Quotes about field
page 11

“The duties of kingship among the anthropoids are not many or arduous. … But Tarzan tired of it, as he found that kingship meant the curtailment of his liberty. He longed for the little cabin and the sun-kissed sea — for the cool interior of the well-built house, and for the never-ending wonders of the many books.
As he had grown older, he found that he had grown away from his people. Their interests and his were far removed. They had not kept pace with him, nor could they understand aught of the many strange and wonderful dreams that passed through the active brain of their human king. So limited was their vocabulary that Tarzan could not even talk with them of the many new truths, and the great fields of thought that his reading had opened up before his longing eyes, or make known ambitions which stirred his soul.
Among the tribe he no longer had friends as of old. A little child may find companionship in many strange and simple creatures, but to a grown man there must be some semblance of equality in intellect as the basis for agreeable association.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 12 : Man's Reason

People, Truth, Books, Dreams

“During the 1950s and 1960s most of the work which was called cybernetics tended to focus on control systems in engineering or on applications of the concept of feedback in fields ranging from mathematics to sociology. At the 1970 meeting of the American Society for Cybernetics in Philadelphia Heinz von Foerster sought to redirect attention to the original interests which had led to the founding of the field of cybernetics. In a paper titled "Cybernetics of Cybernetics" he made a distinction between first order cybernetics, the cybernetics of observed systems, and second order cybernetics, the cybernetics of observing systems.”

Stuart A. Umpleby (1944) American scientist

Stuart A. Umpleby (1991) "Strategies for Winning Acceptance of Second Order Cybernetics." In George E. Lasker, et al. (eds.) Advances in Human Systems and Information Technologies. Windsor, Canada: International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics, 1992. pp. 97-196. (paper)

Mathematics

“I suppose this is peasant food. You know, the workers in the fields needed these heavy dumplings and things to eat, but God don't offer them to me…”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville: Using words to paint pictures of "magical" Prague (2006)

God, Food

“A man came to Allah's Apostle and said, "Instruct me as to such a deed as equals Jihad (in reward)." He replied, "I do not find such a deed." Then he added, "Can you, while the Muslim fighter is in the battle-field, enter your mosque to perform prayers without cease and fast and never break your fast?" The man said, "But who can do that?" Abu- Huraira added, "The Mujahid (i. e. Muslim fighter) is rewarded even for the footsteps of his horse while it wanders about (for grazing) tied in a long rope."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Narrated Abu Huraira, in Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 44
Sunni Hadith

Horse

“Many people fail to grasp this point, apparently because they think of "scientific" evidence as only that produced in laboratories by controlled experiments. This leads them to treat field studies, however careful, thorough and well-documented, as "anecdotal"--mere preparation for the real thing, therefore properly ignored till it bears fruit entitled to be considered by learned persons. This attitude was much like that of cavalry generals in the First World War, waiting patiently for the infantry to clear the ground so that they could make the dashing charges that alone they thought entitled the name of warfare. Because these creatures are complex, only a tiny fraction of important truths about them can ever be seen in laboratories of expressed in control experiments. The same, of course, is true of the human race.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 224.

War, People, Truth, World

“[About whether critics have influenced his work:] None could have, because I don't read them. I doubt anyone does, except other critics. It seems like a sealed-off field with its own lieutenants, pretty much preoccupied with its own intrigues. I got a glimpse into the uses of a certain kind of criticism this past summer at a writers' conference – into how the avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph. D. I saw how it was possible to gain a chair of literature on no qualification other than persistence in nipping the heels of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck. I know, of course, that there are true critics, one or two. For the rest all I can say is, “Deal around me.””

Nelson Algren (1909–1981) American novelist, short story writer

"The Art of Fiction No. 11" (1955)

Men, Literature, Failure, Reading

“What we need, then, is a new 'paradigm' - a new vision of reality; a fundamental change in our thoughts, perceptions, and values. The beginnings of this change, of the shift from the mechanistic to the holistic conception of reality, are already visible in all fields and are likely to dominate the present decade. The various manifestations and implications of this 'paradigm shift' are the subject of this book. The sixties and seventies have generated a whole series of social movements that all seem to go in the same direction, emphasizing different aspects of the new vision of reality. So far, most of these movements still operate separately and have not yet recognized how their intentions interrelate. The purpose of this book is to provide a coherent conceptual framework that will help them recognize the communality of their aims. Once this happens, we can expect the various movements to flow together and form a powerful force for social change. The gravity and global extent of our current crisis indicate that this change is likely to result in a transformation of unprecedented dimensions, a turning point for the planet as a whole.”

Fritjof Capra book The Turning Point

Preface.
The Turning Point (1982)

Books, Communication, Reality, Change

“Having presented all the relevant nanoscale mechanisms, thus laying down a firm background for the readers’ understanding, the author moves to the topic of architectural challenges in Chapter 7. This field is claimed still to be an unsolved problem so the author gives examples of currently used technologies and points out potential architectural solutions such as self-assembly, carbon nanotubes, or quantum systems. That is why it makes the book even more valuable for those who intend to involve nanonetworks in their research.”

Stephen F Bush

Book Reviews, REVIEWER: JAKUB PALIDER, NANOSCALE COMMUNICATION NETWORKS STEPHEN F. BUSH, ARTECH HOUSE, 2010, ISBN-13: 978-1-60807-003-9, HARDCOVER, 308 PAGES, IEEE Communications Magazine, August 2011.

Books, Understanding, Problem

“Like many fields in their early stages, the software field has had its share of project disasters: the software equivalents of Beauvais Cathedral, the S. S. Titanic, and the "Galloping Gertie" Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The frequency of these disaster projects is a serious concern: a recent survey of 600 firms indicated that 35% of them had at least one "runaway' software project.”

Barry Boehm (1935) American software engineer

Source: Software risk management: principles and practices (1991), p. 32

“We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

Earl Warren (1891–1974) United States federal judge

Writing for the court, Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)
1950s

Education

“The United States follows the pattern of men taking the financial risks even within a given field. Women physicians are three times as likely as men to work for the government or an HMO; men physicians are much more likely to be self-employed in a solo practice.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 108.

Women, Men, Time

“Man rears his cattle, his sheep, and his poultry much like household pets. His children make his lambs their playmates. Side by side his oxen toil with him in the field. In return for kindness, they give affection. What confidence they repose in him! how faithfully they serve! With winter's frost an evil day arrives,—a day of massacre, of perfidy, of bloodshed and butchery. With knife and ax he turns upon his trusted friends, the sheep that kissed his hand, the ox that plowed his field. The air is filled with shrieks and moans, with cries of terror and despair; the soil is wet with warm blood, and strewn with corpses.”

John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) American physician

Source: The Living Temple, p. 186

Children, Confidence, Kiss, Winter

“He who knows the surface of the earth and the topography of a country only through the examination of maps.. is like a man who learns the opera of Meyerbeer or Rossini by reading only reviews in the newspapers. The brush of landscape artists Lorrain, Ruysdael, or Calame can reproduce on canvas the sun's ray, the coolness of the heavens, the green of the fields, the majesty of the mountains…but what can never be stolen from Nature is that vivid impression that she alone can and knows how to impart--the music of the birds, the movement of the trees, the aroma peculiar to the place--the inexplicable something the traveller feels that cannot be defined and which seems to awaken in him distant memories of happy days, sorrows and joys gone by, never to return”

José Rizal (1861–1896) Filipino writer, ophthalmologist, polyglot and nationalist

"Los Viajes" in La Solidaridad (15 May 1889)- translated from the Spanish by Nick Joaquin

Happiness, Music, Travel, Feeling

“With Mie's view of matter there is contrasted another, according to which matter is a limiting singularity of the field, but charges and masses are force-fluxes in the field. This entails a new and more cautious attitude towards the whole problem of matter.”

Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) German mathematician

From the Author's Preface to Fourth Edition (1920)
Space—Time—Matter (1952)

Problem

“The new institutionalism focuses instead on nonlocal environments, either organisational sectors or fields roughly coterminous with the boundaries of industries, professions, or national societies. Environments, in this view, are more subtle in their influence; rather than being co-opted by organisations, they penetrate the organisation, creating the lenses through which actors view the world and the very categories of structure, action and thought.”

Paul DiMaggio (1951) American sociologist

Source: Introduction to The New Institutionalism and Organizational Analysis, 1991, p. 12-13.

World

“Cybernetics as a specific field grew out of a series of interdisciplinary meetings held from 1944 to 1953 that brought together a number of noted post-war intellectuals, including Wiener, John von Neumann, Warren McCulloch, Claude Shannon, Heinz von Foerster, W. Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. Hosted by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, these became known as the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics. From its original focus on machines and animals, cybernetics quickly broadened to encompass minds (e. g. in the work of Bateson and Ashby) and social systems (e. g. Stafford Beer's management cybernetics), thus recovering Plato's original focus on the control relations in society.
Through the 1950s, cybernetic thinkers came to cohere with the school of General Systems Theory (GST), founded at about the same time by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, as an attempt to build a unified science by uncovering the common principles that govern open, evolving systems. GST studies systems at all levels of generality, whereas Cybernetics focuses more specifically on goal-directed, functional systems which have some form of control relation.”

Francis Heylighen (1960) Belgian cyberneticist

Source: Cybernetics and Second-Order Cybernetics (2001), p.2 Cited in: " Notes on Heylighen 2001 http://thinkipedia.wikispaces.com/Notes+on+Heylighen+2001" at thinkipedia.wikispaces.com, 2013

War, School, Beer, Study

“What should we do if it want for the churches? Thare iz a plenty ov people who kant worship God only in a church. If they were out in a field on the Sabbath day they would at once bekum lawless, and fall to digging out woodchucks or hunting for bumblebees' nests.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

God, People

“General systems theory, in a sense, is no news at all, as Von Foerster found out when he attempted to organize a conference of general systems people and anthropologists. In a sense, the situation is comparable to that found by the Committee for the Study of Mankind, in which a committee that included Robert Redfidd tried to get each discipline to consider its relationship to the concept of Mankind. Anthropologists replied, "we are related already," and so they were. Something similar may be said of attempts to date in mathematical anthropology. The kind of information that a computer program can finally provide, on a level of a particular culture, is simply a reflection of how detailed field work has been done, and to the careful field worker, on kinship, for example, it provides no illumination.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1970s, Changing Styles of Anthropological Work, 1973, p. 8

People, Mathematics, Sense, Study

“Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all he has. It is the pearl of great price to by which the merchant will sell all his goods.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Costly Grace, p. 45.

“There is no direct observational evidence for the curvature [of space], the only directly observed data being the mean density and the expansion, which latter proves that the actual universe corresponds to the non-statical case. It is therefore clear that from the direct data of observation we can derive neither the sign nor that value of the curvature, and the question arises whether it is possible to represent the observed facts without introducing the curvature at all. Historically the term containing the 'cosmological constant λ' was introduced into the field equations in order to enable us to account theoretically for the existence of a finite mean density in a static universe. It now appears that in the dynamical case this end can be reached without the introduction of λ.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Joint memoir with Einstein (1932) as quoted by Gerald James Whitrow, The Structure of the Universe: An Introduction to Cosmology (1949)

Question, Universe, Appearance

“The contemporary era constantly proclaims itself as post-ideological, but this denial of ideology only provides the ultimate proof that we are more than ever embedded in ideology. Ideology is always a field of struggle - among other things, the struggle for appropriating past traditions.”

Slavoj Žižek (1949) Slovene philosopher

Source: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2009), Chapter One, Human, All Too Human

Past

“Mahomed Ghoory, in the mean time returning from Ghizny, marched towards Kunowj, and engaged Jye-chund Ray, the Prince of Kunowj and Benares' This prince led his forces into the field, between Chundwar and Etawa, where he sustained a signal defeat from the vanguard of the Ghiznevide army, led by Kootbood-Deen Eibuk, and lost the whole of his baggage and elephants' He marched from thence to Benares, where, having broken the idols in above 1000 temples, he purified and consecrated the latter to the worship of the true God…'Mahomed Ghoory, following with the body of the army into the city of Benares, took possession of the country as far as the boundaries of Bengal, without opposition, and having destroyed all the idols, loaded four thousand camels with spoils.”

Muhammad of Ghor (1160–1206) Ghurid Sultan

Tarikh-i-Firishta, translated by John Briggs under the title History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, first published in 1829, New Delhi Reprint 1981, Vol. I, p. 100-108

God, Time, Country

“The field of economics is not exempt from the consequences of chaos and complexity. Marketplaces are indeterminate; value is subjective; and outcomes are subject to interpretation. Economic forecasting is just as nebulous, being based on the probability of statistical information that may or may not be accurate.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 16

“I see art-making, especially that which comes from the margins of the mainstream, as a site of resistance, a way of interrupting and intervening in those historical and cultural fields that continually exclude me, a sort of gathering of forces on the borders. For the dominant hegemonic stance that has worked to silence and subdue gender and ethnic difference has also silenced difference based on sexual preference.”

Harmony Hammond (1944) artist

From Women, Art, and Society: Fourth Edition (2007) by Whitney Chadwick ISBN 0-500-20393-8.

Art, Way, Silence

“The classical concept of 'physical entity', be it particle, wave, field or system, has become a problematic concept since the advent of relativity theory and quantum mechanics. The recent developments in modern quantum mechanics, with the performance of delicate and precise experiments involving single quantum entities, manifesting explicit non-local behavior for these entities, brings essential new information about the nature of the concept of entity.”

Diederik Aerts (1953) Belgian theoretical physicist

Aerts, D. (1998). " The entity and modern physics: the creation-discovery view of reality. http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/aerts/publications/1998EntModPhys.pdf" In E. Castellani (Ed.), Interpreting Bodies: Classical and Quantum Objects in Modern Physics (pp. 223-257). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Behavior, Nature

“... published today as a United Nations Special Report. The alleged rise of intelligence in so-called backward countries is ascribed by the scientists who conducted the three-year investigation to improved diet and sanitation, while the as-yet unconfirmed decline in advanced nations is attributed to intensified pollution. Asked to comment on the report just prior to leaving for Hollywood, where he is tonight slated to open his annual retrospective, Prexy said, quote, Well, if they’re so smart why aren’t they clever? End quote. At a press conference in Tegucigalpa the disappearance of Leonard Ross, field agent for Globe Relief, and Dr. Isaiah Williams, the British medico who’s also unaccounted for, was officially ascribed today to terrorism. Troops are searching the area intensively, but so far have reported no success. Following the shock resignation of the former president of the “Save the Med” fund, Dottore Giovanni Crespinolo, the Italian government has flatly denied his charge that the vast sums donated by corporations and individuals in forty-eight countries in the hope of saving the doomed landlocked sea have been embezzled. Reports from Rome, however...”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

January “NO BIGGER THAN A MAN’S HAND”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Hope, Quotes, Search, Intelligence

“He's an emotional guy, but I don't believe what went on the field tonight outside of baseball deserves any words.”

Carlos Zambrano (1981) Venezuelan baseball pitcher

Scott Rolen
2004

Guy

“It is with logic as it is with other sciences. They draw wisdom from the mysterious source of plain experience. Agriculture, e. g., aims to teach the farmer how to cultivate the soil; but fields were tilled long before any agricultural college had begun its lectures. In the same way human beings think without ever having heard of logic. But by practice they improve their innate faculty of thought, they make progress, they gradually learn to make better use of it. Finally, just as the farmer arrives at the science of agriculture, so the thinker arrives at logic, acquires a clear consciousness of his faculty of thought and a professional dexterity in applying it.”

Joseph Dietzgen (1828–1888) german philosopher

Letter 2
Letters on Logic: Especially Democratic-Proletarian Logic (1906)

Wisdom, Way, Thinking, Learning

“Since economics deals with human beings, the problems of its scientific treatment involves fundamental problems of the relations between man and his world. From a rational or scientific point of view, all practically real problems are problems in economics. The problem of life is to utilize resources "economically," to make them go as far as possible in the production of desired results. The general theory of economics is therefore simply the rationale of life. - In so far as it has any rationale! The first question in regard to scientific economics is this question of how far life is rational, how far its problems reduce to the form of using given means to achieve given ends. Now this, we shall contend, is not very far; the scientific view of life is a limited and partial view; life is at bottom an exploration in the field of values, an attempt to discover values, rather than on the basis of knowledge of them to produce and enjoy them to the greatest possible extent. We strive to "know ourselves," to find out our real wants, more than to get what we want. This fact sets a first and most sweeping limitation to the conception of economics as a science.”

Frank Knight (1885–1972) American economist

Source: "The limitations of scientific method in economics", 1924, p. 97 (2009 edition); Lead paragraph

Life, World, Question, Knowledge

“[Conflict can be defined] as the opposition of approximately equally strong field forces.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, The conflict between Aristotelian and Galileian modes of thought in contemporary psychology, 1931, p. 109 as cited in: Man Cheung Chung, Michael E. Hyland (2012) History and Philosophy of Psychology. p. 107.

Strong

“Stress, loneliness, depression, boredom- the madness of everyday life. Ever-greater levels of sadness, implying a recognition, on the visceral level at least, that things could be different. How much joy is there left in the technological society, this field of alienation and anxiety.”

John Zerzan book Future Primitive and Other Essays

"The Mass Psychology of Misery"
Future Primitive and Other Essays (1994)

Life, Sadness, Joy, Loneliness

“Some men are born to feast, and not to fight;
Whose sluggish minds, e'en in fair honor's field,
Still on their dinner turn—
Let such pot-boiling varlets stay at home,
And wield a flesh-hook rather than a sword.”

Joanna Baillie (1762–1851) Scottish poet and dramatist

Act I, scene 1.
Count Basil (1798)

Men, Home, Fight

“As a science mathematics has been adapted to the description of natural phenomena, and the great practitioners in this field… have never concerned themselves with the logical foundations of mathematics, but have boldly taken a pragmatic view of mathematics as an intellectual machine which works successfully. Description has been verified by further observation, still more strikingly be prediction, and sometimes, more ominously, by control of natural forces. Happily, unresolved problems… still remain as challenges.”

George Frederick James Temple (1901–1992) British mathematician

100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)

Mathematics, Nature, Problem, Science

“I have [drawings of] about twelve figures of diggers and men who are working in a potato field, and I wonder if I could not make something of it, you have still a few, for instance, a man who fills a bag with potatoes. Well, I do not know for sure, but sooner or later I shall accomplish that, for I looked at it so attentively this summer, and here in the dunes I could make a good study of the earth and the sky, and then boldly put in the figures.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in letter 169, from The Hague, January, 1882; as cited in Vincent van Gogh, Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, catalog-page: Dutch Period: - 4. Potato Diggers 1880s, 1882

Men, Study, Summer, Drawing

“A manufacturing organization being a live, human thing, is like a municipality. Many of our shops are as fruitful fields for riddance of graft as are many of our cities. The graft in the shop consists mostly in the distortion of the managing and planning body into a wire-pulling and influence machine with easy berths filled by incompetents or idlers. This condition often exists not because of any intentional desire to be disloyal on the part of the employees, but simply on account of the work being allowed to drift without systematic attention to departmental organization.”

Hugo Diemer (1870–1937) American mechanical engineer

Source: "Industrial Engineering," 1905, p. 67

Parting

“My etchings have.... the mistake of being processed as images and to have at the same time the meaning of epigrams. It is the union of pure painting with pure graphics... From now onwards my task will be the division of art and graphics, and the full development of both fields. The pure art has already turned to impressionism and the graphics is going to do it.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote in a letter to his wife, 12 June, 1906; as cited in Paul Klee. Das Frühwerk 1883-1922, p. 50.
1903 - 1910

Art, Time, Painting

“It's unbelievable that Phil had to wait so long to get in to the Hall of Fame. Maris's home run record in 1961 has become something of a curse. He wasn't just a home run hitter, he could do everything—hit in the clutch, field, throw and run.”

Yogi Berra (1925–2015) American baseball player, manager, coach

On the two players deemed by Berra the most underrated of his era; as quoted in The Greatest Team of All Time: As Selected by Baseball Immortals from Ty Cobb to Willie Mays, p. 13.

Home, Waiting

“The nature poet may (should in fact ), resort to the field guide or library but will keep coming back, figuratively speaking, to the trail - to the grain of experience.”

Don McKay (1942) Canadian poet

Baler Twine

Nature

“Outside his own ever-narrowing field of specialization, a scientist is a layman. What members of an academy of science have in common is a certain form of semiparasitic living.”

Erwin Chargaff (1905–2002) Ukrinian-born biochemist who emigrated to the United States

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (1973)

Science

“To State Department employees: "Yours is not an easy task nor one which is much appreciated. You don't ask much of your fellow citizens, and if any of you are so inexperienced that you ever do, you will receive very little. Certainly not much in the form of material recompense; certainly not much in the form of appreciation for your work, because you are dealing with matters which, though they affect life of every citizen of this country intimately, do it in ways which it is not easy for every citizen to understand. And so you are dealing in a field which I called the other day a field of 'alien knowledge,' which seems strange to many of your fellow citizens … We have a tradition in this country of skepticism about government, of looking at it very carefully, of seeing whether our public servants can take it. That isn't always comfortable, but, on the whole, it is good. Any time when there are governments in the world which are crushing the liberties of their citizens, it is good that in this great country people look with some skepticism upon government as such. That is one of our traditions … "”

Dean Acheson book Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), Principles

Life, People, World, Way

“We can see in the gladiatorial shows of Rome, which degenerated into the butchery alike of beasts and men, the sure sign of moral decay which ended in the destruction of the empire and the breaking up of the great influence it had cast over the world. It is altogether necessary that we keep our own amusements and recreations within that field which will be prophetic, not of destruction, but of development. It is characteristic of almost the entire American life that it has a most worthy regard for clean and manly sports. It has little appetite for that which is unwholesome or brutal.”

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

1920s, The Democracy of Sports (1924)

Life, Men, World, Sport

“The incorporation of every indidual in a collective mechanism of production, would mean the renunciation (or surrender) for man himself of its independance and his dignity as a rational (or thinking, or reasonable) being. The results (or consequences) of such a state of things would be: regression (or retrogression) and deterioration in every fields (or domain) of life. For the true progress consist in the accomplishment of higher ends, et these would be directly (or right off) made impossible in a coercive social mechanism. Let us think to the fate that, in these conditions, new truths would have in store”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

"Qu'on songe au sort qui, dans ces conditions, serait réservé à des vérités nouvelles", Fr.
Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 47.

Life, Fate, Truth, Thinking

“Perhaps an underlying cause [of doubt as to the future of information science] is in some cases… the apprehension that information science may become “submerged” in the larger field of computer science.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Meeting the challenge (2009), p. xxviii; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Science, Future

“Like the cellar-growing vine is the Christian who lives in the darkness and bondage of fear. But let him go forth, with the liberty of God, into the light of love, and he will be like the plant in the field, healthy, robust, and joyful.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 106

Love, God, Fear, Light

“Having expelled quality from the field of extension, [idealists] do not know how to account for it when it reappears in thought.”

Étienne Gilson (1884–1978) French historian and philosopher

Methodical Realism

“With each pattern, small piecework is standardized into a larger chunk or unit. Patterns become the building blocks for design and construction. Finding and applying patterns indicates progress in a field of human endeavor.”

Peter Coad (1953) American software entrepreneur

Source: Object-oriented patterns. (1992), p. 152

“A form of recreation not so accesible to many as games, but one which has in it a peculiar hold on that which is elemental in human nature, is hunting and fishing. These are true outdoor sports in the highest sense, and must be pursued in a way that develops energy, perseverance, skill, and courage of the individual. They call for personal direction, and can not be taken up vicariously. There is a great wealth of life and experience in this field which is never exhausted, and always fresh and new. It is accompanied by traits of character which make a universal appeal. A knowledge of these arts may well be cultivated and cherished like a knowledge of the humanities and the sciences. Around hunting and fishing is gathered a great wealth of prose and poetry, which testifies to the enduring interest which these sports have held all through the development of the race.”

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

1920s, The Democracy of Sports (1924)

Life, Art, Way, Game

“Mathematics and philosophy are cultivated by two different classes of men: some make them an object of pursuit, either in consequence of their situation, or through a desire to render themselves illustrious, by extending their limits; while others pursue them for mere amusement, or by a natural taste which inclines them to that branch of knowledge. It is for the latter class of mathematicians and philosophers that this work is chiefly intended j and yet, at the same time, we entertain a hope that some parts of it will prove interesting to the former. In a word, it may serve to stimulate the ardour of those who begin to study these sciences; and it is for this reason that in most elementary books the authors endeavour to simplify the questions designed for exercising beginners, by proposing them in a less abstract manner than is employed in the pure mathematics, and so as to interest and excite the reader's curiosity. Thus, for example, if it were proposed simply to divide a triangle into three, four, or five equal parts, by lines drawn from a determinate point within it, in this form the problem could be interesting to none but those really possessed of a taste for geometry. But if, instead of proposing it in this abstract manner, we should say: "A father on his death-bed bequeathed to his three sons a triangular field, to be equally divided among them: and as there is a well in the field, which must be common to the three co-heirs, and from which the lines of division must necessarily proceed, how is the field to be divided so as to fulfill the intention of the testator?"”

Jean-Étienne Montucla (1725–1799) French mathematician

This way of stating it will, no doubt, create a desire in most minds to discover the method of solving the problem; and however little taste people may possess for real science, they will be tempted to try iheir ingenuity in finding the answer to such a question at this. Source: Preface to Recreations in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. (1803), p. ii; As cited in: Tobias George Smollett. The Critical Review: Or, Annals of Literature http://books.google.com/books?id=T8APAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA410, Volume 38, (1803), p. 410

Death, Men, People, Books

“It is common to think of statistical graphics and data visualization as relatively modern developments in statistics. In fact, the graphic representation of quantitative information has deep roots. These roots reach into the histories of the earliest map-making and visual depiction, and later into thematic cartography, statistics and statistical graphics, medicine, and other fields. Along the way, developments in technologies (printing, reproduction) mathematical theory and practice, and empirical observation and recording, enabled the wider use of graphics and new advances in form and content.”

Michael Friendly (1945) American psychologist

Michael Friendly. " A brief history of data visualization http://www.datavis.ca/papers/hbook.pdf at datavis.ca, March 21, 2006.

Way, History, Mathematics, Thinking

“Him here he found preparing for the field
His bow, his breast-plate, and his glittering shield:
Whilst beauteous Helen 'mongst her maids in state
Their several works and tasks disposing sate.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

Book IV
Homer His Iliads Translated (1660)

“And all now is war
Where so lately there was peace,
and the sweet brotherhood, the use
of tilled fields.”

Charles Olson (1910–1970) American writer

Part I, 3
The Kingfishers (1950)

War, Peace

“It seems plain and self-evident, yet it needs to be said: the isolated knowledge obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever, but only in its synthesis with all the rest of knowledge and only inasmuch as it really contributes in this synthesis toward answering the demand, "Who are we?"”

Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) Austrian physicist

Science and Humanism (1951)

Knowledge

“In the fields with which we are concerned knowledge exists only in lightning flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterwards.”

Walter Benjamin book Arcades Project

Arcades Project (1927-1940)

Knowledge

“Mary Follett devoted a lifetime to searching for the true principles of organization which would ensure a stable foundation for the steady, ordered progress of human well-being. That her search was not in vain will be evident to all who read the lectures. Her teaching is not theoretical, but is based on a close study of the practice of a large number of business undertakings. She chose this field of enquiry to supplement her work on local and national government because she realized that the principles which should determine organization are identical, no matter what the purpose which that organization is designed to serve.”

Seebohm Rowntree (1871–1954) British philanthropist industrialist and sociologist writer

Seebohm Rowntree, "Preface" to Mary Parker Follett with Henry C. Metcalf, and Lyndall Urwick (eds.). Dynamic administration: the collected papers of Mary Parker Follett. Harper & Brother Publishing, 1942

Search, Business, Study, Reading

“I looked at my hands, to see if I was de same person now I was free. Dere was such a glory over everything, de sun came like gold trou de trees, and over de fields, and I felt like I was in heaven.”

Harriet Tubman (1820–1913) African-American abolitionist and humanitarian

On realizing that she had passed out of the slavery states into the northern states
Modernized rendition: I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything. The sun came up like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven.
1880s, Harriet, The Moses of Her People (1886)

Tree, Sun, Personality

“I asked the Field Marshal von Manstein if he would take part in the actions against Hitler. Manstein was sitting in a chair and reading the Bible. Quick, almost embarrassed, he put it aside and covered it with some papers.”

Dietrich von Choltitz (1894–1966) German general

Ich habe den Feldmarschall von Manstein gefragt, ob er an der Aktion gegen Hitler teilnehmen würde. Manstein sitzt in einem Sessel und liest in der Bibel. Schnell, fast verlegen, legt er sie zur Seite und deckt sie mit Papieren zu. About Erich von Manstein, "Der Spiegel", nr. 14, p. 12, 2 April 1952, spiegel.de http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-21694964.html

Reading, Parting

“[Computers] are developing so rapidly that even computer scientists cannot keep up with them. It must be bewildering to most mathematicians and engineers… In spite of the diversity of the applications, the methods of attacking the difficult problems with computers show a great unity, and the name of Computer Sciences is being attached to the discipline as it emerges. It must be understood, however, that this is still a young field whose structure is still nebulous. The student will find a great many more problems than answers.”

George Forsythe (1917–1972) Stanford University computer scientist

George Forsythe (1961) "Engineering students must learn both computing and mathematics". J. Eng. Educ. 52 (1961), p. 177. as cited in ( Knuth, 1972 http://www.stanford.edu/dept/ICME/docs/history/forsythe_knuth.pdf) According to Donald Knuth in this quote Forsythe coined the term "computer science".

Problem, Science

“Defined in broadest terms, public administration consists of all those operations having for their purpose the fulfillment or enforcement of public policy. This definition covers a multitude of particular operations in many fields — the delivery of a letter, the sale of public land, the negotiation of a treaty, the award of compensation to an injured workman, the quarantine of a sick child, the removal of litter from a park, manufacturing plutonium, and licensing the use of atomic energy. It includes military as well as civil affairs, much of the work of courts, and all the special fields of government activity— police, education, health, construction of public works, conservation, social security, and many others.”

Leonard D. White (1891–1958) American historian

Source: Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, 1926, p. 1

Health, Education

“Paradoxically, it has turned out that game theory is more readily applied to biology than to the field of economic behavior for which it was originally designed”

John Maynard Smith book Evolution and the Theory of Games

Source: Evolution and the Theory of Games (1973), p. vii.

Behavior, Game

“Hark! Hark! my soul, angelic songs are swelling
O’er earth’s green fields and ocean’s wave-beat shore;
How sweet the truth those blessed strains are telling
Of that new life when sin shall be no more.”

Frederick William Faber (1814–1863) British hymn writer and theologian

The Pilgrims of the Night.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Life, Truth, Angels, Soul

“In our theory we have multiple “mini bangs” and these mini bangs are not mysterious like the big bang but they come because of the concentration of what we call negative energy fields. Whenever there are pockets of negative energy, they explode and produce a mini bang. We believe there’s a mini bang producing energy in the centre of quasars, which are very bright star like objects. Gamma ray bursts, which are the explosive creations of gamma rays, are another example of a mini bang. These are actually happening. These can be described by normal physics, but the big bang cannot. The big bang theory does not use any mathematical formulation so they can’t say why the bang occurred.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

Jayant Narlikar's Cosmology

Star, Mathematics

“The universe does not care whether man unlocks its secrets or leaves them closed. Water does not care whether man bathes in it or drowns in it; whether it waters his fields or washes them away. If man masters its laws and utilizes his knowledge, water becomes a force in his favor. But enemy or servant, water does not care.”

Mark Clifton book They'd Rather Be Right

Source: They'd Rather Be Right (1954), p. 48.

Secret, Law, Knowledge, Universe

“The nation is in the grip of a crisis. It is in essence a crisis of character. The obstructions and failures in other fields – economic, social and political – are just a reflection of our decline in the moral scale.”

Gulzarilal Nanda (1898–1998) Prime Minister of India

MSN News in: Past Prime Ministers: Those who came before Gulzarilal Nanda http://news.in.msn.com/elections-2014/past-prime-ministers-those-who-came-before?page=2, MSN News, 26 May 2014.

Failure

“I saw Substance D growing. I saw death rising from the earth, from the ground itself, in one blue field, in stubbled color.”

Philip K. Dick book A Scanner Darkly

Source: A Scanner Darkly (1977), Chapter 17 (p. 275)

Death, Color

“I would like to congratulate everybody with the commencement of the "Combined Endeavour 2007" military exercises. This exercise is running simultaneously in Armenia and Germany. We have about 130 participants from 6 countries, this being evidence of importance and actuality of the event. It is notable that the cooperation between the Ministry of Defence of Armenia and the US European Command is developing and implementing a number of projects, and the vivid evidence of this cooperation is this military exercise. This is not the first military exercise in Armenia. Since 2003, we have hosted a number of military exercises organized with the NATO/PfP and the US European Command. It is important that the running of military exercises in Armenia is growing into a good tradition. Especially since, we already have an arrangement of hosting "Cooperative Longbow/Lancer" military exercises in Armenia for 2008. I would also like to mention with appreciation that the planning conference and working meetings before the military exercise would be held in a constructive atmosphere. We have effectively managed to run all preparation activities with joint efforts of the US European Command, the MOD of Armenia and other partners. The communication field is that chain which has fundamental importance for realizing multinational activities. The effectiveness and successes of our cooperation is related to that. This military exercise not only supports the testing of capabilities of participating units and experts, but also an opportunity for developing effective mechanisms for ensuring an interoperability and carrying out the tasks jointly. It is not accidental that Armenia has always expressed its readiness to host such kinds of events, and all participants have been trying to create appropriate conditions for their work. Taking this opportunity, one more time, I would like to thank all participants for their presence here and the US European command for their assistance in organizational matters. I am sure that due to our joint activities, the military exercise would be on a high professional and organizational level. I also hope that while you are in Armenia, you have a chance to make yourselves familiar with our history, culture and will have wonderful impressions. I am sure that on the 10th of May, after the completion of the military exercise, we will ascertain one more time that another multinational military exercise was held with success and fulfilled its tasks. I would like to wish all participants fruitful work and further success. I allow the commencement of the opening of the "Combined Endeavour 2007" military exercise.”

Mikael Harutyunyan (1946) Armenian general

Quoted in 2007 article. [April 27, 2007]

Hope, Exercises, History, Communication

“Of all trees, I observe God hath chosen the vine, a low plant that creeps upon the helpful wall; of all beasts, the soft and patient lamb; of all fowls, the mild and guileless dove. Christ is the rose of the field, and the lily of the valley. When God appeared to Moses, it was not in the lofty cedar nor the sturdy oak nor the spreading palm; but in a bush, a humble, slender, abject shrub; as if He would, by these elections, check the conceited arrogance of man.”

Owen Feltham (1602–1668) English writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 333.

God, Tree, Appearance, Help

“Then, on the slight turn of the Lower Hope Reach, clusters of factory chimneys come distinctly into view, tall and slender above the squat ranges of cement works in Grays and Greenhithe. Smoking quietly at the top against the great blaze of a magnificent sunset, they give an industrial character to the scene, speak of work, manufactures, and trade, as palm-groves on the coral strands of distant islands speak of the luxuriant grace, beauty and vigour of tropical nature. The houses of Gravesend crowd upon the shore with an effect of confusion as if they had tumbled down haphazard from the top of the hill at the back. The flatness of the Kentish shore ends there. A fleet of steam-tugs lies at anchor in front of the various piers. A conspicuous church spire, the first seen distinctly coming from the sea, has a thoughtful grace, the serenity of a fine form above the chaotic disorder of men’s houses. But on the other side, on the flat Essex side, a shapeless and desolate red edifice, a vast pile of bricks with many windows and a slate roof more inaccessible than an Alpine slope, towers over the bend in monstrous ugliness, the tallest, heaviest building for miles around, a thing like an hotel, like a mansion of flats (all to let), exiled into these fields out of a street in West Kensington. Just round the corner, as it were, on a pier defined with stone blocks and wooden piles, a white mast, slender like a stalk of straw and crossed by a yard like a knitting-needle, flying the signals of flag and balloon, watches over a set of heavy dock-gates. Mast-heads and funnel-tops of ships peep above the ranges of corrugated iron roofs. This is the entrance to Tilbury Dock, the most recent of all London docks, the nearest to the sea.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

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

Men, Beauty, Hope, Nature

“I hold that the self-authentication of truth, or, in other words, seeing, is the authority, and the only authority there is in the field of religion.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.52

Truth, Religion

“Although it is always somewhat dangerous to look for the cause of a complex sociological phenomenon in a single event, nonetheless, I believe that a cause can be made for the proposition that the present widespread interest in the quantum theory can be traced to a single paper with the nontransparent title “On the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox,” which was written in 1964 by the then thirty-four-year-old Irish physicist John Bell. It was published in the obscure journal Physics, which expired after a few issues. Bell’s paper was, as it happens, published in its first issue. Bell, who has worked since 1960 at CERN, the gigantic elementary-particle physics laboratory near Geneva, has been known to claim that his paper involves only the use of “high school mathematics”; however, its six pages are dense with an extremely abstract set of arguments, which even professionals in the field must work hard at to understand. In fact, for several years after its publication, few if any professional physicists bothered to try.”

Jeremy Bernstein (1929) American physicist

Quantum Profiles (1991), John Stewart Bell: Quantum Engineer

School, Mathematics, Understanding

“Look, if you take the best batting team in the world, they too will have their weaknesses -- otherwise, wouldn't they win all the time? You mention any team to me, and I will pick out for you a dozen weaknesses. But that is not the point -- these things, like fielding, running between wickets, all these are technical things, they can be learnt and practised.”

Kapil Dev (1959) Indian cricketer

In an interview on "Fielding, running between wickets" quoted in The Rediff Cricket Interview / Kapil Dev, 20 December 2013, Rediff.com http://www.rediff.com/sports/1998/sep/01a.htm,

World, Time

“Gibson … swings and a fly ball to deep right field. This is gonna be a home run! UNBELIEVABLE! A home run for Gibson! And the Dodgers have won the game, five to four; I don't believe what I just saw! I don't BELIEVE what I just saw!”

Jack Buck (1924–2002) American sportscaster

Calling an injured Kirk Gibson's walk-off home run in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series off Dennis Eckersley. 1980s Source: Jack Buck's call of Kirk Gibson's home run in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series on CBS Radio (via WJBC-AM in Bloomington, Illinois) http://www.wjbc.com/media/buck4.MP3

Home, Game, Flying

“He managed to come into the world at what was still a fitting time.
All that was to pass passed in this house.
Not in housing projects,
not in furnished but empty quarters,
among unknown neighbors
on fifteenth floors
that student field trips rarely reach.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

"The Great Man's House"
Poems New and Collected (1998), The People on the Bridge (1986)

World, Time, Housing

“Topology or relational mathematics, including non-metrical fields such as network and graph theory.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

General System Theory (1968), 4. Advances in General Systems Theory

Mathematics

“Theoretical psychology in its present state must try to develop a system of concepts which shows all the characteristics of a Gestalt, in which any part depends upon every other part. As we do not yet have the knowledge of facts which really suffices to determine this system of concepts and as, on the other hand, this knowledge of "facts" cannot be acquired without developing this system of concepts, there seems to be only one way open: to proceed slowly by tentative steps, to make decisions rather reluctantly, to keep in view always the whole field of psychology, and to stay in closest contact with the actual work of psychological research.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. viii.

Way, Knowledge, Decision, Parting

“I knew Muhammad Mujeeb personally. He was Head of the Department of History and Shaikh-ul-Jamia… In 1972, however, there was a mild 'confrontation' between him and me. Sometime that year there was a Selection Committee meeting for the post of Professor of History in Delhi University. I was then a Reader and candidate for the post of Professor. Mujeeb was an 'expert'… Mujeeb asked me a question: "Why did the Hindu convert to Islam?" It was a loaded question carrying the suggestion that the initiative for conversion came from the Hindu. In all probability Mujeeb expected me to say that the Hindus suffered from the injustices of the caste system, that Islam was spiritually so great and its message of social equality so attractive that the Hindus queued up for conversion the moment they came in contact with Islamic invaders. A tactful candidate (not a truthful one) would have said what Mujeeb desired, but my answer was different. I said that Hindus did not (voluntarily) convert to Islam; they were converted, often forcibly, as told by Muslim chroniclers. Muslim invaders and rulers felt proud of their achievements in the fields of loot and destruction, enslavement and proselytization. Their chroniclers, writing at their command or independently, speak about their achievements in these spheres in glowing terms. They repeatedly write about the choice offered to the Hindus - "Islam or death". Mujeeb expected a different answer. I was not selected.”

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

Source: Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India (1999), Chapter 6

Death, Truth, History, Question

“If all the wisdom of the world and all its art—all the spoils that it has won from nature, all the fire that it has snatched from heaven—were gathered together and divided into heaps, and we could point and say, for instance, these mighty truths were flashed forth in the brilliant salon amid the ripple of light laughter and the sparkle of bright eyes; and this deep knowledge was dug up in the quiet study, where the bust of Pallas looks serenely down on the leather-scented shelves; and this heap belongs to the crowded street; and that to the daisied field—the heap that would tower up high above the rest as a mountain above hills would be the one at which we should look up and say: this noblest pile of all—these glorious paintings and this wondrous music, these trumpet words, these solemn thoughts, these daring deeds, they were forged and fashioned amid misery and pain in the sordid squalor of the city garret. There, from their eyries, while the world heaved and throbbed below, the kings of men sent forth their eagle thoughts to wing their flight through the ages. There, where the sunlight streaming through the broken panes fell on rotting boards and crumbling walls; there, from their lofty thrones, those rag-clothed Joves have hurled their thunderbolts and shaken, before now, the earth to its foundations.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Wisdom, Men, Pain, Truth

“I think that we are approaching a kind of event field – fifteen years, twenty years up the road. There is a big event in the future and because time is not what we think it is, that event radiates in all directions. We are entering its field and have been for hundreds of years. We are starting to approach the core of it.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

Thinking, Time, Future

“I spent the winter [1859-1860, when he was painting 'Orfée et Euridice'] in the Elysian fields, where I was very happy; you must admit that if painting is a folly, it’s a sweet folly that men should not only forgive but seek out.”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) French landscape painter and printmaker in etching

Corot told Dumensnil in 1875; as quoted in Corot, Gary Tinterow, Michael Pantazzi, Vincent Pomarède - Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (France), National Gallery of Canada, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.), 1996, p. 290 – note 18
1870s

Men, Happiness, Forgiveness, Winter

“I had the play safe. I saw a replay -- it was a point where Randall made a great stretch, made a great play. I have to go with what I had on the field.”

Carlos Zambrano (1981) Venezuelan baseball pitcher

Umpire Bill Miller
2003

“System theory is basically concerned with problems of relationships, of structure, and of interdependence rather than with the constant attributes of objects. In general approach it resembles field theory except that its dynamics deal with temporal as well as spatial patterns. Older formulations of system constructs dealt with the closed systems of the physical sciences, in which relatively self-contained structures could be treated successfully as if they were independent of external forces. But living systems, whether biological organisms or social organizations, are acutely dependent on their external environment and so must be conceived of as open systems”

Daniel Katz (1903–1998) American psychologist

Source: The Social Psychology of Organizations (1966), p. 22

Problem, Science, Dependency

“We shall also concern ourselves with the institutional order built up from transactions, but our focus will be less narrowly economic than the one adopted by Williamson. Like him, we shall argue that institutional structures aim partly at achieving transactional efficiencies and that where such efficiencies are effectively achieved they act somewhat like a magnetic field – a mathematician would call them ‘attractors’ – drawing the uncommitted transaction into a given institutional orbit. Yet in contrast to Williamson’s, our concept of transactions is underpinned by an explicit rather than an implicit theory of information production and exchange which yields a different way of classifying them as well as a distinctive approach to their governance. We find ourselves in consequence in the realm of political economy rather than of economics tout court.”

Max Boisot (1943–2011) British academic and educator

Source: Information Space, 1995, p. 235

Way, Drawing

“The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts.”

George Meredith (1828–1909) British novelist and poet of the Victorian era

Source: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4412/4412.txt (1859), Ch. 19.

Water, Sun

“The art of writing history is the art of emphasizing the significant facts at the expense of the insignificant. And it is the same in every field of knowledge. Knowledge is power only if a man knows what facts not to bother about.”

Robert Wilson Lynd (1879–1949) Irish writer

Robert Lynd (1926) The orange tree: a volume of essays. p.60. The last sentence "Knowledge is power only if a man knows what facts not to bother about." was cited in some sources in the 1960s, such as August Kerber (1968) Quotable quotes on education. p.190, and in multiple other sources ever since.

Art, History, Knowledge

“Uncorrupted man, with God's blessing, advances across the fields of the universe as though he were walking down a country lane.”

Pierre Stephen Robert Payne (1911–1983) British lecturer, novelist, historian, poet and biographer

The Romantic Agony, p. 157,
The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America (1975)

God, Universe, Country

“Honor Wisdom; and deny it not to them that would learn; and shew it unto them that dispraise it! Sow not the sea fields!”

Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher

The Sayings of the Wise (1555)

Wisdom, Learning, Sea

“One cannot help but be struck by the diversity that characterizes efforts to study the management process. If it is true that psychologists like to study personality traits in terms of a person's reactions to objects and events, they could not choose a better stimulus than management science. Some feel it is a technique, some feel it is a branch of mathematics, or of mathematical economics, or of the "behavioral sciences," or of consultation services, or just so much nonsense. Some feel it is for management (vs. labor), some feel it ought to be for the good of mankind — or for the good of underpaid professors.
But this diversity of attitude, which is really characteristic of all fields of endeavor, is matched by another and more serious kind of diversity. In the management sciences, we have become used to talking about game theory, inventory theory, waiting line theory. What we mean by "theory" in this context is that if certain assumptions are valid, then such-and-such conclusions follow. Thus inventory theory is not a set of statements that predict how inventories will behave, or even how they should behave in actual situations, but is rather a deductive system which becomes useful if the assumptions happen to hold. The diversity of attitude on this point is reflected in two opposing points of view: that the important problems of management science are theoretical, and that the important problems are factual.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

quote in: Fremont A. Shull (ed.), Selected readings in management https://archive.org/stream/selectedreadings00shul#page/n13/mode/2up, , 1957. p. 7-8 1940s - 1950s, "Management Science — Fact or Theory?" 1956

Behavior, Feeling, Game, Mathematics

“So I asked him why he had poled one of his fields and not the other of his small farm. His reply showed the folly of assuming rationality in human behavior. "The Germans told us farmers to pole all our fields by June 15. My cow never liked that west field so I poled it first." In this case, the whim of a French cow was the controlling factor, not the plans of the German General Staff. As I was about to go, the farmer asked me to wait a moment, went back into the house and returned with a clip of World War I rifle ammunition. He gave it to me with the injunction "Allez me tuer un Boche."”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

"Go kill me a German."
Source: Swords and Plowshares (1972), p. 80-81

War, World, Behavior, Waiting

“What is so remarkable about Crowley the 'magician' is that he remains Crowley the scientist, and always applies the same probing intellectual curiosity to every field he surveys. This is ultimately the most impressive quality about his mind, and the one that might -- if he had concentrated on developing it to the full -- have brought him the fame that he craved. Crowley's tragedy was that he never concentrated long enough to develop anything to the full.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast (1987), p. 150

“So important, indeed, is the use of maps in geographic work, that, without wishing to propose any new law, it seems fair to suggest to the geographer a ready rule of thumb to test the geographic quality of any study he is making: if his problem cannot be studied fundamentally by maps - usually by a comparison of several maps - then it is questionable whether or not it is within the field of geography.”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

Source: The Nature of Geography (1939), p. 425

Law, Question, Problem, Study

“Donald Trump misses so much. He doesn’t see the success of black leaders in every field… The vibrancy of black-owned businesses…Or the strength of the black church… He doesn’t see the excellence of historically black colleges and universities or the pride of black parents watching their children thrive… And he certainly doesn’t have any solutions to take on the reality of systemic racism and create more equity and opportunity in communities of color. It takes a lot of nerve to ask people he’s ignored and mistreated for decades, "What do you have to lose?"”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

The answer is everything!
Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Speech in Reno, Nevada (August 25, 2016)

Children, People, Color, Communication

“The Novice has been the focus of an alarming amount of attention in the computer field. It is not just that the preferred user is unskilled, it is that the whole field in its application rewards novices and punishes experts. What you learn today will be useless a few years hence, so why bother to study and know anything well? I think this is the main reason for the IT winter we are now experiencing.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: "Well, I want to switch over to replace EMACS LISP with Guile." http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/a6df017072f4c700 (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Thinking, Study, Learning, Winter

“The first thing our leadership in 1947 should have done was to delegalize all communal bodies. All organizations whose membership was confined to a particular caste or religion should have been disallowed from the political field.”

Charan Singh (1902–1987) prime minister of India

Stig Toft Madsen, et al, in: "Trysts with Democracy: Political Practice in South Asia}, P.80-81

Religion, Communication

“But now in this Valley of Humiliation poor Christian was hard put to it, for he had gone but a little way before he espied a foul Fiend coming over the field to meet him; his name is Apollyon. Then did Christian begin to be afraid, and to cast in his mind whether to go back, or to stand his ground. But he considered again, that he had no Armor for his back, and therefore thought that to turn the back to him might give him greater advantage with ease to pierce him with his Darts; therefore he resolved to venture, and stand his ground. For thought he, had I no more in mine eye than the saving of my life, 'twould be the best way to stand.
So he went on, and Apollyon met him. Now the Monster was hideous to behold, he was cloathed with scales like a Fish (and they are his pride) he had Wings like a Dragon, feet like a Bear, and out of his belly came Fire and Smoke, and his mouth was as the mouth of a Lion. When he was come up to Christian, he beheld him with a disdainful countenance, and thus began to question with him.
Apollyon: Whence come you, and whither are you bound?
Christian: I am come from the City of Destruction, which is the place of all evil, and am going to the City of Zion.
Apollyon: By this I perceive thou art one of my Subjects, for all that Country is mine; and I am the Prince and God of it. How is it then that thou hast run away from thy King? Were it not that I hope thou mayest do me more service, I would strike thee now at one blow to the ground.
Christian: I was born indeed in your Dominions, but your service was hard, and your wages such as a man could not live on, for the wages of Sin is death; therefore when I was come to years, I did as other considerate persons do, look out if perhaps I might mend my self.
Apollyon: There is no Prince that will thus lightly lose his Subjects, neither will I as yet lose thee. But since thou complainest of thy service and wages be content to go back; what our Country will afford, I do here promise to give thee.
Christian: But I have let myself to another, even to the King of Princes, and how can I with fairness go back with thee?
Apollyon: Thou hast done in this, according to the Proverb, Changed a bad for a worse: but it is ordinary for those that have professed themselves his Servants, after a while to give him the slip, and return again to me: do thou so to, and all shall be well.
Christian: I have given him my faith, and sworn my Allegiance to him; how then can I go back from this, and not be hanged as a Traitor?
Apollyon: Thou didst the same to me, and yet I am willing to pass by all, if now thou wilt yet turn again, and go back.
Christian: What I promised thee was in my nonage; and besides, I count that the Prince under whose Banner now I stand, is able to absolve me; yea, and to pardon also what I did as to my compliance with thee: and besides, (O thou destroying Apollyon) to speak truth, I like his Service, his Wages, his Servants, his Government, his Company, and Country better than thine: and, therefore, leave off to perswade me further, I am his Servant, and I will follow him.
Apollyon: Consider again when thou art in cool blood, what thou art like to meet with in the way that thou goest. Thou knowest that for the most part, his Servants come to an ill end, because they are transgressors against me, and my ways. How many of them have been put to shameful deaths! and besides, thou countest his service better than mine, whereas he never came yet from the place where he is, to deliver any that served him out of our hands; but as for me, how many times, as all the World very well knows, have I delivered, either by power or fraud, those that have faithfully served me, from him and his, though taken by them, and so I will deliver thee.
Christian: His forbearing at present to deliver them, is on purpose to try their love, whether they will cleave to him to the end: and as for the ill end thou sayest they come to, that is most glorious in their account. For for present deliverance, they do not much expect it; for they stay for their Glory, and then they shall have it, when their Prince comes in his, and the Glory of the Angels.
Apollyon: Thou hast already been unfaithful in thy service to him, and how doest thou think to receive wages of him?
Christian: Wherein, O Apollyon, have I been unfaithful to him?
Apollyon: Thou didst faint at first setting out, when thou wast almost choked in the Gulf of Dispond; thou didst attempt wrong ways to be rid of thy burden, whereas thou shouldest have stayed till thy Prince had taken it off: thou didst sinfully sleep and lose thy choice thing: thou wast also almost perswaded to go back, at the sight of the Lions; and when thou talkest of thy Journey, and of what thou hast heard, and seen, thou art inwardly desirous of vain-glory in all that thou sayest or doest.
Christian:All this is true, and much more, which thou hast left out; but the Prince whom I serve and honour, is merciful, and ready to forgive: but besides, these infirmities possessed me in thy Country, for there I suckt them in, and I have groaned under them, been sorry for them, and have obtained pardon of my Prince.
Apollyon: Then Apollyon broke out into a grievous rage, saying, I am an enemy to this Prince: I hate his Person, his Laws, and People: I am come out on purpose to withstand thee.
Christian: Apollyon beware what you do, for I am in the King's Highway, the way of Holiness, therefore take heed to your self.
Apollyon: Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way, and said, I am void of fear in this matter, prepare thy self to die, for I swear by my Infernal Den, that thou shalt go no further, here will I spill thy soul; and with that, he threw a flaming Dart at his breast, but Christian had a Shield in his hand, with which he caught it, and so prevented the danger of that. Then did Christian draw, for he saw 'twas time to bestir him; and Apollyon as fast made at him, throwing Darts as thick as Hail; by the which, notwithstanding all that Christian could do to avoid it, Apollyon wounded him in his head, his hand and foot; this made Christian give a little back: Apollyon therefore followed his work amain, and Christian again took courage, and resisted as manfully as he could. This sore combat lasted for above half a day, even till Christian was almost quite spent. For you must know that Christian by reason of his wounds, must needs grow weaker and weaker.
Then Apollyon espying his opportunity, began to gather up close to Christian, and wrestling with him, gave him a dreadful fall; and with that, Christian's Sword flew out of his hand. Then said Apollyon, I am sure of thee now, and with that, he had almost prest him to death, so that Christian began to despair of life. But as God would have it, while Apollyon was fetching of his last blow, thereby to make a full end of this good Man, Christian nimbly reached out his hand for his Sword, and caught it, saying, Rejoice not against me, O mine Enemy! when I fall, I shall arise; and with that, gave him a deadly thrust, which made him give back, as one that had received his mortal wound: Christian perceiving that, made at him again, saying, Nay, in all these things we are more than Conquerors, through him that loved us. And with that, Apollyon spread forth his Dragon's wings, and sped him away, that Christian saw him no more….”

John Bunyan The Pilgrim's Progress

Source: The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), Part I, Ch. IX : Apollyon

Love, Life, Death, God

“Ridgway and I climbed a ladder inside the tower to the belfry, spoke to the sergeant observer there, and looked over the landscape on the German side of the river. Then Ridgway turned to the sergeant and at length asked him to put a mortar concentration on a point of woods a few hundred yards away on the German side. The sergeant, unperturbed, cranked his field telephone and spoke to someone at the mortar position in the fields behind the church. "Joe," he said, "remember the dead horse we used as an aiming point yesterday? This target is about fifty over and 100 left. Ten rounds when you're ready." The rounds were in the air almost at once, and their accuracy was impeccable; but I was far from happy about the way my sergeant had shortcut the standard methods of adjusting fire as prescribed in the mortar manual. Although an artilleryman and not the expert on infantry weapons which Ridgway was, I was sure the "dead horse" method of adjustment was not in the book.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: Swords and Plowshares (1972), p. 94

Happiness, Books, Way, Horse

“Without dynamic conquering spirit, even devotion to a divine cause will be of little avail In this hard world which is an arena for trial of strength with brute forces, mere goodness or noble virtues will not hold the field for a single moment. That is why we find that in spite of all the piety, goodness and devotion to God all through the past thousand years, we were trampled under the feet by foreign aggressors who, though total strangers to goodness and virtue, had a passion for heroic action and organised effort.”

M. S. Golwalkar book Bunch of Thoughts

M.S. Golwalkar : ‘Bunch of Thoughts’, third edition, 1996, p. 92 Quoted from Talreja, K. M. (2000). Holy Vedas and holy Bible: A comparative study. New Delhi: Rashtriya Chetana Sangathan.
Bunch of Thoughts

God, World, Effort, Passion

“That's the way beauty is found, by accident [referring to the Glass house he lived in, with the family]. You don't recognize it when you are looking for it, and you won't find it by looking in a magazine. It's right here in the moon, the stars, the horizon, the snow formations... In this house we can see all those things. But what I miss are the songs in the fields. No one sings them any more because everyone has become a little businessman. And there are no more plows. I love a plow more than anything else on a farm.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

1942 - 1948, A Painter in a Glass House' (1948)

Love, Family, Beauty, Way

“In the early twenty-first century farming had all but died out here. We got our food from the supermarket, and not everybody cared where the supermarket got it as long as it was there on the shelves. A few elderly dairymen hung on. Many let their fields and pastures go to scrub. Some sold out to what used to be called developers, and they'd put in five or ten poorly build houses. Now, in the new times, there were far fewer people, and many houses outside town were being taken down for their materials. Farming was back. That was the only way we got food.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 1, p. 5

People, Food, Way, Time

“You have to develop a thick skin in life. Its not in this field only. You might think of the ideal of the scientists, the ivory tower, the idealist. That's true of some. And I wouldn't guess as to what proportion. But there are some who are of that character, and there are some who are not.”

Jonas Salk (1914–1995) Inventor of polio vaccine

Academy of Achievement interview (1991)

Life, Thinking

“Probably even more than the architecture I'd be drawn to landscape. That's my first love, landscape... All kinds of landscape, if it's not cluttered up and vandalised. Yesterday we went out to Blenheim, and I love the flatness and the trees. I like all kinds. And where I'm from, the central valley of Virginia, is not one of the most exciting landscapes in the world, but it's one of the most beautiful. It's very beautiful because it has everything. It has mountains, there are streams, there are fields, beautiful trees. And architecture sits very well in it... And I've always lived in the south of Italy, because it’s more excitable. It's volcanic. The land affects people naturally, that's part of the characteristics, for me, of a people, in a sense.”

Cy Twombly (1928–2011) American painter

Source: 2000 - 2011, Cy Twombly, 2000', by David Sylvester (June 2000), p. 173

Love, People, World, Beauty

“It was found [in the 1970s], unexpectedly and without anyone really having a concept for it, that the rules of perturbation theory can be changed in a way that makes relativistic quantum gravity inevitable rather than impossible. The change is made by replacing point particles by strings. Then Feynman graphs are replaced by Riemann surfaces, which are smooth - unlike the graphs, which have singularities at interaction vertices. The Riemann surfaces can degenerate to graphs in many different ways. In field theory, the interactions occur at the vertices of a Feynman graph. By contrast, in string theory, the interaction is encoded globally, in the topology of a Riemann surface, any small piece of which is like any other. This is reminiscent of how non-linearities are encoded globally in twistor theory.”

Edward Witten (1951) American theoretical physicist

"The Past and Future of String Theory" in The Future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology: Celebrating Stephen Hawking's Contributions to Physics (2003) ed. G.W. Gibbons, E.P.S. Shellard & S.J. Rankin

Way, Change

Quotes about field page 11

Quotes about field
page 11