Quotes about finding
page 91

“I have read the Liberal programme. They talk of cooperation between employer and employed. That is not the problem. There is no use in cooperating when there is no work to be done. There is no use in imposing capital levies upon a capital which every year dwindles and disappears. … The problem that awaits the people of this country is to increase the markets within which their goods can find employment, and you will never increase those markets until you have enabled our working people on equal terms and our manufacturers on equal terms to deal with the working people and manufacturers of the world.”

F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead (1872–1930) British politician

Speech to the Constitutional Club (20 November 1923), quoted in The Times (21 November 1923), p. 17

People, World, Problem, Reading

“Even relatively benign and temporary authoritarianism that rests upon elected power is being challenged. We are moving rapidly towards a situation where the pressure for the redistribution of political power will have to be faced as a major political issue. In a world where authoritarianism of the left or right is a very real possibility, the question of whether ordinary people can govern themselves by consent is still on trial—as it always has been, and always will be. Beyond parliamentary democracy as we know it, we shall have to find a new popular democracy to replace it.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

Speech to the Welsh Council of Labour (25 May 1968), quoted in The Times (27 May 1968), p. 2
1960s

People, World, Democracy, Question

“By power… I do not understand a general system of domination exercised by one element or one group over another, whose effects… traverse the entire body social… It seems to me that first what needs to be understood is the multiplicity of relations of force that are immanent to the domain wherein they are exercised, and that are constitutive of its organization; the game that through incessant struggle and confrontation transforms them, reinforces them, inverts them; the supports these relations of force find in each other, so as to form a chain or system, or, on the other hand, the gaps, the contradictions that isolate them from each other; in the end, the strategies in which they take effect, and whose general pattern or institutional crystallization is embodied in the mechanisms of the state, in the formulation of the law, in social hegemonies. The condition of possibility of power… should not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique space of sovereignty whence would radiate derivative and descendent forms; it is the moving base of relations of force that incessantly induce, by their inequality, states of power, but always local and unstable. Omnipresence of power: not at all because it regroups everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced at every instant, at every point, or moreover in every relation between one point and another. Power is everywhere: not that it engulfs everything, but that it comes from everywhere.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Par pouvoir… je n’entends pas un système général de domination exercée par un élément ou un groupe sur un autre, et dont les effets, par dérivations successives, traversaient le corps social tout entier… il me semble qu’il faut comprendre d’abord la multiplicité de rapports de force qui sont immanents au domaine où ils s’exercent, et sont constitutifs de leur organisation ; le jeu qui par voie de luttes et d’affrontements incessants les transforme, les renforce, les inverse ; les appuis que ces rapports de force trouvent les uns dans les autres, de manière à former chaîne ou système, ou, au contraire, les décalages, les contradictions qui les isolent les uns des autres ; les stratégies enfin dans lesquelles ils prennent effet, et dont le dessin général ou la cristallisation institutionnelle prennent corps dans les appareils étatiques, dans la formulation de la loi, dans les hégémonies sociales. La condition de possibilité du pouvoir… il ne fait pas la chercher dans l’existence première d’un point central, dans un foyer unique de souveraineté d’où rayonneraient des formes dérivées et descendantes ; induisent sans cesse, par leur inégalité, des états de pouvoir, mais toujours locaux et instables. Omniprésence du pouvoir : non point parce qu’il aurait le privilège de tout regrouper sous son invincible unité, mais parce qu’il se produit à chaque instant, en tout point, ou plutôt dans toute relation d’un point à un autre. Le pouvoir est partout ; ce n’est pas qu’il englobe tout, c’est qu’il vient de partout.
Vol. I, p. 121-122.
History of Sexuality (1976–1984)

Law, Exercises, Game, Understanding

“We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets of faculties, the particular and the catholic. We adjust our instrument for general observation, and sweep the heavens as easily as we pick out a single figure in the terrestrial landscape. We are practically skilful in detecting elements, for which we have no place in our theory, and no name. Thus we are very sensible of an atmospheric influence in men and in bodies of men, not accounted for in an arithmetical addition of all their measurable properties. There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society. England, strong, punctual, practical, well-spoken England, I should not find, if I should go to the island to seek it. In the parliament, in the playhouse, at dinner-tables, I might see a great number of rich, ignorant, book-read, conventional, proud men, — many old women, — and not anywhere the Englishman who made the good speeches, combined the accurate engines, and did the bold and nervous deeds. It is even worse in America, where, from the intellectual quickness of the race, the genius of the country is more splendid in its promise, and more slight in its performance.”

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

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Nominalist and Realist

Women, Men, Books, Strong

“That happens in the world, which we often witness in a public debate. Each of the speakers expresses himself imperfectly: no one of them hears much that another says, such is the preoccupation of mind of each; and the audience, who have only to hear and not to speak, judge very wisely and superiorly how wrongheaded and unskilful is each of the debaters to his own affair. Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never. When I meet a pure intellectual force, or a generosity of affection, I believe, here then is man; and am presently mortified by the discovery, that this individual is no more available to his own or to the general ends, than his companions; because the power which drew my respect, is not supported by the total symphony of his talents.”

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

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Nominalist and Realist

Men, World, Support

“I cannot often enough say, that a man is only a relative and representative nature. Each is a hint of the truth, but far enough from being that truth, which yet he quite newly and inevitably suggests to us. If I seek it in him, I shall not find it. Could any man conduct into me the pure stream of that which he pretends to be! Long afterwards, I find that quality elsewhere which he promised me.”

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

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Nominalist and Realist

Truth, Nature

“I read to you parts of the indictment claiming that I was part of a joint criminal enterprise to expel Croatians from Croatia, Muslims from Bosnia, Albanians from Kosovo, in order to create some sort of Greater Serbia. Now, if you have in mind that the greatest part of that Greater Serbia would be precisely the Republic of Serbia, which did not see any expulsions at all throughout the crisis, do you find it logical that Serbia should initiate expulsions from territories outside of Serbia?”

Slobodan Milošević (1941–2006) Yugoslavian and Serbian politician

Slobodan Milošević (2004) International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia https://www.icty.org/x/cases/slobodan_milosevic/trans/en/041116IT.htm

Reading, Parting

“What we are left with, if what I have said so far is right, is a conclusion that I initially found very distressing: either GRW or some successor, or else Bohm or some successor, is the correct interpretation—or, to include a third possibility to please Itamar Pitowski, we will just fail to find a scientific realist interpretation which is acceptable.”

Hilary Putnam (1926–2016) American philosopher

And the ghost of Bohr will laugh, and say, ‘I told you all along that the human mind cannot produce a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics’!
"A philosopher looks at quantum mechanics (again)", Brit. J. Phil. Sci. 56 (2005), 615–634

“I find it increasingly difficult to take Mr Benn seriously as an economics minister.”

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

Britain in Europe press conference (27 May 1975), quoted in The Times (28 May 1975), p. 3
1970s

“Society assumes that specialization is natural, inevitable, and desirable. Yet in observing a little child, we find it is interested in everything and spontaenously apprehends, comprehends, and co-ordinates an ever-expanding inventory of experiences. … Nothing seems to be more prominent about human life than its wanting to understand all and put everything together.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Life, Understanding, Nature

“I don’t know if my writing has the energy you say it does. Of course, if that energy exists, it’s because either it finds no other outlets or, consciously or not, I’ve refused to give it other outlets. Of course, when I write, I draw on parts of myself, of my memory, that are agitated, fragmented, that make me uncomfortable. A story, in my view, is worth writing only if its core comes from there.”

Elena Ferrante (1943) Italian writer

On being told that her writing is energeticin “In a rare interview, Elena Ferrante describes the writing process behind the Neapolitan novels” https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-elena-ferrante-interview-20180517-htmlstory.html in Los Angeles Times (2018 May 17)

Making love, Memory, Parting, Drawing

“The desire to continue to feel yourself guilty arguably finds its endpoint in modern European liberal societies: the first societies in human history who, when they are hit, ask what they did to deserve it. Unassuageable historical guilt carries over into the present.”

Douglas Murray (1979) British political commentator and far-right activist

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017)

Feeling, History

“I was unable before starting to formulate a plan of campaign because I did not know whether I should find an army there … In fact I found the troops in a deplorable condition, without clothes, without arms, and without bread.”

Claude Louis Hector de Villars (1653–1734) Marshal General of France

Villars reflecting on the state of the French army in 1709 when he took command, quoted in Winston Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times

Clothes

“In the first place there isn’t a distinguished anthropologist in the world but what you’ll find one equally distinguished who will call him a diamond-studded liar. They can’t agree on the simplest elements of their alleged science.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Lost Legacy

Lost Legacy (p. 301)
Short fiction, Off the Main Sequence (2005)

World, Science

“During my travels, I find a general belief that to turn a Christian is to turn European; to become self-willed, and give up self-restraint, use only foreign cloth, dress oneself in European style and start taking meat and brandy. But I think the fact is, if a person discards his country, his customs and his old connections and manners when he changes his religion, he becomes all the more unfit to gain a knowledge of God. For, a change of religion means really a conversion of the heart. When there is a real conversion, a man’s heart grows. But in this country one finds that conversion brings about deep disdain for one’s old religion and its followers, i. e., one’s old friends and relatives. The next change that takes place is that of dress and manners and behaviour. All that does great harm to the country.”

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

Mahatma Gandhi in Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi,Volume 7, Varanasi, 1969, as quoted in Goel, S.R. History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)
Posthumous publications (1950s and later)

God, Religion, Travel, Knowledge

“Whosoever seeks the truth will not proceed by studying the writings of his predecessors and by simply accepting his own good opinion of them. Whosoever studies works of science must, if he wants to find the truth, transform himself into a critic of everything he reads.”

Alhazen (965–1038) Arab physicist, mathematician and astronomer

He must examine tests and explanations with the greatest precision and question them from all angles and aspects. Ehsan Masood, Science and Islam https://www.amazon.com/Science-Islam-History-Icon/dp/1785782029/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1544708566&sr=1-3&keywords=ehsan+masood p: 169

Truth, Study, Science, Reading

“Thus liberalism, democracy, and socialism appear to be, as they are in reality, not only the offspring of one and the same theory of government but also logical derivations one of the other. Logically, developed liberalism leads to democracy; the logical development of democracy issues into socialism. It is true that for many years, and with some justification, socialism was looked upon as antithetical to liberalism. But the antithesis is purely relative and breaks down as we approach the common origin and foundation of the two doctrines, for we find that the opposition is one of method, not of purpose.”

Alfredo Rocco (1875–1935) Italian politician and jurist

The end is the same for both, namely, the welfare of the individual members of society. The difference lies in the fact that liberalism would be guided to its goal by liberty, whereas socialism strives to attain it by the collective organization of production.
Source: The Political Doctrine of Fascism (1925), pp. 108-109

Democracy, Reality, Appearance

“The ideal of this brotherhood is to draw angels and men, two branches of the infinite family of God, into close cooperation. The chief purpose of such cooperation is to uplift the human race. To this end the angels, on their side, are ready to participate as closely as possible in every department of human life and in every human activity that holds cooperation in view. Those members of the human race who will throw open heart and mind to their brethren of the other sphere, will find an immediate response, and a gradually increasing conviction of its reality.”

Geoffrey Hodson (1886–1983) New Zealand occultist

Source: The Brotherhood of Angels and Men https://www.theosophy.world/sites/default/files/ebooks/The%20brotherhood%20of%20Angels%20and%20of%20Men%20-%20Geoffrey%20Hodson.pdf (1927)

Life, Men, God, Family

“It is not a being but a law, the universal law of harmony which unerringly restores all disturbance to equilibrium. In this the theory conflicts with the ordinary conception about God, built up from the Jewish system, which assumes that the Almighty as a thinking entity, extraneous to the Cosmos, builds up, finds his construction inharmonious, out of proportion, errant, and disturbed, and then has to pull down, destroy, or punish that which he created. This has either caused thousands to live in fear of God, in compliance with his assumed commands, with the selfish object of obtaining reward and securing escape from his wrath, or has plunged them into darkness which comes from a denial of all spiritual life. But as there is plainly, indeed painfully, evident to every human being a constant destruction going on in and around us, a continual war not only among men but everywhere through the whole solar system, causing sorrow in all directions, reason requires a solution of the riddle.”

William Quan Judge (1851–1896) American occult writer

The Ocean of Theosophy by William Q. Judge (1893), Chapter 11, Karma

Life, Men, God, War

“Although this path may at first seem hard and toilsome, yet ever as we rise our footing becomes firmer and our outlook wider, and thus we find ourselves better able to help those who are climbing beside us.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: Invisible Helpers (1915), Ch. 17

Help

“Many of the dead very considerably retard the process of dissolution by clinging passionately to the earth which they have left; they simply will not turn their thoughts and desires upward, but spend their time in struggling with all their might to keep in full touch with the physical plane, thus causing great trouble to any one who may be trying to help them. Earthly matters are the only ones in which they have had any living interest, and they cling to them with desperate tenacity even after death. Naturally as time passes on they find it increasingly difficult to keep hold of things down here, but instead of welcoming and encouraging this process of gradual refinement and spiritualization they resist it vigorously by every means in their power… thereby not only causing themselves a vast amount of entirely unnecessary pain and sorrow, but also very seriously delaying their upward progress and prolonging their stay in astral regions to an almost indefinite extent. In convincing them that this ignorant and disastrous opposition to the cosmic will is contrary to the laws of nature, and persuading them to adopt an attitude of mind which is the exact reversal of it, lies a great part of the work of those who are trying to help.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: Invisible Helpers (1915), Ch. 12

Death, Pain, Law, Nature

“Although instances of apparitions shortly after death are by no means uncommon, it is rare to find one in which the departed person has really done anything useful, or succeeded in impressing what he wished upon the friend or relation whom he visited… but little help is usually given by the dead - indeed, as will presently be explained, it is far more common for them to be themselves in need of assistance than to be able to accord it to others… the main bulk of the work which has to be done along these lines falls to the share of those living persons who are able to function consciously on the astral plane.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: Invisible Helpers (1915), Ch. 4

Death, Relation ships, Help, Personality

“There are some who cannot make anything much of meditation, and when they try to study they find it very hard. They ought to continue to try both these things, because we must develop all sides of our nature, but most of all they should throw themselves into the work, and do something for their fellow-men.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: The Masters and the Path (1925), Ch.3

Men, Making love, Nature, Study

“The thoughtful student, in scanning the religious history of the race has one fact continually forced upon his notice, viz., that there is an invariable tendency to deify whomsoever shows himself superior to the weakness of our common humanity. Look where we will, we find the saint like man exalted into a divine personage and worshiped for a god. Though perhaps misunderstood, reviled and even persecuted while living, the apotheosis is almost sure to come after death: and the victim of yesterday’s mob, raised to the stage of an Intercessor in Heaven, is besought with prayer and tears, and placatory penances to mediate with God for the pardon of human sin. This is a mean and vile trait of human nature, the proof of ignorance, selfishness, brutal cowardice, and a superstitious materialism. It shows the base instinct to put down and destroy whatever or whoever makes men feel their own imperfections; with the alternative of ignoring and denying these very imperfections by turning into gods men who have merely spiritualized their natures, so that it may be supposed that they were heavenly incarnations and not mortal like other men.”

Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907) Union United States Army officer

Life of Buddha and Its Lessons https://cdn.website-editor.net/e4d6563c50794969b714ab70457d9761/files/uploaded/AdyarPamphlet_No15.pdfThe (May 1912)

Death, Men, God, Making love

“This information is about the total transformation of every aspect of our lives: political, economic, religious, social, scientific, cultural, educational and personal. If what I say is true, the current ways of thinking, living, relating and expressing our inner selves will be fundamentally altered in the time ahead. If this is your first acquaintance with this information, you may find it difficult to accept and believe, especially if you are approaching it from an orthodox religious or philosophical background. If you find it impossible to believe, please be assured that I shall not be the slightest bit offended or even disappointed.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The Great Approach (2001)

Education, Disappointment, Way, Thinking

“The right finds it easy to explain what is and to justify what is, but not to account for change. The left finds it easy to justify change, but not to account for what is, and what is accepted.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

On the BBC Radio 4 series Politics in the Seventies (10 June 1973), quoted in The Times (11 June 1973), p. 3
1970s

Change

“I have been concerned to find out that many of our best trained students who have completed the higher levels of education at university or polytechnic have no desire to join industry. Their preferences are to stay in academic life or to find their way into the civil service. There seems to be a need for more technological bias in science teaching that will lead towards practical applications in industry rather than towards academic studies. Or, to take other examples, why is it that such a high proportion of girls abandon science before leaving school? … Why is it that 30,000 vacancies for students in science and engineering in our universities and polytechnics were not taken up last year while the humanities courses were full?”

James Callaghan (1912–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; 1976-1979

Speech https://www.theguardian.com/education/thegreatdebate/story/0,,574645,00.html to Ruskin College, Oxford University (18 October 1976) Prime Minister

Life, Education, School, Way

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

The Writing Life (1989)

Peace, Time

“My work is to teach and spread the knowledge of the Ageless Wisdom wherever I can find a response, and I have been doing this for many years… In all the above, I have told you much; yet at the same time I have told you nothing which would lead you to offer me that blind obedience and the foolish devotion which the emotional aspirant offers to the Guru and Master Whom he is as yet unable to contact. Nor will he make that desired contact until he has transmuted emotional devotion into unselfish service to humanity--not to the Master.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Extract from a Statement by the Tibetan

Wisdom, Making love, Knowledge, Time

“According to what I’ve been able to find out so far, there must have been something like fifty thousand. Mind you, too many. Even if the action was morally justified. I’m not trying to minimize things; I’m trying to bring them back to reality—there’s quite a difference between fifty thousand and three million.”

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1928–1979) Fourth President and ninth Prime Minister of Pakistan

Oriana Fallaci. Interview with Ali Bhutto in Karachi, April 1972

Reality

“If you do this, then you will find, as others have found before you, that the vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Voting Rights Act signing speech (1965)

Men

“There is one point more which has been troubling me very much of late and one which I want you to think carefully and that is the question of Hindu-Mohamedan unity. I have devoted most of my time during the last six months to the study of Muslim history and Muslim Law and I am inclined to think, it is neither possible nor practicable. Assuming and admitting the sincerity of the Mohamedan leaders in the Non-cooperation movement, I think their religion provides an effective bar to anything of the kind. You remember the conversation, I reported to you in Calcutta, which I had with Hakim Ajmalkhan and Dr. Kitchlew. There is no finer Mohamedan in Hindustan than Hakimsaheb but can any other Muslim leader override the Quran? I can only hope that my reading of Islamic Law is incorrect, and nothing would relieve me more than to be convinced that it is so. But if it is right then it comes to this that although we can unite against the British we cannot do so to rule Hindustan on British lines, we cannot do so to rule Hindustan on democratic lines. What is then the remedy? I am not afraid of seven crores in Hindustan but I think the seven crores of Hindustan plus the armed hosts of Afghanistan, Central Asia, Arabia, Mesopotamia and Turkey will be irresistible. I do honestly and sincerely believe in the necessity or desirability of Hindu-Muslim unity. I am also fully prepared to trust the Muslim leaders, but what about the injunctions of the Quran and Hadis? The leaders cannot override them. Are we then doomed? I hope not. I hope learned mind and wise head will find some way out of this difficulty.”

Lala Lajpat Rai (1865–1928) Indian author and politician

in B.R. Ambedkar, Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)

Religion, Law, Hope, Way

“We would find ourselves pulling out of the European Community straight into the arms of the wild men of the left. The whole country would be plagued with Foot and Benn disease. … The left are not really all that interested in the Common Market. What they want is for Britain to break her treaty obligations and pull out of the Community so that they could impose their own extreme socialist state in Britain.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

Speech in Catterick, Yorkshire (29 May 1975), quoted in The Times (30 May 1975), p. 4
Post-Prime Ministerial

Men, Disease, Communication, Country

“As you all know, ever since the end of the war Britain has been working against time. We must find a way to stand on our own feet, and that very soon. Since the end of the war, too, our reserves have been small. This means that any alteration in world trade conditions, any failure to produce and sell enough goods must land us in serious trouble. … I would like every one of you, whether employer or employed, to start right away to consider how in your particular job you can increase and cheapen production, how you can check absenteeism and get the kind of public opinion in factory, mine, railway, or other workplace which will bring the person who is slacking up to the mark.”

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

Broadcast (24 October 1949), quoted in The Times (25 October 1949), p. 2
Prime Minister

War, World, Way, Failure

“I am aware that the age is not what we all wish. But I am sure, that the only means of checking its precipitate degeneracy, is heartily to concur with whatever is the best in our time; and to have some more correct standard of judging what that best is, than the transient and uncertain favour of a court. If once we are able to find, and can prevail on ourselves to strengthen an union of such men, whatever accidentally becomes indisposed to ill-exercised power, even by the ordinary operation of human passions, must join with that society, and cannot long be joined, without in some degree assimilating to it. Virtue will catch as well as vice by contact; and the public stock of honest manly principle will daily accumulate. We are not too nicely to scrutinize motives as long as action is irreproachable. It is enough, (and for a worthy man perhaps too much,) to deal out its infamy to convicted guilt and declared apostacy.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777)

Men, Age, Exercises, Motivation

“I hope there are none of you, corrupted with the doctrine taught by wicked men for the worst purposes, and received by the malignant credulity of envy and ignorance, which is, that the men who act upon the public stage are all alike; all equally corrupt; all influenced by no other views than the sordid lure of salary and pension. The thing, I know by experience to be false. Never expecting to find perfection in men, and not looking for divine attributes in created beings, in my commerce with my contemporaries, I have found much human virtue. I have seen not a little public spirit; a real subordination of interest to duty; and a decent and regulated sensibility to honest fame and reputation. The age unquestionably produces (whether in a greater or less number than former times, I know not) daring profligates and insidious hypocrites. What then? Am I not to avail myself of whatever good is to be found in the world, because of the mixture of evil that will always be in it? The smallness of the quantity in currency only heightens the value. They, who raise suspicions on the good on account of the behaviour of ill men, are of the party of the latter.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777)

Men, Age, World, Hope

“Civil freedom, gentlemen, is not, as many have endeavoured to persuade you, a thing that lies hid in the depth of abstruse science. It is a blessing and a benefit, not an abstract speculation; and all the just reasoning that can bo upon it, is of so coarse a texture, as perfectly to suit the ordinary capacities of those who are to enjoy, and of those who are to defend it. Far from any resemblance to those propositions in geometry and metaphysics, which admit no medium, but must be true or false in all their latitude; social and civil freedom, like all other things in common life, are variously mixed and modified, enjoyed in very different degrees, and shaped into an infinite diversity of forms, according to the temper and circumstances of every community. The extreme of liberty (which is its abstract perfection, but its real fault) obtains no where, nor ought to obtain any where. Because extremes, as we all know, in every point which relates either to our duties or satisfactions in life, are destructive both to virtue and enjoyment. Liberty too must be limited in order to be possessed. The degree of restraint it is impossible in any case to settle precisely. But it ought to be the constant aim of every wise public counsel, to find out by cautious experiments, and rational, cool endeavours, with how little, not how much of this restraint, the community can subsist. For liberty is a good to be improved, and not an evil to be lessened. It is not only a private blessing of the first order, but the vital spring and energy of the state itself, which has just so much life and vigour as there is liberty in it. But whether liberty be advantageous or not, (for I know it is a fashion to decry the very principle,) none will dispute that peace is a blessing; and peace must in the course of human affairs be frequently bought by some indulgence and toleration at least to liberty. For as the sabbath (though of divine institution) was made for man, not man for the sabbath, government, which can claim no higher origin or authority, in its exercise at least, ought to conform to the exigencies of the time, and the temper and character of the people, with whom it is concerned; and not always to attempt violently to bend the people to their theories of subjection. The bulk of mankind on their part are not excessively curious concerning any theories, whilst they are really happy; and one sure symptom of an ill-conducted state, is the propensity of the people to resort to them.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777)

Life, Happiness, People, Peace

“Citizen Paine…is ready to blaspheme his God, to insult his king, and to libel the constitution of his country, without any provocation from me…I neither encouraged nor provoked that worthy citizen to seek for plenty, liberty, safety, justice or lenity, in the famine, in the prisons, in the decrees of convention, in the revolutionary tribunal, and in the guillotine of Paris, rather than quietly to take up with what he could find in the glutted markets, the unbarricadoed streets, the drowsy Old Bailey judges, or, at worst, the airy, wholesome pillory of Old England. … I admit, indeed, that my praises of the British government loaded with all its encumbrances; clogged with its peers and its beef; its parsons and its pudding; its Commons and its beer; and its dull slavish liberty of going about just as one pleases, had something to provoke a Jockey of Norfolk, who was inspired with the resolute ambition of becoming a citizen of France, to do something which might render him worthy of naturalization in that grand asylum of persecuted merit.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Letter to William Elliot (26 May 1795), quoted in Daniel E. Ritchie (ed.), Further Reflections on the French Revolution (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992), pp. 261-262
1790s

God, Pain, Justice, Beer

“There are some who question the relevance of space activities in a developing nation. To us, there is no ambiguity of purpose. We do not have the fantasy of competing with the economically advanced nations in the exploration of the Moon or the planets or manned space-flight. But we are convinced that if we are to play a meaningful role nationally, and in the community of nations, we must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man and society, which we find in our country. And we should note that the application of sophisticated technologies and methods of analysis to our problems is not to be confused with embarking on grandiose schemes, whose primary impact is for show rather than for progress measured in hard economic and social terms.”

Vikram Sarabhai (1919–1971) (1919-1971), Indian physicist

Quoted in "List Of Important Speeches And Papers By Dr. Vikram A. Sarabhai"
Source: [List Of Important Speeches And Papers By Dr. Vikram A. Sarabhai., https://www.prl.res.in/~library/sarabhai_v_speeches.pdf, PRL.res.in, 27 June 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20190627181445/https://www.prl.res.in/~library/sarabhai_v_speeches.pdf, 27 June 2019, 113]

Communication, Question, Problem, Country

“No generation can choose the age or circumstance in which it is born, but through leadership it can choose to make the age in which it is born an age of enlightenment, an age of jobs, and peace, and justice. Only leadership -- that intangible combination of gifts, the discipline, information, circumstance, courage, timing, will and divine inspiration -- can lead us out of the crisis in which we find ourselves. Leadership can mitigate the misery of our nation. Leadership can part the waters and lead our nation in the direction of the Promised Land. Leadership can lift the boats stuck at the bottom.”

Jesse Jackson (1941) African-American civil rights activist and politician

Address to the Democratic National Convention, 1984

Age, Making love, Peace, Justice

“I sought her in the grayness and she wasn’t there, she was dead and she wasn’t there, she wouldn’t be there ever again and I could never find comfort in her again. Ellen, beloved, you are dead and your voice is in my mind and only in my mind.”

Fredric Brown book The Lights in the Sky Are Stars

Source: The Lights in the Sky Are Stars (1953), Chapter 3, “1999” (p. 233)

Dead

“My message, unchanged for more than fifty years, is this: God loves you unconditionally, as you are and not as you should be, because nobody is as they should be. It is the message of grace… A grace that pays the eager beaver who works all day long the same wages as the grinning drunk who shows up at ten till five. A grace that hikes up the robe and runs breakneck toward the prodigal reeking of sin and wraps him up and decides to throw a party no ifs, ands, or buts… This vulgar grace is indiscriminate compassion. It works without asking anything of us… Grace is sufficient even though we huff and puff with all our might to try to find something or someone it cannot cover. Grace is enough… Jesus is enough.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

All Is Grace: A Ragamuffin Memoir https://books.google.com/books?id=eFTh3OqjASkC&pg=PA192 (2011), pp. 192–194 2010s

Love, God, Making love

“The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving the shell of edifying behavior. Suddenly I discover that I am ministering to AIDS victims to enhance my resume. I find I renounced ice cream for Lent to lose five excess pounds… I have fallen victim to what T. S. Eliot calls the greatest sin: to do the right thing for the wrong reason.”

Brennan Manning book The Ragamuffin Gospel

p. 121 https://books.google.com/books?id=sUTZCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA121 1990s, The Ragamuffin Gospel (1990)

Life, Behavior, Self-confidence

“It was the mystery of my sexual nature that a body which was the mirror image of mine could be so compelling and feel so unfamiliar. When I was younger, it had seemed urgent to unravel this mystery because I believed that if it could be explained, the haters would stop hating us. Now I believed that they had no more right to an explanation about me than I did about them and, in any case, they would find other reasons to hate. Now I was simply grateful for his body beside me, known and unknown.”

Michael Nava (1954) American writer

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, The Hidden Law (1992), p.55

Hate, Feeling, Nature

“If the world’s largest economy looked poised to show that kind of visionary leadership, other major emitters — like the European Union, China, and India — would almost certainly find themselves under intense pressure from their own populations to follow suit.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

The Game-Changing Promise of a Green New Deal, The Intercept, https://theintercept.com/2018/11/27/green-new-deal-congress-climate-change/ (27 November 2018)

World

“It is necessary that each Marxist-Leninist understand that he can contribute to Marxism-Leninism with an atom of his experience, that every solution he finds, every experience he acquires, in the act of solving a problem, will be one more experience with which he enriches Marxism-Leninism, because Marxism-Leninism has been enriched so much precisely by the experience of millions and millions of Marxist-Leninists acting in the reality of life.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

Speech (20 December 1961) http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1961/esp/f201261e.html

Life, Understanding, Problem, Reality

“One is always finding out more.”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

[A Chat with Mr. Whistler, January 1895, The Studio, 4, 116–121, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.319510019270823;view=1up;seq=132] (quote from p. 118)
1870 - 1903, A Chat with Mr. Whistler' (1895)

“Those who look for seashells will find seashells; those who open them will find pearls.”

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111) Persian Muslim theologian, jurist, philosopher, and mystic

“When a woman is suspected by her own kinsmen or by neighboring Brahmans of having been guilty of light conduct, she is under pain of ox-communication of all her kinsmen, placed under restraint. The maid-servant (Dasi or Vrshali), who is indispensable to every Nambutiri family, if not to every individual female thereof, is then interrogated, and if she should eliminate her mistress, the latter is forthwith segregated and a watch set upon her. When the family can find a suitable house for the purpose, the sadhanam (the thing of article or subject, as the suspected person is called) is removed to it; otherwise she is kept in the family house, the other members finding temporary accommodation elsewhere.”

William Logan (author) book Malabar Manual

Malabar Manual, Page 122 https://archive.org/details/MalabarLogan/page/n134 Malabar Manual (1887)

Pain, Family, Communication, Light

“You see that man can endure toil: Cato, on foot, led an army through African deserts. You see that thirst can be endured: he marched over sun-baked hills, dragging the remains of a beaten army and with no train of supplies, undergoing lack of water and wearing a heavy suit of armour; always the last to drink of the few springs which they chanced to find. You see that honour, and dishonour too, can be despised: for they report that on the very day when Cato was defeated at the elections, he played a game of ball. You see also that man can be free from fear of those above him in rank: for Cato attacked Caesar and Pompey simultaneously, at a time when none dared fall foul of the one without endeavouring to oblige the other. You see that death can be scorned as well as exile: Cato inflicted exile upon himself and finally death, and war all the while.”

Seneca the Younger book Epistulae morales ad Lucilium

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter CIV: On Care of Health and Peace of Mind

Death, War, Fear, Game

“So the wise man will develop virtue, if he may, in the midst of wealth, or, if not, in poverty; if possible, in his own country—if not, in exile; if possible, as a commander—if not, as a common soldier; if possible, in sound health—if not, enfeebled. Whatever fortune he finds, he will accomplish therefrom something noteworthy.”

Seneca the Younger book Epistulae morales ad Lucilium

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXXXV: On Some Vain Syllogisms

Health, Country, Wealth

“Before the spirit could seek into it, the mind must. She studied the tensor equations as once she studied the sutras, she meditated upon the koans of science, and at last she began to feel her oneness with all that was, and in the vision find peace.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 19 “Thule”, Section 18 (p. 449)

Peace, Feeling, Study, Science

“Paddy dashed back towards his goal like a woman who smells a cake burning. The ball won the race and it curled inside the near post as Paddy crashed into the outside of the net and lay against it like a fireman who had returned to find his station ablaze.”

Con Houlihan (1925–2012) Irish sportswriter

The Evening Press, 25 September 1978. As reprinted https://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/con-houlihan-paddy-dashed-back-to-his-goal-like-a-woman-who-smells-a-cake-burning--26885274.html in the Irish Independent following Houlihan's death.

“Many researchers say they have been shaken by their own findings about changes in conscious functioning because of the implications for widespread social change. There are hard facts to face, not just soft speculation.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Three, Brains Changing, Minds Changing

Change

“Consider that everything is opinion, and opinion is in thy power. Take away then, when thou choosest, thy opinion, and like a mariner, who has doubled the promontory, thou wilt find calm, everything stable, and a waveless bay.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book XII, 22

“It is said a fish as large as a man has a brain no larger than the kernel of an almond. In all fish and reptiles where there is no great brain development, there is also no conscious sexual control. The lower down in the scale of human development we go the less sexual control we find. It is said that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets. According to one writer, the rapist has just enough brain development to raise him above the animal, but like the animal, when in heat knows no law except nature which impels him to procreate whatever the result. Every normal man and Woman has the power to control and direct his sexual impulse. Men and women who have it in control and constantly use their brain cells in thinking deeply, are never sensual.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

Source: What Every Girl Should Know (1913), Chapter 4, "Sexual Impulses--Part II", p. 47.

Women, Men, Family, Law

“I would have this to say – that our primary responsibility is to find the right opportunity and create the necessary conditions for us to put into effect the local legislation, before we need a committee to ensure the legislation is being effectively enforced.”

Carrie Lam (1957) Chief Executive of Hong Kong

Carrie Lam (2018) cited in " Macau to form national security commission chaired by city’s leader as a ‘preventative measure’ https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/08/28/macau-form-national-security-commission-chaired-citys-leader-preventative-measure/" on Hong Kong Free Press, 28 August 2018

“Ten years ago the incoming Conservative Government found the national finances in good order. …. What do we find to-day? Expenditure and indebtedness have been piled up, the income-tax stands at a shilling, war taxes are continued in peace time, the national credit is impaired, and a heavy depreciation has taken place in securities of every description. You only have to look around to see the result. Industry is burdened, enterprise is restricted, workmen are thrown out of employment, and the poorer classes are straitened still further in their circumstances.”

Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836–1908) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Election Address, quoted in The Times (8 January 1906), p. 8
Prime Minister

War, Peace, Time

“In such a situation, where any scholar, Indian or Western, who finds that the facts indicate an Indian homeland, has to struggle against a strong tide of prejudice in Western academic circles (not to mention the deeply entrenched leftist lobby in Indian academic circles), it is clear that establishing the truth about the original homeland is, practically speaking, an uphill task.”

Shrikant Talageri (1958) Indian author

The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis (2000), Chapter 7 : The Indo-European Homeland

Truth, Strong

“This is a Vote to spend £58,000,000 in protection of our trade routes. Our trade routes are in danger, but they are not in danger from navies. … They are not naval, they are not military, they are not aerial; they are industrial, and the First Lord of the Admiralty has within the last few days been brought face to face with far and away the greatest danger to our trade routes. It is not in the Pacific; it is at home. It is no use sweeping the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean in order to see whether you can somehow or other find dangers to guard against. The danger is yawning in front of us, and the Government are marching into it, scanning the horizon with telescope glued to one eye, and the other closed.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1925/jul/29/navy-supplementary-estimate-1925-26#column_479 in the House of Commons (29 July 1925) Later life

Home

“There should be a new and sincere attempt to reach a consensus. If we do not find a solution with the members, we may have to ask the British to give their opinion again, in one form or another.”

Philip Hammond (1955) British Conservative politician

Philip Hammond will 'not exclude' backing no confidence vote to stop no-deal Brexit https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49044966 BBC News (19 July 2019) 2019

Sincerity

“We are still not there. There are still several issues which remain unresolved, including that of Ireland, and therefore what I understand is that more time is required to find this comprehensive deal and to reach this decisive progress which we need in order to finalise these negotiations on the orderly exit of the United Kingdom.”

Michel Barnier (1951) French politician

Brexit: 'No optimism' for summit breakthrough, says Donald Tusk https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-45871254 BBC News (16 October 2018) 2018

Understanding, Decision, Time

“If only we could find out for certain where Hitler and Mussolini are meeting tomorrow, and get one well-placed bomb, then the world might really take on a different appearance.”

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax (1881–1959) British politician

Diary (17 June 1940), quoted in Andrew Roberts, ‘The Holy Fox’: The Life of Lord Halifax (Phoenix, 1997), p. 237
Foreign Secretary

World, Appearance

“The sacred books of the East are the best evidence for the greatness of their authors, for who in later days or in modern times can even approach the spiritual sublimity of their religious thought, the intellectual splendour of their philosophy, the breadth and purity of their ethic? And when we find that these books contain teachings about God, man, and the universe identical in substance under much variety of outer appearance, it does not seem unreasonable to refer to them to a central primary body of doctrine. To that body we give the name Divine Wisdom, in its Greek form: THEOSOPHY.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Source: The Ageless Wisdom (1897)

Wisdom, God, Books, Universe

“I have spent my life building bridges and tearing down barriers — not building walls. That’s why I find Donald Trump’s belief that an American-born judge of Mexican descent is incapable of fairly presiding over his case is not only dead wrong, it is un-American. As the Presidential campaign progressed, I was hoping the rhetoric would tone down and reflect a campaign that was inclusive, thoughtful and principled. While I oppose the Democratic nominee, Donald Trump’s latest statements, in context with past attacks on Hispanics, women and the disabled like me, make it certain that I cannot and will not support my party’s nominee for President regardless of the political impact on my candidacy or the Republican Party. It is absolutely essential that we are guided by a commander-in-chief with a responsible and proper temperament, discretion and judgment. Our President must be fit to command the most powerful military the world has ever seen, including an arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons. After much consideration, I have concluded that Donald Trump has not demonstrated the temperament necessary to assume the greatest office in the world.”

Mark Kirk (1959) former U.S. junior senator from Illinois

As quoted in Sen. Mark Kirk withdraws support for Trump https://web.archive.org/web/20160608015204/http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/sen-mark-kirk-withdraws-support-for-trump/ by Lynn Sweet, 7 June 2016, Chicago Sun-Times.

Life, Women, World, Making love

“It is good to see that we agree that the UK should leave the European Union with a deal and that the urgent task at hand is to find a deal that honours our commitments to the people of Northern Ireland, can command support in Parliament and can be negotiated with the EU - not to seek an election or second referendum.”

Theresa May (1956) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Brexit: Theresa May to give MPs update on Tuesday https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47192233 BBC News (11 February 2019) 2010s, On Brexit

People, Support

“Southerners like Fitzhugh pushed the Democratic Party towards a socialist-slavery plantation society that would impose a dependency on government largesse under the shadow of paternalistic racism. His was a popular voice in justifying slavery, finding support among many southern politicians, slaveholders, and newspapers.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the ‘Free Left’ and the ‘Statist Left', (2019), p. 452

Support, Dependency

“And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations - as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world - we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

Hannah Arendt's "judgement" of Eichmann, in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).

People, World, Support

“If we compare. e. g. the systems of classical mathematics and of intuitionistic mathematics, we find that the first is much simpler and technically more efficient, while the second is more safe from surprising occurences, e. g. contradictions. At the present time, any estimation of the degree of safety of the system of classical mathematics, in other words, the degree of plausibility of its principles, is rather subjective. The majority of mathematicians seem to regard this degree as sufficiently high for all practical purposes and therefore prefer the application of classical mathematics to that of intuitionistic mathematics. The latter has not, so far as I know, been seriously applied in physics by anybody.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Rudolf Carnap (1939; 51), as cited in: Paul van Ulsen. Wetenschapsfilosofie http://www.illc.uva.nl/Research/Publications/Inaugurals/IV-10-Arend-Heyting.text.pdf, 6 november 2017.

Mathematics, Time

“The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organisation of the state. But after its victory the sole organisation which the proletariat finds already in existence is precisely the state. This state may require very considerable alterations before it can fulfil its new functions. But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and in a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris Commune.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

Letter to Philipp Van Patten http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/letters/83_04_18.htm (18 April 1883)

Communication, Victory

“I am still sometimes surprised by the contemporary Left’s show of aggressivity, and I can’t even think about it without finding something ridiculous in it. It is really so difficult to note that an internal necessity pushes us toward the historico-genetic conception of the theory of totalitarianism if we subscribe to the basic points of the Marxist interpretation of the twentieth century without accepting the claim of Marxism, and thus of communism, of having the market on absolute truth?”

Ernst Nolte (1923–2016) German historian and philosopher

Source: Fascism & Communism (2004), p. 24

Truth, Communication, Thinking

“If along the path of truth, success (which was often near-failure unnoticed) is subjected to the same scrutiny and desire for improvement as failure, we may find ourselves in closer proximity to trees.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

[Hans Reichenbach, The rise of scientific philosophy, University of California Press, 1951, 0520010558, 326]

Truth, Failure, Tree, Success

“Well, if we read the Bible as a whole we would expect order in the world. Purpose would imply order, and what we actually find is order.”

Arno Allan Penzias (1933) American physicist

interview, The Voice of Genius, published in 1995.

World, Reading

“Quotations: I love them because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognizedly wiser than oneself.”

Marlene Dietrich (1901–1992) German-American actress and singer

Marlene Dietrich's ABC https://books.google.com/books?id=u7x5UYHMs0IC&pg=PT157 (1962)

Love, Making love, Joy

“Indeed, I scarcely comprehend how one can be a poet without revering and loving Spinoza and becoming completely his. Your own fantasy is rich enough for the invention of the particular: nothing is better suited to entice your fantasy, to stimulate and nourish it, than the poetic creations of other artists. But in Spinoza you find the beginning and the end of all fantasy, the universal ground on which your particularity rests — and you should welcome precisely this separation of that which is originary and eternal in fantasy from everything particular and specific.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Original in German: In der Tat, ich begreife kaum, wie man ein Dichter sein kann, ohne den Spinosa zu verehren, zu lieben und ganz der seinige zu werden. In Erfindung des Einzelnen ist Eure eigne Fantasie reich genug; sie anzuregen, zur Tätigkeit zu reizen und ihr Nahrung zu geben, nichts geschickter als die Dichtungen andrer Künstler. Im Spinosa aber findet Ihr den Anfang und das Ende aller Fantasie, den allgemeinen Grund und Boden, auf dem Euer Einzelnes ruht und eben diese Absonderung des Ursprünglichen, Ewigen der Fantasie von allem Einzelnen und Besondern muß Euch sehr willkommen sein.
Friedrich Schlegel, Rede über die Mythologie, in Friedrich Schlegels Gespräch über die Poesie (1800)
S - Z

Love, Making love, Universe

“It is important that death finds us alive!”

Marcello Marchesi (1912–1978) Italian actor and director

Original: (it) L'importante è che la morte ci trovi vivi. Il malloppo (1971). Quoted in Emotions and the Therapist (2015) by Paolo Bertrando, p. 128 https://books.google.it/books?id=l8mzCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA128. Variant translation: "The important thing is to make sure that when death comes, it finds us still alive." Quoted in One Hundred Days of Happiness (2015) by Fausto Brizzi, trans. Anthony Shugaar, p. 235 https://books.google.it/books?id=jEh4BwAAQBAJ&pg=PA235.

Death

“Both the court and the general public give a conventional value to men and things, and then are surprised to find themselves deceived by it. This is as if arithmeticians should give a variable an arbitrary value to the figures in a sum, and then, after restoring their true and regular value in the addition, be astonished at the incorrectness of their answer.”

Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794) French writer

Les gens du monde et de la Cour donnent aux hommes et aux choses une valeur conventionnelle dont ils s'étonnent de se trouver les dupes. Ils ressemblent à des calculateurs, qui, en faisant un compte, donneraient aux chiffres une valeur variable et arbitraire, et qui, ensuite, dans l'addition, leur rendant leur valeur réelle et réglée, seraient tout surpris de ne pas trouver leur compte.
Maximes et Pensées, #199
Maxims and Considerations, #199

Men

“Let us not, however, deceive ourselves with the thought that vaulting ambition, that lust for power and place is a disease peculiar to great minds, for nothing is more commonly found among ordinary men in the humbler walks of life. We need not travel very far in any direction to find a little Caesar or a little Napoleon.”

William H. Crogman (1841–1931) American classical philologist

Source: Talks for the Times (1896), "The Importance of Correct Ideals" (1892), p. 276

Life, Men, Disease, Travel

“History is mere Empiricism; it has only facts to communicate, and all its proofs are founded upon facts alone. To attempt to rise to Primeval History on this foundation of fact, or to argue by this means how such or such a thing might have been, and then to take for granted that it has been so in reality, is to stray beyond the limits of History, and produce an a priori History; just as the Philosophy of Nature, referred to in our preceding lecture, endeavoured to find an a priori Science of Physics.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), p. 140

History, Communication, Nature, Reality

“I veil my face before thee, and lay my finger on my lips. What thou art in thyself, or how thou appearest to thyself, I can never know. After living through a thousand lives, I shall comprehend Thee as little as I do now in this mansion of clay. What I can comprehend, becomes finite by my mere comprehension, and this can never, by perpetual ascent, be transformed into the infinite, for it does not differ from it in degree merely, but in kind. By that ascent we may find a greater and greater man, but never a God, who is capable of no measurement.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte book The Vocation of Man

Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p.115
The Vocation of Man (1800), Faith

God, Art

“It is a proof that the state is not an arbitrary invention, but is established by nature and reason, when we actually find that, in places where men have lived together for a time and have become educated, states are erected, although the people in the one such place know not that the same thing has been done in other places. Each people, which does not live in a condition of nature, but has a government, no matter how constituted, has a right to compel its recognition from all adjoining states.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Science of Rights 1796, P. 474, 477

Men, People, Education, Nature

“I will remember him as a man who is honestly seeking the truth. And a bit more: there was also the courage to find and take risks to defend this truth.”

Jerzy Vetulani (1936–2017) Polish scientist

Grzegorz Strzelczyk, a Catholic priest who co-authored a book that was a conversation record between him and Vetulani, in an interview with Tygodnik Sanocki http://tygodniksanocki.pl/2017/10/08/czy-w-mozgu-mieszka-bog/ (in Polish).

Truth, Courage

“My friends, if you would see men again the beasts of prey they seemed in the nineteenth century, all you have to do is to restore the old social and industrial system, which taught them to view their natural prey in their fellow-men, and find their gain in the loss of others. No doubt it seems to you that no necessity, however dire, would have tempted you to subsist on what superior skill or strength enabled you to wrest from others equally needy.”

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) American author and socialist

Source: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25439 (1888), Ch. 26.

Men, Nature, Loss

“Whatever her sorrow had once been, for nearly a century she had ceased to weep, and, my sudden passion spent, my own tears dried away. I had loved her very dearly in my other life, but it was a hundred years ago! I do not know but some may find in this confession evidence of lack of feeling, but I think, perhaps, that none can have had an experience sufficiently like mine to enable them to judge me.”

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) American author and socialist

Source: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25439 (1888), Ch. 20

Love, Life, Making love, Feeling

“We do without the lawyers, certainly… It would not seem reasonable to us, in a case where the only interest of the nation is to find out the truth, that persons should take part in the proceedings who had an acknowledged motive to color it. But who defends the accused? If he is a criminal he needs no defense, for he pleads guilty in most instances. The plea of the accused is not a mere formality with us, as with you. It is usually the end of the case.”

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) American author and socialist

Source: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25439 (1888), Ch. 19

Truth, Color, Motivation, Parting

“We leave the question whether a man shall be a brain or hand worker entirely to him to settle. At the end of the term of three years as a common laborer, which every man must serve, it is for him to choose, in accordance to his natural tastes, whether he will fit himself for an art or profession, or be a farmer or mechanic. If he feels that he can do better work with his brains than his muscles, he finds every facility provided for testing the reality of his supposed bent, of cultivating it, and if fit of pursuing it as his avocation. The schools of technology, of medicine, of art, of music, of histrionics, and of higher liberal learning are always open to aspirants without condition.”

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) American author and socialist

Source: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25439 (1888), Ch. 7.

School, Art, Music, Feeling

“Therefore a wise prince ought to adopt such a course that his citizens will always in every sort and kind of circumstance have need of the state and of him, and then he will always find them faithful.”

Niccolo Machiavelli book The Prince

Original: (it) E però un principe savio deve pensare un modo per il quale i suoi cittadini sempre ed in ogni modo e qualità di tempo abbiano bisogno dello Stato di lui, e sempre poi gli saranno fedeli.
Source: The Prince (1513), Ch. 9; translated by W. K. Marriot

Faith

“We intend to make use of the natural buffer zone of the Taiwan Strait and our geostrategic advantages (in the case of conflicts with Mainland China). We adopt innovative and asymmetric concepts to focus our investment on systems that are mobile, hard to find, agile, cheap, numerous, survivable and operationally effective.”

Chang Guan-chung (1959) Taiwanese military personel

Chang Guan-chung (2019) cited in " Taiwan seeking long-term U.S. logistic support: defense official http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aipl/201910080004.aspx" on Focus Taiwan, 8 October 2019

Making love, Nature

“Unless we can trace our lineage to the original humans and find that we live where they lived, we are all international migrants. Furthermore, we are all wanderers. We symbolically carry our homes on our backs, like turtles, snails, and crustaceans—for the meanings and associations of home are always with us and affect our orientation in space and time, and how we negotiate our way through the world.”

Michael Allen Fox (1940)

Home: A Very Short Introduction https://books.google.it/books?id=CyShDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT0 (Oxford University Press, 2017), ch. 7.

World, Way, Home, Time

“The subject-matter of this book is sadhana. There are not many books like this on this subject showing such mastery and insight. Sri Anirvan lived a life of dedication and reflection and he speaks as an insider. He takes his readers onto unfamiliar grounds and there is no doubt that they will find in him a sure guide on this unusual pilgrimage.”

Anirvan (1896–1978) Indian Hindu philosopher

Inner yoga (antaryoga): Anirvan. (1988). New Delhi: Voice of India. From the Introduction by Ram Swarup.

Life, Books

“Unlawful revenue which, after being conveniently cleaned, is then reinvested within the legal economy: polluting it, corrupting it, forging it, killing it. Whether it’s reinvested in the London property market, in Parisian restaurants, or in hostels on the French Riviera. Drug trafficking money will buy homes that honest folk can no longer afford; it will open shops that will sell at more competitive prices than legitimate shops; it will start businesses that can afford to be more competitive than clean businesses. But one thing must be clear: these businesses are not interested in being successful; the main purpose for which they were created was to launder money, turning money that shouldn’t even exist into clean and usable money. In silence, illegal assets are moving around and undermining our economy and our democracies. In silence. But it doesn’t stop here; organised crime is providing us with a winning economic model. Organised crime is the only segment of global economy to have not been affected by the financial crisis; to have profited from the crisis, to have fed on the crisis, to have contributed to the crisis. And it’s in the crisis that it finds its satellite activities, such as usury, gambling, counterfeiting. But the most important – and most alarming – aspect of this issue is that it’s exactly in times of crisis that criminal organisations find their safe haven in banks.”

Roberto Saviano (1979) Italian journalist, writer and essayist

Dirty Money in London event (2016)

Money, Democracy, Home, Business

“Even after his conversion to Islam, the Hindu remained an object of abhorrence… Barani is so maliciously vituperative against Hindus that even many modem Muslim scholars feel embarrassed at his language and find it difficult to defend him. It must, however, be remembered that Barani belonged to the common run of Muslim theologians and chroniclers. He was a personal friend of men like Amir Khusrau and Ala Hasan Sijzi and was a disciple of no less a Sufi than Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya. He possessed charming manners and was known for his wit and humour. But in the case of Hindus, his wit turned into rage. He is copiously quoted by future chroniclers like Nizamuddin Ahmad, Badaoni and Farishtah, who all praise him highly. Most of medieval Muslim chroniclers wrote in the idiom of Barani; only he excelled them all. All medieval chroniclers were scholars of Islamic scriptures and law. They often quote from these to defend or justify the actions of their kings in relation to their non-Muslim subjects.”

Ziauddin Barani (1285–1357) Indian Muslim historian and political thinker (1285–1357)

Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3

Men, Law, Feeling, Quotes

“Pity for poverty, enthusiasm for equality and freedom, recognition of social injustice and a desire to remove it, is not socialism. Condemnation of wealth and respect for poverty, such as we find in Christianity and other religions, is not socialism. The communism of early times, as it was before the existence of private property, and as it has at all times and among all peoples been the elusive dream of some enthusiasts, is not socialism. The forcible equalization advocated by the followers of Baboeuf, the so-called equalitarians, is not socialism. In all these appearances there is lacking the real foundation of capitalist society with its class antagonisms. Modern socialism is the child of capitalist society and its class antagonisms.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

Without these it could not be. Socialism and ethics are two separate things. This fact must be kept in mind. Whoever conceives of socialism in the sense of a sentimental philanthropic striving after human equality, with no idea of the existence of capitalist society, is no socialist in the sense of the class struggle, without which modern socialism is unthinkable. Whoever has come to a full consciousness of the nature of capitalist society and the foundation of modern socialism, knows also that a socialist movement that leaves the basis of the class struggle may be anything else, but it is not socialism.
No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

People, Religion, Dreams, Communication

“We are not in the business of finding faults. But when we detect some loopholes during the process of audit, we advise the executive to plug those loopholes.”

Vinod Rai (1948) Comptroller and Auditor General of India

Vinod Rai at a seminar on 'Public Accountability and the Role of CAG' organized by the Institute of Public Auditors of India at New Delhi on 28/03/2012.

Business

“I’m finding the intrusion of the state into everything in our lives increasingly intolerable, we are being dismantled as thinking adults to the extent that we are dumbing down. Eventually we will become completely politically, spiritually, mentally enfeebled … That’s the future, that’s what we’re looking down the barrel of, and it shits me.”

Richard Roxburgh (1962) Australian actor

Richard Roxburgh on Rake, Donald Trump and the 'immeasurable madness' of the nanny state https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/may/17/richard-roxburgh-on-rake-donald-trump-and-the-immeasurable-madness-of-the-nanny-state (May 17, 2016)

Thinking, Future

“Kant has rightly observed that by the resolution of the concept of a thing we can find neither that it exists nor that it is the cause of something else, and accordingly that the concepts of being and causality are not analytical but can be derived only from experience. When however he later feels himself obliged to assume that the notion of causality originates in a pre-experiential property of the cognising subject and therefore stamps it a mere rule of time-series, by which, in experience, with each observation as cause any other could be connected as effect, then is the child thrown out with the bath.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

Indeed, we must derive the relations of causality from experience; but we must not fail to correct and to complete our conception of these facts of experience by reflection.
Causality
Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

Feeling, Time

“One source of misunderstanding is that many of the commentators have been economists who have looked at the Moral Sentiments simply in order to find some relevance for The Wealth of Nations.”

D. D. Raphael (1916–2015) Philosopher

This gave rise to the so-called Adam Smith problem, a supposed inconsistency between the psychological assumptions of the two books. Another source of error has been a failure to note whether a particular passage was written for the first or for the sixth edition.
The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith's Moral Philosophy (2007), Ch. 1: Two Versions

Wealth

“Everywhere you look it unpacks to infinity. What you look for, you find. And you people can have it. All of it.”

M. John Harrison book Light

The comfortable generosity of this offer puzzled Kearney, so he decided to ignore it. It seemed meaningless anyway.
Source: Light (2002), Chapter 31 “I’ve Been Here” (p. 390)

People

“Professor Lal was already a veteran whose major book, History of the Khaljis, was compulsory reading for students of medieval Indian history from the undergraduate class onwards. I still find it very useful when I teach any course on the Delhi sultanate. … Historiographically the book fell entirely and conspicuously in the genre of nationalist historiography whose hallmark was its challenge· to the portrayal of medieval Indian history as a story of unrelenting conflict between the medieval Muslim rulers and their Hindu subjects. History of the Khaljis is one of the best works in this genre: empirically sound, objective in its assessment of events and persons, non-judgemental in its evaluation of the motives of rulers or their opponents. The remarkable quality gave the book a long life in the discipline, even when newer problematiques of socio-economic history began to displace the ones of dynastic history that had remained the preoccupation of the earlier generation.”

K. S. Lal (1920–2002) Indian historian

Harbans Mukhia, Obituary, The Indian Historical Review http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/037698360102800245

Life, Books, History, Motivation

“I have tried to find some explanation that does not rely on logic, but once the borders of rationality have been removed I cannot imagine what should take their place. How does one begin to measure? What standards should one apply?”

Sean Russell (1952) author

The prince understood what she meant. Once reason was no longer your guide, you were like a man stranded in a featureless landscape. There were no landmarks to use. One direction was as likely to yield results as any other.
Source: Sea Without a Shore (1996), Chapter 26 (p. 353)

Imagination

Quotes about finding page 91

Quotes about finding
page 91