Quotes about general (7423 quotes, page 54)

““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.”

William H. Starbuck (1934) American 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

“When some people urged that it is impossible for man to live like the animals owing to the tenderness of his flesh and because he is naked and unprotected, [ Diogenes] would say in reply that men are so very tender because of their mode of life. … Man’s ingenuity and his discovering and contriving so many helps to life had not been altogether advantageous to later generations, since men do not employ their cleverness to promote courage or justice, but to procure pleasure.”

Dio Chrysostom (40–120) Greek philosopher

Source: Diogenes, or On Tyranny, p. 267

Life , Men , People , Pleasure

“Then he rose and began to pace the room in an overwrought sort of way, like a zoo lion who has heard the dinner-gong go and is hoping the keeper won't forget him in the general distribution.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Right Ho, Jeeves

Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

Hope , Way , Forgetting

“The Republican Party insists that slavery originated in force, by the stronger against the weaker party, and not by natural right; that it is maintained and upheld by oppression and wrong, and against the law of nature. This usurped ownership in man is not that kind of property which is recognized by the general consent of mankind.”

Elbridge G. Spaulding (1809–1897) American politician

Remarks on the Republican platform (1860)

Law , Nature

“A general belief seems to prevail in the colony that the Indians are little better, if at all, than the savages or natives of Africa. Even the children are taught to believe in that manner, with the result that the Indian is being dragged down to the position of a raw Kaffir.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

During his time in South Africa from The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Government of India (CWMG), Vol I, p. 150
1900s

Children

“While doing justice to the intellectual power with which a few Circles have for many generations maintained their supremacy over immense multitudes of their countrymen, he believes that the facts of Flatland, speaking for themselves without comment on his part, declare that Revolutions cannot always be suppressed by slaughter, and that Nature, in sentencing the Circles to infecundity, has condemned them to ultimate failure — "and herein," he says, "I see a fulfilment of the great Law of all worlds, that while the wisdom of Man thinks it is working one thing, the wisdom of Nature constrains it to work another, and quite a different and far better thing." For the rest, he begs his readers not to suppose that every minute detail in the daily life of Flatland must needs correspond to some other detail in Spaceland; and yet he hopes that, taken as a whole, his work may prove suggestive as well as amusing, to those Spacelanders of moderate and modest minds who — speaking of that which is of the highest importance, but lies beyond experience — decline to say on the one hand, "This can never be," and on the other hand, "It must needs be precisely thus, and we know all about it."”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Preface to the Second and Revised Edition (1884)
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884)

Life , Wisdom , World , Justice

“The Penan do not have many possessions. They have lived for generations in the Borneo forests in harmony with their environment, taking what they need from the jungle, leaving no footprint but that of bare feet on muddy earth washed away with each rain. It was not difficult for them to regroup and move deeper into the forest. They would not be missed and traces of their ephemeral presence would soon be erased.”

Shamini Flint book Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder

Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder, Cap 9

“Science is a search for truth –whatever the truth may turn out to be, even if it’s evidently not what we wanted to believe it was. In science, it doesn’t matter what you believe; all that matters is why you believe it. This is why real science disallows faith, promising instead to remain objective, to follow wherever the evidence leads, and either correct or reject any and all errors along the way even if it challenges whatever we think we know now. But creationist organizations post written declarations of their unwavering obligation to uphold and defend their preconceived notions, declaring in advance their refusal to ever to let their minds be changed by any amount of evidence that is ever revealed. Anti-science evangelists display their statement of faith proudly on their own forums, as if admitting to a closed and dishonest mind wasn’t something to ashamed of or beg forgiveness for. They don’t want to do science. They want to un-do science! They try to segregate experimental science from historical science, ignoring the fact that both are based on empirical observations and both can be checked with testable hypotheses. Worse, they want to redefine science in general so that astrology, subjective convictions of faith, and excuses of magic can supplant the scientific method whenever necessary in defense of their beliefs. They’re only open to critical inquiry so long as that is not permitted to challenge the sacred scriptures nor vindicate any of the fields of study to which they’re already opposed. In short, everything science stands for, -or hopes to achieve- is threatened by the political agenda of these superstitious subversives.”

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

"12th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TkY7HrJOhc Youtube (April 19, 2008)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Truth , Faith , Hope , Way

“John T. Unger came from a family that had been well known in Hades — a small town on the Mississippi River — for several generations.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

"The Diamond As Big As The Ritz"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

Family

“I fell in love with a Muslim after my husband's death. He was kind and generous in the beginning. But I now feel one shouldn't change one's religion. It is not worth it. Also, I have been accused of being feminist. I am not a feminist, as it is understood. I don't hate men. I feel a woman is most attractive when she surrenders to her man. She is incomplete without a man.”

Kamala Surayya (1934–2009) Indian author

Suresh Kohli: Still a rebel writer, The Hindu (August 13, 2006)

Love , Death , Men , Hate

“The transformation of the automobile market was essentially complete in 1929. If Mr. Ford, in that pivotal year in the modern economy, still held stubbornly to his old concept in his new Model A, he was counterbalanced by Mr. Chrysler, who had come up from nowhere with tremendous vitality and with a market policy similar to General Motors'. The fact that Mr. Ford built nearly two million of the five million U. S.-produced cars and trucks sold that year was only incidental from the long-term point of view. it was a splurge, not the sign of a trend.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 169

Cars

“Yet to enter approved memory is the "finale" described in the official Air Force history, a 1000-plane raid on civilian targets organized by General "Hap" Arnold to celebrate the war's end, five days after Nagasaki. According to survivors, leaflets were dropped among the bombs announcing the surrender.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999, Z Magazine, July 1995

War , History , Memory

“I would write your Excellency a more particular account of the battle and retreat, but I imagine General Sullivan and Colonel Laurens have done it already, and I am myself very much unwell. I have had no sleep for three nights and days, being severely afflicted with the asthma.”

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

Letter to George Washington (August 1778)

Imagination , Sleep , Affliction , Night

“The third reason is that at the time that Turkic Muslims were waging rebellion in the early years of the Guangxu reign, the ‘five elite divisions’ that governor general Liu Jintang led out of the Pass were all Dungan troops [Hui dui 回队]. Back then, Dungan military commanders such as Cui Wei and Hua Dacai were surrendered troops who had been redeployed. These are undoubtedly cases of pawns who went on to achieve great merit. When Cen Shuying was in charge of military affairs in Yunnan, the Muslim troops and generals that he used included many rebels, and it was because of them that the Muslim rebellion in Yunnan was pacified. These are examples to show that Muslim troops can be used effectively even while Muslim uprisings are still in progress. What is more, since the establishment of the Republic, Dungan have demonstrated not the slightest hint of errant behaviour to suggest that they may prove to be unreliable.”

Yang Zengxin

From Yunnan to Xinjiang:Governor Yang Zengxin and his Dungan Generals, by Anthony Garnaut ( PDF http://www.ouigour.fr/recherches_et_analyses/Garnautpage_93.pdf).

Time

“If plants, and live stock as well, require space and air, sunlight and love, children need them even more. The only real wealth of our country lies in the men and women of the next generation. A farmer would rather produce a thousand thoroughbreds than a million runts. How are we to breed a race of human thoroughbreds unless we follow the same plan? We must make this country into a garden of children instead of a disorderly back lot overrun with human weeds. In a home where there are too many children in proportion to the living space, the air and sunlight, the children are usually overcrowded and underfed. They are a constant burden on their mother's overtaxed strength and the father's earning capacity. Such homes cannot be gardens in any sense of the word.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

Radio WFAB Syracuse, , transcripted in "The Meaning of Radio Birth Control", April 1924, p. 111
Birth Control Review, 1918-32

Love , Women , Men , Children

“[A] skyhook is … an exception to the principle that all design, and apparent design, is ultimately the result of mindless, motiveless mechanicity. A crane, in contrast, is a subprocess or special feature of a design process that can be demonstrated to permit the local speeding up of the basic, slow process of natural selection, and that can be demonstrated to be itself the predictable (or retroactively explicable) product of the basic process. … [T]he physicist Steven Weinberg, in Dreams of a Final Theory (1992) … distinguishes between uncompromising reductionism (a bad thing) and compromising reductionism (which he ringingly endorses). Here is my own version. We must distinguish reductionism, which is in general a good thing, from greedy reductionism, which is not. The difference, in the context of Darwin's theory, is simple: greedy reductionists think that everything can be explained without cranes; good reductionists think that everything can be explained without skyhooks.”

Daniel Dennett book Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

Dreams , Nature , Thinking , Speed

“The next phase of the work was when Joseph LeDoux and I came up with the idea of the interpreter. Twenty-five years into studying these patients we finally got around to asking the patients, "Why did you do that?" after they had a response with the left hand that was being governed by the separated, silent, speechless right hemisphere. We began to understand that the left hemisphere "made up" a story as to why the patient did what he/she did, and in that moment we began to see the cardinal feature of the left hemisphere: the ability to interpret actions generated outside its realm of conscious awareness.”

Michael S. Gazzaniga (1939) American neuroscientist

Idea , Understanding , Study

“Leland Weston: "Never take a position unless you are certain it can be defended any onslaught. That may sound like good advice to a general, but then, a courtroom is nothing more then a very civilized war."”

Michael Crichton book A Case of Need

A Case of Need (1968)

War

“Both induction and deduction, reasoning from the particular and the general, and back again from the universal to the specific, form the essence to scientific thinking.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 16, Unpacking Information, The computer in the service of physics, p. 138

Thinking , Universe

“The inversion theory has a long and fascinating history in the discussion of vertebrate origins. The founding version dates to the early nineteenth century and became the centerpiece of a movement often called "transcendental biology," and centered on the attempt to reduce organic diversity to one or a very few archetypal building blocks that could generate all actual anatomies as products of rational laws of transformation. Some of Europe's greatest thinkers participated in this grand, if flawed enterprise. Goethe, Germany's preeminent poet-scientist, tried to explain the varied parts of plants as different manifestations of an archetypal leaf.”

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

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 325
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Law , History , Parting

“Eventually the decision was reached to accept the armed chopper as an essential part of the air mobility concept but not to allow the Army to use the Mohawk as an attack aircraft, confining it to a reconnaissance role. Both were wise decisions. But prior to these decisions there were some hot and emotional sessions of the JCS. One concerned the armed Huey, which as then being used successfully in Vietnam to support ARVN operations, but which was considered by the Air Force as illegal poaching on their roles and missions. This was in the midsummer of 1964. General LeMay suddenly took his cigar out of his mouth and, gesticulating wildly, challenged General Johnson to an aerial duel. He screamed, "Johnson, you fly one of those damned Huey's and I'll fly an F-105, and we'll see who survives. I'll shoot you down and scatter your peashooter all over the goddamn ground." I was eager to defend my chief, both verbally and physically (LeMay would have made two Johnsons in body weight, if not in mental poundage) but Johnson motioned to me to keep quiet and responded quietly: "I'm not a flier, but I will be happy to get qualified and take you on- we can agree on a time and place later. But let's not waste the valuable time of our colleagues on such a trivial matter."”

Bruce Palmer Jr. (1913–2000) United States Army Chief of Staff

Source: The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (1984), p. 27

Support , Decision , Time , Parting

“…if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your [Hilary Clinton's] situation, because there has never been so many lies, so much deception. There has never been anything like it, and we're going to have a special prosecutor.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, October, Second presidential debate (October 9, 2016)

“Every right of suffrage, like any political right in general, is not to be measured by some sort of abstract scheme of “justice,” or in terms of any other bourgeois-democratic phrases, but by the social and economic relationships for which it is designed. The right of suffrage worked out by the Soviet government is calculated for the transition period from the bourgeois-capitalist to the socialist form of society, that is, it is calculated for the period of the proletarian dictatorship. But, according to the interpretation of this dictatorship which Lenin and Trotsky represent, the right to vote is granted only to those who live by their own labor and is denied to everyone else.”

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

Source: The Russian Revolution (1918), Chapter Five, "The Question of Suffrage"

Justice

“The societies to which most readers of this book belong represent a narrow slice of human cultural diversity. Societies from that slice achieved world dominance not because of a general superiority, but for specific reasons: their technological, political, and military advantages derived from their early origins of agriculture, due in turn to their productive local wild domesticable plant and animal species. Despite those particular advantages, modern industrial societies didn’t also develop superior approaches to raising children, treating the elderly, settling disputes, avoiding non-communicable diseases, and other societal problems. Thousands of traditional societies developed a wide array of different approaches to those problems.”

Jared Diamond book The World Until Yesterday

Epilogue
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (2012)

Children , Books , World , Disease

“In general admittedly the Wise of all times have always said the same thing, and the fools, that is to say the vast majority of all times, have always done the same thing, i. e. the opposite; and so it will remain in the future.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Im allgemeinen freilich haben die Weisen aller Zeiten immer dasselbe gesagt, und die Toren, d.h. die unermessliche Majorität aller Zeiten, haben immer dasselbe, nämlich das Gegenteil getan; und so wird es denn auch ferner bleiben.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Fools , Time , Future

“A new generation of Christians is being called to help build a world in which God's gift of life is welcomed, respected and cherished-not rejected, feared as a threat and destroyed. A new age in which love is not greedy or self-seeking, but pure, faithful and genuinely free, open to others, respectful of their dignity, seeking their good, radiating joy and beauty - a new age in which hope liberates us from the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption that deaden our souls and poison our relationships.”

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

2008, Closing Mass (19 July 2008)

Love , Life , God , Age

“Not only had they behaved dutifully and without apparent concern for their own safety, but they also offered the hope that not all of the younger male generation were venial, lazy, proud, irreligious, inconsiderate, self-indulgent, weak-willed, and timorous.”

Steve Turner (1949) British writer

Source: The Band That Played On (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 193

Hope

“There is something is common between literary, and above all theatrical, reputations and the fortunes which used of old to be made in the West Indies. In the early days it was almost sufficient to reach those islands to return with incalculable riches; but the very vastness of the fortunes thus obtained was prejudicial to those of the following generation, since the exhausted earth could yield no more.”

Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794) French writer

Il en est un peu des réputations littéraires, et surtout des réputations de théâtre, comme des fortunes qu'on faisait autrefois dans les Iles. Il suffisait presque autrefois d'y passer, pour parvenir à une grande richesse, mais ces grandes fortunes mêmes ont nui à celles de la génération suivante: les terres épuisées n'ont plus rendu si abondamment.
Maximes et Pensées (Van Bever, Paris :1923), #442
Maxims and Considerations, #442

“I think that some people over here imagine that the Socialists are out to destroy freedom, freedom of the individual, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the freedom of the Press. They are wrong; the Labour Party is in the tradition of freedom-loving movements which have always existed in our country, but freedom has to be striven for in every generation, and those who threaten it are not always the same. Sometimes the battle of freedom has had to be fought against kings, sometimes against religious tyranny, sometimes against the power of the owners of the land, sometimes against the overwhelming strength of the moneyed interests. We in the Labour Party declare that we are in line with those who fought for Magna Carta and habeas corpus, with the Pilgrim Fathers, and with the signatories of the Declaration of Independence.”

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

Address to the United States Congress (13 November 1945), quoted in The Times (14 November 1945), p. 4. Aneurin Bevan said to Attlee afterwards: "That was a noble speech. I felt very proud", quoted in John Campbell, Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), p. 187.
1940s

Love , Money , People , Religion

“When an Englishman has professed his belief in the supremacy of Shakespeare amongst all poets, he feels himself excused from the general study of literature. He also feels himself excused from the particular study of Shakespeare.”

Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) English illustrator and author

Table Talk" p. 63
Under the Hill and Other Essays (1904)

Feeling , Literature , Study

“If you pass the light from a sodium flash through a prism, you get a pattern very different from the familiar continuous rainbow that Newton elicited from natural sunlight. Instead of a continuous pattern, in which all gradations of pure color are apparently represented, the sodium flash generates a series of lines of light. …in the musical analogy, sodium produces a chord where sunlight produced all possible tones—"white noise."”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Other elements produce other chords.
Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

Music , Color , Nature , Light

“In the human heart there is a perpetual generation of passions, such that the ruin of one is almost always the foundation of another.”

François de La Rochefoucauld book Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

Il y a dans le coeur humain une génération perpétuelle de passions, en sorte que la ruine de l'une est presque toujours l'établissement d'une autre.
Maxim 10.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Passion , Heart

“One great mystery is why sexual reproduction became dominant for higher life-forms. Optimization theory says it should be otherwise.
Take a fish or lizard, ideally suited to her environment, with just the right internal chemistry, agility, camouflage—whatever it takes to be healthy, fecund, and successful in her world. Despite all this, she cannot pass on her perfect characteristics. After sex, her offspring will be jumbles, getting only half of their program from her and half their re-sorted genes somewhere else.
Sex inevitably ruins perfection. Parthenogenesis would seem to work better—at least theoretically. In simple, static environments, well-adapted lizards who produce duplicate daughters are known to have advantages over those using sex.
Yet, few complex animals are known to perform self-cloning. And those species exist in ancient, stable deserts, always in close company with a related sexual species.
Sex has flourished because environments are seldom static. Climate, competition, parasites—all make for shifting conditions. What was ideal in one generation may be fatal the next. With variability, your offspring get a fighting chance. Even in desperate times, one or more of them may have what it takes to meet new challenges and thrive.
Each style has its advantages, then. Cloning offers stability and preservation of excellence. Sex gives adaptability to changing times. In nature it is usually one or the other. Only lowly creatures such as aphids have the option of switching back and forth.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Introduction to Chapter 8 (pp. 123-124)
Glory Season (1993)

Life , World , Sex , Optimism

“Strong families value their extended family, particularly grandparents. In one study of college students, a majority thought their interactions with grandparents reflected high family strengths. It’s important to create continuity between generations, passing along traditions and making roots ever stronger, so the tree continues to reach for the sun.”

Joyce Brothers (1927–2013) Joyce Brothers

10 Keys to a Strong Family (2002)

Family , Tree , Study , Strong

“The supreme principle [in Industrial Organization] has been the belief that business efficiency and the welfare of the employees are but different sides of the same problem. Character is an economic asset; and business efficiency depends not merely on the physical condition of employees, but on their general attitude and feeling towards the employer.”

Edward Cadbury (1873–1948) British businessman

Introduction, p. vii; Partly cited in: Felix Behling et al., The Changing Worlds and Workplaces of Capitalism. 2015, p. 194
Experiments in industrial organization (1912)

Feeling , Business , Problem , Dependency

“Recognizing that the current form of globalization is nothing more than a generalized downward leveling in which global corporations are extracting more and more of the wealth, power, and productive energies from communities and the environment is the right approach. Recognizing that our response must be nothing less than upward leveling that does entail the transfer of resources, power, wealth, and knowledge from the world's haves to the world's have-nots is the right approach.”

Robin Hahnel (1946) American economist

Source: Panic Rules!: Everything You Need to Know about the Global Economy, 1999, p. 103

World , Communication , Knowledge , Wealth

“In the construction of world views one can distinguish seven important tasks that correspond with the various components of a world view and that must provide an answer to a number of fundamental questions. First we must design a model of the world. What is the world like in which we live? How is the world structured and how does it function? What are the most suitable metaphors for speaking of the whole? Are mechanistic or organic models to be given preference? An explanation of reality must then follow. Why are the world and mankind as they are? Is a completely different world possible? What general explanatory principles apply?”

Diederik Aerts (1953) Belgian theoretical physicist

Source: Perspectives on the World: an interdisciplinary reflection. (1995), p. v : About "The seven tasks of World-view construction"

World , Question , Reality

“It is easier to be generous than to be just.”

Elizabeth Bibesco (1897–1945) writer, actress; Romanian princess

Haven (1951)

“Thank you for calling the Powers of Darkness. Your call may be recorded for security and training purposes. For general moral and ethical enquiries, press 1 on your keypad. To make a reservation, press 2. For details of our special discount packages for lawyers, politicians, and Microsoft executives, press 3.”

Tom Holt (1961) British writer

You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps (2006)

Training

“When the federal government spends more each year than it collects in tax revenues, it has three choices: It can raise taxes, print money, or borrow money. While these actions may benefit politicians, all three options are bad for average Americans. Deficits mean future tax increases, pure and simple. Deficit spending should be viewed as a tax on future generations, and politicians who create deficits should be exposed as tax hikers.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Deficits Make You Poorer http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul238.html (March 15, 2005).
2000s, 2001-2005

Money , Future

“With a note of music, one strikes the fundamental, and, in addition to the root note, other notes are generated: these are called the harmonic series…As one fundamental note contains within it other notes in the octave, two fundamentals produce a remarkable array of harmonics, and the number of possible combinations between all the notes increases phenomenally. With a triad, affairs stand a good chance of getting severely out of hand…”

Robert Fripp (1946) English guitarist, composer and record producer

[Denyer, Ralph, The Guitar Handbook, 2002, 114, 0-679-74275-1]
Elsewhere

Music , Chance

“Unpredictability is in general a fine protective feature, which should never be squandered but always spent wisely. There is much to be gained from communication if it is craftily doled out — enough truth to keep one's credibility high but enough falsehood to keep one's options open. (This is the first point of wisdom in the game of poker: he who never bluffs never wins; he who always bluffs always loses.)”

Daniel Dennett (1942) American philosopher

Kinds of Minds (1996)

Wisdom , Truth , Game , Communication

“If our armies are not so numerous as those of other nations, they have qualities which render them more valuable. Those raised by voluntary enlistment are more effective than those raised by conscription; and I should think a general would feel much more confidence in an army raised as our armies are raised, than he could possibly have while leading to battle a band of slaves torn from their homes by force.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech in the House of Commons (23 June 1813), quoted in George Henry Francis, Opinions and Policy of the Right Honourable Viscount Palmerston, G.C.B., M.P., &c. as Minister, Diplomatist, and Statesman, During More Than Forty Years of Public Life (London: Colburn and Co., 1852), p. 11.
1810s

Feeling , Home , Confidence , Thinking

“Architecture was my way of expressing my ideals: to be simple, to create a world equal to everyone, to look at people with optimism, that everyone has a gift. I don’t want anything but general happiness. Why is that bad?”

Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012) Brazilian architect

Quoted in "Why Oscar Niemeyer is king of curves", Tom Dyckhoff, The Times Online (London, 2007-12-12).

People , World , Way , Optimism

“Our initial sensory data are always "first derivatives," statements about differences which exist among external objects or statements about changes which occur either in them or in our relationship to them. Objects and circumstances which remain absolutely constant relative to the observer, unchanged either by his own movement or by external events, are in general difficult and perhaps always impossible to perceive. What we perceive easily is difference and change — and difference is a relationship.”

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

Source: Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry, 1951, p. 173

Change

“We can create the appearance of knowledge, the illusion of knowing how to grapple with a problem. Far too many educational systems have done exactly that. The result is generations of mouthpieces who can pour forth approved responses to programmed stimuli that contribute nothing to rational discussion. Dogma is for those who only wish to be comfortable. Catechisms are for cowards; commandments, for control freaks who have so little respect for their species that they are driven to appeal to a higher power to keep everyone in line.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 21 (p. 193)

Education , Knowledge , Problem , Appearance

“In a general way, we can represent the present value of a future good as a function of the time separating the present from this future. In the classical conception, an exponential future discount is stipulated, which implies that the curves corresponding to two distinct future goods, one small and immediate, the other large and more remote, never intersect. According to more recent research, however, it seems that this discount typically takes a hyperbolic form.”

Jon Elster (1940) Norwegian academic

Reason and Rationality (2009)

Way , Time , Future

“The first remark we have to make, and which — though already presented more than once — cannot be too often repeated when the occasion seems to call for it, — is that what we call principle, aim, destiny, or the nature and idea of Spirit, is something merely general and abstract. Principle — Plan of Existence — Law — is a hidden, undeveloped essence, which as such — however true in itself — is not completely real.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on the Philosophy of History

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

Law , Idea , Nature

“More importantly however, is that a new generation of leaders is emerging in Africa who does not want to approach the world with a begging bowl. Leaders who want to engage the world as partners; leaders who are prepared to take responsibilities for the problems of their countries and continent; leaders who recognize the enormous opportunities that abound in the world and are eager to connect Africa to the centres of those opportunities; leaders who want to harness the huge resources of Africa to play on the global stage; leaders who are not content to ask, ‘what can the rest of the world do for us', but rather ‘what can we do with the rest of the world.”

Bukola Saraki (1962) Nigerian politician

Beyond Natural Resources (2005)

World , Problem , Country

“Music… is… a core element of our species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next.”

Daniel Levitin book The World in Six Songs

The World in Six Songs (2008)

Music , Way , Behavior

“It will be remembered, that the object of the several states in the adoption of that instrument, was not the establishment of a general consolidated government, which should swallow up the state sovereignties, and annihilate their several jurisdictions, and powers, as states; but a federal government, with powers limited to certain determinate objects; viz. their intercourse and concerns with foreign nations; and with each other, as separate and independent states; and, as members of the same confederacy: leaving the administration of their internal, and domestic concerns, to the absolute and uncontrolable jurisdiction of the states, respectively; except in one or two particular instances, specified, and enumerated in the constitution.”

St. George Tucker (1752–1827) Bermudan lawyer and judge

https://books.google.com/books?id=NTQ0AQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA412 Page 412
Blackstone’s Commentaries (1803)

“From a spinner’s perspective, in India it was never easy for me to judge where to stand: how far forward, how far back, because on Indian wickets the ball does not carry as much as abroad. That is true of slip fielding in general. I wouldn’t say only for spinner – even for a fast bowler, that holds true.”

Rahul Dravid (1973) Indian cricketer

“All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies. All Praise is due to Allah. So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.”

Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) founder of al-Qaeda

2000s, 2004, 2004 Video Broadcast on Al-Jazeera October 29

Suffering , Loss , Clothes

“On the whole [the alignment of a series of stained glass windows with the interior of a villa in The Hague] I have thought about all the time... I want to focus more on the architecture of the interior in general and that should we do together [with architect Buys]... Now I was already thinking, the enormous color effect that the window will generate - and that will certainly become powerful - must be accompanied with strong colors - the hall -, otherwise the window itself will be too much isolated. For instance the staircase, could it be painted in strong colors and not [in] oak.... deep ultramarine blue or green, with a beautiful colorful carpet.... I feel I must make designs for carpets, to create in that way a beautiful unity with the stained glass as a whole.”

Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876–1923) Dutch painter

translation from Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
version in original Dutch / citaat van Jacoba van Heemskerck, in het Nederlands: Over het geheel [de afstemming van een serie aan Jacoba opgedragen glasramen met het interieur van een villa in Den Haag] heb ik steeds loopen denken.. ..ik wil mij veel meer op de architectuur van het binnenhuis in het algemeen toeleggen en dat moeten wij samen doen [met architect Buys].. .Nu heb ik al gedacht het enorme kleur-effekt dat het raam zal maken en dat zal zeker machtig werken, moet gedragen worden door sterke kleuren - de hal - anders staat het teveel alleen; zou de trap b.v. in de verf een sterke kleur kunnen krijgen en niet [in] eikenhout.. ..diep ultramarijn blauw of groen en dan een prachtige kleurige loper.. ..ik voel dat ik ontwerpen voor tapijten moet maken om zoo met het glas in lood een mooi geheel te hebben.
Quote in een brief van Jacoba aan architect J. Buys, 28 April 1920 in archief N.D.B., Amsterdam; as cited by Herbert Henkels, in Jacoba van Heemskerck, kunstenares van het Expressionisme, Haags Gemeentemuseum The Hague, 1982, p. 42
1920's

Beauty , Color , Way , Feeling

“Mill sought to strengthen his defence of trade unions not by denying their possible monopoly effects, but by an appeal to the principle of laisser faire itself. To prevent the formation of corporate unions was, he thought, to interfere with a right obviously included in the general rule of freedom of contract.”

Eric Roll, Baron Roll of Ipsden (1907–2005) British economist

Source: A History of Economic Thought (1939), Chapter VII, The Transition, p. 357

Freedom

“They were nothing like the French people I had imagined. If anything, they were too kind, too generous and too knowledgeable in the fields of plumbing and electricity.”

David Sedaris book Me Talk Pretty One Day

Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000)

People , Imagination , Knowledge

“Were an impartial and competent observer of the state of society in these middle colonies asked, whence it happens that Virginia and Maryland (which were the first planted, and which are superior to many colonies and inferior to none, in point of natural advantage) are still so exceedingly behind most of the other British trans-Atlantic possessions in all those improvements which bring credit and consequence to a country? - he would answer - They are so, because they are cultivated by slaves. … Some loss and inconvenience would, no doubt, arise from the general abolition of slavery in these colonies: but were it done gradually, with judgement, and with good temper, I have never yet seen it satisfactorily proved that such inconvenience would either be great or lasting. … If ever these colonies, now filled with slaves, be improved to their utmost capacity, an essential part of the improvement must be the abolition of slavery. Such a change would hardly be more to the advantage of the slaves, than it would be to their owners.”

Jonathan Boucher (1738–1804) English minister

"A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution" (London, Robinson, 1797)

Nature , Change , Loss , Parting

“While economic theory in general may be defined as the theory of how an economic condition or an economic development is determined within an institutional framework, the welfare theory deals with how to judge whether one condition can be said to be better in some way than another and whether it is possible, by altering the institutional framework, to achieve a better condition than the present one.”

John Hicks (1904–1989) British economist

Kenneth Arrow and John Hicks (1972) From Nobel Lectures, Economics 1969-1980, Editor Assar Lindbeck, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1992 ( online http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1972/presentation-speech.html)

Way

“This is the last programme in this natural history, and it's very different from all the others because it's been devoted to just one animal: ourselves. And that may have been a very misleading thing to have done. It may have given the impression that somehow man was the ultimate triumph of evolution, that all those thousands of millions of years of development had no purpose other than to put man on Earth. There is no scientific evidence whatsoever for such a belief. No reason to suppose that man's stay on Earth should be any longer than that of the dinosaurs. He may have learned how to control his environment, how to pass on information from one generation to another, but the very forces of evolution that brought him into existence here on these African plains are still at work elsewhere in the world, and if man were to disappear, for whatever reason, there is doubtless somewhere some small, unobtrusive creature that would seize the opportunity and, with a spurt of evolution, take man's place. But although denying a special place in the world may be becomingly modest, the fact remains that man has an unprecedented control over the world and everything in it. And so, whether he likes it or not, what happens next is very largely up to him.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Closing lines
Life on Earth (1979)

World , History , Nature , Learning

“The alternatives with which Freud leaves us are grim only if we view them from the perspective of some past possibility. … The grimness is relieved by the gaiety of being free from the historic Western compulsion of seeking large and general meanings for small and highly particular lives.”

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) American sociologist

The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

Past

“But what has struck me most looking at my own constituency in-box as well as the thousands of emails that I’m receiving from the general public here is that it isn’t just the Muslim community that’s reacting to this. It’s a broad swathe of British public opinion that feels deeply disturbed by what it is seeing on its television screens coming out of Gaza.”

Philip Hammond (1955) British Conservative politician

Telegraph article (2014)

Feeling , Communication , Box

“There has been a great difficulty in getting anything into the heads of this generation. It has been like splitting hemlock knots with a corn-dodger for a wedge and a pumpkin for a beetle.”

Joseph Smith, Jr. book History of the Church

History of the Church, 6:184-85 (21 January 1844)
1840s

“The old question as to what shall be done with the negro will have to give place to the greater question “What shall be done with the Mongolian,” and perhaps we shall see raised one still greater, namely, “What will the Mongolian do with both the negro and the white?” Already has the matter taken shape in California and on the Pacific coast generally. Already has California assumed a bitterly unfriendly attitude toward the Chinaman. Already has she driven them from her altars of justice. Already has she stamped them as outcasts and handed them over to popular contempts and vulgar jest. Already are they the constant victims of cruel harshness and brutal violence. Already have our Celtic brothers, never slow to execute the behests of popular prejudice against the weak and defenseless, recognized in the heads of these people, fit targets for their shilalahs. Already, too, are their associations formed in avowed hostility to the Chinese. In all this there is, of course, nothing strange. Repugnance to the presence and influence of foreigners is an ancient feeling among men. It is peculiar to no particular race or nation. It is met with, not only in the conduct of one nation towards another, but in the conduct of the inhabitants of the different parts of the same country, some times of the same city, and even of the same village. 'Lands intersected by a narrow frith abhor each other. Mountains interposed, make enemies of nations'. To the Greek, every man not speaking Greek is a barbarian. To the Jew, everyone not circumcised is a gentile. To the Mohametan, every one not believing in the Prophet is a kaffer.”

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

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

Men , Hostility , People , Justice

“The appropriate critique of … sciences is not that they are not "objective" but that they are partial, or narrow, or directed towards ends which one opposes. In general, knowledge is no less objective (that is true, or reliable) being in the service of interests.”

Robert N. Proctor (1954) American historian

Source: Value-free science?: Purity and power in modern knowledge, 1991, p. 10

Knowledge , Science

“Forget decorated generals, tell me about Private Ryan.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

A New Friend http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21370/A_New_Friend
From the poems written in English

Forgetting

“Efficient financial regulation theories necessarily derive from lucid postulates about the general invariability of human nature, specifically where financial institution executives are involved (see the latest contributions from the field of evolutionary psychology). There is little chance that this will change much over the next few decades -but it is no use complaining, seeing as greed has always been (and will always be) one of the most powerful drivers of capitalist progress.”

Éric Pichet (1960) economist

Quelle régulation financière pour le XXIè siècle ? http://lecercle.lesechos.fr/entreprises-marches/finance-marches/finances/221144733/quelle-regulation-financiere-xxie-siecle Article in Le Cercle Les Echos (2012): Financial Regulation Theory (2012).
Financial Institution Governance Theory

Nature , Change , Chance

“From education by the Church to education by Germanic value is a step of several generations. We are the transition from one education to the other. We are the conquerors of one era and the founders of a new - also religious - epoch. We bear a heavy and therefore a great destiny. To destroy images is something every revolution has been able to do. But to establish its cause upon nothing and yet not to burn all bridges behind it: that is the nobility of character of the National Socialist era. The German people is not marked by original sin, but by original nobility. The place of Christian love has been taken by the National Socialist, Germanic idea of comradeship…which has already been symbolically expressed through the replacement of the rosary by the spade of labour.”

Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946) German architect and politician

Quoted in Chapter 13, Part 3 of "The Face Of The Third Reich" by Joachim C. Fest.

Love , People , Education , Idea

“There is a narrowness of action, though not of intent, which characterizes university departments, and scientific publications and scientists in general: if it is too popular, it is somehow vulgar and wrong. You can't really speak to those people across the street. I live next to the chemists at MIT, but I never see them. I hardly know who they are, yet between physics and chemistry it is hard to know who should study what molecule. I myself am guilty. We form communities not based on the problems of science, but on quite other things. This is part of the general split between the intelligent member of the public and the scientist who speaks in narrow focus. But the great theoretical problems which I believe the world expects will somehow be solved by science, problems close to deep philosophical issues are the very problems that find the least expertise, the least degree of organization, the least institutional support in the scientific institutions of America or indeed of the world.”

Philip Morrison (1915–2005) American astrophysicist

On specialization, Nothing is Too Wonderful to be True (1995)

People , World , Intelligence , Communication

“Secrecy was paramount. Britain's imperial general staff knew there would be outrage if it became known that the government was intending to use its secret stockpile of chemical weapons. But Winston Churchill, then secretary of state for war, brushed aside their concerns. As a long-term advocate of chemical warfare, he was determined to use them against the Russian Bolsheviks.”

Giles Milton (1966) British writer and historian

Winston Churchill's shocking use of chemical weapons https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/sep/01/winston-churchill-shocking-use-chemical-weapons (1 September 2013), .

War , Secret

“This sort of scenario has happened, I imagine, millions of times. It has rarely happened in a nicer, sweeter, more gentle way than in Richard Linklater's "Before Sunrise," which I could call a "Love Affair" for Generation X, except that Jesse and Celine stand outside their generation, and especially outside its boring insistence on being bored.
The R rating for this film, based on a few four-letter words, is entirely unjustified. It is an ideal film for teenagers.”

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

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/before-sunrise-1995 of Before Sunrise (27 January 1995)
Reviews, Three star reviews

Love , Way , Imagination , Time

“The idea that some of the members of the smooth, bland variety of second generation of linguistic philosophers undergo ”perplexity”, let alone intellectual cramp, has an element of high comedy.”

Ernest Gellner (1925–1995) Czech anthropologist, philosopher and sociologist

Source: Words and Things (1959), p. 138

Idea

“I think President Obama is the most radical president this nation's ever seen. And in particular, I think he is a true believer in government control of the economy and of our everyday lives. In my judgment, we are facing what I consider to be the epic battle of our generation, quite literally the battle over whether we remain a free market nation.”

Ted Cruz (1970) American politician

Interview with Caroline May of the The Daily Caller, after his announcement to run for U.S. Senate for the first time; in Caroline May, " Partier for Senate http://dailycaller.com/2011/06/06/ted-cruz-cuban-ivy-league-tea-partier-for-senate/", The Daily Caller (June 6, 2011).
2010s

Thinking

“Historically, "public administration" has grown in large part out of the wider field of inquiry, "political science." The history of American political science during the past fifty years is a story much too lengthy to be told here, but some important general characteristics and tendencies it has communicated to or shared with public administration must be noted.
The Secular Spirit Despite: the fact that "political science" in such forms as moral philosophy and political economy had been taught in America long before the Civil War, the present curriculum, practically in its entirety, is the product of the secular, practical, empirical, and "scientific" tendencies of the past sixty or seventy years. American students dismayed at the inadequacies of the ethical approach in the Gilded Age, stimulated by their pilgrimage to German universities, and led by such figures as J. W. Burgess, E. J. James, A. B. Hart, A. L. Lowell, and F. J. Goodnow have sought to recreate political science as a true science. To this end they set about observing and analyzing "actual government." At various times and according to circumstances, they have turned to public law, foreign institutions, rural, municipal, state, and federal institutions, political parties, public opinion and pressures, and to the administrative process, in the search for the "stuff" of government. They have borrowed both ideas and examples from the natural sciences and the other social disciplines. Frequently they have been inspired by a belief that a Science of Politics will emerge when enough facts of the proper kinds are accumulated and put in the proper juxtaposition, a Science that will enable man to "predict and control" his political life. So far did they advance from the old belief that the problem of good government is the problem of moral men that they arrived at the opposite position: that morality is irrelevant, that proper institutions and expert personnel are determining.”

Dwight Waldo (1913–2000) American political scientist

Source: The Administrative State, 1948, p. 22-23

Life , Men , War , Age

“You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind…. Cain slew his brother. Cain might have been killed, and that would have put a termination to that line of human beings. This was not to be, and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses, vol. 7, 1863, p. 290.
1860s

Family , Intelligence

“A rebel is born, a rebel is dead and in his death many others come to life. This is how we get revolutionists one generation after another”

Ali Al-Wardi (1913–1995) Iraqi sociologist

Life , Death , Dead

“When you try to generate ideas, think of yourself as a sales person knocking on a whole subdivision of doors. Some won't open at all, some will open a suspicious crack, and some will slam in your face. But the more doors you knock on, the greater your chances of being invited in.”

Tim Hurson (1946) Creativity theorist, author and speaker

Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking

Idea , Thinking , Chance , Personality

“In string theory one studies strings moving in a fixed classical spacetime. …what we call a background-dependent approach. …One of the fundamental discoveries of Einstein is that there is no fixed background. The very geometry of space and time is a dynamical system that evolves in time. The experimental observations that energy leaks from binary pulsars in the form of gravitational waves—at the rate predicted by general relativity to the… accuracy of eleven decimal places—tell us that there is no more a fixed background of spacetime geometry than there are fixed crystal spheres holding the planets up.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

"Loop Quantum Gravity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

Study , Time , Dependency

“Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.”

Jonathan Franzen (1959) novelist

Voices in the Wilderness The Guardian (Saturday 28 September 2002).

Depressing , Life , World

“The Present Age, according to my view of it, stands in that Epoch which in my former lecture I named the THIRD, and which I characterized as the Epoch of Liberation—directly from the external ruling Authority, indirectly from the power of Reason as Instinct, and generally from Reason in any form; the Age of absolute indifference towards all truth, and of entire and unrestrained licentiousness:–the state of completed sinfulness.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), p. 16

Truth , Age , Indifference

“Love — caritas — is an extraordinary force which leads people to opt for courageous and generous engagement in the field of justice and peace. It is a force that has its origin in God, Eternal Love and Absolute Truth. Each person finds his good by adherence to God's plan for him, in order to realize it fully: in this plan, he finds his truth, and through adherence to this truth he becomes free (cf. Jn 8:32). To defend the truth, to articulate it with humility and conviction, and to bear witness to it in life are therefore exacting and indispensable forms of charity. Charity, in fact, “rejoices in the truth””

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

1 Cor 13:6
2009, Cartias in Vertitate (29 June 2009)

Love , Life , God , People

“My father came to visit and spent about half a day with me during a weekend. At the time, September 1942, he was in a highly classified planning program for the attack on Morocco at Casablanca. He was unable to tell me anything about the operation, except that this would be the last time he would see me before going overseas. He said that I was not to tell anybody that he was going overseas, but that he was leaving soon. Of course, in those days, you didn't have too many privileges as a fourth classman, and besides there were so damned many generals at West Point, and in the Army, that his appearance, as I recall, didn't cause any particular stir. At the time he was a major general and had recently been training in Indio, California.”

George S. Patton IV (1923–2004) U.S. Army general

Source: The Fighting Pattons (1997) by Brian M. Sobel, p. 30-31

Appearance , Time , Training

“Multiple discoveries are in fact very common in science and for much the same reason. Developments in related fields with different motivation help one to understand a difficult problem better. Since these developments are public knowledge, many scholars can take advantage of them. It is pleasant to the ego to be first or among the first with a new discovery. However, in this case at least, the evidence is clear that the development of general equilibrium theory would have gone on quite as it did without me.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Arrow (1984) "November 1984 lecture at Trinity University". Lecture presented November 5, 1984.
1970s-1980s

Motivation , Understanding , Knowledge , Problem

“Europe is not really even a geographic entity; it is separated from Asia only at one point, the Bosphorus, by a small stretch of water. North of that there is continuity over the russians steppes, a complete terrestrial flow. I suggest that is also true of culture, and indeed of social organization. Indeed Europe has never been purely isolated, purely Christian. Instead of Christian Europe, one has to see the continent as penetrated by the three world religions that originated in the Near East and which indeed had a common mythology or sacred text; in order of arrival these were Judaism, Christianity and Islam. (…) All have equal entitlements to be present, and in this general ('objective') sense none can be considered only as the Other; they are part of Europe, part of our heritage.”

Jack Goody (1919–2015) British anthropologist

Jack Goody, Islam in Europe, Polity, 2004, p.14

World , Religion , Sense , Water

“No mathematical idea has ever been published in the way it was discovered. Techniques have been developed and are used, if a problem has been solved, to turn the solution procedure upside down, or if it is a larger complex of statements and theories, to turn definitions into propositions, and propositions into definitions, the hot invention into icy beauty. This then if it has affected teaching matter, is the didactical inversion, which as it happens may be anti-didactical. Rather than behaving anti-didactically, one should recognise that the learner is entitled to recapitulate in a fashion of mankind. Not in the trivial matter of an abridged version, but equally we cannot require the new generation to start at the point where their predecessors left off.”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Source: The Concept and the Role of the Model in Mathematics and Natural and Social Sciences (1961), p. ix

Beauty , Way , Mathematics , Idea

“I was really into sci-fi books as a kid. My dad is a physicist and he used to take my brothers and I into his lab when we were little. We played games with liquid nitrogen and Van de Graaff generators. He had the keys to the observatory at St Andrew's University and he'd get us up in the middle of the night to show us Halley's Comet. That's partly why the album is called Eye To The Telescope.”

KT Tunstall (1975) Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist

KTTunstall.com

Books , Game , Universe , Night

“All the gifted souls, of every rank, who are born to you in this generation. These are appointed, by the true eternal "divine right" which will never become obsolete, to be your governors and administrators; and precisely as you employ them, or neglect to employ them, will your State be favored of Heaven or disfavored. This noble young soul, you can have him on either of two conditions; and on one of them, since he is here in the world, you must have him. As your ally and coadjutor; or failing that, as your natural enemy: which shall it be? I consider that every Government convicts itself of infatuation and futility, or absolves and justifies itself before God and man, according as it answers this question.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), The New Downing Street (April 15, 1850)

God , World , Soul , Question

“In the yearly days those nouvo riches were too busy. As they finally got their moneys grabbed, they started to look round and discovered emptiness, vacuum inside… It so happened that the whole new generation grew up with this feeling of emptiness. When, say, falling in love, such a person simply doesn’t know - how to experience an emotion. And then this question of Life’s reason arises. People don’t think about it until one day something happens. Then all of a sudden they find that their life is not particularly interesting. First they get bored, then get frightened. Because its frightening for one, after having got everything - houses, cars, stocks and funds, - to discover they haven’t a ground to stand on.”

Nina Shatskaya (1966) Russian singer

Ogonyok interview. Нина Шацкая, Огонек, 2011-01-01 http://www.ogoniok.com/4977/25/,

Love , Life , Money , People

“The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.”

George Bernard Shaw Three Plays for Puritans

Three Plays for Puritans, Preface (1900)
1900s

Fashion

“Since the State thrives on what it expropriates, the general decline in production that it induces by its avarice foretells its own doom. Its source of income dries up. Thus, in pulling Society down it pulls itself down. Its ultimate collapse is usually occasioned by a disastrous war, but preceding that event is a history of increasing and discouraging levies on the marketplace, causing a decline in the aspirations, hopes, and self-esteem of its victims.”

Frank Chodorov (1887–1966) American libertarian thinker

Source: The Rise & Fall of Society (1959), p. 150

War , Hope , History

“One such evolutionary system, or ridge, encompasses panhuman emotional faculties, or affective "programs." These include the basic, or primary, emotions that Darwin first identified: surprise, fear, anger, joy, sadness, disgust, and perhaps contempt. Certain reactions characteristic of the neurophysiology of surprise and fear are already evident in reptiles, and the other primary emotions are at least apparent in monkeys and apes. Then there are the secondary, mostly "social" emotions, such as anxiety, grief, guilt, pride, vengeance, and love. These may be unique to humans-hence, at the lower level in our evolutionary mountain landscape and somewhat more liable to cultural manipulation and variation than the primary, "Darwinian" emotions. Thus, only humans seek revenge or redemption across lifetimes and generations, whatever the cost, although the nature of the deeds that trigger insult or remorse may vary considerably across societies, and the means to counter them may range even wider.”

Scott Atran (1952) Anthropologist

Introduction: an evolutionary riddle, p. 11
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

Love , Sadness , Fear , Mountain

“They were the misfits of the world, the outcasts, for they deviated from the norm of humanity as established through all of history. Yet it was this very deviation which made them the hope of all mankind. Ordinary human beings—the kind of human beings who had brought the race this far—were not enough today. The ordinary humans had pushed the culture forward as far as they could push it. It had served its purpose; it had brought the ordinary human as far as he could go. Now the race evolved. Now new abilities had awoke and grown—exactly as the creatures of the Earth had evolved and specialized and then evolved again from that first moment when the first feeble spark of life had come into being in the seething chemical bath of a new and madcap planet.
Twisted brains, the normal people called them; magic people, dwellers of the darkness—and could anyone say no to this? For each people set its standards for each generation and these standards and these norms were not set by any universal rule, by no all-encompassing yardstick, but by what amounted to majority agreement, with the choice arrived at through all the prejudice and bias, all the faulty thinking and the unstable logic to which all intelligence is prone.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 31 (pp. 233-234)

Life , People , World , Hope

“It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.”

Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900) American writer

Backlog Studies, "Second Study” (1873).

“The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive. (p. 201)”

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

1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)

“Economists of the modern school will no doubt protest that I have said nothing of the use of budget deficits or surpluses for the control of the economy in general. I doubt if such techniques would ever be appropriate in Hong Kong's exposed economic position; and I think they are certainly not appropriate at present, when in strict orthodoxy they would suggest the need to plan for a very substantial surplus "to take the heat out of the economy". Although we have in fact run substantial surpluses in recent years we have not done so with deflationary effect because we have not removed them from the economy but have left them inside the Colony's banking system to continue to work for the economy. $500 million or 55% of reserves are so held at present.”

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

February 26, 1964, page 47.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

School , Thinking

“From a score of well-observed original orbits it is shown that the "new" long-period comets generally come from regions between about 50000 and 150000 A. U. distance. The sun must be surrounded by a general cloud of comets with a radius of this order, containing about 1011 comets of observable size; the total mass of the cloud is estimated to be of the order of 1/10 to 1/100 of that of the earth. Through the action of the stars fresh comets are continually being carried from this cloud into the vicinity of the sun.”

Jan Oort (1900–1992) Dutch astronomer

[The structure of the cloud of comets surrounding the Solar System and a hypothesis concerning its origin, Bulletin of the Astronomical Institutes of the Netherlands, 11, 408, 91–110, 3 January 1950, 91, https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/6036/BAN_11_91_110.pdf?sequence=1]

Star , Sun

“As the degree of observational accuracy at which general relativity becomes significantly different from Newtonian theory is far from being achieved in this field, and as stellar velocities are small compared with light, there is no sign yet that any non-Newtonian theory is required.”

Gerald James Whitrow (1912–2000) British mathematician

"Newton and the Stars" (10 Oct 1957)

Light

“Geoffrey also recognized that the opposite orientations of gut and nervous system posed a problem for his claim that insects and vertebrates represent different versions of the same archetypal animal - and he proposed the first account of the inversion theory to resolve this threat to unification. …Geoffroy pursued the… aim of establishing a "unity of type" that could generate both arthropods and vertebrates from the same basic blueprint. …The single grand design includes a gut in the middle and the main nerve cords somewhere on the periphery.”

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

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 326
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Problem , Animals

“"If the trade is at present carried on to the same extent and nearly in the same manner, while we are delaying from year to year to put a stop to our part in it, the blood of many thousands of our helpless, much injured fellow creatures is crying against us. The pitiable state of the survivors who are torn from their relatives, connections, and their native land must be taken into account. I fear the African trade is a national sin, for the enormities which accompany it are now generally known; and though, perhaps, the greater part of the nation would be pleased if it were suppressed, yet, as it does not immediately affect their own interest, they are passive. {… ] Can we wonder that the calamities of the present war begin to be felt at home, when we ourselves wilfully and deliberately inflict much greater calamities upon the native Africans, who never offended us?. "Woe unto thee that spoilest, and thou wast not spoiled when thou shalt cease to spoil, thou shalt be spoiled"”

John Newton (1725–1807) Anglican clergyman and hymn-writer

Alluding to the biblical verse in Isaiah 33:1. As quoted in The Works of the Rev. John Newton... to which are Prefixed Memoirs of His Life (1839), Vol. 2, U. Hunt., page 438.

War , Fear , Home , Parting

“Resolved, That the General Assembly of Virginia, doth unequivocally express a firm resolution to maintain and defend the Constitution of the United States, and the Constitution of this State, against every aggression either foreign or domestic, and that they will support the Government of the United States in all measures warranted by the former.”

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

Resolutions proposed to the Legislature of Virginia (21 December 1798), passed on 24 December; as published in the "Report of the Committee to whom were referred the Communications of various States, relative to the Resolutions of the last General Assembly of this State, concerning the Alien and Sedition Laws" (20 January 1800)
1790s

Support

“Anxiety occurs because of a threat to the values a person identifies with his existence as a self … most anxiety comes from a threat to social, emotional and moral values the person identifies with himself. And here we find that a main source of anxiety, particularly in the younger generation, is that they do not have viable values available in the culture on the basis of which they can relate to their world. The anxiety which is inescapable in an age in which values are so radically in transition is a central cause of apathy … such prolonged anxiety tends to develop into lack of feeling and the experience of depersonalization.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Psychology and the Human Dilemma (1967), p. 42

Age , World , Feeling , Personality

Quotes about general page 54

Quotes about general
page 54