Quotes about happening
page 56

“Thus, what with several generations of most active Church Fathers ever working at the destruction of old documents and the preparation of new passages to be interpolated in those which happened to survive, there remains of the Gnostics -- the legitimate offspring of the Archaic Wisdom-religion -- but a few unrecognizable shreds.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book The Key to Theosophy

The Key to Theosophy (1889)

Religion, Wisdom

“The Ramayan also happens to be part of the Mahabharata, dated between 300 BCE and 300 CE, where it is called the Ramopakhyan. When the Pandavas bemoaned their thirteen years of forest exile, Rishi Markandeya retorted by telling them how Ram suffered for fourteen years and while the Pandavas deserved their punishment for gambling away their kingdom, Ram did not deserve his fate – he was simply obesing his father.”

Devdutt Pattanaik (1970) Indian physician; leadership consultant, mythologist and author

Source: The Book of Ram, p. 183

Suffering, Parting, Fate

“Zionists today not only control the entire world finance and media but the entire Government of the United States of America. Nothing can happen in the world without the sanction of the zionist leadership.”

V. T. Rajshekar (1932) Indian conspiracy theorist

Brahminism. (2015) Gyan Publishing House, Annexure I

World

“The prophets never taught that God and history are one, or that whatever happens below reflects the will of God above. Their vision is of man defying God, and God seeking man to reconcile with him.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

Source: The Prophets (1962), p. 168

God, History

“No scientific support of any kind was present for the events described in the first book. But events that have taken place since publication, and coming from different parts of the world, have proven greater support than anything that I could have produced on publication date. This has happened in spite of opposing forces who, for whatever reasons, do not wish the truth to come out... I have been well protected against many things, as well as guided. So far, the Brothers have never let me down. So if we wait patiently and in quiet confidence, things will come out as they should. There will be more abundant proof throughout the world than I, as one man, could ever be given or, in turn, give out.”

George Adamski (1891–1965) American ufologist

Inside the Spaceships

Confidence, Waiting, Support, Self-confidence

“I would like to devote little time to proving or disproving the reality of these wonderful flying objects... but for those who have heard of saucers only by hearsay or read of them in the popular Sunday papers that would prove a little unsatisfactory, so I shall dedicate the first part of this book to an account of what has happened up to the time of writing.”

George Adamski (1891–1965) American ufologist

Flying Saucers Have Landed

Time, Reading, Reality, Books

“People tell me how relevant they find the movie to what’s happening now. It’s comforting, at a time when so many films are being remade, to find that people still appreciate – and are scared by – the original film.”

Mick Jackson (director) (1943) film director

How we made the nuclear apocalypse TV drama Threads

Time, People

“Only human beings guide their behaviour by a knowledge of what happened before they were born and a preconception of what may happen after they are dead; thus only humans find their way by a light that illuminates more than the patch of ground they stand on.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

(with Jean Medawar) The Life Science, 1977
1970s

Knowledge, Way, Dead, Light

“In a word, human life is more governed by fortune than by reason; is to be regarded more as a dull pastime than as a serious occupation; and is more influenced by particular humour, than by general principles. Shall we engage ourselves in it with passion and anxiety? It is not worthy of so much concern. Shall we be indifferent about what happens? We lose all the pleasure of the game by our phlegm and carelessness. While we are reasoning concerning life, life is gone; and death, though perhaps they receive him differently, yet treats alike the fool and the philosopher.”

David Hume book Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary

Part I, Essay 18: The Sceptic
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741-2; 1748)

Indifference, Game, Fools, Pleasure

“It is not theory, but actual statistical experience, which forces us to the conclusion that, however little we know of what will happen in the individual instance, yet the frequency of a large number of instances is distributed round the mode in a manner more and more smooth and uniform the greater the number of individual instances. When this distribution round the mode does not take place... then we assert that some cause other than chance is at work.”

Karl Pearson (1857–1936) English mathematician and biometrician

"The Chances of Death" (1895)

Chance

“Such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide. It is clear that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity even if he happens to be a resident of an enemy country... The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.”

Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) Italian physicist

On the Hydrogen bomb in a minority annex http://web.archive.org/web/20080725010150/honors.umd.edu/HONR269J/archive/GACReport491030.html (co-authored with I. I. Rabi) to an official General Advisory Committee report for the Atomic Energy Commission (30 October 1949)

Country, Light, Nature, Knowledge

“The single merit I can claim at this junction is that I am not seeking to obtain agreement. I am seeking only to outline the reality that exists, not to win support, start a movement, or contrive concurrence. The reason is clear. It can’t be done. Additionally I do not know everything. Therefore, I can be wrong. What evil I could impose if I obtain agreement on a point that happened to be in error! I do not intend to be wrong, but the mind and the memory are both fallible. So I propose to set down what is so, to the degree I am capable of recognizing it.”

Robert LeFevre (1911–1986) American libertarian businessman

Source: A Way to Be Free: The Autobiography of Robert LeFevre, Volume I, (1999), pp. 18-19

Support, Reality, Memory, Error

“First, a good sex scene is about the exchange of emotions, not body fluids. In other words, what’s going on physically is not really important. It’s what’s going on emotionally that’s important. You use the physical attributes or setting, only as a means of anchoring the reader in the moment, but it’s about what’s going on between these two people. And that leads to the second principle, which is that a good sex scene can only happen between two unique and specific people…”

Diana Gabaldon (1952) American author

On how she conjures an erotic scene in her writing in “Outlander Author Diana Gabaldon on Her Two Rules for Writing a Good Sex Scene” https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a24146013/outlander-diana-gabaldon-interview-great-american-read in Town and Country (2018 Oct 24)

Sex, People

“We tend to pass particularly harsh moral judgment on sadism, but sadistic violence isn’t even necessarily the worst thing that can happen to people. There’s also the quieter structural injustices that lead to millions of people starving, or workers throwing themselves out of windows at the iPhone factory, or the lowkey normalization of sexual assault in supposedly civilized countries, none of which requires so much as a single cackling maniac. So in order to think about this intelligently, we have to weigh the risk that revolutionary violence will spin out of control and lead to sadistic mayhem, against the risk that our complacency with the injustices of the status quo will make us quiet enablers of more subtle but equally unjust forms of violence. And I don’t feel confident enough to say which one I think is the bigger risk.”

Natalie Wynn ContraPoints

ContraPoints, Feminism Did Not Destroy Atheism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klfH9QaEcqY (2016), Violence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmsoVFCUN3Q (2017)

Confidence, Country, Intelligence, People

“Every time something really bad happens, people cry out for safety, and the government answers by taking rights away from good people.”

Penn Jillette (1955) American magician

Penn and Teller's How to Play in Traffic (1997), p. 35
1990s

Bad luck, Cry, People, Time

“Thinking it over later, she blamed TV and the movies for her immediate reaction. The media gobbled everything that happened or could happen, then spit it out, over and over, every idea regurgitated, every concept so mushed up that when anything remarkable actually occurred it was already a cliché. Like cloning or surrogate mothers or extraterrestrials and UFOs. The whole world had heard about it and seen movies about it, and had become bored with the subject before it even happened!”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 2, p. 8

World, Idea, Thinking

“It is a very physically and mentally torturous process. It goes 18-20 hours a day, and if you’re stoned during that whole period, you’re not going to make a good movie, because you just won’t have the stamina to physically and mentally do that. And it’s every day. So we didn’t get stoned making the record, never stoned on stage. But we were very disciplined artists about what we were doing. It didn’t magically happen. Well, it did magically happen, but not without effort.”

Cheech Marin (1946) American comedian, actor and writer

On how there’s a misconception that he’s like his stoner character in “Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong Are Not Their Characters: ‘It’s All for the Love of the Art’” https://www.thewrap.com/heres-the-biggest-misconception-about-cheech-and-chong/ in The Wrap (2018 Sep 14)

Making love, Effort

“I think I have a sense of how things need to sound, how to pull an audience in with tone, timing, and pacing. That affects a lot of my writing, too, being hyper aware of how an audience might read something. I want what’s happening on the page to mimic what my body would do on stage. A lot of that came out in the audiobook. I think I would have struggled to record the audiobook without having stage experience because it’s a lot of work to maintain that kind of performance voice.”

Elizabeth Acevedo American poet and author

Source: On how she aimed to preserve the spoken word feel for her book The Poet X in “Debut Author Elizabeth Acevedo on 'The Poet X'” https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/76224-q-a-with-elizabeth-acevedo.html in Publishers Weekly (2018 Mar 6)

Sense, Thinking, Time, Reading

“Because of that whole kind of philosophy that we Latinos have where your roof caves in, your sink goes out on you, everything bad, but you got to go on with life…Ni modo. No matter what happens to you, you are a survivor. You endure. You keep on going.”

Denise Chávez (1948) American writer

On the perseverance of Latinos in “‘My Dream Was to Work at the Dairy Queen’: Author: Denise Chavez is earning raves for her first book, which celebrates Latino culture. But she isn’t moved by her new fame. She just wants to tell her tales--and re-stucco her house” https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-11-09-ls-60448-story.html in the Los Angeles Times (1994 Nov 9)

Bad luck, Life

“Some people love my work, some people hate it…You can’t be liked by everybody. There has been opposition in some places. I represent the opposite of what is happening in art today. But I don’t complain. It hasn’t hurt my career. I’m happy to have the success I have had.”

Fernando Botero (1932–2023) Colombian artist

On the reactions to his work in “Botero: ‘You Can’t Be Liked By Everybody’” https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/fernando-botero-says-you-cant-be-liked-by-everybody-2155/ in ARTnews (2013 Jan 30)

Hurt, Hate, Success, People

“The first thing that begins to happen when you begin taking yourself seriously as a writer is this imaginary writer’s block that people talk about, but I never really suffered from. But there’s this barrier between the spoken word and the written word, once you set something down in writing it’s supposed to be set in stone or you take on this funny attitude that writing is unnatural…”

Frank Chin (1940) American writer

On the writing process in ““FRANK CHIN: HIS OWN VOICE” https://resisters.com/by-frank-abe/frank-chin-his-own-voice/ in the Bloombury Review (September 1991)

People, Suffering

“I want to have a beneficial effect on your physiology, but it’s not my business what happens after that…It’s my gift to you.”

Esperanza Spalding (1984) American jazz bassist and singer

On the healing effects that she hopes her music provides in “Esperanza Spalding Wants to Connect You to Your Body” https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/09/esperanza-spalding-12-little-spells-interview in Vanity Fair (2018 Sep 25)

Business

“What happens at the beginning of your poem has to—because it’s a poem—be transformed by the end of your poem. So if the triggering moment for the beginning of your poem is a known political moment, I am fine with that, that’s great. But as I’m reading, I expect it to change because that was just the trigger…”

Jericho Brown (1976) American writer

On how poems might be structured around a political theme in “JERICHO BROWN in conversation with MICHAEL DUMANIS” http://www.benningtonreview.org/jericho-brown-interview in Bennington Review (2018 Oct 27)

Reading, Change

“They go off to sea for nine months, they’re sick half the time, bad things happen to them, they see others die. Then they come back home and they have not a cent in their account. The way it ruins these men in their very spirit is a crime that’s horrific to see. And it’s hard to capture that in writing because wage theft, that term, is so boring. But on the ocean, it’s so pervasive and so ruinous that I would put it up there on par with putting men in an oven and cooking them slowly.”

Ian Urbina (1972) American journalist

On the victims of wage theft in “Wage Theft, Slavery, and Climate Change on the Outlaw Ocean” https://civileats.com/2019/09/27/wage-theft-slavery-and-climate-change-on-the-outlaw-ocean/ (Civil Eats; 2019 Sep 27)

Home, Time, Bad luck, Way

“All of these types of abuses, whether they’re human rights abuses, or environmental crimes, stem from a core problem, which is a lack of governance at sea, especially on the high seas. Specifically, there are three ways in which misbehavior happens offshore routinely and with impunity: too few rules, a lack of enforcement, and insufficient awareness of what is happening there. All of these problems are also connected in the sense that they occur with a certain tacit complicity from all of us who live on land…”

Ian Urbina (1972) American journalist

On his book The Outlaw Ocean in “The Outlaw Ocean project – interview with Ian Urbina” https://hopeforjustice.org/news/2019/07/the-outlaw-ocean-project-interview-with-ian-urbina/ (Hope for Justice; Jul 2019)

Sense, Problem, Sea, Way

“You all wanted that someone be made a scapegoat. I did not do that. I allowed you to break all pots on my head alone. You have all decided-all these riots happened under this man (Narendra Modi). Until this man is removed from the chief minister’s post, we will not rest in peace. My best wishes to you in your mission.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

Interview to NDTV broadcast on March 20, 2004, Narendra Modi said to Shekhar Gupta. quoted in Madhu Purnima Kishwar: Modi, Muslims and Media. Voices from Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, Manushi Publications, Delhi 2014.
2004

Peace

“World War II, at least in Europe, may have had some moral justification, though there can be some legitimate debate as to whether the US and its freedoms were ever really threatened, and certainly many of the Americans who died in that war saw their struggle as worthy, so that we may at least in good conscience honor their deaths. But Khe Sanh? Mosul? And for god’s sake, Marjah? Let’s get real. Khe Sanh, one of the major battles in the Vietnam War, was just one little piece of a huge malignant disaster in a war that was criminal from its inception, and that had no purpose beyond perpetuating the neocolonialist control by the US of a long-subjugated people who were fighting to be free, just as our own ancestors had done. The over 58,000 Americans who died in that war, who contributed to the killing of over 2 million Vietnamese, many or most of them civilians, may have engaged in personal acts of bravery, but they were not, as a group, heroes. Nor were they over there fighting for American freedom. Some, like Lt. William Calley, who did not die, were no doubt murderers. Most, though, were simply victims–victims of their own government’s years of lying and deceit. If we memorialize them, it should be by vowing never again to allow our government to commit such crimes, and to send Americans to fight and die for such criminal policies. Sadly, we’ve already allowed that to happen, though, over and over again–in the Panama, in Grenada, in Iraq, and now in Afghanistan and perhaps, before long, Iran and/or Pakistan.”

Dave Lindorff (1949) Award winning American journalist

The Glorification of War, 2010

God, Freedom, War, Personality

“A lot of my writing is triggered by something true, either something I read in the papers, something I overheard—I am an inveterate eavesdropper—or something that happened in my very large, and very extended, family. And yet it is precisely those things that no one believes are real.”

Petina Gappah (1971) Zimbabwean writer, journalist and business lawyer

On what she typically writes about in “Exclusive interview: Petina Gappah speaks about the highs and lows of her writing career, and reveals details of her next book” https://johannesburgreviewofbooks.com/2017/09/04/exclusive-interview-petina-gappah-speaks-about-the-highs-and-lows-of-her-writing-career-and-reveals-details-of-her-next-book/ in the Johannesburg Review of Books (2017 Sep 4)

Family, Reading

“The past is not yet past. When things happen, the only way we can make sense of it is by telling the story about the past – realising where prejudices come from. And the point would be not only to spin a story about racial violence but to tell how our ancestors have bravely and creatively overcome these things.”

David Chariandy (1969) Canadian writer

On the past and prejudices in “David Chariandy: ‘To make sense of prejudice, tell the story of the past’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/14/david-chariandy-ive-been-meaning-to-tell-you-father-advice-to-daughter in The Guardian (2019 Apr 14)

Sense, Past, Way, Making love

“I am the sort of writer who needs another form to tell me who I am and what has happened to me…I think all my novels are self-portraits, but there’s no one character who resolves me, or catalyses me, or is me.”

Maylis de Kerangal (1967) French writer

On writing in “‘What is a heart? You have an organ in your body and you have a symbol of love’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/28/maylis-de-kerangal-interview-wellcome-prize-writing in The Guardian (2017 Apr 28)

Self-confidence, Thinking

“Nothing happens for the first time, especially if what you’re trying to do is to invent something absolutely novel and unprecedented. Of course, if nothing happens for the first time, that leaves the apparent problem of how anything happens at all. But the difficulty is entirely semantic: in the eternal recurrence of subatomic configurations of which our world is a simulacrum, there is no question of beginnings or endings. There are only middles, continuations, repetitions. Originality is a concept possible only to a limited viewpoint.”

Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) American writer

Slaves of Time (pp. 14-15)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

World, Problem, Time, Question

“But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, The American Promise (1965)

Life, Parting, Effort

“The unique aspect of biblical faith is that immediate, mundane history is beheld, affirmed, and lived as the true story of the redemption of time and Creation. Biblical ethics constitute a sacramental participation in history as it happens. ... In this saga, time is transcended within the events of a single day—today—so that all that is past, from the first day, is consummated and is anticipated; so that today is esteemed in its real dignity, as if it were the first day, as if it were the last day, as if it were the only day, as if today and eternity were one.”

William Stringfellow (1928–1985) American theologian

Source: An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973), pp. 47-48

Past, Faith, Time, History

“The most striking of all the impressions I have formed since I left London a month ago is of the strength of this African national consciousness. In different places it may take different forms but it is happening everywhere. The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact. Our national policies must take account of it. This means, I would judge, that we must come to terms with it. I sincerely believe that if we cannot do so we may imperil the precarious balance between East and West on which the peace of the world depends.”

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) British politician

Speech to the South African Parliament (3 February 1960), quoted i.a. in "Mr Macmillan's appeal to South Africans", The Times (4 February 1960), p. 15
Prime Minister

Peace, Dependency, Sincerity, World

“Everybody want to know what the kids was listening to, what kind of music they was listening to, or what kind of movies they was watching. Who gives a fuck what they was watching? Whatever happened to CRAZY?”

Chris Rock (1965) American comedian, actor, screenwriter, television producer, film producer, and director

Bigger and Blacker (Album Version, 1999)

Music

“This world is a strange world. We have to learn many lessons. One of the disciples of the Lord Jesus betrayed the Lord. Many obstacles will come to the growing aspirant at every step. We will have to show our strength. Do not be agitated by little things. Be cheerful. Smile. Walk boldly. Think and feel that nothing has happened. Don’t worry about little things. You have to do many great actions yet. Prakriti is preparing you in a variety of ways. Feel this. Be grateful to the Lord.”

Swami Sivananda (1887–1963) Indian philosopher

You Cannot Get Away From Evil
Autobiography of Swami Sivananda

Smile, Learning, Thinking, Way

“It is safe to say that if the Communists took over the Sahara Desert tomorrow, two things would happen. First, nothing. And second, with their centralized approach to the market, there would be a shortage of sand.”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) American conservative author and commentator

“Buckley Heard By Tulane Unit”, John Roberts, Times-Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana), (April 22, 1971) p. 22

“When it comes to bodies, there is violence done every day. I did not think of body horror as a sub-genre when writing it, but I think the body is a source of great anxiety to each of us. So you shave (legs, armpits, or chin), taking a blade to yourself; perhaps you exercise, causing yourself pain; perhaps you fast or diet, denying yourself; perhaps your job means you have to stay awake. If you think about it, life itself consists of low-levels of body horror all the time. To write fiction, we just exaggerate some of what happens naturally…”

Tade Thompson British science fiction writer

On body horror in “Interview: Tade Thompson” http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-tade-thompson/ in Lightspeed Magazine (October 2017)

Pain, Time, Nature, Thinking

“For someone born in the US but whose parents hail from Mexico, there is always a disconnect that happens between the present culture and the one before. Sometimes, it is a flimsy synapse, and sometimes the disconnect can be a chasm…”

Octavio Solis (1958)

On having Mexican-born parents in “An Interview with Octavio Solis” http://literaryashland.org/?p=10939 (Welcome to Literary Ashland; 2019 Jun 24)

Parent

“I wanted to be at the apex of my story…For a long time, it felt as though things were happening to me. I felt as though I had no agency.”

Terese Marie Mailhot (1983) First Nation Canadian writer, journalist, memoirist, teacher

On what led her to write Heart Berries in “Why 'Heart Berries' Author Terese Marie Mailhot Doesn't Use The Word ‘Resilient’" https://www.bustle.com/p/why-heart-berries-author-terese-marie-mailhot-doesnt-use-the-word-resilient-8134108 in Bustle Magazine (2018 Feb 7)

Time

“Implicitly, the novel insists that a true war story has to take into account not just combat and soldiers, but civilians, the home front, and the military-industrial complex. For me, war is more than guns and shooting. That’s the spectacle that distracts us from how pervasive war is throughout a society and how it makes all of us complicit through things like paying taxes and watching horrifying images on TV without doing anything to stop them from happening…”

Viet Thanh Nguyen (1971) American author of fiction

On his work The Sympathizer in “Viet Thanh Nguyen: From both sides” https://www.writermag.com/writing-inspiration/author-interviews/viet-thanh-nguyen-sides/ in The Writer (2017 Jan 17)

War, Home, Making love

“Humor is absolutely necessary to keep going…So many of the people in my family and my community were wonderful storytellers. They would tell stories about just awful things that happened to them. But their humor made what happened into their own kind of triumph.”

Stephanie Powell Watts

On the importance of humor in “INTERVIEWS: Stephanie Powell Watts” https://bookpage.com/interviews/21148-stephanie-powell-watts-fiction#.Xe_qN_lKjcs in BookPage (April 2017)

Family, People, Communication

“I mean, the enclosures in Britain would never have happened without the king’s army and without state brutality for pushing peasants off their ancestors’ land and creating the commodification of labor, the commodification of land which then gave rise to capitalism.”

Yanis Varoufakis (1961) Greek-Australian political economist and author, Greek finance minister

Yanis Varoufakis and Noam Chomsky discussion the New York Public Library (26 April 2016)

“Trump would have us believe that these are our only two choices: We can either have smash-and-grab capitalism, where so many hands in the cookie jar has resulted in so many government scandals, and where the top 1 percent have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, or we can have what’s happening in Venezuela, where the economy has collapsed and humanitarian and political crises have ensued...”

Krystal Ball (1981) American journalist

Wealth

“Interesting nugget here as well. @tparsi had been informed by a Hill staffer in touch with the Pentagon that military strikes were imminent. Apparently everyone thought these strikes were really happening right up until the last moment. @esaagar ...”

Krystal Ball (1981) American journalist

Twitter Post, (24 June 2019)

“There was a time, Prax knew, that the violence would have bothered him. Not the blood or bodies. He’d spent more than enough time doing dissections and even autonomous-limb vivisection to be able to wall off what he was seeing from any particular sense of visceral horror. But that it was something done in anger, that the men and women he’d just seen blown apart hadn’t donated their bodies or tissues, would have affected him once. The universe had taken that from him, and he couldn’t say now exactly when it had happened. Part of him was numb, and maybe it always would be. There was a feeling of loss in that, but it was intellectual.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 51 (p. 563)

Loss, Anger, Time, Universe

“I keep thinking what happens when the power of love is twisted into the love of power. … When he bought our temple we had an eternal light going. Jim asked us to leave it. He wanted to keep it burning as a sign of our friendship and what we stood for. All last night I kept wondering, where did it go out?”

Maurice Davis (1921–1993) American rabbi

On Jim Jones, upon hearing of the mass murders and suicides of Jonestown, as quoted in "Cult Chief's Beginnings in Indianapolis Recalled" by James Feron, The New York Times (22 November 1978); in the early years of Jones' ministries, Davis had sold Jones a synagogue in Indianapolis within which Jones housed his first "People's Temple"; also quoted in "Masters and Slaves: The Tragedy of Jonestown", by Fanita English, M.S.W, in Idea, Vol.1, no.2 (1 September 1996) http://www.ideajournal.com/articles.php?id=7

Night, Friendship, Light, Thinking

“And what is it in us that is mellowed by civilization? All it does, I’d say, is to develop in man a capacity to feel a greater variety of sensations. And nothing, absolutely nothing else. And through this development, man will yet learn how to enjoy bloodshed. Why, it has already happened.... Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky book Notes from Underground

Part 1, Chapter 7 (page 23)
Notes from Underground (1864)

Feeling, Learning

“It was very dispiriting because a lot of things needed to be done. One of the things that happened was, if you had a good rank-and-file activist in a trade union situation, they would make them an offer to become part of the staff—at which point the person was totally lost to the campaign where they were a catalyst and became part of an apparatus that was basically going nowhere. The odd thing is, despite The Permanent Revolution being on the bookshelves, they would explain everything by going back and finding a quote from Trotsky or from Lenin in order to explain things, as opposed to explaining how things were in the real world.... They were basically just living in their own universe as opposed to making real life connections.”

Henry Spira (1927–1998) American activist

Ethics Into Action: Henry Spira and The Animal Rights Movement by Peter Singer (1998).

Personality, Universe, Parting, World

“I think there’s something spiritual in a very day-to-day, mundane existence. It’s impossible to articulate, and it’s happening now, almost like a perverse secret.... That’s always sort of fascinating to me.”

Miranda July (1974) American performance artist, musician and writer

As quoted in "Miranda July Is Totally Not Kidding" by Katrina Onstad, in The New York Times (14 July 2011) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/magazine/the-make-believer.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all

Secret, Thinking

“I want more time with Jason. I want more time with my children. I want more time sipping martinis at the Green Mill Jazz Club on Thursday nights. But that is not going to happen. I probably have only a few days left being a person on this planet.”

Amy Krouse Rosenthal (1965–2017) author, a radio show host and producer, and filmmaker

From her essay [Amy Krouse Rosenthal, You May Want to Marry My Husband, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/style/modern-love-you-may-want-to-marry-my-husband.html, 22 November 2019, The New York Times, March 3, 2017], published 10 days before her death, as quoted in [Stevens, Heidi, Chicago author Amy Krouse Rosenthal's 'You May Want to Marry My Husband' essay went viral. Now her husband is honoring her life with a giant yellow umbrella in Lincoln Park., https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/heidi-stevens/ct-life-stevens-monday-amy-krause-rosenthal-lincoln-park-0513-story.html, 22 November 2019, The Chicago Times]

Personality, Children, Night, Time

“Look, there are senior executives from our television company Russia Today sitting across from me. What is happening in some countries where they operate? They are being banned. What does this mean? It means those who do so are afraid of the competition… Someone is making it hard for them. That means we are winning…. We do not have global media like CNN, Fox News, BBC and so on… We have just one fairly modest channel. Even if it causes so much heartburn and fear of it being able to influence minds, then we are winning this competition…”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

Cooperation, Terrorism, UK & USA, President Trump, Resolving Conflict, Defense, Crimea, The Media, Nuclear Weapons Policy: 15th Plenary Session (18 October 2018)

Fear, Making love, Country

“As to Russia, we spoke about it a number of times and we reaffirmed that at the forum again and also agreed on that in the final document. We are going to fully comply with our commitments. In the nearest future we will begin the ratification of these agreements and will conduct the necessary domestic procedures. These issues are highly relevant for us.I stated this at the last plenary session. Let me remind you that according to the Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring, the warming in Russia is happening 2.5 times faster than the average global warming. This is a major challenge for us. We must realise that. This is the reason for floods, and for permafrost thawing in the areas where we have fairly big cities. We must be able to understand how to react to the climate changes underway there.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

Vladimir Putin’s news conference, Transcript, Kremlin.ru, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/60857 (29 June 2019) 2019

Future, Time, Understanding, Change

“So the Jews have problems with finances, only such a thing could happen in Crimea.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

Quoted in Putin Makes Joke About Jews and Money, Speaks Hebrew https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/putin-makes-joke-about-jews-and-money-speaks-hebrew-1.7041106 (20 March 2019) 2019

Problem

“Not cool. Ever. I’ve never been cool and I don’t really care about being cool. It’s just an awful lot of time and hair gel wasted. At school I was a medium-clever geek. If you’re at public school (Sherbourne) and you’re not that good at rugby, you spend quite a few important years of your life feeling like a real loser. We’ve never been about cool. What’s happened to us is more about showing that the geeks at school can get there in the end. And you have to stay true to who you are, the root of all this is to do with our friendship.”

Chris Martin (1977) musician, co-founder of Coldplay

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-2048220/Chris-Martin-Coldplay-Gwyneth-Paltrow-album.html source

School, Time, Friendship, Life

“You can only aim at equality by giving some people the right to take things from others. And what ultimately happens when you aim for equality is that A and B decide what C should do for D, except that they take a bit of commission off on the way.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

“Milton Friedman vs Free Lunch Advocate” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Qe7fLL25AQ (1980s)

Way, People

“So why fret and care that the actual version of the destined deed was done by an upper class English gentleman who had circumnavigated the globe as a vigorous youth, lost his dearest daughter and his waning faith at the same time, wrote the greatest treatise ever composed on the taxonomy of barnacles, and eventually grew a white beard, lived as a country squire just south of London, and never again traveled far enough even to cross the English Channel? We care for the same reason that we love okapis, delight in the fossil evidence of trilobites, and mourn the passage of the dodo. We care because the broad events that had to happen, happened to happen in a certain particular way.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

And something unspeakably holy—I don't know how else to say this—underlies our discovery and confirmation of the actual details that made our world and also, in realms of contingency, assured the minutiae of its construction in the manner we know, and not in any one of a trillion other ways, nearly all of which would not have included the evolution of a scribe to record the beauty, the cruelty, the fascination, and the mystery.
Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 1342

Faith, Time, Country, Daughters

“Since we all breathe, all the time, it is amazing what happens when someone else directs you how and when to breathe. And how vividly someone with no imagination whatsoever can see what he’s told is right there, complete with banister and rubber runners, curving down and rightward into a darkness that recedes before you.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

The Pale King (2011)

Imagination, Time

“I have to totally credit that to my mother. There were two children. I was the only girl. And she just always talked to me. She would tell me things that happened to her … her dreams, her past … it’s like the monologues in my plays, it really is. Because her stories were loaded with imagery and tragedy, darkness and sarcasm and humor…”

Adrienne Kennedy (1931) African-American playwright

On how her mother’s influence appears in her works in “Adrienne Kennedy by Suzan-Lori Parks” https://bombmagazine.org/articles/adrienne-kennedy/ in BOMB Magazine (1996 Jan 1)

Dreams, Past, Children, Girl

“I didn’t start writing to tell happy, little stories. I started writing to make some impact on the world in which I live. If you don’t want to say anything about sexual assault, that’s your business, but I want to say something about it. I think it is absolutely and unequivocally wrong. We have no right because we are in the military to rape fellow soldiers who just happen to be females. A lot of victims are male as well. In the Army I was in, the life of the person next to you was as valuable as your own. You would never do anything to hurt your comrade. Your life depended on him, and in the case of Iraq, those gentlemen’s lives depended on the women they were raping. It’s horrifying.”

Charles Fuller (1939–2022) American playwright

On writing about a female sexual assault victim serving in the military in his play One Night in “Charles Fuller Discusses ‘One Night’” https://catf.org/charles-fuller-discusses-one-night/ in Contemporary American Theater Festival (2014 Jun 1)

Hurt, Dependency, Business, Personality

“I believe it’s something that happens when one is around art, and when one is close to books: they seep into your system, into your blood, and start to activate something in your life. We start living in the way that some of these characters live, with some sense of their sensibility. It’s almost as if the reader becomes the writer and the writer becomes the reader…”

Nilo Cruz (1960) American playwright

On how a written work may speak to you in “Nilo Cruz by Emily Mann” https://bombmagazine.org/articles/nilo-cruz/ in BOMB Magazine (2004 Jan 1)

Art, Books, Sense, Way

“We find, in the rules laid down by the greatest English Judges, who have been the brightest of mankind; We are to look upon it as more beneficial, that many guilty persons should escape unpunished, than one innocent person should suffer. The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished; for guilt and crimes are so frequent in the world, that all of them cannot be punished; and many times they happen in such a manner, that it is not of much consequence to the public, whether they are punished or not. But when innocence itself, is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, it is immaterial to me, whether I behave well or ill; for virtue itself, is no security. And if such a sentiment as this, should take place in the mind of the subject, there would be an end to all security what so ever.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

In Adams' Argument for the Defense in the case of Rex v. Wemms: Suffolk Superior Court, Boston, 3-4 December, 1770; source "The Adams Papers", http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/
1770s

Time, Personality, Suffering, Communication

“I happen to think that videogames are an ideal means to help broaden the imaginations of young people.”

Adam West (1928–2017) American actor

"The Keyboard: Guest Editorials", Videogaming Illustrated, (July 1983), p. 6

Help, Thinking, Imagination, People

“Imagine a world where speaking or writing words can literally and directly make things happen, where getting one of those words wrong can wreak unbelievable havoc, but where with the right spell you can summon immensely powerful agencies to work your will. Imagine further that this world is administered: there is an extensive division of labour, among the magicians themselves and between the magicians and those who coordinate their activity. It’s bureaucratic, and also (therefore) chaotic, and it’s full of people at desks muttering curses and writing invocations, all beavering away at a small part of the big picture. The coordinators, because they don’t understand what’s going on, are easy prey for smooth-talking preachers of bizarre cults that demand arbitrary sacrifices and vanish with large amounts of money. Welcome to the IT department.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Ken MacLeod in Introduction: Charlie’s Demons (p. xvi)
The Laundry Files, The Atrocity Archives (2004)

Money, Imagination, Understanding, People

“I think what happened was the language settled in me much deeper than it settled into people who just can read something once and absorb what they absorb of it. I feel like what I was absorbing was not by any means superficial. And I think I was - from a really young age, I was reading like a writer. I was reading for this deep understanding of the literature not simply to hear the story but to understand how the author got the story on the page…”

Jacqueline Woodson (1963) American writer

On how she processed literature differently at an early age in “Jacqueline Woodson On Growing Up, Coming Out And Saying Hi To Strangers” https://www.npr.org/2016/10/14/497953254/jacqueline-woodson-on-growing-up-coming-out-and-saying-hi-to-strangers in NPR (2016 Oct 14)

Reading, Understanding, People, Thinking

“One step forward, two steps back. … It happens in the lives of individuals, and it happens in the history of nations and in the development of parties. It would be the most criminal cowardice to doubt even for a moment the inevitable and complete triumph of the principle of revolutionary Social-Democracy, of proletarian organization and Party discipline. We have already won a great deal, and we must go on fighting, undismayed by reverses, fighting steadfastly, scorning the philistine methods of circle wrangling, doing our very utmost to preserve the hard-won single Party tie linking all Russian Social-Democrats, and striving by dint of persistent and systematic work to give all Party members, and the workers in particular, a full and conscious understanding of the duties of Party members, of the struggle and Second Party Congress, of all the causes and all the stages of our divergence, and of the utter and disastrousness of opportunism., which, in the sphere of our programme and our tactics, helplessly surrenders to the bourgeois psychology, uncritically adopts the point of view of bourgeois democracy, and blunts the weapon of the class struggle of the proletariat.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Lenin Anthology, p. 119
1900s, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904)

Democracy, Fight, Understanding, History

“I happen to believe also that what, to me, democratic socialism means is we deal with an issue we do not discuss enough… not in the media and not in Congress. You’ve got three people in America owning more wealth than the bottom half of this country. You’ve got a handful of billionaires controlling what goes on in Wall Street, the insurance companies and in the media. Maybe, just maybe, what we should be doing is creating an economy that works for all of us, not 1%. That’s my understanding of democratic socialism.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Bernie Sanders on Democratic Socialism: We Want to Create an Economy That Works for All of Us https://www.democracynow.org/2019/9/13/bernie_sanders_democratic_socialism_defense_democratic DemocracyNow (13 September 2019) 2010s, 2019, September 2019

Wealth, People, Understanding, Country

“Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism. This is what the Soviets did when they erased political dissidents from historical photos. This is what happens in George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, when a torturer holds up four fingers and delivers electric shocks until his prisoner sees five fingers as ordered. The goal is to make you question logic and reason and to sow mistrust towards exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves.”

Hillary Clinton What Happened

"Showing Up" https://books.google.com/books?id=UjAIDgAAQBAJ&pg=PA9, What Happened (2017), Simon & Schuster. Post Presidential Election

Photo, Question, People, Reality

“The clamor of agreement betrayed the anti-French sentiment ever ready to be mobilized when Americans in Paris got together. And as happened with anti-Semites merrily fraternizing, nobody at the table seemed to remember that there were French people present.”

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) American writer

"Round Table, with the Damsel Parcenet"
Birds of America (1971)

People

“As Socrates showed, love cannot be anything else but the love of the good. But to find the good is very rare. That is why love is rare, in spite of what people think. It happens to one in a thousand, and to that one it is a revelation. No wonder he cannot communicate with the other nine hundred and ninety-nine.”

Mary McCarthy book The Group

Mr Schneider in Ch. 12
The Group (1963)

People, Communication, Thinking, Love

“The inextricable way pleasure and pain are mixed up with each other in this world is a mournful fact to beings who are all the time striving for pleasure alone. In the ideal world there is no pain, no misery. There is nothing but happiness. But in our world pain seems to have been the original feeling, the first one to appear in the evolution of sentiency. Pleasure is a sort of after-thought, a secondary attribute of consciousness which developed later as an aid to pain in keeping living beings straight. Pain is a whip, a penalty. Pleasure is a reward or bribe. Pain is a curse. We are all the time trying to minimize and escape it. In an ideal world the inhabitants never have any impulses that drive them to improper acts. All their impulses are good. Every act is proper and right. Ideal beings need only to live and act in order to be happy. We are not ideal beings. Our world happens to be one affording almost unlimited opportunities for improvement.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), Contents of Ethics, pp. 52–53

Pain, Time, Penalty, Pleasure

“At first, I wasn’t too sure about becoming a vegetarian. … In the beginning it was for athletic reasons, but later I became more concerned about life itself. I won’t go too deeply into it, but there is a religious part and meditative part of vegetarianism for me. … As far as I know, I was the only vegetarian wrestler around. … Well, when I got away from animal foods, I became closer to God. That’s what happened to me. I was more conscious of the good things in life. I was more conscious of other people. And I was conscious of love.”

Killer Kowalski (1926–2008) Canadian professional wrestler

"A Vegetarian Travel Guide exclusive interview with the world-famous wrestler... Walter "Killer" Kowalski" https://www.vegetarianusa.com/feature_articles/sports/Kowalski.html, interview by Barry Harris, VegetarianUSA.com.

God, Food, People, Animals

“I marvel at the complacency of Ministers in the face of the frightful experiences through which we have all so newly passed. I look with wonder upon our thoughtless crowds disporting themselves in the summer sunshine, and upon this unfocused, unheeding House of Commons, which seems to have no higher function than to cheer a Minister. But what is happening across the narrow seas? A terrible process is astir. Germany is arming.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

That mighty race who fought and almost vanquished the whole world is on the march again. The whole nation is inspired with the idea of retrieving and avenging their defeat in the Great War. They have arisen from the pit of disaster in monstrous guise. ... And we are still pestering France to disarm, and we are still disarmed ourselves!
'How I Would Procure Peace', Daily Mail (9 July 1934), quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, Volume 12: The Wilderness Years, 1929–1935 (Michigan: Hillsdale Press, 2012), p. 825, n. 3
The 1930s

Sea, Summer, Housing

“What is happening to Assange should terrify the press…The silence about the treatment of Assange is not only a betrayal of him but a betrayal of the freedom of the press itself. We will pay dearly for this complicity…. Assange is on his own. Each day is more difficult for him. This is by design. It is up to us to protest. We are his last hope, and the last hope, I fear, for a free press.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

"Crucifying Julian Assange" (2018)

Betrayal, Freedom, Silence, Hope

“What happened today to @JussieSmollett must never be tolerated in this country. We must stand up and demand that we no longer give this hate safe harbor; that homophobia and racism have no place on our streets or in our hearts. We are with you, Jussie.”

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

Twitter https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1090422326783606784, , quoted in * 2019-02-21 Jussie Smollett Supporters: Rooting for a 'Modern Lynching' Larry Elder RealClearPolitics https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/02/21/jussie_smollett_supporters_rooting_for_a_modern_lynching_139531.html 2020-03-12 Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Joe Biden / Quotes / 2010s / 2019 2019

Heart, Hate, Country

“On the whole, people tend to take prisons for granted. It is difficult to imagine life without them At the same time, there is reluctance to face the realities hidden within them, a fear of thinking about what happens inside them. Thus, the prison is present in our lives and, at the same time, it is absent from our lives. To think about this simultaneous presence and absence is to begin to acknowledge the part played by ideology in shaping the way we interact with our social surroundings. We take prisons for granted but are often afraid to face the realities they produce.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter One

Fear, Time, Imagination, People

“Everything good that has happened to me has happened as a direct result of helping someone else. Everything.”

Danny Trejo (1944) Mexican American actor

"Actor Danny Trejo saves a trapped baby from an overturned car" https://kfor.com/2019/08/07/actor-danny-trejo-saves-a-trapped-baby-from-an-overturned-car/ (August 7, 2019)

Help

“We are motivated by what makes our hearts feel lighter, no matter what is happening.”

Jakub Tencl (1978) Czech clinical hypnotherapist and writer

Source: The mystery of life : you are the light, and that's indestructible truth, Tencl, Jakub,, 9781512399882, [United Kingdom? https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/914353319,, 914353319]

Motivation, Making love, Feeling, Heart

“I of course take a negative attitude about a great deal that is happening, and I have said so directly and frankly to many of those who stand at the head of government. They behave well towards me, and many things I asked were carried out. They even proposed that I should take part in their work, but I refused. As an anarchist, I cannot reconcile myself to any government.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

About the Bolshevik revolution, as quoted in Peter Kropotkin : From Prince to Rebel (1990) by George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, p. 428

Parting

“A colonial student does not by origin belong to the intellectual history in which the university philosophers are such impressive landmarks. The colonial student can be so seduced by these attempts to give a philosophical account of the universe, that surrenders his whole personality to them. When he does this, he loses sight of the fundamental social fact that he is a colonial subject. In this way, he omits to draw from his education and from the concern displayed by the great philosophers for human problems, anything which he might relate to the very real problem of colonial domination, which, as it happens, conditions the immediate life of every colonized African.”

Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) Pan Africanist and First Prime Minister and President of Ghana

Consciencism (1964), Introduction

Drawing, History, Personality, Universe

“I do not think we have a free press in Britain today. There is not a single newspaper that I can buy, not one in Britain that reflects my political position. And The Times, dare I say to you, is really disreputable. It does not print truthfully and faithfully what happens and it pretends, because it is printed in small print that it is above argument. But it is a political propaganda instrument like The Sun, but it is printed in rather better print and rather shrewder language.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

Press conference in Athens (12 March 1982), quoted in The Times (13 March 1982), p. 5
1980s

Sun, Thinking, Time

“It’s about learning to listen, much like in music. You can train your ears to history. You can train your ears to the earth. You can train your ears to the wind. It’s important to listen and then to study the world, like astronomy or geology or the names of birds. A lot of poets can be semihistorians. Poetry is very mathematical. There’s a lot in the theoretical parts that is similar. Quantum physicists remind me of mystics. They are aware of what happens in timelessness, though they speak of it through theories and equations.”

Joy Harjo (1951) American writer

On her advice to poets in “The First Native American U.S. Poet Laureate on How Poetry Can Counter Hate” https://time.com/5658443/joy-harjo-poet-interview/ in Time Magazine (2019 Aug 22)

Study, History, Learning, Music

“That happens in the world, which we often witness in a public debate. Each of the speakers expresses himself imperfectly: no one of them hears much that another says, such is the preoccupation of mind of each; and the audience, who have only to hear and not to speak, judge very wisely and superiorly how wrongheaded and unskilful is each of the debaters to his own affair. Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never. When I meet a pure intellectual force, or a generosity of affection, I believe, here then is man; and am presently mortified by the discovery, that this individual is no more available to his own or to the general ends, than his companions; because the power which drew my respect, is not supported by the total symphony of his talents.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Nominalist and Realist

World, Support, Men

“The nation yesterday was awaiting a clear, statesmanlike call from the Chancellor of the efforts and, if necessary, the sacrifices that are needed to lift the country out of the perpetual series of crises and near crises that have dogged us ever since the war. That was what we were led to believe would happen. What did we get? We had a shambling, fumbling, largely irrelevant and, at one point, degrading speech. The Chancellor told us that the Budget was prepared under the piercing eye of Mr. Gladstone. There was one passage that was quite obviously written under a portrait of Horatio Bottomley.”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1956/apr/18/budget-proposals-and-economic-situation in the House of Commons (18 April 1956) Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer

War, Dogs, Effort, Country

“That is the meaning of love. In the final analysis, love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It’s not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.”

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

[“Loving Your Enemies,” Sermon Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, King, Jr., Martin Luther, 1957-11-17, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/loving-your-enemies-sermon-delivered-dexter-avenue-baptist-church, http://www.webcitation.org/6x5ROMlxu, 2018-02-08]
1950s, Loving Your Enemies (November 1957)

Understanding, Beauty, Love, Making love

“I can’t say precisely. I don’t think anyone really knows how a story takes shape. When it’s done you try to explain how it happened, but every effort, at least in my case, is insufficient. There is a before, made up of fragments of memory, and an after, when the story begins. But before and after, I have to admit, are useful only in answering your question now in an intelligible way.”

Elena Ferrante (1943) Italian writer

On being asked how she begins a new work in “Elena Ferrante, Art of Fiction No. 228” https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6370/elena-ferrante-art-of-fiction-no-228-elena-ferrante in The Paris Review (Spring 2015)

Question, Intelligence, Thinking, Memory

“Today, 14% of the Brazilian territory is demarcated as indigenous land, but we must understand that our natives are human beings, just like any of us. They want and deserve to enjoy the same rights as all of us. I want to make it clear: Brazil will not increase its already demarcated indigenous lands to 20%, as some Heads of State would like it to happen.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

Speech at the at the 74th UN General Assembly. Statement by Mr. Jair Messias Bolsonaro, President of the Federative Republic of Brazil http://statements.unmeetings.org/GA74/BR_EN.pdf. United Nations PaperSmart (24 September 2019).

Making love, Understanding

“It’s a combination of things that are happening now, Amy, that make it clear to more and more members of Congress that you can’t keep a straight face on all of this incredible indebtedness, talk about all the money that we’ve shoveled out to Wall Street, and credit isn’t loosening up, unemployment is still at all-time highs. We’re projected in Detroit to have more foreclosures on homes than last year. And so, we’ve got to turn with — especially with all the shouts about being fiscally conservative, the way to climb out of this is to reduce the obligations of our government. Here we are in hundreds of billions of dollars of war debt, and our president is saying we now have to have an emergency funding, which is merely another way of saying we’re going to specially fund the Afghanistan surge. It makes no sense. And I think militarily, it is not logical. And, of course, morally, I can’t remember anything like this since Korea and Vietnam…”

John Conyers (1929–2019) American politician from Michigan

Rep. John Conyers and Out of Afghanistan Caucus Oppose Obama Admin’s $33B Escalation of Afghan War, DemocracyNow! https://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/1/conyers (1 July 2010)

Money, Home, Time, War

“It was odd that I should discover eternity in this way, long before I knew what eternity was, and even before I had learned the proposition that all man are mortal - yes, while I was actually living in eternity myself. It was as if a fish were suddenly to discover the water it swam in. I mentioned this to my grandfather one day when we happened to be alone in the living-room.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Way, Fish, Water, Learning

“Here’s my attitude, and I’m sort of sorry to say this sometimes – but there are people who try and elevate film music - of all kinds – to being the great twentieth century classical music, and my opinion is it just isn’t. It’s very straightforward, major/minor or modal writing. The only time you get any kind of originality is usually in the timbres and the sounds and the mixture of elements. But to get through a scene it’s either happy, or sad – and it’s either going forward in action or it’s not – and it can be ironic, which means you’ve got to switch from major to minor frequently. But it’s not rocket science. It’s a lot of skills – a lot of political skills, frankly. It’s being in a room and playing off fifty opinions from studios, producers, directors, sometimes actors – and coming out the end with something that vaguely represents music. And frequently it doesn’t. The minute you try to get original or break the box – unless you’ve got either a very experimental or powerful director, it’s probably not going to happen.”

Graeme Revell (1955) New Zealand musician

Time, Box, People, Music

“I’ve seen trends ebb and flow. I’ve seen progress and I’ve seen regression, not just in gay movements, but in all types of movements — whether it’s gender or sexuality or race. All kinds of different movements. And humans are fickle. Humans are very trendy. And they’re posers. If some economic change happens, it can all go to shit, honestly. And I’ve seen it happen in my lifetime. So do I trust that this is what it is and it’ll stick forever? I’m skeptical and I’m cautious.”

RuPaul (1960) Actriz de Televisa, dueña y señora de los ejidos cacaoahuateros

Quoted by Doug Rule in RuPaul: Ultimate Queen http://www.metroweekly.com/2016/04/ultimate-queen-rupaul/ (2016)

Change

“A lot more can happen in the world of singer-songwriters that I appreciate. This storytelling where you have the ability to sit and listen to it because you don’t have other distractions -- you’re not listening to what the bass part is doing, there isn’t an elaborate instrumental arrangement that’s taking you into Middle Earth and back.. For me just as a singer I think you’re able to hear aspects of my voice and my singing and what it conveys in ways you’re not going to on a Soundgarden or an Audioslave record.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Chris Cornell Talks Missing Andrew Wood, Writing Songs In the Bathroom: Unpublished 2015 Interview Excerpts, Billboard, 19 May 2017 https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/7801053/chris-cornell-2015-interview-higher-truth, On songwriting

Singing, Thinking, Way, World

“I was on tour with Soundgarden, and I remember writing down the title. The title immediately brought up the idea of the song, which is that someone is so distracted by a new person or a new thing in their life that they kind of forgot that they had given up on life. Sometimes it just happens without us even noticing.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

On the inspiration behind the song "Nearly Forgot My Broken Heart" ** Chris Cornell Flashback Q&A: 'We Have to Be Aware That Life Is So Short', Yahoo!, May 19, 2017 https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/chris-cornell-flashback-qa-aware-life-short-023857577.html, On songwriting

Idea, Life, Personality

“That’s one of those songs that kind of happened in one moment. I just picked up a guitar and started playing it, and those lines just came out. I had a dream when I was in Seattle with my wife. I woke up from this dream, and as I woke up it was like I was sort of flying away above us. I remember feeling like our whole life is wrapped up in moments, but we have to be really aware because it’s so short. That was kind of what the song was about to me. We have to be really aware of every moment together. All we really know is that we have this life. Who knows what else is gonna happen? Let’s not let it suddenly be over and we didn’t appreciate it from day to day, from hour to hour, ’cause life’s gonna fly by.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

On the song "Before We Disappear" from his 2015 solo album Higher Truth ** Chris Cornell Flashback Q&A: 'We Have to Be Aware That Life Is So Short', Yahoo!, May 19, 2017 https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/chris-cornell-flashback-qa-aware-life-short-023857577.html, On songwriting

Life, Dreams, Feeling, Flying

“Origen taught that all souls were created at the beginning of creation as angelic spirits. In this condition they sinned and for their apostasy were transferred into material bodies. It was this view of preexistence which was proclaimed heretical. In any case, heresy thus condemned so long ago need not be regarded today as of major importance. Truth matters a great deal more and a condemned heresy may turn out to be a truth, as happened, for example, when a local church of Rome condemned Galileo’s heliocentric doctrine and forced him to recant. Galileo was right and the church in question was wrong. It is therefore quite legitimate for both clergy and laity of the Christian faith to preach and believe in both preexistence and reincarnation.”

Geoffrey Hodson (1886–1983) New Zealand occultist

Source: Reincarnation & Christianity https://www.theosophical.org/files/resources/articles/ReincarnationChristianity.pdf (1967)

Soul, Faith, Question, Truth