Quotes about first
page 85

“What are we first? First, animals; and next
Intelligences at a leap; on whom
Pale lies the distant shadow of the tomb,
And all that draweth on the tomb for text.
Into which state comes Love, the crowning sun:
Beneath whose light the shadow loses form.
We are the lords of life, and life is warm.
Intelligence and instinct now are one.
But nature says: 'My children most they seem
When they least know me: therefore I decree
That they shall suffer.' Swift doth young Love flee,
And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.
Then if we study Nature we are wise.”

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

St. 30. Modern Love http://www.ev90481.dial.pipex.com/Meredith/modern_love.htm (1862)

Love, Life, Children, Dreams

“It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo stillmore complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

volume III, chapter I: "The Spread of Evolution", page 18 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=30&itemID=F1452.3&viewtype=image; letter to Joseph Hooker (1871) The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887)

Light, Change

“A cross could be a shape for expressing something spacious; such as the coordinators of space. That could be called its first significance or its first relevance. A cross could equally stand for crossing something out. It could also be a sign of obstruction. An overturned cross, an X so to speak, could be the symbol of mystery, something for the other side. Then I could paint a cross in such a way that a connection is made between two bars, and in doing so convert it into a symbol of the unlimited. So, many different crosses and X symbols occur in my works.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

quote from 1988
1981 - 1990
Source: Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 – 2003, Achim Sommer, Kunsthalle Emden, Altana 2004, p. 27

Way, Quotes, Painting

“It is as well to be born in the first chapter as elsewhere, and though I have only secondary evidence as to the fact, believe it happened as related to me afterwards by my mother, who said the doctor found me in an old hollow log and, as our house happened to be nearest to the log in question, he wrapped me up in his cloak, carried me to the house and left me with mother.”

Terence V. Powderly (1849–1924) American mayor

[Powderly, Terence, 'The Path I Trod: The Autobiography of Terence V. Powderly, 1940, Columbia University Press, 9781163178164, https://archive.org/stream/pathitrodautobio00powdrich, 8]

Question, Housing

“Visionaries are the first people in their industry segment to see the potential of the High Tech Marketing Enlightenment new technology. Fundamentally, they see themselves as smarter than their opposite numbers in competitive companies—and, quite often, they are. Indeed, it is their ability to see things first that they want to leverage into a competitive advantage. That advantage can only come about if no one else has discovered it. They do not expect, therefore, to be buying a well—tested product with an extensive list of industry references. Indeed, if such a reference base exists, it may actually turn them off, indicating that for this technology, at any rate, they are already too late.”

Geoffrey Moore book Crossing the Chasm

Source: Crossing the Chasm, 1991, p. 41-42

People

“I just don't like meat. Rotten carcasses don't feel good inside in my body. I've also seen some horrible documentaries about the hormones and things that go into meat. On a health level, meat is so scary. […] It's not just about staying away from meat, it's about keeping things in your diet that make you feel good. That's why you eat vegetarian in the first place. […] I think killing to make or eat things is horrific. It seems like there was a movement against wearing fur in fashion, but overnight it's fine again. I hate the way we pay lip service to issues like that.”

Alan Cumming (1965) Scottish actor

“ One on One with Alan Cumming https://www.vegetariantimes.com/life-garden/one-on-one-with-alan-cumming,” interview with Vegetarian Times (27 January 2011).

Hate, Health, Way, Feeling

“I really remember John Lennon's Imagine. I guess I'm twelve; that's one of my first albums. That really set fire to me. It was like he was whispering in your ear — his ideas of what's possible. Different ways of seeing the world.”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

Rolling Stone interview (2005)

World, Way, Imagination, Idea

“The man whom Nature has appointed to do great things is, first of all, furnished with that openness to Nature which renders him incapable of being insincere! To his large, open, deep-feeling heart Nature is a Fact: all hearsay is hearsay; the unspeakable greatness of this Mystery of Life, let him acknowledge it or not, nay even though he seem to forget it or deny it, is ever present to him,—fearful and wonderful, on this hand and on that.”

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

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Man of Letters

Life, Fear, Feeling, Nature

“David Bowie has a huge influence on me because his was his first concert I went to see. I remember watching him and thinking I didn't know what sex he was, and it didn't matter. Because one minute he was wearing body stockings - the whole Ziggy Stardust thing - and the next minute he was the Thin White Duke in white double-breasted suits, and there's something so androgynous about him. And I think androgyny, whether it's David Bowie or Helmut Berger, that has really really influenced my work more than anything.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Aperture Magazine 1999 http://allaboutmadonna.com/madonna-interviews-articles/aperture-magazine-summer-1999

Sex, Thinking

“I think at first they were a bit surprised that it had happened, then they realised it was really nice and it was good fun and we got on really well, they were good friends of ours as well so we had a good giggle with them as well.”

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge (1982) a member of the British royal family

On the reaction of their flatmates when he and Kate became romantically involved with each other.
First post-engagement interview (2010)

Thinking

“The adverse economic events following the First World War turned me toward economics… I learned during my youth how hard it was for farm families to stay solvent. Farm product prices fell abruptly by more than half. Banks went bankrupt and many farmers suffered foreclosures. Was politics or economics to blame? I opted for economics.”

Theodore Schultz (1902–1998) American economist

" Nobelprize.org: Autobiography http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1979/schultz-autobio.html," in: Nobel Lectures, Economics 1969-1980, Editor Assar Lindbeck, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1992

War, Youth, World, Family

“Galileo had provided the methodology for the analysis of motions on and near the earth and had applied it successfully. Copernicus and Kepler had previously obtained the laws of motion of the planets and their satellites. …But Galileo had succeeded in deriving numerous laws from a few physical principles and… the axioms and theorems of mathematics. …The Keplerian laws …were not logically related to each other. Each was an independent inference from observations. …They seemed to be suspended in the same vacuum in which the planets moved.
Galileo's laws had the additional advantage of supplying physical insight. The first law of motion and the law that the force of graviation gives… a downward acceleration of 32 ft/sec2… explain the vertrical rise and fall of bodies, motion on slopes, and projectile motion. Kepler's laws… had no physical basis. …Kepler tried to introduce the idea of a magnetic force which the sun exerted… But he failed to related the behavior of the planets to the precise laws of planetary motion. …
The new astronomical theory was completely isolated from the theory of motion on earth. …it bothered mathematicians and scientists who believed that all the phenomena of the universe were governed by one master plan instituted by the master planner—God.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematics and the Physical World (1959), pp. 224-225

God, Law, Behavior, Mathematics

“As already mentioned, so long as classes exist, contradictions between correct and incorrect ideas in the Communist Party are reflections within the Party of class contradictions. At first, with regard to certain issues, such contradictions may not manifest themselves as antagonistic. But with the development of the class struggle, they may grow and become antagonistic. The history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union shows us that the contradictions between the correct thinking of Lenin and Stalin and the fallacious thinking of Trotsky, Bukharin and others did not at first manifest themselves in an antagonistic form, but that later they did develop into antagonism.”

Mao Zedong book On Contradiction

On Contradiction (1937)
Original: (zh-CN) 共产党内正确思想和错误思想的矛盾，如前所说，在阶级存在的时候，这是阶级矛盾对于党内的反映。这种矛盾，在开始的时候，或在个别的问题上，并不一定马上表现为对抗性的。但随着阶级斗争的发展，这种矛盾也就可能发展为对抗性的。苏联共产党的历史告诉我们：列宁、斯大林的正确思想和托洛茨基、布哈林等人的错误思想的矛盾，在开始的时候还没有表现为对抗的形式，但随后就发展为对抗的了。中国共产党的历史也有过这样的情形。我们党内许多同志的正确思想和陈独秀、张国焘等人的错误思想的矛盾，在开始的时候也没有表现为对抗的形式，但随后就发展为对抗的了。目前我们党内的正确思想和错误思想的矛盾，没有表现为对抗的形式，如果犯错误的同志能够改正自己的错误，那就不会发展为对抗性的东西。因此，党一方面必须对于错误思想进行严肃的斗争，另方面又必须充分地给犯错误的同志留有自己觉悟的机会。在这样的情况下，过火的斗争，显然是不适当的。但如果犯错误的人坚持错误，并扩大下去，这种矛盾也就存在着发展为对抗性的东西的可能性

History, Idea, Thinking

“The turtle obviously had no sense of proportion; it differed so widely from myself that I could not comprehend it; and as this word occurred to me, it occurred also that until my body comprehended its body in a physical material sense, neither would my mind be able to comprehend its mind with any thoroughness. For unity of mind can only be consummated by unity of body; everything, therefore, must be in some respects both knave and fool to all that which has not eaten it, or by which it has not been eaten. As long as the turtle was in the window and I in the street outside, there was no chance of our comprehending one another.
Nevertheless, I knew that I could get it to agree with me if I could so effectually buttonhole and fasten on to it as to eat it. Most men have an easy method with turtle soup, and I had no misgiving but that if I could bring my first premise to bear I should prove the better reasoner. My difficulty lay in this initial process, for I had not with me the argument that would alone compel Mr. Sweeting to think that I ought to be allowed to convert the turtles — I mean I had no money in my pocket. No missionary enterprise can be carried on without any money at all, but even so small a sum as half a crown would, I suppose, have enabled me to bring the turtle partly round, and with many half-crowns I could in time no doubt convert the lot, for the turtle needs must go where the money drives. If, as is alleged, the world stands on a turtle, the turtle stands on money. No money no turtle. As for money, that stands on opinion, credit, trust, faith — things that, though highly material in connection with money, are still of immaterial essence.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Ramblings In Cheapside (1890)

Men, Money, World, Faith

“War is at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that the other fellow isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off.”

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist

Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)

War, Hope

“The Constituent Assembly has got two main functions to perform. The first is the very onerous and responsible task of framing the future constitution of Pakistan and the second of functioning as a full and complete sovereign body as the Federal Legislature of Pakistan.”

Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948) Founder and 1st Governor General of Pakistan

Address to the Constituent Assembly (1947)

Future

“The Age of Reptiles ended because it had gone on long enough and it was all a mistake in the first place. A better day was dawning at the close of the Mesozoic Era. There were some little warm-blooded animals around which had been stealing and eating the eggs of the Dinosaurs, and they were gradually learning to steal other things, too. Civilization was just around the corner.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Dinosaur
How to Become Extinct (1941)

Age, Learning, Animals

“Ernst Bloch … recognized the dual character of the religious phenomenon, its oppressive aspect as well as its potential for revolt. The first requires the use of what he called 'the cold stream of Marxism': the relentless materialist analysis of ideologies, idols and idolatries. The second, however, requires 'the warm stream of Marxism', seeking to rescue religion's utopian cultural surplus, its critical and anticipatory force.”

Michael Löwy (1938) French sociologist

Source: The War of Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America (1996), p. 16 http://books.google.com/books?id=gyOHaZFpvL8C&pg=PA16

Religion

“When, where, and how were you, Joseph Smith, first called? How old were you? and what were you qualifications? I was between fourteen and fifteen years of age. Had you been to college? No. Had you studied in any seminary of learning? No. Did you know how to read? Yes. How to write? Yes. Did you understand much about arithmetic? No. About grammar? No. Did you understand all the branches of education which are generally taught in our common schools? No. But yet you say the Lord called you when you were but fourteen or fifteen years of age? How did he call you? I will give you a brief history as it came from his own mouth. I have often heard him relate it. He was wrought upon by the Spirit of God, and felt the necessity of repenting of his sins and serving God. He retired from his father's house a little way, and bowed himself down in the wilderness, and called upon the name of the Lord. He was inexperienced, and in great anxiety and trouble of mind in regard to what church he should join. He had been solicited by many churches to join with them, and he was in great anxiety to know which was right. He pleaded with the Lord to give him wisdom on the subject; and while he was thus praying, he beheld a vision, and saw a light approaching him from the heavens; and as it came down and rested on the tops of the trees, it became more glorious; and as it surrounded him, his mind was immediately caught away from beholding surrounding objects. In this cloud of light he saw two glorious personages; and one, pointing to the other, said, "Behold my beloved son! hear ye him."”

Orson Pratt (1811–1881) Apostle of the LDS Church

Journal of Discourses 7:220 (August 14, 1859).
Joseph Smith Jr.'s First Vision

Wisdom, God, Age, Education

“The Sichuan disaster is not the first nor the most wrongful. But all the details of this tragedy will be forgotten, and once again it will be like nothing ever happened. Eventually all these disasters will together create a bizarre miracle called civilization and evolution.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Our Duty Is to Remember Sichuan, 2009

“Let me endeavour, very briefly to sketch, in the rudest outline what the Turkish race was and what it is. It is not a question of Mohammedanism simply, but of Mohammedanism compounded with the peculiar character of a race. They are not the mild Mohammedans of India, nor the chivalrous Saladins of Syria, nor the cultured Moors of Spain. They were, upon the whole, from the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went a broad line of blood marked the track behind them, and, as far as their dominion reached, civilization vanished from view. They represented everywhere government by force as opposed to government by law. – Yet a government by force can not be maintained without the aid of an intellectual element. – Hence there grew up, what has been rare in the history of the world, a kind of tolerance in the midst of cruelty, tyranny and rapine. Much of Christian life was contemptuously left alone and a race of Greeks was attracted to Constantinople which has all along made up, in some degree, the deficiencies of Turkish Islam in the element of mind!”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. (1876)
1870s

Life, World, Law, History

“Our point of view is, lets not be so elitist that we can't honor good, hard, dignified, ennobling work: people working with their hands, building things, putting up solar panels, weatherizing homes, working on organic agriculture, building wind farms. We don't have robots in society, so somebody has to do that work. Lets make sure that the people who can use that work get a chance to do it. I see that as a first step toward bigger and better things.”

Van Jones (1968) American environmental advocate and civil rights activist

"Interview: Van Jones" in The Green Options (29 May 2007) http://ryanthibodaux.greenoptions.com/2007/05/29/the-green-options-interview-van-jones/

People, Home, Chance, Weather

“Between the Republicans trying to repeal the first chance we’ve ever had to get to universal health care, and Senator Sanders wanting to throw us into a contentious debate over single-payer, I think the smart approach is build on and protect the Affordable Care Act. Make it work. Reduce the cost.”

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

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Democratic Presidential Debate in Miami (March 9, 2016)

Thinking, Chance

“The poverty-stricken rural population rose up against their despoilers; they burnt down the castles of the nobles, and swore that they would leave nothing to be seen upon the land but the cabins of the poor. The rich middle-class seemed at first to side with them, and at Strasburg, Nuremberg, and Ulm the peasants were encouraged, aided, and provided for. However, the bourgeoisie soon grew alarmed at the spreading of the insurrection, and made common cause with the nobles in smothering the revolt in the rural districts. Luther, who was then at the apex of his power, condemned the rising in the name of religion, and proclaimed the servitude of the people as holy and legitimate. "You seek," wrote he, "to free your persons and your goods. You desire the power and the goods of this earth. You will suffer no wrong. The Gospel, on the contrary, has no care for such things, and makes exterior life consist in suffering, supporting injustice, the cross, patience, and contempt of life, as of all the things of this world. To suffer! To suffer! The cross! The cross! Behold what Christ teaches!" Were not these teachings, given in the name of the faith to a famishing people in revolt against the tyranny and avidity of the ruling aristocracy, fatal to the future of the peasant masses, whose very sufferings were thus legitimised in the name of the religion that should have come to their aid?”

Francesco Saverio Nitti (1868–1953) Italian economist and political figure

Source: Catholic Socialism (1895), p. 75

Life, People, World, Faith

“In selecting our subject then we have two things to consider. First, is it as good as the conditions will let it be - that is, have we chosen the point of view which, with the present conditions, shows at its best pictorially, and secondly, if taken from this point now, are the alterations we would like, weather or light, to make for us of such a kind that we can introduce them for ourselves when printing, and, if so, what are those alterations.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Part II : Practical Pictorial Photography, Some practical suggestions on the selection of the subject and a note on the subject of motive

Light, Weather

“On the morning when I moved into my new office, when the telephone rang for the first time I eagerly picked up the receiver to find out who the caller could be, only to discover that the person on the other end of the line wanted to speak to Edwina Currie.”

Theresa May (1956) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Maiden speech to Parliament https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=1997-06-02a.59.0 (02 June 1997)

Time, Personality

“Before the first before and after the last after, there is night waiting.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Before and After http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21375/Before_and_After From the poems written in English

Waiting, Night

“There are already people who are world class in India, for example C. N. R. Rao (who has worked mainly in solid-state and structural chemistry). He is an example of how you can do first rate international work within India. So I would say to Indians — you have it within you to do this”

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (1952) Nobel prize winning American and British structural biologist

in India
Venki’ makes light of India link- Winner says not to treat science like cricket; league of misses grows

People, World

“For their doctrine is this: That bodies are corruptible, and that the matter they are made of is not permanent; but that the souls are immortal, and continue forever; and that they come out of the most subtile air, and are united to their bodies as to prisons, into which they are drawn by a certain natural enticement; but that when they are set free from the bonds of the flesh, they then, as released from a long bondage, rejoice and mount upward. And this is like the opinions of the Greeks, that good souls have their habitations beyond the ocean, in a region that is neither oppressed with storms of rain or snow, or with intense heat, but that this place is such as is refreshed by the gentle breathing of a west wind, that is perpetually blowing from the ocean; while they allot to bad souls a dark and tempestuous den, full of never-ceasing punishments. And indeed the Greeks seem to me to have followed the same notion, when they allot the islands of the blessed to their brave men, whom they call heroes and demi-gods; and to the souls of the wicked, the region of the ungodly, in Hades, where their fables relate that certain persons, such as Sisyphus, and Tantalus, and Ixion, and Tityus, are punished; which is built on this first supposition, that souls are immortal; and thence are those exhortations to virtue and dehortations from wickedness collected; whereby good men are bettered in the conduct of their life by the hope they have of reward after their death; and whereby the vehement inclinations of bad men to vice are restrained, by the fear and expectation they are in, that although they should lie concealed in this life, they should suffer immortal punishment after their death. These are the Divine doctrines of the Essens about the soul, which lay an unavoidable bait for such as have once had a taste of their philosophy.”

Josephus on the Essenes

Jewish War

Life, Death, Men, God

“A child now entering first grade has never known a world without the Web; I want you, just for a moment, to try to imagine a world without the telephone, without electricity. It’s difficult to do, because both of these technologies are entirely commonplace, woven into the fabric of our culture so intensely it becomes nearly impossible to imagine a time before they existed. As electricity is for us, the Web will be for our children; an invisible field of knowledge that surrounds them, and infuses the entire world with instant answers to their requests. Within a generation, it won’t be important how much you can remember; that will have been replaced by how agile you are at acquiring the facts you need.”

Mark Pesce (1962) American writer

Toys and the Playful World http://hyperreal.org/~mpesce/WIT.html

Children, World, Imagination, Knowledge

“I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to Mr. Clarke (1816-04-01) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

Life, People, Way, Motivation

“Computer science is still a young field. The first computers were built in the mid 1940s, since when the field has developed tremendously. Applications from the early years of computerization can be characterized as follows: the programs were quite small, certainly when compared to those that are currently being constructed; they were written by one person; they were written and used by experts in the application area concerned. The problems to be solved were mostly of a technical nature, and the emphasis was on expressing known algorithms efficiently in some programming language. Input typically consisted of numerical data, read from such media as punched tape or punched cards. The output, also numeric, was printed on paper. Programs were run off-line. If the program contained errors, the programmer studied an octal or hexadecimal dump of memory. Sometimes, the execution of the program would be followed by binary reading machine registers at the console.”

Hans van Vliet (1949) Dutch computer scientist

Source: Software Engineering: Principles and Practice, 2007, p. 2

Error, Nature, Problem, Study

“At first glance they [his Bedu companions] seemed to be little better than savages, as primitive as the Danakil, but I was soon disconcerted to discover that, while they were prepared to tolerate me as a source of very welcome revenue, they never doubted my inferiority. They were Muslims and Bedu and I was neither. They had never heard of the English, for all Europeans were known to them simply as Christians, or more probably infidels, and nationality had no meaning to them. They had heard vaguely of the war as a war between the Christians, and of the Aden government as a Christian government. Their world was the desert and they had little if any interest in events that happened outside it.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 36.

War, World

“Our fathers founded the first secular government that was ever founded in this world. Recollect that. The first secular government; the first government that said every church has exactly the same rights, and no more; every religion has the same rights, and no more. In other words, our fathers were the first men who had the sense, who had the genius, to know that no church should be allowed to have a sword; that it should be allowed only to exert its moral influence.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Centennial Oration (4 July 1876) http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/centennial_oration.html

Men, World, Religion, Sense

“Hayek’s blind spot with regard to politics was clear in the early 1980s when the first Thatcher government, in an attempt to reduce inflation and bring the public finances closer to a balanced budget, was raising interest rates and cutting public spending. As he had done during the 1930s, Hayek attacked these policies as not being severe enough. It would be better, he told me in a conversation we had around this time, if Thatcher imposed a more drastic contraction on the economy so that the wage-setting power of the trade unions could be broken. He appeared unfazed by unemployment, which was already higher (more than three million people) than at any time since the 1930s, and would rise much further if his recommendations were accepted.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Friedrich Hayek I knew, and what he got right - and wrong (2015)

People, Appearance, Time

“In a cupboard filled with books he came across one with brightly colored pictures — it was a child's illustrated alphabet — A is for Archer Who shoots with a bow. B is for Boy, His first name is Joe. The pictures interested him greatly.
There were many apes with faces similar to his own, and further over in the book he found, under "M," some little monkeys such as he saw daily flitting through the trees of his primeval forest. But nowhere was pictured any of his own people; in all the book was none that resembled Kerchak, or Tublat, or Kala.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 6 : Jungle Battles

People, Books, Color, Boy

“My veganism stems from Mike Vallely. He was the person, he and Christian Kline … would take me out to dinner and say, “We’ll buy dinner for you if you don’t order meat.” I remember being totally bummed out about that and thinking, “I can’t get the Kung Pow chicken, this sucks.” Then I read some pamphlets and discovered how it was made. I think it takes a weird person to know that and then keep eating it. As I read that stuff, it hit me and I instantly went vegetarian. Then a year later went vegan. I read more information because I was interested, the floodgates opened and there was no turning back. … A lot of kids come up to me at demos and say, “Oh, you’ve skated so long. Is that because you’re vegan?” I’m always the first person on the course and the last person off. I’ve always had good energy. Maybe it’s from eating healthy. … I was just one person who said, “I’m not putting my dollars into this stuff, I’m only putting my dollars in this vegan stuff.” When millions of others do the same, the markets respond. Now there’s great ice cream and great soy milk. Everything you can dream about is made vegan now. That’s something that has transformed over the years. I did my little part, my little sacrifice made a point.”

Ed Templeton (1972) artist

"Ed Templeton Interview pt. 2" https://web.archive.org/web/20130207234012/http://veganskateblog.com/interview/ed-templeton-interview-pt-2. Vegan Skate Blog (February 1, 2013).

Dreams, Thinking, Reading, Parting

“A spectacular anomaly came up with the hydrides of the nonmetals—an ugly bunch, about as inimical to life as one could get. Arsenic and antimony hydrides were very poisonous and smelly; silicon and phosphorous hydrides were spontaneously inflammable. I had made in my lab the hydrides of sulfur (H2S), selenium (H2Se), and tellurium (H2Te), all Group VI elements, all dangerous and vile-smelling gases. The hydride of oxygen, the first Group VI element, one might predict by analogy, would be a foul-smelling, poisonous, inflammable gas, too, condensing to a nasty liquid around −100°C. And instead it was water, H2O—stable, potable, odorless, benign, and with a host of special, indeed unique properties (its expansion when frozen, its great heat capacity, its capacity as an ionizing solvent, etc.) which made it indispensable to our watery planet, indispensable to life itself. What made it such an anomaly? […]”

Oliver Sacks book Uncle Tungsten

This question, I found, had only been resolved recently, in the 1930s, with Linus Pauling's delineation of the hydrogen bond.
Source: Uncle Tungsten (2001), pp. 204–205

Life, Question, Water

“Yes, there was a lot of fuss about it, then [c. 1879-80].... [that] I also was permitted to enter the nude class [c. at the Art Academy in Rotterdam, evening classes! ].. that was never done before me by other ladies. I was the first who claimed it. And even in a local newspaper they cried shame about it: a young woman who painted nude model. And moreover.. a teacher with so many girls under her guidance.”

Suze Robertson (1855–1922) Dutch painter

at the Dutch Highschool
(version in original Dutch / origineel citaat van Suze Robertson:) Ja, dat is toen nog een heel ding geweest [c. 1879-80].. ..[dat] ik ook toegelaten werd tot de naaktklasse [c. op de Kunst-academie in Rotterdam, avondlessen!].. ..dat werd vóór mij nooit door dames gedaan. Ik was de eerste die er aanspraak op maakte. En tot zelfs in een plaatselijk blad werd er schande van gesproken: een jonge vrouw, die schilderde naar naakt model. En dan nog wel een lerares met zóóveel meisjes onder haar leiding. [op de Rotterdamse H.B.S.]
Source: 1900 - 1922, Onder de Menschen: Suze Robertson' (1912), p. 31

Art, Girl, Teachers, Painting

“While there are periodic calls from libertarians and others for the privatization or elimination of the program, given the first political opportunity to dramatically influence the Medicare program, a conservative White House and Congress sought to strengthen, not weaken, the program. To be sure, debates will linger about whether Medicare is too large or too small. Debates remain about the allocation of Medicare dollars. But December 8, 2003, demonstrated that there is no debate on this most fundamental fact: Medicare must survive.”

Michael Johns (1964) American businessman

"The Great Society Meets the 21st Century," Orthopedic Technology Review, January 2004, by Michael Johns: 'Medicare Must Survive'

Housing

“The first opinion the Court ever filed has a dissenting opinion. Dissent is a tradition of this Court… When someone is writing for the Court, he hopes to get eight others to agree with him, so many of the majority opinions are rather stultified.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Interview with the New York Times (29 October 1973)
Other speeches and writings

Hope

“There is little danger that any student, however idle or stupid, will fail to get some result; but there is great danger that he will be led astray, obsessed and overwhelmed by his results, even though it be by those which it is necessary that he should attain. Too often, moreover, he mistaketh the first resting-place for the goal, and taketh off his armour as if he were a victor ere the fight is well begun.
It is desirable that the student should never attach to any result the importance which it at first seems to possess.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Book VI : Liber O (1909)

Stupidity, Fight

“When we were first told the extent of Ivan's disability I thought that we would suffer having to care for him but at least he would benefit from our care. Now as I look back I see that it was all the other way round. It was only him that ever really suffered and it was us — Sam, me, Nancy and Elwen — who gained more than I ever believed possible from having and loving such a wonderfully special and beautiful boy.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

In a letter to activists after the death of his son http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tory-leader-david-camerons-moving-379874 (28 February 2009) 2000s, 2009

Love, Beauty, Way, Boy

“It is sometimes difficult to get rid of first impressions.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

Withnell v. Gartham (1795), 6 T. R. 396.

“As to Divinity, (on which I had an eye from the first,) l had the happiness of a strict and Religious Education, all along from a Child: Whereby I was not only preserved from vicious Courses, and acquainted with Religious Exercises; but was early instructed in the Principles of Religion, and Catachetical Divinity, and the frequent Reading of Scripture, and other good Books, and diligent attendance on Sermons. (And whatever other Studies I followed, I was careful not to neglect this.) And became timely acquainted with Systematick and Polemick Theology. And had the repute of a good Proficient therein.”

John Wallis (1616–1703) English mathematician

Dr. Wallis's Account of some Passages of his own Life (1696)

Happiness, Books, Education, Religion

“The first, the very first; oh! none
Can feel again as they have done;
In love, in war, in pride, in all
The planets of life's coronal,
However beautiful or bright,—
What can be like their first sweet light?”

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

Canto II
The Troubadour (1825)

Love, Life, War, Beauty

“A little roller up along first; behind the bag! It gets through Buckner! Here comes Knight and the Mets win it!”

Vin Scully (1927) American sports broadcaster

Famous call from Game 6 of the 1986 World Series

“Galt was the first writer to show the effects of the burgeoning industrial revolution, making him the first political novelist in the English language, and though his reputation has been overshadowed by Scott and Hogg, he is now recognised as one of the great writers of the age.”

John Galt (novelist) (1779–1839) British writer

Carl MacDougall, "Reformers and radicals in Scottish literature" http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/arts/writingscotland/learning_journeys/reformers_and_radicals/. Criticism

Age

“The Euthyphron then gives us a two-fold presentation of piety. First, a discussion of what piety is. Secondly, a presentation of the problem of Socrates' piety.”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

An Untitled Lecture on Plato's Euthyphron (1996)

Problem

“First and foremost, I'd like to continue taking risks with my music. Everything I've done so far has been a gut reaction, honest and real. And that's who I am. That's what I want my music to always be -- honest and real.”

Josh Groban (1981) American musician and actor

Chicago Sun Times, 11/16/03

Music

“They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

"First We Take Manhattan" (written in 1986) - Leonard Cohen video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTTC_fD598A - Jennifer Warnes & Leonard Cohen video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0rZ2CPCYBQ I'm Your Man (1988)

Change

“I remember a picture I saw in a paper not long before the wall came down. There was a man standing holding a very young daughter, my guess was that she was only about one or two years old. She had on a rather plain dress, he had on a coat and a tie and he was carrying probably a cardboard suitcase. And my guess is that everything he owned in the world was in that suitcase. And he was weeping. He wasn't weeping because he left his car and the rest of his family back on the other side of that Iron Curtain; he was weeping because he was free. He was weeping because now he had opportunity, he had the chance to choose for the first time in his life, and his daughter whom he was holding in his hands had a future, whereas before she would not have had one. That struck me as a very, very vivid picture of what this all meant.”

Leighton W. Smith, Jr. (1939) United States Navy admiral

On the end of the Cold War, in part 7: The End of the Cold War http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/LWSmith/lwsmith-con02.html Interview at USC Berkeley (1997)

Life, World, Family, Cars

“I come here tonight as a sister, blessed with a brother who is my mentor, my protector and my lifelong friend. I come here as a wife who loves my husband and believes he will be an extraordinary president. I come here as a mom whose girls are the heart of my heart and the center of my world — they're the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning, and the last thing I think about when I go to bed at night. Their future — and all our children's future — is my stake in this election.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2000s, Democratic National Convention speech (2008)

Love, Children, World, Girl

“Mahomed Shah now sat down before Condapilly and Bhim Raj, after six months, being much distressed, sued for pardon; which being granted, at the intercession of some of the nobility, he surrendered the fort and town to the royal troops. The King having gone to view the fort, broke down an idolatrous temple, and killed some bramins, who officiated at it, with his own hands, as a point of religion. He then gave orders for a mosque to be erected on the foundation of the temple, and ascending a pulpit, repeated a few prayers, distributed alms, and commanded the Khootba to be read in his name. Khwaja Mahmood Gawan now represented, that as his Majesty had slain some infidels with his own hands, he might fairly assume the title of Ghazy, an appellation of which he was very proud. Mahmood Shah was the first of his race who had slain a bramin…”

Firishta (1560–1620) Indian historian

Sultãn Muhammad Shãh II Bahmanî (AD 1463-1482) Kondapalli (Andhra Pradesh)
Tãrîkh-i-Firishta

Religion, Reading

“If I find the constitution being misused, I shall be the first to burn it.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Political Science for Civil Services Main Examination (2010)

“For the first time, I wasn't embarrassed by the look of beauty, of elegance, because when you see someone who has only one rag as their property, but it happens to be beautiful and pink and silk, beauty doesn't have to be separated... I have always said that you shouldn't have biases, you shouldn't have prejudices. But before that [before his trip to India, c. 1975] I'd never been able to use purple, because it was too beautiful.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

Source: 1990's, Rauschenberg, Art and Live, 1990, p. 206

Beauty, Time

“Please give me a second grace.
Please give me a second face.
I've fallen far down
The first time around.
Now I just sit on the ground in your way.”

Nick Drake (1948–1974) British singer-songwriter

Fly
Song lyrics, Bryter Later (1970)

Way, Time

“With the success of my first story, l decided to make writing a career, though I was canny enough not to give up my job. But the job did not pay expenses and we had a recurrence of great poverty, sustained only by the thread of hope that I might make a living writing fiction. I cast about for a better job and landed one as a department manager for a business magazine. While I was working there, I wrote Tarzan of the Apes, evenings and holidays. I wrote it in longhand on the backs of old letterheads and odd pieces of paper. I did not think it was a very good story and I doubted if it would sell. But Bob Davis saw its possibilities for magazine publication and I got a check … this time, l think, for $700.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) American writer

How I Wrote the Tarzan Books (1929)

Hope, Business, Thinking, Time

“I must tell you first, in order to clear up any uncertainty about my own position, that I never speak primarily as a member of the S. A., but as a National Socialist, since the S. A. cannot be independent of the National Socialist movement but can only exist as a part of it.”

Viktor Lutze (1890–1943) SA Stabschef

Quoted in "Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal" - Page 130 - Nuremberg, Germany - 1947.

Parting

“The first thing is that you’re always at a disadvantage, because a bureaucracy is funded by the public to have permanent people there who can relentlessly advocate for their own interest. And that’s the problem: when bureaucracy stops working for the public interest.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

International Journalism Festival http://www.journalismfestival.com/news/heather-brooke-antitrust-legislation-needed-to-keep-the-internet-free/ Interview with Fabio Chiusi, 12 April 2012. Attributed, In the Media

People, Problem

“We are now, probably for the first time in our history, entering a new aspect of national politics.”

Benjamin Stanton (1809–1872) American politician

Speech (1860)

History, Time

“Fifty years ago, when Europeans and Americans still distinguished high culture from popular culture, and when classical learning was still highly esteemed in colleges and universities, C. P. Snow delivered his famous Rede Lecture at Cambridge University, "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution." Snow did more than warn of the growing split between the old culture of the humanities and the rising culture of science. He took Britain's literary aristocracy to task for its dangerous dismissal of scientific and technological progress, which Snow believed offered the solutions to the world's deepest problems. In a vitriolic response to Snow, the literary critic F. R. Leavis defended the primacy of the humanities for a civilizing education, insisting that science must not be allowed to operate outside of the moral norms that a first-rate humanistic education alone could provide.”

Leon R. Kass (1939) American academic

Looking for an Honest Man (2009)

World, Education, Problem, Learning

“Embarrassing cricket tales. When I was about 14, my school team played against a school called Langdon, somewhere or other in the wilds of East London. They batted first and racked up 180-3 off 20 overs. We got 13. My PE teacher called it the most humiliating day of his life. Years later, he got done for sex offences. I wonder what he thinks now.”

Ben Dirs journalist

Cricket England v West Indies, First test, day five as it happened, 2007-05-21, 2007-05-26, BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/england/6675703.stm,

Life, School, Sex, Thinking

“Do you always travel first-class, Mr. Hardman?”
“Yes, sir. The firm pays my travelling expenses.”

Agatha Christie book Murder on the Orient Express

He winked.
Murder on the Orient Express (1934)

Travel

“We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first.”

Julian Jaynes book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Introduction, p. 18
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)

Behavior

“DNA has been aptly described as the first three-dimensional Xerox machine.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 100

“I quote somewhere a correspondence with Ken Arrow, after he wrote Arrow and Hahn. I wrote to him and I said that the trouble is that neoclassical economists confuse risk with uncertainty. Uncertainty means non-probabilistic. And he said, 'Quite true, you're quite correct that Keynes is much more fruitful, but the trouble with the General Theory is, those things that were fruitful couldn't be developed into a nice precise analytical statement, and those things that could were retrogressions from Keynes but could be developed into a nice precise analytical statement.' That's why mainstream economics went that route. And my answer is, I would hope that even Nobel Prize winners didn't believe that regression is growth, which it clearly isn't. But that's right. The fear that everybody has, you see, is nihilism: you won't be able to say what's going to happen. Well, evolutionists don't worry about being unable to predict. You ask the evolutionists, who tell you what happened in the past, just what next species is going to appear, and the answer is, anything could. Right? Does that bother people? Explanation is the first thing in science. If you can't explain, you don't have anything. But you needn't necessarily predict. Now, if you know the future's uncertain, what does that mean? It means basically, the way Hicks put it in his later years, that humans have free will. The human system isn't deterministic or stochastic, which is deterministic with a random error. Humans can do thins to change the world.”

Paul Davidson (1930) Post Keynesian economist

quoted in Conversations with Post Keynesians (1995) by J. E. King

People, World, Fear, Hope

“I, however, place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.”

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

Letter to William Plumer (21 July 1816)
1810s

Fear

“In a society where there is no freedom of the press, it is difficult for victims to be noticed. Just take the example from yesterday: I had given a telephone interview to CNN. Then, suddenly, CNN was shut down for a couple of minutes. It was the first time I experienced that my television went totally dead. I realized: Oh my God, it’s because of me. This is crazy! Which nation would do that? Maybe Cuba, North Korea, China. But what do they want, what are they so afraid of?”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, Ai Weiwei Does Not Feel Powerful, 2011

God, Freedom, Time, Dead

“The effectiveness of authority as a means of control depends first of all upon the ability to enforce it through the use of punishment. In the two organizations which have been the models for classical organization theory, the situation with respect to enforcement is clear. In the military, authority is enforceable through the court-martial, with the death penalty as the extreme form of punishment. In the Church, excommunication represents the psychological equivalent of the death penalty.”

Douglas McGregor (1906–1964) American professor

Source: The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), p. 27 (in 2006 edition)

Death, Penalty, Dependency

“First they junked the concept of “justice.” Examined semantically “justice” has no referent—there is no observable phenomenon in the space-time-matter continuum to which one can point, and say, “This is justice.” Science can deal only with that which can be observed and measured. Justice is not such a matter; therefore it can never have the same meaning to one as to another; any “noises” said about it will only add to confusion.
But damage, physical or economic, can be pointed to and measured. Citizens were forbidden by the Covenant to damage another. Any act not leading to damage, physical or economic, to some particular person, they declared to be lawful.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

“Coventry”, pp. 500-501; originally published in Astounding Science Fiction (July 1940)
Short fiction, The Past Through Tomorrow (1967)

Justice, Law, Science, Time

“I started chanting when I was living on Hollywood Boulevard, working as a stripper. Within six months, I got my first million dollars and I didn’t have to strip for bucks any more. Then I met Kurt and we still chanted, but we did a lot of drugs together.”

Courtney Love (1964) American punk singer-songwriter, musician, actress, and artist

On her Nichiren Buddhist chanting practice, The Guardian (29 December 2010)
2006–2013

“I saved her {pet bulldog Noelle's) life -- and she changed mine. [Noelle is the title character of The Magically Mysterious Adventures of Noelle the Bulldog -- Estefan's first children's book. ]”

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

The Book Standard (4 June 2005)
2007, 2008

Life, Children, Books, Change

“I am not an animal in my personal life. But in the ring there is an animal inside me. Sometimes it roars when the first bell rights. Sometimes it springs out later in a fight. But i can always feel it there, driving me and pushing me forward. It is what makes me win. It makes me enjoy fighting.”

Roberto Durán (1951) Panamanian boxer

http://www.cmgworldwide.com/sports/duran/quotes.html

Life, Feeling, Spring, Animals

“If we were choosing sides and every player was in the pool, my first pick would be Whitey Ford and my second would be Ted Williams. Beyond that there would be just too many and I'd be afraid of leaving somebody out. Besides, with Whitey on the mound and Williams in the lineup, we'd still beat just about anybody.”

Mickey Mantle (1931–1995) Professional baseball player

When asked "to choose the ideal team he would field if he had to win game," with "the stipulation that he confine his choices to one-time teammates and rivals"; as quoted in The Greatest Team of All Time: As Selected by Baseball's Immortals, From Ty Cobb to Willie Mays (1994), compiled by Nicholas Acocella and Donald Dewey, p. 121.

“Let me first tell you one thing: It doesn't matter what the world says about Israel; it doesn't matter what they say about us anywhere else. The only thing that matters is that we can exist here on the land of our forefathers. And unless we show the Arabs that there is a high price to pay for murdering Jews, we won't survive.”

David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) Israeli politician, Zionist leader, prime minister of Israel

As quoted by Ariel Sharon, in the documentary The 50 Years War : Israel & The Arabs (1999), this advice was given to him by Ben-Gurion after the controversial raid on Qibya.

World

“Andrew Johnson lacked Lincoln's qualities of greatness. While Lincoln had been open-minded, willing to listen to criticism, attuned to the currents of northern public opinion, and able to get along with all elements of his party, Johnson was stubborn, deeply racist, and insensitive to the opinions of others. If anyone was responsible for the wreck of his presidency, it was Johnson himself, first by establishing new governments in the South in which blacks had no voice whatsoever, and then refusing, when these governments sought to reduce freedpeople to a situation akin to slavery through the Black Codes, to heed the rising tide of northern concern. As congressional opposition mounted, Johnson refused to budge.”

Eric Foner (1943) American historian

2000s, If Lincoln Hadn't Died (2009)

“The fact that certain composers have been able to create first-class music within the medium of film proves that film music can be as good as the composer is gifted.”

Jerry Goldsmith (1929–2004) film composer

ibid., p. 209

Music

“Every boy should know that masturbation may be the first step to homosexuality.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

So you want to raise a boy? (1962)

Boy

“Honestly, ever since I found this way of eating I have endless amounts of energy. I can go all day, and after it all I never find myself getting tired. No matter what kind of shows I have done, or workouts I do on top of it, I still have to force myself to sleep at night. … Right from the first time that I started to really eat vegan I could feel how much it was affecting me. John Salley … always told me how the players who ate that way outperformed the others. I started to see that results for myself as well.”

Travis Barker (1975) American drummer and music producer

"Blink 182's Travis Barker: Why I'm Vegan" https://web.archive.org/web/20170321220957/https://www.mensjournal.com/entertainment/articles/blink-182s-travis-barker-why-im-vegan-w473107, interview with Men's Journal (March 2017).

Way, Feeling, Sleep, Time

“Political Independence was only the first step. Sending the British home was only the first step. The struggle still continues. In the last 40-42 years since the advent of Independence, there has been a lot of development, a lot of progress but much more still needs to be done.”

Rajiv Gandhi (1944–1991) sixth Prime Minister of India

Speech in Hindi while addressing a tribal rally at Nandurbar, Pune, 31 March 1989 — Selected Speeches and Writings of Rajiv Gandhi, Vol.V, 1989, p.7 note: Nothing is more important than the unity and integrity of our nation. India is indivisible. Secularism is the bedrock of our nationhood. It implies more than tolerance. It involves an active effort for harmony. No religion preaches hatred and intolerance. Vested interests, both external and internal, are inciting and exploiting communal passions and violence to divide India.

Source: en.wikiquote.org - Rajiv Gandhi / Nothing is more important than the unity and integrity of our nation. India is indivisible. Secularism is the bedrock of our nationhood. It implies more than tolerance. It involves an active effort for harmony. No religion preaches hatred and intolerance. Vested interests, both external and internal, are inciting and exploiting communal passions and violence to divide India.

Home

“For the first [his very first time in Paris], I went to a little hotel, where I spent the night in a sort of nightmare, in which I saw my home, full of melancholy, with my mother, grandmother, and sister spinning in the evening, weeping and thinking of me, praying that I should escape the perdition of Paris. Then the evil demon drove me on before wonderful pictures, which seemed so beautiful, so brilliant, that it appeared to me they took fire and vanished in a heavenly cloud... Finally, without knowing how, I found myself [during one of his his first days in Paris] on the Pont Neuf, from which I saw a magnificent building which I thought must be the Louvre, from the descriptions I had heard of it. I went to it, and mounted the great stairway with a beating heart. At last one great object of my life was attained. I had imagined correctly what I should see. It seemed to me that I was in a world of friends [the paintings of the old masters], in a family where all that I beheld was the reality of my dreams.”

Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) French painter

Source: Jean-Francois Millet – Peasant and Painter, 1881, p. 46-49

Life, World, Family, Beauty

“Not surprisingly, the insurance lobby recoils in horror at the prospect of automatic coverage ( including, when it was first proposed, Social Security), no matter how efficient it may be. Automatic coverage eliminates sales commissions and profit.”

Andrew Tobias (1947) American journalist

Source: The Invisible Bankers, Everything The Insurance Industry Never Wanted You To Know (1982), Chapter 4, Tell Us The Odds, p. 63-64.

“Profound thanks to Columbia Pictures and the lovely forms of Lisa Henson, Gary Wiggan, and Mark Canter for hiring a first-time writer; to James Shamus for his rare intelligence; to Sidney Pollack for asking all the right questions, like 'Why couldn't these women go out and get a job?' Why, indeed. To the cast and crew, for being impeccable. To my friend and my teacher, Lindsay Doran, for being the single most frustrating reason why I can't claim all the credit for myself. And finally, I would like with your permission to dedicate this Oscar to our director, Ang Lee. Ang, wherever you are, this is for you. [Beaming smile]”

Emma Thompson (1959) British actress and writer

68th Academy Awards speech (1996)

Love, Women, Smile, Intelligence

“First, the welfare state is not a subject apart, but fits naturally into the framework of economic analysis. Secondly, the theoretical arguments support the existence of the welfare state not only for well known equity reasons but also - and powerfully - in efficiency terms.”

Nicholas Barr (1943) British economist

Source: Economics Of The Welfare State (Fourth Edition), Chapter 1, Introduction, p. 3

Support, Nature

“Computers and robots replace humans in the exercise of mental functions in the same way as mechanical power replaced them in the performance of physical tasks. As time goes on, more and more complex mental functions will be performed by machines. Any worker who now performs his task by following specific instructions can, in principle, be replaced by a machine. This means that the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish—in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors.”

Wassily Leontief (1906–1999) Russian economist

Leontief (1983) " National perspective: The definition of problem and opportunity http://books.google.nl/books?id=hS0rAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA3", in: National Academies, The Long-term Impact of Technology on Employment and Unemployment: A National Academy of Engineering Symposium, June 30, 1983. p. 3.

Way, Exercises, Time, Horse

“Such things had occasionally been said by some political enthusiast in the olden time, but, for the first time in the history of the world, the representatives of a nation, the representatives of a real, living, breathing, hoping people, declared that all men are created equal. With one blow, with one stroke of the pen, they struck down all the cruel, heartless barriers that aristocracy, that priestcraft, that king-craft had raised between man and man. They struck down with one immortal blow that infamous spirit of caste that makes a God almost a beast, and a beast almost a god. With one word, with one blow, they wiped away and utterly destroyed, all that had been done by centuries of war — centuries of hypocrisy — centuries of injustice.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Centennial Oration (4 July 1876) http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/centennial_oration.html

Men, God, War, People

“The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.”

Margot Fonteyn (1919–1991) English ballerina

As quoted in Simpson's Contemporary Quotations‎ (1988) by James Beasley Simpson; also quoted in Running on Empty: Meditations for Indispensable Women (1992) by Ellen Sue Stern, p. 235
Paraphrased variants: The most important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative, and the second disastrous.
Take your work seriously, but never yourself.

Learning

“Blue Labour has complete disrespect for the managerialism of New Labour and has much more honour for the workforce. If you talk about schooling, we'd like to see parents have a third of the power, teachers have a third of the power and the funders – whether it's the state or local authority – a third of the power, and negotiate a common good. New Labour sought managerial solutions in the private sector and that's what led to the banking collapse; they sought managerial solutions in the public sector which led to the erosion of the public ethos – so we will put people first, relationships first and that's a very different thing.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

The Guardian article, 30 June 2011 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/jun/30/labour-guru-german-public-service-vision

People, School, Parent, Teachers

“Late at night the horses stumble
Around the camp and I awake.
I lie on my elbow watching
Your beautiful sleeping face
Like a jewel in the moonlight.
If you are lucky and the
Nations let you, you will live
Far into the twenty-first
Century. I pick up the glass
And watch the Great Nebula
Of Andromeda swim like
A phosphorescent amoeba
Slowly around the Pole. Far
Away in distant cities
Fat-hearted men are planning
To murder you while you sleep.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

In Defense of the Earth (1956), The Great Nebula of Andromeda

Men, Lie, Beauty, Sleep

“Although he was completely illiterate, if he looked at a book which was incorrect, which contained some false statement, or which aimed at deceiving the reader, he immediately put his finger on the offending passage. If you asked him how he knew this, he said that a devil first pointed out the place with its finger…When he was harried beyond endurance by these unclean spirits, Saint John’s Gospel was placed on his lap, and then they all vanished immediately, flying away like so many birds. If the Gospel were afterwards removed and the History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth put there in its place, just to see what would happen, the demons would alight all over his body, and on the book, too, staying there longer than usual and being even more demanding.”
Librum quoque mendosum, et vel falso scriptum, vel falsum etiam in se continentem inspiciens, statim, licet illiteratus omnino fuisset, ad locum mendacii digitum ponebat. Interrogatus autem, qualiter hoc nosset, dicebat daemonem ad locum eundem digitum suum primo porrigere…Contigit aliquando, spiritibus immundis nimis eidem insultantibus, ut Evangelium Johannis ejus in gremio poneretur: qui statim tanquam aves evolantes, omnes penitus evanuerunt. Quo sublato postmodum, et Historia Britonum a galfrido Arthuro tractata, experiendi causa, loco ejusdem subrogata, non solum corpori ipsius toti, sed etiam libro superposito, longe solito crebrius et taediosius insederunt.

Gerald of Wales (1146) Medieval clergyman and historian

Book 1, chapter 5, pp. 117-18.
Itinerarium Cambriae (The Journey Through Wales) (1191)

Books, History, Bird, Falseness

“Autumn nights, it seems,
are long by repute alone:
scarcely had we met
when morning's first light appeared,
leaving everything unsaid.”

Ono no Komachi (825–900) Japanese poet

Source: Helen Craig McCullough's translations, Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry (1985), p. 142

Autumn, Light, Appearance, Night

“En route to Tokyo in 1945 to embark on the occupation of Japan, U. S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur laid out his goals for Japan to his aide, Maj. Gen. Courtney Whitney: "First destroy the military power, then build up representative government, enfranchise women, free political prisoners, liberate farmers, establish free labor, destroy monopolies, abolish police repression, liberate the press, liberalize education, and decentralize political power."”

Sung-Yoon Lee Korea and East Asia scholar, professor

The transformation of North Korea will require nothing less.
https://foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/16/life_after_kim
Life After Kim
February 16, 2010
Foreign Policy
March 1, 2013
https://www.webcitation.org/6EyqdXfyA?url=http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/16/life_after_kim?page=full
March 9, 2013
no

Women, Education