Quotes about kindness (7466 quotes, page 23)

“Islamic Iran will resist … any kind of threat and will give a powerful answer to enemies and oppressors.”

Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar (1956) Iranian politician

Iran will resist "any threat": defense minister http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL2329805520070523?src=052307_0815_DOUBLEFEATURE_ May 2007

“They [the true instructors of the people] will accustom children to the vegetable régime. The peoples living on vegetable foods, are, of all men, the handsomest, the most vigorous, the least exposed to diseases and to passions, and they whose lives last longest. Such, in Europe, are a large proportion of the Swiss. The greater part of the peasantry who, in every country, form the most vigorous portion of the people, eat very little flesh-meat. The Russians have multiplied periods of fasting and days of abstinence, from which even the soldiers are not exempt; and yet they resist all kinds of fatigues. The negroes, who undergo so many hard blows in our colonies, live upon manioc, potatoes, and maize alone. The Brahmins of India, who frequently reach the age of one hundred years, eat only vegetable foods. It was from the Pythagorean sect that issued Epaminondas, so celebrated by for his virtues, Archytas, by his genius for mathematics and mechanics; Milo of Crotona, by his strength of body. Pythagoras himself was the finest man of his time, and, without dispute, the most enlightened, since he was the father of philosophy amongst the Greeks. Inasmuch as the non-flesh diet introduces with many virtues and excludes none, it will be well to bring up the young upon it, since it has so happy an influence upon the beauty of the body and upon the tranquillity of the mind. This regimen prolongs childhood, and, by consequence, human life.”

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737–1814) writer and botanist from France

Vœux d'un solitaire, pour servir de suite aux "Études de la nature", as quoted in The Ethics of Diet by Howard Williams (University of Illinois Press, 2003, p. 175 https://books.google.it/books?id=o9ugCcZ13BMC&pg=PA175)

Life , Men , Children , People

“If I can be permitted to turn around a phrase, I would say that I'm kind of sorry I won't have you to kick around any more.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

Statement to the press, referencing "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more", during his resignation speech (21 November 1979) http://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/1979-trudeau-steps-down-as-liberal-leader

“Every Sunday I’d take a 20-minute bus ride to his house in Beverley Hills for a one-hour lesson and be there for four hours […] They had four sons, they didn’t have a daughter and I kind of fitted in as the baby of the family.”

Nancy Cartwright (1957) American actress

Quoted in And speaking of the Simpsons, 2004-08-12, Edinburgh Evening News, 2009-02-07 http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com/thesimpsons/And-speaking-of-the-Simpsons.2554090.jp,
Referring to her voice training lessons with Butler

Family , Baby , Housing , Daughters

“His face was lit up with a divine look as lie uttered these words. Though not a handsome man, and ungainly in his person, yet in his enthusiasm he seemed the personification of manly beauty, and that sad face of his looked down in kindness upon these ignorant blacks with a grace that could not be excelled. He really seemed of another world.”

David Dixon Porter (1813–1891) United States Navy admiral

Source: 1880s, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (1885), p. 296

Lie , World , Sadness , Beauty

“There is no kind way to rip the skin off animals’ backs. Anyone who wears any fur shares the blame for the torture and gruesome deaths of millions of animals each year. … Saving animals is as simple as choosing synthetic alternatives instead of real fur.”

Natalie Imbruglia (1975) British-Australian singer and actor

"Natalie Imbruglia Speaks Out Against Fur in New PETA Video", PETA.org.uk (9 September 2010) https://www.peta.org.uk/blog/natalie-imbruglia-speaks-fur-new-video/.

Death , Way , Animals

“Notwithstanding the work of all kinds done by steam-engines… their theory is very little understood, and the attempts to improve them are still directed almost by chance.”

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) French physicist, the "father of thermodynamics" (1796–1832)

p, 125
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)

Chance

“I also hope that Mainland China does not misinterpret or misjudge the current (cross-strait) situation, or think that Taiwanese will bow to such pressure. In a democratic society, this kind of pressure is felt by all. No administration in Taiwan can make a decision that runs counter to public opinion.”

Tsai Ing-wen (1956) President of the Republic of China

President urges talks with Beijing: report, Focus Taiwan, 1, October 5, 2016, 6 October 2016 http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aipl/201610050021.aspx,

Hope , Thinking , Decision

“From my own kind I only learn
How foolish comfort is”

William Henry Davies (1871–1940) British poet

Comfort.

Learning

“Because in the end those kind of conservative tea-leaf-reading focus group driven polling types who I think led Kim into nothingness, he's got his life to repent in leisure now at what they did to him.”

Paul Keating (1944) Australian politician, 24th Prime Minister of Australia

On Kim Beazley's ALP Leadership, Lateline interview, June 7 2007.

Life , Thinking , Reading , Tea

“A poet of my kind
Skates on the thinnest ice.”

Edward Lucie-Smith (1933) British art critic, writer and curator

Poem Postcard

“Your brains have been rewired to process all this Net-based information. Your brains are dealing with the world in a different way than humans ever have. That kind of profound shift has occurred only six times in the entire 200,000-year history of Homo Sapiens. And you, here today, are the vanguard of the seventh wave”

Steve Blank (1953) American businessman

Discussing the seven waves (the invention of speech, the written word, the printing press, newspapers, radio, television, and Internet)
Dalhousie University Commencement Speech (2017)

World , Way , History , Time

“I think we should just kind of keep this clean, keep it simple, go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant — they're quite clear — that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the Ten Commandments.”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

2010-05-06
The O'Reilly Factor
Fox News, quoted in * 2010-05-10
Sarah Palin: American Law Should Be 'Based On The God Of The Bible And The Ten Commandments'
The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/10/sarah-palin-american-law_n_569922.html
2014

God , Law , Thinking

“Solomon: Your entry in Wikipedia says that your work has inspired many students to begin careers in computing and artificial intelligence.
Hofstadter: I have no interest in computers. The entry is filled with inaccuracies, and it kind of depresses me.
Solomon: So fix it.
Hofstadter: The next day someone will fix it back.”

Douglas Hofstadter (1945) American professor of cognitive science

Quoted in Deborah Solomon, "The Mind Reader," http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/magazine/01wwlnQ4.t.html New York Times (2007-04-01)

Intelligence

“The right kind of leisure is better than the wrong kind of work.”

Baltasar Gracián book The Art of Worldly Wisdom

Más vale el buen ocio que el negocio.
Maxim 247
The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

“The disconnected impressions which we derive from life form a kind of knowledge ‘in growth,’ as Bacon called it; an over-early and peremptory attempt to digest this knowledge into a system tends, as he suggests, to falsify and distort it.”

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

“English Aphorists,” p. 103
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

Life , Knowledge

“Only with these three kinds of creativity - technology, product planning, and marketing - can the public receive the benefit of a new technology.”

Akio Morita (1921–1999) Japanese businessman

Made in Japan (1986)

“Why should inspiration be limited to one past age? If Truth came to Paul 1900 years ago it can come to you today. After all, Heaven is as near to-day, God is as loving and as kind to-day, and truth as abundant to-day, as in the ages when men are said to have possessed inspiration.”

Benjamin Fish Austin (1850–1933) Nineteenth-century Canadian educator/Methodist Minister/Spiritualist

Sermon (1899)

Love , Men , God , Truth

“I would never say that God used Hitler to punish the Jews. If God treated any of us justly and punished us according to our sins, we would all be in Hell in an instant. I'm Jewish and I am as guilty as any Gentile of violating His law. However, you and I get to stay alive for a time because God is rich in mercy, is filled with what the Bible calls "lovingkindness," and He particularly lavished this loving-kindness upon the Jewish nation. If you study the Scriptures, you will see that He promised them that if they loved and obeyed Him He would give them long life, health, prosperity, and protection from their enemies. But He also warned that if they disobeyed Him, His hand of protection would be removed.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

The Defender's Guide for Life's Toughest Questions (2011)

Love , Life , God , Health

“I believe honestly and deeply that the treatment of whales is an example of the evil intelligence of humankind in relation to the rest of the natural world. We have seen greed of the most impossible kind descending on the Arctic and the Antarctic to destroy the most intelligent and beautiful creatures that the planet can produce…We are in the process of destroying much of the planet through destruction of the ozone layer, leading to the greenhouse effect, and the destruction of life. The whale is an example of how such destruction happens. As the ozone layer is destroyed the plankton in the Southern ocean will die and the whales will lose much of their food. Last year we opposed the Antarctic Minerals Bill because we feared that it would lead to pollution of the Southern ocean and damage the whales' food supply. The Government must oppose any extension of whaling of any type, scientific or otherwise, and I hope and trust that they will do so. But we must go further. Countries which engage in the barbarity of so-called scientific whaling, which in reality is crude commercialism of the nastiest kind, deserve retribution from us all and we must bring every possible sanction to bear against them. If we do not take care of our planet and our environment, and of animals such as the whale, mankind will suffer and our planet will die because we have not cared for the natural environment that we all share.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1990/mar/02/whaling in the House of Commons (2 March 1990).
1990s

Life , World , Fear , Food

“My main problem with 64-bit binary is that it’s one extra compile to do every time you want to release binaries, so you have to maintain one build system for your 64-bit binary and then every time you have to make a build you have to make sure you get both the 32-bit and 64. Really honestly, there’s not any kind of significant performance increase. If you have good compatibility you’re able to run 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit machine, that’s the performance you get. If you run a 64-bit binary, it’s not going to make much difference. The technology is cool, but there’s really not that much point for doing it.”

Timothee Besset French software programmer

Quoted in Dustin Reyes, "Interview with id Software's Timothee Besset at QuakeCon 2006" http://www.linuxgames.com/articles/ttimo2006 LinuxGames (2006-08-07).

Problem , Time

“His [the Philistine’s] existence is not animated by any keen desire for knowledge and insight for their own sake, or by any desire for really aesthetic pleasures which is so entirely akin to it. If, however, any pleasures of this kind are forced on him by fashion or authority, he will dispose of them as briefly as possible as a kind of compulsory labour.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Kein Drang nach Erkenntniß und Einsicht, um ihrer selbst Willen, belebt sein [des Philisters] Daseyn, auch keiner nach eigentlich ästhetischen Genüssen, als welcher dem ersteren durchaus verwandt ist. Was dennoch von Genüssen solcher Art etwan Mode, oder Auktorität, ihm aufdringt, wird er als eine Art Zwangsarbeit möglichst kurz abthun.
E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 344
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Pleasure , Fashion , Knowledge , Animals

“All gods have good points, just as have all priests. Personally, I attach much importance to Hanuman, and am kind to his people—the great gray apes of the hills. One never knows when one may want a friend.”

Rudyard Kipling Life's Handicap

The Mark of the Beast.
Life's Handicap (1891)

God , People , Personality

“To the very last, he had a kind of idea; that, namely, of la carrière ouverte aux talents,—the tools to him that can handle them.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

On Napoleon; Carlyle in his essay on Mirabeau, 1837, quotes this from a "New England book".
1830s, Sir Walter Scott (1838)

Idea

“As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of colour. The great musicians knew this. w:Beethoven and the rest wrote music — simply music; symphony in this key, concerto or sonata in that... Art should be independent of all claptrap — should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works 'arrangements' and 'harmonies.”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

Propositions, 2
also in a letter to 'The World', London 22 Mai, 1878; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 186
1870 - 1903, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies' (1890)

Love , Art , Music , Sense

“The poet's job is not to tell you what happened, but what happens: not what did take place, but the kind of thing that always does take place. He gives you the typical, recurring, or what Aristotle calls universal event.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time

Universe

“What would the Israelis do if they could do what they want? They would live in peace with their neighbors, if they had neighbors who would live in peace with them. They would simply continue to build out their high tech sector and thrive. What do groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda and even Hamas want? They want to impose their religious views on the rest of humanity. They want to stifle every freedom that decent, educated, secular people care about. This is not a trivial difference. And yet judging from the level of condemnation that Israel now receives, you would think the difference ran the other way. This kind of confusion puts all of us in danger. This is the great story of our time. For the rest of our lives, and the lives of our children, we are going to be confronted by people who don't want to live peacefully in a secular, pluralistic world, because they are desperate to get to Paradise, and they are willing to destroy the very possibility of human happiness along the way. The truth is, we are all living in Israel. It's just that some of us haven't realized it yet.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, "Why Don't I Criticize Israel?" http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/why-dont-i-criticize-israel (27 July 2014)
2010s

Children , People , Truth , World

“These effects of mescalin are the sort of effects you could expect to follow the administration of a drug having the power to impair the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve. When the brain runs out of sugar, the undernourished ego grows weak, can't be bothered to undertake the necessary chores, and loses all interest in those spatial and temporal relationships which mean so much to an organism bent on getting on in the world. As Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen. … Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualized event.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

describing his experiment with mescaline, p. 26
The Doors of Perception (1954)

World , Beauty , Past , Personality

“Muslims are allowed to get away with almost anything. They can shut down and intimidate prominent ex-Muslims. They’re allowed to engage in the most brazen anti-semitism, even as they run for office in European left-wing political parties. And, of course, politicians and the media routinely turn a blind eye to the kind of sexism and homophobia that would instantly end the career of a non-Muslim conservative — and perhaps get the latter arrested for hate speech when he dared to object.”

Milo Yiannopoulos (1984) British journalist

The Left chose Islam over Gays http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/06/12/left-chose-islam-gays-now-100-people-killed-maimed-orlando/, Breitbart (12 Jun 2016)
2016

Hate

“The best antidote against evils of all kinds, against the evil thoughts that haunt the soul, against the needless perplexities which distract the conscience, is to keep hold of the good we have. Impure thoughts will not stand against pure words and prayers and deeds. Little doubts will not avail against great certainties. Fix your affections on things above, and then you will less and less be troubled by the cares, the temptations, the troubles of things on earth.”

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815–1881) English churchman, Dean of Westminster

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 214.

Soul , Evil

“We are divided not only about political facts and social values, but also about what the Constitution itself means. The crusaders on this issue choose to ignore these problems and are proposing to deny the will of 64 million voters by appealing to five Supreme Court Justices (since no one is delusional enough to think that the four liberal justices are going to take the presidency away from Obama). What kind of conservatism is this?”

David Horowitz (1939) Neoconservative activist, writer

Horowitz speaks about Obama birth certificate doubters. [David, Horowitz, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/226474/obama-derangement-syndrome-david-horowitz, "Shut up about the birth certificate.", nationalreview.com, December 8, 2008, 2016-30-03]
2008

Justice , Problem , Thinking

“To me more important is taking care of the people that really have proven to be, to love Donald Trump, as opposed to the political people. And frankly if the political people don't take care of these people, they're not going to win and you're going to end up with maybe a total different kind of government than what you're looking at right now. These people are really angry. They're smart, they're workers, and they're angry. I call them the forgotten men and women. And I use that in speeches, I say they're the forgotten people — they were totally forgotten.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, November, New York Times Interview (November 23, 2016)

Love , Women , Men , People

“It's simply a national acknowledgement that in any kind of priority, the needs of human beings must come first. Poverty is here and now. Hunger is here and now. Racial tension is here and now. Pollution is here and now. These are the things that scream for a response. And if we don't listen to that scream - and if we don't respond to it - we may well wind up sitting amidst our own rubble, looking for the truck that hit us - or the bomb that pulverized us. Get the license number of whatever it was that destroyed the dream. And I think we will find that the vehicle was registered in our own name.”

Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter

Commencement Address at the University of Southern California (March 17, 1970).
Other

Hunger , Dreams , Thinking

“I used to be able to look at myself and grin without giving a damn about how ugly it made me look. Now I was looking at myself the same way those people did back there. I was looking at a big guy with an ugly reputation, a guy who had no earthly reason for existing in a decent, normal society. That's what the judge had said.
I was sweating and cold at the same time. Maybe it did happen to me over there. Maybe I did have a taste for death. Maybe I liked it too much to taste anything else. Maybe I was twisted and rotted inside. Maybe I would be washed down the sewer with the rest of all the rottenness sometime. What was stopping it from happening now? Why was I me with some kind of lucky charm around my neck that kept me going when I was better off dead?”

Mickey Spillane book One Lonely Night

One Lonely Night (1951)

Death , People , Way , Guy

“Tis certainly a kind of indignity to philosophy, whose sovereign authority ought every where to be acknowledg'd, to oblige her on every occasion to make apologies for her conclusions, and justify herself to every particular art and science, which may be offended at her.”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 4, Section 5
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 1: Of the understanding

Art , Science

“The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.”

W. H. Auden book Forewords and Afterwords

"The Greeks and Us", p. 21
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)

Law , Suffering

“In general, just as painters in working from models constantly gaze at their exemplar and thus strive to transfer the expression of the original to their own artistry, so too he who is anxious to make himself perfect in all the kinds of virtue must gaze upon the lives of the saints as upon statues, so to speak, that move and act, and must make their excellence his own by imitation.”

Basil of Caesarea (329–379) Christian Saint

vol. 1, p. 17
Letters

Perfection

“How on earth are the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England, commending the 'Hard ECU' as they strive to, to be taken as serious participants in the debate against that kind of background noise? I believe that both the Chancellor and the Governor are cricketing enthusiasts, so I hope that there is no monopoly of cricketing metaphors. It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.”

Geoffrey Howe (1926–2015) British Conservative politician

Hansard, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 180 col. 464.
Personal statement in the House of Commons on his resignation, 13 November 1990.

Hope , Game

“From all the properties of man and of nature, from all the various branches of science, from all the deductions of human reason, the general corollary, admitted by Hindus, Arabs, and Tartars, by Persians, and by Chinese, is the supremacy of an all-creating and all-preserving spirit, infinitely wise, good, and powerful, but infinitely removed from the comprehension of his most exalted creatures; nor are there in any language (the ancient Hebrew always excepted) more pious and sublime addresses to the being of beings, more splendid enumerations of his attributes, or more beautiful descriptions of his visible works, than in Arabick, Persian, and Sanscrit, especially in the Koran, the introductions to the poems of Sadi', Niza'm'i and Firdaus'i, the four Védas, and many parts of the numerous Puránas: but supplication and praise would not satisfy the boundless imagination of the Vedánti and Sufi theologists, who blending uncertain metaphysicks with undoubted principles of religion, have presumed to reason confidently on the very nature and essence of the divine spirit, and asserted in a very remote age, what multitudes of Hindus and Muselmans assert… that all spirit is homogeneous, that the spirit of God is in kind the same with that of man, though differing from it infinitely in degree, and that, as material substance is mere illusion, there exists in this universe only one generick spiritual substance, the sole primary cause, efficient, substantial and formal of all secondary causes and of all appearances whatever, but endued in its highest degree, with a sublime providential wisdom, and proceeding by ways incomprehensible to the spirits which emane from it; an opinion which Gotama never taught, and which we have no authority to believe, but which, as it is grounded on the doctrine of an immaterial creator supremely wise, and a constant preserver supremely benevolent, differs as widely from the pantheism of Spinoza and Toland, as the affirmation of a proposition differs from the negation of it; though the last named professor of that insane philosophy had the baseness to conceal his meaning under the very words of Saint Paul, which are cited by Newton for a purpose totally different, and has even used a phrase, which occurs, indeed, in the Véda, but in a sense diametrically opposite to that, which he would have given it. The passage to which I allude is in a speech of Varuna to his son, where he says, "That spirit, from which these created beings proceed; through which having proceeded from it, they live; toward which they tend and in which they are ultimately absorbed, that spirit study to know; that spirit is the Great One."”

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

"On the Philosophy of the Asiatics" (1794)

Wisdom , God , Age , Religion

“I like women, I never run them down as somehow inferior to men, and I have a contempt for men who do. And I think, for one thing, that women are just as principled as men—but they sure as hell aren’t the same kind of principles.”

Jack Finney book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1970), Chapter 8 (p. 108)

Women , Men , Hell , Thinking

“Scott wants us each to talk about "the kind of society we'd like to live in." … From the start I am very nervous. Phil goes on about "the redistribution of wealth"; nearly everyone comes out for "socialism" of one kind or another; Brick even hints at "another revolution." When it is my time to speak I am moved to say, "I think people's tolerance is the main issue, even more than socialism. I mean, look at the people who are for the war. Look at the courthouse square."”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

I am afraid to go on and say what I don't like about socialism. ...
Pages 93–94. It's the spring of 1965. Satin had dropped out of college to become a volunteer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Holly Springs, Mississippi. The meeting above had been called by SNCC to explore SNCC workers' views.
Confessions of a Young Exile (1976)

War , People , Thinking , Time

“I thank God that my body has been able to handle this kind of workload. I don't know if I will ever be like Lorenzo White, but that's the goal I'm trying to get to.”

Javon Ringer (1987) All-American college football player, professional football player, running back

Quoted here http://www.ncaa.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/092108acj.html

God

“A baby is shown sitting on the floor. He appears to be about a year and a half old. Incidentally, he is a very plain baby. Strewn about him on the floor are the toys that he has been playing with. There are a ball, a rattle, a ring, a doll, a bell and a pair of roller-skates. Evidently, the candidate is supposed to be aghast at the roller-skates in the possession of such a small child.
The man who drew that picture had evidently never furnished playthings for a small child. I can imagine nothing that would delight a child of a year and a half more than a pair of roller-skates to chew and spin and hit himself in the face with. They could also be dropped on Daddy when Daddy was lying on the floor in an attempt to be sociable. Of all the toys arranged before the child, the roller-skates are the most logical. … That is my great trouble in taking tests and examinations of any kind. I always want to argue with the examiner, because the examiner is always so obviously wrong.”

Robert Benchley (1889–1945) American comedian

"Measure Your Mind", in Love Conquers All (1922)

Imagination , Lying , Appearance , Baby

“The purse strings tie us to our kind.”

Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) British journalist, businessman, and essayist

Literary Studies (1879)

“Moshiach is ready to come now, we all must only do something additional in the realm of goodness and kindness.”

Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994) Hasidic rabbi

In response to CNN reporter, Chabad.org http://www.chabad.org/therebbe/livingtorah/player_cdo/aid/490071/jewish/Acts-of-Goodness-and-Kindness.htm

“We understand instinctively that being a prodigy wasn’t [Wayne Gretzky’s] platform for a lifetime’s achievement; it marked the possibility of a highly specific, highly term-limited kind of performance.”

Adam Gopnik (1956) American journalist

How to Raise a Prodigy, The New Yorker (2018)

Understanding

“A pure elastic fluid is one the constituent particles of which are all alike, or in no way distinguishable. Steam, or aqueous vapour, hydrogenous gas, oxygenous gas… and several others are of this kind. …Whatever …may be the shape or figure of the solid atom abstractedly, when surrounded by such an atmosphere it must be globular; but as all the globules in any small given volume are subject to the same pressure, they must be equal in bulk, and will therefore be arranged in horizontal strata, like a pile of shot.”

John Dalton book A New System of Chemical Philosophy

Source: A New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808), Ch. II. On the Constitution of Bodies, Sect. 1. On the Constitution of Pure Elastic Fluids

Way

“If I’m required to identify myself on a form, I write “teacher.” I’ve been a teacher almost as long as I’ve been writing. [Pause. ] I think of myself less as a writer than as a person who writes — or tries to. Each morning is a kind of obstacle course in which the obstacles seem to have all the advantage.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

Joyce Carol Oates interviews herself (2013)

Thinking , Teachers , Personality

“I think acting is something that I want to make sure that, if I do make that transition, I want to make sure that it's really dramatic, and put my energy into acting, you know, fully instead of trying to balance a whole lot of things at once, 'cause I really don't want to become one of those singer-trying-to-be-actor-but-didn't-really-work kind of thing.”

Skye Sweetnam (1988) Canadian singer-songwriter

On becoming a full-time actress

Thinking

“I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man. Harry [Hopkins] says he's not and that he doesn't want anything except security for his own country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.”

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

Response to advice from Ambassador William C. Bullitt to pursue a containment policy against the Soviet Union (1943), quoted in his account in Life (23 August 1948)
1940s

World , Peace , Democracy , Thinking

“I like to think of myself as the ultimate anti-postmodernist post-modernist. Notwithstanding the unusual narrative or visual devices that appear in many of the films, what have kept me going for the three years of investigating [for The Thin Blue Line, was the belief that there answers to questions such as, Adams did it, didn't he? Or Harris did it, didn't he? That it's not just up for grabs. Today, I believe there's a kind of frisson of ambiguity. People think that ambiguity is somehow wonderful in its own right, an excuse for failing to investigate. What can I say? I think this view is wrong. At best, misguided. Maybe even reprehensible.”

Errol Morris (1948) American filmmaker and writer

Source: The Anti-Post-Modern Post-Modernist http://errolmorris.com/content/lecture/theantipost.html

People , Question , Thinking , Appearance

“One of the present values of the past is as a repository of values we no longer endorse, of questions we no longer ask. One corresponding role for the intellectual historian is that of acting as a kind of archaeologist, bringing buried intellectual treasure back to the surface, dusting it down and enabling us to consider what we think of it.”

Quentin Skinner (1940) British historian

Source: Liberty Before Liberalism (1998), p. 112

Question , Thinking , Past

“Let no act be done at haphazard, nor otherwise than according to the finished rules that govern its kind.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

IV, 2
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IV

“Remarkably, the building of the Standard Model — the theory of how particles and forces interact — was the success of the conservatives. It required no revolution at the foundational level. Normal physics, the kind that goes on experiment after experiment, produced the Standard Model.”

David Gross (1941) American particle physicist and string theorist

"Waiting for the Revolution" https://www.quantamagazine.org/20130524-waiting-for-the-revolution/, an interview of David Gross by Peter Byrne, Quanta Magazine (2013)

Success

“You can't con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don't deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Source: 1980s, Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987), p. 60

People

“I don't want people memorizing the planets or counting how many plants there are in the world. But I want them to know that the world is 4.56 billion years old, and I want them to know how we know it is 4.56 billion years old. It's wonderful and exciting, and it creates a reverence for nature. When I see people reject all that, it's kind of creepy.”

Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer

[NewsBank, D-01, Bill Nye, the Science Guy, brings humor to normally serious field, The Daily Gazette, Schenectady, New York, March 9, 2005, Bill Buell]

People , World , Nature

“If I could read your mind love
What a tale your thoughts could tell
Just like a paperback novel just like the kind a drug store would sell
When you reach the part where the heart aches come the hero would be me
But heroes often fail
And you won't read that book again because the endings just too hard to take..”

Gordon Lightfoot (1938) Canadian singer-songwriter

If You Could Read My Mind, Track 8, Reprise
Sit Down Young Stranger (1970)

Love , Books , Reading , Heart

“Ordinarily the enjoyment of sensual pleasures is the highest and only happiness of the average man. There is no doubt a kind of momentary happiness in the anticipation, gratification and retrospection of such fleeting material pleasures, but they are illusive and temporary. According to the Buddha non-attachment is a greater bliss.”

Narada Maha Thera (1898–1983) Sri Lankan monk and missionary

Buddhism in a Nutshell

Pleasure , Happiness

“In the end, the desolate age always turns instinctively to Classicism, which if nothing else legislates against certain kinds of disappointment.”

Don Paterson (1963) Poet

Aphorisms in Poetry, vol. 187, n. 1, October 2005

Age , Disappointment

“In all this world, I pray thee, who
Is virtuous, heroic, true?
Firm in his vows, of grateful mind,
To every creature good and kind?
Alone most fair to all men’s eyes?
Devoid of envy, firm, and sage,
Whose tranquil soul ne'er yields to rage?
Whom, when his warrior wrath is high,
Do Gods embattled fear and fly?
Whose noble might and gentle skill
The triple world can guard from ill? Who is the best of princes, he
Who loves his people’s good to see.”

Vālmīki Legendary Indian poet, author of the Ramayana

Source: King of Siam Rama I The-Ramayana https://books.google.co.in/books?id=OvqbCHa3zWkC&pg=PA19, Islamic Books, 1967, p. 19.

Love , Men , God , People

“It was impossible to see warfare as anything other than what Morgenes had once termed it: a kind of hell on earth that impatient mankind had arranged so it would not have to wait for the afterlife.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, To Green Angel Tower (1993), Part 1, Chapter 12, “Raven’s Dance” (p. 392).

Hell , Waiting

“Churchman recognized in his critical systemic thinking that the human mind is not able to know the whole. … Yet the human mind, for Churchman, may appreciate the essential quality of the whole. For Churchman, appreciation of this essential quality begins … when first you see the world through the eyes of another. The systems approach, he says, then goes on to discover that every worldview is terribly restricted. Consequently, with Churchman, a rather different kind of question about practice surfaces. … That is, who is to judge that any one bounded appreciation is most relevant or acceptable? Each judgment is based on a rationality of its own that chooses where a boundary is to be drawn, which issues and dilemmas thus get on the agenda, and who will benefit from this. For each choice it is necessary to ask, What are the consequences to be expected insofar as we can evaluate them and, on reflection, how do we feel about that? As Churchman points out, each judgment of this sort is of an ethical nature since it cannot escape the choice of who is to be the client—the beneficiary—and thus which issues and dilemmas will be central to debate and future action. In this way, the spirit of C. West Churchman becomes our moral conscience. A key principle of systemic thinking, according to Churchman, is to remain ethically alert. Boundary judgments facilitate a debate in which we are sensitized to ethical issues and dilemmas.”

Robert L. Flood (1959) British organizational scientist

Robert L. Flood (1999, p. 252-253) as cited in: Michael H. G. Hoffmann (2007) Searching for Common Ground on Hamas Through Logical Argument Mapping. p. 5.

World , Way , Feeling , Question

“People often think that Europeans are homogeneous group that arrived in a simple way there maybe 40 or 50 thousand years ago maybe based on the archaeology and just kind of sat there until they became the Europeans they are today, but that's probably not true: the Europeans today are a replacement population who came in much more recently and replaced the people who were there originally 40 thousand years ago.”

David Reich (geneticist) (1974) American geneticist, Professor of Genetics

History Aids Understanding Diseases Today http://www.livescience.com/21740-history-aids-understanding-diseases-today.html, National Science Foundation, 20 July 2012

People , Way , Thinking

“I think the most successful way to overthrow any government is through infiltration. It's been proven for years. The dream, of course, is that there is going to be a fantastic cataclysm, and that tomorrow we have Adlai Stevenson in the White House. That's not going to happen, and not because Adlai Stevenson is dead. The reason it's not going to happen is that kind of overthrow is not possible. So I will work in the only way I know how, and that is within the establishment — because that is the only existing program. Let someone come up with another one and if it's good I'd do it in a second.”

Cass Elliot (1941–1974) American singer

Rolling Stone interview (1968)

Dreams , Way , Thinking , Success

“Efficiency of a practically flawless kind may be reached naturally in the struggle for bread. But there is something beyond — a higher point, a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride beyond mere skill; almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art — which is art.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Source: The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Ch. 7

Love , Art , Nature

“When I was in the hospital, I was very suicidal in a kind of blind way, I was starving to death and just 'cause I didn't want to turn out like my family showed me, you know, that's all I ever saw of people, was my own family. I wasn't allowed to associate with anyone. Oh, God. So I didn't want to live.”

Edie Sedgwick (1943–1971) Socialite, actress, model

Edie : Girl On Fire (2006)

Death , God , People , Family

“I shall not again be a candidate for the Presidency…I shall be 65 on the 23rd April next, and I had determined upon my line of life from the remnant of days with which a kind Providence might bless me, discarding every idea of the Presidency…I can now leave public life, I trust, with credit. Should I become President, the case may be very different, after I shall have worn myself out with the toil and anxiety of the office.”

James Buchanan (1791–1868) American politician, 15th President of the United States (in office from 1857 to 1861)

Responding to suggestions that he run for President in 1856, as quoted at wheatland.org http://www.wheatland.org.

Life , Idea

“There were other fellow-sufferers, lower-case ones: the thousands who were either killed, maimed or bereaved by the devotees of the Irish Republic in Mr Sands's organization, the Provisional IRA. Those other dead, however, being the wrong kind, are implicitly excluded from what is seen as a celestial tête-à-tête.”

Conor Cruise O'Brien (1917–2008) Irish politician

Passion & Cunning; Essays on Nationalism, Terrorism and Revolution

Suffering , Dead

“I know the Leader of the Opposition [Tony Abbott] has an unhealthy kind of obsession with the so-called "faceless men in the Labor Party"; what he really should be obsessed about is the useless men sitting behind him.”

Julia Gillard (1961) Australian politician and lawyer, 27th Prime Minister of Australia

In Question Time, c. March 2012
"Labor cleans up after aftermath" http://www.abc.net.au/insiders/content/2012/s3445116.htm, in Insiders (ABC), 4 March 2012

Men

“When I was in hospital I found I could hardly read or writ. In these circumstances I began to write poems. I found that poetry was the only kind of writing in which I could express my thoughts. One night I dreamed I was lying on the bank of a canal, under machine gun fire. The next morning I wrote it out, Carentan O Caretan, and as I wrote I realized it was not a dream, but the memory of my first time under fire”

Louis Simpson (1923–2012) Jamaican poet

The Poetry of War 1939-45 ed. Ian Hamilton, London 1965
Carentan O Carentan, 1948

Dreams , Lying , Memory , Time

“Our autopilot was taking us into a very large crater, about the size of a big football stadium with steep slopes on the crater covered with very large rocks about the size of automobiles that was not the kind of place that I wanted to try to make the first landing.”

Neil Armstrong (1930–2012) American astronaut; first person to walk on the moon

60 Minutes interview (2005)

Football

“Around 1650 I came across the mathematical writings of Torricelli, where among other things, he expounds the geometry of indivisibles of Cavalieri. …His method, as taught by Torricelli… was indeed all the more welcome to me because I do not know that anything of that kind was observed in the thinking of almost any mathematician I had previously met.”

John Wallis (1616–1703) English mathematician

Arithmetica Infinitorum (1656)

Mathematics , Thinking

“If you think about it, being digital is Italian. It's underground, provocative, interactive. It has humor, discourse, and debate. It has a kind of liveliness to it.”

Nicholas Negroponte (1943) American computer scientist

Being Nicholas, The Wired Interview by Thomas A. Bass http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/bd1101bn.htm

Thinking

“At that period, everybody in the Roman Empire had some kind of religion, but nobody bothered much about it. Just like today. …Although Romans had plenty of gods, in reality they believed in none.”

Wilhelm Busch (pastor) (1897–1966) German pastor and writer

Things have got to change -but how? It's Either this or that! p. 146 Walking with God is no illusion. p. 208
Jesus Our Destiny

God , Religion , Reality

“There is also a considerable tendency to define the subject as a kind of meeting place of science and art. This is exemplified by Eckert. He pleads for artistic imagination and intuition in cartographic portrayal and claims that the inter-action of such talents with scientific geography produces the aesthetic map. There is no question about the importance of imagination and new ideas, but it is equally important that significant processes be objectively investigated, whether it be the visual consumption of a graphic technique or a process in geomorphology. It can perhaps best be approached by a comparison of the aims, techniques involved, and the results accomplished by each activity”

Arthur H. Robinson (1915–2004) American geographer

Source: The Look of Maps (1952), p. 17; as cited in: Kirk Patrick Goldsberry (2007) Real-time Traffic Maps. p. 23-24

Art , Imagination , Idea , Question

“.. No academy could have given me all I discovered by getting my teeth into the exhibitions, the shop windows, and the museums of Paris. Beginning with the market – where, for lack of money, I bought only a piece of a long cucumber – the workman in his blue overall, the most ardent followers of Cubism, everything showed a definite feeling for proportion, clarity, an accurate sense of form, of a more painterly kind of painting, even in the canvases of second-rate artists.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

Quote in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 29
1920's, My life (1922)

Money , Feeling , Sense , Painting

“This, then, is the gain of the Good Fight in this war, first, that the nation has attained a living consciousness of its inevitable unity, second, that it has proved its enormous power, and third, that in the terrible struggle it has used that united power for, and not against, equal rights. And the spirit of caste which it has disabled it will now utterly destroy. For the Good Fight is not a crusade against a section or a State, but against caste everywhere in the country. This is now entrenched in the bitter prejudice against the colored race, which is as inhuman and unmanly as the old hatred and contempt of Christendom for the Jews. Lifting their heads from bloody defeat in the field, the wan and wasted States of the South say in terms caste must be maintained, and by every kind of vagrant law and hostile legislation they will try to maintain it.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Hostility , War , Law , Color

“In whatever kind of a "race" life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.”

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

I.
2010s, 2011, Mortality (2012)

Life

“Now I don't know what it always was with us.
We chose the words, and yeah, we drew the lines.
There was just no way this house could hold the two of us.
I guess that we were just too much of the same kind.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Independence Day"
Song lyrics, The River (1980)

Way , Housing

“Of all kind of authors there are none I despise more than compilers, who search every where for shreds of other men's works, which they join to their own, like so many pieces of green turf in a garden: they are not at all superior to compositors in a printing house, who range the types, which, collected together, make a book, towards which they contribute nothing but the labours of the hand. I would have original writers respected, and it seems to me a kind of profanation to take those pieces from the sanctuary in which they reside, and to expose them to a contempt they do not deserve. When a man hath nothing new to say, why does not he hold his tongue? What business have we with this double employment?”

Montesquieu (1689–1755) French social commentator and political thinker

No. 66.
Lettres Persanes (Persian Letters, 1721)

Men , Books , Search , Business

“Semiotics… is not concerned with the study of a particular kind of object, but with ordinary objects in so far (and only in so far) as they participate in semiosis.”

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Signs," 1938, p. 4

Study

“Lots of artists who paint have that experience to one degree or another, this release where their thinking doesn't precede their doing. The space is shortened between thinking and doing. It's a funny thing, what I really hate, yet I have to go through with it, is the preparation. You have to go through it, like somebody preparing for sacred vows, the sensation of you putting paint on, and it's so boring to put paint on and to see yourself putting paint on. You're really preparing for those few hours where some kind of umbilical cord is attached between you and it. You do it and the work is done and this cord seems to slacken, as if you left yourself there. And what a relief to leave yourself somewhere, to get out of it entirely.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1961 - 1980, transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow 1966, p. 68

Hate , Thinking , Painting

“When there was bad behaviour – and Kevin consistently danced right out on that line of bad behaviour – I couldn’t do that much to discipline him because the nature of minority government is kind of everybody’s got their hand on the grenade and anybody could pull the pin.”

Julia Gillard (1961) Australian politician and lawyer, 27th Prime Minister of Australia

The Killing Season, Episode three: The Long Shadow (2010–13)

Nature , Dance

“Disciple: Lord, what is true detachment?
Truth: Take note with careful discrimination of these two words: oneself and leave. If you know how to weigh these two words properly, testing their meaning thoroughly to their core and viewing them with true discernment, then you can quickly grasp the truth.
Take, first of all, the first word -- oneself or myself -- and see what it is. It is important to realize that everyone has five kinds of self. The first self we have in common with a stone, and this is being. The second we share with plants, and this is growing. The third self we share with animals, and this is sensation. The fourth we share with all other human beings: we possess a common human nature in which all are one. The fifth - which belongs to a person exclusively as his or her own - is one's individual human self…
Now what is it that leads people astray and robs them of happiness? It is exclusively this last self. Because of it a person turns outward, away from God and toward this self, when he or she should be returning inward. Thus they fashion their own selves according to what is accidental. In their blindness they appropriate to themselves what is God's. This is the direction they take, and they eventually sink into sinfulness.”

Henry Suso (1295–1366) Dominican friar and mystic

The Exemplar, The Little Book of Truth

God , People , Truth , Fashion

“"One thing more, son. Do you believe in God?"
Slowly Frost put the spoon back into the bowl.
He asked: "You really want an answer?"
"I want an answer," said the man. "I want an honest one."
"The answer," said Frost, "is that I don't know. Not, certainly, in the kind of God that you are thinking of. Not the old white-whiskered, woodcut gentleman. But a supreme being — yes, I would believe in a God of that sort. Because it seems to me there must be some sort of force or power or will throughout the universe. The universe is too orderly for it to be otherwise. When you measure all this orderliness, from the mechanism of the atom at one end of the scale, out to the precision of the operation of the universe at the other end, it seems unbelievable that there is not a supervisory force of some kind, a benevolent ruling force to maintain that sort of order."”

Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) American writer, journalist

Why Call Them Back From Heaven? (1967)

God , Thinking , Universe

“The main thing, if there is a power that the media has, it’s mostly because they represent the public in quite a direct relationship. They’re very populist in the sense that they are meant to be the public’s hired goons who go out, find information, collate it all, verify whether or not it’s true, and then signpost to the citizens that this is worth reading. And they make it in such a way that it’s interesting to read. So they are kind of spokespeople for the people. And in an interconnected age, they are definitely quicker to realize the way power has shifted. You find most journalists now are on all these social networks. They’re all about creating… they want a direct relationship with their audience, in a way that politicians have been very loathe to do.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Attributed, Chatham House Talk (September 28, 2011)

People , Age , Way , Sense

Mike Murphy (political consultant) (1962) American political consultant

2010s, 2018, Interview with Bill Kristol (2018)

History , Understanding

“Take to the highway, won't you lend me your name?
Your way and my way seem to be one and the same, child.
Mamma don't understand it.
She wants to know where I've been.
I'd have to be some kind of natural born fool
To want to pass that way again.
But I could feel it
On a country road.”

James Taylor (1948) American singer-songwriter and guitarist

"Country Road"
Song lyrics, Sweet Baby James (1970)

Fools , Way , Feeling , Understanding

“[…] for the Doctor observed, that no man takes upon himself small blemishes without supposing that great abilities are attributed to him; and that, in short, this affectation of candour or modesty was but another kind of indirect self-praise, and had its foundation in vanity.”

James Boswell book The Life of Samuel Johnson

30 November 1784
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791)

“There never was a greater perfectionist, there never was, and never will be, a better dancer, and I never knew anybody more kind, more considerate, or more completely a gentleman…I love Fred, John, and I admire and respect him. I guess it's because he's so many things I'd like to be and I'm not.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Bing Crosby in a letter to John O'Hara as quoted in Thomas, Bob. Astaire, the Man, The Dancer. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1985. ISBN 0297784021 p. 242.

Love

“I think cynicism is the worst thing because it kills everything. There’s no more honesty, no more poetry, no more freshness. Cynicism is the worst thing — a kind of smart person who’s got all the answers. This is death. It kills creation. There’s no love, no tenderness, nothing at all left. There’s no hatred even, nothing. Equally dangerous is the detached attitude that says, “Everything is fun!””

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, Conversation. Interview with Byron Dobell (1957), p. 38

Love , Death , Thinking , Personality