Quotes about instrumentation (988 quotes, page 4)

“Although I cannot accuse myself of being remarkably unstable, I do not pretend that I have never altered my opinion both in respect to men and things. Indeed, I have been very much modified both in feeling and opinion within the last fourteen years. When I escaped from slavery, and was introduced to the Garrisonians, I adopted very many of their opinions, and defended them just as long as I deemed them true. I was young, had read but little, and naturally took some things on trust. Subsequent experience and reading have led me to examine for myself. This had brought me to other conclusions. When I was a child, I thought and spoke as a child. But the question is not as to what were my opinions fourteen years ago, but what they are now. If I am right now, it really does not matter what I was fourteen years ago. My position now is one of reform, not of revolution. I would act for the abolition of slavery through the Government — not over its ruins. If slaveholders have ruled the American Government for the last fifty years, let the anti-slavery men rule the nation for the next fifty years. If the South has made the Constitution bend to the purposes of slavery, let the North now make that instrument bend to the cause of freedom and justice. If 350,000 slaveholders have, by devoting their energies to that single end, been able to make slavery the vital and animating spirit of the American Confederacy for the last 72 years, now let the freemen of the North, who have the power in their own hands, and who can make the American Government just what they think fit, resolve to blot out for ever the foul and haggard crime, which is the blight and mildew, the curse and the disgrace of the whole United States.”

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

1860s, The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery? (1860)

Men , Justice , Feeling , Question

“Stakeholder theory regards the firm as a nexus of stakeholders, commonly defined as groups or individuals who can affect or are affected by the achievement of the firm's goals (Freeman 1984). Depending on the ground for examining a firm's stakeholders, we can differentiate three approaches (Jones 1995):
The descriptive approach proposes an examination of firm-stakeholder relationships to provide an understanding of how the firm deals with different stakeholders.
The normative approach proposes an examination of firm-stakeholder relationships to discem stakeholders' interests and offer guidance on how to account for them using moral or philosophical principles.
The instrumental approach also proposes an examination of firm-stakeholder relationships to discem stakeholders' interests. However, in contrast to the normative approach, the instrumental approach involves the organizational performance consequences that stem from accounting for these interests.
The distinctive aspect of the instrumental approach to stakeholder theory is that it explicitly suggests linking stakeholder-directed activities (means) to corporate performance outcomes (ends) (Donaldson and Preston 1995; Freeman 1999).”

Christian Homburg (1962) German academic

Source: "Corporate social responsibility in business-to-business markets", 2013, p. 56; On Instrumental stakeholder theory

Understanding , Dependency

“The point of following Jesus isn't simply so that we can be sure of going to a better place than than this after we die. Our future beyond death is enormously important, but the nature of the Christian hope is such that it plays back into the present life. We're called, here and now, to be instruments of God's new creation, the world-put-to-rights which has already been launched by Jesus and of which Jesus's followers are supposed to be not simply beneficiaries but also agents.”

N.T. Wright (1948) Anglican bishop

Source: Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (2006), p. xi

Life , Death , God , World

“Number is therefore the most primitive instrument of bringing an unconscious awareness of order into consciousness; from it you can best tap the unconscious constellation. This probably why it is used in most mantic methods.”

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

Creation Myths (1995) 'Chains' (Genealogies), p. 326 Shambhala ISBN 0-87773-528-X

“Musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts we have found. …Music predates agriculture in the history of our species.”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Music , History

“I have pursued this intellectual program by building a radical alternative in social theory to Marxism, by recasting legal thought as an instrument of the institutional imagination, by proposing particular institutional alternatives for the organization of the economy and the state, and by developing a philosophical conception of nature and mankind within which history is open, novelty is possible, and the divinization of humanity counts for more than the humanization of society.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Left Alternative

Source: The Left Alternative (2009), p. 187-8

Imagination , History , Nature

“The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism.”

Carl Schmitt book The Concept of the Political

The Concept of the Political (1927)

“I have recently returned from an expedition to scientific societies of the West. Their members exhibited intense interest in delicate instruments of my invention which demonstrate the indivisible unity of all life. The Bose crescograph has the enormity of ten million magnifications. The microscope enlarges only a few thousand times; yet it brought vital impetus to biological science. The crescograph opens incalculable vistas.”

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937) Bengali polymath, physicist, biologist, botanist and archaeologist

India's Great Scientist, J.C. Bose

Life , Science , Time

“When played at the right sound level, which is quite high and exciting, the tones in this music will cause your ears to act as neurophonic instruments that emit sounds that will seem to be issuing directly from your head.”

Maryanne Amacher (1938–2009) Composer and installation artist

Amacher, 1999, cited in: Franziska Schroeder (2006). Bodily instruments and instrumental bodies. Vol. 25. p. 74:
Description of how "ears act as instruments and emit sounds as well as receive them (Amacher, 1999)... [and] the way these 'otoacoustic emissions' might function."

Music

“India is free but she has not achieved unity, only a fissured and broken freedom…. The old communal division into Hindu and Muslim seems to have hardened into the figure of a permanent political division of the country. It is to be hoped that the Congress and the nation will not accept the settled fact as for ever settled or as anything more than a temporary expedient. For if it lasts, India may be seriously weakened, even crippled: civil strife may remain always possible, possible even a new invasion and foreign conquest. The partition of the country must go,'it is to be hoped by a slackening of tension, by a progressive understanding of the need of peace and concord, by the constant necessity of common and concerted action, even of an instrument of union for that purpose. In this way unity may come about under whatever form'the exact form may have a pragmatic but not a fundamental importance. But by whatever means, the division must and will go. For without it the destiny of India might be seriously impaired and even frustrated. But that must not be.”

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

August 15, 1947 (A passage from Sri Aurobindo's message on the occasion of India's independence. August 15 is also Sri Aurobindo's own birthday.)
India's Rebirth

Peace , Hope , Way , Communication

“[ Technology is] the instrumentality for accessing and using free energies in human societies for human and social purposes.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Laszlo (1992) "Information Technology and Social Change: An Evolutionary Systems Analysis". Behavioral Science 37: pp.237-249; As cited in: K.L. Dennis (2003, p. 36).

“Egoism is the identification of the power that knows with the instruments of knowing.”

Patañjali (-200–-150 BC) ancient Indian scholar(s) of grammar and linguistics, of yoga, of medical treatises

§ 2.6
Yoga Sutras of Patañjali

“With the enactment of the Income Tax Law of 1913, the Federal Government began to apply effectively the widely accepted principle that taxes should be levied in proportion to ability to pay and in proportion to the benefits received. Income was wisely chosen as the measure of benefits and of ability to pay. This was, and still is, a wholesome guide for national policy. It should be retained as the governing principle of Federal taxation. The use of other forms of taxes is often justifiable, particularly for temporary periods; but taxation according to income is the most effective instrument yet devised to obtain just contribution from those best able to bear it and to avoid placing onerous burdens upon the mass of our people.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, Message to Congress on tax revision (1935)

People , Law

“I knew that I had been chosen as God's instrument for the work of the healing of the nation.”

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

Letter from 1938, as quoted in My Father : The True Story (1955) by A. W. Baldwin, pp. 327 - 328
1938

God

“Work, mental or manual, is the means whereby attention is compelled, it is the instrument of all knowledge and virtue, the root whence all excellence springs.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 116

Spring , Knowledge

“The producer and director were developing my story to a mega series. They had shot around 100 episodes after which the ban was imposed. The Muslim fanatics in Bengal, supported by the ruling Trinamool Congress played havoc when the serial was to be aired. The chief minister was instrumental in imposing the ban. It is interesting to see that the same person (Mamata Bangerjee) is now advocating for freedom of expression and calling it super emergency,” “This is sheer double standard….. If some people do not like a representation of art, there are other ways to counter it. I never support violent attack on artistic freedom. I also do not support the trend of issuing fatwa. But, there are politicians, who support or protest on the basis of religion. Why are rules being tweaked for one particular community in Bengal? Why did Mamata Banerjee’s government never allow me to work there, allow my books to be published? Freedom of expression, the most important character of a democracy, is always under attack for vested political interest. Nobody criticises things neutrally,”

Taslima Nasrin (1962) Poet, columnist, novelist

Taslima Nasrin about Mamata, Economic Times https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/didi-tweet-on-padmavati-fuels-taslima-nasreen-fury-over-bengal-gag-on-tv-serial/articleshow/61762771.cms

People , Books , Religion , Art

“The mind must free itself from all kinds of “schools,” religions, sects, beliefs, etc. All those “cages” are obstacles which render the mind incapable of thinking freely. It is necessary for the mind to become free of the illusions of this world and become a fine and marvelous instrument of the Inner Being.”

Samael Aun Weor (1917–1977) Colombian writer

Zodiacal Course

World , School , Religion , Thinking

“There are two types of composers. Like Stravinsky, some always are aware of the instrument that will be playing a given melody. However, other composers do work out the orchestration only after they have finished composing. I'm like Stravinsky. I always write music with specific instruments in mind.”

Akira Ifukube (1914–2006) Japanese composer

As quoted by David Milner, "Akira Ifukube Interview I" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/ifukub.htm, Kaiju Conversations (December 1992)

Music

“The cultivation of science is a luxury of no common kind amid the bustle and vexation of life, and is quite compatible with the most active professional duties. Your education and the example you have had to copy will, I am sure, guard you against those presumptuous and skeptical opinions which scientific knowledge too often engenders. In the ardour of pursuit and under the intoxication of success scientific men are apt to forget that they are the instrument by which Providence is gradually revealing the wonders of creation, and that they ought to exercise their functions with the same humility as those who are engaged in unfolding the mysteries of His revealed will.”

David Brewster (1781–1868) British astronomer and mathematician

In a letter to James David Forbes, as found in Life and letters of James David Forbes, p. 39.

Life , Men , Education , Exercises

“[A]nybody who has served in combat in any way understands that words are weapons. And I'm in a war. The war hasn't stopped. I've always used the books as a blunt instrument.”

Andrew Vachss (1942) American writer and lawyer

Dan Webster interview, originally published June 19, 2005, by the Spokesman Review,

War , Books , Way , Understanding

“Here is a well-known trajectory: You begin with a heartfelt desire to help other people and the conviction, however well or ill founded, that your guild or club or church is the coalition that can best serve to improve the welfare of others. If times are particularly tough, this conditional stewardship — I'm doing what's good for the guild because that will be good for everybody — may be displaced by the narrowest concern for the integrity of the guild itself, and for good reason: if you believe that the institution in question is the best path to goodness, the goal of preserving it for future projects, still unimagined, can be the most rational higher goal you can define. It is a short step from this to losing track of or even forgetting the larger purpose and devoting yourself singlemindedly to furthering the interests of the institution, at whatever costs. A conditional or instrumental allegiance can thus become indistinguishable in practice from a commitment to something "good in itself." A further short step perverts this parochial summum bonum to the more selfish goal of doing whatever it takes to keep yourself at the helm of the institution ("who better than I to lead us to triumph over our adversaries?")We have all seen this happen many times, and may even have caught ourselves in the act of forgetting just why we wanted to be leaders in the first place.”

Daniel Dennett book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Breaking the Spell (2006)

People , Question , Time , Future

“Critique in its many manifestations puts up a common opposition to instrumental rationality, because such a rationality can be linked to control in the human condition in a similar way to the idea of power in the control of the natural world.”

Robert L. Flood (1959) British organizational scientist

Robert L. Flood (1990) Liberating Systems Theory p. 204; as cited in: Trudi Cooper (2003) Critical Management, Critical Systems Theory And System Dynamics http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/ejrot/cmsconference/2003/proceedings/orsystems/Cooper.pdf.

World , Way , Idea , Nature

“So long as a man’s power, that is, his capacity to realize what he has in mind, is bound to the goal, to the work, to the calling, it is, considered in itself, neither good nor evil, it is only a suitable or unsuitable instrument. But as soon as this bond with the goal is broken off or loosened, and the man ceases to think of power as the capacity to do something, but thinks of it as a possession, that is, thinks of power in itself, then his power, being cut off and self-satisfied, is evil; it is power withdrawn from responsibility, power which betrays the spirit, power in itself.”

Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian

Source: Between Man and Man (1965), p. 152

Thinking , Evil

“Anything can be an instrument, Chigurh said. Small things. Things you wouldnt even notice. They pass from hand to hand. People dont pay attention. And then one day there's an accounting. And after that nothing is the same. Well, you say. It's just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it's just a coin. Yes. That's true. Is it?”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005)

People , History , Problem , Parting

“The most precise and complete formulation of the law of higher logic I find in the writing of Plotinus, in his On Intelligible Beauty. I shall quote this passage in the succeeding chapter.
I have called this system of higher logic Tertium Organum because for us it is the third canon — third instrument — of thought after those of Aristotle and Bacon. The first was Organon, the second, Novum Organum. But the third existed earlier than the first.
Man, master of this instrument, of this key, may open the door of the world of causes without fear.”

P. D. Ouspensky book Tertium Organum

Ch. XXI http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/to/to24.htm#page_262
Tertium Organum (1912; 1922)

World , Fear , Law , Beauty

“When a community has sufficiently advanced so that its government begins to take on that of the nature of a republic, the processes of education become even more important, but the method is necessarily reversed. It is all the more necessary under a system of free government that the people should be enlightened, that they should be correctly informed, than it is under an absolute government that they should be ignorant. Under a republic the institutions of learning, while bound by the constitution and laws, are in no way subservient to the government. The principles which they enunciate do not depend for their authority upon whether they square with the wish of the ruling dynasty, but whether they square with the everlasting truth. Under these conditions the press, which had before been made an instrument for concealing or perverting the facts, must be made an instrument for their true representation and their sound and logical interpretation. From the position of a mere organ, constantly bound to servitude, public prints rise to a dignity, not only of independence, but of a great educational and enlightening factor. They attain new powers, which it is almost impossible to measure, and become charged with commensurate responsibilities.”

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

1920s, The Press Under a Free Government (1925)

People , Truth , Education , Law

“You have spoken much today of my self-sacrifice and devotion to my country. I have heard that kind of speech ever since I came out of jail, but I hear it with embarrassment, with something of pain. For I know my weakness, I am a prey to my own faults and backslidings. I was not blind to them before and when they all rose up against me in seclusion, I felt them utterly. I knew them that I the man was a man of weakness, a faulty and imperfect instrument, strong only when a higher strength entered into me. Then I found myself among these young men and in many of them I discovered a mighty courage, a power of self-effacement in comparison with which I was simply nothing. I saw one or two who were not only superior to me in force and character, - very many were that, — but in the promise of that intellectual ability on which I prided myself.”

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

The Uttarpara Address (1909)

Men , Pain , Courage , Strong

“Thy light alone like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

St. 3
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1816)

Life , Truth , Dreams , Music

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Widely attributed to Goethe, but also claimed to be a distortion of a passage by Haim Ginott.
Disputed

Life , People , Mood , Decision

“Scarce a month had elapsed since the law was to have gone into effect before it was clear to the discerning that, for all their professions, most of the "better sort" were not genuine Sons of Liberty at all, but timid sycophants, pliant instruments of despotism, far more intent upon the ruin of Mr. Adams and of America in general than any minister could be shown to be.”

Carl L. Becker (1873–1945) American historian

The Eve of the Revolution (1918)

Law

“A very eminent writer has observed, that "the conversion of the Gentile world, whether we consider the difficulties attending it, the opposition made to it, the wonderful work wrought to accomplish it, or the happy effects and consequences of it, may be considered as a more illustrious evidence of God's power, than even our Saviour's miracles of casting out devils, healing the sick, and raising the dead." Indeed, a miracle said to have been wrought without any attending circumstances to justify such an exertion of divine power, could not easily be rendered credible; and our author's argument proves no more. If it were related, that about 1700 years ago, a man was raised from the dead, without its answering any other end than that of restoring him to life, Iconfess that no degree of evidence could induce me tobelieve it; but if the moral government of God appeared in that event, and there were circumstances attending it which could not be accounted for by any human means, the fact becomes credible. When two extraordinary events are thus connected, the proof of one established the truth of the other. Our author has reasoned upon the fact as standing alone, in which case it would not be easy to disprove some of his reasoning; but the fact should be considered in a moral view - as connected with the establishment of a pure religion, and it then becomes credible. In the proof of any circumstance, we must consider every principle which tends to establish it; whereas our author, by considering the case of a man said to have been raised from the dead, simpli in a physical point of view, without any reference to a moral end, endavours to show that it cannot be rendered credible; and, from such principles, we may admit his conclusions without affecting the credibility of Christianity. The general principle on which he establishes his argument, is not the great foundation upon which the evidence of Christianity rests. He says, "Notestimony can be sufficient to establish a miracle, unless it be of such a kind, that the falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endavours to prove." Now this reasoning, at furthest, can only be admitted in those cases where the fact has nothing but testimony to establish it. But the proofs of Christianity do not rest simply upon the testimony of its first promulgators, and that of those who were affterwards the instruments of communicating it; but they rest principally upon the acknowledged and very extraordinary affects which were produced by the preaching of a few unlearned, obscure persons, who taught "Christ crucified;" and it is upon these indisuptable matters of ffact which we reason; and when the effects are totally unaccountable upon any principle which we can collect from the operation of human means, we must either admit miracles, or admit an effect without an adequate cause. Also, when the proof of any position depends upon arguments drawn from various sources, all concutring to establish its turh, to select some one circumstance, and atrempt to show that that alone is not sufficient to render the fact credible, and thence infer that it is not ture, is a conclusion not to be admitted. But it is thus that our author has endavoured to destroy the credibiliry of Christianity, the evidences of which depend upon a great variety of circumstances and facts which are indisputably true, all cooperating to confirm its truth; but an examination of these falls not whithin the plan here proposed. He rests all his arguments upon the extraordinary nature of the fact, considered alone by itself; for a common fact, with the same evidence, would immediately be admitted. I have endavoured to show, that the extraordinary nature, as much as the mosst common events are necessary to fulfill the usual dispensations of Providence, and therefore the Deity was then direted by the same motive as in a more ordinary case, that of affording us such assitance as our moral condition renders necessary. In the establishment of a pur religion, the proof of its divine origin may require some very extraordinary circumstances which may never afterwards be requisite, and accordingly we find that they have not happened. Here is therefore a perfect concistencty in the operation of the Deity, in his moral government, and not a violation of the laws of nature: Secondly, the fact is immediately connected with others which are indisputably true, and which, without the supossition of the truth of that fact, would be, at least, equally miraculous. Thus I conceive the reasoning of our author to be totally inconclusive; and the argumentss which have been employed to prove the fallacy of his conclusions, appear at the same time, fully to justify our belief in, and prove the moral certainty of, our holy religion.”

Samuel Vince (1749–1821) British mathematician, astronomer and physicist

Source: The Credibility of Christianity Vindicated, p. 27; As quoted in " Book review http://books.google.nl/books?id=52tAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA262," in The British Critic, Volume 12 (1798). F. and C. Rivington. p. 262-263

Life , God , Truth , World

“One thing I learned a long time ago was my fretboard, in terms of all the scales in all the positions…You have to learn it - there are no two ways about it. I shift between positions so easily now that I really don't have to think about them much…I would suggest starting your scale education with the major and minor scales, and after that, diminished, augmented and whole-tone. Then depending on what kind of music you want to play, the modes should be learned. My theory about this kind of thing is that you should learn it all. Once you've learned it you can play whatever you want to play, and I think that your playing will be more advanced, and you'll have a better understanding of the instrument.”

Al Di Meola (1954) guitarist

[Denyer, Ralph, The Guitar Handbook, 2002, 102, 0-679-74275-1]

Education , Music , Way , Understanding

“Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deeds of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day.”

Lewis Mumford book Technics and Civilization

Source: Technics and Civilization (1934), Chapter 6, § 9

People

“Prison officers do not have a 'duty of care' to protect prisoners who harm themselves while taking part in illegal behaviour. With regard to needles in prisons, provision of bleach could also be harmful. Bleach is by nature a corrosive agent and could cause serious injury if thrown into the eyes of a prison officer or fellow prisoner, There is evidence that even the highly caustic phenol used to sterilise dental instruments does not eliminate all HIV viruses - only autoclaving in super-heated steam is fully effective. If government provided bleach fails to sterilise prisoners’ illegal needles adequately, does the government become liable for breach of duty of care?”

Stewart Leggett (1944) Australian politician

HIV/AIDS - Hepatitis B Inquiry (Part II): Dissenting Statement by Mr Stewart Leggett MP (1997)

Nature , Parting

“In the hydraulic and optical part, may be enumerated an over flowing lamp; a simplification of the rules for finding the velocity of running water; remarks on the application of force to hydraulic machines; a mode of letting out air from water pipes; an analysis of the human voice; and some arrangements for solar microscopes, and for other optical instruments of a similar nature.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

Preface
A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (1807)

Nature , Water , Parting

“The well known elevation of the pitch of wind instruments, in the course of playing, sometimes amounting to half a note, is not, as is commonly supposed, owing to any expansion of the instrument, for this should produce a contrary effect, but to the increased warmth of the air in the tube.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

"Outlines of Experiments and Inquiries Respecting Sound and Light" (1800)

“Thenceforth they thought that, rationally concluded, doubt could become an instrument of knowledge.”

Marc Bloch (1886–1944) French historian, medievalist, and historiographer

Knowledge

“If the gospel is to challenge the public life of our society, if Christians are to occupy the "high ground" which they vacated in the noon time of "modernity," it will not be by forming a Christian political party, or by aggressive propaganda campaigns. Once again it has to be said that there can be no going back to the "Constantinian" era. It will only be by movements that begin with the local congregation in which the reality of the new creation is present, known, and experienced, and from which men and women will go into every sector of public life to claim it for Christ, to unmask the illusions which have remained hidden and to expose all areas of public life to the illumination of the gospel. But that will only happen as and when local congregations renounce an introverted concern for their own life, and recognize that they exist for the sake of those who are not members, as sign, instrument, and foretaste of God's redeeming grace for the whole life of society.”

Lesslie Newbigin (1909–1998) Christian missionary

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Eerdmans, 1989 (reprinted 2002), 232-233.

Life , Women , Men , God

“Clearly the present organization of the scientific community, cutting across the lines of nation states, bureaus, and almost all previously existing institutions, cannot be the result of conscious planning. There is, today, a good deal of organizational planning, but all of the instrumentalities which engage in this activity were founded after the development of science was well under way. Further, most of these organizations are parochial in nature, concerning themselves with only some special part of the scientific community like mathematical biophysics or Russian science. There is no general institution which has shaped or now can shape the development of science, only a mass of institutions which provide little more than liaison (and sometimes funds) for the scientific “producers.””

Gordon Tullock (1922–2014) American economist

The Organization of Inquiry (1966) Ch 1. The Social Organization of Science

Way , Communication , Mathematics , Nature

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

Henry Suso (1295–1366) Dominican friar and mystic

The Exemplar, The Little Book of Truth

Love , Life , God , People

“People who can readily put on their agenda the foundations of the world they inhabit must be haughty, high-spirited, and even reckless. They must be secure in their inviolable independence. Yet the instruments of this independence must not smother the struggles that constantly offer them visible images of the connection between the forms of their life in common and the activities from which these forms arise and that cultivate the sense of mastery suitable to men and women who are neither masters nor servants.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), p. 134

Life , Women , Men , People

“He had come to power because he had seen through Hitler from the very beginning- but not, ironically, because his inner light, the source of that insight, was understood by Englishmen. Churchill's star was invisible to the public and even to most of his peers. But a few saw it. One of them wrote afterward that although Winston knew the world was complex and in constant flux, to him "the great things, races, and peoples, and morality were eternal." Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford philosopher, later observed that the Churchill of 1940 was neither "a sensitive lens, which absorbs and concentrates and reflects… the sentiments of others," nor a politician who played "on public opinion like an instrument." Instead Berlin saw him as a leader who imposed his "imagination and his will upon his countrymen," idealizing them "with such intensity that in the end they approached his ideal and began to see themselves as he saw them."”

William Manchester (1922–2004) (April 1, 1922 – June 1, 2004) American author, journalist and historian

In doing so he "transformed cowards into brave men, and so fulfilled the purpose of shining armour."
Source: 1980s, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone 1932-1940 (1988), p. 687

Men , People , World , Imagination

“People call my music complex because I will have instruments playing at their own paces, as if the other instruments weren't even there. It doesn't march along in the same way that most older music does. But to me, I honestly don't think that a work like Debussy's La Mer is any less complex than my work. It's full of all sorts of sounds and textures going on at once, yet we still look at is as beautiful, structured and fluid. That's all I'm trying to do; I'm not out to compose for complexity's sake.”

Elliott Carter (1908–2012) American composer

From American Gothic: An Interview with Elliott Carter http://edwebproject.org/carter.html (1993) by Andy Carvin.

People , Beauty , Music , Way

“It is fitting that a discourse on Romantic music should commence with a meditation on the art of Bach. The Bach revival is still sometimes considered an early nineteenth-century phenomenon, although this is hardly tenable: in the 1780s Mozart was deeply affected by Bach, and at the same time Beethoven was being brought up on the Well-Tempered Keyboard. Bach was well known to European musicians as a composer of keyboard music through manuscript copies of this work long before systematic publication began in 1800. The "revival" of Bach in the Romantic period was basically a rediscovery of his choral works and a new evaluation of his technique: his art was no longer simply a model for the fugue, as it had been in the eyes of Mozart, but for the art of music as a whole. The new approach to Bach and to Baroque music in general, however, did not extend to the sound of that music on the original instruments. Few musicians in the 1820s and '30s 'had the slightest interest in the sonority of old harpsichords or Baroque organs (Ignaz Moscheles was an engaging exception). What they saw, and needed to see, in Bach was the achievement of an ideal.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 1 : Music and Sound

Art , Music , Time

“[E]ducation in a democracy, in our democracy, must use all the instruments of civilization, home, church, community, as well as school, for the adequate, suitable development of each child. This means that character and imagination, as well as heart and hand, are developed together.
Education in a democracy must consciously direct reading and observation, principle and practice to the happiness, the responsibilities, and the participation of group living. Government in a democracy is not “they,” it is “us.””

Aurelia Henry Reinhardt (1877–1948) American educator and social activist

Speech given to the Unitarian Radio Hour, reprinted in [McKanan, Dan, A Documentary History of Unitarian Universalism, Volume Two: From 1900 to the Present, https://books.google.com/books?id=4FBUDwAAQBAJ, 3 July 2018, 2017, Skinner House Books, 978-1-55896-791-5, 105-7]

Education , School , Democracy , Home

“He made an instrument to know
If the moon shine at full or no.”

Samuel Butler (poet) (1612–1680) poet and satirist

Canto III, line 261
Source: Hudibras, Part II (1664)

“The total institutions of our society can be linked in five rough groupings. First, there are institutions established to care for persons felt to be both incapable and harmless; these are the homes for the blind, the aged, the orphaned, and the indigent. Second, there are places established to care for persons felt to be incapable of looking after themselves and a threat to the community, albeit an unintended one: TB sanitaria, mental hospitals, and leprosaria. A third type of total institution is organised to protect the community against what are felt to be intentional dangers to it, with the welfare of the persons thus sequestered not the immediate issue: jails, penitentiaries, P. O. W. camps, and concentration camps. Fourth, there are institutions purportedly established the better to pursue some work-like tasks and justifying themselves only on these instrumental grounds: army barracks, ships, boarding schools, work camps, colonial compounds, and large mansions from the point of view of those who live in the servants' quarters. Finally, there are those establishments designed as retreats from the world even while often serving also as training stations for the religious; examples are abbeys, monasteries, convents, and other cloisters.”

Erving Goffman book Asylums

Source: 1950s-1960s, Asylums, 1961, p. 4-5

Age , World , School , Home

“To the memory of Sir Thomas Denison, Knt., this monument was erected by his afflicted widow. He was an affectionate husband, a generous relation, a sincere friend, a good citizen, an honest man. Skilled in all the learning of the common law, he raised himself to great eminence in his profession; and showed by his practice, that a thorough knowledge of the legal art and form is not litigious, or an instrument of chicane, but the plainest, easiest, and shortest way to the end of strife. For the sake of the public he was pressed, and at the last prevailed upon, to accept the office of a judge in the Court of King's Bench. He discharged the important trust of that high office with unsuspected integrity, and uncommon ability. The clearness of his understanding, and the natural probity of his heart, led him immediately to truth, equity, and justice; the precision and extent of his legal knowledge enabled him always to find the right way of doing what was right. A zealous friend to the constitution of his country, he steadily adhered to the fundamental principle upon which it is built, and by which alone it can be maintained, a religious application of the inflexible rule of law to all questions concerning the power of the crown, and privileges of the subject. He resigned his office February 14, 1765, because from the decay of his health and the loss of his sight, he found himself unable any longer to execute it. He died September 8, 1765, without issue, in the sixty-seventh year of his age. He wished to be buried in his native country, and in this church. He lies here near the Lord Chief Justice Gascoigne, who by a resolute and judicious exertion of authority, supported law and government in a manner which has perpetuated his name, and made him an example famous to posterity.”

Thomas Denison (1699–1765) British judge (1699–1765)

Memorial inscription, reported in Edward Foss, The Judges of England, With Sketches of Their Lives (1864), Volume 8, p. 266-268.
About

Health , Truth , Age , Justice

“As far as vocal preparation goes, it’s really an interesting thing for such a fragile instrument and using it properly is like walking a tightrope. I have learned not to do extensive warm-ups. It’s really more of a cerebral mind-body connection Zen hippy thing, just knowing your body and figuring out if I do that then I will be able to speak tomorrow.”

Davey Havok (1975) American singer

On singing. Southern Courier, February 2010 http://southern-courier.whereilive.com.au/lifestyle/story/body-on-the-line/

Learning

“Our children should be taught to beware of everything foreign and not to disclose any state or party secrets to foreigners… for foreigners are eyes for their countries, and some of them are counterrevolutionary instruments”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

in the hands of imperialism
al-Dimuqratiyya Masdar Quwwa li al-Fard wa al-Mujtama, 1977, quoted in Saddam Hussein: a political biography (2002) by Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi.

Children , Secret , Country

“We started out in the middle ages creating music which had certain desirable physical properties (for example, a major chord sounds "nice" because the frequencies are in integer ratios to each other). And then as society evolved, we created these emotional contexts for certain instruments and progressions. Major-chord arpeggios sound "happy", minor chords sound "sad", chromatic scales can sound "scary", et cetera. In the 20th century, film soundtracks reinforced this point as people associated certain kinds of music with certain visual and emotional experiences. It's a giant feedback loop, really; once you grow up in a given culture, it leaves this musical fingerprint on you which colors your experiences.”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Andrew Sega Shrine interview, 2011

People , Age , Sadness , Music

“It is only in the case of musical instruments that I find any commendable diligence in the [Irish] people. They seem to me to be incomparably more skilled in these than any other people that I have seen. The movement is not, as in the British instrument to which we are accustomed, slow and easy, but rather quick and lively, while at the same time the melody is sweet and pleasant. It is remarkable how, in spite of the great speed of the fingers, the musical proportion is maintained. The melody is kept perfect and full with unimpaired art through everything – through quivering measures and the involved use of several instruments – with a rapidity that charms, a rhythmic pattern that is varied and a concord achieved through elements discordant.”
In musicis solum instrumentis commendabilem invenio gentis istius diligentiam. In quibus, prae omni natione quam vidimus, incomparabiliter instructa est. Non enim in his, sicut in Britannicis quibus assueti sumus instrumentis, tarda et morosa est modulatio, verum velox et praeceps, suavis tamen et jocunda sonoritas. Mirum quod, in tanta tam praecipiti digitorum rapacitate, musica servatur proportio; et arte per omnia indemni inter crispatos modulos, organaque multipliciter intricata, tam suavi velocitate, tam dispari paritate, tam discordi concordia, consona redditur et completur melodia.

Gerald of Wales (1146) Medieval clergyman and historian

Topographia Hibernica (The Topography of Ireland) Part 3, chapter 11 (94); translation from Gerald of Wales (trans. John J. O'Meara) The History and Topography of Ireland ([1951] 1982) p. 103.

People , Art , Music , Time

“Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837)

Thinking

“Organisations are technical instruments; designed as means to definite goals… they are expendable. Institutions… may be partly engineered, but they have also a “natural” dimension. They are the products of interaction and adaptation; they become the receptacles of group idealism; they are less readily expendable.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Philip Selznick, quoted in Charles Perrow (1960, p.4), as cited in: Owen A. Jones. The Sources of Goal Incongruence in a Public Service Network. 2013. p. 35-36

Nature

“In the Far West, the United States of America openly claimed to be custodians of the whole planet. Universally feared and envied, universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character of man’s existence. By this time every human being throughout the planet made use of American products, and there was no region where American capital did not support local labour. Moreover the American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph and televisor ceaselessly drenched the planet with American thought. Year by year the aether reverberated with echoes of New York’s pleasures and the religious fervours of the Middle West. What wonder, then, that America, even while she was despised, irresistibly moulded the whole human race. This, perhaps, would not have mattered, had America been able to give of her very rare best. But inevitably only her worst could be propagated. Only the most vulgar traits of that potentially great people could get through into the minds of foreigners by means of these crude instruments. And so, by the floods of poison issuing from this people’s baser members, the whole world, and with it the nobler parts of America herself, were irrevocably corrupted.
For the best of America was too weak to withstand the worst. Americans had indeed contributed amply to human thought. They had helped to emancipate philosophy from ancient fetters. They had served science by lavish and rigorous research. In astronomy, favoured by their costly instruments and clear atmosphere, they had done much to reveal the dispositions of the stars and galaxies. In literature, though often they behaved as barbarians, they had also conceived new modes of expression, and moods of thought not easily appreciated in Europe. They had also created a new and brilliant architecture. And their genius for organization worked upon a scale that was scarcely conceivable, let alone practicable, to other peoples. In fact their best minds faced old problems of theory and of valuation with a fresh innocence and courage, so that fogs of superstition were cleared away wherever these choice Americans were present. But these best were after all a minority in a huge wilderness of opinionated self-deceivers, in whom, surprisingly, an outworn religious dogma was championed with the intolerant optimism of youth. For this was essentially a race of bright, but arrested, adolescents. Something lacked which should have enabled them to grow up. One who looks back across the aeons to this remote people can see their fate already woven of their circumstance and their disposition, and can appreciate the grim jest that these, who seemed to themselves gifted to rejuvenate the planet, should have plunged it, inevitably, through spiritual desolation into senility and age-long night.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter II: Europe’s Downfall; Section 1, “Europe and America” (p. 33)

Fate , People , Pleasure , Youth

“I've always doubted that the socialists had a leg to stand on intellectually. They have improved their argument somehow, but once you begin to understand that prices are an instrument of communication and guidance which embody more information than we directly have, the whole idea that you can bring about the same order based on the division of labor by simple direction falls to the ground. Similarly, the idea [that] you can arrange for distributions of incomes which correspond to some conception of merit or need. If you need prices, including the prices of labor, to direct people to go where they are needed, you cannot have another distribution except the one from the market principle. I think that intellectually there is just nothing left of socialism.”

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

Interview with Thomas W. Hazlett in May of 1977, as published in " The Road to Serfdom, Forseeing the Fall", in Reason magazine (July 1992) http://reason.com/archives/1992/07/01/the-road-from-serfdom
1960s–1970s

People , Communication , Idea , Understanding

“Freedom is not merely a word or an abstract theory, but the most effective instrument for advancing the welfare of man.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Message to the Inter-American Economic and Social Conference at Punta del Este, Uruguay (5 August 1961) http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8271
1961

Freedom

“And I go down the stairs again
with the screeching of my worn out
soul

P. G. tunes instruments
for his golden arm
alchemy in a metropolitan shell

The squeak of time was
thrown back into the cracks
where the plaster has the form of a twisting branch

and my veins are sturdy trunks,
scaly, for drops of green sap
nourishment rising
from the bowels of the earth,
…”

Caterina Davinio (1957) Italian writer

The Book of Opium (1975 - 1990), (Heroin) P. G.'s Basement
Source: Caterina Davinio, Il libro dell'oppio 1975 – 1990 (The Book of Opium 1975 – 1990), Puntoacapo Editrice, Novi Ligure 2012. English translation by Caterina Davinio and David W. Seaman.

Soul , Time

“If the users don't control the program, the program controls the users. With proprietary software, there is always some entity, the "owner" of the program, that controls the program—and through it, exercises power over its users. A nonfree program is a yoke, an instrument of unjust power.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

Free Software Is Even More Important Now (September 2013) https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html
2010s

Exercises

“After reading and considering the works of Babhravya and other ancient authors, and thinking over the meaning of the rules given by them, this treatise [Kama Sutra] was composed, according to the precepts of the Holy Writ, for the benefit of the world,… while leading the life of a religious student at Benares, and wholly engaged in the contemplation of the Deity. This work is not to be used merely as an instrument for satisfying our desires…”

Vātsyāyana Indian logician

Source: Richard F. Burton The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana http://books.google.com/books?id=p7dW_kmUX_wC&pg=PA12, WingSpan Press, 1 February 2009, p. 12

Life , World , Thinking , Reading

“Over the years, I have become convinced that Hellenism as a culture represents not a static condition of uniform sublimity mysteriously achieved and maintained as an effect of some racial advantage. Rather it should be understood as an evolving process, governed by a dynamic of change, as both language and thought underwent transformational alteration caused by a transition from orality to literacy. The instrument of change is discerned to be the invention of the Greek alphabet, at a quite late stage in the history of developing cultures.”

Eric A. Havelock (1903–1988) 1903-1988, British classical philologist

"Chinese Characters and the Greek Alphabet" in Sino-Platonic Papers, 5 (December 1987)

History , Change

“Taxation must be used as an instrument of social policy, but if carried too far under the profit system, it may be an instrument of destruction rather than construction.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Property (1935)

“To approach Chopin, you have to separate him completely from Schumann. Schumann admired Chopin very much and saw him as friend, but - what only few people know - Chopin himself had much less interest in and esteem for Schumann. In detail: Schumann’s works follow on from a transitional period determined by the successors of Viennese Classicism, particularly Beethoven. Just as the sons of Bach espoused the ‘galant,’ ornamented style of their generation, so the pupils of Mozart and Beethoven - Hummel, Ries, Czerny, Moscheles - took pains to compensate for a thinner musical substance with increased instrumental brilliance and thus prepared the ground for the golden age of the piano and the era of the Romantic virtuoso. Among the multitude of composers writing for the piano at that time, only two - Weber and Schubert - stand out as original creative forces.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Pain , People , Age , Music

“Mathematics have a triple aim. They must furnish an instrument for the study of nature. But that is not all: they have a philosophic aim and, I dare maintain, an esthetic aim. They must aid the philosopher to fathom the notions of number, of space, of time. And above all, their adepts find therein delights analogous to those given by painting and music. They admire the delicate harmony of numbers and forms; they marvel when a new discovery opens to them an unexpected perspective; and has not the joy they thus feel the esthetic character, even though the senses take no part therein? Only a privileged few are called to enjoy it fully, it is true, but is not this the case for all the noblest arts?
This is why I do not hesitate to say that mathematics deserve to be cultivated for their own sake, and the theories inapplicable to physics as well as the others. Even if the physical aim and the esthetic aim were not united, we ought not to sacrifice either.”

Henri Poincaré book The Value of Science

Source: The Value of Science (1905), Ch. 5: Analysis and Physics

Art , Music , Feeling , Mathematics

“Not to go on for ever repeating what man has already done is our work, but to arrive at new realisations and undreamed-of masteries. Time and soul and world are given us for our field, vision and hope and creative imagination stand for our prompters, will and thought and labour are our all-effective instruments.”

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

Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17)

World , Hope , Soul , Imagination

“My early feeling that scientific truths are to the Christian religion much what brooks and rivers are to the ocean, has become my most vital conviction. Tempted as I was to drift with the tempest of passion, I had made shipwreck in these latter years, had not in my heaviest hours the Mercy of God, through your instrumentality, kept me always on the right path.”

Robert Mayer (1814–1878) German physicist

December 31 1851, as translated by Kneller, Karl Alois. 1911. pp. 18. Christianity and the Leaders of Modern Science https://archive.org/stream/christianitylead00kneluoft#page/18/mode/2up. London.

God , Truth , Religion , Feeling

“If, for example, a conspiratorially minded elite is so powerful, has at its fingertips such multiple and delicate instruments with which to fine-tune accumulation, then how can the periodic headlong slides into crisis be explained?”

David Harvey (1935) British anthropologist

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 10, Finance Capital And Its Contradictions, p. 316

“Every accessory, every instrument of usefulness, the church has now in such a degree and of such excellence as was never known in any other age; and we want but a supreme and glorious baptism of fire to exhibit to the world such a spectacle as would raise ten thousand hallelujahs to the glory of our King.”

William Arthur (minister) (1819–1901) Wesleyan Methodist minister and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 322.

Age , World

“How do things stand, now, if the subject contains a large element of pathos?... Consider such an interesting subject as the scene taking place around the bed of a dying woman, for example; seize and render that ensemble by photography, if that is possible [photography was a very recent invention in Paris ca. 1853, a. o. by the photographer Nadar ]: it will be falsified in a thousand ways. The reason is that, according to the degree of your imagination, the subject will appear to you more or less beautiful, you will be more or less the poet in that scene in which you are an actor; you see only what is interesting, whereas the instrument puts in everything.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

In Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 233
quote circa 1853, in which Delacroix relates painting to theater from the view of the visitor / spectator
1831 - 1863

Beauty , Way , Imagination , Appearance

“I sank Atlantis," he said, "personally. It was about three years ago. And God! it was lovely! It was all ivory towers and golden minarets and silver balconies. There were bridges of opal, and crimson pennants and a milk-white river flowing between lemon-colored banks. There were jade steeples, and trees as old as the world tickling the bellies of clouds, and ships in the great sea-harbor of Xanadu, as delicately constructed as musical instruments, all swaying with the tides. The twelve princes of the realm held court in the dozen-pillared Coliseum of the Zodiac, to listen to a Greek tenor sax play at sunset.”

Roger Zelazny book He Who Shapes

He Who Shapes (1965)

Love , God , World , Music

“Conceptual Art is a sounding instrument between printed words, luminous writings, and letters scrawled in a hasty nervous instinctive calligraphy.”

Mario Merz (1925–2003) Italian artist, painter and sculptor

Quoted in Kristine Stiles & Peter Howard Selz: Theories and documents of contemporary art (1996), p. 671

Art

“Compulsion means force; there must be a policeman to see that the individual does not follow his own inclinations. But policemen must live. Since they do not produce a thing by which they can live, others must support them. Hence, the planners must have the means of getting at the production of the very people who are to be improved by the policeman. That means taxes, and the more taxes the greater the number of enforcement agents, and therefore the more comprehensive the plan. No plan can be bigger than its bureaucracy. The income tax is the ideal instrument for the planner.”

Frank Chodorov (1887–1966) American libertarian thinker

Source: The Income Tax: Root of All Evil (1954), p. 54

People , Support

“American citizens are instrumental in carrying on a traffic in enslaved Africans, equally in violation of the laws of humanity and in defiance of those of their own country. The same just and benevolent motives which produced interdiction in force against the criminal conduct will doubtless be felt by Congress in devising further means of suppressing the evil.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

State of the Union address (1810) https://books.google.com/books?id=PsFnB7FA11YC&pg=PA200&dq=%22Rendered+impossible+by+the+prejudices+of+the+whites%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAWoVChMI8uuN6dbUxwIVBD0-Ch1EqwFq#v=onepage&q=%22Rendered%20impossible%20by%20the%20prejudices%20of%20the%20whites%22&f=false
1810s

Law , Motivation , Evil , Country

“The problem that confronts most of us is whether the individual is merely the instrument of society or the end of society. Are you and I as individuals to be used, directed, educated, controlled, shaped to a certain pattern by society and government; or does society, the State, exist for the individual? Is the individual the end of society; or is he merely a puppet to be taught, exploited, butchered as an instrument of war? That is the problem that is confronting most of us. That is the problem of the world; whether the individual is a mere instrument of society, a plaything of influences to be moulded; or whether society exists for the individual.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

1950s, The First and Last Freedom (1954)

War , World , Education , Problem

“I had long wished for some opportunity of endeavouring to explain… the principles on which the instruments of an Observatory are constructed, (omitting all details, so far as they are merely subsidiary,) and the principles on which the observations made with these instruments are treated…
Such an opportunity appeared to present itself in the course of Lectures which I engaged to give to the Members of the Ipswich Museum and their friends.”

George Biddell Airy (1801–1892) English mathematician and astronomer

Introduction
Popular Astronomy: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Ipswich (1868)

Appearance

“I started writing instrumentals but Roma pointed out they were very visual, so she started writing lyrics.. and Nicky had this idea of creating a wall of sound and started multi-tracking my voice.”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

The Times Magazine interview (2005)

Idea

“The world of their [the bourgeois’] predecessors was a backward, pre-technological world, a world with the good conscience of inequality and toil, in which labor was still a fated misfortune; but a world in which man and nature were not yet organized as things and instrumentalities. With its code of forms and manners. with the style and vocabulary of its literature and philosophy. this past culture expressed the rhythm and content of a universe in which valleys and forests, villages and inns, nobles and villains, salons and courts were a part of the experienced reality. In the verse and prose of this pre-technological culture is the rhythm of those who wander or ride in carriages. who have the time and the pleasure to think, contemplate, feel and narrate. It is an outdated and surpassed culture, and only dreams and childlike regressions can recapture it. But this culture is, in some of its decisive elements. also a post-technological one. Its most advanced images and positions seem to survive their absorption into administered comforts and stimuli; they continue to haunt the consciousness with the possibility of their rebirth in the consummation of technical progress. They are the expression of that free and conscious alienation from the established forms of life with which literature and the arts opposed these forms even where they adorned them. In contrast to the Marxian concept, which denotes man's relation to himself and to his work in capitalist society, the artistic alienation is the conscious transcendence of the alienated existence—a “higher level” or mediated alienation. The conflict with the world of progress, the negation of the order of business, the anti-bourgeois elements in bourgeois literature and art are neither due to the aesthetic lowliness of this order nor to romantic reaction—nostalgic consecration of a disappearing stage of civilization. “Romantic” is a term of condescending defamation which is easily applied to disparaging avant-garde positions, just as the term “decadent” far more often denounces the genuinely progressive traits of a dying culture than the real factors of decay. The traditional images of artistic alienation are indeed romantic in as much as they are in aesthetic incompatibility with the developing society. This incompatibility is the token of their truth. What they recall and preserve in memory pertains to the future: images of a gratification that would dissolve the society which suppresses it”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 59-60

Life , Fate , Pleasure , Truth

“Both the old and new approaches share a scepticism toward rational-actor models of organisation, and each views institutionalisation as a state-dependent process that makes organisations less instrumentally rational by limiting the options they can pursue. Both emphasise the relationship between organisations and their environments, and both promise to reveal aspects of reality that are inconsistent with organisations’ formal accounts. Each approach stresses the role of culture in shaping organisational reality.”

Paul DiMaggio (1951) American sociologist

Source: Introduction to The New Institutionalism and Organizational Analysis, 1991, p. 12

Reality , Dependency

“They are men and women who tend to believe that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable, and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason; that truths are transitory and empirically determined; that equality is desirable and attainable through the action of state power; that social and individual differences, if they are not rational, are objectionable, and should be scientifically eliminated; that all people and societies strive to organize themselves upon a rationalist and scientific paradigm.”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) American conservative author and commentator

A definition of what he meant when referring to "liberals"in Up from Liberalism (1959); as quoted in "An American original: appreciating Bill Buckley" by George Shadroui (2003) http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2003/an-american-original-appreciating-bill-buckley/.

Women , Men , People , Truth

“When confronted by midnight in the social order we have in the past turned to science for help. And little wonder! On so many occasions science has saved us. When we were in the midnight of physical limitation and material inconvenience, science lifted us to the bright morning of physical and material comfort. When we were in the midnight of crippling ignorance and superstition, science brought us to the daybreak of the free and open mind. When we were in the midnight of dread plagues and diseases, science, through surgery, sanitation, and the wonder drugs, ushered in the bright day of physical health, thereby prolonging our lives and making for greater security and physical well-being. How naturally we turn to science in a day when the problems of the world are so ghastly and ominous. But alas! science cannot now rescue us, for even the scientist is lost in the terrible midnight of our age. Indeed, science gave us the very instruments that threaten to bring universal suicide.”

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

A Knock on Midnight http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/multimediaentry/doc_a_knock_at_midnight/
1960s, Strength to Love (1963)

Health , Age , World , Disease

“That's what it's like when people have crawled very high up in a tree, then they sometimes need help to get down with ladders and ropes and other instruments.”

Anders Fogh Rasmussen (1953) former Prime Minister of Denmark and NATO secretary general

On potential face-saving deals for Poland on the Lisbon Treaty http://euobserver.com/?aid=24331 (21 June 2007)

People , Tree , Help

“There's an old Australian stockman -- er, rock band, trying, dying. They get themselves up on their collective elbows, revert to their sixties instrumentation, and they try again.”

Rolf Harris (1930–2023) Australian-born, British-based entertainer and convicted sex offender

parodying "Stairway to Heaven", 1993
Lyrics

“By virtue of the universal concept, thought attains mastery over the particular cases. However, the most formalized universe of logic still refers to the most general structure of the given, experienced world; the pure form is still that of the content which it formalizes. The idea of formal logic itself is a historical event in the development of the mental and physical instruments for universal control and calculability. In this undertaking man had to create theoretical harmony out of actual discord, to purge thought from contradictions, to hypostatize identifiable and fungible units in the complex process of society and nature. Under the rule of formal logic, the notion of the conflict between essence and appearance is expendable if not meaningless; the material content is neutralized; the principle of identity is separated from the principle of contradiction (contradictions are the fault of incorrect thinking); final causes are removed from the logical order. Well defined in their scope and function, concepts become instruments of prediction and control. Formal logic is thus the first step on the long road to scientific thought”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 137

World , Idea , Nature , Thinking

“The fact must be expressed as data, but there is a problem in that the correct data is difficult to catch. So that I always say "When you see the data, doubt it!" "When you see the measurement instrument, doubt it!… For example, if the methods such as sampling, measurement, testing and chemical analysis methods were incorrect, data… to measure true characteristics and in an unavoidable case, using statistical sensory test and express them as data.”

Kaoru Ishikawa (1915–1989) Japanese business theorist

Kaoru Ishikawa in: Annual Quality Congress Transactions, (1981), p. 130

Problem

“I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.”

Samuel Johnson book A Dictionary of the English Language

Preface http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/preface.html
A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

Idea , Science , Daughters , Forgetting

“What is, however, expected of intellect is that it should show a most proper way to achieve its end, be it the hunting of a beast, inventing of an instrument, laying down the foundations of a new system of economy, setting up a new form or government, kindling a war, or making peace. All these activities of man depend upon his intellectual ability. Emotions creeping in will only spoil them.”

Muhammad Qutb (1919–2014) Egyptian Islamist writer and scholar

Source: Islam: the Misunderstood Religion, Chapter 7, p. 146.

War , Peace , Way , Dependency

“Having given up autonomy, reason has become an instrument.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 21.

“The reality of the situation is obscured when population is expressed as a percentage proportion taken over the whole of the United Kingdom. The ethnic minority is geographically concentrated, so that areas in which it forms a majority already exists, and these areas are destined inevitably to grow. It is here that the compatibility of such an ethnic minority with the functioning of parliamentary democracy comes into question. Parliamentary democracy depends at all levels upon the valid acceptance of majority decision, by which the nation as a whole is content to be bound because of the continually available prospect that what one majority has decided another majority can subsequently alter. From this point of view, the political homogeneity of the electorate is crucial. What we do not, as yet, know is whether the voting behaviour of our altered population will be able to use the majority vote as a political instrument and not as a means of self-identification, self-assertion and self-enumeration. It may be that the United Kingdom will escape the political consequences of communalism; but communalism and democracy, as the experience of India demonstrates, are incompatible. That is the spectre which the Conservative party's policy of assisted repatriation in the 1960s aimed to banish; but time and events have swept over and passed the already outdated remedies of the 1960s. We are entering unknown territory where the only certainty for the future is the relative increase of the ethnic minority due to the age structure of that population which has been established.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Article on the 25th anniversary of his 'Rivers of Blood speech', The Times (20 April 1993), p. 18
1990s

Age , Democracy , Communication , Question

“I don't believe God wants every Christian who plays an instrument to try and form a ministry from it. After all, you don't expect a tire salesman to form a ministry with his expertise on tread design as the basis. -Appalachian Melody.”

Mark Heard (1951–1992) American musician and record producer

Liner Notes

God

“Somebody will ask those of us who compose with the aid of computers: 'So you make all these decisions for the computer or the electronic medium but wouldn't you like to have a performer who makes certain other decisions?' Many composers don't mind collaborating with the performer with regards to decisions of tempo, or rhythm, or dynamics, or timbre, but ask them if they would allow the performer to make decisions with regard to pitch and the answer will be 'Pitches you don't change.' Some of us feel the same way in regard to the other musical aspects that are traditionally considered secondary, but which we consider fundamental. As for the future of electronic music, it seems quite obvious to me that its unique resources guarantee its use, because it has shifted the boundaries of music away from the limitations of the acoustical instrument, of the performer's coordinating capabilities, to the almost infinite limitations of the electronic instrument. The new limitations are the human ones of perception.”

Milton Babbitt (1916–2011) American composer

Quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812.

Music , Way , Feeling , Quotes

“The master class, which transforms everything and everyone into its instruments, imposes its views and values upon the wage slaves, who come to see the world through the eyes of their oppressors.”

George Novack (1905–1992) American politician

Existentialism Versus Marxism (1966), p. 20

World

“Dr. Kallen says, "Free public education and private instruction purchasable at a price are both but the community's device to meet present needs by transmitting the past unchanged. They provide a grammar of assent, not a logic of inquiry. The mental posture they habituate the youth in is not the posture of reflection. The mental posture they habituate the youth in is the posture of conformity. They require belief, not investigation. They impose reverence for the past and idealization of the present. They envision the future as a perpetuation of the past, not as a new creation of it. They are Main Street's most powerful instrument of self-reproduction without variation…. They enable government both visible and invisible to continue by consent, for they forestall and inhibit in the citizens of the land the technique of doubt and dissent which is the necessary condition of good government and the true inward-ness of that eternal vigilance so notoriously the price of liberty."”

Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941)

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 75

Youth , Education , Communication , Past

“The sense that a man is serving a Higher than himself, with a service which will become ever more and more perfect freedom, evokes more profound, more humbling, more exalted emotions than any thing else in the world can do. The spirit of man is an instrument which cannot give out its deepest, finest tones, except under the immediate hand of the Divine Harmonist.”

John Campbell Shairp (1819–1885) British writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 127.

World , Sense , Freedom , Perfection

“Instrumentation is to music precisely what color is to painting.”

Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) French Romantic composer

Cette face de l’instrumentation est exactement, en musique, ce que le coloris est en peinture.
A travers chants (1862), ch. 1 http://www.hberlioz.com/Writings/ATC01.htm; Elizabeth Csicsery-Rónay (trans.) The Art of Music and Other Essays (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) p. 5.

Music , Color , Painting