Quotes about form (6850 quotes, page 14)

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956)

“Air, fire, water and the earth evolve out of the spiritual and material staminibus in periodic cycles of time. Diverse connections of water, air, and light precede the emergence of the seed of the simplest plant, for instance moss. Many plants had to come into being, then die away before an animal emerged. Insects, birds, water animals, and night animals preceded the present animal forms; until finally the crown of earthly organization appeared—the human being, microcosm. He is the son of all the elements and beings, Nature’s most carefully chosen conception and the blossom of creation. He must be the youngest child of Nature; many evolutions and revolutions must have preceded his formation.”

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic

Book 1, as cited in Frank Teichmann (tr. Jon McAlice), "The Emergence of the Idea of Evolution in the Time of Goethe" http://www.waldorfresearchinstitute.org/pdf/BAIdeaEvolTeich.pdf
Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-91)

Nature , Bird , Light , Water

“I think all men recognize that in time of war the citizen must surrender some rights for the common good which he is entitled to enjoy in time of peace. But, sir, the right to control their own government according to constitutional forms is not one of the rights that the citizens of this country are called upon to surrender in time of war.”

Robert M. La Follette Sr. (1855–1925) American politician

Free Speech in Wartime (October 6, 1917)

Men , War , Peace , Thinking

“Father-dominated people who form father-dominated cultures have father-religions: a male deity, an authoritative scripture, a strong central government, an intolerance for inquiry and research, a repressive sexual attitude, a deep conservatism (for one does not change what Father built), a rigid demarcation, in dress and conduct, between the sexes, and a profound horror of homosexuality.
Mother-dominated people who form mother-dominated cultures have mother religions: a female deity served by priestesses, a liberal government—one which feeds the masses and succors the helpless—a great tolerance for experimental thought, a permissive attitude toward sex, a hazy boundary between the insignes of the sexes, and a dread of incest.”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Section 43 (pp. 131-132)
Venus Plus X (1960)

People , Religion , Sex , Strong

“The armature of economic neo-liberalism … cannot concede any space to the idea of counter-conduct; counter-conduct becomes inconceivable, since conduct as such is a concept fully integrated into a scientific-epistemological field. Regime of veridiction, homo oeconomicus, rational behavior, ethical and political neutralization – such is the scheme, for instance, of American neo-liberalism. In this setting, counter-conduct is nothing more than a form of irrationality, just as in the history of psychiatry, it is but a form of abnormality.”

Arnold Davidson (1955) American academic

"In praise of counter-conduct," History of the Human Sciences, v. 24, n. 4

Behavior , History , Idea

“Matisse's art speaks for itself through its "mechanics", it's "form" and through the feeling which that "form" makes manifest. It's not by far the first to do so and to transcend the illustrated subject by doing so. (All good painting and sculpture does that to some extent). But just as Matisse rejected verbal rhetoric so he kept every last trace of illustrational rhetoric out of his art. He may have been the first painter in our tradition to do that in a really radical way. This doesn't make his art better than a Giotto's or Caravaggio's or Goya's or David's, not necessarily. But it does make it a salutary example for all those people who find it hard, in any medium, to mean what they say.”

Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) American writer and artist

On Matisse http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/matisse.html at sharecom.ca, 1973: On Henri Matisse
1970s

People , Art , Way , Feeling

“What modernity requires is not that you cease living according to your faith, but that you accept that others may differ and that therefore politics requires a form of discourse that is reasonable and accessible to believer and non-believer alike. This religious restraint in politics is critical to the maintenance of liberal democracy.”

Andrew Sullivan (1963) Journalist, writer, blogger

"Of Modern Faith," http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/12/christian-publi.html#more The Daily Dish (14 December 2008)

Faith , Democracy

“I was remarking that we are passing through one of the greatest revolutions in the annals of the world. Seven States have within the last three months thrown off an old government and formed a new. This revolution has been signally marked, up to this time, by the fact of its having been accomplished without the loss of a single drop of blood.”

Alexander H. Stephens (1812–1883) Vice President of the Confederate States (in office from 1861 to 1865)

The Cornerstone Speech (1861)

World , Loss , Time

“Big industry, and the limitless expansion of production which it makes possible, bring within the range of feasibility a social order in which so much is produced that every member of society will be in a position to exercise and develop all his powers and faculties in complete freedom. It thus appears that the very qualities of big industry which, in our present-day society, produce misery and crises are those which, in a different form of society, will abolish this misery and these catastrophic depressions.
We see with the greatest clarity: (i) That all these evils are from now on to be ascribed solely to a social order which no longer corresponds to the requirements of the real situation; and (ii) That it is possible, through a new social order, to do away with these evils altogether.”

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

(1847)

Exercises , Freedom , Appearance , Evil

“Notwithstanding all the differences in the aims and tasks of the Russian revolution, compared with the French revolution of 1871, the Russian proletariat had to resort to the same method of struggle as that first used by the Paris Commune — civil war. Mindful of the lessons of the Commune, it knew that the proletariat should not ignore peaceful methods of struggle — they serve its ordinary, day-to-day interests, they are necessary in periods of preparation for revolution — but it must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

“Lessons of the Commune”, in Zagranichnaya Gazeta, No. 2 (23 March 1908) http://www.marx.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mar/23.htm, as translated by Bernard Isaacs, Collected Works, Vol. 13, p. 478.
1900s
Variant: The proletariat should not ignore peaceful methods of struggle — they serve its ordinary, day-to-day interests, they are necessary in periods of preparation for revolution — but it must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes. This was first demonstrated by the French proletariat in the Commune and brilliantly confirmed by the Russian proletariat in the December uprising.

War , Peace , Communication , Time

“The development of Christianity in all the sects of the Western world during the past two centuries has been the progressive elimination from all of them of the elements of our natively Aryan morality that were superimposed on the doctrine before and during the Middle Ages to make it acceptable to our race and so a religion that could not be exported as a whole to other races. With the progressive weakening of our racial instincts, all the cults have been restored to conformity with the "primitive" Christianity of the holy book, i. e., to the undiluted poison of the Jewish originals. I should, perhaps, have made it more explicit in my little book that the effective power of the alien cult is by no means confined to sects that affirm a belief in supernatural beings. As I have stressed in other writings, when the Christian myths became unbelievable, they left in the minds of even intelligent and educated men a residue, the detritus of the rejected mythology, in the form of superstitions about "all mankind," "human rights," and similar figments of the imagination that had gained currency only on the assumption that they had been decreed by an omnipotent deity, so that in practical terms we must regard as basically Christian and religious such irrational cults as Communism and the tangle of fancies that is called "Liberalism" and is the most widely accepted faith among our people today.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

Men , People , Books , Age

“The Court today finds that the Powers That Be, up in Albany, have conspired to effect an establishment of the Satmar Hasidim. I do not know who would be more surprised at this discovery: the Founders of our Nation or Grand Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum, founder of the Satmar. The Grand Rebbe would be astounded to learn that after escaping brutal persecution and coming to America with the modest hope of religious toleration for their ascetic form of Judaism, the Satmar had become so powerful, so closely allied with Mammon, as to have become an establishment of the Empire State. And the Founding Fathers would be astonished to find that the Establishment Clause — which they designed to insure that no one powerful sect or combination of sects could use political or governmental power to punish dissenters — has been employed to prohibit characteristically and admirably American accommodation of the religious practices (or more precisely, cultural peculiarities) of a tiny minority sect. I, however, am not surprised. Once this Court has abandoned text and history as guides, nothing prevents it from calling religious toleration the establishment of religion.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Board of Ed. of Kiryas Joel v. Grumet (1994) (dissenting) (citations and some internal quotation marks omitted).
1990s

Religion , Hope , History , Learning

“The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art.”

Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980) English theatre critic and writer

"Meditations on Basic Baroque," IV (1966), p. 432
Tynan Right and Left (1967)

Art , Parting

“I should strive (on reading a book of poetry) to evoke the a soul out of this piece of inanimate matter, a something characteristic and structural inherent in this organic form which is friendly to me and responds to my mood.”

John Gould Fletcher (1886–1950) American writer

Preface to Goblins and Pagodas, 1916

Books , Soul , Mood , Reading

“But it was impossible to remain so long in the company of a female, even a divine one, without suffering some form of disillusionment.”

M. K. Hobson (1969) American writer

Prologue (p. 14)
The Hidden Goddess (2011)

Suffering

“We now live in what the German political scientist Ernst Fränkl called the dual state. Totalitarian states are always dual states. … The outward forms of democracy, of democratic participation, voting, competing political parties, judicial oversight and legislation remain, but are hollow political stagecraft. And Fränkl called those who wield this unchecked power over the citizenry “the prerogative state.” The masses in a totalitarian structure live in what he termed “the normative state.””

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

The normative state, he said, is defenseless against the abuses of the prerogative state.
36:15
“ Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOlg_2qAbUA” (2014)

Democracy

“I decided (after listening to a "talk radio" commentator who abused, vilified, and scorned every noble cause to which I had devoted my entire life) that I was both a humanist and a liberal, each of the most dangerous and vilified type. I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create a reasonably decent society. I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. I do not believe that pure reason can solve the perpetual problems unless it is modified by poetry and art and social vision. So I am a humanist. And if you want to charge me with being the most virulent kind—a secular humanist—I accept the accusation.”

James A. Michener (1907–1997) American author

Interview, Parade magazine (24 November 1991)

Life , Men , Art , History

“Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government.”

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

Not found in any writings of Madison. The earliest known appearance is a 1994 pamphlet from the Militia of Montana. See “In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution”, above, for a sourced quote with a related theme.
Misattributed

“Though the poems of Homer and his successors were recorded, there will be no Greek reading public till we reach the fifth century B. C. …There was instead, a hearing public that formed responsive audiences at festivals and contests.”

Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch. III The Poet: How to Party

Reading

“The great tragedy is that they're removing art completely, not because they're putting more science in, but because they can't afford the art teachers or because somebody thinks it's not useful. An enlightened society has all of this going on within it. It's part of what distinguishes what it is to be human from other life forms on Earth — that we have culture.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Global Ideas from Pluto's Challenger (May 21, 2009)

Life , Art , Thinking , Teachers

“Psychoanalysis does not distort the truth by accident. It does so by necessity. It is an effective system for the suppression of the truth about childhood, a truth feared by our entire society. Not surprisingly, it enjoys great esteem among intellectuals… Fear of the truth about child abuse is a leitmotif of nearly all forms of therapy known to me.”

Alice Miller (1923–2010) Swiss psychologist

Breaking Down the Wall of Silence (Abbruch der Schweigemauer) (1990)

Truth , Fear , Childhood

“I object to several popular ideas. I don't think anyone's work is reductive. The most the term can mean is that new work doesn't have what the old work had. Its not so definitive that a certain kind of form is missing; a description and discussion of the kind present is pretty definitive.”

Donald Judd (1928–1994) artist

Donald Judd, ‎William C. Agee (1968) Don Judd, p. 15
1960s

Idea , Thinking

“[Describing her visit to a slaughter facility in Pennsylvania] The floor was very slippery and the walls and everything else were covered with blood. Dried blood had formed a crust on the chains. I surely didn't want to fall down in all that blood and guts. The workers wore non-slip boots, yellow aprons, and helmets. It was a scene of controlled, mechanized chaos.”

Sue Coe (1951) British artist

Dead Meat, as quoted in A Plea for the Animals by Matthieu Ricard (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2016), p. 78 https://books.google.it/books?id=bTLuDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA78.

“In that Renaissance (Cellini, Tintoretto, Titian..) there was an explosion of unique truthfulness, a love of painting and form... Then come the Jesuits and everything is formal; everything has to be taught and learned. It required a revolution for nature to be rediscovered; for Delacroix to paint his beach at Etratat, Corot his roman rubble, Gustave Courbet his forest scenes and his waves. And how miserable slow that revolution was, how many stages it had to go through!... These artists had not yet discovered that nature has more to do with depth than with surfaces. I can tell you, you can do things to the surface.... but by going deep you automatically go to the truth. You feel a healthy need to be truthful. You'd rather strip your canvas right down than invent or imagine a detail. You want to know.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), pp. 156-157, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

Love , Truth , Feeling , Imagination

“Transient bodies are only subject to destruction through their substance and not through their form, nor can the essence of their form be destroyed; in this respect they are permanent.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.8

“Here's the clear "science:"When the male sperm and female egg join, a new and unique life form is created. At conception. Not at birth or viability, or when a lawyer says so. At conception this happens. John McCain got it right; Obama pled less scientific knowledge than a 5th grader.This life is either human or something else. Science irrefutably would declare that the life which is starting from that moment is human. It's not a stalk of broccoli, it's not a parrot, squirrel, or dolphin. It will never become a tree—it can only become a human. It has the entire DNA schedule that it will have for the rest of its life right then. In days it will begin to take on increasingly observable human characteristics and form, but at conception, it is biologically human.If this life is human, then the only issue left is whether this human life falls under the notion that it has a fundamental right of existence or not. If not, it is because we as a culture have decided that some human lives are simply not worth living. If we can decide that about an innocent and unborn baby, we can also decide it on the basis of less absolute criteria than that. If we make that choice (and this is all about "CHOICE," isn’t it?) then someone may decide that a terminally ill person is not a life worth living. Maybe a severely disabled child is a life not worth living; what about a person with a limited IQ? Say that's absurd—that an educated and enlightened society would never be so audacious as to begin to terminate life based on such arbitrary excuses? Maybe you haven't studied Nazi Germany, in which the murder of six million Jews was justified because of their religion and millions of others were murdered because of their politics. Germany was not a primitive, superstitious culture. It was one filled with the intelligentsia and enlightened.This is an important issue. It's why we can't trust Obama with America's future because he's not even sure which Americans are worth saving and which ones aren't. And it's why that for many of us, McCain's selection of a running mate really does matter. Because John McCain clearly is pro life, I will support and vote for him because Obama is not an option for me as a pro life person. I will be disappointed if McCain doesn't pick a true pro life person and realize that should that happen, he will lose many of the very people who supported me. I cannot expect all of you to vote for McCain if he chooses someone whose record isn't pro life. It will be a less than perfect decision for all of us—our only real choices are McCain and Obama; one will protect life and one won't. Some will argue for a 3rd party candidate and I respect that, but in political realities, that is essentially a vote for Obama and I can't go there.”

Mike Huckabee (1955) Arkansas politician

A Message from the Governor
HuckPAC
2008-08-23
http://www.huckpac.com/?Fuseaction=Blogs.View&Blog_id=1848&CommentPage=5
2011-03-01

Life , People , Education , Religion

“Colander: What’s your view of the New Keynesian approach?
Tobin: I’m not sure what that means. If it means people like Greg Mankiw, I don’t regard them as Keynesians. I don’t think they have involuntary unemployment or absence of market clearing. It is a misnomer to call Mankiw any form of Keynesian.
Colander: How about real-business-cycle theorists?
Tobin: Well, that’s just the enemy.”

David Colander (1947) American economist

David Colander, "Conversations with James Tobin and Robert J. Shiller on the “Yale Tradition” in Macroeconomics", Macroeconomic Dynamics (1999), later published in Inside the economist’s mind: conversations with eminent economists (2007) edited by Paul A. Samuelson and William A. Barnett.
1990s

People , Business , Thinking

“In organizations, real power and energy is generated through relationships. The patterns of relationships and the capacities to form them are more important than tasks, functions, roles, and positions.”

Margaret J. Wheatley (1941) American writer

Margaret Wheatley (1992), as quoted in 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself (2004) by Steve Chandler, p. 123

“The old world is engaged in a struggle to find a way by which each race living on its own soil, separated by definite national boundaries, can be assured freedom and peace in the full development of its national life and in the realization of international opportunities. The task of America is different. It is for her to find the way by which these races, living on one soil, under one form of government, with no territorial lines, can be assimilated and become a part of her integral national life.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Life , World , Peace , Way

“If I were the type of artist that didn't care whether or not my works communicated with viewers then I wouldn't bother exhibiting them, I might as well stock them in a warehouse. But I do exhibit and I do care because I want to communicate back to the viewer what I've viewed. My paintings are inspired by my homeland's traditional spaces. My colors are the colors of monasteries and mosques, the color of ruins of Sassanid and Seljuq era, colors of Bazaars of Isfahan and Shiraz, and colors of northern-Iran's ceramics. I have sensed all these colors, forms and everything within my painting's frame from the viewer's own world.”

Guity Novin (1944) artist

Source: Negin (1971), p. 57

World , Color , Communication , Sense

“When a man is ill it is not necessarily because he wants to be ill subconsciously. It is not necessarily because he is receiving some hidden psychological benefit, or because the illness fulfills some need. He is ill often - always in fact - because of a distortion that is occurring within the self, and materialized in physical form.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 297, Page 136
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 7

“If the power of government be very extensive, and the subjects of it have, consequently, little power over their own actions, that government is tyrannical, and oppressive; whether, with respect to its form, it be a monarchy, an aristocracy, or even a republic.”

Joseph Priestley book Essay on the First Principles of Government

Section III, "Of Civil Liberty"
Essay on the First Principles of Government, 2nd Edition (1771)

“[T]he evidence from anthropology concurs with history in refuting the popular belief in a Jewish race descended from the biblical tribe. From the anthropologist's point of view, two groups of facts militate against this belief: the wide diversity of Jews with regard to physical characteristics, and their similarity to the Gentile population amidst whom they live. Both are reflected in the statistics about bodily height, cranial index, blood-groups, hair and eye colour, etc. Whichever of these anthropological criteria is taken as an indicator, it shows a greater similarity between Jews and their Gentile host-nation than between Jews living in different countries. …The obvious biological explanation for both phenomena is miscegenation, which took different forms in different historical situations: intermarriage, large-scale proselytizing, rape as a constant (legalized or tolerated) accompaniment of war and pogrom.”

Arthur Koestler book The Thirteenth Tribe

The Thirteenth Tribe (1976).

War , History , Country

“Democracies are dangerous forms of government. They always become dictatorships; and they almost always talk about this universal health care.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Garden of Eden

Health , Democracy , Universe

“No one who begins a biography of Jesus with the words "The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God" or concludes an account with "these things have been written so that you might believe" is attempting to be neutral about the subject matter. The question that should be raised about such accounts is not whether they amount to a form of advocacy—because of course they do—but whether the interpretation of Jesus offered illuminates or obscures the historical subject matter that is being treated.”

Ben Witherington III (1951) American religion academic

Prolegomenon
New Testament History : A Narrative Account (2001)

God , Question , Christ

“The disharmoniousness (one might say, the negative rhythm) of the individual forms was that which primarily drew me, attracted me, during the period to which this watercolor belongs. The so-called rhythmic always comes on its own because in general the person himself is rhythmically built. Thus at least on the surface, the rhythmic is innate in people. Children, 'primitive' peoples, and laymen draw rhythmically..
In that period my soul was especially enchanted by the not-fitting-together of drawn and painterly form. Line serves the plane in that the former bounds the latter. And it makes my heart race in those cases when the independent plane springs over the confining line: line and plane are not in tune! It was this that produced a strong inner emotion in me, the inner 'ah!”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

2 quotes from Kandinsky's letter to Hans Arp, November 1912; in Friedel, Wassily Kandinsky, p. 489; as cited in Negative Rhythm: Intersections Between Arp, Kandinsky, Münter, and Taeuber, Bibiana K. Obler (including transl. - Yale University Press, 2014
Kandinsky was trying to explain to Arp his state of mind when he made his sketch for 'Improvisation with Horses' https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Wassily_Kandinsky_Cossacks_or_Cosaques_1910%E2%80%931.jpg, 1911, a watercolor belonging to Arp. Kandinsky had told Arp that he could have one of his pictures included in the 'Moderne Bund' (second) exhibition in Zurich, 1912, and this was the one Arp selected
1910 - 1915

Children , People , Soul , Spring

“I want, however, to conclude by calling attention to a less visible form of social action: norms of social behavior, including ethical and moral codes. I suggest as one possible interpretation that they are reactions of society to compensate for market failures. It is useful for individuals to have some trust in each other's word. In the absence of trust it would become very costly to arrange for alternative sanctions and guarantees, and many opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation would have to be, foregone.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Kenneth Arrow, “The Organization of Economic Activity: Issues Pertinent to the Choice of Market versus Non-market Allocation” (1969)
1950s-1960s

Behavior , Failure

“Sacred religion! mother of form and fear.”

Samuel Daniel book Musophilus

Musophilus (1599), Stanza 57, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Fear , Religion

“Any form of idealism involves avoiding some specific pain or suffering.”

Ken McLeod (1948) Canadian lama

Money and Value http://www.unfetteredmind.org/money-value-life-1#sect8. Unfettered Mind http://www.unfetteredmind.org. (2007-12-02) (Topic: Life)

Pain , Suffering

“On the other end of this process, there are the finished forms which I sometimes portray at night with sporadic illumination. The obscurity isolates them and the light accentuates their volumes. My focus is on creating images of the buildings which have a sense of being unreal and that have a certain autonomy. Small and big parts of the building can now stand on their own and become independent characters.”

Hélène Binet (1959) Swiss photographer

In: Hélène Binet’s ‘Forming | Portrait – Architecture of Zaha Hadid’ @ Gabrielle Ammann // Gallery http://sandsof.com/2012/11/24/helene-binets-forming-portrait-architecture-of-zaha-hadid-gabrielle-ammann-gallery/, sandsof.com, 24 November 2012

Sense , Light , Parting , Night

“When art is a form of behaviour, software predominates over hardware in the creative sphere. Process replaces product in importance, just as system supersedes structure.”

Roy Ascott (1934) British academic

Behaviourables and Futuribles, manifesto, 1967; as cited in: Edward A. Shanken. " Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s http://www.responsivelandscapes.com/readings/CyberneticsArtCultConv.pdf." 2002

Art

“Incorporating in their colorful, slashing, superbly readable pages, the major themes of the "left" opposition under Walpole, these libertarian tracts, emerging first in the form of denunciations of standing armies in the reign of William III, left an indelible imprint on the "country" mind everywhere in the English-speaking world.”

Bernard Bailyn book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter II, SOURCES AND TRADITIONS, p. 36.

World , Color , Country

“And let's not make any mistake, or gloss over that fact: Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are at risk every day of their lives. Not only are we the group most at risk of violence, we are most at risk of job discrimination, losing our families; homophobia retains its title as the last socially acceptable form of bigotry.”

Jeffrey Montgomery (1953–2016) American LGBT rights activist and public relations executive

America...You Kill Me

People , Family

“If you look at early shamanic texts and cultures, the magical powers that the shaman hopes the gods might give him, flying, turning into animals, invisibility, poetry – as if poetry was a magic power. As if it was the equivalent of turning into a dog or flying. As if. What does this tell us? Maybe there was a time when we could legitimately ask the gods for it as a gift. But we know there aren’t any gods, and that they can’t give those gifts, so the best thing we can do is go to church, listen to the lesson and hope we don’t burn. Have no direct contact with whatever form of god we choose to worship. It’s like the magical or spiritual equivalent of the big flaw in Marxism. Karl Marx, lovely geezer, very humane, a bit middle class but we’ll gloss over that, but his big flaw was that when he said “The reins of society will inevitably rest in the hands of those who control the means of production” didn’t take into account middle management. All the people who get between those with the means of production and the society. That translates onto a spiritual level as the shift from our earliest beliefs, which are all shamanic.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

Love , God , People , Dogs

“As in the focus of a magnifying glass, play contains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form and is itself a major source of development.”

Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) Soviet psychologist

Vygotsky, L. S. (1930) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press p.102

“It would seem essential to distinguish the emergent forms of a new commercial culture - beginning with advertisements and spreading on to formal packaging of all kinds, from products to buildings, and not excluding artistic commodities such as television shows (the "logo") and best-sellers and films - from the older kinds of folk and genuinely "popular" culture which flourished when the older social classes of a peasantry and an urban artisanat still existed and which, from the mid-nineteenth century on, has gradually been colonized and extinguished by commodification and the market system.”

Fredric Jameson (1934) American academic

Source: Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Chapter 2: Theories of the Postmodern

“Let us not attempt, from the pontifical throne of realism-at-any-cost, to condemn all the art forms which have evolved since the first half of the nineteenth century for we would then fall into the Proudhonian mistake of returning to the past, of putting a straitjacket on the artistic expression of the man who is being born and is in the process of making himself.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Art , Past

“Were castles really as rough and rugged as their owners? The answer seems to be, “not necessarily.” Castles were indeed rough and rugged fortresses, the product of an essentially elite, masculine warrior society, what today we call a feudal society. But they were also among the finest buildings of their times—secure, well-built residences that supported the complex rituals of noble life. To understand how castle form came to meet castle function, we must look briefly at the castle’s social and economic underpinnings.”

Marilyn Stokstad (1929–2016) art historian

Overview: Castles in Context
Medieval castles (2005)

Life , Understanding , Support , Time

“PROUN is understood as the creative construction of form (based on the mastery of space) assisted by economic construction of the applied material. The goal of PROUN is progressive movement on the way to concrete creation, and not the substantiation, explanation, or promotion of life.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

1915 - 1925, Theses on the 'PROUN': from painting to architecture' (1920)

Life , Way

“Ice formed on the butler's upper slopes.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Pigs Have Wings

Pigs Have Wings (1952)

“The great Roman statesman Cicero observed that, 'Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.' In our ignorance of the Immoral values that form part of our history and heritage, we Americans have become perpetual children.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“A Burning Dilemma Among America’s Dhimma,” http://www.americandailyherald.com/pundits/ilana-mercer/item/a-burning-dilemma-among-america-s-dhimma American Daily Herald, May 10, 2013.
2010s, 2013

Children , History , Parting

“Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

"On Noise"
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Studies in Pessimism

“His aunt drily remarked that, at this rate, he would soon get through all the sights; but she could not guess — having lived always in Washington — how little the sights of Washington had to do with its interest.

The boy could not have told her; he was nowhere near an understanding of himself. The more he was educated, the less he understood. Slavery struck him in the face; it was a nightmare; a horror; a crime; the sum of all wickedness! Contact made it only more repulsive. He wanted to escape, like the negroes, to free soil. Slave States were dirty, unkempt, poverty-stricken, ignorant, vicious! He had not a thought but repulsion for it; and yet the picture had another side. The May sunshine and shadow had something to do with it; the thickness of foliage and the heavy smells had more; the sense of atmosphere, almost new, had perhaps as much again; and the brooding indolence of a warm climate and a negro population hung in the atmosphere heavier than the catalpas. The impression was not simple, but the boy liked it: distinctly it remained on his mind as an attraction, almost obscuring Quincy itself. The want of barriers, of pavements, of forms; the looseness, the laziness; the indolent Southern drawl; the pigs in the streets; the negro babies and their mothers with bandanas; the freedom, openness, swagger, of nature and man, soothed his Johnson blood.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Education , Boy , Understanding , Nature

“The original thinking force of the universe progresses and develops itself in all possible determinations of which it is capable, just as the other original natural forces progress and assume all possible configurations. I am a particular determination of the formative force, like the plant; a particular determination of the peculiar motive force, like the animal; and in addition to this a determination of the thinking force: and the union of these three basic forces into one force, into one harmonious development, is the distinguishing characteristic of my species.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte book The Vocation of Man

Source: The Vocation of Man (1800), P. Preuss, trans. (1987), p. 12

Motivation , Nature , Thinking , Universe

“The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.”

Henry James book What Maisie Knew

What Maisie Knew.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

Color , Business , Reality , Effort

“God made the mind but He never made a stoplight. And when He saw that 'There is no stop in this mind which I have made,' He was very sorry. He had to take a form. The form of Guru is nobody but Himself, the whole that you want to see. The whole power is now in the form of a body. That is the body which is the 'Supremest' of all, and its duties, works are not like those of humanity.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

(responding to a question about the word satguru), Alta Loma Terrace Satsang, 1971 - reproduced from Elan Vital magazine, vol. II, issue 1
1970s

God

“The basic law underlying all occult healing, may be stated to be as follows: Law I: All disease is the result of inhibited soul life, and that is true of all forms in all kingdoms. The art of the healer consists in releasing the soul, so that its life can flow through the aggregate of organisms which constitute any particular form. It is interesting to note that the attempt of the scientist to release the energy of the atom, is of the same general nature as the work of the esotericist when he endeavours to release the energy of the soul. In this release the nature of the true art of healing is hidden. Herein lies an occult hint.”

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

Source: A Treatise on the Seven Rays: Volume 4: Esoteric Healing (1953) p. 5

Life , Disease , Law , Art

“In this country political agitation is not likely to be soon lulled. We shall have no violence, I think, except in Ireland, and even there I hope appearances are rather less threatening than were supposed a short time ago. But we shall have, and ought to have, a powerful agitation in favour of a real Parliamentary Reform, and to gain this would be worth some time longer of commercial depression. We have deluded ourselves with the notion that we are a free people, and have a good government and a representative system, whilst in fact our representative system is for the most part a sham, and the forms of representation are used to consolidate the supremacy of the titled and proprietary class. All this will break down by and by. From all parts of the country we hear of preliminary meetings and new organisations, Associations and Leagues, etc. The middle and working classes are beginning to see that united they may win all they require; divided they are a prey to their insatiable enemies.”

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

Letter to Mrs. Priestman (23 April 1848), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 183.
1840s

People , Hope , Thinking , Appearance

“In 1915 Sophie Taeuber and I carried out our first works in the simplest forms, using painting, embroidery and pasted paper [without using oil colors to avoid any reference with usual painting]. These were probably the first manifestations of their kind, pictures that were their own reality, without meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected everything in the nature of a copy or a description, in order to give free flow to what was elemental and spontaneous.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

on creating art without using oil colors to avoid any reference with usual painting, in The Art of Jean Arp, Herbert Read, Abrams, New York 1968, p. p. 34, 38
1960s

Color , Nature , Reality , Past

“Lamarck, after having first studied botany with success, had then turned his attention to conchology, and soon became aware that in the newer (or tertiary) strata of the earth's crust there were a multitude of fossil species of shells… He also observed that other shells were so nearly allied to living forms, that it was difficult not to suspect that they had been connected by a common bond of descent. He therefore proposed that the element of time should enter into the definition of a species, and that it should run thus: 'A species consists of individuals all resembling each other, and reproducing their like by generation, so long as the surrounding conditions do not undergo changes sufficient to cause their habits, characters, and forms to vary. He came at last to the conclusion, that none of the animals and plants now existing were primordial creations, but were all derived from pre-existing forms, which, after they may have gone on for indefinite ages reproducing their like, had, at length, by the influence of alterations in climate and in the animate world, been made to vary gradually, and adapt themselves to new circumstances, some of them deviating, in the course of ages, so far from their original type as to have claims to be regarded as new species.”

Charles Lyell (1797–1875) British lawyer and geologist

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.20, p. 389-390

Age , World , Study , Change

“The way the anima initially manifests in an individual man usually bears the stamp of his mother's character. If he experienced her in a negative way, then his anima often takes the form of depressive moods, irritability, perpetual malcontent, and excessive sensitivity. If the man is able to overcome these, precisely these things can strengthen his manliness. Such a negative mother anima will endlessly whisper within a man: "I'm a nothing," "It doesn't make sense anyhow," "It's different for other people," "Nothing * gives me any pleasure," and so on. Continual fear of disease, impotence, or accidents are her work, and she constellates a general sense of gloom. Troubled moods like these can intensify to the point of temptations to suicide; thus the anima can become a demoness of death. She appears in this role in Cocteau's film Orpheus.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (1994), The Anima as the Woman within the Man

Death , People , Pleasure , Fear

“Beyond all conscious lying and falsifying, there is a deeper “organic mendacity.” Here the falsification is not formed in consciousness, but at the same stage of the mental process as the impressions and value feelings themselves: on the road of experience into consciousness. There is “organic mendacity” whenever a man’s mind admits only those impressions which serve his “interest” or his instinctive attitude. Already in the process of mental reproduction and recollection, the contents of his experience are modified in this direction. He who is “mendacious” has no need to lie! In his case, the automatic process of forming recollections, impressions, and feelings is involuntarily slanted, so that conscious falsification becomes unnecessary.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 77-78

Lie , Feeling , Lying

“I was thrilled, and I mean really thrilled, when I read that parts of the Merzbau could still be buried under the ruins. Whatever the circumstances. I will try and come to Hannover to salvage it.... wait until I arrive, for the Merzbau is made of plaster of Paris and could easily be damaged. However by working slowly I am sure I can save parts. And it is certainly worth it, because it [his 'Merzbau'] is my life's work. And in the opinion of people abroad it was seen as a new form of art.”

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) German artist

Source: 1940s, I is Style (2000), p. 47 : in a letter to Käthe Steinitz (24 June 1945)

Life , People , Art , Waiting

“art is fruit growing out of man like the fruit out of a plant like the child out of the mother. While the fruit of the plant grows independent forms and never resembles a balloon or a president in a cutaway suit the artistic fruit of man shows for the most part a ridiculous resemblance to the appearance of other things. Reason tells man to stand above nature and to be the measure of all things. thus man thinks he is able to live and to create against the laws of nature and he creates abortions. through reason man became a tragic and ugly figure. i dare say he would create even his children in the form of vases with umbilical cords if he could do so. reason has cut man off from nature.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

Arp wrote this in lowercase letters
Notes From a Dada Diary; published, 1932 in 'Transition magazine'; as quoted (in lowercase letters), “Soby, James Thrall. Arp: The Museum of Modern Art. Doubleday, New York, 1958, Print. p. 17
1930s

Children , Law , Art , Nature

“Hayek says that the problem with classical liberalism was that it was not pure enough. The government needed to restrict itself to establishing the rule of law and to using antitrust to break up monopolies. It was the overreach of the government beyond those limits, via central banking and social democracy, that caused all the trouble. A democratic government needs to limit itself to rule of law and antitrust–and perhaps soup kitchens and shelters. And what if democracy turns out not to produce a government that limits itself to those activities? Then, Hayek says, so much the worse for democracy. A Pinochet is then called for to, in a Lykourgan moment, minimalize the state. After social democracy has been leveled and the rubble cleared away, then–perhaps–a limited range of issues can be discussed and debated by a–limited–restored democracy, with some kind of group of right-wing army officers descended from latifundistas Council of Guardians in the background to ensure that property remains sacred and protected, and the government small enough to fit in a bathtub. […] Hayek was formed in Austria. From his perspective the property and enterprise respecting Imperial Habsburg government of Franz Josef eager to make no waves, to hold what it has, and to keep the lid off the pressure cooker appears not unattractive. This is especially so when you contrasted would be really existing authoritarian alternatives: anti-Semitic populist demagogue mayors of Vienna; nationalist Serbian or Croatian politicians interested in maintaining popular legitimacy by waging class war or ethnic war; separatists who seek independence and then one man, one vote, one time. An “authoritarian” after the manner of Franz Josef looks quite attractive in this context–and if you convince yourself but they are as dedicated to small government neoliberalism as you are, and that the Lykourgan moment of the form will be followed by soft rule and popular assent, so much the better. And if the popular assent is not forthcoming? Then Hayek can blame the socialists, and say it is their fault for not understanding how good a deal they are offered.”

J. Bradford DeLong (1960) American economist

Making Sense of Friedrich A. von Hayek: Focus/The Honest Broker for the Week of August 9, 2014 http://equitablegrowth.org/making-sense-friedrich-von-hayek-focusthe-honest-broker-week-august-9-2014/ (2014)

War , Law , Democracy , Understanding

“Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. (p.46)”

Marshall McLuhan book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Understanding Media (1964)

Love , World , Sex , Bee

“Mathematical activity has taken the forms of a science, a philosophy and an art.”

George Frederick James Temple (1901–1992) British mathematician

100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)

Art , Mathematics , Science

“Byron idealised and expressed that bitter spirit of discontent which has at the present moment taken a more material and tangible form. He is the incarnation of November. From time immemorial it has been an Englishman's privilege to grumble, and Byron gave picturesque language to the universal feeling.”

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

The Monthly Magazine

Feeling , Universe , Time

“Poor rhetoric, once "learning" itself, now becomes reduced to the teaching of mannerisms and forms, Aristotelian forms, for writing, as if these mattered.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29

Learning

“We may not feel as confident as once we did that the way to truth lies all open before us the moment we have brought our vague questionings to a form that "leaves the rest to experiment."”

Edgar A. Singer, Jr. (1873–1954) American philosopher

Source: Mind As Behavior And Studies In Empirical Idealism, (1924), p. v: Preface

Truth , Way , Feeling , Confidence

“The logos of creation, 'And God Said…' formed the basis of Christian interpretation of the 'Book of Nature.”

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

Source: Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 217

God , Books , Nature

“In undertaking the conquest of self it is of the utmost importance to form strong bonds of habit between ideas and conduct.”

Jules Payot (1859–1940) French educationist

Source: The Education of the Will (1920), p. 100

Idea , Strong

“I don't understand how many painters can be so short-sighted to value art from earlier periods as completely worthless. Every art is an expression of an era and only for that reason already it is interesting. A Rembrandt has gone other ways, but he has certainly also pursued the highest goals. That one can assert: it is not necessary for a painter to have an impression when he is painting an Image, is nonsense. Certainly an artist, if he is really an artist, always has an inner urge to create an Image and thus sees an impression for himself that he may not always be able to explain, because deeper feelings are very difficult to grasp in words, but he has an impression - otherwise he only makes paintings as pure brain work. And intellectual art I can't bear. You can not make abstract art as something on its own. One feel various forms in their inner coherence. For example: when reading a fairy tale I can get the idea to paint a forest in completely abstract forms with motifs of trees. Every abstract form has an inner meaning for me.”

Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876–1923) Dutch painter

translation from Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
version in Dutch / citaat van Jacoba van Heemskerck, in het Nederlands vertaald: Ik begrijp niet hoe veel schilders zo kortzichtig kunnen zijn kunst uit vroegere perioden als volkomen waardeloos aan te merken. Elke kunst is een uiting van een tijdperk en alleen daarom al interessant. Een Rembrandt is andere wegen gegaan maar heeft zeker ook de hoogste doelen nagestreefd. Dat men beweren kan: een schilder hoeft bij het schilderen van een Bild geen voorstelling te hebben, is onzin. Zeker heeft een kunstenaar, als hij werkelijk artiest is, altijd een innerlijke drang een Bild te scheppen en ziet dus een Bild voor zich dat hij misschien niet altijd verklaren kan omdat diepere gevoelens heel moeilijk in woorden te vatten zijn, maar een voorstelling heeft hij - anders maakt hij schilderijen en is het puur hersenwerk. En intellectuele kunst staat mij zeer tegen. Abstracte kunst is niet op zich zelf staand te maken. Men voelt verscheidene vormen in hun innerlijke samenhang. Bijvoorbeeld: bij het lezen van een sprookje kan ik de ingeving krijgen een bos in geheel abstracte vormen met boommotieven te schilderen. Elke abstracte vorm heeft voor mij een innerlijke betekenis.
Quote of Jacoba van Heemskerck in her letter of 1 May 1920, to Gustave Bock in Giessen, Germany; as cited in Jacoba van Heemskerck van Beest, 1876 – 1923: schilderes uit roeping, A. H. Huussen jr. (ed. Marleen Blokhuis), (ISBN: 90-400-9064-5) Waanders, Zwolle, 2005, p. 168
1920's

Art , Way , Feeling , Idea

“The forms [of poetry] are subsets of the principles that govern the cosmos itself which, by its very definition is: a complete, orderly, harmonious system.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

The Cosmos as a Poem (2010)

“Tolstoy, while sympathizing with the industrial workers, believed that they ought not to organize in trade unions and he opposed strenuously nearly every form of action advocated by working-class organizations.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 72

“The attack of the Luddites was not occasioned by the introduction of new machinery, however, as is commonly thought, for there is no evidence of such in 1811 and 1812 when Luddism proper began. Rather, the destruction was leveled at the new slip-shod methods which were ordered into effect on the extant machinery. Not an attack against production on economic grounds, it was above all the violent response of the textile workers (soon joined by others) to their attempted degradation in the form of inferior work; shoddy goods — the hastily-assembled "cut-ups," primarily — was the issue at hand.”

John Zerzan (1943) American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author

Source: Elements of Refusal (1988), p. 108

“As you probably know, I'm often accused of intellectual exhibitionism and all forms of elitism. Although I can understand this point of view, it's a rather wasted argument because, if we regard areas of information as being elite and therefore somehow not usable, it means our centre-ground of activity becomes very, very impoverished.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

In an interview in the Washington DC City Paper, 6 Apr 1990
Interviews

Understanding

“By a revolution, the Society does not mean an orderly revolt according to the classic western model – a revolt which always stops short of attacking the rights of property and the traditional social systems of so-called civilization and morality. Until now, such a revolution has always limited itself to the overthrow of one political form in order to replace it by another, thereby attempting to bring about a so-called revolutionary state. The only form of revolution beneficial to the people is one which destroys the entire State to the roots and exterminated all the state traditions, institutions, and classes in Russia.”

Sergey Nechayev book Catechism of a Revolutionary

Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869)

People

“Although Cardan reduced his particular equations to forms lacking a term in x^2, it was Vieta who began with the general formx^3 + px^2 + qx + r = 0and made the substitution x = y -\frac{1}{3}p, thus reducing the equation to the formy^3 + 3by = 2c.He then made the substitutionz^3 + yz = b, or y = \frac{b - z^2}{z},which led to the formz^6 + 2cz^2 = b^2,a sextic which he solved as a quadratic.”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

Source: History of Mathematics (1925) Vol.2, p.465

“Most of the time, organizations generate actions unreflectively and non-adaptively. To justify their actions, organizations create problems, successes, threats and opportunities. These are ideological molecules that mix values, goals, expectations, perceptions, theories, plans, and symbols. The molecules form while people are result watching, guided by the beliefs that they should judge results good or bad, look for the causes of results, and propose needs for action. Because organizations modify their behavior programs mainly in small increments that make sense to top managers, they change too little and inappropriately, and nearly all organizations disappear within a few years.”

William H. Starbuck (1934) American academic

Abstract
"Organizations as action generators," 1983

People , Behavior , Problem , Sense

“…the jeaned and rucksacked young I see on Continental trains or thumbing rides on motorways are not in search of the exotic. They are seeking confirmation that their own kind exists everywhere and denies the racial and cultural variety that used to be one of the joys of the world. If they want the exotic at all it is in the form of what they know well in their own lands through regular, though usually illegal, importation….”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

World , Search , Joy , Training

“I felt it necessary to evolve entirely new concepts (of form and space and paintings) and postulate them in an instrument that could continue to shake itself free from dialectical perversions. The dominant ones, Cubism and Expressionism, only reflected the attitudes of power or spiritual debasement of the individual.”

Clyfford Still (1904–1980) American artist

Clyfford Still, interview with Ti Grace Sharpless, 1963; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 200
1960s

Painting

“My fathering had always taken the form of a friendly cloud that floated across the lives of the children, and paused occasionally to cast a shadow. That they would turn out to have their own weather, and that I would profit by the climate, was an immense satisfaction.”

John Leonard (1939–2008) American critic, writer, and commentator

"The Fathering Instinct" http://books.google.com/books?id=EbQbAQAAMAAJ&q=%22My+fathering+had+always+taken+the+form+of+a+friendly+cloud+that+floated+across+the+lives+of+the+children+and+paused+occasionally+to+cast+a+shadow+That+they+would+turn+out+to+have+their+own+weather+and+that+I+would+profit+by+the+climate+was+an+immense+satisfaction%22&pg=PA112#v=onepage, Ms. magazine, May 1974

Children , Weather

“My [artworks] have neither object nor space nor line nor anything – no forms. They are light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form. You wouldn’t think of form by the ocean. You can go in if you don’t encounter anything. A world without objects, without interruption, making a work without interruption or obstacle. It is to accept the necessity of this simple, direct going into a field of vision as you could cross and empty beach to look at the ocean.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

her remark in 1966 as quoted by Ann Wilson in 'Linear Webs', Art and Artists 1, no. 7, Oct. 1966, p. 49; as quoted on the Tate exhibition, London June - October 2015 http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/agnes-martin/room-guide/room-nine & by Julie Warchol, on Smith College Museum of Art https://www.smith.edu/artmuseum/Collections/Cunningham-Center/Blog-paper-people/Agnes-Martin-On-a-Clear-Daywebsite
1960's

World , Thinking , Light

“We look upon economic theory as a sequence of conceptual models that seek to express in simplified form different aspects of an always more complicated reality.”

Tjalling Koopmans (1910–1985) Dutch American economist

Source: Three Essays (1957), p. 142

Reality

“Any two opposite colours of the rainbow (eg yellow and blue), form a third between them, thus imparting to each other their peculiar qualities. The sight of what they were originally is quite lost, and instead, a most pleasing green is found, which colour, nature has chosen for the vestment of the earth, and with the beauty of which the eye never tires.”

William Hogarth book The Analysis of Beauty

The Analysis of Beauty (1753)

Beauty , Nature

“It seems obvious that Pollock is committed to the Marxist theory linking literary works and political power. He wants to deploy it as his lens for analysing how the aesthetic use of languages in India became interwoven into the fabric of politics. At a deeper level, beyond the aesthetic and political usage of Sanskrit, he finds that old Marxist demon: theology. For him, as for most Marxist-oriented scholars, all forms of spirituality/transcendence are, in effect, irrational, deformed and mystified ways of thinking….”

Rajiv Malhotra book The Battle for Sanskrit

The Battle for Sanskrit (2016)

Way , Thinking

“Of late, attempts have been made in the USA — at a high level and in a rather cynical form — to play the "Chinese card" against the USSR. This is a shortsighted and dangerous policy.”

Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

As quoted in Peace, Détente, and Soviet-American Relations : A Collection of Public Statements (1979), p. 222

“This bubbling and whirling of forms and lights, composed of sounds, noises, and smells has been partly achieved by me in my 'Anarchical funeral' [the painting Carra painted ca 1910-1911, ed. ].... by Umberto Boccioni in his 'States of Minds' and 'Forces of a Street' [both paintings Boccioni painted in 1911], by Russolo in 'Rebellion' (1911) and Severini in 'Pan-Pan [the first version, Severini painted in 1909-1911], paintings which were violently discussed at our first Paris exhibition in 1912.”

Carlo Carrà (1881–1966) Italian painter

Quote in La Pittura dei suoni, rumori, odori Carrà, 11 Aug 1913, as quoted in Futurism, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 142
1910's

Light , Painting

“But I am no longer trying to formulate a stylised version of anxiety such as we find in the Laocoon group and in so many other sculptures of the Silver Age of antiquity. I feel that these works are always a bit too melodramatic. If you really want to find the sources of my present style [1958] in antiquity, I must confess that you will find them in the remains of the life of the past rather than in those of its art. The fossilized corpses that have been unearthed in Pompeii.... if the whole earth is destroyed in our atomic age, I feel that the human forms which may survive as mere fossils will have become sculptures similar to mine.”

Marino Marini (1901–1980) Italian sculptor

Source: Interview with Edouard Roditi' (1958), p. 88

Life , Age , Art , Feeling

“It is in the development of further administrative coordination that we must come to political scientists for aid. We ask that you apply to the field of economic administration the technique of analysis and principles of organization which you have developed in the study of administrative organization in the form of the state.”

Gardiner C. Means (1896–1988) American economist

Source: "The Distribution of Control and Responsibility in a Modern Economy", 1935, p. 64

Study

“A small beginning has led us to a great ending. If I were to put the bit of chalk with which we started into the hot but obscure flame of burning hydrogen, it would presently shine like the sun. It seems to me that this physical metamorphosis is no false image of what has been the result of our subjecting it to a jet of fervent, though nowise brilliant, thought to-night. It has become luminous, and its clear rays, penetrating the abyss of the remote past, have brought within our ken some stages of the evolution of the earth. And in the shifting "without haste, but without rest" of the land and sea, as in the endless variation of the forms assumed by living beings, we have observed nothing but the natural product of the forces originally possessed by the substance of the universe.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

1860s, On a Piece of Chalk (1868)

Nature , Universe , Sun , Past

“In the past the mood of the comic postcard could enter into the central stream of literature, and jokes barely different from McGill's could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare's tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of humour, integral to our literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn postcards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers' windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish.”

Donald McGill (1875–1962) British artist

George Orwell "The Art of Donald McGill", in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (1984) Vol. 2, pp. 194-5.
Criticism

Literature , Mood , Past , Heart

“I was attracted to video art because it allowed me to combine a strong sense of content with formal innovation. The field was wide open and allowed for a great deal of experimentation for creating new forms.”

Beryl Korot (1945) American artist

Source: Meeker, Carlene. " Beryl Korot http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/korot-beryl." Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 March 2009. Jewish Women's Archive. (Viewed on July 9, 2015)

Art , Sense , Strong

“Liberalism—it is well to recall this today—is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so acrobatic, so anti-natural. Hence, it is not to be wondered at that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth.”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Chap. VIII: The Masses Intervene In Everything, And Why Their Intervention Is Solely By Violence
The Revolt of the Masses (1929)

Nature , Appearance , Cry

“This conscious self is only one aspect of our greater reality, however; the part that springs into earthknowing. It can be called the "focus personality," because through it we perceive our three-dimensional life. It contains within it, however, traces of the unknown or "source self" out of which it constantly emerges. The source self is the fountainhead of our present physical being, but it exists outside of that frame of reference. We are earth versions of ourselves, beautifully turned into corporal experience. Our known consciousness is filtered through perceptive mechanisms that are a part of what they perceive. We are the instruments through which we know the earth. In other terms, we are particles of energy, flowing from the source self into physical materialization. Each source self forms many such particles or "Aspect selves" that impinge upon three-dimensional reality, striking our space-time continuum. Others are not physical at all, but have their existence in completely different systems of reality. Each Aspect self is connected to the other, however, through the common experience of the source self, and can come to some degree to draw on the knowledge, abilities, and perceptions of the other Aspects. Psychologically, these other Aspects appear within the known self as personality traits, characteristics, and talents that are uniquely ours. The individual is the particle or focus personality, formed by the intersection of the unknown self with space and time. We can follow any of our traits or emotions back to this source self, or at least to a recognition of its existence.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Adventures In Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology (1975), pp.118-119

Life , Spring , Knowledge , Reality

“Gravitational force is simple, and a thing by itself, as also are electric and magnetic forces as long as the electric and magnetic poles stand at rest. But as soon as motion comes into the picture, the whole situation is changed. Forces of new kinds come into play, for moving electric charges exert magnetic forces in addition to the electric forces they exert when at rest, while moving magnets exert electric forces in addition to the magnetic forces they exert while at rest. When the exact laws governing these intricate laws had been discovered by a great number of experimenters, Clerk Maxwell succeeded in expressing them in a mathematical form which was both simple and elegant.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Law , Mathematics , Change

“Francis Fukuyama seized on the ignominious collapse of the Soviet system as proof that “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” was “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” and Marxism’s “death as a living ideology of world historical significance.” That conclusion was, to say the least, premature, not only because it reckoned without the rise of an Islamist theocracy or the fallout from the 2008 worldwide recession, which provoked a renascence of Marxist advocacy in the writings of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Alain Badiou, the Occupy Movement, and Thomas Picketty. This pattern is, again, an echo of what happened in Reconstruction, and it warns those who yet believe that liberal democracy is the most desirable political future to be wary of Whiggish assumptions about democracy’s inevitability. Human society has oscillated between desires for stability, security, and reciprocity—which is what feudalism, Marxism, and theocracy promise—and desires for mobility, liberty, and profit—which is what the Enlightenment offered on a world-historical scale. There is nothing that can be declared permanent in a bourgeois revolution, and our own Reconstruction, not to mention a good deal of recent history, is the unhappy proof.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Defending Reconstruction (2017)

Death , World , Democracy , History

“The mass-man has very little spare time, does not live a life that appertains to a whole, does not want to exert himself except for some concrete aim which can be expressed in terms of utility; he will not wait patiently while things ripen; everything for him must provide some immediate gratification; and even his mental life must minister to his fleeting pleasures. That is why the essay has become the customary form of literature, why newspapers are taking the place of books… People read quickly and cursorily.”

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) German psychiatrist and philosopher

Der Massenmensch hat wenig Zeit, lebt kein Leben aus einem Ganzen, will nicht mehr die Vorbereitung und Anstrengung ohne den konkreten Zweck, der sie in Nutzen umsetzt; er will nicht warten und reifen lassen; alles muß sogleich gegenwärtige Befriedigung sein; Geistiges ist zu den jeweils augenblicklichen Vergnügungen geworden. Daher ist der Essay die geeignete Literaturform für alles, tritt die Zeitung an die Stelle des Buches... Man liest schnell.
Man in the Modern Age (1933)

Life , People , Pleasure , Books

“Now if plurality and difference belong only to the appearance-form; if there is but one and the same Entity manifested in all living things: it follows that, when we obliterate the distinction between the ego and the non-ego, we are not the sport of an illusion. Rather are we so, when we maintain the reality of individuation, — a thing the Hindus call Maya, that is, a deceptive vision, a phantasma. The former theory we have found to be the actual source of the phaenomenon of Compassion; indeed Compassion is nothing but its translation into definite expression. This, therefore, is what I should regard as the metaphysical foundation of Ethics, and should describe it as the sense which identifies the ego with the non-ego, so that the individual directly recognises in another his own self, his true and very being. From this standpoint the profoundest teaching of theory pushed to its furthest limits may be shown in the end to harmonise perfectly with the rules of justice and loving-kindness, as exercised; and conversely, it will be clear that practical philosophers, that is, the upright, the beneficent, the magnanimous, do but declare through their acts the same truth as the man of speculation wins by laborious research … He who is morally noble, however deficient in mental penetration, reveals by his conduct the deepest insight, the truest wisdom; and puts to shame the most accomplished and learned genius, if the latter's acts betray that his heart is yet a stranger to this great principle, — the metaphysical unity of life.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book On the Basis of Morality

Part IV, Ch. 2, pp. 273 https://archive.org/stream/basisofmorality00schoiala#page/273/mode/2up-274
On the Basis of Morality (1840)

Love , Life , Wisdom , Truth

Quotes about form page 14

Quotes about form
page 14