Quotes about kindness (7466 quotes, page 34)

“What is a “heart of great forbearance?” As a practitioner, the first thing you should be able to do is to not fight back when you are beaten or sworn at—you must be tolerant. Otherwise, what kind of practitioner will you be?”

Li Hongzhi (1951) Chinese religious leader and dissident

Zhuan Falun http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/zflus.html

Heart , Fight

“With that kind of money, I could have invaded some country.”

Clint Eastwood (1930) actor and director from the United States

On the $31 million cost of making a film
"Figures and quotes", Bristol Evening Post (June 19, 2007), p. 36.

Money , Country

“In his (Barack Obama's) distorted understanding of economics, when anyone, but especially the rich get a tax break or pay less in taxes, someone else has to pay the difference or the supposed shortfall adds to the debt. His assumption, typical of most Democrats and Republicans, is the government is “owed” a portion of the fruits of our labor. It never occurs to him that perhaps the government has no business taking money from people who earn it in the first place. He never thinks that the solution is to stop government spending and stop robbing Peter to pay Paul.He and other members of the ruling elite can only see the economy as a pie, with only so much to go around. If one person gets “more,” someone has to do with “less.” It never occurs to them that the free market is like a bakery that can produce many pies, and bigger pies, and different kinds of pies so that everyone has their fill.”

R. Lee Wrights (1958–2017) American gubernatorial candidate

2012, " The State of the Union is Still a State of War http://www.libertyforall.net/?p=7189"

Money , People , Understanding , Business

“Politically I am neither left nor right! And this kind of political-ethical standpoint-- being in the middle-- usually brings about seclusion and isolation! But now I do not mind it anymore and, instead, I work more and more in my self-made solitude!”

Javad Alizadeh (1953) cartoonist, journalist and humorist

Quoted in "About me" in his 4D Humor website http://javad.8m.com/about.html

Solitude

“Overload could be regarded as a kind of inter-sender conflict in which various role senders may hold quite legitimate expectations that a person perform a wide variety of tasks, all of which are mutually compatible in the abstract. But it may be virtually impossible for the focal person to complete all of them within given time limits. He [sic] is likely to experience overload as a conflict of priorities; he must decide which pressures to comply with and which to hold off. If it is impossible to deny any of the pressures, he may be taxed beyond the limits of his abilities. Thus overload involves a kind of person-role conflict and is perhaps best regarded as a complex, emergent type combining aspects of inter-sender and person-role conflicts.”

Robert L. Kahn (1918–2019) American psychologist

Source: Organizational stress: Studies in role conflict and ambiguity, 1964, p. 20

Time , Personality

“You use things; the idea is, of course, to eliminate things [in making a picture]. And just as fifteen or eighteen years ago [when Guston made whole figurative series of children's pictures: 'all sort of props and so on'] I stretched out to get that, - put it in and took it out - to get that look in that's kid's eye and the way his mouth was open or wasn't - I mean a very particular kind of look - I'd do the same now. In other words, I can't find any freedom in abstract painting [but Guston did abstract painting in 1960 - till in 1967 he moved to figuration]. I'am just as stuck with locations, a few areas of colour in relation to some kind of totality that I want, as I was before. And so the problem of figuration is somehow irrelevant to me. I think some of the best painting done in New York today is figuration, but it's not recognised as such... Well I think of my pictures as a kind of figuration... I think every good painter here in New York really paints a self-portrait..”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1950 - 1960, Interview with David Sylvester, BBC (March 1960), pp. 92-93

Children , Way , Idea , Problem

“You are not traditionally beautiful; and you know it. We women do. But what most people mean by beauty is really a kind of aesthetic acceptability, not so much character as a lack of it, a set of features and lineaments that hide their history, that suggest history itself does not exist. But the template by which we recognize the features and forms in the human body that cause the heart to halt, threatening to spill us over into the silence of death—that is drawn on another part of the soul entirely…But all sing, chant, hymn the history of the body, if only because we all know how people regard bodies that deviate from the lauded and totally abnormal norm named beauty. Most of us would rather not recognize such desires in ourselves and thus avoid all contemplation of what the possession of such features means about the lives, the bodies, the histories of others, preferring instead to go on merely accepting the acceptable. But that is not who I am.”

Samuel R. Delany book Neveryóna

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 5, “Of Matrons, Mornings, Motives, and Machinations” (p. 103; ellipsis represents a minor elision of description)

Death , Women , People , Beauty

“I had auditory sensory problems and touch sensitivity problems, I had no problems with my vision. Other people absolutely cannot stand fluorescent lighting and they're sometimes helped by a thing called the Irlen colored glasses where you try on all kinds of different pale colored glasses until it's easier to read. It stops the problem of the print jiggling on the page.”

Temple Grandin (1947) USA-american doctor of animal science, author, and autism activist

in "A Conversation with Temple Grandin" January 20, 2006 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5165123

People , Color , Problem , Light

“The aim is not to give human beings real goals that warrant belief, and tasks to share in, but to re-establish “belonging,” although this kind of speech and thought is precisely calculated to avoid contact and so makes belonging impossible.”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 38.

“He had the notion that because I am a clergyman I should believe anything. Many people have little notions of that kind.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

The Dagger with Wings (1926)

People

“If it is possible to walk twenty feet, it’s possible to walk twenty miles. So creationists insist there must be some “definite boundary” blocking the evolution of new “kinds”. But they won’t say where or what that boundary is. Creationists habitually misdefine their terms –if they can be forced to use definitions at all, because they will not be accountable. They can’t be, because they’ve decided in advance never to change their minds even if they’re proven wrong. If they were to find out that macroevolution was ever actually seen and proven to have happened for certain, their cultish faith would still forbid them to admit it. Instead they’d have to redefine their terms, to “move the goalposts” to some higher taxonomic level –but not so high as to have to admit where humans belong in the families of apes.”

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

"11th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm277H3ot6Y, Youtube (June 26, 2008)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Family , Faith , Change

“For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel - a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance - and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in de facto way for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle. This last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or difused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects; for they are themselves, consciously or unconsciously seeking to fit them into or exclude them from any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete at times fanatical, military inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes.”

Isaiah Berlin book The Hedgehog and the Fox

The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953). Editor Henry Hardy. Collaborator Michael Ignatieff. Editorial Princeton University Press, 2013. ISBN 1400846633, p. 2.

Way , Feeling , Idea , Understanding

“Now, there are some, and I don’t just mean Communists like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of these gods actually exist. Some believe that ‘’none’’ of them exist. There’s just us and an ocean of darkness around us. I’m no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth? It’s true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work—much like our politicians—and yet keep winning reelection to their golden thrones in heaven, year after year. That’s not to say that I don’t respect them, Mr. Premier! Don’t you ever let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull. My country is the kind where it pays to play it both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time.”

Aravind Adiga book The White Tiger

The First Night.
The White Tiger (2008)

Men , God , Truth , Way

“I believe in being cruel to be kind. I love gaming, I have done all my life. I want to see it lifted in the eyes of the general public above how they view it now. Pottering endlessly about with the same dreary plots and game mechanics isn't helping any of us evolve.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

http://www.destructoid.com/destructoid-interview-ben-yahtzee-croshaw-69631.phtml
Other Articles

Love , Life , Game , Help

“As an actor in Iceland, I found good training and colleagues in the National Theatre, and none of us could have predicted the kind of fame that LazyTown found globally. When you are an actor or do anything in the arts for a career, your life will take many unexpected twists and turns.Robbie was a product of many years of thinking and doing. What you see in the TV show is different from his first personality. One of the big challenges playing a part like Robbie is bringing the right kind of energy. You don't want to scare the littlest viewers but you have to bring a certain villain personality with humor.As many actors have said before me, being famous or well known can be nice or it can be a burden, it all depends on how you look at it. I love my fans - they have come along on this ride with me and have said too many nice things for me to ever count. I am grateful.There is no difference in preparing for Robbie Rotten or any classical serious role…. Every part you prepare for you have to be honest and truthful and wholly believe that the character exists – otherwise no one will accept your acting. Kids are a demanding audience and they KNOW when something is untruthful.”

Stefán Karl Stefánsson (1975–2018) Icelandic actor

Reddit AMA https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/57bkxj/i_am_stefan_karl_robbie_rotten_from_lazytown_and/ (13 October 2016)

Love , Life , Truth , Art

“In a word, CLEANTHES, a man who follows your hypothesis is able perhaps to assert, or conjecture, that the universe, sometime, arose from something like design: but beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance; and is left afterwards to fix every point of his theology by the utmost license of fancy and hypothesis. This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him. You justly give signs of horror, DEMEA, at these strange suppositions; but these, and a thousand more of the same kind, are CLEANTHES’s suppositions, not mine. From the moment the attributes of the Deity are supposed finite, all these have place. And I cannot, for my part, think that so wild and unsettled a system of theology is, in any respect, preferable to none at all.”

David Hume book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Philo to Demea, Part V
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)

Death , Age , World , Thinking

“In every kind of testing to see where I'm at, strength, speed, conditioning, I'm either right at or well ahead of the best marks I've ever had at this stage of training. A few weeks ago, we were concerned I was peaking too fast. I'd kick the [expletive] out of myself at the same stage of training for any of my previous fights. … The biggest thing is better recuperation from training. I don't have the days where I came in flat. It's made for the best training camp of my career.”

Jon Fitch

About his switch to a vegetarian diet. "Vegetarianism all the rage in MMA" https://www.yahoo.com/news/vegetarianism-rage-mma-145900165--mma.html, interview with Yahoo! Sports (18 February 2011).

Fight , Speed , Training

“I reject that criticism because this is indeed another kind of holocaust, by another name. At last count, more than 40 million unborn children have been deliberately, intentionally destroyed. What word adequately defines the scope of such slaughter? [After 9/11] the American people responded with shock, sadness and a deep and righteous anger — and rightly so. Yet let us not forget that every passing day in our country, more than three thousand innocent Americans are killed [through abortion].”

Jesse Helms (1921–2008) American politician

As quoted in Here's Where I Stand (2005)
2000s

Children , People , Sadness , Anger

“I'm not quite sure that I know how they complement each other, because I use them for the opposite reason. I find music to be an intensely personal kind of thing, perhaps it's because I write a lot of the stuff. I use acting to escape from being me, and I use music to explore being me. I think that's the best way to put it.”

Colleen Fitzpatrick (1972) American singer and actress

Asked how dancing & music complement each other
Attributed

Music , Way , Thinking , Personality

“When you review an exhibition of paintings you don't compose a painting about it, when you review a film you don't make a film about it and when you review a new CD you don't make a little CD about it. But when you review a prose-narrative then you write a prose-narrative about that prose-narrative and those who write the secondary prose-narrative, let's face it, must have once had dreams of writing the primary prose-narrative. And so there is a kind of hierarchy of envy and all those other things.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Interview with Ramona Koval on Radio National (4 September 1999) http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s21638.htm

Dreams , Envy , Painting

“My interest had been in a broad class of situations, broader than the advanced industrial market economies, including situations in third world countries, and in countries attempting to have some kind of socialist approach to their problems. I have been interested in how one can construct efficient mechanisms that have the decentralization features similar to a market but that do not necessarily resemble a market. For this purpose, I formulated the notion of an informationally-decentralized economy in which perfect competition was just a very special case…”

Leonid Hurwicz (1917–2008) Russian-American economist and mathematician

Source: David Warsh, " The Road to a System that Works (Without Shooting People) http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2007.10.21/69.html" at economicprincipals.com, October 21, 2007.

World , Problem , Perfection , Country

“For example, the GPLv2 in no way limits your use of the software. If you're a mad scientist, you can use GPLv2'd software for your evil plans to take over the world ("Sharks with lasers on their heads!!"), and the GPLv2 just says that you have to give source code back. And that's OK by me. I like sharks with lasers. I just want the mad scientists of the world to pay me back in kind. I made source code available to them, they have to make their changes to it available to me. After that, they can fry me with their shark-mounted lasers all they want.”

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

Linux Licensing, Forbes, 2006-03-09, Lyons, Daniel, 2006-08-28 http://www.forbes.com/technology/2006/03/09/torvalds-linux-licensing-cz_dl_0309torvalds1.html,
2000s, 2006

World , Way , Evil , Change

“In some central and important cases, … the existence of specific power relations in the society will produce an appearance of a particular kind. Certain features of the society that are merely local and contingent, and maintained in existence only by the continual exercise of power, will come to seem as if they were universal, necessary, invariant, or natural features of all forms of human social life, or as if they arose spontaneously and uncoercedly by free human action.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), p. 52.

Life , Exercises , Nature , Universe

“Jioji Kotobalavu, chief executive in the office of the Prime Minister: "What kind of question is that?" (21 July 2005, in reaction to Nailatikau's accusation that the government was incapable of functioning without perpetrators of the 2000 coup).”

Koila Nailatikau (1953) Fijian politician

Question

“Yes, throughout our marriage [with Gerhard Richter during 1982 - 1993], we influenced each other mutually. We didn't have a student-teacher kind of relationship.”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

after 2010, Isa Genzken, the artist who doesn't do interviews' (2014)

Marriage , Teachers

“I'm always trying to understand myself, but it's like there's a point in the centre of the room, and there's a hundred windows to look at the same point from. All I can do is give you different angles on the same thing. God, you know, if I could find one conclusive thing in anything I would probably have something to put an anchor down on. But I can't, and I haven't met anyone that can. You can pick out anything you like in my lyrics, I don't seek to be cryptic. I love words for the sake of words, for me they're kind of free standing, and they don't really need to be explained. I think every word has its own character and colour and picture and the result you get with lyrics just depends how you put them together.”

KatieJane Garside (1968) English singer

On writing, Repeat https://web.archive.org/web/20031101121528/https://www.repeatfanzine.co.uk/interviews/queen%20adreena.htm fanzine (2003)

Love , God , Understanding , Thinking

“Genius declares itself to be a kind of higher masculinity.”

Otto Weininger book Sex and Character

Source: Sex and Character (1903), p. 111.

“I don't know how to find our voice. It catches in my throat when I try to use it. If I do manage to get something out, its met with very vocal opposition from all kinds of surprising sources.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, INVISIBILITY

“I am just thinking how unfair it is of you to quote their own words. It is a low blow to use what ExxonMobil has actually said against them. I mean, that is kind of a cheap shot, don't you think?”

Joe Barton (1949) United States congressional representative from Texas

Committee on Energy of Commerce Hearing: Gasoline: Supply, Price, and Specifications https://house.resource.org/109/org.c-span.192444-1.pdf, May 10, 2006
to Representative Anna Eshoo, on her citing ExxonMobil officials saying they don't want to build any new refineries in North America

Quotes , Thinking

“The believers in their kindness and merciful behaviors are like one body, if any organ of this body complains, the rest of the body stays awake, ill and feverish.”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 5665, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2586
Sunni Hadith

Behavior

“States have two kinds of power: latent power and military power.”

John Mearsheimer book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

Source: The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), Chapter 3, Wealth and Power, p. 55

“In my eighteenth year, my father sent me to the University of Gottingen. The first winter I did not leave the Anatomical School, and although I gave myself up to the most intense study, I willingly entered into all the gaities and amusements so much sought by German students, but avoided carefully debaucheries of any kind; they gave me the cognomen, Half Benommist, owing to my puerile look and feeble and weak voice. Unzer and Ebeling, two students in physic, took me under their powerful protection, and extricated me out of many scrapes.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

My Life and Confessions, for Philippine, 1786

School , Study , Winter

“It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable tentacular oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)

People , Behavior , Appearance , Night

“As for comics, one has only to turn to the characteristic output of Marvel Comics, for the period from about 1961 to about 1975, to find not an expression of base and cynical impulses but of good, old-fashioned liberal humanism of a kind that may strike us today, God help us, as quaint, but which nevertheless appealed, in story after story, to ideals such as tolerance, technological optimism, and self-sacrifice for the benefit of others.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Unpublished Letter of Complaint to The New York Review of Books

God , Fashion , Optimism , Help

“There are, of course, good happy endings as well as bad ones, but surely they are of a kind that in some way expresses happiness rather than glibly promises it.”

Louis Kronenberger (1904–1980) American critic and writer

http://books.google.com/books?id=cI1KAAAAMAAJ&q=%22There+are+of+course+good+happy+endings+as+well+as+bad+ones+but+surely+they+are+of+a+kind+that+in+some+way+expresses+happiness+rather+than+glibly+promises+it%22&pg=PA74#v=onepage
The Cart and the Horse (1964)

Way , Happiness

“Initially I observed, in sweeping, panoramic vision, a perpetually metamorphosing Persian rug. A few minutes later these patterns segued into cinematic images from childhood—it was kind of like watching home movies.”

David Woodard (1964) American writer, conductor and businessman

LA Weekly (Jul. 26 - Aug. 1, 1996)

Home , Childhood

“For applied psychology, whether American or German, it never had the slightest appeal, as is shown by the figures for the relevant journals, Zeitschrift fiir angewandte Psychologie, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Journal of Educational Psychology. Applied psychology had committed itself to knowledge goals that were unlikely to be advanced by the kind of investigative practice associated with Wundt's laboratory. What it was after was knowledge that could be quickly utilized by agencies of social control so as to make their work more efficient and more rationally defensible.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

66
Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research. 1994

Education , Knowledge

“I have a lot of critics; we all know that. And I do kind of want to say — you know, put my middle finger up to everybody and say, think what you want about me. I am who I am. But at the end of the day, I'm an athlete that wants to win.”

Hope Solo (1981) American association football player

As quoted in Hope Solo: 'I speak the truth, and people either love me or they hate me'" http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlesports/2012/08/29/hope-solo-i-speak-the-truth-and-people-either-love-me-or-they-hate-me/#6489101=0, seattlepi.com (August 29, 2012)
2010s

Thinking

“I'm actually kind of impressed by Iraq's patience right now… I mean, look at it objectively. They've opened their doors to un inspectors, they're being bombed by british and american troops, american forces are massing at their borders, american diplomats are actively looking to assinate [sic] Saddam Hussein, etc. It almost seems like Bush is doing everything he can to taunt Saddam Hussein. Not just if you step over this line I will hit you, but if you step over this line while I put rats on your back and put butter on the floor and make fun of your mom and move the line then I will hit you, in fact I'll hit you even if you just stand there and do nothing. It's painfully clear that iraq should not be allowed to have weapons of mass destruction. But it also seems painfully clear that the bush administration have no intention of finding a peaceful resolution to the situation in Iraq.”

Moby (1965) Activist, American musician, DJ and photographer

"troubled times", journal entry (4 January 2003) at moby.com http://www.moby.com/journal/2003-01-04/troubled_times.html

Peace , Moms , Patience

“Every time you become confidential with some people, you hear of a new kind of dirty trick.”

E. W. Howe (1853–1937) Novelist, magazine and newspaper editor

Country Town Sayings (1911), p211.

People , Time

“What became a problem is there was a clause that allowed investors to cover losses. As long as you made losses one year, you could carry them over to the next and to the next. And because of that they would pay no taxes. So this fellow takes all the gold away and he says he makes losses and so he does not pay us anything. So he is the only one that is being protected. Those of us who are losing our resources are not protected. This is the thing that created the kind of debate that we had and we had to renegotiate.”

Jakaya Kikwete (1950) Tanzanian politician and president

On Tanzania's mining sector.
Interviews, Interview with Financial Times, 2007-10-04 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d8a07e28-72a3-11dc-b7ff-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check1/

Problem , Loss

“One night, when all the thoughts were coming to me, the concept came to me that Superman could have a dual identity, and that in one of his identities he could be meek and mild, as I was, and wear glasses, the way I do. The heroine, who I figured would be some kind of girl reporter, would think he was some kind of worm; yet she would be crazy about this Superman character who could do all sorts of fabulous things. In fact, she was real wild about him, and a big inside joke was that the fellow she was crazy about was also the fellow whom she loathed.”

Jerry Siegel (1914–1996) American co-creator of Superman

In the beginning (1983)

Way , Girl , Thinking , Night

“I like to try different things. A good strong character and a good story are the key things for me when I'm considering a script. But I don't want to do the same kinds of things over and over. I like to challenge myself and do projects that dare to push the limits.”

Matt Dillon (1964) American actor

Dennis King (January 12, 1990) "Matt Dillon - This Era's James Dean - 'Drugstore Cowboy' Star Takes Critics' Award, Speculation About Oscar Nomination in Stride", Tulsa World, p. C1.

Strong

“I don’t know why I think this, but maybe I’ve got my best work ahead. Maybe I’ll be putting my teeth in the glass, and maybe it will be a very different kind of role, but I want to do something where I’m not driving a car or a truck, where it’s real. Something that people wouldn’t expect me to do. Probably a man in search of himself. But we’re always searching for ourselves anyway.”

Burt Reynolds (1936–2018) American actor, director and producer.

"Burt Reynolds Has Made Mistakes. But He Regrets Nothing." in The New York Times (23 March 2018)

People , Cars , Search , Thinking

“It was not, however, a matter of interest to me only with respect to my divisions, since as a member of the Executive Committee, I was a kind of general executive and so had begun to think from the corporate viewpoint. The important thing was that no one knew how much was being contributed — plus or minus — by each division to the common good of the corporation. And since, therefore, no one knew, or could prove, where the efficiencies and inefficiencies lay, there was no objective basis for the allocation of new investment. This was one of the difficulties with the expansion program of that time. It was natural for the divisions to compete for investment funds, but it was irrational for the general officers of the corporation not to know where to place the money to best advantage. In the absence of objectivity it was not surprising that there was a lack of real agreement among the general officers. Furthermore, some of them had no broad outlook, and used their membership on the Executive Committee mainly to advance the interests of their respective divisions.
The important thing was that no one knew how much was being contributed—plus or minus—by each division to the common good of the corporation. And since, therefore, no one knew, or could prove, where the efficiencies and inefficiencies lay, there was no objective basis for the allocation of new investment.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 48-49

Money , Nature , Thinking , Time

“It is significant that nothing resembling Platonism arose in China. Classical Chinese script is not ideographic, as used to be thought; but because of what A. C. Graham terms its 'combination of graphic wealth with phonetic poverty' it did not encourage the kind of abstract thinking that produced Plato's philosophy. Plato was what historians of philosophy call a realist - he believed that abstract terms designated spiritual or intellectual entities. In contrast, throughout its long history, Chinese thought has been nominalist - it has understood that even the most abstract terms are only labels, names for the diversity of things in the world. As a result, Chinese thinkers have rarely mistaken ideas for facts. Plato's legacy to European thought was a trio of capital letters - the Good, the Beautiful and the True. Wars have been fought and tyrannies established, cultures have been ravaged and peoples exterminated in the service of these abstractions. Europe owes much of its murderous history to errors of thinking engendered by the alphabet.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Deception: Plato and the alphabet (p. 57-8)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

War , People , World , Beauty

“Things that have a common quality ever quickly seek their kind.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

IX, 9
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IX

“The 81 days of detention were a nightmare. I am not unique; it happened to many people in China. Conditions were extreme, created by a system that thinks it is above the law and has become a kind of monstrous machine. There were so many moments when I felt desperate and hopeless. But still, the next morning, I heard the birds singing.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, Living in Fear Is Worse Than Imprisonment, 2012

People , Law , Bird , Thinking

“We have come here to learn about the creations, about God's secret, and about God's grace. We are the form of light. There are six kinds of lives and we are the form of light. We have come here to learn the sirr, the secret connection between ourselves and His power, to study our Father and the story of where we were before. Within this body, within this show, there is much we must learn. We have come here to learn, not to dance on this dramatic stage or to watch show after show. We have come here to open and look within everything and see our Father. Each thing that we enjoy or feel sorrow about must be opened, and we must see God within. That is the lesson we have come to learn.”

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (1900–1986) Sri Lankan Sufi leader

God , Secret , Feeling , Study

“I am not interested in the kind of expression that you have when you paint a painting with brush strokes. It's all right, but it's already done and I want to do something new. I didn't want to get into something which is played out and narrow. I want to do as I like, invent my own interests. Of course, that doesn't mean that people who, like Newman, still paint are worn out. But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment. I think what I'm trying to deal with is something more long range than that in a way, more obscure perhaps, more involved with things that happen over a longer time perhaps. At least it's another area of experience.”

Donald Judd (1928–1994) artist

Quoted in: Donald Jud http://www.theartstory.org/artist-judd-donald.htm at theartstory.org, 2014
1960s, "Oral history interview with Donald Judd," 1965

People , Way , Thinking , Time

“Religiosity has appeared in the course of evolution and is advantageous for human kind. And although it is believed that it is religion that teaches us what's right and what's wrong, I think religion evolved to substantiate our morality. Brain likes to justify our beheviors.”

Jerzy Vetulani (1936–2017) Polish scientist

Woźniak, Olga; Vetulani, Jerzy (24 December 2011): Stań się dobrym. To się opłaca, interview. Gazeta Wyborcza (in Polish).

Religion , Thinking , Appearance

“I just feel that there's a little bit of lack of respect and class just to kind of leave a tournament like that and then come out and practice here, especially being the hostess. You know, I don't know the situation, if it's injury or whatever it is. It's just -- it just seemed really weird.”

Annika Sörenstam (1970) Swedish golfer

Annika Sorenstam comments re Michelle Wie - Press Conference 2007 LPGA Championships http://www.asapsports.com/show_interview.php?id=43436

Feeling

“Jim and his crew of a dozen or so specialize in loud, sloppy publicity seeking…. Myself, I like the stiletto-in-the-night approach. That's partly because I'm younger, a post-Sixties type, and partly because my thing is toxics, not nukes or mammals. … there are all kinds of direct, simple ways to go after toxic criminals.
You just plug the pipes.”

Neal Stephenson book Zodiac

Source: Zodiac (1988), Chapter 6

Way , Night

“Tolstoy … believed that property claims were based on robbery and maintained by violence. More radical than second-century radical Christians and than most monks, he turned even against the subdivision of labor in economic society. It seemed to him to be the means by which privileged persons such as artists, intellectuals, and their kind, absorbed the labor of others, justifying themselves by the belief that they were beings of a higher order than workingmen, or that their contribution to society was so great that it compensated for their claims.”

H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) American theologian

Source: Christ and Culture (1951), p. 62

Personality

“In our culture … people who don't submit to their lust are said to be repressed and have all kinds of warped beasts in the basement. So the part of the mind that thrives when it's freed from lust doesn't get a chance. It gets pushed into the corner of the basement. It becomes the repressed part.”

Thanissaro Bhikkhu (1949) Theravadin Buddhist Monk and Scholar

People , Chance , Parting

“The only problem I have with computers and television is that when all cultures on earth reach the stage we are at it will lead to a kind of homogenization.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Playboy interview (May 1995)

Problem

“By your faith in people, you will someday be betrayed.
I thought it was the same as being rejected.
At the time I didn't have that kind of strength.
Certainly, I knew too much.
It was said that I was a strong child.
I was praised, saying "you must have strength not to cry"
The more things like that were said,
the more even laughing was painful.”

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

A Song for XX
Lyrics, A Song for XX

Pain , People , Faith , Strong

“The worship of money is the lowest of all human emotions, but it is shared not only by the bourgeoisie, but also by the great majority of us… Little people, humble people, even those who are practically penniless. And I, with all my indignation, all my passion for destruction, I, too, am not free of it. I who am oppressed by wealth, who realise it to be the source of all misery, all my vices and hatred, all the bitterest humiliations that I have to suffer, all my impossible dreams and all the endless torment of my existence, still, all the time, as soon as I find myself in the presence of a rich person, I cannot help looking up to him, as some exceptional and splendid being, a kind of marvelous divinity, and in spite of myself, stronger than either my will of my reason, I feel rising from the very depths of my being, a sort of incense of admiration for this wealthy creature, who is all too often as stupid as he is pitiless. Isn’t it crazy? And why… why?”

Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright

Diary ot a Chambermaid

Money , People , Stupidity , Dreams

“In the Church which was founded at Corinth, St. Paul had special difficulties of the kind I have mentioned. In that flourishing commercial city, which through its shipping and situation, maintained a vital connexion between East and West, numerous crowds of people flocked together from all quarters, different in speech and in culture. As they mingled with the inhabitants, they produced, by contacts and contrasts, new and ever new differences. Even in the Church this differentiation endeavoured to make itself felt in sects and parties; and a kind of pagan wisdom made a special attempt to force itself forward as a teacher of truth. In his first letter to this church, from which the text I read is taken, St. Paul strongly combats this tendency.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, Sermon Preached at Trinitatis Kirke, 1844, P. 162

Wisdom , People , Truth , Teachers

“That will become clear in the next few months as we see just what kind of minority the Sunnis in Iraq intend to be. If they come around, a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible, and we should stay to help build it. If they won't, then we are wasting our time. We should arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind.”

Thomas Friedman (1953) American journalist and author

New York Times (28 May 2005) "The Endgame in Iraq".
"The next … months" in Iraq

Time , Help

“We venture to say a few words in explanation of the plan of this work. Its object is not to force upon the public the personal views or theories of its author; nor has it the pretensions of a scientific work, which aims at creating a revolution in some department of thought. It is rather a brief summary of the religions, philosophies, and universal traditions of human kind, and the exegesis of the same, in the spirit of those secret doctrines, of which none — thanks to prejudice and bigotry — have reached Christendom in so unmutilated a form, as to secure it a fair judgment. Since the days of the unlucky mediaeval philosophers, the last to write upon these secret doctrines of which they were the depositories, few men have dared to brave persecution and prejudice by placing their knowledge upon record. And these few have never, as a rule, written for the public, but only for those of their own and succeeding times who possessed the key to their jargon. The multitude, not understanding them or their doctrines, have been accustomed to regard them en masse as either charlatans or dreamers. Hence the unmerited contempt into which the study of the noblest of sciences — that of the spiritual man — has gradually fallen.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Introduction
Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume I

Men , Secret , Religion , Understanding

“They come to have a party for themselves, and we're kind of a house band for their party.”

Jason Mraz (1977) American singer-songwriter

Discussing students in college venues
[Christina, Fuoco, http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/7600127/jason_mraz_goes_to_school, Jason Mraz Goes to School, Rolling Stone, 2 September 2007, 2007-09-28]

Housing

“It seems as if there are almost two different kinds of religion, one of which brutally divides, and one of which unites (or can unite). How do we tell them apart, and how might we begin to switch allegiance from the former to the latter?”

Ken Wilber (1949) American writer and public speaker

Why Do Religions Teach Love and Yet Cause So Much War?

Religion

“The poet is a particular kind of expert.”

Robert Pinsky (1940) American poet, editor, literary critic, academic.

Singing School

“I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary world, some imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to love it and be glad to belong to it. These, Govinda, are some of the thoughts in my mind.”

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) German writer

Siddhartha (1922)

Love , World , Learning , Perfection

“The aversion of the first Christians to the images, inspired by the Pagan simulachres, made room, during the centuries which followed the period of the persecutions, to a feeling of an entirely different kind, and the images gradually gained their favour. Reappearing at the end of the fourth and during the course of the fifth centuries, simply as emblems, they soon became images, in the true acceptation of this word; and the respect which was entertained by the Christians for the persons and ideas represented by those images, was afterwards converted into a real worship. Representations of the sufferings which the Christians had endured for the sake of their religion, were at first exhibited to the people in order to stimulate by such a sight the faith of the masses, always lukewarm and indifferent. With regard to the images of divine persons of entirely immaterial beings, it must be remarked, that they did not originate from the most spiritualised and pure doctrines of the Christian society, but were rejected by the severe orthodoxy of the primitive church. These simulachres appear to have been spread at first by the Gnostics,—i. e., by those Christian sects which adopted the most of the beliefs of Persia and India. Thus it was a Christianity which was not purified by its contact with the school of Plato,—a Christianity which entirely rejected the Mosaic tradition, in order to attach itself to the most strange and attractive myths of Persia and India,—that gave birth to the images.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Source: A Treatise of Relics (1549), p. 13

People , School , Faith , Religion

“Yes. There was a period when I tried to avoid looking at Greek – and Renaissance – sculpture of any kind; when I thought that the Greek and Renaissance were the enemy and that one had to throw all that over and start again from the beginning of primitive art. It's only in the last ten or fifteen years that I've begun to know how wonderful the elgin Marbles are.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote from 'Henry Moore', an interview by Donald, in 'Horizon', New York, Nov. 1960
1955 - 1970

Art

“Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.”

H. Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) British physician, writer, and social reformer

Source: The Dance of Life http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300671.txt (1923), Ch. 3

Money , Thinking

“I'd been carrying [my Ruger.41 Magnum] so many days that I had almost forgotten it was there. This was the kind of world we now lived in.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 36, p. 171

World

“Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

D 89
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)

Knowledge , Reading

“It is difficult to say when algebra as a science began in China. Problems which we should solve by equations appear in works as early as the Nine Sections (K'iu-ch'ang Suan-shu) and so may have been known by the year 1000 B. C. In Liu Hui's commentary on this work (c. 250) there are problems of pursuit, the Rule of False Position… and an arrangement of terms in a kind of determinant notation. The rules given by Liu Hui form a kind of rhetorical algebra.
The work of Sun-tzï contains various problems which would today be considered algebraic. These include questions involving indeterminate equations. …Sun-tzï solved such problems by analysis and was content with a single result…
The Chinese certainly knew how to solve quadratics as early as the 1st century B. C., and rules given even as early as the K'iu-ch'ang Suan-shu… involve the solution of such equations.
Liu Hui (c. 250) gave various rules which would now be stated as algebraic formulas and seems to have deduced these from other rules in much the same way as we should…
By the 7th century the cubic equation had begun to attract attention, as is evident from the Ch'i-ku Suan-king of Wang Hs'iao-t'ung (c. 625).
The culmination of Chinese is found in the 13th century. …numerical higher equations attracted the special attention of scholars like Ch'in Kiu-shao (c.1250), Li Yeh (c. 1250), and Chu-Shï-kié (c. 1300), the result being the perfecting of an ancient method which resembles the one later developed by W. G. Horner”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

1819
Source: History of Mathematics (1925) Vol.2, Ch. 6: Algebra

Way , Question , Problem , Appearance

““I really liked that girl.”
“Not loved, evidently,” I observed.
“N-n-no. I supposed not. Though what is love, anyway? Doesn’t it have so infinitely many kinds and degrees and mutations and quantum jumps that— Never mind.””

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 8 (p. 83)

Love , Girl

“They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don't want any other point of view. They don't even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive.”

Roger Ailes (1940–2017) Television executive

Howard
Kurtz
Fox News Chief Blasts NPR 'Nazis'
The Daily Beast
2010-11-17
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-11-17/fox-news-chief-roger-ailes-blasts-national-public-radio-brass-as-nazis/
2011-02-10
on NPR firing Juan Williams for remarks he made on Fox News about fearing airplane passengers in Muslim garb

Guy , Feeling

“Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others. Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Family , Understanding

“I have read with very great interest Mr. Metcalfe's paper, as we at the Midvale Steel Co. have had the experience, during the past ten years, of organizing a system very similar to that of Mr. Metcalfe. The chief idea in our system, as in his, is, that the authority for doing all kinds of work should proceed from one central office to the various departments, and that there proper records should be kept of the work and reports made daily to the central office, so that the superintending department should be kept thoroughly informed as to what is taking place throughout the works, and at the same time no work could be done in the works without proper authority. The details of the system have been very largely modified as time went on, and a consecutive plan, such as Mr. Metcalfe proposed, would have been of great assistance to us in carrying out our system. There are certain points, however, in Mr. Metcalfe's plan, which I think our experience shows to be somewhat objectionable. He issues to each of the men a book, something like a check-book, containing sheets which they tear out, and return to the office after stating on them the work which they have done. We have found that any record which passes through the average workman's hands, and which he holds for any length of time, is apt either to be soiled or torn. We have, therefore, adopted the system of having our orders sent from the central office to the small offices in the various departments of the works, in each of which there is a clerk who takes charge of all orders received from, and records returned to, the central office, as well as of all records kept in the department.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) American mechanical engineer and tennis player

F.W. Taylor (1886), " Comment to "The Shop-Order System of Accounts https://archive.org/stream/transactionsof07amer#page/475/mode/1up," by Henry Metcalfe in: Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Vol 7 (1885-1886), p. 475; Partly cited in: Charles D. Wrege, ‎Ronald G. Greenwood (1991), Frederick W. Taylor, the father of scientific management. p. 204.

Men , Books , Idea , Thinking

“The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity I need. My name in print. That really makes somebody. Things are going to start happening to me now!”

Steve Martin (1945) American actor, comedian, musician, author, playwright, and producer

As "Navin R. Johnson" in The Jerk (1979)

Books

“Today, our country has ushered into an era of technological advancements, when current achievements oblige us to mobilize all our forces and work with a maximum effectiveness and goal-orientation. Therefore, our goal is a single one, namely: to rally around our values, to be proud of our achievements and to be confident with the future. This is the way in which Armenia can move ahead. Armenia should improve more than the previous day. All of us should constantly remember this. All of us should remember the logic of a better Armenia, a safer Armenia, a prosperous Armenia, and a powerful Armenia… Let there be an atmosphere of kindness and tolerance throughout all our undertakings. I am thankful…and onward to a new Armenia, onward to a prosperous Armenia.”

Serzh Sargsyan (1954) Armenian politician, 3rd President of Armenia

Government of the Republic of Armenia http://www.gov.am/old/enversion/premier_2/primer_home_S.Sargsyan.htm?mat=2341 (December 20, 2007)

Way , Confidence , Future , Country

“Although there was much to criticize in American domestic and foreign policy, what struck me was the one-sidedness, unfairness, and systematic use of the double standard in the attacks against the United States and South Vietnam. … He called upon the United States "to denazify itself," but not North Vietnam or China. What practices in the United States, compared to the barbarous practices of Cuba or of China or of North Vietnam, warrant such a characterization? In those countries how long would one survive who whispered the kind of criticisms Chomsky was perfectly free to broadcast in the United States and be rewarded for it?”

Sidney Hook (1902–1989) American philosopher

Out of Step (1985)

Country

“There is no merit in being truthful when one is truthful by nature, or rather when one can be nothing else; it is a gift, like poetry or music. But it needs courage to be truthful after carefully considering the matter, unless a kind of pride is involved; for example, the man who says to himself, "I am ugly," and then says, "I am ugly" to his friends, lest they should think themselves the first to make the discovery.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote, 6 June 1824 (p. 45)
1815 - 1830, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1822 – 1824)

Truth , Music , Courage , Nature

“Dots are just one example of an element in Lascaux art, and in all cave art… This is a profusion of nonrepresentational, geometric patterns. In addition to dots, there are grids and chevrons, curves and zigzags, and more. …The coincidence of these geometric motifs with representational images is one of the most puzzling aspects of Upper Paleolithic art. …images, six different kinds in all, are shimmering, incandescent, mercurial—and powerful. Called entoptic images—which means "within vision"—these phenomena are products of the basic neural architecture of the human brain.”

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

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

Art

“Earlier contentions that the right hemisphere is not even conscious largely gave way by the mid seventies to an intermediate position conceding that the mute hemisphere may be conscious at some lower elemental levels, but claiming that it lacks the higher, reflective, self-conscious kind of inner awareness that is special to the human mind and is needed, so it is said, to qualify the right conscious system as a "self' or "person". Self awareness in particular is reported, on the basis of mirror tests mainly, to be a predominantly human attribute and is rated by developmental as well as by evolutionary standards to be a highly advanced phase of conscious awareness.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

Nobel lecture (1981)

Way , Personality

“The Republican Party is strong enough to dare to do right and cannot afford to shirk a duty. The colored men North and South were loyal to the Government in the days of its greatest peril. There was not a rebel or a traitor to be found among them. They ask the privilege of citizenship now that slavery has been forever banished from our country. Why should the great freedom-loving State of Iowa longer deny them this right? No one reason can be given that has not been used to bolster up slavery for the last hundred years. The war that has just closed has swept that relic of barbarism from our land; let the Republican Party have the courage to do justice…I have no fear of the result in a contest of this kind. We shall carry the election and have the satisfaction of wiping out the last vestige of the black code that has long been a disgrace to our State.”

Hiram Price (1814–1901) American politician

As quoted in History of Iowa from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century https://books.google.com/books?id=gTdAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=%22With+proper+safeguards+to+the+purity+of+the+ballot+box,+the+elective+franchise+should+be+based+upon+loyalty+to+the+Constitution+and+the+Union+recognizing+and+affirming+the+equality+of+all+men+before+the+law%22&source=bl&ots=z_M1ul7IWl&sig=8CNmDX4D9Q3cLBaZ1hxR_MgATZE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjI7_W07L7UAhVMcT4KHT1uDXAQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=%22With%20proper%20safeguards%20to%20the%20purity%20of%20the%20ballot%20box%2C%20the%20elective%20franchise%20should%20be%20based%20upon%20loyalty%20to%20the%20Constitution%20and%20the%20Union%20recognizing%20and%20affirming%20the%20equality%20of%20all%20men%20before%20the%20law%22&f=false (1903), by Benjamin F. Gue, Volume III, Chapter 1

Love , Men , War , Fear

“Amongst the half-human progenitors of man, and amongst savages, there have been struggles between the males during many generations for the possession of the females. But mere bodily strength and size would do little for victory, unless associated with courage, perseverance, and determined energy. With social animals, the young males have to pass through many a contest before they win a female, and the older males have to retain their females by renewed battles. They have, also, in the case of mankind, to defend their females, as well as their young, from enemies of all kinds, and to hunt for their joint subsistence. But to avoid enemies or to attack them with success, to capture wild animals, and to fashion weapons, requires the aid of the higher mental faculties, namely, observation, reason, invention, or imagination. These various faculties will thus have been continually put to the test and selected during manhood; they will, moreover, have been strengthened by use during this same period of life. Consequently, in accordance with the principle often alluded to, we might expect that they would at least tend to be transmitted chiefly to the male offspring at the corresponding period of manhood.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

second edition (1874), chapter XIX: "Secondary Sexual Characters of Man", page 564 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=587&itemID=F944&viewtype=image
The Descent of Man (1871)

Life , Imagination , Fashion , Courage

“This Don Giovanni had heat, passion and total commitment from everyone involved under dynamic, dramatic direction of conductor Metodi Matakiev. The Don was Lithuanian baritone Vytautas Juozapaitis, a highly physical, Douglas Fairbanks / Errol Flynn kind of Don. Tall, dark, quite handsome, a really sexy beast possessed of a bronze colored voice of power and some suavity, completely at ease on stage, and finally a Don who actually ENJOYS to the hilt the life of a promiscuous hedonist. He was close to irresistible.”

Vytautas Juozapaitis (1963) Lithuanian opera singer

William Fregosi, Opera - L (September 24, 2003) http://www.opera.lt/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabID=538-

Life , Color , Passion

“I supported the president’s moves. I helped to implement some of them leading up to the announcements when I was secretary of state, expanding travel opportunities, remittances. And I certainly told the president toward the end of my time that I hoped he would be able to move toward diplomatic relations and to make more of an impact by building up the relationship. And there are no better ambassadors for freedom, democracy and economic opportunity than Cuban Americans. So the more that we can have that kind of movement back and forth, the more likely we are to be able to move Cuba toward greater freedom, greater respect for rights. … I do think meeting with dissidents, meeting with people who have been voices, tribunes of freedom and opportunity is important.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Democratic Presidential Debate in Miami (March 9, 2016)

People , Hope , Travel , Democracy

“The world sure isn’t kind to the man who tries to be gentle and thoughtful.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 40 (p. 113)

World

“It’s just like when the Allies were victorious over Nazi Germany in World War II, when we occupied the country, we left a lot of Nazis in place because they were the ones who made the trains run on time and the bureaucracy function properly, etc. And it was distasteful, but you needed them. And in fact, our experience in Iraq kind of demonstrates the wisdom of that, because in Iraq we replaced the Baathist bureaucrats and the result was chaos. Not to compare Wall Street to Iraq or Nazi Germany, but the point is you need people who know what they’re doing.”

Mark Haines (1946–2011) American journalist and television show presenter

Wisdom , War , People , World

“There is a kind of laughter that sickens the soul. Laughter when it is out of control: when it screams and stamps its feet, and sets the bells jangling in the next town. Laughter in all its ignorance and cruelty. Laughter with the seed of Satan in it. It tramples upon shrines; the belly-roarer. It roars, it yells, it is delirious: and yet it is as cold as ice. It has no humour. It is naked noise and naked malice.”

Mervyn Peake book Boy in Darkness

"Boy in Darkness," Sometime, Never (1956)

Soul , Laughter

“We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy that they have in Iraq, quite honestly.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

July 17, 2006, during the St. Petersburg Group of Eight summit Putin said in reply to George W. Bush, who said he hopes Russia will follow Iraq in turning to democracy
http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2006/07/bush_says_just_.html http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/07/15/russia.g8/index.html
2006- 2010

Democracy

“[About Christian Groups] They have no rights to call themselves "Christians", because they have no Christianity to them; they have no kindness, no compassion, no charity. I want Jesus to come back and say: "THAT'S NOT WHAT I MEANT!"”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

Source: From Her Tours and CDs, Assassin CD

“I became aware of Louise Bourgeois in my first or second year at Brighton Art College. One of my teachers, Stuart Morgan, curated a small retrospective of her work at the Serpentine, and both he and another teacher, Edward Allington, saw something in her, and me, and thought I should be aware of her. I thought the work was wonderful. It was her very early pieces, The Blind Leading the Blind, the wooden pieces and some of the later bronze works. Biographically, I don't really think she has influenced me, but I think there are similarities in our work. We have both used the home as a kind of kick-off point, as the space that starts the thoughts of a body of work. I eventually got to meet Louise in New York, soon after I made House. She asked to see me because she had seen a picture of House in the New York Times while she was ironing it one morning, so she said. She was wonderful and slightly kind of nutty; very interested and eccentric. She drew the whole time; it was very much a salon with me there as her audience, watching her. I remember her remarking that I was shorter than she was. I don't know if this was true but she was commenting on the physicality of making such big work and us being relatively small women. When you meet her you don't know what's true, because she makes things up. She has spun her web and drawn people in, and eaten a few people along the way.”

Rachel Whiteread (1963) British sculptor

Rachel Whiteread, " Kisses for Spiderwoman http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2007/oct/14/art2," The Guardian, 14 Oct. 2007: on Louise Bourgeois

Women , People , Art , Way

“I have spent myself on all kinds of things … I have advanced much politically but I have written little and moreover have written it badly.”

Ba Jin (1904–2005) Chinese novelist

As quoted in "Ba Jin", obituary in The Times (25 October 2005) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article582233.ece?print=yes&randnum=1195994894125

“The places I come from, we don’t deal with that kind of petty nonsense… I’m just not going to be part of this effort to divide this administration.”

Rex Tillerson (1952) 69th United States Secretary of State

Remark about the "moron" remark. As quoted in [Flegenheimer, Matt, Oct. 4 2017, ‘Petty Nonsense’ of Washington: Tillerson Joins in Thrashing the Capital, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/us/politics/tillerson-trump-moron.html, New York Times, Mar. 20 2018]

Effort , Parting

“One time I was in the men's room of the bar and there was a guy at the urinal. He was kind of drunk, and said to me in a mean-sounding voice, "I don't like your face. I think I'll push it in."I was scared green. I replied in an equally mean voice, "Get out of my way, or I'll pee right through ya!"”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

Part 4: "From Cornell to Caltech, With a Touch of Brazil", "Any Questions?", p. 177
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)

Men , Way , Guy , Thinking

“Toni: Well… straight couples get respect when they marry. Maybe we need to make some kind of symbolic affirmation of our commitment to one another!
Clarice: You mean…
Toni: Yes! Let's open a joint checking account!
Clarice: Oh, darling! But this is so sudden!”

Alison Bechdel book Dykes to Watch Out For

#7, "Getting Respectable" (1987), collected in More DTWOF (1988).
Dykes to Watch Out For

“There can be few national movements which have renounced as Plaid Cymru has done, the use of methods of war and violence. It has done this… because it knows that it will never see the kind of Wales it wants to build if its methods rest on hatred and the violation of the personalities of others.”

Gwynfor Evans (1912–2005) Welsh politician

Welsh Nationalist Aims http://www.gwynfor.net/lluniau/welsh-nationalist-aims.pdf Published 1966-1970.

War , Personality

“I wanted a break. I had been on the road more or less since I was 18, you know? And I hadn't known any other life, other than, you know, hotel rooms and concerts and records and studios and press conferences. … and to me, here was a chance to jump off that kind of wagon and see life for real. You know, actually my last album was called Back to Earth. So that was the meaning of it. I wanted to join the human race again. I didn't want to be a star. I didn't want to continue with that thing, because so much illusion and non-reality is connected to it. I wanted to be real. And so I — I kind of — I found an opportunity. And the actual point about music was — the imam who I met and who I first embraced Islam with in London's Central Mosque, he actually told me to continue making records.”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

On the abandonment of his music career after converting to Islam, on Larry King Live (7 October 2004) http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0410/07/lkl.01.html

Life , Music , Star , Reality