Quotes about independent (1886 quotes, page 11)

“Even those who once supported and promoted Taiwan independence, or followed those who do, so long as they are willing to help improve and develop cross-strait relations, will be welcome to visit the mainland and to join us in promoting exchanges and cooperation between the two sides of the (Taiwan) strait.”

Yu Zhengsheng (1945) Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference

Yu Zhengsheng (2013) cited in " China unveils 6 new cross-strait measures http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/china-taiwan-relations/2013/06/17/381387/China-unveils.htm" on The China Post, 17 June 2013.

Support , Help

“We have reversed the usual classical notion that the independent "elementary parts" of the world are the fundamental reality, and that the various systems are merely particular contingent forms and arrangements of these parts. Rather, we say that inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality, and that relatively independent behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within this whole.”

David Bohm (1917–1992) American theoretical physicist

"On the Intuitive Understanding of Nonlocality as Implied by Quantum Theory", Foundations of Physics Vol 5 (1975)

World , Reality , Universe , Parting

“We can now determine, easily and relatively cheaply, the detailed chemical architecture of genes; and we can trace the products of these genes (enzymes and proteins) as they influence the course of embryology. In so doing we have made the astounding discovery that all complex animal phyla - arthropods and vertebrates in particular - have retained, despite their half-billion years of evolutionary independence, an extensive set of common genetic blueprints for building bodies.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 330
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Animals

“The science of human nature belongs to people who are not afraid to live independent lives. They alone have the flexible access to experience which can bring human wisdom and strength into being, and once these assets exist, they will send forth their influence with an authority that cannot be resisted, unmindful of artificial man made boundaries, reaching anywhere in the world.”

Paul Rosenfels (1909–1985) American sociologist

A Renegade Psychiatrist's Story

Wisdom , People , World , Nature

“According to Husserl, that 'act of meaning', or the use of a given phrase as an expression of a certain language, consists in the fact that a sensory content appears in consciousness, by means of which one might think visually about that phrase, should that content be joined by an appropriate intention directed to that phrase. But when a given phrase is used as an expression belonging to a certain language, then that sensory content is joined by another intention, not necessarily a representative one, which is however in principle directed to something other than that phrase itself. Together with the sensory content in question, that intention makes up a uniform experience, but neither the experiencing of that sensory content, nor that intention is a complete, independent experience. Both the one and the other are non-independent parts of the experience as a whole. The meaning of a given expression (as a type) would be, according to Husserl, the type under which that intention joined to the sensory content must fall if the given phrase is to be used as an expression belonging precisely to that language”

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890–1963) Philosopher, logician

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, On the Meaning of Expressions, Lwow 1931. (original title: O znaczeniii wyrazen.) p. 19-20; as cited in: Schaff (1962;299)

Question , Thinking , Appearance , Parting

“We must remember that the real problem is not how to produce some improvement in the condition of the working man— for that has to a certain extent been attained already— but how to secure his complete material independence.”

Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883) British economic historian

Source: Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884), p. 151

Problem

“It's the man who dares to take, who is independent, not he who gives.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Letter to John Middleton Murry, 27 November 1913 http://books.google.com/books?id=NyudR_ePn8sC&q=%22It%27s+the+man+who+dares+to+take+who+is+independent+not+he+who+gives%22&pg=PA112#v=onepage

“The urn model is to be the expression of three postulates: (1) the constancy of a probability distribution, ensured by the solidity of the vessel, (2) the randomcharacter of the choice, ensured by the narrowness of the mouth, which is to prevent visibility of the contents and any consciously selective choice, (3) the independence of successive choices, whenever the drawn balls are put back into the urn. Of course in abstract probability and statistics the word " choice " can be avoided and all can be done without any reference to such a model. But as soon as the abstract theory is to be applied, random choice plays an essential role.”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Source: The Concept and the Role of the Model in Mathematics and Natural and Social Sciences (1961), p. 80; Cited in: Lev D. Beklemishev (2000) Provability, Computability and Reflection. p. 9

Success

“In its essence, the right of self-determination means that individuals and peoples should be in control of their destinies and should be able to live out their identities, whether within the boundaries of existing States or through independence.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order on the right of self determination http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IntOrder/Pages/Reports.aspx.
2015, Report submitted to the UN General Assembly

People

“Let me go back quickly to a comfortable analogy for me and that's sports. Basketball! And I use it because you are naïve if you don't see a full court press from the national level picking away right now. A… good point guard here's what she does: she drives through a full court press pro…tecting the ball, keeping her head… up because she needs to keep her eye on the basket and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can win *gasp* and that is what I'm doing - keeping our eye on the ball that represents sound priorities remember they include energy independence and smaller government *gasp* and national security and freedom and I know when it's time to pass the ball… for victory.”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

On her resignation, July 3rd, 2009. http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2009/07/03/sot.palin.stepping.down.ktuu
2014

Sport , Freedom , Time , Victory

“Emerson said to him, "Young man, have you read Plato?" Holmes said he hadn't. "You must. You must read Plato. But you must hold him at arm's length and say, 'Plato, you have delighted and edified mankind for two thousand years. What have you to say to me?'" Holmes said, "That's the lesson of independence." So off he went and read Plato for a few moths or a year, and then wrote a piece doing in Mr. Plato in one of those ephemeral literary things at Harvard. He laid this, as it were, at the feet of Mr. Emerson and awaited the next morning's mail, hoping to get a warm appreciation from Emerson. And the next day and the next and the next — no sign of life. No acknowledgment from Mr. Emerson. Holmes didn't see him again for about a year. When he saw him, this, that, and the other thing was again talked about. Emerson said, "Oh, by the way, I read your piece on Plato. Holmes, when you strike at a king, you must kill him."”

Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965) American judge

Holmes said, "That was the second great lesson — humility."
Source: Other writings, Felix Frankfurter Reminisces (1960), P. 59.

Life , Hope , Way , Reading

“The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment.”

Bernard d'Espagnat (1921–2015) French physicist and philosopher

in The Quantum Theory and Reality, by [Bernard d'Espagnat, Scientific American, November, 1979, 158] http://www.sciam.com/media/pdf/197911_0158.pdf

World

“The independent project, in a general way, requests a constant work to spread, in the traditional way and in the alternative circuit. It is a fight… but I believe that it is the way.”

Kátya Chamma (1961) Brazilian singer and writer

Source: Interview at Recanto das Letras http://recantodasletras.com.br/entrevistas/625556, 2007.

Way , Fight

“1. Laughter is the Wild Body's song of triumph.
2. Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously.
3. Laughter is the bark of delight of a gregarious animal at the proximity of its kind.
4. Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid emotion.
5. Laughter is the representative of Tragedy, when Tragedy is away.
6. Laughter is the emotion of tragic delight.
7. Laughter is the female of Tragedy.
8. Laughter is the strong elastic fish, caught in Styx, springing and flapping about until it dies.
9. Laughter is the sudden handshake of mystic violence and the anarchist.
10. Laughter is the mind sneezing.
11. Laughter is the one obvious commotion that is not complex, or in expression dynamic.
12. Laughter does not progress. It is primitive, hard and unchangeable.”

Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) writer and painter

"Inferior Religions" (1917), cited from Lawrence Rainey (ed.) Modernism: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) pp. 208-9.

Spring , Fish , Laughter , Strong

“Do everything to demonstrate, and in the most emphatic manner, our sympathy for the Moslems, their autonomy, independence, etc.”

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

Collected Works, Vol. 30, p. 494.
Collected Works

“The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.”

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

Der Glaube an eine vom wahrnehmenden Subjekt unabhängige Außenwelt liegt aller Naturwissenschaft zugrunde.
First sentence of "Maxwells Einfluss auf die Entwicklung der Auffassung des Physikalisch-Realen". Manuscript at the Hebrew University Jerusalem alberteinstein.info http://alberteinstein.info/vufind1/Digital/EAR000034102#page/1/mode/2up
From "Maxwell's Influence on the Evolution of the Idea of Physical Reality," 1931. Available in Einstein Archives: 65-382
1930s

World , Nature , Science

“An Independent is someone who wants to take the politics out of politics.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

As quoted in The Quotable Politician (2003) by William B. Whitman, p. 36

“I believe the essence of the Independence Day is missing. We celebrate it like any other holiday, which is wrong. We must celebrate our independence everyday, not just on one day of the year.”

Arin Paul (1980) Indian film director

On Indian Independence Day Celebrations http://www.ilovekolkata.in/index.php/My-City/Independence-means.html (2010)

Holiday

“The promise I made when I went to Ferguson and at the time that we launched our investigation was not that we would arrive at a particular outcome, but rather that we would pursue the facts, wherever they led. Our investigation has been both fair and rigorous from the start. It has proceeded independently of the local investigation that concluded in November. And it has been thorough: as part of a wide-ranging examination of the evidence, federal investigators interviewed and re-interviewed eyewitnesses and other individuals claiming to have relevant information and independently canvassed more than 300 residences to locate and interview additional witnesses.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Time , Parting

“Secularism per se is a doctrine which arose in the modem West as a revolt against the closed creed of Christianity. Its battle-cry was that the State should be freed from the stranglehold of the Church, and the citizen should be left to his own individual choice in matters of belief. And it met with great success in every Western democracy. Had India borrowed this doctrine from the modem West, it would have meant a rejection of the closed creeds of Islam and Christianity, and a promotion of the Sanatana Dharma family of faiths which have been naturally secularist in the modern Western sense. But what happened actually was that Secularism in India became the greatest protector of closed creeds which had come here in the company of foreign invaders, and kept tormenting the national society for several centuries.
We should not, therefore, confuse India's Secularism with its namesake in the modern West. The Secularism which Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru propounded and which has prospered in post-independence India, is a new concoction and should be recognized as such. We need not bother about its various definitions as put forward by its pandits. We shall do better if we have a close look at its concrete achievements.
Going by those achievements, one can conclude quite safely that Nehruvian Secularism is a magic formula for transmitting base metals into twenty-four carat gold. How else do we explain the fact of Islam becoming a religion, and that too a religion of tolerance, social equality, and human brotherhood; or the fact of Muslim rule in medieval India becoming an indigenous dispensation; or the fact of Muhammad bin Qasim becoming a liberator of the toiling masses in Sindh; or the fact of Mahmud Ghaznavi becoming the defreezer of productive wealth hoarded in Hindu temples; or the fact of Muhammad Ghuri becoming the harbinger of an urban revolution; or the fact of Muinuddin Chishti becoming the great Indian saint; or the fact of Amir Khusru becoming the pioneer of communal amity; or the fact of Alauddin Khilji becoming the first socialist in the annals of this country; or the fact of Akbar becoming the father of Indian nationalism; or the fact of Aurangzeb becoming the benefactor of Hindu temples; or the fact of Sirajuddaula, Mir Qasim, Hyder Ali, Tipu Sultan, and Bahadur Shah Zafar becoming the heroes of India's freedom struggle against British imperialism or the fact of the Faraizis, the Wahabis, and the Moplahs becoming peasant revolutionaries and foremost freedom fighters?
One has only to go to the original sources in order to understand the true character of Islam and its above-mentioned luminaries. And one can see immediately that their true character has nothing to do with that with which they have been invested in our school and college text-books. No deeper probe is needed for unraveling the mysteries of Nehruvian Secularism.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Tipu Sultan - Villain or Hero (1993)

Books , School , Family , Faith

“My ambition is much higher than independence. Through the deliverance of India, I seek to deliver the so-called weaker races of the Earth from the crushing heels of Western exploitation in which England is the greatest partner.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Young India (12 January 1928). Quoted in The Essential Writings of Gandhi, edited by Judith Brown. Oxford University Press, 2008, (p. 153).
1920s

“A long standing prediction (Milgrom 1983) of MOND is that rotating galaxy curves will fall on a single mass-velocity relation with slope 4: Mb \propto Vf4. This prediction is realized in multiple independent data sets. Gas rich galaxies fall where predicted by MOND with no free parameters. There are not many predictions in extragalactic astronomy that fare so well a quarter century after their publication. … a physical understanding for why galaxy formation in the context of ΛCDM should pick out the particular phenomenology predicted a priori by MOND remains wanting.”

Stacy McGaugh (1964) American astronomer

[Stacy McGaugh, 2011, The Baryonic Tully-Fisher Relation of Gas-Rich Galaxies as a Test of ΛCDM and MOND, p. 16, ApJ, http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.2934]

Understanding

“According to … the French counterrevolutionaries and German Romantics, … the corpus of prejudices was a country’s cultural treasure, its ancient and tested intelligence, present as the consciousness and guardian of its thought. Prejudices were the “we” of every “I”, the past in the present, the revered vessels of the nation’s memory, its judgements carried from age to age. Pretending to spread enlightenment, the philosophes had set out to extirpate these precious residua. … The result was that they had uprooted men from their culture at the very moment when they bragged of how they would cultivate them. … Convinced that they were emancipating souls, they succeeded only in deracinating them. These calumniators of the commonplace had not freed understanding from its chains, but cut it off from its sources. The individual who, thanks to them, must now cast off childish things, had really abandoned his own nature. … The promises of the cogito were illusory: free from prejudice, cut off from the influence of national idiom, the subject was not free but shrivelled and devitalised. … Everyday opinion should therefore be regarded as the soil where thought was nourished, its hearth and sanctuary, … and not, as the philosophes would have it, as some alien authority which overwhelmed and crushed it. … The cogito needed to be steeped in the profundities of the collective mind; the broken links with the past needed repairing; the quest for independence should yield to that for authenticity. Men should abandon their scepticism and give themselves over to the comforting warmth of majoritarian ideas, bowing down before their infallible authority.”

Alain Finkielkraut (1949) French essayist, born 1949

Source: The Undoing of Thought (1988), pp. 25-26.

Men , Age , Soul , Intelligence

“On Kant’s view it can never follow from the fact that God commands is to do such-and-such that we ought to do such-and-such. In order for us to reach such a conclusion we would also have to know that we always ought to do what God commands. But this last we could not know unless we ourselves possessed a standard of moral judgment independent of God’s commandments by means of which we could judge God’s deeds and words and so find the latter morally worthy of obedience. But clearly if we possess such a standard, the commandments of God will be redundant.”

Alasdair MacIntyre book After Virtue

Source: After Virtue (1981), p. 45.

God

“The President, and government, will only control the militia when a part of them is in the actual service of the federal government, else, they are independent and not under the command of the president or the government. The states would control the militia, only when called out into the service of the state, and then the governor would be commander in chief where enumerated in the respective state constitution.”

Alexander Hamilton Federalist Papers

No. 69
The Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

Parting

“True independence means being free from the domination of your own internal automatic behaviors, not doing what you feel like when the urge strikes.”

Nicholas Lore (1944) American social scientist

The Pathfinder (1998)

Behavior , Feeling

“… it seems that it would take less than half a million years to evolve a good camera eye … It's no wonder "the" eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom … It is a geological blink.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

River out of Eden (1995)

Time , Animals

“The Supreme Court is an institution far more dominated by centrifugal forces, pushing toward individuality and independence, than it is by centripetal forces pulling for hierarchical ordering and institutional unity.”

William H. Rehnquist (1924–2005) Chief Justice of the United States

Address at the University of Minnesota Law School; quoted in The New York Times (20 October 1984).
Books, articles, and speeches

“This tape is not copyrighted, it is not patented, and it is not trademarked. You are free to use this information or this tape in any way that you please. Freedom and independence is what it is all about now, and you therefore may exercise your own prerogatives regarding this tape. I will however simply state that it is true and factual and as so many other people have done in the past you will find that your own reality, your own perception and your own awarenesses over the years will prove what I am talking about in this tape as true.”

Ronald DeWolf (1934–1991) American critic of Scientology

Taped Message (1984)

People , Way , Exercises , Reality

“Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the “content,” which is always another medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 267

Books

“Definite portions of a manifoldness, distinguished by a mark or by a boundary, are called Quanta. Their comparison with regard to quantity is accomplished in the case of discrete magnitudes by counting, in the case of continuous magnitudes by measuring. Measure consists in the superposition of the magnitudes to be compared; it therefore requires a means of using one magnitude as the standard for another. In the absence of this, two magnitudes can only be compared when one is a part of the other; in which case also we can only determine the more or less and not the how much. The researches which can in this case be instituted about them form a general division of the science of magnitude in which magnitudes are regarded not as existing independently of position and not as expressible in terms of a unit, but as regions in a manifoldness.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

On the Hypotheses which lie at the Bases of Geometry (1873)

Science , Parting

“In a fundamental sense, Alchian's theory of economic organizations is different from those of Coase or Simon. He disavows an explicit model of individual choice… and… offers a system-level explanation of organizational emergence, structure, and survival that is largely independent of decision making at the micro level… Yet it is precisely this independence of a distinct model of choice that ultimately renders it compatible with the individualistic theories of both Coase and Simon….
Whether individuals optimize under uncertainty or satisfice under the more limiting conditions of bounded rationality…, Alchian's logic of natural selection, when grafted onto either approach, provides a powerful means of deriving and integrating expectations about individuals, organizations and systems. The result in either case is an approach that gains in scope and coherence, and that does so by remaining true to its underlying model of individual choice.”

Terry M. Moe (1949) American political scientist

Source: "The new economics of organization." 1984, p. 746-747; as cited in Eggertsson (1990; 56)

Optimism , Nature , Decision , Sense

“In other words, Lincoln's belief was that slavery could be ended peacefully through the action of the states themselves. It couldn't be done through direct intervention by the Federal government, but it could be done within the states themselves. And after all of the states north of the Mason-Dixon line had adopted plans for emancipation—slavery was lawful in every one of the 13 colonies, and the 13 states which declared their independence.”

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

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A

Law

“Since the 1970s, thanks to a North Korean-style cult of personality, the [Syrian] presidency has been a kind of supranational institution, above anything as vulgar as the competition for power. But now it has lost its mystique: The president is a lonely man who dares not venture beyond his palace in the outskirts of a besieged capital. Syria’s history since independence in 1947 shows that whenever a ruler calls in the army to crush the street, he ends up the loser. It happened three times in 1949 alone, when the army staged three coups, each time after being ordered to crush the street.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"The loneliest man in Syria" http://nypost.com/2011/05/10/the-loneliest-man-in-syria/, New York Post (May 10, 2011).
New York Post

History , Time , Personality

“We can conceive of various kinds of democracy. But my intention is not to treat of every kind, but of that only, "wherein all, without exception, who owe allegiance to the laws of the country only, and are further independent and of respectable life, have the right of voting in the supreme council and of filling the offices of the dominion."”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Source: Political Treatise (1677), Ch. 11, Of Democracy

Life , Law , Democracy , Country

“The concepts of social power and social control are closely interrelated, since the process of social control involves the exercise of the bases and resources of power. But both terms also have their negative and even threatening connotations. All of us, or at least most of us, like to think that we are independent agents, and being subjected to social power restricts that sense of independence. The thought of being "socially controlled" also brings forth strong negative feelings. Yet, when we consider it more carefully, power and influence are part of our everyday interaction and contribute to individual and collective benefit. Similarly for social control.”

Bertram Raven (1926) American psychologist

Source: "Influence, Power, Religion, and the Mechanisms of Social Control," 1999, p. 161

Feeling , Exercises , Thinking , Sense

“You know the funny thing about child pornography: […] the lack of credits at the end. No ego on that side of Hollywood, is there? “Who did the editing on this film, it's seamless! I want to use him on my independent documentary”— but no names. Not even a nom de plume. Some people are in it just for the art.”

Doug Stanhope (1967) American stand-up comedian, actor, and author

From Across The Street (2009)

People , Art

“Gravitation is entirely independent of everything that influences other natural phenomena. It is not subject to absorption or refraction, no velocity of propagation has been observed. You can do whatever you please with a body, you can electrify or magnetise it, you can heat it, melt or evaporate it, decompose it chemically, its behaviour with respect to gravitation is not affected. Gravitation acts on all bodies in the same way, everywhere and always we find it in the same rigorous and simple form, which frustrates all our attempts to penetrate into its internal mechanism.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

Way , Nature

“There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy. We have consistently denied the constitutionality of measures which restrict the rights of citizens on account of race. There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.”

Earl Warren (1891–1974) United States federal judge

Loving v. Virginia http://www.amazon.com/Everyone-African-Science-Explodes-Myth/dp/1633880184/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 (1967).
1960s

Marriage , Freedom , Personality

“When, therefore, it shall be asked what we have to do with the memory of Abraham Lincoln, or what Abraham Lincoln had to do with us, the answer is ready, full, and complete. Though he loved Caesar less than Rome, though the Union was more to him than our freedom or our future, under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood; under his wise and beneficent rule, and by measures approved and vigorously pressed by him, we saw that the handwriting of ages, in the form of prejudice and proscription, was rapidly fading away from the face of our whole country; under his rule, and in due time, about as soon after all as the country could tolerate the strange spectacle, we saw our brave sons and brothers laying off the rags of bondage, and being clothed all over in the blue uniforms of the soldiers of the United States; under his rule we saw two hundred thousand of our dark and dusky people responding to the call of Abraham Lincoln, and with muskets on their shoulders, and eagles on their buttons, timing their high footsteps to liberty and union under the national flag; under his rule we saw the independence of the black republic of Haiti, the special object of slave-holding aversion and horror, fully recognized, and her minister, a colored gentleman, duly received here in the city of Washington; under his rule we saw the internal slave-trade, which so long disgraced the nation, abolished, and slavery abolished in the District of Columbia; under his rule we saw for the first time the law enforced against the foreign slave trade, and the first slave-trader hanged like any other pirate or murderer.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1870s, Oratory in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (1876)

Love , People , Age , Law

“Love is a power, a mighty principle that exists in its own right independent of any individual. Man changes, but the principle of love does not and cannot. Love does not leave men and women. Men and women leave love.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Love , Women , Men , Change

“Shall we now give up the independence we have won, and crusade abroad in a utopian attempt to force our ideas on the rest of the world; or shall we use air power, and the other advances of modern warfare, to guard and strengthen the independence of our nation?”

Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974) American aviator, author, inventor, explorer, and social activist

A speech on “Air Power” (29 August 1941)

World , Idea

“The Court is perhaps one of the last citadels of jealously preserved individualism. For the most part, we function as nine, small independent law firms.”

Lewis F. Powell, Jr. (1907–1998) American judge

Los Angeles Times (10 September 1981).
1980s

Law , Parting

“Gold and silver are constituted, by the nature of things, money, and universal money, independent of all convention, and of all laws.”

Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727–1781) French economist

§ 43
Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth (1766)

Money , Law , Nature , Universe

“There are indeed certain names and prefixes to names which suggest serious reading, independently of the words printed on the title-page of the book. If the Archbishop of Canterbury, or General Booth, or the Emperor William published a novel, for instance, the work might reasonably be expected to contain an exposition of personal views on some question of the day. But in ordinary cases the purpose-novel is a simple fraud, besides being a failure in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand.”

Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909) Novelist, short story writer, essayist (1854-1909)

The Novel: What It Is (1893)

Books , Failure , Question , Fraud

“What has stood in the way of people running as an independent is that winning the presidency in a system that so clearly favors the two major parties is something of a hopeless cause.”

Dan Balz (1946) American journalist

Donald Trump, America’s first independent president (November 19, 2016)

People , Way

“Transformers is so belabored that it makes Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End seem like a masterpiece of pacing. It makes that "classic" midsummer alien invasion movie, Independence Day, seem like a template for inventive plotting and solid character development. Even by Michael Bay standards, this movie is vapid. Yes, there are plenty of explosions, but those are a dime-a-dozen these days; even Discovery Channel's Mythbusters has them. Transformers isn't clean, big-budget fun; it's clean, big-budget tedium. For Transformers fans, I suppose this is a dream motion picture. For everyone else, it's a nightmare.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=591 of Transformers (2007).
One-and-a-half star reviews

World , Dreams

“…good American poets are surprisingly individual and independent; they have little of the member-of-the-Academy, official man-of-letters feel that English or continental poets often have. When American poets join literary political parties, doctrinaire groups with immutable principles, whose poems themselves are manifestoes, the poets are ruined by it. We see this in the beatniks, with their official theory that you write a poem by putting down anything that happens to come into your head; this iron spontaneity of theirs makes it impossible for even a talented beatnik to write a good poem except by accident, since it eliminates the selection, exclusion, and concentration that are an essential part of writing a poem. Besides, their poems are as direct as true works of art are indirect: ironically, these conscious social manifestoes of theirs, these bohemian public speeches, make it impossible for the artist’s unconscious to operate as it normally does in the process of producing a work of art.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Fifty Years of American Poetry”, pp. 327–328
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Art , Feeling , Parting

“I venture on assuring you that I regard the design formed by you and your friends with sincere interest, and in particular wish well to all the efforts you may make on behalf of individual freedom and independence as opposed to what is termed Collectivism.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to F. W. Hirst on being unable to write a preface to Essays in Liberalism by "Six Oxford Men" (2 January 1897), as quoted In the Golden Days (1947) by F. W. Hirst, p. 158
1890s

Effort , Freedom , Sincerity

“I’m vying as an independent candidate in Nairobi City County. I’m not vying as a representative of any ethnic group. I’m going to be the Governor of all patriotic Kenyans. I’m going to be the Governor of all tribes, religions, faiths, races and political persuasions.”

Miguna Miguna (1962) lawyer, author and columnist

Facebook post in response to detractors, https://www.facebook.com/GovernorMigunaMiguna/posts/562185893970795, 2016
2016

Faith , Religion

“Again, science has the power to silence heretics. Today it is the only institution that can claim authority. Like the Church in the past, it has the power to destroy, or marginalise, independent thinkers. (Think how orthodox medicine reacted to Freud, and orthodox Darwinians to Lovelock.) In fact, science does not yield any fixed picture of things, but by censoring thinkers who stray too far from current orthodoxies it preserves the comforting illusion of a single established worldview.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Against Fundamentalism - Religious and Scientific (p. 19)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Thinking , Silence , Science , Past

“The Sufism that survived and even prospered was tame and promised to subserve prophetism. Some great Sufi poets like Rumi and Attar convey a wrong impression of Islamic Sufism in general; they have been its show-pieces, not its representative figures. Mainstream Sufism has been represented by its silsilas like the Naqshbandiyya, Qadiriyya, Chishtiyya, Dervish, Marabout, Ribat, etc. They had no independent ideology of their own and they only served the spiritual-intellectual categories (manisha) of prophetic Islam; in fact, they became its most willing spokesmen. They never questioned its dogmas, not even its barbaric ideas about the kafirs, the jihad, the zimmis, the dar al-harb. There is nothing to show that they ever spoke against Islamic wars and oppression. On the other hand, as their history shows they were part and parcel of Islamic Imperialism, its enthusiastic sappers and miners and also its beneficiaries. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Dervish and Sufis have fought against the unbelievers in time of war. The devotees have accompanied the Shaikh or Murshid or Pir to the threatened frontiers. … In India, the sufis have been an important limb of Islamic Imperialism and expansion.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Hindu View of Christianity and Islam (1992)

War , History , Idea , Question

“Look, I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I'm not trying to take us back to Reagan-Bush.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

United States Senatorial debate, October 1994, quoted in * Geraghty
Jim
w:Jim Geraghty
So What Did Romney Mean When He Said, 'I Was an Independent During Reagan-Bush'?
National Review Online
2007
October 8, 2007
http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/11745/so-what-did-romney-mean-when-he-said-i-was-independent-during-reagan-bush
2011-12-29
1994 United States Senate campaign

Time

“The biggest alien invasion picture of the summer of 1996 is Independence Day. But it's not the first. The Arrival, with a significantly lower budget than Fox's July 3 release, has that distinction, and, while this particular film doesn't boast any radical or surprising ideas, it combines numerous familiar plot elements into a suspenseful, entertaining whole. Best of all, perhaps, is the realization that some thought went into writer/director David Twohy's script. This is not a dumb movie; in fact, with its heavy reliance upon real science, it's startlingly credible.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/movies/a/arrival.html of The Arrival (1996).
Three star reviews

Idea , Science , Summer

“Call us not weeds, we are flowers of the Sea,
For lovely and bright and gay tinted are we,
And quite independent of sun's fire or showers-
Then call us not weeds! We are ocean's bright flowers,
Not nursed like the plants of a summer parterre,
Where gales are but sighs of an evening air,
Our exquisite, fragile and delicate forms
Are nursed by the Ocean and rocked by the Storms.”

Petar Beron

Historia naturalis bulgarica 4: 10 - 15.

Love , Flowers , Sun , Summer

“The idea that the people have a right to choose their own rulers was not new in political history. It was the foundation of every popular attempt to depose an undesirable king. This right was set out with a good deal of detail by the Dutch when as early as July 26, 1581, they declared their independence of Philip of Spain. In their long struggle with the Stuarts the British people asserted the same principles, which finally culminated in the Bill of Rights deposing the last of that house and placing William and Mary on the throne. In each of these cases sovereignty through divine right was displaced by sovereignty through the consent of the people. Running through the same documents, though expressed in different terms, is the clear inference of inalienable rights. But we should search these charters in vain for an assertion of the doctrine of equality. This principle had not before appeared as an official political declaration of any nation. It was profoundly revolutionary. It is one of the corner stones of American institutions.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)

People , History , Search , Idea

“Although Saussure recognized the necessity of putting the phonic substance between brackets ("What is essential in language, we shall see, is foreign to the phonic character of the linguistic sign" [p. 21]. "In its essence it [the linguistic signifier] is not at all phonic" [p. 164]), Saussure, for essential, and essentially metaphysical, reasons had to privilege speech, everything that links the sign to phone. He also speaks of the "natural link" between thought and voice, meaning and sound (p. 46). He even speaks of "thought-sound" (p. 156). I have attempted elsewhere to show what is traditional in such a gesture, and to what necessities it submits. In any event, it winds up contradicting the most interesting critical motive of the Course, making of linguistics the regulatory model, the "pattern" for a general semiology of which it was to be, by all rights and theoretically, only a part. The theme of the arbitrary, thus, is turned away from its most fruitful paths (formalization) toward a hierarchizing teleology:… One finds exactly the same gesture and the same concepts in Hegel. The contradiction between these two moments of the Course is also marked by Saussure's recognizing elsewhere that "it is not spoken language that is natural to man, but the faculty of constituting a language, that is, a system of distinct signs …," that is, the possibility of the code and of articulation, independent of any substance, for example, phonic substance.”

Jacques Derrida book Positions

Source: Positions, 1982, p. 21

Motivation , Nature , Parting

“The world looks with some awe upon a man who appears unconcernedly indifferent to home, money, comfort, rank, or even power and fame. The world feels not without a certain apprehension, that here is some one outside its jurisdiction; someone before whom its allurements may be spread in vain; some one strangely enfranchised, untamed, untrammelled by convention, moving independent of the ordinary currents of human action.”

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

At an unveiling of a memorial to T. E. Lawrence at the Oxford High School for Boys (3 October 1936); as quoted in Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of T.E. Lawrence (1989) by Jeremy M Wilson.
The 1930s

Money , World , Feeling , Home

“Competition has been curtailed by larger corporations; it has been sabotaged by groups of smaller entrepreneurs acting collectively. Both groups have made clear the locus of liberalism's rhetoric of small business and family farm.The character and ideology of the small entrepreneur and the facts of the market are selling the idea of competition short. These liberal heroes, the small businessmen and the farmer, do not want to develop their characters by free and open competition; they do not believe in competition, and they have been doing their best to get away from it.When the small businessmen are asked whether they think free competition is…a good thing, they answer…, 'Yes, of course—what do you mean?' … Finally: 'How about here in this town in furniture?'—or groceries, or whatever the man's line is. Their answers are of two sorts: 'Yes, if it's fair competition,' which turns out to mean: 'if it doesn't make me compete.' … The small businessman, as well as the farmer, wants to become big, not directly by eating up others like himself in competition, but by the indirect ways means practiced by his own particular heroes—those already big. In the dream life of the small entrepreneur, the sure fix is replacing the open market.But if small men wish to close their ranks, why do they continue to talk…about free competition? The answer is that the political function of free competition is what really matters now…[f]or, if there is free competition and a constant coming and going of enterprises, the one who remains established is 'the better man' and 'deserves to be where he is.' But if instead of such competition, there is a rigid line between successful entrepreneurs and the employee community, the man on top may be 'coasting on what his father did,' and not really be worthy of his hard-won position. Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning than the man who inherited his father's store or farm. …… In Congress small-business committees clamored for legislation to save the weak backbone of the national economy. Their legislative efforts have been directed against their more efficient competitors. First they tried to kill off the low-priced chain stores by taxation; then they tried to eliminate the alleged buying advantages of mass distributor; finally they tried to freeze the profits of all distributors in order to protect their own profits from those who could and were selling goods cheaper to the consumer.The independent retailer…has been pushing to maintain a given margin under the guise of 'fair competition' and 'fair-trade' laws. He now regularly demands that the number of outlets controlled by chain stores be drastically limited and that production be divorced from distribution. This would, of course, kill the low prices charged consumers by the A&P;, which makes very small retail profits, selling almost at cost, and whose real profits come from the manufacturing and packaging.…Under the threat of 'ruinous competition,' laws are on the books of many states and cities legalizing the ruin of competition.”

C. Wright Mills book White Collar: The American Middle Classes

Section One: The Competitive Way of Life.
White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)

Life , Men , Books , Family

“There is … no first person plural to the verb "cogito." Observation, verification, and inference are functions which are perfected only in their independent individual exercise. I am not unmindful of the importance of the corroboration of one mind by another; but such corroboration is valuable only in so far as both minds have reached their results alone. Corroboration implies the absence of collusion. The devotee of the intellect must, then, have the strength to work alone.”

Ralph Barton Perry (1876–1957) American philosopher

The Integrity of the Intellect (July 1920)

Exercises , Personality , Perfection

“The independence of the (legal) profession also ensures that it can take an objective view on issues concerning not only these matters, but also those of wider public concern. In fact, it can only discharge this responsibility to be independent and objective, if it is perceived by society at large to be independent.”

Daniel Fatiaki (1954) Fijian judge

Address to the Fiji Law Society, Coral Coast, Fiji, 2 July 2005 (excerpts)

“When speaking of a “body of knowledge” or of “the results of research,” e. g., we tacitly assign the same cognitive status to inherited knowledge and to independently acquired knowledge. To counteract this tendency a special effort is required to transform inherited knowledge into genuine knowledge by revitalizing its original discovery, and to discriminate between the genuine and the spurious elements of what claims to be inherited knowledge.”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

Source: What is Political Philosophy (1959), p. 77

Knowledge , Effort

“A line cannot control pictorial space absolutely. A line may flow freely in and out space, but cannot independently create the phenomenon of push and pull necessary to plastic creation. Push and pull are expanding and contracting forces which are activated by carriers in visual motion. Planes are the most important carriers, lines and points less so... the picture plane reacts automatically in the opposite direction to the stimulus received; thus action continues as long as it receives stimulus in the creative process. Push answers with pull and pull with push. … At the end of his life and the height of his capacity Cézanne understood color as a force of push and pull. In his pictures he created an enormous sense of volume, breathing, pulsating, expanding, contracting through his use of colors.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 44
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Life , Color , Sense

“But if the same tests, the same foods are examined by an independent scientist, then it turns out that in almost every case there are quite serious harms done to the rats, the mice or the other poor unfortunate animals, particularly internal organs like liver and kidneys and things of that sort.”

Jane Goodall (1934) British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist

Jane Goodall Godall Says Animals Suffer From Genetically Modified Foods http://www.marketwatch.com/story/goodall-says-animals-suffer-from-genetically-modified-foods-2015-04-28?siteid=yhoof2 (2015-04-28)

Food , Animals

“Whatever else we can say about this referendum campaign, we have touched sections of the community who've never before been touched by politics. These sections of the community have touched us and touched the political process. I don't think that will ever be allowed to go back to business as usual in politics again. So friends, sometimes it's best to reflect where we are on a journey. 45 per cent, 1.6 million of our fellow citizens voting for independence, I don't think that any of us whenever we entered politics would have thought such a thing to be either credible or possible. Today of all days as we bring Scotland together let us not dwell on the distance we have fallen short. Let us dwell on the distance we have travelled and have confidence that the movement is so broad in Scotland that it will take this nation forward and we shall go forward as one nation. Thank you very much.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Speech http://news.scotland.gov.uk/Speeches-Briefings/First-Minister-on-referendum-outcome-106a.aspx at Dynamic Earth (19 September 2014).

Travel , Confidence , Communication , Business

“Sean Hannity: For what possible reason would he possibly want to destroy America's economy and place in the world. Where is that coming from?
Herman Cain: Where I'm coming from is if you weaken the United States militarily, economically, and culturally, then America is gonna suffer from the same problems that all of— a lot of the other countries suffer from, and that opens the door to some dramatic change in how we run this country.
Sean Hannity: Would that fit into black liberation theology, social, Marxism, redistribution, G. D. America, America's chickens have come home to roost—?
Herman Cain: It fits into what I would call anti-American, anti-Constitutional, anti-Declaration of Independence. That's what it fits into.”

Herman Cain (1945) American writer, businessman and activist

Hannity
Television
2010-04-14
Fox News, quoted in * Herman Cain calls Obama's policies "anti-American, anti-Constitutional, anti-Declaration of Independence"
Media Matters for America
2010-04-14
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201004140078
2011-10-08
regarding President Obama

World , Home , Problem , Thinking

“The two photons are entangled and according to local realism, their polarization planes should become independent… a typical EPR situation. Already in 1948, observations… agreed with quantum mechanics, not with local realism.”

Richard Dalitz (1925–2006) Australian physicist

R. H. Dalitz and F. J. Duarte, John Clive Ward, Physics Today 53, 99-100 (2000).

“By an incredible coincidence, Gamow and Edward Condon, who had discovered simultaneously and independently the explanation of radioactivity (one in Russia, the other in this country), came to spend the the last ten years of their lives within a hundred yards of each other in Boulder.”

Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) Polish-American mathematician

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 14, Professor Again, p. 267

Country

“Placing every man on a plane where he acknowledged no superiors, where no one possessed any right to rule over him, he must inevitably choose his own rulers through a system of self-government. This was their theory of democracy. In those days such doctrines would scarcely have been permitted to flourish and spread in any other country. This was the purpose which the fathers cherished. In order that they might have freedom to express these thoughts and opportunity to put them into action, whole congregations with their pastors had migrated to the colonies. These great truths were in the air that our people breathed. Whatever else we may say of it, the Declaration of Independence was profoundly American.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)

People , Truth , Democracy , Freedom

“Free trade is the serial killer of American manufacturing and the Trojan Horse of World Government. It is the primrose path to the loss of economic independence and national sovereignty. Free trade is a bright shining lie.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2000s, Where the Right Went Wrong (2004)

Lie , World , Loss , Horse

“We must not suppose any corporeal conjunction or marriage in the case — all which are merely the sportive fables of Poetry; but must hold the father and the producer of that Being as something most divine and super-eminent. Of such a nature is He who is above all things, around whom, and by reason of whom, all things do subsist. But Homer calls him by his father's name, "Hyperion," in order to show that he is independent, and not subjected to any constraint.”

Julian (emperor) (331–363) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer

Upon the Sovereign Sun (362)

Marriage , Nature

“My hon. Friend is right in saying that the Bank of England has often operated against the interests of Labour Governments. That is due to the mandarins who run it. If the hon. Gentleman has such doubts about the running of a bank which theoretically is state-owned and state-controlled, what influence does he think will be possible in the case of an independent central bank dedicated to a course of Euro-monetarism?”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Question http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1993/jan/14/treaty-on-european-union in the House of Commons (14 January 1993).
1990s

Thinking

“The important thing with a child is that you love them, you protect them and you help them to grow and find out who they are. And as a parent, it's my responsibility to help them to become independent and get all the knowledge and a broad view of the world and life. I know that Nic [former wife Nicole Kidman] absolutely agrees with that. And that's what's important: being there.”

Tom Cruise (1962) American actor and film producer

Quoted in Neil Strauss, "The Passion of the Cruise" http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/the_passion_of_tom_cruise, Rolling Stone (August 2004).

Love , Life , World , Knowledge

“The chief weakness in France’s anti-terrorism strategy is the inability of its leadership elite to agree on a workable definition of the threat the nation faces. Many still cling to the notion that Bouhelel and other terrorists are trying to take revenge against France for tis colonial past. Yet Tunisia, where Bouhelel’s family came from in the 1960s, has been independent for more than 60 years, double the life of the terrorist — who had not been there, even as a tourist. Some, like the Islamologist Gilles Kepel, blame French society for “the sense of exclusion” inflicted on immigrants of Muslim origin. However, leaving aside self-exclusion, there are few barriers that French citizens of Muslim faith can’t cross. Today, the Cabinet of Prime Minister Manuel Valls includes at least two Muslim ministers. Others still claim that France is being hit because of Muslim grievances over Palestine, although successive French governments have gone out of their way to sympathize with the “Arab cause.” France was the first nation to impose an arms embargo on Israel in 1967 and the first in the West to recognize the PLO. The blame-the-victim school also claims that France is attacked because of the “mess in the Middle East,” although the French took no part in toppling Saddam Hussein and have stayed largely on the sidelines in the conflict in Syria. Isn’t it possible that this new kind of terrorism, practiced by neo-Islam, is not related to any particular issue? Isn’t it possible that Bouhelel didn’t want anything specific because he wanted everything, starting with the right to kill people not because of what they did but because of who they were?”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"A cry from France: After Nice, can we finally face the truth about this war?" http://nypost.com/2016/07/15/a-cry-from-france-after-nice-can-we-finally-face-the-truth-about-this-war/ New York Post (July 15, 2016)
New York Post

Life , People , School , Family

“A foreign visitor to the Berlin Stock Exchange would easily be deceived. There are announcements of daily quotations and price changes as though a free Stock Exchanged still existed, but nowhere would he find the former ‘public’— private buyers and sellers—as represented by independent brokers, bankers and ‘visitors.”

Günter Reimann (1904–2005) German economist

Source: The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism, 2014, p. 178

Change

“The new institutionalism in organization theory and sociology comprises a rejection of rational-actor models, and interest in institutions as independent variables, a turn toward cognitive and cultural explanations, and an interest in properties of supra-individual units of analysis that cannot be reduced to aggregations or direct consequences of individual’s attributes or motives.”

Paul DiMaggio (1951) American sociologist

Source: Introduction to The New Institutionalism and Organizational Analysis, 1991, p. 8

Motivation

“I claim that jihadis are really motivated neither by religion nor by a Leftist sense of justice, but by resentment, which in no way puts them on the Left, neither “objectively” nor “subjectively.” I simply never wrote that Islamic fundamentalists are in any sense on the Left—the whole point of my writing on this topic is that the “antagonism” between liberal tolerance and ethnic or religious fundamentalism is inherent to the universe of global capitalism: in their very opposition, they are the two faces of the same system. The true Left starts with the insight into this complicity. A good example of how religious fundamentalism is to be located “in the context of the antagonisms of global capitalism” is Afghanistan. Today, when Afghanistan is portrayed as the utmost Islamic fundamentalist country, who still remembers that, 30 years ago, it was a country with strong secular tradition, up to a strong Communist party which first took power there independently of the Soviet Union? Afghanistan became fundamentalist when it was drawn into global politics”

Slavoj Žižek (1949) Slovene philosopher

first through the Soviet intervention
"Disputations: Who Are You Calling Anti-Semitic?" in The New Republic (7 January 2009) http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/disputations-who-are-you-calling-anti-semitic

Religion , Justice , Way , Motivation

“A finished or even a competent reasoner is not the work of nature alone… education develops faculties which would otherwise never have manifested their existence. It is, therefore, as necessary to learn to reason before we can expect to be able to reason, as it is to learn to swim or fence, in order to attain either of those arts. Now, something must be reasoned upon, it matters not much what it is, provided that it can be reasoned upon with certainty. The properties of mind or matter, or the study of languages, mathematics, or natural history may be chosen for this purpose. Now, of all these, it is desirable to choose the one… in which we can find out by other means, such as measurement and ocular demonstration of all sorts, whether the results are true or not.
.. Now the mathematics are peculiarly well adapted for this purpose, on the following grounds:—
1. Every term is distinctly explained, and has but one meaning, and it is rarely that two words are employed to mean the same thing.
2. The first principles are self-evident, and, though derived from observation, do not require more of it than has been made by children in general.
3. The demonstration is strictly logical, taking nothing for granted except the self-evident first principles, resting nothing upon probability, and entirely independent of authority and opinion.
4. When the conclusion is attained by reasoning, its truth or falsehood can be ascertained, in geometry by actual measurement, in algebra by common arithmetical calculation. This gives confidence, and is absolutely necessary, if… reason is not to be the instructor, but the pupil.
5. There are no words whose meanings are so much alike that the ideas which they stand for may be confounded.
…These are the principal grounds on which… the utility of mathematical studies may be shewn to rest, as a discipline for the reasoning powers. But the habits of mind which these studies have a tendency to form are valuable in the highest degree. The most important of all is the power of concentrating the ideas which a successful study of them increases where it did exist, and creates where it did not. A difficult position or a new method of passing from one proposition to another, arrests all the attention, and forces the united faculties to use their utmost exertions. The habit of mind thus formed soon extends itself to other pursuits, and is beneficially felt in all the business of life.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

Source: On the Study and Difficulties of Mathematics (1831), Ch. I.

Life , Children , Truth , Education

“To apply the category of cause and effect means to find out which parts of nature stand in this relation. Similarly, to apply the gestalt category means to find out which parts of nature belong as parts to functional wholes, to discover their position in these wholes, their degree of relative independence, and the articulation of larger wholes into sub-wholes.”

Kurt Koffka (1886–1941) German psychologist

Kurt Koffka (1931), self-cited in: Kurt Koffka. Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 1935, p. 22

Nature , Parting

“The biological organism and the social persona are profoundly different social constructions. The different systems of social practices, including discourse practices, through which these two notions are constituted, have their meanings, and are made use of, are radically incommensurable. The biological notion of a human organism as an identifiable individual unit of analysis depends on the specific scientific practices we use to construct the identity, the boundedness, the integrity, and the continuity across interactions of this unit. The criteria we use to do so: DNA signatures, neural micro-anatomy, organism-environment boundaries, internal physiological interdependence of subsystems, external physical probes of identification at distinct moments of physical time -- all depend on social practices and discourses profoundly different from those in terms of which we define the social person.
The social-biographical person is also an individual insofar as we construct its identity, boundedness, integrity, and continuity. But the social practices and discourses we deploy in these constructions are quite different. We define the social person in terms of social interactions, social roles, socially and culturally meaningful behavior patterns. We construct from these notions of the personal identity of an individual the separateness and independence of that individual from the social environment with which it transacts, the internal unity or integrity of the individual as a consistent persona, and the continuity of that persona across social interactions.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics, 1995, p. 68

Behavior , Time , Dependency , Personality

“There was a time when people listened to me because I showed them how to give fight to the British without arms when they had no arms and the British Government was fully equipped and organised for an armed fight. But today I am told that my non-violence can be of no avail against the communal madness and, therefore, people should arm themselves for self-defence. If this is true, it has to be admitted that our thirty years of nonviolent practice was an utter waste of time. We should have from the beginning trained ourselves in the use of arms. But I do not agree that our thirty years' probation in nonviolence has been utterly wasted. It was due to our non-violence, defective though it was, that we were able to bear up under the heaviest repression and the message of independence penetrated every nook and corner of India. But as our non-violence was the nonviolence of the weak, the leaven did not spread. Had we adopted non-violence as the weapon of the strong, because we realised that it was more effective than any other weapon, in fact the mightiest force in the world, we would have made use of its full potency and not have discarded it as soon as the fight against the British was over or we were in a position to wield conventional weapons. But as I have already said, we adopted it out of our helplessness. If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Speech (16 June 1947) as the official date for Indian independence approached (15 August 1947), as quoted in Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase (1958) https://books.google.com/books?id=sswBAAAAMAAJ&q=%22+I+have+already+said,+we+adopted+it+out+of+our+helplessness%22&dq=%22+I+have+already+said,+we+adopted+it+out+of+our+helplessness%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj6ydqTtK7LAhUI4D4KHW3-DwEQ6AEIHTAA by Pyarelal Nayyar, p. 326 http://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/mahatma-gandhi-volume-ten.pdf
1940s

People , World , Communication , Strong

“Local economic independence cannot be preserved in the face of consolidations such as we have had during the past few years. The control of American business is steadily being transferred, I am sorry to have to say, from local communities to a few large cities in which central managers decide the policies and the fate of the far-flung enterprises they control. Millions of people depend helplessly on their judgment. Through monopolistic mergers the people are losing power to direct their own economic welfare. When they lose the power to direct their economic welfare, they also lose the means to direct their political future.”

Estes Kefauver (1903–1963) American politician

Senate Hearing, 1947, reported in Michael J. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (1998), p. 243.

Fate , People , Communication , Business

“The continuance of India within the British Empire is essential to the Empire's existence and is consequently a paramount interest both of the United Kingdom and of the Dominions…for strategic purposes there is no half-way house between an India fully within the Empire and an India totally outside it…Should it once be admitted or proved that Indians cannot govern themselves except by leaving the Empire – in other words, that the necessary goal of political development for the most important section of His Majesty's non-European subjects is independence and not Dominion status – then the logically inevitable outcome will be the eventual and probably the rapid loss to the Empire of all its other non-European parts. It would extinguish the hope of a lasting union between "white" and "coloured" which the conception of a common subjectship to the King-Emperor affords and to which the development of the Empire hitherto has given the prospect of leading…In discussion of the wealth of India it is usual to forget the principal item, which is four hundred millions of human beings, for the most part belonging to races neither unintelligent nor slothful…[British policy should be to] create the preconditions of democracy and self-government by as soon as possible making India socially and economically a modern state.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Memorandum on Indian Policy (16 May 1946), from Simon Heffer, Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell (Phoenix, 1999), pp. 104-105.
1940s

Hope , Way , Democracy , Loss

“If no one is to be accounted as born into a superior station, if there is to be no ruling class, and if all possess rights which can neither be bartered away nor taken from them by any earthly power, it follows as a matter of course that the practical authority of the Government has to rest on the consent of the governed. While these principles were not altogether new in political action, and were very far from new in political speculation, they had never been assembled before and declared in such a combination. But remarkable as this may be, it is not the chief distinction of the Declaration of Independence. The importance of political speculation is not to be under-estimated, as I shall presently disclose. Until the idea is developed and the plan made there can be no action.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)

Idea

“Most mathematicians are by nature Platonists who cheerfully, unreflectingly and habitually employ such loaded phrases as 'We assume there exists…' or 'Therefore there exists…' an entity with such and such characteristics. Challenged by the realist they would probably reply that since the truths of mathematics are absolute, universal and eternal it is hard indeed to deny them an existence independent of human intelligence.”

George Frederick James Temple (1901–1992) British mathematician

100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)

Truth , Intelligence , Mathematics , Nature

“Hume was right about one thing: to have real confidence in a miracle, one needs evidence—massive, well-documented, and either replicated or independently corroborated evidence from multiple and reliable sources. No religious miracle even comes close to meeting those standards.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 124

Confidence

“There is no rivalry, no competition to get employment among slaves, as among free laborers. Nor is there a war between master and slave… His feeling for his slave never permits him to stint him in old age. The slaves are all well fed, well clad, have plenty of fuel, and are happy. They have no dread of the future—no fear of want. A state of dependence is the only condition in which reciprocal affection can exist among human beings—the only situation in which the war of competition ceases, and peace, amity and good will arise. A state of independence always begets more or less of jealous rivalry and hostility. A man loves his children because they are weak, helpless and dependent; he loves his wife for similar reasons.”

George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) American activist

Source: Sociology For The South: Or The Failure Of A Free Society (1854), pp. 246-247

Love , Hostility , War , Children

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

Timothy Geithner (1961) American central banker and politician

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

Money , Strong , Time , Future

“The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal, and in 1776, that's exactly what they meant. Women could not vote, women could not own property, and blacks were considered property. After 200 years of enlightenment, we have realized that gender and race are inappropriate distinctions for determining who has individual rights. Anytime Gov gives you permission they let you know that you have permission by giving you a permit or a license. If you have a marriage license, what permission do you have to do now that you did not have permission to do before, who gave you that permission, and who gave them the authority to give you that permission in the first place?”

Michael Badnarik (1954) American software engineer

Source: Libertarian Party National Convention (2004)

Women , Men , Marriage

“In human history it seems that the idea of using a pictograph in the new function of representing sound may have occurred only three times: once in Mesopotamia, perhaps by the Sumerians, once in China, apparently by the Chinese themselves, and once in Central America, by the Mayas. (Conceivably it was invented only once, but there is no evidence that the Chinese or the Mayas acquired the idea from elsewhere.) The idea that was independently conceived by these three peoples was taken over, as were at times even the symbols themselves, though often in a highly modified form, by others who made adaptations to fit a host of totally different languages. One of the major adaptations, generally attributed to the Greeks, was the narrowing of sound representation from syllabic representation to phonemic representation (Gelb 1963; Trager 1974), after an earlier stage of mixed pictographic and syllabic writing (Chadwick 1967).”

John DeFrancis book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy

The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984, p. 139) http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html
The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984)

People , History , Idea , Time

“I believe in the restoration of an independent Scotland. Others in this chamber take a different view. I welcome that debate and the national conversation to follow. The challenge for all of us is to have that conversation with dignity, with respect and with substance.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Third Session of Parliament (June 30, 2007)

“Trump owes his success in part to the fact that he ran for president in an environment that favored change over the status quo. But his luck or genius goes beyond that. It has long been noted that the conditions have existed for an independent candidate to run a serious campaign for president.”

Dan Balz (1946) American journalist

Donald Trump, America’s first independent president (November 19, 2016)

Change , Success , Parting

“And what have our unions done? What do they aim to do? To improve the standard of life, to uproot ignorance and foster education, to instill character, manhood and independent spirit among our people; to bring about a recognition of the interdependence of man upon his fellow man. We aim to establish a normal work-day, to take the children from the factory and workshop and give them the opportunity of the school and the play-ground. In a word, our unions strive to lighten toil, educate their members, make their homes more cheerful, and in every way contribute an earnest effort toward making life the better worth living.”

Samuel Gompers (1850–1924) American Labor Leader[AFL]

Gompers, Samuel. "Gompers Speaks for Labor." McClure's Magazine, February 1912, p. 376 http://books.google.com/books?id=3Su0lykF-OMC&dq=%22And%20what%20have%20our%20unions%20done%3F%20What%20do%20they%20aim%20to%20do%3F%22&pg=PA376#v=onepage&q=%22And%20what%20have%20our%20unions%20done?%20What%20do%20they%20aim%20to%20do?%22&f=false

Life , Children , People , Education

“What are novels? What is the secret of the charm of every romance that ever was written? The first thing in a good novel is to place the persons together in circumstances which naturally call out the high feelings and thoughts of the character, which afford food for sympathy between them on these points — romantic events they are called. The second is that the heroine has generally no family ties (almost invariably no mother), or, if she has, these do not interfere with her entire independence.
These two things constitute the main charm of reading novels.”

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing

Cassandra (1860)

Secret , Family , Food , Feeling

“They did not deny the existence of authority. They recognized it and undertook to abide by it, and through obedience to it secure their freedom. They made their appeal and rested their cause not merely upon earthly authority, but in the very first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence asserted that they proposed 'to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them.' And as they closed that noble document in which they submitted their claims to the opinions of mankind they again revealed what they believed to be the ultimate source of authority by stating that they were also 'appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of' their 'intentions.'.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Authority and Religious Liberty (1924)

God , World , Law , Nature

“There is no meaning to space that is independent of the relationships among real things of the world. …Space is nothing apart from the things that exist. …If we take out all the words we are not left with an empty sentence, we are left with nothing.”

Lee Smolin book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity

Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000)

World

“I valued my independence from an early age and was always something of a individualist … Well, a show-off anyway.”

Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884–1980) American writer and prominent socialite

As quoted in "The Doyenne of the Drawing Room" in The New York Times (23 August 1981) http://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/23/books/the-doyenne-of-the-drawing-room.html?sec=&pagewanted=all.

Age