Quotes about happening (6021 quotes, page 28)

“The case for dumping iPhone, or at least threatening to do so in order to renegotiate Apple's subsidy requirement away, seems pretty open and shut. Apple has things all its own way right now — skimming the lion's share of the profits off the carriers' business without having to shoulder their risks. But this is an unstable situation, because the carriers' investors won't tolerate it indefinitely. What happens when they revolt?”

Eric S. Raymond (1957) American computer programmer, author, and advocate for the open source movement

The Smartphone Wars: The market share scramble and Apple’s long con http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4128 in Armed and Dangerous (8 February 2012)

Way , Business

“When I get to Australia in January I know what is going to happen. They are going to wheel out all the so-called eyewitnesses. One in particular, Mrs. Altman, I've clashed with once or twice. She is very convincing. They can be very convincing. Because they have to do it so often over the years. They've had a free run. We're going to meet because she has that tattoo. I am going to say,'You have that tattoo, we all have the utmost sympathy for you. But how much money have you made on it! In the last 45 years! Can I estimate! Quarter of a million! Half million! Certainly not less. That's how much you've made from the German taxpayers and the American taxpayers.' Ladies and gentlemen, you're paying $3 billion a year to the State of Israel. Compensation to people like Mrs. Altman. She'll say,'Why not, I suffered.' I'll say you didn't. You survived. By definition you didn't suffer. Not half as much as those who died…. They suffered. You didn't. You're the one making the money. Explain to me this. Why have you people made all the money, but Australian soldiers who suffered for five years in Japanese prison camps haven't got a bent nickel out of it!”

David Irving (1938) British writer and Holocaust denier

Speech in Portland, OR. September 18, 1996 http://www.adl.org/holocaust/denier_quotes.asp

Money , People , Suffering , Tattoo

“So, can demonic spirits attach themselves to inanimate objects? The answer is yes. But I don't think every sweater you get from Goodwill has demons in it. But, in a sense, you're mother's just being super cautious, so hey, it isn't going to hurt you to rebuke any spirits that happen to have attached themselves to those clothes.”

Pat Robertson (1930) American media mogul, executive chairman, and a former Southern Baptist minister

2013-02-25
Pat Robertson
The 700 Club
Television, quoted in * 2013-02-28
Colbert Report Consumer Alert - Demonic Goodwill Items
The Colbert Report
Television
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/424278/february-28-2013/colbert-report-consumer-alert---demonic-goodwill-items
Responding to letter asking "I buy a lot of clothes and other items at Goodwill and other second-hand shops. Recently my mom told me that I need to pray over the items, bind familiar spirits, and bless the items before I bring them into the house. Is my mother correct? Can demons attach themselves to material items?"

Thinking , Sense , Hurt , Clothes

“People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like.”

William Zinsser (1922–2015) writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, professor

Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 11, Writing About Places: The Travel Article, p. 80.

People

“The things that were said about me. … You know what, I wanted to hit a couple of those speakers so hard. … I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy. I was gonna hit this guy so hard, his head would spin. He wouldn't know what the hell happened.”

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

Press conference, reported in Jacob Bogage, " ‘I wanted to hit a couple of those speakers so hard', Trump says of Democratic convention https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/07/29/i-wanted-to-hit-a-couple-of-those-speakers-so-hard-trump-says-of-dem-convention-critics/", The Washington Post (July 29, 2016).
2010s, 2016, July

Guy , Hell

“I think that it is my duty today to remind you as well of the good things that have happened, accomplishments that a year ago we could scarcely have imagined.”

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

New Year's Address to the Nation (1991)

Imagination , Thinking

“In the preface to the reissue of Risk, Uncertainty and Proﬁt, Frank Knight makes the penetrating observation that under the conditions envisaged above the velocity of circulation would become inﬁnite and so would the price level. This is perhaps an over-dramatic way of saying that nobody would hold money, and it would become a free good to go into the category of shell and other things which once served as money. We should expect too that it would not only pass out of circulation, but it would cease to be used as a conventional numeraire in terms of which prices are expressed. Interest bearing money would emerge. Of course, the above does not happen in real life, precisely because uncertainty, contingency needs, non-synchronization of revenues and outlay, transaction frictions, etc., etc., all are with us. But the abstract special case analyzed above should warn us against the facile assumption that the average levels of the structure of interest rates are determined solely or primarily by these differential factors. At times they are primary, and at other times, such as the twenties in this country, they may not be. As a generalization I should hazard the hypothesis that they are likely to be of great importance in an economy in which there is a “quasi-zero" rate of interest. I think by this hypothesis one can explain many of the anomalies of the United States money market in the thirties.”

Paul A. Samuelson book Foundations of Economic Analysis

Source: 1940s, Foundations of Economic Analysis, 1947, Ch. 5 : Theory of Consumer’s Behavior

Life , Money , Way , Thinking

“It was always with great pleasure that I met the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie who had shown great patriotic energy in his resistance to Italy. Our conversations were frank and animated and I occasionally hazarded to suggest various reforms to him. I was a young student when I heard him unsuccessfully defend his country from the rostrum of the League of Nations at Geneva. The League of Nations was powerless and today the United Nations is no more effective. What has happened to Ethiopia?”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

Page 145
Publications, The Shah's Story (1980), On world leaders and statesmen

Pleasure , Animals , Country

“If dust tries to get together, as it increases in density it increases the temperature, which increases the movement, and it drives it back away - it's called Boyle's Gas Laws. You cannot compress dust into solid matter without creating a real serious physical science problem of overcoming the gas laws. The pressure increases, the temperature increases, which drives them out again - it's not going to happen.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Star Formation and Boyle's Gas Laws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTzoLHdNhP8, at 1 minute 27 seconds, Youtube (February 17, 2010)

Law , Problem , Science

“War is not horrible all the time, as pacifists seem to believe. There are compensations for everything, and there is compensation in comradeship, intimacy, freedom from economic anxiety, the knowledge that once one's mind is adjusted to the worst that can happen – and that is a pretty bad and bloody wound or swift and sudden death – one settled down to existence as an Infantryman. Man is an adaptable animal – I acknowledge that myself. I adapted myself more easily to the environment of the trenches with its lice, filth, heat, stench, flies, dysentery, danger – I adapted myself to these more successfully, I repeat, than I have been able to adapt myself to this life as a shopkeeper.”

William Darling (politician) (1885–1962) Scottish politician

Source: The Bankrupt Bookseller (1947), p. 239

Life , Death , War , Knowledge

“Lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they'll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it. Think about that issue. How is it that that's happened to us?”

Tom Coburn (1948) Medical doctor, politician

GOP Senate candidate in Oklahoma speaks of 'rampant' lesbianism in schools http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/article_9ff48ab7-2233-50c1-8a13-b1b6b715f7b0.html, August 31, 2004.

School , Girl , Thinking

“Sometimes when he is among the sheep — when they have been rounded up to be dipped, and are penned tight and cannot get away — he wants to whisper to them, warn them of what lies in store. But then in their yellow eyes he catches a glimpse of something that silences him: a resignation, a foreknowledge not only of what happens to sheep at the hands of Ros behind the shed, but of what awaits them at the end of their long, thirsty ride to Cape Town on the transport lorry. They know it all, down to the finest detail, and yet they submit. They have calculated the price and are prepared to pay it — the price of being on earth, the price of being alive.”

J.M. Coetzee (1940) South African writer

Boyhood (1998)

Silence

“A moment of truth here: If you continue to eat processed foods full of sugar and fat, you won’t lose weight. But you knew that. And that’s not why you’re here. You’re here to discover how good you’ll feel on a diet of vegetarian proteins, whole grains, and all the glorious and diverse vegetables and fruits of the earth. If you look around, you won’t see many fat vegans. Vegans tend to be slim and strong, gorgeous and glowing, and that’s because a healthy, plant-based diet creates vitality and vigor—and weight loss simply happens as a result of not eating fatty animal protein. And lest you think a plant-based diet is for weaklings, consider bulls, elephants, gorillas, orangutans, and stallions. These plant eaters are pure lean and powerful muscle.”

Kathy Freston American self-help writer

Source: Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World (2011), p. 3

Truth , Food , Feeling , Thinking

“A certain area within a channel may function as a “gate”; the constellation of the forces before and after the gate region is decisively different in such a way that the passing or not passing of the unit through the whole channel depends to a high degree upon what happens in the gate region. This holds not only for food channels but also for the travelling of a news item through certain communication channels in a group, for movement of goods, and the social locomotion of individuals in many organizations.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1940s, Frontiers in group dynamics II, 1947, p. 145.

Food , Way , Travel , Communication

“In a war the normal codes of civilized behavior are suspended. It would be unthinkable in so-called normal life to go into someone's home where a family is grieving over the death of a loved one and spend long moments photographing them. It simply wouldn't be done. Those picture could not have been made unless I was accepted by the people I'm photographing. It's simply impossible to photograph moments such as those…without the complicity of the people I'm photographing…without the fact that the welcomed me, that they accepted me, that they wanted me to be there. They understand that a stranger who's come there with a camera to show the rest of the world what is happening to them…gives them a voice in the outside world that they otherwise wouldn't have. I try my best to approach people with respect. I want them to see that I have respect for them and the situation they're in. I want to be very open in my approach…feel open in my own heart towards them. I want them to be aware of that. People do sense it…with very few words…sometimes with no words at all.”

James Nachtwey (1948) American photographer

War Photographer, documentary, 2001

Love , Life , Death , War

“All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. But when an unanticipated phenomenon occurs again and again—finally turning into an expectation—then theories are overturned.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Wonderful Life

Source: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 136

History , Question , Nature

“A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.”

Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) British astronomer

Arguing that living organisms could not have arisen by chance alone.
The Intelligent Universe (1983), p. 19

Universe , Chance , Flying

“People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming. But the generic city, the general urban condition, is happening everywhere, and just the fact that it occurs in such enormous quantities must mean that it's habitable. Architecture can't do anything that the culture doesn't. We all complain that we are confronted by urban environments that are completely similar. We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.”

Rem Koolhaas (1944) Dutch architect (b.1944)

From Bauhaus to Koolhaas Interview in Wired magazine http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.07/koolhaas.html (4 July 1996)

People , Truth , Beauty , Thinking

“She said out of pity for him, "I shall give you a kiss if you like," but though he once knew, he had long forgotten what kisses are, and he replied, "Thank you," and held out his hand, thinking she had offered to put something into it. This was a great shock to her, but she felt she could not explain without shaming him, so with charming delicacy she gave Peter a thimble which happened to be in her pocket, and pretended that it was a kiss.”

J. M. Barrie book Peter Pan

Source: Peter and Wendy (1911), Ch. 6

Kiss , Thinking

“Even now, not a day goes by when I don't wish I could turn back the clock and change what happened.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Denise Holton, Chapter 15, p. 166
2000s, The Rescue (2000)

Change

“Pro-slavery impulse still governs the Democratic Party, the party of government sinecures. It is the party that wants to use political power to tax us not for any common good, but to eat while we work. Consider the Great Society and its legacy. In the fall of 1964, I was on the speech-writing staff of the Goldwater campaign. In September and October I went on a number of forays to college campuses, where I debated spokesmen for our opponents. My argument always started from here. In 1964 the economy, thanks to the Kennedy tax cuts, was growing at the remarkable annual rate of four percent. But federal revenues were growing at 20 percent; five times as fast. The real issue in the election, I said, was what was to happen to that cornucopia of revenue. Barry Goldwater would use it to reduce the deficit and to further reduce taxes; Lyndon Johnson would use it to start vast new federal programs. At that point I could not say what programs, but I knew that the real purpose of them would be to create a new class of dependents upon the Democratic Party. The ink was hardly dry on the election returns before Johnson invented the war on poverty; and proved my prediction correct. One did not need to be cynical to see that the poor were not a reason for the expansion of bureaucracy; the expansion of bureaucracy was a reason for the poor. Every failure to reduce poverty was always represented as another reason to increase expenditures on the poor. The ultimate beneficiary was the Democratic Party. Every federal bureaucrat became in effect a precinct captain, delivering the votes of his constituents. His job was to enlarge the pool of constituents. But every increase in that pool meant a diminution of our property and our freedom.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

1990s, The Party of Lincoln vs. The Party of Bureaucrats (1996)

War , Failure , Freedom , Time

“In real life, as well as in experiments, people can come to believe things that never really happened.”

Elizabeth Loftus (1944) American cognitive psychologist

Source: Eyewitness Testimony (1979), p. 62

Life , People

“I never knew where babies came from until it happened to me.”

Loretta Lynn (1932) American country-music singer-songwriter

Lynn, Loretta (2001). Coal Miner's Daughter (Reissue edition). Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-30-681037-9.

Baby

“The commentators have fixed the month for me, they have chosen the date and the day. But I advise them: "Don't count your chickens before they are hatched." Remember what happened to Marie Lloyd. She fixed the day and the date, and she told us what happened. As far as I remember it went like this: 'There was I, waiting at the church–' (laughter). Perhaps you recall how it went on. 'All at once he sent me round a note. Here's the very note. This is what he wrote: "Can't get away to marry you today, my wife won't let me."' Now let me just make clear that I have promised nobody that I shall be at the altar in October? Nobody at all.”

James Callaghan (1912–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; 1976-1979

"Mr Callaghan renews plea for 5% pay guideline", The Times, 6 September 1978, p. 4.
Speech at the Trades Union Congress, 5 September 1978. Callaghan was teasing the audience about the date for the impending general election. Although his message was intended to convey that he may not call an election in October, many people interpreted him as saying that the opposition would be caught unprepared by an October election.
Callaghan deliberately misattributed the music hall song "Waiting at the Church" to Marie Lloyd rather than to its real singer, Vesta Victoria, knowing that Vesta Victoria was too obscure for the audience to recognise.

Laughter , Waiting

““Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person’s time line sideways till they all coincide.”

Thomas Pynchon book The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 5, Mucho Maas

Way , Time , Personality

“You can decide what you want to eat for dinner, you can decide to go away for the weekend, and you can decide what clothes you’re going to wear in the morning, but when it comes to artistic things, there’s never a rhyme or reason. It’s, like, they just happen. And they happen when they happen.”

Meat Loaf (1947) American musician, singer, songwriter, record producer and actor

A chat with Meat Loaf (2006)

Clothes

“Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

Introduction
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)

People , Thinking

“Across the San Joaquin Valley, across California, across the entire Southwest of the United States, wherever there are Mexican people, wherever there are farm workers, our movement is spreading like flames across ad dry plain. Our pilgrimage is the match that will light our cause for all farm workers to see what is happening here, so that they may do as we have done. The time has come for the liberation of the poor farm worker.
History is on our side. May the strike go on! Viva la causa!”

Cesar Chavez (1927–1993) American farm worker, labor leader, and civil rights activist

A similar statement (perhaps used in a later declaration) has been quoted at the UFW site http://www.ufw.org/_page.php?menu=research&inc=history/09.html: "Across the San Joaquin valley, across California, across the entire nation, wherever there are injustices against men and women and children who work in the fields — there you will see our flags — with the black eagle with the white and red background, flying. Our movement is spreading like flames across a dry plain."
The Plan of Delano (1965)

People , History , Light , Time

“It is wise not to confuse information and inspiration. The former is the result of studious application, the latter is what happens when you don't think about it.
Each has a role to play, but must not look to play the role of the other. Inspiration may be the bright tower in the clouds; information is the solid rock where the foundations are.”

John Howe (illustrator) (1957) Canadian illustrator

Source: John Howe : Fantasy Art Workshop (2007), p. 11

Thinking

“Whenever I refused to follow my fate, something very hard to bear would happen in my life.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Aleph (2011)

Life , Fate

“We have numerous, extremely naïve assumptions built into our thinking, and our most venerable explanatory engines, such as science, happen also to be our oldest explanatory engines, and therefore they have built into them the most naïve and unexamined assumptions.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Psychedelic Society (1984)

Thinking , Science

“If you don’t believe your salmon is wild, ask it to fetch your newspaper and see what happens.”

Scott Adams (1957) cartoonist, writer

"Menus: Grilled Salmon", Stacey's at Waterford, 2008-01-14 http://www.eatatstaceys.com/staceys-waterford/menus-lunch.php,
Restaurant menus

“Whereas the good news had first been published for its own sake with no concern for success, now ineluctably success brought, as always, a desire for it. … They were not aware of what was happening, namely, that society was inverting Christianity instead of being subverted by it.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 30

Success

“I suppose you are a fool to do it [express a political view as an artist], but if you happen to be more interested in the political question, than the size of your audience, then it doesn't matter.”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Fools , Question

“I'm not concerned about avoiding anything that happened three years ago or worried about letdowns or things of that nature. When you use the term 'letdown' you proceed with the assumption that this is a continuation of something that happened in the past.”

Mike Tomlin (1972) head coach of the National Football League's Pittsburgh Steelers

Referring to the Steelers' poor start in 2006 following their Super Bowl win, as quoted in "Tomlin looks ahead" by Ed Bouchette, in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (1 August 2009) http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09213/987980-66.stm

Nature , Past

“I've seen it happen time after time. When the Democratic candidate allows himself to be put on the defensive and starts apologizing for the New Deal and the fair Deal, and says he really doesn't believe in them, he is sure to lose. The people don't want a phony Democrat. If it's a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat, and I don't want any phony Democratic candidates in this campaign.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Address at the National Convention Banquet of the Americans for Democratic Action (17 May 1952) https://trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=1296&st=republican+party&st1=

People , Time , Clothes

“Although to penetrate into the intimate mysteries of nature and thence to learn the true causes of phenomena is not allowed to us, nevertheless it can happen that a certain fictive hypothesis may suffice for explaining many phenomena.”
Quanquam nobis in intima naturae mysteria penetrare, indeque veras caussas Phaenomenorum agnoscere neutiquam est concessum: tamen evenire potest, ut hypothesis quaedam ficta pluribus phaenomenis explicandis aeque satisfaciat, ac si vera caussa nobis esset perspecta.

Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) Swiss mathematician

§1
A conjecture about the nature of air (1780)

Nature , Learning

“I read in the proof-sheets of Hardy on Ramanujan: 'As someone said, each of the positive integers was one of his personal friends.' My reaction was, 'I wonder who said that; I wish I had.' In the next proof-sheets I read (what now stands): 'It was Littlewood who said…' (What had happened was that Hardy had received the remark in silence and with a poker face, and I wrote it off as a dud….)”

John Edensor Littlewood (1885–1977) English Mathematician

"Cross-purposes, Unconscious Assumptions, Howlers, Misprints, etc.", p. 61.
Littlewood's Miscellany (1986)

Silence , Reading , Personality

“Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority. It wasn't like somebody told me about it and I said, "I don't know how to spell that." I said, "Yeah, I've got that on my list, so I'm okay." But there came a point when we realized it was happening faster and was a much deeper phenomenon than had been recognized in our strategy.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

Speech at the University of Washington, as reported in "Gates, Buffett a bit bearish" CNET News (2 July 1998) http://archive.is/20130102062335/http://news.com.com/2100-1023-212942.html
1990s

“Oh, Sirin, how could you? You know as well as I do how dangerous scrying the future can be. Half the time what it shows you wouldn’t happen if you hadn’t foreseen it.”

Michael Swanwick book The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 16 (p. 277)

Time , Future

“What I have been talking about is knowledge. Knowledge, perhaps, is not a good word for this. Perhaps one would rather say my image of the world. Knowledge has an implication of validity, of truth. What I am talking about is what I believe to be true; my subjective knowledge. It is this Image that largely governs my behavior. In about an hour I shall rise, leave my office, go to a car, drive down to my home, play with the children, have supper, perhaps read a book, go to bed. I can predict this behavior with a fair degree to accuracy because of the knowledge which I have: the knowledge that I have a home not far away, to which I am accustomed to go. The prediction, of course, may not be fulfilled. There may be an earthquake, I may have an accident with the car on the way home, I may get home to find that my family has been suddenly called away. A hundred and one things may happen. As each event occurs, however, it alters my knowledge structure or my image. And as it alters my image, I behave accordingly. The first proposition of this work, therefore, is that behavior depends on the image.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1950s, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, 1956, p. 5

Children , Truth , Books , World

“It seems to be really happening. I mean, my parents are using Linux. The setup is still the tricky point, but I set the machine up last time I was in France and they've been actually catching on and start to use it. They like OpenOffice, they like having GAIM and Firefox, they're really happy with that. My brother-in-law, who's really a Windows guy, just decided to install Linux because he was tired of his machine being slow and spyware and everything. He really didn't need that much help from me to get his stuff running, doing mail and chatting and all that basic web stuff, so I guess it's really picking up.”

Timothee Besset French software programmer

Quoted in Dustin Reyes, "Interview with id Software's Timothee Besset at QuakeCon 2006" http://www.linuxgames.com/articles/ttimo2006 LinuxGames (2006-08-07).

Law , Guy , Parent , Time

“No one except a dumb thief plays with the security of others and then makes himself believe he will be secure. Whereas thinking people, when disaster strikes, make it their priority to look for its causes, in order to prevent it happening again.”

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

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

People , Thinking

“The theory is the result of listening to the problem. When the theory acquires a life of its own because some people like it more than the real world, all kinds of uninspiring, uninteresting things happen, so the key is both to listen to the problem and to study the theory. But always remember that just as much theory is bunk as there are buggy solutions. There is nothing more wrong with "theory" than "solutions" – both their quality and their applicability are orthogonal to their existence.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: "Choose the Right Language" in "Tutorial" by Norvig and Pitman http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/99d41ab4a42978b1 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Life , People , World , Problem

“Everything that happens in the Old Testament is a "type" or adumbration of something that happens in the New Testament, and the whole subject is therefore called typology, though it is a typology in a special sense.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter Four, p. 79

Sense

“It went without saying that he felt guilty about what had happened, but married friends had assured him that guilt was the cornerstone of any good marriage. It meant that a conscience was at work, values were held in high esteem, and reasons to feel guilty were best avoided whenever possible.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Travis Parker, Proloque, p. 2
2000s, The Choice (2007)

Marriage , Feeling

“These things [cutting, cropping and shaping] always happen in strange ways. You can say after the fact what you're doing, but, believe me, you can't project it ahead. It has to be worked through before you can recognize what it was that you were looking for. It's a search; it's not like getting a brainstorm... It's work, yes; it comes out of the practice of painting, the practice of your art.”

Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) American artist

Source: Color, Format and Abstract Art' (1977), pp. 99 – 105

Art , Way , Search , Painting

“One must dare to show what he wants. You have to go and ask for things rather than wait for them to happen.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

(Crillon Hotel, Paris, November 1998).

Waiting

“There's a great deal of criticism about the United States, but there is one thing that nobody criticizes the United States. Nobody thinks the United States went to strike against Iraq in order to gain land or water or oil, nobody thinks America has any ambitions about real estate. As it happened in the 20th century, the American boys went to fight in two world wars, many of them lost their lives. The United States won the wars, won the land, but you gave back every piece of it. America didn't keep anything out of her victories for herself. You gave back Japan, an improved Japan, you gave Germany, an improved Germany, you've heard the Marshall Plan. And today, I do not believe there is any serious person on earth who thinks the United States, whether you agree or don't agree with this strike, has any egoistic or material purposes in the war against Iraq. The reason is, for this strike, that you cannot let the world run wild. And people who are coming from different corners of our life, attack and kill women and children and innocent people, just out of the blue. And I think the whole world is lucky that there is a United States that has the will and the power to handle the new danger that has arrived on the 21st century.”

Shimon Peres (1923–2016) Israeli politician, 8th prime minister and 9th president of Israel

Speech at Harvard University (20 October 2004)

Life , Women , War , Children

“Since Pharaoh’s bits were pushed into the jaws of kings, these dyings—patient or impatient, but dyings—have happened, by the hundreds of millions; they were all wasted. They taught us to kill others and to die ourselves, but never how to live. Who is “taught to live” by cruelty, suffering, stupidity, and that occupational disease of soldiers, death?”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Poetry in War and Peace”, p. 129
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Death , Stupidity , Disease , Suffering

“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of "liberalism" they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

Norman Thomas (1884–1968) American Presbyterian minister and socialist

Reagan biographer Lou Cannon noted that this was a suspect quotation, and that he could find no evidence of it. Thomas did say that both major political parties had borrowed items from the Socialist Party platform.
Cannon, Lou. Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power. New York: PublicAffairs Books, 2003. ISBN 1-586-48030-8 (p. 125).
Possibly Misattributed

People

“I don't respect people unless I think they deserve the respect. There are people who think that respect is something that should be given, and I happen to be one of the people who is perfectly happy saying no; respect should be earned. And without being earned, you don't get it. It's really that simple.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Mg5_gxNXTo

DebConf 14: Q&A with Linus Torvalds

DebConf 2014 Portland

Youtube/Google

14min35

2014

Daniel Gillmore, Ana Guerrerero López.
2010s, 2014

People , Thinking , Happiness

“The resume was a work of art. It listed jobs she had never held at health clubs that never existed, promotions that had never happened, professional memberships in nonexistent organizations, awards she had never received, and a fake degree. Accompanying it were letters of recommendation she had written herself.”

Lis Wiehl (1961) American legal scholar

Source: Heart of Ice A Triple Threat Novel with April Henry (Thomas Nelson), pp. 39, 40

Health , Art

“I remember we adjourned for lunch and a friendly Afrikaner warder asked me the question, "Mandela, what do you think is going to happen to you in this case?" I said to him, "Agh, they are going to hang us." Now, I was really expecting some word of encouragement from him. And I thought he was going to say, "Agh man, that can never happen." But he became serious and then he said, "I think you are right, they are going to hang you."”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

Interview segment http://www.radiodiaries.org/mandela/t_movement.html on All Things Considered (NPR) broadcast (27 April 2004)
2000s

Question , Thinking

“The art always wins. Anything can happen to me, but the art will stay.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

“ Ai Weiwei: Artistic Licence http://www.economist.com/node/21554178.” Economist, May 5, 2012.
2010-, 2012

Art

“There are three things that can happen when you throw a pass, and two of them are bad.”

Woody Hayes (1913–1987) American football player and coach

This quote is often attributed to Hayes, but some contend General Robert Neyland of the University of Tennessee or Darrell Royal of the University of Texas was the source. Darrell Royal gives the credit to Woody Hayes as being the source of the quote.
[Todd, Jones, Royal took Longhorns from oblivion to No. 1, Columbus Dispatch, 07E, 2006-09-09, 2006-10-08]
Attributed

“Since taking this job things have happened. I've been spending my free time studying the Word. Each night the Lord seemed to get hold of me a little more. Night before last I was reading in Nehemiah. I finished the book, and read it through again. Here was a man who left everything as far as position was concerned to go do a job nobody else could handle. And because he went the whole remnant back in Jerusalem got right with the Lord. Obstacles and hindrances fell away and a great work was done. Jim, I couldn't get away from it. The Lord was dealing with me. On the way home yesterday morning I took a long walk and came to a decision which I know is of the Lord. In all honesty before the Lord I say that no one or nothing beyond Himself and the Word has any bearing upon what I've decided to do. I have one desire now - to live a life of reckless abandon for the Lord, putting all my energy into it. Maybe He'll send me someplace where the name of Jesus Christ is unknown. Jim, I'm taking the Lord at His word, and I'm trusting Him to prove His Word. It's kind of like putting all your eggs in one basket, but we've already put our trust in Him for salvation, so why not do it as far as our life is concerned? If there's nothing to this business of eternal life we might as well lose everything in one crack and throw our present life away with out life hereafter. But if there is something to it, then everything else the Lord says must hold true likewise. Pray for me, Jim.”

Ed McCully (1927–1956) American Christian missionary

Life , Books , Way , Home

“Cinema: An illusion that can only satisfactorily happen in the dark.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Rosa: The Death of a Composer

“Men all say, "We are wise"; but being driven forward and taken in a net, a trap, or a pitfall, they know not how to escape. Men all say, "We are wise"; but happening to choose the course of the Mean, they are not able to keep it for a round month.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Doctrine of the Mean

Men

“I paint people not because of what they are like… but how they happen to be.”

Lucian Freud (1922–2011) British painter and engraver

"A Queen of many colours," interview with Martin Gayford, Daily Telegraph, (2006-04-20), p. 3
Other

People , Painting

“Without conviction that you can make change happen, you will not act, even if you see the vision. Your feelings will hold you back.”

John P. Kotter (1947) author of The heart of Change

Step 5, p. 115
The Heart of Change, (2002)

Feeling , Change

“I got those, Data’s chair and console, the side walls, and some panels from Vegas. And though I didn’t know I'd have the entire bridge someday, I knew they were an invaluable history of Trek,
I couldn't allow it to bring me down. I spent almost a year trying to convince people to help me. If worst came to worst it could go to a rich guy’s house but then no one would see it.
Once this happened, that's how this bridge got forgotten about—people changed hands, people got fired,
I didn't know if he had standing assembled walls or what,
My whole thing was: this is good, it's great to have a dream, but it’s great to have your feet on the floor too.
They said: ‘You have to do something. This can't remain in this condition.”

Huston Huddleston

December 2012 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/12/captain-i-saved-the-bridge-boldly-going-where-no-tv-set-has-gone-before/

People , Dreams , Guy , History

“A deed happens in a definite place at a definite time, but if it be sufficiently great and pregnant, its virtue radiates everywhere in time and space.”

George Sarton (1884–1956) American historian of science

Preface.
A History of Science Vol.2 Hellenistic Science and Culture in the Last Three Centuries B.C. (1959)

Time

“The worst thing that can happen during the 1980s is not energy depletion, economic collapse, limited nuclear war, or conquest by a totalitarian government. As terrible as these catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired within a few generations. The one process ongoing in the 1980s that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly that our descendents are least likely to forgive us.”

Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist

Gaia Atlas of Planet Management

War , Forgiveness , Nature , Loss

“It has become clear from the rumblings and soul-searching in the field of competitive strategy that a revolution is brewing. Managers and strategy researchers are discovering that existing models of strategy are nearly obsolete in the intensity of today's fast-paced competition. Some have called for a more dynamic approach, even questioning the sustainability of competitive advantage in this new environment. But so far, this revolution-waiting-to-happen has had no leader. Now it has.”

Richard D’Aveni (1953) American economist

Foreword
Hypercompetitive rivalries, 1994

Soul , Search , Question , Waiting

“If the gospel is to challenge the public life of our society, if Christians are to occupy the "high ground" which they vacated in the noon time of "modernity," it will not be by forming a Christian political party, or by aggressive propaganda campaigns. Once again it has to be said that there can be no going back to the "Constantinian" era. It will only be by movements that begin with the local congregation in which the reality of the new creation is present, known, and experienced, and from which men and women will go into every sector of public life to claim it for Christ, to unmask the illusions which have remained hidden and to expose all areas of public life to the illumination of the gospel. But that will only happen as and when local congregations renounce an introverted concern for their own life, and recognize that they exist for the sake of those who are not members, as sign, instrument, and foretaste of God's redeeming grace for the whole life of society.”

Lesslie Newbigin (1909–1998) Christian missionary

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Eerdmans, 1989 (reprinted 2002), 232-233.

Life , Women , Men , God

“Of course, of course. Even though if it wasn’t for what happened previously, all the success we had previously, it’s not like you can come straight from an underground record to Oscar status and be recognised by the people at the Academy. Me and Paul had a conversation about this actually when I got out of jail. I congratulated him because I came out like the day before it came on and I was like: ‘I’m proud of you’. And he told me: ‘Well don’t be proud of me because we couldn’t have did it without all the stuff you did’.”

Lord Infamous (1975–2013) American rapper

Interview whit Lord Infamous - RIP - March 2009 https://medium.com/@daveyboysmith/interview-with-lord-infamous-rip-march-30th-2009-94dbfc2f0d9b

People , Success

“While reading the Times of India each morning, my father spares a minute for the cartoon by R. K. Laxman. While my mother is, like a magician, making untidy sheets disappear in the bedroom and producing fresh towels in the bathroom, or braving bad weather in the kitchen, my father, in the extraordinary Chinese calm of the drawing-room, is dmiring the cartoon by R. K. Laxman, and, if my mother happens to be there, unselfishly sharing it with her. She, as expected, misunderstands it completely, laughing not at the joke but at the expressions on the faces of the caricatures, and at the hilarious fact that they talk to each other like human beings.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Afternoon Raag (1993)

Time , Reading , Drawing , Weather

“A person can get used to just about anything if it happens slow enough.”

Robert Olmstead (1954) American writer

Coal Black Horse (2007)

Personality

“Glenn Beck: But I was standing on the stage with Freedom Works on Friday in a show that we’re going to air tonight at 8:00 on TheBlaze and I was giving a speech and it struck me about halfway through, the similarities of what is being done right now to the beginning of our country— we are repeating, and we're at the very beginning of it, but we're repeating all of the steps that it took for use to be free in— around the time of the Declaration of Independence, don't you think?
David Barton: I agree. And I look—
Glenn Beck: It's starting to happen.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

2012-11-05
Will Christians show up this time? Glenn interviews David Barton
http://www.glennbeck.com/2012/11/05/will-christians-show-up-this-time-glenn-interviews-david-barton/
The Glenn Beck Program
Radio, quoted in * 2012-11-05
Beck & Barton Say Romney Will Win Because 'We are Repeating all of the Steps' the Founders Took to Create This Nation
Kyle
Mantyla
RightWingWatch
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/beck-barton-say-romney-will-win-because-we-are-repeating-all-steps-founders-took-create-nati
2012-11-07
2010s, 2012

Thinking , Freedom , Time , Country

“It's wonderful to be able to read a newspaper that tells you what's going to happen--not just what's already happened. Anybody can tell you what's already happened, but the Bible tells you what's going to happen. Newspapers are not really newspapers; they're history papers. They tell you what's already happened--past news. But God has given us a lot of later news about today, the time in which we're living right now, and what's going to happen next. So the Bible is not just a history book, it's a news book. It not only tells you about yesterday, it also tells you about tomorrow.”

David Berg (1919–1994) Children of God founder

A More Sure Word of Prophecy (2 Peter 1:19)

God , Books , History , Time

“Anyone wanting slyly to avoid suffering identifies with the entirety of the universe, judges each thing as if he were it. In the same way, he imagines, at bottom, that he will never die. We receive these hazy illusions like a narcotic necessary to bear life. But what happens to us when, disintoxicated, we learn what we are? Lost among babblers in a night in which we can only hate the appearance of light which comes from babbling. The self-acknowledged suffering of the disintoxicated is the subject of this book.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: L’Expérience Intérieure (1943), p. xxxii

Life , Hate , Books , Way

“Don't let any of the incidents happening now affect the will of Egyptians.”

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (1954) Current President of Egypt

-El-Sisi http://news.yahoo.com/egypt-hikes-assault-muslim-brotherhood-182705477.html
2013

“The cell phones in the pockets of the dead students were still ringing when we were told that it was wrong to ask why. As the police cleared the bodies from the Virginia Tech engineering building, the cell phones rang, in the eccentric varieties of ring tones, as parents kept trying to see if their children were OK. To imagine the feelings of the police as they carried the bodies and heard the ringing is heartrending; to imagine the feelings of the parents who were calling — dread, desperate hope for a sudden answer and the bliss of reassurance, dawning grief — is unbearable. But the parents, and the rest of us, were told that it was not the right moment to ask how the shooting had happened — specifically, why an obviously disturbed student, with a history of mental illness, was able to buy guns whose essential purpose is to kill people — and why it happens over and over again in America.”

Adam Gopnik (1956) American journalist

Gun Control and the Virginia Tech Massacre, The New Yorker (2007)

Children , People , Hope , Feeling

“p>It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.
The more things happen to you the more you can't
Tell or remember even what they were.The contradictions cover such a range.
The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there.”

William Empson (1906–1984) English literary critic and poet

"Let It Go" (1949), line 1; cited from John Haffenden (ed.) The Complete Poems (London: Allen Lane, 2000) p. 99.
The Complete Poems

“It is absurd in general relativity to speak of a universe in which nothing happens.”

Lee Smolin book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity

Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000)

Universe

“This [covariance] is something that is not in the habit of thinking of most amateur investors. They look at their investments one at a time, and they don't, you always have to go back and say, what's the covariance? That's what really matters for what happen to your portfolio. Because when you invest in a lot of companies that are all the same, you're asking for trouble, because the whole thing is going to either blow up or succeed. And you can't live like that. You have to be looking for low covariance.”

Robert J. Shiller (1946) American economist

Robert Shiller. Chalk Talk - Covariance, Financial Markets (Coursera) https://www.coursera.org/learn/financial-markets-global/lecture/41Ujc/chalk-talk-covariance.

Thinking , Time

“As someday it may happen that a victim must be found
I've got a little list, I've got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed—who never would be missed!”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

Song, "As someday it may happen".
The Mikado (1885)

“Forensic procedure is an art form, nothing less. No, I'll go further: it's higher, more refined, than any art form. Why? Because it's real. Take just one aspect of it—say the diagrams: with all their outlines, arrows and shaded blocks they look like abstract paintings, avant-garde ones from the last century—dances of shapes and flows as delicate and skilful as the markings on butterflies' wings. But they're not abstract at all. They're records of atrocities. Each line, each figure, every angle—the ink itself vibrates with an almost intolerable violence, darkly screaming from the silence of white paper: something has happened here, someone has died.”

Tom McCarthy (writer) book Déjà vu

Source: Remainder (2005), Ch. 11.

Art , Silence , Dance , Painting

“If they (the ASME) had not been (aware of human problems involved) — and Taylor either failed to encounter, or to recognize the significance of, the early work in industrial psychology contributed by Walter Dill Scott, Hugo Munsterberg, and others — there was the amazing fact that one of them, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, happened to fall in love with a girl who was a psychologist by education, a teacher by profession, and a mother by vocation. I know of no occurrence in the whole history of human thought more worthy of the epithet "providential" than that fact. Here were three engineers — Taylor, Gantt, and Gilbreth — struggling to realize the wider implications of their technique, in travail with a "mental revolution," their great danger that they might not appreciate the difference between applying scientific thinking to material things and to human beings, and one of them married Lillian Moller, a woman who by training, by instinct, and by experience was deeply aware of human beings, the perfect mental complement in the work to which they had set their hands.”

Lyndall Urwick (1891–1983) British management consultant

Cited in: Harold F. Smiddy and Lionel Naum. " Evolution of a "Science of Managing" in America https://archive.org/details/selectedreadings00shul," in: Selected readings in management, Fremont A. Shull (edd), 1957. p. 16-17
1950s, "Management's Debt to the Engineers", 1952

Love , Education , History , Girl

“When we talk career, we get into an argument. In Hindi films, she is facing the same problems I did. If a K. Balachander hadn't come along to do 'Ek Duuje Ke Liye' with me in Hindi, I wonder what would've happened to me! I would have suffered much worse because Shruti is far more savvy than me.”

Kamal Haasan (1954) Indian actor

Aamir's choice of films makes Kamal Haasan happy

Problem , Suffering

“I don't agree with the notion that some are putting out there — including scientists — that somehow, there are actions we can take today that would actually have an impact on what's happening in our climate. Our climate is always changing. And what they have chosen to do is take a handful of decades of research, and say that this is now evidence of a longer-term trend that's directly and almost solely attributable to manmade activity.”

Marco Rubio (1971) U.S. Senator from state of Florida, United States; politician

This Week http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/week-transcript-defense-secretary-chuck-hagel-sen-marco/story?id=23667691, ABC News, , quoted in * 2014-05-11
Marco Rubio Says Scientists Are Wrong: 'Human Activity' Does Not Cause Climate Change
David
Crooks and Liars
http://crooksandliars.com/2014/05/marco-rubio-says-scientists-are-wrong
2014-05-17
2010s, 2014

Change

“I commend our soldiers for their gallantry and bravery and for fighting for our freedom. I want to know if our soldiers were killed in a legitimate encounter or were they again butchered like pigs like what happened with our five marines.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

The Official Website of the Senate of the Philippines http://www.senate.gov.ph/press_release/2011/1020_escudero1.asp
2011

Freedom , Fight

“Living with the conditions of slavery and then later segregation, many Negroes lost faith in themselves. Many came to feel that perhaps they were less than human, perhaps they were inferior. But then something happened to the Negro. Circumstances made it possible and necessary for him to travel more. The coming of the automobile, the upheavals of two world wars, the great depression. So his rural plantation background gradually gave way to urban industrial life. His economic life was gradually rising and even his cultural life was gradually rising through the steady decline of crippling illiteracy. All of these forces conjoined to cause the Negro to take a new look at himself. His religion revealed to him that God loves all of his children and that all men are made in His image. That the basic thing about a man is not his specificity but his fundamental. Not the texture of his hair or the color of his skin but his eternal dignity and worth.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

"Social Justice and the Emerging New Age" address at the Herman W. Read Fieldhouse, Western Michigan University (18 December 1963)
1960s

Love , Life , Men , God

“Many childless single woman would be at my age already in panic. Also I have been thinking for the last 3 years, why I have been sacrificing so much time for my work. But, I have ended up to a thought that I would never change a single day out of my life. It would be lovely to get a family one day, but my life doesn't end even if that would not happen.”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Anna interview (2005)

Love , Life , Age , Family

“So the years passed and I worked a great deal. And then I became ill and although I could still work, despite the fact that my hands became more and more rigid. I could no longer pick up the paintbrush and had to use both hands to do so, always with a great deal of pain. The format of my works became very small, and I also had to find a new technique. For three years I painted these small heads like a man possessed. Then I realized that I would soon have to stop working entirely: and that's what happened, too!”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

In a letter to the Dutch Fauvist painter Father Verkade, 12 June 1938; as quoted in Alexej Jawlensky, Jürgen Schultze; M. DuMont Schauberg, Cologne 1970, p. 54
1936 - 1941

Pain , Painting

“What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

Source: Attributed from posthumous publications, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), Ch. 22, August 30, 1941.

Time

“Contemplating such questions as the dialectical relations between being and becoming has inspired and strengthened my beliefs. You are not hearing here some random ideas of a passionate student or a distressed prisoner, but reflections rooted in the experience of a woman physicist who happens to have also advocated for equal rights and human rights, and who as a result was subjected to threats, deprivation, arrests, continuous prosecutions, and finally sentenced to a total of 23 years of imprisonment, 16 years of which has to be served based on the ruling laws in Iran. The harsh treatment and excessive sentence to which I have been subjected were not due to any underground violent or terrorist activity on my part, but– as admitted by the judges of this very system–because of my insistence on the rights of civil society and of human rights. My case, then, clearly portrays the unjust, brutal and illegal practices of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Narges Mohammadi (1972) Iranian human rights activist

Letter Accepting 2018 Andrei Sakharov Prizefrom (2018)

Law , Idea , Question , Passion

“"Hair loss and retrieval" (Translation of "Pérdida y recuperación del pelo")

To combat pragmatism and the horrible tendency to achieve useful purposes, my elder cousin proposes the procedure of pulling out a nice hair from the head, knotting it in the middle and droping it gently down the hole in the sink. If the hair gets caught in the grid that usually fills in these holes, it will just take to open the tap a little to lose sight of it.

Without wasting an instant, must start the hair recovery task. The first operation is reduced to dismantling the siphon from the sink to see if the hair has become hooked in any of the rugosities of the drain. If it is not found, it is necessary to expose the section of pipe that goes from the siphon to the main drainage pipe. It is certain that in this part will appear many hairs and we will have to count on the help of the rest of the family to examine them one by one in search of the knot. If it does not appear, the interesting problem of breaking the pipe down to the ground floor will arise, but this means a greater effort, because for eight or ten years we will have to work in a ministry or trading house to collect enough money to buy the four departments located under the one of my elder cousin, all that with the extraordinary disadvantage of what while working during those eight or ten years, the distressing feeling that the hair is no longer in the pipes anymore can not be avoided and that only by a remote chance remains hooked on some rusty spout of the drain.

The day will come when we can break the pipes of all the departments, and for months to come we will live surrounded by basins and other containers full of wet hairs, as well as of assistants and beggars whom we will generously pay to search, assort, and bring us the possible hairs in order to achieve the desired certainty. If the hair does not appear, we will enter in a much more vague and complicated stage, because the next section takes us to the city's main sewers. After buying a special outfit, we will learn to slip through the sewers at late night hours, armed with a powerful flashlight and an oxygen mask, and explore the smaller and larger galleries, assisted if possible by individuals of the underworld, with whom we will have established a relationship and to whom we will have to give much of the money that we earn in a ministry or a trading house.

Very often we will have the impression of having reached the end of the task, because we will find (or they will bring us) similar hairs of the one we seek; but since it is not known of any case where a hair has a knot in the middle without human hand intervention, we will almost always end up with the knot in question being a mere thickening of the caliber of the hair (although we do not know of any similar case) or a deposit of some silicate or any oxide produced by a long stay against a wet surface. It is probable that we will advance in this way through various sections of major and minor pipes, until we reach that place where no one will decide to penetrate: the main drain heading in the direction of the river, the torrential meeting of detritus in which no money, no boat, no bribe will allow us to continue the search.

But before that, and perhaps much earlier, for example a few centimeters from the mouth of the sink, at the height of the apartment on the second floor, or in the first underground pipe, we may happen to find the hair. It is enough to think of the joy that this would cause us, in the astonished calculation of the efforts saved by pure good luck, to choose, to demand practically a similar task, that every conscious teacher should advise to its students from the earliest childhood, instead of drying their souls with the rule of cross-multiplication or the sorrows of Cancha Rayada.”

Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) Argentinian writer

Historias de Cronopios y de Famas (1962)

Money , Family , Way , Feeling

“Just consider, all the little nations running for shelter here and there, one running to Russia and another to the United States. In that situation before anything else would happen, the world will have been polarised between the Soviet Union and the United States. It is against that negative polarisation we have been fighting for years. We want to have the opportunity to interpose between these two giants a moderating, modifying and mitigating diplomacy.”

Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960) Welsh politician

Speech at the Labour Party Conference (4 October 1957), on unilateral nuclear disarmament.
1950s

World , Fight

“I don't believe in just ordering people to do things. You have to sort of grab an oar and row with them. My philosophy is to stay as close as possible to what's happening. If I can't solve something, how the hell can I expect my managers to?”

Harold Geneen (1910–1997) American businessman

from an interview for an article in The New York Times (1977), as cited in " Harold S. Geneen, 87, Dies; Nurtured AT&T http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/23/business/harold-s-geneen-87-dies-nurtured-itt.html?pagewanted=all" published 23 November 1997 in The New York Times.

People , Hell