, that only the lesser fry had to go to jail. It meant, second, that we still do not even know why the burglars were originally sent into the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In this respect, the famous pardon is not unlike the Warren Commission: another establishment exercise in damage control and pseudo-reassurance (of which Ford was also a member) that actually raised more questions than it answered. The fact is that serious trials and fearless investigations often are the cause of great division, and rightly so.”

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

2006-12-29
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2006/12/our_short_national_nightmare.html
Our Short National Nightmare
Slate
1091-2339
referencing a quote by Gerald Ford
2000s, 2006

Law, Exercises, Question, Thinking

“I remember reports that the American and English newspapers were very happy about the fact that so many were killed in Dresden. There are many instances of barbarity and cruelty on the part of the Allies which I could tell you.”

Julius Streicher (1885–1946) German politician

To Leon Goldensohn, June 15, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Happiness, Parting

Quotes about fact page 60

Quotes about fact
page 60