Quotes about humanity
page 58

“Human beings seem to be far more autonomous and self-governed than modern psychological theory allows for.”

Abraham Maslow book Motivation and Personality

Source: Motivation and Personality (1954), p. 123.

“Another discipline began to intrude upon the confident work and increasingly elaborate models of the human relations theorists (largely social psychologists) and the uneasy toying with bureaucracy of the "structionalists" (largely sociologists). Both tended to study economic organizations. A few, like Philip Selznick, were noting conflict and differences in goals (perhaps because he was studying a public agency, the Tennessee Valley Authority), but most ignored conflict or treated it as a pathological manifestation of breakdowns in communication or the ego trips of unreconstructed managers.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1970s, "The short and glorious history of organizational theory", 1973, p. 7

Confidence, Communication, Study

“When you are a genius, you do not have the right to die, because we are necessary for the progress of humanity..”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quote, early January 1986, in: 'El País, Dalí vuelve a casa', 17 July 1986: as cited on Wikipedia: Salvador Dali
Dali was returned to the Teatro-Museo and on his return he made his last public appearance. He was taken in a wheelchair to a room where press and TV were waiting and made this brief public statement
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1981 - 1989

“How difficult, how extremely difficult for the soul to sever itself from its body the world: from mountains, seas, cities, people. The soul is an octopus and these are its tentacles. … No force anywhere on earth is as imperialistic as the human soul. It occupies and is occupied in turn, but it always considers its empire too narrow. Suffocating, it desires to conquer the world in order to breathe freely.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Report to Greco

"My Friend The Poet. Mount Athos.", Ch. 19, p. 188
Report to Greco (1965)

People, World, Soul, Mountain

“The manipulation of public opinion both by governments and corporate media, and the manufacturing of consent undermine the essence of democracy, which is genuine participation. The harassment, imprisonment and killing of human rights defenders, including journalists, in many countries shocks the conscience. But also certain aspects of the war on terrorism and the abuse of anti-terrorist legislation have significantly eroded human rights and fundamental freedoms. In a democratic society it is crucial for citizens to know whether their governments are acting constitutionally, or are engaged in policies that violate international law and human rights. It is their civic duty to protest against government secrecy and covers-up, against disproportionate surveillance, acts of intimidation and harassment, arbitrary arrests and defamation of human rights defenders, including whistleblowers as unpatriotic or even traitors, when in fact they are necessary defenders of the rule of law.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Alfred de Zayas' comments to the remarks made by NGOs and States during the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council Session http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=13713&LangID=E Comments by Alfred de Zayas, Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, following the Interactive Dialogue on the presentation of his thematic report. 2013

War, Law, Democracy, Freedom

“Human process music using both absolute and relational processing… we attend to the actual pitches and duration we hear in music, as well as their relative values. This dual mode of processing is rare among species… These modes of processing and the brain mechanisms that gave rise to them were necessary for the development of language, music, poetry, and art.”

Daniel Levitin book The World in Six Songs

The World in Six Songs (2008)

Art, Music

“What should a society be, so that in his last years a man might still be a man?
The answer is simple: he would always have to have been treated as a man. By the fate that it allots to its members who can no longer work, society gives itself away — it has always looked upon them as so much material. Society confesses that as far as it is concerned, profit is the only thing that counts, and that its "humanism" is mere window-dressing. In the nineteenth century the ruling classes explicitly equated the proletariat with barbarism. The struggles of the workers succeeded in making the proletariat part of mankind once more. But only in so far as it is productive. Society turns away from the aged worker as though he belonged to another species. That is why the whole question is buried in a conspiracy of silence.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

Conclusion, p. 542
The Coming of Age (1970)

Fate, Age, Question, Silence

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

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

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

Love, Life, Men, God

“She had impressed him as capable of behaviour even more meaningless than most human beings. He had watched her kill her own people with a ferocity that betrayed real grief. But she was someone, he had decided early, who struggled harder with life than she needed to: this he respected, even admired.”

M. John Harrison book Light

Source: Light (2002), Chapter 29 “Surgery” (p. 361)

Life, People

“Arbitrary compulsory education is after all a flagrant curtailment of parental rights and at least as "totalitarian" as conscription. Yet practically nobody dared to contradict the sacrifices made to the idol of "education" and few people sensed that compulsory elementary education was a great step in the direction of totalitarianism which in time intervened in every region of human existence. True, the father's right is not violated by compulsory education in so far as a certain degree of education is reasonably deemed necessary by the State for citizenship, to be administered in the school of the father's choice, provided that school is not subversive in its nature. But the supreme rule is that the child belongs to the parent and not to the State.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Pg 67n
The Menace of the Herd (1943)

People, Education, School, Nature

“There are three things needed to eliminate human misery. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.”

David H. Levy (1948) Canadian astronomer

Humor in Psychotherapy (2007)

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

Narges Mohammadi (1972) Iranian human rights activist

Letter Accepting 2018 Andrei Sakharov Prizefrom (2018)

Law, Idea, Question, Passion

“Question: Does a detached person remain unoccupied all the time, or what does he or she do?
Answer: The activity of really detached people lies in their becoming detached, and their achievement is to remain unoccupied because they remain calm in action and unconcerned about their achievements.
Question: What is their conduct toward their fellow human beings?
Answer: They enjoy the companionship of people, but without being compromised by them. They love them without attachment, and they show them sympathy without anxious concern - all in true freedom.
Question: Is such a person required to go to confession?
Answer: The confession that is motivated by love is nobler than one motivated by necessity.
Question: What is such people’s prayer like? Are they supposed to pray, too?
Answer: Their prayer is effective because they forestall the influence of the senses. God is spirit and knows whether this person has put an obstacle in the way or whether he or she has acted from selfish impulses. And then a light is enkindled in their highest power, which makes clear that God is the being, life and activity within them and that they are merely instruments.
Question: What are such a person's eating, drinking and sleeping like?
Answer: Externally, and in keeping with their sensuous nature, the outward person eats. Internally, however, they are as if not eating; otherwise, One does not arrive at the goal by asking questions. It is rather through detachment that one comes to this hidden truth they would be enjoying food and rest like an animal. This is also the case in other things pertaining to human existence.”

Henry Suso (1295–1366) Dominican friar and mystic

The Exemplar, The Little Book of Truth

Love, Life, God, People

“Today we face a problem that involves two difficult to satisfy conditions. On the one hand we have to find a way for computer assisted verification of mathematical proofs. This is necessary, first of all, because we have to stop the dissolution of the concept of proof in mathematics. On the other hand, we have to preserve the intimate connection between mathematics and the world of human intuition. This connection is what moves mathematics forward and what we often experience as the beauty of mathematics.”

Vladimir Voevodsky (1966–2017) Russian mathematician

UniMath by Vladimir Voevodsky, Heidelberg Laureate Forum, Sept. 22, 2016, Heidelberg https://www.math.ias.edu/vladimir/sites/math.ias.edu.vladimir/files/2016_09_22_HLF_Heidelberg.pdf p. 3

World, Beauty, Way, Mathematics

“A Settlement is above all a place for enthusiasms, a spot to which those who have a passion for the equalization of human joys and opportunities are early attracted.”

Jane Addams (1860–1935) pioneer settlement social worker

Source: Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Ch. 9

Passion, Joy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) Argentinian writer

Historias de Cronopios y de Famas (1962)

Money, Family, Way, Feeling

“In summary, it is the diversity of human behavior, its appropriateness to new situations, and man’s capacity to innovate – the creative aspect of language use providing the principal indication of this –that leads Descartes to attribute possession of mind to other humans, since he regards this capacity as beyond the limitations of any imaginable mechanism.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

"Creative aspect of language use"
Quotes 2000s, 2007-09, (3rd ed., 2009)

Behavior, Imagination

“This is to me one of the most poignant communities of the world: a great, sad city, where the spark of human genius has always had to penetrate the darkness, the dampness, and the cold in order to make its light felt, and has acquired, for that very reason, a strange warmth, a strange intensity, a strange beauty. I know that in this city, where I have never lived, there has nevertheless, by some strange quirk of fate—a previous life, perhaps?—been deposited a portion of my own capacity to feel and to love, a portion, in other words, of my own life; and that this is something which no American will ever understand and no Russian ever believe.”

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) American advisor, diplomat, political scientist and historian

Leningrad, September 1945
The Kennan Diaries

Love, Life, Fate, World

“If a man dies of cancer in fear and despair, then cry for his pain and celebrate his life. The other man, who fought like hell and laughed in the end, but also died, may have had an easier time in his final months, but took his leave with no more humanity.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

Source: Full House (1996), p. 47

Life, Pain, Fear, Hell

“Fascists are not human. A snake is more human.”

Hugo Chávez (1954–2013) 48th President of Venezuela

Referring to Spanish politician José María Aznar as a fascist, November 2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7089131.stm 2007

“Each high point in the history of human civilisation has taken place where the conditions were ripe and has borrowed and built on the achievements of other cultures whose golden age may have passed.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.138

Age, History

“I cannot believe that there is any being in this universe who has created a human soul for eternal pain. I would rather that every god would destroy himself; I would rather that we all should go to eternal chaos, to black and starless night, than that just one soul should suffer eternal agony.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

What Must We Do To Be Saved? (1880) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38801/38801-h/38801-h.htm Section X, "The Evangelical Alliance."

God, Pain, Soul, Suffering

“At present, I am particularly excited by 'bad taste'. I have the deep feeling that there exists in the very essence of bad taste a power capable of creating those things situated far beyond what is traditionally termed 'The Work of Art'. I wish to play with human feeling, with its 'morbidity' in a cold and ferocious manner. Only very recently I have become a sort of gravedigger of art (oddly enough, I am using the very terms of my enemies). Some of my latest works have been coffins and tombs. During the same time I succeeded in painting with fire, using particularly powerful and searing gas flames, some of them measuring three to four meters high. I use these to bathe the surface of the painting in such a way that it registered the spontaneous trace of fire.”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

Quote from Klein's 'Chelsea Hotel Manifesto', 1961; from the Yves Klein Archives - archived from the original on 15 January 2013; as cited on Wikipedia: Yves Klein
After the opening of his unsuccesful exhibition at Leo Castelli's Gallery, New York 1961, Klein stayed with Rotraut Uecker (fr) at the Chelsea Hotel for the duration of the exhibition. While there, he wrote the 'Chelsea Hotel Manifesto', a proclamation of the 'multiplicity of new possibilities'
1960 -1964

Art, Way, Feeling, Time

“Human beings—any one of us, and our species as a whole—are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.”

Bill McKibben (1960) American environmentalist and writer

Source: The Age of Missing Information (1992), p. 228

Secret, World, Mountain, Nature

“What was it that made this human love so much more desirable to me than the love of my own kind? Was it because it was exclusive and capricious? The souls offered love and acceptance to all. Did I crave a greater challenge? This love was tricky; it had no hard-and-fast rules — it might be given for free, as with Jamie, or earned through time and hard work, as with Ian, or completely and heartbreakingly unattainable, as with Jared.
Or was it simply better somehow? Because these humans could hate with so much fury, was the other end of the spectrum that they could love with more heart and zeal and fire?”

Stephenie Meyer book The Host

Wanderer, p. 472
The Host (2008)

Love, Hate, Soul, Time

“The question "cui bono" to what practical end and advantage do your researches tend? is one which the speculative philosopher who loves knowledge for its own sake, and enjoys, as a rational being should enjoy, the mere contemplation of harmonious and mutually dependent truths, can seldom hear without a sense of humiliation. He feels that there is a lofty and disinterested pleasure in his speculations which ought to exempt them from such questioning; communicating as they do to his own mind the purest happiness (after the exercise of the benevolent and moral feelings) of which human nature is susceptible, and tending to the injury of no one, he might surely allege this as a sufficient and direct reply to those who, having themselves little capacity, and less relish for intellectual pursuits, are constantly repeating upon him this enquiry.”

John Herschel (1792–1871) English mathematician, astronomer, chemist and photographer

A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831)

Love, Happiness, Pleasure, Truth

“For no human defense avails against Heaven.”

Francesco Petrarca Il Canzoniere

Canzone 270, st. 6
Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Death

“Reform will come and only come through the building of mass movements and alternative centers of power that can overthrow—let me repeat that word for Homeland Security—overthrow the corporate state. If we fail to sever these chains, we will become like many who did not rise up in time to save their civil society’s human chattel. This means we too must defy the law and engage in civil disobedience”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

42:45 “ Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOlg_2qAbUA” (2014)

Law, Time

“One can follow any religion, one can follow any practice or path, but one must be humane.”

Haidakhan Babaji teacher in northern India

The Teachings of Babaji, 22 January 1983
Humanity

Religion

“In every country the intellectual class is the most influential class. This is the class which can foresee, advise and lead. In no country does the mass of the people live the life for intelligent thought and action. It is largely imitative and follows the intellectual class. There is no exaggeration in saying that the entire destination of the country depends upon its intellectual class. If the intellectual class is honest and independent, it can be trusted to take the initiative and give a proper lead when a crisis arises. It is true that the intellect by itself is no virtue. It is only a means and the use of a means depends upon the ends which an intellectual person pursues. An intellectual man can be a good man but he may easily be a rogue. Similarly an intellectual class may be a band of high-souled persons, ready to help, ready to emancipate erring humanity or it may easily be a gang of crooks or a body of advocates of narrow clique from which it draws its support.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Speech delivered to the Bombay Presidency Mahar Conference (31 May 1936) http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/txt_ambedkar_salvation.html

Life, People, Soul, Intelligence

“The root of the problem is that domesticated animals have inherited from their wild ancestors many physical, emotional and social needs that are redundant in human farms. Farmers routinely ignore these needs without paying any economic price. They lock animals in tiny cages, mutilate their horns and tails, separate mothers from offspring, and selectively breed monstrosities.”

Yuval Noah Harari (1976) Israeli historian

Introduction to Animal Liberation

Problem, Animals

“Natural selection operates according to immediate circumstances and not toward a long-term goal. Homo sapiens did eventually evolve as a descendent of the first humans, but there was nothing inevitable about it.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

The Origin of Humankind (1994)

Nature

“Most human lives are forgotten after four generations. We build our splendid houses on the edge of the abyss then distract and dazzle ourselves with entertainers and sex while we slowly at first, then more rapidly, spin around the ever-thirsty plughole in the middle. My treasured possessions -- all the silly little mementoes and toys and special books I’ve carried with me for decades -- will wind up on flea market tables or rot on garbage heaps. Someone else will inhabit the rooms that were mine. Everything that was important to me will mean nothing to the countless generations that follow our own. In the grand sprawl of it all, I have no significance at all. I don’t believe a giant gaseous pensioner will reward or censure me when my body stops working and I don’t believe individual consciousness survives for long after brain death so I lack the consolations of religion. I wanted Annihilator to peek into that implacable moment where everything we are comes to an end so I had to follow the Black Brick Road all the way down and seriously consider the abject pointlessness of all human endeavours. I found these contemplations thrilling and I was drawn to research pure nihilism, which led me to Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound and back to Ligotti. I have a fundamentally optimistic and positive view of human existence and the future and I think it’s important to face intelligent, well-argued challenges to that view on a regular basis. While I agree with Ligotti that the universe is, on the face of it, a blind emergent process, driven by chance over billions of years of trial and error to ultimately produce creatures capable of little more than flamboyant expressions of the agonizing awareness of their own imminent deaths, I don’t share his slightly huffy disappointment at this state of affairs. If the universe is intrinsically meaningless, if the mindless re-arrangement of atomic debris into temporarily arising then dissipating forms has no point, I can only ask, why do I see meaning everywhere, why can I find a point in everything? Why do other human beings like me seem to see meaning in everything too? If the sun is only an apocalyptic series of hydrogen fusion reactions, why does it look like an angel and inspire poetry? Why does the flesh and fur-covered bone and jelly of my cat’s face melt my heart? Is all that surging, roaring incandescent meaning inside me, or is it out there? “Meaning” to me is equivalent to “Magic.” The more significance we bring to things, even to the smallest and least important things, the more special, the more “magical” they seem to become. For all that materialistic science and existential philosophy tells us we live in a chaotic, meaningless universe, the evidence of my senses and the accounts of other human beings seem to indicate that, in fact, the whole universe and everything in it explodes second-to-second with beauty, horror, grandeur and significance when and wherever it comes into contact with consciousness. Therefore, it’s completely down to us to revel in our ability to make meaning, or not. Ligotti, like many extreme Buddhist philosophers, starts from the position that life is an agonizing, heartbreaking grave-bound veil of tears. This seems to be a somewhat hyperbolic view of human life; as far as I can see most of us round here muddle through ignoring death until it comes in close and life’s mostly all right with just enough significant episodes of sheer joy and connection and just enough sh-tty episodes of pain or fear. The notion that the whole span of our lives is no more than some dreadful rehearsal for hell may resonate with the deeply sensitive among us but by and large life is pretty okay generally for most of us. And for some, especially in the developed countries, “okay” equals luxurious. To focus on the moments of pain and fear we all experience and then to pretend they represent the totality of our conscious experience seems to me a little effete and indulgent. Most people don’t get to be born at all, ever. To see in that radiant impossibility only pointlessness, to see our experience as malignantly useless, as Ligotti does, seems to me a bit camp.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2014
http://www.blastr.com/2014-9-12/grant-morrisons-big-talk-getting-deep-writer-annihilator-multiversity
On life

Life, Death, Pain, People

“In a machine age, dressmaking is one of the last refuges of the human, the personal, the inimitable.”

Christian Dior (1905–1957) French fashion designer

Source: Rotunda Rotunda, Volumes 34-36 http://books.google.co.in/books?id=bxoTAQAAMAAJ, Royal Ontario Museum, 2001, P.12

Age, Personality

“It's me versus Mother Nature and me versus me. I want to see how far a human can fly with six kilograms of high-tech nylon over his head with no engine. Ultimately though, I love being able to fly like a bird.”

Godfrey Wenness (1967)

"SMH Article 3 Feb 2007" http://www.smh.com.au/news/new-south-wales/the-thriller-in-manilla/2007/02/01/1169919460467.html?page=3

Love, Nature, Bird, Flying

“If it is necessary that each sentient being must have the possibility of achieving an overwhelming good, then it is clear that there must be some form of life after earthly death. Despite the many pointers to the existence of God, theism would be falsified if physical death was the end, for then there could be no justification for the existence of this world. However, if one supposes that every sentient being has an endless existence, which offers the prospect of supreme happiness, it is surely true that the sorrows and troubles of this life will seem very small by comparison. Immortality, for animals as well as humans, is a necessary condition of any acceptable theodicy; that necessity, together with all the other arguments for God, is one of the main reasons for believing in immortality.”

Keith Ward (1938) British philosopher, theologian, priest and scholar

Rational Theology and the Creativity of God (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), pp. 201-202.

Life, Death, God, Happiness

“Another powerful principle of our nature, which is the spring of war, is the passion for superiority, for triumph, for power. The human mind is aspiring, impatient of inferiority, and eager for preeminence and control.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

War (1816)

War, Spring, Nature, Passion

“Putting a shovel in a gallery or museum signified “this shovel has become art.” And it actually was. The action itself is art, because the artist projects himself in choosing the shovel, and especially in placing it out of context. It is art in the sense that the imprint of a hand in a cave is art, the Mona Lisa is art, a happening is art, etc. It is a problem that touches on the ethics and function of the artist: he assumes the right to have this supra-human calling that allows him to say to others, “everything that I touch with my hand is transformed into art.” The artist imposes his anguish, his vision of the world, and himself on others. The artist emasculates the observer. Maybe he thinks that the latter deserves no better… The artist assumes the right to show you what you can see for yourself, what you could obviously see much more clearly without his intervention. I contest this right.”

Daniel Buren (1938) sculptor from France

Source: Art is no longer justifiable or setting the record straight, 2000, p. 66-67

World, Art, Problem, Thinking

“That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.”

Graham Greene (1904–1991) English writer, playwright and literary critic

Getting to know the General (1984)

Imagination

“All children have certain assets and should be taught how to use them; these they share with the whole of humanity, irrespective of race or nationality.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: Problems Of Humanity (1944), p. 53

Children

“This nation was founded," President Bush wrote, "upon the belief that every human being is endowed by our Creator with certain 'unalienable rights.'" The President, in using the exact language of the Declaration of Independence, including the archaic "unalienable," has expressed the conviction that "the laws of nature and of nature's God" furnish the moral foundation of constitutional government. "President Jefferson's timeless principle," he wrote, "obligates us to pursue a civil society that will democratically embrace its essential moral duties…”

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

2000s, Bush's Lincolnian Challenge (2002)

God, Law, Nature

“The times we live in are alternately derided for their failings and romanticized for their emerging opportunities. It sometimes seems that we now live amid greater violence, greater uncertainty; that the world suffers more conflicts and tragedies; that the poor are poorer and greater in number; that race, ethnicity and nationalism divide us more intractably than ever before.
But that is not so. Human beings are still capable of violence and cruelty. We all succumb to sin. But look back at any preceding century or even just a few decades, and you will see cruelty, violence and misery on a scale that is, with few exceptions, unknown today.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

1990s, Speech at Ohio Wesleyan University (1997)

World, Suffering, Time

“By openly recognizing the inescapable rhythm of harmony and tension which is the form of all human processes unitary man achieves a far-reaching emancipation. Much that was concealed can now stand in the open. The neutrality and objectivity of the quantity symbolism seemed to dissociated man a guarantee of the liberation of the mind from anthropomorphic and subjective illusions. But at deeper level it expressed merely the desire to escape inner conflict in a harmony of static form. This escape was wholly illusory; the superficial neutrality of science left it open to abuse, and the spirit of man has been punished by its attempt to escape struggle in an intellectual harmony. Unitary man renounces such separation and partakes in the development of the whole. Man finds himself in the universal process, by finding the universal process within himself. Tension continues, but henceforward his struggle is with, not against, the process of nature.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 276

Nature, Universe, Science

“Where once there was an understanding that a reality independent of the human observer exists; students are now taught that truth is a social construction, a function of the power and position—or lack thereof—of persons or groups in society.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Faking History To Make The Black Kids Feel Good" http://dailycaller.com/2017/01/16/faking-history-to-make-the-black-kids-feel-good/ The Daily Caller, January 13, 2017 2010s, 2017

Truth, Understanding, Reality, Personality

“Stand near me and you get sick. Why? It reminds you that you’re an animal too, because you get a full dose of me. So we go round and round in our endless feedback. You hate me because you learn things about your own soul by getting near me. And I hate you because you must draw back from me. What I am, you see, is a plague carrier, and the plague I carry is the truth. My message is that it’s a lucky thing for humanity that we’re shut up each in his own skull. Because if we had even a little drop of telepathy, even the blurry nonverbal thing I’ve got, we’d be unable to stand each other. Human society would be impossible.”

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 8 (p. 120)

Hate, Truth, Soul, Learning

“God's irony: that in order to fight and defeat the threat of terrorism, we shall have to be clear about the principle of justice that allows us to understand what is evil in terrorism. And that principle of justice is the claim of justice that is inherent in every innocent human life. But if that claim was there in the Twin Towers, if it was there on the airplanes that those terrorists attacked, you explain to me why it is not there in the womb!”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

Speech at Thanksgiving Point, Lehi, Utah, September 24, 2002. http://renewamerica.us/archives/speeches/02_09_24utah.htm. 2002

Life, God, Justice, Understanding

“Only in this age and generation, is it at last possible to impart the laws of magnetic healing, and to indicate the causes of those diseases - originating in the three inner bodies - which today devastate the human frame, cause endless suffering and pain, and usher man through the portal which leads to the world of bodiless existence. Only today is man at the point in the evolution of his consciousness where he can begin to realise the power of the subjective worlds, and the new and vast science of psychology is his response to this growing interest.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: Esoteric Healing (1953), p. 1

Pain, Age, World, Disease

“It is probable that the future will be more limited by the slow evolution of the human animal and the corresponding human laws, social institutions, and organizations than it will be by the rapid evolution of technology.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)

Law, Future, Animals

“Humanity has just crossed a major landmark in its history with the majority of people now living in cities. Cities have long been known to be society's predominant engine of innovation and wealth creation, yet they are also its main source of crime, pollution, and disease. The inexorable trend toward urbanization worldwide presents an urgent challenge for developing a predictive, quantitative theory of urban organization and sustainable development”

Geoffrey West (1940) British physicist

Bettencourt, L. M., Lobo, J., Helbing, D., Kühnert, C., & West, G. B. (2007). " Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities http://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301.long." Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 104(17), 7301–7306. 2000s

People, Disease, History, Wealth

“Were half the power that fills the world with terror,
Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts,
Given to redeem the human mind from error,
There were no need of arsenals and forts.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

The Arsenal at Springfield.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

World, Error, Wealth

“The human body has no more need for cows' milk than it does for dogs' milk, horses' milk, or giraffes' milk.”

Michael Klaper (1947) American physician

Speech of July 19, 1985. Quoted in David Robinson Simon, Meatonomics (Conari Press, 2013), p. 193 https://books.google.it/books?id=PY0KUnaIU5AC&pg=PA193.

Dogs, Horse

“What exactly did these words, of both the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, mean? They meant that there was no difference, between one human being, and another human being, that made one the master and the other the servant. As Jefferson once put it, some men are not born with saddles on their backs, nor are others born booted and spurred to ride them. That a man or woman rides a horse corresponds with the difference in their natures. No injustice is done to the horse! That an ox should pull a plow, while a man walks behind, is according to nature. In these cases, servitude follows from the laws of nature. But these same laws of nature tell us that when a human being is subjected to other human beings as if he were a horse or an ox, the laws of nature are violated. All human beings are accordingly equal in their right not to be enslaved, and in their right to be in secure possession of their lives, liberties, and property. To this end they have a right to be governed only by laws to which they have consented.”

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

2000s, God Bless America (2008), The American Proposition

Men, Law, Nature, Horse

“Godzilla 2014 missed the mark primarily because it is not an origins story. Gojira was a monster of our own making. Similarly Gino was supposed to impose nature’s response to our meddling. But G2014 pre-existed genetic modifications and nuclear testing. We have no responsibility for him, nor the mutos either. They come from a time that never was, millions of years ago, “when the world was much more radioactive than it is today”. The story implies that mutos ‘eat radiation’. In the film, they can track it through every kind of protective shielding, and they eat nuclear devices like fruit -metallic peal and all. I guess millions of years ago, nuclear missiles grew on trees, and kaiju were common even though they’re absent from the fossil record -with only one top-secret exception. As an advocate of science education with a deep interest in paleontology, and as someone who would rather see humans held accountable for what they do to their environment, this film was very disappointing. As an atheist, it was even worse. The star of the film not only has impossible dimensions and an inexplicable power, he is also immortal. He’s been alive forever, and spends all his time sleeping. He awakens only he senses submarines or the arrival of other kaiju, because he has a mission to protect humanity. G2014 put the ‘god’ in Godzilla. The director called him a god, and some of the characters in the movie describe him as a god too. So he’s not a lizard, not a dinosaur, but one of the Lovecraftian great old ones like Cthulhu. In a video I made years ago, I too joked about Godzilla being a god. But it was still somewhat disappointing to see him depicted that way.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, Weighing in on Godzilla http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2014/06/08/weighing-in-on-godzilla/ (June 8, 2014)

God, Secret, World, Education

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure."”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

418
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

Men

“A pantheistic edict of science would only proclaim a deadlock in the system and substance of truth itself, and herald an implacable conflict between the law of Nature and the law written indelibly in the human spirit.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Modern Science and Pantheism, p.78

Truth, Law, Nature, Science

“Mahatma Gandhi once said, "You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty." Besides, two wrongs do not make a right. President Obama is right: Peace is the only path to true security.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

Peace, Faith

“The thought of being under absolute compulsion, the plaything of another, is unendurable for a human being. Hence, if every way of escape from the constraint is taken from him, there is nothing left for him to do but to persuade himself that he does the things he is forced to do willingly, that is to say, to substitute devotion for obedience. … It is by this twist that slavery debases the soul: this devotion is in fact based on a lie, since the reasons for it cannot bear investigation. … Moreover, the master is deceived too by the fallacy of devotion.”

Simone Weil book Gravity and Grace

Source: Gravity and Grace (1947), p. 142 (1972 edition)

Lie, Way, Soul

“I had lost of humanity but its illusions, and they alone are what render it supportable.”

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

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Support

“My blog is an extension of my thinking. Why should I deform my thinking simply because I live under a government that espouses an ideology which I believe to be totally against humanity?”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Truth to Power, 2008

Thinking

““To imitate Socrates” meant, in other words, to staunchly refuse imitation; refuse imitation of the person “Socrates”—or any other person, however worthy. The model of life Socrates selected, painstakingly composed and laboriously cultivated for himself might have perfectly suited his kind of person, but it would not necessarily suit all those who made a point of living as Socrates did. A slavish imitation of the specific mode of life that Socrates constructed on his own, and to which he remained unhesitatingly, steadfastly loyal throughout, would amount to a betrayal of his legacy, to the rejection of his message—a message calling people first and foremost to listen to their own reason, and calling thereby for individual autonomy and responsibility. Such an imitation could suit a copier or a scanner, but it will never result in an original artistic creation, which (as Socrates suggested) human life should strive to become.”

Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) Polish philosopher and sociologist

Source: The Art of Life (2008), p. 79.

Life, People, Betrayal, Personality

“Existence as entirety remains beyond any one meaning—and it is the conscious presence of humanness in the world inasmuch as this is nonmeaning, having nothing to do other than be what it is, no longer able to go beyond itself or give itself some kind of meaning through action.”

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

Source: On Nietzsche (1945), p. xxx

World

“It is unbearable to consider that at this very moment that we are gathered together in this hall on this festive occasion, hundreds and thousands of prisoners of conscience are suffering from undernourishment, as the result of year-long hunger, and of an almost total lack of proteins and vitamins in their daily food, of a shortage of medicines (there is a ban on the sending of vitamins and medicines to internees), and of over-exertion. They shiver with cold, damp, and exhaustion in ill-lit dungeons, where they are forced to wage a ceaseless struggle for their human dignity and their conviction against the "indoctrination machine", in fact against the very destruction of their souls.”

Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist

Nobel Peace Prize Speech (1975)

Hunger, Food, Soul, Suffering

“If to these universal benefits of the growing emancipation of women can be added to the "peace dividend" for human development offered by the end of the Cold War, spending less on the war toys of grown men and much more on the urgent needs of humanity as a whole, then truly the next millennia will be an age the like of which has never been seen in human history. But there still remain many obstacles to be overcome before we can achieve this goal. And not least among those obstacles are intolerance and insecurity.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (1945) State Counsellor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy

Opening Keynote Address at NGO Forum on Women, Beijing China (1995)

Women, Men, War, Age

“The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition—thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not.”

Michael Shermer (1954) American science writer

[Shermer, Michael, July, 2008, http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-anecdotal-evidence-can-undermine-scientific-results, How Anecdotal Evidence Can Undermine Scientific Results, Scientific American, 2008-07-24]

Nature, Thinking

“What humiliation, what disgrace for us all, that it should be necessary for one man to exhort other men not to be inhuman and irrational towards their fellow-creatures! Do they recognise, then, no mind, no soul in them — have they not feeling, pleasure in existence, do they not suffer pain? Do their voices of joy and sorrow indeed fail to speak to the human heart and conscience — so that they can murder the jubilant lark, in the first joy of his spring-time, who ought to warm their hearts with sympathy, from delight in bloodshed or for their ‘sport,’ or with a horrible insensibility and recklessness only to practise their aim in shooting! Is there no soul manifest in the eyes of the living or dying animal — no expression of suffering in the eye of a deer or stag hunted to death — nothing which accuses them of murder before the avenging Eternal Justice? …. Are the souls of all other animals but man mortal, or are they essential in their organisation? Does the world-idea (Welt-Idee) pertain to them also — the soul of nature — a particle of the Divine Spirit? I know not; but I feel, and every reasonable man feels like me, it is in miserable, intolerable contradiction with our human nature, with our conscience, with our reason, with all our talk of humanity, destiny, nobility; it is in frightful (himmelschreinder) contradiction with our poetry and philosophy, with our nature and with our (pretended) love of nature, with our religion, with our teachings about benevolent design — that we bring into existence merely to kill, to maintain our own life by the destruction of other life. …. It is a frightful wrong that other species are tortured, worried, flayed, and devoured by us, in spite of the fact that we are not obliged to this by necessity; while in sinning against the defenceless and helpless, just claimants as they are upon our reasonable conscience and upon our compassion, we succeed only in brutalising ourselves. This, besides, is quite certain, that man has no real pity and compassion for his own species, so long as he is pitiless towards other races of beings.”

Bogumil Goltz (1801–1870) German humorist and satirist

Das Menschendasein in seinen weltewigen Zügen und Zeichen (1850); as quoted in The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-eating https://archive.org/stream/ethicsofdietcate00will/ethicsofdietcate00will#page/n3/mode/2up by Howard Williams (London: F. Pitman, 1883), pp. 287-286.

Love, Life, Death, Men

“What is real? Is there more to reality than meets the eye? Yes! was Plato’s answer over two millennia ago. In his famous cave analogy, he likened us to people who’d lived their entire lives shackled in a cave, facing a blank wall, watching the shadows cast by things passing behind them, and eventually coming to mistakenly believe that these shadows were the full reality. Plato argued that what we humans call our everyday reality is similarly just a limited and distorted representation of the true reality, and that we must free ourselves from our mental shackles to begin comprehending it.”

Max Tegmark book Our Mathematical Universe

Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2014)

People, Reality

“Free speech is not the great danger for humanity. Concentration of power is. We learn this lesson over and over again, and yet seem compelled eternally to repeat it. Communism, colonialism, monarchy, state socialism, tyranny- all become enemies of the people because they offer their citizens not too many opportunities to communicate or associate, but too few. Power is the dynamic force that fuels politics and it is this, not speech, which needs to be constantly monitored, controlled and checked. We view crimes against humanity as aberrations, individuals gone wild, when we should be seeing them through the prism of power. Abuse happens when a culture values some people more than others and those exercising power are not accountable for their actions.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Page 230.
The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War, 1st Edition

People, Exercises, Communication, Learning

“Ah! why so rare does cruel Love inspire
Two tender bosoms with a mutual fire?
Say, whence, perfidious, dost thou pleasure find
To sow dissension in the human mind?”

John Hoole (1727–1803) British translator

Book II, line 1
Translations, Orlando Furioso of Ludovico Ariosto (1773)

Love, Pleasure

“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 5 : The Delphic Oracle as Therapist, p. 100

Freedom

“But how can we avoid the use of human language? The… symbol. Only by using a symbolic language not yet usurped by those vague ideas of space, time, continuity which have their origin in intuition and tend to obscure pure reason—only thus may we hope to build mathematics on the solid foundation of logic.”

Tobias Dantzig (1884–1956) American mathematician

p, 125
Number: The Language of Science (1930)

Hope, Mathematics, Idea, Time

“Women have been discouraged from genres such as sculpture that require studio training or expensive materials. But in philosophy, mathematics, and poetry, the only materials are pen and paper. Male conspiracy cannot explain all female failures. I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant. Genius is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome. Men's egotism, so disgusting in the talentless, is the source of their greatness as a sex. […] Even now, with all vocations open, I marvel at the rarity of the woman driven by artistic or intellectual obsession, that self-mutilating derangement of social relationship which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 653

Women, Men, Sex, Mathematics

“I'm just saying, a lot of people are on medicine, they don't need to be. Because let's be honest folks, it isn't easy for anyone. And I think in most cases, the only difference between depression and disappointment is your level of commitment. And to be honest, in the day and age we live in now, if someone comes up to you and says, “I think you might be clinically depressed,” the proper response is, “Thank you, thank you very much. That means I’m awake." Is there any indication we shouldn’t be depressed— are you living on the same planet that I am? Did you ever think that depression is the reasonable human response to the crap we’re going through as a species, meant to propel us into the next evolutionary step, or at least into taking some different course of action so we might survive? Did you ever think that maybe it’s the happy people that are really screwed up in the head? Where’s that spin on the situation? Maybe it's those guys. "Hey, how ya doing?" "I don't know, I feel great, again!" "Really, well, that's creepy and weird. Maybe you should be on medication. Clearly you're self-centered, delusional, narcissistic. I don't know, but you're draining me with your happy. Could you move along because I'm doing the big work, creating a world that functions properly in my brain."”

Marc Maron (1963) Comedian

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/2ufif7/comedy-central-presents-bipolar-coaster
Comedy Central Presents (2007)

Happiness, People, Age, World

“Secretary Tom Price is also here. Today Dr. Price still lives the scout oath, helping to keep millions of Americans strong and healthy as our Secretary of Health and Human Services, and he's doing a great job. And, hopefully, he's going to get the votes tomorrow to start our path toward killing this horrible thing known as Obamacare that's really hurting us, folks. By the way, you going to get the votes? He better get them. He better get them. Oh, he better, otherwise I'll say, "Tom, you're fired."”

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

2010s, 2017, July, 2017 National Scout Jamboree (July 24, 2017)

Health, Way, Strong, Help

“Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art — the finest of all, perhaps — truly to depict humanity by the enlargement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal.”

Victor Hugo book William Shakespeare

Homère est un des génies qui résolvent ce beau problème de l’art, le plus beau de tous peut-être, la peinture vraie de l’humanité obtenue par le grandissement de l’homme, c’est-à-dire la génération du réel dans l’idéal.
Part I, Book II, Chapter II, Section I
William Shakespeare (1864)

Men, Art, Problem

“I accept that in a free society you have to justify reductions in people's liberties. I accept that, bearing in mind my starting point is that the most important human right is the right to life…”

John Howard (1939) 25th Prime Minister of Australia

Terrorism Summit (Friday, 5 August 2005)

Life, People

“Proceeding from ourselves, from our own human consciousness, the only consciousness which we feel from within and in which feeling is identical with being, we attribute some sort of consciousness, more or less dim, to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for they also live. And the evolution of organic beings is simply the struggle to realize fullness of consciousness through suffering, a continual aspiration to be others without ceasing to be themselves, to break and yet to preserve their proper limits.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VII : Love, Suffering, Pity

Feeling, Suffering

“If only the specialist is to be allowed access to these books, on the ground that it is impossible to understand them without "scholarship," … then we shall be compelled to shut out the majority of mankind from some of the finest creations of the human mind. This is aristocracy with a vengeance.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Books, Understanding

“There are dilettantes in human relationships just as there are, let's say, in politics.”

Penelope Fitzgerald book Innocence

Innocence (1986)

“Are people naturally destructive, immoral, predatory and self-seeking, only to be kept in order by harsh laws and fiercely deterrent mandatory sentences? Or are men and women naturally orderly, merciful, humane and bred with a need for justice and mutual aid? Of course these qualities, or defects, are not evenly distributed, and undoubtedly there is much of each in all of us, but when it comes to the law some sort of distinction can be drawn. Are you a Shylock or a Bassanio?
Shylock pinned his faith on the words in the contract, the nature of his bond and the duty of the state to uphold the letter of the law regardless of human suffering. Bassanio put another point of view. More important than the sanctity of the law was the plight of the individual parties in the particular case.”

John Mortimer (1923–2009) English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author

Source: Where There's a Will: Thoughts on the Good Life (2003), Ch. 20 : Law or Justice

Women, Men, People, Faith

“I do know that technologically humanity now has the opportunity, for the first time in its history, to operate our planet in such a manner as to support and accommodate all humanity at a substantially more advanced standard of living than any humans have ever experienced.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

From 1980s onwards, Grunch of Giants (1983)

History, Support, Time

“[On modern art] True psychos stand alone. The only pioneers are those who give voices to the ugliest corridors of their unconscious without fear of censure from any quarter. The acts that ordinary of people commit behind closed doors are beyond the ken of any performance artist. Humans' innate weirdness is far more threating and entertaining than anything the professional shock mavens could conjure. I boggle your conception of a world split between cognoscenti and squares. I subvert the subversive and bury the underground under six feet of its own hypocritical manure. I perform unsolicited tattooing, body-piercing, and ritual scarification upon you. Give vent to your sickest fantasies, but don't call it art. Cornhole Barbara Bush, but only if you want to. Sketch your astrological chart with your own feces, but only if it feels good. If you want to do something truly radical, kill yourself. We'll have one less reader, but the world will be a better place.”

Jim Goad (1961) Author, publisher

ANSWER Me!

People, World, Fear, Art

“Get, by six hundred and fifty-eight votes, or by no vote at all, by the silent intimation of your own eyesight and understanding given you direct out of Heaven, and more sacred to you than anything earthly, and than all things earthly,—a correct image of the fact in question, as God and Nature have made it: that is the one thing needful; with that it shall be well with you in whatsoever you have to do with said fact. Get, by the sublimest constitutional methods, belauded by all the world, an incorrect image of the fact: so shall it be other than well with you; so shall you have laud from able editors and vociferous masses of mistaken human creatures; and from the Nature's Fact, continuing quite silently the same as it was, contradiction, and that only. What else?”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

God, World, Understanding, Question

“Like all great minds that do not merely imagine Utopias, but actually advance humanity to a new epoch, he [Jesus] took the situation and material furnished to him by the past and molded that into a fuller approximation to the divine conception within him.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.2 The Social Aims of Jesus, p. 54

Imagination, Past

“If that hideousness came here, it wouldn't be any more hideous for the animals — they are all bound for a ghastly death anyway. But it would wake up consumers. … I openly hope it [hoof and mouth disease] comes here. It will bring economic harm only for those who profit from giving people heart attacks and giving animals a concentration camp-like existence. It would be good for animals, good for human health and good for the environment.”

Ingrid Newkirk (1949) British-American activist

ABC News interview, 2001 April 2

Death, People, Health, Disease

“To elevate every desire, however obscene, into a good because it is desired may be the way of all flesh, but it is not the way of the Cross. And the moral anarchy which is said to pervade our youth…is not going to be countered by lowering the demands of religion, but by insisting on them. The notion that to enlist the support and enthusiasm of youth it is necessary to condone their vices is entirely to misjudge them, and to forfeit their respect. The churches are much more likely to fail in the long run because they demand too little than because they demand too much of human nature. The real tragedy of the position in which the young find themselves to-day arises from the collapse of the orthodoxy of past generations, and the failure to replace it by a confident coherent faith applicable to the conditions of to-day. Principles may be eternal, but their embodiment must be temporal.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the annual assembly of the Congregational Union, London (12 May 1931), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), pp. 83-84.
1931

Youth, Faith, Religion, Way

“Human forms are perpetuated through sex, and sex also perpetuates human consciousness.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Source: Zero Gravity interview (2006), p. 75

Sex

“It is quite likely that it is possible, yes. But what we've said all along -- speaking for both the (Roslin) Institute and the PPL staff - is that we would find it ethically unacceptable to think of doing that. We can't think of a reason to do it. If there was a reason to copy a human being, we would do it, but there isn't.”

Ian Wilmut (1944) embryologist

On human cloning, in "Dr. Frankenstein, I Presume?" by Andrew Ross in Salon February 1997) http://web.archive.org/web/20000301033550/http://www.salon.com/feb97/news/news2970224.html.

Thinking

“Deconstructing the concept of race not only goes against the tendency of virtually every known culture to classify and build family histories according to some measure of common descent, it also ignores the work of biologists studying non-human species.”

J. Philippe Rushton (1943–2012) Canadian psychology professor

Mankind Quarterly, Winter98, Vol. 39 Issue 2, p231

Family, History, Study