Quotes about form
page 42

“Snatch them baldheaded, slap their teeth out. Little starved faces four feet from the screen, you’d speak to them in a loud, commanding voice, get not even a twitch. Use of the preemptive splint, not everyone knows about it. The world reminds us of its power, again and again and again. Going along minding your own business, and suddenly an act of God, right there in front of you. Great falls of snow and bursting birds. Getting guilty, letting it all slide. Sown here and there like little…petunias, one planted in Old Lyme, one in Fairbanks, one in Tempe. Alleged that he slept with her while she was asleep, I can see it, under certain circumstances. You may wink, but not at another person. You may wink only at pigeons. You may pound in your tent pegs, pitch your tent, gather wood for the fire, form the hush puppies. They seek to return? Back to the nest? The warm arms? The ineffable smells? Not on your tintype. Well, I think that’s a little harsh. Think that’s a little harsh do you? Yes, harsh. Harsh. Well that’s a sketch, that is, that’s a tin-plated sketch— They write and telephone. Short of cash? Give us a call, all inquiries handled with the utmost confidentiality. They call constantly, they’re calling still, saying williwaw, williwaw”

Donald Barthelme book Sixty Stories

“Aria”.
Sixty Stories (1981)

God, World, Business, Bird

“You ask which form of government is the best? Whichever teaches us to govern ourselves.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Welche Regierung die beste sei? Diejenige, die uns lehrt, uns selbst zu regieren.
Maxim 353, trans. Stopp
Variant translation by Saunders: Which is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves. (225)
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

“The dualistic-static form of thought which marks the European tradition attains its most radical expression in Descartes. Whatever lip service we pay to other ideas, and however certain we are of its falsity, after three centuries we still behave as if we lived in a Cartesian world. The static clarity of Cartesian thought inevitably fascinated and imposed on beings who were so badly in need of harmony and so ready to deny process in the search for it. The very clarity of the method exposes its own errors, but we are accustomed to them and like them, for they satisfy our vanity. It has been evident for a century that unity is necessary to thought, and that process is inherent in nature, but western man has preferred to perish in his dualism rather than give up the proud autonomy of reason and risk losing his identity in the universal process.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 214

World, Error, Search, Idea

“I'd like to say something about this last, about this last point of this terrible, terrible business. I mean Treblinka. I was given orders. I went to see Globocnik in Treblinka. That was the second time. The installations were now in operation, and I had to report to Müller. I expected to see a wooden house on the right side of the road and a few more wooden houses on the left; that's what I remembered. Instead, again with the same Sturmbannführer Höfle, I came to a railroad station with a sign saying Treblinka, looking exactly like a German railroad station — anywhere in Germany — a replica, with signboards, etc. There I hung back as far as I could. I didn't push closer to see it all. I saw a footbridge enclosed in barbed wire and over that footbridge a file of naked Jews was being driven into a house, a big… no, not a house, a big, one-room structure, to be gassed. As I was told, they were gassed with …what's it called? … Potassium cyanide… or cyanic acid. In acid form it's called cyanic acid. I didn't look to see what happened. I reported to Müller and as usual he listened in silence, without a word of comment. Just his facial expression said: "There's nothing I can do about it."”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

I am convinced, Herr Hauptmann, [Eichmann is referring to his interrogator, Avner Less] I know it sounds odd coming from me, but I'm convinced that if it had been up to Müller it wouldn't have happened.
Source: Eichmann Interrogated (1983), p. 84.

Business, Silence, Time, Housing

“Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.”

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

Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929), Ch. 49.

Fear

“"I have often wished in vain," said she, "for another's judgment to appeal to when I could scarcely trust the direction of my own eye and head, they having been so long occupied with the contemplation of a single object as to become almost incapable of forming a proper idea respecting it."
"That," replied I, "is only one of many evils to which a solitary life exposes us."”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. VII : The Excursion; Helen and Gilbert

Life, Idea, Evil

“Experience is always seeking for special literary forms in which its various aspects can find their most adequate expression; and there are many of these aspects which are best rendered in a fragmentary fashion, because they are themselves fragments of experience, gleams and flashes of light, rather than the steady glow of a larger illumination.”

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

“English Aphorists,” pp. 102-103
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

Fashion, Light

“No mind can have an efficient relation to another mind; efficiency is the attribute of every mind toward its own acts and life, or toward the world of mere "things " which forms the theatre of its action; and the causal relation between minds must be that of ideality, simply and purely.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Modern Science and Pantheism, p.74

Life, World

“This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 33

“What is video art? How does it differ from commercial television? Is video art linked to such traditional art forms as painting and sculpture? Is it a totally new phenomenon?”

Gregory Battcock (1937–1980)

Gregory Battcock. New Artists’ Video, an anthology, (1978) p. xiii. Introduction:
Listing of the several general questions to which video art gave rise to in those days.

Art, Painting

“Drawing is not the same as form; it is a way of seeing form.”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

Le dessin n'est pas la forme, il est la manière de voir la forme.
"Drawing Is Not the Same As Form..." (p. 82)
posthumous quotes, Degas Dance Drawing' (1935)

Way, Drawing

“Today, I view Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru as a bloated Brown Sahib, and Nehruism as the combined embodiment of all the imperialist ideologies Islam, Christianity, White Man's Burden, and Communism that have flooded this country in the wake of foreign invasions. And I do not have the least doubt in my mind that if India is to live, Nehruism must die. Of course, it is already dying under the weight of its sins against the Indian people, their country, their society, their economy, their environment, and their culture. What I plead is that a conscious rejection of Nehruism in all its forms will hasten its demise, and save us from the mischief which it is bound to create further if it is allowed to linger.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

How I became a Hindu (1982)

People, Communication, Country

“Nobody, I believe, will deny, that we are to form our judgment of the true nature of the human mind, not from sloth and stupidity of the most degenerate and vilest of men, but from the sentiments and fervent desires of the best and wisest of the species.”

Robert Leighton (1611–1684) 17th century Archbishop of Glasgow, and Principal of the University of Edinburgh

Theological Lectures, No. 5, "Of the Immortality of the Soul", reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 514.

Men, Stupidity, Nature

“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belong to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Bk. 2, ch. 1
The End of the Affair (1951)

Pain, Happiness, Sense

“From the time of Zeno to Simplicius, a period of about nine hundred years, the Stoic philosophy formed the characters of some of the best and greatest men. Finally it became extinct, and we hear no more of it til the revival of letters in Italy.”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

M. Aurelius Antoninus

Men, Time

“Well! according to the sketch your picture [which Whistler sent him in a letter] seems well-composed, the lines of sky, sea, the position of the figures all that seems very, very well done[, ] on opening the letter it struck me immediately, an impression of decorative ornamentation which makes a good picture appeal to the eye as well - upside down and any other way up. Arrangement, layout, composition. etc - mysterious words harmonious laws - in no way conventional - needs of the Artist glory of the Raphael's Michelangelo's etc etc - for me a repetition a hesitation, a matter of feeling - which should also be a law, a mathematical thing, like form, like light, colour[. ] I find similarities with the colour method which works by opposing colours to arrive at a harmony that is to say to make a canvas a complete whole, to put into a small space an image with all the forces all the principles of nature - [instead of showing a part of it]..”

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) painter from France

quote from a letter of Fantin-Latour, Paris 7-14 October 1862 to James Whistler; from The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler - Repository: Glasgow University Library http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/people/display/?cid=1075&nameid=Manet_E&sr=0&surname=&firstname=&rs=1 - System Number: 01075; Call Number: MS Whistler F 6.

Law, Way, Feeling, Mathematics

“It is the fact of life that a truth emerges out of a conflict between two wrongs. The development of society is through contradictions. Thus the Roopa Bhadrata argument which arose out of our conflict was wrong, in another sense it was correct too. Evaluating the worth of literature we should never confine ourselves to content alone. Mundassery was correct in insisting that form too is to be evaluated. In his own words it is not enough to have perfect content, it must also have perfect form. That is Roopa Bhadrata. Is that not correct? Yes, it is. We accept that we were wrong on that count. Those of us who founded the Jeevat Sahitya Sanghom were political workers. We looked at literature too through political eyes. So we did not pay sufficient attention to the artistic structure of literature. That was our mistake.”

E. M. S. Namboodiripad (1909–1998) Indian politician

EMS As A Literary Critic And Cultural Activist

Life, Truth, Literature, Sense

“The landscape painter, perhaps, goes even further. It is not only in living beings that he sees the reflection of the universal soul; it is in the trees, the bushes, the valleys, the hills. What to other men is only wood and earth appears to the great landscapist like the face of a great being. Corot saw kindness abroad in the trunks of the trees, in the grass of the fields, in the mirroring water of the lakes. But there Millet read suffering and resignation.
Everywhere the great artist hears spirit answer to his spirit. Where, then, can you find a more religious man?
Does not the sculptor perform his act of adoration when he perceives the majestic character of the forms that he studies? — when, from the midst of fleeting lines, he knows how to extricate the eternal type of each being? — when he seems to discern in the very breast of the divinity the immutable models on which all living creatures are moulded? Study, for example, the masterpieces of the Egyptian sculptors, either human or animal figures, and tell me if the accentuation of the essential lines does not produce the effect of a sacred hymn. Every artist who has the gift of generalizing forms, that is to say, of accenting their logic without depriving them of their living reality, provokes the same religious emotion; for he communicates to us the thrill he himself felt before the immortal verities.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Art, 1912, Ch. Mystery in Art

Men, Soul, Communication, Reality

“Find a fraction which, multiplied by itself, shall give 6, or… find the square root of 6. This can be shown to be an impossible problem; for it can be shown that no fraction whatsoever multiplied by itself, can give a whole number, unless it be itself a whole number disguised in a fractional form, such as 4⁄2 or 21⁄3. To this problem, then, there is but one answer, that it is self-contradictory. But if we propose the following problem,—to find a fraction which, multiplied by itself, shall give a product lying between 6 and 6 + a; we find that this problem admits of solution in every case. It therefore admits of solution however small a may be… as small as you please.”

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

...there is such a thing as the square root of 6, and it is denoted by √<span style="text-decoration: overline">6</span>. But we do not say we actually find this, but that we approximate to it.
The Differential and Integral Calculus (1836)

Lying, Problem

“Liberalism, which Luxemburg called by its more appropriate name—“opportunism”—is an integral component of capitalism. When the citizens grow restive, it will soften and decry capitalism’s excesses. But capitalism, Luxemburg argued, is an enemy that can never be appeased. Liberal reforms are used to stymie resistance and then later, when things grow quiet, are revoked on the inevitable road to capitalist slavery. The last century of labor struggles in the United States provides a case study for proof of Luxemburg’s observation.The political, cultural and judicial system in a capitalist state is centered around the protection of property rights. And, as Adam Smith pointed out, when civil government “is instituted for the security of property, [it] is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” The capitalist system is gamed from the start. And this makes Luxemburg extremely relevant as corporate capital, now freed from all constraints, reconfigures our global economy, including the United States’, into a ruthless form of neofeudalism.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

"Reform or Revolution" (2016)

Game, Reality, Study

“A strange persuasion came upon me that, save for the grossness of the line, the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form.”

H. G. Wells book The Island of Doctor Moreau

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 16: How the Beast Folk Tasted Blood

Life, Fate

“The first hole made through a piece of stone is a revelation. The hole connects one side to the other, making it immediately more three-dimensional. A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as a solid mass. Sculpture in air is possible, where the stone contains only the hole, which is the intended and considered form. The mystery of the hole – the mysterious fascination of caves in hill sides and cliffs.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Source: 1925 - 1940, The sculptor speaks' (1937), p. 251

“Immortality had been perfected, at least in its non-biological forms, but insufficient attention had been paid to the boredom of eternity and the corrosive nature of the ratchet effect which demanded ever sharper, stronger and more intense sensations to maintain something like the same level of satisfaction.
Living forever turned out to be much like long-term sex, psychologically tricky; which was why what killed the original colonists was not hardship but boredom.”

Jon Courtenay Grimwood (1953) British writer

Source: Stamping Butterflies (2004), Chapter 10 (p. 71)

Sex, Nature, Perfection

“aAs a creative artiste dedicated to a spiritual art form I was deeply pained by the communal violence in Gujarat.”

Vyjayanthimala (1936) Indian actress, politician & dancer

Vyjayanthimala still cuts a striking figure tall

Pain, Art, Communication

“I claim that the central goal of managers in the past hundred years has been to make sure their firms survived. To promote survival they proposed various forms of control, both inside and outside the firm. Internally, control was oriented to ensuring that organizational resources were deployed so that top management could be confident that their directives were being executed. Externally, this control was oriented toward establishing stable relations between competitors to promote the survival of their organizations.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: The transformation of corporate control, 1993, p. 5

Confidence, Past

“There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, — now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860), Behavior

Love, Life, Happiness, Way

“The essence of any interpersonal relationship is interaction. Two individuals may be said to have formed a relationship when on repeated occasions they are observed to interact. By interaction it is meant that they emit behavior in each other's presence, they create products for each other, or they communicate with each other. In every case we would identify as an instance of interaction there is at least the possibility that the actions of each person affect the other.”

John Thibaut (1917–1986) American social psychologist

Source: The social psychology of groups. 1959, p. 10

Behavior, Communication, Personality

“Still haunted by Haiku, and tried my hand at it, but I fall pitifully short of the Wordsworthian touch. But failure in this realm turned my mind to an old enthusiasm of mine, the Welsh englyn. This verse form was derived by the Welsh from the inscriptions which their Roman conquerors put on tombs … A good englym must have four lines, of ten, then six, syllables, the last two lines having seven syllables each. In the first line there must be a break after the seventh, eighth, or ninth syllable, and the rhyme with the second line comes at this break; but the tenth syllable of the first line must either rhyme or be in assonance with the middle of the second line. The last two lines must rhyme with the first rhyme in the first line, but the third or fourth line must rhyme on a weak syllable. Got that?”

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

"Haiku and Englyn" in The Toronto Daily Star (4 April 1959), republished in The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies (1979) edited by Judith Skelton Grant, p. 241.

Failure

“Literature, outside of the masters, has given us but one idea of the mistress, the subtle, calculating siren who delights to prey on the souls of men. The journalism and the moral pamphleteering of the time seem to foster it with almost partisan zeal. It would seem that a censorship of life had been established by divinity, and the care of its execution given into the hands of the utterly conservative. Yet there is that other form of liaison which has nothing to do with conscious calculation. In the vast majority of cases it is without design or guile. The average woman, controlled by her affections and deeply in love, is no more capable than a child of anything save sacrificial thought—the desire to give; and so long as this state endures, she can only do this. She may change—Hell hath no fury, etc.—but the sacrificial, yielding, solicitous attitude is more often the outstanding characteristic of the mistress; and it is this very attitude in contradistinction to the grasping legality of established matrimony that has caused so many wounds in the defenses of the latter. The temperament of man, either male or female, cannot help falling down before and worshiping this nonseeking, sacrificial note. It approaches vast distinction in life. It appears to be related to that last word in art, that largeness of spirit which is the first characteristic of the great picture, the great building, the great sculpture, the great decoration—namely, a giving, freely and without stint, of itself, of beauty.”

Theodore Dreiser book The Financier

Source: The Financier (1912), Ch. XXIII

Love, Life, Men, Beauty

“Characters — conventional women with minor eccentricities — flourished in our world, as Mrs. Cork had no doubt observed. But she'd failed to notice that the characters were all old, rich and pedigreed. Newcomers, especially those of moderate means, were expected to form an attractive but featureless chorus behind our few madcap divas.”

Edmund White book A Boy's Own Story

Source: A Boy's Own Story (1982), Chapter One (p. 14).

Women, World

“I read with great interest all that you have written me about what is called Colonialism, namely: bringing forward backward races and opening up the jungles. I was brought up to feel proud of much that we had done. Certainly in India, with all its history, religion and ancient forms of despotic rule, Britain has a story to tell which will look quite well against the background of the coming hundred years. … I am sceptical about universal suffrage for the Hottentots even if refined by proportional representation. The British and American Democracies were slowly and painfully forged and even they are not perfect yet.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to President Eisenhower (8 August 1954), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Never Despair': Winston S. Churchill, 1945–1965 (London: Heinemann, 1988), pp. 1040-1041. Cf. Lord Salisbury: "You would not confide free representative institutions to the Hottentots".
Post-war years (1945–1955)

Religion, Feeling, Democracy, History

“In the army, capitalist development leads to the extension of obligatory military service to the reduction of the time of service and consequently to a material approach to a popular militia. But all of this takes place under the form of modern militarism in which the domination of the people by the militarist State and the class character of the State manifest themselves most clearly.”

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

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

People, Time

“Tektology is concerned only with activities, but activities are characterized by the fact that they produce changes. From this point of view it is out of the question to think about a simple and pure "preservation" of forms, one that would constitute a real absence of changes. Preservation is always only a result of immediately equilibrating each of the appearing changes by another opposing change; it Is a dynamic equilibrium of changes.”

Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) Physician, philosopher, writer

Source: Essays in tektology, 1980, p. 78

Question, Thinking, Appearance, Change

“The nation has been, and is still being, eroded and hollowed out from within by the implantation of large unassimilated and unassimiliable populations—what Lord Radcliffe once in a memorable phrase called "alien wedges"—in the heartland of the state…The disruption of the homogeneous "we", which forms the essential basis of parliamentary democracy and therefore of our liberties, is now approaching the point at which the political mechanics of a "divided community"…take charge and begin to operate autonomously. Let me illustrate this pathology of a society that is being eaten alive…The two active ingredients are grievance and violence. Where a community is divided, grievance is for practical purposes inexhaustible. When violence is injected—and quite a little will suffice for a start—there begins an escalating competition to discover grievance and to remove it. The materials lie ready to hand in a multiplicity of agencies with a vested interest, more or less benevolent, in the process of discovering grievances and demanding their removal. The spiral is easily maintained in upward movement by the repetitions and escalation of violence. At each stage alienation between the various elements of society is increased, and the constant disappointment that the imagined remedies yield a reverse result leads to growing bitterness and despair. Hand in hand with the exploitation of grievance goes the equally counterproductive process which will no doubt, as usual, be called the "search for a political solution"…Indeed, attention has already been drawn publicly to the potentially critical factor of the so-called immigrant vote in an increasing number of worthwhile constituencies. The result is that the political parties of the indigenous population vie with one another for votes by promising remedy of the grievances which are being uncovered and exploited in the context of actual or threatened violence. Thus the legislature finds itself in effect manipulated by minorities instead of responding to majorities, and is watched by the public at large with a bewildering and frustration, not to say cynicism, of which the experience of legislation hitherto in the field of immigration and race relations afford some pale idea…I need not follow the analysis further in order to demonstrate how parliamentary democracy disintegrates when the national homogeneity of the electorate is broken by a large and sharp alteration in the composition of the population. While the institutions and liberties on which British liberty depends are being progressively surrendered to the European superstate, the forces which will sap and destroy them from within are allowed to accumulate unchecked. And all the time we are invited to direct towards Angola or Siberia the anxious attention that the real danger within our power and our borders imperatively demand.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech the Hampshire Monday Club in Southampton (9 April 1976), from A Nation or No Nation? Six Years in British Politics (Elliot Right Way Books, 1977), pp. 165-166
1970s

Lie, Disappointment, Democracy, Imagination

“Her dæmon's name was Pantalaimon, and he was currently in the form of a moth, a dark brown one so as not to show up in the darkness of the hall.”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

Introducing Pantalaimon, also called Pan, in Ch. 1 : The Decanter of Tokay
His Dark Materials, The Golden Compass (1995)

“Does the Secretary of State agree that it is time for a serious review of Britain's defence expenditure, which now totals more than £23 billion a year? Should not we cancel the nuclear missile programme and consign all nuclear missiles back to base as part of a programme of worldwide disarmament? Should not we try to cut conventional expenditure to at least the European average, which would save £6 billion a year? Should not we also ensure that skilled workers who are at present manufacturing weapons of mass destruction and other forms of armaments are put to making socially useful products, including materials for the health service and housing industry—and recognise that world peace is best achieved by people working for peace rather than by arming themselves for war?”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Question http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1993/mar/09/strategic-review in the House of Commons (9 March 1993). <br class="br">1990s

War, People, Health, World

“Writing in 1944, the year of the Bretton Woods Conference, Polanyi suggested that the extension of the institutions of the market over the course of the nineteenth century aroused a political reaction in the form of associations and lobbies that ultimately undermined the stability of the market system. He gave the gold standard a place of prominence among the institutions of laissez faire in response to which this reaction had taken place. And he suggested that the opening of national economic decision making to parties representing working-class interests had contributed to the downfall of that international monetary system. In a sense, this book asks whether Polanyi’s thesis stands the test of time. Can the international monetary history of the second half of the twentieth century be understood as the further unfolding of Polanyian dynamics, in which democratization again came into conflict with economic liberalization in the form of free capital mobility and fixed exchange rates? Or do recent trends toward floating rates and monetary unification point to ways of reconciling freedom and stability in the two domains?”

Barry Eichengreen Introduction

Source: Globalizing Capital (2008), Chapter 1. Introduction

Books, Way, History, Decision

“From the first I saw no chance of bettering the condition of the freedman until he should cease to be merely a freedman and should become a citizen. I insisted that there was no safety for him or for anybody else in America outside the American government; that to guard, protect, and maintain his liberty the freedman should have the ballot; that the liberties of the American people were dependent upon the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box; that without these no class of people could live and flourish in this country; and this was now the word for the hour with me, and the word to which the people of the North willingly listened when I spoke. Hence, regarding as I did the elective franchise as the one great power by which all civil rights are obtained, enjoyed, and maintained under our form of government, and the one without which freedom to any class is delusive if not impossible, I set myself to work with whatever force and energy I possessed to secure this power for the recently-emancipated millions.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/dougl92/dougl92.html (1892), p. 460. <br class="br">1890s, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892)

People, Freedom, Chance, Dependency

“The method of successive approximations is often applied to proving existence of solutions to various classes of functional equations; moreover, the proof of convergence of these approximations leans on the fact that the equation under study may be majorised by another equation of a simple kind. Similar proofs may be encountered in the theory of infinitely many simultaneous linear equations and in the theory of integral and differential equations. Consideration ofjkbni semiordered spaces and operations between them enables us to easily develop a complete theory of such functional equations in abstract form.”

Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) Russian mathematician

"On one class of functional equations" (1936), as cited in: O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., " Leonid Kantorovich http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Kantorovich.html", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews

Study, Success

“In civilized societies today … clitoris envy, or womb envy, takes subtle forms. Man's constant need to disparage woman, to humble her, to deny her equal rights, and to belittle her achievements — all are expressions of his innate envy and fear.”

Elizabeth Gould Davis book The First Sex

The First Sex, ch. 9 - The Sexual Revolution (1971).

Fear, Envy

“I suppose I must be out of sorts to feel everything so deeply. Sometimes, however, it seems to me that i am not really a human being at all, but like a bird or a beast in human form. I feel so much more at home even in a scrap of garden like the one here, an dstill more in the meadows when the grass is humming with bees than - at one of the our party congresses.”

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

Prison Letter, (May 12, 1917), Rosa Luxemburg Speaks

Feeling, Home, Bird, Grass

“… dinosaur bones that are supposedly millions of years old have been found to show evidence of arthritis, abscesses, and osteoarthritis. Evidence of cancer and other diseases have also been found in fossil bones. So, if a Christian believes the fossil record was laid down millions of years before the first two people, then they've accepted that there were all sorts of horrible diseases in this world before sin. How could God have described such a world as VERY GOOD?… No - our answers in Genesis make it clear that there were NO diseases before sin. This is another reason why Christians cannot believe in millions of years to form the fossil record.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Did Adam have a Bellybutton?: And other tough questions about the Bible (2000)

God, People, World, Disease

“In the entire circuit of the globe those races which have developed under a tropical sun are found to be indolent and fickle. From the standpoint of survival of the fittest, such vices are virtues, for severe and continuous exertion under tropical conditions bring prostration and predisposition to disease. Therefore, if such races are to adopt that industrious life which is a second nature to races of the temperate zones, it is only through some form of compulsion. The negro could not possibly have found a place in American industry had he come as a free man.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

pg. 136.
Races and Immigrants in America, 1907

Life, Disease, Nature, Sun

“The differentiation of the political state from civil society was made historically possible, Marx believed, by the introduction of commodity exchange into the productive life of society, and the resulting opposition between the form of common property corresponding to the tribal Gemeinwesen and the form of private property corresponding to the exchange of commodities. This opposition, present already in the oriental and ancient productive modes, made possible in Marx's view the alienation of the state from civil society which characterized feudal production, and which reaches its extreme form in the fragmented life of capitalist civil society. Here the state, which began in immediate unity with the process of social production, has become a distinct institution operating within this process, which nevertheless still claims to represent society in its totality.”

Allen W. Wood (1942) academic

"The Marxian Critique of Justice," Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring, 1972), pp. 244-282

Life

“The universe is a puppet-show; Brahman is sole producer, Brahman is scenery and players, Brahman is sole spectator. The universe is Brahman, sportively self-deluded, taking delight in itself. The means of production is the power of delusion, or māyā; scenery and puppets are Brahman, self-stamped with 'name and form', its 'lower nature'—prakṛiti; as spectator it is puruṣa, retaining its proper nature.”

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

Source: The Bhagavadgītā (1973), p. 35. (20. Kṛiṣṇa-Brahman and the Universe)

Nature, Universe

“As is by now well known, attempts to form social judgments by aggregating individual expressed preferences always lead to the possibility of paradox.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Source: 1970s-1980s, The Limits Of Organization (1974), Chapter 1, Rationality: Individual And Social, p. 25

“Men of mixed blood in this country apply the name 'negro' to themselves, not because it is a correct ethnological description, but to seem especially devoted to the black side of their parentage. Hence in some cases they are more noisily opposed to the conclusion to which I have come, than either the white or the honestly black race. The opposition to amalgamation, of which we hear so much on the part of colored people, is for most part the merest affectation, and, will never form an impassable barrier to the union of the two varieties.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1880s, The Future of the Colored Race (1886)

Men, People, Color, Parting

“To overvalue something is a form of lying.”

Baltasar Gracián book The Art of Worldly Wisdom

El encarecer es ramo de mentir.
Maxim 41 (p. 24)
The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

Lying

“Things like the proposed tech tax are actually a very good idea. The specific form of it is debatable, but the idea is that five companies are worth $3.5tn, basically because of network externalities and information monopolies, and therefore are absolutely right for efficient taxation… The marginal cost of production of AI is effectively zero. The ability to make these technologies available to the poorest countries at no cost is an evident option. So we should be taking special care to make sure that this revolution can reach everybody.”

Jeffrey D. Sachs (1954) American economist

Tech tax' necessary to avoid dystopia, says leading economist, the Guardian, 23 Oct 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/23/exclusive-tech-tax-jeffrey-sachs-ai-wealth-facebook-google-amazon

Idea, Country

“As an artistic style, mannerism conformed to a divided outlook on life which was, nevertheless, spread uniformly all over Western Europe; the baroque is the expression of an intrinsically more homogeneous worldview, but one which assumes a variety of shapes in the different European countries. Mannerism, like Gothic, was a universal European phenomenon, even if it was restricted to much narrower circles than the Christian art of the Middle Ages; the baroque, on the other hand, embraces so many ramifications of artistic endeavour, appears in so many different forms in the individual countries and spheres of cultures, that it seems doubtful at first sight whether it is possible to reduce them all to a common denominator.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

'Chapter 8. The Concept of Baroque
The Social History of Art', Volume II. Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, 1999

Life, Age, Art, Universe

“No form remains permanently in a substance; a constant change takes place, one form is taken off and another is put on.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

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

Change

“We know it because, if we look below the surface, we sense it still spreading on every continent — for it is the most humane, the most advanced, and in the end the most unconquerable of all forms of human society.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1940s, Third inaugural address (1941)

Sense

“When I became secretary of state, Iran was weeks away from having enough nuclear material to form a bomb. They had mastered the nuclear fuel cycle under the Bush administration. They had built covert facilities. They had stocked them with centrifuges that were whirling away. And we had sanctioned them. I voted for every sanction against Iran when I was in the Senate, but it wasn't enough. So I spent a year-and-a-half putting together a coalition that included Russia and China to impose the toughest sanctions on Iran.”

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

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), First presidential debate (September 26, 2016)

“It is essentially to the very idea and concept of organization that we there must be a process, formal in character, through which the supreme co-ordinating authority operates throughout the whole structure of the organized body. This process is not an abstraction; it is a tangible reality observable in every organization. It appears in a form so distinct and characteristic that it practically names itself, — hence the term Scalar Process.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: Onward Industry!, 1931, p. 31

Idea, Reality, Appearance

“Whatever forms your resentments may take, they wreck only you, not the one you resent.”

Guy Finley (1949) American self-help writer, philosopher, and spiritual teacher, and former professional songwriter and musician

Designing Your Own Destiny

“We may say that many, if not all, of the personality traits which we have called masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners, and the form of headdress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 280, cited in Perspectives in Cultural Anthropology (1987) by Herbert A. Applebaum, p. 141

Sex, Personality, Clothes

“Some time ago a tailor in Chicago was conducting a vigorous advertising campaign. I did not suppose that his advertising was having any influence upon me. Some months after the advertising had begun I went into the tailor's shop and ordered a suit. While in the shop I happened to fall into conversation with the proprietor and he asked me if a friend had recommended him to me. I replied that such was the case. Thereupon I tried to recall who the friend was and finally came to the conclusion that this shop had never been recommended to me at all. I had seen his advertisements for months and from them had formed an idea of the shop. Later, I forgot where I had received my information and assumed that I had received it from a friend who patronized the shop. I discovered that all I knew of the shop I had learned from advertisements and I doubt very much whether I ever read any of the advertisements further than the display type. Doubtless many other customers would have given the same reply even though, as in my case, no friend had spoken to them concerning the shop.”

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

Source: The Psychology of Advertising in Theory and Practice, 1908, p. 176

Idea, Learning, Time, Reading

“It may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance

Question

“All kinds of separate, fragmented portions of the jigsaw puzzle are of little avail, unless they are fitted together in the best possible way, to form an image of the future depicting a number of main areas of development.”

Fred Polak (1907–1985) Dutch futurologist

Source: Prognostics, 1971, p. 261

Way, Future

“Some consider… all wants of the body as shame, disgrace, and defect to which they are compelled to attend; this is chiefly the case with the sense of touch, which is a disgrace to us according to Aristotle, and which is the cause of our desire for eating, drinking, and sensuality. Intelligent persons must, as much as possible, reduce these wants, guard against them, abstain from speaking of them, discussing them, and attending to them in company of others. Man must have control over all these desires, reduce them as much as possible, and only retain of them as much as is indispensable. His aim must be the aim of man as man, viz., the formation of ideas, and nothing else. The best and sublimest among them is the idea which man forms of God, angels, and the rest of the creation according to his capacity. Such men are always with God, and of them it is said, "Ye are princes, and all of you are children of the Most High."”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

(Ps. lxxxii. 6) This is man's task and purpose.
Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.8

Men, God, Children, Angels

“Man's own form in space – his body – was a private prison; and that it was because of this imprisoning misery – because he was hungry and overworked and went to a horrid place called home late at night in the rain, and his bones ached and his head was heavy.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

Willem de Kooning, MOMA Bull, pp. 7,6; as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 135.
1980's

Home, Night

“Schnabel said that Beethoven's late piano sonatas are music better than could be played. Larkin's best poems are poetry better than can be said, but sayability they sumptuously offer. Larkin demands to be read aloud. His big, intricately formed stanzas, often bridging from one to the next, defeat the single breath but always invite it. As you read, the ideal human voice speaks in your head. It isn't his: as his gramophone records prove, he sounded like someone who expects to be interrupted. It isn't yours, either. It's ours.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Philip Larkin: Somewhere becoming rain'
Essays and reviews, The Dreaming Swimmer (1993)

Music, Reading

“Every human good we enjoy today is, directly or indirectly, a legacy from what the Founders wrought, and Lincoln preserved. That legacy was formed by what the American Founders called an experiment in free government, at the heart of which is a simple, yet radical idea; that under the laws of nature and of nature's God, all men are created equal. From this idea, and this idea alone, flow all the precepts of free government. If all men are created equal, it is unjust for one man to rule another without his consent. If men possess rights by nature, the purpose of government is to protect our natural liberty. As we know the purpose of government we know also of its limitations, and so we limit the power of government by writing a constitution, and requiring the government as well as citizens to live under the rule of law- laws which must be consented to by the citizens in order to be legitimate.”

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

2000s, Before In History (2004)

Men, God, Law, Idea

“Slave-owning culture … gives rise to the teleological explanation of the Universe, which reaches its subtlest form in Plato’s or Aristotle’s philosophies, in which all phenomena are determined by Ideas or Forms. These correspond to the plans formed in the mind of the slave-owner which his slave passively fulfils.”

Christopher Caudwell (1907–1937) British Marxist literary critic, journalist and writer

Further Studies in a Dying Culture (1949), Chapter IV: Consciousness: A Study in Bourgeois Psychology

Idea, Universe

“Federal law forms a new governance structure that opposes both free enterprise and representative government…A new national curriculum is used that embraces a socialist, globalist worldview; loyalty to all government and not America.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

Michael J. Chapman and Senator Michele Bachmann, "How New U.S. Policy Embraces a State-Planned Economy" (2001)
2000s

Law, Loyalty

“This is not work
but a kind of workmanship.
First out of paper, then from the body.
To provoke thought into form,
molded according to a measure.
I think of a tailor
who is his own fabric.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Homage to Valerio Magrelli" (After the Italian of Valerio Magrelli), vi
Poetry, Interrogations at Noon (2001)

Thinking

“A mind of a certain size can feel only exasperation toward a city. Nothing can drive me more fully into despair. The walls first of all, and even then all the rest is only so many horrid images of selfishness, mistrust, stupidity, and narrow-mindedness. No need to memorize the Napoleonic code. Just look at a city and you have it. Each time I come back from the country, just as I am starting to congratulate myself on my calmness, there breaks out a furor, a rage… And I come upon my mark, homo sapiens, the acquisitive wolf. Cities, architectures, how I loathe you! Great surfaces of vaults, vaults cemented into the earth, vaults set out in compartments, forming vaults to eat in, vaults for sex, vaults on the watch, ready to open fire. How sad, sad…”

Henri Michaux (1899–1984) painter, poet, writer

Ecuador (1929)

Stupidity, Sadness, Sex, Feeling

“The linguistic entity is not accurately defined until it is delimited, i. e. separated from everything that surrounds it on the phonic chain. These delimited entities or units stand in opposition to each other in the mechanism of language.
One is at first tempted to liken linguistic signs to visual signs, which can exist in space without becoming confused, and to assume that separation of the significant elements can be accomplished in the same way, without recourse to any mental process. The word "form," which is often used to indicate them (cf. the expression "verbal form," "noun form") gives support to the mistake. But we know that the main characteristic of the sound-chain is that it is linear.”

Ferdinand de Saussure book Course in General Linguistics

Source: Cours de linguistique générale (1916), p. 103

Way, Support

“I can understand the poor and stupid voting for Marxism or one of its fashionable variants. If you've no hope of being other than a slave, you may as well opt for the most efficient form of slavery.”

P. D. James (1920–2014) English crime writer

A Taste for Death Published 1986. Page 412.
Other

Stupidity, Hope, Fashion, Understanding

“In fact it is a stupidity, Maurice Princet told me in the presence of Juan Gris, to claim to be able to bring together in a single system of relations, colour, which is a sensation that only needs to be received, and form which is an organisation that has to be understood (14); and, introducing us to the non-Euclidean geometries, he urged us to create a geometry for painters.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Cubism was born

Stupidity

“Surely one of the reasons for our continued failures throughout these areas [Asia and the Middle East] has been our inability to understand how profound, how irrational, and how erratic has been the reaction generally of the respective peoples to the ideas and impulses that have come to them from the West in recent decades. This applies particularly to the intellectuals who play so prominent a part in political leadership and in the molding of public opinion. To ascertain the reasons for the intensely anti-American attitudes manifested by these people would be to delve deeply into psychological reactions and the origins of various forms of neuroses. I have thoughts about these matters, but will not take up your time with them here.
Only one thing I would emphasize. The respective reactions are obviously emotional and subconscious, and not likely to be altered by any attempts on our part to meet them by any verbal appeal to rational processes.”

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

January 23, 1952
The Kennan Diaries

People, Idea, Failure, Understanding

“In object-oriented analysis, we seek to model the world by identifying the classes and objects that form the vocabulary of the problem domain, and in object-oriented design, we invent the abstractions and mechanisms that provide the behavior that this model requires.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Source: Object-oriented design: With Applications, (1991), p. 141

World, Behavior, Problem

“There is only one art of writing, and that is the art of poetry.. whether it is in the form of prose or in rhyme and meter or in rhymed cadence.”

F. S. Flint (1885–1960) English Imagist poet

Otherworld Cadences (1920)

Art

“In painting it is the forming of the image.”

Cy Twombly (1928–2011) American painter

1950 - 1960
Source: 'In painting it is the forming of the image', Cy Twombly, 'L'Esperienza moderna', 1957; as quoted in Cy Twombly, a monograph, Richard Leeman / picture research Isabelle d’Hauteville. London, 2005 p. 239

Painting

“Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should and can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, rather than just waiting for it.”

Augusto Boal (1931–2009) Brazilian writer

Source: Games for Actors and non-Actors (1992), p. xxxi

Knowledge, Waiting, Future, Help

“If, as many anthropologists still hold, the making and using of tools as one of the chief sources of primitive man's intellectual development, is it not time that we asked ourselves what will happen to man if he departs as completely as he now threatens to do from his primal polytechnic occupations? Since they can no longer be pursued at a profit, perhaps they will have to be restored as modes of sport and recreation, even more as helpful — increasingly essential — forms of personal service and mutual aid.”

Lewis Mumford book The Myth of the Machine

Technical Liberation
The Myth of the Machine (1967-1970), The Pentagon of Power (1970)

Sport, Time, Help, Personality

“The great masters of modern analysis are Lagrange, Laplace, and Gauss, who were contemporaries. It is interesting to note the marked contrast in their styles. Lagrange is perfect both in form and matter, he is careful to explain his procedure, and though his arguments are general they are easy to follow. Laplace on the other hand explains nothing, is indifferent to style, and, if satisfied that his results are correct, is content to leave them either with no proof or with a faulty one. Gauss is as exact and elegant as Lagrange, but even more difficult to follow than Laplace, for he removes every trace of the analysis by which he reached his results, and studies to give a proof which while rigorous shall be as concise and synthetical as possible.”

W. W. Rouse Ball (1850–1925) English mathematician

W. W. Rouse Ball, History of Mathematics, (London, 1901), p. 463;

Study, Perfection, Indifference

“I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time. The oak is especially so because it is a slowly growing tree with a kind of really solid heartwood. It has always been a form of sculpture, a symbol for this planet.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Joseph Beuys (1982), cited in: Claudia Mesch (2013) Art and Politics: A Small History of Art for Social Change Since 1945. p. 160
1980's

Thinking, Tree, Time

“[On service] Giving feels good. It's a form of healing. Not just for you as an individual, but for everyone.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Speech at “Bear to Make a Difference” gala for the Matthew Shepard Foundation, Seawell Grand Ballroom at the Denver Center of Performing Arts, Denver, Colorado (15 October 2011) http://www.jennifer-beals.com/media/speeches/matthewshepard.html.

Feeling

“A strong church is made up of well-ordered families, where intelligent, Christian parents bring up their children in the fear of the Lord, where the home of the week has its counterpart in the home of the Sabbath, where the hopes and joys of the living, and the blessed memories of the dead bind to the Lord and His church, where young men and maidens are glad when it is said to them, " Let us go unto the house of the Lord," where the tranquillity, and purity, and holy peace, the light and the love, form to the opening minds of the children a type and prophecy of the eternal Sabbath and the heaven above.”

John Hall (1829–1898) Presbyterian pastor from Northern Ireland in New York, died 1898

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 144.

Love, Men, Children, Fear

“In your [ composer Schönberg's ] works, you have realized what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed for in music. The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions, is exactly what I am trying to find in my painting.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

in his letter to Arnold Schönberg, 18 Jan. 1911; as cited in Schonberg and Kandinsky: An Historic Encounter, by Klaus Kropfinger; edited by Konrad Boehmer; published by Routledge (imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informal company), 2003, p. 9
Kandinsky visited a concert with music of Schönberg on 11 Jan. 1911 with Franz Marc, Alexej von Jawlensky, Gabriele Münter and others; they played compositions, Schönberg wrote in 1907 and 1909: his second string quartet and the 'Three piano pieces'
1910 - 1915

Life, Music, Painting

“To suppose that God Almighty has confined his goodness to this world, to the exclusion of all others, is much similar to the idle fancies of some individuals in this world, that they, and those of their communion or faith, are the favorites of heaven exclusively; but these are narrow and bigoted conceptions, which are degrading to a rational nature, and utterly unworthy of God, of whom we should form the most exalted ideas.”

Ethan Allen (1738–1789) American general

Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Ch. II Section III - Of The Eternity and Infinitude of Divine Providence

God, World, Faith, Idea

“What other form of government, indeed, can so well deserve our esteem and love?”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

1790s, Inaugural Address (Saturday, March 4, 1797)

Love

“It seems as though the goal of my work has always been to dissolve myself completely into the sensations of the surroundings in order to then integrate this into a coherent painterly form.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

Letter to Karl Ernst Osthaus, 23 December 1917; as quoted in Kirchner and the Berlin street, ed. Deborah Wye, Moma, New York, 2008, p. 36
1916 - 1919

“The proper form of economy must be observed in building houses for each and every class.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter II, Sec. 9

Housing

“Organizational forms — specific configurations of goals, boundaries, and activities — are the elements selected by environmental criteria, and change may occur either through new forms eliminating old ones or through the modification of existing forms. Environmental niches are distinct in combination of resources and other constraints that are sufficient to support organizational form. Organizational forms, then, are organized activity systems oriented toward exploiting the resources within a niche.
Selection pressures may favour or eliminate entire groups of organizations, such as industries, and the changing population distribution of organizations in a society reflects the operation of such selection pressures.”

Howard E. Aldrich (1943) American sociologist

Source: Organizations and Environments, 1979, p. 28

Support, Change

“Yes, the work comes out more fair,
From a form that rebels against
Handling,
Verse, marble, onyx, enamel.”

Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) French writer

Oui, l'œuvre sort plus belle
D'une forme au travail
Rebelle,
Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.
"L'Art", line 1, in Émaux et Camées (1852; Genève: Librairie Droz, 1947) p. 130; Earl Jeffrey Richards (ed.) Christine de Pizan and Medieval French Lyric (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998) p. 32.

“Toronto Globe – he was a man who loved the people and fought for their rights against privilege and monopoly in every form. (Buckingham and Ross 1892, p. 661)”

Alexander Mackenzie (1822–1892) 2nd Prime Minister of Canada

His Character

Love, People

“The United States is in sore need today of an aristocracy of intellect and service. Because such an aristocracy does not exist in the popular consciousness, we are bending the knee to the golden calf of money. The form of monarchy and its pomp offer a valuable foil to the worship of money for its own sake. A democracy must provide itself with a foil of its own and none is better or more effective than an aristocracy of intellect and service.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

Address to the Students of University of California, Berkeley (March 23, 1907) as reported in The New York Times, March 24, 1907.

Money, Democracy

“Every mind-mass strives to produce a like formed mind-mass and accordingly strives to produce that form of motion of the matter by which it was formed.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

“Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty. … It is at the same time a training in boldness. … It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or least popular opinions”

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

“What is liberal education,” p. 8
Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968)

Education, Time, Training

“Nature has put itself the problem of how to catch in flight light streaming to the Earth and to store the most elusive of all powers in rigid form. The plants take in one form of power, light; and produce another power, chemical difference.”

Robert Mayer (1814–1878) German physicist

in Die organische Bewegung in ihrem Zusammenhange mit dem Stoffwechsel, [Julius Robert von Mayer, Die Mechanik der Wärme in gesammelten Schriften, Cotta, 1867, 53-54]
Original: Die Natur hat sich die Aufgabe gestellt, das der Erde zuströmende Licht im Fluge zu erhaschen, und die beweglichste aller Kräfte, in starre Form umgewandelt, aufzuspeichern. Zur Erreichung dieses Zweckes hat sie die Erdkruste mit Organismen überzogen, welche lebend das Sonnenlicht in sich aufnehmen und unter Verwendung dieser Kraft eine fortlaufende Summe chemischer Differenzen erzeugen.

Nature, Problem, Light

“It is equally obvious and it became clear … that no ruler can legislate a social revolution. He can implement the outward form of social change, but he cannot legislate change in the minds of the people. Stable and lasting change has to evolve slowly and gradually over a period of many generations. What signaled the beginning of the end … was the radical modernization program, which virtually affected every aspect of Iranian life … [including] the sweeping emancipation of women, which moved as it were 13 centuries in the course of three decades.”

Ashraf Pahlavi (1919–2016) Iranian royal

In Tribute to Princess Ashraf Pahlavi: A Jewel of Iran http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nina-ansary/princess-ashraf-pahlavi-jewels-of-allah_b_8991932.html (January 17, 2016)

Life, Women, People, Change

“I became aware that in Hank's recorded songs were the archetype rules of poetic songwriting. The architectural forms are like marble pillars and they had to be there. Even his words - all of the syllables are divided up so they make perfect mathematical sense. You can learn a lot about the structure of songwriting by listening to his records.”

Hank Williams (1923–1953) American country music singer

Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (2004)
About

Mathematics, Sense, Learning, Perfection

“I have never definitely broken with Christianity nor renounced it. To attack it has never been my thought. No, from the time when there could be any question of the employment of my powers, I was firmly determined to employ them all to defend Christianity, or in any case to present it in its true form.”

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

The Point of View for My Work as An Author, Soren Kierkegaard, translated by Walter Lowrie 1939, 1962 P. 77
1840s, The Point of View for My Work as an Author (1848)

Question, Time