Quotes about finding
page 57

“No one can learn to love by following a manual, and no one can learn to write by following a course. I’m not telling you to seek out other writers but to find people with different skills from yourself, because writing is no different from any other activity done with joy and enthusiasm.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Aleph (2011)

Love, People, Learning, Joy

“Rachel Maddow: Do you think that a private business has the right to say we don't serve black people?Rand Paul: I'm not in favor of any discrimination of any form; I would never belong to any club that excluded anybody for race. We still do have private clubs in America that can discriminate based on race. But I think what's important about this debate is not written into any specific "gotcha" on this, but asking the question: what about freedom of speech? Should we limit speech from people we find abhorrent? Should we limit racists from speaking? I don't want to be associated with those people, but I also don't want to limit their speech in any way in the sense that we tolerate boorish and uncivilized behavior because that's one of the things freedom requires is that we allow people to be boorish and uncivilized, but that doesn't mean we approve of it. I think the problem with this debate is by getting muddled down into it, the implication is somehow that I would approve of any racism or discrimination, and I don't in any form or fashion.I do defend and believe that the government should not be involved with institutional racism or discrimination or segregation in schools, busing, all those things. But had I been there, there would have been some discussion over one of the titles of the civil rights. And I think that's a valid point, and still a valid discussion, because the thing is, is if we want to harbor in on private businesses and their policies, then you have to have the discussion about: do you want to abridge the First Amendment as well. Do you want to say that because people say abhorrent things — you know, we still have this. We're having all this debate over hate speech and this and that. Can you have a newspaper and say abhorrent things? Can you march in a parade and believe in abhorrent things, you know?”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

The Rachel Maddow Show
MSNBC
2010-05-19
Rand Paul on 'Maddow' fallout begins
Maddow Blog
MSNBC
2010-05-20
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/05/20/4313688-rand-paul-on-maddow-fallout-begins
2010-11-17
2010s

Hate, People, School, Way

“The only difference [between promoting a book and a CD] is when I do the readings. My fans are out there in full force, but it's nice to have all the kids there as well. I really love this evolution of writing. Writing is my core, and writing the book was like writing a really long love song. I have 31 pages to elaborate instead of three minutes. And my target audience, although it is children, I don't talk down to them. I want the parents to find it interesting. [Children] sit in my lap. I love it. I've always tried to turn an arena into an intimate setting. So, if I'm already in an intimate setting... You get to talk to a few hundred people, and you get to really bring them in, to have an exchange with them that often doesn't occur on the stage.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

Reuters (November 17, 2006)
2007, 2008

Love, Children, People, Books

“In my conversation, I shall talk and act as I please. Still I am always aware, when speaking in public, that there are those present who are disposed to find fault with this people, and to try to raise a prejudice against them; and they will pick up isolated words and sentences, and put them together to suit themselves, and send forth a garbled version to prejudice the world against us. Such a course I never care anything about; for I have frequently said, spoken words are but wind, and when they are spoken are gone; consequently I take liberties in speaking which I do not allow when I commit my sentiments to writing.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses 2:179 (February 18, 1855)
Young predicts that people will take his written words and rearrange them to suit themselves.
1850s

People, World

“A smart man isn't necessarily one who knows all the answers, but knows where to find them.”

Kenny Rogers

Television Show "Kenny Rogers - Going Home"

“We have the greatest admiration for this learned doctor: with what scientific stoicism he walks through the land of wonders, unwondering; like a wise man through some huge, gaudy, imposing Vauxhall, whose fire-works, cascades and symphonies, the vulgar may enjoy and believe in,—but where he finds nothing real but the saltpetre, pasteboard and catgut.”

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

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Learning

“… it's pretty obvious if you look at the world, if you take the water out of the ocean, you'll find out there is dirt underneath. You know, these continents are not floating around like lily pads in a bathtub. They are connected. It's just the low places happen to be filled with water. That's all.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Coast-to-Coast AM interview (August 2-3, 2000)

World, Water

“A bureaucrat is one who has the power to say “no” but none to say “yes”. Bureaucrats can find an infinite number of reasons for rejecting any proposed change, but can find none for accepting it.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Ackoff (2006) A little book of f-laws: 13 common sins of management. p. 12.
2000s

Change

“It doesn’t take much refection—and indeed only a little research—to discover that the kind of conservative readings of the Genesis story that are often put up in opposition to what it is thought Darwin said (often without bothering to read what Darwin himself had to say) bear almost no relation to what we find in the refection of the fathers on the account found in Genesis. Such Christians have imagined a tradition that has no right to call itself tradition.”

Andrew Louth (1944)

"Being Human," The Wheel, Spring/Summer 2018

Imagination, Reading

“People who evacuated their homes to get away from the bombings are beginning to come back. However, many have a strange conception of the meaning of unconditional surrender. Often they find their homes have been occupied by the slave workers who have been forced to withstand the bombing. They come to the military government and ask for authority to evict these people. But they get unsympathetic answers…the forced laborers stay put until they can be sent back to their homes…and the Germans look for billets.”

Bill Downs (1914–1978) American journalist

Broadcast from liberated Hamburg (1945)

People, Home

“My moon shines so softly
On the hair of my killer
Pours flowers on his head
Help me, give him some shelter!
Come, lie by the river
Rest your head, don't you fear
Sleep softly, my baby
They won't find you here.”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Children of the Sun (1969)

Lie, Fear, Flowers, Sleep

“We all belong to this country, what are we going to call ourselves? Recognizing the sensibilities of most indigenous people here about the term 'Fijian', let us find some other name. But let us not leave it unresolved because it is an important symbol of belonging here.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Opening address, Fiji Week celebrations, 7 October 2005.

People, Country

“As he drove, he was conscious of the web around him. The web of streets, of people, of places, and of things. The other web, too, the new world. This parallel place, with email address private driveways, it sdotcom marketplaces. You could find out so much there, running reality through your hands likea god's. Everything on the web is information; but everything is on the web, these days; so the world has become information. Everything has become an utterance of this thing, of this bank of words and images: everything is something it is saying, or has said. It's about buying, and looking, about our habits and desires, about contact with others, about voyeurism and aspiration and addiction. It is us boiled down — our essence, for better or worse. It is no longer passive. It is telling the story of us, and sometimes that story needs work.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Source: The Lonely Dead (2004), Ch. 16

God, People, World, Reality

“The shape of something uncaring and
perversely cold stands up inside a man
and he finds himself completely deceived.
This world’s anguish is no different
from the love we insist on holding back.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(The Homeless, Psalm 85:10, p. 111).
Book Sources, ELEMENTAL, The Power of Illuminated Love (2008)

Love, World

“Toni Morrison is challenged regularly because she is a black author who writes about the real world. She speaks with so much knowledge about black issues she can't be accused of creating these (issues). People find these issues threatening.”

Judith Krug (1940–2009) librarian and freedom of speech proponent

Referring to people seeking to prevent children in public schools from reading books allegedly containing sexually inappropriate material. " Group Targets Black Authors' Books; Toni Morrison's Novel Deemed 'Smut' by Parent; Acclaimed Memoir 'Black Boy' Also is Under Fire http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070124/METRO04/701240390/1037/ENT05" by Valerie Olander, The Detroit News (January 24, 2007)

People, World, Knowledge

“Omni: Will robots be complex enough to be friends of people?
Shannon: I think so. I myself could very easily imagine that happening. I see no limit to the capabilities of machines. As microchips get smaller and faster, I can see them getting better than we are. I can visualize a time in the future when we will be to robots as dogs are to humans.
[…]
Omni: Do you find it depressing that chess computers are getting so strong?
Shannon: I am not depressed by it. I am rooting for the machines! I have always been on the machines' side. Ha-ha!”

Claude Elwood Shannon (1916–2001) American mathematician and information theorist

Omni Magazine (1987) https://archive.org/details/omni-magazine-1987-08. (sometimes quoted as "I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans. And I am rooting for the machines.")

People, Dogs, Imagination, Thinking

“One might expect bad behaviour from existentialists – indeed that was what existentialism was all about, was it not? – but to find this happening on one’s own doorstep was a shock.”

Alexander McCall Smith (1948) British writer

Love Over Scotland, chapter 50.
The 44 Scotland Street series

“He fought despairingly to go deeper into the blackness of a sleep, any sleep, even the sleep of death or some form of non-existence, but even with the loss of consciousness he dreamt he was awake, lying on the bed trying desperately to sleep. If he could find some way to prove that time had passed, no matter how short that time, he could tell himself that he had slept and perhaps then, just perhaps, he would feel rested.”

Hubert Selby Jr. book The Room

The Room (1971)

Death, Way, Feeling, Lying

“Today these taboos and terrors still linger, many of them, in the form of conventions of morality, uneasy strivings of conscience, doubts and desperations of religion; but ultimately Man will emerge from all these things, FREE—familiar, that is, with them all, making use of all, allowing generously for the values of all, but hampered and bound by NONE. He will realize the inner meaning of the creeds and rituals of the ancient religions, and will hail with joy the fulfilment of their far prophecy down the ages—finding after all the long-expected Saviour of the world within his own breast, and Paradise in the disclosure there of the everlasting peace of the soul.”

Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) British poet and academic

Pagan and Christian Creeds (1920)

Age, World, Peace, Religion

“Serpents, thirst, burning-sand – all are welcomed by the brave; endurance finds pleasure in hardship; virtue rejoices when it pays dear for its existence.”
Serpens, sitis, ardor harenae dulcia virtuti; gaudet patientia duris; laetius est, quotiens magno sibi constat, honestum.

Marcus Annaeus Lucanus book Pharsalia

Book IX, line 402 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia

Pleasure

“It caused quite a stir when the Captain arrived
To ‘find out the cause of the trouble’
And every man there, all excepting Old Sam,
Was full of excitement and bubble.”

Stanley Holloway (1890–1982) English stage and film actor, comedian, singer, poet and monologist

Sam, Sam, Pick Oop Tha' Musket

“When you sit at home comfortably folded up in a chair beside a fire, have you ever thought what goes on outside there? Probably not. You pick up a book and read about things and stuff, getting a vicarious kick from people and events that never happened. You're doing it now, getting ready to fill in a normal life with the details of someone else's experiences. Fun, isn't it? You read about life on the outside thinking about how maybe you'd like it to happen to you, or at least how you'd like to watch it. Even the old Romans did it, spiced their life with action when they sat in the Coliseum and watched wild animals rip a bunch of humans apart, reveling in the sight of blood and terror. They screamed for joy and slapped each other on the back when murderous claws tore into the live flesh of slaves and cheered when the kill was made. Oh, it's great to watch, all right. Life through a keyhole. But day after day goes by and nothing like that ever happens to you so you think that it's all in books and not in reality at all and that's that. Still good reading, though. Tomorrow night you'll find another book, forgetting what was in the last and live some more in your imagination. But remember this: there are things happening out there. They go on every day and night making Roman holidays look like school picnics. They go on right under your very nose and you never know about them. Oh yes, you can find them all right. All you have to do is look for them. But I wouldn't if I were you because you won't like what you'll find. Then again, I'm not you and looking for those things is my job. They aren't nice things to see because they show people up for what they are. There isn't a coliseum any more, but the city is a bigger bowl, and it seats more people. The razor-sharp claws aren't those of wild animals but man's can be just as sharp and twice as vicious. You have to be quick, and you have to be able, or you become one of the devoured, and if you can kill first, no matter how and no matter who, you can live and return to the comfortable chair and the comfortable fire. But you have to be quick. And able. Or you'll be dead.”

Mickey Spillane (1918–2006) American writer

My Gun is Quick (1950)

Life, People, Books, School

“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

“We cannot inherit a fixed, unmoving view of life and of art from the past generation. The expression of art is in any period different, as are our experiences. A new experience creates a new form. We like to learn all we need from earlier generations, but we have to find out for ourselves what we need; nobody else can do that for us. It is not our business to receive and work on what the earlier generation might want us to work on. On the other hand, it is its business to help us where we want its help.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

1940 - 1948, Intimate Banalities' (1941)

Life, Art, Business, Learning

“We must recognize that in our generation there might come a day with no remaining avenue of escape. State laws can be avoiding simply by moving, but what of unconstitutional Federal laws? At that point we will have no choice but to rebel against tyranny. (Since the alternative would be to live as little better than bleating sheep.) When we reach that juncture I doubt that I will advocate expatriation. Most foreign lands have less freedom than we enjoy here in these United States. I don't think that I will find some ideal "bolt hole" nation with more firearms freedom, better banking privacy, a more positive business climate, lower taxes, full religious freedom, unimpeded personal property rights, fair courts, and assured freedom of speech. If I must die, then I will do so here in America, fully armed and facing my oppressors. I won't die in some ditch, begging for mercy.”

James Wesley Rawles (1960) Survivalist-fiction author and blogger

Letter Re: Drawing the Line on Noncompliance with Unconstitutional Laws https://survivalblog.com//?s=noncompliance, Survivalblog, 11 June 2013

Law, Business, Thinking, Freedom

“Day by day, we let love just walk away
And I'll be the first to say, I was glad to see it go
And day by day, ever since you went away
I'm finding I'm still missing you, and I just got to know…Does that blue moon ever shine on you?
I wanna hold you close to me, feel just like it used to be.
And baby, if you feel like I do,
You can come to me.”

Toby Keith (1961) American country music singer and actor

Does That Blue Moon Ever Shine on You.
Song lyrics, Blue Moon (1996)

Love, Feeling, Baby

“By the bye, as I must leave off being young, I find many douceurs in being a sort of chaperon, for I am put on the sofa near the fire and can drink as much wine as I like.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter (1813-11-06) on ageing [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

Drink, Wine

“This test thought out and proposed by Professor Ebbinghaus of Berlin, varies in significance according to its mode of use. It consists essentially in this: a word of a text is omitted and the subject is asked to replace it. The nature of the intellectual work by which the gap is filled, varies according to the case. This may be a test of memory, a test of style, or a test of judgment. In the sentence: ‘Louis IX was born in ——‘ the gap is filled by memory. ‘The crow —– his feathers with his beak’; in this the idea of the suppressed word is not at all obscure, and the task consists in finding the proper word. We may say in passing, that according to the opinion of several teachers before whom we have tried it, this kind of exercise furnishes excellent scholastic training. Lastly, in sentences of the nature of those we have chosen, the filling of the gaps requires an attentive examination and an appreciation of the facts set forth by the sentence. It is therefore an exercise of judgment.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Source: The development of intelligence in children, 1916, p. 64

Exercises, Idea, Nature, Teachers

“There are crimes I don’t commit mainly because I don’t want to find out I could.”

James Richardson (1950) American poet

#124
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“We believe that this administration represents Israel inside America. Take the sensitive ministries such as the Ministry of Exterior and the Ministry of Defense and the CIA, you will find that the Jews have the upper hand in them. They make use of America to further their plans for the world, especially the Islamic world. American presence in the Gulf provides support to the Jews and protects their rear. And while millions of Americans are homeless and destitute and live in abject poverty, their government is busy occupying our land and building new settlements and helping Israel build new settlements in the point of departure for our Prophet's midnight journey to the seven heavens. America throws her own sons in the land of the two Holy Mosques for the sake of protecting Jewish interests.”

Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) founder of al-Qaeda

1990s, ABC interview (1998)

World, Departure, Business, Support

“I have been attracted to Freemasonry of my own freewill and accord, because it is an International Brotherhood with worldwide interests and its spirit appears as comprehensive and embracing as the globe itself. This brotherhood represents an idealism in which national and racial boundaries find no place. Freemasonry places the fact of God, the Great Architect of the Universe, the Creator of all things in the forefront of its teaching. It recognizes no specific religion, but emphasizes the Universality of all religious faiths. From the limited experience, I have had of my formal admission to the Fraternity this evening, I see that there is a religious spirit underlying the whole symbolic teaching of Masonry. It seems to me that apart from the rituals and symbols peculiar to it, the object of Masonry is generally to make the world a better, brighter and happier place to live in. These are some of the more important and characteristic features of the institution, which have had the greatest appeal to me and that is how I find myself to be one with you from now onwards.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

In his address to the members of the Masonic Fraternity on the occasion of his joining as member of the Masonic Lodge. Article # 14 Initiate responds to his Toast R.W.Bro. Jaya Chamaraja Wadeyar http://masonicpaedia.org/showarticle.asp?id=14

God, World, Faith, Religion

“If a person is unwilling to make a decisive resolution, if he wants to cheat God of the heart’s daring venture in which a person ventures way out and loses sight of all shrewdness and probability, indeed, takes leave of his senses or at least all his worldly mode of thinking, if instead of beginning with one step he almost craftily seeks to find out something, to have the infinite certainty changed into a finite certainty, then this discourse will not be able to benefit him. There is an upside-downness that wants to reap before it sows; there is a cowardliness that wants to have certainty before it begins. There is a hypersensitivity so copious in words that it continually shrinks from acting; but what would it avail a person if, double-minded and fork-tongued he wanted to dupe God, trap him in probability, but refused to understand the improbable, that one must lose everything in order to gain everything, and understand it so honestly that, in the most crucial moment, when his soul is already shuddering at the risk, he does not again leap to his own aid with the explanation that he has not yet fully made a resolution but merely wanted to feel his way. Therefore, all discussion of struggling with God in prayer, of the actual loss (since if pain of annihilation is not actually suffered, then the sufferer is not yet out upon the deep, and his scream is not the scream of danger but in the face of danger) and the figurative victory cannot have the purpose of persuading anyone or of converting the situation into a task for secular appraisal and changing God’s gift of grace to the venture into temporal small change for the timorous. It really would not help a person if the speaker, by his oratorical artistry, led him to jump into a half hour’s resolution, by the ardor of conviction started a fire in him so that he would blaze in a momentary good intention without being able to sustain a resolution or to nourish an intention as soon as the speaker stopped talking.”

Sören Kierkegaard book Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Hong, One Who Prays Aright Struggles In Prayer and is Victorious-In That God is Victorious p. 380-381
1840s, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

God, Pain, Way, Feeling

“So here’s a question from one who believed, only a week ago, that Baghdad might just collapse, that we might wake up one morning to find the Baathist militia and the Iraqi army gone and the Americans walking down Saadun Street with their rifles over their shoulders. If the Iraqis can still hold out against such overwhelming force in Umm Qasr for four days, if they can keep fighting in Basra and Nassariyeh — the latter a city which briefly rose in successful revolt against Saddam in 1991 — why should Saddam’s forces not keep fighting in Baghdad?”

Robert Fisk (1946) English writer and journalist

Anglo-American Lies Exposed http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles191.htm, March 24, 2003 2003

Question, Success, Fight

“If every earthly pleasure were melted An intelligence in repose without images, an intuition in the light of God, and a spirit elevated in Purity to the Face of God, these three qualities united constitute the true contemplative life into a single experience and bestowed upon one man,
it would be as nothing when measured by the joy of which I write for here it is God who passes into the depths of us in all His purity,
and the soul is not only filled but overflowing.
This experience is that light that makes manifest to the soul the terrible desolation of such as live divorced from love;
it melts the man utterly; he is no longer master of his joy.
Such possession produces intoxication, the state of the spirit in which its bliss transcends the uttermost bounds of anticipation or desire.
Sometimes the ecstasy pours forth in song, sometimes in tears:
at one moment it finds expression in movement, at others in the intense stillness of burning, voiceless feeling.
Some men knowing this bliss wonder if others feel God as they do; some are assured that no living creature has ever had such experiences as theirs;
there are those who wonder that the world is not set aflame by this joy; and there are others who marvel at its nature, asking whence it comes, and what it is.
The body itself can know no greater pleasure upon earth than to participate in it;
and there are moments when the soul feels that it must shiver to fragments in the poignancy of this experience.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

An Anthology of Mysticism and Philosophy

Love, Life, Men, God

“Enlightenment … asks, innocently and subversively, for proofs, sources, and evidence. At the beginning it solemnly avers that it would willingly believe everything, if only it could find someone to convince it. Here it becomes clear that the biblical texts, taken philologically, remain themselves their only witness. Their revelatory character is their own claim, and it can be believed or not; the church, which elevates this revelatory character to the status of a grand dogma, itself plays only the role of an interpreter. With his radical biblicism, Luther rejected the church’s claim to authority. This repudiation then repeats itself on the higher level through biblicism itself. For text remains text, and every assertion that it is divinely inspired can, in turn, be only a human, fallible assertion. With every attempt to grasp the absolute source, critique comes up against relative, historical sources that only ever assert the Absolute. The miracles spoken about in the Bible to legitimate God’s power are only reports of miracles for which there are no longer any means of verification. The revelatory claim is stuck in a philological circle.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 24

God

“If you only knew the dreams in that little boy's head all those years ago. You don't know how lucky I am. I will never retire because even if they retire me, I'll find something else to do.”

Jimmy Magee (1935–2017) Gaelic games commentatot

Magee said he hoped to die live on air. herald.ie http://www.herald.ie/news/irelands-other-big-games-winner-jimmy-magee-3196108.html Others

Dreams, Boy

“Unfortunately, many people find it difficult to accept what current science tells us about the myth of race. It runs counter to what seem to be obvious racial distinctions, mostly in parts of the world where immigration history has juxtaposed people with discontinuous ancestral backgrounds in the same place. The racial categorizations that many of us have experienced throughout our lives have likewise inculcated a sense of racial division that is not easy to abandon. Regardless of what the science shows, the perception of race and the associated racial discrimination are unlikely to disappear soon. Furthermore, a scientific understanding of human evolutionary history challenges commonly-held religious beliefs that are based on literal interpretations of biblical history.”

Daniel J. Fairbanks (1956) American artist

Source: Everyone is African: How Science Explodes the Myth of Race (2015), p. 155.

People, World, History, Understanding

“I would hope that all educated citizens would fulfill this obligation — in politics, in Government, here in Nashville, here in this State, in the Peace Corps, in the Foreign Service, in the Government Service, in the Tennessee Valley, in the world. You will find the pressures greater than the pay. You may endure more public attacks than support. But you will have the unequaled satisfaction of knowing that your character and talent are contributing to the direction and success of this free society.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Address at Vanderbilt University

World, Education, Peace, Hope

“Good love is hard to find.
You got lucky, babe.
You got lucky, babe, when I found you.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

You Got Lucky, written with Mike Campbell
Lyrics, Long After Dark (1982)

Love

“He is always furious, on account of what he finds out or what he doesn't find out.”

Mario Vargas Llosa book The Time of the Hero

The Time of the Hero (1963)

“Why, then, in the absence of all control over the subject of African slavery, are you agitated in relation to it? With Pharisaical pretension it is sometimes said it is a moral obligation to agitate, and I suppose they are going through a sort of vicarious repentance for other men's sins… Who gave them a right to decide that it is a sin? By what standard do they measure it? Not the Constitution; the Constitution recognizes the property in many forms, and imposes obligations in connection with that recognition. Not the Bible; that justifies it. Not the good of society; for if they go where it exists, they find that society recognizes it as good…”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Speech in Boston http://jeffersondavis.rice.edu/Content.aspx?id=80 (11 October 1858). 1850s

Men

“As you do not feel the weight of your head, of hands, and of feet … so do I feel that these persons are all organic members of THIS BODY; so I don't feel their pressure or find their worries weighing on me. Their joys and sorrows, problems and their solutions, I feel to be vitally mine … I have no ego sense nor conception of separateness.”

Sri Anandamoyi Ma (1896–1982) Hindu saint

Gopinath Kaviraj, Mother as Seen by Her Devotees, p. 94
By followers

Feeling, Problem, Sense, Joy

“The fault is all ours. We have become overwhelming. About one in twenty of all the people who have ever existed is alive today, compared to just one in a thousand of other species. As a result we are depleting the earth.
But even now the question is still asked: Does it really matter? So we lose a few cute mammals, and a lot of bugs nobody ever heard of. So what? We’re still here.
Yes, we are. But the ecosystem is like a vast life-support machine. It is built on the interaction of species on all scales of life, from the humblest fungi filaments that sustain the roots of plants to the tremendous global cycles of water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. Darwin’s entangled bank, indeed. How does the machine stay stable? We don’t know. Which are its most important components? We don’t know. How much of it can we take out safely? We don’t know that either. Even if we could identify and save the species that are critical for our survival, we wouldn’t know which species they depend on in turn. But if we keep on our present course, we will soon find out the limits of robustness.
I may be biased, but I believe it will matter a great deal if we were to die by our own foolishness. Because we bring to the world something that no other creature in all its long history has had, and that is conscious purpose. We can think our way out of this.
So my question is—consciously, purposefully, what are we going to do?”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 16 “An Entangled Bank” section I (pp. 509-510)

Life, People, World, Way

“You see, she was gonna be an actress
And I was gonna learn to fly.
She took off to find the footlights,
And I took off for the sky.
And here, she's acting happy,
Inside her handsome home.
And me, I'm flying in my taxi,
Taking tips, and getting stoned,
I go flying so high, when I'm stoned.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Taxi
Song lyrics, Heads & Tales (1972)

Happiness, Home, Learning, Flying

“The test of an intelligence officer is not so much the ability to accumulate information; it's to judge between different pieces of information, and not to take a piece of information and use it in a piece of analysis simply because it fits your case, but to use it because it either comes from a reliable source like signals intercepts, from a human source that has been vetted over time as a reliable person, or it comes from documentary information -- papers you've stolen from another government or some other organization. The work that came out of Feith's shop that I saw, especially on Al Qaeda and Iraq, was simply … finding pieces of information in the world of intelligence information that fit the argument they wanted to make. Tenet, to his credit, had us go back 10 years in the agency's records and look and see what we knew about Iraq and Al Qaeda. I was available at the time, and I led the effort. We went back 10 years. We examined about 20,000 documents, probably something along the line of 75,000 pages of information, and there was no connection between [Al Qaeda] and Saddam.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

" The Dark Side http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/interviews/scheuer.html, PBS Frontline Interview, (22 June 2006). 2000s

World, Intelligence, Effort, Time

“How many years had he taken to admit a notion of what Michael Angelo and Rubens were driving at? He could not say; but he knew that only since 1895 had he begun to feel the Virgin or Venus as force, and not everywhere even so. At Chartres — perhaps at Lourdes — possibly at Cnidos if one could still find there the divinely naked Aphrodite of Praxiteles — but otherwise one must look for force to the goddesses of Indian mythology.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Feeling

“There is no theology so desperate that you can’t find it.”

China Miéville book The City & the City

Source: The City & the City (2009), Chapter 4 (p. 38)

“Vivisection is the killing of animals to find cures for the diseases caused by eating animals.”

Victoria Moran (1950) American writer

Quoted in William Harris, The Scientific Basis of Vegetarianism (1995), cap. XVII http://www.vegsource.com/harris/sci_basis/CHAP17.pdf.

Disease, Animals

“Some of the [band's] work has a genuine feeling behind it. Some of it is probably just being funny for the sake of being funny. Obviously, there are elements to "Detachable [Penis]" about male identity that are there, but not really overtly there. For the person who wants to find it, it's there. I don't know. I don't think… I like to think I'm not obvious about the humor, and I'm not obvious about the feelings, either. There's a certain degree of subtlety to what I'm doing; even in very obvious things, there's something underneath that's interesting. I think [the band is] guilty of being clever at times, to the detriment of conveying something more important, more real, more honest. I'll cop to that. But I will also say that there's also stuff that does have meaning.”

John S. Hall (1960) Poet, author, singer, lawyer

Interview by Stephen Thompson, The A.V. Club, November 11, 1998 ( link http://www.avclub.com/content/node/23128) Quotes from interviews

Feeling, Thinking, Time, Personality

“Why do you work so hard to make yourself disliked? I should think you'd find it happens enough on its own without putting yourself to any extra trouble.”

Steven Brust book Tiassa

Tiassa ( 2011) (goodreads) http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/13578278

Thinking

“I find that I have great faith in human nature. I believe that people are good. I believe they are to be trusted. So far as I know, no one has ever betrayed my faith, in any way. If they ever have, I've been spared the knowledge of it.
If I couldn't have faith in human nature, I wouldn't want to live. It is the one thing that could destroy for me the joy of living.
I've come to believe that life, under almost any conditions, is worth while.
I found that out when I had my accident some years ago, and was in the hospital.
I thought, for a couple of weeks, that I would be blind for life. I thought I would surely be so disabled that I would never be able to work again. I didn't suppose that I would have one five-hundredth of what I have now. Still I thought, 'Life is worth while. Just to be alive. I still think so.”

Harold Lloyd (1893–1971) American film actor and producer

"Discoveries About Myself". Motion Picture, October 1930, pg. 90. (Brewster Publications). https://archive.org/stream/motionpicture1923040chic#page/n595/mode/2up

Life, People, Faith, Way

“My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Friendship

God, Age, Sex

“So be sweet and kind to mother
Now and then, have a chat!
Buy her candy or some flowers or a brand-new hat
But maybe you best let it go at that!
Or you may find yourself with a quite complex
…Com-plex!
…and…
You may end up like Oedipus
I'd rather marry a duck-billed platypus!
Than end up like poor Oedipus Rex!”

Tom Lehrer (1928) American singer-songwriter and mathematician

"Oedipus Rex", final stanza
An Evening (Wasted) With Tom Lehrer (1959)

Flowers

“Isn't it great that I evoke a reaction from people? Whether it is good or bad is secondary. The thing is that I like being myself. I find it very tiresome to put up a fake smile, say the right things, and be diplomatic. It's just not in my personality to be like that.”

Mallika Sherawat (1976) Indian actress

Cine Bliitz magazine,(July 2005)

People, Smile, Personality

“Neither Bush nor Tony Blair has provided any evidence that such weapons exist. But what we know is that Israel has weapons of mass destruction. Nobody talks about that. Why should there be one standard for one country, especially because it is black, and another one for another country, Israel, that is white. … Many people say quietly, but they don't have the courage to stand up and say publicly, that when there were white secretary generals you didn't find this question of the United States and Britain going out of the United Nations. But now that you've had black secretary generals like Boutros Boutros Ghali, like Kofi Annan, they do not respect the United Nations. They have contempt for it. This is not my view, but that is what is being said by many people.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

2000s, Newsweek interview (2002)

People, Courage, Question, Country

“The thirteen Colonies were not unaware of the difficulties which these problems presented. We shall find a great deal of wisdom in the method by which they dealt with them. When they were finally separated from Great Britain, the allegiance of their citizens was not to the Nation, for there was none. It was to the States. For the conduct of the war there had been a voluntary confederacy loosely constructed and practically impotent. Continuing after peace was made, when the common peril which had been its chief motive no longer existed, it grew weaker and weaker. Each of the States could have insisted on an entirely separate and independent existence, having full authority over both their internal and external affairs, sovereign in every way. But such sovereignty would have been a vain and empty thing. It would have been unsupported by adequate resources either of property or population, without a real national spirit; ready to fall prey to foreign intrigue or foreign conquest. That kind of sovereignty meant but little. It had no substance in it. The people and their leaders naturally sought for a larger, more inspiring ideal. They realized that while to be a citizen of a State meant something, it meant a great deal more if that State were a part of a national union. The establishment of a Federal Constitution giving power and authority to create a real National Government did not in the end mean a detriment, but rather an increment to the sovereignty of the several States. Under the Constitution there was brought into being a new relationship, which did not detract from but added to the power and the position of each State. It is true that they surrendered the privilege of performing certain acts for themselves, like the regulation of commerce and the maintenance of foreign relations, but in becoming a part of the Union they received more than they gave.”

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

1920s, Freedom and its Obligations (1924)

Wisdom, War, People, Peace

“Being a DJ, I take the art of digging seriously… it has almost a karmic element of, 'I was meant to find this on top.' or, 'I was meant to pull this out becuase it works so well with this.' So it has a lot of meaning for me personally.”

DJ Shadow (1972) American trip-hop musician

From the documentary Scratch

Art, Personality

“Try as we will to be culturally aggrieved by day, we find the gringos kind of attractive in the moonlight.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

“You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say that there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man, because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God.”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

Source: Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (1960), p. 1

God, Star, Sun, Night

“I like to find things from unexpected sources. I tend to move between turtlenecks and shirts and ties. I don't really have a uniform in the sense that some people might.”

Norman Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank (1935) British architect

gq-magazine.co.uk http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/entertainment/articles/2011-02/01/gq-film-norman-foster-how-much-does-your-building-weigh-interview.

People, Sense

“Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea
Tracing one warm line through a land so wide and savage
And make a northwest passage to the sea.”

Stan Rogers (1949–1983) Folk singer

Northwest Passage (1981)

Time, Sea

“As soon as a real artist finds out what art is, the more is he likely to feel the need of keeping silent about it, and about himself in connection with it. There is almost, these days, a kind of petit scandale in the thought of allying oneself with anything of a professional nature. And it is at this point that I shrink a little from asserting myself with regard to professional aspects of art. And here the quality of confession must break through.”

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) American artist

n.p.
1921 - 1930, Art and the Personal Life', Marsden Hartley, 1928

Art, Feeling, Nature

“It was, as we know, not so much eradicated as replaced by a Communist orthodoxy after 1949. And when this orthodoxy began to lose its grip on the Chinese public after the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, Chinese officials struggled to find a new set of beliefs to justify their monopoly on power. The ideological hybrid that followed Maoism was "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics," a mixture of state capitalism with political authoritarianism.”

Ian Buruma (1951) Dutch writer and academic

Battling the Information Barbarians China often views the ideas of foreigners, from missionaries in the 17th century to 21st-century Internet entrepreneurs, as subversive imports. The tumultuous history behind the clash with Google. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704878904575031263063242900.html#video%3DA8F64C9A-F513-4C06-8E68-CCB96C2ED70D%26articleTabs%3Darticle

Death

“Mr. Pritchard was a businessman, president of a medium-sized corporation. He was never alone. His business was conducted by groups of men like himself who joined together in clubs so that no foreign element or idea could enter. His religious life was again his lodge and his church, both of which were screened and protected. One night a week he played poker with men so exactly like himself that the game was fairly even, and from this fact his group was convinced that they were very fine poker players. Wherever he went he was not one man but a unit in a corporation, a unit in a club, in a lodge, in a church, in a political party. His thoughts and ideas were never subjected to criticism since he willingly associated only with people like himself. He read a newspaper written by and for his group. The books that came into his house were chosen by a committee which deleted material that might irritate him. He hated foreign countries and foreigners because it was difficult to find his counterpart in them. He did not want to stand out from his group. He would like to have risen to the top of it and be admired by it; but it would not occur to him to leave it. At occasional stags where naked girls danced on the tables and sat in great glasses of wine, Mr. Pritchard howled with laughter and drank the wine, but five hundred Mr. Pritchards were there with him.”

John Steinbeck book The Wayward Bus

Source: The Wayward Bus (1947), Ch. 3

Life, Men, Hate, People

“In a public, as we may understand the term, (1) virtually as many people express opinions as receive them, (2) Public communications are so organised that there is a chance immediately and effectively to answer back any opinion expressed in public. Opinion formed by such discussion (3) readily finds an outlet in effective action, even against – if necessary – the prevailing system of authority. And (4) authoritative institutions do not penetrate the public, which is thus more or less autonomous in its operations.-In a mass, (1) far fewer people express opinions than receive them; for the community of publics becomes an abstract collection of individuals who receive impressions from the mass media. (2) The communications that prevail are so organised that it is difficult or impossible for the individual to answer back immediately or with any effect. (3) The realisation of opinion in action is controlled by authorities who organise and control the channels of such action. (4) The mass has no autonomy from institutions; on the contrary, agents of authorised institutions penetrate this mass, reducing any autonomy it may have in the formation of opinion by discussion.”

C. Wright Mills book The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956)

People, Communication, Understanding, Chance

“Minkowski… supposed that this fourth dimension of time was not detached from and independent of the three dimensions of space. He introduced a new four-dimensional space to which ordinary space contributed three dimensions, and time one; we may call it 'space-time'…. The succession of positions which a particle occupied in ordinary space at a succession of instants of time would be represented by a line in space-time; this he called the 'world-line' of the particle…. Newton's absolute space and absolute time fell out of science, and they carried much with them in their fall. First to go was the concept of simultaneity…. It now became necessary to find a way of treating gravitation which should not involve simultaneity. Einstein found through the medium of his 'Principle of Equivalence'.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

The Growth of Physical Science (1947)

World, Way, Science, Time

“I am not so much angry as trying to find my own voice in the world, to find enough courage to speak up in the first place, then to go forth and use it, which both are monumental tasks and require more confidence than you'd think.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, SPEAKING UP

World, Confidence, Courage, Thinking

“Sometimes I get mad at people. But only once here in Pittsburgh. That when I was hurt and everyone call me Jake. I don't like that. I want to play but my back hurt lots of times and I can't play. Then that year in St. Paul when I throw the ball in exhibition game the elbow started to puff up. That when some people write that I was in fight with Face in St. Louis. You know that not right. You can still feel bone chip in my elbow. That's why I throw the ball underhand sometimes. That way it don't hurt my arm. If I throw real hard lots of times overhand in game, the elbow hurts and swells up.
The back is okay too. Sometime it hurt me when I run. But I find out it is bad disc. If it goes out on the right side I can push it back in easy. But if it hurts on the other side, sometimes I have to work long time to get it back in place.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "Roamin' Around: Look Out, Joe Brown" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=OsZaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=F2wDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6551%2C2915264 by Jack Hernon, in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Sunday, August 13, 1961), p. D3 Baseball-related, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1961</big>

People, Way, Feeling, Game

“It is beyond doubt that the happiness which love can bestow on its chosen souls is the highest that can fall to mortal's lot. But when I imagine myself in the place of the man who, after twenty happy years, now in one moment loses his all, I am moved almost to say that he is the wretchedest of mortals, and that it is better never to have known such happy days. So it is on this miserable earth: 'the purest joy finds its grave in the abyss of time.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

What are we without the hope of a better future? As quoted in Kneller, Karl Alois, Kettle, Thomas Michael, 1911. "Christianity and the leaders of modern science; a contribution to the history of culture in the nineteenth century" https://archive.org/stream/christianitylead00kneluoft#page/44/mode/2up, Freiburg im Breisgau, p. 44-45

Love, Happiness, Hope, Soul

“They use [the term Isolationist] all the time, and they do that to be very negative. There are a few people in the country who say, "Well, that's good. I sort of like that term." I don't particularly like the term because I do not think I am an isolationist at all. Because along with the advice of not getting involved in entangling alliances and into the internal affairs of other countries, the Founders said – and it's permissible under the Constitution – to be friends with people, trade with people, communicate with them, and get along with them – but stay out of the military alliances. The irony is they accuse us, who would like to be less interventionist and keep our troops at home, of being isolationist. Yet if you look at the results of the policy of the last six years, we find that we are more isolated than ever before. So I claim the policy of those who charge us with being isolationists is really diplomatic isolationism. They are not willing to talk to Syria. They are not willing to talk to Iran. They are not willing to trade with people that might have questionable people in charge. We have literally isolated ourselves. We have less friends and more enemies than ever before. So in a way, it's one of the unintended consequences of their charges. They are the true isolationists, I believe.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Interview by Scott Horton, April 4, 2007 http://www.antiwar.com/horton/?articleid=10798 2000s, 2006-2009

People, Way, Home, Communication

“Soon, the enterprise of the information age will find itself immobilized if it does not have the ability to tap the information resources within and without its boundaries.”

John F. Sowa (1940) artificial intelligence researcher

Zachman & Sowa (1992, p. 613), cited in: Nik Bessis, Fatos Xhafa (2011) Next Generation Data Technologies for Collective Computational Intelligence. p. 84

Age

“Is there a nobler or more excellent kind of Socialism and is there a truer form of Democracy than this National Socialism which is so organized that through it each one among the millions of German boys is given the possibility of finding his way to the highest office in the nation, should it please Providence to come to his aid.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Speech by Adolf Hitler, On National Socialism and World Relations http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/hitler1.htm, delivered in the German Reichstag (January 30, 1937). German translation published by H. Müller & Sohn in Berlin. 1930s

Way, Democracy, Boy

“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

“Those that can readily master the difficulties of Mathematics find a considerable charm in the study, sometimes amounting to fascination. This is far from universal; but the subject contains elements of strong interest of a kind that constitutes the pleasures of knowledge. The marvellous devices for solving problems elate the mind with the feeling of intellectual power; and the innumerable constructions of the science leave us lost in wonder.”

Alexander Bain (1818–1903) Scottish philosopher and educationalist

Source: Education as a Science, 1898, p. 153.

Pleasure, Feeling, Mathematics, Knowledge

“The new discovery that I have made in painting is the following. There are chords of colors, let's say a certain red and green, which move, shimmer when you look at them. Now if you're looking at a tree in a landscape, you can either look at the tree, or at the landscape, but not both, because of the stereoscopic effect. Now, when you are painting something three-dimensional, the chromatic sound which shimmers is the three-dimensional effect of colour, and when you paint a landscape, and the green foliage shimmers a little with the blue sky showing through it, that happens because the green is on a different plane from the sky in nature too. Finding the space-shaping energies of colour, instead of contenting ourselves with a dead chiaroascuro, is our finest task.”

August Macke (1887–1914) German painter of the expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter

in a letter to artist de:Hans Thuar, 1913, from Lake Thun in Switzerland; as quoted by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 145

Color, Nature, Tree, Painting

“Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole — so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

On the Art of Fiction"; originally published in The Borzoi 1920 (1920)
Willa Cather on Writing (1949)

Art

“My early book learning came to me as naturally as the seasons in … the little town in which I grew up. … Quite early I began to find a special charm in an unpeopled world … of lava rock and sagebrush desert. … I was often more purely happy at such times than I think I have ever been since.”

Richard McKenna (1913–1964) American writer

Statement made in 1962, as quoted in the Boise Weekly Vol. 7, No. 39 (8 April 1999) http://www.thesandpebbles.com/mckenna/richard_mckenna.html

Happiness, Books, World, Nature

“We are weary and heavy laden, and our heavenly Father offers to carry us and our affairs in His own everlasting arms. And so far as the weariness is concerned, we consent; we consent to be carried and find rest to our souls. But " heavy laden," — no, we cannot part with the heavy load. This responsibility, this nervousness about the absent, this household worry, this mercantile venture, this literary experiment, this invalid friend, we cannot transfer to Him who says, "Cast thy burden on the Lord," but even our bleared and sleepy eyes we open from time to time to see that it is still there, and ("O fools and slow of heart!") when we can guard it no longer, the relaxing arms are still in attitude as if they enclasped it, all unconscious that it is now better cared for elsewhere.”

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

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 99.

Fools, Soul, Time, Heart

“You'll find my power comes from within…. and is a force to be reckoned with.”

Jim Starlin (1949) Comic creator

Silver Surfer, speaking to Thanos, in Silver Surfer, Vol. 3, no. 35 "The Name is Thanos"

“I was too curvy and too busty and a little too short. And I was a little bit self-conscious about it. But I was by no means heavy, I just — well, you have hips and boobs, and that's it. Haute couture, you don't really see girls with big boobs. And I always wanted first to be a model. So I had to say, "OK, you're going to find other things to do in this industry, or it's maybe not my industry."”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

Discussing being rejected at the beginning of her modeling career, as quoted in Allure Magazine, May 2012

Girl

“[The coming war is] the last battle between Teutons and Slavs [which would] find the Anglo-Saxons on the side of the Slavs and the Gauls…[England] wanted to forbid other Powers to defend their interests…with the sword. … England will undoubtedly stand behind France and Russia against Germany out of hatred and envy. The imminent struggle for existence which the Germanic peoples of Europe (Austria, Germany) will have to fight out against the Slavs (Russians) and their Latin (Gallic) supporters finds the Anglo-Saxons on the side of the Slavs. Reason: petty envy, fear of our growing big.”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Marginal note on report from the German ambassador to London, Prince Lichnowsky (December 1912), quoted in Fritz Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1967), p. 32
1910s

War, People, Fear, Support

“Sins which would terrify us if they were peculiar to ourselves alone cease to frighten us when they are shared. The sinner sleeps soundly when he finds himself surrounded by a multitude, as though God were obliged to spare him.”

Pierre Nicole (1625–1695) French Jansenists

L'esprit de M. Nicole, ou: Instructions sur les vérités de la religion, p. 461, in The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1968), p. 94

God, Sleep

“Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.”

Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961) Swedish diplomat, economist, and author

Markings (1964)

Loneliness

“As long as words a different sense will bear,
And each may be his own interpreter,
Our airy faith will no foundation find;
The word's a weathercock for every wind.”

John Dryden book The Hind and the Panther

Pt. I, lines 462–465.
The Hind and the Panther (1687)

Faith, Sense

“The faith that education would destroy intolerance is false. It may be partly true, but people find that intolerance is fun.”

Richard Summerbell (1956) Canadian mycologist

The Ubyssey (student newspaper of the University of British Columbia), February 9, 1979

People, Education, Faith, Falseness

“I am finding the inherent politeness of this place quite destabilising. Having come from a House where politeness is about as rare as an orderly queue at a London bus stop, the culture shock on entering your Lordships' House has been profound. Indeed, such relentless politeness is not merely destabilising, but positively exhausting.”

Tony Banks (1942–2006) British politician

maiden speech to the House of Lords http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldhansrd/vo050720/text/50720-23.htm, 20 July 2005; quoted by United Kingdom Parliament World Wide Web Service contrasting the House of Lords with the House of Commons.

Housing

“I always felt that there had to be much more [than] just… shaking it, you know, eternally. Or just making music. Or more even than the pure enjoyment of entertaining someone – being on stage, which is a tremendous rush of adrenaline. But there had to be something else to my life. And I feel that with this work that I do, that’s how my life gets fulfilled. And how I find a purpose to my own existence. And I do feel that music is the platform. It’s become the vehicle that allows me to use my voice to speak about those issues that need urgent attention. I can take the spotlight that shines on me and shift it towards those issues that are infinitely more important than my own issues.”

Shakira (1977) Colombian singer

Life, Music, Feeling

“The mammalian record thus confirms our statement that any animal which is not too strongly conditioned by some special sort of experience is capable of responding to any adequate stimulus. This is what we find in the more uninhibited segments of our human species, and this is what we find among young children who are not too rigorously restrained in their early sex play. Exclusive preferences and patterns of behavior, heterosexual or homosexual, come only with experience, or as a result of social pressures which tend to force an individual into an exclusive pattern of one or the other sort. Psychologists and psychiatrists, reflecting the mores of the culture in which they have been raised, have spent a good deal of time trying explain the origins of homosexual activity; but considering the physiology of sexual response and the mammalian backgrounds of human behavior, it is not so difficult to explain why a human animal does a particular thing sexually. It is more difficult to explain why each and every individual is not involved in every type of sexual activity.”

Alfred Kinsey (1894–1956) American scientist (1894–1956)

Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)

Children, Sex, Behavior, Time

“We don't allow any prick teasing bimbos on our program. If they don't put out they're thrown out of the van at sixty miles an hour. And they can turn some tricks at the truck stop. That's the best place to find wimmen and that's the best place to leave wimmen.”

Steve Broy (1958) American musician

El Duce, The Man, The Myth, The Video (1993) by Reverend Cuntbag

“I have just concluded my series of paintings, I look at them constantly. I who made them often find them horrible. I understand them only at rare moments, when I have forgotten all about them, on days when I feel kindly disposed and indulgent to their poor maker. Sometimes I am horribly afraid to turn round canvases which I have piled against the wall; I am constantly afraid of finding monsters where I believed there were precious gems!… Thus it does not astonish me that the critics in London relegate me to the lowest rank. Alas! I fear that they are only too justified! - However, at times I come across works of mine which are soundly done and really in my style, and at such moments I find great solace. But no more of that. Painting, art in general, enchants me. It is my life. What else matters?”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote in a letter, 20 Nov. 1883; as quoted in Painting Outside the lines, Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art, ed. David W. Galenson, Harvard University Press, 30 Jun 2009, p. 84
1880's

Life, Fear, Art, Feeling

“If the divorced are remarried civilly, they find themselves in a situation that objectively contravenes God's law. Consequently, they cannot receive Holy Communion as long as this situation persists. This norm is not at all a punishment or a discrimination against the divorced and remarried, but rather expresses an objective situation that of itself renders impossible the reception of Holy Communion: '… If these people were admitted to the Eucharist, the faithful would be led into error and confusion regarding the Church's teaching about the indissolubility of marriage.”

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

Letter to bishops, Sept. 14, 1994
1990s

God, Marriage, People, Faith

“The type of rationality we assume in economics — perfect, logical, deductive rationality — is extremely useful in generating solutions to theoretical problems. But it demands much of human behavior — much more in fact than it can usually deliver. If we were to imagine the vast collection of decision problems economic agents might conceivably deal with as a sea or an ocean, with the easier problems on top and more complicated ones at increasing depth, then deductive rationality would describe human behavior accurately only within a few feet of the surface. For example, the game Tic-Tac-Toe is simple, and we can readily find a perfectly rational, minimax solution to it. But we do not find rational “solutions” at the depth of Checkers; and certainly not at the still modest depths of Chess and Go.”

W. Brian Arthur (1946) American economist

Source: Inductive Reasoning and Bounded Rationality (The El Farol Problem) (1994), p. 1

Behavior, Imagination, Game, Problem

“I believe Corot painted a tree better that any of us, but still I find him superior in his figures.”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

Degas in 1883, as quoted by Colin B. Bailey, in The Annenberg Collection: Masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-impressionism, publish. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2009, p. 4 note 5: 20 June 1887, - Corot’s biographer Alfred Robaut https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Robaut told this story (1905. Vol. 1. P. 336) 1876 - 1895

Tree, Painting

“To repeat to yourself a thousand times a day: 'Nothing on Earth has any worth,' to keep finding yourself at the same point, to circle stupidly as a top, eternally…”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

Time

“Every human being has to find their own peace. Peace is within you and me. When you and I can experience who we really are, what life is, and what we are doing here, that’s the day peace will begin in this world.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Dublin, Eire, October 7, 1981
1980s

Life, World, Peace

“All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called "guessing what was at the other side of the hill."”

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769–1852) British soldier and statesman

Statement in conversation with John Croker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilson_Croker and Croker's wife (4 September 1852), as quoted in The Croker Papers: The Correspondence and Diaries of the Late Right Honourable John Wilson Croker, LL.Dm F.R.S, Secretary of the Admiralty from 1809 to 1830 (1884), edited by Louis J. Jennings, Vol.III, p. 276.

Life, War, Business

“Every now and then you run across radiantly attractive people and you're delighted to find they adore you, till you realize that they adore just about everybody- and that's what's made them radiantly attractive.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

People