Quotes about interpretation
page 3

“When a woman appears to express fear, we cannot assure her without at least releasing her from responsibility; when we interpret the same emotion in a man as anger, we want to blame him and be certain he acknowledges responsibility. We want to find her guiltless; we want to find him guilty.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000), p. 22.

Fear, Appearance, Anger

“There has never been just one best way to teach quantum mechanics. My goal is neither to sow nostalgia for the philosophically engaged style of Oppenheimer and Nordheim, nor to condemn the pragmatic approach of Fermi, Bethe and Feynman. It is rather to highlight the choices that physicists must always make when stepping into the classroom. Choices of topics to discuss and problems to assign reflect deeper decisions about the ideal type of physicist one seeks to train. Should the new generation be philosophically attuned, concerned with minute details of conceptual interpretation? Or should physicists hone their ability to calculate, pushing Heisenberg’s and Schrödinger’s equations into the service of ever more elaborate problems to solve and phenomena to analyse? Competing ideals have flourished under different pedagogical conditions.”

David Kaiser (1971) American physicist

Turning physicists into quantum mechanics (2007)

Way, Problem, Decision, Nostalgia

“To work for peace and reconciliation is central to the mission of the Church. For the Church exists in order to carry on the saving work of Jesus under the guidance of the Spirit. And his saving work is interpreted in the New Testament as reconciliation and peace-making. According to Paul, God was in Christ Jesus reconciling the world to himself.”

Kurien Kunnumpuram (1931–2018) Indian theologian

Kunnumpuram, K. (ed) (2007) World Peace: An Impossible Dream? , Mumbai: St Pauls
On Peace

God, World, Peace, Christ

“Third, this allowed us to propose what we called the cosmological interpretation of quantum mechanics. Here we interpret the wavefunction for an object as describing not some funky imaginary ensemble of possibilities for what the object might be doing, but rather the actual spatial collection of identical copies of the object that exist in our infinite space. Moreover, quantum uncertainty that you experience simply reflects your inability to self-locate in the Level I multiverse, i. e., to know which of your infinitely many copies throughout space is the one having your subjective perceptions.”

Max Tegmark book Our Mathematical Universe

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

“The playing of Soviet pianists of the younger generation differed significantly from the composer’s performing style, as discussed above. (Here I am referring to the generation of Richter and Gilels or younger, as opposed to Prokofiev’s coevals such as Neuhaus and Samuil Feinberg, who also had Prokofiev’s works in their repertoires.) Since we know that Prokofiev appreciated their playing, does it mean that he accepted their approach? Should we regard the new generation’s playing as a distortion of the composer’s intentions or as a natural evolution of interpretive style?
I believe that Prokofiev, having been exposed to the new performing style of the Soviet pianists, accepted at least some of its qualities. We can mention assertive muscular playing, open expressivity, and a gripping commitment to the music among those traits that brought recognition to Soviet pianists and assured their success in the international arena. These characteristics were concordant with the evolving compositional style of Prokofiev, whose later works became both more virile (often heroic) and expressive in a warmer and more open way.”

Boris Berman (1948) Russian/American musician

Prokofiev’s piano sonatas : a guide for the listener and the performer (2008), Prokofiev the pianist

Music, Way, Nature, Success

“The beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often virtually our interpreters of the world, and some feather-headed gentleman or lady whom in passing we regret to take as legal tender for a human being may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the minds of those who live with them — like a piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form and makes colour an affliction. Their trivial sentences, their petty standards, their low suspicions, their loveless ennui, may be making somebody else's life no better than a promenade through a pantheon of ugly idols.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

Love, Life, Hate, World

“We should be very careful to distinguish between our knowledge of phenomena and our interpretations of them.”

Alfred Stillé book The Essentials of the Art of Medicine

The Essentials of the Art of Medicine. 1897. p 26.

Knowledge

“Now one may ask, How could a Christian philosophy have something over a non-Christian philosophy, if it does not reach to a higher level of solutions, if it cannot get handy answers, if the problems and questions are still there? Well, perhaps a greater truth could be present in its ability to see the world in its truly mysterious character, in its inexhaustablity. It could even be the case that here, in the very experience of being as a mystery, that it is not to be grasped in the hand as a "well-rounded truth" — herein is reality more deeply and truly grasped than in any transparent system that may charm the mind of the student with its clarity and simplicity. And this is the claim of Christian philosophy: to be truer, precisely because of its recognition of the mysterious character of the world.
In no way, then, does philosophy become easier. Plato appears to have discovered and felt that too — if a certain interpretation of Plato is correct, maintaining that Plato understood philosophy to be something tragic for this reason, that it must constantly have recourse to mythos, since the teaching of philosophy can never close itself into a system.”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), The Philosophical Act, pp. 127–128
The "interpretation of Plato" referred to is that of Gerhard Krüger, Einsicht und Leidenschaft (Frankfurt, 1939), p. 301.

Truth, World, Way, Question

“All these associates were willing to help me in expanding my habit of trying to look all around things before interpreting them, as it seemed to me that the administrator should, instead of limiting his range of thought to some specialized point of view.”

Wallace Brett Donham (1877–1954) American academic

Wallace Brett Donham (1952). Administration and blind spots: the biography of an adventurous idea. p. 3

Help

“In the early 1950s, […] there were two important advances in the interpretation of quantum mechanics, both made by the American physicist David Bohm. Just as there were, it seems, two Bohrs, there were apparently two Bohms: a 1951 Bohm and a 1952 Bohm.”

David Bohm (1917–1992) American theoretical physicist

Jeremy Bernstein, Quantum Profiles (1991), John Stewart Bell: Quantum Engineer

“Do we really have to look these chords up in Forte's catalog in order to find a name for them? Another theorist [Christopher Hasty] assures us that, 'Allen Forte's perceptive interpretation…accounts for an essential quality of this mysteriously pulsating music. The eighth-note chords of the flute and clarinets form alternately, with the sustaining oboes and horns, the six-tone sonorities labeled A and B. The sonorities A and B are both representatives of the same set class (6-Z19) and are thus made up of precisely the same intervals. As Forte points out, "There is a flucuation of pitch-class content while interval content remains constant."' 'A fluctuation of pitch-class content while interval content remains constant' is what the rest of us have always known as 'a transposition.'”

George Perle (1915–2009) American composer

Page 42
The Listening Composer

Music

“Without thinking too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed. My fundamental purpose is to interpret the typical American. I am a story teller.”

Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) Armatian

As quoted in Fodor's New England (2008) by Debbie Harmsen, p. 194

Thinking

“Just as a telegram is composed of symbols called words, so the personagram is made of Aspect-prints that together combine to form the message. Only this message is written "on" a psychological structure by psychologically animate symbols. A telegram is inert itself; the information appears upon it, but it can't send a message or interpret its own. A personagram can.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Adventures In Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology (1975), p. 127

Appearance, Animals

“It is my interpretation that on the deepest archetypal level the feminist movement is partially fueled by an intuitive sensing of the decay and demise of the male. Women are rushing in to take men's places, as much for survival's sake as for any sociological or philosophical reasons. He has become a hyperactive, hyper-cerebral, hyper-mechanical, rigid, self-destructive machine out of control.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

The Cardboard Goliath, p. 8
The New Male (1979)

Women, Men, Sense

“They who interpret secularism as dharma-nirpekshata fail to understand either dharma or secularism. A secular state does not mean an anti-religious state, nor even an irreligious state. For, in that sense, the people of India just never can become secular. A secular state simply means a state which does not identify itself with any specific mode of worship and holds the balance even between all sects- secularism thus mean sampradayanirpekshata and not dharma-nirpekshata.”

Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1924–2018) 10th Prime Minister of India

Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha Session, Indore – September, 7-8, 1968
Quotes from ataljee.org

People, Understanding, Sense

“It doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with my interpretations, even the classical Quran commentators disagreed on many details. Disagreement deepens our understanding of the Quran.”

Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) Austro-Hungarian writer and academic

Documentary, A Road To Mecca

Understanding

“Joseph Ratzinger has stood still because as a Bavarian Catholic in the Hellenistic tradition, interpreted in Roman terms, he wanted to stand still. To this degree he represented and represents a different basic model of theology and church, as different from mine as in astronomy Ptolemy's geocentric picture of the world is different from Copernicus' heliocentric picture.”

Hans Küng (1928) Swiss Catholic priest, theologian and author

Disputed Truth: Memoirs Volume 2 (2008), p. 329

World

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

John Gilmore (1955) Internet activist, software programmer and contributor to the GNU project

As quoted in TIME magazine (6 December 1993) http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/outerspace/internet-article.html Unsourced variant: The Net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it.

“Here then (belove reader) thou hast this work devided into two treatises, the first is the said introduction and reasoning, for investigation of the true sense of every cheife Theological tearme and date contained in the Revelation, whereby, not onely is it opened, explained and interpreted, but also that same explanation and interpretation is proved, confirmed and demonstrated, by evidente proofe and coherence of scriptures, agreeable with the event of histories. The seconde is, the principall treatise, in which the whole Apocalyps, Chapter by chapter, Verse by verse, and Sentence by sentence, is both Paraphrastically expounded and Historically applyed. …And because this whole work of Revelation concerneth most the discoverie of the Antichristian and Papisticall kingdome, I have therefore (for removing of all suspition) in al histories and prophane matters, taken my authorities and cited my places either out of Ethnick auctors, or then papistical writers, whose testimonies by no reason can be refuted against themselves. But in matters of divinitie, doctrine & interpretation of mysteries (leaving all opinions of men) I take me onely to the interpretation and discoverie thereof, by coherence of scripture, and godly reasons following thereupon; which also not only no Papist, but even no Christian may justly refuse. And forasmuch as our scripturs herein are of two fortes, the one our ordinary text, the other extraordinary citations; In our ordinary text, I follow not altogether the vulgar English translation, but the best learned in the Greek tong, so that (for satisfying the Papists) I differ nothing from their vulgar text of S. Jerome, as they cal it, except is such places, where I prove by good reasons, that hee differeth from the Original Greek. In the extraordinary texts of other scriptures cited by me, I followe ever Jeromes latine translation, where any controverse stands betwixt us and the Papists, and that moveth me in divers places to insert his very latine text, for their cause, with the just English thereof, for supply of the unlearned.”

John Napier (1550–1617) Scottish mathematician

A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John (1593)

Men, History, Sense, Learning

“I interpret contemporary human social behavior to comprise hypertrophic outgrowths of the simpler features of human nature joined together into an irregular mosaic.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.4 Emergence

Behavior, Nature

“Nor are the general laws of economics "institutional." They work in an institutional setting, and upon institutional material; institutions supply much of their content and furnish the machinery by which they work themselves out, more or less quickly and completely, in different actual situations. Institutions may determine the alternatives of choice and fix the limits of freedom of choice, but the general laws of choice among competing motives or goods are not institutional unless rational thinking and an objective world are institutions, an interpretation which would make the term meaningless. Economic activity consists in the use of certain resources by certain processes, to produce "wealth." The content of the concept wealth is largely institutional, and the resources available and processes known and used at any place and time for producing wealth are in a sense historical products; but there are general laws of production and consumption which hold good whatever specific things are thought of as wealth and whatever productive factors and processes in use.”

Frank Knight (1885–1972) American economist

Source: "The limitations of scientific method in economics", 1924, p. 129 (2009 edition)

World, Law, Motivation, Thinking

“Judges ought to remember, that their office is jus dicere, and not jus dare; to interpret law, and not to make law, or give law.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Judicature
Essays (1625)

Law

“There has been the conflict between science and religion. Science was the interpretation from the past that is considered today as hermeneutics, but the conflict concerns the experimental science. If we ask the scientists what is the science, they will not have a correct answer. Because they are so concerned with this issue that they can also be far from it. It is said that "human knows more than what he says". This indicates the existence of the implicit knowledge in the humans. The essence of science is ambiguous.”

Khosrow Bagheri (1957) Iranian philosopher of education

Religion, Knowledge, Science, Past

“Mathematics, like music and poetry, is a creation of the mind; … the primary task of the mathematician, like that of any other artist, is to extend man's mental horizon by representation and interpretation.”

Graham Sutton (1903–1977) Welsh scientist

Mathematics in Action (1954) page 1

Music, Mathematics

“The Abbé Breuil died in 1961, and with him died the all-encompassing hunting magic hypothesis. By this time another French archeologist, André Leroi-Gourhan, had been developing his own interpretation, one based on the emerging ideas on structuralism.”

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

Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (1992)

Idea, Time

“So ends this demonstratiue resolution of all difficulties of the Revelation, first of all dates and times, and last of the principall termes and matters, as to the meaner termes and smaller matters, they are interpreted in the notes of the principall treatise.”

John Napier (1550–1617) Scottish mathematician

A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John (1593), The First and Introductory Treatise

Time

“I hate analyzing stuff. I do the bare minimum. When it comes to interpretation, I just play it and go from there. I think emotion is everything. When you get the notes, you've just scratched the surface. The best things happen spontaneously, on stage. I'm doing three concerts here; I guarantee that none of them will be the same. We're not machines.”

Sarah Chang (1980) violinist

JS online 1999 http://www2.jsonline.com/enter/performingarts/strini/jun99/chang03060299.asp

Hate, Thinking

“In the following decades “Kierkegaard remained completely unknown, Schelling’s work was contemptuously buried, and Marx and Feuerbach were interpreted as dogmatic materialists. Then a new impetus came in the 1880’s with the work of Dilthey, and particularly with Freidrich Nietzsche, the “philosophy of life” movement, and the work of Berson. The third phase came after the shock of WWI – “Kierkegaard and the early Marxists were rediscovered and the serious challenges to the spiritual and psychological basis of Western society given by Nietzsche could no longer be covered over by Victorian self-satisfied placidity. The specific form of the third phase owes much to the phenomenology of Edmond Husserl, which gave to Heidegger, Jaspers, and the others the tool they needed to undercut the subject object cleavage which had been such a stumbling block to science as well as philosophy.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Discovery of Being (1983), p. 54-55

Life, Science

“If you think back, my comments were very open to interpretation. And you happen to be easily misled. As for the queen, who is difficult to lead anywhere… I have always been and intend to be entirely straightforward.”

Suzanne Collins The Underland Chronicles

Ripred, p. 247
The Underland Chronicles, Gregor and the Marks of Secret (2006)

Thinking

“Everyone with any experience of life is aware of the extent to which the characters of people he has known have been given their particular forms by the sufferings through which they have passed. But it is not simply what has happened to them that has defined them; their responses to what has happened to them have been of even greater importance, and these responses have been shaped by their interpretations of what they suffered.”

H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) American theologian

Source: The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy (1963), pp. 60-61

Life, People, Suffering

“I had long since insisted upon interpreting the things that Fate forced me to do as victories of my own will and intelligence, and now this bad habit had grown into a sort of frenzied arrogance. In the nature of what I was calling my intelligence there was a touch of something illegitimate, a touch of the sham pretender who has been placed on the throne by some freak chance. This dolt of a usurper could not foresee the revenge that would inevitably be wreaked upon his stupid despotism.”

Yukio Mishima book Confessions of a Mask

Source: Confessions of a Mask (1949), p. 220.

Fate, Stupidity, Intelligence, Revenge

“One thing seems at any rate certain, that the spiritual motive will be in the future of India, as in her past, the real originative and dominating strain. By spirituality we do not mean a remote metaphysical mind or the tendency to dream rather than to act. That was not the great India of old in her splendid days of vigour, — whatever certain European critics or interpreters of her culture may say, — and it will not be the India of the future. Metaphysical thinking will always no doubt be a strong element in her mentality, and it is to be hoped that she will never lose her great, her sovereign powers in that direction…”

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

The Renaissance in India (1918)

Dreams, Hope, Motivation, Thinking

“It is remarkably difficult to avoid falling under the spell of our own intellectual heritage. As we analyse and reflect on our normative concepts, it is easy to become bewitched into believing that the ways of thinking about them bequeathed to us by the mainstream of our intellectual traditions must be the ways of thinking about them. … The history of philosophy, and perhaps especially of moral, social and political philosophy, is there to prevent us from becoming too readily bewitched. The intellectual historian can help us to appreciate how far the values embodied in our present way of life, and our present ways of thinking about those values, reflect a series of choices made at different times between different possible worlds. This awareness can help to liberate us from the grip of any one hegemonal account of those values and how they should be interpreted and understood. Equipped with a broader sense of possibility, we can stand back from the intellectual commitments we have inherited and ask ourselves in a new spirit of enquiry what we should think of them.”

Quentin Skinner (1940) British historian

Source: Liberty Before Liberalism (1998), pp. 116-117

Life, World, Way, History

“Joni's genius is that she creates chords that are ambiguous, chords that have two or more different roots. …Joni's music is as close to impressionist visual art as anything I've heard. …harmonic complexity born out of her strict insistence that the music not be anchored in a single harmonic interpretation.”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Art, Music

“The term "meaning" is not here included among the basic terms of semiotic. This term, useful enough at the level of everyday analysis, does not have the precision necessary for scientific analysis. Accounts of meaning usually throw a handful of putty at the target of sign phenomena, while a technical semiotic must provide us with words which are sharpened arrows. "Meaning" signifies any and all phases of sign-processes (the status of being a sign, the interpretant, the fact of denoting, the significatum), and frequently suggests mental and valuational processes as well; hence it is desirable for semiotic to dispense with the term and to introduce special terms for the various factors which meaning fails to discriminate.”

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Source: Signs, Language and Behavior, 1946, p. 19

“Having liberated the key to a liberatory interpretation and contextualization of the Qur'an, the issue of patriarchal and misogynic interpretations of the Qur'an becomes a societal issue rather than an issue of the religion.”

Yasser Harrak Canadian liberal writer, columnist and human rights activist

Yasser Harrak. 2016. "The Patriarchal Characterization Of Islam". UnpublishedOttawa. Accessed June 23,2016. http://unpublishedottawa.com/letter/78752/patriarchal-characterization-islam

Religion

“Yes, I’m profoundly a representative of the great hypervirtuosic Romantic epoch. But as already mentioned, my roots also go back to Bach and this special style of interpretation, where I’m also at home. In this special field of tension I also see many of the major composers and works in the Romantic tradition. It was no less than Schumann himself who said that great music finds all its combinations in Bach. Indeed, Schumann also builds up his works in polyphonic style, and even in his orchestral scores and symphonic movements he is a counterpointer. As Romantic and modern his work must have seemed to people of his era and lifetime, in main he was a classicist. That means that - and only to name one typical Romantic composer - Schumann cannot be understood without Bach.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

People, Music, Home

“Philosophy is empty if it isn't based on science. Science discovers, philosophy interprets.”

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

Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 98

Science

“If, as I have said, the things already listed were all we had had to contribute, America would have made no distinctive and unique gift to mankind. But there has been also the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

James Truslow Adams (1878–1949) American writer and historian

Adams first coined the phrase http://memory.loc.gov/learn/lessons/97/dream/thedream.html "the American dream" in The Epic of America (2nd ed., Greenwood Press, 1931), p. 404

Life, Dreams, Cars, Birth

“Poetry's magic lies in the imagery which satifies even without interpretation.. it is accepted as easily as it was created.”

Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930) British writer

The Necessity of Poetry Tredegar 1917 (from Collected Essays).
Essays

“He never asks the orchestra to do anything which contradicts the players' feeling of what the music signifies or what the printed notes of the score actually mean in plain musical language. To his credit he does not pretend to omniscience. When a certain progression of programs with the Philharmonic decreed that he conduct the Brahms Fourth Symphony two seasons ago, he disavowed intensive rehearsals with the simple statement to the orchestra: "Gentlemen, you know the work better than I do." Both the compliment and the attitude endeared themselves so much to the orchestra that they literally forgot themselves in a mass effort to justify his statement—and, as one of those who heard the performance, I can testify that they delivered one of the most powerful and integrated interpretations of the score that New York has experienced in years.”

Oscar Levant (1906–1972) American comedian, composer, pianist and actor

On conductor George Enescu, in "Music in Aspic," Harper's Magazine (October 1939) and A Smattering of Ignorance (1940); as quoted in "Lightning Wit Plays On American Musical Scene; Oscar Levant Answers Unspoken Request for 'Information, Please' With Uncensored Comments on Exalted Persons" by Ray C. B. Brown, in The Washington Post (January 14, 1940), p. E4

Music, Feeling, Effort, Season

“There's something to the idea of the autonomous character. Big chunks of our wetware are devoted to simulating other people, trying to figure out if we are likely to fight or fondle them. It's unsurprising that when you ask your brain to model some other person, it rises to the task. But that's exactly what happens to a reader when you hand your book over to him: he simulates your characters in his head, trying to interpret that character's actions through his own lens.”

Cory Doctorow (1971) Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author

"In Praise of Fanfic" in Locus (May 2007) http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2007/05/cory-doctorow-in-praise-of-fanfic.html

People, Books, Idea, Fight

“Those dreams that on the silent night intrude,
And with false flitting shapes our minds delude
… are mere productions of the brain.
And fools consult interpreters in vain.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

On Dreams (1727)

Dreams, Fools, Falseness, Night

“He [Jesus] claims that not the observance of outer civil or statutory churchly duties but the pure moral disposition of the heart alone can make man well-pleasing to God (Matthew V, 20-48); … that injury done one’s neighbor can be repaired only through satisfaction rendered to the neighbor himself, not through acts of divine worship (V, 24). Thus, he says, does he intend to do full justice to the Jewish law (V, 17); whence it is obvious that not scriptural scholarship but the pure religion of reason must be the law’s interpreter, for taken according to the letter, it allowed the very opposite of all this. Furthermore, he does not leave unnoticed, in his designations of the strait gate and the narrow way, the misconstruction of the law which men allow themselves in order to evade their true moral duty, holding themselves immune through having fulfilled their churchly duty (VII, 13). He further requires of these pure dispositions that they manifest themselves also in works (VII, 16) and, on the other hand, denies the insidious hope of those who imagine that, through invocation and praise of the Supreme Lawgiver in the person of His envoy, they will make up for their lack of good works and ingratiate themselves into favor (VII, 21). Regarding these works he declares that they ought to be performed publicly, as an example for imitation (V, 16), and in a cheerful mood, not as actions extorted from slaves (VI, 16); and that thus, from a small beginning in the sharing and spreading of such dispositions, religion, like a grain of seed in good soil, or a ferment of goodness, would gradually, through its inner power, grow into a kingdom of God (XIII, 31-33).”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Book IV, Part 1, Section 1, “The Christian religion as a natural religion”
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793)

Men, God, Religion, Justice

“I understand that it is the wish of the Editor of this collection of essays that each contributor should describe his own system of philosophy. Were I to interpret this demand literally I could not contribute anything at all, for two excellent reasons. In the first place, I have nothing worth calling a system of philosophy of my own, and there is no other philosopher of whom I should be willing to reckon myself a faithful follower. If this be a defect I see no likelihood of its ever being cured. Secondly, if I had a system of my own, I should doubt the propriety of "pushing" my crude philosophical wares in competition with the excellent products of older firms with well-earned reputations.”

C. D. Broad (1887–1971) English philosopher

From Critical and Speculative Philosophy (1924)

Faith, Understanding

“It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book III, Ch. 13
Essais (1595), Book III

Books

“Maia recognized a look of true religion in the other woman’s eyes. A version and interpretation that conveniently justified what had already been decided.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Source: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 14 (p. 240)

Religion

“As so often I have pointed out, intuition is a level of the highest range. In details, I don’t have to think or to worry about the realization of my interpretation; no, it’s something that spreads out of my artistic all-compassion. Probably I have to be sorry for it, but this is my deepest artistic conviction for the rightness of an interpretation - interpretation as a summary of something unique and whole, not of a combining of details. Intuition is a level that includes all levels of emotion, intelligence, structure, and architecture. And I’m also confronted with the question of poetry and poesy, something that is so often neglected - especially in Bach.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Intelligence, Question, Thinking

“That God is quoted verbatim, that God is said to be speaking (when, in fact, he is being spoken for) points to either the remarkable arrogance of the biblical contributors or their unshakeable conviction that their access to the deity was total.
The fateful, and perhaps even unwitting, manipulation performed by the Hebrew Bible is to have convinced its readers that what stands in front of them is not a hodgepodge of texts worked over by countless men position across time and motivated by mundane political and theological interests. Instead, it presents itself as a self-evident treasury of the actual words, though, actions, political opinions, and future aspirations of Yahweh. From early on, apparently, interpreters wholly swallowed this argument.”

Jacques Berlinerblau (1966) Associate Professor, Director of the Program for Jewish Civilization, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service,…

Source: The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (2005), p. 65

Men, God, Fate, Quotes

“Keep in mind that the practice of dream interpretation is not generally useful for spiritual advancement. […] People codify things and events as positive or negative based on culture. Even within a culture there can be variations of codification. Thus, dream analysis by the average person often can lead to confusion due to personal speculation and mental gymnastics.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: Dreams: A State of Reality, p. 25

People, Dreams, Personality

“Laplace made many important discoveries in mathematical physics… Indeed, he was interested in anything that helped to interpret nature. He worked on hydrodynamics, the wave propagation of sound, and the tides. In the field of chemistry, his work on the liquid state of matter is classic. His studies of the tension in the surface layer of water, which accounts for the rise of liquids inside a capillary tube, and of the cohesive forces in liquids, are fundamental. Laplace and Lavoisier designed an ice calorimeter (1784) to measure heat and measured the specific heat of numerous substances; heat, to them, was still a special kind of matter. Most of Laplace's life was, however, devoted to celestial mechanics.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972), p. 495

Life, Mathematics, Nature, Study

“Almost alone among cognitive-aesthetic movements and strategies of interpretation, deconstruction neither champions any body of past literature or art, nor does it act as vanguard or advocate for any contemporary or incipient school. The New Criticism and T. S. Eliot strove for the revaluation of Metaphysical poetry so as to underwrite, in turn, certain tactics of modenity. Aristotle was advocate for Sophocles. Deconstruction is, intentionally, marginal (a key trope) to all histories of taste and manifestos for innovation.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 7 (p. 117).

School, Art, History, Literature

“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group… We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”

Steven Pinker (1954) psychologist, linguist, author

" Rules of Language http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/Pinker%20Rules%20of%20Language.pdf," Science (August 2, 1991)

World, Imagination, Communication, Problem

“Too many crucial things about this country turn out to be highly recommended because they are 'invisible'. There is the 'hidden hand' of the free market, the 'unwritten' Constitution, the 'invisible earnings' of the financial service sector, the 'magic' of monarchy and the 'mystery' of the Church and its claim to the interpretation of revealed truth. When we do get as far as the visible or the palpable, too much of it is deemed secret. How right it is that senior ministers, having kissed hands with the monarch, are sworn to the cult of secrecy by 'The Privy Council Oath'. How right it is that our major foreign alliance - the 'special relationship' with the United States - is codified by no known treaty and regulated by no known Parliamentary instrument.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

1990s, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

Truth, Secret, Kiss, Country

“Ranting about "political correctness" is best read as "I can't really deal with the merits of your interpretation, so I'll deride it largely because it doesn't reinforce my own preferences and prejudices."”

Brooks D. Simpson (1957) American historian

2010s, Erasing History? Monuments and Memory (January 2016)

Reading

“For me the different religions are beautiful flowers from the same garden, or they are branches of the same majestic tree. Therefore they are equally true, though being received and interpreted through human instruments equally imperfect.”

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

Harijan, 30-1-1937, p. 407; In: My God (1962), Chapter 13. Pathways of God http://www.mkgandhi.org/god/mygod/pathwaystogod.html, Printed and Published by: Jitendra T. Desai, Navajivan Mudranalaya, Ahemadabad-380014 India Posthumous publications (1950s and later)

Religion, Beauty, Flowers, Tree

“[Physicists and philosophers] stick stubbornly to the principles of a mechanistic interpretation of the world after physics has, in its factual structure, already outgrown the latter. They have the same excuse as the inhabitant of the mainland who for the first time travels on the open sea: he will desperately try to stay in sight of the vanishing coast line, as long as there is no other coast in sight, towards which he steers.”

Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) German mathematician

"Wissenschaft als symbolische Konstruktion des Menschen" Eranos-Jahrbuch (1948) GA IV, as quoted/translated by Erhard Scholz, "Philosophy as a Cultural Resource and Medium of Reflection for Hermann Weyl" http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0409596 (2004)

World, Travel, Time, Sea

“I felt that I was like Joan of Arc (at that time my heroine) and that, like her, I was seeing spiritual visions and was consequently set aside for a great work. What it was I could not imagine, but pictured myself as the dramatic and admired teacher of thousands. This is a very common mistake on the part of beginners and I see a lot of it today in connection with various occult groups. People's sincerity and aspiration do succeed in bringing them some inner, spiritual contact and they then interpret it in terms of personality success and importance. A reaction of over-stimulation…”

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

Source: The Unfinished Autobiography (1951), Chapter I, Part 2

People, Imagination, Teachers, Time

“Language and the human spirit are inextricably intertwined. We interpret the world through language. We express ourselves through language. Language is powerful. Language can bring us together or set us apart. It can be used to include — to bridge barriers between cultures, religions, worldviews — at the same time as it can be used to exclude by inflaming xenophobia and racism. Language can establish community and solidarity at the same time as it can be used to erect boundaries and divide communities. More often than not, when we turn on the TV we see language used to occlude — to hide reality — to deceive, to spin, to distract, to disempower, to reinforce us versus them conceptions of humanity. Language is no longer innocent. We can no longer conceptualize language as some kind of neutral code that can be taught in classrooms in splendid isolation from its intersection with issues of power, identity, and spirituality.”

Jim Cummins (professor) (1949) professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto

Language and the Human Spirit (2003)

World, Religion, Communication, Reality

“Conclusion. Then for conclusion, by these interpretative propositions, followeth foure thinges marvelous and notable. First, that the interpretation of every parte of the Revelation, is accessorie or consectarie to other: that is to say, it is so chained and linked together, that every mysterie opens other to the discoverie of the whole. Secondly, that the first halfe of the book is orderly, that is to say, it containeth in order of time the most notable accidents that concerneth Gods Church, from the time of Christs Baptisme successively to the latter day. Thirdly, that every historie prophecied, is limited or dated with his own nŭber of years. Fourthly and last of all, that whatsoever historie is more orderlie and summarlie, than plainly set downe in the first orderlie parte of the booke, the same is repeated, interpreted, or amplified in the last part of the booke: deviding the whole Revelation according to the table following, before we proceed to the principall matter.”

John Napier (1550–1617) Scottish mathematician

A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John (1593), The First and Introductory Treatise

God, Books, History, Time

“As Amish say "There is a vast difference between putting your nose in other people's business and putting your heart in other people's problems,” and there is also a vast difference between using the ‘grammar of language’ and the ‘grammar of painting’. In a language we have subjects, adjectives, verbs, and so on, and in painting we have light, composition, geometric planes, and lines. It is by using this grammar that one can understand a work of art. This is very similar to Ferdinand Saussure’s, distinction between “la langue” and “la parole” for interpretation of written words.”

Guity Novin (1944) artist

Dialogues on enlightenment and reason (2013)

People, Art, Understanding, Business

“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”

Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985) American philosopher

Feeling and Form, ch. 1, Scribner (1953)

Idea, Understanding, Question, Nature

“There is no pure visualization in the sense of a priori philosophies; every visualization is determined by previous sense perceptions, and any separation into perceptual space and space of visualization is not permissible, since the specifically visual elements of the imagination are derived from perceptual space. What led to the mistaken conception of pure visualization was rather an improper interpretation of the normative function… an essential element of all visual representations. Indeed, all arguments which have been introduced for the distinction of perceptual space and space of visualization are base on this normative component of the imagination.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

Imagination, Sense

“Of course, the apparent disarray could have stemmed entirely from my own ignorance. But when I revealed my impression of confusion and dissonance to one of the attendees, he reassured me that my perception was accurate. “It’s a mess,” he said of the conference (and, by implication, the whole business of interpreting quantum mechanics). The problem, he noted, arose because, for the most part, the different interpretations of quantum mechanics cannot be empirically distinguished from one another; philosophers and physicists favor one interpretation over another for aesthetic and philosophical—that is, subjective—reasons.”

John Horgan (journalist) (1953) American science journalist

Source: The End of Science (1996), p. 88

Business, Problem, Parting

“To be creative, scientists need libraries and laboratories and the company of other scientists; certainly a quiet and untroubled life is a help. A scientist's work is in no way deepened or made more cogent by privation, anxiety, distress, or emotional harassment. To be sure, the private lives of scientists may be strangely and even comically mixed up, but not in ways that have any special bearing on the nature and quality of their work. If a scientist were to cut off an ear, no one would interpret such an action as evidence of an unhappy torment of creativity; nor will a scientist be excused any bizarrerie, however extravagant, on the grounds that he is a scientist, however brilliant.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

1970s, Advice to a Young Scientist (1979)

Life, Way, Nature, Help

“My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody.”

U.G. Krishnamurti (1918–2007) Indian philosopher

Copyright release found in this and several other publications of his conversations (note: copyright restrictions apply)
The Mystique of Enlightenment (1982)

“[Information processing is] the gathering, interpreting and synthesis of information in the context of organisational decision making.”

David A. Nadler (1948–2015) American organizational theorist

Source: "Information Processing as an Integrating Concept in Organizational Design." 1978, p. 614

Decision

“Let us assume that we invited an unknown person to a game of cards. If this person answered us, “I don’t play,” we would either interpret this to mean that he did not understand the game, or that he had an aversion to it which arose from economic, ethical, or other reasons. Let us imagine, however, that an honorable man, who was known to possess every possible skill in the game, and who was well versed in its rules and its forbidden tricks, but who could like a game and participate in it only when it was an innocent pastime, were invited into a company of clever swindlers, who were known as good players and to whom he was equal on both scores, to join them in a game. If he said, “I do not play,” we would have to join him in looking the people with whom he was talking straight in the face, and would be able to supplement his words as follows: “I don’t play, that is, with people such as you, who break the rules of the game, and rob it of its pleasure. If you offer to play a game, our mutual agreement, then, is that we recognize the capriciousness of chance as our master; and you call the science of your nimble fingers chance, and I must accept it as such, it I will, or run the risk of insulting you or choose the shame of imitating you.” … The opinion of Socrates can be summarized in these blunt words, when he said to the Sophists, the leaned men of his time, “I know nothing.””

Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) German philosopher

Therefore these words were a thorn in their eyes and a scourge on their backs.
Socratic Memorabilia, J. Flaherty, trans. (Baltimore: 1967), pp. 165-167.

Men, People, Pleasure, Imagination

“The reader cannot create; that has been done for him by the author. The reader can only interpret, giving the author a fair chance to make his impression.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Chance

“I had always regarded language as more a question of utility than identity. Therefore, I promptly noted that all the (EU) meetings should be conducted in English and French. My older colleagues laughed. Later I understood why. On the second day of the Finnish presidency (of the EU) a German delegation refused to participate in an informal ministerial meeting because no German interpretation had been arranged.”

Alexander Stubb (1968) Finnish politician

Alexander Stubb The naked truth and other stories about Finns and Europeans WSOY 2009 p 13, 31.

Question

“Deniers do not get their views just from simple mistakes about language and truth. Rather, they believe that there is something to worry about in important areas of our thought and in traditional interpretations of those areas; they sense that it has something to do with truth; and (no doubt driven by the familiar desire to say something at once hugely general, deeply important, and reassuringly simple) they extend their worry to the notion of truth itself.”

Bernard Williams (1929–2003) English moral philosopher

Source: Truth and Truthfulness (2002), p. 6

Truth, Sense

“Some argue that the Bible doesn’t really say some of the things we can prove that it does, while others are convinced that it clearly does say things that it doesn’t really even hint at anywhere. For example, the idea that there was no death before “the fall”. The Bible doesn’t say that. In fact, it says there was death before the fall, because Adam and Eve had to ingest and digest living cells in order to survive, the very definition of what it means to be an animal. The only way around that was to eat of the fruit of the tree of eternal life, which directly contradicts the creationist’s interpretation, because it wouldn’t need to be there if they already had eternal life. It is an obvious metaphor representing a choice, perhaps between innocence and responsibility. That too is an interpretation. But it was obviously not an actual deciduous plant!”

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

"3rd Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnj7PlqmJ5o, Youtube (December 10, 2007) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Life, Death, Way, Idea

“The human is a narrative being. We construct emotional machines, so-called “stories”, to communicate, to share the world in which we live and make it collectively experienceable. And we are pretty good at doing that. Since the primordial soup at some point mendelized into primate brains, we have either been fleeing from big cats or telling others about our escapes from the clutches of big cats. Sitting around the campfire, interpreting and breaking down the world, charging it with aura. Initially this was all very mythopoeic, and slowly it became more differentiated. But even in the post-Enlightenment age, world interpretations are not necessarily particularly rational. Good stories sell well, and the best stories are the ones that hit you in the gut, regardless of whether they would hold up to a Wikipedia check or not.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

via Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2016/04/14/the-story-of-traceroute-about.html

Age, World, Communication, Cats

“Every man lives in his neighborhood, and beyond his home and his job. To most men, except in the largest cities, the municipality is interpreted in terms of his neighborhood. Few men get beyond this except through occasional excursions into the larger world. America is a country of parallel neighborhoods; the native American in one section and the immigrant in another. Americanization is the elimination of the parallel line. So long as the American thinks that a house in his street is too good for his immigrant neighbor and tolerates discriminations in sanitation, housing, and enforcement of municipal laws, he can serve on all Americanization Committees that exist and still fail in his efforts.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)
Context: Every man lives in his neighborhood, and beyond his home and his job. To most men, except in the largest cities, the municipality is interpreted in terms of his neighborhood. Few men get beyond this except through occasional excursions into the larger world. America is a country of parallel neighborhoods; the native American in one section and the immigrant in another. Americanization is the elimination of the parallel line. So long as the American thinks that a house in his street is too good for his immigrant neighbor and tolerates discriminations in sanitation, housing, and enforcement of municipal laws, he can serve on all Americanization Committees that exist and still fail in his efforts. The immigrant neighborhood is often made up of people who have come from one province in the old country. Inevitably the culture of that neighborhood will be that of the old country; its language will persist and its traditions will flourish. It is not that we undervalue these, or desire to discredit them. But separated from the land and surroundings that gave them birth, from the history that cherishes them, they do not remain the strong, beautiful things they were on the other side. These aliens may retain some of the form of culture of the land of their birth long after its spirit has departed or has lost its savor in a new atmosphere. New opportunities, strange conditions, unforeseen adjustments, necessary sacrifices, and forces unseen and not understood affect the immigrant and his life here, and unless this culture is connected and fused with that of the new world, it loses its vitality or becomes corrupt.

Men, World, Law, Home

“Leibniz’s theory on the subject as substantia ideans in the sense of a causative agent of decision and acts stands much closer to a materialist interpretation of history than does a philosophy which reduces the thinking subject to the role of subsuming protocol sentences under general propositions and deducing other sentences from them.”

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) German philosopher and sociologist

Source: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 149.

History, Thinking, Decision, Sense

“Copy nature and you infringe on the work of our Lord. Interpret nature and you are an artist.”

Jacques Lipchitz (1891–1973) American and French sculptor

Jacques Lipchitz cited in: Bernard S. Raskas (1976). Living thoughts: inspiration, insight, and wisdom from sources throughout the ages. p. 22; Quoted in: William Safire, ‎Leonard Safir (1990). Words of Wisdom. p. 34

Nature

“A great deal of misunderstanding is avoided if it be remembered that the terms infinity, infinite, zero, infinitesimal must be interpreted in connexion with their context, and admit a variety of meanings according to the way in which they are defined.”

George Ballard Mathews (1861–1922) British mathematician

Part 1, sect. 104.
Theory of Numbers, 1892

Way

“The fall of communism confirms century-old libertarian claims that equity and justice cannot be imposed by force, that interpreting "to each according to work" as "to each according to the marginal revenue product of one's labor" rationalizes privilege, and that central planning stifles workers' creative potentials. Clearly, enterprises whose inputs and outputs have been determined by a central planning procedure exclude workers and consumers from decision making, separate conceptual and manual tasks, and offer unequal consumption and work opportunities. For the Soviet, East German, Polish, Czechoslovakian, and Hungarian people to reject these injustices is encouraging. But it is dishonest to say this demonstrates that capitalism is optimal. It only bespeaks a lack of alternatives.”

Robin Hahnel (1946) American economist

Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel. The political economy of participatory economics. Princeton University Press, 1991. p. 3

People, Justice, Communication, Optimism

“I want to offer a little ode to the importance of studying history. We’ve seen the assertion of “alternative facts” – meaning, essentially, a denial of actual facts. We’ve see the proliferation of “fake news,” along with the suggestion that it’s impossible to differentiate between “real” and “fake” news. Studying history responsibly does some handy things. It compels you to confront and consider ugly realities as part of a bigger picture. Studying history compels you to investigate, evaluate, compare, and analyze evidence to help you piece together ACTUAL facts. And in teaching people to evaluate evidence in search of facts, it trains them to logically analyze and interpret news for themselves. [F]or those insisting that the humanities has no value, we are getting daily examples of how the study of history offers practical tools for understanding not only the past, but the present.”

Joanne B. Freeman (1962) US historian and tenured professor of History and American Studies at Yale University

Twitter (6 Mar 2017) https://twitter.com/jbf1755/status/838897292132421632

People, History, Search, Understanding

“Much time was wasted and ink spilled in the late 1960s and early 1970s trying to interpret the lagged effect of prices on wages as reflecting adaptive lags in the formation of expectations. But if we have learned anything from the new Keynesian economics of Fischer, Taylor, Blanchard, and their younger followers, it is that price and wage inertia is compatible with rational expectations.”

Robert J. Gordon (1940) American economist

Robert J. Gordon, The Phillips Curve Now and Then. (1990).

Learning, Time

“Rolling Stone: What was your headspace at the time of Superunknown? A lot of the lyrics are dark.
Cornell: I don't know if I would say I was in a particularly dark or moody headspace more than other times. I feel the lyrics have to be born from the music. Or if I had a lyrical idea, separate from Soundgarden music, I knew if it would work with the band because it tended to reflect what the music was and what the feeling of the music was – which was usually somewhat dark and somber or moody, or over-the-top, visceral, aggressive angry.
Rolling Stone: So it wasn't an especially dark time?
Cornell: No, not that I remember. No more than usual. I think that I always struggled with depression and isolation, so those could come out. I think that the mood of Seattle to me, and the way that I always interpreted that mood was something that was always a little bit introspective and dark. And I wouldn't say "depressing," but introspective in a way that could be moodier and darker.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Interview with Rolling Stone, 2014 https://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/soundgardens-chris-cornell-on-superunknown-depression-w483113, On depression and suicide

Music, Way, Feeling, Idea

“The scandal is that there are still many articles, discussions, and textbooks, which advertise various interpretations and philosophical profundities. In the seventeenth century Cartesians refused to accept Newton’s attraction because they could not accept a force that was not transmitted by a medium. Even now many physicists have not yet learned that they should adjust their ideas to the observed reality rather than the other way round.”

Nico van Kampen (1921–2013) Dutch theoretical physicist

The Scandal of Quantum Mechanics (2008)

Way, Idea, Reality, Learning

“Many of those who read history at Delhi in the mid-1970s and later, still bear the ugly scars inflicted by the thought police of sarkari Marxism. 'There are two interpretations of history', a leading representative of the Red Cretin Brigade used to inform his students casually, 'the bourgeois interpretation and the Marxist interpretation, and the Marxist interpretation is the correct one.'… Whereas the British Marxists established their reputation by crafting their radical concerns their Indian counterparts took cheeky short cuts. it may also explain why substantive research on Indian history has increasingly become the prerogative of British, and a few American and Australian universities. The presiding deities of Indian historiography have meanwhile devoted themselves to writing politically correct text books that present history as chapters of received wisdom. They have also drafted resolutions for the Indian History Congress and written articles in the press on the Ayodhya issue.”

Swapan Dasgupta (1955) Indian politician, journalist and columnist

Swapan Dasgupta Indian Express of July 23, 1995. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 7

Wisdom, Books, History, Universe

“Professor Smith has kindly submitted his book to me before publication. After reading it thoroughly and with intense interest I am glad to comply with his request to give him my impression.
The work is a broadly conceived attempt to portray man's fear-induced animistic and mythic ideas with all their far-flung transformations and interrelations. It relates the impact of these phantasmagorias on human destiny and the causal relationships by which they have become crystallized into organized religion.
This is a biologist speaking, whose scientific training has disciplined him in a grim objectivity rarely found in the pure historian. This objectivity has not, however, hindered him from emphasizing the boundless suffering which, in its end results, this mythic thought has brought upon man.
Professor Smith envisages as a redeeming force, training in objective observation of all that is available for immediate perception and in the interpretation of facts without preconceived ideas. In his view, only if every individual strives for truth can humanity attain a happier future; the atavisms in each of us that stand in the way of a friendlier destiny can only thus be rendered ineffective.
His historical picture closes with the end of the nineteenth century, and with good reason. By that time it seemed that the influence of these mythic, authoritatively anchored forces which can be denoted as religious, had been reduced to a tolerable level in spite of all the persisting inertia and hypocrisy.
Even then, a new branch of mythic thought had already grown strong, one not religious in nature but no less perilous to mankind — exaggerated nationalism. Half a century has shown that this new adversary is so strong that it places in question man's very survival. It is too early for the present-day historian to write about this problem, but it is to be hoped that one will survive who can undertake the task at a later date.”

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

Foreword of "Man and his Gods" by Homer W. Smith
Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and Religion (1999)

Truth, Books, Fear, Religion

“Secondly, the student is trained to accept historical mis-statements on the authority of the book. If education is a pre- paration for adult life, he learns first to accept without question, and later to make his own contribution to the creation of historical fallacies, and still later to perpetuate what he has learnt. In this way, ignorant authors are leading innocent students to hysterical conclusions. The process of the writers' mind provides excellent material for a manual on logical fallacies. Thirdly, the student is told nothing about the relationship between evidence and truth. The truth is what the book ordains and the teacher repeats. No source is cited. No proof is offered. No argument is presented. The authors play a dangerous game of winks and nods and faints and gestures with evidence. The art is taught well through precept and example. The student grows into a young man eager to deal in assumptions but inapt in handling inquiries. Those who become historians produce narratives patterned on the textbooks on which they were brought up. Fourthly, the student is compelled to face a galling situation in his later years when he comes to realize that what he had learnt at school and college was not the truth. Imagine a graduate of one of our best colleges at the start of his studies in history in a university in Europe. Every lecture he attends and every book he reads drive him mad with exasperation, anger and frustration. He makes several grim discoveries. Most of the "facts", interpretations and theories on which he had been fostered in Pakistan now turn out to have been a fata morgana, an extravaganza of fantasies and reveries, myths and visions, whims and utopias, chimeras and fantasies.”

Khursheed Kamal Aziz (1927–2009) historian

The Murder of History, critique of history textbooks used in Pakistan, 1993

Life, Truth, Books, Education

“As educators of linguistically and culturally diverse students we face choices with respect to how we view language and human potential. Is language the means of interpreting our increasingly complex world and mobilizing intellect, imagination, and identity to create new knowledge and act on social realities or is it simply a set of sounds and symbols and the codes that bind them? Can our society benefit from all the intelligence, imagination, and multilingual talent it can get or should schools develop these attributes only among a privileged elite while focusing on English-only basic skills for those constructed as incapable of independent learning?”

Jim Cummins (professor) (1949) professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto

Language and the Human Spirit (2003)

World, Education, School, Imagination

“[Feminism] is alienating women from their own bodies … because they don’t understand that they have something that men want, okay? So they’re encouraged to interpret all male lust as oppressive and victimizing and negative, instead of seeing that it is up to them to husband this flame. They have a flame, and it’s enormously powerful…”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 259

Women, Men, Understanding

“The reciprocal relationship of epistemology and science is of noteworthy kind. They are dependent on each other. Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is — insofar as it is thinkable at all — primitive and muddled. However, no sooner has the epistemologist, who is seeking a clear system, fought his way through to such a system, than he is inclined to interpret the thought-content of science in the sense of his system and to reject whatever does not fit into his system. The scientist, however, cannot afford to carry his striving for epistemological systematic that far. He accepts gratefully the epistemological conceptual analysis; but the external conditions, which are set for him by the facts of experience, do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted in the construction of his conceptual world by the adherence to an epistemological system. He therefore must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist: he appears as realist insofar as he seeks to describe a world independent of the acts of perception; as idealist insofar as he looks upon the concepts and theories as free inventions of the human spirit (not logically derivable from what is empirically given); as positivist insofar as he considers his concepts and theories justified only to the extent to which they furnish a logical representation of relations among sensory experiences. He may even appear as Platonist or Pythagorean insofar as he considers the viewpoint of logical simplicity as an indispensible and effective tool of his research.”

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

Contribution in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, p. A. Schilpp, ed. (The Library of Living Philosophers, Evanston, IL (1949), p. 684). Quoted in Einstein's Philosophy of Science http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/ 1940s

World, Way, Sense, Appearance

“In the interpretation of figurative passages, let the following canon be observed. If the passage be preceptive, either forbidding some flagitious deed and some heinous crime, or commanding something useful and beneficent: then such passage is not figurative. But, if the passage seems, either to command some flagitious deed and some heinous crime, or to forbid something useful and beneficent: then such passage is figurative. Thus, for example, Christ says: Unless ye shall eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood; ye shall have no life in you. Now, in these words, he seems to command a heinous crime or a flagitious deed. Therefore the passage is a figure, enjoining us to communicate in the passion of our Lord, and admonishing us to lay it up sweetly and usefully in our memory because, for us, his flesh was crucified and wounded. On the other hand, Scripture says: If thy enemy shall hunger, give him food; if he shall thirst, give him drink.”

George Stanley Faber (1773–1854) British theologian

Here, without all doubt, an act of beneficence is enjoined.
Source: Christ's Discourse at Capernaum: Fatal to the Doctrine of Transubstantiation (1840), pp. 147-149

Life, Hunger, Food, Communication

“The fact that, from 1938 onwards, I concentrated more on the interpretation of personal ideas was primarily the result of my departure from Italy. In Switzerland, Belgium, and Holland where I successively established myself, I found the outward appearance of landscapes and architecture to be less striking than those which are particularly to be seen in the southern part of Italy. Thus I felt compelled to withdraw from the more or less direct and true-to-life illustrating of my surroundings.”

M. C. Escher (1898–1972) Dutch graphic artist

Escher's note in a 1960 book introduction; as cited in 'Metamorphosis', in Biography of M.C. Escher http://im-possible.info/english/articles/escher/escher.html 1950's

Life, Idea, Departure, Appearance

“God is the architect of the event; you are the interpreter of the moment.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 32

God

“Careful listening to current country and western and rock music with the help of an interpreter for coded phrases shows that young people are hearing a constant stream of messages about getting high, feeling good, going on trips, and using drugs of all kinds with all methods.”

Virgil Miller Newton (1938) American priest

Miller Newton (1983). The Teenage Drug Epidemic, El Paso Physician, vol 6, pp. 5-6.
On Teenage Drug Use

People, Music, Feeling, Help

“Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness…This is a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.”

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

1960s, Playboy Interview (1969)

Men, Communication, Universe, Christ

“Now the Senate is looking for 'moderate' judges, 'mainstream' judges. What in the world is a moderate interpretation of a constitutional text? Halfway between what it says and what we'd like it to say?”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Address to Chapman University students http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/08/30/scalia.re.enactment.ap/index.html (2005). 2000s

World

“The eye projects and focuses the inner image (idea) onto the physical world in the same manner that a motion picture camera transfers an image onto a screen. The mouth creates words. The ears create sound. The difficulty in understanding this principle is due to the fact that we’ve taken it for granted that the image and sound already exist for the senses to interpret. Actually the senses are the channels of creation by which idea is projected into material expression.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Seth Material (1970), p. 13

World, Idea, Understanding, Sense

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

Source: Projective methods for the study of personality (1939), p. 402-403; As cited in: Edwin Inglee Megargee, Charles Donald Spielberger (1992) Personality assessment in America: a retrospective on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Society for Personality Assessment. p. 20-21

Life, World, Way, Feeling

“My job is to faithfully interpret the work of the Legislature and to try and communicate to our judgments as clearly as possible, I never signed on for the job of philosopher king, If I thought I was any good at crafting policy, I would be in a different branch of government.”

Joan Larsen (1968) United States Circuit Judge for the Sixth Circuit

POTUS election could have ‘huge’ impact on Mich. judges http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2016/06/04/potus-election-huge-impact-mich-judges/85424958/ (June 4, 2016)

Communication