Quotes about general (7423 quotes, page 57)

“Thematic analysis is a process for encoding quantitative information. The encoding requires an explicit "code". This may be a list of themes; a complex model with themes, indicators, and qualifications that are causally related; or something in between these two forms. A theme is a pattern found in the information that at minimum describes and organizes the possible observations and at maximum interprets aspects of the phenomenon. A theme may be identified at the manifest level (directly observable in the information) or at the latent level (underlying the phenomenon). The themes may be initially generated inductively from the raw information or generated deductively from theory or prior research.”

Richard Boyatzis (1946) American business theorist

Source: Transforming qualitative information (1998), p. vi-vii.

“In general, the rate of evaporation (m) of a substance in a high vacuum is related to the pressure (p) of the saturated vapor by the equation m=\sqrt{\frac{M}{2\pi RT}}p. Red phosphorus and some other substances probably form exceptions to this rule.”

Irving Langmuir (1881–1957) American chemist and physicist

Irving Langmuir, "The Constitution and Fundamental Properties of Solids and Liquids. Part I. Solids.", Journal of the American Chemical Society, September 5, 1916

“This vocation is sometimes termed a harried one and it is said that the abuse of School-masters was scribbled on the Pyramids long before the Monument was complete and that the general hatred and contempt for the pedagogue dates back to the very beginning of recorded things. These and other similar foolish accusations are the additional burden this class of people have to bear. Consider the gibe of that arch-cynic G. B. S., "When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else, who has no aptitude for it and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman."”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Teachers & Education

People , Education , School

“When the year was completed, I began to examine and compare my observations, and having pretty well satisfied myself as to the general laws of the phenomena, I then endeavored to find out the cause of them. I was already convinced that the apparent motion of the stars was not owing to the nutation of the earth's axis. The next thing that offered itself was an alteration in the direction of the plumb-line with which the instrument was constantly rectified; but this upon trial proved insufficient. Then I considered what refraction might do, but here also nothing satisfactory occurred. At length I conjectured that all the phenomena hitherto mentioned, proceeded from the progressive motion of light and the earth's annual motion in its orbit. For I perceived that, if light was propagated in time, the apparent place of a fixed object would not be the same when the eye is at rest, as when it is moving in any other direction than that of the line passing through the eye and the object; and that, when the eye is moving in different directions, the apparent place of the object would be different.”

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

As quoted by W. S. Eichelberger, "The Distances of the Heavenly Bodies," http://www.jstor.org/stable/1639343 Science New Series, Vol. 43, No. 1110 (Apr. 7, 1916), pp. 475-483.

Law , Star , Light , Time

“There is no end to the war and death caused by man or to the tears shed by all the innocent victims of such tragedies. What were all these for? Only for conquering, establishing superiority and satisfying our greed for money and fame. Mankind has taken upon itself countless curses. In order to attain freedom from these curses, at least a hundred generations to come should wipe the tears of the suffering, striving to console them and alleviate their pain. At least now, as an atonement, shouldn’t we try to introspect?”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

Compassion: The Only Way to Peace (2007)

Death , Money , Pain , War

“If by politeness then is meant goodness, it is appreciated by me as I trust it always has been, but if it is to mean the string of ceremonies generally used for concealing ill nature, and which have been found necessary to the existence of every society whose members are wanting in self respect and morality, I detest it more than ever.My prominent idea of a polite man is one who is nothing but polish. It is an unenviable reputation. If there was anything else in him the polish would never be noticed. He is a bad drawing finely worked up, and Gérôme says that every attempt at finish on a bad design serves only to make the work more contemptible.”

Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) American painter

Letter to Emily Sartain (ca. 1867); from Sylvan Schendler, Eakins (1967), footnote, ch. 10.

Idea , Nature , Drawing

“I complain about the United States not being Athens. I certainly say we are a very good Roman republic, and the lies are based upon the most advanced techniques of advertising, which is the only art form my country has ever created — the television commercial — and we sell soap and presidents in the same fashion. Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to bring the truth back.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

2010s, "Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia" (2013)

Truth , Art , Fashion , Country

“Terrorists are desperate assholes who see no institutionalized recourse to address their grievances, so they resort to random acts of violence in order to instill fear into the general population.”

Ze Frank (1972) American online performance artist

http://www.zefrank.com/wiki/index.php/the_show:_06-21-06
"The Show" (www.zefrank.com/theshow/)

Fear

“A bandana full of glittering generality, 'fighting for freedom' and 'fighting terror', but what's reality? Martial law is coming soon to the hood to kill you, while you hanging your flag out your project window.”

Immortal Technique (1978) American rapper and activist

The 4th Branch
Albums, Revolutionary Vol. 2 (2003)

Law , Reality , Freedom , Fight

“The average man, if he meddles with criticism at all, is a conservative critic. His opinions are determined not by his reason -- 'the bulk of mankind' says Swift 'is as well qualified for flying as for thinking' -- but by his passions; and the faintest of all human passions is the love of truth. He believes that the text of ancient authors is generally sound, not because he has acquainted himself with the elements of the problem, but because he would feel uncomfortable if he did not believe it; just as he believes, on the same cogent evidence, that he is a fine fellow, and that he will rise again from the dead.”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

Introduction to Astronomicon of Manilius, Lib I. (Cambridge University Press, [1903] 1937) p. xliii.

Love , Truth , Feeling , Problem

“Not only the Greeks in general — Aristotle no less than Plato — but the great medieval thinkers as well, all held that there was an element of purely receptive "looking," not only in self-perception but also in intellectual knowing or, as Heraclitus said, "Listening-in to the being of things."
The medievals distinguished between the intellect as ratio and the intellect as intellectus. Ratio is the power of discursive thought, of searching and re-searching, abstracting, refining, and concluding [cf. Latin dis-currere, "to run to and fro"], whereas intellectus refers to the ability of "simply looking" (simplex intuitus), to which the truth presents itself as a landscape presents itself to the eye.”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), Leisure, the Basis of Culture, p. 11

Truth , Search

“In general, the Church has often rendered valuable aid by joining the advanced public conscience of any period in its protest against some single intolerable evil, but it has accepted as inevitable the general social system under which the world was living at the time, and has not undertaken any thoroughgoing social reconstruction in accordance with Christian principles.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.4 Why Has Christianity Never Undertaken the Work of Social Reconstruction?, p. 149-150

World , Evil , Time

“Candid, and generous, and just,
Boys care but little whom they trust,
An error soon corrected—
For who but learns in riper years
That man, when smoothest he appears
Is most to be suspected?”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

"Friendship", line 19 (1782).

Error , Boy , Learning , Appearance

“[Lloyd George] was still pessimistic about the war—said we were fighting better brains than our own—that there was not one really first-class man on our side. The Germans had shown that they had better training than we, and he knew the value of training—he had seen examples of it in the House of Commons, when Labour members competed against men of better education than themselves—they were just as good fellows, but they hadn't the training. And [Lloyd George] says that it is training that is wanting on our side—among the generals. He says our soldiers are the best in Europe, but they are being wantonly sacrificed because those in authority do not know how to make the best use of them.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Frances Stevenson's diary entry (16 December 1914), A. J. P. Taylor (ed.), Lloyd George: A Diary (London: Hutchinson, 1971), p. 17
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Men , War , Education , Fight

“To say that the cosmos was expanding is equally to say that its members were contracting. The ultimate centers of power, each at first coincident with the punctual cosmos, themselves generated the cosmical space by their disengagement from each other.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 162)

“There was much idle talk at the Conference of Paris about the disappearance of four mighty empires, German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Turkish. But the cynical Clemenceau, at the head of the French delegation knew that the strongest of them remained -- even though it had reluctantly become a Republic. His task at the peace parleys, as he saw it, was to see that Germany was permanently weakened, or, if this could not be achieved, confronted for at least a generation with an Allied coalition which, having won the war, would keep the peace by guarding France's northeastern border to make sure that any future invasion from across the Rhine would be met with overwhelming force.”

William L. Shirer book The Collapse of the Third Republic

The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969)

War , Peace , Future

“The Inclinations of Men, in this their degenerate State, carry them with great Force to those voluptuous Objects, that please their Appetites and gratify their Senses; and which not only by their early Acquaintance and Familiarity, but as they are adapted to the prevailing Instincts of Nature, are more esteem'd and pursu'd than all other Satisfactions. As those inferior Enjoyments, that only affect the Organs of the Body are chiefly coveted, so next to these, that light and facetious Qualification of the Mind, that diverts the Hearers and is proper to produce Mirth and Alacrity, has, in all Ages, by the greatest Part of Mankind, been admir'd and applauded. No Productions of Human Understanding are receiv'd with such a general Pleasure and Approbation, as those that abound with Wit and Humour, on which the People set a greater Value, than on the wisest and most instructive Discourses. Hence a pleasant Man is always caress'd above a wise one, and Ridicule and Satyr, that entertain the Laughers, often put solid Reason and useful Science out of Countenance. The wanton Temper of the Nation has been gratify'd so long with the high Seasonings of Wit and Raillery in Writing and Conversation, that now almost all Things that are not accommodated to their Relish by a strong Infusion of those Ingredients, are rejected as the heavy and insipid Performances of Men of a plain Understanding and meer Masters of Sense.”

Richard Blackmore (1654–1729) English poet and physician

Essay upon Wit http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13484/13484-8.txt (1711)

Men , People , Pleasure , Age

“Let’s forget for the moment the generalizations about what the Muslim religion as a whole had to do with September 11th. How did anyone ever get the idea that Hinduism had anything to do with that whatsoever? And how is it that no one in this country can tell a Muslim or a Hindu apart from a Sikh? How do these people justify their own senseless stupidity? It pains me that our paranoid reactionary religiously-bigoted society produces people of such stark hatred and bewildering inanity.”

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

"Kill ‘em all; let God sort ‘em out." http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2012/12/30/kill-em-all-let-god-sort-em-out/, Patheos (December 30, 2012)
Patheos

Pain , People , Stupidity , Religion

“Art' is a Renaissance invention which has been carried to a state of extreme refinement in the present day. This is the so-called 'abstract art'. The production of good works of art was achieved only at the cost of an enormous concentration upon certain matters. This concentration could be achieved only through neglecting 'life', through the very loss of life- just as religion had experienced before. 'Today this situation is no longer tolerable'. Today life is paramount. Modern life in general rejects all tendencies towards isolation and ivory tower-like exclusiveness. It is absolute un-modern to concentrate upon just one thing (as did the middle Ages!) Modern life is based upon the construction, which is to say, upon a system of tensions or the neutralization of the system of carry and support. In agreement with this concept we too must distribute our vitality over the whole range of life taken in the broadest possible sense. All other attitudes towards life produce tragedy.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote in 'The end of Art', in De Stijl; Theo van Doesburg – series XII, 1924-5, pp. 135–136
1920 – 1926

Life , Age , Religion , Art

“Luck, like a Russian car, generally only works if you push it.”

Tom Holt (1961) British writer

My Hero (1996)

Cars

“If people differ in an absolutely general way in their estimations of epistemic relevance, and if we follow the holism of meaning and individuate intentional states by way of the totality of their epistemic bonds, the consequence will be that two people (or, for that matter, two temporal sections of the same person) will never be in the same intentional state. Therefore, two people can never be subsumed under the same intentional generalizations. And, therefore, intentional generalization can never be successful. And, therefore again, there is no hope for an intentional psychology.”

Jerry Fodor (1935–2017) American philosopher

Fodor & E. Lepore (1992) Holism: A Shopper's Guide, Blackwell.

People , Hope , Way , Success

“Successes in socialist construction largely depend on the correct combination of the general and the nationally specific in social development. Not only are we now theoretically aware but also have been convinced in practice that the way to socialism and its main features are determined by the general regularities, which are inherent in the development of all the socialist countries. We are also aware that the effect of the general regularities is manifested in different forms consistent with concrete historical conditions and national specifics. It is impossible to build socialism without basing oneself on general regularities or taking account of the concrete historical specifics of each country. Nor is it possible without a consideration of both these factors correctly to develop relations between the socialist states.”

Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Cited in the Future of Society http://leninist.biz/en/1973/FS375/5.3-Main.Historical.Stages.of.the.Communist.Formation

Way , Success , Dependency , Country

“We must seek another interpretation of the cross, and at the same time we must realize that the generations ahead will discard our interpretations.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.119

Time

“Women in general are not interested in questions of principle as such, but at most only in so far as they affect particular personalities. They require the dramatic element to evoke their interest. With many men, on the contrary, though this element of course enhances interest, it is not the indispensable condition of interest.”

Ernest Belfort Bax (1854–1926) British barrister and journalist

To-Day magazine, October issue ‘No Misogyny But True Equality’ http://historyoffeminism.com/ernest-belfort-bax-no-misogyny-but-true-equality-1887-complete/
‘No Misogyny But True Equality’ (1887)

Women , Men , Question , Personality

“Many Franks of the sixteenth generation were killed in the muck of the trenches, he died not once but many times, developing an obsessive dread of war which never left him.
By the time the Americans entered the war, he was turning his many thoughts to politics.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

Let's Be Frank (1957)

War , Time

“All marriage is such a lottery -- the happiness is always an exchange -- though it may be a very happy one -- still the poor woman is bodily and morally the husband's slave. That always sticks in my throat. When I think of a merry, happy, and free young girl -- and look at the ailing aching state a young wife is generally doomed to -- which you can't deny is the penalty of marriage.”

Victoria of the United Kingdom (1819–1901) British monarch who reigned 1837–1901

Source: Letter (16 May 1860), published in Dearest Child: Letters Between Queen Victoria and the Princess Royal Previously Unpublished edited by Roger Fulfold (1964), p. 254. Also quoted in the article "Queen Victoria's Not So Victorian Writings" http://www.victoriana.com/doors/queenvictoria.htm by Heather Palmer (1997).

Marriage , Penalty , Girl , Thinking

“May any spiritual energy thus generated
By my devotion to the enlightened ones
Be dedicated to dispelling the misery
Of living beings without exception.”

Šantidéva (685–763) 8th-century Indian Buddhist monk and scholar

Bodhicaryavatara

“I find, by your Excellency's letter to General Sullivan, that you expect the enemy are going to evacuate New York, and that it is probable they are coming eastward. I can hardly think they mean to make an attempt upon Boston, notwithstanding the object is important; and, unless they attack Boston, there is no other object worthy their attention in New England. I am rather inclined to think they mean to leave the United States altogether. What they hold here now, they hold at a great risk and expense. But, suppose they actually intend to quit the Continent, they will endeavour to mislead our attention, and that of our allies, until they can get clear of the coast. The Admiral is fortifying for the security of his fleet; but I am told his batteries are all open in the rear, which will be but a poor security against a land force. General Heath thinks there ought to be some Continental troops sent here : but the Council will not turn out the militia; they are so confident the enemy are not coming here. If your Excellency thinks the enemy really design an attack upon Boston, it may not be useless for you to write your opinion to the Council Board, for I suspect they think the General here has taken the alarm without sufficient reasons. The fortifications round this place are very incomplete, and little or nothing doing upon them. I have given General Heath my opinion what parts to take possession of, if the enemy should attempt the place before the Continental army gets up. From four to five hundred troops have arrived at Halifax; their collective strength will make a formidable army.”

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

Letter to George Washington (September 1778)

Confidence , Thinking , Parting

“Something there is that can refresh and revivify older people: joy in the activities of the younger generation—a joy, to be sure, that is clouded by dark forebodings in these unsettled times. And yet, as always, the springtime sun brings forth new life, and we may rejoice because of this new life and contribute to its unfolding; and Mozart remains as beautiful and tender as he always was and always will be. There is, after all, something eternal that lies beyond reach of the hand of fate and of all human delusions. And such eternals lie closer to an older person than to a younger one oscillating between fear and hope. For us, there remains the privilege of experiencing beauty and truth in their purest forms.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Letter to Queen Mother Elizabeth of Belgium (20 March, likely 1936), written to her when she was depressed over the recent death of her husband and daughter-in-law, p. 51
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)

Life , Fate , People , Truth

“As a brave man goes into fire or flood or pestilence to save a human life, so a generous mind follows after truth and love, and is not frightened from the pursuit by danger or toil or obloquy.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 227

Love , Life , Truth

“And yet there is nothing so badly imagined: nature seems to have provided, that the follies of men should be transient, but they by writing books render them permanent. A fool ought to content himself with having wearied those who lived with him: but he is for tormenting future generations; he is desirous that his folly should triumph over oblivion, which he ought to have enjoyed as well as his grave; he is desirous that posterity should be informed that he lived, and that it should be known for ever that he was a fool.”

Montesquieu (1689–1755) French social commentator and political thinker

Commonly paraphrased as "An author is a fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on boring future generations".
No. 66. (Rica writing to * * *)
Lettres Persanes (Persian Letters, 1721)

Men , Books , Fools , Imagination

“When under the influence of certain (or some) reasons (or causes) (alcohol, war, etc - added Spir here) the low instincts are unbridled (or unrestrained), the brute appears (or come forward, "apparait", Fr.) and rule over (or dominate), stifling every ("toute", Fr.) noble, generous impulse; it is then the ruin (or downfall or decline) of any humanity in man.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 48.

War , Alcohol , Appearance

“When Sultan Alau-d din, the Sultan of Delhi, was well established in the centre of his dominion and had cut off the heads of his enemies and slain them, the vein of the zeal of religion beat high for the subjection of infidelity and destruction of idols, and in the month of Zi'l-hijja 698 H. (1298 AD) his brother Malik Mu'izzu-d din and Nusrat Khan, the chief pillar of the state and the leader of his armies, a generous and intelligent warrior, were sent to Kambayat, the most celebrated of the cities of Hind in population and wealth' With a view of holy war, and not for the lust of conquest…”

Alauddin Khalji (1266–1316) Ruler of the Khalji dynasty

Elliot and Dowson, Vol. III : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 42-43 Also quoted in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts.
Quotes from The History of India as told by its own Historians

War , Religion , Intelligence , Wealth

“It's like the 'normalisation' discussion because in both cases we dream of a 'true message' that, in the NLG case, we generate from, and in the normalisation and analysis cases, we normalise/analyse to. Of course the 'true message' is a fantasy, and what we think it should be will depend on our particular goals in our particular context.”

Adam Kilgarriff (1960–2015) linguist from England

in Discussion on Corpora-list (5 March 2015) http://mailman.uib.no/public/corpora/2015-March/022161.html

Dreams , Thinking , Dependency

“If anything, we Generals and minorities continue to contribute constructively to every facet of life in this country.”

Kenneth Zinck (1959) Fijian politician

Calls for greater minority representation in the House of Representatives, 10 August 2005

Life , Country

“When I talk to farmers about how they treat the animals on their farms, I come up against a strange fact: while the general public and most research scientists all acknowledge that farm animals suffer, the farmers responsible for them have a tendency to deny it.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Source: The Face on Your Plate (2009), Ch. 2, p. 64

Suffering , Animals

“Official goals are the general purposes of the organization as put forth in the charter, annual reports, public statements… Official goals are purposely vague and general and do not indicate two major factors which influence organizational behavior: the host of decisions that must be made among alternative ways of achieving official goals, and the priority of multiple goals and the many unofficial goals pursued by groups within the organization.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1960s, "The analysis of goals in complex organizations", 1961, p. 855

Way , Behavior , Decision

“How many of us are able to distinguish between the odors of noon and midnight, or of winter and summer, or of a windy spell and a still one? If man is so generally less happy in the cities than in the country, it is because all these variations and nuances of sight and smell and sound are less clearly marked and lost in the general monotony of gray walls and cement pavements.”

Lin Yutang book The Importance of Living

Source: The Importance of Living (1937), p. 129

Winter , Summer , Country , Happiness

“Isn't it dreadful? Here we are, two officers of the German General Staff, discussing how best to murder our commander in chief. It must be done. This is our only chance… Hitler must be cut down like a rabid dog.”

Henning von Tresckow (1901–1944) German general

1943. Roger Moorhouse, Killing Hitler, p. 249.

Dogs , Chance

“Each one of these social generations—from the ‘50s, from the ‘60s, from the ‘70s, from the Reagan era, from now—thinks of its social aesthetic as definitive. In fact, they are all in a process: encouraged toward, and beyond, hubris, by demography.”

George W. S. Trow (1943–2006) American writer

Collapsing Dominant (1997)

Thinking

“Mr Pollexfen was at one and the same time right and wrong—a condition much more common than is generally supposed.”

Rafael Sabatini book Captain Blood

Source: Captain Blood (1922), Ch. IV: "Human Merchandise"

Time

“As I look at American history, I see that this has always been a country of “we” not “me.” We stand together because we are stronger together.. One — out of many, one — has seen us through the darkest chapters of our history. Ever since 13 squabbling colonies put aside their disagreements and united because they realized they were going to rise together or fall separately, generation after generation has fought and marched and organized to widen the circle of dignity and opportunity. Ending slavery. Securing and expanding the right to vote. Throwing open the doors of education. Building the greatest middle class the world has ever seen. And we are stronger when more people can participate in our democracy.”

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

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Speech about the Orlando Shooting (June 13, 2016)

People , World , Education , Democracy

“I shall always regard this aspect of my dispute with Keynes as the greatest mistake of my professional career, and the book, The Great Depression, which I subsequently wrote, partly in justification of this attitude, as something which I would willingly see be forgotten. […] Now I still think that there is much in this theory as an explanation of a possible generation of boom and crisis. But, as an explanation of what was going on in the early ’30s, I now think it was misleading. Whatever the genetic factors of the pre-1929 boom, their sequelae, in the sense of inappropriate investments fostered by wrong expectations, were completely swamped by vast deflationary forces sweeping away all those elements of constancy in the situation which otherwise might have provided a framework for an explanation in my terms. The theory was inadequate to the facts. Nor was this approach any more adequate as a guide to policy. Confronted with the freezing deflation of those days, the idea that the prime essential was the writing down of mistaken investments and the easing of capital markets by fostering the disposition to save and reducing the pressure on consumption was completely inappropriate. To treat what developed subsequently in the way which I then thought valid was as unsuitable as denying blankets and stimulants to a drunk who has fallen into an icy pond, on the ground that his original trouble was overheating.”

Lionel Robbins (1898–1984) British economist

Autobiography of an Economist (1971), p. 154.

Books , Way , Idea , Thinking

“The particles of this cosmos rock and roll to their own self-generated beat. They defy the rules of arithmetic. Protons plus neutrons… equals music. Is this harmony… entropy? …No. …it's social behavior …riddled with form. And it's so antientropic that those in the scientific world who are trying desparately to rescue entropy… call it "negentropy."”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

…Entropy is a very big assumption.
Heresy Number Three
The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates (2012)

World , Music , Behavior

“Before being Christians or Jews or Muslims, before being Americans or Russians or Africans, before being generals or priests, rabbis or imams, before having visible or invisible disabilities, we are all human beings with hearts capable of loving”

Jean Vanier (1928–2019) Canadian humanitarian

Jean Vanier: Philosopher.. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/jean-vanier-philosopher-who-dislikes-the-religion-of-success-wins-12m-templeton-prize-for-promoting-spiritual-awareness-10101621.html The Independent, 11 March 2015
From interviews and talks

Love , Heart

“There is a constant rush to judgment in Foucault. He is filled with specious generalizations, false categories, distortions, fudging, pretenses to knowledge in areas where he was ignorant. He had no ability whatsoever to distinguish among historical sources, where he makes terrible blunders.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 224

Knowledge , Falseness

“The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them. I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children.Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children's books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading…It's tosh. It's snobbery and it's foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn't hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian "improving" literature. You'll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)

Love , Children , Pleasure , Books

“By 1922, General Hans von Seeckt, commander of the German armed forces, was secretly advising his government: "Poland's existence is intolerable, incompatible with the essential conditions of Germany's life. Poland must go and will go". He added that Poland's obliteration "must be one of the fundamental objectives of German policy… With the disappearance of Poland will fall one of the strongest pillars of the Versailles Peace, the hegemony of France."”

William L. Shirer book The Collapse of the Third Republic

The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969)

Life , Peace

“Legendre's Law of Quadratic Reciprocity' … is …the most important general truth in the science of integral numbers which has been discovered since the time of Fermat. It has been called by Gauss 'the gem of the higher arithmetic,' and is equally remarkable whether we consider the simplicity of its enunciation, the difficulties which for a long time attended its demonstration, or the number and variety of the results which have been obtained by its means. …[W]e find in the 'Opuscula Analytica' of Euler… a memoir… which contains a general and very elegant theorem from which the Law of Reciprocity is immediately deducible, and which is, vice versâ, deducible from that law. But Euler… expressly observes that the theorem is undemonstrated; and this would seem to be the only place in which he mentions it in connexion with the theory of the Residues of Powers; though in other researches he has frequently developed results which are consequences of the theorem, and which relate to the linear forms of the divisors of quadratic formulae. But here also his conclusions repose on induction only; though in one memoir he seems to have imagined… that he had obtained a satisfactory demonstration.”

Henry John Stephen Smith (1826–1883) mathematician

Report on the Theory of Numbers (1859) Part I, pp. 56-57.
The Collected Mathematical Papers of Henry John Stephen Smith (1894) Vol. 1

Truth , Law , Imagination , Science

“I never threw an illegal pitch. The trouble is, once in a while I toss one that ain't never been seen by this generation.”

Satchel Paige (1906–1982) American baseball player and coach; Negro Leagues

New York Times (June 9, 1982)

“The study of economics does not seem to require any specialized gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy and pure science? Yet good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds. An easy subject, at which very few excel! The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that the master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often found together. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher – in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician. Much, but not all, of this many-sidedness Marshall possessed. But chiefly his mixed training and divided nature furnished him with the most essential and fundamental of the economist's necessary gifts – he was conspicuously historian and mathematician, a dealer in the particular and the general, the temporal and the eternal, at the same time.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Source: Essays In Biography (1933), Alfred Marshall, p. 170; as cited in: Donald Moggridge (2002), Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography, p. 424

Lie , Mood , Understanding , Nature

“The Simplification had ceased to have plan or purpose soon after it began, and became an insane frenzy of mass murder and destruction such as can occur only when the last traces of social order are gone. The madness was transmitted to the children, taught as they were — not merely to forget — but to hate, and surges of mob fury recurred sporadically even through the fourth generation after the Deluge. By then, the fury was directed not against the learned, for there were none, but against the merely literate.”

Walter M. Miller, Jr. book A Canticle for Leibowitz

Ch 6
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Homo

Hate , Children , Learning , Madness

“As a general rule, I beg that it may be understood, that a case is not to be cut into parts, but that when it is known what the question in issue is, it must be met at once.”

Edward Law, 1st Baron Ellenborough (1750–1818) Lord Chief Justice of England

Rees v. Smith and others (1816), 2 Starkie, 32.

Question , Parting

“The attentive synthesis of any particular letter or figure takes an appreciable time, of the order of 100ms…If a whole row of letters is to be identified, they must be synthesized one at a time… To "identify" generally means to name, and hence to synthesize not only a visual object but a linguistic-auditory one… Hence the span of apprehension is limited to what can be synthesized, and then verbally stored.”

Ulric Neisser (1928–2012) American psychologist

Source: Cognitive Psychology, 1967, p. 103; As cited in: A.H.C. Van der Heijden (1996)

Time

“A geologist should be well versed in chemistry, natural philosophy, mineralogy, zoology, comparative anatomy, botany; in short, in every science relating to organic and inorganic nature. …But the brief duration of human life, and our limited powers, are so far from permitting us to aspire to such extensive acquisitions, that excellence even in one department is within the reach of few, and those individuals most effectually promote the general progress, who concentrate their thoughts on a limited portion of the field of inquiry.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.1, p. 3
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Life , Nature , Science

“Their [Athenians] history furnishes the classic example of the peril of Democracy under conditions singularly favourable. For the Athenians were not only brave and patriotic and capable of generous sacrifice, but they were the most religious of the Greeks. They venerated the constitution which had given them prosperity and equality and the pride of freedom…They tolerated considerable variety of opinion, and great license of speech…Thus they became the only people of antiquity that grew great by democratic institutions. But the possession of unlimited power, which corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding of monarchs exercised its demoralizing influence on the illustrious Democracy of Athens.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

People , Exercises , Democracy , History

“Those who urge an alliance with Assad cite the example of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet despot who became an ally of Western democracies against Nazi Germany. I never liked historical comparisons and like this one even less. To start with, the Western democracies did not choose Stalin as an ally; he was thrusted upon them by the turn of events. When the Second World War started Stalin was an ally of Hitler thanks to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviet Union actively participated in the opening phase of the war by invading Poland from the east as the Germans came in from the West. Before that, Stalin had rendered Hitler a big service by eliminating thousands of Polish army officers in The Katyn massacre. Between September 1939 and June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin was an objective ally of Hitler. Stalin switched sides when he had no choice if he wanted to save his skin. The situation in Syria today is different. There is no alliance of democracies which, thanks to Obama’s enigmatic behavior, lack any strategy in the Middle East. Unlike Stalin, Assad has not switched sides if only because there is no side to switch to. Assad regards ISIS as a tactical ally against other armed opposition groups. This is why Russia is now focusing its air strikes against non-ISIS armed groups opposed to Assad. More importantly, Assad has none of the things that Stalin had to offer the Allies. To start with Stalin could offer the vast expanse of territory controlled by the Soviet Union and capable of swallowing countless German divisions without belching. Field Marshal von Paulus’ one-million man invasion force was but a drop in the ocean of the Soviet landmass. In contrast, Assad has no territorial depth to offer. According to the Iranian General Hossein Hamadani, who was killed in Aleppo, Assad is in nominal control of around 20 percent of the country. Stalin also had an endless supply of cannon fodder, able to ship in millions from the depths of the Urals, Central Asia and Siberia. In contrast, Assad has publicly declared he is running out of soldiers, relying on Hezbollah cannon fodder sent to him by Tehran. If Assad has managed to hang on to part of Syria, it is partly because he has an air force while his opponents do not. But even that advantage has been subject to the law of diminishing returns. Four years of bombing defenseless villages and towns has not changed the balance of power in Assad’s favor. This may be why his Russian backers decided to come and do the bombing themselves. Before, the planes were Russian, the pilots Syrian. Now both planes and pilots are Russian, underlining Assad’s increasing irrelevance. Stalin’s other card, which Assad lacks, consisted of the USSR’s immense natural resources, especially the Azerbaijan oilfields which made sure the Soviet tanks could continue to roll without running out of petrol. Assad in contrast has lost control of Syria’s oilfields and is forced to buy supplies from ISIS or smugglers operating from Turkey. There are other differences between Stalin then and Assad now. Adulated as “the Father of the Nation” Stalin had the last word on all issues. Assad is not in that position. In fact, again according to the late Hamadani in his last interview published by Iranian media, what is left of the Syrian Ba’athist regime is run by a star chamber of shadowy characters who regard Assad as nothing but a figurehead.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Opinion: No, Bashar Al-Assad is no Joseph Stalin http://english.aawsat.com/2015/10/article55345413/opinion-no-bashar-al-assad-is-no-joseph-stalin, Ashraq Al-Awsat (16 Oct, 2015).

War , World , Law , Behavior

“While our view of the world is filtered through our senses, evolution has, by and large, molded those senses to perceive the world accurately, for there’s a severe penalty to be paid for seeing things wrongly. That holds not only for the external environment, but also for the character of others. Without accurate perceptions, we couldn’t find food, avoid predators and other dangers, or form harmonious social groups. And following those perceptions is indeed the pursuit of “true beliefs”: beliefs based on evidence. Natural selection doesn’t mold true beliefs; it molds the sensory and neural apparatus that, in general, promotes the formation of true beliefs.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 182

World , Food , Penalty , Nature

“What’s odd about Friedman’s absolutism on the virtues of markets and the vices of government is that in his work as an economist’s economist he was actually a model of restraint. As I pointed out earlier, he made great contributions to economic theory by emphasizing the role of individual rationality—but unlike some of his colleagues, he knew where to stop. Why didn’t he exhibit the same restraint in his role as a public intellectual?
The answer, I suspect, is that he got caught up in an essentially political role. Milton Friedman the great economist could and did acknowledge ambiguity. But Milton Friedman the great champion of free markets was expected to preach the true faith, not give voice to doubts. And he ended up playing the role his followers expected. As a result, over time the refreshing iconoclasm of his early career hardened into a rigid defense of what had become the new orthodoxy.
In the long run, great men are remembered for their strengths, not their weaknesses, and Milton Friedman was a very great man indeed—a man of intellectual courage who was one of the most important economic thinkers of all time, and possibly the most brilliant communicator of economic ideas to the general public that ever lived. But there’s a good case for arguing that Friedmanism, in the end, went too far, both as a doctrine and in its practical applications. When Friedman was beginning his career as a public intellectual, the times were ripe for a counterreformation against Keynesianism and all that went with it. But what the world needs now, I’d argue, is a counter-counterreformation.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

"Who Was Milton Friedman?", The New York Review of Books (February 15, 2007)
The New York Review of Books articles

Men , World , Faith , Communication

“We want to replace proprietary software, with its unjust social system with Free Software and its ethical social system. And so we develop free replacements for proprietary software, and other free programs whenever we get an idea, so that the world can live in freedom. The part that uses computers, at least, in that one area of life. Because winning and maintaining freedom in general is a much bigger, much broader and harder activity, but this is one part of it.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

2000s, What is free software? (2006)

Life , World , Idea , Freedom

“In most Western economies, the general relationship is not in fact between the rate of inflation and the level of unemployment, but between the rate of change of inflation and the rate of change of unemployment.”

Paul Ormerod book The Death of Economics

Part II, Chapter 6, Unemployment and Inflation, p. 130
The Death of Economics (1994)

Change

“When they accepted their assignments they were not very confident, especially the assistant head surgeon who simply believed in his own past experience, in the statistics of international medical literature, and in the medical equipment and resources of the hospitals in capitalist countries. Therefore when he first heard the talk of the vice-superintendent, who was the secretary of the general Party branch, he had some inner feeling of resistance. He thought to himself, "This is simply coercing people to try and do the impossible! But since I have accepted the assignment I'll do what I can. At any rate, the patients will die either in the shock stage or later."”

Ba Jin (1904–2005) Chinese novelist

With such downhearted feelings he entered the ward to see his patients.
A Battle For Life (July 1958)

People , Feeling , Confidence , Literature

“I think it is generally true that sociology does not discover what no one ever knew before.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Source: Art Worlds (1982), p.x.

Thinking

“It was in reading Tristam Shandy that I noticed how it is primarily men who gravitate towards the game-playing self-reflexive style. There is an alienation from emotion in it, a Nervous Nelly fear of letting go and being “exposed.” As an attitude towards life, it betrays a perpetual adolescence. Those who hurled themselves after Derrida were not the most sophisticated but the most pretentious, and least creative members of my generation of academics.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 231

Life , Men , Fear , Game

“It should be remembered that the pharmacologic treatment of raised farm animals can cause damage to the health of anyone who eats their meat. For example, the antibiotics that are legally added to animal feed—with the objective of preventing infections—can cause a resistance to antibiotics in humans. That is to say, a selection of bacterial strains resistant to antibiotics can be transmitted from animals to man through food; and can thereby generate infections difficult to stop”

Umberto Veronesi (1925–2016) Italian oncologist and politician

at times fatal, as with salmonella
The First Day Without Cancer (2013)

Health , Food , Time , Animals

“Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199709032332.QAA21669@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

Future , Parting

“When we approach the study of business cycle with the intention of carrying through an analysis that is truly dynamic and determinate in the above sense, we are naturally led to distinguish between two types of analyses: the micro-dynamic and the macro-dynamic types. The micro-dynamic analysis is an analysis by which we try to explain in some detail the behaviour of a certain section of the huge economic mechanism, taking for granted that certain general parameters are given. Obviously it may well be that we obtain more or less cyclical fluctuations in such sub-systems, even though the general parameters are given. The essence of this type of analysis is to show the details of the evolution of a given specific market, the behaviour of a given type of consumers, and so on.”

Ragnar Frisch Propagation problems and impulse problems in dynamic economics

Source: 1930s, Propagation problems and impulse problems in dynamic economics, 1933, p. 2

Business , Nature , Sense , Study

“I do not wish to force my thoughts upon you, but I feel forced myself. Little as I know of Captain Brown, I would fain do my part to correct the tone and the statements of the newspapers, and of my countrymen generally, respecting his character and actions. It costs us nothing to be just. We can at least express our sympathy with, and admiration of, him and his companions, and that is what I now propose to do.”

Henry David Thoreau book A Plea for Captain John Brown

A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859)

Feeling , Parting

“God's truth and faithfulness "are a great deep." They resemble the ocean itself; always there — vast, fathomless, sublime, the same in its majesty, its inexhaustible fullness, yesterday, to-day, and forever; the same in calm and storm, by day and by night; changeless while generations come and pass; everlasting while ages are rolling away.”

Richard Fuller (minister) (1804–1876) United States Baptist minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 261.

God , Truth , Age , Faith

“[W]e shall be concerned with the general nature of pure mathematics, and how it is distinguished from other sciences. Here there are… two distinct categories of things of which an account must be given—the ideas or concepts of mathematics, and the propositions of mathematics. …the great majority of writers on the subject have concentrated their attention on the explanation of one or the other… and erroneously supposed that a satisfactory explanation of the other would immediately follow.”

Frank P. Ramsey (1903–1930) British mathematician, philosopher

Footnote: In the future by 'mathematics' will always be meant 'pure mathematics'.
The Foundations of Mathematics (1925)

Mathematics , Idea , Nature , Science

“The underlying ideological agenda of Gould has always been fairly clear. Even where there has been a shift in thinking, it might be argued that in general the discussions were reflecting a particular world-view that at the least was sympathetic to the greatest of twentieth-century pseudo-religions, Marxism.”

Simon Conway Morris (1951) British palaeontologist

Source: The Crucible of Creation (1998), p. 11.

World , Religion , Thinking

“Already in my original paper I stressed the circumstance that I was unable to give a logical reason for the exclusion principle or to deduce it from more general assumptions. I had always the feeling, and I still have it today, that this is a deficiency.”

Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) Austrian physicist, Nobel prize winner

"Exclusion Principle and Quantum Mechanics," Nobel Prize acceptance lecture for the discovery of the Exclusion Principle, also called the Pauli Principle (Dec. 13, 1946)

Feeling

“I thought that I was the only historian, that had at once neglected present power, interest, and authority, and the cry of popular prejudices; and as the subject was suited to every capacity, I expected proportional applause. But miserable was my disappointment: I was assailed by one cry of reproach, disapprobation, and even detestation; English, Scotch, and Irish, Whig and Tory, churchman and sectary, freethinker and religionist, patriot and courtier, united in their rage against the man, who had presumed to shed a generous tear for the fate of Charles I and the Earl of Strafford.”

David Hume (1711–1776) Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian

'My Own Life' (1776), quoted in David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (1741–1777), ed. Eugene Miller (1985), p. xxxvii

Fate , Disappointment , Tear , Rage

“From the top of the campanile, or Giotto's bell tower, in Florence, one can look out over the city in all directions, past the stone banking houses where the rich Medici lived, past the art galleries they patronized, past the magnificent cathedral and churches their money helped to build, and on to the Tuscan vineyards where the contadino works the soil as hard and efficiently as he probably ever did. The city below is busy with life. The university halls, the shops, the restaurants are crowded. The sound of Vespas, the "wasps" of the machine age, fills the air, but Florence is not today what it once was, the center in the 15th century of a great civilization, one of the most extraordinary the world has ever known. Why? What produced the Renaissance in Italy, of which Florence was the center? How did it happen that such a small population base could produce, in the short span of a few generations, great historical figures first in commerce and literature, then in architecture, sculpture and painting, and finally in science and music? Why subsequently did Northern Italy decline in importance both commercially and artistically until at the present time it is not particularly distinguished as compared with many other regions of the world? Certainly the people appear to be working as hard and energetically as ever. Was it just luck or a peculiar combination of circumstances? Historians have been fascinated by such questions ever since they began writing history, because the rise and fall of Florence or the whole of Northern Italy is by no means an isolated phenomenon.”

David C. McClelland (1917–1998) American psychological theorist

Source: The Archiving Society, 1961, p. 1; lead paragraph, about the problem

Life , Money , People , Age

“There can be but two modes of cantonment, to prevent the enemy from disturbing us in quarters. One is, to keep such a force together as to bid defiance to all their menaces; the other is, to disperse the troops in such a manner as to afford no object. The first is infinitely the most favorable to discipline and economy. To disperse the troops among the inhabitants, will be attended with a certain loss of discipline to the soldiers and a general corruption of manners among the people. They will mutually debauch each other. Besides these disadvantages, the expense and waste of stores will be nearly double, and a great addition to the list of Staff Officers (al ready too numerous from the state of our money) will be found necessary. For these, and many other reasons too obvious to need explanation, dispersing the troops should be avoided at all events.”

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

Letter to George Washington (November 1779)

Money , People , Loss

“The process of aging can only be fruitful and satisfactory if the important transitions are accompanied by free resignation, by the renunciation of the values proper to the preceding stage of life. Those spiritual and intellectual values which remain untouched by the process of aging, together with the values of the next stage of life, must compensate for what has been lost. Only if this happens can we cheerfully relive the values of our past in memory, without envy for the young to whom they are still accessible. If we cannot compensate, we avoid and flee the “tormenting” recollection of youth, thus blocking our possibilities of understanding younger people. At the same time we tend to negate the specific values of earlier stages. No wonder that youth always has a hard fight to sustain against the ressentiment of the older generation”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 62-63

Life , People , Youth , Age

“Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral. Its general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately to a cleaner race.”

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

"Morality and Birth Control", February-March, 1918, pp. 11,14.
Birth Control Review, 1918-32

Birth , Knowledge

“Indeed, the PLO's submission to Israel's rewriting of the conflict had begun even before Oslo: part of the price for the Madrid Conference was the repeal, in December 1991, of the 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 (XXX) characterizing Zionism as "a form of racism and racial discrimination."”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Ibid.
On the PLO

Parting

“So for example, I'm the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right? And we're going to make it clear that we don't want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we've got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don't want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.”

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

CNN Democratic Presidential Town Hall http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/may/10/context-hillary-clintons-comments-about-coal-jobs/ in Columbus, Ohio (13 March 2016)
Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016)

People , Health , Business , Light

“The American people, through the 35 states that have liberalized laws banning either medical marijuana, marijuana in general, or cannabinoid oils, have made it clear that federal enforcers should stay out of their personal lives. It’s time for restraint of the federal government’s over-aggressive weed warriors.”

Dana Rohrabacher (1947) American politician

"O.C. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher trying again with bill protecting state marijuana laws", The Orange County Register http://www.ocregister.com/articles/rohrabacher-659189-laws-state.html (April 23, 2015)

People , Law , Time , Personality

“What really made me angry though was finding myself agreeing with any of the journal's articles, and I did agree with several. The writers had a keen, if cold intelligence. They did a great deal of seeing through some of the nonsense concerned with the psychic field in general. Of course, they were almost vengefully gleeful when they could legitimately knock down some psychic performance, or show a psychic's predictions to be wrong. Only why couldn't they see their own scientific nonsense? And why couldn't their trained intellects perceive their own emotional vehemence? Because, I thought unhappily, they were scientific witch hunters.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981), p. 141

Intelligence , Training

“Citizens United has a policy for ISIS and it’s quite simple: Acknowledge it; confront it; and destroy it. By any means necessary, wherever they are in the world. For the sake of future generations, we need to handle this problem without delay before it gets any larger, because right now it’s a cancer that is growing.”

David Bossie (1965) American political activist

9/11: Our Yearly Reminder http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/09/11/911-our-yearly-reminder/ (September 11, 2015)

World , Problem , Future

“Although I am not aware of having omitted any thing that is requisite to the full explanation of the subject, yet I cannot flatter myself that it will be thoroughly understood from this Work alone. For, in general it may be laid down as true, that no doctrine, of novelty and intricacy, can be completely taught by a single Treatise. It seems to be indispensably necessary for the student, that the subject should be put under several points of view: that if not apprehended under one, it may be under another.”

Robert Woodhouse (1773–1827) English mathematician

Preface p. viii
A Treatise on Isoperimetrical Problems, and the Calculus of Variations (1810)

“In one of my latest conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive. Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent, and it is notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes.”

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist

Human Selection, Popular Science Monthly, volume 38 (November 1890) page 93.
(Misquoted in the article Evolution and You, in Awake! magazine, 8 August 1995).

Intelligence , Nature , Future , Wealth

“Logically the Neo-Pagan should get rid of the institution of marriage altogether; but the very nature of human society, which is built up of cells each of which is a family, and the very nature of human generation, forbid such an extreme. Children must be brought up and acknowledged and sheltered, and the very nature of human affection, whereby there is the bond of affection between the parent and the child, and the child is not of one parent but of both, will compel the Neo-Pagan to modify what might be his logical conclusion of free love and support some simulacrum of the institution of marriage.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Source: Survivals and New Arrivals (1929), Ch. V New Arrivals

Love , Marriage , Children , Family

“It is almost a general rule that nations do not decline gradually. Instead they fall abruptly from their greatest heights.”

Pierre Stephen Robert Payne (1911–1983) British lecturer, novelist, historian, poet and biographer

Ibn Khaldun and Machiavelli, p. 147
The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America (1975)

“Of various admirals I could tell you a great deal: of them and their flags, and the gradation of their pay, and their bickerings and jealousies. But, in general, I can assure you that they are all passed over, and all very ill used. Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices I saw enough. Now do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.”

Jane Austen book Mansfield Park

Mansfield Park (1814)
Works, Mansfield Park

Jealousy , Home

“It behooveth you to proclaim the Cause of God unto all created things as a token of grace from His presence; no God is there but Him, the Most Generous, the All-Compelling.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

Tablet to the First Letter of the Living

God

“Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!”

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

On Twitter after the 2017 Barcelona attack. (17 August 2017) http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/450574/donald-trump-tweet-fake-history-libel-war-crime. Referring to an allegedly false story about John J. Pershing which has circulated on the Internet.
2010s, 2017, August

Study

“Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature's meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

Source: The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. V, Reason in Science, Ch. 3 "Mechanism"

World , Imagination , Mathematics , Nature

“The most general definition of beauty … Multeity in Unity.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

On the Principles of Genial Criticism (1814)

Beauty

“You are not necessarily depriving him of his liberty, for territory is a form of natural cage and the word "liberty" does not have the same connotation for an animal as it does for a chest-beating liberal homo sapiens, who can afford the luxury of abstract ideas. What you are, in fact, doing is much more important, you are taking away his territory, so you must take great care to provide him with an adequate substitute, or you will get a bored, sick or dead animal on your hands.
The thing that turns a cage into a territory may be something quite slight, but it need not be size. It might be the shape of the cage, the number of branches or the lack of them, the absence or presence of a pond, a patch of sand, a chunk of log, which could make all the difference. Such a detail, trivial to the uninformed visitor, can help the animal consider this area his territory, rather than simply a place where he ekes out his existence. As I say it is not necessarily size which is of prime importance. This is where people who criticise zoos go wrong, for they generally have little idea what circumscribed lives most animals lead.”

Gerald Durrell (1925–1995) naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author and television presenter

The Stationary Ark (1976)

People , Idea , Nature , Help

“The Stranger is close to us, insofar as we feel between him and ourselves common features of a national, social, occupational, or generally human, nature. He is far from us, insofar as these common features extend beyond him or us, and connect us only because they connect a great many people.”

Georg Simmel book The Stranger

Der Fremde ist uns nah, insofern wir Gleichheiten nationaler oder sozialer, berufsmäßiger oder allgemein menschlicher Art zwischen ihm und uns fühlen; er ist uns fern, insofern diese Gleichheiten über ihn und uns hinausreichen und uns beide nur verbinden, weil sie überhaupt sehr Viele verbinden.
Source: The Stranger (1908), p. 405

People , Feeling , Nature

“It is senseless to proclaim that it’s evil to make generalizations about groups. Generalization is a natural human mental process, and many generalizations are true—in average. What often does promote evil behavior is the lazy, nasty habit of believing that generalizations have anything at all to do with individuals. We have no right to pre-judge that a specific man can’t nurture, or a particular woman cannot fight.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Afterword (p. 562)
Glory Season (1993)

Behavior , Nature , Evil , Fight

“This book is dedicated to the people of America--strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched.”

Paul Johnson book A History of the American People

A History of the American People (1997).

People , Books , Justice , Strong

“Earthquakes generate elastic waves when one block of material slides against another; the break between the two blocks being called a fault. Explosions generate elastic waves by an impulsive change in volume in the material. Small explosive charges are used in controlled-source seismic experiments in which the waves penetrate only a few kilometres into the earth.”

David Gubbins (1947) British university teacher

(p. 12)
Seismology and Plate Tectonics (1990)

Change

“The following question had been much in my mind. How is it possible for a population to remain alike in its features, as a whole, during many successive generations, if the average produce of each couple resemble their parents? Their children are not alike but vary…”

Francis Galton (1822–1911) British polymath: geographer, statistician, pioneer in eugenics

Source: Memories of My Life (1908), Ch. XX Heredity (1909 ed.)

Children , Question , Parent , Success

“They are the basic mechanism of control of the external environment available to managers and entrepreneurs. Organizational fields are not generally benign and cooperative arrangements held in place by a sense of duty or honor the rhetoric and ideology of their proponents might lead one to think so. Instead, they are set up to benefit their most powerful members.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: The transformation of corporate control, 1993, p. 6

Thinking , Sense

“Primary causes are unknown to us; but are subject to simple and constant laws, which may be discovered by observation, the study of them being the object of natural philosophy.
Heat, like gravity, penetrates every substance of the universe, its rays occupy all parts of space. The object of our work is to set forth the mathematical laws which this element obeys. The theory of heat will hereafter form one of the most important branches of general physics.”

Joseph Fourier book The Analytical Theory of Heat

Source: The Analytical Theory of Heat (1878), Ch. 1, p. 1

Law , Mathematics , Nature , Study

“His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.”

Idi Amin (1925–2003) third president of Uganda

His full, formal title, which he conferred upon himself. Quoted inAfricana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (1999) by Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates
Attributed

Life , Fish , Sea

Quotes about general page 57

Quotes about general
page 57