Quotes about island
page 4

“On the evening of the 29th, the army fell back to the north end of the Island. The next morning, the enemy advanced upon us in two columns upon the east and west road. Our light troops, commanded by Colonel Livingston and Colonel Laurens, attacked the heads of the columns about seven o'clock in the morning, but were beat back they were reinforced with a regiment upon each road. The enemy still proved too strong. General Sullivan formed the army in order of battle, and resolved to wait their approach upon the ground we were encamped on, and sent orders to the light troops to fall back. The enemy came up and formed upon Quaker Hill, a very strong piece of ground, within about one mile and a quarter of our line. We were well posted, with strong works in our rear, and a strong redoubt in front, partly upon the right of the line.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (August 1778)

Light, Strong, Waiting

“The original idea [for Destroy All Monsters! ] was to show all of the monsters. We then started thinking about undersea farming. Eventually, we came up with the idea of an island on which all of the monsters had been collected for scientific study. You see, we imagined that undersea farming would be required to feed all of the monsters. I very much wanted to explore that idea, but because of financial constraints, I was not allowed to do so. Only the idea of an island of monsters survived.”

Ishirō Honda (1911–1993) Japanese film director

As quoted by David Milner, "Ishiro Honda Interview" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/honda.htm, Kaiju Conversations (December 1992)

Imagination, Idea, Thinking, Study

“The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live. With the tidings that make such an Ireland possible, St. Patrick came to our ancestors fifteen hundred years ago promising happiness here no less than happiness hereafter. It was the pursuit of such an Ireland that later made our country worthy to be called the island of saints and scholars. It was the idea of such an Ireland - happy, vigorous, spiritual - that fired the imagination of our poets; that made successive generations of patriotic men give their lives to win religious and political liberty; and that will urge men in our own and future generations to die, if need be, so that these liberties may be preserved. One hundred years ago, the Young Irelanders, by holding up the vision of such an Ireland before the people, inspired and moved them spiritually as our people had hardly been moved since the Golden Age of Irish civilisation. Fifty years later, the founders of the Gaelic League similarly inspired and moved the people of their day. So, later, did the leaders of the Irish Volunteers. We of this time, if we have the will and active enthusiasm, have the opportunity to inspire and move our generation in like manner. We can do so by keeping this thought of a noble future for our country constantly before our eyes, ever seeking in action to bring that future into being, and ever remembering that it is for our nation as a whole that future must be sought.”

Éamon de Valera (1882–1975) 3rd President of Ireland

Radio broadcast http://www.rte.ie/archives/exhibitions/eamon-de-valera/719124-address-by-mr-de-valera/, "On Language & the Irish Nation" (17 March 1943), often called "The Ireland that we dreamed of" speech

Life, Wisdom, Men, God

“South America had been an island continent, far bigger and far more diverse than Australia, for tens of millions of years before the Isthmus of Panama rose just a couple of million years ago. The resulting flood of North American mammals across the new land bridge corresponds in time with the decimation of the native South American fauna. In fact, most large mammals generally considered distinctly South American… are all recent migrants from North America.”

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

"Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?" pp. 390
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Time

“Thus departed Hiawatha,
Hiawatha the Beloved,
In the glory of the sunset,
In the purple mists of evening,
To the regions of the home-wind,
Of the Northwest-Wind, Keewaydin,
To the Islands of the Blessed,
To the Kingdom of Ponemah,
To the Land of the Hereafter!”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow book The Song of Hiawatha

Pt. XXII, Hiawatha's Departure, st. 29.
The Song of Hiawatha (1855)

Home

“Sappho was a worshipper of the Aphrodite cult and on the island of Lesbos there were many cliff-jumpers. They all jumped. Some may say they flew in ecstasy. If only for nine seconds -- one second for each string of the lyre.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Flying Out of This World

“Bod said, "I want to see life. I want to hold it in my hands. I want to leave a footprint on the sand of a desert island. I want to play football with people. I want," he said, and then he paused, and thought. "I want everything."”

Neil Gaiman book The Graveyard Book

Source: The Graveyard Book (2008), Ch. 8

Life, People, Football

“Pliny had no theoretical opinions of his own concerning changes of the earth's surface… But his enumeration of the new islands which had been formed in the Mediterranean, and of other convulsions, shows that the ancients had not been inattentive observers of the changes which had taken place on the earth within the memory of man.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.2, p. 22
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Memory, Change

“Truth of it is,’ said Commander Haydock, steering rather erratically round a one-way island and narrowly missing collision with a large van, ‘when the beggars are right, one remembers it, and when they’re wrong you forget it.”

Agatha Christie book N or M?

N or M? (1941)

Truth, Way, Forgetting

“Even if a civil society were to be dissolved by the consent of all its members (e. g., if a people inhabiting an island decided to separate and disperse throughout the world), the last murderer remaining in prison would first have to be executed, so that each has done to him what his deeds deserve and blood guilt does not cling to the people for not having insisted upon this punishment; for otherwise the people can be regarded as collaborators in his public violation of justice.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Kt6:333
Metaphysics of Morals (1797)

People, World, Justice

“Reliable men among the inhabitants of the islands, like the jurist (faqîh) and teacher (mu'allim) 'Alî, the judge 'Abdullãh - and others besides them - told me that the inhabitants of these islands were infidels. Subsequently a westerner named Abul Barakãt the Berbar who knew the great Qur'ãn came to them. He stayed amongst them and God opened the heart of the king to Islãm and he accepted it before the end of the month; and his wives, children and courtiers followed suit. They broke to pieces the idols and razed the idol-house to the ground. On this the islanders embraced Islãm and sent missionaries to the rest of the islands, the inhabitants of which also became Muslims. The westerner stood in high regard with them, and they accepted his cult which was that of Imãm Mãlik. May God be pleased with him! And on account of him they honour the westerners up to this time. He built a mosque which is known after his name.”

Ibn Battuta (1304–1377) Moroccan explorer

About the Maldive Islands , The Rehalã of Ibn Battûta translated into English by Mahdi Hussain, Baroda, 1967.
Travels in Asia and Africa (Rehalã of Ibn Battûta)

Men, God, Children, Teachers

“[I]ts patronising, right-on, sanctimonious political correctness gets me so angry it would give me the energy and the willpower to get off that island”

Paul Dacre (1948) English journalist

Dacre's explanation for choosing The Guardian as his luxury on Desert Island Discs in 2004. [Lewis, Helen, w:Helen Lewis (journalist), https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2018/06/paul-dacre-daily-mail-editor, Paul Dacre’s departure from the Daily Mail will trigger a sea-change in the British media, New Statesman, 13 June 2018, y]

“It is a nation of contradictions, sir. Consider this: Ireland is an island nation that has never developed a navy; a music-loving people who have produced only those harmless lilting ditties as their musical legacy; a bellicose people who have never known the sweet savor of victory in a single war; a Catholic country that has never produced a single doctor of the Church; a magnificently beautiful country, a country to inspire artists, but a country not yet immortalized in art; a philosophic people yet to produce a single philosopher of note; a sensual people who have never mastered the art of preparing food.”

Pat Conroy The Lords of Discipline

p 274. Said by character Colonel Edward T. Reynolds.
The Lords of Discipline (1980)

Love, War, People, Food

“Your practical statesmanship has succeeded in converting a people who three years ago were ready to kiss the hem of the garment of the American and to welcome him as a liberator, who thronged after your men when they landed on those islands with benediction and gratitude, into sullen and irreconcilable enemies, possessed of a hatred which centuries can not eradicate.”

George Frisbie Hoar (1826–1904) American politician

Subjugation of the Philippines Iniquitous (1902)

Men, People, Kiss, Gratitude

“The royal navy of England hath ever been its greatest defense and ornament; it is its ancient and natural strength; the floating bulwark of our island.”

William Blackstone book Commentaries on the Laws of England

Book I, ch. 13 http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/blackstone_bk1ch13.asp: Of the Military and Maritime States. Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769)

Nature

“We…have enfranchised the whole adult and labouring population of these islands, saints and sinners alike, and are attempting the immense double enterprise not only of making each citizen count as one and an end in himself, but also of asking him to share effectively and intelligently in the responsibilities of municipal citizenship and imperial government…Democracy is still an aspiration and not a fact…What we have achieved is a democratic framework of government, which is not the same thing as a democratic society. We have perfected the machinery of popular government, and one immediate danger is that it may be seized and exploited in undemocratic ways for democratic ends. In the name of the sovereign people deeds may be done as cruel as those done by any Greek tyrant or mediaeval despot. It is terribly easy for those in power to confuse justice with the interest of the strong; but oppression of the few by the many is just as ugly as its opposite.”

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

The John Clifford Lecture at Coventry (14 July 1930), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), pp. 39-40.
1930

People, Justice, Way, Democracy

“Christianity took Ratu Cakobau and the Fijians from the way of the club, to the way of peace. Our islands were transformed forever.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

Additional remarks about the proposed Reconciliation and Unity Commission, Address to the nation at the National Day of Prayer in Fiji combined church service http://www.fiji.gov.fj/publish/page_4615.shtml, Post Fiji Stadium, Suva, 15 May 2005

Peace, Way

“[My mother] said, "Arlo, I was out in the middle of China. And they brought out these school kids, and they started singing us songs, and they started singing 'This Land is Your Land', and I said 'STOP! Stop the song! My husband wrote that song!" She must have drove them nuts! She was driving me nuts about it! It was weeks after she had got back she hadn't slowed down about it one little bit! And I just looked at her and I said, "You know, mom… California….. to the New York Island. What are they singing it for over there anyhow?" She just looked with one of those Mom kind of looks. She said, "Oh Arlo…" She walked away. I was left standing there feeling like my usual self. I knew she was right, but I just didn't know why. After a while though, it come to me. I could see it, just because it said "California to the New York Island", didn't mean it had to go the short way! I could see it going around back! Redwood Forests, Gulf stream waters, around that way! Then the whole world could be singing that song! Except America.”

Arlo Guthrie (1947) American folk singer

Talking about the song "This Land is Your Land" which was his father's most famous song, and his mother's trip to China. (Live in Sydney)

World, School, Way, Feeling

“We inflict our rage for immortality on things, marooning them on static islands.”

Don McKay (1942) Canadian poet

Baler Twine

Rage

“We retain nothing, although we have conquered everything…France is chiefly, if not solely, to be dreaded by us in the light of a maritime and commercial power; and therefore by restoring to her all the valuable West India islands, and by our concessions in the Newfoundland fishery, we have given her the means of recovering her prodigious losses and of becoming once more formidable to us at sea…all the Spanish treasures and riches in America, lay at our mercy.”

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708–1778) British politician

Speech against the Treaty of Paris (December 1762).

Light, Loss, Sea

“…. The Greek War of Independence, which came to a successful conclusion in 1832, affected less than one half of the Greeks in the Turkish Empire. It did not bring freedom to the Greeks of Macedonia and Thrace, of Crete and the Aegean Islands, nor to the more than two million Greeks in Asia Minor and Constantinople.”

Henry Morgenthau, Sr. (1856–1946) American diplomat

I was sent to Athens http://www.hri.org/docs/Morgenthau/

War, Freedom, Success

“Then, on the slight turn of the Lower Hope Reach, clusters of factory chimneys come distinctly into view, tall and slender above the squat ranges of cement works in Grays and Greenhithe. Smoking quietly at the top against the great blaze of a magnificent sunset, they give an industrial character to the scene, speak of work, manufactures, and trade, as palm-groves on the coral strands of distant islands speak of the luxuriant grace, beauty and vigour of tropical nature. The houses of Gravesend crowd upon the shore with an effect of confusion as if they had tumbled down haphazard from the top of the hill at the back. The flatness of the Kentish shore ends there. A fleet of steam-tugs lies at anchor in front of the various piers. A conspicuous church spire, the first seen distinctly coming from the sea, has a thoughtful grace, the serenity of a fine form above the chaotic disorder of men’s houses. But on the other side, on the flat Essex side, a shapeless and desolate red edifice, a vast pile of bricks with many windows and a slate roof more inaccessible than an Alpine slope, towers over the bend in monstrous ugliness, the tallest, heaviest building for miles around, a thing like an hotel, like a mansion of flats (all to let), exiled into these fields out of a street in West Kensington. Just round the corner, as it were, on a pier defined with stone blocks and wooden piles, a white mast, slender like a stalk of straw and crossed by a yard like a knitting-needle, flying the signals of flag and balloon, watches over a set of heavy dock-gates. Mast-heads and funnel-tops of ships peep above the ranges of corrugated iron roofs. This is the entrance to Tilbury Dock, the most recent of all London docks, the nearest to the sea.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Hope Point to Tilbury / Gravesend
The Mirror of the Sea (1906), On the River Thames, Ch. 16

Men, Beauty, Hope, Nature

“Then silence is sawn in half by a dragonfly
as eels sign their names along the bottom-sand
when the sunrise brightens the river's memory and waves of huge ferns are nodding to the sea's sound.
Although the smoke forgets the earth from which is ascends
and the nettles guard the holes where the laurels were killed an iguana hears the axes, clouding each lens
over its lost name, when the hunched island was called
'Iounalao' 'Where it iguana is from' But, taking its own time, the iguana will scale
the rigging of vines in a year, its dewlap fanned,
its elbows akimbo, its deliberate tail moving with the island. The slit pods of its eyes
ripened in a pause that lasted for centuries,
that rose with the Aruacs' smoke till a new race unknown to the lizard stood measuring the trees.
These were their pillars that fell, leaving a blue space
for a single God where the old gods stood before, The first god was a gommier. The generator
began with a whine, and a shark, with sidewise jaw,
sent the chips flying like mackrel over water into trembling weeds”

Derek Walcott book Omeros

"A Far Cry from Africa" (1962), Omeros

God, Tree, Silence, Water

“Still peering eastward from my hill, I saw the Pacific, strewn with islands; and then the Americas, where the descendants of Europe long ago mastered the descendants of Asia, through priority in the use of guns, and the arrogance that guns breed.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XVI: Epilogue: Back to Earth (p. 187)

“A winter's day
In a deep and dark
December;
I am alone,
Gazing from my window to the streets below
On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.
I am a rock,
I am an island.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

I Am a Rock
Song lyrics, Sounds of Silence (1966)

Winter

“Difficult days lie ahead, but Britain will face them in the conviction that our cause is just and in the knowledge that we have been doing everything reasonable to secure a negotiated settlement. The principles that we are defending are fundamental to everything that this Parliament and this country stand for. They are the principles of democracy and the rule of law…Britain has a responsibility towards the islanders to restore their democratic way of life. She has a duty to the whole world to show that aggression will not succeed and to uphold the cause of freedom.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech in the House of Commons (20 May 1982) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104943 First term as Prime Minister

Life, Lie, World, Law

“I speak to you for the first time as Prime Minister, in a solemn hour of the life of our country, of our Empire, of our Allies, and, above all, of the cause of Freedom. … I am sure I speak for all when I say we are ready to face it; to endure it; and to retaliate against it—to any extent that the unwritten laws of war permit. There will be many men and women in this Island who when the ordeal comes upon them, as come it will, will feel comfort, and even a pride, that they are sharing the perils of our lads at the Front—soldiers, sailors and airmen, God bless them—and are drawing away from them a part at least of the onslaught they have to bear. Is not this the appointed time for all to make the utmost exertions in their power?”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Broadcast (19 May 1940), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 363
The Second World War (1939–1945)

Life, Women, Men, God

“This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land is made for you and me.”

Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) American singer-songwriter and folk musician

This Land Is Your Land (1940; 1944)

Water

“We are but of yesterday, and yet we have filled all the places that belong to you — cities, islands, forts, towns, exchanges; the military camps themselves, tribes, town councils, the palace, the senate, the market-place; we have left you nothing but your temples.”
Esterni sumus, & vestra omnia implevimus, Vrbes, Insulas, Castella, Municipia, Conciliabula, Castra ipsa, Tribus, Decurias, palatium, Senatum, Forum, sola vobis relinquimus Templa.

Tertullian (155–220) Christian theologian

Tertullian's Plea For Allegiance, A.2

“The spirit of Japan, conceived in the Nara epoch, carried in the womb of her islands throughout the Heian period, delivered in the anguish of the Middle Ages, schooled by the rod of iron of the Tokugawas, fully grown now, benefited from all her past experiences. She cannot forget them.”

Louis Frédéric (1923–1996) French scholar

Frédéric, L. (1984). Daily life in Japan at the time of the samurai, 1185-1603. Tokyo: Tuttle.

Age, School, Past, Forgetting

“So, the kangaroos, people ask, "How did the kangaroos get to Australia?" Uhh, they hopped. That is how they get everywhere. You see, kangaroos, koalas, and wombats are nonaggressive. Compared to tigers they are just not very aggressive. So when animals got off the Ark over here in Turkey where it landed, they are going to start spreading out and establishing their territory. So the kangaroos are at home raising their family and all of the sudden the tigers come in, "Rrrr - I want this property!" So they say, okay So, rather than fight, they run, if possible. Less aggressive animals would have been pushed to the migration fringe. A kangaroo would rather run than fight. And they ended up over generations, possibly a hundred years or so, they would keep spreading out. And those that don't run get killed. And they end up in Australia, down here. But at the same time, while they are being pushed to the edge of the migration fringe the water is coming up because the ice caps are melting back. And as the ice caps melt back, the water comes up, and all of a sudden, Australia is protected from additional migrations. Now Australia is an island. Long ago it used to be a part of the mainland. And they just got as far away from the tigers as they could get, and that is where they got stuck in Australia.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Hovind theory

People, Family, Home, Water

“…When the Sultãn saw that the infidels had gone to that island, he ordered boats from the ports and proceeded to the island with his well-armed soldiers… The infidels did not stint in fighting with swords and guns. In the end the army of Islãm achieved victory. A majority of the infidels were slaughtered. The Musalmãns started giving calls to prayers after mounting on top of the temples. They started destroying the temples and desecrating the idols. The Sultãn offered namãz out of gratefulness of Allãh… He got a Jãmi‘ Masjid raised in that place…”

Mahmud Begada (1458–1511) Sultan of Gujarat

Sultãn Mahmûd BegDhã of Gujarat (AD 1458-1511) Sankhodhar (Gujarat) Mir‘ãt-i-Sikandarî in S.A.A. Rizvi in Uttara Taimûr Kãlîna Bhãrata, Aligarh, 1959, Vol. II, p. 319

Victory, Fight

“[Footnote] Pericles immediately banished his strongest rival, Cimon, who had achieved popularity by bringing the bones of Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur, back to Athens from the island of Scyros. As Theseus was a myth, he could hardly have had any bones. Nevertheless, Cimon brought them back.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part II: Ancient Greeks and Worse, Pericles

“The population of Majorca has always been noted for its absolute indifference to politics. In the days of the Carlistes and the Cristinos, George Sand tells us how they welcomed with equal unconcern the refugees of either side. According to the head of the Phalange, you could not have found a hundred Communists in the whole island. Where could the Party have got them from? It is a country of small market-gardening, of olives, oranges and almonds, without industry, without factories. I declare on oath that during the months preceding the civil war there was no attempt of any kind made against persons or belongings. 'There was killing in Spain,' you say. 'A hundred and thirty-five political assassinations between March and July 1936.”

Georges Bernanos book Les grands cimetières sous la lune

But in Majorca there were no crimes to avenge, so it could only have been a preventative action, the systematic extermination of suspects.
Source: Les grands cimetieres sous la lune (A Diary of My Times) 1938, p.86 [Carlistes and Cristinos - followers of Don Carlos - reactionary, and Maria Cristina - liberal - in the Spanish War of Succession in the 1830s].

War, Personality, Country, Indifference

“In Hawaii the United States has another possible source of undesirable immigration. The dominant element among its third of a million inhabitants is the Japanese, who have held themselves aloof from the other residents and shown little tendency to intermarry. Every Japanese child born in the islands is an American citizen, with the full right of entry to the mainland. The greater part of the rest of the population is a mongrel crowd. Chinese and native Hawaiians, until quite recently, have shown a marked tendency to intermarry. Every effort should be made to find some constitutional way by which Hawaii can be prevented from becoming a continuous source of supply of undesirable citizens of the United States.”

Madison Grant (1865–1937) American lawyer, eugenicist, and conservationist

The Conquest of a Continent (1933)

Way, Effort, Parting

“Now he lives in the islands, fishes the pilin's
And drinks his green label each day,
He's writing his memoirs and losing his hearing,
But he don't care what most people say.
Through eighty-six years of perpetual motion,
If he likes you he'll smile then he'll say,
Jimmy, some of it's magic, some of it's tragic,
But I had a good life all the way.”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

He Went to Paris
Song lyrics, A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean (1973)

Life, People, Smile, Way

“Why would the oldest tree on earth be less than 4,400 years old (and still growing)? Why would the oldest coral reef on earth (Great Barrier Reef in Australia) be less than 4,400 years old? Why would the largest cave formations be dated at less than 4,400 years old? Why would the oldest records of capital punishment, farming, writing, husbandry, and metallurgy be less than 4,400 years old? Why would the oldest known civilizations be advanced and appear to have sprung up out of nowhere? It’s almost as if very intelligent people coming from a stock of people getting off Noah’s ark who already had knowledge of scores of things just moved into an area and developed a civilization in a short time. There is no evidence of “upward advancement from apelike creatures to hunter-gatherers,” as books often teach. After the Flood it was sort of like a Gilligan’s Island situation. The people were very smart, but it would take a while to rebuild civilization after a global flood. The first settlers coming off the ark would be in an automatic “Stone Age” because it’s faster to make stone tools than steel ones.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 40

People, Books, Age, Intelligence

“Our aim is to create an island of tranquility in our own country which, amid the joyful hum of arts and crafts, would be welcome to anyone who professes faith in Ruskin and Morris.”

Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956) Austrian architect and product designer

Declaration in work programme of Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop, 1903)

Faith, Art, Country

“After the first day there [In 1961, at the invitation of Tatyana Grosman, Frankenthaler ventured out to Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), Grosman's Long Island printmaking studio, and began making lithographs for the first time] I felt no hesitation. I was very committed. All I had to do was start work on that print. It was a whole new road - and a very connected road.”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

Quote from Artists and Prints: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Deborah Wye; The Museum of Modern Art, 2004, p. 146 http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=69050 1990s - 2000s

Art, Universe, Time

“A wedding. According to Chris, they didn't die on the boat. They got washed up on a shore in a jungle island. The queen gave birth to a baby boy. They build a treehouse. They get eaten by a leopard…”

Jennifer Lee (1971) American motion picture writer and director.

Boy, Birth, Wedding, Baby

“Not only is she obsessed with fur, she also collects clothes, houses, land, islands, and, above all, diamonds. Lots of diamonds. Big ones. The biggest are the size of pigeon eggs, and she's already wearing them for breakfast. I feel sorry for her. She'd give it all up just to be a couple of years younger.”

Klaus Kinski (1926–1991) German actor

On Martine Carol. p. 185
Kinski Uncut : The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski (1996)

Feeling, Housing, Clothes

“Jacques Spex had explained to Ieyasu the methods of Spain and Portugal and in 1612 Henrick Brower presented to the Shogun a memorandum on Spanish and Portuguese methods of conquest. In the time of the second Tokugawa Shogun (Hidetada) the European nations were themselves denouncing each other's imperialist intentions. The Japanese converts had, as elsewhere, shown that their sympathies were with their foreign mentors and for this they had to pay a very heavy price. The Christian rebellion of 1637 in Shembara disclosed this danger to the Shogun. It took a considerable army and a costly campaign to put down the revolt which was said to have received support from the Portuguese. The Japanese were also fully informed of the activities of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Spaniards and the English in the islands of the Pacific especially in the Philippines, the Moluccas and Java ‑ and these had taught them the necessity of dealing with the foreigners firmly and of denying them an opportunity to gain a foothold on Japanese territory. In 1615 the Japanese sent a special spy to the southern regions to report on the activities of the Europeans there. They were strengthened by the information that reached them in 1622 of a Spanish plan to invade Japan itself. By the beginning of the seventeenth century Spain had consolidated her position in the Philippines, where she maintained a considerable naval force. Japan was the only area in the Pacific which Spain could attack without interfering with Portuguese claims or the Papal distribution of the world which in her own interests she was bound to uphold. It seemed natural to the Spaniards that they should undertake this conquest. The reaction of the Shogunate was sharp and decisive. All Spaniards in Japan were ordered to be deported, the firm policy of eliminating the converts was put into effect and a few years later the country was closed to the Western nations.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

World, Support, Nature, Decision

“The United States of America will become the United States of Banana. And Puerto Rico will be the first half-and-half banana republic state incorporated that will secede from the union. Then will come Liberty Island, then Mississippi Burning, Texas BBQ, Kentucky Fried Chicken—all of them—New York Yankees, Jersey Devils—you name it—will want to break apart—and demand a separation—a divorce. Things will not go well for the banana republic when the shackles and chains of democracy break loose and unleash the dogs of war. Separation—divorce—disintegration of subject matters that don’t matter anymore—only verbs—actions. Americans will walk like chickens with their heads cut off.”

Giannina Braschi book United States of Banana

United States of Banana (2011)

War, Dogs, Democracy

“My collages are only ideas for things much larger – things to cover walls. In fact all the things that I have done I would like to see much larger. I am not interested in painting as it has been accepted for so long – to hang on walls of houses as pictures. To hell with pictures – they should be the wall – even better – on the outside wall – of large buildings. Or stood up outside as billboards or a kind of modern 'icon'. We must make our art like the Egyptians, the Chinese & the African and the Island primitives – with their relation to life. It should meet the eye direct.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

Quote in a letter to John Cage, 4 September 1950; as quoted in "Ellsworth Kelly, a Retrospective", ed. Diane Waldman, Guggenheim museum, New York 1997, p. 11
1950 - 1968

Life, Art, Idea, Hell

“We are going to be posted all round the shores as a guard upon them, and in that state to wait for the return of the fleet, which, by the by, I think will not be in a hurry. It is reported that Lord Howe arrived last night with his fleet and the re enforcement mentioned in your Excellency's letter to General Sullivan. If the report is true, we got off the island in very good season.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (August 1778)

Thinking, Waiting, Night, Season

“The author of Amelia, the most singular genius which their island ever produced, whose works it has long been the fashion to abuse in public and to read in secret.”

George Borrow book The Bible in Spain

The Bible in Spain (1843), ch. 1.

Secret, Fashion, Reading

“Once there were islands all a-sprout with palms: and coral reefs and sands as white as milk. What is there now but a vast shambles of the heart? Filth, squalor, and a world of little men.”

Mervyn Peake book Titus Alone

Source: Titus Alone (1959), Chapter 114 (p. 1012)

Men, World, Heart

“The traffic lights, they turn a blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sags on downstream
Cause the life it lived, is, is dead”

Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) American musician, singer and songwriter

The Wind Cries Mary
Song lyrics, Are You Experienced? (1967)

Life, Light, Dead

“Most fortunate Prince, we have known and seen how in the third year of your reign in the year of Our Lord 1498, in which your Highness ordered us to discover the Western region, a very large landmass with many large islands adjacent, extending 700 North of the Equator, and located beyond the greatness of the Ocean, has been discovered and navigated; this distant land is densely populated and extends 28º degrees on the other side of the Equator towards the Antarctic Pole. Such is its greatness and length that on either side its end has not been seen or known, so that it is certain that it goes round the whole globe.”

Duarte Pacheco Pereira (1460–1533) Portuguese explorer

Bemauenturado Príncipe, temos sabido e visto como no terceiro anno de vosso Reinado do hanno de nosso senhor de 1498, donde nos vossa alteza mandou descobrir a parte oucidental, passando alem ha grandeza do mar oceano, onde he achada a navegada hûa tão grande terra firme, com muitas e grandes ilhas ajacentes a ella, que se estende a setente graaos de ladeza da linha equinoçial contra ho pollo artico e posto que seja asaz fora, he grandemente pouorada, e do mesmo circulo equinocial torna outra vez e vay alem em vinte e oito graaos e meo de ladeza contra ho pollo antartico, e tanto se dilata sua grandeza e corre com muita longura, que de hûa parte nem da outra foy visto nem sabido ho fim e cabo della; pello qual segundo ha hordem que leua, he certo que vay en cercoyto por toda a Redondeza.
Esmeraldo de situ orbis [published between 1506 and 1508], Part I, ch. I, translated and edited by George Herbert Tinley Kimble, London: 1937, p. 12; Duarte Pacheco Pereira was most likely referring to the coast of Brazil.
Variant translations:
Your Highness sent us to discover towards the west, across the broad expansion of the ocean sea where there is found and sailed a very large mainland with many and large adjacent islands, which extends to 70°N of the equator to … 28º 50S.
As quoted in Diffie, Davison, Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire (1977), p. 451
In the third year of your reign, in the year of grace of 1498, Your Highness ordered me that I went on a discovery expedition, in the areas of the west, crossing the entire extension of the ocean sea, where there was found and rounded a great firm land...
As quoted in Silva Pinto Sagres (2002), p. 313

Distant

“Vodka is a very deceptive drink, because you drink it and you think, "What is this? This is pointless! It's— you can't taste it, you can't smell it… Why did we waste our money on this, bloody— why are we on a traffic island?"”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

On vodka.
Monster (2004)

Money, Drink, Thinking

“Charles Boarman. a Lieutenant in the Navy of the United States, being duly sworn, according to law, deposes and says:
Q. In what capacity did you serve in the squadron under the command of Captain Porter, and for what period of time?

A. As lieutenant I commanded the schooner Weasel, from the 20th July, 1824, till the return of Commodore Porter.

Q. On what particular service were you engaged during that period of time?

A. From the time of my arrival at St. Barts, on the 15th August, I was employed during the whole time, in convoying and cruising for pirates. Went to Crab Island in pursuit of pirates — captured a boat; the pirates escaped on shore. In September sailed from Havana for the Gulf of Mexico, convoying three American vessels; arrived at Campeachy; sailed to Alvarado, and made my report of the 5th December, (read and annexed;) thence sailed to Tampico, inquiring after pirates, and furnishing protection to our commerce; and having fulfilled my orders, took on board specie for the United States, arrived at the Havana, and made my report of the 21st January, 1825.

Q. During this time, what amount of specie did you carry on freight, from, and to, what ports?

A. I carried about $65,000 from Tampico, shipped for New York: about $20,000 of it was subject to the order of a merchant at Havana, and was there transferred to an English frigate; of this about $14,000 was shipped by an American house, and a part of the money was shipped by Spaniards. At Havana from three to four thousand dollars was put on board, and landed at Norfolk.

Q. What amount of freight was paid for this transportation, and how was it appropriated?

A. About $1,200 was paid; one-third I gave to Commodore Porter, and the residue I retained.

Q. Did this canning of specie interfere in any manner with your attention to the suppression of piracy, and the protection of American commerce?

A. Not in the least. I was offered money at Campeachy to carry to the United States, but would receive none until 1 had completed my cruise, and was on the eve of returning to the United States; and I sailed as soon as I should have done had I carried no specie.

Q. Did the general protection of American property and commerce, and the suppression of piracy, require the presence of an American force in the Gulf of Mexico as frequently as it was sent there, and at the places to which it was sent?

A. I think so. During the period of from two to three months that I was there, there was no other vessel of the squadron there.

Q. Was everything done by the squadron which could be done, for the suppression of piracy?

A. My opinion is, that all was done that could be done to suppress it.

Q. Is there any other matter within your knowledge material to this inquiry?

A. Nothing.”

Charles Boarman (1795–1879) US Navy Rear Admiral

Testimony of Lieutenant Charles Boarman at the naval court of inquiry and court martial of Captain David Porter (July 7, 1825)
Minutes of Proceedings of the Courts of Inquiry and Court Martial, in relation to Captain David Porter (1825)

Money, Law, Knowledge, Thinking

“Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves. … But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

"Confidences of a 'Psychical Researcher'" http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton/exhibits/james/psychical/7_8.cfm, in The American Magazine, Vol. 68 (1909), p. 589 Often (mis)quoted as: "We are like islands in the sea; separate on the surface but connected in the deep", or: "Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest, which co-mingle their roots in the darkness underground." 1900s

Tree, Sea

“Make an island of yourself,
make yourself your refuge;
there is no other refuge.
Make truth your island,
make truth your refuge;
there is no other refuge.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

Gautama Buddha, Digha Nikaya, 16
Unclassified

Truth

“A novelist has to enter deeper exile still. In most outward ways the experience was depressive, as many young would-be writers and painters who have ever gone to Greece have discovered. We used to have a nickname for the sense of inadequacy and accidie it produced – the ‘Aegean blues’. One has to be a very complete artist to create good work among the purest and most balanced landscapes on the planet…The Greece of the Islands is Circe still; no place for the artist-voyager to linger long, if he cares for his soul.”

John Fowles book The Magus

Introduction (1977 edition)
The Magus (1965)

Way, Soul, Sense

“Autism is a neuro-developmental disorder affecting so many around the world. Autism is not mental illness, these children and adults think differently. Albert Einstein they say was autistic. How many in the audience know that there are 38,000 autistic people in Sri Lanka? So we as entertainers, urge you all to ‘speak up for those who cannot speak up for themselves.’ Lets spread awareness of autism, particularly when numbers of autistic children are rising and we urge our government to also provide public services – who knows we may even produce Albert Einsteins if we provide education, health, specialist speech therapy for autistic children in our lovely island….”

Desmond de Silva Sri Lankan singer

Clickpress release http://www.clickpress.com/releases/Detailed/3033005cp.shtml (9 August 2009).

Love, Children, People, Health

“The chief character in this narrative is the Caribbean Sea, one of the world's most alluring bodies of water, a rare gem among the oceans, defined by the islands that form a chain of lovely jewels to the north and east.”

James A. Michener book Caribbean

Caribbean (1989) First lines

Love, World, Water, Sea

“We cannot afford to ignore HIV/AIDS. We can only ignore this battle at the cost of being regarded by future generations of Pacific Islanders as lacking the will, the foresight, the understanding to tackle this issue, which threatens our very future.”

Epeli Ganilau (1951) Fijian politician

Address to the Pan Pacific HIV/AIDS Conference, Auckland, New Zealand, October 2005

Understanding, Future

“We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Speech in the House of Commons (4 June 1940).
The Second World War (1939–1945)

God, World, Confidence, Time

“We call out into the distance…
Less than a pearl in a sea of stars,
we are a lost island in the shadows.”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Song lyrics, Amarantine (2005)

Star, Sea

“Nobilities, indecencies, heroic impulses, cowardly ravings, good and bad, white and black — the mystery of mysteries, the central island of nescience in a sea of science, the dark spot in the lighted room of knowledge, the unknown quantity, the X in the universal problem.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

Knowledge, Problem, Light, Universe

“Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the serious labours of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between. Personally, I would sooner have written "Alice in Wonderland" than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

Stephen Leacock book Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

Preface
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)

Way, Reading, Personality

“Democracy means that if this man, you, and I will be trapped on an island, we having a majority of votes will decide that you have to sleep with us. That's the Democracy. And with 2/3 votes we can even put that in the constitution.”

Janusz Korwin-Mikke (1942) polish politician

Source: speech during a meeting in the R. Barbosa High School

Democracy, Sleep

“I’m very much a free market capitalist, actually. I don’t agree with a kind of totalitarian, one government or sort of universal law. I think what will happen and what is happening now is, in the same way as… In the way that countries make themselves attractive to investors through different pieces of legislation they offer, whether it’s secrecy in the case of the Cayman Islands or Switzerland, I think the fact that some countries now are offering very robust publishing laws, it will be that as information is global, what you might see is that these big internet companies like Google or Facebook, that have their servers, will start to relocate those servers to countries where they have less interference. In a way, you’re creating a kind of free market of freedom of information law.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Attributed, Chatham House Talk (September 28, 2011)

Law, Way, Thinking, Freedom

“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.”

Jorge Luis Borges Dreamtigers

Un hombre se propone la tarea de dibujar el mundo. A lo largo de los años puebla un espacio con imágenes de provincias, de reinos, de montañas, de bahías, de naves, de islas, de peces, de habitaciones, de instrumentos, de astros, de caballos y de personas. Poco antes de morir, descubre que ese paciente laberinto de líneas traza la imagen de su cara.
Epilogue
Variant translation: A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face.
Dreamtigers (1960)

People, World, Mountain, Star

“Poland is like an island on the north European plain. At times the island has been swamped by a tide of iron or steel helmets converging from Germany and Russia. At times it has drifted suddenly with the current; if the continent of Africa had drifted relatively as much as the boundaries of Poland have drifted in the last two hundred years, then Africa would at one time have touched the north pole and at another the south pole.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

Across a Red World (1968)

Time

“Come: there shall be such islanding from grief,
And small communion with the master shore.
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin,
Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry
In humming pallor or to leap and die.”

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) American writer

A Sunset of the City

“The Prime Minister constantly asserts that the nuclear weapon has kept the peace in Europe for the last 40 years… Let us go back to the middle 1950s or to the end of the 1940s, and let us suppose that nuclear power had never been invented… I assert that in those circumstances there would still not have been a Russian invasion of western Europe. What has prevented that from happening was not the nuclear hypothesis… but the fact that the Soviet Union knew the consequences of such a move, consequences which would have followed whether or not there were 300,000 American troops stationed in Europe. The Soviet Union knew that such an action on its part would have led to a third world war—a long war, bitterly fought, a war which in the end the Soviet Union would have been likely to lose on the same basis and in the same way as the corresponding war was lost by Napoleon, by the Emperor Wilhelm and by Adolf Hitler…
For of course a logically irresistible conclusion followed from the creed that our safety depended upon the nuclear capability of the United States and its willingness to commit that capability in certain events. If that was so—and we assured ourselves for 40 years that it was—the guiding principle of the foreign policy of the United Kingdom had to be that, in no circumstances, must it depart from the basic insights of the United States and that any demand placed in the name of defence upon the United Kingdom by the United States was a demand that could not be resisted. Such was the rigorous logic of the nuclear deterrent…
It was in obedience to it… that the Prime Minister said, in the context of the use of American bases in Britain to launch an aggressive attack on Libya, that it was "inconceivable" that we could have refused a demand placed upon this country by the United States. The Prime Minister supplied the reason why: she said it was because we depend for our liberty and freedom upon the United States. Once let the nuclear hypothesis be questioned or destroyed, once allow it to break down, and from that moment the American imperative in this country's policies disappears with it.
A few days ago I was reminded, when reading a new biography of Richard Cobden, that he once addressed a terrible sentence of four words to this House of Commons. He said to hon. Members: "You have been Englishmen." The strength of those words lies in the perfect tense, with the implication that they were so no longer but had within themselves the power to be so again. I believe that we now have the opportunity, with the dissolution of the nightmare of the nuclear theory, for this country once again to have a defence policy that accords with the needs of this country as an island nation, and to have a foreign policy which rests upon a true, undistorted view of the outside world. Above all, we have the opportunity to have a foreign policy that is not dictated from outside to this country, but willed by its people. That day is coming. It may be delayed, but it will come.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech on Foreign Affairs in the House of Commons http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1987/apr/07/foreign-affairs (7 April 1987). 1980s

War, People, World, Peace

“In every age there is a turning point, a new way of seeing and asserting the coherence of the world. It is frozen in the statues of Easter Island that put a stop to time—and in the medieval clocks of Europe that once also seemed to say the last word about the heavens for ever. Each culture tries to fix its visionary moment, when it was transformed by a new conception either of nature or of man. But in retrospect, what commands our attention as much are the continuities—the thoughts that run or recur from one civilization to another.”

Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man

Source: The Ascent of Man (1973), Ch. 1 Lower than the Angels.

Age, World, Way, Nature

“That house with its remoteness and the islands going down like soft gongs all the time into the amazing blue, and I shall never, never ever forget a youth spent there, discovered by accident. It was pure gold. But then of course …youth does mean happiness, it does mean love, and that's something you can't get over.”

Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer

About the pre-WWII days in Kalami on Corfu (1975), as quoted in Amateurs in Eden (2011) by Joanna Hodgkin, p. 6

Love, Happiness, Youth, Time

“The general disposition of the land is one of metals in the west, giving way, as you travel eastward, to a varied landscape of nonmetals, which terminates in largely inert elements at the eastern shoreline. To the south of the mainland, there is an offshore island, which we shall call the Southern Island. It consists entirely of metals of subtly modulated personality. North of the mainland, situated rather like Iceland off the northwestern edge of Europe, lies a single, isolated region-hydrogen. This simple but gifted element is an essential outpost of the kingdom, for despite its simplicity it is rich in chemical personality. It is also the most abundant element in the universe and the fuel of the stars.”

Peter Atkins (1940) British chemist

Source: Periodic Kingdom (1995), Chapter 1. The Terrain

Way, Travel, Star, Universe

“Island girl,
What you wanting with the white man's world?
Island girl,
Black boy want you in his island world.
He want to take you from the racket boss,
He want to save you but the cause is lost.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Island Girl
Song lyrics, Rock of the Westies (1975)

World, Girl, Boy

“A people whom Providence hath cast together into one island or country are in effect one great body politic, consisting of head and members, in imitation of the body natural, as is excellently set forth in the statute of appeals, made 24 H. 8, c. 12, which stiles the King the supreme head, and the people a body politic (these are the very words), compact of all sorts and degrees of men, divided into spirituality and temporality. And this body never dies.”

Robert Atkyns (judge) (1621–1710) Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer and Speaker of the House of Lords

11 How. St. Tr. 1204.
Trial of Sir Edward Hales (1686)

Men, People, Nature, Country

“I thought I might teach philosophy but the atmosphere of a college faculty repelled me; the few islands of greatness seemed to be washed by seas of pettiness and mediocrity.”

I. F. Stone (1907–1989) American investigative journalist and author

I.F. Stone's Bi-Weekly (1971-12-14)

Sea

“[I]magination… is the faculty… the common root from which science and literature… spring and grow and flourish together. …the great ages of science are the great ages of all the arts… [P]owerful minds have taken fire from one another… without asking… to tie their imagination to falling balls or a haunted island. …When Galileo was looking through his telescope at the moon, Shakespeare was writing The Tempest and all Europe was in ferment, from Johannes Kepler to Peter Paul Rubens, and from the first table of logarithms by John Napier to the Authorized version of the Bible.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

Age, Art, Imagination, Spring

“Such desire is in him
merely to see the hearthsmoke leaping upward
from his own island, that he longs to die.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

I. 58–59 (tr. Robert Fitzgerald).
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)

“There are no countries in the world less known by the British than these selfsame British Islands, or where more strange things are every day occurring.”

George Borrow book Lavengro

Preface
Lavengro (1851)

World, Country

“Muslim power again suffered a setback after the death of Alauddin Khalji in 1316 AD. But it was soon revived by the Tughlaqs. By now most of the famous temples over the length and breadth of the Islamic empire in India had been demolished, except in Orissa and Rajasthan which had retained their independence. By now most of the rich treasuries had been plundered and shared between the Islamic state and its swordsmen. Firuz Shah Tughlaq led an expedition to Orissa in 1360 AD. He destroyed the temple of Jagannath at Puri, and desecrated many other Hindu shrines….
After the sack of the temples in Orissa, Firuz Shah Tughlaq attacked an island on the sea-coast where 'nearly 100,000 men of Jajnagar had taken refuge with their women, children, kinsmen and relations'. The swordsmen of Islam turned 'the island into a basin of blood by the massacre of the unbelievers'. A worse fate overtook the Hindu women. Sirat-i-Firuz Shahi records: 'Women with babies and pregnant ladies were haltered, manacled, fettered and enchained, and pressed as slaves into service in the house of every soldier.' Still more horrible scenes were enacted by Firuz Shah Tughlaq at Nagarkot (Kangra) where he sacked the shrine of Jvalamukhi. Firishta records that the Sultan 'broke the idols of Jvalamukhi, mixed their fragments with the flesh of cows and hung them in nosebags round the necks of Brahmins. He sent the principal idol as trophy to Medina.”

Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309–1388) Tughluq sultan

S.R. Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

Death, Women, Men, Fate

“Argentina will maintain its freedom of action to protect the nation's interests and honor, which will not be negociated… Argentina is not willing to renounce its historical rights over the islands and withdraw from what is hers the armed forces who are and represent the people of our nation.”

Leopoldo Galtieri (1926–2003) Argentine military dictator

"Argentina rejects resolution" http://www.nytimes.com/1982/04/04/world/argentina-rejects-resolution.html, The New York Times (April 4, 1982)

People, Freedom

“"No man is an island — " Much as we may feel and act as Individuals, our race is —a single organism, always growing and branching —which must be pruned regularly to be healthy.
This necessity need not be argued; anyone with eyes can see that any organism which grows without limit always dies in its own poisons. The only rational question is whether pruning is best done before or after birth.
Being an incurable sentimentalist I favor the former of these methods —killing makes me queasy, even when it's a case of "He's dead and I'm alive and that's the way I wanted it to be."
But this may be a matter of taste. Some shamans think that it is better to be killed in a war, or to die in childbirth, or to starve in misery, than never to have lived at all. They may be right.
But I don't have to like it —and I don't.”

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love

Time Enough for Love (1973)

War, Way, Feeling, Birth

“General Mercer writes me the Virginia troops are coming on. They are now at Trenton. He proposes an attack on Staten Island; but the motions of the enemy are such I think it necessary for them to come forward as fast as possible. On York Island, the enemy have taken possession of the hill, next to Spiten Devil. I think they will not be able to penetrate any farther. There appears to be about fifteen hundred of them.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (7 October 1776)

Thinking, Appearance

“In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness.”

Sarah Orne Jewett book The Country of the Pointed Firs

Source: The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Ch. 15

Life, Happiness, Secret

“The policy of the London Cabinet largely contributed to the first movement of our Revolution…. Taking advantage of political tempests (the cabinet) aimed to effect in an exhausted and dismembered France a change of dynasty and to place the Duke of York on the throne of Louis XVI…. Pitt…. is an imbecile, whatever may be said of a reputation that has been much too greatly puffed up. A man who, abusing the influence acquired by him on an island placed haphazard in the ocean, is desirous of contending with the French people, could not have conceived of such an absurd plan elsewhere than in a madhouse.”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

Quotes from speeches (17 November 1793 & 26 January 1794) in La Révolution: III – Le Gouvernement Révolutionnaire (1883) by Hippolyte Taine, translated as The Revolution Vol. 3 (1885), by John Durand, Book 7 : The Governors, p. 144, footnote 3 https://books.google.com/books?id=dCBKAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA144&lpg=PA144

People, Change

“It may be that the Greeks had it easy, with their light and their mountains and their plains and their islands waiting around for tourists. It was easy for them to believe that man fit in rather well. This fittingness may have given them the idea that we are seemlier than other evidence suggests. The heads of Rameses II at Abu Simbel and, for that matter, the skyscrapers of New York, have another idea of man. So do the artifacts of Albert Speer. It is depressing to wonder whether the Greeks just happened to be lucky, and the dream they left us is a lie about ourselves.”

John Leonard (1939–2008) American critic, writer, and commentator

"The Caryatid" (p. 208)
Private Lives in the Imperial City (1979)

Lie, Dreams, Mountain, Idea

“We must also sympathize with the Whites in Kenya Colony in their opposition to a filling of their country with cheap Hindu labor. As Americans we can understand the Negro and recognize his cheerful qualities, but we can have little sympathy with the Hindu whom we have expressly barred from our Pacific Coast. These Hindus, with the Chinese, have ruined the native races of many of the Polynesian Islands. They have been for ages in contact with the highest civilizations, but have failed to benefit by such contact, either physically, intellectually, or morally.”

Madison Grant (1865–1937) American lawyer, eugenicist, and conservationist

The Conquest of a Continent (1933)

Age, Understanding, Country

“Jumbled black rocks adorned an otherwise pale, flat landscape of salmons and khakis. Mountains rose in distant ridges. Out there in the Namaqua sea, I found myself thinking of South Africa as an island. Like Robinson Crusoe, I was walking its perimeter, noting the extent of my domain, checking for cannibals, finding fresh water. Sure, there were 47 million others who might make such a claim, but theirs were no more valid than mine, only similar. Beating my drum, singing the land, proclaiming it mine from coast to coast.”

Justin D. Fox (1967) South African author, photojournalist, lecturer and editor

The Marginal Safari: Scouting the Edge of South Africa (2010)

Mountain, Thinking, Water, Distant

“If you drive a nation to adopt procedures which run counter to its instincts, you weaken and may destroy the motive force of its action…You will realise that I am speaking of the frequent suggestion that the United Kingdom should join a federation on the continent of Europe. This is something which we know, in our bones, we cannot do…For Britain's story and her interests lie far beyond the continent of Europe. Our thoughts move across the seas to the many communities in which our people play their part, in every corner of the world. These are our family ties. That is our life: without it we should be no more than some millions of people living in an island off the coast of Europe, in which nobody wants to take any particular interest.”

Anthony Eden (1897–1977) British Conservative politician, prime minister

Speech to the Columbia University, New York (January 1952), quoted in Anthony Eden, Full Circle (Cassell, 1960), pp. 36-7

Life, People, Lie, World

“I know I speak for everyone in these islands, all parties, all our people, when I say to Mr. Smith tonight: "Prime Minister, think again."”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast (12 October 1965), quoted in The Times (13 October 1965), p. 8, calling on the Government of Rhodesia not to declare independence.
Prime Minister

People, Thinking

“A prison taint was on everything there. The imprisoned air, the imprisoned light, the imprisoned damps, the imprisoned men, were all deteriorated by confinement. As the captive men were faded and haggard, so the iron was rusty, the stone was slimy, the wood was rotten, the air was faint, the light was dim. Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb, the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside; and would have kept its polluted atmosphere intact, in one of the spice islands of the Indian Ocean.”

Charles Dickens book Little Dorrit

Bk. I, Ch. 1
Little Dorrit (1855-1857)

Men, Knowledge, Light

“The motions of the Grand Army will best deter mine the propriety of endeavouring to hold all the ground from King's Bridge to the lower lines. I shall be as much on the Island of York as possible, so as not to neglect the duties of my own department.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (31 October 1776)

“While North Carolina has the honor of first authorizing its delegates to concur with other Colonies in declaring independence, it was quickly followed by South Carolina and Georgia, which also gave general instructions broad enough to include such action. But the first instructions which unconditionally directed its delegates to declare for independence came from the great Commonwealth of Virginia. These were immediately followed by Rhode Island and Massachusetts, while the other Colonies, with the exception of New York, soon adopted a like course.”

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

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

“[Is "90 Millas" another crossover -- into World Music? ] I can see that. The core is African rhythm -- half of the world's music comes from that. The difference between our music and American blues: Cubans may have been slaves, but in Cuba slaves became part of the family. They could buy their freedom. And they are Island people. And Island people are happier. But, you know, in the '80s, when we released "Conga," wasn't that World Music? Everywhere we went, people got it. And why? The drums. So maybe all music is World Music, and the only question is: Do you like it?”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

www.huffingtonpost.com (September 7, 2007)
2007, 2008

People, World, Family, Music

“I was carrying out my duty, as the Japanese high commander of the Japanese Army in the Philippine Islands, to control my army with the best of my ability during wartime. Until now, I believe that I have tried my best for my army. As I said in the Manila Supreme Court that I have done everything with all my capacity, so I wouldn't be ashamed in front of the Gods for what I have done when I have died. But if you say to me "you do not have any ability to command the Japanese Army," I should say nothing in response, because it is my own nature. Now, our war criminal trial is going on in the Manila Supreme Court, so I wish to be justified under your kindness and righteousness. I know that all your American military affairs always have had tolerant and rightful judgment. When I had been investigated in the Manila court, I have had good treatment, a kind attitude from your good-natured officers who protected me all the time. I will never forget what they have done for me even if I die. I don't blame my executioners. I'll pray that the Gods bless them. Please send my thankful word to Col. Clarke and Lt. Col. Feldhaus, Lt. Col. Hendrix, Maj. Guy, Capt. Sandburg, Capt. Reel, at Manila court, and Col. Arnard. I thank you. I pray for the Emperor's long life and prosperity forever.”

Tomoyuki Yamashita (1885–1946) general in the Imperial Japanese Army

Last words. Quoted in "Yamashita Hanged Near Los Banos" - "New York Times" article - February 23, 1946.

Life, God, War, Guy

“I am hard at work, at least I work as much as the weather permits. - I began a work the motif of which is the river bank in the direction of St. Paul's Church. Looking towards Rouen I have before me all the houses on the quays lighted by the morning sun, in the background the stone bridge, to the left the island with its houses, factories, boats, launches, to the right a mass of pinnaces of all colors… Yesterday, not having the sun, I began another work on the same motif in grey weather, only I looked more to the right [603]. I must leave you for my motif. I have a room on the street. I shall start on a view of the street in fog for it has been foggy every morning until eleven o'clock—noon. It should be interesting, the square in the fog, the tramways, the goings and comings..”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote in a letter, Rouen 11 October 1883, to his son Lucien; from Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 40
1880's

Color, Light, Sun, Housing

“We cannot tell when they will try to come; we cannot be sure that in fact they will come at all; but no one should blind himself to the fact that a heavy full-scale invasion of this Island is being prepared with all the usual German thoroughness and method, and that it may be launched at any time now. … Therefore, we must regard the next week or so as a very important week for us in our history. It ranks with the days of the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel, and Drake was finishing his game of bowls; or when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon's Grand Army at Boulogne. We have read all about this in the history books; but what is happening now is on a far greater scale and of far more consequence to the life and future of the world and its civilization than these brave old days of the past. Every man and every woman will therefore prepare himself to do his duty, whatever it may be, with special pride and care.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Broadcast (11 September 1940), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 778
The Second World War (1939–1945)

Life, Books, World, History

“Nobody disputes, I believe, that our nuclear weaponry is negligible in comparison with that of Russia: if we could destroy 16 Russian cities, she could destroy practically every vestige of life on these islands several times over. For us to use the weapon would therefore be equivalent to more than suicide: it would be genocide – the extinction of our race – in the most literal and precise meaning of that much abused expression. An officer may, in the hour of his country's defeat and disgrace, commit suicide honourably and rationally with his service revolver; but in any collective context the choice of non-existence, of the obliteration of all future hopes, is insanity.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Downpatrick, County Down (31 May 1983), quoted in The Times (1 June 1983), p. 4
1980s

Life, Hope, Suicide, Time