Quotes about finding
page 64

“I find a lot of club music extremely boring.”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Gothtronic interview with Iris http://www.gothtronic.com/?page=23&interviews=899

“As a Macedonian [Philip] was looked down upon by the more refined Athenians, but they shared the same Hellenistic culture. How deep this went is evident in aesthetically the least spectacular, but politically the most explosive, of the finds in Vergina. In the Great Tumulus above Philip's tombs, which was raised by the invading Galatians in 274 BC, the archaeologists found fragments of no fewer than seventy-five funeral monuments, or stelai. The names on these were entirely Greek, save two which appeared to be Hellenised versions of Thracian and Phoenician names. The implication is that Philip's Macedonia was thoroughly Hellenised, an outpost of classical Greek culture.”

Robert Fox

The Inner Sea: The Mediterranean and its People, (Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 1991) pp. 229-230

Appearance

“Experience is always seeking for special literary forms in which its various aspects can find their most adequate expression; and there are many of these aspects which are best rendered in a fragmentary fashion, because they are themselves fragments of experience, gleams and flashes of light, rather than the steady glow of a larger illumination.”

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

“English Aphorists,” pp. 102-103
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

Fashion, Light

“The news media should do a penetrating expose and take a look. I wish they would, I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out are they are pro-America or anti-America.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

on MSNBC's Hardball With Chris Matthews, October 17, 2008 http://rawstory.com/rawreplay/?p=2203 on whether there are anti-American members of Congress 2000s, Hardball Appearance (October 2008)

People

“Symmetry is a vast subject, significant in art and nature. Mathematics lies at its root, and it would be hard to find a better one on which to demonstrate the working of the mathematical intellect.”

Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) German mathematician

Symmetry (1952)

Art, Mathematics, Nature

“They [Mondrian's friends in Paris, Tonia and Wim Stieltjes] are receptive to the new, although they do not know what it is. Thus I do occasionally feel that my effort has not been in vain. They find the idea of the N. B. [= Dutch: nl:Nieuwe Beelding / Neo Plasticism] sound and quite magnificent, but think that it will be quite a long time before people are ready for it.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

In a letter to Theo van Doesburg, Paris 1920; as quoted in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 17
1920's

People, Feeling, Idea, Thinking

“Hasn’t there … been a little too much zeal in our reproof of children and friends for yielding to the temptations we ourselves find it most difficult to resist? We punish where we can least afford to sympathize. Of all the horrors of the daily news, it seems hardest to imagine the kind of cruelty that is intensified by the pain of its victims, but whenever we feel sympathy would weaken us, we are a little closer to the torturer.”

James Richardson (1950) American poet

#449
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

Pain, Children, Feeling, Imagination

“Saddam Hussein… I believe is involved with this World Trade Center and Pentagon bombing. I believe that you're going to find out that money from Iraq flowed in and helped this happen.”

Bill O'Reilly (1949) American political commentator, television host and writer

2001-09-14
[2005-06-10, O'Reilly: "We Do Not Speculate Here", FAIR.org, http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2543, 2010-11-19]

Money, World, Help

“Scientology means scio, knowing in the fullest sense of the word, and logos, study. In itself the word means knowing how to know. Scientology is a 'route,' a way, rather than a dissertation or assertive body of knowledge. Through its drills and studies one may find the truth for himself. The technology is therefore not expounded as something to believe, but something to do.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

The Basic Dictionary of Dianetics and Scientology (1988), p. 34.

Truth, Way, Knowledge, Sense

“It is a great tragedy that science, this wonderful process for finding out what is true, has ceded the spiritual uplift of its central revelations: the vastness of the universe, the immensity of time, the relatedness of all life, and life’s preciousness on our tiny planet.”

Ann Druyan (1949) American author and producer

Ann Druyan interviewed by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. — "Ann Druyan Talks About Science, Religion, Wonder, Awe … and Carl Sagan" http://www.csicop.org/si/show/ann_druyan_talks_about_science_religion/. Skeptical Inquirer 27 (6). November–December 2003.

Life, Universe, Science, Time

“Well! according to the sketch your picture [which Whistler sent him in a letter] seems well-composed, the lines of sky, sea, the position of the figures all that seems very, very well done[, ] on opening the letter it struck me immediately, an impression of decorative ornamentation which makes a good picture appeal to the eye as well - upside down and any other way up. Arrangement, layout, composition. etc - mysterious words harmonious laws - in no way conventional - needs of the Artist glory of the Raphael's Michelangelo's etc etc - for me a repetition a hesitation, a matter of feeling - which should also be a law, a mathematical thing, like form, like light, colour[. ] I find similarities with the colour method which works by opposing colours to arrive at a harmony that is to say to make a canvas a complete whole, to put into a small space an image with all the forces all the principles of nature - [instead of showing a part of it]..”

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) painter from France

quote from a letter of Fantin-Latour, Paris 7-14 October 1862 to James Whistler; from The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler - Repository: Glasgow University Library http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/people/display/?cid=1075&nameid=Manet_E&sr=0&surname=&firstname=&rs=1 - System Number: 01075; Call Number: MS Whistler F 6.

Law, Way, Feeling, Mathematics

“…I don't feel that they deserve a blanket condemnation at all. There are many things to object to in any society. But take China, modern China; one also finds many things that are really quite admirable. […] There are even better examples than China. But I do think that China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

" The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act? Noam Chomsky debates with Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, et al. http://www.chomsky.info/debates/19671215.htm" in New York, December 15, 1967; Republished at chomsky.info, accessed May 23, 2014. Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1960s

Feeling, Communication, Understanding, Thinking

“many women, especially as a result of social and cultural conditioning, do not become fully aware of their dignity. Others are victims of a materialistic and hedonistic outlook which views them as mere objects of pleasure, and does not hesitate to organize the exploitation of women, even of young girls, into a despicable trade. Special concern needs to be shown for these women, particularly by other women who, thanks to their own upbringing and sensitivity, are able to help them discover their own inner worth and resources. Women need to help women, and to find support in the valuable and effective contributions which associations, movements and groups, many of them of a religious character, have proved capable of making in this regard.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Message for the XXVIII World Day of Peace, 8 December 1994 Source: www.vatican.va http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/messages/peace/documents/hf_jp-ii_mes_08121994_xxviii-world-day-for-peace_en.html

Women, Pleasure, Girl, Support

“The landscape painter, perhaps, goes even further. It is not only in living beings that he sees the reflection of the universal soul; it is in the trees, the bushes, the valleys, the hills. What to other men is only wood and earth appears to the great landscapist like the face of a great being. Corot saw kindness abroad in the trunks of the trees, in the grass of the fields, in the mirroring water of the lakes. But there Millet read suffering and resignation.
Everywhere the great artist hears spirit answer to his spirit. Where, then, can you find a more religious man?
Does not the sculptor perform his act of adoration when he perceives the majestic character of the forms that he studies? — when, from the midst of fleeting lines, he knows how to extricate the eternal type of each being? — when he seems to discern in the very breast of the divinity the immutable models on which all living creatures are moulded? Study, for example, the masterpieces of the Egyptian sculptors, either human or animal figures, and tell me if the accentuation of the essential lines does not produce the effect of a sacred hymn. Every artist who has the gift of generalizing forms, that is to say, of accenting their logic without depriving them of their living reality, provokes the same religious emotion; for he communicates to us the thrill he himself felt before the immortal verities.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Art, 1912, Ch. Mystery in Art

Men, Soul, Communication, Reality

“You have been born in this world as a human being to worship God; therefore try to acquire love for His Lotus Feet. Why do you trouble yourself to know a hundred other things? What will you gain by discussing philosophy? Look here, one ounce of liquor is enough to intoxicate you. What is the use of your trying to find out how many gallons of liquor there are in the tavern?”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

Source: The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942), p. 901

Love, God, World

“We do not find it hard to bear with ourselves, though we are full of faults. Why then may we not learn to be tolerant of others?”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 238

Learning

“Isn't it better to be alone than pretend you're someone else? Be you. Find you. Be happy with that.”

Katherine Heigl (1978) American actress and film producer

InStyle magazine (2009)

Happiness

“A human being at rest runs on 90 watts. That’s how much power you need just to lie down. And if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you’ll need about 250 watts. That’s how much energy it takes to run about and find food. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy needed to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can’t have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It’s not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales.”

Geoffrey West (1940) British physicist

2010s Source: Jonah Lehredec. " A Physicist Solves the City http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html?pagewanted=5&_r=1," in www.nytimes.com. Dec 17, 2010.

Lie, Food, Animals

“As we find ourselves in jobless economies, societies in which small minorities consume while the masses starve, we find ourselves forced to rethink the rationale of our current globalization and to ponder the Gandhian alternative.
At a time when Freud was liberating sex, Gandhi was reining it in; when Marx was pitting worker against capitalist, Gandhi was reconciling them; when the dominant European thought had dropped God and soul out of the social reckoning, he was centralizing society in God and soul; at a time when the colonized had ceased to think and control, he dared to think and control; and when the ideologies of the colonized had virtually disappeared, he revived them and empowered them with a potency that liberated and redeemed.”

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

2000s, The Sacred Warrior (2000)

God, Sex, Soul, Thinking

“Find a fraction which, multiplied by itself, shall give 6, or… find the square root of 6. This can be shown to be an impossible problem; for it can be shown that no fraction whatsoever multiplied by itself, can give a whole number, unless it be itself a whole number disguised in a fractional form, such as 4⁄2 or 21⁄3. To this problem, then, there is but one answer, that it is self-contradictory. But if we propose the following problem,—to find a fraction which, multiplied by itself, shall give a product lying between 6 and 6 + a; we find that this problem admits of solution in every case. It therefore admits of solution however small a may be… as small as you please.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

...there is such a thing as the square root of 6, and it is denoted by √6. But we do not say we actually find this, but that we approximate to it.
The Differential and Integral Calculus (1836)

Lying, Problem

“We have had landlord rule longer, far longer than the life of the oldest man in this vast assembly, and I would ask you to look at the results of that rule. The landowners have had unlimited sway in Parliament and in the provinces. Abroad the history of our country is the history of war and rapine: at home, of debt, taxes, and rapine too. In all the great contests in which we have been engaged we have found that this ruling class have taken all the honours, while the people have taken all the scars. No sooner was the country freed from the horrible contest which was so long carried on with the Powers of Europe, than this law, by their partial legislation, was enacted—far more hostile to British interests than any combination of foreign powers has ever proved. We find them legislating corruptly: they pray daily that in their legislation they may discard all private ends and partial affections, and after prayers they sit down to make a law for the purpose of extorting from all the consumers of food a higher price than it is worth, that the extra price may find its way into the pockets of the proprietors of land, these proprietors being the very men by whom this infamous law is sustained…”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in Covent Garden (19 December 1845), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 142.
1840s

Life, Men, Hostility, War

“Guilford thought he knew what science was. It was nothing more than curiosity…tempered by humility, disciplined with patience.
Science meant looking—a special kind of looking. Looking especially hard at the things you didn’t understand. Looking at the stars, say, and not fearing them, not worshiping them, just asking questions, finding the question that would unlock the door to the next question and the question beyond that.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Darwinia

Prologue (pp. 10-11)
Darwinia (1998)

Fear, Star, Understanding, Question

“Decision making processes are aimed at finding courses of action that are feasible or satisfactory in the light of multiple goals and constraints.”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

Source: 1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947, p. 274.

Decision, Light

“It is a fascinating story to those who care for their Bible. It is the life-history of the greatest of books, diversified by interesting episodes which appeal to our human sympathies; and we venture to think that the result is reassuring. It may be disturbing to some to part with the conception of a Bible handed down through the ages without alteration and in unchallenged authority; but it is a higher ideal to face the facts, to apply the best powers with which God has endowed us to the solutions of the problems which they present to us; and it reassuring at the end to find that the general result of all these discoveries and all this study is to strengthen the proof of the authenticity of the Scripture, and our conviction that we have in our hands, in substantial integrity, the veritable Word of God.”

Frederic G. Kenyon (1863–1952) British palaeographer and biblical and classical scholar

Source: The Story Of The Bible, Chapter X, The Position Today, p. 144

Life, God, Books, Age

“The recognition of God is easier through the nature. Find the presence of God by apprehending the nature, and comprehend the Divine allusions through the nature”

Elia M. Ramollah (1973) founder and leader of the El Yasin Community

Amen (vol.1)

God, Nature

“Dump the reds in a pile, boys
Dump the reds in a pile
You'd better wipe off that smile, boys
Better wipe off that smile
We'll spit through the streets of the cities we wreck
We'll find you a leader that you can't elect
Those treaties we signed were a pain in the neck
'Cause we're the cops of the world, boys
We're the cops of the world.”

Phil Ochs (1940–1976) American protest singer and songwriter

"Cops of the World" http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/ochs/lyrics/cops-of-the-world.html from Phil Ochs in Concert (1966) Lyrics

Pain, World, Smile, Boy

“While we find such endless differences between the actions of different men under the same temptations, or of the same man at different times, we shall yet be unable to find any link of the chain undetermined by the action of the outward circumstance on the inner law; or any point where we can say a power lay in the individual will of choosing either of two courses — in other words, to discover sin. Actions are governed by motives. The power of motives depends on character, and character on the original faculties and the training which they have received from the men or things among which they have been bred.
Sin, therefore, as commonly understood, is a chimera.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Fragments of Markham's notes
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)

Men, Law, Motivation, Time

“Even men who share their personal experiences find that, instead of empathy, they get the response Dear Abby gave this man: “Women have it worse.” This belief is so strong that over the past quarter century, women’s old fantasy of marrying a man-as-protector has been tainted by women’s new nightmare of husband-as-batterer.”

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

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

Women, Men, Strong, Past

“Here are poor who, far from discovering their true selves through the pressure of their poverty, find in it a cloud which for ever hides them from themselves.”

Henry Scott Holland (1847–1918) British theologian

Our Neighbors (1911)

“Imagine a book of unexplained mysteries written by a contemporary of Shakespeare. It might include the mystery of the falling stars that sweep through the sky foretelling disaster; the mystery of the Kraken, the giant sea devil with 50-foot tentacles; the mystery of monster bones, sometimes found in caves or on beaches. Such a book would be a curious mixture of truth and absurdity, fact and legend. We would all feel superior as we turned its pages and murmured: "Of course, they didn't know about comets and giant squids and dinosaurs." If this book should happen to find its way into the hands of our remote descendants, they may smile pityingly and say: "It's incredible to think that they knew nothing about epsilon fields or multiple psychic feedback or cross gravitational energies. They didn't even know about the ineluctability of time."”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

But let us hope that such a descendant is in a charitable mood, and might add: "And yet they managed to ask a few of the right questions."
Source: Enigmas and Mysteries (1976), p. 142

Truth, Books, Smile, Hope

“Take any aspect of the Western inheritance of which our ancestors were proud, and you will find university courses devoted to deconstructing it. Take any positive feature of our political and cultural inheritance, and you will find concerted efforts in both the media and the academy to place it in quotation marks, and make it look like an imposture or a deceit.”

Roger Scruton book How to Be a Conservative

Source: How to Be a Conservative (2014), p. 40

Effort, Universe

“That dualism of the Church and the Chapel taken together has been one of the most potent influences in the life of our country. The one fostering, perhaps, more than the other, the respect for authority and tradition and the sense of historical continuity; the other laying its main emphasis on individual obedience to eternal law. They both have defects of their qualities, but they have both been, and are, and will be great social forces with great political consequences. Both at their best penetrate life with serious purpose, and are in constant war with that spirit of secularism which finds its paradise in idleness and frivolity, with which no country can ever prosper.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Cornwall (23 June 1927), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), p. 55.
1927

Life, War, Law, Sense

“There is an enormous difference between modern science and Greek philosophy, and that is just the empiristic attitude… Since the time of Galileo and Newton, modern science has been based upon a detailed study of nature and upon the postulate that only such statements should be made, as have been verified or at least can be verified by experiment. The idea that one can single out some events from nature by an experiment… to find out what is the constant law in the continuous change, did not occur to the Greek philosophers. Therefore, modern science has from its beginning stood on a much more modest, but at the same time much firmer, basis than ancient philosophy. Therefore, the statements of modern physics are in some way meant much more seriously than the statements of Greek philosophy.”

Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) German theoretical physicist

p, 125
Physics and Philosophy (1958)

Law, Way, Idea, Nature

“Upon this I sent to the Register who brought me the [twenty-four] articles, which I have read and find so curiously penned, so full of branches and circumstance, as I think the Inquisitors of Spain use not so many questions to comprehend and to trap their prey. … this kind of proceeding is too much savouring of the Roman inquisition, and is rather a device to seek for offenders than to reform any.”

William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley (1520–1598) English statesman

Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Whitgift, criticising the Court of High Commission which was persecuting nonconformists (1 July, 1584).
Conyers Read, Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth (London: Jonathan Cape, 1960), p. 295.

Question, Thinking, Reading

“I have always heard in the music what I am finding out from the books: the man was a tyrant who beat his musicians with insults and temper tantrums. He never smiled when conducting (not even in rehearsals!) never thanked or complimented his men, never made them feel they were valuable partners or had even done a creditable job. He would fail to give them cues, then blame them with curses and insults for needing them! Besides being a compulsive perfectionist, he was childish, petulant, inconsiderate, monomaniacal, and monstrously self-centered. His technique was fear, and I always heard that fear in his music…Reading about him - especially books by people who worked with him - strongly confirmed what I had felt in my bones”

Donald Vroon (1942) American music critic

On the subject of Toscanini - from Vroon's foreword to The mystery of Leopold Stokowski, By William Ander Smith, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1990, ISBN 0838633625

Men, People, Books, Fear

“Books were banned from my house, my mum thought they were ‘germ traps’, so I was always sneaking into the library, hiding under a big plant; reading. I was escaping into another world as well as finding out stuff that was news to me.”

Carole Morin British writer

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse (2013)

Books, World, Reading, Housing

“I already see enough evidence for this optimism … in recent years I find that perhaps what Im seeking is a scientific basis for hope, and I think I've found it.”

Jonas Salk (1914–1995) Inventor of polio vaccine

The Open Mind interview (1985)

Hope, Optimism, Thinking

“The advance of science is not comparable to the changes of a city, where old edifices are pitilessly torn down to give place to new, but to the continuous evolution of zoologic types which develop ceaselessly and end by becoming unrecognizable to the common sight, but where an expert eye finds always traces of the prior work of the centuries past. One must not think then that the old-fashioned theories have been sterile or vain.”

Henri Poincaré book The Value of Science

Il ne faut pas comparer la marche de la science aux transformations d’une ville, où les édifices vieillis sont impitoyablement jetés à bas pour faire place aux constructions nouvelles, mais à l’évolution continue des types zoologiques qui se développent sans cesse et finissent par devenir méconnaissables aux regards vulgaires, mais où un œil exercé retrouve toujours les traces du travail antérieur des siècles passés. Il ne faut donc pas croire que les théories démodées ont été stériles et vaines.
Introduction, p. 14
The Value of Science (1905)

Fashion, Thinking, Science, Change

“When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. […] The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. […] The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after.”

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

You and Your Research (1986)

Way, Error, Problem, Tree

“The story of the Fall always fascinates me as a play ground, but I cannot find any profound meaning in it, because of my 'liberal' view of human nature: I cannot believe in a state of original innocence, still less in a profound meaning in it, and I am always minimising the conception and the extent of Sin and the sinfulness of sex.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Letter 396, to Eric Fletcher, 9 July 1951
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

Sex, Nature

“The word ‘Sudra’ which means ‘Son of prostitute’ should not find a place even in the history hereafter. We will not allow it to find a place in the dictionary or encycl”

Periyar E. V. Ramasamy (1879–1973) Tamil politician and social reformer

In the Collected Works of Periyar E.V.R., p. 490.
Society

History

“Practically speaking, if timesaving devices really saved time, there would be more time available to us now than ever before in history. But, strangely enough, we seem to have less time than even a few years ago. It's really great fun to go someplace where there are no timesaving devices because, when you do, you find that you have lots of time. Elsewhere, you're too busy working to pay for machines to save you time so you won't have to work so hard.”

Benjamin Hoff book The Tao of Pooh

Bisy Backson.
The Tao of Pooh (1982)

History, Business, Time

“Sour Grapes is a comedy about things that aren't funny. It reminded me of Crash, an erotic thriller about things no one finds erotic. The big difference is that David Cronenberg, who made Crash, knew that people were not turned on by auto accidents. Larry David, who wrote and directed Sour Grapes, apparently thinks people are amused by cancer, accidental castration, racial stereotypes and bitter family feuds… The more I think of it, the more Sour Grapes really does resemble Crash (except that Crash was not a bad film). Both movies are like watching automobile accidents. Only one was intended to be.”

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

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/sour-grapes-1998 of Sour Grapes (17 April 1998) Reviews, Zero star reviews

People, Family, Thinking

“The nation has been, and is still being, eroded and hollowed out from within by the implantation of large unassimilated and unassimiliable populations—what Lord Radcliffe once in a memorable phrase called "alien wedges"—in the heartland of the state…The disruption of the homogeneous "we", which forms the essential basis of parliamentary democracy and therefore of our liberties, is now approaching the point at which the political mechanics of a "divided community"…take charge and begin to operate autonomously. Let me illustrate this pathology of a society that is being eaten alive…The two active ingredients are grievance and violence. Where a community is divided, grievance is for practical purposes inexhaustible. When violence is injected—and quite a little will suffice for a start—there begins an escalating competition to discover grievance and to remove it. The materials lie ready to hand in a multiplicity of agencies with a vested interest, more or less benevolent, in the process of discovering grievances and demanding their removal. The spiral is easily maintained in upward movement by the repetitions and escalation of violence. At each stage alienation between the various elements of society is increased, and the constant disappointment that the imagined remedies yield a reverse result leads to growing bitterness and despair. Hand in hand with the exploitation of grievance goes the equally counterproductive process which will no doubt, as usual, be called the "search for a political solution"…Indeed, attention has already been drawn publicly to the potentially critical factor of the so-called immigrant vote in an increasing number of worthwhile constituencies. The result is that the political parties of the indigenous population vie with one another for votes by promising remedy of the grievances which are being uncovered and exploited in the context of actual or threatened violence. Thus the legislature finds itself in effect manipulated by minorities instead of responding to majorities, and is watched by the public at large with a bewildering and frustration, not to say cynicism, of which the experience of legislation hitherto in the field of immigration and race relations afford some pale idea…I need not follow the analysis further in order to demonstrate how parliamentary democracy disintegrates when the national homogeneity of the electorate is broken by a large and sharp alteration in the composition of the population. While the institutions and liberties on which British liberty depends are being progressively surrendered to the European superstate, the forces which will sap and destroy them from within are allowed to accumulate unchecked. And all the time we are invited to direct towards Angola or Siberia the anxious attention that the real danger within our power and our borders imperatively demand.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech the Hampshire Monday Club in Southampton (9 April 1976), from A Nation or No Nation? Six Years in British Politics (Elliot Right Way Books, 1977), pp. 165-166
1970s

Lie, Disappointment, Democracy, Imagination

“Harmony is always when I look around me
And your smile I see
I can feel it surrounds me
A miracle I find in your company.”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Earth Moving (1989)

Smile, Feeling

“He could find no cure for his grief; but he did know that continued occupation would relieve him, and therefore he occupied himself continually.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

The Life of Cicero (1880)

“Yes I have spoken on Gandhi ji’s Vaishnav Jan bhajan at many places. In fact, I used to deliver hour-long speeches describing why Gandhi ji loved this bhajan. If we think carefully and dwell on each word of this song, composed 500 years ago, we will find that everything said in it is still relevant, especially for our public life. He speaks against corruption and importance of personal integrity. In short, it is a manifesto for public life and morality. So, I worked around the words and would say: … "A people’s representative is one who feels the pain of others; one who removes the sorrows of others and yet does not let a trace of pride or arrogance come into his heart."
This used to be part of my worker development programmes. I used to analyse each line of this bhajan and explain why Gandhi ji promoted these values in public life; it contains all the wisdom you need for public life. It is a great misfortune for our country that this bhajan is played only on October 2 at Rajghat. It should have become an instrument of inculcating moral values. Gandhi ji liked this bhajan because Gandhi’s DNA and the elements of this geet match each other. I hold it up as a model of conduct for our party and RSS workers. In the RSS, there is an old tradition of remembering this bhajan every morning. Their pratah smaran (morning remembrance) starts with Gandhi ji’s name.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

Narendra Modi quoted from Kishwar, Madhu (2014). Modi, Muslims and media: Voices from Narendra Modi's Gujarat. p.379-380
2013

Love, Life, Wisdom, Pain

“There is in mankind a deep and desperate necessity to feel superior. In any group there are some who genuinely are superior…but it is easy to see that within the parameters of any group, be it culture, club, nation, profession, only a few are really superior; the mass, clearly, are not.
But it is the will of the mass that dictates the mores, initiated though changes may be by individuals or minorities; the individuals or minorities, more often than not, are cut down for their trouble. And if a unit of the mass wants to feel superior, it will find a way. This terrible drive has found expression in many ways, through history—in slavery and genocide, xenophobia and snobbery, race prejudice and sex differentiation. Given a man who, among his fellows, has no real superiority, you are faced with a bedevilled madman who, if superiority is denied him, and he cannot learn one or earn one, will turn on something weaker than himself and make it inferior. The obvious, logical, handiest subject for this inexcusable indignity is his woman.
He could not do this to anyone he loved.”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Section 41 (p. 126)
Venus Plus X (1960)

Love, Sex, Way, Feeling

“I've come out here tonight to challenge you… challenge you, the WWE Universe, into seeing things my way and to learn how to just say "no." See, because the people who cheer for Jeff Hardy are just slaves to the vices associated with his (with quote fingers) "living in the moment." I feel bad for you, I really do. You walk around almost blind and you wear your prescriptions proudly on your sleeves like they were badges of honor. What was it the doctor told you? 'Just take one… every four hours,' right? Aside from myself, there's not a person in this arena who hasn't abused prescription medication or taken a recreational drug. And I know, trust me, it's hard being straight-edge, it's hard to live a straight-edge lifestyle. It's extremely difficult to be me, but what concerns me now is that none of you realize how much more difficult it is to live the life… that you all live. I'm positive nobody in here takes into account the long-term consequences of alcohol on your liver. (Smattering of cheers from audience) See, and you cheer that. That's nothing to cheer. You drink because it's fun, right? (Audience cheers a little louder) Eventually, it's not gonna be fun anymore when it spirals out of control and its no longer… it's no longer fun. Sooner or later, you're just drinking to feel normal. And then there's the smokers. You know, I don't know what's more disgusting–is watching a smoker pollute his/her lungs with over 4,000 foreign chemicals, or having to listen to the smoker convince themselves that they can quit whenever they want to. It's… it's hard to quit, I know, it takes a very strong person to quit, but an even stronger person never would've started smoking in the first place. (Audience boos and chants "Hardy") I didn't want to come out here and be the bearer of bad news, but let's face facts: chances are pretty slim that any of you here will ever get the monkey off your back. You'll never be able to pry the cigarette from your lips, or find the self-control to pour your drink from your glass, or the self-respect to take the pill out of your mouth. See, it starts, and it can't happen without learning how to say "no" to temptation, and that's why I'm out here. I'm out here to challenge you before it's too late. Please, learn how to say "no" to temptation, learn how to say "no" to your vices, learn how to control yourself.”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

July 24, 2009
Friday Night SmackDown

Life, People, Alcohol, Way

“It's ten years since I heard, and
Then one day a letter comes.
It's neutral stuff, until I
Delve into the envelope
Again and find your photo,
Handsome still, and not a line
To tell me why you sent it.”

Edward Lucie-Smith (1933) British art critic, writer and curator

Poem A Former Lover

Photo

“All my life my mother has told me I'm hard to shop for. She can't find the bacon aisle!”

Morgan Murphy (food critic) (1972) Southern writer

Source: Bourbon & Bacon (2014), p. 193

Life

“Life is a campus: in a Greenwich Village bookstore, looking for a New Yorker collection, I asked of an earnest-looking assistant where I might find the humour section. Peering over her granny glasses, she enquired, "Humour studies would that be, sir?"”

Keith Waterhouse (1929–2009) British writer

The Spectator, January 15, 1994

Life, Study

“Pope John Paul II is a tireless champion of peace who has dealt with the theme of peace often and at some length. Like his predecessors, John Paul II sees a close connection between justice and peace. John Paul II believes that justice is rooted in love and “finds its most significant expression in mercy”. Hence, justice, “if separated from merciful love, becomes cold and cutting.””

Kurien Kunnumpuram (1931–2018) Indian theologian

Kunnumpuram, K. (ed) (2007) World Peace: An Impossible Dream? , Mumbai: St Pauls
On Peace

Love, Peace, Justice

“Everyone has to find what is right for them, and it is different for everyone. Eating for me is how you proclaim your beliefs three times a day. That is why all religions have rules about eating. Three times a day, I remind myself that I value life and do not want to cause pain to or kill other living beings. That is why I eat the way I do.”

Natalie Portman (1981) Israeli-American actress

On vegetarianism. Interview with The New Zealand Herald (5 May 2011), quoted in “Natalie Portman: 'Eating For Me Is How You Proclaim Your Beliefs'”, in ecorazzi.com http://www.ecorazzi.com/2011/05/05/natalie-portman-my-beliefs-are-reflected-in-how-i-eat/.

Life, Pain, Religion, Way

“I don't really agree that most academics frown when they hear Wikipedia. Most academics I find quite passionate about the concept of Wikipedia and like it quite a bit. […] The number of academics who really really don't like Wikipedia is really quite small and we find that they get reported on in the media far out of proportion to the amount they actually exist.”

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

Wikimania 2008 Alexandria, press conference, 0'14 (August 2008)

Passion

“Speaking of New York as a traveller I have two faults to find with it. In the first place there is nothing to see; and in the second place there is no mode of getting about to see anything.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

Source: North America (1862), Ch. 14

Travel

“I have sometimes felt that writers on the artistic aspect of photography have too often, like the reformers of religious creeds, led their followers into a condition of disbelief and unrest, and then left them to find out for themselves how to live up to new and vague beliefs, so many writers on Pictorial Photography have told us what to avoid without saying why, and have then told us what to do without showing how.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Part II : Practical Pictorial Photography, p. 2

“Just when you get really wound up, you turn a corner and you're somewhere else completely. You find an Arcadian glade - a glimpse of paradise in the middle of it all. And that's why you persevere. That's why you don't chuck yourself off a building or shoot yourself at the same time as someone else, like he [Carl] wanted us to.”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

The Guardian, January 10, 2003.
Arcadia

Time, Perseverance

“Marshes that are stagnant and have no outlets either by rivers or ditches, like the Pomptine marshes, merely putrefy as they stand, emitting heavy, unhealthy vapors. A case of a town built in such a spot was Old Salpia in Apulia… Year after year there was sickness, until finally the suffering inhabitants came with a public petition to Marcus Hostilius and got him to agree to seek and find them a proper place to which to remove their city.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter IV, Sec. 12

Suffering

“Hey folks, tonight I wanna talk about global warming. Now, The World is Hot and Flat Society is growing increasingly hysterical and that indeed is causing me to sweat a little. In the last month or so, I've heard suggestions that those skeptical of Al Gore's spiritual crisis are deniers and one good way to serve the planet would be to have one less kid and I've also read that mankind is 'a virus' and human beings are 'the AIDS of the earth.' Global warming is officially becoming creepy and I can't tell yet if it's facisitc or fetishistic but it's kinda like piercing or tattoos, I don't even wanna get one, because I see how hooked people are and it spooks me. I just find it odd that we've come to a point in history where if I don't concede that if Manhattan will be completely submerged in 2057 I'm thought to be a delusional contrarian by some of my more zealous fellow citizens. I'm sorry Angst Squad, but if we commissioned a public works project (let's call it 'The Manhattan Project') and tried our hardest to submerge Manhattan in the next 50 years, we couldn't pull it off, mainly because it wouldn't be environmentally sound and you guys would hang it up in the permitting process. Simply put, I can't worry about the earth right now because I'm too worried about the world. Why can't I take terrorism as seriously as Al Gore takes global warming? There are times that you think that liberals only fear car bombs if they have leaky exhaust systems. And why am I constantly beaten over the head with 'the delicate balance of nature'? Am I the only one who watches Animal Planet? Every time I turn it on, I see some demented harp seal chucking peguins down his gullet like they were maitre d'Tic-Tacs. To me, nature always appears more unbalanced than Gary Busey with a clogged eustachian tube. Listen, the weather is just like Hilary's explanation for her war vote: we just don't know, do we? We're here to miss our next Tuesday's weather much less the year 2057. Relax, we'll replace oil when we need to. American ingenuity will kick in and the next great fortune will be made. It's not pretty, but it is historically accurate. We need to run out of oil first. That's why I drive an SUV: so we run out of it more quickly. I consider myself at the vanguard of the environmental movement and I think the individuals who insist on driving hybrids are just prolonging our dillemma and I think that's just selfish. Come on, don't you care about our Mother Earth? Don'tcha?”

Dennis Miller (1953) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actor

6/17 The Half Hour News Hour
The Buck Starts Here

War, People, World, Fear

“Everything you tell me in your last letter, which is to say that to spend more time with me they will give up going to Paris, fills me with the greatest pleasure... I find myself much better, and I hope to be back where I was before... I am happy to be better to receive my most beloved travelers. This improvement I owe to Molina.”

Francisco De Goya (1746–1828) Spanish painter and printmaker (1746–1828)

letter to Javier (his only son), from Madrid, Summer of 1827; as quoted by Robert Hughes, in: Goya. Borzoi Book - Alfred Knopf, New York, 2003, p. 401 – note 15
1820s

Happiness, Pleasure, Hope, Travel

“On the justification for the war, it wasn't related to finding any particular weapon of mass destruction. In our judgment, it was much more fundamental. It was the removing of a regime that was hostile, that clearly had the intention of constructing weapons systems. … I think, frankly, that everybody knew the post-war situation was probably going to be more difficult than the war itself. Canada remains alienated from its allies, shut out of the reconstruction process to some degree, unable to influence events. There is no upside to the position Canada took.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

Maclean’s, August, 25, 2003: On the Iraq war.
2003

Hostility, War, Thinking

“I am now pretty far advanced in life, and all my views are centered in the Happiness and well-fare of my children; you will, therefore, find from me every Indulgence which you have a right to expect from an affectionate Parent.”

George Mason (1725–1792) American delegate from Virginia to the U.S. Constitutional Convention

Letter to his son, George Mason V. (8 January 1783)

Life, Happiness, Children, Parent

“At last a pleasant river's mouth he finds,
Free from rough clifts, safe from disturbing winds.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

Book V
Homer His Odysses Translated (1665)

“May I never sit on a tribunal where my friends shall not find more favor from me than strangers.”

Themistocles (-524–-459 BC) Athenian statesman

As quoted by Plutarch, in Lives as translated by J. Langhorne and W. Langhorne (1850) http://books.google.com/books?id=jaBfAAAAMAAJ, p. 225

“My God, it was really coming true. The higher and higher I climbed in education, the more I was finding people I could talk to.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

God, People, Education

“To find the cause of our ills in something outside ourselves, something specific that can be spotted and eliminated, is a diagnosis that cannot fail to appeal. To say that the cause of our troubles is not in us but in the Jews, and pass immediately to the extermination of the Jews, is a prescription likely to find a wide acceptance.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Section 126
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

“These people must be helped to find themselves in this new world, but they must not know that they’re being helped. To let them know would destroy confidence and dignity, and human dignity is the keystone of any civilization.”

Clifford D. Simak book City

Source: City (1952), Chapter 1, “City” (p. 31)

People, World, Confidence, Help

“You don't need to turn the light switch on and off, again! You have absolutely NAILED DOWN the principle finding of that experiment; when you turn the lights off, daddy can't see ANYTHING. He steps on your toys trying to find you and kill you… And breaks his foot!”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

Monster (2004)

Light

“I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 176 (footnote)

People

“"But tell me how it is that she could be so beautiful without any heart at all — without any place even for a heart to live in." "I cannot quite tell," she said; "but I am sure she would not look so beautiful if she did not take means to make herself look more beautiful than she is. And then, you know, you began by being in love with her before you saw her beauty … But the chief thing that makes her beautiful is this: that, although she loves no man, she loves the love of any man; and when she finds one in her power, her desire to bewitch him and gain his love (not for the sake of his love either, but that she may be conscious anew of her own beauty, through the admiration he manifests), makes her very lovely—with a self-destructive beauty…"”

George MacDonald book Phantastes

On the Alder Tree
Phantastes (1858)

Love, Beauty, Heart

“My illness is alive, the threats to my life are real; yet it is only my death I feel, only the lessening made by my own loss. I am gone, Kohler, right now; and who is so dead as one so dead to a moment of life that life can't raise him up? Not to be here, not to see tomorrow—which, when I see it I shall find as stupid and empty as I found today—is appalling, Kohler, appalling… to slip into the insignificance of history like a thought held in a dream…”

William H. Gass book The Tunnel

Source: The Tunnel (1995), p. 250

Life, Death, Stupidity, Dreams

“You will find an allusion to some mysterious cause for a phenomenon in Stocks. It is surmised that the deferred debt is to be taken up at the next session, and some anticipated provision made for it. This may either be an invention of those who wish to sell, or it may be a reality imparted in confidence to the purchasers or smelt out by their sagacity. I have had a hint that something is intended and has dropt from 1 which has led to this speculation. I am unwilling to credit the fact, untill I have further evidence, which I am in a train of getting if it exists. It is said that packet boats & expresses are again sent from this place to the Southern States, to buy up the paper of all sorts which has risen in the market here. These & other abuses make it a problem whether the system of the old paper under a bad Government, or of the new under a good one, be chargeable with the greater substantial injustice. The true difference seems to be that by the former the few were the victims to the many; by the latter the many to the few. It seems agreed on all hands now that the bank is a certain & gratuitous augmentation of the capitals subscribed, in a proportion of not less than 40 or 50 [per cent] and if the deferred debt should be immediately provided for in favor of the purchasers of it in the deferred shape, & since the unanimous vote that no change [should] be made in the funding system, my imagination will not attempt to set bounds to the daring depravity of the times. The stock-jobbers will become the pretorian band of the Government, at once its tool & its tyrant; bribed by its largesses, & overawing it by clamours & combinations. Nothing new from abroad. I shall not be in [Philadelphia] till the close of the Week.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Letter to Thomas Jefferson (8 August 1791)
1790s

Confidence, Imagination, Problem, Reality

“My joy was boundless. I had learnt the true practice of law. I had learnt to find out the better side of human nature and to enter men’s hearts. I realized the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder. The lesson was so indelibly burnt into me that a large part of my time during the twenty years of my practice as a lawyer was occupied in bringing about private compromises of hundreds of cases. I lost nothing thereby - not even money, certainly not my soul.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Part II, Chapter 14, Preparation for the Case
1920s, An Autobiography (1927)

Men, Money, Law, Soul

“[Glossary of Broken Dreams] was born out of the frustration that debate culture (not only) on digital platforms has become radically fragmented and fractalized, making it hard to call it discourse. It's a Tower of Babel-like context confusion that pleases me as a nerd, but as a political being who wants society to progress, it doesn't please me at all. […] I just thought it was time for something like a political spring cleaning of concepts. Because picking up the broom and taking a chance to get rid of stuff is the only way to prevent us all from becoming social liberal hoarders. One of my examples is the concept of privacy that, at the moment, everyone coddles like a puppy. Let me say this, as a good old Neo-leftist, I'm having problems with the conservative and deeply bourgeois can of worms that the privacy debate entails. I think it's time to change our thought patterns here. Instead of trying to find ways to defend our privacy come hell or high water, we should ask ourselves why privacy is such a major concern for us? Is what we're trying to achieve here just reformist symptom-control rather than a solution to the underlying problems?”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

from an interview about Grenzfurthner's film Glossary of Broken Dreams (via Boing Boing https://boingboing.net/2018/05/24/at-the-golden-calf-slaughterho.html)

Dreams, Way, Spring, Hell

“The FBI was most disturbed by the Panthers' survival programs providing community service. The popular free breakfast program, in which the party provided free hot breakfasts to children in Black communities throughout the United States, was, as already noted, a particular thorn in the side of J. Edgar Hoover. Finding little to criticize about the program objectively, the Bureau decided to destroy it.”

Huey P. Newton (1942–1989) Co-founder of the Black Panther Party

War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America (June 1980)

Children, Communication

“But if we judge only those things which are in our power to be good or bad, there remains no reason either for finding fault with God or standing in a hostile attitude to man.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

VI, 41
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VI

God, Hostility

“I do care about memory leaks but I still don't find programming enjoyable.”

Rasmus Lerdorf (1968) Danish programmer and creator of PHP

@rasmus http://twitter.com/rasmus/statuses/7636370468

Memory

“As I think back on those years, I find it interesting that many people seemed to have trouble with their identities as black men. Having had to accept my blackness in the caldron of ridicule from some of my black schoolmates under segregation, then immediately thereafter remain secure in that identity during my years at all-white seminary, I had few racial identity problems. I knew who I was and needed no gimmicks to affirm my identity. Nor, might I add, do I need anyone telling me who I am today. This is especially true of the psycho-silliness about forgetting my roots or self-hatred. If anything, this shows that some people have too much time on their hands.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

Men, People, Problem, Thinking

“The way to find out about your happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you really are happy-not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what I call "following your bliss."”

Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth

Source: The Power of Myth (book), p.193

Happiness, People, Way, Feeling

“Some religions might have at least a facade of a very anti-LGBT or very non-progressive culture so to speak -- or like you can’t be religious and be whatever. I’m telling you from experience that yes you can,” … “You might have to make it work but thankfully we live in a place and in a time when there’s a lot of communities with a lot of places that you can find support.”

Abby Stein (1991) Trans activist, speaker, and educator

At Ramapo College of New Jersey, February 15, 2017 http://www.ramaponews.com/news/view.php/1027379/Panel-Reflects-on-Relationship-of-Religi 2017

Religion, Communication, Support, Time

“Photography is not about seeing, but about Knowing. Going so deeply into the subject, whatever, whoever, that you find the spirit within. And then you memorialize it for others to also Know.”

John Diamond (doctor) (1934) Australian doctor

Source: Beyond the Obvious: Photography for Healing (2014), p. 3

Memory

“Fortunately, the less you have to rely on art materials – what are considered classic art materials which are all overpriced anyway – the more you can rely on materials at large in the culture and the more you should rely on them. The more free you are because you're not tied down to a higher-priced set of materials. That's the advantage of getting out in to the streets. I find that work I'm interested in now is made out of things which have been discarded by people – metals and things which I find in vacant lots. I don't want all of it. I want only certain kinds for certain purposes. But this is of interest to me now, just so I won't get into a trap where I have to work and continue with more and more expensive materials.”

Carl Andre (1935) American artist

Source: Artists talks 1969 – 1977, p. 25

People, Art

“In a world that both desexualizes and hypersexualizes transfeminine people, I am desperate to find companionship and touch.”

Jacob Tobia (1991) american LGBTIQ activist

Sissy Diaries: The Harsh Realities of Dating for Gender-Nonconforming Femmes https://www.them.us/story/sissy-diaries-dating-while-nonbinary (April 25, 2018).

People, World

“But whatever grounds I supposed there were for authorizing such expectations, I now find they were vain and nugatory. The cloud thickens, and the prospects are daily growing darker. There is now no hope of cash. The agents are loaded with heavy debts, and perplexed with half-finished contracts, and the people clamorous for their pay, refusing to proceed in the public business unless their present demands are discharged. The constant run of expenses, incident to the department, presses hard for further credit., or immediate supplies of money. To extend one, is impossible; to obtain the other, we have not the least prospect. I see nothing, therefore, but a general check, if not an absolute stop, to the progress of every branch of business in the whole department, I have little reason to hope that, with the most favorable disposition in the agents, it will be in our power to provide for the occasional demands of the army in their present cantonments; much less, to have in readiness the necessary apparatus, and supplies of different kinds, for putting the army in motion at the opening of the campaign. My apprehensions of a failure in these respects are so strong, and my anxiety for the consequences so great, that I feel it my duty once more to represent to your Excellency our circumstances and prospects. From such a view of our situation, you may be led not to expect more from us than we are able to perform, and may have time to take your measures consequent upon such information.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (January 1780)

Money, People, Hope, Feeling

“I find a lot of comfort in having one sex partner. That is because she knows what I like and I know what she won't do.”

Ron White (1956) American comedian

Behavioral Problems

Sex

“By the early 1920s I knew that I needed to move beyond the simple cubist vocabulary I had learned and to find a new content, a new personal expression. Abstraction was never enough for me.”

Jacques Lipchitz (1891–1973) American and French sculptor

Source: Jacques Lipchitz: My life in sculpture, 1972, p. 41

Learning, Personality

“Strangely enough, many of the philosophical issues surrounding quantum mechanics are today being used to entice potential students into physics. As quantum computing and quantum communication become a commercial reality, tomorrow’s students may find themselves routinely grappling with the same philosophical questions that challenged their forebears almost a century ago.”

David Kaiser (1971) American physicist

Turning physicists into quantum mechanics (2007)

Communication, Question, Reality

“Leadership tip: Sound confident even when you have no idea. Just do not make a habit of it. They will find you out.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 87 (p. 313)

Confidence, Idea

“When I was a child the boys of the town never came near me except to make fun of me. I was almost always alone. Sometimes, finding me by chance among them, they hurled themselves against me, and not only with words. One day – and while he told me this his great eyes shone with an inner light - … they started to throw stones at me with more violence than usual, with the evilness which is found among children and the weak. I lost patience, and grabbing stones I too started to defend myself with such energy that my attackers were put to flight. Mario, I succeeded in beating them: I terrified them to such an extent that from that day they respected me and no longer annoyed me. I ran to my mother … and told her of my first victorious battle: she kissed me tenderly and it was the best prize that I could have wanted.”

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) Italian writer, politician, theorist, sociologist and linguist

Gramsci cited in Garuglieri's Garuglieri, 'Ricordo di Gramsci.' Societa, 691-701., 1946, p. 700.

Children, Boy, Kiss, Light

“All who delight in the pleasures of the belly, exceeding all measure in eating and drinking and love, find that the pleasures are brief and last but a short while—only so long as they are eating and drinking—but the pains that come after are many and endure. The longing for the same things keeps ever returning, and whenever the objects of one's desire are realized forthwith the pleasure vanishes, and one has no further use for them. The pleasure is brief, and once more the need for the same things returns.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Golden Sayings of Democritus

Love, Pain, Pleasure, Drink

“Suppose aliens invade the earth and threaten to obliterate it in a year's time unless human beings can find the Ramsey number for red five and blue five. We could marshal the world's best minds and fastest computers, and within a year we could probably calculate the value. If the aliens demanded the Ramsey number for red six and blue six, however, we would have no choice but to launch a preemptive attack.”

Paul Erdős (1913–1996) Hungarian mathematician and freelancer

As quoted in "Ramsey Theory" by Ronald L. Graham and Joel H. Spencer, in Scientific American (July 1990), p. 112-117

World, Time

“The human mind is still something of a troglodyte. Expelled from one falling cavern, its first thought is to find another.”

G. M. Young (1882–1959) English historian

Portrait of an Age (1936)

“I make a little mystique for myself. Since I have no preference or so-called sense of color, I could take almost everything that could be some accident of a previous painting. Or I set out to make a series. I take, for instance, some pictures where I take a color, some arbitrary color I took from some place. Well, this is gray maybe, and I mix the color for that, and then I find out that when I am through with getting the color the way I want it, I have six other colors in it, to get that color; and then I take those six colors and I use them also with this color. It is probably like a composer does a variation on a certain theme. But it isn't technical, it isn't just fun.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

interview conducted by David Sylvester for the BBC, 1962; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 50.
1960's

Color, Way, Sense, Painting

“In men whom men condemn as ill
I find so much of goodness still.
In men whom men pronounce divine
I find so much of sin and blot
I hesitate to draw a line
Between the two, where God has not.”

Joaquin Miller Songs of the Sierras

Burns and Byron (also known as In Men Whom Men Condemn), p. 175.
Songs of the Sierras (1871)‎

Men, God, Drawing

“Professor Bell, in his tortured efforts to sound fair and impersonal, arrives at an aesthetic principle too edifying for Art to bear. He says in effect that you can explore evil, drawing "on the tap roots of the demonic," but you may not approve it. But when you draw on those tap roots, who knows what you will find? Writers just back from their season in hell are likely to be covered in goat blood and tend to rave. The moralists can sort out the evidence later. But the writer with the correct attitude could not have entered hell in the first place.”

Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) English-American novelist and essayist

"Honoring Ezra Pound" (1972), p. 59
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Art, Hell, Effort, Evil

“The great body of population dynamics, like those of the motion of the celestial bodies, can be solved—and what is most remarkable, there is a surprising analogy between the formulas employed in these calculations. I believe that I have achieved to some extent what I have long said about the possibility of founding a social mechanics on the model established by celestial mechanics—to formulate the motions of the social body in accordance with those of celestial bodies, and to find there again the same properties and laws of conservation.”

Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist

Astronomie élémentaire? (1834) as quoted by Theodore M. Porter, "From Quetelet to Maxwell: Social Statistics and the Origin of Statistical Physics" in The Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences: Some Critical and Historical Perspectives (2013) ed., I. Bernard Cohen

Law

“The Big Bang theory has been extremely successful in describing the history and evolution of the Universe, and new experiments and observations continue to confirm the basic predictions of this theory. But we do not yet know the answer to the question
What is the Universe made of?
The evidence for dark matter and dark energy has rewritten this question, redirected our efforts to address it — and strengthened the motivation for finding an answer. Dark matter and dark energy cannot be explained by our current model of fundamental physics; deciphering these mysterious substances will require a leap into a new realm of understanding, a theoretical upheaval that will rival the changes brought about by quantum mechanics and general relativity.”

Evalyn Gates (1958)

Einstein's Telescope: The Hunt for Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe (2009), Epilogue : Dark Matter and Dark Energy: Keys to the Next Revoution, p. 267

History, Motivation, Understanding, Question

“No-one should have any trouble finding a party.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

St Andrew's Day (November 30, 2007)

“Then gaze not on other eyes, Love;
Breathe not other sighs, Love;
You may find many a brighter one
Than your own rose, but there are none
So true to thee, Love.”

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

5th January 1822) Song ("Are other eyes beguiling, Love?"
The London Literary Gazette, 1821-1822

Love

Quotes about finding page 64

Quotes about finding
page 64