Quotes about final
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“The vision we have of conversational programming takes in much more than rapid turn around time and convenient debugging aids: our most interesting programs are never wrong and never final. […] What is new is the requirement to make variable in our languages what we had previously taken as fixed. I do not refer to new data classes now, but to variables whose values are programs or parts of programs, syntax or parts of syntax, and regimes of control.”

Alan Perlis (1922–1990) American computer scientist

The Synthesis of Algorithmic Systems, 1966

Time, Parting

“Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive, that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.”

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist

On Manners and Fashion
Essays on Education (1861)

“There are signs that the system of collective security established in San Francisco nearly 50 years ago [at the founding of the UN] is finally beginning to work as conceived. . . We are on the way to achieving a workable international system.”

Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1922–2016) 6th Secretary-General of the United Nations

Cited in the Awake! magazine 1996, 4/22; article: Is a World Without War Possible?
1990s

Way

“When I finally gathered, invented, stole, simplified, borrowed, and found a publisher for a clutch of reasonably foolproof recipes, I learned I had friends I hadn't known about—more proof that a mutual dislike can be quite as sound a basis for friendship as a mutual devotion.”

Peg Bracken (1918–2007) American writer

I Didn't Come Here to Argue, "My Feud With Food," page 22.

Friendship, Learning

“In recent years there has been increased interest in the effects of internal communication on decision processes. A number of hypotheses relating the bias in information to the final decision have been proposed. In this paper we discuss two laboratory experiments which were designed to test two such hypotheses. The first experiment tests the hypothesis that cost and sales estimations are made with the implicit assumption that a biased pay-off structure exists. The second experiment tests explicitly the effects of biased and unbiased pay-off structures on estimation within an organization. An analysis of the data for the two experiments is made and some implications for further research are drawn from the results.”

Richard Cyert (1921–1998) American economist

Richard Cyert, James G. March, William H. Starbuck. (1961) "Two experiments on bias and conflict in organisational estimation," Management Science, 254–64; Abstract

Communication, Decision

“This is the model we await from Kasimir Malevich. AFTER THE OLD TESTAMENT THERE CAME THE NEW AFTER THE NEW THE COMMUNIST AND AFTER THE COMMUNIST THERE FOLLOWS FINALLY THE TESTAMENT OF SUPREMATISM. [But in this text postponed in a far wider concept than Malevich meant his Suprematism ]”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

1915 - 1925, Suprematism' in World Reconstruction (1920)

“The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.”

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

Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 21, A Writers Decisions: Organizing a Long Article, p. 254.

William H. Starbuck (1934) American academic

Richard Cyert, James G. March, William H. Starbuck. (1961) "Two experiments on bias and conflict in organisational estimation," Management Science, 254–64; Abstract

Communication, Decision

“I had scarcely entered the room when I saw on my table an open book I had not put there. It was the works of Cardano. I did not intend to read it, but my gaze fell as though compelled on a story told by that philosopher. He writes that he was studying one night by candlelight when he saw two tall old men come in through the closed doors of his room. He asked them many questions, and they finally told him they were from the Moon; whereupon they disappeared.
I was so surprised, both by the book that had put itself on my table and by the page it was open to, that I took this chain of events for an inspiration from God, who was urging me to tell people that the Moon is a world.”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

The Other World (1657)

Men, God, People, Books

“You can have news that (Cristiano) Ronaldo went to the toilet three times a day, and that's the news. I make semi-finals and nothing.”

João Sousa (1989) Portuguese tennis player

On tennis' lack of public visibility in Portugal when compared with football, during 2015 ATP Dubai tournament. Source: From Novak Djokovic to Joao Sousa: ATP Dubai quotes of the week, Sport 360, 2 November 2015 http://sport360.com/article/dubai-tennis-championship/33436/novak-djokovic-joao-sousa-atp-dubai-quotes-week,

Time

“The offer to direct an animated version of Blue Dragon came in February of last year [2006]. Studio Pierrot approached me regarding it. I knew that Sakaguchi had been working on assembling staff to produce a game, although at the time Blue Dragon hadn't yet been formally announced. According to the materials, it was to be a fantasy world like Lord of the Rings, with a detailed world view and story. This may be my final anime, I'm a little worried (about it). There's incredible pressure, but at the same time, there's a sense of accomplishment — that it's worth doing. Blue Dragon will be a masterpiece, not simply because I'm working hard on it, but because the staff is expecting nothing less.”

Akira Toriyama (1955) manga artist and video game character designer

Last anime?

World, Game, Sense, Time

“It is the knowledge and experience of the Incarnation, the wisdom and warnings given by Jesus in the Gospels, and not least the Resurrection that in the final analysis are all that matters.”

Simon Conway Morris (1951) British palaeontologist

The Boyle lecture (2005)

Wisdom, Knowledge

“In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln accomplished something almost miraculous. That is to say, what he had to do was to fight off the challenge of Douglas from the Republican side and at the same time drive a wedge between Douglas and the Southern Democrats. I compared his achievement in that to Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign, where Jackson fought two federal armies, beat them both and kept them close to Washington while he joined Lee before Richmond for the final battle of the seven days. It was a case of technical and strategic cleverness and profundity that is, I think, perhaps almost unrivaled in world history.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

World, History, Thinking, Time

“Finally, let me explain why this De la Rosa World Summit is the last Neo-Tech summit -- and why that may be the best news. But, first, I want to hail whom I believe to be the most genuinely-happy spirit in today’s anticivilization -- a beautiful person who brings to us her happiness made from the love of life as we travel toward the Civilization of the Universe. Let us emblazon our own spirits by remembering this lovely beam of light -- this enduring beacon of joy, this amazingly-wonderful person -- our free-spirit Summit impresario, Rosa María Wallace. …What a woman!”

Frank R. Wallace (1932–2006) Philosopher, author, entrepreneur

Keynote Address for The Neo-Tech 2003 World Summit. Pax Neo-Tech. http://www.neo-tech.com/neotech/pax-b1/a3.php

Love, Life, World, Beauty

““Let me explain to you,” the Horned One said, “the nature of history.”
“What?”
“The first thing you need to know is that history happens almost exclusively in the dark… Here is your second lesson: History is that which cannot be prevented… Here is your third and final lesson: History is simply life with all the bits any sane person might care to experience left out.””

Michael Swanwick book Jack Faust

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 14, “Dreadnought” (pp. 246-256; extracts from a long narrative passage)

Life, History, Nature, Personality

“Knowledge is like the carrot, few know by looking at the green top that the best part, the orange part, is there. Like the carrot, if you don't work for it, it will wither away and rot. And finally, like the carrot, there are a great many donkeys and jackasses that are associated with it.”

Nasreddin (1208–1284) philosopher, Sufi and wise man from Turkey, remembered for his funny stories and anecdotes

Dan Keding, Elder Tales: stories of wisdom and courage from around the world (2008), ISBN 1591585945, p. 151

Knowledge, Parting

“On the trip to Russia with the Harlem Globetrotters, we were in Lenin Stadium, and they assigned a dressing room to the team. The players were getting dressed for one of their games. They were in rather close quarters. Remember, these were young kids-Wilt was 23. The others were his age. They were like kittens. You bump me, i'll bump you back. And before you know it, two of the guys set on Wilt. They started playfully pushing and shoving him. And finally one of his teammates hit Wilt a little too hard. He took these two guys, twisted each of their shirts, and lifted both of them off the ground. Each of these guys weighed over 200 pounds. It looked like he had two little crackers in his hands. I thought he was going to hit their heads together. It was an amazing demonstration of strength.”

Wilt Chamberlain (1936–1999) basketball player

Dr. Stan Lorber, team doctor on the Globetrotters' Russian trip
Strength

Age, Guy, Game

“It has been the White Race who has been the world builder, the maker of cities and commerce and continents. It is the White Man who is the sole builder of civilizations. It was he who build the Egyptian civilization, the great unsurpassed Roman civilization, the Greek civilization of beauty and culture, and who, after having been dealt a serious blow by a new Semitic religion, wallowed through the Dark Ages, finally extricated himself, and then build the great European civilization.”

Ben Klassen (1918–1993) American engineer, author and politician

Nature's Eternal Religion (1973), Ch. 2, Paragraph 2
Nature's Eternal Religion (1973)

Age, World, Religion, Beauty

“Lines formed at Ruby Pier - just as a line formed someplace else: Five people, waiting, in five chosen memories, for a little girl named Amy or Annie to grow and to love and to age and to die, and to finally have her questions answered - why she lived and what she lived for. And in that line now was a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the secret of heaven: That each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

Love, People, Secret, Age

“And now, at the end of the twentieth century, with the pressure of modern information and the advances of data processing, graphics is passing through a new and fundamental stage. The great difference between the graphic representation of yesterday, which was poorly dissociated from the figurative image, and the graphics of tomorrow, is the disappearance of the congential fixity of the image.
When one can superimpose, juxtapose, transpose, and permute graphic images in ways that lead to groupings and classings, the graphic image passes from the dead image, the 'illustration,' to the living image, the widely accessible research instrument it is now becoming. The graphic is no longer only the 'representation' of a final simplification, it is a point of departure for the discovery of these simplifications and the means for their justification. The graphic has become, by its manageability, an instrument for information processing.”

Jacques Bertin (1918–2010) French geographer and cartographer

Source: Semiology of graphics (1967/83), p. 4

Way, Departure, Dead

“The bill of grievances contained in the immortal Declaration of Independence could be extended by our own citizens in modern times, had they the stomach for it. … So important is the right and duty of the people to dispense with despotism, this great Declaration contains the sentence not once, but twice. In its final utterance, the choice of words does not call for the formation of a government. Rather, it calls for "new guards" which may or may not entail such a unit as an artificial agency.”

Robert LeFevre (1911–1986) American libertarian businessman

This Bread is Mine (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: American Liberty Press, (1960) pp. 363, 365. Source. http://alexpeak.com/twr/doi/

People, Time

“Almost everywhere and at all times the saying of St. Augustine aptly described the situation: "et paupera et inops est ecclesia — the Church is poor and helpless." The Church was powerful only when the state wanted it to be so or when pious laymen had a burning desire to make it so. In the Middle Ages especially the Church was sedulously oppressed: Popes were frequently imprisoned, made the pawns of secular rulers, persecuted, ridiculed, besieged, plundered, exiled, imprisoned and insulted. What about Canossa? People forget how the story ended, and the words of Gregory VII on his death-bed in exile: "Dilexi iustitiam et odi iniquitatem, propterea morior in exilio [I loved justice and hated injustice, therefore I die in exile]." Finally there came the Babylonian Captivity at Avignon. It is true that all of this looks quite different in the elementary schools of Kazachstan, in McKinley High and to our intellectuals, whose grasp of history is almost nil.
The situation altered very little in the nineteenth century. Once again there was a prisoner in the Vatican, Pius IX, whose body the mob yelling "Al fiume la carogna!" wanted to throw into the Tiber. This brings us to the twentieth century: Mexico City, Moabit, Dachau, Plötzensee, Auschwitz, Struthof, Carcel Modelo, Andrássy-út 66, Sremska Mitrovica, Vorkuta, Karaganda, Magadan, Lubyanka, Ocnele Mare — these are the modern Stations of the Cross of our clergy. (Pg 128)”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

The Timeless Christian (1969)

Love, Death, Hate, People

“Lamarck taught not only that species had been constantly undergoing changes from one geological period to another, but that there also had been a progressive advance of the organic world from the earliest to the latest times, from beings of the simplest to those of more and more complex structure and from the lowest instincts up to the highest, and, finally, from brute intelligence to the reasoning powers of Man. The improvement in the grade of being had been slow and continuous, and the human race itself was at length evolved out of the most highly organised and endowed of the inferior mammalia.”

Charles Lyell (1797–1875) British lawyer and geologist

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.20, p. 390-391

World, Intelligence, Change, Time

“The watchword is only one, categorical and challenging for everyone. It already flies across and lights the hearts from the Alps to the Indian Ocean: Winning! And we will win, in order to finally give a long period of peace with justice to Italy, to Europe, to the world. **From the declaration of war's announce, 10 June 1940”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

1940s

War, World, Peace, Justice

“We're adding a triple sign-off for all work done on the launch pad, on flight components, and flight critical GSE. You have a technician, a responsible engineer, and then quality assurance will sign the final, record all information, and take photographs of all the work that was done, and then make sure that all information is put into our quality assurance database, which is reviewed prior to launch.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science (2007)

“After centuries of relative silence and enforced acceptance, we adapted a technique of exposing the problem by direct and dramatic methods. We had confidence that when we awakened the nation to the immorality and evil of inequality, there would be an upsurge of conscience followed by remedial action. We knew that there were solutions and that the majority of the nation were ready for them. Yet we also knew that the existence of solutions would not automatically operate to alter conditions. We had to organize, not only arguments, but people in the millions for action. Finally we had to be prepared to accept all the consequences involved in dramatizing our grievances in the unique style we had devised.”

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

1960s, Family Planning - A Special and Urgent Concern (1966)

People, Confidence, Problem, Silence

“When I think of the artist Yves Klein, I think of those absolutists who preceded him by a generation or two, those who vanished, think of the boxer and Dadaist poet Arthur Cravan who in 1918 was supposed to leave Mexico to meet his new wife in Argentina but was never seen again; of Everett Ruess, the bohemian who might have become an artist or writer had he not disappeared into the canyons of Utah at the age of twenty in 1934, leaving behind a final signature carved into the rock: “Nemo” or “no one”; of the aviator Amelia Earhart who disappeared over the Pacific in 1937; of the pilot Antoine de Saint Exupéry who left behind several lapidary books before his plane too disappeared, in 1944, in the Mediterranean. They were all saddled with a desire to appear in the world and a desire to go as far as possible that was a will to disappear from it. In the ambition was a desire to make over the world as it should be; but in the disappearances was the desire to live as though it had been made over, to refashion oneself into a hero who disappeared not only into the sky, the sea, the wilderness, but into a conception of self, into legend, into the heights of possibility.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

Books, Age, World, Thinking

“At the first stages of negotiations, we will not release prisoners with blood on their hands. However, as part of a final agreement, I do not rule out this option. Offering hope for a better future is more important than grieving the past.”

Amir Peretz (1952) Israeli politician

Source: TV interview by Menashe Raz, Oded Shachar and Maya Bengal, on Channel 1, October 16, 2005.

Hope, Past, Future, Parting

“Finally, and beyond all else, ravished out of self into the Glory of God, without limit, incomprehensible, immense, we are to enjoy Him for ever and ever”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

Source: The Seven Steps of the Ladder of Spiritual Love, p. 144

God

“What happened was that Nigerians decided that they would like to put a final solution to Igbo problem. They unleashed a massacre. We tried to contain them; they unleashed a second wave more vicious than the previous one. I looked upon the situation, did the best I could for our people who were scattered all over Nigeria. I said okay, this is our boundary. If you can find your way back to within this area, whatever there is within this area would be shared amongst all of us. You have as much right here as anybody who happened to be here. That actually is another way of seeing the declaration of Biafra and they had a goal and aim in their flight. The other thing to bear in mind is that we didn’t really wage a war. What we did was resist Gowon’s coup d’état and I hope that he would enter the Guinness Book of Records as the person who has waged a coup longer than any body else because the whole three years, he was actually trying to legitimize his coup.”

Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu (1933–2011) Nigerian politician and military leader

9 July, 2001, as quoted by Rudolph Okonkwo, My Last Interview With Dim Chukwuemeka Ojukwu - Rudolf Okonkwo http://saharareporters.com/column/my-last-interview-dim-chukwuemeka-ojukwu-rudolf-okonkwo, Sahara Reporters (26 November, 2011)

War, People, Books, Hope

“Countless attempts have been made to no avail to construct a continuity from the supreme principle of the intellectual world to the finite world. The oldest and most frequent of these attempts is well known: the principle of emanation, according to which the outflowings from the godhead, in gradual increments and detachment from the ordinary source, losing their divine perfection until, in the end, they pass into the opposite (matter, privation), just as light is finally confined by darkness. P. 24”

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) German philosopher (idealism)

Philosophy and Religion 1804)

World, Light, Perfection

“Critics argue that Hayek mixed a number of ethical and political philosophies in constructing his system, positions that do not necessarily cohere one with another and all of which have been independently criticized. … There are evident tensions as well between his earlier advocacy of planning a framework of law and his later enthusiasm for the gradual evolution of judge-made common law. Finally, Hayek's opinion that judges operating under the common law tradition are bound to draw "conclusions that follow from the existing body of rules and the particular facts of the case" has struck more than one observer as naive. If one is judging his work against the standard of whether he provided a finished political philosophy, Hayek clearly did not succeed.”

Bruce Caldwell (economist) (1952) economic historian

Source: Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (2004), Ch. 14 : Journey’s End—Hayek’s Multiple Legacies

Law, Drawing

“We have to consider that the foods we ingest let a certain amount of soluble toxic substances dispersed in the environment into our bodies. These polluting substances are harmful if we breathe them in, but they are even more so if we ingest them. By consuming meat, we put ourselves precisely in that position, because such substances in the atmosphere fall back to Earth, and hence, onto the grass that, when eaten by cattle, introduces harmful substances into their adipose deposits and therefore into their flesh, and finally, onto our plates.”

Umberto Veronesi (1925–2016) Italian oncologist and politician

The First Day Without Cancer (2013)

Food, Grass

“And now, in the final irony, the fact that the US military power has solved the European problem, especially the "German problem", allows Europeans today, and Germans in particular, to believe that American military power, and the "strategic culture" that has created and sustained it, is outmoded and dangerous.”

Robert Kagan book Of Paradise and Power

Of Paradise and Power, p. 73

Problem

“Scripture tells us that 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.' Captain Humayun Khan of the United States Army showed in his final moments that he was filled and motivated by this love. His name will live forever in American memory, as an example of true American greatness.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

2010s, 2016, Statement regarding the Khan family (1 August 2016)

Love, Life, Motivation, Memory

“Reason will take us so far on firm ground. But then there must be the leap in the same direction, if the truth of those facts in religion which are only reached by faith are to be enjoyed... It is taking the road of evidence as far as it will go and then, with the energy provided by meditating on the character of God as Christ revealed him, making a leap of faith, only to land finally in a conviction as strong as proof can supply.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.79 [ellipsis added]

God, Truth, Faith, Religion

“And finally I must tell you that I was influenced [in Paris, c. 1912/13] by seeing the work of Picasso, whom I 'greatly' admire. I am not ashamed to speak of his influence, for I believe that it is better to be receptive to correction than to be satisfied with one's own imperfection, and to think that one is O so original! Just as so many painters think. And besides, I am surely totally different from Picasso, as one is generally wont to say.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote from Mondrian's letter to H. P. Bremmer, Paris 29 January 1914; ; as cited in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 81
1910's

Thinking

“It would let me protect the Earth from asteroids. In fact, for a small fee I would protect the Earth on a monthly basis, locating rocks that could be steered into the Earth and then not doing it if the cheque didn't bounce.
We could finally commodify sunlight. A large solar collector at the Earth Sun L1 would block all the light that otherwise falls on the unworthy and could be sold to those that deserve it (Litmus test is the same as with Operation Nice Planet You Have, Shame If Anything Were To Happen To It).”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

Livejournal comment http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/226271.html?thread=2139359#t2139359 2000s

Light, Sun

“An opinion can be argued with; a conviction is best shot. The logical end of a war of creeds is the final destruction of one, and Salammbo is the classical text-book instance.”

T. E. Lawrence (1888–1935) British archaeologist, military officer, and diplomat

The Evolution of A Revolt (1920)

War, Books

“Her point of view about student work was that of a social worker teaching finger-painting to children or the insane.
I was impressed with how common such an attitude was at Benton: the faculty—insofar as they were real Benton faculty, and not just nomadic barbarians—reasoned with the students, “appreciated their point of view”, used Socratic methods on them, made allowances for them, kept looking into the oven to see if they were done; but there was one allowance they never under any circumstances made—that the students might be right about something, and they wrong. Education, to them, was a psychiatric process: the sign under which they conquered had embroidered at the bottom, in small letters, Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?—and half of them gave it its Babu paraphrase of Can you wait upon a lunatic? One expected them to refer to former students as psychonanalysts do: “Oh, she’s an old analysand of mine.” They felt that the mind was a delicate plant which, carefully nurtured, judiciously left alone, must inevitably adopt for itself even the slightest of their own beliefs.
One Benton student, a girl noted for her beadth of reading and absence of coöperation, described things in a queer, exaggerated, plausible way. According to her, a professor at an ordinary school tells you “what’s so”, you admit that it is on examination, and what you really believe or come to believe has “that obscurity which is the privilege of young things”. But at Benton, where education was as democratic as in “that book about America by that French writer—de, de—you know the one I mean”; she meant de Tocqueville; there at Benton they wanted you really to believe everything they did, especially if they hadn’t told you what it was. You gave them the facts, the opinions of authorities, what you hoped was their own opinion; but they replied, “That’s not the point. What do you yourself really believe?” If it wasn’t what your professors believed, you and they could go on searching for your real belief forever—unless you stumbled at last upon that primal scene which is, by definition, at the root of anything….
When she said primal scene there was so much youth and knowledge in her face, so much of our first joy in created things, that I could not think of Benton for thinking of life. I suppose she was right: it is as hard to satisfy our elders’ demands of Independence as of Dependence. Harder: how much more complicated and indefinite a rationalization the first usually is!—and in both cases, it is their demands that must be satisfied, not our own. The faculty of Benton had for their students great expectations, and the students shook, sometimes gave, beneath the weight of them. If the intellectual demands were not so great as they might have been, the emotional demands made up for it. Many a girl, about to deliver to one of her teachers a final report on a year’s not-quite-completed project, had wanted to cry out like a child, “Whip me, whip me, Mother, just don’t be Reasonable!””

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 3, pp. 81–83

Life, Children, Books, Youth

“Sponge Bob Square Pants will begin airing in China in December so millions of factory workers can finally know what the hell they’re making. But Chinese censors have ordered the name of the show be changed to "CleaningpadCharlie RectangleShorts"”

Tina Fey (1970) American comedian, writer, producer and actress

citation needed

Hell, Change

“A system designed to protect individual liberty will have no punishments for any group and no privileges. Today, I think inner-city folks and minorities are punished unfairly in the war on drugs.
For instance, blacks make up 14% of those who use drugs, yet 36 percent of those arrested are Blacks and it ends up that 63% of those who finally end up in prison are Blacks. This has to change.
We don’t have to have more courts and more prisons. We need to repeal the whole war on drugs. It isn’t working. We have already spent over $400 billion since the early 1970s, and it is wasted money. Prohibition didn’t work. Prohibition on drugs doesn’t work. So we need to come to our senses. And, absolutely, it’s a disease. We don’t treat alcoholics like this. This is a disease, and we should orient ourselves to this. That is one way you could have equal justice under the law.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

GOP Presidential Forum at Morgan State University http://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/p/30724045/Stands-on-race-Paul-can-not-deny.aspx, September 27, 2007 2000s, 2006-2009

Money, War, Alcohol, Disease

“And then I awoke and yet continued to dream… painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement. I thought of my grand old friend Henri Rousseau [French Primitive painter, died in 1910] that Homer in the porter's lodge whose prehistoric dreams have sometimes brought me near the gods. I saluted him in my dream. Near him I saw William Blake, noble emanation of English genius...'Have confidence in your objects,' he said, 'do not let yourself be intimidated by the horror of the world. Everything is ordered and correct and must fulfill its destiny in order to attain perfection. Seek this path'... I awoke and found myself in Holland in the midst of boundless world turmoil. But my belief in the final release and absolution of all things, whether they please or torment, was newly strengthened. Peacefully I laid my head among the pillows… to sleep, and dream, again.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

1930s, On my Painting (1938)

God, World, Dreams, Confidence

“Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move-and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman book The Yellow Wall Paper

The Yellow Wallpaper (1891)

Change, Night

“That thing doesn’t care about you. It won’t reward you when you take risks. It is simply indifferent. That’s the fact about it that most never learn. They hate it and fear it and finally ignore it. Because of that. It would be easier if it hated us. Maybe even if it hunted us. But it doesn’t care. Remember.”

Gregory Benford (1941) Science fiction author and astrophysicist

Part 2 “Aleph”, Chapter 2 (p. 51)
Against Infinity (1983)

Hate, Fear, Learning, Indifference

“Eichmann, much less intelligent and without any education to speak of, at least dimly realized that it was not an order but a law which had turned them all into criminals. The distinction between an order and the Führer's word was that the latter's validity was not limited in time and space, which is the outstanding characteristic of the former. This is also the true reason why the Führer's order for the Final Solution was followed by a huge shower of regulations and directives, all drafted by expert lawyers and legal advisors, not by mere administrators; this order, in contrast to ordinary orders, was treated as a law. Needless to add, the resulting legal paraphernalia, far from being a mere symptom of German pedantry and thoroughness, served most effectively to give the whole business its outward appearance of legality.And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody, "Thou shalt not kill," even though man's natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler's land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: "Thou shalt kill," although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it — the quality of temptation.”

Hannah Arendt book Eichmann in Jerusalem

Source: Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Ch. VIII.

People, Education, Law, Intelligence

“In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain.”

William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer

Queer: A Novel (1985)

Sadness, Mountain

“Populations with diets with little or no saturated fat have little or no heart disease. The development of heart disease begins in childhood. Not only do unhealthy childhood diets high in saturated fat and low in the protective micronutrients found in unprocessed plant foods accelerate heart disease, but they promote the aging process, and create a cellular environment favorable for the development of cancer. To add insult to injury, much of the processed foods children eat are rich in trans fat, a man-made fat that is also linked to cancer and heart disease. We could not have designed a cancer-causing environment more effectively if we scientifically planned it. We feed our children a diet high in saturated fat, add lots of processed foods with those dangerous (man-made) trans fats, and combine it with an insufficient intake of unrefined plant foods to guarantee sufficient phytochemical deprivation, and presto, we have created a nation rich in autoimmune illnesses, allergies, obesity, diabetes, and finally, heart disease and cancer.”

Joel Fuhrman (1953) Family Physician and author

Source: Disease-Proof Your Child (2005), Ch. 1, pp. 11-12

Children, Age, Disease, Food

“What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as afield, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes—coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.”

Paul DiMaggio (1951) American sociologist

Source: "The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields," 1983, p. 147; abstract

Change, Dependency

“I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he'll become.”

Don DeLillo (1936) American novelist, playwright and essayist

'The American Strangeness: An Interview with Don DeLillo' by Gerald Howard, The Hungry Mind Review, #47 , 1997

“In the 19th century you had two important events in Europe: the unification of Italy and the unification of Germany, and both of these had a tremendous impact in the Arab world. They saw in this, a model for what they should be able to do, and they tried for a long time to do it. Nasserism is probably the final phase of that movement and, as you know, it failed. Now all the Arab states are independent but no union of Arab states has ever worked. They always fall apart through internal dissension.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Bernard Lewis (2006)

World, Time

“…your letter has arrived…Safdar Jang had reached such a state (of damnation) that his foot got afflicted with cancer. The more they removed the (affected) flesh from his foot, the worse it became. At last, they were forced to amputate his foot. Finally, he passed away in this piteous condition. It means that Allah’s wrath against the Marhatahs and the Jats has now become manifest, and the defeat and destruction of these people has been decided at the occult level.”

Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762) Indian muslim scholar

To Shah Muhammad Ashiq Pahalti Translated from the Urdu version of K.A. Nizami, Shãh Walîullah Dehlvî ke Siyãsî Maktûbãt, Second Edition, Delhi, 1969, pp. 125-26.
From his letters

People, Affliction

“What people do isn't determined by where they live. It happens to be their damned fault. They decided to watch TV instead of thinking when they were in high school. They decided to blow-off courses and drink beer instead of reading and trying to learn something. They decided to chicken out and be intolerant bastards instead of being openminded and, finally, they decided to go along with their buddies and do things that were terribly wrong when there was no reason they had to. Anyone who hurts someone else decides to hurt them, goes out of their way to do it…. The fact that it's hard to be a good person doesn't excuse going along and being an asshole. If they can't overcome their own fear of being unusual, it's not my fault, because any idiot ought to be able to see that if he just acts reasonably and makes a point of not hurting others, he'll be happier.”

Neal Stephenson book The Big U

Sarah
The Big U (1984)

People, Fear, School, Way

“So you can't take credit for your talents, but it really matters if you use them. You can't really be blamed for your weaknesses and your failings, but it matters if you correct them. Pride and shame don't make a lot of sense in the final analyses. But they were no fun anyway. These are isolating emotions. What does make sense are things like compassion and love: caring about well-being makes sense; trying to maximize your well-being and the well-being of others makes sense. There is still a difference between suffering and happiness, and love consists in wanting those we love to be happy. All of that still makes sense without free will.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris at Sydney Opera House Festival of Dangerous Ideas 2012, Discussion on Free Will http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM3raA1EwrI. 2010s

Love, Sense, Suffering, Happiness

“A thief enters a dark room and feels the various articles therein. He lays his hands upon a table perhaps, and saying "Not this" passes on. Next he come upon some other article — a chair, perhaps — and again saying "Not this" continues his search, till, leaving article after article, he finally lays his hands on the box containing the treasure. Then he exclaims "It is here!"”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

and there his search ends. Such, indeed is the search for Brahman.
Source: Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (1960), p. 733

Feeling, Search, Box

“The debate regarding which individual factor, among the three key factors producing the environmental crisis, causes more damage - the size of the human population on the planet, excessive consumption of resources or unequal/ unjust distribution of resources among countries [the wealthier countries consume much more resources than poorer countries] - is like a debate about which contributes more to a triangle, the base or the ribs of the triangle. You can not separate the three factors. If we analyze the numbers over a relatively longer time interval, we will conclude that the size of the population has a bigger impact than consumption. On the other hand, consumption and unequal distribution are also important aspects. If we do not change these three factors all at the same time, the quality of our life will change dramatically. Today humanity is delivering a serious blow to nature, but it is clear that nature will deliver the final blow.”

Paul R. Ehrlich (1932) American scientist and environmentalist

Paul Ehrlich, People should produce far fewer children, or expect the worst http://www.haaretz.co.il/1.1875624 (Dec. 2012), Haaretz

Life, Nature, Change, Time

“The Duke (Cesare) is a good-natured man, but he cannot tolerate affronts. I have often told him that Rome is a free city, and that everyone may write and speak as he pleases. Evil is even spoken of me, but I let it pass." The Duke replied: "Rome is accustomed to write and speak; it is well, but I will teach such people repentance."* The Pope finally reminded him how much he himself had forgiven, and especially at the time of Charles VIII's invasion, so many cardinals, whom the King himself had called his betrayers. "I could," he said, "have sentenced the Vice-Chancellor and Cardinal Vincula to death, but I did not wish to harm anyone, and I have forgiven fourteen great nobles.”

Pope Alexander VI (1431–1503) pope of the Catholic Church 1492-1503

Report of the Ferrarese ambassador, Beltrando Costabili to Ercole I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, February 1, 1502. Archives of Modena: As quoted in History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (1900), Ferdinand Gregorovius, George Bell & Sons, London, Volume 7, Part 2 (1497-1503), p. 486. http://books.google.com/books?id=kW1OAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA486&dq=%22often+told+him+that+Rome+is+a+free+city%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=PQRlUeiiBIPA9QT4s4H4CA&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22often%20told%20him%20that%20Rome%20is%20a%20free%20city%22&f=false See also L. Pastor, History of the Popes, vol.6, p. 12. http://books.google.com/books?id=hk1DAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA112&dq=%22told+him+that+Rome+is+a+free+city%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ojZlUeS7Dob49QTTn4HQBw&ved=0CEUQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%22told%20him%20that%20Rome%20is%20a%20free%20city%22&f=false. (Commonweal writes: “Whatever his faults, the Pope appears to have been of a forgiving and clement disposition, pardoning foes when he had them in his power, and becoming reconciled with those who had bitterly opposed him. With Savonarola — pulpit methods, by the way, were scarcely as novel and extraordinary then as our author (Peter de Roo) thinks — Alexander VI dealt on the whole rather patiently, more so, indeed, than our author, who is hardly fair to the friar.” -- Commonweal (1924), Commonweal Publishing Company, volume 1, p. 185. https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&hl=en&q=Whatever+his+faults%2C+the+Pope+appears+to+have+been+of+a+forgiving+and+clement+disposition&btnG=#hl=en&tbm=bks&sclient=psy-ab&q=%22Whatever+his+faults%2C+the+Pope+appears+to+have+been+of+a+forgiving+and+clement+disposition%22&oq=%22Whatever+his+faults%2C+the+Pope+appears+to+have+been+of+a+forgiving+and+clement+disposition%22&gs_l=serp.3...1287.1287.1.1562.1.1.0.0.0.0.79.79.1.1.0...0.0...1c.1.8.psy-ab.VnzmdIrn1SQ&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&bvm=bv.44990110,d.eWU&fp=5b7686e7449457e7&biw=1294&bih=770)

Death, People, Nature, Evil

“Certain ways of life, especially leisureliness and contemplation, are said to be marked by “self-sufficiency” (Aristotle). Here there is a double connotation of not needing much from others to carry on such a life, and of the life itself having the character of finality. Both connotations suggest forms of independence. Not needing much from others means being independent of them. And “finality” implies that the activity of thinking, or, more generally, of being leisurely has intrinsic worth. Thus the leisurely person is independent in the sense that the value of his leisure does not depend on any consequence it may have, for example, the consequence that it restores his energy for the next day’s work.”

Lawrence Haworth (1926) American-Canadian philosopher

Lawrence Haworth, Autonomy: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology and Ethics (Yale University Press: 1986), pp. 12-13.

Life, Way, Thinking, Sense

“Doing nothing is not the absence of a policy; it is, in fact, the adoption of one. "Neutrality" favors the side with the biggest arsenal. "Nonintervention" is a form of interference. If you will the end—and President Barack Obama has finally said that Qaddafi should indeed go—then to that extent you will the means…The immediate task is therefore to limit the amount of damage Qaddafi can do and sharply minimize the number of people he can murder. Whatever the character of the successor system turns out to be, it can hardly be worsened if we show it positive signs of friendship and solidarity…I am sure I am not alone in feeling rather queasy about being forced to watch the fires in Tripoli and Benghazi as if I were an impotent spectator. Indifference of this kind to the lives of others can have a coarsening effect. It can lower one's threshold of sympathy. If protracted unduly, it might even become brutalizing.”

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

2011-03-07
American Inaction Favors Qaddafi
Slate
1091-2339
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/03/american_inaction_favors_qaddafi.html: On the 2011 Libyan civil war
2010s, 2011

Friendship, People, Feeling, Indifference

“For I had expected always
Some brightness to hold in trust,
Some final innocence
To save from dust”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"What I Expected Was" (l. 25–28). . .

“The idea for [his sculpture] 'The Warrior' came to me at the end of 1952 or very early in 1953. It was evolved from a pebble I found on the seashore in the summer of 1952, and which reminded me of the stump of a leg, amputated at the hip. Just as Leonardo says somewhere in his notebooks that a painter can find a battle scene in the lichen marks on a wall, so this gave me the start of The Warrior idea. First I added the body, leg and one arm and it became a wounded warrior, but at first the figure was reclining. A day or two later I added a shield and altered its position and arrangement into a seated figure and so it changed from an inactive pose into a figure which, though wounded, is still defiant... The head has a blunted and bull-like power but also a sort of dumb animal acceptance and forbearance of pain... The figure may be emotionally connected (as one critic has suggested) with one’s feelings and thoughts about England during the crucial and early part of the last war. The position of the shield and its angle gives protection from above. The distance of the shield from the body and the rectangular shape of the space enclosed between the inside surface of the shield and the concave front of the body is important... This sculpture is the first single and separate male figure that I have done in sculpture and carrying it out in its final large scale was almost like the discovery of a new subject matter; the bony, edgy, tense forms were a great excitement to make... Like the bronze 'Draped Reclining Figure' of 1952-3 I think 'The Warrior' has some Greek influence, not consciously wished…”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote from Moore's letter, (15 Jan. 1955); as cited in Henry Moore on Sculpture: a Collection of the Sculptor's Writings and Spoken Words, ed. Philip James, MacDonald, London 1966, p. 250
1940 - 1955

Pain, War, Feeling, Idea

“Business leaders, of course, had long been working to "merchandise" themselves through the appropriation of religion. In organizations such as Spiritual Mobilization, the prayer breakfast groups, and the Freedoms Foundation, they had linked capitalism and Christianity and, at the same time, likened the welfare state to godless paganism. After decades of work, these businessmen believed their efforts had finally paid off with the election of Dwight Eisenhower.”

Kevin M. Kruse (1972) American historian

Source: One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (2015), p. 86

Religion, Business, Effort, Freedom

“The concepts of purposive behavior and teleology have long been associated with a mysterious, self-perfecting or goal-seeking capacity or final cause, usually of superhuman or super-natural origin. To move forward to the study of events, scientific thinking had to reject these beliefs in purpose and these concepts of teleological operations for a strictly mechanistic and deterministic view of nature. This mechanistic conception became firmly established with the demonstration that the universe was based on the operation of anonymous particles moving at random, in a disorderly fashion, giving rise, by their multiplicity, to order and regularity of a statistical nature, as in classical physics and gas laws. The unchallenged success of these concepts and methods in physics and astronomy, and later in chemistry, gave biology and physiology their major orientation. This approach to problems of organisms was reinforced by the analytical preoccupation of the Western European culture and languages. The basic assumptions of our traditions and the persistent implications of the language we use almost compel us to approach everything we study as composed of separate, discrete parts or factors which we must try to isolate and identify as potential causes. Hence, we derive our preoccupation with the study of the relation of two variables. We are witnessing today a search for new approaches, for new and more comprehensive concepts and for methods capable of dealing with the large wholes of organisms and personalities.”

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

L.K. Frank (1948) "Foreword". In L. K. Frank, G. E. Hutchinson, W. K. Livingston, W. S. McCulloch, & N. Wiener, Teleological mechanisms. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sc., 1948, 50, 189-96; As cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) "General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications". p. 16-17

Law, Behavior, Search, Fashion

“Apparently an "art"—which almost by definition cannot be put into words—is probably best communicated by approaching it from many sides and doing so repeatedly, hoping thereby students will finally master enough of the art, or if you wish, style, to significantly increase their future contributions to society.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)

Hope, Art, Communication, Future

“We can each sit and wait to die, from the very day of our births. Those of us who do not do so, choose to ask--and to answer--the two questions that define every conscious creature: What do I want? and What will I do to get it? Which are, finally, only one question: What is my will? Caine teaches us that the answer is always found within our own experience; our lives provide the structure of the question, and a properly phrased question contains its own answer.”

Matthew Stover book Blade of Tyshalle

(XIV.3) Del Rey, p. 472
Blade of Tyshalle (2001)

Birth, Question, Waiting

“I felt aimless, but it felt fine. (This is not what I wanted to feel though. I wanted to feel a great absence, a longing, a distance that would finally inspire.)”

Why the lucky stiff American computer programmer

Collected PDFs (2013)

Feeling

“Ultimately, the struggle of the fundamentalists is against two enemies, secularism and modernism. The war against secularism is conscious and explicit, and there is by now a whole literature denouncing secularism as an evil neo-pagan force in the modern world and attributing it variously to the Jews, the West, and the United States. The war against modernity is for the most part neither conscious nor explicit, and is directed against the whole process of change that has taken place in the Islamic world in the past century or more and has transformed the political, economic, social, and even cultural structures of Muslim countries. Islamic fundamentalism has given an aim and a form to the otherwise aimless and formless resentment and anger of the Muslim masses at the forces that have devalued their traditional values and loyalties and, in the final analysis, robbed them of their beliefs, their aspirations, their dignity, and to an increasing extent even their livelihood.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Roots of Muslim Rage (1990)

War, World, Literature, Evil

“Here in the shadow of death it is hard
To utter the final word.
I'll only say, then,
"Without saying."
Nothing more,
Nothing more.”

Dokyo Etan (1642–1721) Son of Sanada Nobuyuki

Japanese Death Poems. Compiled by Yoel Hoffmann. ISBN 978-0-8048-3179-6.

Death

“Tin soldiers and Nixon's comin'.
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drummin'.
Four dead in Ohio.”

Neil Young (1945) Canadian singer-songwriter

Ohio, from 4 Way Street (1971)
Song lyrics, With Crosby, Stills & Nash

Summer, Dead

“When one begins looking for influences one finds them by the score. I haven't thought much about my own, not enough anyway; I hazard that the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech — and something of Dickens' love for bravura — have something to do with me today; but I wouldn't stake my life on it. Likewise, innumerable people have helped me in many ways; but finally, I suppose, the most difficult (and most rewarding) thing in my life has been the fact that I was born a Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with this reality.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

Truce, by the way, is the best one can hope for.
Autobiographical Notes (1952)

Love, Life, People, Hope

“[About Edith Stein] I see her groping, wonder-filled prayer, which in the beginning resembles a conversation she is conducting with herself and is very managed. It is half like a question she puts to herself without knowing exactly what she means; it may be that the step she takes does not need to be completed by her; the question does not need to be perfectly articulated; perhaps God would be able to intervene in the middle of her step, in order to make his presence known and answer her question in a much more profound way than she herself would have expected or even would have been capable of expecting. And God truly answers. She prays more and more and finally receives a victorious certainty and rejoices. From this moment of victorious certainty on, everything is perfectly simple and unambiguous. She will follow the path God shows to her; she belongs to him; she has rediscovered her childlike cheerfulness, which has increased and become clearly manifest through love and faith.”

Adrienne von Speyr (1902–1967) Swiss doctor and mystic

Book of All Saints (1966)

Love, God, Faith, Way

“One widely articulated paradigm was based on the assumption that the end of the Cold War meant the end of significant conflict in global politics and the emergence of one relatively harmonious world. The most widely discussed formulation of this model was "the "end of history" thesis advanced by Francis Fukuyama. "We may be witnessing, Fukuyama argued, "… the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." … The future will be devoted not to great exhilarating struggles over ideas but rather to resolving mundane economic and technical problems. And, he concluded rather sadly, it will all be rather boring.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Ch. 1: The New Era in World Politics, § 3 : Other Worlds?, p. 31

War, World, Democracy, History

“Some may wish to argue that Hayek was simply born with a sort of natural pessimism or cynicism, and that this generated his long standing belief in the inherent limitations that humans face when they try to intervene in social phenomena. Perhaps. But it is also possible that this view was the product of his having come of age during the final collapse of an already broken-down empire, of having experienced the multiple forms of disaster that surrounded postwar Vienna and enveloped interwar central Europe, and of having witnessed the failures of various high-minded social experiments to achieve anything like what their exponents had promised. In bearing witness to so much tragedy Hayek was again very much a part of the larger Austrian tradition. His famed ‘‘epistemic pessimism’’ may well have been another result of that larger experience.”

Bruce Caldwell (economist) (1952) economic historian

"Hayek and the Austrian tradition", in Edward Feser(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek (2006)

Age, Failure, Nature, Parting

“The acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching, and will give us experience for the attack of Halifax the next, and the final expulsion of England from the American continent.”

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

Statement during an early stage of the War of 1812, in a letter to William Duane (4 August 1812)
1810s

“Being fresh out of college, I found myself in the typically feminine dilemma of carving out for myself in a male world a way of life appropriate to a young woman of taste, cultivation and sensitivity. There must be nothing crass—like work. However, a girl must survive. So, after a cool appraisal of the social scene, I finally hit upon an excellent-paying occupation, challenging to the ingenuity, dealing on one's own terms with people and affording independence, flexible hours, great stability and, most important, a large amount of leisure time, an occupation highly appropriate to female sensibilities. I contemplate my good fortune as I begin work for the day: "Pardon me, Sir, do you have fifteen cents?"”

Valerie Solanas (1936–1988) American radical feminist and writer. Attempted to assassinate Andy Warhol.

"A Young Girl's Primer" (1966)

Life, People, World, Way

“[Swami Sri Yukteswar to Paramahansa Yogananda, before whom he appeared in the flesh on June 19, 1936, more than three months after his mahasamadhi (a great yogi’s final conscious exit from the body)] Grieve not for me…. You and I shall smile together, so long as our two forms appear different in the maya-dream of God. Finally we shall merge as one in the Cosmic Beloved; our smiles shall be His smile, our unified song of joy vibrating throughout eternity to be broadcast to God-tuned souls!”

Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936) Indian yogi and guru

Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

God, Smile, Dreams, Soul

“More and more of the flow was diverted from production into the political mechanism. Whatever elements in motion compose a stream of energy, enough must go through to complete the circuit and renew production. Water running in an aqueduct to turn a millwheel is a stream of energy; or electricity going through insulated wires; or goods in process from raw materials to finished product and conveyed by a system of transport. If the water channel is pierced with many small openings en route; or electricity taken off by more and more outlets; or the goods expropiated piecemeal at each stage of the process, finally not enough will go through for maintenance of the system. In the energy system comprised in an exchange of goods, the producers and processors have to get back enough to enable them to keep on producing and working up the raw materials and to provide transport…”

Isabel Paterson (1886–1961) author and editor

Source: The God of the Machine (1943), p. 39

Water

“Speaking of things that'll make your head explode, "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story" finally made it to the drive-in”

Joe Bob Briggs (1953) American film critic, writer, and actor; alter ego of John Bloom

Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story review http://www.joebobbriggs.com/drivein/1993/dragonthebruceleestory.htm

“In November 1944 the Nazi authorities finally decided to deport my labor unit from Budapest to an Austrian concentration camp, where most of my comrades eventually perished. But I was lucky enough to make my escape from the railway station in Budapest, just before our train left for Austria. Then a Jesuit father I had known gave me refuge in the cellar of their monastery.”

John Harsanyi (1920–2000) hungarian economist

"John C. Harsanyi - Biographical," 1994

Training

“Remember Marxism? It used to be a sour sort of fun to tease Marxists about the contradictions in some of their pet ideas. The revolution of the proletariat was inevitable, good Marxists believed, but if so, why were they so eager to enlist us in their cause? If it was going to happen anyway, it was going to happen with or without our help. But of course the inevitability that Marxists believe in is one that depends on the growth of the movement and all its political action. There were Marxists working very hard to bring about the revolution, and it was comforting to them to believe that their success was guaranteed in the long run. And some of them, the only ones that were really dangerous, believed so firmly in the rightness of their cause that they believed it was permissible to lie and deceive in order to further it. They even taught this to their children, from infancy. These are the "red-diaper babies," children of hardline members of the Communist Party of America, and some of them can still be found infecting the atmosphere of political action in left-wing circles, to the extreme frustration and annoyance of honest socialists and others on the left.Today we have a similar phenomenon brewing on the religious right: the inevitability of the End Days, or the Rapture, the coming Armageddon that will separate the blessed from the damned in the final day of Judgment. Cults and prophets proclaiming the imminent end of the world have been with us for several millennia, and it has been another sour sort of fun to ridicule them the morning after, when they discover that their calculations were a little off. But, just as with the Marxists, there are some among them who are working hard to "hasten the inevitable," not merely anticipating the End Days with joy in their hearts, but taking political action to bring about the conditions they think are the prerequisites for that occasion. And these people are not funny at all. They are dangerous, for the same reason that red-diaper babies are dangerous: they put their allegiance to their creed ahead of their commitment to democracy, to peace, to (earthly) justice — and to truth. If push comes to shove, some of the are prepared to lie and even to kill…”

Daniel Dennett book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Breaking the Spell (2006)

Children, People, Truth, Lie

“Basically I hate categorical labels. As a young artist I already was very clear about this — that 'objectification' is not the final aim of art. For there are greater things than the object. The greatest thing is the human mind.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

As quoted in The Artist's Voice : Talks With Seventeen Modern Artists (1962) by Katharine Kuh, p. 118
1960s

Hate, Art

“One day I said to myself that it would be better to get rid of all that—melody, rhythm, harmony, etc. This was not a negative thought and did not mean that it was necessary to avoid them, but rather that, while doing something else, they would appear spontaneously. We had to liberate ourselves from the direct and peremptory consequence of intention and effect, because the intention would always be our own and would be circumscribed, when so many other forces are evidently in action in the final effect.”

Christian Wolff (1934) American composer

quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

Appearance

“Galileo was NOT imprisoned for “speaking against the consensus”. He was imprisoned for heresy against the church. He was imprisoned for life by the Holy Inquisition, who forced him to recant his truth. Three hundred and fifty years later, in 1992, the Catholic Church finally formally dismissed the charges against him, admitting Galileo’s views were correct after all.”

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

Patheos, Orwellian Legislative Duplicity on HB 1485 http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2017/05/05/orwellian-legislative-duplicity-hb-1485/ (May 5, 2017)

Life, Truth

“‘Justice,’” he said, his breath coming out raggedly as he quoted another Nobel laureate—at that precise moment, he couldn’t remember which one—“‘is always delayed and finally done only by mistake.’”

Robert J. Sawyer book Frameshift

Source: Frameshift (1997), Chapter 41 (p. 326; apparently quoting George Bernard Shaw)

Justice, Quotes

“He wanted to tell me that he thought he finally knew why Christ said to call no man Fool. Christ had said it, Seymour thought I'd want to know, because there are no fools. Dopes, yes — fools, no.”

Jerome David Salinger book Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Seymour: An Introduction (1959)

Fools, Christ

“As we divided natural philosophy in general into the inquiry of causes, and productions of effects: so that part which concerneth the inquiry of causes we do subdivide according to the received and sound division of causes. The one part, which is physic, inquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes; and the other, which is metaphysic, handleth the formal and final causes.”

Francis Bacon book The Advancement of Learning

Book VII, 3
The Advancement of Learning (1605)

Nature, Parting

“The Vietnam War is behind us but not entirely forgotten. Like our Civil War, Vietnam holds a fascination for many Americans, and I suspect that this will grow rather than diminish as research continues and new works are published about the war. For the older military professionals who served during the Vietnam War and for the still older career military men who were perplexed by it, my advice is to look at Vietnam in a broader historical perspective. For the young military professional who did not serve in Vietnam, my advice is to learn all you can about the war and try to understand it. Finally for those military men now serving at the top military positions, as well as those who will rise to those positions later, my advice is to do all you can to improve the civilian-military interface in the highest councils of our government. This is the best way I know to better the chances that our civilian leaders truly understand the risks, costs, and probable outcomes of military actions before they take the nation to war. The United States cannot afford to put itself again at such enormous strategic disadvantage as we found ourselves in in Vietnam. How deep Vietnam has stamped its imprint on American history has yet to be determined. In any event, I am optimistic enough to believe that we Americans can and will learn and profit from our experience.”

Bruce Palmer Jr. (1913–2000) United States Army Chief of Staff

Closing words, p. 209-210
The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (1984)

Men, War, Way, History

“The final dive of the ship, as the bow lay submerged and the stern rose out of the water, was truly horrendous for all who witnessed it.”

Steve Turner (1949) British writer

Source: The Band That Played On (Thomas Nelson, 2011), pp. 153-154

Water

“The true key to the declension of the Roman empire — which is not to be found in all Gibbon's immense work — may be stated in two words: — the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the national character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

15 August 1833
Table Talk (1821–1834)

“Myspace is a great way to keep in touch with friends whom you don't care enough about to actually have a conversation with. Why bother calling to say 'How are you?' when you can just surf their page and post an mpeg of a guy farting on his cat?
[Myspace is] this website where young people can post pictures and info about themselves for anyone to see. When I first heard about it, I thought to myself, 'Finally a Yellow Pages for sex offenders. Why didn't I think of that?'
The most popular (American Idol) contestants have been: white people that sound black, young people that sound old, and straight guys that sound gay.
The final five are exactly like The Breakfast Club: There's the rebel(Chris Daughtry), the princess (Katharine McPhee), the nerd (Elliot Yamin), the weirdo (Paris Bennett)… and of course, the principal (Taylor Hicks). What? He's old!
(Ryan Phillippe & Reese Witherspoon) Broke up, (Kid Rock & Pamela Anderson) broke up, (Vince Vaughn & Jennifer Aniston) broke up, (Kate Moss & Pete Doherty) coked up. They said it wouldn't last; not the marriage, the stash. 007,.08, 1.2, 215. Came out, came out, (Tom Brady and Bridget Moynihan) came in, (Brady and Gisele Bündchen) came in. Hates Jews, went to rehab, loves Jews; hates gays, went to rehab, now loves gays; hates blacks, didn't go to rehab, still hates blacks. 'Father Knows Best', (with Britney Spears) 'Mad About You,' (Spears without panties) 'Leave It to Beaver.' New father, new father, new father? R. I. P., D. U. I., P. O. W. 'You're a hypocrite,' 'you're fat,' 'you're rude,' 'you're ugly,' whoa, whoa, whoa, guys. Stop fighting, you're both right. Booze, pot, Vicodin, crack, booze, pot, Vicodin, and crack.”

David Spade (1964) American stand-up comedian

The Showbiz Show with David Spade

Love, Hate, Marriage, People

“The scientist who considers himself absolutely "objective" and believes that he can free himself from the compulsion of the "merely" subjective should try — only in imagination of course — to kill in succession a lettuce, a fly, a frog, a guineapig, a cat, a dog, and finally a chimpanzee. He will then be aware how increasingly difficult murder becomes as the victim's level of organisation rises. The degree of inhibition against killing each one of these beings is a very precise measure for the considerably different values that we cannot help attributing to lower and higher forms of life. To any man who finds it equally easy to chop up a live dog and a live lettuce I would recommend suicide at his earliest convenience!”

Konrad Lorenz book On Aggression

Source: On Aggression (1963), Ch. XII : On the Virtue of Scientific Humility

Life, Dogs, Imagination, Cats

“I wanted to be a novelist and a newspaper man… I went to Antioch College and majored in English, at least in the beginning, with the intention of doing something like that…. Antioch had a co-op program so I went to work for the New York Post as a copyboy when I decided I didn't want to be a newspaper man; it was fun, but it wasn't practical. After a while I shifted into philosophy as a major, but I never had any undergraduate training at all in anthropology and, indeed, very little social science outside of economics. I had a lot of economics but nothing else. Anthropology wasn't even taught at Antioch then, although it is now. And except for a political science course or two and lots of economics, I didn't have any social sciences. So I was in literature for at least half the time I was there, the first couple of years, and then I shifted to philosophy, partly because of the influence of a terrific teacher and partly because in a small college you can run out of courses. 'Men I got interested in the same sort of thing I'm interested in now: values, ideas, and so on. Finally, one of my professors said, "Why don't you think about anthropology?"”

Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) American anthropologist

That was the first time I had thought seriously about being an anthropologist, and then I began to think about it and I went to Harvard and so on.
"Clifford Geertz on Ethnography and Social Construction", 1991

Men, Literature, Idea, Thinking

“Cash: I went into a coma and I was there for 12 days. They all thought I was dying and they couldn't diagnose what was wrong with me. They finally came up with a diagnosis of Shy-Drager syndrome. It was few months later they realized I didn't have that so it was Parkinson's. And then it was not that. Then finally it was autonomic neuropathy. … And I'm pretty well resolved to the fact that that's what it is. And it's a slow process of the nerve endings.
King: No cure?
Cash: No, I don't think so. But that's all right. There's no cure for life either.”

Johnny Cash (1932–2003) American singer-songwriter

CNN interview (2002)

Life, Thinking

“As told in the final section of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour Christmas CD:
Jeff Foxworthy: Tell 'em the one you did.
Engvall: Aw, why'd you have to bring that up?
Foxworthy: Come on, share that one with the group.
Engvall: Alright. Well, nobody's immune from this, not even me.
Foxworthy: Not even Brainiac here.
Engvall: I'm in the car park at the mall, and there's this guy with a coat hanger inside his window… and I could not stop myself. I said, "You lock your keys in your car?"”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

Driver: No, just washed it, gonna hang it up to dry (dumbass). Here's your sign.
Here's Your Sign, "Here's MY Sign..."

Cars, Guy, Christmas

“In his Gospel, St. John, through long and deep contemplation, acknowledges Jesus to be the Logos of God. In his epistles he points entirely away from himself toward Christ. Finally, in the Apocalypse, in the vision of the Lamb of God, Old and New Testaments are united, and the whole drama of salvation is summed up.”

Hans Urs Von Balthasar (1905–1988) Swedish Catholic theologian

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Our Task https://books.google.it/books?id=yEjT5yVci2gC&pg=PT0, trans. John Saward, Ignatius Press, 1994. Our Task: A Report and a Plan (1984)

God, Christ

“Finally.... I will have finished the paintings for my uncle. I have completely reworked them since my last letter [to his mother, 5 May 1865]; originally I had included a mass of details, which, from the distance they were intended to be viewed, had a very bad effect. I have worked at breakneck speed for two weeks, and now I am rather pleased, at least with one of them.”

Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870) French painter

Quote from Bazille's letter to his mother, c. 18/25 August, 1865; as cited in Impressionnism, Gary Tinterow, Henri Loyrette; Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994, p. 329
1861 - 1865

Painting, Speed