Quotes about few (4560 quotes, page 35)

“Few are the beliefs, still fewer the superstitions of to-day. We pretend to account for everything, till we do not believe enough for that humility so essential to moral discipline. But the dark creed of the fatalist still holds its ground — there is that within us, which dares not deny what, in the still depths of the soul, we feel to have a mysterious predominance. To a certain degree we controul our own actions — we have the choice of right or wrong; but the consequences, the fearful consequences, lie not with us. Let any one look upon the most important epochs of his life; how little have they been of his own making — how one slight thing has led on to another, till the result has been the very reverse of our calculations. Our emotions, how little are they under our own controul! how often has the blanched lip, or the flushed cheek, betrayed what the will was strong to conceal! Of all our sensations, love is the one which has most the stamp of Fate. What a mere chance usually leads to our meeting the person destined to alter the whole current of our life. What a mystery even to ourselves the influence which they exercise over us. Why should we feel so differently towards them, to what we ever felt before? An attachment is an epoch in existence — it leads to casting off old ties, that, till then, had seemed our dearest; it begins new duties; often, in a woman especially, changes the whole character; and yet, whether in its beginning, its continuance or its end, love is as little within our power as the wind that passes, of which no man knows whither it goeth or whence it comes.”

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

No.14. The Bride of Lammermuir — LUCY ASHTON.
Literary Remains

Love , Life , Fate , Lie

“Then he added, as men will who are of infinite imagination and crammed with desires, 'My wants are few.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Source: The Four Men: A Farrago (1911), p. 78

Men , Imagination

“We should all have access to the mathematical knowledge and tools needed to protect us from arbitrary decisions made by the powerful few in an increasingly math-driven world. Where there is no mathematics, there is no freedom.”

Edward Frenkel (1968) mathematician working in representation theory, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics

Source: Love and Math, 2013, p. 5

World , Mathematics , Knowledge , Decision

“Zeus had loved his old friend, and lifted him up, and set him among the stars as the constellation Sagittarius. Here, in the Zodiac, now above, now below the horizon, he assists in the regulation of our destinies, though in this latter time few living mortals cast their eyes respectfully toward Heaven, and fewer still sit as students to the stars.”

John Updike book The Centaur

The Centaur (1963)

Love , Star , Time

“To increase his suffering he now accused her, asserting that she didn't love him, and that is always a dangerous thing to say: If one wants somebody to love one, one should not ask her to consider whether she "really": does. When all is said, we "really" do very few things. If one probes very deeply one realizes that the weight never reaches the bottom, and then one grows afraid of the depths inside one. But it is not until one understands that another name for deep is emptiness that one becomes really afraid.”

Stig Dagerman book A Burnt Child

Source: A Burnt Child (1948), p. 222

Love , Understanding , Suffering

“When the women of the country come in and sit with you, though there may be but very few in the next few years, I pledge you that you will get ability, you will get integrity of purpose, you will get exalted patriotism, and you will get unstinted usefulness.”

Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930) American politician

Address to the Senate, November 21, 1922

Women , Country

“There were few who thought him a starter,
Many who thought themselves smarter.
But he ended PM,
CH and OM,
an Earl and a Knight of the Garter.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Kenneth Harris, Attlee (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1982)
Self-penned limerick.
1960s

“Petal, like a persistent song phrase, like a few stubborn lines of verse memorized in childhood. The needle was stuck.”

Annie Proulx book The Shipping News

Source: The Shipping News (1993), P. 53

Childhood

“Let me remind you that science is not necessarily wisdom. To know, is not the sole nor even the highest office of the intellect; and it loses all its glory unless it act in furtherance of the great end of man's life. That end is, as both reason and revelation unite in telling us, to acquire the feelings and habits that will lead us to love and seek what is good in all its forms, and guide us by following its traces to the first Great Cause of all, where only we find it pure and unclouded.
If science be cultivated in congruity with this, it is the most precious possession we can have— the most divine endowment. But if it be perverted to minister to any wicked or ignoble purpose — if it even be permitted to take too absolute a hold of the mind, or overshadow that which should be paramount over all, the perception of right, the sense of Duty — if it does not increase in us the consciousness of an Almighty and All-beneficent presence, — it lowers instead of raising us in the great scale of existence.
This, however, it can never do but by our fault. All its tendencies are heavenward; every new fact which it reveals is a ray from the origin of light, which leads us to its source. If any think otherwise, their knowledge is imperfect, or their understanding warped, or darkened by their passions. The book of nature is, like that of revelation, written by God, and therefore cannot contradict it; both we are unable to read through all their extent, and therefore should neither wonder nor be alarmed if at times we miss the pages which reconcile any seeming inconsistence. In both, too, we may fail to interpret rightly that which is recorded; but be assured, if we search them in quest of truth alone, each will bear witness to the other, — and physical knowledge, instead of being hostile to religion, will be found its most powerful ally, its most useful servant. Many, I know, think otherwise; and because attempts have occasionally been made to draw from astronomy, from geology, from the modes of the growth and formation of animals and plants, arguments against the divine origin of the sacred Scripture, or even to substitute for the creative will of an intelligent first cause the blind and casual evolution of some agency of a material system, they would reject their study as fraught with danger. In this I must express my deep conviction that they do injury to that very cause which they think they are serving.
Time will not let me touch further on the cavils and errors in question; and besides they have been often fully answered. I will only say, that I am here surrounded by many, matchless in the sciences which are supposed so dangerous, and not less conspicuous for truth and piety. If they find no discord between faith and knowledge, why should you or any suppose it to exist? On the contrary, they cannot be well separated. We must know that God is, before we can confess Him; we must know that He is wise and powerful before we can trust in Him, — that He is good before we can love Him. All these attributes, the study of His works had made known before He gave that more perfect knowledge of himself with which we are blessed. Among the Semitic tribes his names betoken exalted nature and resistless power; among the Hellenic races they denote his wisdom; but that which we inherit from our northern ancestors denotes his goodness. All these the more perfect researches of modern science bring out in ever-increasing splendour, and I cannot conceive anything that more effectually brings home to the mind the absolute omnipresence of the Deity than high physical knowledge. I fear I have too long trespassed on your patience, yet let me point out to you a few examples.
What can fill us with an overwhelming sense of His infinite wisdom like the telescope? As you sound with it the fathomless abyss of stars, till all measure of distances seems to fail and imagination alone gauges the distance; yet even there as here is the same divine harmony of forces, the same perfect conservation of systems, which the being able to trace in the pages of Newton or Laplace makes us feel as if we were more than men. If it is such a triumph of intellect to trace this law of the universe, how transcendent must that Greatest over all be, in which it and many like it, have their existence! That instrument tells us that the globe which we inhabit is but a speck, the existence of which cannot be perceived beyond our system. Can we then hope that in this immensity of worlds we shall not be overlooked? The microscope will answer. If the telescope lead to one verge of infinity, it brings us to the other; and shows us that down in the very twilight of visibility the living points which it discloses are fashioned with the most finished perfection, — that the most marvellous contrivances minister to their preservation and their enjoyment, — that as nothing is too vast for the Creator's control, so nothing is too minute or trifling for His care. At every turn the philosopher meets facts which show that man's Creator is also his Father, — things which seem to contain a special provision for his use and his happiness : but I will take only two, from their special relation to this very district. Is it possible to consider the properties which distinguish iron from other metals without a conviction that those qualities were given to it that it might be useful to man, whatever other purposes might be answered by them. That it should. be ductile and plastic while influenced by heat, capable of being welded, and yet by a slight chemical change capable of adamantine hardness, — and that the metal which alone possesses properties so precious should be the most abundant of all, — must seem, as it is, a miracle of bounty. And not less marvellous is the prescient kindness which stored up in your coalfields the exuberant vegetation of the ancient world, under circumstances which preserved this precious magazine of wealth and power, not merely till He had placed on earth beings who would use it, but even to a late period of their existence, lest the element that was to develope to the utmost their civilization and energy migbt be wasted or abused.
But I must conclude with this summary of all which I would wish to impress on your minds—* that the more we know His works the nearer we are to Him. Such knowledge pleases Him; it is bright and holy, it is our purest happiness here, and will assuredly follow us into another life if rightly sought in this. May He guide us in its pursuit; and in particular, may this meeting which I have attempted to open in His name, be successful and prosperous, so that in future years they who follow me in this high office may refer to it as one to be remembered with unmixed satisfaction.”

Thomas Romney Robinson

Robinson in his 1849 adress, as quoted in the Report of the Nineteenth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science https://archive.org/stream/report36sciegoog#page/n50/mode/2up, London, 1850.

Love , Life , Wisdom , Men

“Efficient financial regulation theories necessarily derive from lucid postulates about the general invariability of human nature, specifically where financial institution executives are involved (see the latest contributions from the field of evolutionary psychology). There is little chance that this will change much over the next few decades -but it is no use complaining, seeing as greed has always been (and will always be) one of the most powerful drivers of capitalist progress.”

Éric Pichet (1960) economist

Quelle régulation financière pour le XXIè siècle ? http://lecercle.lesechos.fr/entreprises-marches/finance-marches/finances/221144733/quelle-regulation-financiere-xxie-siecle Article in Le Cercle Les Echos (2012): Financial Regulation Theory (2012).
Financial Institution Governance Theory

Nature , Change , Chance

“If the methods you employ are good, then what’s the point of all this reasoning and argument? A few drops of credendium, a single squirt in the eyes, and I applaud your every word with enthusiasm, you have my full approval, my esteem. If those methods are good. Yet apparently you yourself are not convinced of their worth, preferring simple, old-fashioned hot air and rhetoric, wasting words on me instead of reaching for the atomizer! Apparently you’re well aware that the triumph of psychem is a sham, and that you will be standing on the field alone, a conqueror with a bad case of heartburn.”

Stanisław Lem book The Futurological Congress

The Futurological Congress (1971)

Fashion

“This sort of scenario has happened, I imagine, millions of times. It has rarely happened in a nicer, sweeter, more gentle way than in Richard Linklater's "Before Sunrise," which I could call a "Love Affair" for Generation X, except that Jesse and Celine stand outside their generation, and especially outside its boring insistence on being bored.
The R rating for this film, based on a few four-letter words, is entirely unjustified. It is an ideal film for teenagers.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/before-sunrise-1995 of Before Sunrise (27 January 1995)
Reviews, Three star reviews

Love , Way , Imagination , Time

“But my motivation was more a matter of wanting to create order – to keep track of things. All those boxes full of photographs and sketches weigh you down, because they have something unfinished, incomplete, about them. So it's better to present the usable material in an orderly fashion and throw the other stuff away. That's how the Atlas came to be, and I exhibited it a few times.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Quote of an interview with Stefan Koldehoff, 1999; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Atlas' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/atlas-4
1990's

Motivation , Fashion , Time , Box

“I have a left shoulder-blade that is a miracle of loveliness. People come miles to see it. My right elbow has a fascination that few can resist.”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

The Mikado (1885)

People

“The old theology had few if any fast colors, and it has become very faded and worn under the fierce light and intense activity of our day. Let it go; it is outgrown and outworn. What mankind will finally clothe themselves with to protect them from the chill of the great void, or whether or not they will clothe themselves at all, but become toughened and indifferent, is more than I can pretend to say. For my part, the longer I live the less I feel the need of any sort of theological belief, and the more I am content to let unseen powers go on their way with me and mine without question or distrust. They brought me here, and I have found it well to be here; in due time they will take me hence, and I have no doubt that will be well for me too.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Preface
The Light of Day (1900)

Color , Way , Feeling , Question

“There are few situations in life that cannot be honourably settled, and without loss of time, either by suicide, a bag of gold, or by thrusting a despised antagonist over the edge of a precipice upon a dark night.”

Ernest Bramah (1868–1942) English author

The Story of Hien and the Chief Examiner
Kai Lung's Golden Hours (1922)

Life , Suicide , Loss , Time

“There is the view that during the Cold War, Pakistan was the most allied ally and then, within the space of just a few months, we became America's most sanctioned friend.”

Maleeha Lodhi (1953) Pakistani diplomat

— Lodhi talking to The New York Times on September 30, 2001

War

“The Syrian Ba’ath Party claims to have 2.3 million members — but most of that consists of people who need membership to get a job or be promoted. Leaving aside a few thousand top cadre (mostly from the Alawite minority to which Assad belongs), the Ba’ath Party is no more than an empty shell.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"Assad must (still) go" http://nypost.com/2012/12/06/assad-must-still-go/, New York Post (December 6, 2012).
New York Post

People

“Few features of humanity are as obvious as the wide array of inherited diversity visible in our outward features. It's also evident that people whose ancestry traces to a particular geographic region typically appear similar to one another and different from other geographic regions. Moreover, we as humans have an almost innate propensity to compartmentalize nearly everything into discrete categories, even when lines that distinguish those categories are complex, blurred, or nonexistent. As an inevitable consequence, people have been subjected to categorization into what we call human races throughout much of the past several centuries.”

Daniel J. Fairbanks (1956) American artist

Source: Everyone is African: How Science Explodes the Myth of Race (2015), p. 14.

People , Appearance , Past

“Never go to a public lavatory in London. I always pee in the street. You may be fined a few pounds for committing a nuisance, but in a public lavatory you risk two years in prison because a policeman in plain clothes says you smiled at him.”

Derek Jackson (1906–1982) British physicist

as quoted by [Diana Mosley, Loved ones: pen portraits, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985, 93]

Smile , Clothes

““It’s so old,” she said, “that, had life developed, it would be billions of years older than we are. Imagine what such a civilization might be like.”
Dead, thought MacAllister. That’s what it would be like. The fact that no technologically advanced species had been found in all these years made it pretty clear that the damned things have no staying power. You could see it at home, where, starting with the Cold War, there’d already been a few close calls.
It explained the Fermi Paradox. Nobody visits us because they blow themselves up before they get that far.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 27 (p. 248)

Life , War , Home , Imagination

“To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves is the cross and bitterness of life. It is the secret of that sad and melancholy smile on the lips of great men which so few understand; it is the cruelest trial reserved for self-devotion; it is what must have oftenest wrung the heart of the Son of man; and if God could suffer, it would be the wound we should be forever inflicting upon Him. He also — He above all — is the great misunderstood, the least comprehended.”

Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881) Swiss philosopher and poet

27 May 1849
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries

Love , Life , Men , God

“The history of the world is the history of a privileged few.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Sunday after the war (1944), pub. New Directions.

World , History

“It is amazing how soon one becomes accustomed to the sound of one's voice, when forced to repeat a speech five or six times a day. As election day approaches, the size of the crowds grows; they are more responsive and more interested; and one derives a certain exhilaration from that which, only a few weeks before, was intensely painful. This is one possible explanation of unlimited debate in the Senate.”

J. William Fulbright (1905–1995) American politician

"The Legislator," lecture delivered at the University of Chicago (1946), edited for the Committee on Social Thought by Robert B. Heywood, p. 123 (1947)

Pain , Time

“How could this great land of plenty produce too few people in the last 30 years?”

Zell Miller (1932–2018) Politician and United States Marine Corps officer

Miller asked in March 2007 during a fund-raiser in Macon, Georgia, for Sav-A-Life Care Center, a crisis pregnancy center. Sav A Life Care Center > Home http://www.salmacon.com/

People

“In every age a few individuals do find The Great Way. They do conquer death by regenerating and restoring their bodies to the Realm of Permanence.”

Harold W. Percival book Thinking and Destiny

Source: Thinking and Destiny (1946), Ch. 11, The Great Way, p. 699

Death , Age , Way

“We are able to discern not only what we already are, but what we may become, to see in ourselves germs and promises of a growth to which no bounds can be set, to dart beyond what we have actually gained to the idea of perfection as the end of our being. It is by this self-comprehending power that we are distinguished from the brutes, which give no signs of looking into themselves. Without this there would be no self-culture, for we should not know the work to be done; and one reason why self-culture is so little proposed is, that so few penetrate into their own nature. To most men, their own spirits are shadowy, unreal, compared with what is outward. When they happen to cast a glance inward, they see there only a dark, vague chaos. They distinguish, perhaps, some violent passion, which has driven them to injurious excess; but their highest powers hardly attract a thought; and thus multitudes live and die as truly strangers to themselves as to countries of which they have heard the name, but which human foot has never trodden.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Self-Culture (1838)

Men , Idea , Nature , Passion

“I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word "faggot", so I — so kind of an impasse — can't really talk about Edwards.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

Speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Washington, DC (2 March 2007), as quoted in "Coulter's Slur Against Edwards Stirs Outrage" at WNBC (4 March 2007) http://www.wnbc.com/politics/11168421/detail.html?rss=ny&psp=news.
2007

“For his Spiritual Church Joachim of Fiore foresaw the continuance of the Papacy (much modified), but the bishops were to disappear. If I think at all of the Church to come, then I hope and pray above all for a revival, indeed resurrection of the episcopal office. To my mind it is still a prisoner of its almost thousand-year long disastrous fusion with temporal power. Strange - only a few years ago I thought the Emperor Otto I just marvellous and was full of admiration for his genius in raising the bishops to Reichsfürsten - princes of the realm - thus securing an unshakeable foundation for his Empire. Politically it was a brilliant decision… Yet I can imagine no way in which a mortal enemy of the Church in all craft and cunning could have fastened a worse fate upon her… For how often was their charismatic office as pastors overshadowed, indeed frequently rendered impossible, by their temporal mission and worldly achievements..”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Letters 1951-59.

Fate , Hope , Way , Imagination

“In 1965, I was invited to a game theory workshop at Jerusalem which lasted for three weeks and had only 17 participants, but among them all the important researchers in game theory, with few exceptions. Game theory was still a small field. We had heated discussions about Harsanyi's new theory of games with incomplete information. This was the beginning of my long cooperation with John C. Harsanyi.”

Reinhard Selten (1930–2016) German economist

"Reinhard Selten - Biographical," 1994

Game

“The conviction that freedom is a universal desire is not the property of any political camp. … Yet those who hold it remain a precious few, outnumbered many times over by the skeptics who don't.”

Natan Sharansky book The Case for Democracy

Pages 18-19.
The Case for Democracy (2004, with Ron Dermer)

Freedom , Universe , Time

“It is the police who are our main protection against terrorism and it is to the police that we must give our sustenance and support. It cannot be without reluctance that we contemplate powers of the kind proposed in the Bill, involving as they must some encroachment—limited but real—on the liberties of individual citizens. Few things would provide a more gratifying victory to the terrorists than for this country to undermine its traditional freedoms in the very process of countering the enemies of those freedoms. This we must keep in mind not only today but in the future as we persevere in what may not be a short struggle to eradicate terrorism from this country…the Bill proposes strengthened powers in four broad areas. First, it proscribes the IRA and makes display of support for it illegal. Second, the Bill makes it possible to make exclusion orders against persons who are involved in terrorism. Third, the Bill gives the police wide powers to arrest and detain, within limits, suspected terrorists. Fourth, it gives the police powers to carry out a security check on all travellers entering and leaving Great Britain and Northern Ireland.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1974/nov/28/prevention-of-terrorism-temporary in the House of Commons introducing the Prevention of Terrorism Act (28 November 1974)
1970s

Travel , Support , Freedom , Future

“As I crossed a few hours ago from Scotland I said to myself,—"The majority there are Radicals. They are going to vote next week for the Home Rule Bill. What would they say to a proposal which was to subject them to the same kind of Government or the same kind of men to which, for the sake of party interests, they are willing to sacrifice you?" They would never accept it. I know Scotland well, and I believe that, rather than submit to such a fate, the Scottish people would face a second Bannockburn or a second Flodden.”

Bonar Law (1858–1923) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

'Mr. Bonar Law In Ulster.', The Times (9 April, 1912), p. 7.

Men , Fate , People , Home

“Man's greatest advances these last few generations have been made by the application of human intelligence to the management of matter. Now we are confronted by a more difficult problem, the application of intelligence to the management of human relations. Unless we can advance in that field also, the very instruments that man's intelligence has created may be the instruments of his destruction.”

Norman Angell (1872–1967) British politician

Peace and the Public Mind (1935)

Intelligence , Problem

“Tides are like politics. They come and go with a great deal of fuss and noise, but inevitably they leave the beach just as they found it. On those few occasions when major change does occur, it is rarely good news.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Deepsix (2001), Chapter 22 (p. 323)

Change

“I don’t want you to forget it. No matter where you are today, somebody helped you to get there. (Yes) It may have been an ordinary person, doing an ordinary job in an extraordinary way. Some few are able to get some education; you didn’t get it by yourself. Don’t forget those who helped you come over.”

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

1960s, Why Jesus Called A Man A Fool (1967)

Education , Way , Help , Personality

“We are now in the middle of a long process of transition in the nature of the image which man has of himself and his environment. Primitive men, and to a large extent also men of the early civilizations, imagined themselves to be living on a virtually illimitable plane. There was almost always somewhere beyond the known limits of human habitation, and over a very large part of the time that man has been on earth, there has been something like a frontier…
Gradually, however, man has been accustoming himself to the notion of the spherical earth and a closed sphere of human activity. A few unusual spirits among the ancient Greeks perceived that the earth was a sphere. It was only with the circumnavigations and the geographical explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, that the fact that the earth was a sphere became at all widely known and accepted. Even in the thirteenth century, the commonest map was Mercator's projection, which visualizes the earth as an illimitable cylinder, essentially a plane wrapped around the globe, and it was not until the Second World War and the development of the air age that the global nature of tile planet really entered the popular imagination. Even now we are very far from having made the moral, political, and psychological adjustments which are implied in this transition from the illimitable plane to the closed sphere.”

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

Source: 1960s, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, 1966, p. 3

Men , War , Age , World

“There were three types of people in the world, Elizabeth believed. Some, like Cassidy, were naïve and full of ridiculous scruples that held them back from ever enjoying life. Others, like that Allison and Nicole, were phonies who pretended to care about others. And some—only a few—were like her. Strong enough to take what they could. And smart enough not to get caught.”

Lis Wiehl (1961) American legal scholar

Source: Heart of Ice A Triple Threat Novel with April Henry (Thomas Nelson), p. 143

Life , People , World , Strong

“Except in a few metropolitan ghettos, my experience has been that few Negroes have any interest at all in this organization, much less give any allegiance to its pessimistic doctrines. The Black Muslims are a quasi-religious, sociopolitical movement that has appealed to some Negroes who formerly were Christians. For the first time, the Negro was presented with a choice of a religion other than Christianity. What this appeal actually represented was an indictment of Christian failures to live up to Christianity's precepts; for there is nothing in Christianity, nor in the Bible, that justifies racial segregation. But when the Negroes' genuine fighting spirit rose during 1963, the appeal of the Muslims began to diminish.”

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

In reference to the Black Muslims who advocated Black Nacionalism. At his Interview in Playboy (January 1965) https://web.archive.org/web/20080706183244/http://www.playboy.com/arts-entertainment/features/mlk/04.html
1960s

Religion , Failure , Time , Fight

“Hungary, severed from half of the population and most of the natural resources that it had once claimed, had now to practice a sort of economic acupuncture, striving to know the magic nodes in the global energy flow where a pinprick could alter the workings of a major organ. Mathematics was one of the few disciplines where it was possible to exert that degree of leverage, and so the Hungarians had become phenomenally good at teaching it to their children.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Day 4
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

Children , Mathematics , Nature

“What do we mean by “understanding” something? We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes “the world” is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics. Even if we knew every rule, however, we might not be able to understand why a particular move is made in the game, merely because it is too complicated and our minds are limited. If you play chess you must know that it is easy to learn all the rules, and yet it is often very hard to select the best move or to understand why a player moves as he does. So it is in nature, only much more so.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

volume I; lecture 2, "Basic Physics"; section 2-1, "Introduction"; p. 2-1
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

God , World , Imagination , Game

“My body is old and tired, but I'll bounce back. I think Mazeroski can do the same if he takes off a few pounds and gives them to me. I need them.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

On being informed that Mazeroski had claimed he wouldn't be retiring if he had Clemente's body; as quoted in "Sidelights on Sports: Monday Morning's Sports Wash" by Al Abrams, in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Monday, October 2, 1972), p. 24
Baseball-related, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1972</big>

Thinking

“The House has the power to take action including suspension against those people who are indulging in violence. Again, the House has passed the vote of confidence and the decision of the House cannot be thwarted by the unruly conduct of a few people. The President's returning the proclamation is both constitutionally correct and praiseworthy.”

R. Venkataraman (1910–2009) seventh Vice-President of India and the 8th President of India

His opinion On the decision of President K R Narayanan's returning the Cabinet recommendation on imposition of central rule in Uttar Pradesh (UP).
The Rediff Interview/R Venkataraman

People , Confidence , Decision , Housing

“If large classes of the population live under conditions which make it difficult if not impossible for them to keep a home together in decent comfort, if the children are habitually underfed, if the housewife is habitually overstrained, if the bread-winner is under-employed or under-paid, if all are unprotected and uninsured against the common hazards of modern industrial life, if sickness, accident, infirmity, or old age, or unchecked intemperance, or any other curse or affliction, break up the home, as they break up thousands of homes, and scatter the family, as they scatter thousands of families in our land, it is not merely the waste of earning-power or the dispersal of a few poor sticks of furniture, it is the stamina, the virtue, safety, and honour of the British race that are being squandered.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The People's Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 147
Early career years (1898–1929)

Life , Children , Age , Family

“Many years ago, I concluded that a few hair shirts were part of the mental wardrobe of every man. The president differs from other men in that he has a more extensive wardrobe.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

Quoted in the New York Times (17 October 1964)

Men , Parting

“Barring drink and the girls, I ne'er heard of a sin –
Many worse, better few, than bright, broken Maginn.”

John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854) Scottish writer and editor

"Here, early to bed, lies kind William Maginn" (1842), line 19; cited from R. Shelton Mackenzie (ed.) The Fraserian Papers of the Late William Maginn (New York: Redfield, 1857) p. cviii.

Girl , Drink

“The best chance disabled students have for productive adult lives comes from being mainstreamed among other students. My daughter Jade is living proof of that. She has a disability, but we have made sure that she has gotten the same kind of exposure as other kids her age. There are a few exceptions; there are students whose special needs are such that mainstreaming won't work for them. But in the majority of cases, mainstreaming should be supported, encouraged, and facilitated for disabled students.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

I Ain't Got Time To Bleed (1999)

Age , Support , Chance , Daughters

“Let's make it clear for the dimmest bulbs among you: the kids at Columbine High didn't die from too many guns, they died from too few. I'm not suggesting that the teachers should have carried guns — not as franchised agents of the state. They should have carried guns as ordinary individuals, exercising a sacred right, and in performance of a solemn duty to protect the young lives that were placed — very foolishly, as it turned out — in their hands.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Murder by Gun Control".

Exercises , Teachers

“She spoke, they were but a few hurried words —
Of the sweet flowers around, the heat, the night —
Yet were they such as the blest heart records
For many an after-moment's long delight;
They touch'd upon his spirit's inmost chords;
Though broken was the sense, the accents light,
Yet sweeter was to him that tremulous tone
Than all that eloquence were proud to own.”

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

26th August 1826) Metrical Fragments No. II. Tasso’s last interview with the Princess Leonora. (under the pen name Iole
The London Literary Gazette, 1826

Flowers , Sense , Light , Heart

“The House has noticed the Prime Minister's remarkable transformation in the past few weeks, from Stalin to Mr. Bean.”

Gordon Brown (1951) British Labour Party politician

Hansard http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm071128/debtext/71128-0003.htm#07112862002023, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 468, col. 275 (28 November 2007)
Vincent Cable, acting leader of the Liberal Democrats.
About

Past , Housing

“Nonroutine tasks:… There are few well-established techniques; there is little certainty about methods, or whether or not they will work. But it also means that there may be a variety of different task to perform, in the sense that raw materials are not standardized, or orders for customers ask for many different or custom-made products.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1970s, Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View, 1970, p. 75

Sense

“But it was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors, who don't have as long to live, might want to consider just taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them. Yet when Sen. Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die? Of course not. He freely did what most of us would do. He choose an expensive operation and painful follow up treatments. He saw his work as vitally important and so he fought for every minute he could stay on this earth doing it. He would be a very fortunate man if his heroic last few months were what future generations remember him most for.”

Mike Huckabee (1955) Arkansas politician

2009-09-24
The Huckabee Report
Radio, quoted in * 2009-09-28
Huckabee: Kennedy Would Have Been Urged To Die Earlier Under ObamaCare
The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/28/huckabee-kennedy-would-ha_n_271605.html
referring to Obama saying, in ABC's "Questions for the President: Prescription for America" forum on , "But what we can do is make sure that at least some of the waste that exists in the system that's not making anybody's mom better, that is loading up on additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care, that at least we can let doctors know and your mom know that, you know what? Maybe this isn't going to help. Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller."

Life , Pain , Home , Future

“Already, we may truly say, we have an enormous body of exact and usable knowledge in the domain of administration. It would be easy to list thousands of volumes and articles on the subject, from the hands of high competence. I have seen this body of literature grow from a few items in 1898 to an enormous mass in 1939. During this period I have seen the number of research workers increase from a mere handful to hundreds. This is a fact also, at least for informed and competent persons. During this period the opportunities for life work in administration have multiplied many times. I dare say, though I shall not try to prove it, that the body of exact literature in administration is many times larger than the body of exact literature in natural science when Bacon, Galileo, and Newton, began the revolution in natural science three hundred years ago. During this same period I have seen the number of societies and organizations among administrators, local and general, increase from nothing to fifty or sixty.”

Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) American historian

Source: Philosophy, Science and Art of Public Administration (1939), p. 662

Life , Literature , Nature , Knowledge

“It is pretty weird. A few years ago, I was just some guy sitting in front of the internet. Now I send an e-mail or edit an article and it makes headlines around the world … I used to be just a guy — now I'm Jimmy Wales.”

Jimmy Wales (1966) Wikipedia co-founder and American Internet entrepreneur

"Identity question for world's encyclopaedia", The Times (30 December 2005) http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article782970.ece?print=yes&randnum=1188516145101

World , Guy

“[The] idea of sharing the gospel with Muslims simply will not work. (1) Islam is famously strict against apostasy, and Christians influence very few from their side in any case. (2) Muslim theology is much more efficient at gaining converts. That’s why they’re the fastest-growing religion, remember? More Christians turn Muslim than vice versa. (3) Christianity can’t even hang onto the people they already have. Religion is not the same thing as ‘race’. You can’t change your ancestors, but you can discard their traditions. Even if Christians did out-reproduce Muslims, statistics indicate that less than half of those kids would still be Christian by the time they grew up. A few might adopt some other religion; most of the rest will likely reject all religions, and that trend is rising. Therein lies the answer. You can’t fight religion with religion. Everything Christians do trying to fuse church and state, all the power they give to their own faith, –will be used to pave the way for the next dominant dogma. Every time any religion has had power to enforce their own laws, the result has invariably been a violation of human rights. The only answer –and the founding fathers said this from the beginning- is a secular government with a “wall of separation” between church and state. Maintain that and you might keep mosque and state separate too.”

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

Patheos, Muslim Demographics http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2013/06/08/muslim-demographics/ (June 8, 2013)

People , Faith , Religion , Law

“With the grace of Prophet Muhammed and Allah, almost all Hindus in Calicut are converted to Islam. Only a few are still not converted on the borders of Cochin State. I am determined to convert them also very soon. I consider this as Jehad to achieve that object.”

Tipu Sultan (1750–1799) Ruler of the Sultanate of Mysore

Tipu Sultan's Letter dated January 18, 1790, to Syed Abdul Dulai: cited in Bhasha Poshini of Chingam 10, 1099 (August, 1923), Article on Tipu Sultan by Sardar K.M. Panicker. Also quoted in Ravi Varma, " Tipu Sultan: As Known In Kerala" in Tipu Sultan: Villain or hero? : an anthology. (1993).
From Tipu Sultan's letters

“With the courage which only comes of justified self-confidence, he dared to rest his case upon its strongest point, and so avoided that appearance of weakness and uncertainty which comes of a clutter of arguments. Few lawyers are willing to do this; it is the mark of the most distinguished talent.”

Learned Hand (1872–1961) American legal scholar, Court of Appeals judge

"In Memory of Charles Neave" (1938).
Extra-judicial writings

Confidence , Courage , Appearance , Self-confidence

“Hard to say whether personal immortality would be a good thing or not. Not for the masses, surely! Too many of them as it was. But a select few, like Terangi Maclaren—or was it worth the trouble? Even given boats, chess, music, the No Drama, beautiful women and beautiful spectroscopes, life could get heavy.”

Poul Anderson book The Enemy Stars

Source: The Enemy Stars (1959), Chapter 5 (p. 36)

Life , Women , Beauty , Music

“ Every individual word in a passage or poetry can no more be said to denote some specific referent than does every brush mark, every line in a painting have its counterpart in reality. The writer or speaker does not communicate his thoughts to us; he communicates a representation for carrying out, this function under the severe discipline of using the only materials he has, sound and gesture. Speech is like painting, a representation made out of given materials -- sound or paint. The function of speech is to stimulate and set up thoughts in us having correspondence with the speaker's desires; he has then communicated with us. But he has not transmitted a copy of his thoughts, a photograph, but only a stream of speech -- a substitute made from the unpromising material of sound. The artist, the sculptor, the caricaturist, the composer are akin in this [fact that they have not transmitted a copy of their thoughts], that they express (make representations of) their thoughts using chosen, limited materials. They make the "best" representations, within these self-imposed constraints. A child who builds models of a house, or a train, using only a few colored bricks, is essentially engaged in the same creative task.* Metaphors can play a most forceful role, by importing ideas through a vehicle language, setting up what are purely linguistic associations (we speak of "heavy burden of taxation," "being in a rut"). The imported concepts are, to some extent, artificial in their contexts, and they are by no means universal among different cultures. For instance, the concepts of cleanliness and washing are used within Christendom to imply "freedom from sin." We Westerners speak of the mind's eye, but this idea is unknown amongst the Chinese. that is, we are looking at it with the eyes of our English-speaking culture. A grammar book may help us to decipher the text more thoroughly, and help us comprehend something of the language structure, but we may never fully understand if we are not bred in the culture and society that has modeled and shaped the language. (p. 74)”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

See Gombrich in reference 348
On Human Communication (1957), Language: Science and Aesthetics

Books , Color , Communication , Idea

“Dr Williams’s book is about a number of nineteenth-century French writers who caught syphilis and probably died of paresis. They are Baudelaire, Jules de Goncourt, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant and Daudet. A similar book could probably be written about nineteenth-century British writers, including such unlikely victims of syphilis as John Keats and Edward Lear. People were not so frightened of the disease as we are. Few physicians saw the connection between cerebral degeneration and the primary chancre: when the secondary stage of the infection had healed, it was generally assumed that everything was over and lightning would not strike the tree again. This was Baudelaire’s belief. One could even rejoice at picking up the pox: it was not merely an inoculation; it advertised one’s virility to the world….”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

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

People , Books , World , Disease

“This poor amphibious Pope too gives loaves to the Poor; has in him more good latent than he is himself aware of. His poor Jesuits, in the late Italian Cholera, were, with a few German Doctors, the only creatures whom dastard terror had not driven mad: they descended fearless into all gulfs and bedlams; watched over the pillow of the dying, with help, with counsel and hope; shone as luminous fixed stars, when all else had gone out in chaotic night: honour to them!”

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

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

Hope , Star , Help , Madness

“Everyone on the set has a mobile phone, and I found by pushing a few buttons, they could be programmed into different languages. I fixed Robbie's (Coltrane) to speak in Turkish.”

Daniel Radcliffe (1989) English actor

on constantly playing practical jokes on Robbie Coltrane http://www.danradcliffe.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=23&Itemid=28

“Shaw's relations with women have always been gallant, coy even. The number he has surrendered to physically have been few – perhaps not half a dozen in all – the first man to have cut a path through the theatre and left it strewn with virgins.”

Frank Harris (1856–1931) Irish journalist and rogue

Bernard Shaw (1931) p. 191.

Women

“When the soul has been deeply touched, it is by love alone that it desires to be intimately joined to God. This is why we advocate reducing ardent aspiration to a few words, even to the mere word ‘love’. This love sends forth ardent and fiery flames with all its strength. As a result. A blazing divine fire is enkindled in the soul. It is in this way that God stirs up the soul and draws it strongly inward. p. 86”

John of St. Samson (1571–1636)

From Prayer, Aspiration, and Contemplation

Love , God , Way , Soul

“Top management as a function and as a structure was first developed by Georg von Siemens (1839-1901) in Germany between 1870 and 1880, when he designed and built the Deutsche Bank and made it, within a very few years, into continental Europe's leading and most dynamic financial institution.”

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

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 3, p. 605

“I shall within a few days divest myself of the anxieties and the labors with which I have been oppressed, and retire with inexpressible delight to my family, my friends, my farms, and books. There I may indulge at length in that tranquillity and those pursuits from which I have been divorced by the character of the times in which I have lived, and which have forced me into the line of political life under a sense of duty and against a great and constant aversion to it.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to David Baillie Warden (25 February 1809)
1800s, Second Presidential Administration (1805-1809)

Life , Books , Family , Sense

“The recent trend of the Bengali film industry is to remake South Indian films. My film had a mockery about that since I don’t believe in remakes. I won’t make a film which is a copy of something. I am very firm in my beliefs, even if that causes me to lose a few producers. There are many people who are making loads of remakes. But at the same time, there are many newcomers who have original ideas, working on new things, and getting producers. It is obviously a bright side of the shoel thing.”

Arin Paul (1980) Indian film director

Interview on Calcuttatube on Remakes http://calcuttatube.com/arin-paul-exclusive-interview/1608/

People , Idea , Time

“Let a man get once fairly possessed of any peculiar notion, whether it be on religion, political economy, morals, politics, arts, or anything else, and he sees little beside his beloved principle, which he is at all times ready to advance, defend, demonstrate, or expatiate on. Nothing can be simpler than the two great dogmas of Christianity, which are so plain that all can both comprehend them and feel their truth. They teach us to love God, the surest way to obey him, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Any one can understand this; all can see how just it is, and how much of moral sublimity it contains. It is Godlike, and brings us near the very essence of the Divinity, which is love, mercy, and truth. Yet how few are content to accept the teachings of the Saviour in this respect, without embarrassing them with theories that have so much of their origin in human fancies.”

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) American author

Source: Oak Openings or The bee-hunter (1848), Ch. XVI

Love , God , Truth , Religion

“There is an emerging alternative to the big government-big business-big labor kind of "rebuilding" of America. Its basic strategy is to get investment capital out of the hands of the big banks … and into the hands of the communities. Its greatest champions are neither politicians nor oppositional political groups, but – remarkably – bankers; or, more specifically, those few bankers who describe themselves as "community development bankers."”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

Source: New Options for America (1991), Chapter 8, "Rebuilding America – the Old-Fashioned Way," p. 57.

Communication , Business

“I cannot myself believe that anyone in this Chamber, and very few in the community as a whole, would wish to reverse all our previous policies and choose stabilization rather than growth; and it would certainly go contrary to the other views expressed by honourable Members about the need to promote the further growth of trade and industry. Not only would we be fore-going the creation of additional wealth and what this can bring, and has brought, in social advance, but we would also, I believe, permanently damage that climate of economic activity which has taken us so far and so fast. This would be particularly unwise, I suggest, in the face of those relatively darker clouds referred to by Your Excellency.”

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

October 9, 1970, page 114.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

Communication , Wealth

“Don’t join too many gangs. Join few if any.
Join the United States and join the family —
But not much in between, unless a college.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

"Build Soil" (1932)
1930s

Family

“You who are apprentices in the field of public administration share with me who am older the task of trying to understand the new conditions in our field. Within a single generation, two world wars and a major depression have engulfed mankind. Within the past few months, the successful trial of the atomic bomb has opened the minds of the thoughtful to new possibilities, threats and coercions, and the defeat of Germany and Japan has abruptly presented the problems of peacemaking and reconstruction to war- weary masses of people. They seek release from their tragedies, deprivations and tensions, often in ways that defeat efforts to understand and attack the problems that confront them. To make progress in such a time, we must recruit widely and work as a guild, young and old together, to achieve a co-operative and cumulative effort whether in academic or governmental posts.”

John M. Gaus (1894–1969) American political scientist

Source: Reflections on public administration, 1947, p. 1; Lead paragraph

War , People , World , Way

“I would say that, whenever religion has rule over law, that madness will reign, with automatic violations of human rights, but maybe I'm being alarmist. What do they say? How can we know what sort of society they envision?.. We know that they are nearly all republicans, and that that party has been virtually assimilated by them, and we know they will speak more freely when they feel the safety of numbers. So let's look at the Republican Party platform of one of the red states, a very red state… Of course, they want to make pornography illegal (no surprises there), they also want to be able to filibuster the US senate again… Regarding the environment, they strongly support the immediate repeal and abolishment of the Endangered Species Act. Remember that these people don't believe in evolution, so they don't understand the importance of biodiversity and they don't care about the rights of animals either. They want to dominate and subdue the earth, just like their abominable doctrine demands, so they strongly oppose all efforts of environmental groups that stymie business interests, especially those of the oil and gas industry… Texas republicans not only want marriage to be restricted to one man and one woman (despite what the Bible says), but they insist it must be a natural man and a natural woman… So transgender people would be completely ostracized under the law should they get their way. There's no civil union options for gay couples either, because the platform also opposes the creation, recognition or benefits of partnerships outside marriage that are provided by some political subdivisions. As if that weren't enough, they also want to define the word "family" such that it excludes homosexual couples. They say they deplore sensitivity training (think about that for a moment), and they state very clearly that they want homosexuality condemned as unacceptable. They mean that very strongly too, so strongly in fact that they oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality as a reaction of religious faith. In fact, they go so far as to urge the immediate repeal of the hate crimes law specifically where that relates to sexual orientation… If you're uncertain whether that includes acts of violence, there at least two members of the current State Board of Education who implied that it should, and we know of a few Tea Partiers who insist that homosexuals should be executed, murdered by the state. I am alarmed at how popular this abominable sentiment is… Under the heading "supporting motherhood", they strongly support women who "choose" to devote their lives to their families and raising their children, but they implicitly object to women choosing other options such as college, careers, or not having children at all. A woman's ambition beyond the confines of the kitchen and obeisance to her husband is decried by conservatives as a deplorable assault on the family which, of course, they blame on liberals. Regarding the right to life, they say that all innocent human life must be respected and safeguarded from fertilization to natural death. Notice a few subtle caveats here: the qualifier of protecting only innocent life is how Texas republicans justify having executed more prisoners than any other state in the union, nearly five times as many as the next deadliest state in fact. Says something about Christian forgiveness, doesn't it!”

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

Youtube, Other, Republican Theocracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSjNg7nQvB0 (November 4, 2012)

Life , Death , Women , Hate

“There appears to me to be no device at present but between an absolute surrender of the liberties of the People and a vigorous exertion…My view of things is I own very gloomy, and I am convinced that in a few years this Government will become completely absolute, or that confusion will arise of a nature almost as much to be deprecated as despotism itself…This is a great Crisis.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Letter to Lord Holland (15 November 1795), quoted in L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 140.
1790s

People , Nature , Appearance

“The physicists of Gilbert's time had recourse to mechanism infrequently, and its effective explanations touched only a few disconnected phenomena. The virtuosity, inventiveness, and optimism of Descartes, however, and the counter-example of latter- day hermetists like Robert Fludd, persuaded many that mechanical models offered the only hope for a precise and comprehensible physics. Expectations rose. Physicists demanded more from models, perhaps even a complete fit with phenomena, with little or no negative analogy.
Gilbert's countrymen, S. J., 'a veritable giant in science' and a liberal and candid physicist whenever his Society's obligation to combat Copernicans did interfer.”

John L. Heilbron (1934) American historian

John L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th centuries: A study of early modern physics. Univ of California Press, 1979. p. 195
The quote "a veritable giant in science," originates from: Elise C. Otté (1881). Denmark and Iceland, p. 156

Hope , Optimism , Science , Time

“Judy: [after catching defendant in a lie; he admitted that he was living with his witness when a few moments earlier he had said he wasn't] PERFECT! So now you're living back together again. And why, Nick, did you feel as if it was necessary to lie to me a moment ago?
Defendant: I… have been staying in Minneapolis every now and then… but I… didn't mean to lie to you.
Judy: There's another reason, Nick.
Defendant: There's no reason to lie. I'm sorry.
Judy: Well…
Defendant's Witness: Not many people know that he is staying there with me.
Judy: Now ten million people know that he's staying with you.”

Judith Sheindlin (1942) American lawyer, judge, television personality, and author

Audience laughs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8B09JYv4Hs&feature=channel_video_title
Dialogue

People , Lie , Feeling , Perfection

“I respect Kirkpatrick both for his sponges and for his numinous nummulosphere. It is easy to dismiss a crazy theory with laughter that debars any attempt to understand a man's motivation—and the nummulosphere is a crazy theory. I find that few men of imagination are not worth my attention. Their ideas may be wrong, even foolish, but their methods often repay a close study. […] The different drummer often beats a fruitful tempo.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Crazy Old Randolph Kirkpatrick", p. 235
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

Men , Imagination , Motivation , Idea

“Had ten minutes conversation with Henry Morgenthau about Jewish ship in Palistine. Told him I would talk to Gen[eral] Marshall about it. He'd no business, whatever to call me. The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement on world affairs. Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed. When the country went backward — and Republican in the election of 1946, this incident loomed large on the DP [Displaced Person] program. The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as DP as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes. Look at the Congress[ional] attitude on DP — and they all come from DPs.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Personal diary 6:00 P. M. Monday (21 July 1947) https://www.trumanlibrary.org/diary/page21.htm

World , Dogs , Business , Sense

“[In] economics… you can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment. Now the spirit of such methods, called scientism by its detractors, continued into the discipline of finance as a few technicians thought their mathematical knowledge could lead them to understand markets. The practice of financial engineering came along with massive doses of pseudoscience.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

page 115
Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Mathematics , Understanding , Knowledge

“My Song, I fear that thou wilt find but few
Who fitly shalt conceive thy reasoning,
Of such hard matter dost thou entertain;
Whence, if by misadventure, chance should bring
Thee to base company (as chance may do),
Quite unaware of what thou dost contain,
I prithee, comfort thy sweet self again,
My last delight! tell them that they are dull,
And bid them own that thou art beautiful.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Epipsychidion

Dedication
Epipsychidion (1821)

Fear , Beauty , Art , Chance

“It is well to start by distinguishing the few really great – the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.”

F. R. Leavis book The Great Tradition

The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948) p. 2

Life , Art , Way , Sense

“His chapters inspire me with more enthusiasm than even poetry itself. And the noble canon, with what true chivalrous feeling he confines his beautiful expressions of sorrow to the death of the gallant and high-bred knight, of whom it was a pity to see the fall, such was his loyalty to his king, pure faith to his religion, hardihood towards his enemy, and fidelity to his lady-love! – Ah, benedicite! how he will mourn over the fall of such a pearl of knighthood, be it on the side he happens to favour, or on the other. But, truly, for sweeping from the face of the earth some few hundreds of villain churls, who are born but to plough it, the high-born and inquisitive historian has marvellous little sympathy.”

Jean Froissart (1337–1405) French writer

Claverhouse, in Walter Scott's Old Mortality (1816), ch. 35.
Criticism

Love , Death , Faith , Religion

“…I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of storybooks and fairy tales. Wasn't it just a storybook over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half replaced and half utilised, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!”

Henry James book The Turn of the Screw

Source: The Turn of the Screw (1898), Ch. I.

Dreams , Idea , Housing

“Recovery is therefore something much more elemental. It aims at continuation of life, on a simple and primitive basis. From mere survival, in view of perhaps a hundred million people killed within a few days, to the construction of a society which adheres to the lofty ideas we cherish today is a long way. And the survivors may develop ideals so different from ours that we may not recognize the country— should we live to make the comparison, or, living, should we care to make it even if we could.”

Oskar Morgenstern (1902–1977) austrian economist

Oskar Morgenstern (1959), The Question of National Defense, p. 129.

Life , People , Way , Idea

“I was told I had to do a speech, to say a few thank yous and was lying in bed a couple of nights ago till about 2:30 in the morning thinking what I was going to say. I had it all planned out perfectly, fell asleep - and then was woken up at 4am when my cars were being driven off in the driveway!”

Frank Lampard (1978) English association football player

Sincerely yours, Frank (May 22, 2005)

Cars , Lying , Thinking , Night

“I hold no dream of fortune vast,
Nor seek undying fame.
I do not ask when life is past
That many know my name.I may not own the skill to rise
To glory's topmost height,
Nor win a place among the wise,
But I can keep the right.And I can live my life on earth
Contented to the end,
If but a few shall know my worth
And proudly call me friend.”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

Success.
Just Folks (1917)

Life , Dreams , Past

“When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side…At last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them [deleted: the end we did not see] along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them; some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing.”

Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) English author, poet and diarist

April 15, 1802
Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" is based on this description.
Diaries

Beauty , Tree , Water , Change

“Men may be natural risk-takers, but the increased confidence and surefootedness that we are recognizing as manly courage is the product of constant testing. The chest-thumping of untested men is hardly courage; Hobbes called it "vain-glory", because "a well grounded confidence begetteth attempt; whereas the supposing of power does not." Or to put it in the words of Tyler Durden, "How much can yo know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?" Modern men are not merely lacking initiation into manhood, as some have suggested, they are lacking meaningful traits of strength and courage. Few modern men will truly "know themselves," as men, in the way that their forefathers did.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

Pg 136
The Way of Men (2012)

Men , Way , Confidence , Courage

“This is such a big deal, and my life is so simple. There are very few things — there's love, and work, and family. And I'd like to thank all my families, all the tribes that I come from and, most importantly, my mother Brandy who taught me that all my finger paintings were Picasso's and that I didn't have to be afraid. And, mostly, that cruelty might be very human, and it might be very cultural, but it's not acceptable.”

Jodie Foster (1962) American actor, film director and producer

Oscar Acceptance Speech, 1989 Academy Awards, Best Actress in a Leading Role, The Accused.

Love , Life , Family , Painting

“Another book read this term seized upon my interest in an exceptional way, this was Gibbon's Autobiography. I had long before got hold of a few extracts from this, which had found their way into Lord Sheffield's Memoir of the author, prefixed to an edition of the Decline and Fall which we had at home. Those extracts had fixed themselves in my memory. I now procured the whole book and devoured it, reading it again and again till I could repeat whole paragraphs. Gibbon, in fact, supplied the place of a college tutor; he not only found me advice, but secretly inspired me with the enthusiasm to follow it.”

Mark Pattison (1813–1884) English author and Church of England priest

Source: Memoirs (1885), Chapter III, pp. 128–130

Books , Way , Home , Memory

“I do understand. I understand that you are offered a loveliness and you vomit on it, that you have the gift of love given you such as few men have ever known and you throw on it the acid of your pride, your ugly twisted sense of importance.”

John Steinbeck book Burning Bright

Friend Ed to Joe Saul in Act Three, Scene I: The Sea
Burning Bright (1950)

Love , Men , Understanding , Sense

“But, perhaps, the excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some obvious and useful truth in few words.”

Samuel Johnson The Rambler

No. 175 (19 November 1751)
The Rambler (1750–1752)

Truth

“And when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The thing became a trumpet; whence he blew
Soul-animating strains,—alas! too few.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Scorn not the Sonnet.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Soul , Animals

“Hindu records of what the “law” of Islam meant to the Hindus are few and far between. But whenever they are available, they confirm the medieval Muslim historians. Gangadevi the wife of Kumar Kampana (died 1374 AD) of Vijayanagara writes as follows in her Madhurãvijayam regarding the state of things in the Madurai region when it was under Muslim rule:
“The wicked mlechchas pollute the religion of the Hindus every day. They break the images of gods into pieces and throw away the articles of worship. They throw into fire Srimad Bhagwat and other holy scriptures, forcibly take away the conchshell and bell of the Brahmanas, and lick the sandal paints on their bodies. They urinate like dogs on the tulsi plant and deliberately pass faeces in the Hindu temples. They throw water from their mouths on the Hindus engaged in worship, and harass the Hindu saints as if they were so many lunatics let large.””

Gangadevi Indian princess and Sanskrit poetess

Goel, S. R. (2001). The story of Islamic imperialism in India.

God , Religion , Law , Dogs

“My work is more varied than at any other point in my life. I am still carrying out research in pure mathematics. And I am working on an idea that I had several years ago on negative dimensions. … Negative dimensions are a way of measuring how empty something is. In mathematics, only one set is called empty. It contains nothing whatsoever. But I argued that some sets are emptier than others in a certain useful way. It is an idea that almost everyone greets with great suspicion, thinking I've gone soft in the brain in my old age. Then I explain it and people realise it is obvious. Now I'm developing the idea fully with a colleague. I have high hopes that once we write it down properly and give a few lectures about it at suitable places that negative dimensions will become standard in mathematics.”

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician

New Scientist interview (2004)

Life , People , Age , Hope

“Well may we say "God save the Queen", because nothing will save the Governor-General! The Proclamation which you have just heard read by the Governor-General's Official Secretary was countersigned "Malcolm Fraser," who will undoubtedly go down in Australian history from Remembrance Day 1975 as Kerr's cur. They won't silence the outskirts of Parliament House, even if the inside has been silenced for the next few weeks … Maintain your rage and enthusiasm for the campaign for the election now to be held and until polling day.”

Gough Whitlam (1916–2014) Australian politician, 21st Prime Minister of Australia

On hearing the proclamation dismissing him from office, which ended with the previous official wording "God Save the Queen" which had been abolished by his government and unilaterally re-instated by David Smith, the Governor-General's Official Secretary, at that moment - the first of many changes undertaken by the so-called "caretaker" government.

Source: [Gough Whitlam dead: His memorable quotes, 21 October 2014, 2 May 2019, https://www.smh.com.au/national/gough-whitlam-dead-his-memorable-quotes-20141021-1193jd.html, Sydney Morning Herald, smh.com.au, Murphy, D]

God , Silence , Rage , Reading

“I don’t need to know most of what’s fed to us by newspapers and the TV. It’s largely useless information and daily moaning. There are only a few things in business that I really want to know about. Tell me about manufacturing productivity, employment, the balance of payments and borrowing levels. With these things you can decide on how to run a business, a constituency or even a country.”

Ivor Tiefenbrun (1946) Scottish businessman

INTERVIEW: Ivor Tiefenbrun – Of High Fidelity & Integrity http://www.hnwmagazine.co.uk/interview-ivor-tiefenbrun-high-fidelity-high-integrity/, HNW Magazine, 2 December 2012.
2012

Business , Country