Quotes about general (7423 quotes, page 35)

“In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

Source: Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, 1979, p. 49

People , Parent , Learning

“Are we going to be the weak and cowardly generation that will relinquish, under threats, the Rumanian destiny and renounce our national mission?”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Nation and Culture

“Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1

Help

“This was not long desired before it was realized. The Lord, who is rich in mercy, and ever willing to answer the consistent prayer of the humble, after we had called upon Him in a fervent manner, aside from the abodes of men, condescended to manifest to us His will. On a sudden, as from the midst of eternity, the voice of the Redeemer spake peace to us, while the veil was parted and the angel of God came down clothed with glory, and delivered the anxiously looked for message, and the keys of the Gospel of repentance. What joy! what wonder! what amazement! While the world was racked and distracted—while millions were groping as the blind for the wall, and while all men were resting upon uncertainty, as a general mass, our eyes beheld, our ears heard, as in the ‘blaze of day’; yes, more—above the glitter of the May sunbeam, which then shed its brilliancy over the face of nature! Then his voice, though mild, pierced to the center, and his words, ‘I am thy fellow-servant,’ dispelled every fear. We listened, we gazed, we admired! ’Twas the voice of an angel from glory, ’twas a message from the Most High! And as we heard we rejoiced, while His love enkindled upon our souls, and we were wrapped in the vision of the Almighty! Where was room for doubt? Nowhere; uncertainty had fled, doubt had sunk no more to rise, while fiction and deception had fled forever!”

Oliver Cowdery (1806–1850) American Mormon leader

Love , Men , God , World

“To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true.”

Tim O'Brien book The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried (1990), How to Tell a True War Story

War , Peace

“…nothing short of a world state will be really effective in preventing war. As long as you rely for security on a number of national armaments you will have the difficulty as to who shall bell the cat in case of need, while you will have general staffs in all countries planning future wars. I want us to come out boldly for a real long-range policy which will envisage the abolition of the conception of the individual sovereign state. … A united navy to police the seas of the world could be attained and would incidentally bring enormous pressure to bear on Japan. The next thing would be an international air force and an international air service. … The basis of such a move would have to be a frank recognition that all states must surrender a large degree of sovereignty and that the Peace Treaties must be revised. On this basis one must then proceed to build up a world structure politically and economically. … This may sound very visionary but I am convinced that unless we see the world we want it is vain to try to build a permanent habitation for Peace and that temporary structures will catch fire very soon if we wait any longer.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to Tom Attlee (1 January 1933), quoted in W. Golant, 'The Emergence of C. R. Attlee as Leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party in 1935', The Historical Journal, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Jun., 1970), p. 323
Deputy Leader of the Opposition

War , World , Peace , Cats

“On the evening of the 29th, the army fell back to the north end of the Island. The next morning, the enemy advanced upon us in two columns upon the east and west road. Our light troops, commanded by Colonel Livingston and Colonel Laurens, attacked the heads of the columns about seven o'clock in the morning, but were beat back they were reinforced with a regiment upon each road. The enemy still proved too strong. General Sullivan formed the army in order of battle, and resolved to wait their approach upon the ground we were encamped on, and sent orders to the light troops to fall back. The enemy came up and formed upon Quaker Hill, a very strong piece of ground, within about one mile and a quarter of our line. We were well posted, with strong works in our rear, and a strong redoubt in front, partly upon the right of the line.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (August 1778)

Light , Strong , Waiting

“It has often occurred to my mind in digesting my thoughts on this subject, what a pity it is that this most useful science should be so generally neglected in the modern methods of education; and that preceptors and tutors, both in public and private seminaries of learning, should forget that the forming the manners is more necessary to a finished education than furnishing the minds of youth. Socrates, who made all his philosophy subservient to morality, was of this sentiment: and took more pains to rectify the tempers than replenish the understandings of his pupils; and looked upon all knowledge as useless speculation that was not brought to this end, to make us wiser and better men. And, without doubt, if in the academy the youth has once happily learned the great art of managing his temper, governing his passions, and guarding his foibles, he will find a more solid advantage from it in afterlife, than he could expect from the best acquaintance with all the systems of ancient and modern philosophy.”

John Mason (1706–1763) English Independent minister and author

A Treatise on Self-Knowledge (1745)

Men , Pain , Youth , Education

“We've got to take the neighborhood back. We've got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It's right around the corner. It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't where you is go." I don't know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with "why you ain't…". You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they're moving ahead on this? Well, they know they're not, they're just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you're just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out.”

Bill Cosby (1937) American actor, comedian, author, producer, musician, activist

"Dr Bill Cosby Speaks at the 50th Anniversary commemoration of the Brown vs Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court Decision," known as the "Pound Cake" speech (May 2004).

People , Peace , Way , Idea

“It is an established maxim that birth is a criterion of allegiance. Birth however derives its force sometimes from place and sometimes from parentage, but in general place is the most certain criterion; it is what applies in the United States; it will therefore be unnecessary to investigate any other.”

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

As quoted in "Constitutional Originalism Requires Birthright Citizenship" https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/constitutional-originalism-requires-birthright-citizenship/ (9 September 2018), by Dan McLaughlin, National Review
1780s

Birth

“The good causes of the Left may generally be compared to NASCAR; they offer the diversion of watching things go excitingly around in a circle, getting nowhere. Page 11.”

David Mamet (1947) American playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and film director

The Secret Knowledge

“It was his general plan to repress emotion by not showing the sympathy he felt.”

Elizabeth Gaskell book Wives and Daughters

Wives and Daughters, ch. 11
Wives and Daughters

“The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live. With the tidings that make such an Ireland possible, St. Patrick came to our ancestors fifteen hundred years ago promising happiness here no less than happiness hereafter. It was the pursuit of such an Ireland that later made our country worthy to be called the island of saints and scholars. It was the idea of such an Ireland - happy, vigorous, spiritual - that fired the imagination of our poets; that made successive generations of patriotic men give their lives to win religious and political liberty; and that will urge men in our own and future generations to die, if need be, so that these liberties may be preserved. One hundred years ago, the Young Irelanders, by holding up the vision of such an Ireland before the people, inspired and moved them spiritually as our people had hardly been moved since the Golden Age of Irish civilisation. Fifty years later, the founders of the Gaelic League similarly inspired and moved the people of their day. So, later, did the leaders of the Irish Volunteers. We of this time, if we have the will and active enthusiasm, have the opportunity to inspire and move our generation in like manner. We can do so by keeping this thought of a noble future for our country constantly before our eyes, ever seeking in action to bring that future into being, and ever remembering that it is for our nation as a whole that future must be sought.”

Éamon de Valera (1882–1975) 3rd President of Ireland

Radio broadcast http://www.rte.ie/archives/exhibitions/eamon-de-valera/719124-address-by-mr-de-valera/, "On Language & the Irish Nation" (17 March 1943), often called "The Ireland that we dreamed of" speech

Life , Wisdom , Men , God

“I will not be proposing a course which has been under some public discussion recently — deficit financing. It is wholly inappropriate to our economic situation. In its least extreme form it is based on the theory that additional money generated by a Government deficit (and given currency, as necessary, by use of the printing press) will stimulate consumption and thereby production, in time to match the excess money with goods before real inflationary harm is done. Unfortunately we don't, and can't, produce more than a small fraction of what we consume, and increased consumption would merely mean increased imports without matching exports; and a severe balance of payment crisis, which would destroy Hong Kong's credit and confidence in the Hong Kong dollar; and which we could not cure without coming close to ruining ourselves. Keynes was not writing with our situation in mind. In this hard world we have to earn before we spend.”

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

February 27, 1963, page 50.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

Money , World , Confidence , Time

“It should be noticed that the whole approach is in contradiction to generally accepted views.”

Michał Kalecki (1899–1970) Polish economist

Source: Theory of Economic Dynamics (1965), Chapter 1, Cost and Prices, p. 17

“Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed, and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them; and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.”

Learned Hand (1872–1961) American legal scholar, Court of Appeals judge

"A Fanfare for Prometheus" (29 January 1955); also in The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses (1952), p. 131.
Extra-judicial writings

Hate , Time

“Speak the truth! One committed mouth carries the seeds that could change a generation and change the world.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 120

Truth , World , Change

“Nothing is gained by a total denial of even sporadic cases of religious persecution and vandalism. But such cases were very few and their very paucity emphasizes and illuminates the great religious tolerance of the Indian people for more than two thousand years.’ … There is a great difference between local brawls as in the above case and a general policy by a community or a king of wholesale persecution.”

Pandurang Vaman Kane (1880–1972) Indian Indologist and Sanskrit scholar

About alleged cases of religious persecution by Hindus. P.V. Kane, History of the Dharmashastras, Ancient and Medieval Religious and Civil Law, Volume V, Part II, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona, 1977, p. 1011, note 1645a. quoted from Shourie, Arun (2014). Eminent historians: Their technology, their line, their fraud. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India : HarperCollins Publishers.

People , Communication

“South America had been an island continent, far bigger and far more diverse than Australia, for tens of millions of years before the Isthmus of Panama rose just a couple of million years ago. The resulting flood of North American mammals across the new land bridge corresponds in time with the decimation of the native South American fauna. In fact, most large mammals generally considered distinctly South American… are all recent migrants from North America.”

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

"Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?" pp. 390
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Time

“The kings made us drunk with fumes,
Peace among us, war to the tyrants!
Let the armies go on strike,
Stocks in the air, and break ranks.
If they insist, these cannibals
On making heroes of us,
They will know soon that our bullets
Are for our own generals.”

Eugène Edine Pottier (1816–1887) French politician

Les rois nous saoulaient de fumées
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans
Appliquons la grève aux armées
Crosse en l'air, et rompons les rangs
S'ils s'obstinent, ces cannibales
À faire de nous des héros
Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles
Sont pour nos propres généraux
The Internationale (1864)

War , Peace

“I think fully accepting that things are not the way they need to be, and going to work on those issues in a way that people understand you are serious about, as opposed to the tech industry generally appearing arrogant, I understand that.”

Steve Ballmer (1956) American businessman who was the chief executive officer of Microsoft

Business Insider: "Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has advice for Facebook and Google: Don't make the mistake we did" http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-microsoft-ceo-steve-baller-tech-industry-work-with-regulators-2018-6?r=UK&IR=T (23 June 2018)
2010s

People , Way , Understanding , Thinking

“Conventions of generality and mathematical elegance may be just as much barriers to the attainment and diffusion of knowledge as may contentment with particularity and literary vagueness… It may well be that the slovenly and literary borderland between economics and sociology will be the most fruitful building ground during the years to come and that mathematical economics will remain too flawless in its perfection to be very fruitful.”

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

Kenneth Boulding (1948) "Samuelson's Foundations: The Role of Mathematics in Economics," In: Journal of Political Economy, Vol 56 (June). as cited in: Peter J. Boettke (1998) " James M. Buchanan and the Rebirth of Political Economy http://publicchoice.info/Buchanan/files/boettke.htm". Boettke further explains "Boulding's words are even more telling today than they were then as we have seen the fruits of the formalist revolution in economic theory and how it has cut economics off from the social theoretic discourse on the human condition."
1940s

Mathematics , Knowledge , Perfection

“The purpose of the suit is to harass and discourage rather than to win. The law can be used very easily to harass, and enough harassment on somebody who is simply on the thin edge anyway, well knowing that he is not authorized, will generally be sufficient to cause his professional decease. If possible, of course, ruin him utterly.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

A Manual on the Dissemination of Material (1955).

Law

“I rapidly discovered that Aristotle had known almost no mechanics at all. … How could his characteristic talents have deserted him so systematically when he turned to the study of motion and mechanics? Equally, if his talents had so deserted him, why had his writings in physics been taken so seriously for so many centuries after his death? … I was sitting at my desk with the text of Aristotle's Physics open in front of me… Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together. My jaw dropped, for all at once Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed, but of a sort I'd never dreamed possible. Now I could understand why he had said what he'd said, and what his authority had been. Statements that had previously seemed egregious mistakes, now seemed at worst near misses within a powerful and generally successful tradition. That sort of experience -- the pieces suddenly sorting themselves out and coming together in a new way -- is the first general characteristic of revolutionary change that I shall be singling out after further consideration of examples. Though scientific revolutions leave much piecemeal mopping up to do, the central change cannot be experienced piecemenal, one step at a time. Instead, it involves some relatively sudden and unstructured transformation in which some part of the flux of experience sorts itself out differently and displays patterns that were not visible before.”

Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) American historian, physicist and philosopher

Source: The Road Since Structure (2002), p. 16-17; from "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" (1982)

Death , Dreams , Way , Understanding

“Most striking, perhaps, in their general appearance was the disproportion between the legs of these creatures and the length of their bodies; and yet — so relative is our idea of grace — my eye became habituated to their forms, and at last I even fell in with their persuasion that my own long thighs were ungainly.”

H. G. Wells book The Island of Doctor Moreau

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 15: Concerning the Beast Folk

Idea , Appearance

“In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court decided that 'separate but equal' did not violate the equal protection clause, and the South and not only the South relied upon this decision in building their systems of racially segregated public schools. The Court's 1896 decision can be explained in part by reason of the fact that the country—and the Western World generally—was then nearly submerged by the 'evolutionary' enlightenment. This movement, which dominated the intellectual elites in the universities, the law schools, and the media, denied the story of Creation in the Bible, and rejected the hitherto received idea that "God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth." It entertained instead the idea that the races of mankind did not all emerge at the same time from the subhumanity which preceded their humanity. Evolutionary doctrine encouraged the idea that there was a fundamental inequality among the aforesaid races, and this idea virtually relegated to the "dustbin of history" the contrary idea, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, "that all men are created equal."”

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

2000s, The Logic of the Colorblind Constitution (2004)

Men , God , World , School

“She nursed him, she read to him, she anticipated his wants, and was solicitous about his feelings; but there had entered into the husband’s mind the certainty that she judged him, and that her wifely devotedness was like a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts—was accompanied with a power of comparison by which himself and his doings were seen too luminously as a part of things in general. His discontent passed vaporlike through all her gentle loving manifestations, and clung to that unappreciative world which she had only brought nearer to him.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

Love , World , Feeling , Reading

“That classical theory had catastrophic implications for the constitution of matter was barely appreciated by Planck and others at the turn of the century, and played no substantial role in the development of quantum theory until Bohr's work 13 years later.
The lesson that could be drawn from this, and also from the development of general relativity, is that a crisis will only become creative if it is formulated in a mathematically precise manner. This conclusion has an echo in Bell's insistence on having quantum mechanics "fully formulated in mathematical terms, with nothing left to the discretion of the theoretical physicist", but what it really calls for is a critique of the "orthodox" theory fully formulated in mathematical terms with nothing left to the discretion of the critic.”

Kurt Gottfried (1929) American physicist

Does quantum mechanics carry the seeds of its own destruction? (1991)

Mathematics

“Make your minds perfectly clear that if ever you let loose upon us again a general strike, we will loose upon you — another "British Gazette."”

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

Speech in the House of Commons, July 7, 1926 "Emergency Services" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1926/jul/07/emergency-services#column_2218 ; at this time, Churchill was serving as Chancellor of the Excheqer under Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.
Threatening the Labour Party and trade union movement with a return of the Government-published newspaper he edited during that May's General Strike.
Early career years (1898–1929)

“I often meet people who are very, very staunch Southerners, some of whom feel that the Yankees are out to do the South in. But believe me, there is not, and never has been anyone, including General Sherman, who does more damage to the South then their own schools heading by their own people. They need to wake up and every part of the country needs to recognize what is being done to it by these educators, this systemic destruction of everything that people treasure and believe in.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Dangers Inherent in Public Education (March 24, 1986)

People , Education , School , Feeling

“For my generation, Judd posed the same problem as Picasso did for the Abstract Expressionists; you either had to go over, under, around, or through him. Conceptual, process, and Earth Art, each in their own way, constituted a rejection of the ‘speciﬁc object.”

Mel Bochner (1940) American artist

Mel Bochner (2005, p. 70) in: David Raskin. Donald Judd. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

Art , Way , Problem

“Proposed Special and General Provisions”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

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

“We arrive at a portrayal of other things, such as the laws governing matter. These are the great generalities – Which do not change.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

note in Mondrian's sketchbook II, 1912/13; as quoted in Two Mondrian sketchbooks 1912 - 1914, ed. Robert P. Welsh & J. M. Joosten, Amsterdam 1969 op. cit. (note 31), p. 61
1910's

Law , Change

“Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists—whether through design or stupidity, I do not know—as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Evolution as Fact and Theory", p. 260
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

Stupidity , Quotes

“The Prussian diet has not an ideal composition…but has done useful work; in spite of this it will be necessary to preserve the [general] franchise for the Reichstag and to change the franchise for the diet. I most sincerely regret the announcement of such a change. It is merely a concession to the supposed popular will.”

Hans von Seeckt (1866–1936) German general

Letter (4 February 1916), quoted in F. L. Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics 1918 to 1933 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 105.

Change , Sincerity

“Before we were old enough to practise at the nets with the Burslem men, we played most of our cricket on waste land that had been trampled flat by the clogs and boots of generations of miners.”

Bernard Hollowood (1910–1981) English cricketer

Cricket on the Brain (1970)

Men

“At our worst in the Middle East, we unreservedly supported—or enthroned—medieval despots who suppressed popular liberation efforts, thus driving moderate dissidents into the arms of fanatics. From our diplomatic personnel held hostage in Iran a generation ago, to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the United States, we have suffered for our support of repressive "stable" regimes that radicalized their own impoverished citizens. In the interests of stability, we looked the other way while secret police tortured and shabby armies massacred their own people, from Iran to Guatemala. But the shah always falls. Would that we could tattoo that on the back of every diplomat's hand: The shah always falls.”

Ralph Peters (1952) American military officer, writer, pundit

Source: 2000s, Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World (2002), p. 174: originally published as "Stability, America's Enemy" in Parameters, Winter 2001-02

People , Secret , Way , Support

“The second part of the book… contains an exposition of the first principles of the theory of complex quantities; hitherto, the very elements of this theory have not been easily accessible to the English student, except recently in Prof. Chrystal's excellent treatise on Algebra. The subject of Analytical Trigonometry has been too frequently presented to the student in the state in which it was left by Euler, before the researches of Cauchy, Abel, Gauss, and others, had placed the use of imaginary quantities, and especially the theory of infinite series and products, where real or complex quantities are involved, on a firm scientific basis. In the Chapter on the exponential theorem and logarithms, I have ventured to introduce the term "generalized logarithm" for the doubly infinite series of values of the logarithm of a quantity.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

A Treatise on Plane Trigonometry https://books.google.com/books?id=_ktLAAAAMAAJ (1891) Preface

Books , Parting

“I graduated on June 13, number 4 in a class of 102. General MacArthur gave me my diploma and his "Congratulations, Mr. Taylor" was the last time I heard his voice until, as the new Chief of Staff of the Army, I called on him in the Waldorf Towers in 1956. Although he had done much for the Corps of Cadets during his superintendency, oddly enough he had never made an effort to impress his personality on the cadets through direct communication with them. I do not ever recall his having made a speech to us and only a few cadets were ever asked to his house. Certainly no graduate has left greater evidence of deep affection for West Point and the Corps than MacArthur, but the cadets saw little of this during his superintendency. Upon graduation I had my choice of branch of service, and I took the engineers for two unrelated but, for me, compelling reasons. The first was that Robert E. Lee had been an engineer, and the second was that the Engineer School at Camp Humphreys, Virginia, now Fort Belvoir, was conveniently near Washington where Miss Happer lived. It became the first of the long list of Army stations at which I was to serve.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: Swords and Plowshares (1972), p. 28

School , Communication , Effort , Time

“Neither economic liberalism nor Keynesianism can conceptualise vocation, virtue or labour value as economic categories, neither can give a primary economic value to intermediate institutions, whether they be the corporate governance of a firm, vocational colleges, regional banks or supporter owned football clubs, they can only conceptualise the state or the market and all forms of particular association are viewed as at best “cultural” or at worst “obstructive”. They can give no conceptual status to place, to the specificity of place and the necessity of institutions in generating virtue and value within it.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Politics, Employment Polices and the Young Generation, Maurice Glasman http://www.lse.ac.uk/economics/newsEventsSeminars/files/MauriceGlasmanPaper.pdf

Support , Football

“Early entry is appropriate when the following general circumstances hold:
- Image and reputation of the firm are important to the buyer, and the firm can develop an enhanced reputation by being a pioneer.
- Early entry can initiate the learning process in a business in which the learning curve is important, experience is difficult to imitate, and it will not be nullified by successive technological generations.
- Customer loyalty will be great, so that benefits will accrue to the firm that sells to the customer first.
- Absolute cost advantages can be gained by early commitment to supplies of raw materials, distribution channels, and so on.”

Michael E. Porter (1947) American engineer and economist

2008 edition, p. 248
Competitive strategy, 1980

Business , Learning , Success , Loyalty

“After six years of war service, I rejoined Ilford Public Library service in 1946, and set about completing my F. L. A., begun in 1940. This service had a good tradition of assistance to readers, and when I joined the Metal Box C. in 1948, I soon realised how the skills required for a scientific and industrial research “information officer” depended on the basic techniques of librarianship, notably classification and cataloguing. The enhancement of these led to the development of higher levels, in literature searching, and, more particularly, in current awareness service and selective dissemination of information….
Meeting with S. R. Ranganathan in 1948 gave me a new view of classification as facet analysis plus traditional generic analysis and I applied this in schemes for Packaging, Occupational Safety and Health, and Education. This experience has suggested to me that facet analysis applied to any subject can reveal hitherto uncoordinated concepts - materials, processes, etc – and thus offer an indication of possible areas of future research. This could be a unique Information Science to the World Wide Web.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Douglas Foskett (2000-04) " From Librarianship to Information Science http://faculty.libsci.sc.edu/bob/scrapbook/foskett2.htm" at

War , Health , World , Education

“It is almost impossible to have a baseless snobbish opinion of the General Theory of Relativity.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Fantastic Metropolis, Christmas Editorial (http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/20011209/3/)

“"A curse," said Lee. "Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands when the baneful word seared my reeling brain: 'homosexual'. I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted simpering female impersonators I'd seen in a Baltimore nightclub. Could it be possible I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze like a man with a light concussion- just a minute, Doctore Kildare, this isn't your script. I might as well have destroyed myself, ending an existence which seemed to offer nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation. Nobler, I thought to die a man than life on, a sex monster. It was a wise old queen - Bob, we called her- who taught me that I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink."”

William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer

Source: Queer: A Novel (1985), Chapter Three

Love , Life , Hate , Hostility

“The analytical equations, unknown to the ancient geometers, which Descartes was the first to introduce into the study of curves and surfaces, are not restricted to the properties of figures, and to those properties which are the object of rational mechanics; they extend to all general phenomena. There cannot be a language more universal and more simple, more free from errors and from obscurities, that is to say more worthy to express the invariable relations of natural things.
Considered from this point of view, mathematical analysis is as extensive as nature itself; it defines all perceptible relations, measures times, spaces, forces, temperatures; this difficult science is formed slowly, but it preserves every principle which it has once acquired; it grows and strengthens itself incessantly in the midst of the many variations and errors of the human mind.
Its chief attribute is clearness; it has no marks to express confused notions. It brings together phenomena the most diverse, and discovers the hidden analogies which unite them.”

Joseph Fourier book The Analytical Theory of Heat

Preliminary Discourse, p.7 Note: often quoted as Mathematics [or mathematical analysis] compares the most diverse phenomena and discovers the secret analogies that unite them.
The Analytical Theory of Heat (1878)

Error , Mathematics , Nature , Study

“Our global responsibility now is not to determine who owns what identity, but to convey to future generations what we all owe each other.”

Irshad Manji book The Trouble with Islam Today

Source: The Trouble with Islam Today (2005), p. 203

Future

“The numerous chimneys with their fantastic shapes rose grimly in the moonlight, like a strange band of goblin sentinels, perched of the roof to watch the mansion. The general effect was that of an ancient structure falling to decay, deserted by all inhabitants save the rats that gnawed the wainscot along the thick old walls. The door-plate that glittered on the faded door, half covered as it was with rust and verdigris, with its saintly name afforded the only signs of the actual occupation of Monk-hall by human beings: in all other respects it looked so desolate, so time-worn, so like a mausoleum for old furniture, and crumbling tapestry, for high-backed mahogany chairs, gigantic bedsteads, and strange looking mirrors, veiled in the thick folds of the spider's web.”

George Lippard (1822–1854) Novelist, journalist

The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk Hall, part 1, chapter 7 "The Monks of Monk-Hall" (1844)

Time

“Thought depends on the habitual exercise of the speculative faculties; action, on the determination of the will. The one assigns reasons for things, the other puts causes into act. … Such is the effeminacy of the speculative and philosophical temperament, compared with the promptness and vigour of the practical! … Reasoners in general are undecided, wavering, and sceptical, or yield at last to the weakest motive as most congenial to their feeble habit of soul.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On Thought and Action"
Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Exercises , Soul , Motivation , Dependency

“International language of the forthcoming generations will be solely and by necessity only a language of art.”

Ludoviko Lazaro Zamenhof (1859–1917) Polish ophthalmologist and inventor of Esperanto

Fundamenta Krestomatio http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/8224, by Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, first published in 1903

Art

“The elucidation of the theory of centripetal and disturbing forces is necessarily less complete. Still… a general conception of the nature of the action of those forces… sufficient to preserve the student from the gross errors… may be obtained from explanations like those here offered. The methods of ascertaining the weight of the Earth and other bodies are… more difficult of explanation; yet… something may be done even in these.”

George Biddell Airy (1801–1892) English mathematician and astronomer

Introduction
Popular Astronomy: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Ipswich (1868)

Error , Nature

“I couldn't live with myself if I thought that these big strategic choices for my generation were there, and I wasn't even making them – or I was making them according to what was expedient rather than what I actually thought was right.”

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

[Stryker Mcguire, I Did It My Way, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17202843/site/newsweek/, Newsweek International, 2007-02-26, 2007-02-20]
2000s

“… don't wait for the good woman. She doesn't exist. There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts. The female loves to play man against man, and if she is in a position to do it there is not one who will not resist. The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal. and torture and damnation. Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

in a letter to Steven Richmond (Published in Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life by Howard Sounes)
Letters

Love , Women , Feeling , Soul

“The Protestant churches generally hold that the elements of the sacrament are flesh and blood only in a tropical sense; they nourish our souls as meat and the juice of it would our bodies. But the Catholics maintain that they are literally just that; although they possess all the sensible qualities of wafer-cakes and diluted wine. But we can have no conception of wine except what may enter into a belief, either —
# That this, that, or the other, is wine; or,
# That wine possesses certain properties.
Such beliefs are nothing but self-notifications that we should, upon occasion, act in regard to such things as we believe to be wine according to the qualities which we believe wine to possess. The occasion of such action would be some sensible perception, the motive of it to produce some sensible result. Thus our action has exclusive reference to what affects the senses, our habit has the same bearing as our action, our belief the same as our habit, our conception the same as our belief; and we can consequently mean nothing by wine but what has certain effects, direct or indirect, upon our senses; and to talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being in reality blood, is senseless jargon. Now, it is not my object to pursue the theological question; and having used it as a logical example I drop it, without caring to anticipate the theologian's reply. I only desire to point out how impossible it is that we should have an idea in our minds which relates to anything but conceived sensible effects of things. Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects; and if we fancy that we have any other we deceive ourselves, and mistake a mere sensation accompanying the thought for a part of the thought itself. It is absurd to say that thought has any meaning unrelated to its only function. It is foolish for Catholics and Protestants to fancy themselves in disagreement about the elements of the sacrament, if they agree in regard to all their sensible effects, here or hereafter.
It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”

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

The final sentence here is an expression of what became known as the Pragmatic maxim, first published in "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12 (January 1878), p. 286

Soul , Motivation , Idea , Question

“Many people fail to grasp this point, apparently because they think of "scientific" evidence as only that produced in laboratories by controlled experiments. This leads them to treat field studies, however careful, thorough and well-documented, as "anecdotal"--mere preparation for the real thing, therefore properly ignored till it bears fruit entitled to be considered by learned persons. This attitude was much like that of cavalry generals in the First World War, waiting patiently for the infantry to clear the ground so that they could make the dashing charges that alone they thought entitled the name of warfare. Because these creatures are complex, only a tiny fraction of important truths about them can ever be seen in laboratories of expressed in control experiments. The same, of course, is true of the human race.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 224.

War , People , Truth , World

“What we need, then, is a new 'paradigm' - a new vision of reality; a fundamental change in our thoughts, perceptions, and values. The beginnings of this change, of the shift from the mechanistic to the holistic conception of reality, are already visible in all fields and are likely to dominate the present decade. The various manifestations and implications of this 'paradigm shift' are the subject of this book. The sixties and seventies have generated a whole series of social movements that all seem to go in the same direction, emphasizing different aspects of the new vision of reality. So far, most of these movements still operate separately and have not yet recognized how their intentions interrelate. The purpose of this book is to provide a coherent conceptual framework that will help them recognize the communality of their aims. Once this happens, we can expect the various movements to flow together and form a powerful force for social change. The gravity and global extent of our current crisis indicate that this change is likely to result in a transformation of unprecedented dimensions, a turning point for the planet as a whole.”

Fritjof Capra book The Turning Point

Preface.
The Turning Point (1982)

Books , Communication , Reality , Change

“You have called upon us to expose ourselves to all the subtle machinations of their malignity for all time. And now, what do you propose to do when you come to make peace? To reward your enemies, and trample in the dust your friends? Do you intend to sacrifice the very men who have come to the rescue of your banner in the South, and incurred the lasting displeasure of their masters thereby? Do you intend to sacrifice them and reward your enemies? Do you mean to give your enemies the right to vote, and take it away from your friends? Is that wise policy? Is that honorable? Could American honor withstand such a blow? I do not believe you will do it. I think you will see to it that we have the right to vote. There is something too mean in looking upon the Negro, when you are in trouble, as a citizen, and when you are free from trouble, as an alien. When this nation was in trouble, in its early struggles, it looked upon the Negro as a citizen. In 1776 he was a citizen. At the time of the formation of the Constitution the Negro had the right to vote in eleven States out of the old thirteen. In your trouble you have made us citizens. In 1812 General Jackson addressed us as citizens; 'fellow-citizens'. He wanted us to fight. We were citizens then! And now, when you come to frame a conscription bill, the Negro is a citizen again. He has been a citizen just three times in the history of this government, and it has always been in time of trouble. In time of trouble we are citizens. Shall we be citizens in war, and aliens in peace? Would that be just?”

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

1860s, What the Black Man Wants (1865)

Men , War , Peace , History

“all our moves are based on four general principles: continued use of the rifle, no waiving of historical rights, no peace, and no negotiations… Whatever form of government is established in the territory when the shadow of occupation passes away, whenever I address my fighters and revolutionaries, I shall say: ‘Let our rifles be aimed at the beloved land, the land of the homeland, the land of Palestine.”

Yasser Arafat (1929–2004) former Palestinian President, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

Statement from Wafa, Beirut (9 June 1974) as quoted in Journal of Palestine Studies (1974), p. 224.
1970s

Peace

“Coups, murders, rapes, violence, brutality, burglaries, incest, rebellion, homosexuality and other forms of social ills and criminality are a product of a generational curse happening mostly in the indigenous Fijian community.”

James Ah Koy (1936) Fijian politician

Quoted by the Daily Star http://www.pacificmagazine.net/pina/pinadefault.php?urlpinaid=15350, 12 May 2005

Communication

“We are then brought to consider Platinotype, which, on the whole, may be regarded as the most suitable for general pictorial work. Its power of rendering relative tones and atmosphere is perhaps unequalled, whilst, although every one who has used it has sometimes wished that the undeveloped image were more visible, yet the pale, ghost-like print made by the light is very much better than nothing at all, and, indeed, may often be quite sufficient to guide us in our endeavours to control the action of light in a manner to be shortly described.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Printing methods and their bearing on pictorial photography, p. 72

Light

“The dissatisfaction with life and the world, felt more or less in the present state of society and intellect by every discerning and highly conscientious mind, gave in his case a rather melancholy tinge to the character, very natural to those whose passive moral susceptibilities are more than proportioned to their active energies. For it must be said, that the strength of will of which his manner seemed to give such strong assurance, expended itself principally in manner. With great zeal for human improvement, a strong sense of duty and capacities and acquirements the extent of which is proved by the writings he has left, he hardly ever completed any intellectual task of magnitude. He had so high a standard of what ought to be done, so exaggerated a sense of deficiencies in his own performances, and was so unable to content himself with the amount of elaboration sufficient for the occasion and the purpose, that he not only spoilt much of his work for ordinary use by over-labouring it, but spent so much time and exertion in superfluous study and thought, that when his task ought to have been completed, he had generally worked himself into an illness, without having half finished what he undertook. From this mental infirmity (of which he is not the sole example among the accomplished and able men whom I have known), combined with liability to frequent attacks of disabling though not dangerous ill-health, he accomplished, through life, little in comparison with what he seemed capable of;”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/74/mode/1up pp. 74-75

Men , Nature , Study , Health

“When the clergy addressed General Washington on his departure from the government, it was observed in their consultation that he had never on any occasion said a word to the public which showed a belief in the Christian religion and they thought they should so pen their address as to force him at length to declare publicly whether he was a Christian or not. They did so. However [Dr. Rush] observed the old fox was too cunning for them. He answered every article of their address particularly except that, which he passed over without notice. Rush observes he never did say a word on the subject in any of his public papers except in his valedictory letter to the Governors of the states when he resigned his commission in the army, wherein he speaks of the benign influence of the Christian religion. I know that Gouverneur Morris, who pretended to be in his secrets & believed himself to be so, has often told me that General Washington believed no more of that system than he himself did.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

The Anas (February 1, 1800). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 1 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-01_Bk.pdf, pp. 352–353
1800s

Secret , Religion , Departure

“Why did the generals who have been so ready to term me a complaisant and incompetent yes-man fail to secure my removal? Was that all that difficult? No, that wasn't it; the truth was that nobody would have been ready to replace me, because each one knew that he would end up just as much a wreck as I.”

Wilhelm Keitel (1882–1946) German general

Excerpt from "The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Keitel" - Page 52 - by Wilhelm Keitel - 1966

Truth

“Many feminists have been grieved or aggrieved by The Left Hand of Darkness because the androgynes in it are called ‘he’ throughout. In the third person singular, the English generic pronoun is the same as the masculine pronoun. A fact worth reflecting upon. And it’s a trap, with no way out, because the exclusion of the feminine (she) and the neuter (it) from the generic/masculine (he) makes the use of either of them more specific, more unjust, as it were, than the use of ‘he.’ And I find made-up pronouns, ‘te’ and ‘heshe’ and so on, dreary and annoying.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Introduction to the story “Winter‘s King” p. 85
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)

Way , Personality

“I looked down the long lines of waving black plumes and stern faces beneath them, and sighed to think that within one short hour most, if not all, of those magnificent veteran warriors, not a man of whom was under forty years of age, would be laid dead or dying in the dust. It could not be otherwise; they were being condemned, with that wise recklessness of human life which marks the great general, and often saves his forces and attains his ends, to certain slaughter, in order to give their cause and the remainder of the army a chance of success. They were foredoomed to die, and they knew the truth. It was to be their task to engage regiment after regiment of Twala’s army on the narrow strip of green beneath us, till they were exterminated or till the wings found a favourable opportunity for their onslaught. And yet they never hesitated, nor could I detect a sign of fear upon the face of a single warrior. There they were—going to certain death, about to quit the blessed light of day for ever, and yet able to contemplate their doom without a tremor. Even at that moment I could not help contrasting their state of mind with my own, which was far from comfortable, and breathing a sigh of envy and admiration. Never before had I seen such an absolute devotion to the idea of duty, and such a complete indifference to its bitter fruits.”

H. Rider Haggard book King Solomon's Mines

Source: King Solomon's Mines (1885), Chapter 14, "The Last Stand of the Greys"

Life , Death , Truth , Age

“Let us not today cast blame on the murderers. Who are we to argue against their potent hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been turning the land and villages in which they and their forefathers lived into our own inheritance… We are the generation of settlement, and without steel helmets and the maw of the cannon we will not be able to plant a tree or build a home. Our children will not live if we do not dig shelters, and without barbed wire fences and machine guns we will not be able to pave roads or drill for water. Millions of Jews, annihilated because they had no country, gaze at us from the dust of Jewish history and command us to settle and raise up a land for our people.”

Moshe Dayan (1915–1981) Israeli military leader and politician

Rise and Kill First (2018) by Ronen Bergman, p. 49. Citing Moshe Dayan by Mordechai Bar-On, p. 128-129

Children , People , Home , History

“Teachers and writers share a responsibility to create the next generation of readers. We need to create and cultivate in our classrooms a dialectic of intellect and intuition, of mental attention and sensory engagement. In poetry, intellectual-ity without physicality becomes dull and barren, just as intuition untethered by intellect quickly becomes sloppy and subjective. We need to augment methodology with magic”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

36
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

Teachers

“Let us look back on the events which fill up the ten years of the Sullan restoration. No one of the movements, external or internal, which occurred during this period - neither the insurrection of Lepidus, nor the enterprises of the Spanish emigrants, nor the wars in Thrace and Macedonia and in Asia Minor, nor the risings of the pirates and the slaves - constituted of itself a mighty danger necessarily affecting the vital sinews of the nation; and yet the state had in all these struggles well-night fought for its very existence. The reason was that the tasks were left everywhere unperformed, so long as they might still have been performed with ease; the neglect of the simplest precautionary measures produced the most dreadful mischiefs and misfortunes, and transformed dependent classes and impotent kings into antagonists on a footing of equality. The democracy and the servile insurrection were doubtless subdued; but such as the victories were, the victor was neither inwardly elevated nor outwardly strengthened by them. It was no credit to Rome, that the two most celebrated generals of the government party had during a struggle of eight years marked by more defeats than victories failed to master the insurgent chief Sertorius and his Spanish guerrillas, and that it was only the dagger of his friends that decided the Sertorian war in favour[sic] of the legitimate government. As to the slaves, it was far less an honour[sic] to have confronted them in equal strive for years. Little more than a century had elapsed since the Hannibalic war; it must have brought a blush to the cheek of the honourable[sic] Roman, when he reflected on the fearfully rapid decline of the nation since that great age. Then the (the Roman) Italian slaves stood like a wall against the veterans of Hannibal; now the Italian militia were scattered like chaff before the bludgeons of their runaway serfs. Then every plain captain acted in case of need as general, and fought often without success, but always with honour, not it was difficult to find among all the officers of rank a leader of even ordinary efficiency. Then the government preferred to take the last farmer from the plough rather than forgo the acquisition of Spain and Greece; now they were on the eve of again abandoning both regions long since acquired, merely that they might be able to defend themselves against the insurgent slaves at home. Spartacus too as well as Hannibal had traversed Italy with an army from the Po to the Sicilian Straights, beaten both consuls, and threatened Rome with a blockade; the enterprise which had needed the greatest general of antiquity to conduct it against the Rome of former days could be undertaken against the Rome of the present by a daring captain of banditti. Was there any wonder that no fresh life sprang out of such victories over insurgents and robber-chiefs?”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 4, Pt. 1, Chapter 2. "Rule of the Sullan Restoration"
The Government of the Restoration as a Whole
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 1

Life , War , Age , Democracy

““Organization theory,” a term that appeared in the middle of the twentieth century, has multiple meanings. When it first emerged, the term expressed faith in scientific research as a way to gain understanding of human beings and their interactions. Although scientific research had been occurring for several centuries, the idea that scientific research might enhance understanding of human behavior was considerably newer and rather few people appreciated it. Simon (1950, 1952-3, 1952) was a leading proponent for the creation of “organization theory”, which he imagined as including scientific management, industrial engineering, industrial psychology, the psychology of small groups, human-resources management, and strategy. The term “organization theory” also indicated an aspiration to state generalized, abstract propositions about a category of social systems called “organizations,” which was a very new concept. Before and during the 1800s, people had regarded armies, schools, churches, government agencies, and social clubs as belonging to distinct categories, and they had no name for the union of these categories. During the 1920s, some people began to perceive that diverse kinds of medium-sized social systems might share enough similarities to form a single, unified category. They adopted the term “organization” for this unified category.”

Philippe Baumard (1968) French academic

William H. Starbuck and Philippe Baumard (2009). "The seeds, blossoming, and scant yield of organization theory," in: Jacques Rojot et. al (eds.) Comportement organisationnel - Volume 3 De Boeck Supérieur. p. 15

People , School , Faith , Way

“The results of this study are presented under three general headings. The first, and most extensive, section consists of data relating to the factors that lead to positive and negative attitudes toward the job. It will be recalled that the major question this study set out to investigate was whether different kinds of factors were responsible for bringing about job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction.”

Frederick Herzberg (1923–2000) American psychologist

Source: The motivation to work, 1959, p. 57

Question , Study

“A college education was for me life-changing. It gave me a life-long passion for reading and learning. It challenged my narrowness and parochialism-really forced open my mind. It deepened my commitment to culture in general and to the higher forms of pleasure. Thus it enriched my life-permanently-by confirming me in habits of mind that would benefit me all my life long. Anyone observing could have seen that happening to me (and my fellow students) at the time. A real education is life-changing. You don't go to classes during the week and get drunk in dance bars on the weekend. You discover a higher level of life and pleasure, and you start living it. If the education takes, you keep living it the rest of your life. […] Education releases you for real joy in the midst of a culture that is abysmally cheap and shabby. The people around you pursue TV, sports, and shopping-- obey the commands of their masters to indulge themselves in every way and not to question the value of what they are fed by the media. But the educated man is critical and even self-critical: he THINKS about things-even things like pleasure. Mindless self-indulgence is no longer enough when you have learned to think.”

Donald Vroon (1942) American music critic

"Critical Convictions", American Record Guide, May/Jun 2002

Life , People , Pleasure , Education

“Today there is a new class hostile to business in general, and especially to large corporations. As a group, you find them mainly in the very large and growing public sector and in the media. They share a disinterest in personal wealth, a dislike for the free-market economy, and a conviction that society may best be improved through greater governmental participation in the country's economic life. They are the media. They are the educational system. Their dislike for the free-market economy originates in their inability to exercise much influence over it so as to produce change. In its place they would prefer a system in which there is a very large political component. This is because the new class has a great deal of influence in politics. Thus, through politics, they can exercise a direct and immediate influence on the shape of our society and the direction of national affairs.”

Irving Kristol (1920–2009) American columnist, journalist, and writer

1970s, Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978)

Life , Hostility , Education , Exercises

“Bureau of Ordnance, Richmond
January 17, 1864
General Lee:
I have the honor to present to you with this letter Mr. Andries Rhoodie of Rivington, North Carolina, who has demonstrated in my presence a new rifle, which I believe may prove to be of the most significant benefit conceivable to our soldiers. As he expressed the desire of making your acquaintance & as the Army of Northern Virginia will again, it is likely, face hard fighting in the months ahead, I send him on to you that you may judge both him & his remarkable weapon for yourself. I remain,
Your most ob't servant,
Josiah Gorgas
Colonel”

Harry Turtledove book The Guns of the South

Source: The Guns of the South (1992), p. 5

Fight

“Of the American institutionalists, his most generous comments concerned Commons’s work, work that he regarded as hopelessly unsystematic but highly ‘suggestive and valuable”

Frank Knight (1885–1972) American economist

"Review of Institutional Economics", 1935

“Suppose you want to convert a bunch of pictures into icons. Suppose you know how to do that with one picture: you click on the file, "drag" it over to the icon-generating program, then "drop" it there. Repeat until thoroughly disgusted with the idiocy of the paradigm of direct manipulation. Suppose instead you were able to communicate your actual desire to the computer, in (gasp!) a language!”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: RFC: Lisp/Scheme with less parentheses through Python-like significant indentation? http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/308ecb00b29198ba (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Communication

“Freedom and idiots make a volatile mix. And the sad truth is that the idiocy quotient in the general population is alarmingly high.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 7 (p. 59)

Truth , Sadness , Freedom

“.. [a] generous display of scantily clad beauties and a carnavalesque inventiveness.... [the] beautifully masked and under-dressed women, with showers of confetti, multicolored streamers. The atmosphere was one of frenzy..”

Gino Severini (1883–1966) Italian painter

Severini described the popular Parisian nightspot 'Bal Tabarin', after which he made his painting 'Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin' https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79419, in 1912
Source: The Life of a Painter - autobiography', 1946, p. 54; as quoted in: Shannon N. Pritchard, Gino Severini and the symbolist aesthetics of his futurist dance imagery, 1910-1915 https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/pritchard_shannon_n_200305_ma.pdf Diss. uga, 2003, p. 39

Women , Beauty

“The Buddhist PAVARANA ceremony at the end of the rainy season retreat was instituted by the Lord Buddha, who did not want human beings to live in silence "like dumb animals." This ceremony, during which monks ask mutual forgiveness for any offence given during the retreat, can be said to be a council of truth and reconciliation. It might also be considered a forerunner of that most democratic of institutions, the parliament, a meeting of peoples gathered together to talk over their shared problems. All the world's great religions are dedicated to the generation of happiness and harmony. This demonstrates the fact that together with the combative instincts of man there co-exists a spiritual aspiration for mutual understanding and peace.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (1945) State Counsellor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy

Opening Keynote Address at NGO Forum on Women, Beijing China (1995)

People , Truth , World , Peace

“According to history, Malays began to migrate to Malaysia in noticeable numbers only about 700 years ago. Of the 39 percent Malays in Malaysia today, about one-third are comparatively new immigrants like the secretary-general of UMNO, Dato' Syed Ja'afar Albar, who came to Malaya from Indonesia just before the war at the age of more than thirty. Therefore it is wrong and illogical for a particular racial group to think that they are more justified to be called Malaysians and that the others can become Malaysian only through their favour.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew (in 1964 or 1965), — Ye, Lin-Sheng (2003). The Chinese Dilemma, p. 43. East West Publishing. ISBN 0-9751646-1-9.
1960s

War , Age , History , Thinking

“I do not worship any gods myself, though I guess some are real in their own ways. I have to believe that all of them get regular belly-laughs because one of them was ingenious to create human sexuality. Even greed and lust for power do not come close to generating the stupidities that us being male and female do.
But by giving it half a thought I can think of as many glories that spring from the same dichotomy.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 98 (p. 266)

God , Stupidity , Way , Spring

“I suggest, then… that the first step was an advance under favor of peculiar conditions, from the simplest forms of being, to the next more complicated, and this through the medium of the ordinary process of generation.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 205

“In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

The Doors of Perception (1954)

Women , Men , Way

“"What is Bazarov?" Arkady smiled. "Would you like me to tell you, uncle, what he really is?""Please do, nephew.""He is a nihilist!""What?" asked Nikolai Petrovich, while Pavel Petrovich lifted his knife in the air with a small piece of butter on the tip and remained motionless."He is a nihilist," repeated Arkady."A nihilist," said Nikolai Petrovich. "That comes from the Latin nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge; the word must mean a man who… who recognizes nothing?""Say — who respects nothing," interposed Pavel Petrovich and lowered his knife with the butter on it."Who regards everything from the critical point of view," said Arkady."Isn't that exactly the same thing?" asked Pavel Petrovich."No, it's not the same thing. A nihilist is a person who does not bow down to any authority, who does not accept any principle on faith, however much that principle may be revered.""Well, and is that good?" asked Pavel Petrovich. "That depends, uncle dear. For some it is good, for others very bad.""Indeed. Well, I see that's not in our line. We old-fashioned people think that without principles, taken as you say on faith, one can't take a step or even breathe. Vous avez changé tout cela; may God grant you health and a general's rank, and we shall be content to look on and admire your… what was the name?""Nihilists," said Arkady, pronouncing very distinctly."Yes, there used to be Hegelists and now there are nihilists. We shall see how you will manage to exist in the empty airless void; and now ring, please, brother Nikolai, it's time for me to drink my cocoa."”

Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) Russian writer

Source: Father and Sons (1862), Ch. 5.

God , People , Health , Faith

“In general, growth is an intrinsic source of change with potentially unintended effects and some subunits are better positioned than others to protect themselves against such effects. Oligarchical tendencies are present in almost all membership-based organizations, such as unions and voluntary associations, and if unchecked, can lead to transformations. Organizations with diffuse goals or innovative leadership are sometimes able to survive the crisis of complementing their original mission by moving onto other goals.”

Howard E. Aldrich (1943) American sociologist

Source: Organizations and Environments, 1979, p. 204

Change

“What is essential to the idea of a slave? We primarily think of him as one who is owned by another. To be more than nominal, however, the ownership must be shown by control of the slave's actions — a control which is habitually for the benefit of the controller. That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labours under coercion to satisfy another's desires. The relation admits of sundry gradations. Remembering that originally the slave is a prisoner whose life is at the mercy of his captor, it suffices here to note that there is a harsh form of slavery in which, treated as an animal, he has to expend his entire effort for his owner's advantage. Under a system less harsh, though occupied chiefly in working for his owner, he is allowed a short time in which to work for himself, and some ground on which to grow extra food. A further amelioration gives him power to sell the produce of his plot and keep the proceeds. Then we come to the still more moderated form which commonly arises where, having been a free man working on his own land, conquest turns him into what we distinguish as a serf; and he has to give to his owner each year a fixed amount of labour or produce, or both: retaining the rest himself. Finally, in some cases, as in Russia before serfdom was abolished, he is allowed to leave his owner's estate and work or trade for himself elsewhere, under the condition that he shall pay an annual sum. What is it which, in these cases, leads us to qualify our conception of the slavery as more or less severe? Evidently the greater or smaller extent to which effort is compulsorily expended for the benefit of another instead of for self-benefit. If all the slave's labour is for his owner the slavery is heavy, and if but little it is light. Take now a further step. Suppose an owner dies, and his estate with its slaves comes into the hands of trustees; or suppose the estate and everything on it to be bought by a company; is the condition of the slave any the better if the amount of his compulsory labour remains the same? Suppose that for a company we substitute the community; does it make any difference to the slave if the time he has to work for others is as great, and the time left for himself is as small, as before? The essential question is—How much is he compelled to labour for other benefit than his own, and how much can he labour for his own benefit? The degree of his slavery varies according to the ratio between that which he is forced to yield up and that which he is allowed to retain; and it matters not whether his master is a single person or a society. If, without option, he has to labour for the society, and receives from the general stock such portion as the society awards him, he becomes a slave to the society.”

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist

The Man versus the State (1884), The Coming Slavery

Life , Food , Communication , Idea

“Cybernetics as a specific field grew out of a series of interdisciplinary meetings held from 1944 to 1953 that brought together a number of noted post-war intellectuals, including Wiener, John von Neumann, Warren McCulloch, Claude Shannon, Heinz von Foerster, W. Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. Hosted by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, these became known as the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics. From its original focus on machines and animals, cybernetics quickly broadened to encompass minds (e. g. in the work of Bateson and Ashby) and social systems (e. g. Stafford Beer's management cybernetics), thus recovering Plato's original focus on the control relations in society.
Through the 1950s, cybernetic thinkers came to cohere with the school of General Systems Theory (GST), founded at about the same time by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, as an attempt to build a unified science by uncovering the common principles that govern open, evolving systems. GST studies systems at all levels of generality, whereas Cybernetics focuses more specifically on goal-directed, functional systems which have some form of control relation.”

Francis Heylighen (1960) Belgian cyberneticist

Source: Cybernetics and Second-Order Cybernetics (2001), p.2 Cited in: " Notes on Heylighen 2001 http://thinkipedia.wikispaces.com/Notes+on+Heylighen+2001" at thinkipedia.wikispaces.com, 2013

War , School , Beer , Study

“It is as the father of the Encyclopedia that Denis Diderot merits eternal recognition. Guilty as he was in almost every relation of life towards the individual, for mankind, in the teeth of danger and of infidelity, at the ill-paid sacrifice of the best years of his exuberant life, he produced that book which first levelled a free path to knowledge and enfranchised the soul of his generation.”

Evelyn Beatrice Hall book The Friends of Voltaire

Source: The Friends of Voltaire (1906), Ch. 2 : Diderot : The Talker, p. 61

Life , Books , Soul , Knowledge

“This will be the greatest legacy that we can proudly leave behind for our next generation, let us sacrifice our today so that our children can have a better tomorrow.”

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam (1931–2015) 11th President of India, scientist and science administrator

In: Philosophy & Social Action (2003)

Children

“Politics is not a self-enclosed activity, organically generating a body of concepts internal to it. What counts as a set of ideas with a bearing on the political conflicts of a time varies according to epoch and region. Today it stretches far beyond the purview of political science, traditionally conceived. Philosophy, economics, history, sociology, psychology, not to speak of the earth and life sciences, and the arts, all intersect at different points with terrain of politics, in its classic definition.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Source: Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Foreword, p. xi

Life , Art , History , Idea

“The third category of which I come now to speak is precisely that whose reality is denied by nominalism. For although nominalism is not credited with any extraordinarily lofty appreciation of the powers of the human soul, yet it attributes to it a power of originating a kind of ideas the like of which Omnipotence has failed to create as real objects, and those general conceptions which men will never cease to consider the glory of the human intellect must, according to any consistent nominalism, be entirely wanting in the mind of Deity.”

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

Lecture II : The Universal Categories, §3. Laws: Nominalism, CP 5.62
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)

Men , Soul , Idea , Reality

“Complexity. In general individual decision makers must be assumed to have multidimensional values which attach nonmonetary subjective cost or value to (1) the process of making and executing individual or group decisions, (2) the end result of such decisions, and (3) the rewards (and perhaps behavior) of other individuals involved in the decision process.”

Vernon L. Smith (1927) American economist

Source: "Relevance of laboratory experiments to testing resource allocation theory," 1980, p. 348.

Behavior , Decision

“How and among whom this Palladian taste became formed it will be our business presently to inquire. The first point to note is that it had nothing to do with Wren, Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor, or Archer except in so far as, by excluding the works of these architects from salvation, it was better able to distinguish its own particular sort of grace. The second point to note is that, once formulated, the Palladian taste became the taste of the second generation of the Whig aristocracy, the sons of that Whiggery which dated its accession to power from 1688 and to which, in Anne’s time, artistic and intellectual leadership, once centred at the Court, had passed. This second Whig generation had strong beliefs and strong dislikes, conspicuous among the latter being the Stuart dynasty, the Roman Church, and most things foreign. In architectural terms that meant the Court taste of the previous half-century, the works of Sir Christopher Wren in particular and anything in the nature of Baroque.”

John Summerson (1904–1992) British architectural historian

Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830

Business , Nature , Strong , Time

“Contemporary feminists, who are generally poor or narrowly trained scholars, insist on viewing history as a weepy scenario of male oppression and female victimization. But it is more accurate to see men, driven by sexual anxiety away from their mothers, forming group alliances by male bonding to create complex structures of society, art, science and technology.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 23

Men , Art , History , Science

“Is this the end? Is it to be merely a chapter in a cruel and senseless story? Will a new generation in their turn be immolated to square the black accounts of the Teuton and Gaul? Will our children bleed and gasp again in devastated lands? Or will there spring from the very fires of conflict that reconciliation of the three giant combatants, which would unite their genius and secure to each in safety and freedom a share in rebuilding the glory of Europe.”

Winston S. Churchill book The World Crisis

The World Crisis, 1916-1918 Part II : Chapter XXIII (Victory), Churchill, Butterworth (1927), p. 544.
Early career years (1898–1929)

Children , Spring , Freedom

“General systems theory, in a sense, is no news at all, as Von Foerster found out when he attempted to organize a conference of general systems people and anthropologists. In a sense, the situation is comparable to that found by the Committee for the Study of Mankind, in which a committee that included Robert Redfidd tried to get each discipline to consider its relationship to the concept of Mankind. Anthropologists replied, "we are related already," and so they were. Something similar may be said of attempts to date in mathematical anthropology. The kind of information that a computer program can finally provide, on a level of a particular culture, is simply a reflection of how detailed field work has been done, and to the careful field worker, on kinship, for example, it provides no illumination.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1970s, Changing Styles of Anthropological Work, 1973, p. 8

People , Mathematics , Sense , Study

“It has been maintained, that Agriculture is, not only, the most productive, but the only productive species of industry. The reality of this suggestion in either aspect, has, however, not been verified by any accurate detail of facts and calculations; and the general arguments, which are adduced to prove it, are rather subtil and paradoxical, than solid or convincing.”

Alexander Hamilton Report on Manufactures

Report on Manufactures (1791)

Reality

“Justice stands in an awkward relationship with utility. The general practice of justice conduces to human welfare, probably more than anything else. The old tag sums up justice as 'honeste vivere, neminem laedere, suum cuique tribuere' … Yet, justice seems also to conflict with utility and even with the general welfare, let alone the welfare of particular people.”

Alan Ryan (1940) British philosopher

Justice (1993)

People , Justice

“To tell the truth, I often felt uneasy when I thought of the excessive brittleness and fragility of the moon. The moon is generally repaired in Hamburg, and very imperfectly. It is done by a lame cooper, an obvious blockhead who has no idea how to do it. He took waxed thread and olive-oil—hence that pungent smell over all the earth which compels people to hold their noses. And this makes the moon so fragile that no men can live on it, but only noses. Therefore we cannot see our noses, because they are on the moon.”

Nikolai Gogol book Diary of a Madman

Diary of a Madman (1835)

Men , People , Truth , Idea

“But before I proceed farther it may be proper to take notice, that since the time when I gave their lordships an account of the near agreement of Mr. Professor Mayer's lunar tables with the observations that had been then made at the Royal Observatory, I have compared several others, which concurred to prove that the difference between the observed and computed places nowhere amounted to more than about one minute and a half; and I find that the difference (small as it is) may yet be diminished by making alterations in some of the equations, whose true quantity could not be determined without proper observations; after making the needful corrections it appeared, by the comparison of above eleven hundred observations taken here since the new instruments were fixed up, that the difference did nowhere amount to more than a minute: it may therefore be reasonably concluded, that so far as it will depend upon the lunar tables the true longitude of a ship at sea may in all cases be found within about half a degree, and generally much nearer.”

James Bradley (1693–1762) English astronomer; Astronomer Royal

Miscellaneous Works and Correspondence (1832), To Mr. Cleveland Secretary of the Admiralty (April 14, 1760)

Appearance , Time , Dependency , Sea

“My Instrument being fixed, I immediately began to observe such Stars as I judged most proper to give me light into the Cause of the Motion… There was Variety enough of small ones; and not less than twelve, that I could observe through all the Seasons of the Year; they being bright enough to be seen in the Day-time, when nearest the Sun. I had not been long observing, before I perceived, that the Notion we had before entertained of the Stars being farthest North and South, when the Sun was about the Equinoxes, was only true of those that were near the solstitial Colure: And after I had continued my Observations a few Months, I discovered what I then apprehended to be a general Law, observed by all the Stars, viz. That each of them became stationary, or was farthest North or South, when they passed over my Zenith at six of the Clock, either in the Morning or Evening. I perceived likewise, that whatever Situation the Stars were in with respect to the cardinal Points of the Ecliptick, the apparent Motion of every one tended the same Way, when they passed my Instrument about the same Hour of the Day or Night; for they all moved Southward, while they passed in the Day, and Northward in the Night; so that each was farthest North, when it came about Six of the Clock in the Evening, and farthest South when it came about Six in the Morning.”

James Bradley (1693–1762) English astronomer; Astronomer Royal

A Letter from the Reverend Mr. James Bradley Savilian Proffesor of Astronomy at Oxford, and F.R.S. to Dr. Edmund Halley, Astronom. Reg. &c. giving an Account of a New Discovered Motion of the Fix'd Stars. Philosophical Transactions (Jan 1, 1727) 1727-1728 No. 406. vol. XXXV. pp. 637-661 http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/35/399-406/637.full.pdf+html, pp.643-644

Law , Way , Star , Light

“Thus we may found the science for the study of the life of signs against the background of social life; it would form part of social psychology, and consequently of general psychology; we shall call it semiology (from Greek sēmeion — 'sign'). That science would explain to us in what signs consist of and by what laws they are governed. Since it is a science which does not yet exist, we do not know what it will be like; it has, however, a reason for its existence, its place is allocated in advance. Linguistics is only a part of that general science; the laws which semiology will discover, will be applicable also to linguistics, which in turn will be linked with a domain clearly defined throughout the entirety of human affairs.”

Ferdinand de Saussure book Course in General Linguistics

Source: Cours de linguistique générale (1916), p. 33; as cited in: Adam Schaff (1962). Introduction to semantics, p. 9

Life , Law , Study , Science

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Quotes about general
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