Quotes about formal
page 2

“You rebel not only for what you can achieve, but for who you become. In the end, those who rebel require faith — not a formal or necessarily Christian, Jewish or Muslim orthodoxy, but a faith that the good draws to it the good. That we are called to carry out the good insofar as we can determine what the good is.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

as interviewed by Elias Isquith, salon.com http://www.salon.com/2015/06/04/we_are_in_a_revolutionary_moment_chris_hedges_explains_why_an_uprising_is_coming_%E2%80%94_and_soon/

Faith, Drawing

“The real writers are tenacious creatures, and they found a way long before there were writers workshops and creative writing courses in the universities. In the absence of formal frameworks, personal initiatives and informal frameworks become more important.”

Philip Ó Ceallaigh (1968) Irish writer

Interview by Tom Vowler (2010-13)

Way, Universe, Personality

“The poet, absorbed in the solving of formal problems, the struggle with slippery eels of language, has no time for dissimulation and he tells us more about himself than he knows.”

Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) British boxer and poet

Tiger and the Rose, 1971

Problem, Time

“From all the properties of man and of nature, from all the various branches of science, from all the deductions of human reason, the general corollary, admitted by Hindus, Arabs, and Tartars, by Persians, and by Chinese, is the supremacy of an all-creating and all-preserving spirit, infinitely wise, good, and powerful, but infinitely removed from the comprehension of his most exalted creatures; nor are there in any language (the ancient Hebrew always excepted) more pious and sublime addresses to the being of beings, more splendid enumerations of his attributes, or more beautiful descriptions of his visible works, than in Arabick, Persian, and Sanscrit, especially in the Koran, the introductions to the poems of Sadi', Niza'm'i and Firdaus'i, the four Védas, and many parts of the numerous Puránas: but supplication and praise would not satisfy the boundless imagination of the Vedánti and Sufi theologists, who blending uncertain metaphysicks with undoubted principles of religion, have presumed to reason confidently on the very nature and essence of the divine spirit, and asserted in a very remote age, what multitudes of Hindus and Muselmans assert… that all spirit is homogeneous, that the spirit of God is in kind the same with that of man, though differing from it infinitely in degree, and that, as material substance is mere illusion, there exists in this universe only one generick spiritual substance, the sole primary cause, efficient, substantial and formal of all secondary causes and of all appearances whatever, but endued in its highest degree, with a sublime providential wisdom, and proceeding by ways incomprehensible to the spirits which emane from it; an opinion which Gotama never taught, and which we have no authority to believe, but which, as it is grounded on the doctrine of an immaterial creator supremely wise, and a constant preserver supremely benevolent, differs as widely from the pantheism of Spinoza and Toland, as the affirmation of a proposition differs from the negation of it; though the last named professor of that insane philosophy had the baseness to conceal his meaning under the very words of Saint Paul, which are cited by Newton for a purpose totally different, and has even used a phrase, which occurs, indeed, in the Véda, but in a sense diametrically opposite to that, which he would have given it. The passage to which I allude is in a speech of Varuna to his son, where he says, "That spirit, from which these created beings proceed; through which having proceeded from it, they live; toward which they tend and in which they are ultimately absorbed, that spirit study to know; that spirit is the Great One."”

William Jones (1746–1794) Anglo-Welsh philologist and scholar of ancient India

"On the Philosophy of the Asiatics" (1794)

Wisdom, God, Age, Religion

“This naive manner of conceptualizing capitalism by reference to a “pursuit of gain” must be relegated to the kindergarten of cultural history methodology and abandoned once and for all. A fully unconstrained compulsion to acquire goods cannot be understood as synonymous with capitalism, and even less as its “spirit.” On the contrary, capitalism can be identical with the taming of this irrational motivation, or at least with its rational tempering. Nonetheless, capitalism is distinguished by the striving for profit, indeed, profit is pursued in a rational, continuous manner in companies and firms, and then pursued again and again, as is profitability. There are no choices. If the entire economy is organized according to the rules of the open market, any company that fails to orient its activities toward the chance of attaining profit is condemned to bankruptcy.
Let us begin by defining terms in a manner more precise than often occurs. For us, a "capitalist" economic act involves first of all an expectation of profit based on the utilization of opportunities for exchange; that is of (formally) peaceful opportunities for acquisition. Formal and actual acquisition through violence follows its own special laws and hence should best be placed, as much as one may recommend doing so, in a different category. Wherever capitalist acquisition is rationally pursued, action is oriented to calculation in terms of capital. What does this mean?”

Max Weber (1864–1920) German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist

Prefatory Remarks to Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion (1920)

Peace, Law, History, Motivation

“I had felt compelled to report everything important that I had found out, as if I were writing an academic paper. Instead of submitting a formal report, I could have simply informed the IR authorities that I had some ideas and information on the IR program that I wanted to discuss with them. In that case, the IR people might have given my criticisms some attention. In any event, they would have been more likely to let me know whether any of the recommendations in my other reports had been acted on—and with what results.”

William Foote Whyte (1914–2000) American sociologist

Source: Participant observer, 1994, p. 196; As cited in: Ickis (2014)

People, Idea

“Cybernetics, although not ignoring formal networks, suggests that an informal communications structure will also be present such that complex conversations at a number of levels between two or more individuals exist.”

Robert L. Flood (1959) British organizational scientist

Source: Dealing with Complexity (1988), p. 79.

Communication

“Bricks are considered to be the first material created by human intelligence from the four elements: earth, air, water, and fire. …The great variety of designs and effects that artists of the past, especially the Arabs… were able to create in their brickwork, assembled with an element so monotonous… can be compared only with the beauty and attractiveness a romantic poet attained by adjusting his verses to the rigidity of a formal meter.”

Eduardo Torroja (1899–1961) Spanish architect

Philosophy of Structures (1958)

Beauty, Intelligence, Water, Past

“Outwardly Eisenhower impressed me favourably. On June 5 Eisenhower, Montgomery and de Lattre de Tassigny arrived in Berlin to sign the declaration on the defeat of Germany and the assumption of supreme authority in Germany by Governments of the USSR, the US, Britain and France. Before the formal meeting, Eisenhower came to my headquarters to confer upon me a high American military award: I was made Chief Commander of the Legion of Merit. On receiving the award, I immediately called Stalin and told him about it. Stalin said: "We should decorate Eisenhower and Montgomery with Orders of Victory and de Lattre de Tassigny with the Order of Suvorov, First Class." "May I tell them about it?"”

Georgy Zhukov (1896–1974) Marshal of the Soviet Union

I asked. Stalin said I could.
p. 660

Victory

“It is impossible to overstate the significance of this. This is the last citadel for women in our Army. The bias towards officers with an arms corps affiliation in choosing senior leaders has some justification. Close combat is the core business of the Army. But women are already ‘in combat’ due to the changing character of war. Formal recognition of this removes the last defence of those who are resistant to the widest employment of women in the Army, and by extension their promotion to the most senior ranks. It is quite conceivable now that a woman will serve as the Chief of the Army in light of this decision.”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

Women, War, Business, Decision

“In its current form UML is designed to support a wide variety of different modelling techniques and formalisms. This is evident, for example, in the state machine formalism which allows both Moore and Mealy formalism with hierarchical states including concurrent sub-states and both synchronous and asynchronous calling semantics. The result of this is not only that almost any state modelling style can be supported but also that many combinations of elements have no defined execution semantics. It is now widely recognised within the UML community, however, that considerable benefit can be gained by forming subsets of the UML with well defined execution semantics. Such subsets can form an “executable UML” which would enable the simulation, execution, testing and ultimately translation of UML models into target code. As part of this movement, work is progressing under the auspices of the OMG towards the definition of “profiles” that define such subsets and towards the more detailed definition of the contents of “actions” including a more precise definition of the execution semantics of UML models.”

Stephen J. Mellor (1952) British computer scientist

Mellor and Ian Wilkie (1999). A mapping from Shlaer-Mellor to UML http://www.ooatool.com/docs/SMUML99.pdf. Technical report, Projtech Inc. and Kennedy Carter Limited, 1999.

Communication, Support, Parting

“The primary purpose of the Declaration was not to declare independence, but to proclaim to the world the reasons for declaring independence. It was intended as a formal justification of an act already accomplished.”

Carl L. Becker (1873–1945) American historian

The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (1922)

World

“Our vulnerability [ to ressentiment], is unavoidable (and probably incurable) in a kind of society in which relative equality of political and other rights and formally acknowledged social equality go hand in hand with enormous differences in genuine power, possessions and education; a society in which everyone “has the right” to consider himself equal to everybody else, while in fact being unequal to them.”

Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) Polish philosopher and sociologist

[paraphrasing the view of Max Scheler], p. 25.
The Art of Life (2008)

Education

“It is almost as hard to define mathematics as it is to define economics, and one is tempted to fall back on the famous old definition attributed to Jacob Viner, “Economics is what economists do,” and say that mathematics is what mathematicians do. A large part of mathematics deals with the formal relations of quantities or numbers.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1970s, Economics As a Science, 1970, p. 97

Mathematics, Parting

“You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.”

Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright

Garden of Tortures

Life, People, World, Sadness

“1. The standard neoclassical model the formal articulation of Adam Smith's invisible hand, the contention that market economies will ensure economic efficiency provides little guidance for the choice of economic systems, since once information imperfections (and the fact that markets are incomplete) are brought into the analysis, as surely they must be, there is no presumption that markets are efficient.
2. The Lange-Lerner-Taylor theorem, asserting the equivalence of market and market socialist economies, is based on a misguided view of the market, of the central problems of resource allocation, and (not surprisingly, given the first two failures) of how the market addresses those basic problems.
3. The neoclassical paradigm, through its incorrect characterization of the market economies and the central problems of resource allocation, provides a false sense of belief in the ability of market socialism to solve those resource allocation problems. To put it another way, if the neoclassical paradigm had provided a good description of the resource allocation problem and the market mechanism, then market socialism might well have been a success. The very criticisms of market socialism are themselves, to a large extent, criticisms of the neoclassical paradigm.
4. The central economic issues go beyond the traditional three questions posed at the beginning of every introductory text: What is to be produced? How is it to be produced? And for whom is it to be produced? Among the broader set of questions are: How should these resource allocation decisions be made? Who should make these decisions? How can those who are responsible for making these decisions be induced to make the right decisions? How are they to know what and how much information to acquire before making the decisions? How can the separate decisions of the millions of actors decision makers in the economy be coordinated?
5. At the core of the success of market economies are competition, markets, and decentralization. It is possible to have these, and for the government to still play a large role in the economy; indeed it may be necessary for the government to play a large role if competition is to be preserved. There has recently been extensive confusion over to what to attribute the East Asian miracle, the amazingly rapid growth in countries of this region during the past decade or two. Countries like Korea did make use of markets; they were very export oriented. And because markets played such an important role, some observers concluded that their success was convincing evidence of the power of markets alone. Yet in almost every case, government played a major role in these economies. While Wade may have put it too strongly when he entitled his book on the Taiwan success Governing the Market, there is little doubt that government intervened in the economy through the market.
6. At the core of the failure of the socialist experiment is not just the lack of property rights. Equally important were the problems arising from lack of incentives and competition, not only in the sphere of economics but also in politics. Even more important perhaps were problems of information. Hayek was right, of course, in emphasizing that the information problems facing a central planner were overwhelming. I am not sure that Hayek fully appreciated the range of information problems. If they were limited to the kinds of information problems that are at the center of the Arrow-Debreu model consumers conveying their preferences to firms, and scarcity values being communicated both to firms and consumers then market socialism would have worked. Lange would have been correct that by using prices, the socialist economy could "solve" the information problem just as well as the market could. But problems of information are broader.”

Joseph E. Stiglitz book Whither Socialism?

Source: Whither Socialism? (1994), Ch. 1 : The Theory of Socialism and the Power of Economic Ideas

Books, Way, Communication, Failure

“Probability theory is an ideal tool for formalizing uncertainty in situations where class frequencies are known or where evidence is based on outcomes of a sufficiently long series of independent random experiments. Possibility theory, on the other hand, is ideal for formalizing incomplete information expressed in terms of fuzzy propositions.”

George Klir (1932–2016) American computer scientist

Source: Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic (1995), p. 205 cited in: Flavio Comim, et al. (2008) The Capability Approach: Concepts, Measures and Applications. p. 298.

“Galileo was NOT imprisoned for “speaking against the consensus”. He was imprisoned for heresy against the church. He was imprisoned for life by the Holy Inquisition, who forced him to recant his truth. Three hundred and fifty years later, in 1992, the Catholic Church finally formally dismissed the charges against him, admitting Galileo’s views were correct after all.”

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

Patheos, Orwellian Legislative Duplicity on HB 1485 http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2017/05/05/orwellian-legislative-duplicity-hb-1485/ (May 5, 2017)

Life, Truth

“Throughout the nineteenth century, apart from the division in theoretical sciences and arts, classifiers attempted to divide the sciences into two groups. Already they had before them the examples of Francis Bacon (speculative and descriptive) and Hobbes (quantitative and qualitative). For Coleridge, the sciences were either pure (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Mathematics, Metaphysics) or mixed. Arthur Schopenhauer’s similar groups were called pure and empirical, Wilhelm Wundt in 1887 called them formal and empirical, Globot mathematical and theoretical, and the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences (1904) normative and physical.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Karl Pearson made similar division of the sciences into abstract and concrete
Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Other Chapters, p. 154.

Art, Mathematics, Science

“Raised an Army brat in a constantly changing scene, Kitsy has always been at ease in any company. While she enjoys formal affairs, she has such an air of informality that in her corner of the room ritual is soon dispensed with. Kitsy was much impressed with the wives of Vietnamese officials. If the Vietnamese men, she liked to say, were half as strong as their women, the country would have no problem. She enjoyed their sense of humor, their propensity for earthly jokes. When she had difficulty deciphering the mixture of languages and getting to the point, one or another of the ladies would take her aside and explain. Kitsy shares some of my lack of affinity for foreign languages; her attempts at French drew the same wry smiles as my attempts at Vietnamese. Kitsy's sense of humor has brightened many an occasion. At a ceremony unveiling my official superintendent's portrait at West Point, the master of ceremonies asked her to say a few words. "This is the second time I have seen Westy unveiled," said Kitsy. "The first time was on our wedding night."”

William Westmoreland book A Soldier Reports

Source: A Soldier Reports (1976), p. 263.

Women, Men, Smile, Problem

“As we divided natural philosophy in general into the inquiry of causes, and productions of effects: so that part which concerneth the inquiry of causes we do subdivide according to the received and sound division of causes. The one part, which is physic, inquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes; and the other, which is metaphysic, handleth the formal and final causes.”

Francis Bacon book The Advancement of Learning

Book VII, 3
The Advancement of Learning (1605)

Nature, Parting

“It is an honour to be invited to address this conference today. For some time the Australian Defence Organisation has formally observed International Women’s Day. That is altogether appropriate. However, as all of you are no doubt aware, such formalities are rendered much less meaningful unless they are underpinned by tangible progress for women. And that necessarily implies cultural change in environments which have not been as conducive as they must be to women realising their full potential.”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

Women, Change, Time

“Each system is unique. However, by capitalizing on similarities we can reduce the time, effort, and cost for some or all of them, and thus the quest for formalized design methods becomes more attractive.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. vii

Effort, Time

“When we examine this suggestion, we see that it is no more than a formal acknowledgement of a problem, the problem of how (by what institutional arrangement, by what organization of affairs) the equilibrium prices are to be discovered. Repeated trial and error, while the market stands in suspense awaiting the outcome, is not a practical resort. The number of distinct trials, even if confined to discrete steps of price and quantity, would be so immense that the necessary 'market day' would extend beyond human life-times… [The] theoretical ideal applies to mutually isolated days or moments, each to be treated as perfectly self-contained and looking to no yesterday and no tomorrow. But the real market is dealing with goods inherited from yesterday, and in means of production whose products will not be ready till tomorrow. Meanwhile the non-economic circumstances are changing and rendering each successive equilibrium obsolete.”

G. L. S. Shackle (1903–1992) British economist

Source: Epistemics and Economics. (1972), p. 150

Life, Error, Problem, Change

“Any planned social change will have to consider a multitude of factors characteristic for the particular case. The change may require a more or less unique combination of educational and organizational measures; it may depend upon quite different treatments or Ideology, expectation and organization. Still, certain general formal principles always have to be considered.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1940s, Quasi-Stationary Social Equilibria and the Problem of Permanent Change, 1947, p. 39.

Education, Change, Dependency

“To the average mathematician who merely wants to know that his work is securely based, the most appealing choice is to avoid difficulties by means of Hilbert's program. Here one regards mathematics as a formal game and one is only concerned with the question of consistency.”

Paul Cohen (1934–2007) American mathematician

p. 11 of "Comments on the foundations of set theory." https://books.google.com/books?id=TVi2AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA11 In Axiomatic set theory, pp. 9-15. Providence (RI). American Mathematical Society, 1971.

Game, Mathematics, Question

“Newton's version of gravity violates common sense. How can one thing tug at another across vast spans of space? …Newton's formalism nonetheless provided an astonishingly accurate means of calculating the orbits of planets; it was too effective to deny.”

John Horgan (journalist) (1953) American science journalist

Source: The End of Science (1996), p. 66

Sense

“Even the street, the sunshine, the very air had a special Sunday quality. We walked differently on Sundays, with greater propriety and stateliness. Greetings were more formal, more subdued, voices more meticulously polite. Everything was so smooth, bland, polished. And genuinely so, because this was Sunday. In church the rustling and the stillness were alike pervaded with the knowledge that all was for the best. Propriety ruled the universe. God was in His Heaven, and we were in our Sunday clothes.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Source: Old Home Town (1935), Ch. 1.

God, Knowledge, Universe, Clothes

“Is it possible or not, given the present conditions in our continent, to achieve it (socialist power, that is) by peaceful means? We emphatically answer that, in the great majority of cases, this is not possible. The most that could be achieved would be the formal takeover of the bourgeois superstructure of power and the transition to socialism of that government which, under the established bourgeois legal system, having achieved formal power will still have to wage a very violent struggle against all who attempt, in one way or another, to check its progress toward new social structures.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Tactics and Strategy of the Latin American Revolution (1962)

Peace, Way

“Yet in a relatively short creative life of twenty years or so, Chopin redrew the boundaries of Romantic music, and his self-imposed restriction to the 88 keys of the piano keyboard sublimated nothing less than the aesthetic essence of piano music. It was his total identification with the instrument which, in its radical regeneration of the lyric and the dramatic, fantasy and passion and their unique fusion, shaped a tonal language which united an aristocratic sense of style and formal Classical training and intuition with an ascetic rigor. Chopin’s precisely marshaled trains of thought permitted no experiments, and so he did not ‘wander about’ within his stylistic points of reference as Scriabin was to do. Chopin’s works may seem light and improvisatory, but they are planned in meticulous details, exactly and well calculated.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Life, Music, Sense, Light

“There have always been two aspects to my work: formal innovation and strong content. That goes for Steve’s tape pieces as well. To make a work together, we had to be engaged by the subject matter, and we shared an interest in technology as it has advanced. Looking back at the Hindenburg and Bikini Atoll, and forward in “Dolly” to new technologies, was a way of rethinking and understanding the soup in which we swim. We call this a theater of ideas, but its success as a work depends on the strength of the video and the music.
“Hindenburg” itself begins with the crash of the zeppelin in 1937 and ends with a view of its burnt-up carcass on the landing field in Lakehurst, New Jersey, taken from an airplane. What interested us here in viewing the archival material and listening to recordings of the period was the overwhelming conviction that technology was the sure way to progress. Naturally, after the atom bomb, a darker view of progress began to appear.”

Beryl Korot (1945) American artist

Beryl Korot, in: " Steve Reich and Beryl Korot by Julia Wolfe http://bombmagazine.org/article/2521/steve-reich-and-beryl-korot," BOMB 81, Fall 2002

Music, Way, Idea, Understanding

“I don’t think this dance is suitable for weddings. This is not a formal dance, this is a cheesy dance! But still, I appreciate that.”

Psy (1977) South Korean singer

When told that “Gangnam Style” has become a popular wedding dance. <br class="br">Interview with The New York Times, 'His Style Is Gangnam, and Viral Too' http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/arts/music/interview-psy-the-artist-behind-gangnam-style.html?_r=0, October 2012.

Thinking, Wedding, Dance

“From Richard McKeon and Robert Brumsbaugh I learned to view the history of philosophy as a series, not of alternative solutions to the same problems, but of quite different sets of problems. From Rudolph Carnap and Carl Hempel I learned how pseudo-problems could be revealed as such by restarting them in the formal mode of speech. From Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss I learned how they could be so revealed by being translated into Whiteheadian or Hegelian terms.”

Richard Rorty book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Preface
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)

History, Problem, Learning

“I've been educated in some pretty lively barrooms, like the Cedar Bar in New York. And I went to high school with Frank Stella and when he got out of college he went to New York and started painting… I was working with sculpture in a kind of dilatory way, and he said to come up and work in his tiny loft when he wasn't there. At the same time I sort of dabbled in a little bit of painting, and a kind of confusion. I was an eye, ear, nose, and throat person too… One day Frank Stella just said to me, 'Look, if you paint another painting I'm going to cut off your hands.' I asked, 'Can't I become a good painter?' Frank said, 'No, because you are a good sculptor now.' That's really my formal education…. the company of artists is the great education. We educate each other. I've learned from older, wiser people by the old Greek method of sitting down and drinking with them. And that's how I received my education.”

Carl Andre (1935) American artist

Source: Artists talks 1969 – 1977, p. 27 - quote referring to his close art-friend, American Minimal Art artist Frank Stella

People, Education, School, Way

“The relations outlined on an organization chart provide a framework within which fuller and more spontaneous human behavior takes place. The formal system may draw upon that behavior for added strength; it will in its turn be subordinated to personal and group egotism.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Source: Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation, 1957, p. 29

Behavior, Drawing, Personality

“Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful—cannot lead to all truths.”

Douglas Hofstadter book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

Source: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (1979), Chapter 9: "Mumon and Gödel"

Truth

“Genesis as formal motion is the essential thing in a work. In the beginning the motif, insertion of energy, sperm. Works as shaping of form in the material sense: the primitive female component. Works as form - determining sperm: the primitive female component. My drawings belong to the male realm.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (1912), # 931, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1911 - 1914

Sense, Drawing

“We have no problem addressing them (PRC officials) by their official titles, although they still have reservations about extending the same courtesy to our (ROC) ministerial-level officials. This is not a personal issue. If there is a formal meeting, I am representing Taiwan.”

Wang Yu-chi (1969) Taiwanese politician

Wang Yu-chi (2013) cited in " Visit viable if China uses official title: MAC chief http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2013/06/29/2003565935" on The Taipei Times, 29 June 2013

Problem, Personality

“Formal theories of organization have been taught in management courses for many years, and there is an extensive literature on the subject. The textbook principles of organization — hierarchical structure, authority, unity of command, task specialization, division of staff and line, span of control, equality of responsibility and authority, etc. — comprise a logically persuasive set of assumptions which have had a profound influence upon managerial behavior.”

Douglas McGregor (1906–1964) American professor

Source: The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), p. 15 (p. 21 in 2006 edition)

Behavior, Literature

“It is essential to realize at this point that the formalism to be developed, although we cast it initially primarily in the framework of natural systems, is in fact applicable to any situation in which a class of objects is associated with real numbers, or in fact classified or indexed by any set whatever. It is thus applicable to any situation in which classification, or recognition, or discrimination is involved; indeed, one of the aims of our formalism is to point up the essential equivalence of the measurement problem in physics with all types of recognition or classification mechanisms based on observable properties of the objects being recognized or classified.”

Robert Rosen (1934–1998) American theoretical biologist

Source: Fundamentals of measurement and representation of natural systems. (1978), Ch. 2. The Basic Formalism; Quoted in: Mikulecky, Donald C. " Robert Rosen: the well‐posed question and its answer‐why are organisms different from machines? http://www.people.vcu.edu/~mikuleck/PPRISS3.html." Systems Research and Behavioral Science 17.5 (2000): 419-432.

Nature, Problem

“Those who rise in peace are men of formality and routine, cautious, inoffensive…Hawke represented the spirit of war, the ardour, the swift initiative, the readiness of resource, the impatience of prescription and routine, without which no great things are done!”

John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher (1841–1920) Royal Navy admiral of the fleet

Fisher of Kilverstone (1973), Ruddock F. Mackay, Clarendon Press, p. 265.

Men, War, Peace

“Although 50 years of European peace since the end of World War II may augur well for the future, it must be remembered that there were also more than 50 year of peace between the Congress of Vienna and the Franco-Prussian War. Moreover, contrary to the hopes and assumptions of Jean Monnet and other advocates of European integration, the devastating American Civil War shows that a formal political union is no guarantee against an intra-European war.”

Martin Feldstein (1939–2019) American economist

"EMU and international conflict", 1997

War, World, Peace, Hope

“Let us not be surprised, however, if the study of the principles of argumentation — or even Burke's much mis-taught Speech — seems dry without the prospect of actual debate. We should hardly expect a half-back to feel much enthusiasm over reading the rules of the game and tackling a dummy if he could not look forward to tackling a man. When elocution and argumentative writing have failed to stimulate interest, formal debate may succeed, for it is a kind of game. In the time limit, the order of speakers, the alternation of rides, the actual struggle of opposing forces, the give and take of rebuttal, the fixed rules and the ethics of conduct, the qualifications for success, and the final awarding of victory, debate has much in common with tennis and football.”

William Trufant Foster (1879–1950) American economist

Source: Argumentation and debating, 1908, p. viii

Feeling, Game, Study, Time

“While in totalitarian regimes, government controls the media and criminalizes journalists, bloggers and human rights defenders who do not echo the State’s propaganda, in numerous democratic countries, the media are largely in private hands — too few hands. Often media are controlled by conglomerates responsive to corporations and advertisers who determine the content of news and other programmes, frequently disseminating disinformation or suppressing crucial information necessary for democratic discourse. Indeed, the media blackout on important issues constitutes a grave obstacle to democracy, since absent sufficient information and without free and pluralistic media, democracy is dysfunctional and the political process, including elections, becomes a mere formality — not an expression of the will of the people.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

2013 <br class="br">Source: United Nations General Assembly - Promotion of a democratic and equitable international order http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/IntOrder/A-68-284_en.pdf.

People, Democracy, Country

“Even though principles of rationality seem as often violated as followed, we still cling to the notion that human thought should be rational, logical, and orderly. Much of law is based upon the concept of rational thought and behavior. Much of economic theory is based upon the model of the rational human who attempts to optimize personal benefit, utility, or comfort. Many scientists who study artificial intelligence use the mathematics of formal logic—the predicate calculus—as their major tool to simulate thought. […] Human thought is not like logic; it is fundamentally different in kind and spirit. The difference is neither worse nor better. But it is the difference that leads to creative discovery and to great robustness of behavior.”

Donald A. Norman book The Design of Everyday Things

Source: The Design of Everyday Things (1988, 2002), Ch. 5, pp. 114–115.

Law, Behavior, Intelligence, Mathematics

“In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards victory.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925)

Knowledge, Victory

“In Stage II guilt is first of all social, liberal, moral guilt—a guilt so general as to seem almost formal. It is we who are responsible, either by commission or—more generally—by omission, for everything from killing off the Tasmanians to burning the books at Alexandria. (You didn’t do it? Then you should have stopped them from doing it. You never heard of it? Ignorant as well as evil, eh? You weren’t born? You’re guilty, I tell you—guilty.)”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden’s Ideology”, p. 169
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Books, Evil

“Fantasizing about action out there in the 'real' world, spinning dreams abut the secret centrality, about the occult importance of the labours in which he has interred his existence — labours that the vast majority of his fellow men would deem wholly marginal and socially wasteful if they knew of them at all — the pure scholar, the master of catalogues, can sup on hatred. At the ordinary level, he will exorcize his spleen in the ad-hominem nastiness of a book review, in the arsenic of a footnote. He will vent his resentments in the soft betrayals of an ambiguous recommendation or examination report and in the scorpion's round of a committee on tenure. The violence stays formal. Not, one supposes, in Professor Blunt.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"The Cleric of Treason"
George Steiner: A Reader (1984)

Men, Secret, Books, World

“Sociologists and anthropologists have long been concerned with how individuals are linked to one another and how these bonds of affiliation serve as both a lubricant for getting things done and a glue that provides order and meaning to social life. The attention to networks of association, which began in earnest in the 1970s, provided welcome texture and dynamism to portraits of social life. This work stood in stark contrast to the reigning approaches in the social sciences. In contrast to deterministic cultural (oversocialized) accounts, network analysis afforded room for human agency, and in contrast to individualist, atomized (undersocialized) approaches, networks emphasized structure and constraint (Granovetter, 1985). Network studies offered a middle ground, a third way, even if no one was quite sure whether networks were a metaphor, a method, or a theory (Barnes 1979). But the sociologists and anthropologists who initially studied networks did not pay sustained attention to economic activity, although some industrial sociologists (Roy, 1954; Dalton, 1959) had long stressed the role of informal networks as an antidote to formal organization practices and structures.”

Walter W. Powell (1948) American sociologist

Walter W. Powell and Laurel Smith-Doerr. "Networks and economic life." The handbook of economic sociology. (1994). p. 368-380; introduction.

Life, Way, Study, Science

“Alone from Jargon born to rescue Law,
From precedent, grave hum, and formal saw!
To strip chicanery of its vain pretence,
And marry Common Law to Common Sense!”

Robert Lloyd (poet) (1733–1764) English poet and satirist

‘The Law-Student’ (1762) (on Lord Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice, 1756-88)

Law, Sense

“In the pedagogical as in certain other spheres freedom is not allowed to erupt, the power of the opposition is not allowed to put a word in edgewise: they want submissiveness. Only a formal and material training is being aimed at and only scholars come out of the menageries of the humanists, only "useful citizens" out of those of the realists, both of whom are indeed nothing but subservient people. Our good background of recalcitrancy [sic] gets strongly suppressed and with it the development of knowledge to free will. The result of school is then philistinism.”

Max Stirner book The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 23

People, School, Knowledge, Freedom

“The Executive order that was issued on February 19, 1942, was for the sole purpose of prosecuting the war with the Axis Powers, and ceased to be effective with the end of those hostilities. Because there was no formal statement of its termination, however, there is concern among many Japanese-Americans that there may yet be some life in that obsolete document. I think it appropriate, in this our Bicentennial Year, to remove all doubts on that matter, and to make clear our commitment in the future.”

Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)

1970s, Proclamation 4417 (1976)

Life, Hostility, War, Thinking

“In today's volatile world, organizational design is an everyday, ongoing activity and challenge for every executive, whether managing a global enterprise or a small work team. Globalization, worldwide competition, deregulation, and ever-new technologies drive the ongoing reassessment of the organization. The executive response has been many new forms of organizational design: virtual, learning, modular, cellular, network, alliance, or spaghetti – to name a few. New organizational forms challenge old ways of organizing for efficiency and effectiveness. Yet fundamental design principles underlie any well-functioning organization. Organizations still require a formal design.”

Richard M. Burton (1939)

Richard M. Burton, ‎Børge Obel, ‎Gerardine DeSanctis (2011). Organizational Design: A Step-by-Step Approach. p. 3

World, Way, Learning

“An examination of our terms, such as competition, rivalry, emulation, etc., reveals that the traditional perspective remains inscribed in the language. Competitors are fundamentally those who run or walk together, rivals who dwell on opposite banks of the same river, etc…The modern view of competition and conflict is the unusual and exceptional view, and our incomprehension is perhaps more problematic than the phenomenon of primitive prohibition. Primitive societies have never shared our conception of violence. For us, violence has a conceptual autonomy, a specificity that is utterly unknown to primitive societies. We tend to focus on the individual act, whereas primitive societies attach only limited importance to it and have essentially pragmatic reasons for refusing to isolate such an act from its context. This context is one of violence. What permits us to conceive abstractly of an act of violence and view it as an isolated crime is the power of a judicial institution that transcends all antagonists. If the transcendence of the judicial institution is no longer there, if the institution loses its efficacy or becomes incapable of commanding respect, the imitative and repetitious character of violence becomes manifest once more; the imitative character of violence is in fact most manifest in explicit violence, where it acquires a formal perfection it had not previously possessed. At the level of the blood feud, in fact, there is always only one act, murder, which is performed in the same way for the same reasons in vengeful imitation of the preceding murder. And this imitation propagates itself by degrees. It becomes a duty for distant relatives who had nothing to do with the original act, if in fact an original act can be identified; it surpasses limits in space and time and leaves destruction everywhere in its wake; it moves from generation to generation. In such cases, in its perfection and paroxysm mimesis becomes a chain reaction of vengeance, in which human beings are constrained to the monotonous repetition of homicide. Vengeance turns them into doubles.”

René Girard book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

Source: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), p. 11-12.

Way, Distant, Time, Perfection

“Social, political and economic institutions have become larger, considerably more complex and resourceful, and prima facie more important to collective life. Many of the major actors in modern economic and political systems are formal organizations, and the institutions of law and bureaucracy occupy a dominant role in contemporary life.”

James G. March (1928–2018) American sociologist

Source: Rediscovering institutions, 1989, p. 1-2

Life, Law

“Like Kant before him, Darwin insists that the source of all error is semblance. Analogy, he says again and again, is always a ‘deceitful guide’ (see pp. 61, 66, 473). As against analogy, or as I would say merely metaphorical characterizations of the facts, Darwin wishes to make a case for the existence of real ‘affinities’ genealogically construed. The establishment of these affinities will permit him to postulate the linkage of all living things to all others by the ‘laws’ or ‘principles’ of genealogical descent, variation, and natural selection. These laws and principles are the formal elements in his mechanistic explanation of why creatures are arranged in families in a time series. But this explanation could not be offered as long as the data remained encoded in the linguistic modes of either metaphor or synecdoche, the modes of qualitative connection. As long as creatures are classified in terms of either semblance or essential unity, the realm of organic things must remain either a chaos of arbitrarily affirmed connectedness or a hierarchy of higher and lower forms. Science as Darwin understood it, however, cannot deal in the categories of the ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ any more than it can deal in the categories of the ‘normal’ and ‘monstrous.’ Everything must be entertained as what it manifestly seems to be. Nothing can be regarded as ‘surprising,’ any more than anything can be regarded as ‘miraculous.”

Hayden White (1928–2018) American historian

"The fictions of factual representation"

Family, Law, Error, Nature

“Ever wish you could draw a few diagrams, press a button, and have a working software system that meets your needs? Sound like magic? Perhaps, but that’s a major part of the Executable UML vision. The basic idea is that you will use a CASE tool to develop detailed UML diagrams and then supplement them by specifications written in a formal language, presumably the OMG’s Object Constraint Language (OCL). The basic idea behind Executable UML is that systems can be modeled at a higher level of abstraction than source code, simulated to support validation of your efforts, and then translated into efficient code. This higher-level of abstraction should help to avoid premature design, enable you to change your system as your requirements evolve, and to delay implementation decisions until the last minute.”

Scott W. Ambler (1966) Canadian software engineer/consultant/author

Source: Agile Modeling: Effective Practices for eXtreme Programming and the Unified Process (2002), p. 172

Idea, Support, Decision, Effort

“Concept maps have long provided visual languages widely used in many different disciplines and application domains. Abstractly, they are sorted graphs visually represented as nodes having a type, name and content, some of which are linked by arcs. Concretely, they are structured diagrams having discipline- and domain-specific interpretations for their user communities, and, sometimes, formally defining computer data structures. Concept maps have been used for a wide range of purposes and it would be useful to make such usage available over the World Wide Web.”

Brian R. Gaines (1938) British computer scientist

Gaines (2001) " WebMap: Concept Mapping on the Web http://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/134/" on w3.org/Conferences/WWW4, 2001.

World, Communication

“NOW, THEREFORE, I, GERALD R. FORD, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim that all authority conferred by Executive Order 9066 terminated upon the issuance of Proclamation 2714, which formally proclaimed the cessation of hostilities of World War II on December 31, 1946.”

Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)

1970s, Proclamation 4417 (1976)

Hostility, War, World

“Needless to say, there is no formal or mathematical content to ID—a “theory” that explains everything, explains nothing, and predicts nothing. ID cannot explain why millions of species were created and then became extinct. Even more importantly, it cannot explain “mistakes” in the design of living organisms such as us.”

Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist

Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 2, “Just a Theory: What Scientists Do” (p. 39)

Mathematics

“The most likely way to kill a tradition is to over-formalize it, which is to carry it on in the same way after everyone has ceased to defer to it. The way to revive it is to show that it has grown out of and is still related to our most cherished values. But this requires radical insight and the stripping away of many things which are mere accretions.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“The Importance of Cultural Freedom,” p. 29.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Way

“I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i. e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.”

Ludwig Feuerbach book The Essence of Christianity

Preface to Second Edition (1843)
The Essence of Christianity (1841)

Truth, Reality, Universe

“A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate's permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia. When a Catholic does not share a candidate's stand in favor of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2004 memorandum to Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington, D.C.
2003

Evil

“The " general" definition may give you no hint as to the way in which a particular assertion is meant to be interpreted. When, therefore, as in formal debate, a proposition is advanced by persons other than those who discuss it, clearness in defining is not sufficient. In such cases a definition must have two qualities: it must be clear, and it must be satisfactory to the persons addressed. They must know what the speaker means, and they must be convinced that his meaning is the correct one, — correct for that particular proposition at the time and place and under the conditions of that particular debate. Otherwise, they may object in the end that he has proved, not the given proposition, but another which he has substituted for it by means of arbitrary definitions.”

William Trufant Foster (1879–1950) American economist

Source: Argumentation and debating, 1908, p. 27; partly cited in: Branham (2013, p. 39)

Way, Time, Personality

“I can’t think of better ways to learn than through pleasure and curiosity. I guess the reason these two qualities play so small a role in formal education is that they are so subjective and individual. Curiosity and delight can’t be institutionalized.Childhood and adolescence form our sensibilities. By the time I arrived in college, I had already developed a deep suspicion of all theories of art that did not originate in pleasure.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Lonely Impulse of Delight: One Reader's Childhood," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/elonely.htm The Southern Review (Winter 2005) <br class="br">Essays

Pleasure, Education, Art, Way

“I think Iraq will have a formally independent government that will be in perpetual gridlock and chaos, and essentially, there will be a U. S. military administration utilizing NGOs that can do a lot of the heavy lifting in the country.”

George Friedman (1949) American businessman and political scientist

Interview with Matt Bai (2003)

Thinking, Country

“I discovered that a whole range of problems of the most diverse character relating to the scientiﬁc organization of production (questions of the optimum distribution of the work of machines and mechanisms, the minimization of scrap, the best utilization of raw materials and local materials, fuel, transportation, and so on) lead to the formulation of a single group of mathematical problems (extremal problems). These problems are not directly comparable to problems considered in mathematical analysis. It is more correct to say that they are formally similar, and even turn out to be formally very simple, but the process of solving them with which one is faced [i. e., by mathematical analysis] is practically completely unusable, since it requires the solution of tens of thousands or even millions of systems of equations for completion.
I have succeeded in ﬁnding a comparatively simple general method of solving this group of problems which is applicable to all the problems I have mentioned, and is sufﬁciently simple and effective for their solution to be made completely achievable under practical conditions.”

Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) Russian mathematician

Kantorovich (1960) "Mathematical Methods of Organizing and Planning Production." Management Science, 6(4):366–422, 1960, p. 368); As cited in: Cockshott, W. Paul. " Mises, Kantorovich and economic computation http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/publications/PAPERS/8707/standalonearticle.pdf." (2007).

Mathematics, Question, Problem

“It is quite useless to declare that all men are born free if you deny that they are born good. Guarantee a man's goodness and his liberty will take care of itself. To guarantee his freedom on condition that you approve of his moral character is formally to abolish all freedom whatsoever, as every man's liberty is at the mercy of a moral indictment which any fool can trump up against everyone who violates custom, whether as a prophet or as a rascal.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Preface
1900s, Major Barbara (1905)

Men, Fools, Freedom

“However, in all honesty, I must say that one must essentially forget that all proofs are transcribed in this formal language. In order to think productively, one must use all the intuitive and informal methods of reasoning at one's disposal. At the very end one must check that no errors have been committed; but in practice set theory is treated as any other branch of mathematics. The reason that we can do this is that we will never speak about proofs but only about models.”

Paul Cohen (1934–2007) American mathematician

p. 1078 of "The discovery of forcing." http://www.logic.univie.ac.at/~ykhomski/ST2013/The%20Discovery%20of%20Forcing.pdf Rocky Mountain Journal of Mathematics 32, no. 4 (2002): 1071–1100.

Error, Mathematics, Thinking, Forgetting

“It was not certain what significance the ceremony held, for unfortunately the records were lost, but the formality was no less sacred for being unintelligible.”

Mervyn Peake book Titus Groan

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 40 “Meanwhile” (pp. 230-231)

“True dragons are Danish and speak Danish, a tongue that the Danes themselves describe as less a language than a throat disease. To attract a dragon, one chains a naked maiden to a rock. The maiden must be chained to the rock in such a way that every part of her is visible to the dragon. Many famous paintings demonstrate the technique; Ingres’s Angelica Saved by Ruggiero is an example. After the dragon has inspected your maiden to its heart’s content, you issue one of the conventional formal challenges, in Danish—’Jeg udfordre dig til ridderlig camp’ is the way one usually puts it—and then the fight begins.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

Source: The King (1990), p. 39.

Disease, Way, Heart, Fight

“Yes, Wordsworth often personified objects in nature and gave them the human aspect, and personally I have done rather the reverse process in sculpture. I’ve often found that by taking formal ideas from landscape, and putting them into my sculpture I have, as it were, related a human figure to a mountain, and so got the same effect as a metaphor in painting.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote in 'The Listener', 13 November 1941, pp. 657-9; as cited in Henry Moore writings and Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson, University of California Press, California 2002, pp. 126-27
1940 - 1955

Mountain, Idea, Nature, Painting

“Ressentiment must therefore be strongest in a society like ours, where approximately equal rights (political and otherwise) or formal social equality, publicly recognized, go hand in hand with wide factual differences in power, property, and education.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 50

Education

“A total institution may be defined as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life. Prisons serve as a clear example, providing we appreciate that what is prison-like about prisons is found in institutions whose members have broken no laws. This volume deals with total institutions in general and one example, mental hospitals, in particular.”

Erving Goffman book Asylums

Source: 1950s-1960s, Asylums, 1961, p. xxi; lead paragraph

Life, Law, Time

“All large organizations have an internal power struggle over the goals and resources of the organization…. In the largest firms, there are two bases of control : formal ownership and authority. Those who own the firm control by virtue of ownership. Authority relations embedded in the organizational structure legitimate how managers can control organizations.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: The transformation of corporate control, 1993, p. 10 ; As cited in: François L'Italien, BÉHÉMOTH CAPITAL. Contribution à une théorie dialectique de la financiarisation de la grande corporation. Université Laval, 2012. p. 147 (Many of the following quotes came from this source)

“The judge smiled. It is not necessary, he said, that the principals here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding. But it is consistent with notions of right principle that these facts—to the extent that they can be readily made to do so—should find a repository in the witness of some third party. Sergeant Aguilar is just such a party and any slight to his office is but a secondary consideration when compared to divergences in that larger protocol enacted by the formal agenda of an absolute destiny. Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter VII

Smile, History, Understanding

“I'm not a Baptist in any formal way. I go to the Baptist church, where my wife plays the piano, on days of bad weather. On days of good weather, I ramble off into the woods somewhere. I am a person who takes the Gospel seriously, but I have had trouble conforming my thoughts to a denomination.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

The Brian Lehrer Show (17 October 2013) http://www.wnyc.org/story/wendell-berry/

Way, Personality, Weather

“If physics leads us today to a world view which is essentially mystical, it returns, in a way, to its beginning, 2,500 years ago. […] This time, however, it is not only based on intuition, but also on experiments of great precision and sophistication, and on a rigorous and consistent mathematical formalism.”

Fritjof Capra book The Tao of Physics

Source: The Tao of Physics (1975), Ch. 1, Modern Physics, p. 19.

World, Way, Mathematics, Time

“Let no-one mistake. This Church, and other faith groups, have the ability to be agents for change and change for the better. … You have worked to promote understanding among faiths. To tackle sectarianism. To promote development worldwide. … And let me say that for our Parliament, that is something that may not yet be formally our responsibility. But it is, in reality, our obligation. … In ancient times it was said that Sparta had no city walls. It did not need them, the people were the walls of Sparta. This church and our other institutions - spiritual and secular are the walls of Scotland - the rocks on which reform and renewal will be built. … We will continue to draw on this Church as a source of wisdom. A source of strength. A source of hope.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Scotland in the World Forum (February 4, 2008), Church of Scotland (May 25, 2009)

Wisdom, People, Faith, Hope

“Despite the separation of church and state in the U. S. Constitution, a Christian politician facing a conundrum may ask, “What would Jesus do?” or WWJD. A transhumanist politician not only relies on a moral compass but also seeks the best solutions with the help of science and technology in addition to formal and informal politics.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Science, Help

“Old answers never perfectly suit new questions, except in the most formal, logical circumstances.”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)

Question

“The subject of a science is never well circumscribed and there is little use sharpening its definition. However, nobody will deny that physics deals with nature and sociology with human society in some of their aspects. With logic, it is another matter. Logic is usually understood nowadays as a study of certain formal systems, though in former times there were philosophers who held that the subject matter of logic was the formal rules of human thought. In the latter sense it would be an empirical rather than a formal science, though its empirical subject matter would still be fundamentally different from that of psychology of thinking. One interpretation of logic does not exclude the other. Formal approaches are often easier than empirical ones, and for this reason one can understand why logic as a study of formal systems has till now made more progress than logic as a study of the formal rules of thought, even if restricted to scientific thought.”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Source: Realistic models in probability (1968), p. 1

Understanding, Nature, Thinking, Sense

“Formal debate is a kind of game. In the time limit, the order of speakers, the alternation of sides, the give and take of rebuttal, the fixed rules of conduct, the ethics of the contest, the qualifications for success, and the final awarding of victory, debate has much in common with tennis.”

William Trufant Foster (1879–1950) American economist

Source: Argumentation and debating, 1908, p. 281

Game, Time, Success, Victory

“The tools of scholarly criticism-stylistics, iconographical analysis, historical context, and formal analysis in the last 50 years remain as trusted now as ever. Yet they explain with diminishing clarity what has happened after 1800, and almost nothing of what has happened in sculpture in the last 60 years.”

Jack Burnham (1931) American art historian

Preface.
Beyond Modern Sculpture, 1968

“"You hear your fate," said the Sphere to me, while the Council was passing for the third time the formal resolution. "Death or imprisonment awaits the Apostle of the Gospel of Three Dimensions." "Not so," replied I, "the matter is now so clear to me, the nature of real space so palpable, that methinks I could make a child understand it. Permit me but to descend at this moment and enlighten them." "Not yet," said my Guide, "the time will come for that. Meantime I must perform my mission. Stay thou there in thy place." Saying these words, he leaped with great dexterity into the sea (if I may so call it) of Flatland, right in the midst of the ring of Counsellors. "I come," cried he, "to proclaim that there is a land of Three Dimensions."”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART II: OTHER WORLDS, Chapter 18. How I came to Spaceland, and What I Saw There

Death, Fate, Understanding, Nature

“That a formal science like algebra, the creation of our abstract thought, should thus, in a sense, dictate the laws of its own being, is very remarkable. It has required the experience of centuries for us to realize the full force of this appeal.”

George Ballard Mathews (1861–1922) British mathematician

G.B. Mathews quoted in: F. Spencer. Chapters on Aims and Practice of Teaching, (London, 1899), p. 184. Reported in Moritz (1914).

Law, Sense, Science

“Paris is a very graceful and beautiful city, almost too formal and sweet to the taste after the raw disorder of New York. Everything seems to have been planned with the purpose of forming a most harmonious whole, which certainly has been done... Every street here is alive with all sorts of conditions of people, priests, nuns, students, and always the little soldiers with wide red pants.”

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

Quote in Hopper's letter to his mother, Paris, October 30, 1906; as cited in Edward Hopper, Gail Levin, Bonfini Press, Switzerland 1984, p. 13
1905 - 1910

People, Beauty

“My father had served with great honor and courage in the Second World War. He fought for a country that was not only great, but good. It had its flaws and had some imperfections. It was the original sin of slavery which you know which we hadn't completed extirpated because we still had racial injustice in the 50s and 60s and 70s. We had only recently abolished, formally abolished segregation. So I was aware that uh, America had its flaws and defects in its history. But I also believed in the country and believed in its principles. That's the way I was brought up and so I was shocked when I found people who were just openly, vociferously anti-American, condemning not only America's sins but America itself, condemning its principles and pointing in some cases to communist regimes like Cuba as being superior.”

Robert P. George (1955) American legal scholar

2016, Interview with Bill Kristol (2016)

War, People, World, Way

“Society is eliminating the prerogatives and privileges of feudal. aristocratic culture together with its content. The fact that the transcending truths of the fine arts, the aesthetics of life and thought, were accessible only to the few wealthy and educated was the fault of a repressive society. But this fault is not corrected by paperbacks, general education, long-playing records, and the abolition of formal dress in the theater and concert hall. The cultural privileges expressed the injustice of freedom, the contradiction between ideology and reality, the separation of intellectual from material productivity; but they also provided a protected realm in which the tabooed truths could survive in abstract integrity—remote from the society which suppressed them.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 64-65

Life, Truth, Education, Art

“The specialist serves as a striking concrete example of the species, making clear to us the radical nature of the novelty. For, previously, men could be divided simply into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two categories. He is not learned, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his speciality; but neither is he ignorant, because he is "a scientist," and "knows" very well his own tiny portion of the universe. We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with an the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line.”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XII: The Barbarism Of "Specialisation"

Men, Fashion, Nature, Learning

“They [the American authorities] can't actually believe that anyone would want to not be an American," he says. "It's not enough to send them a letter and tell them you've become British; you've got to go to the embassy to formally renounce your US citizenship. I'm a little worried that when I do this they'll pack me off to Guantanamo.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

Bill Bryson: The accidental chancellor (November 15, 2005)

“The presence of U. S. troops in South Korea has been and remains the greatest deterrent to North Korean adventurism and a disruption of the current and longstanding peace on the Korean peninsula. And to repeat an important point: the absence of a formal peace treaty no more threatens this peace than the absence of a post-World War Two peace treaty between Moscow and Tokyo threatens the peace between Russia and Japan.”

Sung-Yoon Lee Korea and East Asia scholar, professor

http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2010&month=12
Keeping the Peace: America in Korea, 1950–2010
December 2010
Imprimis
March 1, 2013
https://www.webcitation.org/6EyqabQdp?url=http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2010
March 9, 2013
yes

War, World, Peace

“I've never known anyone who has fallen into sin and been successfully restored by the formal church structure. Nor have I ever seen a formal church structure wisely deal with sin, enabling ministry to continue without interruption.”

Ted Haggard (1956) American minister

[Haggard, Ted, The Life Giving Church, Regal Books, Expanded edition (May 2001), p. 111, ISBN 0830726594]