Quotes about happening
page 40

“To operate an intelligence network against the Islamist terror is terribly difficult because they don't have a central command and control center such as we would understand. Therefore you cannot penetrate at the top and find out what will happen on the ground.”

John le Carré (1931) British novelist and spy

Radio interview (November 2008)

Intelligence, Understanding

“I wish that I wasn't seen differently. I wish that people looked at me and just saw that I was a good person with a good heart. And that wants to make people laugh. And that's who I am. I also happen to be gay. And I would love to have the same rights as everybody else. I would love, I don't care if it's called marriage. I don't care if it's called, you know, domestic partnership. I don't care what it's called. I mean, there are couples that have been together, 30 years, 40 years. And all of a sudden, they lose their house, you know, the taxes kill them, because it's different because they're not married. Everything is taken away just because. You know, with Sept. 11, there are a lot of people that lost their partner and didn't get the same benefits. It's not fair. And at the same time I know there are people watching right now saying, you know, it's sick it's wrong, it's this. And it's like, I can't convince them that I'm not sick or wrong, that there's nothing wrong with me. You know, I can live my life and hope that things change, and hope that we're protected as any other couples”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

Ellen Degeneres talking about being gay with Stone Phillips in an interview for Dateline NBC, Nov. 8, 2004

Love, Life, Marriage, People

“Each part of the mind sees only a little of what happens in some others, and that little is swiftly refined, reformulated and "represented." We like to believe that these fragments have meanings in themselves — apart from the great webs of structure from which they emerge — and indeed this illusion is valuable to us qua thinkers — but not to us as psychologists — because it leads us to think that expressible knowledge is the first thing to study.”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)

Knowledge, Thinking, Study, Parting

“Try some Symbolic Logic on your little Couch Potato when you go home, and see what happens.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Lewis Carroll in the Theatre (1994)

Home

“What Alvin figured out was that when you’re Making, you don’t use people like tools. You don’t wear them out to achieve your purpose. You wear yourself out helping them achieve theirs. You wear yourself out teaching and guiding, persuading and listening to advice and letting folks persuade you, when it happens they’re right.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Alvin Journeyman (1995), Chapter 14.

People, Help

“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

“What struck him was not sadness or remorse or pity but the wonder of it. How can it be? How can it happen that one day you are young, you marry, and then another day you come to yourself and your life has passed like a dream? They looked at teach other curiously and wondered how they could have missed each other, lived in the same house all those years and passed in the hall like ghosts.”

Walker Percy book The Second Coming

The Second Coming (1980)

Life, Sadness, Dreams, Housing

“Mr. Speaker, you have no idea how great this feels to be great back here at work in people’s House. As you can imagine, these last 3 1/2 months have been pretty challenging times for me and my family. But, if you look at the outpouring of love — my gosh Jennifer and I have been overwhelmed with the outpouring — It’s given us the strength to get through all of this. And get to this point today; it starts with God. When I was laying out on that ball field, the first thing I did once I was down and couldn’t move anymore, I started to pray. And tell you, it gave me an unbelievable sense of calm knowing at that point it’s in God’s hands. I prayed for specific things, and I’ll tell you, pretty much every one of those prayers was answered. They were some pretty challenging prayers I was putting in God’s hands, but he really did deliver for me and my family. And it just gives you that renewed faith and understanding that the power of prayer is something you cannot under estimate. So I’m a living example that miracles really do happen.”

Steve Scalise (1965) American politician

Love, God, People, Family

“On the artist, Charley Patton, who changed him: What happened was I was going out on a Saturday night, so I went into my mam’s bedroom, she’s got a double mirror, really kitsch 50s. So I’m in there, doing that, and she’s got an old alarm clock where the radio comes on, but she never learned how to do it properly. And it came on. […] I remember it was ten past three in the afternoon and it was winter, it was getting dark, and it was when the BBC had just started doing Telstar live things from America. It was some station in Memphis - one of those classic names, ‘RK 51’ or whatever. […] On it came and there’s this record. The satellite thing was a bit cloudy and it was a 78 record and there was compression on the radio, so it was this strange kind of musical blur with this voice coming through: Charley Patton. […] On that night I told the bass player of one of the local bands that I’d heard this record and it sounded weird, it sounded like a violin. He said, ‘No, it’s not a violin, it’s a slide guitar.’ I thought, ‘What’s one of them?”

Chris Rea (1951) English singer-songwriter

2017

Music, Learning, Winter, Change

“Hair got caught in the sunlight darling
But I just wasted the day.
I knew it would happen this way.”

Zooey Deschanel (1980) American actress, musician, and singer-songwriter

I Knew It Would Happen This Way (Bonus track on pre-orders).
Volume Two (2010)

Way

“She looked at me askance. “Of course I bribed him, Victor. You’d be amazed to know how cheaply. Does that bother you?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I don’t like bribery.”
“I’m indifferent to it. It happens, like gravity. It may not be admirable, but it gets things done.””

John Varley (1947) American science fiction author

"Press Enter"

Indifference

“We must surely learn, from both our past and present history, how careful we must be not to provoke the anger of the native people by doing them wrong, how we should be cautious in our dealings with a foreign people among whom we returned to live, to handle these people with love and respect and, needless to say, with justice and good judgment. And what do our brothers do? Exactly the opposite! They were slaves in their Diasporas, and suddenly they find themselves with unlimited freedom, wild freedom that only a country like Turkey [the Ottoman Empire] can offer. This sudden change has planted despotic tendencies in their hearts, as always happens to former slaves ['eved ki yimlokh – when a slave becomes king – Proverbs 30:22]. They deal with the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly, beat them shamefully for no sufficient reason, and even boast about their actions. There is no one to stop the flood and put an end to this despicable and dangerous tendency. Our brothers indeed were right when they said that the Arab only respects he who exhibits bravery and courage. But when these people feel that the law is on their rival's side and, even more so, if they are right to think their rival's actions are unjust and oppressive, then, even if they are silent and endlessly reserved, they keep their anger in their hearts. And these people will be revengeful like no other.”

Ahad Ha'am (1856–1927) Hebrew essayist and thinker

Source: Wrestling with Zion, p. 15.

Love, Hostility, People, Justice

“Things happen in NFL games. I don't try to dwell on it. I try to say, It happened. Let's move onto the next one.”

Devin Hester (1982) American football player, wide receiver, kick returner

About his fumbles Devin Hester's kick returns can inspire cheers or cringing http://www.sun-sentinel.com/sports/football/pro/dolphins/sfl-sphester16jan16,0,1250224.story?coll=sfla-dolphins-front

Game

“Jews abused and attacked on the streets of European cities… Muslim mobs attacking synagogues… Nobody gives a damn about Jews and they never have, which is why the Holocaust was allowed to happen in the first place.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"A New Kind of Hate" (27 January 2015) https://youtube.com/watch/?v=YQjTLGgQV2w 2015

““Do you understand what’s going on?”
“Not at all,” he shouted back. “I can almost prove this can’t be happening.””

Carl Sagan book Contact

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 19 (p. 330)

Understanding

“We must first of all, however, definitely understand, in reference to the end we have in view, that it is not the concern of philosophy to produce religion in any individual. Its existence is, on the contrary, presupposed as forming what is fundamental in every one. So far as man s essential nature is concerned, nothing new is to be introduced into him. To try to do this would be as absurd as to give a dog printed writings to chew, under the idea that in this way you could put mind into it. It may happen that religion is awakened in the heart by means of philosophical knowledge, but it is not necessarily so. It is not the purpose of philosophy to edify, and quite as little is it necessary for it to make good its claims by showing in any particular case that it must produce religious feeling in the individual.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) German philosopher

Lectures on the philosophy of religion, together with a work on the proofs of the existence of God. Translated from the 2d German ed. by E.B. Speirs, and J. Burdon Sanderson: the translation edited by E.B. Speirs. Published 1895 p. 4
Lectures on Philosophy of Religion, Volume 1 (1827)

Religion, Dogs, Way, Feeling

“I disagree with the concept that somehow or another we're going to pack up 10, to 12, to 15 million people and ship them back to the country of origin. That's not going to happen. So reality has to be part of our conversation. And then you need to have a strategy to deal with it. That is what I think we will have, but first you have to secure that border.”

Rick Perry (1950) 14th and current United States Secretary of Energy

2011-11-03T20:27
Perry supports work visas for illegal immigrants
Dana
Thompson
Houston Chronicle
http://blog.chron.com/rickperry/2011/11/perry-supports-work-visas-for-illegal-immigrants/
2011

People, Thinking, Reality, Parting

“Good leadership is not just a matter of making things happen; it is a matter of making essential things happen, making important and productive things happen, and helping people feel good about what is happening. Leaders need to have a vision, but they also need to know how to convince others that their vision can manifest, and how to empower them to participate in the mission of bringing the vision about.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

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Books, Leadership for an Age of Higher Consciousness, Volume II: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times (Hari-Nama Press, 2001)

People, Feeling, Help

“Why did it occur to anyone to believe in only one God? And conversely why did it ever occur to anyone to believe in many gods? To both these questions we must return the same answer: Because that is how the human mind happens to work. For the human mind is both diverse and simple, simultaneously many and one. We have an immediate perception of our own diversity and of that of the outside world. And at the same time we have immediate perceptions of our own oneness.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

“One and Many,” p. 12
Do What You Will (1928)

God, World, Question, Time

“I really wish the people that look sort of in anger at the 'weirdos,' at the happenings, at the psychedelic freak-out, would instead of just looking with anger, just look with nothing; with no feeling; be unbiased about it. They really don't realize that what these people are talking about is something that they really want themselves. It's something that everyone wants. You know, it's personal freedom to be able to talk and be able to say things And it's dead straight! It's a real sort of basic pleasure for everyone. But it looks weird from the outside.”

Paul McCartney (1942) English singer-songwriter and composer

From the TV show "It's So Far Out It's Straight Down", 18.1.1967

People, Pleasure, Feeling, Freedom

“I have to dedicate myself. Do you understand? I don't feel conflict in myself because if I do, my work doesn't go well. If there's conflict I have to sit down or go to sleep to solve it. And the only way to solve the problem is to produce really affirmative work which can only come – I can't make it come. I can't conjure it up. I can only go to sleep and hope it happens... You have to digest it and if you digest you can contribute.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Source: 1961 - 1975, Art Talk, conversations with 15 woman artists', (1975), p. 15

Hope, Way, Feeling, Understanding

“Everyone thinks chemistry and alchemy are so similar, but they’re really not. They’re not even related. They just happen to live in the same house.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind (2007), Chapter 44, “The Burning Glass” (p. 328)

Thinking, Housing

“I'm doing this for the sake of this country [Malaysia], because this nation belongs to us. We were born here and we will die here. If I were to die fighting, let it be… but I can't just stand and do nothing, when I see the things that are happening in our nation. So right now I have to give a message to my brethren: The people who have been living in unity all this time. Don't believe the propaganda of today's government. They go around to kampungs to spread all sorts of propaganda, that whatever they implement must be obeyed. Think for yourself - are they really doing what is right? Don't just follow without question, use your wisdom and think. What is happening is, they take credit for all that is good, their opponents are responsible for all bad things, and they [government he is referring to as "spreading propaganda"] cover up all the bad things they do and point the finger of blame on the people who stand up to them. So this is the situation today, the press has no voice. When a newspaper reports something, the issue is covered up. This just goes to show that the people who stand up to them have no voice at all. This government [todays government] controls everything. But the ones who really hold power in this nation, you, the ordinary rakyat (Dewan Rakyat). So if we don't seek what is true, or use wisdom to discern a matter, this nation will crumble. If only the rakyat could understand all of this, at the end of the day, the rakyat has the right to vote, and the rakyat itself can elect anyone to be the leader here, ordinary rakyat, think for yourselves, because that "magic lamp" is in the hands of the original rakyat. So, ordinary rakyat with power in their hands, use your wisdom, protect your rights, in order to preserve our beloved nation, Malaysia, because it's not only this present generation that depend on our nation, that depends on fairness in our nation, but even our next generation to come all depend on the governance of our nation. If this Merdeka is to have any meaning at all, may they be well until the end of time. This is our responsibility. I pray that all will be well.”

Tunku Abdul Rahman (1903–1990) Malaysian politician

"Tunku Abdul Rahman last speech" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdoxoum02BA, interview taken on National Day, 1988, Malaysia.

Wisdom, People, Understanding, Question

“One woman came to me recently, since this happened, and described that she needs contraception to prevent seizures. So she has several seizures a month if she doesn't have contraception to balance her hormones. And that's just an incredible intrusion on her life, her ability to manage her daily affairs, if she doesn't have access to that medical prescription. So that's one of the huge impacts.”

Sandra Fluke (1981) American women's rights activist and lawyer

Sandra Fluke, (February 23, 2012). "Sandra Fluke responds to Nationwide Campaign Against Contraceptives", United States House of Representatives, House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee. Sandra Fluke answering a question from Congressman Elijah Cummings as part of her Congressional testimony, as given at C-SPAN http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjhfUuW8Vgo&list=UUXSlyao4qkUFiPqghptHtZA. U.S. Congressional testimony (February 23, 2012)

Life

“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

“If you want to know everything about the market, go to the beach. Push and pull your hands with the waves. Some are bigger waves, some are smaller. But if you try to push the wave out when it's coming in, it'll never happen. The market is always right.”

Ed Seykota (1946) American commodities trader

Source: Harris, Sunny J. Trading 102: Getting Down to Business, Wiley; 1 edition (September 1998), ISBN 0471181331 Read it here http://books.google.co.uk/books?vid=ISBN0471181331&id=lvq0DElVjRIC&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=seykota&sig=SvwZDgQxbP1_aH9Pi06-xucp4P0

“America is an outstandingly dangerous place. Consider this: every year in New Hampshire a dozen or more people are killed crashing their cars into moose. Now correct me if I am wrong, but this is not something that is likely to happen to you on the way home from Sainsbury's.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

I'm a Stranger Here Myself (US), Notes From a Big Country (UK) (1998)

People, Cars, Way, Home

“Roger: It’s complicated. It kind of has different phases. It will be like Chris [Demakes, guitarist/singer] or I will have a song idea and Vinnie Fiorello [drummer/lyricist] will write lyrics that go with that song idea or Vinnie will just have words that he wrote down and we’ll take that and sort of mold it into a song. I mean it kind of happens in different ways and not everyone is always involved, and sometimes everyone is involved it just depends. There’s no like formula for writing songs at least not in our band. It’s pretty much however it comes apart and falls apart and everything if it feels right it feels right the song is the ultimate guide. Am I being too hippie for you?”

Roger Manganelli (1973) American musician

Way, Feeling, Idea, Dependency

“It's a fantastically specialized universe, but how in the world did it happen?”

Charles Hard Townes (1915–2015) American Physicist

as quoted by Alvin Powell, in Laser's inventor predicts meeting of science, religion http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2005/06.16/05-laser.html, Harvard News Office, June 2005.

World, Universe

“I urge the Commission on Elections to ditch its plan to use a combination of manual and computerized elections next year and exert all efforts instead to ensure that the 2016 national polls will still be fully automated. Returning to manual polls is a cause for serious concern due to its dangerous implications on the country’s electoral process and a step backwards after having fully automated the elections previously. The proposed "hybrid polls" raises the chilling prospect of a wide-scale electoral cheating similar to what happened during the 2004 presidential elections and brings back memories of "Hello Garci."”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Escudero, F. [Francis]. (2015, July 7). Retrieved from Official Facebook Page of Francis Escudero https://www.facebook.com/senchizescudero/posts/10153411040670610/ 2015, Facebook

Effort, Memory, Cheating, Country

“Confederates were terrified of what was happening to slavery.”

William C. Davis (1946) American historian

Source: Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002), p. 150

“Everything that happens to us, everything that we say or hear, everything we see with our own eyes or we articulate with our tongue, everything that enters through our ears, everything we are witness to (and for which we are therefore partly responsible) must find a recipient outside ourselves and we choose that recipient according to what happens or what we are told or even according to what we ourselves say.”

Javier Marías (1951) Spanish writer

Todo lo que nos sucede, todo lo que hablamos o nos es relatado, cuanto vemos con nuestros propios ojos o sale de nuestra lengua o entra por nuestros oídos, todo aquello a lo que asistimos (y de lo cual, por tanto, somos algo responsables), ha de tener un destinatario fuera de nosotros mismos, y a ese destinatario lo vamos seleccionando en función de lo que acontece o nos dicen o bien decimos nosotros.
Source: Todas las Almas [All Souls] (1989), p. 140

“It's almost as if art, in painting and music and stuff, is the leftover of some activity. The activity is the thing that I'm most interested in. Nearly everything that I've done was to see what would happen if I did this instead of that.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

1960's, I never thought of it as much of an ability,' (1968)

Art, Music, Painting

“I watched and tried to figure out what he would have done. I was only sure of one thing: he wouldn't have left something like that sit there in the day room with his name tacked on it for twenty or thirty years so the Big Nurse could use it as an example of what can happen if you buck the system. I was sure of that.”

Ken Kesey book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

"Chief, in Ch. 29
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)

“According to Seth, poor health is caused mainly by destructive mental feeling patterns that directly affect the body because of the particular range within the electromagnetic system in which they fall. Bad health, for example, does not happen first, resulting in unhealthy thoughts. It is the other way around.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 237-238

Health, Way, Feeling

“Donald Trump lacks the temperament of be president. After all, this is an individual who mocked a disabled reporter, who attributed a reporter's questions to her menstrual cycle, who mocked a brilliant rival who happened to be a woman due to her appearance, who bragged about his marital affairs, and who laces his public speeches with vulgarity.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

2016, Remarks on Donald Trump and the 2016 race

Question, Appearance

“As often happens, fear showed itself in hostility.”

Michael Flynn book Eifelheim

Source: Eifelheim (2006), Chapter XII (p. 212)

Hostility, Fear

“The universe must be law-abiding, and if Christ suspended law it would be a criticism of his Father as one whose laws were inadequate for certain possible situations which might arise. "We say," said St. Augustine profoundly, "that all portents (miracles) are contrary to nature, but they are not so. For how is that contrary to nature which happens by the will of God, since the will of so mighty a Creator is certainly the nature of each created thing?"”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.106 (Augustine: The City of God. 21:8)

God, Law, Nature, Universe

“The dominant propaganda systems have appropriated the term "globalization" to refer to the specific version of international economic integration that they favor, which privileges the rights of investors and lenders, those of people being incidental. In accord with this usage, those who favor a different form of international integration, which privileges the rights of human beings, become "anti-globalist." This is simply vulgar propaganda, like the term "anti-Soviet" used by the most disgusting commissars to refer to dissidents. It is not only vulgar, but idiotic. Take the World Social Forum, called "anti-globalization" in the propaganda system -- which happens to include the media, the educated classes, etc., with rare exceptions. The WSF is a paradigm example of globalization. It is a gathering of huge numbers of people from all over the world, from just about every corner of life one can think of, apart from the extremely narrow, highly privileged elites who meet at the competing World Economic Forum, and are called "pro-globalization" by the propaganda system. An observer watching this farce from Mars would collapse in hysterical laughter at the antics of the educated classes.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Interview by Sniježana Matejčić, June 2005 http://www.galerija-rigo.hr/05/chomsky_en_2.htm. Quotes 2000s, 2005

Life, People, World, Education

“Do not be afraid, Leon, — I feel much better; but in case anything should happen to me I wanted to leave you something to remember me by. Perhaps I ought not to say it so soon after my husband's death; but as I might die, I wanted to tell you now that I loved you very, very much.”

Henryk Sienkiewicz book Without Dogma

Anelia, to Leon, 21 November
Without Dogma (1891)

Love, Death, Feeling

“And secondly, I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars.”

Kay Bailey Hutchison (1943) American politician

On the Scooter Libby case.
[October 23, 2005, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9764239/, "Transcript for October 23", Meet the Press, MSNBC, 2009-02-23]

Hope, Time

“On second handers: [They are] always concerned with people - not facts, ideas, work or production. What would happen to the world without those who think, work, and produce?”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Journals of Ayn Rand (1997)

People, World, Idea, Thinking

“I’m very much a free market capitalist, actually. I don’t agree with a kind of totalitarian, one government or sort of universal law. I think what will happen and what is happening now is, in the same way as… In the way that countries make themselves attractive to investors through different pieces of legislation they offer, whether it’s secrecy in the case of the Cayman Islands or Switzerland, I think the fact that some countries now are offering very robust publishing laws, it will be that as information is global, what you might see is that these big internet companies like Google or Facebook, that have their servers, will start to relocate those servers to countries where they have less interference. In a way, you’re creating a kind of free market of freedom of information law.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Attributed, Chatham House Talk (September 28, 2011)

Law, Way, Thinking, Freedom

“If you want to avoid upsetting these people (Muslim fundamentalists) you have to let Indonesia commit genocide in East Timor, otherwise they'll be upset with you. You'll have made an enemy. If you tell them they can't throw acid in the faces of unveiled women in Karachi they will be annoyed with you. If you say we insist, we think that cartoonists in Copenhagen can print satire on the Prophet Muhammed you've just made an enemy. You've brought it on. You're encouraging it to happen. So unless you're willing to commit suicide for yourself and for this culture, get used to the compromises you'll have to make and the eventual capitulation that will come to you, but bloody well don't do that in my name…”

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

Speech at Freedom From Religion Foundation on 12 October 2007.
2000s, 2007

Women, People, Thinking, Suicide

“What happened what happened, let's go!”

Ramón Valdés (1923–1988) Mexican actor

As Don Ramón Original: (sp) ¡Qué pasó qué pasó vamos ay! Don Ramón - Qué pasó, que pasó, vamos ay !! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u35jIrN_tyg

Faith

“We joined long wagon trains moving south; we met hundreds of wagons going north; the roads east and west were crawling lines of families traveling under canvas, looking for work, for another foothold somewhere on the land…. The country was ruined, the whole world was ruined; nothing like this had ever happened before. There was no hope, but everyone felt the courage of despair.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Written in 1935, recalling her family’s migration from drought-stricken South Dakota to the Missouri Ozarks in 1894; the 650-mile trip had taken them six weeks.
As quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, ch. 1, by William V. Holtz (1993).

World, Family, Hope, Travel

“I was reading in the paper the other day about those birds who are trying to split the atom, the nub being that they haven't the foggiest as to what will happen if they do. It may be all right. On the other hand, it may not be all right. And pretty silly a chap would feel, no doubt, if, having split the atom, he suddenly found the house going up in smoke and himself torn limb from limb.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Right Ho, Jeeves

Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

Feeling, Bird, Reading, Housing

“Dialectical logic undoes the abstractions of formal logic and of transcendental philosophy, but it also denies the concreteness of immediate experience. To the extent to which this experience comes to rest with the things as they appear and happen to be, it is a limited and even false experience. It attains its truth if it has freed itself from the deceptive objectivity which conceals the factors behind the facts — that is, if it understands its world as a historical universe, in which the established facts are the work of the historical practice of man.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 141

Truth, World, Understanding, Universe

“I believe that we don't need to worry about what happens after this life, as long as we do our duty here—to love and to serve.”

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

Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 94

Love, Life

“I do not care a button about having my name in any blessed place. I was never ardent about fame even in my political days; I preferred to remain behind the curtain, push people without their knowing it and get things done. It was the confounded British Government that spoiled my game by prosecuting me and forcing me to be publicly known and a 'leader'. Then, again, I don't believe in advertisement except for books etc., and in propaganda except for politics and patent medicines. But for serious work it is a poison. It means either a stunt or a boom' and stunts and booms exhaust the thing they carry on their crest and leave it lifeless and broken high and dry on the shores of nowhere… or it means a movement. A movement in the case of a work like mine means the founding of a school or a sect or some other damned nonsense. It means that hundreds or thousands of useless people join in and corrupt the work or reduce it to a pompous farce from which the Truth that was coming down recedes into secrecy and silence. It is what has happened to the 'religions' and is the reason of their failure. If I tolerate a little writing about myself, it is only to have a sufficient counter-weight in that amorphous chaos, the public mind, to balance the hostility that is always aroused by the presence of a new dynamic Truth in this world of ignorance. But the utility ends there and too much advertisement would defeat that object. I am perfectly 'rational', I assure you, in my methods and I do not proceed merely on any personal dislike of fame. If and so far as publicity serves the Truth, I am quite ready to tolerate it; but I do not find publicity for its own sake desirable.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

October 2, 1934
India's Rebirth

Hostility, People, Truth, Books

“Now everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody Else, but when it happens to you, why it seems to lose some of its Humor, and if it keeps on happening, why the entire laughter kinder Fades out of it.”

Will Rogers (1879–1935) American humorist and entertainer

"Warning to Jokers: Lay off the Prince"
The Illiterate Digest (1924)

Laughter

“Hyperinflation is not going to happen in this country, will never happen… The Fed putting so much money into the system is not going to create the risk of hyperinflation in the future. We have a strong independent Federal Reserve with a very strong mandate from the Congress, and they will do what's necessary to keep inflation low and stable over time.”

Timothy Geithner (1961) American central banker and politician

This Week with George Stephanopoulos, March 29, 2009 http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/Story?id=7200273&page=4

Money, Strong, Time, Future

“In any transition period there is a clash of realities. In the 1930s people considered the eventual solutions, at first, to be unrealistic. It’s the same this time round. At first, in the euro crisis there was to be no bailout. Then no buying of government debt. Then no QE. Each of these things have happened. Some things which are now seen as unrealistic will change with the political balance of forces.”

Euclid Tsakalotos (1960) Greek economist and politician

" Inside Syriza’s economic brain http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/Greece-syriza-election/2941" (20 January 2015) Quoted during an interview, via Skype, between Tsakalotos and a number of other economists. Hosted at the London School of Economics.

People, Reality, Change, Time

“During the entire period of my banishment and trial, I wanted to tell Piedmont and Bennington that what was happening between us was not confined to Beaufort, South Carolina. I wanted to tell them about the river that was rising quickly, flooding the marshes and threatening the dry land. I wanted them to know that their day was ending. When I saw them at the trial, I knew that they were the soldiers of the rear guard, captains of a doomed army retreating through the snow and praying that the quick, dark wolves, waiting in the cold, would come no closer. They were old men and could not accept the new sun rising out of the strange waters. The world was very different now.”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

Source: The Water is Wide (1972), p. 311-312

Men, World, Water, Waiting

“The worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.”

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

Source: 1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925), Ch. 1: "The Origins of Modern Science"

Men, Suffering, Science

“I don't think about that. I will think about that when I have the trophy in my hands. I just said that in spring training, and I'll just let it happen. You can see [Johan] Santana has like a four-something earned-run average. That's not Santana. At the end of the season, you'll see what Santana is capable of doing.”

Carlos Zambrano (1981) Venezuelan baseball pitcher

Sullivan, Paul, Zambrano remains sharp against Cards http://chicagosports.chicagotribune.com/sports/baseball/cubs/cs-070428cubsgamer,1,5520199.story?coll=cs-cubs-headlines, Chicago Tribune, Retrieved on June 16, 2007 2007

Spring, Thinking, Training, Season

“You are as responsible for what you let happen as for the actions you share.”

Joan Slonczewski book A Door into Ocean

Part 5, Chapter 6 (p. 239)
A Door into Ocean (1986)

“He was carried away by that mania of the storyteller, who never knows which stories are more beautiful—the ones that really happened and the evocation of which recalls a whole flow of hours past, of petty emotions, boredom, happiness, insecurity, vanity, and self-disgust, or those which are invented, and in which he cuts out a main pattern, and everything seems easy, then begins to vary it as he realizes more and more that he is describing again things that had happened or been understood in lived reality.”

Italo Calvino book The Baron in the Trees

The Baron in the Trees (1957), Chapter 16; English translation: Archibald Colquhoun (1959).

Beauty, Reality, Past, Happiness

“The Prime Minister constantly asserts that the nuclear weapon has kept the peace in Europe for the last 40 years… Let us go back to the middle 1950s or to the end of the 1940s, and let us suppose that nuclear power had never been invented… I assert that in those circumstances there would still not have been a Russian invasion of western Europe. What has prevented that from happening was not the nuclear hypothesis… but the fact that the Soviet Union knew the consequences of such a move, consequences which would have followed whether or not there were 300,000 American troops stationed in Europe. The Soviet Union knew that such an action on its part would have led to a third world war—a long war, bitterly fought, a war which in the end the Soviet Union would have been likely to lose on the same basis and in the same way as the corresponding war was lost by Napoleon, by the Emperor Wilhelm and by Adolf Hitler…
For of course a logically irresistible conclusion followed from the creed that our safety depended upon the nuclear capability of the United States and its willingness to commit that capability in certain events. If that was so—and we assured ourselves for 40 years that it was—the guiding principle of the foreign policy of the United Kingdom had to be that, in no circumstances, must it depart from the basic insights of the United States and that any demand placed in the name of defence upon the United Kingdom by the United States was a demand that could not be resisted. Such was the rigorous logic of the nuclear deterrent…
It was in obedience to it… that the Prime Minister said, in the context of the use of American bases in Britain to launch an aggressive attack on Libya, that it was "inconceivable" that we could have refused a demand placed upon this country by the United States. The Prime Minister supplied the reason why: she said it was because we depend for our liberty and freedom upon the United States. Once let the nuclear hypothesis be questioned or destroyed, once allow it to break down, and from that moment the American imperative in this country's policies disappears with it.
A few days ago I was reminded, when reading a new biography of Richard Cobden, that he once addressed a terrible sentence of four words to this House of Commons. He said to hon. Members: "You have been Englishmen." The strength of those words lies in the perfect tense, with the implication that they were so no longer but had within themselves the power to be so again. I believe that we now have the opportunity, with the dissolution of the nightmare of the nuclear theory, for this country once again to have a defence policy that accords with the needs of this country as an island nation, and to have a foreign policy which rests upon a true, undistorted view of the outside world. Above all, we have the opportunity to have a foreign policy that is not dictated from outside to this country, but willed by its people. That day is coming. It may be delayed, but it will come.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech on Foreign Affairs in the House of Commons http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1987/apr/07/foreign-affairs (7 April 1987). 1980s

War, People, World, Peace

“If you look at anyone successful, at the start they were not balanced. Balanced people go nowhere. They stay in one spot. To make progress, you must first go unbalanced. Just look at how you make progress walking. Thomas Edison was not balanced. He was focused. Bill Gates was not balanced. He was focused. Donald Trump is focused. George Soros is focused. George Patton did not take his tanks wide. He focused them and blew through the weak spots in the German line. The French went wide with the Maginot Line, and you know what happened to them. If you have any desire of being rich, you must focus.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

People, Success

“We nest in an accident whose precarious valance, when we happen to become conscious of it, oppresses yet at the same time inspires us”

Max Frisch (1911–1991) Swiss playwright and novelist

Sketchbook 1946-1949

Time

“In view of what has happened to other indigenous groups, the fear and insecurity of Fijians should be easy to understand.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

Excerpts from a parliamentary speech, 3 June 2005

Fear, Understanding

“The homosexual culture as we have said is at war with God, and there are no negotiations possible in this world. That modernists and atheists would be in the enemy camp should not surprise us. But we know how far gone it is when periodical like Christianity Today carry articles stating that ‘the individual homosexual would appear to be more sinned against than sinning. because his condition is either genetic or environmental in nature, and therefore not his fault.’ Thus we should not be surprised at what is happening today.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Homosexuality (n. d.)

God, War, World, Nature

“Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin or circles under the eyes. it is not a superficial flaw in an otherwise perfect picture. It is not a minor irritation, nor it is it a trivial inconvenience, an occasional aggravation, or a regrettable but (frankly) harmless lapse in manners. It is not a "point of view" that some people with soft skins find "offensive." it is the deep and destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and self-respect, an imposed exile from human worth an human recognition, the forced alienation of a person from even the possibility of whole ness or internal integrity.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 9

Life, Women, People, Affliction

“Institutionalization is a process. It is something that happens to an organization over time, reflecting the organization’s own distinctive history, the people who have been in it, the groups it embodies and the vested interests they have created, and the way it has adapted to its environment.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Source: Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation, 1957, p. 34 (in 2011 edition)

People, Way, History, Time

“Anita Sarkeesian: For me, the big picture has always been culture change, and pop culture was just a vehicle and a medium through which cultural change can happen or it can be influenced by; so it’s not actually about video games. But it’s about video games, right?”

Anita Sarkeesian (1983) American blogger

[NIwtbdEcVrI, Fighting for a Cause (Creator)] (June 24, 2016), VidCon 2016 @34:06

Game, Change

“The first few days I felt trapped in a constant twilight of vertigo, like in the dream where you're suddenly falling… only I was constantly falling. In moments of fitful sleep I was aware of the dim possibility that I would wake up, truly wake up, and this would not have happened.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Page 80
2000s, Promises to Keep (2008)

Dreams, Sleep

“I once asked Aragon, the historian, how history was written. He said, 'You have to invent it.' When I wish as now to tell of critical incidents, persons, and events that have influenced my life and work, the true answer is all of the incidents were critical, all of the people influenced me, everything that happened and that is still happening influences me.”

John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer

Quote of John Cage: the first lines of his 'Autobiographical Statement', April, 1990 http://www.johncage.org/autobiographical_statement.html 1990s

Life, People, History, Personality

“We could no more have a universal world market than we could have a system in which everyone who wasn't a capitalist was somehow able to to become a respectable, regularly paid wage laborer with access to adequate dental care. A world like that has never existed and never could exist. What's more, the moment that even the prospect that this might happen begins to materialize, the whole system starts to come apart.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, "Age of the Great Capitalist Empires", p. 355

World, Universe

“Does screen violence provide a window or a mirror? Is it an effect or a cause, an encouragement, a facilitation? Fairly representatively, I think, I happen to like screen violence while steadily execrating its real-life counterpart. Moreover, I can tell the difference between the two. One is happening, one is not.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Review of Hollywood vs. America by Michael Medved, p. 16
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

Life, Thinking

“One of the things that was introduced to me at an early stage in life was to try to make stuff happen. But nothing ever worked that way for me. What I learned on my own was that to try and play God with your life will wreck your brain and your nervous system, and mess up your natural direction in the course that's already there…But look, I just don't want to read about me being made into a basket case because of my work. It's self-pity that I hate. I mean, it comes with the territory. An actor with any conviction goes the extra mile.”

River Phoenix (1970–1993) American actor, musician, and activist

Movieline (1991)

Life, God, Hate, Way

“I'd like to say something about this last, about this last point of this terrible, terrible business. I mean Treblinka. I was given orders. I went to see Globocnik in Treblinka. That was the second time. The installations were now in operation, and I had to report to Müller. I expected to see a wooden house on the right side of the road and a few more wooden houses on the left; that's what I remembered. Instead, again with the same Sturmbannführer Höfle, I came to a railroad station with a sign saying Treblinka, looking exactly like a German railroad station — anywhere in Germany — a replica, with signboards, etc. There I hung back as far as I could. I didn't push closer to see it all. I saw a footbridge enclosed in barbed wire and over that footbridge a file of naked Jews was being driven into a house, a big… no, not a house, a big, one-room structure, to be gassed. As I was told, they were gassed with …what's it called? … Potassium cyanide… or cyanic acid. In acid form it's called cyanic acid. I didn't look to see what happened. I reported to Müller and as usual he listened in silence, without a word of comment. Just his facial expression said: "There's nothing I can do about it."”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

I am convinced, Herr Hauptmann, [Eichmann is referring to his interrogator, Avner Less] I know it sounds odd coming from me, but I'm convinced that if it had been up to Müller it wouldn't have happened.
Source: Eichmann Interrogated (1983), p. 84.

Business, Silence, Time, Housing

“I assume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to our side (God forgive me if that is hubris). The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, 'Horrible three-way civil war?”

Molly Ivins (1944–2007) American journalist

Appalling silence http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/1/2003/20, January 16, 2003. Retrieved February 1, 2007.

God, War, Way, Forgiveness

“Weisinger, a couple of years ago, made up the following story: "Isaac Asimov was asked how Superman could fly faster than the speed of light, which was supposed to be an absolute limit. To this Asimov replied, 'That the speed of light is a limit is a theory; that Superman can travel faster than light is a fact.'"
I assure you it never happened and I never said it, but it will be repeated, I am quite certain, indefinitely, and it will probably be found in Bartlett's quotations a century from now, attributed to me, after all my writings have been forgotten.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

"Science Fiction, 1938" Nebula Winners 14 (1980) edited by Frederick J. Pohl, p. 97
General sources

Travel, Light, Speed, Flying

“The notion of thumos tells us further that politics is about protection, not primarily about gain. The reason you assert in your defense protects you and people like you that are included in the argument you advance. In an assertive, political argument you assume that you are perfectly OK. You are not apologizing for your self or your soul. The problem lies in things outside you, accidents that have happened or might happen, or the faults of others besides yourself. You therefore want to be protected in your self-satisfaction.”

Harvey Mansfield (1932) Author, professor

Source: How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

People, Soul, Problem

“Back at the Philadelphia Worldcon (which seems a million years ago), I announced the famous five-year gap: I was going to skip five years forward in the story, to allow some of the younger characters to grow older and the dragons to grow larger, and for various other reasons. I started out writing on that basis in 2001, and it worked very well for some of my myriad characters but not at all for others, because you can't just have nothing happen for five years. If things do happen you have to write flashbacks, a lot of internal retrospection, and that's not a good way to present it. I struggled with that essentially wrong direction for about a year before finally throwing it out, realizing there had to be another interim book. That became A Feast for Crows, where the action is pretty much continuous from the preceding book. Even so, that only accounts for one year. Why the four after that? I don't know, except that this was a very tough book to write -- and it remains so, because I've only finished half. Going in, I thought I could do something about the length of the second book in the series, A Clash of Kings, roughly 1,200 pages in manuscript. But I passed that and there was a lot more to write. Then I passed the length of the third book, A Storm of Swords, which was something like 1,500 pages in manuscript and gave my publishers all around the world lots of production problems. I didn't really want to make any cuts because I had this huge story to tell. We started thinking about dividing it in two and doing it as A Feast for Crows, Parts One and Two, but the more I thought about that the more I really did not like it. Part One would have had no resolution whatsoever for 18 viewpoint characters and their 18 stories. Of course this is all part of a huge megaseries so there is not a complete resolution yet in any of the volumes, but I try to give a certain sense of completion at the end of each volume -- that a movement of the symphony has wrapped up, so to speak.”

George Raymond Richard Martin (1948) American writer, screenwriter and television producer

Interview with Locus magazine (November 2005)

Books, World, Way, Problem

“I think when something's over, events have a way of conspiring to make you realise that it's over. As cryptic as that sounds, it's true. Things would happen and I'd be like, Am I going to have to deal with this for the rest of my life? And it was a very, very emotional band. It's in the music. The relationship between me and Morrissey was very emotional. It wasn't volatile in that we would row or anything like that, but it was so intense that if rocked slightly it would be a big deal. Was the lack of a manager important? Massively, I think. I was nursemaiding people when I needed nursemaiding myself. And I couldn't see where we were going to go in the near future musically without repeating ourselves and not being as good.”

Johnny Marr (1963) musician

from "Trouble at Mill" by John Harris, Mojo (April 2001).

Life, People, Music, Way

“I came here tonight to talk about the agreement and security that are broad consensus within Israeli society. This is what guides our policy. This policy must take into account the international situation. We have to recognize international agreements but also principles important to the State of Israel. I spoke tonight about the first principle - recognition. Palestinians must truly recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people. The second principle is demilitarization. Any area in Palestinian hands has to be demilitarization, with solid security measures. Without this condition, there is a real fear that there will be an armed Palestinian state which will become a terrorist base against Israel, as happened in Gaza. We do not want missiles on Petah Tikva, or Grads on the Ben-Gurion international airport. We want peace.”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

Speech at Bar-Ilan University, as quoted in "Full text of Netanyahu's foreign policy speech at Bar Ilan" in Haaretz (14 June 2009) http://www.haaretz.com/news/full-text-of-netanyahu-s-foreign-policy-speech-at-bar-ilan-1.277922 2000s, 2009

People, Fear, Peace

“Saddam Hussein… I believe is involved with this World Trade Center and Pentagon bombing. I believe that you're going to find out that money from Iraq flowed in and helped this happen.”

Bill O'Reilly (1949) American political commentator, television host and writer

2001-09-14
[2005-06-10, O'Reilly: "We Do Not Speculate Here", FAIR.org, http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2543, 2010-11-19]

Money, World, Help

“Well I didn't tape him — you never know what's happening, when you see that the Obama administration, and perhaps longer than that, was doing all of this unmasking and, er, surveillance, and you read all about it, and I've been reading about for the last couple of months about the seriousness of the, and horrible situation, with surveillance all over the place, and you've been hearing the word 'unmasking', a word you probably never heard before, so you never know what's out there — but I didn't tape, and I don't have any tape, and I didn't tape.”

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

2010s, 2017, June

Reading

“I don't like movies where everything happens fast. I like the buildup, the obstacles, the mystery.”

Matt Dillon (1964) American actor

Terry Lawson (May 28, 2003) "Dillon's Cambodia Vacation Pays Off - Actor Turns Director to Tell a Story of Beauty With an Air of Mystery", Detroit Free Press, p. 1C.

“…I don't feel that they deserve a blanket condemnation at all. There are many things to object to in any society. But take China, modern China; one also finds many things that are really quite admirable. […] There are even better examples than China. But I do think that China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

" The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act? Noam Chomsky debates with Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, et al. http://www.chomsky.info/debates/19671215.htm" in New York, December 15, 1967; Republished at chomsky.info, accessed May 23, 2014. Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1960s

Feeling, Communication, Understanding, Thinking

“I understand and sympathize with the reasonable needs of a reasonable number of people on a finite continent. All life depends upon other life. But what is happening today, in North America, is not rational use but irrational massacre. Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

“The Crooked Wood” p. 208
The Journey Home (1977)

Life, People, Understanding, Dependency

“God can make good use of all that happens, but the loss is real.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Perelandra

Perelandra (1943)

God, Loss

“I wish I could paint more... I do dozens of sketches for oils.... if I do one that interests me I go on to make a painting but that happens only two or three times a year.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

Quote in 'Travelling Man', Time January 1948
1941 - 1967

Time, Painting

“So intimate is the union between Mathematics and Physics that probably by far the larger part of the accessions to our mathematical knowledge have been obtained by the efforts of mathematicians to solve the problems set to them by experiment, and to create for each successive class phenomena a new calculus or a new geometry, as the case might be, which might prove not wholly inadequate to the subtlety of nature. Sometimes the mathematician has been before the physicist, and it has happened that when some great and new question has occurred to the experimentalist or the observer, he has found in the armory of the mathematician the weapons which he needed ready made to his hand. But much oftener, the questions proposed by the physicist have transcended the utmost powers of the mathematics of the time, and a fresh mathematical creation has been needed to supply the logical instrument requisite to interpret the new enigma.”

Henry John Stephen Smith (1826–1883) mathematician

As quoted in The Century: A Popular Quarterly (1874) ed. Richard Watson Gilder, Vol. 7, pp. 508-509, https://books.google.com/books?id=ceYGAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA508 "Relations of Mathematics to Physics". Earlier quote without citation in Nature, Volume 8 (1873), page 450. Also quoted partially in Michael Grossman and Robert Katz, Calculus http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis;c=216746186|Non-Newtonian (1972) p. iv. ISBN 0912938013.

Mathematics, Question, Nature, Knowledge

“I've seen anti-Semitism essentially disappear in my adult life as a social and economic factor. There may be some nuts out there, but generally things are fine. I think the same thing will happen with gayness. We'll get to a point soon enough where it's not even an issue anymore. But progress can be slow. I filed my first gay rights bills in 1972 in Massachusetts. Forty years later, it would be nice to have this wrapped up and put to bed.”

Barney Frank (1940) American politician, former member of the House of Representatives for Massachusetts

Quoted in [Denizet-Lewis, Benoit, 3 December 2008, http://www.advocate.com/print_article_ektid67124.asp, "Harrumph!", w:The Advocate, Advocate.com, 2008-12-12]

Life, Thinking

“Imagine a book of unexplained mysteries written by a contemporary of Shakespeare. It might include the mystery of the falling stars that sweep through the sky foretelling disaster; the mystery of the Kraken, the giant sea devil with 50-foot tentacles; the mystery of monster bones, sometimes found in caves or on beaches. Such a book would be a curious mixture of truth and absurdity, fact and legend. We would all feel superior as we turned its pages and murmured: "Of course, they didn't know about comets and giant squids and dinosaurs." If this book should happen to find its way into the hands of our remote descendants, they may smile pityingly and say: "It's incredible to think that they knew nothing about epsilon fields or multiple psychic feedback or cross gravitational energies. They didn't even know about the ineluctability of time."”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

But let us hope that such a descendant is in a charitable mood, and might add: "And yet they managed to ask a few of the right questions."
Source: Enigmas and Mysteries (1976), p. 142

Truth, Books, Smile, Hope

“God, say some philosophers, manifests himself in the sublunary world in particular beauties, truths and acts of benevolence; properly, the values should be conjoined to shadow their identity in the godhead, but this happens so infrequently that one must suppose divinity condones a kind of diabolic fracture or else, and perhaps my book is already giving some hint of this, he demonstrates his ineffable freedom through contriving at times a wanton inconsistency. If this is so, we need not wonder at Messalina’s failure to match her beauty with a love of truth and goodness. She was a chronic liar and she was thoroughly bad. But her beauty, we are told, was a miracle. The symmetry of her body obeyed all the golden rules of the mystical architects, her skin was without even the most minuscule flaw and it glowed as though gold had been inlaid behind translucent ivory, her breasts were full and yet pertly disdained earth’s pull, the nipples nearly always erect, and visibly so beneath her byssinos, as in a state of perpetual sexual excitation, the areolas delicately pigmented to a kind of russet. The sight of her weaving bare white arms was enough, it is said, to make a man grit his teeth with desire to be encircled by them; the smooth plain of her back, tapering to slenderness only to expand lusciously to the opulence of her perfect buttocks, demanded unending caresses.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985)

Love, God, Truth, Books

“It doesn't happen that way.”

Bernard Goldberg (1945) American journalist

Response to a student asking if he ever met a conservative who became a liberal. Goldberg Predicts Collapse of Liberal Media http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/4/11/132345.shtml Newsmax.com. Phil Brennan (April 11, 2003)

Way

“Our economy has been at risk by investment schemes aimed at making not just a few, but many extra dollars, and we need to start insisting on the right rules and transparency so this doesn't happen again.”

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

December 5, 2007
Presidential campaign (January 20, 2007 – 2008)

“You need to try to do the impossible, to anticipate the unexpected. And when the unexpected happens, you should double the efforts to make order from the disorder it creates in your life. The motto I'm advocating is — Let chaos reign, then rein chaos. Does that mean that you shouldn't plan? Not at all. You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate fires, so it has to shape a flexible organization that is capable of responding to unpredictable events.”

Andrew S. Grove (1936–2016) Hungarian-born American businessman, engineer, and author

1995, p. 229; As cited in: Cristina Chaminade, ‎Bino Catasús (2007) Intellectual Capital Revisited: Paradoxes in the Knowledge Intensive Organization.. p. 94
1980s - 1990s, High Output Management (1983)

Life, Way, Effort

“When you remember how few Jews there are in Italy and how relatively few there are in Germany, one must wonder at the violence and the bitterness of this perse cution. The number of Jews in Italy is only a small fraction of those in the city of New York, while there are in the city of New York six times as many Jews as there were in the German Reich when the last war ended and possibly more than four times as many as there are there now. Yet the persecution, personal, physical, family, financial, goes on, openly and secretly, in a way that is perfectly appalling. To my great astonishment, this anti-Semitic persecution has been violently and publicly revived in this country within the last few weeks or months, and it is as discreditable to us that this should have happened as anything that we can imagine.'
Jews differ among themselves just as do Spaniards or Italians or Canadians or Americans. There are some who belong to one party, some who belong to another some whp hold one point of view, some who hold a point of view that is contradictory. The notion that all who belong to that race or profess that faith are of one mind in everything that relates to their public relationships is a grotesque departure from fact. But if you can play upon an excited public emotion by the use of these terms and by the insinuation that the entire Hebrew population is engaged, let us say as we have been told from the platform recently in trying to get this nation into war, such statements, although absolutely contradictory to every well-known fact, will, if repeated long enough, be believed and acted upon by a certain number of our unthinking population.
We cannot protest too vigorously and too strongly against that sort of thing. It may be the Ku Klux Klan persecuting the Catholics, it may be the anti-Semites persecuting the Jews: but persecution on racial or religious ground has absolutely no place in a nation given over to liberty and which calls itself a democracy.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

Liberty-Equality-Fraternity (1942)

War, Family, Faith, Way

“Say, take Rachel Corrie, local young woman, she was extremely courageous. She's a martyr for peace and justice. We happened to kill her too, even if we don't like to admit it. She was killed by U. S. sent equipment, which is Caterpillar…
[Q: you draw that line right back to you and me sitting here? ] Absolutely, we're responsible for it. I mean, we didn't drive the bulldozer, but why is it there? What's it doing? Who provides the military, economic, and diplomatic support for destroying the occupied territories?”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Quotes 2000s, 2005, Interview by Steve Scher on KUOW, 2004

Peace, Justice, Courage, Support

“Happiness and suffering, however extreme, are mental events. The mind depends upon the body, and the body upon the world, but everything good or bad that happens in your life must appear in consciousness to matter. This fact offers ample opportunity to make the best of bad situations—changing your perception of the world is often as good as changing the world—but it also allows a person to be miserable even when all the material and social conditions for happiness have been met. During the normal course of events, your mind will determine the quality of your life.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: 2010s, Waking Up (2014), p. 204

Life, World, Suffering, Appearance

“You all should feel angry tonight, very angry, because yet again the legal system in this country has let you down. A court has ruled that a man who committed a ghastly crime against a little girl should walk free and unsupervised. The details are distasteful, but you should know. Hans Lester Watt abducted and raped a three-year-old girl. The 42-year-old was drunk when he took the toddler, and assulted her so badly, she needed medical attention. He said it was revenge, to get back at the innocent little girl's grandmother, whom he claimed had insulted his dead mother. Watt was jailed for 11 years. When due for release last year, the Queensland Attorney-General, understandably, applied to have him classified as a dangerous sexual offender. That meant his jail term could be extended, or at least he'd be released with a supervision order. Remember, this was a three-year-old girl. The court refused the request. The judge found the circumstances were "unique" — that Watt was not an unacceptable risk. Well, I agree it was unique — thank God the rape of a three-year-old doesn't happen often in this country. A psychiatrist said the chances of Watt re-offending were low if he did not drink alcohol, moderate if he did drink, and said the best chance of rehabilitation was if he lived in a dry Aboriginal community. The Attorney-General appealed the judge's decision. Well, yesterday, the Supreme Court turned him down, upheld the earlier ruling that let the child rapist walk free — unsupervised. My mantra for years has been "Who's looking after the children?" In my opinion, the Queensland Supreme Court certainly is not — this decision was a travesty.”

Derryn Hinch (1944) New Zealand–Australian media personality

Today Tonight, 24 April 2013.

God, Children, Alcohol, Feeling

“Is there any of me, or of any of us, that isn’t just consequence?
I think, and I’ve thought it over a lot, that everything that ever happened keeps on happening, extending tendrils of itself endlessly into the moving present tense of time, porducing its echoes, and explosions and extinctions forever.”

Frederik Pohl (1919–2013) American science fiction writer and editor

I Remember a Winter (p. 139)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

Thinking, Time

“When you come to the end of all the light you know, and it's time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen: either you will be given something solid to stand on or you will be taught to fly.”

Edward Teller (1908–2003) Hungarian-American nuclear physicist

As quoted in Seven Steps to Starting and Running an Editorial Consulting Business (2002) by Jane M. Frutchey, p. 121

Faith, Light, Time, Flying

“Fear is the imaginary response to something that has not happened.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 84

Fear

“I have this kind of philosophy that I can't do anything about what happened yesterday, or what's going to happen tomorrow. But I feel in full control of what's going on now. I think worry will make you sick. I've never seen it accomplish anything. I've never seen worrying about anything change it. So I decided not to do it. If you can't do anything about it, why in the hell worry about it? Every negative thought you have releases poison into your system, and will kill you or give you cancer, or tumors or whatever else you can think of. So if you are thinking negative about anything, erase that.”

Willie Nelson (1933) American country music singer-songwriter.

Willie Nelson On Eggs, Martial Arts & Living A Life Without Worry, Southern Living, Lifestyle Network, January 2017, February 22, 2017 http://www.southernliving.com/culture/celebrities/willie-nelson-interview-video,

Feeling, Hell, Thinking, Change

Quotes about happening page 40

Quotes about happening
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