Quotes about form
page 40

“Some students cannot accept that radical openness of history, and they lapse into some form of fundamentalism or traditionalism that simply clings to theological formulas of the past.”

Roger Haight (1936) American theologian

Preface, p. vii
Dynamics Of Theology

History, Past

“The modern age did not so much invent new forms of migration as alter drastically the means and conditions of the old forms”

Eugene M. Kulischer (1881–1956) American sociologist

Variant: The modern age did not so much invent new forms of migration as alter drastically the means and conditions of the old forms Source: Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917-1947, 1948, p. 96 as cited in: Sarah Collinson (1999) Globalisation and the dynamics of international migration implications for the refugee regime http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/pdfid/4ff59b852.pdf. May 1999. p. 1

Age

“At the point at which the concept of différance, and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity; etc.)- to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present (for example, in the form of the identity of the subject who is present for all his operations, present beneath every accident or event, self-present in its "living speech," in its enunciations, in the present objects and acts of its language, etc.)- become non pertinent. They all amount, at one moment or another, to a subordination of the movement of différance in favor of the presence of a value or a meaning supposedly antecedent to différance, more original than it, exceeding and governing it in the last analysis. This is still the presence of what we called above the "transcendental signified.”

Jacques Derrida book Positions

Source: Positions (1982), p. 29

Intelligence

“Anyway everyboy (sorry) knows that what women have done that is really important is not to constitute a great, cheap labor force that you can zip in when you're at war and zip out again afterwards but to Be Mothers, to form the coming generation, to give birth to them, to nurse them, to mop floors for them, to love them, cook for them, clean for them, change their diapers, pick up after them, and mainly sacrifice themselves for them. This is the most important job in the world. That’s why they don’t pay you for it.”

Joanna Russ (1937–2011) American author

Part 7, Chapter 1 (p. 137)
Fiction, The Female Man (1975)

Love, Women, War, World

“What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which fellowship could form. We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication.”

Dennis M. Ritchie (1941–2011) American computer scientist

In a 1980 lecture "The Evolution of the UNIX Time-sharing System", as quoted in Christopher Negus, Linux Bible 2010 Edition http://books.google.com/books?id=W5vItTVMLaYC&pg=PT650 (2010),

Communication, Time

“Poetry is a process, a form of discovery, which if it serves a cause, transcends it.”

Michael Schmidt (poet) (1947) American poet

Reading Modern Poetry, London, 1989

“[O]ligarchy, strictly speaking, is a regime "in which a rich minority rules for the advantage of the rich minority and in which the people composing that political society are ranked… because the ruling principle of that regime is the principle of natural inequality." Aristotle called it a deviant form of aristocracy (in the same way that tyranny is a deviant form of monarchy), and in practical terms, it exhibits its form through excessive concentrations of property in the hands of a few, the reservation of education to the elite, and the organization of government to serve the purposes of the oligarchs.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Bullwhip Feudalism (2018)

People, Education, Way, Nature

“Leadership is the form that authority assumes when it enters into process. As such it constitutes the determining principle of the entire scalar process, existing not only at the source, but projecting itself through its own action throughout the entire chain, until, through functional definition, it effectuates the formal coordination of the entire structure.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: Onward Industry!, 1931, p. 33

“We need no science of formulae, but a science of forms.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Implosion Magazine, No. 124, p. 29. (Callum Coats: Energy Evolution (2000))
Implosion Magazine

Science

“The dignity of history consists in reciting events with truth and accuracy, and in presenting human agents and their actions in an interesting and instructive form. The first element in history, therefore, is truthfulness; and this truthfulness must be displayed in a concrete form.”

Daniel Webster (1782–1852) Leading American senator and statesman. January 18, 1782 – October 24, 1852. Served as the Secretary of Sta…

The Dignity and Importance of History http://www.dartmouth.edu/~dwebster/speeches/dignity-history.html (23 February 1852)

Truth, History

“It is impossible to concede that, by the words "freedom of the press," the framers of the amendment intended to adopt merely the narrow view then reflected by the law of England that such freedom consisted only in immunity from previous censorship, for this abuse had then permanently disappeared from English practice. It is equally impossible to believe that it was not intended to bring within the reach of these words such modes of restraint as were embodied in the two forms of taxation already described.”

George Sutherland (1862–1942) Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, United States Senator, member of the United States House of Re…

Grosjean v. American Press Co. (1936)

Law, Freedom

“It has been my experience that good theoretical physics is empowering, in that it enables thinking to take place that would otherwise not occur, and, in its highest form, facilitates experiments that would otherwise not be done.”

Robert B. Laughlin (1950) American physicist

Emergent Relativity

Thinking

“Art thy not content that thou hast done something conformable to thy nature, and dost thou seek to be paid for it? Just as if the eye demanded recompense for seeing, or the feet for walking. For as these members are formed for a particular purpose… so also is man formed by nature to acts of benevolence.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

IX, 42
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IX

Art, Nature

“The meaning that I have given to the word administration and which has been generally adopted, broadens considerably the field of administrative science. It embraces not only the public service but enterprises of every size and description, of every form and every purpose. All undertakings require planning, organization, command, co-ordination and control, and in order to function properly, all must observe the same general principles. We are no longer confronted with several administrative sciences but with one alone, which can be applied equally well to public and to private affairs and whose principal elements are today summarized in what we term the Administrative Theory.”

Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism

Source: The administrative theory in the state, 1923, p. 116

Science

“Shy and proud men … are more liable than any others to fall into the hands of parasites and creatures of low character. For in the intimacies which are formed by shy men, they do not choose, but are chosen.”

Henry Taylor (1800–1886) English playwright and poet

Source: The Statesman (1836), Ch. 4. p. 27

Men

“Verbitsky is a servant of the United States. He receives a salary form the Ford Foundation, and in addition to being a Jew, is totally pro-North American.”

Hebe de Bonafini (1928) President of the Association of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo

Source: Old Ideas in New Discourses: "The War Against Terrorism" and Collective Memory in Uruguay and Argentina http://essays.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/marchesi.htm Ser judío http://www.pagina12.com.ar/2001/01-10/01-10-28/pag15.htm, Página/12, 2001).

“One thing leads to another, and soon you are searching for answers to basic questions.Another time during lectures on Classical Logic, we were introduced to an “experimentum crucis”. It was illustrated by the deciding experiment of Fizeau on the speed of light in water as compared to its speed in air. Since wave theory predicts that speed in water is less, and corpuscular theory (with point particles) predicts it would be faster, this is supposed to have selected the wave theory is correct. But then how would one accommodate the photoelectric effect? Then it turns out that if the “corpuscle” of light had a finite size, corpuscular theory also predicts lower speed of light in water. But then one can ask how come photoelectric emission being prompt even in feeble light, how could the energy of a photon spread over π(λ/2)2 act as a whole and liberate a single photoelectron! This leads us to question the square of the amplitude being interpreted as the probability of the particle being formed in the immediate vicinity. How do probabilities enter quantum mechanics? Thus the questions (and the quest) go on.”

E. C. George Sudarshan (1931–2018) Indian physicist

in A Glance Back at Five Decades of Scientific Research, published in Particles and Fields: Classical and Quantum, Journal of Physics: Conference Series 87 (2007), IOP Publishing, p. 1-2.

Search, Question, Light, Water

“All acts of reasoning seem to me to be different cases of one uniform process which may perhaps be best described as the substitution of similars… The chief difficulty consists in showing that all the forms of the old logic, as well as the fundamental rules of mathematical reasoning, may be explained upon the same principle; and it is to this difficult task I have devoted the most attention.”

William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) English economist and logician

Preface
The Substitution of Similars, The True Principles of Reasoning (1869)

Mathematics

“Now, what about this negro equality of which we hear so much, in and out of Congress? It is claimed by the Democrats of today, that Jefferson has uttered an untruth in the declaration of principles which underlie our government. I still abide by the democracy of Jefferson, and avow my belief that all men are created equal. Equal how? Not in physical strength, not in symmetry of form and proportion, not in graceful of motion, or loveliness of feature, not in mental endowment, moral susceptibility, and emotional power. Not socially equal, not of necessity politically equal. Not this, but every human being equally entitled to his life, his liberty, and the fruit of his toil. The Democratic Party deny this fundamental doctrine of our government, and say that there is a certain class of human beings which have no rights. If you maliciously kill them, it is no murder. If you take away their liberty, it is no crime. If you deprive them of their earnings, it is no theft. No rights which another is bound to regard. Was there ever so much diabolism compressed into one sentence? Why do |the Democrats come to us with their complaints about the negroes? I for one feel no responsibility in the matter. I did not create them; was not consulted.”

Owen Lovejoy (1811–1864) American politician

As quoted in His Brother's Blood: Speeches and Writings, 1838&ndash;64 https://books.google.com/books?id=qMEv8DNXVbIC&pg=PA177 (2004), edited by William Frederick Moore and Jane Ann Moore, p. 177 1850s, The Fanaticism of the Democratic Party (February 1859)

Life, Men, Feeling, Democracy

“The slow, the never ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those at which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 5, The Magical Control of the Weather.

Truth, Time

“Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Government and Racism http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3EADdr-5AY (16 April 2007). 2000s, 2006-2009 Context: I’m not a racist. As a matter of fact, Rosa Parks is one of my heroes, Martin Luther King is a hero — because they practiced the libertarian principle of civil disobedience, nonviolence. Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike: as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called "diversity" actually perpetuate racism. Their obsession with racial group identity is inherently racist. The true antidote to racism is liberty. Liberty means having a limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims. Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence, not skin color, gender, or ethnicity.

“Let no man posture as an advocate of peace if he proposes or supports any social system that initiates the use of force against individual men, in any form.”

Ayn Rand book For the New Intellectual

For the New Intellectual

Men, Peace, Support

“The reason why the music is important is that it's an art form— an ancient art form— that takes in the mythology of our people.”

Wynton Marsalis (1961) American jazz musician

Attributed

People, Art, Music

“If one benighted class of men begins by assuming that whatever is, is right, [contemporary radicals] begin by assuming that whatever is, is wrong. Had we to decide between these two—and I hope I make it clear that I do not think we have to decide thus—the latter would appear more blasphemous than the former because it makes a wholesale condemnation of a creation which is not ours and which exhibits the marks of a creative power that we do not begin to possess. The intent of the radical to defy all substance, or to press it into forms conceived in his mind alone … is an aggression by the self which outrages a deep-laid order of things.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“Up From Liberalism,” p. 142.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Men, Hope, Thinking, Appearance

“Opinions are not to be learned by rote, like the letters of an alphabet, or the words of a dictionary. They are conclusions to be formed, and formed by each individual in the sacred and free citadel of the mind, and there enshrined beyond the arm of law to reach, or force to shake; ay! and beyond the right of impertinent curiosity to violate, or presumptuous arrogance to threaten.”

Frances Wright (1795–1852) American activist

Lecture VI: Formation of Opinions
A Course of Popular Lectures (1829)

Law, Learning

“As a piece of rope, when burnt, retains its form, but cannot serve to bind, so is the ego which is burnt by the fire of supreme Knowledge.”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

Source: Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (1960), p. 132

Knowledge

“A scene like Peter's denial fits into no antique genre. It is too serious for comedy, too contemporary and everyday for tragedy, politically too insignificant for history—and the form which was given it is one of such immediacy that its like does not exist in the literature of antiquity.”

Erich Auerbach Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Source: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), p. 45

History, Literature

“Control every single moment of a slaves life, every minute of their day; it would tell them where to go, what to wear, where to sleep, when to work, when to eat, what to eat, when to speak, when to be silent. This is probably the biggest form of government that human beings have ever invented in the whole of history. I vigorously support Abraham Lincoln’s federal takeover of the southern states, and his highly commendable commitment to human rights. Lincoln viewed secession as an attempt to expand slavery. The Confederacy was based on the glorification of inequality and tyranny. The southern leaders clearly spelled out their views. Their motivation was not to be left alone, it was to enshrine slavery. CSA President Jefferson Davis said all black people are 'not fit to govern themselves', and they should be treated in a manner similar to 'lunatics, criminals and children.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Joshua Felipe, as quoted in "The Libertarian Attack on Abraham Lincoln" https://diplomatdc.wordpress.com/2010/06/05/the-libertarian-attack-on-abraham-lincoln-by-gregory-hilton/ (5 June 2010), by Gregory Hilton, The DC World Affairs Blog, WordPress

Life, Children, People, History

“We cannot avoid moodiness; but we may turn to account, as does the poet, the various dispositions of the mind, or give them form and shape, as the sculptor his marble.”

Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben (1806–1849) Austrian psychiatrist, poet and philosopher

The Dietetics of the Soul; Or, True Mental Discipline (1838)

“My master's thesis and later my Ph. D. thesis had the aim of axiomatizing a value for e-person games in extensive form. This work made me familiar with the extensive form, in a time when very little work on extensive games was done. This enabled me to see the perfectness problem earlier than others and to write the contributions for which I am now honored by the prize in memory of Alfred Nobel.”

Reinhard Selten (1930–2016) German economist

"Reinhard Selten - Biographical," 1994

Game, Problem, Memory, Time

“The city was breaking state and national laws every day—it had to—and the governor was outraged. He wanted to bring the whole state back under his own authority. It wasn’t an unreasonable wish, but the times weren’t ripe; and when they eventually were, the old forms of government would be no more important than the difference between Homoousian and Homoiousian. But it was going to take a lot of argument to convince the Albany man of that.”

Poul Anderson book Brain Wave

Source: Brain Wave (1954), Chapter 9 (p. 76)

Law, Time

“When something dies, it is usually disassembled, digested, and decomposed. Only rarely is anything ever fossilized, and even fewer things are very well-preserved. Because the conditions required for that process are so particular, the fossil record can only represent a tiny fraction of everything that has ever lived. Darwin provided many environmental dynamics explaining why no single quarry could ever provide a continuous record of biological events, and why it would be impossible to find all the fossilized ancestors of every lineage. But despite this, he predicted that future generations, -having the benefit of better understanding- would discover a substantial number of fossil species which he called “intermediate” or “transitional” between what we see alive today and their taxonomic ancestors at successive levels in paleontological history. In fact, in the century-and-a-half since then, we’ve found millions of evolutionary intermediaries in the fossil record, much more than Darwin said he could reasonably hope for. There are three different types of transitional forms and we have ample examples of each. But creationists still insist that we’ve never found a single one, because what they usually ask us to present are impossible parodies which evolution would neither produce nor permit.”

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

"9th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfoje7jVJpU, Youtube (May 8, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Hope, History, Understanding, Success

“We see that experience plays an indispensable role in the genesis of geometry; but it would be an error thence to conclude that geometry is, even in part, an experimental science. If it were experimental it would be only approximative and provisional. And what rough approximation!
…The object of geometry is the study of a particular 'group'; but the general group concept pre-exists… in our minds. It is imposed on us, not as form of our sense, but as form of our understanding. Only, from among all the possible groups, that must be chosen… will be… the standard to which we shall refer natural phenomena.
Experience guides us in this choice without forcing it upon us; it tells us not which is the truest geometry, but which is the most convenient.
Notice that I have been able to describe the fantastic worlds… imagined without ceasing to employ the language of ordinary geometry.”

Henri Poincaré book Science and Hypothesis

Source: Science and Hypothesis (1901), Ch. IV: Space and Geometry, Conclusions (1905) Tr. https://books.google.com/books?id=5nQSAAAAYAAJ George Bruce Halstead

World, Error, Imagination, Understanding

“Younger and smaller firms would be more likely to adopt the MDF (Multidivisional Form) than older and larger ones.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Fligstein, Neil. "The spread of the multidivisional form among large firms, 1919-1979." Advances in Strategic Management 17 (1985): 55-78.

“I wonder who will find the film more uncomfortable - men or women? Both will recoil from the brutality of the scenes of the assault. But for some men, the movie will reveal a truth that most women already know. It is that verbal sexual harassment, whether crudely in a saloon back room or subtly in an everyday situation, is a form of violence - one that leaves no visible marks but can make its victims feel unable to move freely and casually in society.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-accused-1988 of The Accused (14 October 1988) Reviews, Three star reviews

Women, Men, Truth, Feeling

“Let us contemplate two epochal events in the long human story. One is the annunciation of the unity of God at Mt. Sinai. That same God was said to have made man, alone among living beings, in His image. Implicit in the unity of God was the corresponding unity of the human race. But it was only after more than three thousand years, that the Declaration of this unity was made in Philadelphia. One need not believe in direct divine intervention to think that it has been the peculiar mission of the American people to testify to the unity on earth of God, and of man. Such testimony could take no more evident form than in the denunciation of chattel slavery in the founding itself. That denunciation is prominent beyond doubt or denial, in the documents of the founding. Men of reason can agree with men of faith, that neither God nor man could have devised a more dramatic event than our founding to demonstrate to the world the meaning inherent in this unity.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, God Bless America (2008), Slavery and the Human Story

Men, God, People, World

“The truth is, however, that every religion form is superior to the others in a particular respect, and it is this characteristic that in fact indicates the sufficient reason for the existence of that form.”

Frithjof Schuon book The Transcendent Unity of Religions

The Transcendent Unity of Religions (1953; revised edition 1984)

Truth, Religion

“Intersectionality is a concept for understanding oppression, not exploitation. Many Black feminists acknowledge the systemic roots of racism and sexism, but place far less emphasis than Marxists on the connection between the system of exploitation and oppression. Marxism is necessary because it provides a framework for understanding the relationship between oppression and exploitation and also identifies the agency for creating the material and social conditions that will make it possible to end both oppression and exploitation: the working class. Workers not only have the power to shut down the system, but also to replace it with a socialist society, based on collective ownership of the means of production. Although other groups in society suffer oppression, only the working class possesses this collective power. So the concept of intersectionality needs Marxist theory to realize the kind of unified movement that is capable of ending all forms of oppression. At the same time, Marxism can only benefit from integrating left-wing Black feminism into our own politics and practice.”

Sharon Smith (writer) (1956) American historian

A Marxist Case For Intersectionality (2017)

Understanding, Suffering, Time

“I venture on assuring you that I regard the design formed by you and your friends with sincere interest, and in particular wish well to all the efforts you may make on behalf of individual freedom and independence as opposed to what is termed Collectivism.”

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

Letter to F. W. Hirst on being unable to write a preface to Essays in Liberalism by "Six Oxford Men" (2 January 1897), as quoted In the Golden Days (1947) by F. W. Hirst, p. 158
1890s

Effort, Freedom, Sincerity

“Shall I now ask these palette-slaves what poetry means, and in how many forms it appears to us? They want to chain her [poetry], just as they are tied up themselves to their master's palette, [or] to some part of the sacred history.... to a folktale.... a miraculous landscape.... or other pompous imaginations.”

Barend Cornelis Koekkoek (1803–1862) painter from the Northern Netherlands

(original Dutch, citaat van B.C. Koekkoek:) Zal ik nu deze palet-slaven vragen, wat poezij is, en onder hoe vele vormen zij zich aan ons vertoont of voordoet? Zij willen haar gekluisterd hebben, evenals zij aan het palet van hun meester gebonden zijn, aan het een of andere gedeelte der gewijde geschiedenis.. ..aan ene volkslegende.. ..een wonder vreemd landschap.. ..en meer andere hoogdravende voorstellingen.
Koekkoek refers to the German painters who rejected the Dutch (often more realistic) landscape-painters, as 'non-poetic' artists]
Source: Herinneringen aan en Mededeelingen van…' (1841), p. 28

Imagination, History, Appearance, Parting

“This is what the visitor said the Ethicals had learned from the Ancients. The Creator, God, the One Spirit, call it what you will, forms all. It is the universe; the universe is it. But its body is formed of two essences. One is matter, the other, for lack of a better word, is nonmatter.”

Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) American science fiction writer

Source: The Riverworld series, The Magic Labyrinth (1980), Ch. 19

God, Learning, Universe

“The creation of the following paintings is to be imagined as follows: A person is sitting beside the sea. She is painting. A tune suddenly enters her mind. As she starts to hum it, she notices that the tune exactly matches what she is trying to commit to paper. A texts forms in her head, and she starts to sing the tune, with her own words, over and over again in a loud voice until the painting seems complete. Frequently, several texts take shape, and the result is a duet, or it..”

Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) German painter

Charlotte's 5th introduction page, related to image JHM no. 4155-5 https://charlotte.jck.nl/detail/M004155-e: 'The creation of the following..', p. 45 this quote is written in brush over the whole page of the painting, without any figure Charlotte Salomon - Life? or Theater?

Imagination, Singing, Painting, Personality

“The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

“It’s been my great fortune to be surrounded by people that have reminded me of how important process is, not outcome. When you’re an actor, or really an artist of a collaborative form, you have so little control of the outcome. And if you are only focused on that…it won’t turn out well. If you’re focused on the outcome, chances are you’re focused on people’s perceptions of the outcome—how much money something makes, how it looks, rather than how it feels. And I think that has been the most valuable—one of the most valuable—lessons I’ve learned is to really appreciate, recognize, and practice the process, not the outcome.”

Zoey Deutch (1994) American actress

Interview with Coveteur Magazine, 2018 http://coveteur.com/2018/05/14/zoey-deutch-talks-beauty-secrets-career/

Money, People, Feeling, Thinking

“As a matter of fact, these attributes are their fate, no longer separate objects they can carry.... part of their actual presence. I try to signify this by reorganizing the objective form of such a legendary figure so as to create an allegorical form that is complete in itself, no longer requiring an attribute that must be carried like the German businessman’s briefcase; the lyre becomes part of the poet's presence, its text written all over his body, as if tattooed on his skin.”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

quote, c. 1960, in France
Source: 1960 - 1968, Dialogues – conversations with.., quotes, c. 1960, p. 153

Fate, Quotes, Tattoo, Parting

“Arthropods and vertebrates share some broad features of general organization - elongated, bilaterally symmetrical bodies, with sensory organs up front, excretory structures in the back, and some form of segmentation along the major axis. But the geometry of major internal organs could hardly be more different… Arthropods concentrate their nervous system on their ventral (belly) side as two major cords running along the bottom surface of the animal. The mouth also opens on the ventral side, with the esophagus passing between the two nerve cords, and the stomach and remainder of the digestive tube running along the body above the nerve cords. In vertebrates, and with maximal contrast, the central nervous system runs along the dorsal (top) surface as a single tube culminating in a bulbous brain at the front end. The entire digestive system then runs along the body axis below the nerve cord.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 321
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Animals

“I'm against abortion as a form of birth control, and I basically hold to the Reagan position.”

John R. Bolton (1948) American lawyer and diplomat

"The Man with the Mustache"

Birth

“It is not always easy to diagnose. The simplest form of stupidity — the mumbling, nose-picking, stolid incomprehension — can be detected by anyone. But the stupidity which disguises itself as thought, and which talks so glibly and eloquently, indeed never stops talking, in every walk of life is not so easy to identify, because it marches under a formidable name, which few dare attack. It is called Popular Opinion.”

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

Can a Doctor Be a Humanist? (1984).

Life, Stupidity

“In the UK, while the arts are the second biggest sector after banking, they probably form less than one tenth of 1% of government spending. It's completely scuzzy.”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

Art

“Foot-and-mouth disease is a form of flu, treatable by proper veterinary care, preventable by vaccination, lethal neither to humans nor to animals. These animals, millions of them not even infected, were all killed only because their market value had been diminished and because trade policies required it—because, in short, under the circumstances it was the quick and convenient thing to do. By the one measure we now apply to these creatures, they had all become worthless. For them, the difference between what happened and what awaited them anyway was one of timing. And for us the difference was visibility. This time, we had to watch.”

Matthew Scully (1959) American political writer and speechwriter

Dominion (2002)

Disease, Time, Animals

“My first serious programming work was done in the very early 1960s, in Assembler languages on IBM and Honeywell machines. Although I was a careful designer — drawing meticulous flowcharts before coding — and a conscientious tester, I realised that program design was hard and the results likely to be erroneous. Into the Honeywell programs, which formed a little system for an extremely complex payroll, I wrote some assertions, with run-time tests that halted program execution during production runs. Time constraints didn't allow restarting a run from the beginning of the tape. So for the first few weeks I had the frightening task on several payroll runs of repairing an erroneous program at the operator’s keyboard ¾ correcting an error in the suspended program text, adjusting the local state of the program, and sometimes modifying the current and previous tape records before resuming execution. On the Honeywell 400, all this could be done directly from the console typewriter. After several weeks without halts, there seemed to be no more errors. Before leaving the organisation, I replaced the run-time halts by brief diagnostic messages: not because I was sure all the errors had been found, but simply because there would be no-one to handle a halt if one occurred. An uncorrected error might be repaired by clerical adjustments; a halt in a production run would certainly be disastrous.”

Michael A. Jackson (1936) British computer scientist

Michael A. Jackson (2000), "The Origins of JSP and JSD: a Personal Recollection", in: IEEE Annals of Software Engineering, Volume 22 Number 2, pages 61-63, 66, April-June 2000.

Error, Time, Drawing

“Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Fragmente, sagen Sie, wären die eigentliche Form der Universalphilosophie.
“A” in “Selected Aphorisms from the Athenaeum (1798)”, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #259
Athenäum (1798 - 1800)

Universe

“How can reason possibly grasp that immensity beyond all being where the precious food of the Eucharist is, in some marvellous way, made one with us, drawing us wholly to itself and changing us into itself? It is a union more intimate than any that the human mind can conceive, totally unlike any other change, a union more compatible than a tiny drop of water losing itself in the wine-vat and becoming one with the wine, or that of the rays of the sun made one with the sun's splendour; or the soul with the body, the two together making one person, one being. In this union the soul is lifted above the infirmity of its natural state, its own insufficiency, and there it is purified, transfigured and raised above its own powers, its human operations, its very self. Both being and activities are penetrated through and through by God, formed and transformed in a divine manner, the soul's new birth is accomplished in truth, and the spirit, losing all its native incompatibility, flows into divine union.”

Johannes Tauler (1300–1361) German theologian

Sermons, From Our Daily Bread

God, Truth, Food, Way

“Call us not weeds, we are flowers of the Sea,
For lovely and bright and gay tinted are we,
And quite independent of sun's fire or showers-
Then call us not weeds! We are ocean's bright flowers,
Not nursed like the plants of a summer parterre,
Where gales are but sighs of an evening air,
Our exquisite, fragile and delicate forms
Are nursed by the Ocean and rocked by the Storms.”

Petar Beron

Historia naturalis bulgarica 4: 10 - 15.

Love, Flowers, Sun, Summer

“Of which liberalism does one wish to speak? I distinguish two principal forms of liberalism. For one…liberty is a right; for the other a duty. For one it is a gift; for the other a conquest… One liberalism conceives liberty rooted in the individual, and therefore opposes the individual to the State, a State understood as possessing no intrinsic value—but exclusively serving the well being and the improvement of the individual. The State is seen as a means, not an end. It limits itself to the maintenance of public order, excluding itself from the entirety of spiritual life—which, therefore, remains exclusively a sphere restricted to the individual conscience. That liberalism, historically, is classical liberalism—of English manufacture. It is, we must recognize, a false liberalism, containing only half the truth. It was opposed among us by Mazzini with a criticism, that I maintain, is immortal. But there is another liberalism, that matured in Italian and German thought, that holds entirely absurd this view of the antagonism between the State and the individual.”

Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) Italian neo-Hegelian Idealist philosopher and politician

Che cosa è il fascismo: Discorsi e polemiche (“What is Fascism?”), Florence: Vallecchi, (1925) pp. 42-45, 47-48, 49-51, 56,Origins and Doctrine of Fascism, A. James Gregor, translator and editor, Transaction Publishers, 2003, p. 63

Life, Truth, Falseness

“If I have called Cubism a new order, it is without any revolutionary ideas or any reactionary ideas... One cannot escape form one's own epoch, however revolutionary one may be. I do not think my painting has ever been revolutionary. It was not directed against any kind of painting. I have never wanted to prove that I was right and someone else wrong... If there is a touch of reaction, since life imposes that, it is minute. And then it is so difficult to judge a thing historically, separated from its environment: it is the relationship between a man and what he does that counts. That's what good and touches us.”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

Source: 1946 - 1963, In conversation with Dora Vallier' (1954), p. 265

Life, Idea, Thinking, Painting

“And however one's mind may be elevated, and kept us to what is excellent, by the works of the Great Masters — still Nature is the fountain's head, the source from whence all originally must spring — and should an artist continue his practice without referring to nature he must soon form a manner, & be reduced to the same deplorable situation as the French painter mentioned by Sir J. Reynolds, who told him that he had long ceased to look at nature for she only put him out.For the last two years I have been running after pictures, and seeking the truth at second hand. I have not endeavoured to represent nature with the same elevation of mind — but have neither endeavoured to make my performances look as if really executed by other men….. There is room enough for a natural painter. The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth.I am come to a determination to make no idle visits this summer, nor to give up my time to common-place people. I shall return to Bergholt, where I shall make some laborious studies from nature — and I shall endeavour to get a pure and unaffected manner of representing the scenes that may employ me.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

3 quotes in Constable's letter to John Dunthorne (29 May 1802), from John Constable's Correspondence, ed. R.B. Beckett (Ipswich, Suffolk Records Society, 1962-1970), part 2, pp. 31-32
1800s - 1810s

Men, People, Truth, Spring

“The highest form of grace is silence.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

Silence

“All groups and organizations need to know how they are doing against their goals and periodically need to check to determine whether they are performing in line with their mission. This process involves three areas in which the group needs to achieve consensus leading to cultural dimensions that later drop out of awareness and become basic assumptions. Consensus must be achieved on what to measure, how to measure it, and what to do when corrections are needed. The cultural elements that form around each of these issues often become the primary focus for what newcomers to the organization will be concerned about because such measurements inevitably become linked to how each employee is doing his or her job.”

Edgar H. Schein (1928) Psychologist

Source: Organizational Culture and Leadership, 1985, p. 97

“I realized that all forms of religion are masks that the divine wears to communicate with us. Behind all religions there’s a reality, and this reality wears whatever clothes it needs to speak to a particular people.”

Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (1924–2014) American writer and activist, Jewish Renewal movement pioneer

The December Project: An Extraordinary Rabbi and a Skeptical Seeker Confront Life’s Greatest Mystery, with Sara Davidson.

People, Religion, Communication, Reality

“Love is the closest thing to laughter and the closest thing to tears. Love is the motive power of everything in the universe that has beauty in it. Love is the reason for everything and the reward for everything.
It’s always seemed strange to me that we have to use the word love for so many things. And yet when you come to think of it, that’s all right, too, because love is in everything in some form or another. Without it, I imagine the flowers would stop blooming and the sun would stop shining and people would stop laughing, and even the rain wouldn’t fall.
So love is always growth.
I think if I could have just one word for love—it would be understanding.
Love must always be unselfish, and strangely enough, love is the only thing in the world that ever is unselfish. And if it isn’t unselfish, it’s only a counterfeit of love.”

Harold Lloyd (1893–1971) American film actor and producer

"What is Love? Twelve Men of the Screen Give Their Ideas". Photoplay, February 1925, p. 36. (Photoplay Publishing Company). https://archive.org/stream/pho28chic#page/n163/mode/2up

Love, People, World, Beauty

“I want to ask this congregation, every man, woman and child, to answer the question in their own heart, what kind of a being God is?... Does any man or woman know? Have any of you seen him, heard him, or communed with him?... God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! That is the great secret. If the veil were rent today, and the great God who holds this world in its orbit, and who upholds all worlds and all things by his power, was to make Himself visible,—I say, if you were to see Him today, you would see Him like a man in form—like yourselves in all the person, image, and very form as a man; for Adam was created in the very fashion, image and likeness of God, and received instruction from, and walked, talked and conversed with Him, as one man talks and communes with another.... It is the first principle of the Gospel to know for a certainty the Character of God, and to know that we may converse with him as one man converses with another, and that He was once a man like us; yea, that God Himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ himself did; and I will show it from the Bible.”

Joseph Smith, Jr. book History of the Church

History of the Church, 6:303-04 (7 April 1844)
1840s, King Follett discourse (1844)

God, Secret, World, Communication

“Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.”

John Berger book Ways of Seeing

Ways of Seeing (1972)

“The chief character in this narrative is the Caribbean Sea, one of the world's most alluring bodies of water, a rare gem among the oceans, defined by the islands that form a chain of lovely jewels to the north and east.”

James A. Michener book Caribbean

Caribbean (1989) First lines

Love, World, Water, Sea

“This means people of every race, ethnicity and religion can be fully and equally American. It means that bigotry or white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed. It means the very identity of our nation depends on the passing of civic ideals to the next generation.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2010s, 2017, Speech at "Spirit of Liberty: At Home, In the World" event (2017)
Context: Our identity as a nation – unlike many other nations – is not determined by geography or ethnicity, by soil or blood. Being an American involves the embrace of high ideals and civic responsibility. We become the heirs of Thomas Jefferson by accepting the ideal of human dignity found in the Declaration of Independence. We become the heirs of James Madison by understanding the genius and values of the U. S. Constitution. We become the heirs of Martin Luther King Jr. by recognizing one another not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. This means people of every race, ethnicity and religion can be fully and equally American. It means that bigotry or white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed. It means the very identity of our nation depends on the passing of civic ideals to the next generation.

People, Religion, Dependency

“The sentence, 'stopping the printing presses,' is a figurative expression, because it is being done now by creating credit by the Federal Reserve System. But this is government action — all inflation is ultimately the result of activities which government determines and can control. And all inflations have been stopped in the past by the government stopping creating money, or preventing the central bank from creating more money. May I add just one thing? See, all inflations have been stopped by people who created or believed in a very naive form of the Quantity Theory, and acted on that. It may be wrong, but it is the only adequate theory effective to stop an inflation.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

1975 interview https://mises.org/library/hayek-meets-press-1975 on "Meet the Press." 1960s–1970s

Money, People, Past

“Human beings hold two types of theories of action. There is the one that they espouse, which is usually expressed in the form of stated beliefs and values. Then there is the theory that they actually use; this can only be inferred from observing their actions, that is, their actual behavior.”

Chris Argyris (1923–2013) American business theorist/Professor Emeritus/Harvard Business School/Thought Leader at Monitor Group

Source: On organizational learning (1999), p. 126: as cited in: Kenneth D. Shearer, ‎Robert Burgin (2001) The Readers' Advisor's Companion. p. 39

Behavior

“An accompanying Special Provision in the Supreme Court budget provides that … “all non-recurring appropriations herein such as, but not limited to, foreign-assisted projects and locally-funded projects, shall not form part of the Judiciary’s appropriation that may not be reduced by Congress, in order to clarify matters Mr. President.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the FY 2015 National Budget

Parting

“To befool and mislead the people, to falsify public opinion, is to pervert and destroy a republican form of government.”

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

"Fooling the People as a Fine Art", La Follette's Magazine (April 1918)

People

“And what (else} did we discover? We discovered that it was exceedingly profitable to get garbage from large parts of the town; that garbage was rich in grease and in sugar. And we took it to the reduction plant and we turned that grease into a very acceptable and delightful non-odorous product which you a little later bought in the form of soap.
Another thing, it seems to me, is a by-product of this catholic curiosity, that is the ability to loaf. You can't be an administrator, a good successful administrator, and not know how to loaf. Because if you are industrious all the time and tend to your job, there is always more work than you can possibly do in a day, and if you tend to that job all the time you will be going right on in a routine, you will become more ans more specialized, you will become more and more analytical, you will become more and more interested in what you are particularly charged with doing, and progressively less and less generalized in your outlook, less and less interested in what the other fellow is doing. And the only way you can compensate for that, of course, is to loaf, to loaf whole-heartedly whenever and wherever possible, and with whomever, because the only way that you can find out what are the questions in the minds of these people you have got to loaf with them to find out the truth about how they feel.
Now, of course, you can't loaf with all the individuals, but you have to loaf with a great many of them, and you have to know how to do it, and you know you won't like to do it unless you have a catholic curiosity, not only about things that I've been talking about, but about persons.”

Louis Brownlow (1879–1963) American mayor

Source: "What Is an Administrator?" 1936, p. 12; As cited in Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 658

People, Truth, Way, Feeling

“But trying to be a painter did teach me to look at the world in a very particular way—looking very closely at things, at colors, at how things form themselves in space — and I've always been grateful for that. You have all this space, and you have a figure: what do you do with it? And in a way that’s what all art is. How do we find a place for our creatures, or inventions, in this incoherent space into which we’re thrown?”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200 (2009)

World, Art, Color, Way

“For the present at least [1909] I shall restrict my work to the ordinary world of the senses, since that is the world in which we still live. But nevertheless art even now form a transition to the finer regions, which perhaps I am incorrect in calling spiritual, for everything that has form is not yet spiritual, as I read somewhere. But it is nonetheless the path of ascension away from matter. Well dear Querido, with many heartfelt wishes, Piet Mondriaan.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote from Mondrian's letter to Israel Querido, Summer of 1909; published in the weekly magazine 'De Controleur' 23 Oct, 1909; as cited in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 36
1900's

World, Art, Sense, Reading

“Any sufficiently advanced form of magick will appear indistinguishable from science.”

Peter J. Carroll (1953) British occultist

Source: PsyberMagick (1995), p. 15

Appearance, Science

“I… praise the newly opened halls of fossil mammals at the American Museum of Natural History. …teaching us about evolutionary trees by organizing the entire hall as a central trunk and set of branches… placing our brains in our feet and letting us learn by walking. …the chosen geometry of evolutionary organization… violates the traditional picture of life's history, thus illustrating… an important principle in the history of science: the central role of pictures, graphs, and other forms of visual representation in channeling and constraining our thought. …Words are an evolutionary afterthought. …My colleagues have actually done it. …They have ordered all the fossils into an unconventional iconographic tree that fractures the bias of progress. …so that we can preambulate along the tree of life and absorb the new scheme viscerally by walking… They have taken Colbert's radical idea and arranged all the fossils by their branching order, not their later "success" or "advancement."”

Stephen Jay Gould book Dinosaur in a Haystack

Groups that branch early appear early in the hall... Sea cows and elephants are at the end of the hall, horses in the middle, and primates near the beginning.
"Evolution by Walking", pp. 249-254.
Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995)

Life, History, Idea, Tree

“There is no aspect of a people's collective life that may not have to be abandoned for the sake of meeting a practical challenge, just as there is no aspect they may not have to jettison in order to deal with the visionary appeal in politics. Consequently, the different forms of social life that exist in the world are always less real than they seem; the differences among them subsist on a containment of conflict. If the nations of the world were exposed to constant practical and visionary conflict, none of the differences among them would have any permanence. This does not mean that the peoples would become alike; it does mean that the marks that distinguish their identities would constantly shift hands and that other marks, never before dreamt of, would suddenly appear.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success (1987), p. 169

Life, People, World, Appearance

“In the 20th Century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas. ("The Circles of Perdition," December 8, 1947)”

Whittaker Chambers (1901–1961) Defected Communist spy

TIME magazine (1939-1948)

Idea

“Nor is this kind of Texture peculiar to Cork onely; for upon examination with my Microscope, I have found that the pith of an Elder, or almost any other Tree, the inner pulp or pith of the Cany hollow stalks of several other Vegetables: as of Fennel, Carrets, Daucus, Bur-docks, Teasels, Fearn, some kinds of Reeds &c., have much such a kind of Schematisme, as I have lately shewn that of Cork, save onely that here the pores are rang'd the long-ways, or the same ways with the length of the Cane, whereas in Cork they are transverse.
The pith also that fills that part of the stalk of a Feather that is above the Quil, has much such a kind of texture, save onely that which way foever I set this light substance, the pores seem'd to be cut transversly, so that I guess this pith which fills the Feather, not to consist of abundance of long pores separated with Diaphragms, as Cork does, but to be a kind of solid or hardned froth, or a congeries of very small bubbles consolidated in that form, into a pretty stiff as well as tough concrete, and that each Cavern, Bubble, or Cell, is distinctly separate from any of the rest, without any kind of hole in the encompassing films, so that I could no more blow through a piece of this kinde of substance, then I could through a piece of Cork, or the found pith of an Elder.”

Robert Hooke book Micrographia

Micrographia (1667) p. 115

Way, Tree, Light, Parting

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

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

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

History, Drawing

“The laws of the media, in tetrad form, bring logos and formal cause up to date to reveal analytically the structure of all human artefacts.”

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

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 127

Law

“Walter Hollenweger states that “intercultural theology is that scientific, theological discipline that operates in the context of a given culture without absolutizing it.” This programmatic statement provides us with a rule for demarcating between missionary and nonmissionary theologies. A nonmissionary theology—that is, one that does not think interculturally—absolutizes its given cultural context. Such a theology engages in what we can call constantinianism. Theologies that engage in this form of God-talk we can then identify as exercises in Volkstheologie. The negative task of a missionary or intercultural theology is therefore to articulate an understanding of the kerygma that precludes, or at least resists, the absolutizing of one’s given culture.”

Constantinianism Policies

David Congdon, The Mission of Demythologizing (2015), pp. 523-524

God, Exercises, Understanding, Thinking

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

Hector McNeil

Hansard, HC Dec 21 May 1946 vol 423 c64W

Men, Fight, Parting, Country

“I raised my arms as if in prayer and heard the mutter of response behind me. Then I scattered the dried grains, red and brown and black, and studied the patterns they formed on the stone ledge before Sibbos. This is not such a mystic thing. You see what it is sensible to see, or else you interpret what you see so that the meaning comes out as you want it.”

Tanith Lee book The Birthgrave

Book Two, Part I “Across the Ring”, Chapter 3 (p. 155)
The Birthgrave (1975)

Study

“The Diary of Vaslav Nijinjsky reaches a limit of sincerity beyond any of the documents that we have referred to on this study. There are other modern works that express the same sense that civilized life is a form of living death; notably the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the novels of Franz Kafka; but there is an element of prophetic denunciation in both, the attitude of healthy men rebuking their sick neighbors. We possess no other record of the Outsider's problems that was written by a man about to be defeated and permanently smashed by those problems.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), p. 115

Life, Death, Men, Problem

“The practice of the Court forms the law of the Court.”

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

Wilson v. Rastall (1792), 4 T. R. 757.

Law

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

Douglas John Hall (1928) Canadian theologian

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

Religion, Strong

“Derangement is the signature expression of the Great Backlash, a style of conservatism that first came snarling onto the national stage in response to the partying and protests of the late sixties. While earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues — summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art — which it then marries to pro-business economic polices. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends. And it is these economic achievements — not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars — that are the movement’s greatest monuments. The backlash is what has made possible the international free-market consensus of recent years, with all the privatization, deregulation, and de-unionization that are its components. Backlash ensures that Republicans will continue to be returned to office even when their free-market miracles fail and their libertarian schemes don’t deliver and their "New Economy" collapses. It makes possible the police pushers’ fantasies of “globalization” and a free-trade empire that are foisted upon the rest of the world with such self-assurance. Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire plant must remake itself along the lines preferred by the Republican Party, U. S. A.The Great Backlash has made the laissez-faire revival possible, but this does not mean that it speak to us in the manner of the capitalists of old, invoking the divine right of money or demanding that the lowly learn their place in the great chain of being. On the contrary; the backlash imagines itself as a foe of the elite, as the voice of the unfairly persecuted, as a righteous protest of the people on history’s receiving end. That is champions today control all three branches of government matters not a whit. That is greatest beneficiaries are the wealthiest people on the plant does not give it pause.”

Thomas Frank book What's the Matter with Kansas?

Introduction: What's the Matter with America (pp. 5-6).
What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004)

Money, War, People, World

“For an instant a half-formed prayer struggled into Havor’s mouth. But he could not utter it. Not for himself. For him those words were already drowned by the noise the thong-whip had made, or the sounds of children crying out of hunger or the cold or sheer misery in that grey house of orphans in the far North, eight years ago.”

Tanith Lee (1947–2015) British writer

Source: Short fiction, Companions on the Road (1975), Chapter 7, “The Snow-Waste” (p. 69)

Hunger, Children, Housing, Cry

“The estranged ego projects its own disorder on to society and expects the restructuring and integration of the self writ large, the society, to reflect back on to the source of consciousness. Stirner regards this flight from self as a form of suicide, the dissolution of identity and uniqueness.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 79

Suicide

“Towns should be laid out not as an exact square nor with salient angles, but in circular form, to give a view of the enemy from many points. Defense is difficult where there are salient angles because the angle protects the enemy rather than the inhabitants.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter V, Sec. 2

“But that is the way of the place: down our many twisting corridors, one encounters story after story, some heroic, some villainous, some true, some false, some funny, some tragic, and all of them combining to form the mystical, undefinable entity we call the school. Not exactly the building, not exactly the faculty or the students or the alumni — more than all those things but also less, a paradox, an order, a mystery, a monster, an utter joy.”

Stephen L. Carter book The Emperor of Ocean Park

Source: The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002), Ch. 9, A Pedagogical Disagreement, II

School, Way, Joy, Falseness

“You can really bring so much more to rock'n'roll. Rock'n'roll is the most accepting, is the most fertile ground for creating hybrid forms of music and hybrid forms of show, if you draw from many, many different wells. It's just unfortunate so many rock'n'roll stars only bother to learn how to play like Led Zeppelin and/or the Rolling Stones and that's what you get, disc after disc and show after show.”

David Lee Roth (1954) Rock vocalist; lead singer with Van Halen

Patrick McDonald (October 13, 1988) "David Lee Roth: Outrageous or normal?", The Advertiser.

Music, Star, Learning, Drawing

“Plato, despair!
We prove by norms
How numbers bear
Empiric forms,

How random wrong
Will average right
If time be long
And error slight,

But in our hearts
Hyperbole
Curves and departs
To infinity.

Error is boundless.
Nor hope nor doubt,
Though both be groundless,
Will average out.”

J. V. Cunningham (1911–1985) American writer

“Meditation on Statistical Method”, 1960
The Exclusions of a Rhyme: Poems and Epigrams, Ohio University Press, 1960.
Other poetry

Hope, Error, Time, Heart

“A manly form at her side she saw,
And joy was duty and love was law.
Then she took up her burden of life again,
Saying only, "It might have been."”

John Greenleaf Whittier Maud Muller

Maud Muller (1856)

Love, Life, Law, Joy

“I told him how we kept fewer forms between us and God; retaining, indeed, no more than, perhaps, the nature of mankind in the mass rendered necessary for due observance. I told him I could not look on flowers and tinsel, on wax- lights and embroidery, at such times and under such circumstances as should be devoted to lifting the secret vision to Him whose home is Infinity, and His being — Eternity. That when I thought of sin and sorrow, of earthly corruption, mortal depravity, weighty temporal woe — I could not care for chanting priests or mumming officials; that when the pains of existence and the terrors of dissolution pressed before me — when the mighty hope and measureless doubt of the future arose in view — _then_, even the scientific strain, or the prayer in a language learned and dead, harassed: with hindrance a heart which only longed to cry — "God be merciful to me, a sinner!"”

Charlotte Brontë book Villette

Source: Villette (1853), Chapter XXXVI: The Apple of Discord

God, Pain, Secret, Hope

“America is preeminently a country of, if not sexual licenses… a country of sexual tolerance, a country of sexual, I… would settle for pluralism, for now. Well, the Holy Mother Church doesn't settle for that. The Holy Mother Church makes rather strict demands. The Holy Mother Church prohibits, by various edicts,… statutes, and pronouncements, all forms of sex that are not specifically devoted to the outcome of procreating further Catholics, and it enforces this with a celibate hierarchy. Now, that's fine, and it is your choice, and… as Mr. Donohue did say, no one has to join that church, but that church, where it can, does try and impose those standards on non-believers and non-members. And there will always seem, to some people, I think, something absurd in the enforcement of such statutes, especially since we know most Catholics don't observe them, by a celibate oligarchy and hierarchy.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2000s, 2000, "Hostility Of America to Religion" (2000)

People, Sex, Thinking, Country

“Thus far, gentlemen, I have been insisting very strenuously upon what the most vulgar common sense has every disposition to assent to and only ingenious philosophers have been able to deceive themselves about. But now I come to a category which only a more refined form of common sense is prepared willingly to allow, the category which of the three is the chief burden of Hegel's song, a category toward which the studies of the new logico-mathematicians, Georg Cantor and the like, are steadily pointing, but to which no modern writer of any stripe, unless it be some obscure student like myself, has ever done anything approaching to justice.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

Lecture II : The Universal Categories, §3. Laws: Nominalism, CP 5.59
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)

Justice, Sense, Study

“I will repeat then, Sir, that it is not this treaty, it is the Earl of Shelburne alone whom the movers of this question are desirous to wound. This is the object which has raised this storm of faction; this is the aim of the unnatural coalition to which I have alluded. If, however, the baneful alliance is not already formed, if this ill-omened marriage is not already solemnized, I know a just and lawful impediment, and, in the name of the public safety, I here forbid the banns.”

William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806) British politician

John Almon and John Debrett, "Register of Parliament".
Speech in the House of Commons, 21 February 1783. Referring to the Fox-North Coalition which was already agreed in outline.

Marriage, Law, Question

“The violent, antirationalistic impulse in Western countries is reacting to an intellectual state of affairs in which all thinking has become strategy; this impulse shows a disgust for a certain form of self-preservation. It is a sensitive shivering from the cold breath of a reality where knowledge is power and power is knowledge.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. xxix

Knowledge, Thinking, Reality, Country

“Superior forms of thought have a fatal tendency of later becoming revealed law: and all philosophy ends, in its last stages, by becoming religion.”

José Maria Eça de Queiroz book Cartas de Inglaterra

As formas superiores do pensamento tem uma tendência fatal a tornar-se na futura lei revelada: e toda a filosofia termina, nos seus velhos dias, por ser religião.
"Israelismo"; "Israelism" p. 50.
Cartas de Inglaterra (1879–82)

Religion, Law

“If grand unified theories are correct, we ought to be able to derive the relative power of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions at accessible energies from their presumed equality at much higher energies. When this is attempted, a wonderful result emerges. …in the form first calculated by Howard Georgi, Helen Quinn, and Steven Weinberg …The couplings of strong-interaction gluons decrease, those of the [weak interaction] W bosons stay roughly constant, and those of the [electromagnetic interaction] photons increase at short distances [or high energies]—so they all tend to converge, as desired.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

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

Strong

Quotes about form page 40

Quotes about form
page 40