Quotes about independent
page 13

Michael Bloomberg photo

“I was elected to be independent. I was elected because I owed no political debts. I was elected to “do the job,” and not to spend my first four years in office campaigning. I’ve kept that promise -- and that’s why we face the future with renewed optimism.”

Michael Bloomberg (1942) American businessman and politician, former mayor of New York City

http://www.gothamgazette.com/searchlight/2004.state.of.city.bloomberg.shtml
Why He Was Elected Mayor

Frances Kellor photo
Will Eisner photo
Kwame Nkrumah photo

“Capitalism is too complicated a system for a newly independent nation. Hence the need for a socialistic society.”

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

The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (1957), p. x.

Nathanael Greene photo
William Lloyd Garrison photo
Zhang Zhijun photo

“China will not allow those Taiwanese investors that advocate Taiwan independence to make money here (in Mainland China).”

Zhang Zhijun (1953) Chinese politician

Zhang Zhijun (2016) cited in " China closes door on independence-espousing firms http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2016/12/03/2003660482" on Taipei Times, 3 December 2016.

Alex Salmond photo
Grady Booch photo

“Model Driven Architecture is a style of enterprise application development and integration, based on using automated tools to build system independent models and transform them into efficient implementations.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Attributed to Grady Booch in: Tarek M. Sobh (2008) Advances in Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering. p. 457

Paul Robeson photo
Alex Salmond photo

“I don't stand before you as the First Minister of an independent Scotland - that must wait for another day perhaps.”

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

Scotland and Northern Ireland (June 18, 2007)

H.L. Mencken photo
Anna Yesipova photo
John Marshall photo
William Jones photo

“The fundamental tenet of the Védántí school, to which in a more modern age the incomparable Sancara was a firm and illustrious adherent, consisted, not in denying the existence of matter, that is, of solidity, impenetrability, and extended figure (to deny which would be lunacy), but, in correcting the popular notion of it, and in contending, that it has no essence independent of mental perception, that existence and perceptibility are convertible terms, that external appearances and sensations are illusory, and would vanish into nothing if the divine energy, which alone sustains them, were suspended but for a moment; an opinion which Epicharmus and Plato seem to have adopted, and which has been maintained in the present century with great elegance, but with little publick applause; partly because it has been misunderstood, and partly because it has been misapplied by the false reasoning of some unpopular writers, who are said to have disbelieved in the moral attributes of God, whose omnipresence, wisdom, and goodness are the basis of the Indian philosophy… [N]othing can be farther removed from impiety than a system wholly built on the purest devotion; and the inexpressible difficulty, which any man, who shall make the attempt, will assuredly find in giving a satisfactory definition of material substance, must induce us to deliberate with coolness, before we censure the learned and pious restorer of the ancient Véda; though we cannot but admit, that, if the common opinions of mankind be the criterion of philosophical truth, we must adhere to the system of Gotama, which the Bráhmens of this province almost universally follow.”

William Jones (1746–1794) Anglo-Welsh philologist and scholar of ancient India

II. pp. 238-239
"On the Philosophy of the Asiatics" (1794)

János Esterházy photo

“Independent Slovakia came into being one year ago. […] More has been gained than the late, great leader of the Slovak nation, Father Hlinka would have dared to dream. The Slovak people have accomplished more than they ever hoped in their long struggle to free themselves from the Czech yoke.”

János Esterházy (1901–1957) Czechoslovak member of Czechoslovak national parliament, russian nation politician and hungary nation polit…

About establishment of the First Slovak Republic (1939-1945), 1940.
Relationship to Czechoslovakia
Source: Gábor Szent-Ivány: Count János Esterházy, Danubian Press, 1989

John F. Kennedy photo

“In the lives of nations some occasions possess a unique character. Surely this, the opening of the Independent Fiji's first Parliament, is one of them.”

Robert Sidney Foster (1913–2005) British Colonial governor

Address opening Fiji's first parliamentary session as an independent nation (excerpts)

George Macartney photo
Lien Chan photo

“Both of our (Mainland China and Taiwan) legal and governance systems were built following the 'one China' structure. That is why cross-strait relations are not state-to-state relations and there is no room for Taiwanese independence.”

Lien Chan (1936) former Chairman of the Kuomintang

Source: Lien Chan (2018) cited in " Lien Chan says no room for Taiwanese independence in talks with Xi Jinping http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2018/07/14/2003696647" on Taipei Times, 14 July 2018

“What language did these Macedones speak? The name itself is Greek in root and in ethnic termination. It probably means highlanders, and it is comparable to Greek tribal names such as `Orestai' and `Oreitai', meaning 'mountain-men'. A reputedly earlier variant, `Maketai', has the same root, which means `high', as in the Greek adjective makednos or the noun mekos. The genealogy of eponymous ancestors which Hesiod recorded […] has a bearing on the question of Greek speech. First, Hesiod made Macedon a brother of Magnes; as we know from inscriptions that the Magnetes spoke the Aeolic dialect of the Greek language, we have a predisposition to suppose that the Macedones spoke the Aeolic dialect. Secondly, Hesiod made Macedon and Magnes first cousins of Hellen's three sons - Dorus, Xouthus, and Aeolus-who were the founders of three dialects of Greek speech, namely Doric, Ionic, and Aeolic. Hesiod would not have recorded this relationship, unless he had believed, probably in the seventh century, that the Macedones were a Greek speaking people. The next evidence comes from Persia. At the turn of the sixth century the Persians described the tribute-paying peoples of their province in Europe, and one of them was the `yauna takabara', which meant `Greeks wearing the hat'. There were Greeks in Greek city-states here and there in the province, but they were of various origins and not distinguished by a common hat. However, the Macedonians wore a distinctive hat, the kausia. We conclude that the Persians believed the Macedonians to be speakers of Greek. Finally, in the latter part of the fifth century a Greek historian, Hellanicus, visited Macedonia and modified Hesiod's genealogy by making Macedon not a cousin, but a son of Aeolus, thus bringing Macedon and his descendants firmly into the Aeolic branch of the Greek-speaking family. Hesiod, Persia, and Hellanicus had no motive for making a false statement about the language of the Macedonians, who were then an obscure and not a powerful people. Their independent testimonies should be accepted as conclusive.”

N. G. L. Hammond (1907–2001) British classical scholar

"The Macedonian State" p.12-13)

Timo K. Mukka photo
Robert N. Proctor photo

“Replace (Taiwan) independence with gradual unification, strengthen China and work towards unification.”

Ma Ho-ling (1920–2005) father of Ma Ying-jeou

Ma Ho-ling (2005) cited in " DPP and KMT Trade Stupidities http://michaelturton.blogspot.com/2007/11/dpp-and-kmt-trade-stupidities.html" on The View from Taiwan, 1 November 2007

Winston S. Churchill photo
Bill Clinton photo

“The last time I checked, the Constitution said, 'of the people, by the people and for the people.' That's what the Declaration of Independence says.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

From a campaign speech given in California. Quoted in Investor's Business Daily October 25, 1996
1990s

R. H. Tawney photo

“The foundation of democracy is the sense of spiritual independence which nerves the individual to stand alone against the powers of this world.”

R. H. Tawney (1880–1962) English philosopher

Part IV, Ch. 4
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

Haile Selassie photo
George W. Bush photo
Hans Reichenbach photo

“It is remarkable that this generalization of plane geometry to surface geometry is identical with that generalization of geometry which originated from the analysis of the axiom of parallels. …the construction of non-Euclidean geometries could have been equally well based upon the elimination of other axioms. It was perhaps due to an intuitive feeling for theoretical fruitfulness that the criticism always centered around the axiom of parallels. For in this way the axiomatic basis was created for that extension of geometry in which the metric appears as an independent variable. Once the significance of the metric as the characteristic feature of the plane has been recognized from the viewpoint of Gauss' plane theory, it is easy to point out, conversely, its connection with the axiom of parallels. The property of the straight line as being the shortest connection between two points can be transferred to curved surfaces, and leads to the concept of straightest line; on the surface of the sphere the great circles play the role of the shortest line of connection… analogous to that of the straight line on the plane. Yet while the great circles as "straight lines" share the most important property with those of the plane, they are distinct from the latter with respect to the axiom of the parallels: all great circles of the sphere intersect and therefore there are no parallels among these "straight lines". …If this idea is carried through, and all axioms are formulated on the understanding that by "straight lines" are meant the great circles of the sphere and by "plane" is meant the surface of the sphere, it turns out that this system of elements satisfies the system of axioms within two dimensions which is nearly identical in all of it statements with the axiomatic system of Euclidean geometry; the only exception is the formulation of the axiom of the parallels.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The geometry of the spherical surface can be viewed as the realization of a two-dimensional non-Euclidean geometry: the denial of the axiom of the parallels singles out that generalization of geometry which occurs in the transition from the plane to the curve surface.
The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

John S. Mosby photo
Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo
Kim Jong-il photo
Adolf A. Berle photo
James Monroe photo
Rufus Choate photo

“Its constitution the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence.”

Rufus Choate (1799–1859) American politician

Letter to the Maine Whig Committee (1856). Six years earlier, Choate gave a lecture in Providence which was reviewed by Franklin J. Dickman in the Journal of December 14, 1849. Unless Choate used the words "glittering generalities", and Dickman made reference to them, it would seem as if Dickman must have the credit of originating the catchword. Dickman wrote: "We fear that the glittering generalities of the speaker have left an impression more delightful than permanent". Reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

David Berg photo

“It speaks for the spirit animating the rulers of independent India that even the roads named after Curzon and Hastings in New Delhi have been renamed.”

Girilal Jain (1924–1993) Indian journalist

page 38, The Hindu Phenomenon, ISBN 81-86112-32-4.
On Peoples, On narrowmindedness of rulers of Independent India

Bill Gates photo
Seneca the Younger photo

“A great step towards independence is a good-humored stomach, one that is willing to endure rough treatment.”
Magna pars libertatis est bene moratus venter et contumeliae patiens.

Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist

Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter CXXIII: On the conflict between pleasure and virtue, Line 3.

Ani DiFranco photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Ossip Zadkine photo
Elbridge G. Spaulding photo

“Why do serious scholars persist in believing in the Aryan invasions?… Why is this sort of thing attractive? Who finds it attractive? Why has the development of early Sanskrit come to be so dogmatically associated with an Aryan invasion?… Where the Indo-European philologists are concerned, the invasion argument is tied in with their assumption that if a particular language is identified as having been used in a particular locality at a particular time, no attention need be paid to what was there before; the slate is wiped clean. Obviously, the easiest way to imagine this happening in real life is to have a military conquest that obliterates the previously existing population! The details of the theory fit in with this racist framework… Because of their commitment to a unilineal segmentary history of language development that needed to be mapped onto the ground, the philologists took it for granted that proto-Indo-Iranian was a language that had originated outside either India or Iran. Hence it followed that the text of the Rig Veda was in a language that was actually spoken by those who introduced this earliest form of Sanskrit into India. From this we derived the myth of the Aryan invasions. QED. The origin myth of British colonial imperialism helped the elite administrators in the Indian Civil Service to see themselves as bringing `pure' civilization to a country in which civilization of the most sophisticated (but `morally corrupt') kind was already nearly 6,000 years old. Here I will only remark that the hold of this myth on the British middle-class imagination is so strong that even today, 44 years after the death of Hitler and 43 years after the creation of an independent India and independent Pakistan, the Aryan invasions of the second millennium BC are still treated as if they were an established fact of history.”

Edmund Leach (1910–1989) British anthropologist

Sir Edmund Leach. "Aryan invasions over four millennia. In Culture through Time, Anthropological Approaches, edited by E. Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990, pp. 227-245.

Kátya Chamma photo

“The Internet is the great highway of the modern communication, free and independent.”

Kátya Chamma (1961) Brazilian singer and writer

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

Georges Braque photo
Robert Mugabe photo

“I am still the Hitler of the time. This Hitler has only one objective, justice for his own people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people, and their right to their resources. If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold. Ten times, that is what we stand for.”

Robert Mugabe (1924–2019) former President of Zimbabwe

Speech at the state funeral of a Cabinet minister, March 2003. Quoted in ['Hitler' Mugabe launches revenge terror attacks, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/zimbabwe/1425727/Hitler-Mugabe-launches-revenge-terror-attacks.html, Peta, Thornycroft, Daily Telegraph, London, 26 March 2003, 5 August 2013]
2000s, 2000-2004

Pope Benedict XVI photo
Frits Bolkestein photo
Feng Shih-kuan photo

“I would not support Taiwan independence.”

Feng Shih-kuan (1945) Taiwanese politician

Feng Shih-kuan (2016) cited in " I would not support Taiwan independence: Taiwan defence minister http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/i-would-not-support-taiwan-independence-taiwan-defence-minister" on The Straits Time, 24 May 2016

Calvin Coolidge photo
Peter Singer photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Muhammad Ali Jinnah photo

“Pakistan not only means freedom and independence but Muslims ideology which has to be preserved which has come to us a precious gift and treasure and which we hope, others will share with us.”

Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948) Founder and 1st Governor General of Pakistan

Address to Frontier Muslim Students Federation (18 June 1945)

Robert Hunter (author) photo
Anu Partanen photo
John Desmond Bernal photo
Eric Foner photo

“The more fiercely the Confederacy fought for its independence, the more bitterly divided it became.”

Eric Foner (1943) American historian

1980s, The South's Inner Civil War (1989)

Keith Ferrazzi photo
Shankar Dayal Sharma photo

“Independent of the relative intrinsic merits of the w:By-lawordinances proposed, promulgating these ordinances would appear to be inappropriate and contrary to the canons of constitutional propriety in view of circumstances existing at this particular juncture.”

Shankar Dayal Sharma (1918–1999) Indian politician

When ordinances were proposed to be introduced with the approval of the President on issues of shortening the poll campaign from three weeks to two weeks, and providing for reservation for Dalit Christians.
Source: Shubhankar Dam Presidential Legislation in India: The Law and Practice of Ordinances http://books.google.co.in/books?id=RvxGAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA218, Cambridge University Press, 16 December 2013, p. 218

Alexis De Tocqueville photo
Jerry Coyne photo

“When facing “scientific” arguments for God like these, ask yourself three questions. First, what’s more likely: that these are puzzles only because we refuse to see God as an answer, or simply because science hasn’t yet provided a naturalistic answer? In other words, is the religious explanation so compelling that we can tell scientists to stop working on the evolution and mechanics of consciousness, or on the origin of life, because there can never be a naturalistic explanation? Given the remarkable ability of science to solve problems once considered intractable, and the number of scientific phenomena that weren’t even known a hundred years ago, it’s probably more judicious to admit ignorance than to tout divinity.
Second, if invoking God seems more appealing than admitting scientific ignorance, ask yourself if religious explanations do anything more than rationalize our ignorance. That is, does the God hypothesis provide independent and novel predictions or clarify things once seen as puzzling—as truly scientific hypotheses do? Or are religious explanations simply stop-gaps that lead nowhere?…Does invoking God to explain the fine-tuning of the universe explain anything else about the universe? If not, then that brand of natural theology isn’t really science, but special pleading.
Finally, even if you attribute scientifically unexplained phenomena to God, ask yourself if the explanation gives evidence for your God—the God who undergirds your religion and your morality. If we do find evidence for, say, a supernatural origin of morality, can it be ascribed to the Christian God, or to Allah, Brahma, or any one god among the thousands worshipped on Earth? I’ve never seen advocates of natural theology address this question.”

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), pp. 156-157

Pope Benedict XVI photo

“The mysterious name of God, revealed from the burning bush, a name which separates this God from all other divinities with their many names and simply asserts being, "I am", already presents a challenge to the notion of myth, to which Socrates' attempt to vanquish and transcend myth stands in close analogy. Within the Old Testament, the process which started at the burning bush came to new maturity at the time of the Exile, when the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: "I am". This new understanding of God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which finds stark expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands (cf. Ps 115). Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature. Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria - the Septuagint - is more than a simple (and in that sense really less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act "with logos" is contrary to God's nature.”

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

2006, Faith, Reason and the University — Memories and Reflections (2006)

George Henry Thomas photo

“On the Indian front, [the Hindutva movement] should spearhead the revival, rejuvenation and resurgence of Hinduism, which includes not only religious, spiritual and cultural practices springing from Vedic or Sanskritic sources, but from all other Indian sources independently of these: the practices of the Andaman islanders and the (pre-Christian) Nagas are as Hindu in the territorial sense, and Sanâtana in the spiritual sense, as classical Sanskritic Hinduism. (…) A true Hindutvavadi should feel a pang of pain, and a desire to take positive action, not only when he hears that the percentage of Hindus in the Indian population is falling due to a coordination of various factors, or that Hindus are being discriminated against in almost every respect, but also when he hears that the Andamanese races and languages are becoming extinct; that vast tracts of forests, millions of years old, are being wiped out forever; that ancient and mediaeval Hindu architectural monuments are being vandalised, looted or fatally neglected; that priceless ancient documents are being destroyed or left to rot and decay; that innumerable forms of arts and handicrafts, architectural styles, plant and animal species, musical forms and musical instruments, etc. are becoming extinct; that our sacred rivers and environment are being irreversibly polluted and destroyed…”

Shrikant Talageri (1958) Indian author

Talageri in S.R. Goel (ed.): Time for Stock-Taking, p.227-228.

Lewis Mumford photo
Georg Cantor photo
Mukesh Ambani photo
Chen Shui-bian photo

“I just cannot declare the independency of Taiwan. Even if Lee Teng-hui was the president now, he could also not do it! (During Sanlih News Channel interview, 2005)”

Chen Shui-bian (1950) Taiwanese politician

Pet Phrases, Regarding to setting up the new constitution and independence of Taiwan

Alexander H. Stephens photo

“In point of material wealth and resources, we are greatly in advance of them. The taxable property of the Confederate States cannot be less than twenty-two hundred millions of dollars! This, I think I venture but little in saying, may be considered as five times more than the colonies possessed at the time they achieved their independence. Georgia, alone, possessed last year, according to the report of our comptroller-general, six hundred and seventy-two millions of taxable property. The debts of the seven confederate States sum up in the aggregate less than eighteen millions, while the existing debts of the other of the late United States sum up in the aggregate the enormous amount of one hundred and seventy-four millions of dollars. This is without taking into account the heavy city debts, corporation debts, and railroad debts, which press, and will continue to press, as a heavy incubus upon the resources of those States. These debts, added to others, make a sum total not much under five hundred millions of dollars. With such an area of territory as we have-with such an amount of population-with a climate and soil unsurpassed by any on the face of the earth-with such resources already at our command-with productions which control the commerce of the world-who can entertain any apprehensions as to our ability to succeed, whether others join us or not?”

Alexander H. Stephens (1812–1883) Vice President of the Confederate States (in office from 1861 to 1865)

The Cornerstone Speech (1861)

Katharine McPhee photo
Henri of Luxembourg photo

“Luxembourg found in the United Nations and multilateralism in general the ideal framework to flourish as an independent, sovereign state.”

Henri of Luxembourg (1955) Grand Duke (head of state) of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

Address to the United Nations (26 September 2012)
Luxembourg

Thomas Szasz photo
Daniel Dennett photo

“Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry in as many minds as possible. This competition is the major selective force in the memosphere, and, just as in the biosphere, the challenge has been met with great ingenuity. For instance, whatever virtues (from our perspective) the following memes have, they have in common the property of having phenotypic expressions that tend to make their own replication more likely by disabling or preempting the environmental forces that would tend to extinguish them: the meme for faith, which discourages the exercise of the sort of critical judgment that might decide that the idea of faith was, all things considered a dangerous idea; the meme for tolerance or free speech; the meme of including in a chain letter a warning about the terrible fates of those who have broken the chain in the past; the conspiracy theory meme, which has a built-in response to the objection that there is no good evidence of a conspiracy: "Of course not — that's how powerful the conspiracy is!" Some of these memes are "good" perhaps and others "bad"; what they have in common is a phenotypic effect that systematically tends to disable the selective forces arrayed against them. Other things being equal, population memetics predicts that conspiracy theory memes will persist quite independently of their truth, and the meme for faith is apt to secure its own survival, and that of the religious memes that ride piggyback on it, in even the most rationalistic environments. Indeed, the meme for faith exhibits frequency-dependent fitness: it flourishes best when it is outnumbered by rationalistic memes; in an environment with few skeptics, the meme for faith tends to fade from disuse.”

Consciousness Explained (1991)

Henry D. Moyle photo

“This great principle does not deny to the needy nor to the poor the assistance they should have. The wholly incapacitated, the aged, the sickly are cared for with all tenderness, but every able-bodied person is enjoined to do his utmost for himself to avoid dependence, if his own efforts can make such a course possible; to look upon adversity as temporary; to combine his faith in his own ability with honest toil; to rehabilitate himself and his family to a position of independence; in every case to minimize the need for help and to supplement any help given with his own best efforts. We believe [that] seldom [do circumstances arise in which] men of rigorous faith, genuine courage, and unfaltering determination, with the love of independence burning in their hearts, and pride in their own accomplishments, cannot surmount the obstacles that lie in their paths. We know that through humble, prayerful, industrious, God-fearing lives, a faith can be developed within us by the strength of which we can call down the blessings of a kind and merciful Heavenly Father and literally see our handicaps vanish and our independence and freedom established and maintained.”

Henry D. Moyle (1889–1963) Member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles

Conference Report, Apr. 1948, p. 5, and quoted in The Celestial Nature of Self-reliance http://lds.org/portal/site/LDSOrg/menuitem.b12f9d18fae655bb69095bd3e44916a0/?vgnextoid=2354fccf2b7db010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD&locale=0&sourceId=0b3ac5e8b4b6b010VgnVCM1000004d82620a____&hideNav=1|
Quotes as an apostle

“An earlier version of this volume was originally contracted for and produced as a monograph by Warner Modular Communications, Inc., a subsidiary member of the Warner communications and entertainment conglomerate. The publishing house had run a relatively independent operation up to the time of the controversy over this document. The editors and publisher were enthusiastic about the monograph and committed themselves to put it out quickly and to promote it with vigor. But just prior to publication, in the fall of 1973, officials of the parent company got wind of it, looked at it, and were horrified by its “unpatriotic” contents. Mr. William Sarnoff, a high officer of the parent company, for example, was deeply pained by our statement on page 7 of the original that the “leadership in the United States, as a result of its dominant position and wide-ranging counter-revolutionary efforts, has been the single most important instigator, administrator, and moral and material sustainer of serious bloodbaths in the years that followed World War II.” So pained were Sarnoff and his business associates, in fact, that they were quite prepared to violate a contractual obligation in order to assure that no such material would see the light of day. […] they decided to close down the publishing house […]. The history of the suppressed monograph is an authentic instance of private censorship of ideas per se. The uniqueness of the episode lies only in the manner of suppression. Usually, private intervention in the book market is anticipatory, with regrets that the manuscript is unacceptable, perhaps “unmarketable.””

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Sometimes the latter contention is only an excuse for unwillingness to market, although it may sometimes reflect an accurate assessment of how the media and journals will receive books that are strongly critical of the established order.
Source: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, pp. xiv-xvii.

Émile Durkheim photo
Henri Poincaré photo

“Does the harmony the human intelligence thinks it discovers in nature exist outside of this intelligence? No, beyond doubt, a reality completely independent of the mind which conceives it, sees or feels it, is an impossibility.”

Cette harmonie que l’intelligence humaine croit découvrir dans la nature, existe-t-elle en dehors de cette intelligence ? Non, sans doute, une réalité complètement indépendante de l’esprit qui la conçoit, la voit ou la sent, c’est une impossibilité.
Introduction, p. 14
The Value of Science (1905)

Glen Cook photo
Temple Grandin photo
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi photo
Rensis Likert photo
Daniel Webster photo

“It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment,—Independence now and Independence forever.”

Daniel Webster (1782–1852) Leading American senator and statesman. January 18, 1782 – October 24, 1852. Served as the Secretary of Sta…

Source: Discourse in Commemoration of Adams and Jefferson (1826), p. 136

Philippe of Belgium photo

“I swear to abide by the constitution and laws of the Belgian people, to maintain national independence and the integrity of the land.”

Philippe of Belgium (1960) seventh king of the Belgians

Divided Belgium has a new King Philippe http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/belgium/10193295/Divided-Belgium-has-a-new-King-Philippe.html, Telegraph (July 21, 2013)

Roger Garrison photo

“Except for Marxian theories, nearly all modern theories of the business cycle have essential elements that trace back to Knut Wicksell's turn-of-the-century writings on interest and prices. Austrians, New Classicists, Monetarists, and even Keynesians can legitimately claim a kinship on this basis. Accordingly, the recognition, that both the Austrians and the New Classicists have a Swedish ancestry does not translate into a meaningful claim that the two schools are essentially similar. To the contrary, identifying their particular relationships to Wicksellian ideas, like comparing the two formally similar business-cycle theories themselves, reveals more differences than similarities. … [T]o establish the essential difference between the Austrians and the New Classicists, it needs to be added that the focus of the Austrian theory is on the actual market process that translates the monetary cause into the real phenomena and hence on the institutional setting in which this process plays itself out.The New Classicists deliberately abstract from institutional considerations and specifically deny, on the basis of empirical evidence, that the interest rate plays a significant role in cyclical fluctuations (Lucas 1981, p. 237 151–1). Thus, Wicksell's Interest and Prices is at best only half relevant to EBCT. … Taking the Wicksellian metaphor as their cue, the New Classicists are led away from the pre-eminent Austrian concern about the actual market process that transforms cause into effect and towards the belief that a full specification of the economy's structure, which is possible only in the context of an artificial economy, can shed light on an effect whose nature is fundamentally independent of the cause.”

Roger Garrison (1944) American economist

Pages 98–99.
"New Classical and Old Austrian Economics", 1991

“The Republican Party is part of a larger American discussion about the tension between equality of opportunity and protection of property, which is sort of the point of the book, that this is a much larger American discussion, and Republicans began under Lincoln with the attempt to turn the discrepancy between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution into, at the time, a modern-day political solution. The Republican Party would manage, they hoped, to turn the principle of the Declaration of Independence, that everybody should have equality of opportunity, into a political reality. The Declaration of Independence was, of course, a set of principles; it wasn't any kind of law or codification of those principles. The Constitution went ahead and codified that the central idea of America was the protection of property, so the Republicans began with the idea that they would be the political arm of the Declaration of Independence's equality of opportunity. Throughout their history, three times now, they have swung from that pole through a sort of racist and xenophobic backlash against that principle, tied themselves to big business, and come out protecting the other American principle, which is the protection of property. That tension between equality of opportunity and the protection of property, both of which are central tenets of America, played out in the Republican Party.”

Heather Cox Richardson American historian

as quoted in "'Not the true Republican Party': How the party of Lincoln ended up with Ted Cruz" http://www.salon.com/2014/09/29/not_the_true_republican_party_how_the_party_of_lincoln_ended_up_with_ted_cruz/ (29 September 2014), by Elias Isquith, Salon

Kevin Kelly photo

“Hereditary information does not exist independently of its embodiment.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)