Quotes about force
page 32

“This paper develops a new theoretical model with which to examine the interaction between technology and organizations. Early research studies assumed technology to be an objective, external force that would have deterministic impacts on organizational properties such as structure. Later researchers focused on the human aspect of technology, seeing it as the outcome of strategic choice and social action. This paper suggests that either view is incomplete, and proposes a reconceptualization of technology that takes both perspectives into account. A theoretical model-- the structurational model of technology--is built on the basis of this new conceptualization, and its workings explored through discussion of a field study of information technology. The paper suggests that the reformulation of the technology concept and the structurational model of technology allow a deeper and more dialectical understanding of the interaction between technology and organizations. This understanding provides insight into the limits and opportunities of human choice, technology development and use, and organizational design. Implications for future research of the new concept of technology and structurational model of technology are discussed.”

Wanda Orlikowski American computer scientist

Source: "The duality of technology" 1992, p. 389; Abstract

Understanding, Study, Future

“From the beginning of physics, there have been those who imagined they would be the last generation to face the unknown. Physics has always seemed to its practitioners to be almost complete. This complacency is shattered only during revolutions, when honest people are forced to admit that they don't know the basics.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (2007)

People, Imagination

“[T]he enemy of totalitarian Nazism is not in the East. It is not Russian communism. The complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxist socialism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian, purely negative, noneconomic society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following… During the last few years Russia has therefore been forced to adopt one purely totalitarian and fascist principle after the other; not, it must be emphasized, because of a ‘Stalinist conspiracy,” but because there was no other possibility.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), pp. 245-246

Travel, Communication, Freedom

“Theism (whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim) holds that God by wisdom created the world. The origin of the world and its subsequent ordering thus results from the designing activity of an intelligent agent—God. Naturalism, on the other hand, allows no place for intelligent agency except at the end of a blind, purposeless material process. Within naturalism, any intelligence is an evolved intelligence. Moreover, the evolutionary process by which any such intelligence developed is itself blind and purposeless. As a consequence, naturalism makes intelligence not a basic creative force within nature but an evolutionary byproduct. In particular, humans (the natural objects best known to exhibit intelligence) are not the crown of creation, not the carefully designed outcome of a purposeful creator, and certainly not creatures made in the image of a benevolent God. Rather, humans are an accident of natural history.”

William A. Dembski (1960) American intelligent design advocate

[The design revolution: answering the toughest questions about intelligent design, Downers Grove, Ill., InterVarsity Press, 2003, [BS652.D46, 2004], 2003020589, 9780830832163, http://books.google.com/books?id=sKVqpXqE0VwC] p. 8-9
2000s

Wisdom, God, World, History

“So, let this Asian-African Conference be a great success! Make the "Live and let live" principle and the "Unity in Diversity" motto the unifying force which brings us all together-to seek in friendly, uninhibited discussion, ways and means by which each of us can live his own life, and let others live their own lives, in their own way, in harmony, and in peace.”

Sukarno (1901–1970) first President of the Republic of Indonesia

Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference

Life, Peace, Way, Success

“I subdue matter and force it to become my mind's good medium. I rejoice in plants, in animals, in man and in gods, as though they were my children. I feel all the universe nestling about me and following me as though it were my own body.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God

The Saviors of God (1923)

God, Children, Feeling, Universe

“Pride is a powerful force. The pride that kept so many men in California. They want to go home. But I can't go until I've got something to prove my success. They've been reading about success back home. I know, says the miner, how many people are failing. Failure is the most common fact of life in California. They don't know that. How can I go home a failure, when they expect me to come home a success? So they stay.”

J. S. Holliday (1924–2006) American historian

On the Predicament of the Miners
The West (1996)

Life, Men, People, Home

“If President Obama had consulted Congress, as our Constitution requires him to do, perhaps we could have debated these questions before hastily involving ourselves in yet another Middle Eastern conflict. While the President is the commander of our armed forces, he is not a king. He may involve those forces in military conflict only when authorized by Congress or in response to an imminent threat. Neither was the case here.”

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

3/28/11 - Sen. Rand Paul Responds to President Obama's Address
YouTube
2011-03-28
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrrV_Txg47Q
2011-03-31
regarding US participation in enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya
2010s

Question

“Had there not been a natural goodness and indestructible force in my father, I see not how be could have bodied himself forth from these mean impediments. I suppose good precepts were not wanting. There was the Bible to read. Old John Orr, the schoolmaster, used from time to time to lodge with them; be was religious and enthusiastic (though in practice irregular with drink). In my grandfather, also, there seems to have been a certain geniality; for instance, he and a neighbor, Thomas Hogg, read "Anson's Voyages;" also tho "Arabian Nights," for which latter my father, armed with zealous conviction, scrupled not to censure them openly. By one means and another, at an early age he had acquired principles, lights that not only flickered, but shone steadily to guide his way.”

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

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)

Age, Way, Drink, Nature

“If a young girl is being forced into a brothel she will not talk about her rights. In such a situation the word would sound ludicrously inadequate.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Human Personality (1943), p. 63

Girl

“We may deny the existence of ethnonationalism, detest it, condemn it. But this creator and destroyer of empires and nations is a force infinitely more powerful than globalism, for it engages the heart. Men will die for it. Religion, race, culture and tribe are the four horsemen of the coming apocalypse.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2010s, Suicide of a Superpower (2011)

Men, Religion, Heart

“Inflation takes advantage of this possibility… to let gravity be the repulsive force that drove the universe into the period of expansion that we call the Big Bang. In fact, when one combines general relativity with conventional ideas, now, in particle physics there really is a pretty clear indication, I should say, not quite a prediction… that at very high energy densities one expects to find states of matter which literally turn gravity on its head and cause gravity to become repulsive.”

Alan Guth (1947) American theoretical physicist and cosmologist

Lecture 1: Inflationary Cosmology: Is Our Universe Part of a Multiverse? Part I.
The Early Universe (2012)

Idea, Universe

“Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them? Astronomers tell us without apparent embarrassment that they can see stellar events that occurred millions of years ago, whereas we all know that we see things as they happen. … Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

" Billions and Billions of Demons http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/jan/09/billions-and-billions-of-demons/" in: The New York Review of Books, 9 January 1997, p. 31 Review of The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan Quote often taken out of context, see Lewontin on materialism http://evolutionwiki.org/wiki/Lewontin_on_materialism on evolutionwiki.org, and for example this example http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/102006325?q=Lewontin&p=par at Watchtower Online Library.

Life, God, Health, World

“Particles that, like 4He, show constructive interference are said to be bosons—a shorthand term for "particles obeying Bose–Einstein statistics." …One way to recognize bosons is their tendency to imitate one each other…. the presence of one boson increases the chance that another of its identical siblings will also appear in the same spot. There's an attraction between them. We will speak… of an attractive identity force drawing together identical bosons. Lasers are a spectacular example…”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

Way, Appearance, Chance, Siblings

“What is the shortest way to travel from Rotterdam to Groningen, in general: from given city to given city. It is the algorithm for the shortest path, which I designed in about twenty minutes. One morning I was shopping in Amsterdam with my young fiancée, and tired, we sat down on the café terrace to drink a cup of coffee and I was just thinking about whether I could do this, and I then designed the algorithm for the shortest path. As I said, it was a twenty-minute invention. In fact, it was published in ’59, three years late. The publication is still readable, it is, in fact, quite nice. One of the reasons that it is so nice was that I designed it without pencil and paper. I learned later that one of the advantages of designing without pencil and paper is that you are almost forced to avoid all avoidable complexities. Eventually that algorithm became, to my great amazement, one of the cornerstones of my fame.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (2001), in an interview with Philip L. Frana. (OH 330; Communications of the ACM 53(8):41–47)
2000s

Way, Travel, Coffee, Drink

“To-day the United States stands out as the mightiest Power on earth, and yet America is a threat to no one. All know that she will never use her power for selfish aims or territorial aggrandisement in the future any more than she has done in the past. We look upon her forces and our own forces and those of other nations as instruments that must never be employed save in the interests of world security and for the repression of the aggressor.”

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

Address to the United States Congress (13 November 1945), quoted in The Times (14 November 1945), p. 4
1940s

World, Past, Future, Selfishness

“The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

Men, Animals

“It is a sin of the soul to force young people into opinions … but it is culpable neglect not to impel young people into experiences.”

Kurt Hahn (1886–1974) German educator

John Gookin, NOLS Wilderness Wisdom: Quotes for Inspirational Exploration (2003), ISBN 0811726460, p. 45.
Attributed

People, Soul

“I love the notion of there being a single group of Apollonian watchdogs down through the aeons, keeping the world safe from the malign (and far more fun-loving) forces of Dionysos.”

Elizabeth Hand (1957) American writer

Apocalypse Descending (2002)

Love, World

“Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 226

“All at once I loathed her, because she had hurt me. This girl! She had torn up my sonnet by Dowson, she had shown my telegram to everybody in the Columbia Buffet. She had made a fool of me at the beach. She suspected my virility, and her suspicion was the same as the scorn in her eyes. I watched her face and lips and thought how it would be a pleasure to strike her, send my fist with all force against her nose and lips.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Pleasure, Fools, Girl, Hurt

“[The Abu Ghraib prison scandal is] the key reason, the sole reason, that I was forced to retire. I was essentially not offered another position in either a three-star or four-star command.”

Ricardo Sanchez (1953) United States Army Lieutenant General

As quoted in " November Off To Bloody Start In Iraq http://web.archive.org/web/20070430024348/http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/02/iraq/main2143888.shtml" (2 November 2006), by Alfonso Serrano, CBS News.

Star

“When the gift I give to the other is integral to my own nature, when it comes from a place of organic reality within me, it will renew itself—and me—even as I give it away. Only when I give something that does not grow within me do I deplete myself and harm the other as well, for only harm can come from a gift that is forced, inorganic, unreal.”

Parker Palmer (1939) American theologian

Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999), pp. 49-50

Nature, Reality

“At the moment when this solidarity exercises its force, our personality vanishes, as our definition permits us to say, for we are no longer ourselves, but the collective life.”

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) French sociologist (1858-1917)

Source: The Division of Labor in Society (1893), p. 130 (in 1933 edition)

Life, Exercises, Personality

“More than the topography and cartography of organization would be necessary to understand the executive functions; a knowledge of the kinds and qualities of the forces at work and the manner of their operation would also be needed.”

Chester Barnard book The Functions of the Executive

Source: The Functions of the Executive (1938), p. viii

Understanding, Knowledge

“Gsell: What astonishes me, is that your way is so different from that of other sculptors. They prose the model. Instead of that, you wait till a model has instinctively or accidentally taken an Interesting pose, and thon you reproduce It. Instead of your giving orders to the model, the model gives orders to you.
Rodin: I am not at the model's orders; I am at Nature's. Doubtless my confreres have their reasons for proceeding as they do. But when one constrains Nature in that way and treats human beings as mannikins, one runs a risk of getting nothing but dead, artificial results. A hunter of truth and a trapper of life. I am careful not to follow their example. I seize upon the movements I observe, but I don't dictate them. when a subject requires a predetermined pose, I merely Indicate It. For I want only what reality will afford without being forced. In everything I obey Nature. I never assume to command her. My sole ambition Is a servile fidelity.
Gsell : And yet, you take liberties with nature. You make changes.
Rodin : Not at all. I should be false to myself if I did.
Gsell : But you finished work is never like the plaster sketch
Rodin : That is so, but the sketch is far less true than the finished work. It would Impossible for a model to keep a living attitude during all the time it takes to shape the clay. Still, I retain a general idea of the pose and require the model to conform to it. But this is not all. The sketch reproduces only the exterior. I must next reproduce the spirit, which is every whit as essential a part of Nature. I see the whole truth — not merely the fraction of it that lies upon the surface. I accentuate tho lines that best express the spiritual state I am Interpreting.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Rodin on realism, 1910

Life, Truth, Way, Idea

“Every individual is a center for the manifestation of a certain force. This force has been stored up as the resultant of our previous works, and each one of us is born with this force at our back.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

“When you're in the middle of nowhere and you see something moving in the jungle, you're forced to become a creative problem solver.”

Bob Parsons (1950) United States Marine

Forbes: GoDaddy Billionaire Founder Bob Parsons On His Passion For Golf And Motorcycles https://www.forbes.com/sites/monteburke/2017/10/18/godaddy-billionaire-founder-bob-parsons-on-his-passion-for-golf-and-motorcycles/ (18 October 2017)

Problem

“[According to Bernier, the Mughals maintained] “a large army for the purpose of keeping people in subjection… No adequate idea can be conveyed of the sufferings of the people. The cudgel and the whip compel them to incessant labour… their revolt or their flight is only prevented by the presence of a military force.””

François Bernier (1620–1688) French physician and traveller

Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 4
Travels in the Mogul Empire (1656-1668)

People, Idea, Suffering

“I will improve the economy in Taiwan with full force!”

Chen Shui-bian (1950) Taiwanese politician

DPP Campaign speech, November 5, 2001
Pet Phrases, 2001
Variant: I'm going to improve the economy in Taiwan！

“The strength that we want is not a brute, unregulated strength; the beauty that we want is no mere surface beauty; but we want a beauty on the surface of life that is from the central force of principle within, as the beauty on the cheek of health is from the central force at the heart.”

Mark Hopkins (educator) (1802–1887) American educationalist and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 113.

Life, Health, Beauty, Heart

“There is almost as great a distance between the first apparatus in which the expansive force of steam was displayed and the existing machine, as between the first raft that man ever made and the modern vessel.”

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) French physicist, the "father of thermodynamics" (1796–1832)

p, 125
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)

“It is universally agreed, that custom, in time, becomes a second nature, forcing men to use that, whether good or bad, to which they have been habituated; in fact, we see habit, in many instances, gain the ascendency over reason. This is so undeniably true, that, virtuous men, by keeping company with wicked, often fall into the same vicious course of life. Seeing and considering all this, I have decided to write on the vice of intemperance, in eating and drinking. Now, though all are agreed, that intemperance is the parent of gluttony, and sober living the offspring of abstemiousness, yet, owing to the power of custom, the former is considered a virtue, and the latter as mean and avaricious, and so many men are blinded and besotted to such a degree, that they come to the age of forty or fifty, burdened with strange and painful infirmities, which render them decrepit and useless, whereas, had they lived temperately and soberly, they would in all probability, have been sound and hearty, to the age of eighty and upwards.”

Luigi Cornaro (1484–1566) Italian philosopher

Discourses on the Sober Life

Life, Men, Pain, Age

“There are only a few images that are not forced to provide meaning, or have to go through the filter of a specific idea.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

New millennium, Photography, or the Writing of Light, (2000)

Idea

“Perhaps most important of the theoretical movements now influencing American administrative study is scientific management. At the level of technique or procedure, borrowing from and liaison with scientific management will undoubtedly continue. Although some doctrines, such as "pure theory of organization," have already affected public administration, how influential other theoretical aspects of scientific management will be remains to be seen. In its "democratic" or "anarchistic" doctrines, conceivably, there is enough force to reconstruct present patterns of administrative thought, at least if conditions become favorable.”

Dwight Waldo (1913–2000) American political scientist

Source: The Administrative State, 1948, p. 209

Study

“It is one of history's most mocking ironies that the German customs union, which set out to dominate Europe and conquer Britain in the form of Bismarckian or Hitlerian military force, has at last vanquished the victor by drawing Britain into a Zollverein which comprises Western Europe and aspires to comprise the Mediterranean as well. If the ghosts of the Hohenzollerns come back to haunt this planet, they must find a lot to laugh at.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Grimsby (20 May 1977), from Enoch Powell on 1992 (Anaya, 1989), p. 93
1970s

History, Drawing

“In the early 1960s there existed a successful quantum theory of the electromagnetic force (QED), which was completed in the late 1940s, but the theories of the weak and strong nuclear forces were not yet known. In UC Berkeley, where I was a graduate student during the period 1962 – 66, the emphasis was on developing a theory of the strong nuclear force. I felt that UC Berkeley was the center of the Universe for high energy theory at the time. Geoffrey Chew (my thesis advisor) and Stanley Mandelstam were highly influential leaders. Also, Steve Weinberg and Shelly Glashow were impressive younger faculty members. David Gross was a contemporaneous Chew student with whom I shared an office.”

John Henry Schwarz (1941) American theoretical physicist

[Schwarz, J. H., The early years of string theory: a personal perspective, https://arxiv.org/pdf/0708.1917.pdf, 2007]

Strong, Universe, Time, Success

“His Majesty's Government contemplate the inclusion in the R. A. F. contingent in the March of a representative party of 25 Polish airmen (including one officer) who fought in the Battle of Britain. There will he no separate representation of other Polish armed forces now in this country, since these do not form part of His Majesty's Forces, but the Polish Government have been invited to send a contingent of three high-ranking officers, three aides-de-camp or staff officers and a flag party of three men, followed by a detachment of.24 men representative of the Polish fighting services.”

Hector McNeil

Hansard, HC Dec 21 May 1946 vol 423 c64W

Men, Fight, Parting, Country

“Whereas civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.”

Tench Coxe (1755–1824) American economist

"Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution," under the pseudonym "A Pennsylvanian" in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789, p. 2 col. 1. As quoted in the Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789, A friend of James Madison, writing in support of the Madison's first draft of the Bill of Rights.

People, Country

“Briefly stated, the Follett philosophy is that any enduring society, any continuously productive industrial organization, must be grounded upon a recognition of the motivating desires of the individual and of the group. Consistently, Miss Follett sought to force home a realization of the fact that the democratic way of life, implemented by intelligent organization and administration of government and of industry, is to work toward an honest integration of all points of view, to the end that every individuality may be mobilized and made to count both as a person and as an effective part of his group and of society as a whole.”

Henry C. Metcalf (1867–1942) American business theorist

Source: Dynamic administration, 1942, p. xi-xii

Life, Way, Home, Intelligence

“Now our forces are killing lots of al-Qaida jihadists, preventing another terrorist attack on U. S. soil, and giving democracy in Iraq a chance — and Democrats say we are "losing" this war. I think that's a direct quote from their leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, but it may have been the Osama bin Laden tape released this week. I always get those two confused.
OK, they knew what Petraeus was going to say. But we knew what the Democrats were going to say. If liberals are not traitors, their only fallback argument at this point is that they're really stupid.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

"From the halls of Malibu to the Shores of Kennedy" (12 September 2007) http://anncoulter.com/cgi-local/article.cgi?article=207. 2007

War, Stupidity, Quotes, Democracy

“I have a feeling that if a Dalitist state gets established it will be a far better Socialist model for the world than the other models which were already established because Dalitbahujan society was never so religiously fundamentalist, there is no such constructed religion like that, it has been much more spontaneous, and they have lived for such a long time with that kind of a thinking. So from that to a kind of conscious educated Dalitist socialist system, I think that the productive forces would get released a thousand times, and equality will come much better but it should be under Dalit leadership. Now if under Dalit women leadership if a Dalitist state and society is established I think we will see a very bright future for the whole country.”

Kancha Ilaiah (1952) Indian scholar, activist and writer

"The State of Dalit Mobilization : An Interview with Kancha Ilaiah" in Ghadar Vol. 1, No. 3 (26 November 1997).

Women, World, Education, Religion

“The conversion of Constantine … was the effective beginning of “Christendom,” namely, of that particular form of the Christian religion that consists of a strong alliance of Christianity with political and social power, sometimes amounting to the practical identification of Christianity with the dominant forces of the society in which it finds itself.”

Douglas John Hall (1928) Canadian theologian

"Where in the World Are We?" (2006)

Religion, Strong

“Lux forced grief from his mind, thinking grimly of revenge.”

Lin Carter (1930–1988) American fantasy writer, editor, critic

Source: Time War (1974), Chapter 3, “The Silver Men” (p. 41)

Revenge, Thinking

“The preparation for these examinations is a forcing system, a straining of the memory, a loading of the head with more than it can hold, and much more than it can understand, followed, as in bodily excesses, by disorder of function, addling of the brain, and the stoppage of healthy mental growth. The weak, who work hard to obtain their object, are damaged; the strong may suffer little or nothing, but they do not gain much. Those do best who do not trouble themselves about the matter, but do as well as they can and care not about success or failure.”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

An Old Man's Thoughts on Many Things, Of Education I

Failure, Understanding, Strong, Suffering

“As far as party primaries are concerned, both Republican and Democratic Party primaries are dominated by the most zealous voters, whose views may not reflect the views of most members of their own respective parties, much less the views of those who are going to vote in the November general election.
In recent times, each election year has seen each party's nominee selected - or at least subject to veto - by its most extreme wing and then forced to try to move back to the center before the general election.
This can only undermine the public's confidence in the integrity of the candidates of both parties.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

"Bipartisan Primary Blues" http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmJhYWM0ZWIxZGZmYWU5YmVmZWQ3ZTUzYzFmMzQ4ZTM=, National Review (25 March 2008). 2000s

Confidence, Time

“Only the power of unbounded love practiced in regard to all human beings can defeat the forces of interhuman strife, and can prevent the pending extermination of man by man on this planet. Without love, no armament, no war, no diplomatic machinations, no coercive police force, no school education, no economic or political measures, not even hydrogen bombs can prevent the pending catastrophe.”

Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968) American sociologist

, p. xii
The Ways and Power of Love (1954)

Love, War, Education, School

“The picture. A great plain, comprising the entire Jerusalem district, where is the supreme Commander-in-Chief of the forces of good, Christ our Lord: another plain near Babylon, where Lucifer is, at the head of the enemy.”

Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) Catholic Saint, founder of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits)

No. 138.
Spiritual Exercises (1548)

Christ

“More men than I have put men to death, but I am the last man in the world that would take a man's life. Two years ago—even if my own life was at stake—and I am confident, if I thought a man would shoot me—I would give him a chance of keeping his life, and would part with my own; but if I knew that through him innocent persons' lives were at stake, I certainly would have to shoot him if he forced me to do so; but I would want to know that he was really going to take my innocent life.”

Ned Kelly (1855–1880) Australian bushranger

Sentencing (1880)

Life, Death, Men, World

“You are for developing village industries and I favour both heavy industries and village industries. To the extent that you propose to advance village industries, I am at once with you. I can never persuade myself to take up a hostile attitude towards any constructive work, from any quarter, least of all towards work attempted by one with your brilliant historic achievements in public life…. I am in favour of heavy industries because heavy industries will save the money that is going out of the country in large sums every year; heavy industries are required to provide the local manufactures of machinery and equipment required by our railways and for defence forces and heavy industries are required also for supplying machinery and tools for the village industries themselves. I recommend more extended use of mechanical power because it produces results for the country much more rapidly than human power. The object is to get food and commodities required by our people for a decent standard of living as speedily as possible.”

Mokshagundam Visveshvaraya (1860–1962) Indian engineer, scholar, statesman and the Diwan of Mysore

In his reply to Gandhiji's letter, quoted in The Most Celebrated Indian Engineer:Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, 22 November 2013, Official web site of Government of India: Vigyan Prasar http://www.vigyanprasar.gov.in/dream/feb2000/article1.htm,

Life, Money, Hostility, People

“This is the reason why all attempts to obtain a deeper knowledge of the foundations of physics seem doomed to me unless the basic concepts are in accordance with general relativity from the beginning. This situation makes it difficult to use our empirical knowledge, however comprehensive, in looking for the fundamental concepts and relations of physics, and it forces us to apply free speculation to a much greater extent than is presently assumed by most physicists.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1950s, On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation (1950)

Knowledge

“Industrial age companies created sharp distinctions between two groups of employees. The intellectual elite—managers and engineers—used their analytical skills to design products and processes, select and manage customers, and supervise day-to-day operations. The second group was composed of the people who actually produced the products and delivered the services. This direct labor work force was a principal factor of production for industrial age companies, but used only their physical capabilities, not their minds. They performed tasks and processes under direct supervision of white-collar engineers and managers. At the end of the twentieth century, automation and productivity have reduced the percentage of people in the organization who perform traditional work functions, while competitive demands have increased the number of people performing analytic functions: engineering, marketing, management, and administration. Even individuals still involved in direct production and service delivery are valued for their suggestions on how to improve quality, reduce costs, and decrease cycle times…
Now all employees must contribute value by what they know and by the information they can provide. Investing in, managing, and exploiting the knowledge of every employee have become critical to the success of information age companies”

Robert S. Kaplan (1940) American accounting academic

Source: The Balanced Scorecard, 1996, p. 5-6

People, Age, Knowledge, Time

“If Nixon is not forced to turn over tapes of his conversations with the ring of men who were conversing on their violations of the law, then liberty will soon be dead in this nation. If Nixon gets away with that, then Nixon makes the law as he goes along — not the Congress nor the courts. The old Court you and I served so long will not be worthy of its traditions if Nixon can twist, turn and fashion the law as he sees fit.”

Earl Warren (1891–1974) United States federal judge

Speaking to William O. Douglas on the afternoon of the day he died (9 July 1974) as quoted in The Court Years, 1939-1975 : The Autobiography of William O. Douglas (1980), p. 514
1970s

Men, Law, Fashion, Dead

“Scientists and business leaders who care about social justice should join forces with environmental and religious organizations to give political clout to ethics. Science and religion should work together to abolish the gross inequalities that prevail in the modern world. That is my vision, and it is the same vision that inspired Francis Bacon four hundred years ago, when he prayed that through science God would "endow the human family with new mercies."”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

Progress In Religion (2000)

God, World, Family, Religion

“A line cannot control pictorial space absolutely. A line may flow freely in and out space, but cannot independently create the phenomenon of push and pull necessary to plastic creation. Push and pull are expanding and contracting forces which are activated by carriers in visual motion. Planes are the most important carriers, lines and points less so... the picture plane reacts automatically in the opposite direction to the stimulus received; thus action continues as long as it receives stimulus in the creative process. Push answers with pull and pull with push. … At the end of his life and the height of his capacity Cézanne understood color as a force of push and pull. In his pictures he created an enormous sense of volume, breathing, pulsating, expanding, contracting through his use of colors.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 44
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Life, Color, Sense

“Money talk tends to be confusing. When people talk money, they usually think “wealth”, “costs”, “profit”, “income”, “gold”, “greed”, “time” (as in “time is money”), or something like that. In everyday discourse money symbolises capitalism, for better or worse: money as the life or evil force of the economy. As sings to us in the classical musical Cabaret: “Money makes the world go round… ”. The tune resonates when people exclaim “money” in response to the question what they are after in life, or when they say that everything people do ultimately revolves around money. All this talk is clear enough. The confusion enters when we observe the very same people who are so enthused about money, stubbornly suppress any reference to money when it comes to goods like the love for their partner, parents and children, friendship, science (truth!) and art (beauty!).”

Arjo Klamer (1953) Dutch columnist, economist and politician

Arjo Klamer, and Harry van Dalen. "The double-sidedness of money." Etnofoor 13.2 (2000): 89-103.

Love, Life, Money, Friendship

“The love of esteem is the life and soul of society; it unites us to one another : I want your approbation, you stand in need of mine. By forsaking the converse of men, we forsake the virtues necessary for society; for when one is alone, one is apt to grow negligent; the world forces you to have a guard over yourself.”

Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert (1647–1733) writer from France

Source: A Mother's Advice to Her Son, 1726, p. 155

Love, Life, Men, World

“We will put Polaris into the arms talks with the Soviet Union and hope to phase it out in multilateral negotiations… if the Russians … fail to cut their nuclear forces accordingly it would be a new situation that we could consider at that time.”

Denis Healey (1917–2015) British Labour Party politician and Life peer

1980s

Hope, Time

“There is, let me assure you, nothing in nature more egocentrical than the embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own war propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts everything else. Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side, on the other hand, is the center of all virtue. The contest comes to be viewed as having a final, apocalyptic quality. If we lose, all is lost; life will no longer be worth living; there will be nothing to be salvaged. If we win, then everything will be possible; all our problems will become soluble; the one great source of evil--our enemy--will have been crushed; the forces of good will then sweep forward unimpeded; all worthy aspirations will be satisfied.”

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) American advisor, diplomat, political scientist and historian

From Russia and the West under Lenin by George Kennan (1960)

Life, War, Democracy, Nature

“It isn’t that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history’s meaning.”

Philip Roth book The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

Opening letter to Nathan Zuckerman
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

History, Idea

“A complete theory of evolution must acknowledge a balance between “external” forces of environment imposing selection for local adaptation and “internal” forces representing constraints of inheritance and development. Vavilov placed too much emphasis on internal constraints and downgraded the power of selection. But Western Darwinians have erred equally in practically ignoring (while acknowledging in theory) the limits placed on selection by structure and development—what Vavilov and the older biologists would have called “laws of form.””

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"A Hearing for Vavilov", p. 144
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

Law

“Black brothers, Black sisters, i want you to know that i love you and i hope that somewhere in your hearts you have love for me. My name is Assata Shakur (slave name joanne chesimard), and i am a revolutionary. A Black revolutionary. By that i mean that i have declared war on all forces that have raped our women, castrated our men, and kept our babies empty-bellied.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

To My People (July 4, 1973)

Love, Women, Men, War

“Now I am prepared to maintain," said Chaffery, proceeding with his proposition, "that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilisation made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry … Were I not of a profoundly indolent, restless, adventurous nature, and horribly averse to writing, I would make a great book of this and live honored by every profound duffer in the world.”

H. G. Wells book Love and Mr Lewisham

Love and Mr Lewisham (1899), Ch. 23

Lie, Books, World, Communication

“Do not be afraid of obstacles in your path, it does not matter how great the forces are that stand in your way…. Do not think that anything is impossible when miracles are being worked on every side. If you are true to yourself there is nothing to be afraid of. There is nothing unattainable by truth, love and faith. This is your whole gospel which will work out miracles.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

April 12, 1908
India's Rebirth

Love, Truth, Faith, Way

“When we attempt to understand the inmost nature of the outer world, we stand before it as before absolute darkness. There probably exists in nature, outside of ourselves, neither colour, odour, force, resistance, space, nor anything that we know as sensation. Light is produced by the excitement of the optic nerve, and it shines only in our brain; as to the excitement itself, there is nothing to prove that it is luminous; outside of us is profound darkness, or even worse, since darkness is the correlation of light. In the same way, all the sonorous excitements which assail us, the creakings of machines, the sounds of nature, the words and cries of our fellows are produced by excitements of our acoustic nerve; it is in our brain that noise is produced, outside there reigns a dead silence. The same may be said of all our other senses.

...In short, our nervous system, which enables us to communicate with objects, prevents us, on the other hand, from knowing their nature. It is an organ of relation with the outer world; it is also, for us, a cause of isolation. We never go outside ourselves. We are walled in. And all we can say of matter and of the outer world is, that it is revealed to us solely by the sensations it affords us, that it is the unknown cause of our sensations, the inaccessible excitant of our organs of the senses, and that the ideas we are able to form as to the nature and the properties of that excitant, are necessarily derived from our sensations, and are subjective to the same degree as those sensations themselves.”

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

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 25

World, Way, Communication, Idea

“The strongest argument for free enterprise is that it prevents anybody from having too much power. Whether that person is a government official, a trade union official, or a business executive. If forces them to put up or shut up. They either have to deliver the goods, produce something that people are willing to pay for, are willing to buy, or else they have to go into a different business.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

From The Tyranny of Control, an episode of the PBS Free to Choose television series (1980, vol. 2 transcript) http://www.freetochoosemedia.org/freetochoose/detail_ftc1980_transcript.php?page=2

People, Business, Personality

“I have no doubt but that every State bordering upon the enemy, will apply for a proper force, to protect them against their ravages. To comply with these demands, will hard the safety of the whole army. Divide your force,, and you will fall a prey in every quarter; and, I am persuaded, were you to adopt the plan which would be most flattering to the wishes of the people, it would be so far from affording them that protection and security which they promise themselves, that it would become one of the principal causes of the enemy's making inroads, and committing depredations upon them.”

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

Letter to George Washington (November 1779)

People

“They act as they please: here and there, they use force against sovereign states, building coalitions based on the principle 'If you are not with us, you are against us.' To make this aggression look legitimate, they force the necessary resolutions from international organizations, and if for some reason this does not work, they simply ignore the UN Security Council and the UN overall.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

Crimea address (18 March 2014) http://rt.com/news/putin-address-ten-quotes-778/ 2011 - 2015

“It was for the purpose of guarding against another outlet of expenditure that he exhorted the Committee to pause before they recognised the principle of extending their possessions in tropical climates. He said tropical climates, because there was a great difference between acquiring territory where the race might become indigenous, so as to extend commerce and to spread the principle of self-government over the world, and taking possession of tropical territory, where their own race was not indigenous, where Government must be upheld by force, and where there was no prospect of being able to disembarrass themselves of the responsibility of governing the people.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1850/jul/19/supply-western-coast-of-africa-and in the House of Commons (19 July 1850). 1850s

People, World

““The politics of reality,” Shevek repeated. He looked at Oiie and said, “That is a curious phrase for a physicist to use.”
“Not at all. The politician and the physicist both deal with things as they are, with real forces, the basic laws of the world.”
“You put your petty miserable ‘laws’ to protect wealth, your ‘forces’ of guns and bombs, in the same sentence with the law of entropy and the force of gravity? I had thought better of your mind, Demaere!””

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 7 (p. 203)

World, Law, Reality, Wealth

“The competition between chunks of capital is getting fiercer, there is the same old same old desperate need to keep wages down, desperate need to substitute machines for labour (but that costs trillions of investment) and no matter how hard you exploit workers, you still need to sell stuff to them, and if their wages are low, they can't buy the stuff. You can force the poorly paid into borrowing money (credit cards, wonga etc) but there comes a point when that causes a credit crisis: someone somewhere says they want some dosh and a bank somewhere says they haven't got the dosh (Northern Rock, last time). Let's remember, none of this is caused by migrants or left social democrats. This is a crisis entirely born from a system that is locked into competition for markets. So, these fervid rows between squadrons of extremely unpleasant individuals are rows between people who deep down know that they can't control this system of running the making and distribution of the things we need. They are just coming up with fantasies on how to stay in power while the next phase veers from crisis to crisis. It is terrible for millions of people in awful insecure, low paid jobs and/or in insecure, lousy housing, or if they are disabled, or for millions trying to migrate their way out of poverty and despair. We should be alarmed when members of the ruling class start pleading with us to take sides with them against the 'elite': one section of the elite calling for us to oppose the elite.”

Michael Rosen (1946) British children's writer

'Neither Brussels or the City - for the many not the few'. http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2018/07/neither-brussels-or-city-for-many-not.html (6 July 2018)

Money, People, Way, Time

“I miss the closet. Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities. They could also not be as promiscuous. Is it any wonder the AIDS epidemic started after they "came out of the closet," and started hyper-promiscuous sodomy? I don't believe so, medically or morally.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

1990
June
Ron Paul Political Report
6
http://www.tnr.com/sites/default/files/PR_June90_p6.pdf, quoted in * 2011-12-23
TNR Exclusive: A Collection of Ron Paul's Most Incendiary Newsletters
New Republic
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/98883/ron-paul-incendiary-newsletters-exclusive
Disputed, Newsletters, Ron Paul Political Report

“Negroes in the United States read the history of labor and find it mirrors their own experience. We are confronted by powerful forces telling us to rely on the goodwill and understanding of those who profit by exploiting us. They deplore our discontent, they resent our will to organize, so that we may guarantee that humanity will prevail and equality will be exacted. They are shocked that action organizations, sit-ins, civil disobedience and protests are becoming our everyday tools, just as strikes, demonstrations and union organization became yours to insure that bargaining power genuinely existed on both sides of the table.”

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

1960s, Address to AFL–CIO (1961)

History, Understanding, Reading

“Three factors defeated us in the West where I was in command. First, the unheard-of superiority of your air force, which made all movement in daytime impossible. Second, the lack of motor fuel - oil and gas - so that the Panzers and even the Luftwaffe were unable to move. Third, the systematic destruction of all railway communications so that it was impossible to bring one single railroad train across the Rhine.”

Gerd von Rundstedt (1875–1953) German Field Marshal during World War II

Quoted in "The Battle of the Bulge: Hitler's Final Gamble" - by Patrick Delaforce - History - 2004

Communication, Training

“If you make the smokestacks out of children, who will you force to clean them?”

John Hodgman book The Areas of My Expertise

May 17, 2006
The Areas of My Expertise (2005), Appearances on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Children

“The bright side is that the conquering of color caste in America is America's own innermost desire. This nation early laid down as the moral basis for its existence the principles of equality and liberty. However much Americans have dodged this conviction, they have refused to adjust their laws to their own license. Today, more than ever, they refuse to discuss systematizing their caste order to mutual advantage, apparently because they most seriously mean that caste is wrong and should not be given recognition. They stand warm heartedly against oppression in all the world. When they are reluctantly forced into war, they are compelled to justify their participation to their own conscience by insisting that they are fighting against aggression and for liberty and equality.”

Gunnar Myrdal book An American Dilemma

Source: An American Dilemma (1944), p. 1021

War, World, Law, Color

“Now of course, the idealistic slogans are still needed for the media, for a lot of scholarship, for the schools, and so on. But, where the serious people are, the problem is that we have to maintain this disparity, and obviously it's gotta be maintained by force. So none of the idealistic slogans at home. So when you're setting up death squads in El Salvador under the Alliance for Progress, you're not hampered by these idealistic slogans. That's for the masses, for us. Well, given this kind of thinking, it's not too surprising that President Kennedy should say, with regard to El Salvador after supporting a military coup there, that "Governments of the civil-military type of El Salvador are the most effective in containing communist penetration in Latin America." This at the time when he organized the basic framework for the death squads that have been torturing and murdering ever since, and which we attribute to some kind of extreme right-wingers who somehow we can't get under control.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Reflecting on George Kennan's Memo PPS23.
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s, Talk at University of California, Berkeley, 1984

Death, People, School, Home

“To speak thus of the universal spirit is almost childishly anthropomorphic. For the life of such a spirit, if it exists at all, must be utterly different from human mentality, and utterly inconceivable to man. Nevertheless, since this childish symbolism did force itself upon me, I record it. In spite of its crudity, perhaps it does contain some genuine reflection of the truth, however distorted.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XV: The Maker and His Works; 2. Mature Creating (p. 177)

Life, Truth, Universe

“When does a state of culture prevail? When the men of a community are steadily working for the production of single great men. From this highest aim all the others follow. And what state is farthest removed from a state of culture? That in which men energetically and with united forces resist the appearance of great men, partly by preventing the cultivation of the soil required for the growth of genius, partly by obstinately opposing everything in the shape of genius that appears amongst them. Such a state is more remote from culture than that of sheer barbarism.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 12

Men, Communication, Appearance

“The biblical case for vegetarianism does not rest on the view that killing may never be allowable in the eyes of God, rather on the view that killing is always a grave matter. When we have to kill to live we may do so, but when we do not, we should live otherwise. It is vital to appreciate the force of this argument. In past ages many – including undoubtedly the biblical writers themselves – have thought that killing for food was essential in order to live. But … we now know that – at least for those now living in the rich West – it is perfectly possible to sustain a healthy diet without any recourse to flesh products. … Those individuals who opt for vegetarianism can do so in the knowledge that they are living closer to the biblical ideal of peaceableness than their carnivorous contemporaries. The point should not be minimized. In many ways it is difficult to know how we can live more peaceably in a world striven by violence and greed and consumerism. Individuals often feel powerless in the face of great social forces beyond even democratic control. To opt for a vegetarian life-style is to take one practical step towards living in peace with the rest of creation. One step towards reducing the rate of institutionalized killing in the world today.”

Andrew Linzey (1952) British theologian and divine

Source: Animal Theology (1994), pp. 131-132

Life, God, Age, World

“American society today is shaped not nearly as much by vast open spaces as it is by vast, bureaucratic organizations. Over half the working population toils away at enterprises with 500 or more employees--up from zero percent in 1800. Is this institutional immensity the logical outcome of technological forces in an all-efficient market, as some have argued?”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Charles Perrow, Organizing America: Wealth, power, and the origins of corporate capitalism. Princeton University Press, 2002/2009. Book abstract.
1980s and later

“Marx… Lenin… Mao Tse-Tung… These men were animated by the love of brother and this we must believe though their ends meant the seizure of power, and the building of mighty armies, the compulsion of concentration camps, the forced labor and torture and killing of tens of thousands, even millions.”

Dorothy Day (1897–1980) Social activist

"The Incompatibility of Love and Violence," Catholic Worker (May 1951)

Love, Men, Animals

“We shall support vigorously the principle that no country has the right to impose its will or rule on another by force.
We shall continue, in this era of negotiation, to work for the limitation of nuclear arms, and to reduce the danger of confrontation between the great powers.
We shall do our share in defending peace and freedom in the world. But we shall expect others to do their share.
The time has passed when America will make every other nation's conflict our own, or make every other nation's future our responsibility, or presume to tell the people of other nations how to manage their own affairs.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

1970s, Second Inaugural Address (1973)

People, World, Peace, Support

“Only now, as we feel the onslaught behind us, do we begin dimly to apprehend why the animals fought, begot, and died; and behind them the plants; and behind these the huge reserve of inorganic forces.
We are moved by pity, gratitude, and esteem for our old comrades-in-arms. They toiled, loved, and died to open a road for our coming.
We also toil with the same delight, agony, and exaltation for the sake of Someone Else who with every courageous deed of ours proceeds one step farther.
All our struggle once more will have a purpose much greater than we, wherein our toils, our miseries, and our crimes will have become useful and holy.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God

The Saviors of God (1923)

Love, Feeling, Courage, Animals

“Direct and unconcealed brute force and violence—although clearly persisting in many quarters of society—are today less acceptable to an increasingly sophisticated public, a public significantly remote from the methods of social and economic control common to early America. This is not a statement, however, that there is such increased civility that Americans can no longer tolerate social control of the country's under classes by force of violence; rather, it is an observation that Americans today appear to be more inclined to issue endorsement to agents and agencies of control which carry out the task, while permitting the benefactors of such control to retain a semidignified, clean-hands image of themselves.”

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

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

Appearance, Country

“I can generate suctional forces, which act indirectly and are entirely undetectable. No current of air can be noticed; only an almost imperceptible cooling, as occurs when air is sucked in strongly with the back of the hand held in front of the mouth. It is therefore incorrect to say that I have copied the cyclones and typhoons of the tropics.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Implosion Magazine, No. 83, p. 17. (Callum Coats: Energy Evolution (2000))
Implosion Magazine

“For what is a nation? What is our mother-country? It is not a piece of earth, nor a figure of speech, nor a fiction of the mind. It is a mighty Shakti, composed of the Shaktis of all the millions of units that make up the nation, just as Bhawani Mahisha Mardini sprang into being from the Shakti of all the millions of gods assembled in one mass of force and welded into unity. The Shakti we call India, Bhawani Bharati, is the living unity of the Shaktis of three hundred million people, but she is inactive, imprisoned in the magic circle of Tamas, the self-indulgent inertia and ignorance of her sons…”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Bhawani Mandir, 1905
India's Rebirth

God, People, Country

“I love to work in the comics medium -- I really do -- and I've realised that a total contempt for the intelligence of the audience is the key to success. You know that Doom Force thing I did recently for D. C.? -- the pisstake of X-Force, right? Well, eighty percent of the people who sent letters of comment in on the story actually took the thing seriously! They didn't see the joke! It's horrific. Tom Peyer phoned me up and read page after page of these insane letters. That was the turning point. That is the moment that I became a super-villain.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

1992
http://web.archive.org/web/20040920205650/www.crgn.demon.co.uk/morrison/irony3.jpg
On comics

Love, People, Intelligence, Reading

“There can be no justification to admit, in any way, the use of armed forced to intervene in the internal affairs of a WTO [Warsaw Treaty Organization] member country. The solving of domestic problems belongs exclusively to the Party and people of each country and any kind of interference can only do harm to the cause of socialism, friendship and collaboration among the socialist countries.”

Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918–1989) General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party

Commencement address at the Romanian Military Academy (14 August 1968), quoted in The Prague Spring (2010) by M. Mark Stolarik

Friendship, People, Way, Problem

“I verily believe that the kingdom of God advances more on spoken words than it does on essays written and read; on words, that is, in which the present feeling and thought of the teaching mind break into natural and forceful expression.”

Richard Salter Storrs (1821–1900) American Congregational clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 484.

God, Feeling, Nature, Reading

“The defeat of Fascism, and the election of a majority Labour Government in 1945 was only possible because Labour had strong mainstream support among working class voters and organised labour. There was no serious Communist Party in Britain, and no serious fascist party either and the principle reason for this is that both were consistently defeated by Labour who maintained working class loyalty precisely because it was not an ideal or a set of principles, but an organisation that upheld the dignity of work and of working people and insisted that they had a constructive role to play in the governance of the country. Labour did not flirt with the popular front or the unity of progressive forces. It pursued a common good which included labour as an interest and as a source of value.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Blue Labour, The Profundity of Defeat http://www.bluelabour.org/2013/10/30/285/

People, Support, Strong, Loyalty

“People kill nonhuman animals for food, for their skins, and sometimes just for fun. We enslave animals and force them to work for us. We experiment on them and justify their suffering in terms of our advantage. Because most of us want to be able to view ourselves as good people (and, perhaps more importantly, because we want others to view us as good people), we may be motivated to view nonhumans in such a way that these activities are rendered morally unproblematic. One way to do this is to view other animals as utterly different from us.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 111

People, Food, Way, Motivation

“The claim by the IPCC that an imposed climate forcing (such as added atmospheric concentrations of CO2) can work through the parameterizations involved in the atmospheric, land, ocean and continental ice sheet components of the climate model to create skillful global and regional forecasts decades from now is a remarkable statement. That the IPCC states that this is a ‘much more easily solved problem than forecasting weather patterns just weeks from now’ is clearly a ridiculous scientific claim.”

Roger A. Pielke (1946) American meteorologist

"A Short Summary of Why Skillful Climate Prediction Is Much More Difficult than Skillful Weather Prediction," Climate Science: Roger Pielke Sr. Research Group Weblog (2007-05-23) http://climatesci.org/2007/05/23/a-short-summary-of-why-skillful-climate-prediction-is-much-more-difficult-than-skillful-weather-prediction/

Problem, Weather

“A finished or even a competent reasoner is not the work of nature alone… education develops faculties which would otherwise never have manifested their existence. It is, therefore, as necessary to learn to reason before we can expect to be able to reason, as it is to learn to swim or fence, in order to attain either of those arts. Now, something must be reasoned upon, it matters not much what it is, provided that it can be reasoned upon with certainty. The properties of mind or matter, or the study of languages, mathematics, or natural history may be chosen for this purpose. Now, of all these, it is desirable to choose the one… in which we can find out by other means, such as measurement and ocular demonstration of all sorts, whether the results are true or not.
.. Now the mathematics are peculiarly well adapted for this purpose, on the following grounds:—
1. Every term is distinctly explained, and has but one meaning, and it is rarely that two words are employed to mean the same thing.
2. The first principles are self-evident, and, though derived from observation, do not require more of it than has been made by children in general.
3. The demonstration is strictly logical, taking nothing for granted except the self-evident first principles, resting nothing upon probability, and entirely independent of authority and opinion.
4. When the conclusion is attained by reasoning, its truth or falsehood can be ascertained, in geometry by actual measurement, in algebra by common arithmetical calculation. This gives confidence, and is absolutely necessary, if… reason is not to be the instructor, but the pupil.
5. There are no words whose meanings are so much alike that the ideas which they stand for may be confounded.
…These are the principal grounds on which… the utility of mathematical studies may be shewn to rest, as a discipline for the reasoning powers. But the habits of mind which these studies have a tendency to form are valuable in the highest degree. The most important of all is the power of concentrating the ideas which a successful study of them increases where it did exist, and creates where it did not. A difficult position or a new method of passing from one proposition to another, arrests all the attention, and forces the united faculties to use their utmost exertions. The habit of mind thus formed soon extends itself to other pursuits, and is beneficially felt in all the business of life.”

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

Source: On the Study and Difficulties of Mathematics (1831), Ch. I.

Life, Children, Truth, Education

“In fact, for a voluntarist like Schopenhauer, a theory so sanely and cautiously empirical and rational as that of Darwin, left out of account the inward force, the essential motive, of evolution. For what is, in effect, the hidden force, the ultimate agent, which impels organisms to perpetuate themselves and to fight for their persistence and propagation? Selection, adaptation, heredity, these are only external conditions. This inner, essential force has been called will on the supposition that there exists also in other beings that which we feel in ourselves as a feeling of will, the impulse to be everything, to be others as well as ourselves yet without ceasing to be what we are.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VII : Love, Suffering, Pity

Feeling, Motivation, Fight

“But now, coming to your shameless assertion that ministers of the altar should be allowed to marry, I consider it superfluous to unsheathe the sword of my own words against you, since we see the armed forces of the whole Church and the massed array of all the holy Fathers ready to resist you. And where so great a host of heavenly troops opposes you, one can only wonder that your novel and rash attempt at doctrine does not submit when confronted by such authority.”

Peter Damian (1007–1072) reformist monk

Letter 141:7, To the Chaplains of Duke Godfrey of Tuscany. A.D. 1066. The Fathers of the Church, Medieval Continuation, 2004, Letters 121- 150, Owen J. Blum, Irven Michael Resnick, trs., Catholic University Press; ISBN 081321372X, ISBN 9780813213729, vol. 6, p. 115 http://books.google.com/books?id=cD_swYLRJOUC&pg=PA115&dq=%22but+now+coming+to+your+shameless+assertion+that+ministers+of+the+altar+should+be+allowed+to+marry%22&hl=en&ei=xIPDTI7dEoP-8Ab59snaBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22but%20now%20coming%20to%20your%20shameless%20assertion%20that%20ministers%20of%20the%20altar%20should%20be%20allowed%20to%20marry%22&f=false

“In my remaining term of around two years, I shall improve the economy in full force!”

Chen Shui-bian (1950) Taiwanese politician

During the meeting with his supporters from Hwalien, April 8, 2006
Pet Phrases, 2006

“There was a time when people listened to me because I showed them how to give fight to the British without arms when they had no arms and the British Government was fully equipped and organised for an armed fight. But today I am told that my non-violence can be of no avail against the communal madness and, therefore, people should arm themselves for self-defence. If this is true, it has to be admitted that our thirty years of nonviolent practice was an utter waste of time. We should have from the beginning trained ourselves in the use of arms. But I do not agree that our thirty years' probation in nonviolence has been utterly wasted. It was due to our non-violence, defective though it was, that we were able to bear up under the heaviest repression and the message of independence penetrated every nook and corner of India. But as our non-violence was the nonviolence of the weak, the leaven did not spread. Had we adopted non-violence as the weapon of the strong, because we realised that it was more effective than any other weapon, in fact the mightiest force in the world, we would have made use of its full potency and not have discarded it as soon as the fight against the British was over or we were in a position to wield conventional weapons. But as I have already said, we adopted it out of our helplessness. If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British.”

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

Speech (16 June 1947) as the official date for Indian independence approached (15 August 1947), as quoted in Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase (1958) https://books.google.com/books?id=sswBAAAAMAAJ&q=%22+I+have+already+said,+we+adopted+it+out+of+our+helplessness%22&dq=%22+I+have+already+said,+we+adopted+it+out+of+our+helplessness%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj6ydqTtK7LAhUI4D4KHW3-DwEQ6AEIHTAA by Pyarelal Nayyar, p. 326 http://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/mahatma-gandhi-volume-ten.pdf 1940s

People, World, Communication, Strong

“Wind, earthquake, fire—meteorology, seismology, physics—pass in review, as we have been reviewing the natural forces of evolution; the Lord was not in them. Afterwards, a stirring, an awakening in the organ of the brain, a voice which asks "What doest thou here?"”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Nature

“There can be no doubt that the modem environment is changing faster than any environment ever previously changed; therefore, the social center of gravity constantly tends to shift more rapidly; and therefore modem civilization has unprecedented need of the administrative or generalizing mind. I take it to be an axiom, that perfection in administration must be commensurate to the bulk and momentum of the mass to be administered, otherwise the centrifugal will overcome the centripetal force, and the mass will disintegrate. In other words, civilization will dissolve. A moment arrives when the minds of any given dominant type fail to meet the demands made upon them, and are superseded by a younger type, which in tum is set aside by another still younger, until the limit of the administrative genius of that particular race has been reached. Then disintegration sets in, the social momentum is gradually relaxed, and society sinks back to a level at which it can cohere.”

Brooks Adams (1848–1927) American political writer

Source: The Theory of Social Revolutions,, p. 204-5, as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 9-10

Change, Perfection

Quotes about force page 32

Quotes about force
page 32