Quotes about interest
page 25

Benjamin Franklin photo

“In the Colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Scrip. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay no one.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Quoted in Money and Men by Robert McCann Rice (1941) but no prior source is extant.
Misattributed

Margaret Sanger photo
Miuccia Prada photo

“I'm not really interested in building a reputation for myself. But I do care for what the company stands for. I believe in work and being connected to the world we live in.”

Miuccia Prada (1948) Italian fashion designer and entrepreneur

On Reputation - Miuccia Prada - forbes.com https://www.forbes.com/100-greatest-business-minds/person/miuccia-prada

Paul Newman photo

“I'm like a good cheese. I'm just getting mouldy enough to be interesting.”

Paul Newman (1925–2008) American actor and film director

Quoted in "Saint Paul," interview with John Aldridge, The Guardian (2005-04-10)

Mao Zedong photo

“History shows hat wars are divided into two kinds, just and unjust. All wars that are progressive are just, and all wars that impede progress are unjust. We Communists oppose all unjust wars that impede progress, but we do not oppose progressive, just wars. Not only do we Communists not oppose just wars, we actively participate in them. As for unjust wars, World War I is an instance in which both sides fought for imperialist interests; therefore the Communists of the whole world firmly opposed that war. The way to oppose a war of this kind is to do everything possible to prevent it before it breaks out and, once it breaks out, to oppose war with war, to oppose unjust war with just war, whenever possible.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On Protracted Warfare (1938)
Original: (zh-CN) 历史上的战争分为两类,一类是正义的,一类是非正义的。一切进步的战争都是正义的,一切阻碍进步的战争都是非正义的。我们共产党人反对一切阻碍进步的非正义的战争,但是不反对进步的正义的战争。对于后一类战争,我们共产党人不但不反对,而且积极地参加。前一类战争,例如第一次世界大战,双方都是为着帝国主义利益而战,所以全世界的共产党人坚决地反对那一次战争。反对的方法,在战争未爆发前,极力阻止其爆发;既爆发后,只要有可能,就用战争反对战争,用正义战争反对非正义战争。

David Fincher photo
Francis S. Collins photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Francis Scott Key photo

“If we believe in the existence of a great moral and political evil amongst us, and that duty, honour, and interest, call upon us to prepare the way for its removal, we must act.”

Francis Scott Key (1779–1843) American lawyer and poet

Speech before the Colonization Society https://books.google.com/books?id=AoS2cqFQCSoC&pg=PA50

Lars Løkke Rasmussen photo
Clement Attlee photo

“The Question of sovereignty is often raised. I am one of those who believe that in a modern world one has to give up a great deal of sovereignty. I am prepared to give up sovereignty to the world, but not to a selected number of European countries. That is not giving up something for world security; it is giving something up to sectional interests.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1962/nov/08/britain-and-the-common-market in the House of Lords on the British application to join the Common Market (8 November 1962).
1960s

Richard A. Posner photo
Arthur Compton photo
James Branch Cabell photo
Isabel Bishop photo
Frances Kellor photo
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu photo

“Those who think that the Jews are poor unfortunates, arrived here by chance, carried by the wind, led by fate, and so on, are mistaken. All the Jews who exist on the face of the earth form a great community, bound by blood and Talmudic religion. They are parts of a truly implacable state, which has laws, plans and leaders who formulate these plans and carry them through. The whole thing is organised in the form of a so-called 'Kehillah'. This is why we are faced, not with isolated Jews, but with a constituted force, the Jewish community. In any of our cities or countries where a given number of Jews are gathered, a Kehillah is immediately set up, that is to say the Jewish community. This Kehillah has its leaders, its own judiciary, and so on. And it is in this small Kehillah, whether at the city or at the national level, that all the plans are formed : how to win the local politicians, the authorities; how to work one's way into circles where it would be useful to get admitted, for example, among the magistrates, the state employees, the senior officials; these plans must be carried out to take a certain economic sector away from a Romanian's hands; how an honest representative of an authority opposed to the Jewish interests could be eliminated; what plans to apply, when, oppressed, the population rebels and bursts in anti-Semitic movements.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Jewish Problem

Eugene V. Debs photo
Stan Lee photo
Robert Owen photo
Martin Gardner photo

“I can say this. I believe that the human mind, or even the mind of a cat, is more interesting in its complexity than an entire galaxy if it is devoid of life.”

Martin Gardner (1914–2010) recreational mathematician and philosopher

Martin Gardner, puzzle master extraordinaire http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29688355 obituary by Colm Mulcahy, BBC News Magazine, October 21, 2014

George Boole photo

“You will feel interested to know the fate of my mathematical speculations in Cambridge. One of the papers is already printed in the Mathematical Journal. Another, which I sent a short time ago, has been very favourably received, and will shortly be printed together with one I had previously sent.”

George Boole (1815–1864) English mathematician, philosopher and logician

George Boole in letter to a friend, 1840, cited in: R. H. Hutton, " Professor Boole http://books.google.com/books?id=pfMEAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA147," in: The British Quarterly Review. (1866), p. 147; Cited in Des MacHale. George Boole: his life and work, Boole Press, 1985. p. 52
1840s

Art Spiegelman photo

“I guess I don’t subscribe to the twee school. I remember trying to lose our copy of Thomas the Tank Engine before I had to read it again. Life is a more dimensional and interesting affair than vestigially Victorian notions of childhood. I was trying to make something substantial, something to be read and reread.”

Art Spiegelman (1948) cartoonist from the United States

On his book Jack and the Box, as quoted in "Smart Art : Spiegelman doesn’t dumb down for kids" by Alexandra Zissu in New York Magazine (16 November 2008) http://nymag.com/family/kids/52136/.

Steve Reich photo

“…in serial music, the series itself is seldom audible… What I'm interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one in the same thing.”

Steve Reich (1936) American composer

Source: Steve Reich, ‎Paul Hillier (2002) Writings on Music, 1965-2000, p. 35

Peter Singer photo

“Albert Einstein when asked what he considered to be the most powerful force in the universe answered: Compound interest!”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

James Connolly photo
Mitt Romney photo
Émile Durkheim photo

“Opinion is steadily inclining towards making the division of labor an imperative rule of conduct, to present it as a duty. Those who shun it are not punished precise penalty fixed by law, it is true; but they are blamed. The time has passed when the perfect man was he who appeared interested in everything without attaching himself exclusively to anything, capable of tasting and understanding everything finding means to unite and condense in himself all that was most exquisite in civilization. … We want activity, instead of spreading itself over a large area, to concentrate and gain in intensity what it loses in extent. We distrust those excessively mobile talents that lend themselves equally to all uses, refusing to choose a special role and keep to it. We disapprove of those men whose unique care is to organize and develop all their faculties, but without making any definite use of them, and without sacrificing any of them, as if each man were sufficient unto himself, and constituted an independent world. It seems to us that this state of detachment and indetermination has something anti-social about it. The praiseworthy man of former times is only a dilettante to us, and we refuse to give dilettantism any moral value; we rather see perfection in the man seeking, not to be complete, but to produce; who has a restricted task, and devotes himself to it; who does his duty, accomplishes his work. “To perfect oneself,” said Secrétan, “is to learn one's role, to become capable of fulfilling one's function... The measure of our perfection is no longer found in our complacence with ourselves, in the applause of a crowd, or in the approving smile of an affected dilettantism, but in the sum of given services and in our capacity to give more.””

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) French sociologist (1858-1917)

[Le principe de la morale, p. 189] … We no longer think that the exclusive duty of man is to realize in himself the qualities of man in general; but we believe he must have those pertaining to his function. … The categorical imperative of the moral conscience is assuming the following form: Make yourself usefully fulfill a determinate function.
Source: The Division of Labor in Society (1893), pp. 42-43.

Roger Ebert photo

“The movie stars six teenage characters who have been marketed on TV and in toy stores. They have names, but no discernible personalities. None of them ever says anything more interesting than "You guys!" As teenagers, they are skilled in-line skaters and karate fighters, but they don't get their real powers until they turn into faceless clones in Power Rangers uniforms with plastic masks and helmets. Is that the message? Faceless conformity is the way to success? Certainly the Rangers are not individuals in or out of uniform, but I wonder if they don't represent a triumph of merchandising over creativity. Children's heroes have traditionally been individualistic and eccentric. The Rangers are not, properly speaking, even characters. They are color-coded products… Paging through the movie's press kit, I came across this quote attributed to Amy Jo Johnson, who plays Kimberly, the Pink Power Ranger: " `Mighty Morphin Power Rangers™: The Movie' is a mix between Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz. " I wonder if Amy Jo actually said "TM" when she was delivering that wonderfully fresh and spontaneous quote, which is so much more involved than anything she says in the movie. More to the point, I wonder if she has ever seen "Star Wars" or "The Wizard of Oz."”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mighty-morphin-power-rangers-the-movie-1995 of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: The Movie (30 June 1995)
Reviews, Half-star reviews

Clarence Darrow photo
G. Edward Griffin photo

“The very wise and wealthy financiers of the world--going way back, even before Rothschild's time--have observed that the world was a pretty rocky place to live in, and that nations were always fighting over something or other, there was always somebody who was trying to conquer somebody else, and wars were universal. Too bad about that, but that's the way it is. So we--the bankers--found out that if we loan money to them that we'll get paid back - they don't question what the interest rate is because they're fighting a war! And if they can win the war they can just plunder the victim and pay us whatever we want out of the plunder - it doesn't cost them anything really. Then the issue comes up of what happens if one of these nations decides not to pay us? Ah! The answer is very simple: if they refuse to pay us back we'll finance an opposing nation, a revolutionary group somewhere else to become an enemy of that nation and attack it, and destroy it, invade it. We'll create another war, in other words, in order to get our money back, we'll finance this side to attack that side. And so, by financing all sides in a war, and keeping the world divided up into warring fractions so that no one unit is particularly stronger than the other, the banks can continue to finance all sides of wars forever, and always collect their interest, because they have the ability of putting one nation against another nation against another nation to collect their debts.”

G. Edward Griffin (1931) American conspiracy theorist, film producer, author, and political lecturer

From the documentary Corporate Fascism: The Destruction of America's Middle Class (2011) http://www.youtube.com/embed/hTbvoiTJKIs?autoplay=1&start=2094&end=2183

Bill Hybels photo

“God isn't interested in stock phrases. Talk to him. Talk to the Father sincerely.”

Bill Hybels (1951) American writer

Too Busy Not to Pray (2008, InterVarsity Press)

Alastair Reynolds photo
Ilana Mercer photo

“An American writer's intellectual energy ought to focus on American interests, first. Personal probity demands it! Otherwise, the columnist is a fifth column.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“American Rabbis For Israel First, http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/08/american-rabbis-for-israel-first.html Economic Policy Journal, August 8, 2014.
2010s, 2014

Camille Paglia photo
John Galsworthy photo
Stevie Smith photo
George Soros photo
Marc Chagall photo

“Only a child had its place on the cross, and that was enough for me [to paint his Crucifixions, earlier].... in the exact sense there was no cross but a blue child in the air. The cross interested me less.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

as quoted in From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, Matthew B. Hoffman; Stanford University Press, 2007, p. 219
after 1930

François Bernier photo
Frederick Douglass photo
James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce photo
Oliver Cromwell photo
Benoît Mandelbrot photo
John Lancaster Spalding photo
Gore Vidal photo
Paul von Hindenburg photo
Jeremy Corbyn photo
Noam Chomsky photo

“We might add now that we do have an authoritative account of why the United States bombed Serbia in 1999. It comes from Strobe Talbott, now the director of the Brookings Institution, but in 1999 he was in charge of the State Department-Pentagon team that supervised the diplomacy in the affair. He wrote the introduction to a recent book by his Director of Communications, John Norris, which presents the position of the Clinton administration at the time of the bombing. Norris writes that "it was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform - not the plight of Kosovar Albanians - that best explains NATO's war". In brief, they were resisting absorption into the U. S. dominated international socioeconomic system. Talbott adds that thanks to John Norris, anyone interested in the war in Kosovo "will know … how events looked and felt at the time to those of us who were involved" in the war, actually directing it. This authoritative explanation will come as no surprise at all to students of international affairs who are more interested in fact than rhetoric. And it will also come as no surprise, to those familiar with intellectual life, that the attack continues to be hailed as a grand achievement of humanitarian intervention, despite massive Western documentation to the contrary, and now an explicit denial at the highest level; which will change nothing, it's not the way intellectual life works.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Talk at the Englert Theatre in Iowa, April 10, 2006 http://www.greenteaphd.com/greenteablog/?p=252
Quotes 2000s, 2006

Joseph Massad photo
Ernst Gombrich photo
Ravi Shankar photo
Wilhelm Liebknecht photo
Bono photo
Thomas Young (scientist) photo
F. R. Leavis photo
Nick Cave photo

“Oh, a passing, skeptical kind of interest. I'm a hammer-and-nails kind of guy.”

Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician

Cave on his interest in Eastern and nontheistic spirituality
God and religion

Henry Cabot Lodge photo
Everett Dean Martin photo
Daniel Radcliffe photo

“I might like to be an actor, but there are loads of other things I'm interested in as well, like music and writing and sports. I want to keep my options open.”

Daniel Radcliffe (1989) English actor

about acting http://www.danradcliffe.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=23&Itemid=28

Neville Chamberlain photo

“Surrealism, is interested in a dream world that will penetrate the human psyche.”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 1. 1943-1945, p. 140

Gertrude Stein photo

“Writers only think they are interested in politics, they are not really, it gives them a chance to talk and writers like to talk but really no real writer is really interested in politics.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

"The Situation in American Writing," Partisan Review (Summer 1939)
How Writing Is Written: Previously Uncollected Writings, vol.II (1974)

James Callaghan photo

“Unilateral disarmament by Britain is opposed to our country's best interests, could begin the unravelling of NATO and therefore jeopardise the stability of Europe.”

James Callaghan (1912–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; 1976-1979

The Guardian (19 November 1982)
Post-Prime Ministerial

Slobodan Milošević photo
Matthew Arnold photo
Harlan F. Stone photo
Patrick Buchanan photo
Heather Brooke photo
James Jeans photo
Paul Robeson photo
Humphrey Lyttelton photo
Jeanne Shaheen photo
Aldous Huxley photo
Willis Lamb photo

“I liked quantum mechanics very much. The subject was hard to understand but easy to apply to a large number of interesting problems.”

Willis Lamb (1913–2008) American Physicist

W. E. Lamb, Super classical quantum mechanics: the best interpretation of non relativistic quantum mechanics, Am. J. Phys. 69, 413-422 (2001).

Pierre Schaeffer photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair photo
Paul Karl Feyerabend photo
Gérard Debreu photo

“I had become interested in economics, an interest that was transformed into a lifetime dedication when I met with the mathematical theory of general economic equilibrium.”

Gérard Debreu (1921–2004) French economist and mathematician

" Gerard Debreu - Biographical http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1983/debreu-bio.html". in: Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1983, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1984; Republished at Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014.

Eduardo Torroja photo
John Howard Yoder photo
Albert Einstein photo
John D. Carmack photo