Quotes about geography

A collection of quotes on the topic of geography, history, world, use.

Quotes about geography

“The primary problem of political geography [is] the analysis of the degree to which the diverse regions of the state constitute a unity.”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

Hartshorne (1955) "The functional approach in political geography". In Annals of the Association of American Geographers, p. 181

Problem

“Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

Source: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Thinking, Passion

“Some imagine the difference between heaven and hell to be a matter of geography. Not so. The difference is much more evident in the individuals who dwell there.”

Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer

Source: Keys to the Demon Prison

Imagination, Hell

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

God, War, Learning

“All the geography, trigonometry, and arithmetic in the world are useless unless you learn to think for yourself. No school teaches you that. It's not on the curriculum.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book Marina

Source: Marina

World, School, Thinking, Learning

“Everywhere's been where it is ever since it was first put there. It's called geography.”

Terry Pratchett book Wyrd Sisters

Source: Wyrd Sisters

“Anybody who believes that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach flunked geography.”

Robert Byrne (1928–2013) American chess player and writer

Way, Heart

“George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography.”

Kurt Vonnegut book A Man Without a Country

A Man Without a Country (2005)

History

“The world itself is a great fusing pot, out of which the One Humanity is emerging. This necessitates a drastic change in our methods of presenting history and geography. Science has always been universal. Great art and literature have always belonged to the world. It is upon these facts that the education to be given to the children of the world must be built - upon our similarities, our creative achievements, our spiritual idealisms, and our points of contact. Unless this is done, the wounds of the nations will never be healed, and the barriers which have existed for centuries will never be removed.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: Education in the New Age (1954), p.46

Children, World, Education, Art

“…a professor in one of the great female colleges. That odious form is common, and I submit and use it, though it offends me as much as it would to say female brickbat or female snow-storm or female geography.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 273

“Geography is not an infant subject, born out of the womb of American geology a few decades ago, which each new generation of American students may change around at will.”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

Source: The Nature of Geography (1939), p. 29

Change

“I think it’s an organic process. I don’t plot. I don’t plan. I start writing and characters and geography emerges. I find that in telling stories, the best laid plans go poof when your characters do what they want to do because you don’t control them—they become real and live their own lives. I certainly am influenced by the people I meet and the places I go to when I create my characters but it’s an intuitive thing, I just know who this person is or that person is and I know their name and I just know. And what I don’t know, he or she tells me.”

Amulya Malladi (1974) Indian writer

On formulating characters in “An Interview with Amulya Malladi” http://jaggerylit.com/an-interview-with-amulya-malladi/ in Jaggery

People, Thinking, Personality

“Also consider that someday, when you’re dead and rotted, kids with their baby teeth will sit in their time-geography class and laugh about how stupid you were.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Rant

Source: Rant

Stupidity, Time, Baby, Dead

“Heimat. The word mean home in German, the place where one was born. But the term also conveys a subtler nuance, a certain tenderness. One's Heimat is not merely a matter of geography; it is where one's heart lies.”

Jenna Blum book Het familieportret

Source: Those Who Save Us

Home, Heart

“Agad bowed to the Fairy Queen. 'You are most wise, your majesty. Some imagine the difference between heaven and hell to be a matter of geography. Not so. The difference is much more evident in the individuals who dwell there.”

Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer

Source: Keys to the Demon Prison

Imagination, Hell

“War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

"War Is God's Way of Teaching Us Geography" https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/19/geography/ at Quote Investigator "The comment 'War is God's way of teaching Americans geography,' is continually attributed to Ambrose Bierce. Biographer David E. Schultz, who has nearly all of Bierce's writing entered on his computer, cannot find this acerbic remark within that database." Ralph Keyes, The Quote Verifier (2007), p. 240 Misattributed

God, War, Way, Funny

“My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.”

Pat Conroy book The Prince of Tides

Source: The Prince of Tides

“Do you understand the sadness of geography?”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

Sadness, Understanding

“Geography is destiny.”

Abraham Verghese book Cutting for Stone

Source: Cutting for Stone

“So we can be filled with holes and loss and wide expanses of unhealed geography - and we can also be excited by life and in love and content at the exact same moment.”

Augusten Burroughs (1965) American writer

Source: This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can't

Love, Life, Loss

“I like geography best, he said, because your mountains & rivers know the secret. Pay no attention to boundaries.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Source: Story People: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas

Secret, Mountain

“Boundary, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of the other.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

“Although the roots of geography, as a field of study, reach back to Classical Antiquity… its establishment as a modern science was essentially the work of the century from 1750 to 1850. The second half of this period, the time of Humboldt and Ritter, is commonly spoken of as the "classical period" of geography.”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

Source: The Nature of Geography (1939), p. 35

Study, Science, Time

“18 chapters of Vyasa's Jaya constitutes the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred text of the Hindus. Thus, this work of Vyasa, called Jaya deals with diverse subjects like geography, history, warfare, religion and morality.”

Vyasa central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions

B. K. Pandey, in Encyclopaedia of Indian philosophers, Volume 2 http://books.google.co.in/books?id=d8ROAQAAIAAJ, p. 14. Sources

Religion, History

“Unless the Arab states give Israel formal recognition, within secure, recognised and mutually agreed boundaries, as a permanent feature of the geography and politics of the Middle East. But if Israel is to obtain this recognition, she must, in a settlement, put an end to the territorial occupation which she has maintained since the war of 1967; the nine members of the European Community have declared that this is an essential element in a settlement. On behalf of the British Government I underline that need today.”

Anthony Crosland (1918–1977) British politician

Speech to the UN General Assembly (5 October 1976).

War, Communication

“What defines a people is not race, not tradition, not geography, but the free choice of a group of human beings to live together as fellow citizens.”

Thomas G. West (1945) American academic

Source: 2000s, Vindicating the Founders (2001), p. 28

People

“With the defeat of the Reich and pending the emergence of the Asiatic, the African and, perhaps, the South American nationalisms, there will remain in the world only two Great Powers capable of confronting each other—the United States and Soviet Russia. The laws of both history and geography will compel these two Powers to a trial of strength, either military or in the fields of economics and ideology.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

2 April 1945.
Disputed, The Testament of Adolf Hitler (1945)

World, Law, History

“A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

"The Armenian and the Armenian".
Inhale and Exhale (1936)

Personality

“The salmon swimming upstream to spawn may be wily in a hundred ways, but she cannot even contemplate the prospect of abandoning her reproductive project and deciding instead to live out her days studying coastal geography or trying to learn Portuguese. The creation of a panoply of new standpoints is, to my mind, the most striking product of the euprimatic revolution.”

Daniel Dennett book Freedom Evolves

Freedom Evolves (2003)

Way, Study, Learning

“This picture will try to show the Nazism is a matter of mind, not geography, and that there are Nazis — and people of good will — in every country. The world can't spend its life looking over its shoulder and nursing hatreds. There would be no progress that way.”

Marlon Brando (1924–2004) American screen and stage actor

At a press conference for The Young Lions in Berlin; republished in Marlon Brando, Portraits and Film Stills 1946-1995 (1996)

Life, People, World, Way

“There is also a considerable tendency to define the subject as a kind of meeting place of science and art. This is exemplified by Eckert. He pleads for artistic imagination and intuition in cartographic portrayal and claims that the inter-action of such talents with scientific geography produces the aesthetic map. There is no question about the importance of imagination and new ideas, but it is equally important that significant processes be objectively investigated, whether it be the visual consumption of a graphic technique or a process in geomorphology. It can perhaps best be approached by a comparison of the aims, techniques involved, and the results accomplished by each activity”

Arthur H. Robinson (1915–2004) American geographer

Source: The Look of Maps (1952), p. 17; as cited in: Kirk Patrick Goldsberry (2007) Real-time Traffic Maps. p. 23-24

Art, Imagination, Idea, Question

“History, geography and future bind us. Let no one separate us. Together, we can create pillars of mutual respect that will support the common good for generations to come.”

Abdullah II of Jordan (1962) King of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

Address to the European Parliament (2015)

History, Support, Future

“To be sure, the moment the study passes beyond bare description the student must leave the landscape itself, must go beneath it, even to state what its form represents — to translate the outer foliage of a forest into the forest, the outer surface of buildings into different kinds of buildings, etc…. Our interest in houses, factories, and forests cannot be confined to their surface form; only in the limited field of aesthetic geography could such a restriction be justified. Our very use of such words as house, barn, factory, office building, etc., indicates that we are primarily concerned with the internal functions within these structures, the external form is a secondary aspect which we use simply as a handy means to detect the internal function - and should use only insofar as it is a reliable means for that purpose.”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

Source: The Nature of Geography (1939), p. 215-216; as cited in: John A. Agnew, James S. Duncan (2011) The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Human Geography. p. 122

Study, Housing

“Prior to the rebellion the great mass of the people were satisfied to remain near the scenes of their birth. In fact an immense majority of the whole people did not feel secure against coming to want should they move among entire strangers. So much was the country divided into small communities that localized idioms had grown up, so that you could almost tell what section a person was from by hearing him speak… This is all changed now. The war begot a spirit of independence and enterprise. The feeling now is, that a youth must cut loose from his old surroundings to enable him to get up in the world. There is now such a commingling of the people that particular idioms and pronunciation are no longer localized to any great extent; the country has filled up "from the centre all around to the sea"; railroads connect the two oceans and all parts of the interior; maps, nearly perfect, of every part of the country are now furnished the student of geography.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

1880s, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885)

War, People, Youth, World

“Internet use is diffusing fast, but this diffusion follows a spatial pattern that fragments its geography according to wealth, technology, and power: it is the new geography of development.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 8, The Geography of the Internet, p. 212

Wealth

“Geographers are wont to boast of their subject as a very old one, extending, even as an organized science, far back to antiquity. But often when geographers in this country discuss the nature of their subject, whether in symposia or in published articles, one has the impression that geography was founded by a group of American scholars at the beginning of the twentieth century.”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

Source: The Nature of Geography (1939), p. 22 Introduction: About the historical background of American Geography

Nature, Science, Country

“We are turning from a mass market back into a niche nation, defined now not by our geography but by our interests.”

Chris Anderson book The Long Tail

Source: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006), Ch. 2, p. 40

“Before we continue our story we must stop to ask, “What is a castle?” Once a castle was defined simply as the fortified and self-sufficient dwelling of an individual feudal lord. Today we know that castles had many functions, both practical and symbolic. The castle was a new ar chitectural form—part fortress, part residence, part statehouse, part the atrical stage. Furthermore, every castle was different, depending on the wealth of the builder, the reason for the castle (control of territory, bor der, coastlines), the local geography (availability of naturally defensible sites), the knowledge of the master builder or patron, the available ma terials, the degree of urgency (speed), and finally the building traditions of the region (the techniques the workmen knew and used). In short, there is no such thing as a typical castle; a castle was a very special build ing whose form and function answered the needs of people living in Eu rope from the eleventh through the fifteenth century.”

Marilyn Stokstad (1929–2016) art historian

Overview: Castles in Context
Medieval castles (2005)

People, Nature, Knowledge, Parting

“To London's Europhiles, Britain is obviously "part of" Europe. But, in the age of jet travel, cellphones, wire transfers and the internet, we are less bound by physical proximity than ever. Yet Britain for the first time in history has chosen to be imprisoned by geography and to disconnect itself from its own culture.”

Mark Steyn (1959) Canadian writer

The slyer virus: The West's anti-westernism (2002)

Age, Travel, History, Time

“Geography is that discipline that seeks to describe and interpret the variable character from place to place of the earth as the world of man.”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

Source: Perspective on the nature of geography (1958), p. 47

World

“Some force whole regions, in despite
O' geography, to change their site;
Make former times shake hands with latter,
And that which was before come after.
But those that write in rhyme still make
The one verse for the other's sake;
For one for sense, and one for rhyme,
I think 's sufficient at one time.”

Samuel Butler (poet) (1612–1680) poet and satirist

Canto I, line 23
Source: Hudibras, Part II (1664)

Thinking, Sense, Change, Time

“The city is unquestionably—or (to say what is in reality exactly the same, but this time with greater caution) vividly—a time machine. It cannot be made without time reversal, and everything we know about historical geography tells us that it is coming to a screen near you.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

Templexity: Disordered Loops Through Shanghai Time (2014), "Distribution" (original emphasis)

Reality, Time

“The use of the term institution has become widespread in the social sciences in recent years, reflecting the growth in institutional economics and the use of the institution concept in several other disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, politics, and geography. The term has a long history of usage in the social sciences, dating back at least to Giambattista Vico in his Scienza Nuova of 1725. However, even today, there is no unanimity in the definition of this concept. Furthermore, endless disputes over the definitions of key terms such as institution and organization have led some writers to give up matters of definition and to propose getting down somehow to practical matters instead. But it is not possible to carry out any empirical or theoretical analysis of how institutions or organizations work without having some adequate conception of what an institution or an organization is. This paper proposes that those that give up are acting in haste; potentially consensual definitions of these terms are possible, once we overcome a few obstacles and difficulties in the way. It is also important to avoid some biases in the study of institutions, where institutions and characteristics of a particular type are overgeneralized to the set”

Geoffrey Hodgson (1946) British economist

Source: Economics and institutions." 1988, p. 1; Abstract

Way, History, Study, Science

“The end of the negotiations is a blow to the cause of the wider European unity for which we have been striving. We are a part of Europe, by geography, history, culture, tradition and civilization … There have been times in the history of Europe when it has been only too plain how European we are; and there have been many millions of people who have been grateful for it. I say to my colleagues: they should have no fear. We in Britain are not going to turn out backs on the mainland of Europe or the countries of the Community.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

Speech at European conference after France vetoed the British application to join the EEC (28 January 1963), quoted in Edward Heath, The Course of My Life (Hodder and Stoughton, 1998), p. 235.
Lord Privy Seal

People, Fear, History, Communication

“What made the West successful was neither capitalism, nor science, nor an historical accident such as a favourable geography. Instead, political and mental diversity combined to create an ever changing panorama of technologically creative societies.”

Joel Mokyr (1946) Israeli American economic historian

p 302
The lever of riches: Technological creativity and economic progress, 1992

Science, Change, Success

“A first proposition, therefore, in Americanization is to find a way to satisfy the creative instinct in men and their sense of home, by giving them and their native-born sons the widest possible knowledge of America, including a pictorial geography, a simple history of the United States, the stories of successful Americans including those of foreign-born origin; a knowledge of American literature, of our political ideals and institutions, and of oiy: free educational opportunities. A systematic effort should be made to give them a land interest and a home stake and to get them close to the soil, not alone in the day's work but also in their cultural life. The men most likely to desert America at the close of the war will be workers with job stakes and wage rates, and not those with a home stake and investments. I would carry this campaign of information into every foreign language publication, every newspaper, every shop, and every racial center in America. The land interpreter of the future will be the government, and Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior, has foreseen this in his appeal for the use of the land for the rehabilitation of men returning from the front. It is the land that will make the life of the maimed livable and will connect the past with the future. This will not be achieved by forced "back-to-the-land movements" and colonization. Each individual American who interprets the beauty of America and its meaning, and who, wherever he can, personally puts the foreign-born in touch with the soil and helps him to a plot of ground which he can call his own, is doing effective Americanization. Loyalty and efficiency are inherent in this land sense, and they are the strength of a nation.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Life, Men, War, Education

“An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

"Damage".
What Are People For? (1990)

Art

“One cannot kick against geography!”

Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936) Greek politician

Source: Victory of Venizelos, 1920, p. 31 ; Part of Venizelos' arguments with king Constantine why Greece should join with the Allies in the World War I.

“Throughout the past several centuries, people have used the term race to describe groups of people in much the same way it was used in past centuries to describe groups of animals. People with ancestry from a particular region of tend to share certain inherited similar features, resembling their parents. However, the children of parents with substantially different ancestral backgrounds often have an appearance that is intermediate between that of their two parents, and in subsequent generations, the offspring may vary. In part because of the obvious similarities between animals and humans for how traits are inherited, and in part because of cultural, political, and religious traditions, notinos of racial purity and superiority have surged and ebbed yet persisted, crossing the boundaries of culture, geography, politics, and time. They are still with us today, and some of the most insidious actions based on notions of racial supremacy happened not long ago.”

Daniel J. Fairbanks (1956) American artist

Source: Everyone is African: How Science Explodes the Myth of Race (2015), pp. 16–17.

Children, People, Way, Parent

“Christ came here for spiritual reasons, not secular war and boundaries and geography. And yet, we are now dedicating so much of our aggressive activity in the name of God, but God, he is the Prince of Peace. That is what I see from my God and through Christ. I vote for peace.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Values Voter Presidential Debate, September 17, 2007 http://www.renewamerica.us/archives/transcript.php?id=429 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hCKZmkF0VU 2000s, 2006-2009

God, War, Peace, Christ

“To adequately understand evolution, you not only have to understand how to be scientific, (which is the real trick for most people) but you also have to know something about cellular biology, genetics, and anatomy, geology, particularly paleontology, as well as environmental systems, tectonics, atomic chemistry, and especially taxonomy, which most people don’t know squat about at all. Most people who accept evolution also tend to know a whole lot about cosmology, geography, history, sociology, politics, and of course, religion. But to believe in creationism, you don’t have to know anything about anything, and its better if you don’t! Because creationism relies on ignorance. It is not honest research! It is a scam, a con job exploiting the common folk, and preying on their deepest beliefs and fears. Creationist apologetics depends on misrepresented data and misquoted authorities, out-of-date and out-of-context, and uses distorted definitions if it uses definitions at all.”

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

"1st Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnJX68ELbAY, Youtube (November 11, 2007) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

People, Fear, Religion, History

“The art of Biography
Is different from Geography.
Geography is about maps,
But Biography is about chaps.”

Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956) British writer

Clerihews: Biography for Beginners (1905)

Art

“When we left El Segundo Barrio across the street from the international border, we didn’t expect the Mexicans in California to act like gringos. But they did. We were outsiders because of geography and outcasts because we didn’t speak English and wore short pants. And so we had to fight every single day.”

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 77.

Fight

“Whether the influence of increasing returns on trade and geography is rising or falling, one thing is clear: much was learned from the intellectual revolution that brought increasing returns into the heart of how we think about the world economy. It wasn't just that economists could make sense of previously puzzling data, we found ourselves able to see things that had previously been in an intellectual blind spot. Many people contributed to this process of enlightenment; I'm proud to have been a part of the journey.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

"The Increasing Returns Revolution in Trade and Geography", The American Economic Review (Jun., 2009)

People, World, Thinking, Sense

“For Pollock, the fact that […] have written about Ayodhya, Mount Meru, Ganga, etc., in multiple locations is dumbfounding and irrational….. I propose a different interpretation of the same data. As per our tradition, the conceptual space of Hindus can be replicated and localized easily. The Hindu metaphysics of immanence leads to the decentralization of sacred geography…. This is why people in south India substitute their local rivers for Ganga for ritualist purposes; there is a town called Ayodhya in Thailand; the cognitive landscape of people in Java started to include Mount Meru as a local place, and so on.”

Rajiv Malhotra book The Battle for Sanskrit

The Battle for Sanskrit (2016)

People

“The vast differences in power contributed to faulty social theories of these differences that are still with us today. When a society is economically dominant, it is easy for its members to assume that such dominance reflects a deeper superiority--whether religious, racial, genetic, cultural, or institutional--rather than an accident of timing or geography.”

Jeffrey D. Sachs book The End of Poverty

The End of Poverty" The End of Poverty, 2005

Time

“The core study of geography is the study of places, that is the analysis of the significant differences that distinguish the various areas of the world from each other. Among the differences that are significant to this areal differentiation, one of the more obvious are differences in landforms; one of the least obvious to the eye, but nonetheless important in molding the character of areas, are the differences in their political organization. In pursuing these and other separate topics, geographers "radiate out in diverse directions" "and for various distances, toward the cores of other disciplines."”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

As long as they realise where they are in reference to the central core, they may hope to understand each other purposes.
R. Hartshorne (1950) "The functional approach in political geography," Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol. 40 (2), p. 95

World, Hope, Understanding, Study

“If there is one single area of economics in which path dependence is unmistakable, it is in economic geography – the location of production in space.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

"History and Industry Location: The Case of the Manufacturing Belt", The American Economic Review, Vol. 81, No. 2, (May, 1991)

Dependency

“Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.”

Mary Schmich (1953) American columnist

"Wear Sunscreen" (1997)

People, Understanding

“One does not live half a life in Asia without return. When it would be I did not know, nor even where it would be, or to what cause. In our changing world nothing changes more than geography. The friendly country of China, the home of my childhood and youth, is for the time being forbidden country. I refuse to call it enemy country. The people in my memory are too kind and the land too beautiful.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

A Bridge for Passing (1962)

Life, People, Youth, World

“To build a theory of international relations on accidents of geography and history is dangerous.”

Kenneth N. Waltz book Man, the State, and War

Source: Man, the State, and War (1959), Chapter IV, The Second Image, p. 107

History

“We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here. In considerable areas of the country we bought lands from the Arabs. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal arose in the place of Mahalul, Gevat — in the place of Jibta, Sarid — in the place of Haneifs and Kefar Yehoshua — in the place of Tell Shaman. There is no one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”

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

From an address given to Technion University students (19 March 1969), a transcription of which appeared in Ha'aretz (4 April 1969), quoted in The Question of Palestine (1980) by Edward Said, p. 14 http://books.google.com.br/books?id=Pa89AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA14#v=onepage&q&f=false

Books, Country

“It would be inconceivable for the House to adjourn for Easter without recording the fact that last Friday the High Court disallowed an Act which was passed by this House and the House of Lords and received Royal Assent — the Merchant Shipping Act 1988. The High Court referred the case to the European Court…I want to make it clear to the House that we are absolutely impotent unless we repeal Section 2 of the European Communities Act. It is no good talking about being a good European. We are all good Europeans; that is a matter of geography and not a matter of sentiment. Are the arrangements under which we are governed such that we have broken the link between the electorate and the laws under which they are governed? I am an old parliamentary hand — perhaps I have been here too long — but I was brought up to believe, and I still believe, that when people vote in an election they must be entitled to know that the party for which they vote, if it has a majority, will be able to enact laws under which they will be governed. That is no longer true. Any party elected, whether it is the Conservative party or the Labour party can no longer say to the electorate, "Vote for me and if I have a majority I shall pass that law", because if that law is contrary to Common Market law, British judges will apply Common Market law.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

Speech in the House of Commons (13 March 1989) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1989/mar/13/adjournment-easter-and-monday-1-may on the Factortame case 1980s

People, Law, Communication, Housing

“No choice we can make as a nation lies between our history and our geography. We can hardly change either of them. They are immutable. The only choice we can make as a nation is the choice about our future.”

Paul Keating (1944) Australian politician, 24th Prime Minister of Australia

"A Prospect of Europe", 1997 speech at the University of New South Wales.

History, Change, Future

“So important, indeed, is the use of maps in geographic work, that, without wishing to propose any new law, it seems fair to suggest to the geographer a ready rule of thumb to test the geographic quality of any study he is making: if his problem cannot be studied fundamentally by maps - usually by a comparison of several maps - then it is questionable whether or not it is within the field of geography.”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

Source: The Nature of Geography (1939), p. 425

Law, Question, Problem, Study

“My poem (Love -Kisses XL1) is like a nugget of gold or clump of earth it contains within itself the seeds rhetoric, ethics, philosophy, mathematics, geography, music, astronomy, medicine, nature, law, writing”

Quirinus Kuhlmann (1651–1689) German poet and mystic

Love-Kiss XL1

Love, Law, Music, Mathematics

“Whoever hasn’t yet arrived at the clear realization that there might be a greatness existing entirely outside his own sphere and for which he might have absolutely no feeling; whoever hasn’t at least felt obscure intimations concerning the approximate location of this greatness in the geography of the human spirit: that person either has no genius in his own sphere, or else he hasn’t been educated to the level of the classic.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), “Critical Fragments,” § 36

Education, Feeling, Personality

“We believe in a single fundamental idea that describes better than most textbooks and any speech that I could write what a proper government should be: the idea of family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another's pain, sharing one another's blessings — reasonably, honestly, fairly, without respect to race, or sex, or geography, or political affiliation.”

Mario Cuomo (1932–2015) American politician, Governor of New York

Democratic National Convention Address (1984)

Pain, Family, Sex, Feeling

“History is philosophy teaching by example, and also warning; its two eyes are geography and chronology.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

This quote was already published in 1853 http://books.google.com/books?id=LM0QVhkWKrcC&pg=PA129&dq=%22two+eyes+are+geography+and+chronology.%22#v=onepage&q=%22two%20eyes%20are%20geography%20and%20chronology.%22&f=false, when Garfield was only 22. Misattributed

History

“Educators everywhere must seek new ways to promote the idea that learning is something a student does with books and materials, and a teacher who cares; that learning can happen in college and outside; and that a student's intellectual growth depends far less on geography (which college) than on what advantage he takes of the opportunities which surround him wherever he is.”

Eugene S. Wilson (1905)

"What's Going On in Schools and Colleges", Kiplinger's Personal Finance, April 1961, p. 31 http://books.google.com/books?id=fwMEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA31 A portion of this is quoted earlier in "Education: Little Known" http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,895088,00.html, Time, 5 December 1960 Attributed

Books, Education, Way, Idea

“Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies. Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Address to the Canadian Parliament (17 May 1961)
1961

History, Nature

“…The subjects we study at school can be divided roughly into two groups—the sciences and the arts. The sciences include mathematics, geography, chemistry, physics, and so on. Among the arts are drawing, painting, modelling, needlework, drama, music, literature. The purpose of education is to fit us for life in a civilised community, and it seems to follow from the subjects we study that the two most important things in civilised life are Art and Science.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

Life, Education, School, Art

“Physics, chemistry, astrophysics are obviously the ideal field for the tidy mind …in the biological and geological sciences the tidy mind often goes astray and the passive, unmathematical approach may me more suitable.
…The sciences that deal with natural process, geology or geography, or with life, zoology or botany, have an immensely more complicated task than physics or chemistry.
… A particular danger, I believe, lies in an oversimplified use of mathematical or statistical methods of investigation, in which obviously erroneous results may be obtained by a selection of only a few of many relevant factors to be considered.”

Claud William Wright (1917–2010) British paleontologist

From "Order and Disorder in Nature", 1958 Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, 69, 2, 77-82.

Life, Mathematics, Nature, Science

“I have presented the periodic table as a kind of travel guide to an imaginary country, of which the elements are the various regions. This kingdom has a geography: the elements lie in particular juxtaposition to one another, and they are used to produce goods, much as a prairie produces wheat and a lake produces fish. It also has a history. Indeed, it has three kinds of history: the elements were discovered much as the lands of the world were discovered; the kingdom was mapped, just as the world was mapped, and the relative positions of the elements came to take on a great significance; and the elements have their own cosmic history, which can be traced back to the stars.”

Peter Atkins (1940) British chemist

Preface
Periodic Kingdom (1995)

Lie, World, Travel, History

“Geography is concerned to provide accurate, orderly, and rational description and interpretation of the variable character of the earth surface.”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

Source: Perspective on the nature of geography (1958), p. 21

“We may once again modify our statement of the purpose of geography to read: the study that seeks to provide scientific description of the earth as the world of man.”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

Source: Perspective on the nature of geography (1958), p. 172

World, Study, Reading

“The border position of geography between the natural and the social sciences is fairly generally recognized. Concerned primarily with differences in the different areas of the world, geography studies both natural and cultural features. In some universities, it is included among the natural sciences, in other among the social scientists. In England and America, geographers have particularly cultivated that portion of their field which leads naturally into economics, i. e. economic geography.”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

R. Hartshorne (1935) "Recent Developments in Political Geography" The American Political Science Review Vol. 29 (5), p. 585

World, Nature, Study, Universe

“The foundation of all religion is the belief in a God, and that He exists in certain relation with His creatures. Such belief necessarily leads to the consciousness of some obligation towards the Deity; and this consciousness suggests the duty of worship; and in the selection of the form of this worship originates the various creeds which distinguish and distract mankind. There is a sort of geography of religion; and I regret to think that the majority of mankind take their creed from the clime in which they happen to be born; and that many, and not an inconsiderable portion of mankind, suffer the sacred torch to burn out altogether, in their contact with the world, and then vainly imagine that they can recover the sacred fire by striking a park out of dogmatic theology.”

Charles Babbage Passages from the life of a philosopher

"Passages from the life of a philosopher", Appendix: Religion, Note (B) pp. 491-492
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864)

God, World, Religion, Imagination

“Cain: "Mr Hitchens, if I may interject, I'm not sure [about the relevance] of the instantaneous command of the geography of a region."”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

1990s

“Oh I'm in love with the janitor's boy,
And the janitor's boy loves me;
He's going to hunt for a desert isle
In our geography.”

Nathalia Crane (1913–1998) American writer

"The Janitor's Boy"
The Janitor's Boy And Other Poems (1924)

Love, Boy

“Navigation brought man face to face with the uncertainty of destiny, where each is left to himself and every departure might always be the last. The madman on his crazy boat sets sail for the other world, and it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks. This enforced navigation is both rigorous division and absolute Passage, serving to underline in real and imaginary terms the liminal situation of the mad in medieval society. It was a highly symbolic role, made clear by the mental geography involved, where the madman was confined at the gates of the cities. His exclusion was his confinement, and if he had no prison other than the threshold itself he was still detained at this place of passage. In a highly symbolic position he is placed on the inside of the outside, or vice versa. A posture that is still his today, if we admit that what was once the visible fortress of social order is now the castle of our own consciousness.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Part One: 1. Stultifera Navis
History of Madness (1961)

World, Departure, Madness

“Since my youth geography has been for me the primary object of study. When I was engaged in it, having applied the considerations of the natural and geometric sciences, I liked, little by little, not only the description of the earth, but also the structure of the whole machinery of the world, whose numerous elements are not known by anyone to date.”

Gerardus Mercator (1512–1594) cartographer, philosopher and mathematician

1578, Introduction to Ptolemy's Geography.

Youth, World, Nature, Study

“In most theoretical embodiments of inflationary cosmology, the currently observed universe appears as a small part of a much larger multiverse. In this framework to hold throughout the universe need not hold through all space. They can be accidents of our local geography, so to speak. If that is so, then it is valid – indeed, necessary – to consider selection effects. It may be that some of the “fundamental constants”, in particular, cannot be determined by theoretical reasoning, even in principle, because they really are different elsewhere.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

"Multiversality" (2013)

Universe, Appearance, Parting

“Combining al Qaeda's significant fighting capabilities with a stronger focus on the administrative capabilities that might permit it to hold ground, the Islamic State copied the latter from Hezbollah's model. Basically, Islamic State is a combined al Qaeda and Lebanese Hezbollah on steroids, destabilizing the region, dissolving borders/changing the political geography in the mid-east, and hardening political positions that make mid-east peace-building more remote by the day.”

James Mattis (1950) 26th and current United States Secretary of Defense; United States Marine Corps general

General Mattis [Ret.] speaking about the Islamic State of the Levant in an interview with Business Insider http://www.businessinsider.com/mattis-testimony-isis-2014-9

Peace, Change, Fight

“We must pass through the barriers of language and race, of geography and religion, of custom and tradition and we must build on a common foundation.”

Vincent Massey (1887–1967) Governor General of Canada

Address at a Citizenship Ceremony, Winnipeg Manitoba, May 20, 1955
Speaking Of Canada - (1959)

Religion

“Israel is a colonialist-imperialist phenomenon. There is no such thing as an Israeli people. Before 1948, world geography knew of no state such as Israel. Israel is the result of an invasion, of aggression.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

Time (9 April 1979) " World: An Interview with Gaddafi http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,920211-1,00.html" Interviews

People, World

“What is the defining difference between passive and active citizens? Curiously, it isn't income, geography, or even education. It depends on whether or not they read for pleasure and participate in the arts. These cultural activities seem to awaken a heightened sense of individual awareness and social responsibility.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Commencement speech, Stanford University (2007-06-17)
Speeches and lectures

Pleasure, Education, Art, Sense

“We are at an extraordinary moment in human history: never before has the possibility of true democracy been so close to realisation. At the cost of publishing and duplication has dropped to near zero, a truly free press, and a truly informed public, becomes a reality. A new Information Enlightment is dawning where knowledge flows freely, beyond national boundaries. Technology is breaking down traditional social barriers of status, class, power, wealth and geography, replacing them with an ethos of collaboration and transparency. In this new Enlightenment it isn't just scientific truths that are the goal, but discovering truths about the way we live, about politics and power.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Page ix.
The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War, 1st Edition

Truth, Way, Democracy, History

“In terms of political geography, The French Revolution ended the European Middle Ages.”

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer

Source: The Age of Revolution (1962), Chapter 4, War

Age

“Holism [is] the art — in contrast with reductionism — of seeing a complex system as a whole. Holism knows the limits to its understanding; it acknowledges that the system has its wildness, its privacy, its own reasons, its defences against invasive explanation … It does not pretend to understand the whole school just on the evidence of dissecting the geography teacher.”

David Fleming (1940–2010) British activist

Lean Logic, (2016), p. 194, entry on Holism http://www.flemingpolicycentre.org.uk/lean-logic-surviving-the-future/

School, Art, Understanding, Teachers

“We meet fellow humans throughout our travels,
Become close — friends, dates, lovers.
Always we are distanced again
from death, geography, or meeting others,
Only dialtone on the phone,
cold and empty beneath the covers.”

Patri Friedman (1976) American libertarian activist and theorist of political economy

Parting is such sweet sorrow http://patrifriedman.com/quotes/sex_love.html

Death, Travel, Lovers

“The unique purpose of geography is to seek comprehension of the variable character of areas in terms of all the interrelated features which together form that variable character.”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

Source: Perspective on the nature of geography (1958), p. 20

“Our aid has humanitarian objectives only; it is never governed by politics or limited by the geography, race, color or religion of the beneficiary.”

Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum (1949) Emirati politician

Quotes on Philanthropy, http://www.sheikhmohammed.co.ae/vgn-ext-templating/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=99c18960a5a11310VgnVCM1000004d64a8c0RCRD&appInstanceName=default, sheikhmohammed.ae.

Religion, Color

“The history of economic geography of the study of the location of economic activity is more like the story of geological thought about the shapes and location of continents and mountain ranges.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Development, Geography, and Economic Theory (1995), Ch. 2. Geography Lost and Found

History, Mountain, Study

“The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person's nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.”

Truman Capote book Other Voices, Other Rooms

Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948)

Love, Beauty, Hell, Nature

“This history of walking is an amateur history, just as walking is an amateur act. To use a walking metaphor, it trespasses through everybody else’s field—through anatomy, anthropology, architecture, gardening, geography, political and cultural history, literature, sexuality, religious studies—and doesn’t stop in any of them on its long route.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001)

History, Literature, Study

“Dreams are our only geography—our native land.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Don Quixote http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/don-quixote-6/ From the poems written in English

Dreams

“Numerous geographers writing in recent years concerning the nature and scope of their subject have described the relation of their field to other fields of science in terms of a concept said to stem from Immanuel Kant and from Alexander von Humboldt. Whatever may be the original source of the concept, its importance in the current geographic thought stems from the writing of Alfred Hettner, the German master of the methodology of geography.”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

Hartshorne (1958) "The concept of geography as a science of space, from Kant and Humboldt to Hettner" in: Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol 48 (2). p. 97

Nature, Science

“On the third floor of Manning's Coffee Shop in the Farmer's Market in Seattle confronting the Sound, the windows are opaque with fog. Sitting here in the long deserted room, I feel suspended enveloped by a white silence. Two floors below, the farmers are bending over their long rows of fruit and vegetables; washing and arranging their produce under intense lights shaded by circular green shades. Above, where I sit, the world seems obliterated from all save memory; abstracted without the feeling of being divorced from one’s roots. My eye keeps focusing upon the opaque windows [an equivalent of the picture plane]. Suddenly the vision is disturbed by the shape of a gull floating silently across the width of the window, a line of movement drawn across the picture surface. Then space again. In opposing lines to the gull's flight, the Sound moves northward through the Inland Passage... It is true that trains run daily out of Seattle to points East and South, but my mind takes but little cognizance of this fact. To me Seattle seems pocketed. There is only one way out: Alaska, toward the North! Swerving to the South, there is the Orient, although in San Francisco I feel the Orient rolling in with its tides. My imagination, it would seem, has its own geography.”

Mark Tobey (1890–1976) American abstract expressionist painter

Source: 1950's, In: Reminiscence and Reverie, 1951, pp. 45, 46

World, Way, Feeling, Imagination

“Material existence is entirely founded on a phantom realm of mind, whose nature and geography are unexplored.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

What Is Reality?

Nature