Quotes about hold
page 33

Calvin Coolidge photo
Nikos Kazantzakis photo
Pearl S.  Buck photo
Orson Scott Card photo

“You speak metaphorically, I hope,” said Peggy.
“I hope not,” said Becca. “Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Alvin Journeyman (1995), Chapter 3.

Penn Jillette photo
Fred Hoyle photo
John Ogilby photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
John McCain photo
Arundhati Roy photo

“He is Karna, whom the world has abandoned. Karna Alone. Condemned goods. A prince raised in poverty. Born to die unfairly, unarmed and alone at the hands of his brother. Majestic in his complete despair. Praying on the banks of the Ganga. Stoned out of his skull.
Then Kunti appeared. She too was a man, but a man grown soft and womanly, a man with breasts, from doing female parts for years. Her movements were fluid. Full of women. Kunti, too, was stoned. High on the same shared joints. She had come to tell Karna a story.
Karna inclined his beautiful head and listened.
Red-eyed, Kunti danced for him. She told him of a young woman who had been granted a boon. A secret mantra that she could use to choose a lover from among the gods. Of how, with the imprudence of youth, the woman decided to test it to see if it really worked. How she stood alone in an empty field, turned her face to the heavens and recited the mantra. The words had scarcely left her foolish lips, Kunti said, when Surya, the God of Day, appeared before her. The young woman, bewitched by the beauty of the shimmering young god, gave herself to him. Nine months later she bore him a son. The baby was born sheathed in light, with gold earrings in his ears and a gold breastplate on his chest, engraved with the emblem of the sun.
The young mother loved her first-born son deeply, Kunti said, but she was unmarried and couldn't keep him. She put him in a reed basket and cast him away in a river. The child was found downriver by Adhirata, a charioteer. And named Karna.
Karna looked up to Kunti. Who was she? Who was my mother? Tell me where she is. Take me to her.
Kunti bowed her head. She's here, she said. Standing before you.
Karna's elation and anger at the revelation. His dance of confusion and despair. Where were you, he asked her, when I needed you the most? Did you ever hold me in your arms? Did you feed me? Did you ever look for me? Did you wonder where I might be?
In reply Kunti took the regal face in her hands, green the face, red the eyes, and kissed him on his brow. Karna shuddered in delight. A warrior reduced to infancy. The ecstasy of that kiss. He dispatched it to the ends of his body. To his toes. His fingertips. His lovely mother's kiss. Did you know how much I missed you? Rahel could see it coursing through his veins, as clearly as an egg travelling down an ostrich's neck.
A travelling kiss whose journey was cut short by dismay when Karna realised that his mother had revealed herself to him only to secure the safety of her five other, more beloved sons - the Pandavas - poised on the brink of their epic battle with their one hundred cousins. It is them that Kunti sought to protect by announcing to Karna that she was his mother. She had a promise to extract.
She invoked the Love Laws.”

pages 232-233.
The God of Small Things (1997)

John Byrne photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“5187. To hold one's Nose to the Grind-stone.”

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

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

Jean Paul Sartre photo
Heather Brooke photo
Alfred de Zayas photo

“I urge Governments to considerably reduce funds allocated to the military, not only as a disarmament issue, but also as a potential contributor to social and environmental protection and call for the holding of referenda on this issue worldwide.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

United Nations expert urges states to cut military spending and invest more in human development http://www.unog.ch/80256EDD006B9C2E/(httpNewsByYear_en)/D5D061E9891363C1C1257CB7003055E0?OpenDocument.
2014

Isaac Asimov photo

“Inertia! Our ruling class knows one law; no change. Despotism! They know one rule; force. Maldistribution! They know one desire; to hold what is theirs.”

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

Source: The Foundation series (1951–1993), Foundation and Empire (1952), Chapter 11 “Bride and Groom”; in part II, “The Mule” originally published under the same title in Astounding (November-December 1945)

John Clare photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo
Stephen Wolfram photo

“I'm committed to seeing this project done. To see if within this decade we can finally hold in our hands the rule for our universe, and know where our universe lies in the space of all possible universes.”

Stephen Wolfram (1959) British-American computer scientist, mathematician, physicist, writer and businessman

"Computing a Theory of Everything" (2010)

Margaret Thatcher photo
Wendell Berry photo

“One cannot reduce terror by holding over the world the threat of what it most fears.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Citizenship Papers (2003), A Citizen's Response

Jeremy Waldron photo
Richard Cobden photo

“I have generally made it a rule to parry the inquiries and comparisons which the Americans are so apt to thrust at an Englishman. On one or two occasions, when the party has been numerous and worth powder and shot, I have, however, on being hard pressed, and finding my British blood up, found the only mode of allaying their inordinate vanity to be by resorting to this mode of argument:—"I admit all that you or any other person can, could, may, or might advance in praise of the past career of the people of America. Nay, more, I will myself assert that no nation ever did, and in my opinion none ever will, achieve such a title to respect, wonder, and gratitude in so short a period; and further still, I venture to allege that the imagination of statesmen never dreamed of a country that should in half a century make such prodigious advances in civilization and real greatness as yours has done. And now I must add, and I am sure you, as intelligent, reasonable men, will go with me, that fifty years are too short a period in the existence of nations to entitle them to the palm of history. No, wait the ordeal of wars, distresses, and prosperity (the most dangerous of all), which centuries of duration are sure to bring to your country. These are the test, and if, many ages hence, your descendants shall be able only to say of their country as much as I am entitled to say of mine now, that for seven hundred years we have existed as a nation constantly advancing in liberty, wealth, and refinement; holding out the lights of philosophy and true religion to all the world; presenting mankind with the greatest of human institutions in the trial by jury; and that we are the only modern people that for so long a time withstood the attacks of enemies so heroically that a foreign foe never put foot in our capital except as a prisoner (this last is a poser);—if many centuries hence your descendants will be entitled to say something equivalent to this, then, and not till then, will you be entitled to that crown of fame which the historian of centuries is entitled to award."”

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

Letter to F. Cobden (5 July 1835) during his visit to the United States, quoted in John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905), pp. 33-34.
1830s

Catharine A. MacKinnon photo

“Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable?”

Catharine A. MacKinnon (1946) American feminist and legal activist

"Postmodernism and Human Rights" (2000), p. 58
Are Women Human?: and Other International Dialogues (2006)

F. W. de Klerk photo
John Bright photo
Sri Aurobindo photo
Marcus Annaeus Lucanus photo

“Such was the character, such the inflexible rule of austere Cato – to observe moderation and hold fast to the limit, to follow nature, to give his life for his country, to believe that he was born to serve the whole world and not himself.”
Hi mores, haec duri inmota Catonis secta fuit, servare modum finemque tenere naturamque sequi patriaeque inpendere vitam nec sibi sed toti genitum se credere mundo.

Book II, line 380 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia

John McCarthy photo

“Whenever we write an axiom, a critic can say that the axiom is true only in a certain context. With a little ingenuity the critic can usually devise a more general context in which the precise form of the axiom doesn't hold. […] There simply isn't a most general context.”

John McCarthy (1927–2011) American computer scientist and cognitive scientist

" Generality in Artificial Intelligence http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/generality.html" (1971–1987), ACM Turing Award Lectures: The First Twenty Years, ACM Press, 1987, ISBN 0201077949
1980s

Paula Modersohn-Becker photo
Peter Cook photo
George Washington Plunkitt photo
Paul Newman photo
Jerome Corsi photo
Aurangzeb photo

“It has been decided according to our Canon Law that long standing temples should not be demolished, but no new temple allowed to be built… Information has reached our... court that its environs and certain Brahmans who have the right of holding charge of the ancient temples there, and that they further desire to remove these Brahmans from their ancient office. Therefore, our royal command is that you should direct that in future no person shall in unlawful ways interfere with or disturb the Brahmans and other Hindus resident in those places.”

Aurangzeb (1618–1707) Sixth Mughal Emperor

Aurangzeb's Benares farman to Abdul Hasan in 1659, see History of Aurangzib: Mainly Based on Persian Sources, Volume 3 by Jadunath Sarkar, p. 281; Emperors of the Peacock Throne: The Saga of the Great Mughals https://books.google.com/books?id=04ellRQx4nMC&pg=PA397 by Abraham Eraly, p. 387, Mughal Rule in India https://books.google.com/books?id=4aqU9Zu7mFoC&pg=PA115 by Stephen Meredyth Edwardes & Herbert Leonard Offley Garrett], p.115 Mughal Empire in India: A Systematic Study Including Source Material, Volume 2 https://books.google.com/books?id=1wC27JDyApwC&pg=PA468 by Shripad Rama Sharma, p. 268. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.62677/page/n295
Quotes from late medieval histories, 1650s and earlier

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Sri Aurobindo photo

“In the stupendous rush of change which is coming on the human world as a result of the present tornado of upheaval, ancient India's culture, attacked by European modernism, overpowered in the material field, betrayed by the indifference of her children, may perish for ever along with the soul of the nation that holds it in its keeping…. Each nation is a Shakti or power of the evolving spirit in humanity and lives by the principle which it embodies. India is the Bharata Shakti, the living energy of a great spiritual conception, and fidelity to it is the very principle of her existence…. To follow a law or principle involuntarily or ignorantly or contrary to the truth of one's consciousness is a falsehood and a self-destruction. To allow oneself to be killed, like the lamb attacked by the wolf, brings no growth, farthers no development, assures no spiritual merit. Concert or unity may come in good time, but it must be an underlying unity with a free differentiation, not a swallowing up of one by another or an incongruous and inharmonious mixture. Nor can it come before the world is ready for these greater things. To lay down one's arms in a state of war is to invite destruction and it can serve no compensating spiritual purpose…. India is indeed awaking and defending herself, but not sufficiently and not with the whole-heartedness, the clear sight and the firm resolution which can alone save her from the peril. Today it is close; let her choose,… for the choice is imperatively before her, to live or to perish.”

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

December, 1918
India's Rebirth

Robert Hayne photo
Leonard Cohen photo
Emil Nolde photo
Billy Joel photo

“I don't care what consequence it brings
I have been a fool for lesser things.
I want you so bad.
I think you ought to know that
I intend to hold you for
The longest time.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

The Longest Time.
Song lyrics, An Innocent Man (1983)

Statius photo

“So when ebbing Nile hides himself in his great caverns and holds in his mouth the liquid nurture of an eastern winter, the valleys smoke forsaken by the flood and gaping Egypt awaits the sounds of her watery father, until at their prayers he grants sustenance to the Pharian fields and brings on a great harvest year.”
Sic ubi se magnis refluus suppressit in antris Nilus et Eoae liquentia pabula brumae ore premit, fumant desertae gurgite valles et patris undosi sonitus expectat hiulca Aegyptos, donec Phariis alimenta rogatus donet agris magnumque inducat messibus annum.

Source: Thebaid, Book IV, Line 705

Frank Herbert photo

“Briefly, the scientists working the Oregon coast found that sand could be controlled only by the use of one type of grass (European beach grass) and by a system of follow-up plantings with other growth. The grass sets up a beachhead by holding down the sand in an intricate lacing of roots. This permits certain other plants to gain a foothold. The beach grass is extremely difficult to grow in nurseries, and part of the solution to the dune problem involved working out a system for propagating and handling the grass.”

"They Stopped the Moving Sands" part of a letter to his agent Lurton Blassingame, outlining an article on how the USDA was using poverty grasses to protect Florence, Oregon from harmful sand dunes (11 July 1957); the article was never published, but did develop several of the ideas that led to "Dune"; as quoted in The Road to Dune (2005), p. 266
General sources

Samuel P. Huntington photo

“The First Welfare Theorem holds only if all consumers and firms are price takers. If some individuals or firms are price makers (they have the power to affect prices), then the allocation of resources will generally be inefficient.”

Harvey S. Rosen (1949) American economist

Source: Public Finance - International Edition - Sixth Edition, Chapter 3, Tools of Normative Analysis, p. 44

Walter Savage Landor photo
John Lancaster Spalding photo

“If thou canst not hold the golden mean, say and do too little rather than too much.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 178

Marcus Manilius photo

“Death's law brings change to all created things;
Lands cease to know themselves as years roll on.
As centuries pass, e'en nations change their form,
Yet safe the world remains, with all it holds.”

Omnia mortali mutantur lege creata, Nec se cognoscunt terræ vertentibus annis, Et mutant variam faciem per sæcula gentes, At manet incolumis mundus suaque omnia servat.

Book I, line 515, as reported in Dictionary of Quotations (classical) (1897) by T. B. Harbottle, p. 197.
G. P. Goold's translation: Everything born to a mortal existence is subject to change, nor does the earth notice that, despoiled by the passing years, it bears an appearance which varies through the ages.
Variant translation (disputed): Everything that is created is changed by the laws of man; the earth does not know itself in the revolution of years; even the races of man assume various forms in the course of ages.
Astronomica

Jack McDevitt photo
John Bunyan photo
Klaus Kinski photo
Warren Farrell photo

“The poor can’t hold their liquor.”

Radio From Hell (July 8, 2005)

“It is generally assumed that men are damaged in their capacity for closeness and intimacy. If intimacy is defined as a loving closeness with another person, then it is usually true that the early conditioning of men to be performers and competitors in the impersonal competitive world limits their intimacy capacity. Women are assumed to have a greater capacity for intimacy than men because they express caring emotions and allow themselves to be dependent and close in relationships more easily. Yet, a closer look will provide a different perspective.

True intimacy is love and closeness based on knowledge of the inner reality and inner experience of the other. However, in romantic relationships, closeness ends or is put into crisis when men describe honestly their inner experiences to women. Women assail the relationship behavior of men and men acknowledge what they are told. Rarely is the opposite true. Men accept the reality of women more than women accept the reality of men.

The fact that a woman's priority is placed on personal needs bears no relationship to a genuine capacity for intimacy. To be loved and known, and to be fully comfortable expressing one's personal self, are two major components of intimacy. There are few men who have received that from a woman. The opposite holds true. A woman's love for a man is contingent on his participating in her romantic fantasy of what he and the relationship should be. Few men risk challenging or undermining that fantasy. Instead, they play by the rules of romance even when it feels uncomfortable, knowing that being loved by her is fragile and easily broken once he reveals his resistances and unromantic feelings.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

Why Women Are Also Incapable of Intimacy, pp. 120–121
What Men Still Don't Know About Women, Relationships, and Love (2007)

Richard Dawkins photo
Joseph Chamberlain photo
David Allen photo

“Rivers of creative flow are log jammed w/ heads holding on to incompletions, old business, & avoided decisions.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

26 December 2011 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/151401985902526464
Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

Samuel Butler photo

“If a man would get hold of the public era, he must pay, marry, or fight.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Ramblings In Cheapside (1890)

“Mountains, solitude and the moon
until the journey's end?
The river holds the lost road of the sky;
the shape of eternity?”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Song lyrics, Amarantine (2005)

Orson Scott Card photo

“Knowing something may be a terrible burden to bear, but it holds no danger to them as aren’t afraid of truth.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, The Crystal City (2003), Chapter 4 “La Tia” (p. 72).

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson photo
Sean Penn photo
John Ralston Saul photo
Richard Henry Dana Jr. photo
George Holmes Howison photo
Rick Santorum photo
Sara Teasdale photo

“I am the pool of gold
When sunset burns and dies,—
You are my deepening skies,
Give me your stars to hold.”

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) American writer and poet

"Peace"
Rivers to the Sea (1915)

Smokey Robinson photo

“I don't like you
But I love you.
See that I'm always
Thinking of you.
Oh, oh, oh,
You treat me badly;
I love you madly.
You've really got a hold on me.
You've really got a hold on me, baby.”

Smokey Robinson (1940) American R&B singer-songwriter and record producer

You've Really Got a Hold on Me (1962)
Song lyrics, With The Miracles

Julian (emperor) photo
Justin D. Fox photo
Alexis De Tocqueville photo
J. B. S. Haldane photo

“I do not intend to be one of those who bemoan little results, while resting in the faithfulness of God. My cue is to take hold of the faithfulness of God and USE THE MEANS necessary to secure big results.”

James O. Fraser (1886–1938) missionary to China, inventor of Tibeto-Burman Nosu alphabet

4 January 1916, Source: Geraldine Taylor. Behind the Ranges: The Life-changing Story of J.O. Fraser. Singapore: OMF International (IHQ) Ltd., 1998, 151.

Roberto Clemente photo
Bert McCracken photo
James A. Garfield photo
Burt Reynolds photo

“You can only hold your stomach in for so many years.”

Burt Reynolds (1936–2018) American actor, director and producer.

Attributed to Reynolds in: Orange Coast Magazine, Oct. 1984. p. 143

Robert Burton photo

“No cord nor cable can so forcibly draw, or hold so fast, as love can do with a twined thread.”

Section 2, member 1, subsection 2, How Love tyranniseth over men. Love, or Heroical Melancholy, his definition, part affected.
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III

Rousas John Rushdoony photo

“The hybrid frustrates the purpose of creation. All things, we are told according to Genesis, were created with their seed in themselves, destined to be fertile. Hybridization seeks to improve God’s work. It seeks to gain the best of two diverse but somewhat related things. The result is a limited advantage but a long range launched including sterility. Second, these laws clearly require a respect for God’s creation. We are not to change one kind into another, or to attempt it. All things we are told were created good. Now when we hold to evolution we cannot see all things as created good. Because evolution is the survival of the fittest, and the best you can say about anything is that it is the fittest. Not that it is the best, not that it is morally the most desirable thing. And though it has survived thus far it may not survive in the next ten thousand years, so that man for example, we are told may be a mistake. Thus we cannot under an evolutionary perspective see all things as created good. But man under God has been created good and the world around him has been created good. Man can kill and eat plants and animals to use this creation under God’s law. But he cannot tamper with it, he cannot hybridize; which is to violate God’s kind. And the penalty for it, of course, is sterility. You can cross a horse and a donkey, but the mule is sterile. You can put all kinds of new variety of squash and carrots and the like on the market, but the penalty for these is sterility. They will not produce a seed. And while they will have certain advantages --the mule has certain advantages over the horse-- they have marked disadvantages, and a greater frailty, sensitivity, nervousness (as with the mule), so that they are a real handicap.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Hybridization and the Law (n. d.)

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky photo
Marie-Louise von Franz photo

“Just as the mother influence is formative with a man's anima, the father has a determining influence on the animus of a daughter. The father imbues his daughter's mind with the specific coloring conferred by those indisputable views mentioned above, which in reality are so often missing in the daughter. For this reason the animus is also sometimes represented as a demon of death. A gypsy tale, for example, tells of a woman living alone who takes in an unknown handsome wanderer and lives with him in spite of the fact that a fearful dream has warned her that he is the king of the dead. Again and again she presses him to say who he is. At first he refuses to tell her, because he knows that she will then die, but she persists in her demand. Then suddenly he tells her he is death. The young woman is so frightened that she dies. Looked at from the point of view of mythology, the unknown wanderer here is clearly a pagan father and god figure, who manifests as the leader of the dead (like Hades, who carried off Persephone). He embodies a form of the animus that lures a woman away from all human relationships and especially holds her back from love with a real man. A dreamy web of thoughts, remote from life and full of wishes and judgments about how things "ought to be," prevents all contact with life. The animus appears in many myths, not only as death, but also as a bandit and murderer, for example, as the knight Bluebeard, who murdered all his wives.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Source: Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (1994), The Animus, a Woman's Inner Man, p. 319 - 320

Albert Einstein photo
Martin Van Buren photo

“There is a power in public opinion in this country- and I thank God for it: for it is the most honest and best of all powers- which will not tolerate an incompetent or unworthy man to hold in his weak or wicked hands the lives and fortunes of his fellow-citizens.”

Martin Van Buren (1782–1862) American politician, 8th President of the United States (in office from 1837 to 1841)

As quoted by William A. DeGregorio, The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents (1984) p. 133

Lucio Russo photo
Yoichiro Nambu photo
Christopher Pitt photo
Freeman Dyson photo