Quotes about kindness
page 33

Mitch Albom photo
Algis Budrys photo
Antonio Negri photo
Melanie Phillips photo
Anaïs Nin photo
John Danforth photo
Nancy Peters photo

“He found in the narcotic night world a kind of modern counterpart to the gothic castle — a zone of peril to be symbolically or existentially crossed.”

Nancy Peters (1936) American writer and publisher

"Philip Lamantia — S.F. Surrealist poet", http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/03/11/BAG4MBNRMF1.DTL San Francisco Chronicle, 2005-03-11.: On her late husband, the poet Philip Lamantia.
2000s

Peter Greenaway photo
Orson Scott Card photo

“Calvin, what kind of trouble are you planning to make?”
“No trouble at all,” said Calvin, annoyed. “Why do you think I want to cause trouble?”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

“Because you are awake.”
Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Heartfire (1998), Chapter 4.

Antoni Tàpies photo
Daniel J. Boorstin photo
Nick Cave photo
Clint Eastwood photo
Joseph Addison photo
J. C. R. Licklider photo

“I came to MIT from Harvard University, where I was a lecturer. I had been at the Harvard Psychoacoustic Laboratory during World War II and stayed on at Harvard as a lecturer, mainly doing research, but also a little bit of teaching—statistics and physiological psychology—subjects like that.
Then there came a time that I thought that I had better go pay attention to my career. I had just been having a marvelous time there. I am not a good looker for jobs; I just came to the nearest place I could, which was in our city. I arranged to come down here and start up a psychology section, which we hoped would eventually become a psychology department. For the purposes of having a base of some kind I was in the Electrical Engineering Department. I even taught a little bit of electrical engineering.
I fell in love with the summer study process that MIT had. They had one on undersea warfare and overseas transport—a thing called Project Hartwell. I really liked that. It was getting physicists, mathematicians—everybody who could contribute—to work very intensively for a period of two or three months. After Hartwell there was a project called Project Charles, which was actually two years long (two summers and the time in between). It was on air defense. I was a member of that study. They needed one psychologist and 20 physicists. That led to the creation of the Lincoln Laboratory. It got started immediately as the applied section of the Research Laboratory for Electronics, which was already a growing concern at MIT.”

J. C. R. Licklider (1915–1990) American psychologist and computer scientist

Licklider in: " An Interview with J. C. R. LICKLIDER http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/107436/1/oh150jcl.pdf" conducted by William Aspray and Arthur Norberg on 28 October 1988, Cambridge, MA.

Lauren Bacall photo
Rudolf Clausius photo
Plutarch photo

“When Philip had news brought him of divers and eminent successes in one day, "O Fortune!" said he, "for all these so great kindnesses do me some small mischief."”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

34 Philip
Apophthegms of Kings and Great Commanders

William Trufant Foster photo
Herman Cain photo
Michael Swanwick photo
Michel Foucault photo
Bob Dylan photo
Lima Barreto photo
Jacob Bronowski photo
Thomas R. Marshall photo
Agnes Repplier photo
Margaret Thatcher photo
Osama bin Laden photo
Bernard Lewis photo

“What we have now come to regard as typical of Middle Eastern regimes is not typical of the past. The regime of Saddam Hussein, the regime of Hafiz al Assad, this kind of government, this kind of society, has no roots either in the Arab or in the Islamic past. It is due and let me be quite specific and explicit it is due to an importation from Europe, which comes in two phases.
Phase one, the 19th century, when they are becoming aware of their falling behind the modern world and need desperately to catch up, so they adopt all kinds of European devices with the best of intentions, which nevertheless have two harmful effects. One, they enormously strengthen the power of the state by placing in the hands of the ruler, weaponry and communication undreamt of in earlier times, so that even the smallest petty tyrant has greater powers over his people than Harun al-Rashid or Suleyman the Magnificent, or any of the legendary rulers of the past.
Second, even more deadly, in the traditional society there were many, many limits on the autocracy, the ruler. The whole Islamic political tradition is strongly against despotism. Traditional Islamic government is authoritarian, yes, but it is not despotic. On the contrary, there is a quite explicit rejection of despotism. And this wasn't just in theory; it was in practice too because in Islamic society, there were all sorts of established orders in society that acted as a restraining factor. The bazaar merchants, the craft guilds, the country gentry and the scribes, all of these were well organized groups who produced their own leaders from within the group. They were not appointed or dismissed by the governments. And they did operate effectively as a constraint.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Bernard Lewis (2006)

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Michael Moorcock photo
Lewis H. Lapham photo
Alan Paton photo
Margaret Thatcher photo
Oliver Wendell Holmes photo
Robert A. Taft photo

“The opportunities for heroism are limited in this kind of world: the most people can do is sometimes not to be as weak as they’ve been at other times.”

Angus Wilson (1913–1991) british author

Malcolm Cowley (ed.) Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series (New York: Viking Press, [1958] 1959) p. 261.

Colin Wilson photo
Robert Silverberg photo
James Brown photo
Glenn Gould photo
Jacques Ellul photo
Philip Warren Anderson photo
Sharon Gannon photo
Germaine Greer photo
Neil Gaiman photo
Gaston Bachelard photo

“Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectifications of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.”

Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French writer and philosopher

A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (1988)

Christopher Hitchens photo

“That war in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstitution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent – or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought – destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position – leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that – like Chomsky – looked ridiculous. So now I was interested.”

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

"In enemy territory? An interview with Christopher Hitchens." http://www.johannhari.com/2004/09/23/in-enemy-territory-an-interview-with-christopher-hitchens, Interview with Johann Hari (2004-09-23): On the Bosnian War
2000s, 2004

Joseph Kosuth photo
Erwin Schrödinger photo
Sinclair Lewis photo
Richard Dawkins photo
Stephen King photo
Jane Roberts photo
Bryce Dallas Howard photo
Andrew Ure photo
James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce photo
PewDiePie photo
Béla H. Bánáthy photo

“Systems inquiry has demonstrated its capability in dealing effectively with highly complex and large-scale problem situations. It has orchestrated the efforts of various disciplines within the framework of systems thinking. It has introduced systems approaches and methods to the analysis, design, development, evaluation, and management of systems of all kinds”

Béla H. Bánáthy (1919–2003) Hungarian linguist and systems scientist

Source: Systems Design of Education (1991), p. 31 as cited in: K.C Laszlo (1998) Dimensions of Systems Thinking http://archive.syntonyquest.org/elcTree/resourcesPDFs/Systems_Thinking.pdf. Working paper on syntonyquest.org

Agatha Christie photo
Clarence Thomas photo
Horace Bushnell photo

“The pain is legit. But Trump is a stupid vote. Because Trump won't solve any of those things, he'll make them all worse. You're voting against your pain. You're voting to create more. You're going for a kind of witch doctor of politics who is promising things based on magic.”

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

As quoted in "Debriefing Mike Murphy" https://www.weeklystandard.com/matt-labash/debriefing-mike-murphy (18 March 2016), by Matt Labash, The Weekly Standard
2010s

Nancy Peters photo

“During the '70s, when the Cold War was still on, we invited Voznesensky and Yevtushenko to come here. We had very large readings for them. It was a way of kind of culturally thawing the Cold War.”

Nancy Peters (1936) American writer and publisher

"And the beat goes on", http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/06/09/DD158147.DTL San Francisco Chronicle, 2003-06-09.
2000s

Damian Pettigrew photo
Aldous Huxley photo
Petr Chelčický photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Murray Leinster photo
Simone de Beauvoir photo

“We were two of a kind, and our relationship would endure as long as we did: but it could not make up entirely for the fleeting riches to be had from encounters with different people.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

On her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, as quoted in "Did Simone de Beauvoir's open 'marriage' make her happy?" http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/10/gender.politicsphilosophyandsociety by Lisa Appignanesi, in The Guardian (9 June 2005) and her book Simone de Beauvoir (2005), p. 36, ISBN 1904950094
General sources

Andy Warhol photo

“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface; of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it... I see everything that way, the surface of things, a kind of mental Braille. I just pass my hands over the surface of things.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

1973
1968 - 1974, Electric chair quote
Source: Warhol in his own words – Untitled Statements ( 1963 – 1987), selected by Neil Printz; as quoted in Andy Warhol, retrospective, Art and Bullfinch Press / Little Brown, 1989, pp. 457 – 467

Fenella Fielding photo

“You get set on a path and, if you succeed, you get better parts, but of the same kind. If you don't take a lot of trouble, you get stuck like that.”

Fenella Fielding (1927–2018) English actress

Interview: Independent, Sunday 24 February 2008 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/the-lady-vanishes-what-ever-happened-to-fenella-fielding-785265.html

Deendayal Upadhyaya photo
Tim McGraw photo

“She's my kind of rain, hey, hey-hey.
Like love from a drunken sky-aye-yai-yai.
Confetti falling down on mine.
She's my kind of rain.”

Tim McGraw (1967) American country singer

She's My Kind of Rain
Song lyrics, Tim McGraw and the Dancehall Doctors (2002)

Thomas Edison photo

“Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions”

Thomas Edison (1847–1931) American inventor and businessman

Thomas Edison ""No Immortality of the Soul" says Thomas A. Edison. In Fact, He Doesn't Believe There Is a Soul — Human Beings Only an Aggregate of Cells and the Brain Only a Wonderful Machine, Says Wizard of Electricity". New York Times. October 2, 1910
1910s

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Anne Brontë photo
William Kingdon Clifford photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Arnold Vosloo photo
Richard Dawkins photo

“I can think of no moral objection to eating human road kills except for the ones that you mentioned like 'what would the relatives think about it?' and 'would the person themselves have wanted it to happen?', but I do worry a bit about slippery slopes; possibly a little bit more than you do.There are barriers that we have set up in our minds and certainly the barrier between Homo sapiens and any other species is an artificial barrier in the sense that its a kind of 'accident' that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct. Never the less it exists and natural barriers that are there can be useful for preventing slippery slopes and therefore I think I can see an objection to breaching such a barrier because you are then in a weaker position to stop people going further.Another example might be suppose you take the argument in favour of abortion up until the baby was one year old, if a baby was one year old and turned out to have some horrible incurable disease that meant it was going to die in agony in later life, what about infanticide? Strictly morally I can see no objection to that at all, I would be in favour of infanticide but I think i would worry about/I think I would wish at least to give consideration to the person who says 'where does it end?'”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

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Peter Singer - The Genius of Darwin: The Uncut Interviews (2009)