Quotes about half (2503 quotes, page 16)

“On those shoulders of the garden, August’s unkempt and harridan luxuriance had expanded into silent hollows of enormous burdocks, holding sway with their flaps of shaggy, leafy tin plate, straggling tongues of fleshy green. Those distended rag dolls of burdocks bulged there like peasant women sitting around half-devoured by their own crazy skirts.”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“August” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/shops/august1.htm
His father, Living things

Women

“We can now determine, easily and relatively cheaply, the detailed chemical architecture of genes; and we can trace the products of these genes (enzymes and proteins) as they influence the course of embryology. In so doing we have made the astounding discovery that all complex animal phyla - arthropods and vertebrates in particular - have retained, despite their half-billion years of evolutionary independence, an extensive set of common genetic blueprints for building bodies.”

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

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 330
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Animals

“The worst thing to happen to the Jews since Mein Kampf…I can't look at it. It's so horrible. The Israelis that helped make this film were crooks. They never gave us the negative back, they never gave us statements — not that the film was worth anything…The lesson for Big Gus for young people is: Don't listen to anybody. We got lots of advice on that film from older, more experienced people. But the film stunk; it's a disgrace. What you saw was made from a half-inch video that somebody from Israel brought to us…The movie opened in Tel Aviv, but it opened the week of the Seven-Day War. So bombs were raining down outside, but we had a bomb inside the movie theater.”

Lloyd Kaufman (1945) American film director

Village Voice http://www.villagevoice.com/2014-01-15/film/troma-lloyd-kaufman-interview/ January 15, 2014
2014

War , People , Help

“Arab sovereignty in Jerusalem just cannot be. This city will not be divided — not half and half, not 60-40, not 75-25, nothing.”

Golda Meir (1898–1978) former prime minister of Israel

Time (19 February 1973)

“The passing-place for trains is fixed and determined, with orders positive and defined that neither shall proceed beyond that point until after the arrival of the other; whereas, in the absence of the telegraph, conductors are governed by general rules, and their individual understanding of the same,—which rules are generally to the effect, that, in case of detention, the train arriving first at the regular passing-place shall, after waiting a few moments, proceed cautiously (expecting to meet the other train, which is generally running as much faster, to make up lost time, as the cautious train is slower) until they have met and passed; the one failing to reach the half-way point between stations being required to back,—a dangerous expedient always,—an example of which operation was furnished at the disaster on the Camden and Amboy Railroad near Burlington; the delayed train further being subjected to the same rule in regard to all other trains of the same class it may meet, thus pursuing its hazardous and uncertain progress during the entire trip.”

Daniel McCallum (1815–1878) Canadian engineer and early organizational theorist

Source: Report of the Superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad to the Stockholders (1856), p. 49: Cited in: "Railway Engineering in the United States" in The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 13, November, 1858. p. 651-2

Way , Understanding , Time , Waiting

“Unfortunately for the modern dramatist, during the past century and a half the public realm has been less and less of a realm where human deeds are done, and more and more of a realm of mere human behavior. The contemporary dramatist has lost his natural subject.”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"Genius & Apostle", p. 435
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

Behavior , Nature , Past

“We talk about world peace. Peace needs to be in the heart of every human being because that is where it belongs. The world would not have half its problems if we understood what we need to understand within us. I come with no solution to the world's problems. I come with nothing new to tell you. Instead, I come to tell you one of the things you have known for the longest time. That which you are looking for, that which you love and admire, is within you.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Wembley Stadium, England, June 22, 1997
1990s

Love , World , Peace , Understanding

“And that one hunting, which the Devil design'd
For one fair female, lost him half the kind.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Theodore and Honoria, line 227.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Until such time that computers at least match human intelligence in every dimension, it will always remain possible for skeptics to say the glass is half empty. Every new achievement of AI can be dismissed by pointing out other goals that have not yet been accomplished. Indeed, this is the frustration of the AI practitioner: once an AI goal is achieved, it is no longer considered as falling within the realm of AI and become instead just a useful general technique. AI is thus often regarded as the set of problems that have not yet been solved.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

Source: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005), p. 441

Intelligence , Problem , Time

“Half of confidence is the appearance of confidence.”

Glen Cook Dreams of Steel

Source: Dreams of Steel (1990), Chapter 17 (p. 287)

Confidence , Appearance

“Short of climbing aboard a time capsule and peeling back eight and one-half decades, James Cameron's magnificent Titanic is the closest any of us will get to walking the decks of the doomed ocean liner. Meticulous in detail, yet vast in scope and intent, Titanic is the kind of epic motion picture event that has become a rarity. You don't just watch Titanic, you experience it — from the launch to the sinking, then on a journey two and one-half miles below the surface, into the cold, watery grave where Cameron has shot never-before seen documentary footage specifically for this movie.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/movies/t/titanic.html of Titanic (1997).
Four star reviews

Time

“Oh I’m on my way I know I am,
But times there were when I thought not
Bleeding half my soul in bad company,
I thank the moon I had the strength to stop”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

Sitting
Song lyrics, Catch Bull at Four (1972)

Way , Soul , Time

“One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore, for instance, and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

“Confessions of a Wild Bore” in Assorted Prose (1965)

People , Time , Patience

“In the last fifteen days of the war, my Fifth and Seventh Air Forces flew 6,732 sorties against Kyushu alone. Thus, with a deafening roar of blasting bombs, Kenney's Far East air forces culminated their blows against Japan. During the last seven and a half months of the war, their planes destroyed 2,846,932 tons of shipping and 1,375 enemy aircraft, dropped 100,000 tons of bombs, and flew over 150,00 sorties.”

Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) U.S. Army general of the army, field marshal of the Army of the Philippines

Source: Reminiscences (1964), p. 265

War

“It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that evolution is a fact, not theory, and that what is at issue within biology are questions of details of the process and the relative importance of different mechanisms of evolution. It is a fact that the earth, with liquid water, is more than 3.6 billion years old. It is a fact that cellular life has been around for at least half of that period and that organized multicellular life is at least 800 million years old. It is a fact that major life forms now on earth were not at all represented in the past. There were no birds or mammals 250 million years ago. It is a fact that major life forms of the past are no longer living. There used to be dinosaurs and Pithecanthropus, and there are none now. It is a fact that all living forms come from previous living forms. Therefore, all present forms of life arose from ancestral forms that were different. Birds arose from nonbirds and humans from nonhumans. No person who pretends to any understanding of the natural world can deny these facts any more than she or he can deny that the earth is round, rotates on its axis, and revolves around the sun. The controversies about evolution lie in the realm of the relative importance of various forces in molding evolution.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

" Evolution/Creation Debate: A Time for Truth http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content/31/8/local/ed-board.pdf", BioScience volume 31 (1981), p. 559; Reprinted in J. Peter Zetterberg, editor, Evolution versus Creationism, Oryx Press, Phoenix, Arizona, 1983.

Life , Lie , World , Understanding

“… Practical people have little idea of the practical ability required to write a large book, and especially a large history. Long before you get to the pen, there is an immensity of pure business: heaps of material are strewn every where; but they lie in disorder, unread, uncatalogued, unknown. It seems a dreary waste of life to be analysing, indexing, extracting works and passages, in which one per cent of the contents are interesting, and not half of that per centage will ultimately appear in the flowing narrative.”

Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) British journalist, businessman, and essayist

[ART. I—Edward Gibbon, National Review, 2, January 1856, 1–42, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433081643169;view=1up;seq=41] (quote p. 29)
Edward Gibbon (1856)

Life , People , Lie , Books

“The United States of America will become the United States of Banana. And Puerto Rico will be the first half-and-half banana republic state incorporated that will secede from the union. Then will come Liberty Island, then Mississippi Burning, Texas BBQ, Kentucky Fried Chicken—all of them—New York Yankees, Jersey Devils—you name it—will want to break apart—and demand a separation—a divorce. Things will not go well for the banana republic when the shackles and chains of democracy break loose and unleash the dogs of war. Separation—divorce—disintegration of subject matters that don’t matter anymore—only verbs—actions. Americans will walk like chickens with their heads cut off.”

Giannina Braschi book United States of Banana

United States of Banana (2011)

War , Dogs , Democracy

“Jacques Bertin's books Semiology of Graphics and Graphics and Graphic Information Processing have been stimuli for my own thinking about the representation and analysis of geographic information. I have also used both books as core readings for graduate seminars and they have generated lively discussion and prompted innovative research. I often ask graduate students to consider how cartographic research and practice in the U. S. might be different today if the English edition of Semiology of Graphics had appeared in 1967 (when it was published in French), rather than in 1983. I know that my own work would have been dramatically different if I had encountered these ideas a decade and a half sooner.”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

Alan MacEachren (2000) " An evolving cognitive-semiotic approach to geographic visualization and knowledge construction http://www.geovista.psu.edu/storage/alan/amm_InfoDesign.pdf"

Books , Idea , Thinking , Appearance

“The enormous and half-educated publics of present-day England and America… acclaim as masterpieces books that are soon forgotten, while ignoring all that is exquisite and rare.”

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

“Fine Writing,” p. 308
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

Books , Education

“The first machine of Papin was very similar to the gunpowder-engine… of Huyghens. In place of gunpowder, a small quantity of water is placed at the bottom of the cylinder, A; a fire is built beneath it, "the bottom being made of very thin metal," and the steam formed soon raises the piston, B, to the top where a latch, E, engaging a notch in latch engaging the piston rod, H, holds it up until it is desired that it shall drop. The fire being removed, the steam condenses, and a vacuum is formed below the piston, and the latch, E, being disengaged, the piston is driven down by the superincumbent atmosphere and raises the weight which has been, meantime, attached to a rope… passing from the piston rod over pulleys… The machine had a cylinder two and a half inches in diameter, and raised 60 pounds once a minute; and Papin calculated that a machine of a little more than two feet diameter of cylinder and of four feet stroke would raise 8,000 pounds four feet per minute—i. e., that it would yield about one horse-power.”

Robert Henry Thurston (1839–1903) mechanical engineer

Robert Henry Thurston, A History of the Growth of the Steam-engine https://books.google.com/books?id=VDgOAAAAYAAJ (1878) Parts 1-2, pp. 50-51

Water , Horse

“Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved alongside each other over millions of years, both reproducing after their own kind before the ability to physically have sex evolved. They did this through "asexuality" ("without sexual desire or activity or lacking any apparent sex or sex organs"). Each of them split in half.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

Sexes without sex
Atheist Central
2008-12-01
http://raycomfortfood.blogspot.com/2008/12/sexs-without-sex.html
2011-10-21

Sex

“I'm drinking Jack and I started blacking out. You ever black out? Or as I call it, time travel? You ever do that? Oh yeah! You know how it is -- you're drinking, you black out. You wake up, you're in another bar. You're drinking, you black out. You wake up, you're playing that knife game with a half-Indian somewhere in North Dakota, "Yeah! Yeah! Winner fixes the tranny! Yeah". You're drinking, you black out. You wake up, you're in White Castle -- working there 3 years, STILL not assistant manager. Your buddies tell you to quit, but you can't 'cause you're banging the slow girl on the fry-o-later. They say she's a little retarded, but those titties ain't retarded!”

Dave Attell (1965) comedian

Comedy Central Presents: Dave Attell

Travel , Girl , Game , Drink

“I woke up in the middle of the night with the sound of heavy explosion. It was deep at night. I do not remember what time it was. I just remember the sound was so heavy and so very shocking. Everything in my room was shaking -- my heart, my windows, my bed, everything. I looked out the windows and I saw a full half-circle of explosion. I thought it was just like the movies, but the movies had not conveyed them in the powerful image that I was seeing full of bright red and orange and gray, and a full circle of explosion. And I kept on staring at it until it disappeared. I went back to my bed, and I prayed, and I secretly thanked God that that missile did not land on my family's home, that it did not kill my family that night. Thirty years have passed, and I still feel guilty about that prayer, for the next day, I learned that that missile landed on my brother's friend's home and killed him and his father, but did not kill his mother or his sister. His mother showed up the next week at my brother's classroom and begged seven-year-old kids to share with her any picture they may have of her son, for she had lost everything.”

Zainab Salbi (1969) Iraqi American author, women's rights activist

Speech at TEDGlobal 2010

God , Family , Feeling , Home

“In an earlier day, the rich lived at the expense of the poor, directly and unequivocally; in a modern economy, unproductive citizens increasingly live at the expense of productive ones—though in an equivocal way, since they are told, and believe, that they are disadvantaged and deserve more still. Today, in fact, a good half of the population of every modern nation is made up of people with little or no income, who are exempt from taxes and live, to a large extent, off the other half of the population, which pays taxes. If such a situation were to be radicalized, it could give rise to massive social conflict. The eminently plausible free-market thesis of exploitation by the unproductive would then have prevailed over the much less promising socialist thesis of the exploitation of labor by capital.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

The Grasping Hand (2010)

People , Way

“This is the part where I tell you guys that my first car was a Corvette that I got for, like, half price or something and you all hate me forever.”

Brian Clevinger (1978) writer

http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=051115

Hate , Cars , Guy , Parting

“… it seems that it would take less than half a million years to evolve a good camera eye … It's no wonder "the" eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom … It is a geological blink.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

River out of Eden (1995)

Time , Animals

“Almost half of the bankruptcies in the United States are connected to an illness in the family, whether people had health insurance or not. Middle-class Americans, who had the misfortune of either experiencing a medical emergency themselves or watching a family member suffer, were then forced to face the daunting task of pulling themselves out of debt. Bankruptcy law has allowed them to start over. It has given hope. Now this new law will put people on their own. Illness or emergency creates medical bills. We are telling the people that they themselves are to blame. At the same time, we are removing protections that would stay an eviction, that would keep a roof over the head of a working family. We allow the credit industry to trick consumers into using subprime cards, with exorbitant interest rate hikes and fees. Then we hand those same consumers over to an unforgiving prison of debt, to be put on a rack of insolvency and squeezed dry by the credit card industry. We are protecting the profits of the credit card industry instead of protecting the economic future of the American people. Americans are left on their own. That's what this Administration's "Ownership Society" is all about — you're on your own — and your ship is sinking.”

Dennis Kucinich (1946) Ohio politician

Speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, Congressional Record (14 April, 2005) http://frwebgate5.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/waisgate.cgi?WAISdocID=240761331899+3+0+0&WAISaction=retrieve.

People , Health , Family , Law

“Perhaps no Australian politician, to this day, has made such a mark for so long on the global stage as Hughes achieved in the first half of 1919.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

The Story of Australia's People: The Rise and Rise of a New Australia (2016)

“Sir, pay no attention to the people who say the glass is half empty, because 32% means it's 2/3 empty. There's still some liquid in that glass, is my point. But I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

White House Correspondents' Association Dinner (2006)

People , Drink

“Suetonius, in holding up a mirror to those Caesars of diverting legend, reflects not only them but ourselves: half-tamed creatures, whose great moral task is to hold in balance the angel and the monster within – for we are both, and to ignore this duality is to invite disaster.”

Sueton (70–126) Roman historian

Gore Vidal, On Our Own Now (London, 1976), p. 72.
Criticism

Angels

“In testimony of the respect in which his memory is held by the Government and people of the United States, I do hereby direct that the flags of the White House and of the several Departmental buildings be displayed at half staff for a period of thirty days, and that suitable military and naval honors under orders of the Secretary of War and of the Secretary of the Navy may be rendered on the day of the funeral.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Proclamation Upon the Death of Woodrow Wilson (1924)

War , People , Memory , Housing

“Probably some ninety-nine out of every hundred of our gifted souls, who have to seek a career for themselves, go this beaver road. Whereby the first half-result, national wealth namely, is plentifully realized; and only the second half, or wisdom to guide it, is dreadfully behindhand.”

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

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

Wisdom , Soul , Wealth

“While I thus cogitate in disquiet and perplexity, half submerged in dark waters of a well in an Arabian oasis, I suddenly hear a voice from the background of my memory, the voice of an old Kurdish nomad: If water stands motionless in a pool it grows stale and muddy, but when it moves and flows it becomes clear: so, too, man in his wanderings. Whereupon, as if by magic, all disquiet leaves me. I begin to look upon myself with distant eyes, as you might look at the pages of a book to read a story from them; and I begin to understand that my life could not have taken a different course. For when I ask myself, 'What is the sum total of my life?' somthing in me seems to answer, 'You have set out to exchange one world for another-to gain a new world for yourself in exchange for an old one which you never really possessed.”

Muhammad Asad book The Road to Mecca

And I know with startling clarity that such an undertaking might indeed take an entire lifetime.
Page 48.
The Road to Mecca (1954)

Life , Books , World , Understanding

“A skilful leech is better far
Than half an hundred men of war,
So he appear'd; and by his skill,
No less than dint of sword, cou'd kill.”

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

Source: Hudibras, Part I (1663–1664)

Men , War

“For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1996)

Time

“As Tarzan grew he made more rapid strides, so that by the time he was ten years old he was an excellent climber, and on the ground could do many wonderful things which were beyond the powers of his little brothers and sisters.
In many ways did he differ from them, and they often marveled at his superior cunning, but in strength and size he was deficient; for at ten the great anthropoids were fully grown, some of them towering over six feet in height, while little Tarzan was still but a half-grown boy.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 5 : The White Ape

Way , Boy , Sister , Time

“This country is a one-party country. Half of it is called Republican and half is called Democrat. It doesn't make any difference. All the really good ideas belong to the Libertarians.”

Hugh Downs (1921) American broadcaster

1997

Idea , Country

“I told you so. Seems like I'm out here a lot saying that to you people, right? I know it seems like a lot, but the truth is i said that i would beat Jeff, and i did. I told you so. I said that i would get rid of Jeff Hardy FOREVER, and i did. I told you so. And then i said i would make The Undertaker tap out to the Anaconda Vice, and you laughed! But then i did just that. And contrary to what you people believe, i didn't come out here to brag about becoming the first and ONLY man in history to make the Phenom, The Undertaker, tap out. I came out here to confront The Undertaker. I came out here to confront The Undertaker in MY ring, or my yard, if you will. I came out here to stick MY World Heavyweight Championship in his face, and look him in the eye, and say to him, I TOLD YOU SO! But, of course, he's conveniently not here right now, so instead, i think i'll address all of you people. It's come to my attention that you people think I have been preaching to you. Alright, we'll call a space a spade. The truth is, YES i have. Because you people need a good preaching to. You people need somebody you can look up to, you need a leader who isn't morally corrupt, and you need someone that's righteous, not self-righteous. And i know what your all gonna do next, your gonna do exactly what your hero, the Undertaker, did, your gonna give up! Hell, by the looks at half of you, you already have. I mean, what kind of life is it that you live? What kind of existence do you have where you wake up in the morning and you have to pop a pill to help crawl out of bed? And then, then you ravage your body with pitchers of beer, and that's supposed to somehow heal your broken self-worth. And then you just make excuses about inhaling poison into your lungs just to calm your nerves. And then, at the end of your sad, pathetic, lonely day, your in need of another pill to make you forget everything. You need a pill to help you sleep. (The crowd boos as Punk mouths "you make me sick") You are all just a legion of inebriated zombies, waiting in line at the pharmacy with your hand out, begging and pleading for that newest anti-depressant that you think is going to put an artificial smile on your face. You scratch and you claw for scapegoats for all of your inadequacies, and believe me, you have a LOT of inadequacies. And don't tell me that you self medicate yourself to forget about it all, don't tell me you don't self medicate to hide from all your inadequacies, don't tell me you don't do it. Because if you do, well then your a liar too. Your lying to yourself, your lying to yourselves right now. Your lying to the person next to you, you go home and you lie to your family, and it's insulting because right now your lying to ME. And i can see right through all of you people and your lies, because i am not a liar. I am a man who means what he says and says what he means. What i am is a prophet, i am the choice of a new generation, i am a champion that everybody can finally be proud of, i am the first and only straight-edge World Heavyweight Champion in history. And if your not straight-edge like me, well, that just means i'm better than you!”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

September 18, 2009
Friday Night SmackDown

Life , People , Truth , Lie

“If it's entirely a numbers game – numeric representation – then obviously you'd be talking to half the people in Hong Kong [that] earn less than US$1,800 a month [the median wage in HK]. You would end up with that kind of politics and policies.”

Leung Chun-ying (1954) Hong Kong politician

2014
Source: Hong Kong Leader Reaffirms Unbending Stance on Elections, The New York Times, Keith Bradsher and Chris Buckley, 20 October 2014, October 2014 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/21/world/asia/leung-chun-ying-hong-kong-china-protests.html,
Source: Hong Kong 'lucky' China has not stopped protests, says CY Leung, Financial Times, Josh Noble and Julie Zhu, 20 October 2014, October 2014 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3f6f1c74-584b-11e4-a31b-00144feab7de.html,
Source: ‘Be more like sheep’: Seven dumb things said by Hong Kong’s leader CY Leung, 18 February 2015, The Daily Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/11420654/Be-more-like-sheep-Seven-dumb-things-said-by-Hong-Kongs-leader-CY-Leung.html,

People , Game

“Yet I also appreciate that we cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well—for we will not fight to save what we do not love (but only appreciate in some abstract sense). So let them all continue—the films, the books, the television programs, the zoos, the little half acre of ecological preserve in any community, the primary school lessons, the museum demonstrations, even […] the 6:00 A. M. bird walks. Let them continue and expand because we must have visceral contact in order to love. We really must make room for nature in our hearts.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Unenchanted Evening", p. 40
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

Love , Books , School , Communication

“The captain is different too, Cyana. Before, the Roc flew under half a man, a man who’d only known victory. Now I’m a whole man. I know defeat as well.”

Samuel R. Delany book Nova

Source: Nova (1968), Chapter 5 (p. 142)

Victory

“Nearly one-third of the population has persistent or recurrent chronic pain—and of those, one-half to two-thirds are either partially or totally disabled for periods of days, weeks, or months, and sometimes permanently.”

John Bonica (1917–1994) Anesthesiologist; pioneer in pain management

As quoted by Melinda Blau, "Conquering Pain: New Treatments, New Hope," New York Magazine (Mar 22, 1982)

Pain

“This was a new generation but now that they are all grown up, probably fathers and grandfathers but at that time, this concept (of a nation) was not even part of the imagination of adults, let alone children. So the best way to create a nation is to start from the schools. Once this is embodied and thinking by pure repetition everyday, that becomes part of the psyche of the people. So let me tell you if you are a Singaporean - two and a half million - no place to run - no more. Whether you are a Singapore Chinese, Singapore Malay and Singapore Indian, you cannot run away. This is your last stand, last outpost. So how do you do it? If you think of yourself as Chinese, Malays, Indians and Sri Lankans, then Singapore will collapse. You must think of Singapore - this is my country. I fight and die for Singapore if necessary.”

Sinnathamby Rajaratnam (1915–2006) Early life

undated

Children , People , School , Way

“In late 1989, the profound transformation that took place in this country brought me here to Prague Castle. It all happened so suddenly that I did not even have time to properly consider whether or not I was up to the task, and I was sincerely of the opinion that I would just take it on for a few months until the first free elections.
Clearly, things turned out quite differently: I have now been here for more than thirteen years, if we discount the short break in the latter half of 1992.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

Farewell Address (2003)

Time , Sincerity , Country

“The Israeli people are actually incredible. Even with world opinion beating down upon them. They’re not broken. You know, for the most part, they don’t care. You know, they need to be protected and again I’m amazed by the courage that I see in the people.
To be honest with you. I don’t think that journalists should be anywhere allowed war. I mean you guys report where our troops are at. You report what’s happening day today. You make a big deal out of it. I think its asinine. I like back in World War I and World War II when you’d go to the theatre and you’d see your troops, on a, on the screen, and everyone would be real excited and happy for them. Now everyone’s got an opinion and wants to down our, down soldiers, you know, American soldiers, Israeli soldiers; And I think media should be abolished, from ah, you know, reporting. War is hell. And if you’re going to sit there and say look at this atrocity. Well, you don’t know the full story behind it half the time. So I think the media should have no business in it.”

Joe the Plumber (1973) American conservative activist and commentator

"Joe Plumber: Media Shouldn't Report War" Associated Press report (11 January 2009) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJYCxj8KXjQ&feature=related.

War , People , World , Guy

“He has called on the best that was in us. There was no such thing as half-trying. Whether it was running a race or catching a football, competing in school—we were to try. And we were to try harder than anyone else. We might not be the best, and none of us were, but we were to make the effort to be the best. "After you have done the best you can", he used to say, "the hell with it."”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

Tribute to his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, read at Joseph Kennedy's funeral by Senator Ted Kennedy, November 20, 1969. Reported in Congressional Record (25 November 1969), vol. 115, p. 35877

School , Hell , Effort , Football

“With perhaps 4 million illegal aliens having broken in in Bush's five-and-a-half years in office, and our border states being daily breached by thousands more, can anyone say President Bush has protected the states of this Union against that invasion? In an earlier America, this dereliction of constitutional duty would have called forth articles of impeachment.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2000s, State of Emergency (2006)

“After three days we reached land, and for twenty-eight days journeyed through uninhabited country, and the food ran out and hunger overtook them; and one day the steersman began saying: "Why is it, Christian? You say your God is great and all-powerful; then why can you not pray for us? For we may perish of hunger; it is unlikely indeed that we shall ever see another human being." In fact, I said to them, confidently: "Be converted by faith with all your heart to my Lord God, because nothing is impossible for him, so that today he will send food for you on your road, until you be sated, because everywhere he abounds." And with God's help this came to pass; and behold, a herd of swine appeared on the road before our eyes, and they slew many of them, and remained there for two nights, and the were full of their meat and well restored, for many of them had fainted and would otherwise have been left half dead by the wayside. And after this they gave the utmost thanks to God, and I was esteemed in their eyes, and from that day they had food abundantly.”

Saint Patrick (385–461) 5th-century Romano-British Christian missionary and bishop in Ireland

The Confession (c. 452?)

Hunger , God , Faith , Food

“There's at least half a billion dollars [worth] of baseball players in Cuba right now and probably a lot more.”

Joe Kehoskie (1973) American baseball agent

On the amount of baseball talent in Cuba, from the Vanity Fair article "Commie Ball: A Journey to the End of a Revolution" http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/07/cuban_baseball200807 by Michael Lewis (July 2008)

“I was an Editor-in-Chief of Philosophy of Science during its early years. Now, over a half century later, I have to admit that I was not very clear what the journal was about, except that it tried to reflect on the meaning of science and its relation to other human activities. At this time I am even less sure of its purposes.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

C. West Churchman "Guest editorial: what is philosophy of science" In: Philosophy of Science Vol. 61, No. 1 (Mar., 1994), p. 132-141
1980s and later

Science , Time

“My object in supporting this Motion is, that I may bring to bear upon the legislation of this House those virtues and that talent which have characterised the middle and industrious classes of this country. If you talk of your aristocracy and your traditions, and compel me to talk of the middle and industrious classes, I say it is to them that the glory of this country is owing. You have had your government of aristocracy and tradition; and the worst thing in this country has been its government for the last century and a half. All that has been done to elevate the country has been the work of the middle and industrious classes. Whether in literature, in arts, in science, in commerce, or in enterprise—all has been done by the middle and industrious classes; and it is because I wish to bring their virtue, intelligence, industry, and frugality, to bear upon the proceedings of this House, that I support the Motion of the hon. Member for Montrose.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1848/jul/06/national-representation-adjourned-debate in the House of Commons (6 July 1848) in favour of a Reform Bill that would have extended the vote to middle class men.
1840s

Art , Intelligence , Literature , Support

“When something dies, it is usually disassembled, digested, and decomposed. Only rarely is anything ever fossilized, and even fewer things are very well-preserved. Because the conditions required for that process are so particular, the fossil record can only represent a tiny fraction of everything that has ever lived. Darwin provided many environmental dynamics explaining why no single quarry could ever provide a continuous record of biological events, and why it would be impossible to find all the fossilized ancestors of every lineage. But despite this, he predicted that future generations, -having the benefit of better understanding- would discover a substantial number of fossil species which he called “intermediate” or “transitional” between what we see alive today and their taxonomic ancestors at successive levels in paleontological history. In fact, in the century-and-a-half since then, we’ve found millions of evolutionary intermediaries in the fossil record, much more than Darwin said he could reasonably hope for. There are three different types of transitional forms and we have ample examples of each. But creationists still insist that we’ve never found a single one, because what they usually ask us to present are impossible parodies which evolution would neither produce nor permit.”

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

"9th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfoje7jVJpU, Youtube (May 8, 2008)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Hope , History , Understanding , Success

“It is a war of ideologies and struggle races. On one side stands National Socialism: ideology, founded on the values of our Germanic, Nordic blood. It is worth the world as we want to see: beautiful, orderly, fair, socially, a world that may be, still suffers some flaws, but overall a happy, beautiful world filled with culture, which is precisely Germany. On the other side stands the 180 millionth people, a mixture of races and peoples, whose names are unpronounceable, and whose physical nature is such that the only thing that they can do - is to shoot without pity or mercy. These animals, which are subjected to torture and ill-treatment of each prisoner from our side, which do not have medical care they captured our wounded, as do the decent men, you will see them for yourself. These people have joined a Jewish religion, one ideology, called Bolshevism, with the task of: having now Russian, half [located] in Asia, parts of Europe, crush Germany and the world. When you, my friends, are fighting in the East, you keep that same fight against the same subhumans, against the same inferior races that once appeared under the name of Huns, and later - 1,000 years ago during the time of King Henry and Otto I, - the name of the Hungarians, and later under the name of Tatars, and then they came again under the name of Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Today they are called Russian under the political banner of Bolshevism.”

Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) Nazi officer, Commander of the SS

Heinrich Himmler speaking in Stettin to soldiers of the SS (13 July 1941)
1940s

Men , War , People , World

“Nature has time without limit, but man has immediate need for better and still better food, houses and clothing, and our present state of civilization depends largely upon the improvements of plants and animals which have consciously and half-consciously been made by man, and future civilization must more and more depend upon scientific efforts to this end.”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

How Plants are Trained to Work for Man (1921) Vol. 1 Plant Breeding

Food , Nature , Effort , Time

“Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. challenged the underlying premise of prevailing Civil War scholarship. The South, he pointed out, had shown no evidence of a willingness to end slavery; indeed, over time it had become ever more hysterical in its defense. With one eye firmly on the recent past, Schlesinger insisted that a society closed in support of evil could not be appeased, and if it was worth a war to destroy Nazism, surely it was worth one to eradicate slavery. But not until the 1960s, under the impact of the civil rights revolution, did historians en masse repudiate a half-century of Civil War scholarship, concluding that the war resulted from an irreconcilable conflict between two fundamentally different societies, one resting on slavery, the other on free labor. Historians pushed Emancipation to the center of their account of the Civil War, and it has remained there ever since.”

Eric Foner (1943) American historian

"The Civil War in 'Postracial' America" https://web.archive.org/web/20111001073757/http://ericfoner.com/articles/101011nation.html (10 October 2011), The Nation
2010s

War , Support , Evil , Time

“The Kantian philosophy is no more than at best a half-secularized version of such a theocratic ethics, with “Reason” in the place of God. This does not amount to much more than a change of names.”

Raymond Geuss (1946) British philosopher

“Liberalism and its Discontents,” p. 20.
Outside Ethics (2005)

God , Change

“He has wasted the day, he tells himself, he has wasted the day as he has wasted so many days of his life … while that huge work with which he has cheated himself, that enormous novel which would lift him at a bound from the impasse in which he stifles, whose dozens of characters would develop a vision of life in bountiful complexity, lies foundering, rotting on a beach of purposeless effort. Notes here, pages there, it sprawls through a formless wreck of incidental ideas and half-episodes; utterly without shape. He is not even a hero for it.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Source: The Man Who Studied Yoga (1956), Ch. 5

Life , Idea , Effort , Cheating

“Well, it's New Year's now but I don't feel that way anymore. I wonder if you do either. Something's happening to me. It's like I'm shrinking smaller and smaller and I can't stop it. There's just so much wrong that I can't imagine the shame in admitting even the tiniest part of it. When you left it was like there was this huge gap to fill, but instead of spreading wide enough to do it I just fell right in, and I'm still falling. Like I'm half-asleep, and I can't wake up, can't wake up….”

Sarah Dessen book Dreamland

Dreamland (2000)

Way , Feeling , Imagination , Parting

“Of which liberalism does one wish to speak? I distinguish two principal forms of liberalism. For one…liberty is a right; for the other a duty. For one it is a gift; for the other a conquest… One liberalism conceives liberty rooted in the individual, and therefore opposes the individual to the State, a State understood as possessing no intrinsic value—but exclusively serving the well being and the improvement of the individual. The State is seen as a means, not an end. It limits itself to the maintenance of public order, excluding itself from the entirety of spiritual life—which, therefore, remains exclusively a sphere restricted to the individual conscience. That liberalism, historically, is classical liberalism—of English manufacture. It is, we must recognize, a false liberalism, containing only half the truth. It was opposed among us by Mazzini with a criticism, that I maintain, is immortal. But there is another liberalism, that matured in Italian and German thought, that holds entirely absurd this view of the antagonism between the State and the individual.”

Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) Italian neo-Hegelian Idealist philosopher and politician

Che cosa è il fascismo: Discorsi e polemiche (“What is Fascism?”), Florence: Vallecchi, (1925) pp. 42-45, 47-48, 49-51, 56,Origins and Doctrine of Fascism, A. James Gregor, translator and editor, Transaction Publishers, 2003, p. 63

Life , Truth , Falseness

“To me it seems perhaps
Kropotkin understood half
of what we need to know,
and Lenin perhaps
knew half, and true revolution … true revolution
must put these two halves together?”

Denise Levertov (1923–1997) Poet

Conversation in Moscow

“The first half-dozen or so will be nice, but after that, I'm going to want a pro. (Referring to the Muslim concept of achieving 72 virgins upon arrival in heaven).”

Dennis Miller (1953) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actor

The Raw Feed (2003)

“Or call up him that left half told
The story of Cambuscan bold.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Source: Il Penseroso (1631), Line 109

“4970. They say so, is half a Lie.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Lie

“He took particular delight in neutralizing those who desperately needed to be neutralized, those overblown, self-important, arrogant half-wits who were always running about dictating behavior, morals, and theology to everyone else. And he never looked back.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Deepsix (2001), Chapter 11 (p. 180)

Behavior

“Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45°, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered throughout the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose? Or was it only the mirror world that counted; only a promise of a kind that the inward bow of a nose-bridge or a promontory of extra cartilage at the chin meant a reversal of ill fortune such that the world of the altered would thenceforth run on mirror-time; work and love by mirror-light and be only, till death stopped the heart's ticking (metronome's music) quietly as light ceases to vibrate, an imp's dance under the century's own chandeliers….”

Thomas Pynchon book V.

Source: V. (1963), Chapter Two, Part I

Love , Death , World , Music

“According to a recent Gallup poll, nearly half of all Marylanders would leave the state if they could. As a lifelong Marylander who loves this state – that just breaks my heart.”

Larry Hogan (1956) American politician

" State of the State Address: A New Direction for Maryland http://governor.maryland.gov/2015/02/04/state-of-the-state-address/" (4 February 2015)

Love , Heart

“There ought to be but one large art warehouse in the world, to which the artist could carry his art-works, and from which he could carry away whatever he needed. As it is, one must be half a tradesman.”

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770–1827) German Romantic composer

Conversations (January 1801)

World , Art

“(In 1985, Jordan broke his foot and the management, namely Jerry Krause, wanted to limit his return for fear of worsening the injury - the idea was to play seven minutes in each half) The [Bulls] came up with this whole theory you can play seven minutes a game when I'm practicing two hours a day… I didn’t agree with that math. I wanted to play. I wanted to make the playoffs. […] Jerry [Reinsdorf] said, "Let me ask if you had a headache and" - there was a 10 percent chance then I’d reinjure my ankle - "and you've got 10 tablets and one of them is coated with cyanide, would you take it?" I looked at him and said, "How bad is the headache?" Jerry looked at me and said, "I guess that's a good answer, you can go back and play."”

Michael Jordan (1963) American retired professional basketball player and businessman

Hall of Fame induction address, 2009 http://www.nba.com/bulls/news/jordanhof_speech_090912.html

Fear , Game , Idea , Chance

“The issue [Israeli-Palestinian conflict], already lasting more than half a century, has brought deep suffering to the Palestinian people and remains an important reason of extended turbulence in the Middle East region.”

Xi Jinping (1953) General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and paramount leader of China

As quoted in "China rebukes Israel ahead of Netanyahu visit" http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/07/world/asia/china-israel-talks/index.html?hpt=hp_t2 in cnn.com (7 May 2013).
2010s

People , Suffering

“Some have half-baked ideas because their ideals are not heated up enough.”

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 69

Idea

“The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter II, Section III, p. 19

War , Wealth

“Just as one cannot study the Holocaust without becoming half Jewish in spirit, one cannot study the Famine and not become at least half Ukrainian.”

James Mace (1952–2004) American historian of the Ukraine

"Legacy of the Famine: Ukraine as a postgenocidal society" in The Day (February 18, 2003) http://www.day.kiev.ua/en/article/close/legacy-famine-ukraine-postgenocidal-society

Study

“Masonically we are heirs of past. Our Masonic ancestors gave the craft devotion, loyalty and faith and made it an illustrious institution in the world. It should be our religious duty to appreciate and conserve the rich inheritance. In view of the increasing complexity of life and the maintenance of the best and highest traditions of the Craft, great care and concern should be displayed, if Freemasonry has to function in the best interests of humanity. It has been truly said, that an inspired and inspiring dedication to service should be the part of every Mason’s life. Let us not give in to skepticism. There is all the difference between a pessimist and an optimist, in any field of human endeavour. One looks at his glass and cries “My glass is half empty.””

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

The optimist looks and exclaims “My glass is half full”.
In his address to the members of the Masonic Fraternity on the occassion of his joining as member of the Masonic Lodge. quoted in "Article # 14 Initiate responds to his Toast R.W.Bro. Jaya Chamaraja Wadeyar".

Life , World , Faith , Past

“The only privilege a student had that was worth his claiming, was that of talking to the professor, and the professor was bound to encourage it. His only difficulty on that side was to get them to talk at all. He had to devise schemes to find what they were thinking about, and induce them to risk criticism from their fellows. Any large body of students stifles the student. No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Money , Education , Problem , Thinking

“There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

"Petty Notes on Some Sex in America" first published in Playboy magazine (1961 - 1962)
Cannibals and Christians (1966)

World , Sex , Business

“He loved hitherto-unthought-of, thereafter-unthinkable combinations of instruments. When some extraordinary array of players filed half-proudly, half-sheepishly on to the stage, looking like the Bremen Town Musicians—if those were, as I think they were, a rooster, a cat, a dog, and a donkey—you could guess beforehand that it was to be one of Gottfried’s compositions. His Joyous Celebration of the Memory of the Master Johann Sebastian Bach had a tone-row composed of the notes B, A, C, and H (in the German notation), of these inverted, and of these transposed; and there were four movements, the first played on instruments beginning with the letter b, the second on instruments beginning with the letter a, and so on. After the magnificent group that ushered in the piece (bugle, bass-viol, bassoon, basset-horn, bombardon, bass-drum, baritone, and a violinist with only his bow) it was sad to see an Alp horn and an accordion come in to play the second movement. Gottfriend himself said about the first group: “Vot a bunch!””

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

When I asked him how he had thought of it he said placidly: “De devil soldt me his soul.”
Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 4: “Constance and the Rosenbaums”, p. 136

Love , Sadness , Dogs , Soul

“What our story, however, has demonstrated is the astonishingly checkered, not to say hazardous, career of a reading device which we in the West now take so much for granted. Historians have acclaimed the "triumph of the alphabet," but the triumph was often compromised, sometimes bitterly contested, and to this day is only half won.”

Eric A. Havelock (1903–1988) 1903-1988, British classical philologist

"Chinese Characters and the Greek Alphabet" in Sino-Platonic Papers, 5 (December 1987)

Reading

“It's amazing what success will do. I've just started a new book after taking a break of a year and a half since finishing 'The Book of Evidence,' and I'm fascinated to see if I can detect in myself a voice saying, 'Tone that bit down; make that bit easier; give them a few laughs,' which would be absolutely fatal. I don't think it's happening, but you can't tell what's happening beneath the surface.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

Once More Admired Than Bought, A Writer Finally Basks in Success (1990)

Books , Thinking , Success

“I am a very bottom-up thinker. If you give me the right kind of Tinker Toys, I can imagine the building. I can sit there and see primitives and recognize their power to build structures a half mile high, if only I had just one more to make it functionally complete. I can see those kinds of things.”

Ken Thompson (1943) American computer scientist, creator of the Unix operating system

"Unix and Beyond: An Interview with Ken Thompson," 1999

Imagination

“For an instant a half-formed prayer struggled into Havor’s mouth. But he could not utter it. Not for himself. For him those words were already drowned by the noise the thong-whip had made, or the sounds of children crying out of hunger or the cold or sheer misery in that grey house of orphans in the far North, eight years ago.”

Tanith Lee (1947–2015) British writer

Source: Short fiction, Companions on the Road (1975), Chapter 7, “The Snow-Waste” (p. 69)

Hunger , Children , Housing , Cry

“He was never in one spot for more than half a second, all my punches were aimed and timed properly but they always wound up hitting empty air. He'd jump in and out, slamming me with a left and whirling me around with his right or the other way around. My arms were plastered with leather and although I jabbed, hooked and crossed, it was like fighting an octopus.”

Harry Greb (1894–1926) American boxer

Former boxing great Gene Tunneyhttp://coxscorner.tripod.com/greb.html

Way , Time , Fight

“"Good Heavens!" ("Ich bin vom Himmel gefallen!") Hitler exclaimed when he read Chamberlain's message. He was astounded but highly pleased that the man who presided over the destinies of the mighty British empire should come pleading to him, and flattered that a man who was sixty-nine years old and had never travelled in an airplane before should make the long seven hours' flight to Berchtesgaden at the farthest extremity of Germany. Hitler had not had even the grace to suggest a meeting place on the Rhine, which would have shortened the trip by half.”

William L. Shirer book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960)

Travel , Reading

“I think many non-Jews don't realise the tremendous emotional heat that is involved here in the second half of the twentieth century. A heat that derives from the Holocaust. That is to say the destruction, the mass murder of the Jews in Eastern Europe where most of the Jews were. That both the Israelis and the Jews of the United States are the bereaved children of that population who were murdered. And the bond between the Jews of the United States and the people of Israel has the emotional intensity derived from that common bereavement. And that is what gives. I do understand that people resent the power of the pro-Israel lobby in this country [the US], but that power derives from that elemental basic bond of the common bereavement and the horror that is there in the background. Therefore, Jews in the United States do react strongly – and that's what makes this a very powerful lobby, and it is – they do react strongly to anything that seems to them to threaten the connection of the United States in Israel, which is Israel's lifeline. They see this as threatening. This may be an exaggerated fear, but always there is the shadow there of a possible new Holocaust. Israel overrun. The people of Israel massacred again.”

Conor Cruise O'Brien (1917–2008) Irish politician

C-SPAN (March 26 1986).

Children , People , Fear , Understanding

“Dedication: To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

The Heart of a Goof (1926)

Books , Time , Daughters

“I should not interfere with this natural march of history. To hold onto power for another half-year, when the country has a strong man who is worthy of being president and with whom practically every Russian today ties his hopes for the future? Why should I interfere with him? Why wait still another half-year? No, that's not for me! It's simply not in my character!”

Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007) 1st President of Russia and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR

1990s, Farewell speech (1999)

Hope , History , Nature , Strong

“I was so surprised at being born that I didn't speak for a year and a half.”

Gracie Allen (1902–1964) American actress and comedienne

As quoted in Gracie : A Love Story (1988) by George Burns, p. 17

“More than half of all our biblical commentaries between 650 and 850 were written by Irishmen.”

Thomas Cahill book How the Irish Saved Civilization

Source: How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995), Ch. VI What Was Found

“One and one half wandering Jews,
Free to wander wherever they choose,
Are travelling together in the Sangre de Christo,
The blood of Christ mountains of New Mexico,
On the last leg of a journey they started a long time ago,
The arc of a love affair,
Rainbows in the high desert air.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

Hearts and Bones
Song lyrics, Hearts and Bones (1983)

Love , Travel , Mountain , Time

“Scaring the children: for Halloween last night, I dressed as a Democrat and when kids came to my door, I took half of their candy!”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

Facebook post https://www.facebook.com/DSouzaDinesh/photos/a.279556495404346.96395.216709768355686/985875871439068/ (1 November 2014).

Children , Night

“One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

Katherine Mansfield (1925)

Love , Life , Children , Sister

“But there was sufficient spirit of toleration and candor amongst the Italian ecclesiastics to allow the subject to be canvassed with much freedom They entered warmly themselves into the controversy often favoring different sides of the question and however much we may deplore the loss of time and labor devoted to the defense of untenable positions it must be conceded that they displayed far less polemic bitterness than certain writers who followed them beyond the Alps two centuries and a half later”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.3, p. 28
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Question , Freedom , Loss , Time

“We know the mountain peaks are lofty, and we think of them so, and we mentally enlarge them, but not the cottage at their foot, or the trees half way up.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, The use of the lens in pictorial work, p. 57

Way , Mountain , Thinking , Tree

“While Apple's attempt to control the ecosystem and maintain a closed platform may be good for Apple, developers want more options and customers want to fully access the overwhelming majority of Web sites that use Flash. We think many customers are getting tired of being told what to think by Apple. … even people inside the distortion field [at Apple] will begin to resent being told half a story.”

Jim Balsillie (1961) Canadian businessman

RIM's Balsillie Slams Jobs, Says Users Are 'Tired' of Apple http://pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371119,00.asp in PC Magazine (19 October 2010)

People , Thinking

“In spite of the honestest efforts to annihilate my I-ity, or merge it in what the world doubtless considers my better half, I still find myself a self-subsisting, and, alas! self-seeking me.”

Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801–1866) Scottish writer

Letter to John Sterling http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/carlyle/jwclam/lam101.html#LM1-5 (15 June 1835).

World , Effort

“We must prioritize projects already partially built. Half a bridge is equivalent having no bridge at all. Then we have to focus on widening our major arteries. Especially where traffic jams occur daily. The wastage of people's time and fuel runs into billions not counting the inefficient use of trucks which deliver goods.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2009, Speech: The Socio-Economic Peace Program of Senator Francis Escudero

People , Time

“I would give worlds, could I believe
One-half that is profess'd me;
Affection! could I think it Thee,
When Flattery has caress'd me.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Song - I pray thee let me weep to-night
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)

World , Thinking

“It's the story of a place called Mouseland. Mouseland was a place where all the little mice lived and played, were born and died. And they lived much the same as you and I do. They even had a Parliament. And every four years they had an election. Used to walk to the polls and cast their ballots. Some of them even got a ride to the polls. And got a ride for the next four years afterwards too. Just like you and me. And every time on election day all the little mice used to go to the ballot box and they used to elect a government. A government made up of big, fat, black cats. Now if you think it strange that mice should elect a government made up of cats, you just look at the history of Canada for last 90 years and maybe you'll see that they weren't any stupider than we are. Now I'm not saying anything against the cats. They were nice fellows. They conducted their government with dignity. They passed good laws--that is, laws that were good for cats. But the laws that were good for cats weren't very good for mice. One of the laws said that mouseholes had to be big enough so a cat could get his paw in. Another law said that mice could only travel at certain speeds--so that a cat could get his breakfast without too much physical effort. All the laws were good laws. For cats. But, oh, they were hard on the mice. And life was getting harder and harder. And when the mice couldn't put up with it any more, they decided something had to be done about it. So they went en masse to the polls. They voted the black cats out. They put in the white cats. Now the white cats had put up a terrific campaign. They said: "All that Mouseland needs is more vision." They said:"The trouble with Mouseland is those round mouseholes we got. If you put us in we'll establish square mouseholes." And they did. And the square mouseholes were twice as big as the round mouseholes, and now the cat could get both his paws in. And life was tougher than ever. And when they couldn't take that anymore, they voted the white cats out and put the black ones in again. Then they went back to the white cats. Then to the black cats. They even tried half black cats and half white cats. And they called that coalition. They even got one government made up of cats with spots on them: they were cats that tried to make a noise like a mouse but ate like a cat. You see, my friends, the trouble wasn't with the colour of the cat. The trouble was that they were cats. And because they were cats, they naturally looked after cats instead of mice. Presently there came along one little mouse who had an idea. My friends, watch out for the little fellow with an idea. And he said to the other mice, "Look fellows, why do we keep on electing a government made up of cats? Why don't we elect a government made up of mice?" "Oh," they said, "he's a Bolshevik. Lock him up!"”

Tommy Douglas (1904–1986) Scottish-born Canadian politician

So they put him in jail. But I want to remind you: that you can lock up a mouse or a man but you can't lock up an idea!
http://www.cbc.ca/player/Digital+Archives/Politics/Parties+and+Leaders/Tommy+Douglas/ID/1409090169/?sort=MostPopular

Life , Stupidity , Law , Travel

“Mr. President, I wish to tell you something personal - not about me, but about my generation. What you have just heard about the Jewish people's inherent rights to the Land of Israel may seem academic to you, theoretical, even moot. But not to my generation. To my generation of Jews these eternal bonds are indisputable and incontrovertible truths, as old as recorded time. They touch upon the very core of our national being. Ours is an almost biblical generation of suffering and courage. Ours is the generation of Destruction and Redemption. Ours is the generation that rose up from the bottomless pit of Hell. We were a helpless people, Mr. President. We were bled white, not once, not twice, but century after century, over and over again. We lost a third of our people in one generation - mine. One-and-a-half million of them were children - ours. No one came to our rescue. We were tertiated, Mr. President. … Tertiated, not decimated. The origin of the word 'decimation' is one in 10. When a Roman legion was found guilty of insubordination one in 10 was put to the sword. In our case it was one in three - tertiated! … Sir, I take an oath before you in the name of the Jewish people - this will never ever happen again.”

Menachem Begin (1913–1992) Israeli politician and Prime Minister

Amb. Yehuda Avner's account of a meeting with U.S. President Jimmy Carter (July 1977)

Children , People , Truth , Courage

“Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. A culture that celebrates femininity and considers women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that mutilates girls' genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs or stones them for falling in love. A culture that protects women's rights by law is better than a culture in which a man can lawfully have four wives at once and women are denied alimony and half their inheritance. A culture that appoints women to its supreme court is better than a culture that declares that the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali (1969) Dutch feminist, author

Source: 2010s, Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010), Chapter 14, “Opening the Muslim Mind: An Enlightenment Mind (pp. 212-213)

Love , Women , People , Religion

“American society today is shaped not nearly as much by vast open spaces as it is by vast, bureaucratic organizations. Over half the working population toils away at enterprises with 500 or more employees--up from zero percent in 1800. Is this institutional immensity the logical outcome of technological forces in an all-efficient market, as some have argued?”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Charles Perrow, Organizing America: Wealth, power, and the origins of corporate capitalism. Princeton University Press, 2002/2009. Book abstract.
1980s and later

Quotes about half page 16

Quotes about half
page 16