Quotes about kindness (7466 quotes, page 27)

““Sounds kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?”
“Very long-term—at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob; if they can’t tax it, they won’t understand it.””

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 1 (“Lobsters”), pp. 14-15

Understanding , Thinking , Forgetting

“I thought being invisible would be great. Then I started thinking about it. It would be a bit creepy standing around and watching people. Don't you think? Then I thought a power that allowed you to light fires would be handy. I would be dangerous if you couldn't handle it, but I always have trouble at home finding matches to light candles. So if I could just walk around and light the candles with my finger, that would be kind of cool.”

Gwyneth Paltrow (1972) American actress, singer, and food writer

People , Home , Thinking , Light

“I only believe in certain kinds of hell," she said, and again she was looking at him, the green eyes steady.
"To each his own, eh?"
"You said it; I didn’t.”

Frank Herbert book The Green Brain

The Green Brain (1966)

Hell

“I think living well is the key: trying not to build up regrets for the things we didn't do in our lives; to try to live a regret-free life in which we feel satisfied in what we're doing; and to try to be kind to ourselves and not disappointed in ourselves.”

Irvin D. Yalom (1931) American psychotherapist and writer

The grand old man of American psychiatry on what he has learnt about life (and death) in his still-flourishing career, The Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/irvin-d-yalom-interview-the-grand-old-man-of-american-psychiatry-on-what-he-has-learnt-about-life-10134092.html

Life , Disappointment , Feeling , Thinking

“I believe that we probably have lost the culture war. That doesn't mean the war is not going to continue, and that it isn't going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in general, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important.Therefore, what seems to me a legitimate strategy for us to follow is to look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness, or by other enemies of our traditional culture. I would point out to you that the word "holy" means "set apart," and that it is not against our tradition to be, in fact, "set apart." You can look in the Old Testament, you can look at Christian history. You will see that there were times when those who had our beliefs were definitely in the minority and it was a band of hardy monks who preserved the culture while the surrounding society disintegrated.What I mean by separation is, for example, what the homeschoolers have done. Faced with public school systems that no longer educate but instead "condition" students with the attitudes demanded by Political Correctness, they have seceded. They have separated themselves from public schools and have created new institutions, new schools, in their homes.”

Paul Weyrich (1942–2008) American political activist

Letter to Amy Ridenour, National Center for Public Policy Research http://www.nationalcenter.org/Weyrich299.html (1999-02-16)

War , Education , School , Way

“Truly I don't know what a 60-year chap is supposed to feel. I like doing some of the things that my son does. I love the kind of clothes the young wear. I love going to their hangouts. I love to talk like them. I'd love to be included in their evenings out, I don't see myself in a rocking chair reading a book.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Quotable quotes by Amitabh Bachchan.

Love , Books , Feeling , Reading

“In this business one becomes a connoisseur. I can now see that [Jim] Carrey is a virtuoso, [Chris] Farley is at least hard-working, [Adam] Sandler is hopeless and Pauly Shore bypasses all categories to achieve a kind of transcendent fingernails-on-the-blackboard effect. His appeal must be limited to people whose self-esteem and social skills are so damaged that they find humor, or at least relief, in at last encountering a movie character less successful than themselves.”

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

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/jury-duty-1995 of Jury Duty (12 April 1995)
Reviews, One-star reviews

People , Business , Success

“In Hollywood, you just kind of fail upwards.”

Kevin Smith (1970) American screenwriter, actor, film producer, public speaker and director

On Jon Peters becoming a producer
An Evening with Kevin Smith (2002) and An Evening With Kevin Smith: Evening Harder (2006)

“Nixon is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump for a speech on conservation.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

Quoted in The Fine Art of Political Wit by Leon Harris (1964)

Tree

“That's pure bunk. I adored Fred. We were good friends. Our only problem is that we never aspired to be any kind of a team. We didn't want to be Abbott and Costello. We thought of ourselves as individuals. We didn't intend to be another Frick and Frack. [smiling, after a pause] But it happened anyway, didn't it? And I'll be forever grateful it did.”

Ginger Rogers (1911–1995) American actress and dancer

Responding to assertions of discord between herself and Fred Astaire; quoted in "Leading Couples", by TCM's Robert Osborne, p. 11.

Smile , Problem

“This is a difficult goal to present to teachers, coming as it does at a time when education is under attack from many quarters. But our society is changing rapidly and the difficulties of foreseeing what kinds of skills future generations will require are increasing. Although we have so far depended on the rational, left half of the human brain to plan our children's future and to solve the problems they might encounter on the way to that future, the onslaught of profound change is shaking our confidence in technological thinking and in the old methdods of education. Without abandoning training in tradtional verbal and computational skills, concerned teachers are looking for teaching techniques that will enchance children's intuitive and creative powers, thus preparing students to meet new challenges with flexibility, inventiveness, and imagination and with the ability to grasp complex arrays of interconnected ideas and facts, to perceive underlying patterns of events, and to see old problems in new ways.”

Betty Edwards (1926) American artist

Source: The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979), p.196

Children , Education , Way , Confidence

“It's the kind of movie home video was invented for: Not worth the trip to the theater, but slam it into the VCR and you get your rental's worth.”

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

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/my-cousin-vinny-1992 of My Cousin Vinny (13 March 1992)
Reviews, Two-and-a-half star reviews

Home

“It is my belief that everyone is a stranger as an individual and since everyone is a stranger, that is precisely the reason we cannot question someone else’s strangeness or otherness. It is that simple. We ourselves are strangers. Often even to ourselves… And while people have some kind of desperate desire to belong somewhere, as I see it, many people also have a perpetual desire to be outsiders.”

András Petőcz (1959) Hungarian writer

"It is good to be a stranger" http://www.hungarianpresence.ca/Culture/Literature/varnai-interview-e.cfm.
Interview

People , Question

“What kind of future is in God’s plan? A good one to which you can look forward. That’s why you can hope.”

James MacDonald (1960) American pastor

Source: Always True (Moody, 2011), p. 89

God , Hope , Future

“It was in this man's class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder--from what I've since come to think of, remembering the wild nocturnal rockings of Albert Vetch, as the midnight disease.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

People , Disease , Thinking , Suffering

“Thoughts have some characteristics of fancy, of freedom, even of unreality, which are wanting to the prosaicness of heavy material things. Thoughts sport with the relations of time and space; they fly in a moment across the gulf between the most distant objects; they travel back up the course of time; they bring near to us events centuries away; they conceive objects which are unreal; they imagine combinations which upset all physical laws, and, further, these conceptions remain invisible to others as well as to ourselves. They are outside the grip of reality, and constitute a world which becomes, for any one with the smallest imagination, as great and as important as the world called real. One may call in evidence the poets, novelists, artists, and the dreamers of all kinds. When life becomes too hard for us, we fly to the ideal world, there to seek forgetfulness or compensation.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 76

Life , World , Law , Travel

“Is health care a privilege, or is it a right? If it's a privilege, even if it's a really desirable privilege like indoor plumbing, we need to stop giving health care of any kind to uninsured people who can't pay for it in advance. But… …I think the reason we continue to treat people who are uninsured is because we don't believe that health care is a privilege. We believe that it is a right. And if it is a right, like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the responsibility of a government to protect that right.”

John Green (1977) American author and vlogger

Health Care Overhaul Summarized Via Massive Pig http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Z_RVl-ph3s
YouTube

Life , People , Health , Thinking

“The kind of slaughter and violence that we have seen in this war, was in my experience very rare during the Russo-Japanese war. In modern war, the whole people are mobilized. Hence the majority of the troops correspond to the people as a whole. An army in which scandals and atrocities occur in great numbers, must surely reflect a decline in public morality?”

Shunroku Hata (1879–1962) Japanese general

Quoted in "Singapore, 1941-1942" - Page 269 - by Louis Allen - History - 1993

War , People

“The words "routine analyses" are used to denote the analyses performed by laboratories, frequently attached to industrial plants, and distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) All the analyses or measurements of the same kind, for example, are designed to measure the sugar content in beets or to determine the coordinates of a star. (2) The analyses are carried out day after day using the same methods and the same instruments. (3) While all the analyses are of the same kind, the quantity n varies from time to time, where n represents some small number, 2, 3, 4, 5.”

Jerzy Neyman (1894–1981) Polish statistician

p. 46 of "On a statistical problem arising in routine analyses and in sampling inspections of mass production." http://www.jstor.org/stable/2235624 The Annals of Mathematical Statistics 12, no. 1 (1941): 46–76.

Star , Time

“Thus, as [Karl] Kautsky wrote in 1919, there was growing up amid despotic conditions a new class of bureaucratic German exploiters, no better than the Tsarist chinovniks; and the workers’ future struggle against tyranny would be even more desperate than under traditional capitalism, when they could exploit divergences of interest between capital and the state bureaucracy, whereas in Bolshevik Russia these two had coalesced into one. This kind of regimented socialism could only maintain itself by denying its own principles, which it was most likely to do, given the Bolsheviks’ notorious opportunism and the ease with which they changed their tune from one day to the next. The most probable result would be a kind of Thermidor reaction which the Russian workers would welcome as a liberation, like the French in 1794. The original sin of Bolshevism lay in the suppression of democracy, abolition of elections, and denial of the freedom of speech and assembly, and in the belief that socialism could be based on a minority despotism imposed by force, which by its own logic was bound to intensify the rule of terror. If the Leninists were able to keep their "Tartar socialism" going long enough, it would infallibly result in the bureaucratization and militarization of society and finally in the autocratic rule of a single individual.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

pg. 51
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume II, The Golden Age

Democracy , Freedom , Change , Future

“In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people's lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1950s, People and Places (1959), p. 198

Children , People , World , Way

“In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American — on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Journal entry (9 April 1906); as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) edited by Holly Stevens

Life , Way , Sense

“I've experienced all kinds of discrimination," Oshima says. "Only people who've been discriminated against can really know how much it hurts. Each person feels the pain in his own way, each has his own scars. So I think I'm as concerned about fairness and justice as anybody. But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T. S. Eliot calls hollow men. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they're doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don't want to. Like that lovely pair we just met." He sighs and twirls the long slender pencil in his hand. "Gays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas-none of them bother me. I don't care what banner they raise. But what I can't stand are hollow people. When I'm with them I just can't bear it, and wind up saying things I shouldn't. With those women I should've just let it slide, or else called Miss Saeki and let her handle it. She would have given them a smile and smoothed things over. But I just can't do that. I say things I shouldn't, do things I shouldn't do. I can't control myself. That's one of my weak points.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter 19, Oshima

Love , Women , Men , Pain

“Perhaps he [ Mondrian ] was too faithful to a single discovery. And perhaps that kind of painting was right for the period. But now peace and harmony are no longer possible. There is only anguish.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)

Peace , Faith , Painting

“"Come Clean" is obviously about a boy and a girl's relationship and it's just talking about how somebody thinks they're in the dark. She's tired of it and he's tired of it and they're coming clean, whether it means they're gonna be together or not. They're laying all the cards out on the table and coming out with everything that hasn't been said basically. The video really shows that she's kind of in this monotone mood throughout the whole thing. She doesn't show too much emotion except that she's waiting for this boy, this guy, to come. You can't tell when they're running toward each other if they're gonna kiss or they're gonna hug or they're gonna hit each other. It's a bunch of different emotions.”

Hilary Duff (1987) American actress and singer

"Hilary Duff comes clean" http://www.hilaryontheweb.com/news/2005/january/21012005_Hilary%20Duff%20comes%20clean.html. News Times. January 21 2005. Retrieved October 25 2006.
On "Come Clean", a song from Metamorphosis (2003).

Guy , Girl , Boy , Mood

“There's something about the water - that solitary kind of peaceful feeling. You're on Earth, but not quite.”

John C. Reilly (1965) American actor

Peace , Feeling , Water

“I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.”

William Thomson (1824–1907) British physicist and engineer

Lecture on "Electrical Units of Measurement" (3 May 1883), published in Lectures Vol. I, p. 73 https://archive.org/stream/popularlecturesa01kelvuoft#page/73/mode/1up|Popular

Knowledge , Science

“People crowded into our room, they shouted, they laughed, they got worked up, they protested, they luxuriated in all kinds of utterances.”

Albert Gleizes (1881–1953) French painter

Quote of Gleizes, 1911, on the Paris' 'Salon d'Automne' exhibition of 1911; as cited by Anne Ganteführer-Trier, in 'Cubism, Taschen, 2004
1910s

People

“I do view the march of technology as kind of inevitable. But I would like to accompany it with reason. And one form of reasoning that’s useful in these debates is to find precedence.”

David Krakauer (1967) scientist

Complexity and Stupidity, Sam Harris interviews David Krakauer, podcast November 13, 2016 https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/complexity-stupidity

“There has been a lot of talk about the formation of a new centre party. Some have even been kind enough to suggest that I might lead it. I find this idea profoundly unattractive. I do so for at least four reasons. First, I do not believe that such a grouping would have any coherent philosophical base…A party based on such a rag-bag could stand for nothing positive. It would exploit grievances and fall apart when it sought to remedy them. I believe in exactly the reverse sort of politics…Second, I believe that the most likely effect of such an ill-considered grouping would be to destroy the prospect of an effective alternative government to the Conservatives…Some genuinely want a new, powerful anti-Conservative force. They would be wise to reflect that it is much easier to will this than to bring it about. The most likely result would be chaos on the left and several decades of Conservative hegemony almost as dismal and damaging as in the twenties and thirties. Third, I do not share the desire, at the root of much such thinking, to push what may roughly be called the leftward half of the Labour Party…out of the mainstream of British politics…Fourth, and more personally, I cannot be indifferent to the political traditions in which I was brought up and in which I have lived my political life. Politics are not to me a religion, but the Labour Party is and always had been an instinctive part of my life.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech to the Oxford University Labour Club (9 March 1973), quoted in The Times (10 March 1973), p. 4
1970s

Life , Religion , Idea , Thinking

“Without even saying anything, just his eyes… It’s not like he forces you to do it, but the power that he has, it’s something in his spirit. It’s almost like intangible and kind of magical. He has an energy that kind of lifts you. Any doubt that you had is just gone. You just do it – it’s really simple. It was so easy to work with him.”

Alison Lohman (1979) American actress

Of Ridley Scott.
Interview with Rebecca Murray

“Why me Lord? What have I ever done
To deserve even one of the pleasures I've known?
Tell me Lord what did I ever do
That was worth loving you or the kindness you've shown?”

Kris Kristofferson (1936) American country music singer, songwriter, musician, and film actor

Why Me
Song lyrics, Jesus Was a Capricorn (1972)

Love , Pleasure

“My dad has hated me for as long as I can remember. That's a pretty sweeping statement, and I know how phony it sounds. It sounds petulant and really fantastic, the kind of weapon kids always use when the old man won't come across with the car for your heavy date at the drive-in with Peggy Sue or when he tells you that if you flunk world history the second time through he's going to beat the living hell out of you. In this day and age when everybody thinks psychology is God's gift to the poor old anally fixated human race and even the president of the United States pops a trank before dinner, it's really a good way to get rid of those Old Testament guilts that keep creeping up our throats like the aftertaste of a bad meal we overate. If you say your father hated you as a kid, you can go out and flash the neighborhood, commit rape, or burn down the Knights of Pythias bingo parlor and still cop a plea… But it also means that no one will believe you if it's true. You're the little boy who cried wolf. And for me it's true…I don't think Dad himself really knew it until then. Even if you could dig to the very bottom of his motives, he'd probably say - at the most - that he was hating me for my own good.”

Stephen King book Rage

Rage (1977)

God , Hate , Age , World

“Brother, thy tail hangs down behind!
This is the way of the Monkey-kind!”

Rudyard Kipling book The Jungle Book

Road-Song of the Bandar-Log.
The Jungle Book (1894)

Way

“All you have to do is touch my hand
To show me you understand
And something happens to me.
That's some kind of wonderful.”

Carole King (1942) Nasa

Some Kind of Wonderful (1961), Co-written with Gerry Goffin, first recorded by The Drifters
Song lyrics, Singles

Understanding

“A woman could be having fun
A woman could be like a nun
In order to survive
We cannot be kind
Until we are hurt”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Real Me
Lyrics, Rainbow

Hurt

“The man who truly loves his work returns to it after the briefest rest with a curious kind of voluptuousness. When he is completely absorbed in his job, the end of work seems like the end of life.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Working

Love , Life

“Rich people didn’t get in that kind of mess. They never had. Only the poor got trapped: by ignorance, by religion, by self-righteous laws passed by people who broke them with impunity.”

Sheri S. Tepper book Grass

Source: Grass (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 32)

People , Religion , Law

“He's the truest friend I've ever had. What's more, he's an exquisite man, full of kindness and sophistication, the most aristocratic aristocrat one can meet. To those who can't understand how I, a non-communist, could be friends with Zhou Enlai, I say: "But he's a prince more princely than I am!"”

Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012) Cambodian King

On Zhou Enlai, said during his exile in Peking, as quoted by Oriana Fallaci (June 1973), Intervista con la Storia (sixth edition, 2011). page 109.
Interviews

Understanding

Michael Simms (software developer) (1973) Video game programmer

Quoted in "Linux Game Publishing - it's possible" http://mstation.org/linuxgamepublishing.php M station (2003)

Game , Personality

“I am willing to respect the 2020 Tokyo Olympics name rectification campaign (from "Chinese Taipei" to "Taiwan"), but I do not like being forced or to encounter people who want others to express their political ideas and do so with loud demands. Frankly speaking, I really dislike this kind of behavior.”

Ko Wen-je (1959) Taiwanese politician and physician

Ko Wen-je (2018) cited in " Ko Wen-je refuses to sign Olympic name-change bid http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2018/08/28/2003699341" on Taipei Times, 28 August 2018.

People , Behavior , Idea

“Every time I see a mirror I’m amazed. I end up wondering who’s taken over the outside of me. A disgusting old goat, from the look of him. The kind I used to snicker at when I was twenty. He scares me, Stance. He looks like a dying man. I’m trapped inside him, and I’m not ready to go.”

Glen Cook book The White Rose

Source: The White Rose (1985), Chapter 10, “Bomanz’s Story” (p. 497)

Time

“Doing good to other people is not only a nice extra thing to do, but it is actually part of Emaan or the Faith; The Prophet (pbuh) said: “Whosoever believes in Allah and the Last Day should be generous to his neighbor [treat his neighbor with kindness], and whosoever believes in Allah and the Last Day should be generous to his guest.””

Mohammed Alkobaisi (1970) Iraqi Islamic scholar

Understanding Islam, "Morals and Ethics" http://vod.dmi.ae/media/96716/Ep_03_Morals_and_Ethics Dubai Media

People , Faith , Parting

“The concept of a system is not a simple or unique one. There are many different kinds of systems, and different systems may be organized and operated in different ways. As individuals we all belong to some social system, we participate in an economic system, we are the product of several educational systems, and we are members of one or more family systems. In a similar fashion, the equipment of which physical systems are made may be members of many other systems, such as electrical, mechanical, sensing, actuating, energy, materials, and/or information systems. One of the challenges to the person who engineers a system is to find the many alternative ways in which the function, the operation, and/or the equipment of concern and interest may be considered, understood, and made to perform most effectively.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. 1: First paragraph of Ch. 1. The Environment for System Engineering Methods

Education , Family , Way , Fashion

“It was not capitalism's internal contradictions that, having exhausted all possibilities, caused the system to explode. The struggle for liberation from a foreign oppressor; the misery caused by external events such as war, whose consequences privileged classes place on the backs of the exploited; liberation movements aimed at overthrowing neo-colonial regimes — these are the usual factors in unleashing this kind of explosion.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

War

“Roger: This place called Common Grounds that used to be called the Covered Dish. We’ve been playing there over the last thirteen years so that feels the most home-ish. [some background chatter] Yeah the old room moved to where the Covered Dish used to be, the old room is a club that’s called 1982 that my friend owns. That’s a cool little club. That’s more where I go to hangout than Common Grounds. Common Grounds is kind of hectic and that kind of thing but yeah it’s the same owner as it was from the little place.”

Roger Manganelli (1973) American musician

Feeling , Home

“The eulogy of the non-lover in the speech of Lysias … stresses the fact that the non-lover … does not commit extreme acts under the influence of passions. Since he acts from calculation, he never has occasion for remorse. … The non-lover demonstrates his superiority through prudence and objectivity. … We must now observe how these points of superiority correspond to those of “semantically purified” speech, … the kind of speech approaching pure notation in the respect that it communicates abstract intelligence without impulsion. It is a simple instrumentality, showing no affection for the object of its symbolizing and incapable of inducing bias in the hearer. In its ideal conception, it would have less power to move than 2 + 2 = 4, since it is generally admitted that mathematical equations may have the beauty of elegance, and hence are not above suspicion where beauty is suspect. But this neuter language will be an unqualified medium of transmission of meanings from mind to mind, and by virtue of it minds can remain in an unprejudiced relationship to the world and also to other minds. … Instead of passion, it offers the serviceability of objectivity … It distrusts any departure from the literal and prosaic.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric,” pp. 6-7.
The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953)

World , Beauty , Intelligence , Communication

“My sermons are criticized by certain audiences. They say that my sermons are hollow, not holy. I agree with them because I myself am not holy. The Buddha's teaching guides people to the place where there is nothing special… People often misunderstand faith as kind of ecstasy of intoxication… True faith is sobering up from such intoxication.”

Kodo Sawaki (1880–1965) Japanese zen Buddhist monk

Source: The Zen Teaching of "Homeless" Kodo (Kyoto: Kyoto Soto Zen Center, 1990), p. 72

People , Faith

“Simply translating the act of the scientist is the first job of any science writer. Then, in my more grandiose moments, the other big job of a science writer is to see connections, to see the forest composed by all these trees. The act of being a scientist, by definition, the act of being a modern scientist requires you to really focus. You have to drill down. You have to spend years studying one brick, one synaptic protein, one kind of thing that turns on the amygdala, one very particular question.”

Jonah Lehrer (1981) American science writer

Chimeras of Experience: A Conversation with Jonah Lehrer (2009)

Question , Tree , Study , Science

“Schools are miniature universes. They encompass, on a child’s scale, the same kind of domination and repression as the most despotically organised societies. A similar sort of injustice and comparable baseness preside over their choice of idols to elevate and martyrs to torment.”

Octave Mirbeau book Sébastien Roch

Sébastien Roch

School , Universe

“When asked what kind of music and bands he enjoys”

Axl Rose (1962) American singer-songwriter and musician

Quoted in "Axl Rose: The Rolling Stone Interview" http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-rolling-stone-interview-axl-rose-19890810 by Del James, Rolling Stone, (10 August 1989)

Music

“I think that we could agree on what kind of a world we would all want to build. it would be a world of independent nations, moving toward international community, each of which protected and respected the basic human freedoms. It would be a world which demanded of each government that it accept its responsibility to insure social justice. It would be a world of constantly accelerating economic progress — not material welfare as an end in itself, but as a means to liberate the capacity of every human being to pursue his talents and to pursue his hopes. It would, in short, be a world that we would be proud to have built.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

Day of Affirmation Address (1966)

World , Justice , Hope , Communication

“The obliteration of the evil hath been practised by two means, some kind of redemption or expiation of that which is past, and an inception or account de novo for the time to come. But this part seemeth sacred and religious, and justly; for all good moral philosophy (as was said) is but a handmaid to religion.”

Francis Bacon book The Advancement of Learning

Book II, xxii, 14
The Advancement of Learning (1605)

Religion , Evil , Time , Past

“Unless we are free from fear we will not be able to give our children the kind of future that we would like them to have.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (1945) State Counsellor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy

Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought Acceptance Speech (2013)

Children , Fear , Future

“Remember the words George Carlin said could not be said on TV? There's now a kind of movie that cannot be made without using all of them except one. Even the online trailer may startle you. It's one of those adults-only Red Band Trailers which you have to give your age in order to view. I lied about my age. Nobody under 17 would ever do that.”

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

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-sitter-2011 of The Sitter (7 December 2011)
Reviews, One-star reviews

Age

“O Christians! are you willing to walk the streets of heaven, and have no one greet you there? Would you be willing to go yourselves inside the gates and never have a soul to greet you and say, " I thank God for the kind words of sympathy and love you spoke on earth?"”

Joseph Cummings

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 561.

Love , God , Soul

“I am essentially a child at heart, and that's something that's never lost on me. It starts with the liberation of the writer's imagination. When you have that kind of really inspired material in your hands, if you can't enjoy it… there are some curmudgeonly people I guess who don't care for this stuff, but it's such a gas. It's so much fun.”

Bill Fagerbakke (1957) American actor

Bill Fagerbakke interview: SpongeBob, Starship Troopers, Statham http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/bill-fagerbakke/36493/bill-fagerbakke-interview-spongebob-starship-troopers-statham (August 8, 2015)

People , Imagination , Heart

“When the ground is soft
It may be worked with any kind of tool.”

Giovanni Maria Cecchi (1518–1587) Italian poet, playwright, writer and notary

Le Pellegrine, Act III., Scene VIL.
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 366.

“It used to be that, when something strange happened, we'd hear on the news "Police believe this is the act of an isolated nut." On the internet there are no isolated nuts; whatever kind of nut you are, you can find fifty nuts in the world exactly like you.”

Bruce Perens American computer scientist

http://blip.tv/file/get/HenrikBennetsen-InnovationGoesPublic160.mov Innovation Goes Public

World

“Even our new Commissioner of Police Andrew Hughes went so far as to say that those involved in these kinds of things are called domestic terrorists. Someone should remind Mr Hughes, who is an Australian, what his own people did to our counterparts.”

Apisai Tora (1934) Fijian politician

Senate speech, 24 August 2004 (excerpts)

People

“As to the origin of life, any life, I thought, we remain ignorant. Our science theorizes about the beginning of the cosmos or the birth of life. Our religions postulate endless versions of a man-God, hardly more rational than we are, as the Creator. In the past I have sometimes thought that maybe life is meaningless after all. Then I'd think that maybe the Seth material is a kind of cosmic poppycock -- the chemical composition of my mind somehow intelligent enough to understand the irony of its own meaninglessness, then spinning desperate yarns, as many psychologists would say; futile fantasies leading nowhere. But then I'd think that a brain that could conceive or order somehow had to emerge from a greater order. Besides that, earlier I hadn't realized (I thought, feeling better) that science and religion had spun some pretty weird yarns themselves, and if poppycock was being measured on a scale of one to ten, in my book anyhow they'd each get a twelve and a gold star.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981), p. 51

Life , God , Books , Religion

“My grandmother—God bless her soul—a Yaqui Indian from northern Mexico, was the greatest teacher I’d ever had! And do you know what she taught me, she taught me that each and every day is un milagro given to us by God, and that work, that planting corn and squash with our two hands is holy. She taught me all this with kindness and invitation. Not with ridicule and looking down her nose at me and making me feel like less than human when I didn’t get it at first.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

God , Feeling , Soul , Teachers

“What Jesus reveals is not that laws disappear but that they must be kept through righteousness of a new kind, … which is more complete because it supplements the deficiency in the laws. … This expanded content we may call an inclination so to act as the laws may command, i. e., a unification of inclination with the law whereby the latter loses its form as law. This correspondence with inclination is the πληρωμα [fulfillment] of the law.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) German philosopher

The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate (1799)

Law

“Scientific Management is not a new "system," something "invented" by a man called F. W. Taylor, a passing novelty." It is something much deeper, an attitude towards the control of human systems of co-operation of all kinds rendered essential by the immense accretion of power over material things ushered in by the industrial revolution…
What Taylor did was not to invent something quite new, but to synthesise and present as a reasonably coherent whole ideas which had been germinating and gathering force in Great Britain and the United States throughout the nineteenth century. He gave to a disconnected series of initiatives and experiments a philosophy and a title; complete unity was not within his scope… It was left to others to extend his philosophy to other functions and especially to Henri Fayol, a Frenchman, to develop logical principles for the administration of a large-scale undertaking as a whole.
It detracts nothing from Taylor's greatness to see him thus as a man who focussed his thought of the preceding age, carried that thought forward with a group of friends and colleagues whose united contribution was so outstanding as to constitute a "golden age" of management in the United States and laid the intellectual foundations on which all subsequent work in Great Britain and many other countries has been based. But it is impossible to understand Taylor's achievement or the significance of Scientific Management for our society, unless his individual work is seen against the background of this larger whole of which it is only a part.”

Lyndall Urwick (1891–1983) British management consultant

Vol I. p. 16-17; as cited in: Harry Arthur Hopf. Historical perspectives in management https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009425985. Ossining, N.Y., 1947. p. 4-5
1940s, The Making Of Scientific Management, 1945

Age , Idea , Understanding , Parting

“In no particular order, I could not or would not exist without air, food, water, gravity, tides, the moon, the sun, night, civilization, the laws of physics, the laws of thermodynamics, the law of the land, ancestors having sex, DNA, viruses, bacteria, plants, animals, oceans, ice caps, the kindness of strangers, the Big Bang, familial bonds, smart people, brave people, memory, medicine, the periodic table of elements, tribal instincts, magnetic fields, weather, Earth's molten core, a rotating Earth, a tilted Earth, tectonic plates, sleep, death, heat, consciousness, evolution, teachers and the miraculous, self-regulating chemical factory that is my body. Other than that, I like to think of myself as a self-made man.”

Chuck Lorre (1952) American screenwriter

Chuck Lorre Productions, Vanity Card #469 (1st Aired: 6 Nov 2014) http://www.chucklorre.com/index-mom.php?p=469

Death , People , Family , Law

“He had no special hobbies, but he needed luxury in general of a kind, and especially the luxury of getting things in a hurry, his theory being that everything comes to the man who won't wait.”

Ada Leverson (1862–1933) British writer

Source: Tenterhooks (1912), Chapter vii.

Waiting

“I would then say that there are two kinds of feeling. The first is to feel in the sense of concentrating your emotions on something immediately available for your understanding: you make your understanding out of the emotions you have about it. The second is to feel in the sense of being affected without trying to understand: something is felt, you do not know what, and it is more important to feel it than to try to understand it, since once you try to understand it you no longer feel it.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"The Idea of God" from Essays from Epilogue (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001)

Feeling , Understanding , Sense

“It is precisely because the Epicurean considered existence to be the result of pure chance that he greeted each moment with immense gratitude, like a kind of divine miracle.”

Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) French historian and philosopher

trans. Michael Chase (1995), p. 252
La Philosophie comme manière de vivre (2001)

Chance , Gratitude

“I do not accept the view, widely held in the Federal Cabinet, that some kind of slow Asian takeover of Australia is inevitable. I do not believe that we are powerless. I do believe that we can with good will and good sense control our destiny…. As a people, we seem to move from extreme to extreme. In the past 30 years the government of Australia has moved from the extreme of wanting a white Australia to the extreme of saying that we will have an Asian Australia and that the quicker we move towards it the better.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

"The Dilemma of Asian Immigration," The Age (March 20, 1984)

People , Sense , Past

“Let us not be surprised, however, if the study of the principles of argumentation — or even Burke's much mis-taught Speech — seems dry without the prospect of actual debate. We should hardly expect a half-back to feel much enthusiasm over reading the rules of the game and tackling a dummy if he could not look forward to tackling a man. When elocution and argumentative writing have failed to stimulate interest, formal debate may succeed, for it is a kind of game. In the time limit, the order of speakers, the alternation of rides, the actual struggle of opposing forces, the give and take of rebuttal, the fixed rules and the ethics of conduct, the qualifications for success, and the final awarding of victory, debate has much in common with tennis and football.”

William Trufant Foster (1879–1950) American economist

Source: Argumentation and debating, 1908, p. viii

Feeling , Game , Study , Time

“My life hadn’t fallen apart. I kept my jobs going, I had girlfriends, I had money, I had a house, I had a car, I had all those things. But I got Hepatitis C from injecting government morphine. I started injecting in 1982, but it took 25 years for the symptoms to show. That was a complete wake-up call. As soon as I found out, I quit everything, including my job in New York, and came to India to be a writer. I started working on the book, and lived very cleanly. I even quit drinking for nine years. It wasn’t easy to do. But just knowing that my time was limited was enough. Hepatitis C will eventually turn into liver cancer. Everybody is dying, by the way. The difference is that I know it, and you don’t. We live in that kind of world. And knowing it has focused me and made me do things that I would probably have put off for another ten years.”

Jeet Thayil (1959) Indian writer

Jeet Thayil: Confessions of an Indian Opium-Eater

Life , Money , Books , World

“Unfortunately, here in the Dominican, a lot of the time kids just quit school at 10, 11, 12 and play baseball full-time. It’s great for the kids who make it because they become superstars and [make] millions of dollars in the big leagues. But for 98 kids out of a hundred, it results in a kid who is 18, 19 with no education. So it’s kind of a win-lose here in the Dominican.”

Joe Kehoskie (1973) American baseball agent

Discussing amateur baseball in the Dominican Republic, from the PBS documentary Stealing Home http://www.pbs.org/stealinghome/transcript.html (18 June 2001)

Education , School , Time

“We sometimes imagine, under the influence of Spenglerian philosophy or some other kind of "historical morphology," that we live in a similar age [to the Romans], the last witnesses of a condemned civilization. But condemned by whom? Not by God, but by some supposed "historical laws." For although we do not know any historical laws, we are in fact able of inventing them quite freely, and such laws, once invented, can then be realized in the form of self-fulfilling prophecies.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

"Looking for the Barbarians"

God , Age , Law , Imagination

“I am particularly concerned about the recent allegations of mass persecutions of LGBTI people in the Chechen Republic of the Russian Federation. Discrimination and violence against LGBTI people is the worst kind of populism. Using minorities as scapegoats is unfortunately a growing trend. It is dangerous to democracy and governments must do all they can to stop it.”

Thorbjørn Jagland (1950) Norwegian politician

The Council of Europe member states have an obligation to protect LGBTI people http://www.coe.int/en/web/portal/-/the-council-of-europe-member-states-have-an-obligation-to-protect-lgbti-people, DC069(2017), Strasbourg, May 17, 2017.

People , Democracy

“My dear Father, Charley wrote you in his letter to his Aunt Laura thanking you for your kindness in sending us a nice Christmas present. You must not think because I have not written you myself before this that I appreciated your kindness less. I have been so troubled with pains and weakness in my arm and hand as to be almost useless at times. I think it was nursing so much when the children were sick. I was so relieved when Anna's note to Charly arrived yesterday telling Frankie was better. It would have been dreadful for Mother to have gone out west at this miserable season of the year. I was wretchedly uneasy. I do hope poor Franky will get along nicely now. It will make him much more careful about exposing himself having had this severe attack. Charley received the enclosed letters Anna sent from Sister Eliza and Toad[? ]. I was very glad to get them. It is quite refreshing to read Sister Eliza's letters. They are so cheerful and happy. I had a letter from her on Friday. This Custom House investigating committee is attracting a great deal of attention and time here. It holds its sessions at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Mr. Broome was up on Tuesday evening until ten o'clock but was not called upon. It is very slow. He has been for three weeks passed preparing the statement for those summoned from the Public Stores. Mr. Broome sends Laura a paper to look at—The Fisk tragedy. What is Nora doing with herself this winter. She might write to me sometimes. Give much love to Mother. Ask her for her receipt for getting fat. I would like to gain some myself. It is so much nicer to grow fleshy as you advance in life than to shrivel and dry up. The children are all well and growing very fast. Lloyd has to study very hard this year. His studies are quite difficult. I suppose Charley Harris is working hard too. Mr. Broome sent you a paper with the Navy Register in this week. I received your papers and often Richard calls and gets them. I must close. Mr. Broome and children join me in love to you, Mother, Laura, Anna, Nora, Charly & all.
With much love,
Your devoted child, Mary Jane
I enclose Nancy letter which was written some time ago.”

Charles Boarman (1795–1879) US Navy Rear Admiral

Mary Jane Boarman in a Sunday letter to her father (January 21, 1872)
The people mentioned in Mary Jane's letter were her children Lloyd, Charley, and Nancy; her husband, William Henry Broome; her sisters Eliza, Anna, Laura, and Nora; her brother Frankie; and her nephew frontier physician Dr. Charles "Charley" Harris, son of her sister Susan.
John Broome and Rebecca Lloyd: Their Descendants and Related Families, 18th to 21st Centuries (2009)

Love , Life , Pain , Children

“To do that kind of job you must be mentally disturbed.”

Silvio Berlusconi (1936) Italian politician

On magistrates, as quoted in "Did I say This? in The Observer (20 April 2008) http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/apr/20/italy
2003

“It was inconceivable to me that the kind of anti-Labor work that Kevin had been involved in – the destabilisation, the leaking – would be rewarded by the leadership.”

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

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

“This shows the kindness of God to His creatures, even to us weak beings. His righteousness and justice as regards all animals are well known; for in the transient world there is among the various kinds of animals no individual being distinguished from the rest of the same species… all physical, psychical, and vital forces and organs that are possessed by one individual are found also in the other individuals. If any one is somehow different it is by accident, in consequence of some exception, and not by a natural property; it is also a rare occurrence.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.12

God , World , Justice , Nature

“The precise reason why abstinence from animal food will be the first act … of a moral life is admirably explained in the book, The Ethics of Diet [by Howard Williams]; and not by one man only, but by all mankind in the persons of its best representatives during all the conscious life of humanity. … the moral progress of humanity — which is the foundation of every other kind of progress — is always slow; but … the sign of true, not casual, progress is its uninterruptedness and its continual acceleration. And the progress of vegetarianism is of this kind. That progress, is expressed both in the words of the writers cited in the above-mentioned book and in the actual life of mankind, which from many causes is involuntarily passing metre and more from carnivorous habits to vegetable food, and is also deliberately following the same path in a movement which shows evident strength, and which is growing larger and larger — viz., vegetarianism.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: The First Step (1892), Ch. X

Life , Books , Food , Animals

“Theologians intensely dislike the definition of faith as belief without—or in the face of—evidence, for that practice sounds irrational. But it surely is, as is any system that requires supporting a priori beliefs without good evidence. In religion, but not science, that kind of faith is seen as a virtue.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 67

Faith , Religion , Support , Science

“It is important to realize that the exercise of any skill depends on the ability to create an abstract system of some kind out of the totality of the world around us. For instance, the carpenter is not interested in wood as a biological or chemical entity. He is sensitive to many of its grosser physical properties but not to many subtler ones. The wood of a carpenter is not the real — that is, the complete substance — but merely wood as a material on which the carpenter can exercise his skill.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1950s, The Skills of the Economist, 1958, p. 9

World , Exercises , Dependency

“If I weren't an actress playing a socialite, I'd have lavender hair, wear crappy vintage clothes and have tattoos. I'd be some kind of crazy lawless rebel - an alternative underground riot girl.”

Megan Mullally (1958) American actress

Attributed

Girl , Tattoo , Clothes

“What we've lost - 'I said in more or less these terms' - is the proper interest in and taste for detail. We've been noting that for a long time yet the loss is irremediable. In the old days man was everything. A human face was worth a poem. When nature appeared behind a human being it was a kind of backdrop taking the place of the dark background of portrait painters or the gold of the Italian primitives… The day when a separation took place art was diminished. It was transformed the day that the 'subject' and the 'genre' destroyed great painting, denaturing even landscapes.”

Eugène Fromentin (1820–1876) French painter

Quote of Fromentin, as cited by Sarah Anderson in Between Sea and Sahara: An Orientalist Adventure, 'Chapter IV', Eugène Fromentin, (1859); transl. Blake Robinson; publisher I.B. Tauris 2004, p. 4

Art , Nature , Appearance , Loss

“I'm a businessman. I work for business people. The kind of thing they say is: Now we've sold a lot of records, let's sell some more.”

Nat King Cole (1919–1965) American singer and jazz pianist

British interview (1963)

People , Business

“We are so accustomed to hear arithmetic spoken of as one of the three fundamental ingredients in all schemes of instruction, that it seems like inquiring too curiously to ask why this should be. Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic—these three are assumed to be of co-ordinate rank. Are they indeed co-ordinate, and if so on what grounds?
In this modern “trivium” the art of reading is put first. Well, there is no doubt as to its right to the foremost place. For reading is the instrument of all our acquisition. It is indispensable. There is not an hour in our lives in which it does not make a great difference to us whether we can read or not. And the art of Writing, too; that is the instrument of all communication, and it becomes, in one form or other, useful to us every day. But Counting—doing sums,—how often in life does this accomplishment come into exercise? Beyond the simplest additions, and the power to check the items of a bill, the arithmetical knowledge required of any well-informed person in private life is very limited. For all practical purposes, whatever I may have learned at school of fractions, or proportion, or decimals, is, unless I happen to be in business, far less available to me in life than a knowledge, say, of history of my own country, or the elementary truths of physics. The truth is, that regarded as practical arts, reading, writing, and arithmetic have no right to be classed together as co-ordinate elements of education; for the last of these is considerably less useful to the average man or woman not only than the other two, but than 267 many others that might be named. But reading, writing, and such mathematical or logical exercise as may be gained in connection with the manifestation of numbers, have a right to constitute the primary elements of instruction. And I believe that arithmetic, if it deserves the high place that it conventionally holds in our educational system, deserves it mainly on the ground that it is to be treated as a logical exercise. It is the only branch of mathematics which has found its way into primary and early education; other departments of pure science being reserved for what is called higher or university instruction. But all the arguments in favor of teaching algebra and trigonometry to advanced students, apply equally to the teaching of the principles or theory of arithmetic to schoolboys. It is calculated to do for them exactly the same kind of service, to educate one side of their minds, to bring into play one set of faculties which cannot be so severely or properly exercised in any other department of learning. In short, relatively to the needs of a beginner, Arithmetic, as a science, is just as valuable—it is certainly quite as intelligible—as the higher mathematics to a university student.”

Joshua Girling Fitch (1824–1903) British educationalist

Source: Lectures on Teaching, (1906), pp. 267-268.

Life , Truth , Education , School

“Could you imagine a wand that was not camp? Could you imagine, for example, Ray Winstone, with a wand? (Impersonating him) 'RIGHT OK. IT'S A KIND OF MAGIC, SIT DOWN.”

Russell Brand (1975) British comedian, actor, and author

"
Radio One Interview, July 5th 2007

Imagination

“There are two kinds of animals on earth. One kind minds his own business, the other minds other people's business. The former are vegetarians, like cows, sheep and thinking men. The latter are carnivorous, like hawks, tigers and men of action.”

Lin Yutang (1895–1976) Chinese writer

As quoted by Tai-yi Lin (Lin Yutang's daughter) in her Foreword (26 March 1950) to The Importance of Living, p. x

Men , People , Business , Thinking

“Even though principles of rationality seem as often violated as followed, we still cling to the notion that human thought should be rational, logical, and orderly. Much of law is based upon the concept of rational thought and behavior. Much of economic theory is based upon the model of the rational human who attempts to optimize personal benefit, utility, or comfort. Many scientists who study artificial intelligence use the mathematics of formal logic—the predicate calculus—as their major tool to simulate thought. […] Human thought is not like logic; it is fundamentally different in kind and spirit. The difference is neither worse nor better. But it is the difference that leads to creative discovery and to great robustness of behavior.”

Donald A. Norman book The Design of Everyday Things

Source: The Design of Everyday Things (1988, 2002), Ch. 5, pp. 114–115.

Law , Behavior , Intelligence , Mathematics

“Zen is a form of liberation - being liberated from Yin and Yang elements, and enabling you to remain calm and cool when you are troubled. Zen is not something definite and tangible, it is a refuge for mental solace. Zen is about concentration of mind. It is a profound culture, enabling people to gain spiritual tranqulity and be awakened. Even though not a word is spoken, it enables one to gain a thorough understanding of the truth of life. This is what we call the harmony between Yin and Yang. It is like a substance deep in your soul, generating a kind of wisdom and energy in your mind. It is also a kind of energy of self-confidence, helping you to achieve self-emancipation, self-regulation and self-perfection, leading you to the path of success. As such, Buddhism talks about ‘Faith, Commitment, and Action’. The theory, when applied in the human realm, is all about Zen. Concentration gives rise to wisdom. With concentration, the mind will be focused and it will not be drifting apart. Hence, the problem of schizophrenia will not arise. Zen culture is about the state of mind. It is a kind of positive energy! Positive energy is a kind of compassion, which enables people to understand each other when they encounter problems, to understand the country and society at large, and to understand their family and children, colleagues and friends. In this way, people will be able to live in peaceful co-existence and remain calm when they are faced with problems. When you see things in perspective using rationality and positive energy, you are able to change your viewpoint pertaining to a certain issue. This is the moment Zen arises in your mind! In fact, Zen is within you. This theory is very profound.”

Jun Hong Lu (1959) Australian Buddhist leader

10 October 2013
Special Interview by People' Daily, Europe Edition

Life , Wisdom , Children , People

“When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely.”

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527) Italian politician, Writer and Author

Letter to Francesco Vettori http://www2.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/flor-mach-lett-vettori.htm (10 December 1513), in James Atkinson (trans.), Prince Machiavelli (1976), p. 19

Death , Food , Feeling , Home

“[He] wasn't interested in meeting the kind of women who would come to one of those places looking for the kind of man who hoped to meet a woman there.”

Orson Scott Card Treasure Box

Treasure Box (1996)

Women , Hope

“One sort of believes in recycling. But one believes in it as a kind of palliative to the gods.”

Fay Weldon (1931) English author, essayist and playwright

"This much I know: Fay Weldon", The Observer Magazine, August 30, 2009.

God

“If we had allowed things to drift, everything would have gone from bad to worse. Nasser would have become a kind of Moslem Mussolini, and our friends in Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and even Iran would gradually have been brought down. His efforts would have spread westwards, and Libya and North Africa would have been brought under his control.”

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

Eden to Eisenhower (5 November 1956), quoted in Peter G. Boyle (ed.), The Eden-Eisenhower Correspondence, 1955-1957 (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), p. 183

Effort

“It is easy to create an interstellar radio message which can be recognized as emanating unambiguously from intelligent beings. A modulated signal (‘beep,’ ‘beep-beep,’. . . ) comprising the numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, for example, consists exclusively of the first 12 prime numbers—that is, numbers that can be divided only by 1, or by themselves. A signal of this kind, based on a simple mathematical concept, could only have a biological origin.. . . But by far the most promising method is to send pictures.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Smithsonian magazine, May 1978, pp. 43, 44. Quoted in Awake! magazine, 1978, 8/22.

Intelligence , Mathematics

“Borges, alas, had no particular objection to extreme authoritarianism as such. The reason he hated Peronismo was that it was a mass movement. He didn't like the masses: he was the kind of senatorial elitist whose chief objection to fascism is that by mobilizing the people it gives them ideas above their station and hands out too many free shirts.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Jorge Luis Borges', p. 69
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

Hate , People , Idea

“Modern PCs are horrible. ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we're kind of stuck with it. If any Intel people are listening to this and you had anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before you reproduce.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Linus & the Lunatics, Part II, 2003-11-25, 2006-08-28 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7279,
2000s, 2000-04

People , Way

“This idea that somebody put into our heads — that companies are somehow these kind of individuated units that are separate from society and don’t have to be paying attention to the communities they’re in — that is incorrect. We need to have a more enlightened view about the role of companies. This company is not somehow separate from everything else. Are we not all connected? Are we not all one? Isn’t that the point?”

Marc Benioff (1964) American businessman

The New York Times: "Marc Benioff of Salesforce: ‘Are We Not All Connected?’" https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/business/marc-benioff-salesforce-corner-office.html (15 June 2018)

Communication , Idea