Quotes about few (4560 quotes, page 28)

“Most businesses -— like most of anything else in life -— fall somewhere between mediocre and good. Few are great. When you compare great companies with good ones, many widely practiced business norms turn out to correlate with mediocrity, not greatness. So, then, why would we want to import the practices of mediocrity into the social sectors?”

James C. Collins (1958) American business consultant and writer

Source: Good To Great And The Social Sectors, 2005, p. 1

Life , Business

“I really want to clear my life so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community.”

Mark Zuckerberg (1984) American internet entrepreneur

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg: Why I wear the same T-shirt every day http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/11217273/Facebooks-Mark-Zuckerberg-Why-I-wear-the-same-T-shirt-every-day.html, The Telegraph, 7 November 2014

Life , Communication , Decision

“In late 1989, the profound transformation that took place in this country brought me here to Prague Castle. It all happened so suddenly that I did not even have time to properly consider whether or not I was up to the task, and I was sincerely of the opinion that I would just take it on for a few months until the first free elections.
Clearly, things turned out quite differently: I have now been here for more than thirteen years, if we discount the short break in the latter half of 1992.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

Farewell Address (2003)

Time , Sincerity , Country

“Frank II had been back in the aptly named Mother Country for only a few months when a lady of his acquaintance presented him with Frank IV. Frank IV was a girl, christened Berenice. The state of coma which had ensnared Frank II for so long did not afflict Berenice, or any other of his descendants.
Another tremendous adjustment in the shared consciousness had to be made. That also had its compensations; Frank was the first man ever really to appreciate the woman's point of view.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

Let's Be Frank (1957)

Girl , Affliction , Country

“Good morning everyone. This past week we've seen the best and the worst of humanity. The heinous terrorist attacks in Paris and Beirut, in Iraq and Nigeria. They showed us once again the depths of the terrorist's depravity. And at the same time we saw the world come together in solidarity. Parisians opening their doors to anyone trapped in the street, taxi drivers turning off their meters to get people home safety, people lining up to donate blood. These simple human acts are a powerful reminder that we cannot be broken and in the face of terror we stand as one. In the wake of these terrible events, I understand the anxiety that many Americans feel. I really do. I don't dismiss the fear of a terrorist bomb going off. There's nothing President Obama and I take more seriously though, than keeping the American people safe. In the past few weeks though, we've heard an awful lot of people suggest that the best way to keep America safe is to prevent any Syrian refugee from gaining asylum in the United States. So let's set the record straight how it works for a refugee to get asylum. Refugees face the most rigorous screening of anyone who comes to the United States. First they are finger printed, then they undergo a thorough background check, then they are interviewed by the Department of Homeland Security. And after that the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center, the Department of Defense and the Department of State, they all have to sign off on access. And to address the specific terrorism concerns we are talking about now, we've instituted another layer of checks just for Syrian refugees. There is no possibility of being overwhelmed by a flood of refugees landing on our doorstep tomorrow. Right now, refugees wait 18 to 24 months while the screening process is completed. And unlike in Europe, refugees don't set foot in the United States until they are thoroughly vetted. Let's also remember who the vast majority of these refugees are: women, children, orphans, survivors of torture, people desperately in need medical help. To turn them away and say there is no way you can ever get here would play right into the terrorists' hands. We know what ISIL - we know what they hope to accomplish. They flat-out told us. Earlier this year, the top ISIL leader al-Baghdadi revealed the true goal of their attacks. Here's what he said: "Compel the crusaders to actively destroy the gray zone themselves. Muslims in the West will quickly find themselves between one and two choices. Either apostatize or emigrate to the Islamic State and thereby escape persecution." So it's clear. It's clear what ISIL wants. They want to manufacture a clash between civilizations. They want frightened people to think in terms of "us versus them."They want us to turn our backs on Muslims victimized by terrorism. But this gang of thugs peddling a warped ideology, they will never prevail. The world is united in our resolve to end their evil. And the only thing ISIL can do is spread terror in hopes that we will in turn, turn on ourselves. We will betray our ideals and take actions, actions motivated by fear that will drive more recruits into the arms of ISIL. That's how they win. We win by prioritizing our security as we've been doing. Refusing to compromise our fundamental American values: freedom, openness, tolerance. That's who we are. That's how we win. May God continue to bless the United States of America and God bless our troops.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Weekly presidential address http://www.c-span.org/video/?401096-1/weekly-presidential-address (21 November 2015).
2010s

Women , God , Children , People

“There are very few men who do not reckon the cost to themselves of a system of taxes before approving it.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Friendship

Men

“How can we help loving best those who first gave us possession of ourselves? All the day long they were together: living as they did, they could not help being so; only parting at night for a few short hours to dream over the happy past day, and to meet again the next morning, the happier for their brief separation. It was a new life to him: what had often hung before him as a fairy vision — what he had longed for, but never found; and here, as if sent down from heaven, was what more than answered to his wildest dreams. Now for the first time he found himself loved for himself — slighted and neglected as he had been …. suddenly he was singled out by a fascinating woman, who made no secret of the pleasure his friendship gave her.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Arthur's commentary
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)

Love , Life , Friendship , Pleasure

“One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles. The top management of the networks with a few notable exceptions, has been trained in advertising, research, sales or show business. But by the nature of the corporate structure, they also make the final and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs. Frequently they have neither the time nor the competence to do this.”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) Television journalist

RTNDA Convention Speech (1958)

Business , Nature , Decision , Time

“I remember opening the letter, scanning the first few lines, feeling the blood go thick behind my eyes. I remember a sound in my head. It wasn't thinking, just a silent howl. A million things all at once — I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything. It couldn't happen. I was above it.”

Tim O'Brien book The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried (1990), On the Rainy River

War , Feeling , Thinking

“I think you're right about the difference between the Trojan mind and the Greek mind: the Greeks live in their imaginations while the Trojans always try to see things as they really are. And with some things they do get hold of the truth, and with some things they don't. But, where they don't, they won't have substitutes. That's why their world-outlook is so much smaller than ours. It's concentrated in a few certainties which are far ahead of anything we'll arrive at, but when you have these you feel that the rest is a blank and long to be back in the bigger world again, where there's space and variety and perplexity.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

Helen in A Trojan Ending (London: Constable, 1937)

Truth , World , Feeling , Imagination

“Both before and after a meal, a pious Jew ritually washes his hands, uttering a special blessing. On one of these two occasions he is worshiping God, by promoting the divine union of Son and Daughter; but on the other he is worshiping Satan, who likes Jewish prayers and ritual acts so much that when he is offered a few of them it keeps him busy for a while and he forgets to pester the divine daughter.”

Israel Shahak (1933–2001) Israeli academic

Jewish History, Jewish Religion (1994)

God , Business , Daughters , Forgetting

“You know, OK, I made a few jokes — and they killed 3000 Americans. Fair trade.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

In response to request by a representative of Muslims for America to stop using the term "raghead" as detrimental to the cause of moderation, alienating to all Muslims and angering many, at a CPAC Conference Q&A (10 February 2006) http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2200579605&topic=218.
2006

“Well what happened was I was asked to be on Seinfeld. They said: “Would you do a Seinfeld?” And I said, and I just happened to know to see a few Seinfelds and I knew these guys were really tops; they were really, really clever guys, and I liked the show. And so I said “Sure!” and I thought they would ask me to do a walk-on, the way it came: "Would you come be part of the show?" And I said “Yeah, sure I’ll do it.” You know what I mean? Then I got the script and my name was on every page because it was about my car. And I laughed; it was hysterically funny. So I was really delighted to do it. The writer came up to me and he said “Jon, would you come take a look at my car to see if you ever owned it?”, because the writer wrote it from a real experience where someone sold him the car based on the fact that it was my car. And I went down and I looked at the car and I said “No, I never had this car.””

Jon Voight (1938) American actor

So unfortunately I had to give him the bad news. But it was a funny episode.
In a Red Carpet interview at the 2006 BAFTA Emmy Awards describing his involvement in and appearance on the 1994 Seinfeld episode The Mom and Pop Store http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8o140TFyAA

Cars , Way , Guy , Parting

“Without the music to shout over, few people bothered saying anything." (Remarking on a power cut while in a bar in the Dominican Republic)”

Mark Kurlansky (1948) American journalist

A Continent of Islands" (1992).

People , Music

“His [Turgot's] first important literary and scholastic effort was a treatise On the Existence of God. Few fragments of it remain, but we are helped to understand him when we learn that he asserted, and to the end of his life maintained, his belief in an Almighty Creator and Upholder of the Universe. It did, indeed, at a later period suit the purposes of his enemies, exasperated by his tolerant spirit and his reforming plans, to proclaim him an atheist; but that sort of charge has been the commonest of missiles against troublesome thinkers in all times.”

Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) American politician

only three fragments of this treatise remain, per Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (baron de l'Aulne), The life and writings of Turgot:Comptroller-General of France, 1774-6 http://books.google.com/books?id=DNHrAAAAMAAJ& W. Walker Stephens, editor, Longman, Green and Co. 1895 p. 7
Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 167-168

Life , God , Understanding , Effort

“But true kingship, which pertains to the divine essence, is still and always shall be in its own station. On the outward plane, the prophets are constant in their sovereignty. They continue until such time as God changes his sacred law. At that time, their dispensations are dissipated. Nevertheless, the sovereignty of the prophets and their religions is everlastingly present in every religion, indeed, in every person who claims to follow those prophets. In sum, such a one has attained leadership, and passes a few days of his life, according to his belief, being a sovereign, until such time as God raises him up to him.”

Subh-i-Azal (1831–1912) Persian religious leader

Treatise on Kingship

Life , God , Religion , Law

“In the last few years, we have seen the executive branch declare itself outside the law — in prosecuting a war on terror. The law against torture has been suspended. The balance between the executive and legislative branch has been dismissed by signing statements and the theory of the unitary executive. The executive has declared its right to suspend habeas corpus indefinitely, to tap anyone's phones without court warrants and to detain and torture anyone it decides is an "enemy combatant." In that sense, we have already left the realm of constitutional government in favor of a protectorate outside the law promising to keep us safe (but never from itself).
But this new move to create a de facto dictator for the financial markets, to invest a Treasury secretary with unprecedented powers to buy and sell at close to a trillion dollar level — with no oversight or accountability: this is a new collapse in democratic life and constitutional norms.”

Andrew Sullivan (1963) Journalist, writer, blogger

"How Democracies Become Dictatorships," http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/09/how-democracies.html The Daily Dish (29 September 2008)

Life , War , Law , Sense

“One of the signs that enable us to recognize the few great men who have lived in the world is this: they are nearly always able to state in clear, simple and concise language what they want to convey to the world.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 6

Men , World

“We are asked now seriously to accept that in the last few years– contrary to all history, contrary to all intelligence– Saddam decided unilaterally to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Hansard http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd/vo030318/debtext/30318-06.htm, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 301, col. 762.
House of Commons debate on Iraq, 18 March 2003.
2000s

History , Intelligence

“[T]he enemy of totalitarian Nazism is not in the East. It is not Russian communism. The complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxist socialism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian, purely negative, noneconomic society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following… During the last few years Russia has therefore been forced to adopt one purely totalitarian and fascist principle after the other; not, it must be emphasized, because of a ‘Stalinist conspiracy,” but because there was no other possibility.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), pp. 245-246

Travel , Communication , Freedom

“Fitz-Roy's temper was a most unfortunate one. It was usually worst in the early morning, and with his eagle eye he could generally detect something amiss about the ship, and was then unsparing in his blame. He was very kind to me, but was a man very difficult to live with on the intimate terms which necessarily followed from our messing by ourselves in the same cabin. We had several quarrels; for instance, early in the voyage at Bahia, in Brazil, he defended and praised slavery, which I abominated, and told me that he had just visited a great slave-owner, who had called up many of his slaves and asked them whether they were happy, and whether they wished to be free, and all answered "No." I then asked him, perhaps with a sneer, whether he thought that the answer of slaves in the presence of their master was worth anything? This made him excessively angry, and he said that as I doubted his word we could not live any longer together. I thought that I should have been compelled to leave the ship; but as soon as the news spread, which it did quickly, as the captain sent for the first lieutenant to assuage his anger by abusing me, I was deeply gratified by receiving an invitation from all the gun-room officers to mess with them. But after a few hours Fitz-Roy showed his usual magnanimity by sending an officer to me with an apology and a request that I would continue to live with him.”

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

volume I, chapter II: "Autobiography", pages 60-61 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=78&itemID=F1452.1&viewtype=image
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887)

Anger , Happiness

“Who among us is not thinking about divorce, except for a few tiny-minded stick-in-the-muds who don’t count?”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“Heliotrope”, p. 106.
The Teachings of Don. B: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992)

Thinking

“The routine in the gallery seemed eternal. The artists ate a skimpy breakfast, worked from seven in the morning until noon, ate lunch when lunch was available, exercised by shift in the courtyard below, worked again till six, ate dinner, and worked from seven until eight-thirty. The gallery housed writers, artists, and a few musicians. Sexes were segregated. Every two weeks the men and women were allowed to mix indiscriminately. Any children born were immediately put in the outside government nurseries where they were brought up as workers, beginning in the fields or chemical gardens at the age of six.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Rebellers (1963), p. 9

Women , Men , Children , Age

“I think one has to say it's not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism. And that's why it has to be a broad and sustained campaign. It's not going to stop if a few criminals are taken care of.”

Paul Wolfowitz (1943) American politician, diplomat, and technocrat

Dep't of Defense News Briefing (September 13, 2001).

People , Support , Thinking

“It is not always easy to diagnose. The simplest form of stupidity — the mumbling, nose-picking, stolid incomprehension — can be detected by anyone. But the stupidity which disguises itself as thought, and which talks so glibly and eloquently, indeed never stops talking, in every walk of life is not so easy to identify, because it marches under a formidable name, which few dare attack. It is called Popular Opinion.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Can a Doctor Be a Humanist? (1984).

Life , Stupidity

“My first serious programming work was done in the very early 1960s, in Assembler languages on IBM and Honeywell machines. Although I was a careful designer — drawing meticulous flowcharts before coding — and a conscientious tester, I realised that program design was hard and the results likely to be erroneous. Into the Honeywell programs, which formed a little system for an extremely complex payroll, I wrote some assertions, with run-time tests that halted program execution during production runs. Time constraints didn't allow restarting a run from the beginning of the tape. So for the first few weeks I had the frightening task on several payroll runs of repairing an erroneous program at the operator’s keyboard ¾ correcting an error in the suspended program text, adjusting the local state of the program, and sometimes modifying the current and previous tape records before resuming execution. On the Honeywell 400, all this could be done directly from the console typewriter. After several weeks without halts, there seemed to be no more errors. Before leaving the organisation, I replaced the run-time halts by brief diagnostic messages: not because I was sure all the errors had been found, but simply because there would be no-one to handle a halt if one occurred. An uncorrected error might be repaired by clerical adjustments; a halt in a production run would certainly be disastrous.”

Michael A. Jackson (1936) British computer scientist

Michael A. Jackson (2000), "The Origins of JSP and JSD: a Personal Recollection", in: IEEE Annals of Software Engineering, Volume 22 Number 2, pages 61-63, 66, April-June 2000.

Error , Time , Drawing

“Whenever a tradition of the Holy Prophet is related to you, scrutinize it, do not be satisfied with mere verbatim repetition of the same because there are many people who repeat the words containing knowledge but only few ponder over them and try to fully grasp the meaning they convey.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Nahj al-Balagha

People , Knowledge

“In May 2004, a fourteen-year-old boy at a middle-class intermediate school in Walnut Creek, an upper-middle-class suburb east of San Francisco, was detained by police who stormed his clasroom, cuffed him in front of the students and teachers, and frog-marched him across the quad… for posting a flash cartoon on his web home page. […] A few years earlier the kid would have been given a serious sit-down, but today, America has no patience for touchy-feely liberal crap. If you step out of line, Team America will be called in to destroy you.”

Mark Ames (1965) American writer and journalist

Part V: More Rage. More Rage., page 176-177.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)

School , Home , Boy , Teachers

“There are few sounds as menacing as a bayonet being fixed.”

George MacDonald Fraser book Quartered Safe Out Here

Source: Quartered Safe Out Here (1992), p. 109.

“Few speeches which have produced an electrical effect on an audience can bear the colorless photography of a printed record.”

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847–1929) British politician

Life of Pitt (1891), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“A false and undeliberated conception of what man is lies at the bottom, I think, of the whole bubble-castle of socialist theory. Although few seem to realize it, Marxism rests on the romantic notion of Rousseau that nature endows men with the qualities necessary to be a free, equal, fraternal, family-like living together, and our sole problem is to fix up the external conditions. All Marx did about this with his dialectical philosophy was to change the tenses in the romance: Nature will endow men with the qualities as soon as the conditions are fixed up.”

Max Eastman (1883–1969) American activist

Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), p. 29

Men , Family , Nature , Problem

“Yesterday I saw Mr. Thackeray. He dined here with some other gentlemen. He is a very tall man — above six feet high, with a peculiar face — not handsome, very ugly indeed, generally somewhat stern and satirical in expression, but capable also of a kind look. He was not told who I was, he was not introduced to me, but I soon saw him looking at me through his spectacles; and when we all rose to go down to dinner he just stepped quietly up and said “Shake hands”; so I shook hands. He spoke very few words to me, but when he went away he shook hands again in a very kind way. It is better, I should think, to have him for a friend than an enemy, for he is a most formidable-looking personage. I listened to him as he conversed with the other gentlemen. All he says is most simple, but often cynical, harsh, and contradictory.”

Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) English novelist and poet

Charlotte Brontë, on William Makepeace Thackeray. Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle, (by Clement King Shorter) (1896)

Way , Thinking

“Most works of art are, necessarily, bad…; one suffers through the many for the few.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Little Cars”, p. 200
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Art , Suffering

“[O'Brien joined the Dublin Gate Theatre) where Orson Welles had started. Very few people know that he started in Dublin, most people think it was the Mercury in New York. James Mason, Peggy Cummins, Edward Mulhare - they all used to work for the Gate Theatre. My father was extremely furious when he found out that I was wasting my time being an actor. He also got wind of the fact that the star of the production (Micheál Mac Liammóir) was one of the biggest queens alive. He also played the part of Jago in Orson Welles' OTHELLO. This really didn't help. He cut my money off.”

Donald O'Brien (actor) (1930–2003) Italian film and TV actor

Euro Trash Cinema magazine interview (March 1996)

Money , People , Star , Thinking

“A few profit – and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.”

Smedley D. Butler (1881–1940) United States Marine Corps General, 2 time Medal of Honor recipient and activist

War is a racket (1935)
War is a racket (1935)

War , Peace , Way

“Very few people who devote their lives to studying the historical Jesus actually want to find a Jesus who is completely removed from our own time. What people want … is relevance.”

Bart D. Ehrman book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium

Source: Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (1999), Ch. 8: 'Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet', p. 127

People , Study , Time

“I thought I was going to die a few times. On the Freedom Ride in the year 1961, when I was beaten at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery, I thought I was going to die. On March 7th, 1965, when I was hit in the head with a night stick by a State Trooper at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I thought I was going to die. I thought I saw death, but nothing can make me question the philosophy of nonviolence.”

John Lewis (civil rights leader) (1940) American politician and civil rights leader

Academy of Achievement web site http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/lew0pro-1 (url accessed on October 22, 2008)

Death , Question , Freedom , Time

“The power of psychedelics… is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, Drugs and the Meaning of Life http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/drugs-and-the-meaning-of-life/ (5 July 2011)
2010s

Understanding

“The world's present industrial civilization is handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping, and incompatible intellectual systems: the accumulated knowledge of the last four centuries of the properties and interrelationships of matter and energy; and the associated monetary culture which has evolved from folkways of prehistoric origin.The first of these two systems has been responsible for the spectacular rise, principally during the last two centuries, of the present industrial system and is essential for its continuance. The second, an inheritance from the prescientific past, operates by rules of its own having little in common with those of the matter-energy system. Nevertheless, the monetary system, by means of a loose coupling, exercises a general control over the matter-energy system upon which it is superimposed.Despite their inherent incompatibilities, these two systems during the last two centuries have had one fundamental characteristic in common, namely exponential growth, which has made a reasonably stable coexistence possible. But, for various reasons, it is impossible for the matter-energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doublings, and this phase is by now almost over. The monetary system has no such constraints, and according to one of its most fundamental rules, it must continue to grow by compound interest.”

M. King Hubbert (1903–1989) American geoscientist

"Two Intellectual Systems: Matter-energy and the Monetary Culture." Summary, by M. King Hubbert, of a seminar he taught at MIT Energy Laboratory, 30 September 1981, recovered from http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/monetary.htm

World , Exercises , Knowledge , Universe

“I felt as if I had at last returned home. The first few days I was there I couldn't stop the tears streaming from my eyes. It was not sadness, but some emotional impact from the past- a returning to a place once loved after too long a time.”

Natacha Rambova (1897–1966) American film personality and fashion designer

On visiting Egypt, p. 207
Madam Valentino: The Many Lives of Natacha Rambova (1991)

Love , Sadness , Home , Tear

“All men do the best they can. But none meet life honestly and few heroically.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

As quoted in Infidels and Heretics : An Agnostic's Anthology (1929) edited by Clarence Darrow and Wallace Rice, p. 206

Life , Men

“Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother.”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

"1896", p. 28
A Writer's Notebook (1946)

Boy

“Since it seems to be the nature of man that he wants to go to hell as quickly as possible, it is not surprising that effective base rhetoricians can greatly accelerate this process for millions. … Many individuals try to drive men into slavery, as if they were cattle, but only a few succeed. These we hail as “great historical figures.” I submit that we cannot judge the noble rhetorician by this standard. Since he urges men to be better than they are, the noble rhetorician cannot possibly succeed in changing those who prefer to remain as they are or become evil. Indeed, because his task is to bring men to themselves, not to him, the noble rhetorician ought not to be judged by his manifest effect on others at all. Rather, he ought to be judged by the clarity and steadfastness with which he proclaims his counsel. Should not a single person heed his advice, the noble rhetorician would still have to be judged successful in proportion as he succeeds in perfecting his own language. … In the final analysis, what Karl Kraus sought was to purify himself by purifying his own language. He achieved his goal. He dies a semantic saint in a semantically satanic society.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: Anti-Freud (1990), pp. 56-57.

Men , Hell , Nature , Evil

“Brother Leon arrived late for the performance. His late entrance was not a surprise. Everybody knew that Leon hated the student skits and sketches. Too often there had been hilarious takeoffs on the faculty and, a few years ago, a devastating burlesque of Brother Leon by a student named Henry Boudreau. Boudreau had minced across the stage, speaking in a prissy voice, wielding an oversized baseball bat the way Leon used his teacher's pointer, as a weapon. The performance had become a legend at Trinity. But funny thing about Boudreau: He had flunked out at the end of the year.”

Robert Cormier book Beyond the Chocolate War

Source: Beyond the Chocolate War (1985), p. 246-247

Hate , Way , Teachers

“You're a slave in your own country, White Man. Each year you get to keep less of the fruits of your labor; each year it gets more difficult to carry the burden the aliens have placed upon you; each year the cheap labor of aliens makes your future less secure; each year you retreat a few steps more into the world of slavery.”

George Lincoln Rockwell (1918–1967) American politician, founder of the American Nazi Party

White Power
1966

World , Future , Country

“There are only a few images that are not forced to provide meaning, or have to go through the filter of a specific idea.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

New millennium, Photography, or the Writing of Light, (2000)

Idea

“It is to be feared that few who are not experts in the history of mathematics have any acquaintance with the details of the original discoveries in mathematics of the greatest mathematician of antiquity, perhaps the greatest mathematical genius that the world has ever seen.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

Source: Achimedes (1920), Ch. I. Archimedes, p.1

World , Fear , History , Mathematics

“News of the atrocities, which have recently been perpetrated by the Turkish king in Constantinople and have now been divulged, has so inflamed a man [Cusa himself] who once saw that region, with zeal for God, that amongst many sighs he asked the Creator of all things if in His kindness He might moderate the persecution, which raged more than usual on account of diverse religious rites. Then it occurred that after several days—indeed on account of lengthy, continuous meditation—a vision was manifested to the zealous man, from which he concluded that it would be possible, through the experience of a few wise men who are well acquainted with all the diverse practices which are observed in religions across the world, to find a unique and propitious concordance, and through this to constitute a perpetual peace in religion upon the appropriate and true course.”

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) German philosopher, theologian, jurist, and astronomer

De Pace Fidei (The Peace of Faith) (1453)

Men , God , World , Peace

“I was in the middle of shooting the last few weeks of Blazing Saddles somewhere in the Antelope Valley, and Gene Wilder and I were having a cup of coffee and he said, I have this idea that there could be another "Frankenstein." I said not another — we've had the son of, the cousin of, the brother-in-law, we don't need another Frankenstein. His idea was very simple: What if the grandson of Dr. Frankenstein wanted nothing to do with the family whatsoever. He was ashamed of those wackos. I said, "That's funny."”

Mel Brooks (1926) American director, writer, actor, and producer

On the initial inspiration for his film Young Frankenstein, in "The Sunday Conversation: Mel Brooks on his 'Young Frankenstein' musical" in The Los Angeles Times (1 August 2010) http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/01/entertainment/la-ca-conversation-20100801

Family , Law , Coffee , Idea

“It's amazing what success will do. I've just started a new book after taking a break of a year and a half since finishing 'The Book of Evidence,' and I'm fascinated to see if I can detect in myself a voice saying, 'Tone that bit down; make that bit easier; give them a few laughs,' which would be absolutely fatal. I don't think it's happening, but you can't tell what's happening beneath the surface.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

Once More Admired Than Bought, A Writer Finally Basks in Success (1990)

Books , Thinking , Success

“These men of the cloth sought reflected glory in glorifying the inhumanity of their sinful flock of hostage takers; but in their uncompassionate hearts, could not find the will to spare a moment to cast a comforting glance at the hapless and innocent hostages who languished but a few yards away in the parliamentary complex. They joined together to desecrate the national motto: Fear God and Honour the Chief; they violated the solemn promise. And their political outriders, far and wide, high and low, military and civilian, hastened to proclaim their support for the newly invented “cause” as defined by army officer Sitiveni Rabuka (1987) and failed businessman George Speight (2000), while occasionally proclaiming not to support the means, but had not the courage to condemn and resist their evil enterprise.”

Vijay R. Singh (1931–2006) Fijian politician

Speaking Out (2006)

Men , God , Fear , Courage

“Few of the major tasks of modern administration can be carried out without the constant support of the technician.”

Leonard D. White (1891–1958) American historian

Source: Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, 1926, p. 14, as cited in: Moynihan (2009)

Support

“There have been a few players described as the new George Best over the years, but this is the first time it's been a compliment to me.”

George Best (1946–2005) British footballer

On Cristiano Ronaldo; reported in " Funniest ever footie quotes http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article891202.ece", TheSun.co.uk (March 8, 2008).

Time

“The world is changing and we are awakening. These statistics give us a numerical glimpse at the visceral dissatisfaction that most of us feel. Now is the time to express it. These corrupt structures cannot be maintained without our compliance. You could vote against them, if there was anything to vote for, but there isn’t, or you could stop paying your mortgage, stop paying your taxes, stop buying stuff you don’t need. When we, the majority, unite and demonstrate our new intention, we will be invincible. If we, who are complicit by our silence, become active and disobedient. This is a pivotal time in the history of our species. We are transitioning from an ideology that places power and responsibility in the hands of the few to one where we all collectively have power. It is important that we clarify, in a manner accessible to all, which institutions and systems are beneficial and which ones have to go. It is important that we propose ideas and systems that will be advantageous, like the handful in this book, and ensure that they are presented properly. When they are inevitably disparaged by the fearful enemies of change, we must remain unified and insistent. At this climactic time, we have no choice but change. This book, written by a twerp, with minimal interaction with brilliant thinkers and uncorrupted minds, demonstrates that. Now, what are you going to do about it?”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Books , World , Fear , Feeling

“When a labourer could no longer work, he had lost the right to live. Work was all they [the landowners] wanted from him; he was to work and hold his tongue, year in and year out, early and late, and if he could not work, why, what was the use of him? It was what he was made for, to labour and toil for his betters, without complaint, on a starvation wage. When no more work could be squeezed out of him, he was no better than a cumberer of other folk's ground, and the proper place for such as he was the churchyard, where he would be sure to lie quiet under a few feet of earth, and want neither food nor wages any more.”

Joseph Arch (1826–1919) British politician

Source: The Story of his Life Told by Himself (1898), p. 11

Lie , Food

“Physics, chemistry, astrophysics are obviously the ideal field for the tidy mind …in the biological and geological sciences the tidy mind often goes astray and the passive, unmathematical approach may me more suitable.
…The sciences that deal with natural process, geology or geography, or with life, zoology or botany, have an immensely more complicated task than physics or chemistry.
… A particular danger, I believe, lies in an oversimplified use of mathematical or statistical methods of investigation, in which obviously erroneous results may be obtained by a selection of only a few of many relevant factors to be considered.”

Claud William Wright (1917–2010) British paleontologist

From "Order and Disorder in Nature", 1958 Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, 69, 2, 77-82.

Life , Mathematics , Nature , Science

“A few friends that also drew manga gathered at the pub regardless of the fact did we drink any alcohol, we would talk excitedly about manga. We will get so preoccupied with the topic, that we always miss the last train. Although we all have the feeling, “We’re so old already, why are we still mucking around like this?” But whenever we hear something like “I want to draw this!!”, the passion from everybody, our spirits are refreshed with new enthusiasm. This time I even got Moritaishi Sensei to draw the omake for me. Wah!! (Happy)”

Hiromu Arakawa (1973) award winning Japanese manga artist

Interview with mobuta.com (2004)

Alcohol , Feeling , Drink , Passion

“He is extremely intelligent and has a great sense of responsibility. I've seen, in the past few years, he has managed several crises with extreme dignity and wisdom.”

John Elkann (1976) Italian businessman

Henry Kissinger, "Interview: All In The Family" http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/article/0,13005,901060703-1207766-2,00.html, Time Magazine, 06-25-2006
About

Wisdom , Intelligence , Sense , Past

“A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over. And I maintain that if a person can put a few common sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

Letter to the editor of Solidarity (1914-11-29)

Sense , Learning , Reading , Heart

“His nobility led him to take a few steps in the direction of fortune, and then to despise her.”

Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794) French writer

Il avait, par grandeur d'âme, fait quelques pas vers la fortune, et par grandeur d'âme il la méprisa.
Maxims and Considerations, #548

“Of what value is the study of management?
The study of management has been omitted from the student's training until comparatively recently, for a very different reason than was psychology. It was never doubted that a knowledge of management would be of great value to anyone and everyone, and many were the queer schemes for obtaining that knowledge after graduation. It was doubted that management could be studied otherwise than by observation and practice. Few teachers, if any, believed in the existence, or possibility, of a teaching science of management. Management was assumed by many to be an art, by even more it was thought to be a divinely bestowed gift or talent, rather than an acquired accomplishment. It was common belief that one could learn to manage only by going out on the work and watching other managers, or by trying to manage, and not by studying about management in a class room or in a text book; that watching a good manager might help one, but no one could hope really to succeed who had not " the knack born in him."”

Lillian Gilbreth (1878–1972) American psychologist and industrial engineer

Source: Psychology of management, 1914, p. 2-3

Books , Hope , Art , Knowledge

“Coming in from the eastward, the bright colouring of the [Nore] lightship marking the part of the river committed to the charge of an Admiral (the Commander-in-Chief at the Nore) accentuates the dreariness and the great breadth of the Thames Estuary. But soon the course of the ship opens the entrance of the Medway, with its men-of-war moored in line, and the long wooden jetty of Port Victoria, with its few low buildings like the beginning of a hasty settlement upon a wild and unexplored shore. The famous Thames barges sit in brown clusters upon the water with an effect of birds floating upon a pond… [The inward-bound ships] all converge upon the Nore, the warm speck of red upon the tones of drab and gray, with the distant shores running together towards the west, low and flat, like the sides of an enormous canal. The sea-reach of the Thames is straight, and, once Sheerness is left behind, its banks seem very uninhabited, except for the cluster of houses which is Southend, or here and there a lonely wooden jetty where petroleum ships discharge their dangerous cargoes, and the oil-storage tanks, low and round with slightly-domed roofs, peep over the edge of the fore-shore, as it were a village of Central African huts imitated in iron. Bordered by the black and shining mud-flats, the level marsh extends for miles. Away in the far background the land rises, closing the view with a continuous wooded slope, forming in the distance an interminable rampart overgrown with bushes.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

The Nore to Hope Point
The Mirror of the Sea (1906), On the River Thames, Ch. 16

Men , War , Bird , Water

“The human population growth that has taken place over the past few hundred years resembles nothing so much as the spikes that occur in the numbers of rabbits, house mice and plague rats. Like them, it can only be short-lived.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Disseminated Primatemaia (p. 9)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Past , Housing

“Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do.”

William Zinsser (1922–2015) writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, professor

Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 2, Simplicity, p. 12.

People , Time , Despair

“There are very few people on top of life, and the rest of us don't like them very much.”

Alan Ayckbourn (1939) English playwright

Newsweek, March 25, 1979.

Life , People

“The applications of science are inevitable and unquotable for all countries and people today. But something more than its application is necessary. It is the scientific approach, the adventurous, and critical temper of science, the search for truth and new knowledge, the refusal to accept anything without testing and trial, the capacity to change previous conclusions in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed fact and not on pre-conceived theory, the hard discipline of the mind – all this is necessary, not merely for the too many scientists today, who swear by science, forget all about it outside their particular sphere. The scientific approach and temper or should be a way of life, a process of thinking, a method of acting, associating, with our fellow men. That is a large order and undoubtedly very few if any at all can function in this way with even partial success. But his [Nehru] criticism applies in equal or even greater measure to all the injunctions which philosophy and religion have laid upon us. The scientific temper points out the way along which man should travel. It is the temper of a free man. We live in a scientific age, so we are told but there is little evidence of this temper in the people anywhere or even in their leaders.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Quoted from his book “In Nehru and His Vision 1999" in: K.K. Sinha, Social And Cultural Ethos Of India http://books.google.co.in/books?id=Jb-fO2R1CQUC&pg=PA183, Atlantic Publishers & Dist, 1 January 2008, p. 183

Life , Men , People , Truth

“The chief weakness in France’s anti-terrorism strategy is the inability of its leadership elite to agree on a workable definition of the threat the nation faces. Many still cling to the notion that Bouhelel and other terrorists are trying to take revenge against France for tis colonial past. Yet Tunisia, where Bouhelel’s family came from in the 1960s, has been independent for more than 60 years, double the life of the terrorist — who had not been there, even as a tourist. Some, like the Islamologist Gilles Kepel, blame French society for “the sense of exclusion” inflicted on immigrants of Muslim origin. However, leaving aside self-exclusion, there are few barriers that French citizens of Muslim faith can’t cross. Today, the Cabinet of Prime Minister Manuel Valls includes at least two Muslim ministers. Others still claim that France is being hit because of Muslim grievances over Palestine, although successive French governments have gone out of their way to sympathize with the “Arab cause.” France was the first nation to impose an arms embargo on Israel in 1967 and the first in the West to recognize the PLO. The blame-the-victim school also claims that France is attacked because of the “mess in the Middle East,” although the French took no part in toppling Saddam Hussein and have stayed largely on the sidelines in the conflict in Syria. Isn’t it possible that this new kind of terrorism, practiced by neo-Islam, is not related to any particular issue? Isn’t it possible that Bouhelel didn’t want anything specific because he wanted everything, starting with the right to kill people not because of what they did but because of who they were?”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"A cry from France: After Nice, can we finally face the truth about this war?" http://nypost.com/2016/07/15/a-cry-from-france-after-nice-can-we-finally-face-the-truth-about-this-war/ New York Post (July 15, 2016)
New York Post

Life , People , School , Family

“Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture.”

Donald Judd (1928–1994) artist

Source: 1960s, "Specific Objects," 1965, p. 74; Lead paragraph; partly cited in: Diane Waldman. Carl Andre https://archive.org/stream/carlandre00wald#page/6/mode/1up. Published 1970 by Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. p. 6
Context: Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. Usually it has been related, closely or distantly, to one or the other. The work is diverse, and much in it that is not in painting and sculpture is also diverse. But there are some things that occur nearly in common.

Painting

“We can assume that in a relatively short time — perhaps within 100 million years — the one celled organism evolved into a colony of cells. With the further passage of time, groups of cells within those colonies assumed specialized functions of food-gathering, digestion, the structural features of an outer skin, and so on; thus began the stage of evolution leading to the complex, many-celled creatures which dominate life today.
The fossil record contains no trace of these preliminary stages in the development of many-celled organisms. The first clues to the existence of relatively advanced forms of life consist of a few barely discernible tracks, presumably made in the primeval slime by soft, wriggling wormlike animals. These are found in rocks about one billion years old. These meager remains are the earliest traces of many-celled animal life on the planet.”

Robert Jastrow (1925–2008) American astronomer

Red Giants and White Dwarfs : Man's Descent from the Stars (1971), p. 249.

Life , Food , Time , Animals

“Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the serious labours of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between. Personally, I would sooner have written "Alice in Wonderland" than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

Stephen Leacock book Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

Preface
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)

Way , Reading , Personality

“We take all things in a minor key as we grow older. There are few majestic passages in the later acts of life's opera. Ambition takes a less ambitious aim. Honor becomes more reasonable and conveniently adapts itself to circumstances. And love—love dies. "Irreverence for the dreams of youth" soon creeps like a killing frost upon our hearts. The tender shoots and the expanding flowers are nipped and withered, and of a vine that yearned to stretch its tendrils round the world there is left but a sapless stump”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Love , Life , Youth , World

“After having my daughter, I made a conscious effort to regain control of my health and my body. But I didn't want to do a crash diet. I was a mom now. I needed to change my ways and set an example for my child. … A year later (around November 2013), my husband and I decided we wanted to try a completely plant-based diet … And so the journey began that helped me get into the best shape of my life. Little did I know the long-lasting effects it would have. I thought, like with most diets, I would feel deprived and hate food, that I would miss out on restaurants and celebrations, that I would get headaches and be irritable, etc. I was wrong about all of that. It took a few days to adjust, but what I discovered was increased energy, better sleep, weight loss, improved digestion, clarity, and an incredibly positive feeling for my actions and the effects it would have on those around me and the environment.”

Beyoncé (1981) American singer, songwriter and actress

Foreword https://books.google.it/books?id=KfeoBAAAQBAJ&pg=PP10 to Marco Borges's The 22-Day Revolution, New York: Penguin, 2015

Life , Hate , Health , Food

““We have now successfully enlisted the aid of many groups of theoretically anti-communist people, all supporting those very causes which lead directly to victory for the Party. These students will be of great value in creating political upheaval here in the next few years. Though they may not vote themselves, they will do a great part of the work for the candidates we shall endorse.”
“I think it was the vague promise of sexual freedom that did it,” said Weintraub wryly. “That seems to work on everybody. Even the clergy.””

George Alec Effinger (1947–2002) Novelist, short story writer

Source: Relatives (1973)., Chapter 11 (p. 177).

People , Support , Thinking , Freedom

“Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.”

Robert Musil (1880–1942) Austrian writer

Source: “Mathematical man” (1913), p. 41

Mathematics

“I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money into money, the banking system will collapse totally, and we will be left having to barter to stay alive. Those who can dig in their garden will have a better chance than the rest. I'll be all right; I've got a few veg.”

Margaret Drabble (1939) Novelist, biographer and critic

The Guardian, January 2, 1993.

Money , Confidence , History , Chance

“It was her own evil assumptions that had done her in. She hadn’t even considered the third possible explanation for his strange behavior—that he was a perfectly nice man, without an ounce of guile, just trying to be helpful. People helped people in California. Why hadn’t she thought of that? She’d only been in New York a few weeks, and already she was turning hard and suspicious.”

M. K. Hobson (1969) American writer

Source: The Hidden Goddess (2011), Chapter 2, “An Unexpected Gift” (p. 33)

People , Behavior , Evil , Help

“Grove quotes me – and the quotes are things I actually said! That is stunningly rare. … What liberals normally do in response to a principled conservative argument is lie, manufacture quotes, and call conservatives names – as some dissolute drunk did in the New York Post a few days later. The left's logic deficit is a topic I explore thoroughly in my book. Buy it and prepare to have your blood run hot.
Oh, and for the record, Howard Kurtz is wrong about the reason I call him the Liberal Ombudsman for Liberal Media Bias in my book – it was not the "girly-boy" quote. Paradoxically, that is the ONLY time Kurtz has quoted me accurately.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

Mentioning comments by journalist Howard Kurtz about his reporting of Coulter calling editors at National Review Online "girly-boys".
2002, Ann Coulter : Left Is 'out to Destroy the Country' (2002)

Lie , Books , Quotes , Boy

“Party is the madness of many, for the gain of a few.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

From Roscoe's edition of Pope, vol. v. p. 376; originally printed in Motte's Miscellanies (1727). In the edition of 1736 Pope says, "I must own that the prose part (the Thought on Various Subjects), at the end of the second volume, was wholly mine. January, 1734".
Thoughts on Various Subjects (1727)

Madness

“Local economic independence cannot be preserved in the face of consolidations such as we have had during the past few years. The control of American business is steadily being transferred, I am sorry to have to say, from local communities to a few large cities in which central managers decide the policies and the fate of the far-flung enterprises they control. Millions of people depend helplessly on their judgment. Through monopolistic mergers the people are losing power to direct their own economic welfare. When they lose the power to direct their economic welfare, they also lose the means to direct their political future.”

Estes Kefauver (1903–1963) American politician

Senate Hearing, 1947, reported in Michael J. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (1998), p. 243.

Fate , People , Communication , Business

“The human understanding is moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination; and then it feigns and supposes all other things to be somehow, though it cannot see how, similar to those few things by which it is surrounded.”

Francis Bacon book Novum Organum

Aphorism 47
Novum Organum (1620), Book I

Imagination , Understanding

“Dream tonight of peacock tails, / Diamond fields and spouter whales. / Ills are many, blessings few, / But dreams tonight will shelter you.”

Thomas Pynchon book V.

Source: V. (1963), Chapter Nine, Part II

Dreams

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

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

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

Life , Men , Law , Food

“Were it necessary to bring a majority into a comprehension of the libertarian philosophy, the cause of liberty would be utterly hopeless. Every significant movement in history has been led by one or just a few individuals with a small minority of energetic supporters.”

Leonard E. Read (1898–1983) American academic

How to Advance Liberty, How to Advance Liberty https://mises.org/library/how-advance-liberty

History , Support

“Few persons are prevented from thinking themselves right by the reflection that, if they be right, the rest of the world is wrong.”

Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) British Conservative politician and statesman

Theism and humanism

World , Thinking , Personality

“When I went vegetarian at age eleven, it was a remarkably easy transition. A boy at my school was attempting to kill creatures in the pond. When I tried to stop him, he said, “You eat animals,” like that meant I had no right to try and save something that could end up on my plate later. The hypocrisy of my actions became crystal clear in that moment. I decided, no more meat. … When I first started working for two organizations supporting anti-factory farming, vegan outreach and humane education, my choice to go vegan became that much clearer. I realized veganism is the only diet that can change the world. … You can expect a healthier body, and the feeling of pride that goes hand-in-hand with living according to your values. That’s something that many people aspire to, but few people achieve.”

Alicia Silverstone (1976) American actress

"How to Transition from Vegetarianism to Veganism", in The Kind Life (9 April 2013) http://thekindlife.com/blog/2013/04/how-to-transition-from-vegetarian-to-vegan/

People , Age , World , Education

“But Zarathustra made it clear in which direction the answer lay; it is towards the artist-psychologist, the intuitional thinker. There are very few such men in the world's literature; the great artists are not thinkers, the great thinkers are seldom artists.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), p. 158

Men , World , Literature

“After we have become familiar with the new idea, however, after it has become part of our general stock of theoretical concepts, our expectations are brought more into balance with its actual uses, and its excessive popularity is ended. A few zealots persist in the old key-to-the-universe view of it; but less driven thinkers settle down after a while to the problems the idea has really generated. They try to apply it and extend it where it applies and where it is capable of extension; and they desist where it does not apply or cannot be extended. It becomes, if it was, in truth, a seminal idea in the first place, a permanent and enduring part of our intellectual armory. But it no longer has the grandiose, all-promising scope, the infinite versatility of apparent application, it once had. The second law of thermodynamics, or the principle of natural selection, or the notion of unconscious motivation, or the organization of the means of production does not explain everything, not even everything human, but it still explains something; and our attention shifts to isolating just what that something is, to disentangling ourselves from a lot of pseudoscience to which, in the first flush of its celebrity, it has also given rise.”

Clifford Geertz book The Interpretation of Cultures

Source: The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), p. 3-4

Truth , Law , Motivation , Idea

“I was in a bar a few nights ago, moving from stool to stool, trying to get lucky… But there was no gum under any of them. And I hear giggling behind me. At first I don't mind, but the giggling continues… Finally, I thought "What's so amusing?" I turn around, and these two guys, for the last, oh, half hour or so, have been throwing darts into my head. It's a good thing I heard them! I said, "Look, you bums," 'cause I was angry now, "As soon as this game is over, hit the road!"”

Emo Philips (1956) American comedian

But as I left that bar, one thing stuck in my mind...
E=MO² (1985)

Guy , Game , Night

“The chroniclers of the early Turkish rulers of India take pride in affirming that Qutbuddin Aibak was a killer of lakhs of infidels. Leave aside enthusiastic killers like Alauddin Khalji and Muhammad bin Tughlaq, even the "kind-hearted" Firoz Tughlaq killed more than a lakh Bengalis when he invaded their country. Timur Lang or Tamerlane says he killed a hundred thousand infidel prisoners of war in Delhi. He built victory pillars from severed heads at many places. These were acts of sultans. The nobles were not lagging behind. One Shaikh Daud Kambu is said to have killed 20,000 with his dagger. The Bahmani sultans of Gulbarga and Bidar considered it meritorious to kill a hundred thousand Hindu men, women and children every year….. The rite of Jauhar killed the women, the tradition of not deserting the field of battle made Rajputs and others die fighting in large numbers. When Malwa was attacked (1305), its Raja is said to have possessed 40,000 horse and 100,000 foot.43 After the battle, "so far as human eye could see, the ground was muddy with blood"…. Under Muhammad Tughlaq, wars and rebellions knew no end. His expeditions to Bengal, Sindh and the Deccan, as well as ruthless suppression of twenty-two rebellions, meant only depopulation in the thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth century. For one thing, in spite of constant efforts no addition of territory could be made by Turkish rulers from 1210 to 1296; for another the Turkish rulers were more ruthless in war and less merciful in peace. Hence the extirpating massacres of Balban, and the repeated attacks by others on regions already devastated but not completely subdued….. Mulla Daud of Bidar vividly describes the war between Muhammad Shah Bahmani and the Vijayanagar King in 1366 in which "Farishtah computes the victims on the Hindu side alone as numbering no less than half a million." Muhammad also devastated the Karnatak region with vengeance….. Under Akbar and Jahangir "five or six hundred thousand human beings were killed," says emperor Jahangir. The figures given by these killers and their chroniclers may be a few thousand less or a few thousand more, but what bred this ambition of cutting down human beings without compunction was the Muslim theory, practice and spirit of Jihad, as spelled out in Muslim scriptures and rules of administration.”

K. S. Lal book Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India

Ch 3
Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India (1999)

Women , Men , War , Children

“The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures….
Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. [… ] The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.”

Fred Brooks (1931) American computer scientist

Page 7.
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975, 1995)

Life , Imagination , Sense , Time

“The preface to the first edition of this book… shows that in 1958 the classification ideas in it were felt to controversial, needing to be championed. A few years before, the had issued a memorandum proclaiming "the need for a faceted classification as the basis of all methods of information retrieval'. As part-author of this memorandum, I must now judge the claim to have been too bold, even brash.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Preface to third edition; Partly cited in: Vanda Broughton (2011) " Brian Vickery and the Classification Research Group: the legacy of faceted classification http://www.iskouk.org/conf2011/papers/broughton.pdf" p. 6
Classification and indexing in science (1958)

Books , Idea , Parting

“Being one of the few women in the leadership team, I am often surrounded by men, but I have never found that to be uncomfortable.”

Smita Nair Jain (1969) Indian Author, screenwriter and playback singer

Source: Women corporate leaders enlighten IIM-Raipur, Sify, 2018-07-23 http://www.sify.com/finance/women-corporate-leaders-enlighten-iim-raipur-news-default-oi2ikzdhagaaf.html,

Women , Men

“Only a few years ago one could observe, at least among German psychologists, a quite pessimistic mood. After the initial successes of experimental psychology in its early stages, it seemed to become clearer and clearer that it would remain impossible for experimental method to press on beyond the psychology of perception and memory to such vital problems as those with which psychoanalysis was concerned. Weighty 'philosophical' and 'methodological' considerations seemed to make such an undertaking a priori impossible.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, A Dynamic Theory of Personality, 1935, p. v.

Mood , Problem , Memory , Success

“There was a kind of shifting of the balances of my brain, of the way I had been thinking, the same kind of realignment as when, a few days before, words like democracy, liberty, freedom, had faded under pressure of a new sort of understanding of the real movement of the world towards dark, hardening power. I knew, but of course the word, written, cannot convey the quality of this knowing, that whatever already is has its logic and its force. I felt this, like a vision, in a new kind of knowing. And I knew that the cruelty and the spite and the I. I. I. I. of Saul and of Anna were part of the logic of war; and I knew how strong these emotions were, in a way that would never leave me, would become part of how I saw the world.”

Doris Lessing book The Golden Notebook

Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 4"
The Golden Notebook (1962)

War , World , Way , Democracy

“Life has its beginning and its maturity comes into being when an individual rises above self to something greater. Few individuals learn this, and so they go through life merely existing and never living. Now you see signs all along in your everyday life with individuals who are the victims of self-centeredness. They are the people who live an eternal “I.” They do not have the capacity to project the “I” into the “Thou." They do not have the mental equipment for an eternal, dangerous and sometimes costly altruism. They live a life of perpetual egotism. And they are the victims all around of the egocentric predicament.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1950s, Conquering Self-centeredness (1957)
Context: Life has its beginning and its maturity comes into being when an individual rises above self to something greater. Few individuals learn this, and so they go through life merely existing and never living. Now you see signs all along in your everyday life with individuals who are the victims of self-centeredness. They are the people who live an eternal “I.” They do not have the capacity to project the “I” into the “Thou." They do not have the mental equipment for an eternal, dangerous and sometimes costly altruism. They live a life of perpetual egotism. And they are the victims all around of the egocentric predicament. They start out, the minute you talk with them, talking about what they can do, what they have done. They’re the people who will tell you, before you talk with them five minutes, where they have been and who they know. They’re the people who can tell you in a few seconds, how many degrees they have and where they went to school and how much money they have. We meet these people every day. And so this is not a foreign subject. It is not something far off. It is a problem that meets us in everyday life. We meet it in ourselves, we meet in other selves: the problem of selfcenteredness.

Life , People , Learning

“The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.”

Primo Levi book Other People's Trades

"News from the Sky"
Other People's Trades (1985)

Life , World , Knowledge , Future

“Unlike the Wikipedia editor stereotype, Wadewitz was not a young male who was tech-obsessed. Still she found Wikipedia appealing as a way to spread her academic knowledge, which was sometimes seen by few, whereas her encyclopedic entries might be read by millions.”

Adrianne Wadewitz (1977–2014) academic and Wikipedian

Michelle Broder Van Dyke (April 21, 2014). "Prolific Wikipedia Editor Adrianne Wadewitz Dies After Rock Climbing Accident" http://www.buzzfeed.com/mbvd/prolific-wikipedia-editor-adrianne-wadewitz-dies-after-rock. BuzzFeed.
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Way , Knowledge , Reading