Quotes about grand
page 4

“A drive to right! Back to Georgia! Gone! A grand slam! What a scene at Shea!”

Bob Costas (1952) American sportscaster

Call of the Mets' Robin Ventura's Grand Slam Single in Game 5 of the 1999 NLCS.

“When you see 300 people naked in Grand Central Station, or a river of flesh flowing through the beauty aisles of Selfridges department store, it makes you think about all sorts of social and political issues.”

Spencer Tunick (1967) American photographer

Over 1,700 men and women strip naked in square in Germany.. and not a sun lounger in sight, 2012

People, Beauty, Thinking

“A very plausible choice for when inflation might have happened would be when the energy scales of the universe were at the scale of grand unified theories… which unify the weak, strong and electromagnetic interactions into a single unified interaction... we're talking about energies which are about 1016 times the equivalent energy of a proton mass. …the initial patch would only have to be the ridiculously small size of about 10-28 cm across to be able to lead ultimately to the creation of everything that we see on the vast scale of which we see it.”

Alan Guth (1947) American theoretical physicist and cosmologist

Lecture 1: Inflationary Cosmology: Is Our Universe Part of a Multiverse? Part I.
The Early Universe (2012)

Strong, Universe, Time

“The next grand extensions of mathematical physics will, in all likelihood, be furnished by quaternions.”

Peter Guthrie Tait (1831–1901) British mathematician

in Note on a Quaternion Transformation , Communication read on Monday, 6th April, 1863, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1866), p. 117.

Mathematics

“This patchwork of largely fictional works makes the Protocols an incoherent text that easily reveals its fabricated origins. It is hardly credible, if not in a roman feuilleton or in a grand opera, that the “bad guys” should express their evil plans in such a frank and unashamed manner, that they should declare, as the Elders of Zion do, that they have “boundless ambition, a ravenous greed, a merciless desire for revenge and an intended hatred.” If at first the Protocols was taken seriously, it is because it was presented as a shocking revelation, and by sources all in all trustworthy. But what seems incredible is how this fake arose from its own ashes each time someone proved that it was, beyond all doubt, a fake. This is when the “novel of the Protocols” truly starts to sound like fiction. Following the article that appeared in 1921 in the Times of London revealing that the Protocols was plagiarized, as well as every other time some authoritative source confirmed the spurious nature of the Protocols, there was someone else who published it again claiming its authenticity. And the story continues unabated on the Internet today. It is as if, after Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, one were to continue publishing textbooks claiming that the sun travels around the earth.
How can one explain resilience against all evidence, and the perverse appeal that this book continues to exercise? The answer can be found in the works of Nesta Webster, an antisemetic author who spent her life supporting this account of the Jewish plot. In her Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, she seems well informed and knows the whole story as Eisner narrates it here, but this is her conclusion:
The only opinion I have committed myself is that, whether genuine or not, the Protocols represent the programme of a world revolution, and that in view of their prophetic nature and of their extraordinary resemblance to the protocols of certain secret societies of the past, they were either the work of some such society or of someone profoundly versed in the lore of secret society who was able to reproduce their ideas and phraseology.
Her reasoning is flawless: “since the Protocols say what I said in my story, they confirm it,” or: “the Protocols confirm the story that I derived from them, and are therefore authentic.” Better still: “the Protocols could be fake, but they say exactly what the Jews think, and must therefore be considered authentic.””

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

In other words, it is not the Protocols that produce antisemetism, it is people’s profound need to single out an Enemy that leads them to believe in the Protocols.
I believe that-in spite of this courageous, not comic but tragic book by Will Eisner- the story is hardly over. Yet is is a story very much worth telling, for one must fight the Big Lie and the hatred it spawns.
Umberto Eco, Milan Italy December 2004 translated by Allesandra Bastagli, p. vi-vii
The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Life, People, Lie, Secret

“Islam is a religion that wants to run the world. It has done so before and eventually, will run it (again)…. Islam came and abrogated all (other religions)…. Its high time Iraq established a Just Islamic regime under the supervision of the Grand Ayatollah Sistani and God willing, they will get somewhere.”

Ali Meshkini (1922–2007) Iranian ayatollah

Ayatollah Meshkini In A Friday Sermon in Qom: An Islamic Rule Under Ayatollah Sistani Is Required in Iraq http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/148.htm July 2004. 2004

God, World, Religion, Time

“However dreary we may have felt life to be here, yet when that hour comes — the winding up of all things, the last grand rush of darkness on our spirits, the hour of that awful sudden wrench from all we have ever known or loved, the long farewell to sun, moon, stars, and light — brother man, I ask you this day, and I ask myself humbly and fearfully, "What will then be finished? When it is finished, what will it be? Will it be the butterfly existence of pleasure, the mere life of science, a life of uninterrupted sin and self-gratification, or will it be, 'Father, I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do?'"”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 175.

Love, Life, Pleasure, Star

“Mo: Toni, come on! I know you're in a lot of pain, but you hafta look at the grand scheme of things! Listen, the environment is polluted beyond the point of no return, nickels and dimes are allocated for AIDS research while billions go into radar systems for blowing up civilians in the Persian Gulf, and we've got to spend the next two months being assaulted with hypocritical hype as two morally bankrupt white boys gear up for another electoral farce! Having a rough time in your relationship kinda pales in comparison, huh?
Toni: Gee, Mo… thanks. I can always count on you.”

Alison Bechdel book Dykes to Watch Out For

#40, "The Big Picture" (1988), collected in New, Improved! DTWOF (1990).
Dykes to Watch Out For

Pain, Boy, Time

“Les Nomades, mes frères vont boire à, la Grande Ourse ("The Nomads: My brothers go drinking in the Grande Ourse") Hachette Education, Paris 2000, ISBN 2-7085-0231-X”

Abdourahman A. Waberi (1965) Djiboutian writer

Works

Education, Drink

“Dear Dorothy, my biography is very short [asked for by the MOMA].... I was born in Tiflis, Caucacus, South Russia, October 25th, 1904 and after the usual studies I came to America in 1920. I had been painting steadily since I was seven and continued to do so during my three and a half years at Brown University where I studied engineering. In 1925 I came to New York and taught at the Grand Central Art School for seven years. I have been living and working ever since in New York.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

Source: 1942 - 1948, Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), p. 163: in a letter to Dorothy Miller, [at the staff on MOMA, New York], 26 June 1942

School, Art, Study, Universe

“You ever go eat breakfast at Denny's, and then go to the toilet and sit in there so long you gotta order lunch from the stool? You ever do that? Now I know why they call it the Grand Slam?”

Larry the Cable Guy (1963) American stand-up comedian, actor, country music artist, voice artist

Morning Constitutions (2007)

“The honour and respect that a country earns by being represented at mega-sporting events like the Grand Slams has to be seen to be believed, experienced to be fully understood.”

Sania Mirza (1986) Indian tennis player

Source: Arun Sharma"Sachin's my inspiration - he's also excellent at tennis: Sania Mirza"

Sport, Country

“The grand destroyer of the world, and the greatest threat … is represented by U. S. imperialism.”

Hugo Chávez (1954–2013) 48th President of Venezuela

Hugo Chávez during his television/radio show ¡Aló Presidente! on August 21, 2005. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9032793/ 2005

World

“And yet I don't know. And yet I don't know!
The handkerchiefs that cost me three shillings or so -
And that seems a lot for poor Uncle John
And anything goes to blow noses on. Talking of noses, hers is red enough.
I know what I'll buy her. A nice powder puff. Now she can't powder her nose with a grand piano.
Nor yet with a sewing machine.
She can't powder her nose with an Ingersoll watch -
Well that's silly, you know what I mean.
She can't powder her nose with a jumper.
She'll find that a little bit rough.
So I'll pop round to Woolworth's tomorrow, God bless her
And buy her a nice powder puff. And yet I don't know. And yet I don't know!
Sixpence ha'pennies aren't found in back yards.
I'll not buy her a powder puff at all - no.
I'll just send her my kindest regards.”

Stanley Holloway (1890–1982) English stage and film actor, comedian, singer, poet and monologist

"And Yet I Don't Know" monologue http://monologues.co.uk/And-Yet1.htm And Yet I Don't Know!

God

“And six little Singing-boys,—dear little souls!
In nice clean faces, and nice white stoles,
Came in order due,
Two by two,
Marching that grand refectory through.”

Richard Harris Barham (1788–1845) British writer and priest

Poem: The Jackdaw of Rheims http://www.bartleby.com/246/108.html

Soul, Boy, Singing

“Enlightenment … asks, innocently and subversively, for proofs, sources, and evidence. At the beginning it solemnly avers that it would willingly believe everything, if only it could find someone to convince it. Here it becomes clear that the biblical texts, taken philologically, remain themselves their only witness. Their revelatory character is their own claim, and it can be believed or not; the church, which elevates this revelatory character to the status of a grand dogma, itself plays only the role of an interpreter. With his radical biblicism, Luther rejected the church’s claim to authority. This repudiation then repeats itself on the higher level through biblicism itself. For text remains text, and every assertion that it is divinely inspired can, in turn, be only a human, fallible assertion. With every attempt to grasp the absolute source, critique comes up against relative, historical sources that only ever assert the Absolute. The miracles spoken about in the Bible to legitimate God’s power are only reports of miracles for which there are no longer any means of verification. The revelatory claim is stuck in a philological circle.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 24

God

“I have ever had the single aim of justice in view. No judge who is influenced by any other consideration is fit for the bench. 'Do equal and exact justice,' is my motto, and I have often said to the grand jury, 'Permit no innocent man to be punished, but let no guilty man escape.”

Isaac Parker (1838–1896) American politician

September 1, 1896, reported in Homer Croy, He Hanged Them High (1952), p. 218.

Justice

“Passing laws and creating bureaus cannot add one jot to human happiness; … governments habitually engage in aggression, grand larceny, cheating, lying, counterfeiting, bullying, meddling and other pursuits immediately recognized, in the private sphere, as nasty and immoral. Why don't people compare political promises with government results?”

Roger Lea MacBride (1929–1995) American writer, TV producer, and politician; 1976 Libertarian Party candidate for President

A New Dawn for America: The Libertarian Challenge, paperback version (1976) p. 93. U guys this is fake notes

Happiness, People, Law, Lying

“As we look up into these glorious culminations, how grand life becomes! To be forever with the Lord, and forever changing into His likeness, and, still more, forever deepening in the companionship of His thought and bliss, "from glory to glory,"”

Randolph Sinks Foster (1820–1903) American bishop

could we desire more?
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 308.

Life, Change

“On March 20, 1854, the Republican Party was established in Ripon, Wisconsin. Referred to as the 'GOP' or 'Grand Old Party', it established for one reason, to break the chains of slavery and ensure the unalienable rights endowed by the Creator of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would be for all Americans. The Republican Party was created to achieve individual freedom. Then, as now, the antagonist to the Republican Party has been the Democrats, the party of collective subjugation and individual enslavement, then physical, now economic.”

Allen West (politician) (1961) American politician; retired United States Army officer

2010s, Voting Democratic for the next 200 years (2014)

Life, Happiness, Freedom

“The young district leader chose Baubaus wallpapers at my suggestion, although I had hinted that these were “Communist” wallpapers. He waved that warning aside with a grand gesture: “We will take the best of everything, even from the Communists.” In saying this he was expressing what Hitler and his staff had already been doing for years: picking up anything that promised success without regard for ideology…”

Albert Speer (1905–1981) German architect, Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi Germany

Source: Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (1970), p. 22

Success

“One of the grand fallacies of our time is that something beneficial should be subsidized.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Cutting the Budget
1980s–1990s, Compassion Versus Guilt and Other Essays (1987)

Time

“I sat day after day in my little room, waiting for inspiration to visit me, trying to invent a pseudonym that would express, in a combination of noble and striking sounds, our dream of artistic achievement, a pen name grand enough to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me.”

Romain Gary book Promise at Dawn

Promise at Dawn (1960) as quoted in "Great Pretenders" by Emma Garman in Tablet (31 October 2007) http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/906/great-pretenders/

Dreams, Feeling, Idea, Waiting

“But just as the world grew right again,
We heard a wanderer out on the plain
Singing what none of us understood;
Yet we thought that the world grew thrice more sweet
And the meadows were blossoming under his feet.
And we felt a grand and beautiful fear,
For we knew that a marvellous thought drew near;
So we kept the glass for a little while:
And the skies grew deeper and twice as bright,
And the seas grew soft as a flower of light,
And the meadows rippled from stile to stile;
And memories danced in a musical throng
Thro' the blossom that scented the wonderful song.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Part III : The Mystic Ruby
The Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems (1907), The Flower of Old Japan

World, Fear, Beauty, Music

“And Mr. Burnaby said acutely: "Well, it doesn't seem to have done her much good, poor lass." But after a while they stopped talking about her and discussed instead who was going to win the Grand National. For, as Mr. Ferguson was saying at that minute in Luxor, it is not the past that matters but the future.”

Agatha Christie book Death on the Nile

Death on the Nile (1937)

Past, Future

“The maddest phenomenon in this wholly mad world – that the filming or wirelessing of an event, whether it is the Grand National or an attack in force on the Maginot Line, is held to be of more importance than the event itself.”

James Agate (1877–1947) British diarist and critic

Ego 4, p. 149, December 18, 1939.

World, Madness

“It may be that the requirement of a preliminary approval by the Grand Jury, of all accusations of a serious nature, justified the boast that a man was presumed to be innocent until he was 'found' guilty; but that presumption certainly ceased to have practical application, so soon as the Grand Jury had returned a 'true bill.”

Edward Jenks (1861–1939) British legal scholar

Source: A Short History Of The English Law (First Edition) (1912), Chapter XVIII, Reform In The Criminal Law, p. 332

Nature

“Her peasant garments cannot hide the light
of noble soul, her nature high and grand,
and all her queenly majesty shines bright
in every act her humble chores demand.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Non copre abito vil la nobil luce,
E quanto è in lei d'altero e di gentile;
E fuor la maesta regia traluce
Per gli atti ancor de l'esercizio umile.
Canto VII, stanza 18 (tr. Wickert)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

Soul, Nature, Light

“The world, I mean our own portion of it, sometimes seems to me like one mighty slaughter-house — one grand school for the suppression of every kind and tender and brotherly feeling — one grand process of education to the entire destitution of all moral principle — one vast scene of destruction to all moral sensibility, and all sympathy with the woes of those around us. Is it not so?”

William Alcott (1798–1859) American physician and author

Source: Vegetable Diet (1838), p. 268

World, Education, School, Feeling

“In the case of their purely concocted grand theory of pre-Muslim persecution of Buddhism by Hindus, we see our leftist historians throw all standards of source criticism to the wind. Such is their eagerness to uphold this convenient hypothesis, and their care not to endanger what little supportive testimony there is. After all, from the millennia of pre-Muslim religious pluralism in India, there are not even five testimonies of such persecution, so these few should be scrupulously kept away from criticism…. The allegation is simply repeated, and amplified, in all secularist history-books….. Incidentally, Hsuen Tsang's statement that his patron, king Harsha, worshipped both Buddha and the Hindu goods, is always carefully kept out of secularists' invocations of Hsuen Tsang's authority, as it is one more blow to the myth of Hindu-Buddhist struggle.”

Harsha of Kashmir

Koenraad Elst 1991: Ayodhya and after: issues before Hindu society.

Books, History, Support

“I guess that is my biggest fear, sort of worrying about the fact that I keep getting more insecure as time goes on rather than feeling more grand with each turn. I feel more and more afraid. When I get my picture taken, I'm convinced it's because I must look terrible and they're going to put it in US Weekly as a joke.”

Natasha Lyonne (1979) actress

Suicidegirls interview (2004)

Fear, Feeling, Time

“Business strategy should not be a grand and sweeping overview. It should be more like an under view, a peek beneath the covers to look in great detail at what is going on.”

Richard Koch (1950) German medical historian and internist

Source: The 80/20 principle: the secret of achieving more with less (1999), p. 58

Business

“Thus it comes about that the endeavour of primitive people to make a clean sweep of all their troubles generally takes the form of a grand hunting out and expulsion of devils and ghosts. They think that if they can only shake off these their accursed tormentors, they will make a fresh start in life, happy and innocent; the tales of Eden and the old poetic golden age will come true again.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 56, The Public Expulsion of Evils.

Life, Happiness, People, Age

“At every period in her history, in different circumstances, the Grand Duchy has had to reinvent herself.”

Henri of Luxembourg (1955) Grand Duke (head of state) of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

An all Period vu senger Geschicht huet de Grand-Duché sech nei erfonnt, an huet dat och misse maachen. Speech on National Day, http://www.monarchie.lu/fr/actualites/discours/2014/06/23062014-fetnat/index.html (23 June 2014) Luxembourg

History

“The grand old Book of God still stands; and this old earth, the more its leaves are turned over and pondered, the more it will sustain and illustrate the Sacred word.”

James Dwight Dana (1813–1895) American mineralogist

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 35.

God, Books

“They say that the eternal future of man depends upon his belief. I deny it. A conclusion honestly arrived at by the brain cannot possibly be a crime; and the man who says it is, does not think so. The god who punishes it as a crime is simply an infamous tyrant. As for me, I would a thousand times rather go to perdition and suffer its torments with the brave, grand thinkers of the world, than go to heaven and keep the company of a god who would damn his children for an honest belief.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

My Reviewers Reviewed (lecture from June 27, 1877, San Francisco, CA)

God, Children, World, Thinking

“Talk not so much, then, young artist, of the great old masters, who but painted and chisell’d. Study not only their productions. There is a still higher school for him who would kindle his fire with coal from the altar of the loftiest and purest art. It is the school of all grand actions and grand virtues, of heroism, of the death of patriots and martyrs — of all the mighty deeds written in the pages of history — deeds of daring, and enthusiasm, devotion, and fortitude.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

"Talk to an Art-Union (A Brooklyn fragment)" (1839)

Death, School, Art, History

“I feel a burning desire to become grand in simplicity.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

note in her Journal, April 1903; as quoted in Expressionism, a German intuition, 1905-1920, Neugroschel, Joachim; Vogt, Paul; Keller, Horst; Urban, Martin; Dube, Wolf Dieter; (transl. Joachim Neugroschel); publisher: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1980, p. 30
1900 - 1905

Feeling

“[Doc Dubois] had been focusing all of his attention in the other direction, on Peach Pit and its iron-rich “children,” PP1, PP2, and PP3, nailing down their exact orbital parameters, taking high-res photographs.
PP3 was especially interesting. It was a congealed glob of mostly iron, similar in composition to Amalthea. It was some fifty kilometers in diameter. And it had a deep cleft on one side, comparable in size to the Grand Canyon, apparently formed by a collision that had rent its outer skin while it was partly congealed. Doob had begun calling PP3 Cleft.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"Day 700"
Seveneves (2015), Part Two

Children

“Trained in a less severe school than that of geometry and physics, his reasonings are almost always loose and inconclusive. His generalizations seem to have been reached before he had obtained the materials upon which he rests them: His facts, though frequently new and interesting, are often little more than conjectures; and the grand phenomena of the world of life, and instinct, and reason, which other minds have woven into noble and elevating truths, have thus become in Mr. Darwin's hands the basis of a dangerous and degrading speculation.”

David Brewster (1781–1868) British astronomer and mathematician

Referring to Charles Darwin
The facts and fancies of Mr. Darwin (1862)

Life, Truth, World, School

“Statism is but socialized dishonesty; it is feathering the nests of some with feathers coercively plucked from others - on the grand scale. There is no moral — only a legal — distinction between petty thievery and political Robin Hoodism, which is to say, there is no moral difference between the act of a pickpocket and the progressive income tax or any other piece of socialization.”

Leonard E. Read (1898–1983) American academic

Anything That's Peaceful https://books.google.com/books?id=4wWA1vexxdsC&pg=PA74&lpg=PA74&dq=%22is+but+socialized+dishonesty;+it+is+feathering+the+nests+of+some+with+feathers+coercively+plucked+from+others+-+on+the+grand+scale.%22&source=bl&ots=1I89gu9Jmo&sig=8jpm9FnYbB87c8BB_twGQw8CC7o&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjIuZ_58vLTAhXD4SYKHbHVAncQ6AEILDAB#v=onepage&q=%22is%20but%20socialized%20dishonesty%3B%20it%20is%20feathering%20the%20nests%20of%20some%20with%20feathers%20coercively%20plucked%20from%20others%20-%20on%20the%20grand%20scale.%22&f=false Anything That's Peaceful (1964)

“Libertarians have always battled the age-old scourge of war. They understood that war brought death and destruction on a grand scale, disrupted family and economic life, and put more power in the hands of the ruling class — which might explain why the rulers did not always share the popular sentiment for peace. Free men and women, of course, have often had to defend their own societies against foreign threats; but throughout history, war has usually been the common enemy of peaceful, productive people on all sides of the conflict.”

David Boaz (1953) libertarian, author and editor

"Key Concepts of Libertarianism" (1 January 1999)

Life, Death, Women, Men

“The grand success of the British Empire depends not on its having followed any constitutional precedent of the past but on having met a new situation in history with a creation in law; and as a matter of fact the new constitutional system grew empirically and organically out of the practical necessities of the colonial situation.”

Jan Smuts (1870–1950) military leader, politician and statesman from South Africa

From The League of Nations - A Practical Suggestion, 1918, pp. 37-38, as cited by W. K. Hancock in SMUTS 1: The Sanguine Years 1870-1919, p. 502

Law, History, Success, Past

“The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love and something to hope for.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

Widely quoted as an Addison maxim this is actually by the American clergyman George Washington Burnap (1802-1859), published in Burnap's The Sphere and Duties of Woman : A Course of Lectures (1848), Lecture IV.
Misattributed

Love, Life, Happiness, Hope

“There is pow'r, there is pow'r
In a band of workingmen.
When they stand hand in hand,
That's a pow'r, that's a pow'r
That must rule in every land —
One Industrial Union Grand.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

"There is power in a Union" http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/There_Is_Power_in_a_Union (1913)

“The tree which rustles and the heather which grows are for me the grand history, that which will not change. If I speak well their language, I shall have spoken well the language of all times.”

Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867) French painter (1812-1867)

as quoted in Barbizon days, Millet-Corot-Rousseau-Barye by Charles Sprague Smith, A. Wessels Company, New York, July 1902, p. 132
undated quotes

History, Tree, Change, Time

“If we read History with any degree of thoughtfulness, we shall find that checks and balances of Profit and Loss have never been the grand agents with men, that they have never been roused into deep, thorough, all-pervading efforts by any computable prospect of Profit and Loss, for any visible, finite object; but always for some invisible and infinite one.”

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

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Men, History, Effort, Loss

“Frankly Jess, on the grand scale—”
“You can’t think on the grand scale. You have to think on the small scale. Otherwise no-one’d ever do anything.”

Jane Rogers book The Testament of Jessie Lamb

Source: The Testament of Jessie Lamb (2011), Chapter 18 (p. 137)

Thinking

“The two grand tyrants of the Earth, Time and Chance.”

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic

Die zwei größten Tyrannen der Erde, der Zufall und die Zeit.
Vol. 1, p. x; translation vol. 1, p. xi
Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-91)

Chance, Time

“Many grand notions and titles have over time attached themselves to this place: a paradise at the southern tip of Africa, the world’s richest floral kingdom, a maritime fulcrum between West and East, a European outpost at the foot of the continent, the Tavern of the Seas. But the two names that are the most potent are also two of the earliest: the contradictory claims of this being both a Cape of Storms and a Cape of Good Hope. The tension between these ideas encapsulates many of the tensions of this city.
Legend has it that the first Portuguese navigator to round the southern tip of Africa, Bartolomeu Dias, named this stormy peninsula Cabo das Tormentas. However, King João II rejected Dias’s name in favour of one that would be more inspirational for the Portuguese people: Cabo da Boa Esperança. The turning point for the Lusitanian caravels would spell untold riches in the East. But the dialectic between the two contending titles is as virile today in a city whose promise is limitless and whose socio-political storms act as a sea anchor.”

Justin D. Fox (1967) South African author, photojournalist, lecturer and editor

Cape Town Calling (2007)

People, World, Hope, Idea

“If grand unified theories are correct, we ought to be able to derive the relative power of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions at accessible energies from their presumed equality at much higher energies. When this is attempted, a wonderful result emerges. …in the form first calculated by Howard Georgi, Helen Quinn, and Steven Weinberg …The couplings of strong-interaction gluons decrease, those of the [weak interaction] W bosons stay roughly constant, and those of the [electromagnetic interaction] photons increase at short distances [or high energies]—so they all tend to converge, as desired.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

Strong

“Sept. 6th, 1822, looking S. E. – 12 to 1 o'clock, fresh and bright, between showers – much the look of rain all the morning, but very fine and grand all the afternoon and evening.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Constable's inscription at the back of a cloud study, 6 September 1822, as quoted in Constable, Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, Tate Gallery Publications, London 1993, p. 233
1820s

“The Athenian empire lasted for fifty years at the most, and the stupendous creation of Alexander the Great for less. What has been the fate of succeeding imperialisms? That of Spain endured on the grand scale for little more than a century; that of Napoleon for a decade; the British Empire is less than two centuries old, and in its present form is a thing of yesterday. In the brief span of recorded history empires have had a shorter life than many monarchies, theocracies, and even republics. The Augustan alone reached a venerable age. In the coming of Christianity it had to face the greatest of all historic convulsions, but such was its potency that it weathered the storm and influenced profoundly the organization of the Christian church.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Augustus (1937)

Life, Fate, Age, History

“Cruel, but composed and bland,
Dumb, inscrutable and grand,
So Tiberius might have sat,
Had Tiberius been a cat.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

" Poor Matthias http://www.flippyscatpage.com/frompoormatthias.html" (1867)

Cats

“If you understood a business perfectly and the future of the business, you would need very little in the way of a margin of safety. So, the more vulnerable the business is, assuming you still want to invest in it, the larger margin of safety you'd need. If you're driving a truck across a bridge that says it holds 10,000 pounds and you've got a 9,800 pound vehicle, if the bridge is 6 inches above the crevice it covers, you may feel okay, but if it's over the Grand Canyon, you may feel you want a little larger margin of safety…”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

1997 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, as quoted in Of Permanent Value : The Story of Warren Buffett, by Andrew Kilpatrick, Vol. 2 (2007), p. 1615

Way, Feeling, Business, Future

“The sane understand that human beings are incapable of sustaining conspiracies on a grand scale, because some of our most defining qualities as a species are inattention to detail, a tendency to panic, and an inability to keep our mouths shut.”

Dean Koontz book Fear Nothing

Source: Fear Nothing (1998), Chapter 17; musings of Christopher Snow

Understanding

“As the antagonism between those who possess, and those who do not, is becoming more acute day after day, we can already foresee a moment when it will bring about ("entraînera", Fr.) severe (big, high, intense, - "grands", Fr.) disasters, if we do turn (direct, aim, - "dirige", Fr.) life in time the social life in new directions”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

or ways, - "dans des voies nouvelles", Fr.
Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 46.

Life, Way, Time

“The first grand design of Christ Jesus is to destroy and consume His mortal enemy antichrist. This must be done by the breath of His mouth in His prophets and witnesses. Now, the nations of the world have impiously stopped this heavenly breath and stifled the Lord Jesus in His servants. Now, it shall please the civil state to remove the state bars set up to resist the holy spirit of God in His servants (whom yet finally to resist is not in all the powers of the world), I humbly conceive that the civil state has made a fair progress in promoting the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Roger Williams (theologian) (1603–1684) English Protestant theologian and founder of the colony of Providence Plantation

The Hireling Ministry, None of Christ's (1652)

God, World, Christ

“And Vache believes that the she-bear is not only his mother, but that of all the people on this earth. This is what grandpa and Kukubo said. Javria looks like nature and she is nature herself. The maker of this world, our Saviour, if he is grand and omnipotent will not allow the killing of this bear. Baido will be left disappointed. God will take the straw coloured bear with his strong, muscled right hand and turn her into the constellation. He took Dali to heaven as well.”

Miho Mosulishvili book A Big She-Bear

Source: A Big She-Bear (2013), p. 67

God, People, World, Disappointment

“The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures….
Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. [… ] The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.”

Fred Brooks (1931) American computer scientist

Page 7.
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975, 1995)

Life, Imagination, Sense, Time

“Originally I was supposed to do Grand Prix, but I was under contract to 20th Century Fox at that time and Alex North was supposed to do Sand Pebbles, but he got sick, so Fox preempted me out of Grand Prix, and to my good fortune, I got to do Sand Pebbles. It was my first time working with Robert Wise and it was a great experience.”

Jerry Goldsmith (1929–2004) film composer

AOL Online Host (1995-07-11)

Time

“Matter is actually distributed very unevenly… conglomerated into stars and galactic systems. The average density is the density that we should get if all… could be evaporated into atoms of hydrogen, or protons, and… distributed evenly over the whole of space. …three or four protons in every cubic foot. …a million million times less than that of the most perfect vacuum that we can produce… The universe thus consists mostly of emptiness… consider a universe without any matter at all, an empty universe, as a good approximation. But we may also take as our first approximation a universe containing… three or four protons per cubic foot. The local deviations from the average, caused by the conglomeration of matter into stars and stellar systems, are then disregarded in the grand scale model, and are only taken into account when we come to study details.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932)

Star, Study, Universe, Time

“One grand fallacy of the women's movement: Expecting work to mean "power" and "self-fulfillment."”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 232.

Women

“[Girls] study under the paralyzing idea that their acquirements cannot be brought into practical use. They may subserve the purposes of promoting individual domestic pleasure and social enjoyment in conversation, but what are they in comparison with the grand stimulation of independence and self- reliance, of the capability of contributing to the comfort and happiness of those whom they love as their own souls?”

Sarah Grimké (1792–1873) American abolitionist

Written in 1852, as quoted in ch. 87.
The Female Experience (1977)

Love, Happiness, Pleasure, Soul

“There is a grand fearlessness in faith. He who in his heart of hearts reverences the good, the true, the holy — that is, reverences God — does not tremble at the apparent success of attacks upon the outworks of faith. They may shake those who rest on those outworks — they do not move him whose soul reposes on the truth itself. He needs no prop or crutches to support his faith. Founded on a Rock, Faith can afford to gaze undismayed at the approaches of Infidelity.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 221.

God, Truth, Faith, Soul

“Un des plus grands romanciers que l'Angleterre ait jamais eus. ("One of the greatest novelists that England has ever had.")”

Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884–1969) English writer

Nathalie Sarraute L'Ère du soupçon (Paris: Gallimard, 1956) p. 119; Maria Jolas (trans.) The Age of Suspicion (New York: George Braziller, 1963) p. 112.
Criticism

“From a town known as Wheeling, West Virginia
Rode a boy with a six-gun in his hand
And his daring life of crime made him a legend in his time
East and west of the Rio Grande.
Well, he started with a bank in Colorado
In the pocket of his vest a Colt he hid.
And his age and his size took the teller by surprise,
And the word spread of Billy the Kid.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

The Ballad of Billy the Kid.
Song lyrics, Piano Man (1973)

Life, Age, Boy, Time

“The refraction of light agrees with the grand principle that Nature always uses the simplest means to accomplish its effects. From this principle, can be derived whenever light passes from one medium to another, the ratio of the sine of the angle of refraction to the sine of the angle of refraction equals the inverse ratio of the speeds at which light moves in each medium.
But this "budget", this expense of action that Nature minimizes in the refraction of light, is it also minimized in the direct propagation and reflection of light? Yes, it always has the smallest possible value.”

Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters

Accord de différentes loix de la nature qui avoient jusqu’ici paru incompatibles (1744)

Nature, Light, Speed

“"Not for ourselves, but for others," is the grand law inscribed on every part of creation.”

Edward Payson (1783–1827) American religious leader

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 26.

Law, Parting

“Christian faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing without you see no glory, nor can possibly imagine any. Nothing is visible but the merest outline of dusky shapes. Standing within all is clear and denned; every ray of light reveals an army of unspeakable splendors.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 134.

Faith, Imagination, Light

“And a year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they've been liberated. And it is getting easier every day for Iraqis to express that sense of liberation.”

Richard Perle (1941) American government official

Notes: from luncheon keynote speech, "Turkey at the Crossroads", September 22, 2003
Source: http://www.aei.org/events/contentID.20031003144313426/default.asp
Source: http://www.catch.com/comments/34635_0_17_0_C/

People, Understanding, Sense

“By an odd amalgam of liberal economic theory and Beccaria on punishment, nineteenth-century thinkers would replicate this exceptional relationship between markets and punishment: natural orderliness in the economic sphere, but government intervention in the penal realm. This is most evident in Jeremy Bentham’s work. The contrast between Bentham’s presumption of quietism in economic matters and his arch-interventionism in the penal domain effectively reproduced and reiterated the Physiocratic duality of economy and police. On the public economy side, Bentham tended toward Adam Smith’s liberalism. His Manual of Political Economy, written in the mid-1790s, rehearsed a presumption of governmental quietism based on his stringent belief in the superiority of individuals’ information and self-interest. But on the punishment side, Bentham embraced Beccaria’s philosophy whole cloth—especially Beccaria’s notion that policing is a sphere of human activity that must be shot through with government intervention. In fact, the criminal code, for Bentham, was precisely a “grand catalogue of prices” by means of which the government set the value of deviance. The penal code was a menu of fixed prices—the polar opposite of laissez-faire.”

Bernard Harcourt (1963) American academic

Source: The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (2011), p. 36

Nature, Clothes

“Rocks and waters, etc., are words of God and so are men. We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

letter http://digitalcollections.pacific.edu/cdm/ref/collection/muirletters/id/9847/show/9846 to Catharine Merrill, from New Sentinel Hotel, Yosemite Valley (9 June 1872); published in William Federic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/life_and_letters/default.aspx (1924), chapter 9: Persons and Problems 1870s

Love, Men, God, People

“Our first of poets was one of our first of men. He was an eminent instance to prove that a poet is not another name for the slave of power and fashion … who merely aspire to make up the pageant and show of the day. There are persons in common life who … can so little bear to be left for any length of time out of the grand carnival and masquerade of pride and folly, that they will gain admittance to it at the expense of their characters … Milton was not one of these. He had lofty contemplative principle, and consciousness of inward power and worth, [not] to be tempted by such idle baits.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On Milton's Sonnets" Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Life, Men, Fashion, Time

“The secret of Hegel's dialectic lies ultimately in this alone, that it negates theology through philosophy in order then to negate philosophy through theology. Both the beginning and the end are constituted by theology; philosophy stands in the middle as the negation of the first positedness, but the negation of the negation is again theology. At first everything is overthrown, but then everything is reinstated in its old place, as in Descartes. The Hegelian philosophy is the last grand attempt to restore a lost and defunct Christianity through philosophy, and, of course, as is characteristic of the modern era, by identifying the negation of Christianity with Christianity itself.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist

Part II, Section 21 Principles of Philosophy of the Future http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/future/index.htm (1843)

Secret

“The human soul yearns for discovery. By unlocking the mysteries of the universe, we unlock truths within ourselves. That's true. Our journey into space will not only make us stronger and more prosperous, but will unite us behind grand ambitions and bring us all closer together. Wouldn't that be nice? Can you believe that space is going to do that? I thought politics would do that. (Laughter.) Well, we'll have to rely on space instead.”

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

2010s, 2017, June

Truth, Soul, Laughter, Universe

“Don't be disheartened by the forces of evil. Nothing can happen that God hasn't allowed. Even resistance is all part of grand orchestration. The devil always has you right were God wants you.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 16

God, Evil, Parting

“The motions of the Grand Army will best deter mine the propriety of endeavouring to hold all the ground from King's Bridge to the lower lines. I shall be as much on the Island of York as possible, so as not to neglect the duties of my own department.”

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

Letter to George Washington (31 October 1776)

“Nothing so closely approaches a grand style as turgid nonsense: the ridiculous is one of the extremes of the subtle.”

Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (1597–1654) French author, best known for his epistolary essays

Rien n'est si voisin du haut style que le galimatias: le ridicule est une des extrémités du subtil.
Socrate Chrétien, Discours X.
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 202.
Socrate Chrétien (1662)

“The Working Man as yet sought only to know his craft; and educated himself sufficiently by ploughing and hammering, under the conditions given, and in fit relation to the persons given: a course of education, then as now and ever, really opulent in manful culture and instruction to him; teaching him many solid virtues, and most indubitably useful knowledges; developing in him valuable faculties not a few both to do and to endure,—among which the faculty of elaborate grammatical utterance, seeing he had so little of extraordinary to utter, or to learn from spoken or written utterances, was not bargained for; the grammar of Nature, which he learned from his mother, being still amply sufficient for him. This was, as it still is, the grand education of the Working Man. As for the Priest, though his trade was clearly of a reading and speaking nature, he knew also in those veracious times that grammar, if needful, was by no means the one thing needful, or the chief thing. By far the chief thing needful, and indeed the one thing then as now, was, That there should be in him the feeling and the practice of reverence to God and to men; that in his life's core there should dwell, spoken or silent, a ray of pious wisdom fit for illuminating dark human destinies;—not so much that he should possess the art of speech, as that he should have something to speak!”

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

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

Life, Wisdom, Men, God

“One of the grand fundamental principles of Mormonism is to receive truth, let it come from whence it may.”

Joseph Smith, Jr. (1805–1844) American religious leader and the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement

Discourses of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 199 (9 July 1843)
1840s

Truth

““It’s not hope,” said Jocundra. “It’s just confusion. I know he’s dead.”
“Sure it’s hope,” said Mr. Brisbeau. “Me, I ain’t no genius, but I can tell you ‘bout hope. When my boy he’s missin’ in action, I live wit hope for ten damn years. It’s the cruelest thing in the world. If it get a hook in you, maybe it never let you go no matter how hopeless things really is.” He closed up the sack and laughed. “I remember what my grand-mère used to say ’round breakfas’ time. My brother John he’s always after her to fix pancakes. Firs’ ting ever’ mornin’ he say, ‘Well, I hope we’re goin’ to have pancakes.’ And my grand-mère she tell him jus’ be glad his belly’s full, him, and then she say, ‘You keep your hope for tomorrow, boy, ’cause we got grits for today.’” He stood and shouldered the sack. “Maybe that’s all there is to some kinds of hopin’. It makes them grits go down easier.””

Lucius Shepard book Green Eyes

Epilogue, p. 274
Green Eyes (1984)

World, Hope, Boy, Time

“In response to the plummeting popularity of the Administration itself, revealed at Newbury and in the shire county elections, we have the Prime Minister's botched reshuffle. If we were to offer that tale of events to the BBC light entertainment department as a script for a programme, I think that the producers of "Yes, Minister" would have turned it down as hopelessly over the top. It might have even been too much for "Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'em". The tragedy for us all is that it is really happening— it is fact, not fiction. The man with the non-Midas touch is in charge. It is no wonder that we live in a country where the Grand National does not start and hotels fall into the sea.”

John Smith (1938–1994) Labour Party leader from Scotland (1938-1994)

Hansard http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199293/cmhansrd/1993-06-09/Debate-1.html, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 226, col. 292. House of Commons speech, 9 June 1993. That year's Grand National horse race had been declared void after a start-line mishap. The Holbeck Hall Hotel in Scarborough began to fall into the sea on 3 June 1993 due to coastal erosion.

Thinking, Light, Sea, Country

“As the Knowledge of Nature tends to enlarge the human Mind, and give us more noble, more grand, and exalted Ideas of the AUTHOR of Nature, and if well pursu'd, seldom fails producing something useful to Man.”

Ebenezer Kinnersley (1711–1778) American scientist

Advertisement for his Course of Experiments in Electricity, 1751.

Idea, Nature, Knowledge

“I have sought, but I seek it vainly,
That one lost chord divine,
Which came from the soul of the Organ,
And entered into mine. It may be that Death's bright angel
Will speak in that chord again,
It may be that only in Heaven
I shall hear that grand Amen.”

Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–1864) English poet and songwriter

"A Lost Chord".
Legends and Lyrics: Second Series (1861)

Death, Angels, Soul

“We cannot tell when they will try to come; we cannot be sure that in fact they will come at all; but no one should blind himself to the fact that a heavy full-scale invasion of this Island is being prepared with all the usual German thoroughness and method, and that it may be launched at any time now. … Therefore, we must regard the next week or so as a very important week for us in our history. It ranks with the days of the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel, and Drake was finishing his game of bowls; or when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon's Grand Army at Boulogne. We have read all about this in the history books; but what is happening now is on a far greater scale and of far more consequence to the life and future of the world and its civilization than these brave old days of the past. Every man and every woman will therefore prepare himself to do his duty, whatever it may be, with special pride and care.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Broadcast (11 September 1940), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 778
The Second World War (1939–1945)

Life, Books, World, History

“I flatter my self to have demonstrated that, neither the Friendly Qualities and kind Affections that are natural to Man, nor the real Virtues he is capable of acquiring by Reason and Self-Denial, are the Foundation of Society; but that what we call Evil in this World, Moral as well as Natural, is the grand Principle that makes us sociable Creatures, the solid Basis, the Life and Support of all Trades and Employments without Exception: That there we must look for the true Origin of all Arts and Sciences, and that the Moment Evil ceases, the Society must be spoiled, if not totally dissolved.”

Bernard Mandeville book The Fable of the Bees

"A Search into the Nature of Society", p. 428
The Fable of the Bees (1714)

Life, World, Art, Support

“And here I hold that a liberal and brotherly welcome to all who are likely to come to the United States is the only wise policy which this nation can adopt. It has been thoughtfully observed that every nation, owing to its peculiar character and composition, has a definite mission in the world. What that mission is, and what policy is best adapted to assist in its fulfillment, is the business of its people and its statesmen to know, and knowing, to make a noble use of this knowledge. I need not stop here to name or describe the missions of other or more ancient nationalities. Our seems plain and unmistakable. Our geographical position, our relation to the outside world, our fundamental principles of government, world-embracing in their scope and character, our vast resources, requiring all manner of labor to develop them, and our already existing composite population, all conspire to one grand end, and that is, to make us the perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen. In whatever else other nations may have been great and grand, our greatness and grandeur will be found in the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds. We are not only bound to this position by our organic structure and by our revolutionary antecedents, but by the genius of our people. Gathered here from all quarters of the globe, by a common aspiration for national liberty as against caste, divine right govern and privileged classes, it would be unwise to be found fighting against ourselves and among ourselves, it would be unadvised to attempt to set up any one race above another, or one religion above another, or prescribe any on account of race, color or creed.”

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

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

People, World, Family, Faith

“Manuel Mercado Acosta is an indio from the mountains of Durango. His father operated a mescal distillery before the revolutionaries drove him out. He met my mother while riding a motorcycle in El Paso. Juana Fierro Acosta is my mother. She could have been a singer in a Juarez cantina but instead decided to be Manuel’s wife because he had a slick mustache, a fast bike and promised to take her out of the slums across from the Rio Grande. She had only one demand in return for the two sons and three daughters she would bear him: “No handouts. No relief. I never want to be on welfare.” I doubt he really promised her anything in a very loud, clear voice. My father was a horsetrader even though he got rid of both the mustache and the bike when FDR drafted him, a wetback, into the U. S. Navy on June 22, 1943. He tried to get into the Marines, but when they found out he was a good swimmer and a non-citizen they put him in a sailor suit and made him drive a barge in Okinawa. We lived in a two-room shack without a floor. We had to pump our water and use kerosene if we wanted to read at night. But we never went hungry. My old man always bought the pinto beans and the white flour for the tortillas in 100-pound sacks which my mother used to make dresses, sheets and curtains. We had two acres of land which we planted every year with corn, tomatoes and yellow chiles for the hot sauce. Even before my father woke us, my old ma was busy at work making the tortillas at 5:00 A. M. while he chopped the logs we’d hauled up from the river on the weekends.”

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 72.

Mountain, Business, Water, Reading

“We started off with this fairly grand concept of, if you were to tackle it at a children's level, eliminating war. What would you do?”

Jim Henson (1936–1990) American puppeteer

Henson on the motivation behind Fraggle Rock
Interview with Associated Press (1987)

War, Children

“I am particularly fond of [Emmanuel Mendes da Costa's] Natural History of Fossils because this treatise, more than any other work written in English, records a short episode expressing one of the grand false starts in the history of natural science—and nothing can be quite so informative and instructive as a juicy mistake.”

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

"The Clam Stripped Bare by Her Naturalists, Even", p. 93
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

History, Nature, Science, Falseness

“The manner in which time and space are bound up with each other in the four-dimensional continuum is variable. It is difficult to express this variability of the cross-connections between space and time in simple language, and different interpretations of it are possible, corresponding to different mathematical transformations of the fundamental line-element, e. g. a different choice of the variable which we interpret as "time." Perhaps the best way we can express it is by saying that the solution of the field-equations of the theory of relativity shows that there is in the universe a tendency to change its scale, which at the present time results in an expansion, but may perhaps at other times become, or have been, a shrinking. This is true of the grand scale model of the universe.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

Way, Mathematics, Universe, Change

“One great lesson that we can learn from its systematic absence in the work of the grand theorists is that every self-conscious thinker must at all times be aware of — and hence be able to control — the levels of abstraction on which he is working. The capacity to shuttle between levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is a signal mark of the imaginative and systematic thinker.”

C. Wright Mills book The Sociological Imagination

The Sociological Imagination (1959)

Imagination, Learning, Time

“I disagreed with the grand jury on [Tawana] Brawley. I believed there was enough evidence to go to trial. The grand jury said there wasn’t. OK, fine. Do I have a right to disagree with the grand jury? Many Americans believe O. J. Simpson was guilty. A jury said he wasn’t. So I have as much right to question a jury as they do. Does it make somebody a racist? No! They just disagreed with the jury. So did I.”

Al Sharpton (1954) American Baptist minister, civil rights activist, and television/radio talk show host

Interview by David Shankbone (3 December 2007).[citation needed]

Question

“Presently I shall be introduced as 'this venerable old gentleman' and the axe will fall when they raise me to the degree of 'grand old man'. That means on our continent any one with snow-white hair who has kept out of jail till eighty.”

Stephen Leacock (1869–1944) writer and economist

On achieving fame in Canada.
Source: Three Score and Ten

“Friendship is one of the grand fundamental principles of "Mormonism"; [it is designed] to revolutionize and civilize the world, and cause wars and contentions to cease and men to become friends and brothers.”

Joseph Smith, Jr. book History of the Church

History of the Church, 5:517 (23 July 1843)
1840s

Men, Friendship, War, World

“The United States Senate has been hijacked by the Democratic leadership. Once again, it shows the Democrats use scare tactics. They have no convictions, they have no principles, they have no ideas. But this is the ultimate. Since I've been majority leader, I'll have to say, not with the previous Democratic leader or the current Democratic leader have ever I been slapped in the face with such an affront to the leadership of this grand institution.”

Bill Frist (1952) physician, businessman, and politician

On the closing of the Senate by Minority Leader Harry Reid, November 1, 2005.
[http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,174187,00.html Senate Goes Into Rare Closed Session, Fox News, November 1, 2005.

Idea