Quotes about form
page 37

“There is a philosophical, or metaphysical position that can be taken–maybe its a scientific hypothesis–that the past cannot in fact exist. Everything that can possibly exist exists now. Things now may be expressive of some conceivable or describable past state of affairs, yes:but that's different from saying this this former state actually somehow exists in the form of "the past". Even in our memory[…]there is no past:no scenes preserved with all their sights and sounds. Merely fleeting states of mind, myriad points assembled for a moment to make a new picture (but "picture" is wrong too, too full, too fixed) of what we think are former states of things: things that once were, or may have been the case.”

John Crowley book Four Freedoms

Prelude
Four Freedoms (2009)

Thinking, Memory, Past

“What ideas individuals may attach to the term "Millennium" I know not; but I know that society may be formed so as to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little, if any misery, and with intelligence and happiness increased a hundredfold; and no obstacle whatsoever intervenes at this moment except ignorance to prevent such a state of society from becoming universal.”

Robert Owen (1771–1858) Welsh social reformer

Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark (1816)

Happiness, Health, Intelligence, Idea

“Western social Darwinists, who include modernisation and development theorists and their kindred spirits (UN agencies, human rights organisations and activists, NGOs, the IMF, the World Bank, the US State Department, etc) would see the possible "advance" of the Arab world (as well as the rest of the "underdeveloped" world) toward a western-defined and sponsored modernity as part of a historical teleology wherein non-Europeans who are still at the stage of European childhood will eventually replicate European "progress" toward modern forms of organisation, sociality, economics, politics and sexual desires. What is emerging in the Arab (and the rest of the third) world is not some universal schema of the march of history but rather the imposition of these western modes by different forceful means and their adoption by third world elites, thus foreclosing and repressing myriad ways of movement and change and ensuring that only one way for transformation is made possible.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Ibid., pp. 49-50.
Desiring Arabs

World, Way, History, Universe

“All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures. Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the forms. Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of foulnesses and concavities, through hollows and over peaks – feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Source: 1961 - 1975, Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial autobiography', 1970, p. 280

Cars, Feeling, Memory

“Every legal constitution is the product of a revolution. In the history of classes, revolution is the act of political creation, while legislation is the political expression of the life of a society that has already come into being. Work for reform does not contain its own force independent from revolution. During every historic period, work for reforms is carried on only in the direction given to it by the impetus of the last revolution and continues as long as the impulsion from the last revolution continues to make itself felt. Or, to put it more concretely, in each historic period work for reforms is carried on only in the framework of the social form created by the last revolution. Here is the kernel of the problem.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Source: Reform or Revolution (1899), Ch. 8

Life, History, Problem

“The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government.”

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

April Thesis (1917)

“When I have to think about it, I know the picture is wrong. And sizing is a form of thinking and coloring is too. My instinct about painting says, 'If you don’t think about it, it's right'. As soon as you have to decide and choose, it's wrong. And the more you decide about, the more wrong it gets. Some people, they paint abstract, so they sit there thinking about it because their thinking makes them feel they're doing something. But my thinking never makes me feel I'm doing anything.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), p. 149

People, Color, Feeling, Thinking

“The onset of a crisis is usually triggered by a spectacular failure which shakes confidence in fictitious forms of capital.”

David Harvey (1935) British anthropologist

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 10, Finance Capital And Its Contradictions, p. 304

Confidence, Failure

“It took me a long time to discover that particularities of form and natural colour evoke subjective states of feeling which obscure pure reality. The appearance of natural forms changes, but reality remains. To create pure reality plasticity, it is necessary to reduce natural forms to constant elements of form, and natural colour to primary colour. The aim is not to create other particular forms and colours, with all their limitations, but to work toward abolishing them in the interest of a larger unity.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Source: Later Quote of Mondrian, about 1910-1914; in 'Mondrian, Essays' ('Plastic art and pure plastic art', 1937 and his other essays, (1941-1943) by Piet Mondrian; Wittenborn-Schultz Inc., New York, 1945, p. 10; as cited in De Stijl 1917-1931 - The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art, by H.L.C. Jaffé http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/jaff001stij01_01/jaff001stij01_01.pdf; J.M. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam 1956, p. 42

Feeling, Nature, Reality, Appearance

“This consideration must alter the form of our proposed inquiry; for the question being thus at least partly decided, since it is ascertained that we have rays of heat which give no light, it can only become a subject of inquiry whether some of these heat-making rays may not have a power of rendering objects visible, superadded to their now already established power of heating bodies. This being the case, it is evident that the onus probandi [burden of proof] ought to lie with those who are willing to establish such an hypothesis, for it does not appear that Nature is in the habit of using one and the same mechanism with any two of our senses. Witness the vibration of air that makes sound, the effluvia that occasion smells, the particles that produce taste, the resistance or repulsive powers that affect the touch—all these are evidently suited to their respective organs of sense.”

William Herschel (1738–1822) German-born British astronomer, technical expert, and composer

Source: Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works (1880), Ch.4 "Life and Works" on his discovery of the infrared.

Lie, Question, Nature, Sense

“Usually musicians have egos and personality quirks which makes it difficult to form collaborative efforts (for long periods of time, anyways).”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Static Line interview, 1998

Effort, Time, Personality

“Without this ridiculous vanity that takes the form of self-display and is part of everything and everyone, we would see nothing, and nothing would exist.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Sin esa tonta vanidad que es el mostrarnos y que es de todos y de todo, no veríamos nada y no existiría nada. [[]]
Voces (1943)

Parting

“Every creature, every work of God, is admirably well made; but if any one appears imperfect in our eyes, it does not belong to us to criticise it. Perhaps that which we do not find right in its kind, turns to our advantage, without our being able to perceive it. Let us look at the state of the heavens, one while the sun shines, another time it does not appear; now the weather is fine; again it is unpleasant; one day is hot, another is cold; another time it is rainy, snowy or cloudy; every thing is variable and inconstant. Let us look at the surface of the earth: here the ground is flat; there it is hilly and mountainous; in other places it is sandy; in others it is barren; and elsewhere it is productive. Let us, in thought, go into an orchard or forest. What do we see? Trees high or low, large or small, upright or crooked, fruitful or unfruitful. Let us look at the birds of the air, and at the fishes of the sea, nothing resembles another thing. Let us look at the beasts. We see among the same kinds some of different forms, of different dimensions, domestic or wild, harmless or ferocious, useful or useless, pleasing or hideous. Some are bred for men's sakes; some for their own pleasures and amusements; some are of no use to us. There are faults in their organization as well as in that of men. Those who are acquainted with the veterinary art, know this well; but as for us who have not made a study of this science, we seem not to discover or remark these faults. Let us now come to ourselves. Our intellectual faculties as well as our corporeal organization have their imperfections. There are faculties both of the mind and heart, which education improve; there are others which it does not correct. I class in this number, idiotism, imbecility, dulness. But nothing can correct the infirmities of the bodily organization, such as deafness, blindness, lameness, palsy, crookedness, ugliness. The sight of a beautiful person does not make another so likewise, a blind person does not render another blind. Why then should a deaf person make others so also? Why are we Deaf and Dumb? Is it from the difference of our ears? But our ears are like yours; is it that there may be some infirmity? But they are as well organized as yours. Why then are we Deaf and Dumb? I do not know, as you do not know why there are infirmities in your bodies, nor why there are among the human kind, white, black, red and yellow men. The Deaf and Dumb are everywhere, in Asia, in Africa, as well as in Europe and America. They existed before you spoke of them and before you saw them.”

Laurent Clerc (1785–1869) French-American deaf educator

Statement of 1818, quoted in Through Deaf Eyes: A Photographic History of an American Community (2007) by Douglas C. Baynton, Jack R. Gannon, and Jean Lindquist Bergey

Men, God, Pleasure, Education

“A man´s taste is formed more by his culture, his profession, and the period in which he is young than by his race or politics.”

A. J. Liebling (1904–1963) American journalist

The road back to Paris (1988)

“I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.”

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) American playwright and novelist

Writers at Work interview (1958)

Childhood

“It is not, I think, going too far to say, that every fact connected with the human organization goes to prove, that man was originally formed a frugivorous animal … This opinion is principally derived from the formation of his teeth and digestive organs, as well as from the character of his skin, and the general structure of his limbs. It is not my intention now to go further into the discussion of this subject, than to observe, that if analogy be allowed to have any weight in the argument, it is wholly on that side of the question which I have just taken. Those animals, whose teeth and digestive apparatus most nearly resemble our own, namely, the apes and monkeys, are undoubtedly frugivorous.”

Thomas Bell (zoologist)

The Anatomy, Physiology, and Diseases of the Teeth, Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1830, p. 35 https://books.google.it/books?id=LK-_LIeEq2oC&pg=PA35&lpg=PA35.

Question, Thinking, Animals

“If heretics no longer horrify us today, as they once did our forefathers, is it certain that it is because there is more charity in our hearts? Or would it not too often be, perhaps, without our daring to say so, because the bone of contention, that is to say, the very substance of our faith, no longer interests us? Men of too familiar and too passive a faith, perhaps for us dogmas are no longer the Mystery on which we live, the Mystery which is to be accomplished in us. Consequently then, heresy no longer shocks us; at least, it no longer convulses us like something trying to tear the soul of our souls away from us…. And that is why we have no trouble in being kind to heretics, and no repugnance in rubbing shoulders with them.

In reality, bias against ‘heretics’ is felt today just as it used to be. Many give way to it as much as their forefathers used to do. Only, they have turned it against political adversaries. Those are the only ones with whom they refuse to mix. Sectarianism has only changed its object and taken other forms, because the vital interest has shifted. Should we dare to say that this shifting is progress?

It is not always charity, alas, which has grown greater, or which has become more enlightened: it is often faith, the taste for the things of eternity, which has grown less. Injustice and violence are still reigning; but they are now in the service of degraded passions.”

Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) Jesuit theologian and cardinal

Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), pp. 226-227

Men, Faith, Way, Soul

“Every American should take note of those candidates who stand with the economic interests of America’s citizens, and who stand with the Rule of Law, by rejecting Amnesty in all its forms. It is wrong when Democrats seek to demean the intrinsic value of American citizenship by importing the Third World to replace the millions of voters their redistributionist policies and racial grievance politics have driven away. It is also wrong when Republican leadership conveniently chooses to waive the application of the law to guarantee a supply of unskilled and low-cost workers for their corporate benefactors.”

Steve King (1949) US Representative for Iowa

Rep. Steve King: ‘DACA’ – ‘Delivering Amnesty to Central Americans’ http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/09/26/exclusive-rep-steve-king-daca-delivering-amnesty-central-americans/ (September 26, 2017)

World, Law

“Radical Protestants have always been concerned for the inwardly authentic quality of personal experience and commitment. From this perspective one judges the run-of-the-mill piety which is satisfied with conformity to easily attained patterns of expression. This critical perspective on hypocrisy and superficiality presupposes a more authentic alternative, which is very difficult to define. Once it is clearly defined, that new, more authentic form becomes inauthentic in its turn; yet that kind of preoccupation always belongs as part of the radical Protestant vision. The "civil religion" is judged for being feasible; its demands are too attainable.”

John Howard Yoder (1927–1997) 20th century American Mennonite theologian

Source: The Priestly Kingdom (1984), p. 175

Religion, Parting, Personality

“The Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation… claims… the "Whole substance" of the wine is converted into the blood of Christ,; the appearance of wine that remains is "merely accidental", "inhering in no substance". Transubstantiation is colloquially taught as meaning that the wine "literally" turns into the blood of Christ. Whether in its obfuscatory Aristotelian or its franker colloquial form, the claim of transubstantiation can be made only if we do serious violence to the normal meanings of words like 'substance' and 'literally'.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

"Viruses of the Mind"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

Appearance, Wine, Christ

“We perceive nature through the senses, which give us images of forms of colour, sounds etc. A form which exists only in relation to another form on its own, it does not exist.”

Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940) French painter

11 Nov 1888.
Private Journal - A collage of notes and images, sketches kept 1888-1895 & 1907 to 1940

Nature, Sense

“His name was William Saroyan. He was the first writer I fell in love with, boyishly in love. I was held by his unaffected voice, his sentimentality, his defiant individualism. I found myself in the stories he told… I learned from Saroyan that you do not have to live in some great city — in New York or Paris — in order to write… When I was a student at Stanford, a generation ago, the name of William Saroyan was never mentioned by any professor in the English Department. William Saroyan apparently was not considered a major American talent. Instead, we undergraduates set about the business of psychoanalyzing Hamlet and deconstructing Lolita. In my mind Saroyan belongs with John Steinbeck, a fellow small town Californian and of the same generation. He belongs with Thornton Wilder, with those writers whose aching love of America was formed by the Depression and the shadow of war. … Saroyan's prose is as plain as it is strong. He talks about the pleasure of drinking water from a hose on a summer afternoon in California's Central Valley, and he holds you with the pure line. My favorite is his novel The Human Comedy… In 1943, The Human Comedy became an MGM movie starring Mickey Rooney, but I always imagined Homer Macaulay as a darker, more soulful boy, someone who looked very much like a young William Saroyan…”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

"Time Of Our Lives" (26 May 1997) http://www.cilicia.com/armo22_william_saroyan_6.html

Love, War, Pleasure, Soul

“Since the form is only an expression of the content and the content is different with different artists, it is then clear that there can be many different forms at the same time which are equally good. Necessity creates the form. Fish which live at great depths have no eyes. The elephant has a trunk. The chameleon changes its color, and so forth.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

1910 - 1915, On the Problem of Form (1912)

Color, Fish, Change, Time

“We do, as a new Government, have to be extremely careful after 18 years in opposition. A lot of people who worked for us, they then go on and work for the lobby firms. I think we have to be very careful with people fluttering around the new Government, trying to make all sorts of claims of influence, that we are purer than pure, that people understand that we will not have any truck with anything that is improper in any shape or form at all.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

David Hughes, "'Don't flutter around us' Blair warns lobbyists", Daily Mail, 8 July 1998, p. 2.
After a scandal about lobbying and access; this statement is often misremembered as "whiter than white".
1990s

People, Understanding, Thinking

“In some form or other the rivalry of men will continue to be employed as an instrument of the general welfare. It is not important that the arrangements which currently are set down as the competitive system will endure. It is important that the spirit of competition shall be enhanced and not impaired. There must be an outlet for the creative urge, free play for the dynamic drive. In a society, as in the physical world, motion is inseparable from life.”

Walton Hale Hamilton (1881–1958) Yale Law Professor

Walton H. Hamilton (1957), The politics of industry, p. 168-69; as cited in: Arnold, Thurman. " Walton Hale Hamilton https://www.jstor.org/stable/794455." The Yale Law Journal 68.3 (1959): 399-400.

Life, Men, World

“To desire and strive to be of some service to the world, to aim at doing something which shall really increase the happiness and welfare and virtue of mankind,—this is a choice which is possible for all of us; and surely it is a good haven to sail for. The more we think of it, the more attractive and desirable it becomes. To do some work that is needed, and to do it thoroughly well; to make our toil count for something in adding to the sum total of what is actually profitable for humanity; to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before, or, better still, to make one wholesome idea take root in a mind that was bare and fallow; to make our example count for something on the side of honesty and cheerfulness, and courage, and good faith, and love - this is an aim for life which is very wide, and yet very definite, as clear as light. It is not in the least vague. It is only free; it has the power to embody itself in a thousand forms without changing its character. Those who seek it know what it means, however it may be expressed. It is real and genuine and satisfying. There is nothing beyond it, because there can be no higher practical result of effort. It is the translation, through many languages, of the true, divine purpose of all the work and labor that is done beneath the sun, into one final, universal word. It is the active consciousness of personal harmony with the will of God who worketh hitherto.”

Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933) American diplomat

Source: Ships and Havens https://archive.org/stream/shipshavens00vand#page/28/mode/2up/search/more+we+think+of+it (1897), p.27

Love, Life, God, Happiness

“One must perhaps qualify this statement and say that seemingly opposite tendencies each contain some modicum of the other. I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

1911 - 1940, Notes on Painting - Edward Hopper (1933)

“I believe that international terrorism is a modern form of warfare against liberal democracies. I believe that the ultimate but seldom stated goal of these terrorists is to destroy the very fabric of democracy. I believe that it is both wrong and foolhardy for any democratic state to consider international terrorism to be 'someone else's' problem…. Liberal democracies must acknowledge that international terrorism is a 'collective problem.”

Henry M. Jackson (1912–1983) American politician

(1979, Jerusalem) [Defending the 'Ancient Dream of Freedom', Paul, Wolfowitz, November 18, 2002, Jinsa.org, http://www.jinsa.org/articles/articles.html/function/view/categoryid/1366/documentid/1839/history/3,2359,2166,1366,1839]

Democracy, Problem

“You look like a faded picture / I see the cracks forming on your skin
For smoking all my stash / For burning all my cash.. It's all over town that the sun's / Going down on the days / Of your easy life”

Noel Gallagher (1967) British musician

Force of Nature
Heathen Chemistry (2002)

Life, Sun

“When poetry loses its ability to enchant, it shrinks into what is just an elaborate form of argumentation. When verse casts its particular spell, it becomes the most evocative form of language.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

“The job of our profession is to facilitate the provision of knowledge (in all forms) to those who need it”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

for whatever purpose
Source: Information history – an introduction (2009), p. 246; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Knowledge

“By me, in form unmanifest, is all this universe pervaded; all beings dwell in me, but I dwell not in them.”

W. Douglas P. Hill (1884–1962) British Indologist

Source: The Bhagavadgītā (1973), p. 139. (4.)

Universe

“In childhood we live under the brightness of immortality — heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood—for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.”

Graham Greene book The Ministry of Fear

Bk. 1, ch. 7, sct. 1
The Ministry of Fear (1943)

God, Truth, Books, World

“Advertising is a serious thing with the businessman of to-day. It is estimated that the businessmen of the United States are spending $600,000,- a year in printed forms of advertising. Furthermore one authority claims that seventy-five per cent, of all this is unprofitable. Every business man is anxious that no part of these unprofitable advertisements shall fall to his lot. The enormity of the expense, the keenness of competition, and the great liability of failure has awakened the advertising world to the pressing need for some basis of assurance in its hazardous undertakings.”

Walter Dill Scott (1869–1955) President of Northwestern university and psychologist

Source: The Theory of Advertising, 1903, p. 2

World, Failure, Business, Parting

“I am not saying that a female-dominated or Amazon society based on the oppression of men is any more "just" than is a male-dominated society based on the oppression of women. I am merely pointing out in what ways it is better for women.Perhaps someday a choice between forms of injustice will not be necessary.”

Phyllis Chesler (1940) Psychotherapist, college professor, and author

Women and Madness (2005), p. 338 (emphasis in original), and see Women and Madness (1972), pp. 287–288 (similar text).
Women and Madness (1972, 2005)

Women, Men, Way

“In order to make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own life. To risk one's life, in fact, is to reveal oneself as not-bound to the objective form or to any determined existence — as not-bound to life.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Being and Nothingness

Source: Being and Nothingness (1943), p. 237, 1998 edition

Life

“The entire heaven, making its parts everywhere harmonize with him, is filled with spirits emanating out of the Sun. For this god is ruler of five orbits in the heavens, and whilst traversing three out of these orbits, he produces in three the Graces, themselves three in number, the remaining circles form the Scales to the Balance of supreme Necessity.”

Julian (emperor) (331–363) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer

Upon the Sovereign Sun (362)

God, Sun, Parting

“The important task of all art is to destroy the static equilibrium by establishing a dynamic one. Non-figurative art demands an attempt of what is a consequence of this task, the destruction of particular form and the construction of a rhythm of mutual relations, of mutual forms, or free lines.... the law of the denaturalization of matter is of fundamental importance. In painting, the primary color that is as pure as possible realizes this abstraction of natural color.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in: 'Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art', Piet Mondrian (1937); in 'Documents of modern Art' ed. Robert Motherwell for Wittenborn, Schulz, New York 1945
1930's

Law, Art, Color, Nature

“We don’t believe this because we want to! And why would we want to? We believe it because we can prove it really is true, and that applies to everyone whether you want to believe it or not. We’re not just saying you’ve descended from primates either; we’re saying you are a primate! Humans have been classified as primates since the 1700s when a Christian creationist scientist figured out what a primate was –and prompted other scientists to figure out why that applied to us. It wouldn’t be this way if different “kinds” of life had been magically-created unrelated to anything else; not unless God wanted to trick us into believing everything had evolved. Because the phylogenetic tree of life is plainly evident from the bottom up to any objective observer who dares compare the anatomy of different sets of collective life forms. But it can be just as objectively confirmed from the top down when re-examined genetically. This is why it is referred to as a “twin-nested hierarchy”. But there’s still more than that because the evident development of physiology and morphology can be confirmed biochemically as well as chronologically in geology and developmentally in embryology. Why should that be? And how do creationists explain why it is that every living thing fits into all of these daughter sets within parent groups, each being derived according to apparently inherited traits? They don’t even try to explain any of that, or anything else. They won’t because they can’t, because evolution is the only explanation that accounts for any of this, and it explains it all.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"10th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MXTBGcyNuc, Youtube (June 5, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Life, God, Way, Parent

“There are numerous forms of marginalization that exist in our society: racism, classism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism, and so on. If you happen to be on the wrong side of any of these hierarchies, you will face many inequities and injustices. … Some people are single-issue activists that are only concerned about a single form of marginalization, usually one that impacts them personally. Single-issue perspectives create a distorted view of the world, and lead activists to propose solutions that will help some people while hurting others and leaving countless more behind. … In contrast, others of us take a more intersectional approach, recognizing that all forms of marginalization intersect with and exacerbate one another, and that we must challenge all of them simultaneously.”

Julia Serano (1967) transsexual American writer, spoken-word performer, trans-bi activist, and biologist

Leftist Critiques of Identity Politics (2018)

People, World, Help, Hurt

“We are stripped of authority and reduced and devaluated and silenced. Silenced here means that the purposes of the First Amendment, premised upon conditions presumed and promoted by protecting free speech, do not pertain to women because they are not our conditions. Consider them: individual self-fulfillment – how does pornography promote our individual self-fulfillment? How does sexual inequality even permit it? Even if she can form words, who listens to a woman with a penis in her mouth?”

Catharine A. MacKinnon (1946) American feminist and legal activist

"Francis Biddle's Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech" (1984), p. 193
Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987)

Women, Silence

“I still work with difficulty, but I seem to get along. That is the important thing to me. Sensations form the foundation of my work, and they are imperishable, I think. Moreover, I am getting rid of that devil who, as you know, used to stand behind me and forced me at will to 'imitate'; he's not even dangerous any more.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

one week later Cezanne died
Quote in Cezanne's last letter to his son Paul, Aix, 15 October 1906; as quoted in Cézanne, Ambroise Vollard, Dover publications Inc. New York, 1984, p. 112
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900

Thinking

“One comes to bless the absolute bareness, feeling that here is a pure beauty of form, a kind of ultimate harmony.”

George Mallory (1886–1924) British mountaineer

Letter to his wife Ruth Mallory (1921), acquitted in Everest: The Mountaineering History‎ (2000) by Walt Unsworth, p. 47; also The Wildest Dream: The Biography of George Mallory (2001) by Peter Gillman and Leni Gillman, p. 13

Beauty, Feeling

“A life given to determining the best form for the letters of the alphabet — does it seem extraordinary to you? But no day passes that our eyes do not fall upon something that was influenced, and made better, by this extraordinary, eccentric Scot, and if that is not a life well spent, I should be interested in a better definition.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Edward Johnston (1960).

Life

“The reproduction of labour power thus reveals as its sine qua non not only the reproduction of its ‘skills’ but also the reproduction of its subjection to the ruling ideology. … It is in the forms and under the forms of ideological subjection that provision is made for the reproduction of the skills of labour power.”

Louis Althusser book Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays

Source: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1968), "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", p. 89

“If there be any fact in our history beyond dispute it is that Roger Sherman expressed the universal sentiment of our fathers when he said, 'The abolition of slavery seemed to be going on in the United States, and the good sense of the several States would probably by degrees complete it'. In that spirit the compromises of the Constitution were made. Had not slavery at that time deprecated itself as an evil, the Constitution could not have been formed. Could the future have been foreseen, it would not have been formed. But, reasoning from the light they had, it was fair to believe as they believed, that, when the slave-trade was prohibited, the system would wither away under the double curse of Morality and Law.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Law, History, Sense, Light

“If people have personal conversations about very emotional matters in public, and people reveal parts of their body that were originally kept covered, and pornography is becoming semi-respectable, it makes you think the push for greater freedom and divesting yourself of inhibitions is a real human need. I'm 54, so I'm further back upon the road. We certainly did a fair amount of divesting ourselves of inhibitions, but there seems to have been a quantum leap in the last half a generation. Maybe we're destined to be freer, but it's taking odd forms, like showing your big gut to all the world and discussing the future of your marriage at a bus stop with 30 people listening in.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Playboy interview (2003)

Marriage, People, World, Thinking

“Could it be argued that if the Chinese revolution seems to be a response to the needs of rural society, whereas the Russian is an urbanized phenomenon, this difference corresponds to that which exists between the users of two different forms of written communication, the one archaic, the other alphabetic?”

Eric A. Havelock (1903–1988) 1903-1988, British classical philologist

"Chinese Characters and the Greek Alphabet" in Sino-Platonic Papers, 5 (December 1987)

Communication

“We do not “look” at something or someone; we “eat” it: we are like “cannibals” consuming the world for our own benefit. “The only people who have any hope of salvation are those who occasionally stop and look for a time, instead of eating.” Here we have Weil’s version of changing from a position of egocentrism to egolessness. … Weil is claiming that it all starts with paying attention to the other—any other—as the way to form our appropriate stance toward the world and all its creatures. Her essay titled “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” joins what appear to be opposites—a child’s concentration on working on a math problem and training for loving God. From her own earliest days, she saw the value of studying math and science, disciplines that demanded an openness and patience to a subject outside of oneself and whose truth did not rest with one’s own interpretation.”

Sallie McFague (1933–2019) American feminist and theologian

describing Simone Weil’s view, Blessed Are the Consumers

Love, God, People, Truth

“In Plato we find the essential form of the European attitude: the intellectual rejection of the phenomenal world of process on account of its sordid ruthlessness and the emancipation of the spirit within its own realm of permanent intellectual clarity and harmony. The ancient, aristocratic, tragic consciousness disappears; man sets out to console his spirit and protect his body by the exploitation of static ideas.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 201

World, Idea

“The promised “Pure Mohammadan Islam” is based on three rejections… The first rejection is of traditional Islamic tolerance for Christians and Jews — who, labeled “People of the Book,” could live in a caliphate by paying protection money (jizyeh). The idea is that the “protection” offered by Mohammad belonged to the early phase of Islam when the “Last Prophet” wasn’t strong enough. Once Mohammad had established his rule, the Daeshites note, he ordered the massacre of Jews and the expulsion of Christians from the Arabian Peninsula… The second rejection is aimed against “Infidel ideologies,” especially democracy — government of men by men rather than by Allah… Daesh’s third rejection is aimed against what is labeled “diluted” (iltiqati) forms of Islam — for example, insisting that Islam is a religion of peace. In Daesh’s view, Islam will be a religion of peace only after it has seized control of the entire world. Until then, the world will be divided between the House of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and the House of War (Dar al-Harb). There can never be peace between Islam and whatever that is not Islam. At best, Muslims can make truce (solh) with non-Muslims while continuing to prepare for the next war. Daesh also rejects the “aping of Infidel institutions” such as a presidential system, a parliament and the use of such terms as “republic.””

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

The only form of government in “Pure Mohammadan Islam” is the caliphate; the only law is sharia. "The ugly attractions of ISIS’ ideology" http://nypost.com/2014/11/02/the-ugly-attractions-of-isis-ideology/, New York Post (November 2, 2014). New York Post

Men, Money, War, People

“Life, as it exists on Earth in the form of men, animals and plants, is to be found, let us suppose in a high form in the solar and stellar regions. Rather than think that so many stars and parts of the heavens are uninhabited and that this earth of ours alone is peopled – and that with beings perhaps of an inferior type – we will suppose that in every region there are inhabitants, differing in nature by rank and all owing their origin to God, who is the center and circumference of all stellar regions”

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) German philosopher, theologian, jurist, and astronomer

De docta ignorantia http://www.challzine.net/29/29extraterr.html

Life, Men, God, People

“Mahela is a class player so it would be great to have him back and in the form he was in before he got injured [injured his thigh during a cricket game]”

Mahela Jayawardene (1977) Former Sri Lankan cricketer

Wicketkeeper-batsman Tim Ludeman of the Adelaide Strikers, The Advertiser (January 19, 2016), "Adelaide Strikers may roll the dice on star import Mahela Jayawardene" http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/sport/cricket/adelaide-strikers-may-roll-the-dice-on-star-import-mahela-jayawardene/news-story/120958219581e550e2750ca5e45bc479 About

Game

“A thousand years later we still use a form of the original Aztec name… coyotl, pronounced COY-yoht, accent of the first syllable… Their rich mythology produced numerous coyote gods… Huehuecoyotl, or "Venerable Old Coyote"… sounds so much like the widespread North American god-avatar… that the empire-minded Aztecs may have borrowed him from tribes far northward…”

Dan Flores (1948) American historian

Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (2016)

God

“[the authors in Justice Belied made a] compelling case that this system is not only flawed but produces serious and systematic injustice. One major theme pressed in a number of chapters is that the international criminal justice system (ICJS) that has emerged in the age of tribunals and “humanitarian intervention” has replaced a real, if imperfect, system of international justice with one that misuses forms of justice to allow dominant powers to attack lesser countries without legal impediment. No tribunals have been established for Israel’s actions in Palestine or Kagame’s mass killings in the DRC. Numerous authors in Justice Belied stress the remarkable fact of the ICC’s [International Criminal Court] exclusive focus on Africans, with not a single case of charges brought against non-Africans. And within Africa itself the selectivity is notorious – U. S. clients Kagame and Museveni are exempt; U. S. targets Kenyatta, Taylor, and Gadaffi are charged. […] The system has worked poorly in service to justice, as the authors point out, but U. S. policy has had larger geopolitical and economic aims, and underwriting Kagame’s terror in Rwanda and the DRC and directing the ICC toward selected African targets while ignoring others served those aims. Many of the statutes and much political rhetoric accompanying the new ICJS proclaimed the aim of bringing peace and reconciliation. But this was blatant hypocrisy as the exclusion of aggression as a crime, the selectivity of application, the frequency of applied victor’s justice, and the manifold abuses of the judicial processes have made for war, hatred, and exacerbated conflict. The authors of Justice Belied do a remarkable job of spelling out these sorry conditions and calling for a dismantling of the new ICJS and return to the UN Charter and nation-based attention to dealing with injustice.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Herman, review of Justice Belied: The Unbalanced Scales of International Criminal Justice, Z Magazine, January 2015.
2010s

War, Age, Peace, Justice

“The thing that I love about acting is the fact that I can help people feel things, know themselves or feel less alone. It's my form of expression, in the same way that someone might paint a picture or sing a song in that you're hoping that it moves somebody outside of their own way of thinking.”

Naomi Watts (1968) British actress and film producer

Interview at Dark Horizons (7 December 2005) http://www.darkhorizons.com/news05/kong3.php

Love, People, Hope, Way

“Applying this approach, systems belonging to different scientific disciplines are investigated in their natural forms. On the basis of experimental results, isomorphic relations between different systems are studied and, finally, some general principles applicable for all systems of a certain class are formulated.”

George Klir (1932–2016) American computer scientist

Source: An approach to general systems theory (1969), p. 97 as cited in: B. Van Rootselaar (2009) Annals of Systems Research. p. 114: About the aim of general systems theory

Nature, Study

“Our most urgent problem just now is how to preserve in a positive and critical form the soul of truth in the two great traditions, classical and Christian, that are crumbling as mere dogma.”

Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) American academic and literary criticism

Source: "English and the Discipline of Ideas" (1920), p. 69

Truth, Soul, Problem

“By "regime values," I intend to suggest that the normative foundation of ethical standards for public servants in any regime is the values of that regime. In the United States these regime values happen to be constitutional values, but not every regime takes its constitution as seriously as Americans do… By using the word "regime," my intention was to stress the particularistic character of the values that form the basis of public administration ethics. By emphasizing regime rather than constitution, I hope to make this book more interesting to students from other countries who are studying public administration in the United States.”

John Rohr (1934–2011) American political scientist

(1989, p. ix-x); as cited in: Patrick Overeem, "The Concept of Regime Values Are Revitalization and Regime Change Possible?." The American Review of Public Administration 45.1 (2015): 46-60.
Ethics for bureaucrats, 1988

Books, Hope, Study, Country

““I had formed the impression the Protector valued your counsel.”
“It is most valued when it most closely accords with his own view.””

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 8 (p. 140)

“Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror.”

Michael Johns (1964) American businessman

"Seventy Years of Evil: Soviet Crimes from Lenin to Gorbachev," Policy Review, Fall 1987, by Michael Johns: In the former Soviet Union, we face an 'Evil Empire'.

History

“Evolution is purely a religion. There is no scientific evidence at all to back up any form of macro-evolution.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Dissertation for doctor of philosophy in christian education (May 25, 1991)

Religion

“Every religion claims to believe as they do because of reason, education, or intelligence given by their god in revelation. But whether they admit it or not, all of them are assuming their preferred conclusions on faith, and this would still be true even if all of their gods exist. Believe as hard as you want to. But convincing yourself however firmly still can’t change the reality of things. Seeing is believing. But seeing isn’t knowing. Believing isn’t knowing. Subjective convictions are meaningless in science, and eyewitness testimony is the least reliable form of evidence.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"4th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80nhqGfN6t8, Youtube (December 25, 2007) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

God, Education, Faith, Religion

“The general form of the total conception of ideology is being used by the analyst when he has the courage to subject not just the adversary's point of view but all points of view, including his own, to the ideological analysis.
At the present stage of our understanding it is hardly possible to avoid this general formulation of the total conception of ideology, according to which the thought of all parties in all epochs is of an ideological character.”

Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) Hungarian sociologist

Ideology and Utopia (1929)

Courage, Understanding

“Before the wonderful, terrible wrestling with words and music there is the state of mind I'm calling 'poetic attention' … a sort of readiness … a form of knowing.”

Don McKay (1942) Canadian poet

Baler Twine

Music

“We take as given the idea of distinction and the idea of indication, and that we cannot make an indication without drawing a distinction. We take, therefore, the form of distinction for the form.”

G. Spencer-Brown (1923–2016) British mathematician

Source: Laws of Form, (1969), p. 1, cited in Niklas Luhmann, Risk: A Sociological Theory, Walter de Gruyter, 1993 p. 223.

Idea, Drawing

“The movement of people and ideas is … more than useful; it is sacrosanct. It forms part of the process by which the whole human race becomes both one and diverse, and makes itself more godlike, by affirming in the individual as well as in the species, its preeminence over the particular social and cultural worlds that it builds and inhabits. Both the movement of people and the movement of ideas can unsettle and frighten us, driving us back into ourselves. They can also inspire us to reimagine and to remake our interests, our ideals, and even our identities, by beginning to detach them from the settings with which we habitually associate them. Each of them is therefore an invitation to open ourselves to the new, in a world in which every man and woman has a better chance to become the original that he imagines himself to be.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Free Trade Reimaginedː The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics (2007), p. 210

People, World, Imagination, Idea

“Why do we forget our childhood? With rare exceptions we have no memory of our first four, five, or six years, and yet we have only to watch the development of our own children during this period to realize that these are precisely the most exciting, the most formative years of life. Schachtel’s theory is that our infantile experiences, so free, so uninhibited, are suppressed because they are incompatible with the conventions of an adult society which we call ‘civilized’. The infant is a savage and must be tamed, domesticated. The process is so gradual and so universal that only exceptionally will an individual child escape it, to become perhaps a genius, perhaps the selfish individual we call a criminal. The significance of this theory for the problem of sincerity in art (and in life) is that occasionally the veil of forgetfulness that hides our infant years is lifted and then we recover all the force and vitality that distinguished our first experiences—the ‘celestial joys’ of which Traherne speaks, when the eyes feast for the first time and insatiably on the beauties of God’s creation. Those childhood experiences, when we ‘enjoy the World aright’, are indeed sincere, and we may therefore say that we too are sincere when in later years we are able to recall these innocent sensations.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

Source: Collected Poems (1966), pp. 16-17

Life, God, Children, World

“BY primary groups I mean those characterized by intimate face-to-face association and cooperation. They are primary in several senses, but chiefly in that they are fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of the individual. The result of intimate association, psychologically, is a certain fusion of individualities in a common whole, so that one's very self, for many purposes at least, is the common life and purpose of the group. Perhaps the simplest way of describing this wholeness is by saying that it is a "we"; it involves the sort of sympathy and mutual identification for which "we" is the natural expression. One lives in the feeling of the whole and finds the chief aims of his will in that feeling.”

Charles Cooley (1864–1929) American sociologist

Source: Social Organization: a Study of the Larger Mind, 1909, p. 23 (1962)

Life, Way, Feeling, Nature

“Not taking risks one doesn't understand is often the best form of risk management.”

Raghuram G. Rajan (1963) Indian economist

From his book: Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (2010) https://books.google.co.in/books/about/Fault_Lines.html?id=2RB3j_YfEg0C

Understanding

“The natural law of good communications takes the following, quite different, form in SA:
Everything worth saying
about anything worth saying something about
must be expressed in six or fewer pieces.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: Structured analysis (SA): A language for communicating ideas (1977), p. 18; Statement cited in: Peter Freeman, ‎Anthony I. Wasserman (1983), Tutorial on software design techniques. p. 98.

Law, Communication, Nature

“The respondents in this case insist that a difficult question of public policy must be taken from the reach of the voters, and thus removed from the realm of public discussion, dialogue, and debate in an election campaign. Quite in addition to the serious First Amendment implications of that position with respect to any particular election, it is inconsistent with the underlying premises of a responsible, functioning democracy. One of those premises is that a democracy has the capacity—and the duty—to learn from its past mistakes; to discover and confront persisting biases; and by respectful, rationale deliberation to rise above those flaws and injustices. That process is impeded, not advanced, by court decrees based on the proposition that the public cannot have the requisite repose to discuss certain issues. It is demeaning to the democratic process to presume that the voters are not capable of deciding an issue of this sensitivity on decent and rational grounds. The process of public discourse and political debate should not be foreclosed even if there is a risk that during a public campaign there will be those, on both sides, who seek to use racial division and discord to their own political advantage. An informed public can, and must, rise above this. The idea of democracy is that it can, and must, mature. Freedom embraces the right, indeed the duty, to engage in a rational, civic discourse in order to determine how best to form a consensus to shape the destiny of the Nation and its people.”

Anthony Kennedy (1936) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, 572 U. S. ____, (2016), plurality opinion.

People, Democracy, Idea, Question

“On the occasion of the International Women’s Day 2016, I call on all Filipino men, women and the LGBT community to be united as one powerful force in promoting and protecting the Filipino women’s physical and emotional health and overall well-being. As one collective group, we must all work to ensure that discrimination and violence against Filipino women, and all women all over the world, do not happen in any instance. Everyday, discrimination and violence against women in so many forms—visible and invisible, physical and verbal—take place. These acts have deep and lasting effects on the women’s health and well-being. On this day, let us also renew our resolve and commitment to uphold, advance and protect our achievements in making the Philippine society more sensitive to the issues affecting the lives of Filipino women. More work needs to be done to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment, factors seen by experts as associated with discrimination and violence. Let us do everything within our power and might to stop all forms of discrimination and violence against women, that their rights are protected and upheld, and that they optimally enjoy and achieve the possible maximum standard of physical and emotion health.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Escudero, F. [Francis]. (2016, March 8). Retrieved from Official Facebook Page of Francis Escudero https://www.facebook.com/senchizescudero/posts/10153923936700610/ 2016, Facebook

Women, Men, Health, World

“Relativism is a product of the modern historical-sociological procedure which is based on the recognition that all historical thinking is bound up with the concrete position in life of the thinker [Standortsgebundenheit des Denkers]. But relativism combines this historical-sociological insight with an older theory of knowledge which was as yet unaware of the interplay between conditions of existence and modes of thought, and which modelled its knowledge after static prototypes such as might be exemplified by the proposition 2 x 2 = 4. This older type of thought, which regarded such examples as the model of all thought, was necessarily led to the rejection of all those forms of knowledge which were dependent upon the subjective standpoint and the social situation of the knower, and which were, hence, merely "relative."”

Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) Hungarian sociologist

Ideology and Utopia (1929)

Life, Knowledge, Thinking, Dependency

“My primary concern is visual form. The visual meaning may be discovered afterwards – by those who look for it. Two meanings have been ascribed to these American Flag paintings of mine. One position is: 'He's painted a flag so you don't have to think of it as a flag but only as a painting'. The other is: 'You are enabled by the way he has painted it to see it as a flag and not as a painting.”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

Actually both positions are implicit in the paintings, so you don't have to choose.
The Insiders, Rejection en Rediscovery of Man in the Arts of our Time, Selden Rodman, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1960, Chapter 6.
1960s

Way, Thinking, Painting

“The amount of suffering and pain caused by the tyranny of human beings over other animals (particularly in food production) far exceeds that caused by sexism, racism, or any other existing form of discrimination, and for this reason, the animal liberation movement is the most important liberation movement on the face of the planet today.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 278

Pain, Food, Suffering, Animals

“Personally, I never met Knut Wicksell. I saw him once when he delivered a lecture in Oslo, but being an unassuming student at the time, I did not have the courage to talk to him. So my knowledge of his theory came only through his writings. That, however, was a very intense and absorbing form of making his acquaintance. Already from my early student days, I read his writings (in German and Swedish) avidly. And I continued to do so later.
When I started my study on Wicksell, I found that his works were not easy reading. Often it was only at the third or fourth reading that I grasped his ideas. Invariably, each new reading made me more and more enthusiastic. Sometimes it happened that I thought I had finally caught him in an inconsistency or in unclear thinking. Every time this happened, it turned out, however, that the error was mine.”

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

Frisch (1952) " Frish on Wicksell http://www.sv.uio.no/econ/om/tall-og-fakta/nobelprisvinnere/ragnar-frisch/published-scientific-work/Scan1.pdf" p. 654 1940-60s

Error, Idea, Courage, Knowledge

“I have broken the blue boundary of color limits, come out into the white, besides me comrade-pilots swim in this infinity. I have established the semaphore of Suprematism. I have beaten the lining of the colored sky, torn it away and in the sack that formed itself, I have put color and knotted it. Swim! The free white sea lies before you.”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

In the 'Catalogue 10th State Exhibition', Kasimir Malevich, Moscow, 1919; as quoted in Autocritique, – essays on art and anti-art 1963 – 1987, Barbara Rose, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New York, 1988, p. 71
1910 - 1920

Color, Sea

“Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

Nobel lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1980/milosz-lecture-en.html (8 December 1980)

Feeling, Time, Dependency

“I have also seen it stated that Capital punishment is murder in its worst form. I should like to know upon what principle of human society these assertions are based and justified.”

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939) American journalist and anarchist

Individual Liberty (1926), Anarchism and Capital Punishment

“Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers.”

Wendell Phillips (1811–1884) American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator and lawyer

Lecture: The Lost Arts, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Beauty, Imagination, Literature

“That from the outset they expect or even impose all the properties of finite numbers upon the numbers in question, while on the other hand the infinite numbers, if they are to be considered in any form at all, must (in their contrast to the finite numbers) constitute an entirely new kind of number, whose nature is entirely dependent upon the nature of things and is an object of research, but not of our arbitrariness or prejudices.”

Georg Cantor (1845–1918) mathematician, inventor of set theory

Letter to Gustac Enestrom, as quoted in Georg Cantor : His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite (1990) by Joseph Warren Dauben ~ ISBN 0691024472

Question, Nature, Dependency

“The truth is always in the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because as a rule the minority is made up of those who actually have an opinion, while the strength of the majority is illusory, formed of that crowd which has no opinion — and which therefore the next moment (when it becomes clear that the minority is the stronger) adopts the latter's opinion, which now is in the majority, i. e. becomes rubbish by having the whole retinue and numerousness on its side, while the truth is again in a new minority.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

1850
1850s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1850s

Truth

“The distance in form, intention, mood and expression between Schubert's songs for voice and piano and those of, say, Adele is remarkably small.”

Howard Goodall

Howard Goodall, Howard Goodall's Story of Music. Episode 3, BBC, February 2014

Mood

“The reason I threw a rock at Billy Walker’s stupid face was I had a crush on him. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been thirty years since my last confession. I threw a rock at Billy Walker’s beautiful face. How many times? At what velocity? The priest does not ask if I intended to mar the face. One of the things I love about the church is that motive is assumed: Because I am human. What alone interests the confessor is the form of humanity I wish to confess. Confession is constructed as we are constructed. The confessional box prefigures the American I. I am the sinner, irreducible. My soul is irreducible. Not my red hand.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Love, Stupidity, Beauty, Soul

“After the Sixties there was a collapse in almost everything we believed in. It culminated in the biological disaster of AIDS — an answer to every one of us who preached free love. … AIDS is a price paid for sins committed in the Sixties, and by gay men who took free love to extremes throughout the Seventies and had unrestrained, decadent, pagan sex. I support paganism in all its forms, but a price must be paid. I believed in free love, too, but we were wrong. It wasn't the Pope who was the problem. It wasn't the struggle with old-fashioned moral codes that was the problem. It was nature. Nature said, "Guess what? If you're going to be that promiscuous, I will off you."”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

… I believe that nature rewards things that are in its best interest and punishes things that are not.
Playboy interview (May 1995)

Love, Men, Sex, Fashion

“Among those today who believe that modern poetry must do without rhyme or metre, there is an assumption that the alternative to free verse is a crash course in villanelles, sestinas and other such fixed forms. But most…are rare in English poetry. Few poets have written a villanelle worth reading, or indeed regret not having done so.”

James Fenton (1949) poet

Source: An Introduction to English Poetry (2002), Ch. 3: The Training of the Poet (p. 21)

Reading

“O the refuge of those without refuge, O the destroyer of the fear of those who bow down [to you], O the remover of the earth's burden, O the paramour of the daughter of the earth, O the cause of pleasure in devotees, O the nourisher of the dynasty of the sun, O the one with feet as delicate as the lotus, O the redeemer of the wife of the Brahmin (Ahalyā), O the nourisher of the three worlds, O the slayer of the clan of demons, O the bearer of sharp arrows, O the destroyer of Rāvaṇa in battle, O the new cloud for the Cātaka bird in the form of the descendant of Bhṛgu (Paraśurāma), O Rāma, O the ornament of devotees, take pleasure in my mind with Sītā. ॥ 20.13 ॥”

Rāmabhadrācārya (1950) Hindu religious leader

aśaraṇaśaraṇa praṇatabhayadaraṇa
dharaṇibharaharaṇa dharaṇitanayāvaraṇa
janasukhakaraṇa taraṇikulabharaṇa
kamalamṛducaraṇa dvijāṅganāsamuddharaṇa ।
tribhuvanabharaṇa danujakulamaraṇa
niśitaśaraśaraṇa dalitadaśamukharaṇa
bhṛgubhavacātakanavīnajaladhara rāma
vihara manasi saha sītayā janābharaṇa ॥
Śrībhārgavarāghavīyam

Pleasure, World, Fear, Bird

“The dominant form of government in the world today is dictatorship. Further throughout history, dictatorship has been the commonest form of government, indeed, for much of history the only form of government in the world.”

Gordon Tullock (1922–2014) American economist

"Industrial Organization and Rent Seeking in Dictatorships"

World, History

“No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in the way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains to wildness, as that which declares that the world as made especially for the uses of men. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

" Wild Wool http://books.google.com/books?id=LcIRAAAAYAAJ&pg=P361", Overland Monthly, volume 14, number 4 (April 1875) pages 361-366 (at page 364); modified slightly and reprinted in Steep Trails (1918), chapter 1 1870s

Men, World, Way, Understanding