Quotes about high
page 19

Victor Villaseñor photo
Herman Cain photo
André Breton photo
Alfred de Zayas photo

“It is high time to mainstream human rights into all trade agreements and World Trade Organization (WTO) rules and regulations, so that trade representatives and dispute-settlers know that trade is neither a “stand alone” regime not an end in itself.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Mainstream human rights into trade agreements and WTO practice – UN expert urges in new report http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=20473&LangID=E#sthash.bn9VjkJJ.dpuf.
2016, Mainstream human rights into trade agreements and WTO practice – UN expert urges in new report

Sarah Chang photo

“The ultimate high for me is being onstage in front of an audience. Nothing else can compare.”

Sarah Chang (1980) violinist

NEWSWEEK 1999 http://www.jeremycaplan.com/SarahChangInterview.htm

Thomas Friedman photo

“Improv time is over. This is crunch time. Iraq will be won or lost in the next few months. But it won't be won with high rhetoric. It will be won on the ground in a war over the last mile.”

Thomas Friedman (1953) American journalist and author

New York Times (28 November 2004) "The Last Mile".
"The next … months" in Iraq

Friedrich Hayek photo

“Life at Cambridge during those war years was to me particularly congenial, and it completed the process of thorough absorption in English life which, from the beginning, I had found very easy. Somehow the whole mood and intellectual atmosphere of the country had at once proved extraordinarily attractive to me, and the conditions of a war in which all my sympathies were with the English greatly speeded up the process of becoming thoroughly at home—much more than in my native Austria from which I had already become somewhat estranged during the conditions of the 1920s. While neither on my early visit to the United States nor during my later stay there or still later in Germany did I feel that I really belonged there, English ways of life seemed so naturally to accord with all my instincts and dispositions that, if it had not been for very special circumstances, I should never have wished to leave the country again. And of all the forms of life, that at one of the colleges of the old universities…still seems to me the most attractive. The evenings at the High Table and the Combinations Room at King's are among the pleasantest recollections of my life, and some of the older men I came then to know well, especially J. H. Clapham, remained, while they lived, dear friends.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

Stephen Kresge and Leif Wenar (eds.), Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 86
1980s and later

Tom Hanks photo
James Anthony Froude photo
Du Fu photo
Paul Graham photo
Joel Fuhrman photo
Noam Chomsky photo
Boris Johnson photo
Pope Benedict XVI photo

“While they are growing up, the young need adults who can suggest principles and values to them. They feel in need of people who can teach by their example, more than by their words, to expend themselves for high ideals.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

Homily on the fourth anniversary of the death of John Paul II http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20090402_anniv-morte-gpii_en.html (2 April 2009)
2009

Patrick Buchanan photo
Dante Gabriel Rossetti photo
Michelle Obama photo
Maurice Strong photo

“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class - involving high meat intake, the use of fossil fuels, electrical appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and suburban housing - are not sustainable.”

Maurice Strong (1929–2015) Canadian businessman

Maurice Strong, opening speech at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit But this quotation is not in the version posted on Mr. Strong's site. http://www.mauricestrong.net/index.php/opening-statement6

Charles Bernstein photo
Joseph Hayne Rainey photo
Beck photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
Kate Chopin photo
Margaret Mead photo

“Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Attributed to Mead in: Fleur L. Strand (1978) Physiology: a regulatory systems approach. p. 509
1970s

“High poet, pride of the English squires,
I would be just a nettle in your garden.”

Eustache Deschamps (1346–1406) French poet

Poete hault, loenge d'escuiye,
En ton jardin ne seroie qu'ortie.
"Grant translateur, noble Geoffroy Chaucier" line 31; text and translation from Ian S. Laurie and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi (eds.), David Curzon and Jeffrey Fiskin (trans.) Eustache Deschamps: Selected Poems (London: Routledge, 2003) pp. 70-71.

Thomas Moore photo

“I would like to congratulate everybody with the commencement of the "Combined Endeavour 2007" military exercises. This exercise is running simultaneously in Armenia and Germany. We have about 130 participants from 6 countries, this being evidence of importance and actuality of the event. It is notable that the cooperation between the Ministry of Defence of Armenia and the US European Command is developing and implementing a number of projects, and the vivid evidence of this cooperation is this military exercise. This is not the first military exercise in Armenia. Since 2003, we have hosted a number of military exercises organized with the NATO/PfP and the US European Command. It is important that the running of military exercises in Armenia is growing into a good tradition. Especially since, we already have an arrangement of hosting "Cooperative Longbow/Lancer" military exercises in Armenia for 2008. I would also like to mention with appreciation that the planning conference and working meetings before the military exercise would be held in a constructive atmosphere. We have effectively managed to run all preparation activities with joint efforts of the US European Command, the MOD of Armenia and other partners. The communication field is that chain which has fundamental importance for realizing multinational activities. The effectiveness and successes of our cooperation is related to that. This military exercise not only supports the testing of capabilities of participating units and experts, but also an opportunity for developing effective mechanisms for ensuring an interoperability and carrying out the tasks jointly. It is not accidental that Armenia has always expressed its readiness to host such kinds of events, and all participants have been trying to create appropriate conditions for their work. Taking this opportunity, one more time, I would like to thank all participants for their presence here and the US European command for their assistance in organizational matters. I am sure that due to our joint activities, the military exercise would be on a high professional and organizational level. I also hope that while you are in Armenia, you have a chance to make yourselves familiar with our history, culture and will have wonderful impressions. I am sure that on the 10th of May, after the completion of the military exercise, we will ascertain one more time that another multinational military exercise was held with success and fulfilled its tasks. I would like to wish all participants fruitful work and further success. I allow the commencement of the opening of the "Combined Endeavour 2007" military exercise.”

Mikael Harutyunyan (1946) Armenian general

Quoted in 2007 article. [April 27, 2007]

Herbert Marcuse photo

“No matter how close and familiar the temple or cathedral were to the people who lived around them, they remained in terrifying or elevating contrast to the daily life of the slave, the peasant, and the artisan—and perhaps even to that of their masters. Whether ritualized or not, art contains the rationality of negation. In its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal—the protest against that which is. The modes in which man and things are made to appear, to sing and sound and speak, are modes of refuting, breaking, and recreating their factual existence. But these modes of negation pay tribute to the antagonistic society to which they are linked. Separated from the sphere of labor where society reproduces itself and its misery, the world of art which they create remains, with all its truth, a privilege and an illusion. In this form it continues, in spite of all democratization and popularization, through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The “high culture” in which this alienation is celebrated has its own rites and its own style. The salon, the concert, opera. theater are designed to create and invoke another dimension of reality. Their attendance requires festive-like preparation; they cut off and transcend everyday experience. Now this essential gap between the arts and the order of the day, kept open in the artistic alienation, is progressively closed by the advancing technological society. And with its closing, the Great Refusal is in turn refused; the “other dimension” is absorbed into the prevailing state of affairs. The works of alienation are themselves incorporated into this society and circulate as part and parcel of the equipment which adorns and psychoanalyzes the prevailing state of affairs.”

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 63-64

Honoré de Balzac photo

“Clouds signify the veil of the Most High.”

Source: Seraphita (1835), Ch. 3: Seraphita - Seraphitus.

John Major photo
Kent Hovind photo
Daniel Kahneman photo
Richard Hovey photo
Christopher Gérard photo
Maxime Bernier photo

“During the final months of the campaign, as polls indicated that I had a real chance of becoming the next leader, opposition from the supply management lobby gathered speed. Radio-Canada reported on dairy farmers who were busy selling Conservative Party memberships across Quebec. A Facebook page called Les amis de la gestion de l’offre et des régions (Friends of supply management and regions) was set up and had gathered more than 10,500 members by early May. As members started receiving their ballots by mail from the party, its creator, Jacques Roy, asked them to vote for Andrew Scheer.
Andrew, along with several other candidates, was then busy touring Quebec’s agricultural belt, including my own riding of Beauce, to pick up support from these fake Conservatives, only interested in blocking my candidacy and protecting their privileges. Interestingly, one year later, most of them have not renewed their memberships and are not members of the party anymore. During these last months of the campaign, the number of members in Quebec had increased considerably, from about 6,000 to more than 16,000. In April 2018, according to my estimates, we are down to about 6,000 again.
A few days after the vote, Éric Grenier, a political analyst at the CBC, calculated that if only 66 voters in a few key ridings had voted differently, I could have won. The points system, by which every riding in the country represented 100 points regardless of the number of members they had, gave outsized importance in the vote to a handful of ridings with few members. Of course, a lot more than 66 supply management farmers voted, likely thousands of them in Quebec, Ontario, and the other provinces. I even lost my riding of Beauce by 51% to 49%, the same proportion as the national vote.
At the annual press gallery dinner in Ottawa a few days after the vote, a gala where personalities make fun of political events of the past year, Andrew was said to have gotten the most laughs when he declared: “I certainly don’t owe my leadership victory to anybody…”, stopping in mid-sentence to take a swig of 2% milk from the carton. “It’s a high quality drink and it’s affordable too.” Of course, it was so funny because everybody in the room knew that was precisely why he got elected. He did what he thought he had to do to get the most votes, and that is fair game in a democratic system. But this also helps explain why so many people are so cynical about politics, and with good reason.”

Maxime Bernier (1963) Canadian politician

page 23 in "Live or die with supply management", chapter 5 previewed April 2018 http://www.maximebernier.com/my_chapter_on_supply_management of "Doing Politics Differently: My Vision for Canada"

Tony Benn photo

“It would be inconceivable for the House to adjourn for Easter without recording the fact that last Friday the High Court disallowed an Act which was passed by this House and the House of Lords and received Royal Assent — the Merchant Shipping Act 1988. The High Court referred the case to the European Court…I want to make it clear to the House that we are absolutely impotent unless we repeal Section 2 of the European Communities Act. It is no good talking about being a good European. We are all good Europeans; that is a matter of geography and not a matter of sentiment. Are the arrangements under which we are governed such that we have broken the link between the electorate and the laws under which they are governed? I am an old parliamentary hand — perhaps I have been here too long — but I was brought up to believe, and I still believe, that when people vote in an election they must be entitled to know that the party for which they vote, if it has a majority, will be able to enact laws under which they will be governed. That is no longer true. Any party elected, whether it is the Conservative party or the Labour party can no longer say to the electorate, "Vote for me and if I have a majority I shall pass that law", because if that law is contrary to Common Market law, British judges will apply Common Market law.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

Speech in the House of Commons (13 March 1989) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1989/mar/13/adjournment-easter-and-monday-1-may on the Factortame case
1980s

Heather Brooke photo
David Miscavige photo

“Scientology is now run by David Miscavige, 31, a high school dropout and second-generation church member. Defectors describe him as cunning, ruthless and so paranoid about perceived enemies that he kept plastic wrap over his glass of water.”

David Miscavige (1960) leader of the Church of Scientology

[Richard, Behar, Richard Behar, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,972865,00.html, The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power, Time, May 6, 1991, 2010-07-03].
About

Rachel Marsden photo
Eugène Fromentin photo
Thomas Gray photo

“To high-born Hoel's harp, or soft Llewellyn's lay.”

I. 2. line 28
The Bard (1757)

John Lancaster Spalding photo
Patrick Dixon photo
Peter F. Drucker photo

“To be a manager requires more than a title, a big office, and other outward symbols of rank. It requires competence and performance of a high order.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 2, p. 398

Pierre Trudeau photo

“We aimed far and high, but we did not miss the mark.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

Part 4, 1979 - 1984 "Welcome to the 1980's", p. 340
Memoirs (1993)

Chuck Berry photo
Edward Bulwer-Lytton photo

“There are times when the mirth of others only saddens us, especially the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our own quiet mood.”

Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) English novelist, poet, playwright, and politician

Kenelm Chillingly; His Adventures and Opinions (1873).

Clive Staples Lewis photo

“I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated, and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In other words, it forbids wholesome doubt. […]
This false certainty comes out in Professor Haldane's article. […] It is breaking Aristotle's canon—to demand in every enquiry that the degree of certainty which the subject matter allows. And not on your life to pretend that you see further than you do.
Being a democrat, I am opposed to all very drastic and sudden changes of society (in whatever direction) because they never in fact take place except by a particular technique. That technique involves the seizure of power by a small, highly disciplined group of people; the terror and the secret police follow, it would seem, automatically. I do not think any group good enough to have such power. They are men of like passions with ourselves. The secrecy and discipline of their organisation will have already inflamed in them that passion for the inner ring which I think at least as corrupting as avarice; and their high ideological pretensions will have lent all their passions the dangerous prestige of the Cause. Hence, in whatever direction the change is made, it is for me damned by its modus operandi.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

The worst of all public dangers is the committee of public safety.
"A Reply to Professor Haldane" (1946), published posthumously in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1966)
Some of these ideas were included in the essay "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" (1949) (see below).

Benito Mussolini photo
Clarence Thomas photo

“This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U. S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new-yitna?id=UsaThom&images=images/modeng&data=/lv6/workspace/yitna&tag=public&part=24, Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library (October 11, 1991).
1990s

Stephenie Meyer photo
Jerome K. Jerome photo
Peter F. Hamilton photo
Matt Ridley photo
James Montgomery photo

“Nature's prime favourites were the Pelicans;
High-fed, long-lived, and sociable and free.”

James Montgomery (1771–1854) British editor, hymn writer, and poet

Canto V, line 144.
The Pelican Island (1827)

C. Wright Mills photo

“The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness.
We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. Very often, the fear of total permanent war paralyzes the kind of morally oriented politics, which might engage our interests and our passions. We sense the cultural mediocrity around us-and in us-and we know that ours is a time when, within and between all the nations of the world, the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial.
We feel that distrust has become nearly universal among men of affairs, and that the spread of public anxiety is poisoning human relations and drying up the roots of private freedom. We see that people at the top often identify rational dissent with political mutiny, loyalty with blind conformity, and freedom of judgment with treason. We feel that irresponsibility has become organized in high places and that clearly those in charge of the historic decisions of our time are not up to them. But what is more damaging to us is that we feel that those on the bottom-the forced actors who take the consequences-are also without leaders, without ideas of opposition, and that they make no real demands upon those with power.”

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) American sociologist

Source: Letters & Autobiographical Writings (1954), pp. 184-185.

Abraham photo
Thomas Fuller photo

“Often the cockloft is empty in those whom Nature hath built many stories high.”

Thomas Fuller (1608–1661) English churchman and historian

Andronicus, or the Unfortunate Politician (1646), Sect. vi. Par. 18, 1. Compare: "My Lord St. Albans said that Nature did never put her precious jewels into a garret four stories high, and therefore that exceeding tall men had ever very empty heads", Francis Bacon, Apothegms, No. 17.

Ilana Mercer photo

“Arisen online and beyond is a niche-market of nudniks (nags): Women talking, blogging, vlogging, writing and publishing about women in high-technology or their absence therefrom; women beating the tom-tom about discrimination and stereotyping, but saying absolutely nothing about the technology they presumably love and help create.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

" James Damore Confronts The Hags of High-Tech (& Loses) https://townhall.com/columnists/ilanamercer/2017/08/12/james-damore-confronts-the-nagging-harridans-of-hightech--loses-n2367635," Townhall.com, August 12, 2017.
2010s, 2017

Margaret Mead photo
Richard Rodríguez photo
Albert Einstein photo
Bill Whittle photo

“You tell the big lie by carefully selecting only the small, isolated truths, linking them in such a way that that advance the bigger lie by painting a picture inside the viewer's head. The Ascended High Master of this Dark Art is Noam Chomsky.”

Bill Whittle (1959) author, director, screenwriter, editor

MAGIC https://web.archive.org/web/20030602124318/http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000051.html (18 May 2003)
2000s

Mary Baker Eddy photo
Elizabeth Kucinich photo
Thomas Henry Huxley photo

“Since Lord Brougham assailed Dr Young, the world has seen no such specimen of the insolence of a shallow pretender to a Master in Science as this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a "flighty" person, who endeavours "to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation," and whose "mode of dealing with nature" is reprobated as "utterly dishonourable to Natural Science."
And all this high and mighty talk, which would have been indecent in one of Mr. Darwin's equals, proceeds from a writer whose want of intelligence, or of conscience, or of both, is so great, that, by way of an objection to Mr. Darwin's views, he can ask, "Is it credible that all favourable varieties of turnips are tending to become men?"; who is so ignorant of paleontology, that he can talk of the "flowers and fruits" of the plants of the Carboniferous epoch; of comparative anatomy, that he can gravely affirm the poison apparatus of the venomous snakes to be "entirely separate from the ordinary laws of animal life, and peculiar to themselves"…
Nor does the reviewer fail to flavour this outpouring of preposterous incapacity with a little stimulation of the odium theologicum. Some inkling of the history of the conflicts between Astronomy, Geology, and Theology, leads him to keep a retreat open by the proviso that he cannot "consent to test the truth of Natural Science by the word of Revelation;" but, for all that, he devotes pages to the exposition of his conviction that Mr. Darwin's theory "contradicts the revealed relation of the creation to its Creator," and is "inconsistent with the fulness of his glory."”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

If I confine my retrospect of the reception of the 'Origin of Species' to a twelvemonth, or thereabouts, from the time of its publication, I do not recollect anything quite so foolish and unmannerly as the Quarterly Review article...
Huxley's commentary on the Samuel Wilberforce review of the Origin of Species in the Quarterly Review.
1880s, On the Reception of the Origin of Species (1887)

Georg Brandes photo

“I will be even briefer than Fabian, I thought I would creep in the back and I don’t have to say anything but what I would like to say and I came in when Eddy was 10 speaking and that was because we had a very constructive meeting with the High Commissioner yesterday and we made some decisions which is always good. Where I disagree sometimes with the Greek Cypriots is that I wanted to vote for Turkey never to be in the European Union! I have no interest in Turkey being in the EU until all, a whole host of problems are resolved and it is of course the Cyprus problem for me first on the agenda, but it is the Kurdish problem, its the military backing barracks, and all the rest of that, you know there are no human rights and many human rights violations in Turkey. So whether it takes 20 years or longer that makes me think that Turkey is using Cyprus as a lever to get as much out of it as is possible and of course the longer it takes for them not to be a member the longer that lever takes and the longer we will have 200,000 or 300,000 Turks settled in Cyprus and that becomes a very much bigger problem than it is now already and I think that I have said that at three or four meetings before rather than us talking about the problem of Cyprus which makes that it becomes a problem for the Republic as it is worldwide known we ought to talk about the problem of Turkey, it is really a 100% Turkish problem that they're not acting in the way in which they should be acting and if that’s the case well shove it to them! And I saw about 50 Turkish … [(A Turkish Cypriot member of the audience accused him saying "You are racist!" and returns his comments…. Many interruptions and heckling from the audience, some Greek Cypriots shouted for the Turkish Cypriot to get out if he didn’t like what he was hearing and three or four police officers arrived in the room.)] Well, it has certainly allocated my speech time and I would only say to the gentleman that we have nothing against honest straightforward Turkish Cypriots but Turkey is using the occupied territory to settle Turkish people they don’t necessarily want in Turkey, many are unemployed, that is not racism, that is a set of true facts and I don’t know whether you are a Turkish Cypriot or a Turkish person I have no disrespect for anybody in the world, but I have deep disrespect for the Turkish Government and the Turkish military and that is my last word on that!”

Rudi Vis (1941–2010) British politician

[At the Friends of Cyprus meeting in the Jubilee Room at the House of Commons, 3rd July 2007] (see External links for transcript)

Edmund Waller photo

“That eagle's fate and mine are one,
Which on the shaft that made him die
Espied a feather of his own,
Wherewith he wont to soar so high.”

Edmund Waller (1606–1687) English poet and politician

To a Lady singing a Song of his Composing; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). See also Eagles, for variations on this theme.

Warren Buffett photo
Chittaranjan Das photo
Harry Chapin photo
Haile Selassie photo
Glenn Greenwald photo

“The national religion in the United States is worship of all things military. And journalists are its high priests.”

Glenn Greenwald (1967) American journalist, lawyer and writer

interview with Democracy Now! (November 14, 2012). Glenn Greenwald: While Petraeus Had Affair with Biographer, Corporate Media Had Affair with Petraeus. http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/14/glenn_greenwald_while_petraeus_had_affair Retrieved on 2012-11-15.

Li Bai photo

“Oh, but it is high and very dangerous!
Such travelling is harder than scaling the blue sky.”

Li Bai (701–762) Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty poetry period

"Hard Roads In Shu" https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/hard-roads-in-shu/ (蜀道难)

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo
Johann Sebastian Bach photo

“To the glory of the most high God alone, and that my neighbour may be educated thereby.”

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) German late baroque era composer

Dem höchsten Gott allein zu Ehren,
Dem Nächsten draus sich zu belehren.
Epigraph to the Orgelbüchlein, cited from Carl Hermann Bitter Johann Sebastian Bach (Berlin: Ferdinand Schneider, 1865), vol. 1, p. 145; translation from Rush Rhees (ed.) Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), p. 182

Noam Chomsky photo
John Milton photo
Julian of Norwich photo

“But howsoever I might behold and desire, I could in no wise see this point in all the Shewing.
But how I understood and saw of the work of mercy, I shall tell somewhat, as God will give me grace. I understood this: Man is changeable in this life, and by frailty and overcoming falleth into sin: he is weak and unwise of himself, and also his will is overlaid. And in this time he is in tempest and in sorrow and woe; and the cause is blindness: for he seeth not God. For if he saw God continually, he should have no mischievous feeling, nor any manner of motion or yearning that serveth to sin.
Thus saw I, and felt in the same time; and methought that the sight and the feeling was high and plenteous and gracious in comparison with that which our common feeling is in this life; but yet I thought it was but small and low in comparison with the great desire that the soul hath to see God.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

Summations, Chapter 47
Context: Two things belong to our soul as duty: the one is that we reverently marvel, the other that we meekly suffer, ever enjoying in God. For He would have us understand that we shall in short time see clearly in Himself all that we desire.
And notwithstanding all this, I beheld and marvelled greatly: What is the mercy and forgiveness of God? For by the teaching that I had afore, I understood that the mercy of God should be the forgiveness of His wrath after the time that we have sinned. For methought that to a soul whose meaning and desire is to love, the wrath of God was harder than any other pain, and therefore I took that the forgiveness of His wrath should be one of the principal points of His mercy. But howsoever I might behold and desire, I could in no wise see this point in all the Shewing.
But how I understood and saw of the work of mercy, I shall tell somewhat, as God will give me grace. I understood this: Man is changeable in this life, and by frailty and overcoming falleth into sin: he is weak and unwise of himself, and also his will is overlaid. And in this time he is in tempest and in sorrow and woe; and the cause is blindness: for he seeth not God. For if he saw God continually, he should have no mischievous feeling, nor any manner of motion or yearning that serveth to sin.
Thus saw I, and felt in the same time; and methought that the sight and the feeling was high and plenteous and gracious in comparison with that which our common feeling is in this life; but yet I thought it was but small and low in comparison with the great desire that the soul hath to see God.

Robert W. Service photo
Bell Hooks photo
Irvine Welsh photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“Cecil Forrester was heir to many misfortunes, being handsome, rich, high-born, and clever.”

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

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Laurent Clerc photo

“Every creature, every work of God, is admirably well made; but if any one appears imperfect in our eyes, it does not belong to us to criticise it. Perhaps that which we do not find right in its kind, turns to our advantage, without our being able to perceive it. Let us look at the state of the heavens, one while the sun shines, another time it does not appear; now the weather is fine; again it is unpleasant; one day is hot, another is cold; another time it is rainy, snowy or cloudy; every thing is variable and inconstant. Let us look at the surface of the earth: here the ground is flat; there it is hilly and mountainous; in other places it is sandy; in others it is barren; and elsewhere it is productive. Let us, in thought, go into an orchard or forest. What do we see? Trees high or low, large or small, upright or crooked, fruitful or unfruitful. Let us look at the birds of the air, and at the fishes of the sea, nothing resembles another thing. Let us look at the beasts. We see among the same kinds some of different forms, of different dimensions, domestic or wild, harmless or ferocious, useful or useless, pleasing or hideous. Some are bred for men's sakes; some for their own pleasures and amusements; some are of no use to us. There are faults in their organization as well as in that of men. Those who are acquainted with the veterinary art, know this well; but as for us who have not made a study of this science, we seem not to discover or remark these faults. Let us now come to ourselves. Our intellectual faculties as well as our corporeal organization have their imperfections. There are faculties both of the mind and heart, which education improve; there are others which it does not correct. I class in this number, idiotism, imbecility, dulness. But nothing can correct the infirmities of the bodily organization, such as deafness, blindness, lameness, palsy, crookedness, ugliness. The sight of a beautiful person does not make another so likewise, a blind person does not render another blind. Why then should a deaf person make others so also? Why are we Deaf and Dumb? Is it from the difference of our ears? But our ears are like yours; is it that there may be some infirmity? But they are as well organized as yours. Why then are we Deaf and Dumb? I do not know, as you do not know why there are infirmities in your bodies, nor why there are among the human kind, white, black, red and yellow men. The Deaf and Dumb are everywhere, in Asia, in Africa, as well as in Europe and America. They existed before you spoke of them and before you saw them.”

Laurent Clerc (1785–1869) French-American deaf educator

Statement of 1818, quoted in Through Deaf Eyes: A Photographic History of an American Community (2007) by Douglas C. Baynton, Jack R. Gannon, and Jean Lindquist Bergey

Richard Nixon photo