Quotes about kindness (7466 quotes, page 41)

“Solos I kind of [couldn't] care less about. I know most people probably think that's what I care most about, but it's really the melody playing that is the cornerstone of what I'm working on.”

Joe Satriani (1956) American guitar player

As quoted in Guitar Magazine (August 1997).

People , Thinking

“Evgeny Lebedev of Russia says, 'An alliance of Western leaders, Muslim nations and Vladimir Putin is the only way to defeat ISIS'. A-MEN. Lebedev is a thousand percent right. You have Muslim nations trying to stop ISIS. They're called Jordan and Egypt. And guess who's not helping them? Your Muslim in the White House. 'Cause he's not the kind of Muslim they are. He's anti them. He's on the side of the, let us say, the ISIS sympathizers. Otherwise he would have stopped them already, with the US military. Alright?”

Michael Savage (1942) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, and Author

The Savage Nation (1995- ), 2015

Men , Way , Help , Housing

“I don’t really remember writing it [The Day I Tried To Live]. I vaguely remember the verse. It was based on a tuning that Ben Shepherd had came up with. Lyrically, it was one of those songs that I thought everyone could connect with. ‘Fell On Black Days’ is maybe a sister song to it. It’s this feeling that could come over anyone, and has probably happened to everyone. ‘Fell On Black Days’ is the feeling of waking up one day and realizing you’re not happy with your life. Nothing happened, there was no emergency, no accident, you don’t know what happened. You were happy, and one day you just aren’t, and you have to try to figure that out.
With ‘The Day I Tried To Live,’ the attitude I was trying to convey was that thing that I think everyone goes through where you wake up in the morning and you just don’t know how you are going to get through the day, and you kind of just talk yourself into it. You may go through different moments of hopelessness and wanting to give up, or wanting to just get back into bed and say f— it, but you convince yourself you’re going to do it again. And maybe this is the last time you’re going to do it, but it’s once more around.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Interview with Entertainment Weekly, June 3, 2014 http://ew.com/article/2014/06/03/soundgarden-superunknown-spoonman-black-hole-sun-stories/,
On depression and suicide

Life , Feeling , Thinking , Sister

“People marry most happily with their own kind. The trouble lies in the fact that people usually marry at an age where they do not really know what their own kind is.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

People , Age

“I've actually felt slightly uncomfortable at TED for the last two days, because there's a lot of vision going on, right? And I am not a visionary. I do not have a five-year plan. I'm an engineer. And I think it's really -- I mean -- I'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying, "I want to go there." But I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in. This is the kind of person I am.”

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

2010s, 2016

People , Star , Thinking , Personality

“The 43rd Federalist deals definitively with this question. There was no question but that the Constitutional Convention, simply as a convention, had no authority of any kind. It did not form a government. But it said that the ratification of nine states shall then bring this new government into existence. The Congress of the Confederation transmitted the results to the country, the ratifications took place, and the government came into existence.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A

Question , Country

“I tend to gravitate toward the more powerful roles. As opposed to the doe-eyed girl who bats her eyelashes and runs around in towels, you now what I mean? Because that kind of makes me want to vomit.”

Julia Stiles (1981) American actress

Movieline, September 1998.

Girl

“You have to grow all the time," I said. "Not necessarily get bigger. But inside your head you have to grow, kid-boy. For us human-type people, that’s what’s important. And that kind of growing never stops. At least, it shouldn’t. You can grow, kid-boy, or you can die. That’s the choice you've got, and it goes on all of your life.”

Samuel R. Delany (1942) American author, professor and literary critic

The Star Pit (1967)

Life , People , Boy , Time

“Your own acts tell the world who you are and what kind of society you think it should be.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

Ai Weiwei, " interview for Unilever Series at the Tate Modern http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/ai-weiwei-conversation," at tate.org.uk, October 12, 2010.
2010-, 2010

World , Thinking

“Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading.”

Sarah Orne Jewett book The Country of the Pointed Firs

Source: The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Ch. 10

Reading

“America`s perpetual trouble has been a less-productive black minority. Black-white economic inequality is not a problem that America is going to be able to solve any time soon. But, due to our market-dominant majority, our country is rich enough to live with it. In contrast, if our current mass immigration system is allowed to continue, America will become just another country with a market dominant minority. Through government policy, we will have inflicted upon ourselves the kind of ugly society seen in most of the rest of the world.”

Steve Sailer (1958) American journalist and movie critic

Will U.S. Retain Its “Market-Dominant Majority”? http://www.vdare.com/articles/will-us-retain-its-market-dominant-majority, VDARE, February 2, 2003

World , Problem , Time , Country

“The best paradoxes raise questions about what kinds of contradictions can occur—what species of impossibilities are possible.”

William Poundstone (1955) American writer

Source: Labyrinths of Reason (1988), Chapter 1: "Paradox", p. 19

Question

“If you look at Paleolithic cave paintings, you see how people were depicted inside nature, not outside it. It was a kind of dream time. That’s what I’m exploring.”

Gregory Colbert (1960) Canadian photographer

"Peerless on the Pier" in Town & Country (March 2005) http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-131688118/peerless-pier-arts-culture.html

People , Dreams , Nature , Time

“I think we're living in an age which despises humanity and despises bravery and doesn't need bravery because modern warfare has rather gone beyond bravery. It is a kind of warfare where people are fighting enemies they never see, killing people of whom they know nothing.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

"Sunday Morning".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

People , Age , Thinking , Fight

“If there were gold medals for taking drugs for England then I’d have won a shitload! I did enjoy it but it kind of got to the point where I’d done them all and that was it, there was none left and I just thought 'Can’t be arsed any more.”

Noel Gallagher (1967) British musician

Noel Gallagher cited in " Gallagher speaks about drug experiences http://www.digitalspy.com/article/ds39948.html" at digitalspy.com, 25 November 2006
Controversy with other artists

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

Jerome David Salinger book The Catcher in the Rye

Source: The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Chapter 1, opening sentence

Truth , Feeling , Parent , Childhood

“She snorted. My wife has three ways of showing disapproval. She harangues loud and long when she is not very sure of her position. Or she may be entirely silent when she is terribly sure. This is usually an act of kindness on her part, as though she were dealing with a dumb animal. Or, lastly, she may snort. This means, I have at last learned, that she disagrees, that she thinks I am a dumb animal, and by God, kindness can go just so far.”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

On his wife's reaction to the notion (of showing up at the ball park without a ticket, for Game 1 of the World Series, and expecting to get in) that gave rise to this, his best known book, from A Day in the Bleachers https://books.google.com/books?id=iJqHg1sitk0C&pg=PA1&dq=%22contest.+i+felt+the+urge%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAWoVChMI587t3tnKxwIVAXE-Ch1XnQRG#v=onepage&q&f=false (1955), p. 1
Other Topics

God , Way , Thinking , Learning

“Neither love nor hate, nor any order of intense adherence to personal involvement in human experience, may be so apt to serve the soul as this freedom and this necessity to be kind.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

Love , Hate , Soul , Freedom

“Tomorrow everybody - or practically everybody - will have had the education of the upper class of yesterday, and will expect equivalent opportunities. That is why we face the problem of making every kind of job meaningful and capable of satisfying every educated man.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959), p. 121

Education , Problem

“You are very kind in planning presents for me to make, and my mother has shown me exactly the same attention; but as I do not choose to have generosity dictated to me, I shall not resolve on giving my cabinet to Anna till the first thought of it has been my own.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to Cassandra (1801-01-08) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“He … got the better of himself, and that's the best kind of victory one can wish for.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book IV, Ch. 72.

Victory

“The role of science is to be systematic, to be accurate, to be orderly, but it certainly is not to imply that the aggregated, successful hypotheses of the past have the kind of truth that goes into a number system.”

Edwin H. Land (1909–1991) American scientist and inventor

Generation of Greatness (1957)

Truth , Science , Success , Past

“Light, colour, love - let me come under your spell. Life can be represented only by a lively kind of painting. There is clarity in passion.”

Stefan Szczesny (1951) German painter and sculptor

Mustique (2002)

Love , Life , Light , Passion

“These [RAF] airmen were my fellow countrymen, and I was proud to be of their race. I knew the essential decency which was the bedrock of their character, their humour, stubbornness, and self-reliance. I knew that if called upon they could adapt themselves to any kind of life, in the desert, in the jungle, in mountains or on the sea, and that in many respects no race in the world was their equal. But the things that interested them bored me. They belonged to an age of machines; they were fascinated by cars and aeroplanes, and found their relaxation in the cinema and the wireless. I knew that I stood apart from them and would never find contentment among them, whereas I could find it among the Bedu, although I should never be one of them.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p.168.

Life , Age , World , Cars

“When we have a choice it is always best to choose kindness. Veganism is simply the kinder choice.”

Sharon Gannon (1951) American yoga teacher

“An Interview With World-Renowned Yogini Sharon Gannon” by Alicia Silverstone, in TheKindLife.com (17 September 2014) http://thekindlife.com/blog/2014/09/an-interview-with-world-renowned-yogini-sharon-gannon/.

“Your book contains direct analogies between us and the Hitlerite fascists. You book incorrectly describes our people, communists. Could we have won the war with the kind of people you describe? In your book you say positive things about religion, God, Catholicism. Your book defends Trotsky. You book is full of doubts about the legitimacy of our Soviet system.”

Vasily Grossman (1905–1964) Soviet writer and journalist who originally trained as an engineer

1960s

God , War , People , Books

“Why are we seeing George Bush on TV every two hours for nine or ten days at a time, like some kind of mutated Mr. Rogers clone? Something is dangerously wrong in any country where a monumentally-failed backwoods politician can scare our national TV networks so totally that they will give him anything he wants.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

"The Bush League" (9 September 2003)
2000s

Time , Country

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

Potter Stewart (1915–1985) American judge

Concurring, Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964).

Intelligence , Understanding

“What I've found is that, because most people are deeply disturbed by and feel guilty about eating meat, and yet at the same time fear not eating it, they defend themselves from having to acknowledge such conflicting feelings. These psychological defenses include denial (“Animals don't really suffer when they're raised and killed for meat.”); justification (“Animals are meant to be eaten by humans.”); dichotomization (“I'd never eat a dog, but I love bacon.”); avoidance (“Don't tell me that; you'll ruin my meal.”); and, most importantly, dissociation (“If I think about the animal when I'm eating meat I feel disgusted.”). … When people break through their dissociation, the feelings that typically emerge are empathy—and therefore disgust. That's why people tend to be disgusted by the idea of eating “unusual” animals, such as dogs and gorillas; they haven't learned to dissociate from these kinds of meat. It's also why vegetarians usually find all meats disgusting.”

Melanie Joy (1966) American psychologist

Source: Strategic Action for Animals (2008), p. 117

Love , People , Fear , Dogs

“In advanced age, and in cases of disability from accident, natural infirmity or any other cause, the individual shall be supported by the colony, and receive every comfort which kindness can administer.”

Robert Owen (1771–1858) Welsh social reformer

The Social System (1826)

Age , Support , Nature

“Wherever applause breaks out in the liturgy because of some human achievement, it is a sure sign that the essence of liturgy has totally disappeared and been replaced by a kind of religious entertainment. Such attraction fades quickly - it cannot compete in the market of leisure pursuits, incorporating as it increasingly does various forms of religious titillation.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2000, The Spirit of the Liturgy (2000)

“If we measured success by longevity, then dinosaurs must rank as the number one success story in the history of land life. Not only did dinosaurs exercise an airtight monopoly as large land animals, they kept their commanding position for an extraordinary span of time - 130 million years. Our own human species is no more than a hundred thousand years old. And our own zoological class, the Mammalia, the clan of of warm-blooded furry creatures, has ruled the land ecosystem for only seventy million years. True, the dinosaurs are extinct, but we ought to be careful in judging them inferior to our own kind. Who can say that the human system will last another thousand years, let alone a hundred million? Who can predict that our Class Mammalia will rule for another hundred thousand millennia?”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 16
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Life , Exercises , History , Time

“There are two kinds of openness, the openness of indifference—promoted with the twin purposes of humbling our intellectual pride and letting us be whatever we want to be, just as long as we don’t want to be knowers—and the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude, for which history and the various cultures provide a brilliant array of examples for examination.”

Allan Bloom book The Closing of the American Mind

Source: The Closing of the American Mind (1987), p. 41.

History , Knowledge , Indifference

“Images produce an intellectual process different from the ancient one or the one developed by classical education. It goes without saying that this process is not completely new; of course, since sight existed, and since people themselves chose their images, they also thought by means of images and entered into this kind of thinking. But this was limited and not frequent, because images were not dominant. The new factor in our day comes from the effect of visual reproduction’s triumph over all else, which involves us in the domination of one form of thought. This supremacy is new, even though we are not dealing with a completely new form of thought.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 210
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

People , Education , Thinking

“They say Archaeopteryx is proof for evolution. You got one here on the table, Brother, Archaeopteryx? Whenever you buy a bag of dinosaurs, they almost always stick one of these in there. Archaeopteryx. Wow. And this somehow gets the impression to the kids, "Wow, we've got proof that dinosaurs turned to birds. Here's one here with feathers on it." They're lying. It's still in the textbooks, I mean today, about Archaeopteryx. And it's been proven years ago, Archaeopteryx was just a bird, a perching bird. Alan Feduccia, who believes in evolution, says it's not a missing link. It had the right features for flight. All the features of the brain were for flight, okay? Archaeopteryx means "ancient wing," and he had claws on his wings. Well, that's kind of unusual, okay. But twelve birds today have claws on their wings. There is the swan, the ibis, the hoatzin… several birds have claws. They say, "Well, he had teeth in his beak." Well, not many birds have teeth, some do. There's the hummingbird that has teeth in his beak. But most birds don't have teeth, I agree. Actually, some mammals have teeth, some don't. Some birds have teeth, some don't. Some fish have teeth, some don't. Some of you have teeth, some don't, okay? Missing link!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), Lies in the textbooks

Lying , Bird , Fish

“Hitherto there had been frequent changes in the tyranny under which, for some four hundred years back, they had lived; and this alternation of masters had kept hope alive. Now there was a sense of permanency in the despotism which, from Antioch as its land base, was bearing down upon them in the trail of the Roman legions. There was an imperious note in the commands of the tribute gatherers, as though an infinite arm of power was now behind the fist which lay at their throat, demanding their goods. Furthermore, all of the tyrannies hitherto had been of the East, Eastern. And though exacting the uttermost farthing of tribute, these despotisms had been gilded with a respect for Asiatic ideals, religion, reverence, a hold-fast in the Unseen. But this new despotism was characterized by a hard materiality, untempered by sentiment of any kind, a race of conquerors self-indulging, heavy-fisted, cynical.”

Bouck White (1874–1951) American author and novelist

Source: The Call of the Carpenter (1914), p. 18

Religion , Hope , Sense , Change

“I kind of had a disaster, I was doing a show, and I changed there, and I couldn’t wear underwear — I don’t think I can tell this story on TV … Let’s just say everyone went scrambling for a razor, so I went from being the most beautiful to the most humiliated in one day.”

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

In an interview in The Ellen DeGeneres Show. http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2013/04/gwyneth-paltrow-ellen/ (April 26, 2013)

Beauty , Thinking , Change

“A nervous blonde nymphet who thought that politics was some kind of game played by old people, like bridge.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

1970s, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 (1973)

People , Game

“2057. Drive away and never endure Tale-bearers : Whoever entertains thee with the Faults of others, designs to serve thee in the same Kind.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)

“Apparently, Mayella's recital had given her confidence, but it was not her father's brash kind: there was something stealthy about hers, like a steady-eyed cat with a twitchy tail.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Pt. 2, ch. 18
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Confidence , Cats

“It's kind of interesting to show that the strange features of quantum mechanics are actually observed. We still don't totally understand what it means.”

Leonard Mandel (1927–2001) German physicist

as quoted by James Glanz, in Leonard Mandel, 73, Revealer Of Light's Weirdness, Is Dead http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/13/nyregion/leonard-mandel-73-revealer-of-light-s-weirdness-is-dead.html?sec=&spon=, New York Times (Tuesday, February 13, 2001)

Understanding

“One does not live half a life in Asia without return. When it would be I did not know, nor even where it would be, or to what cause. In our changing world nothing changes more than geography. The friendly country of China, the home of my childhood and youth, is for the time being forbidden country. I refuse to call it enemy country. The people in my memory are too kind and the land too beautiful.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

A Bridge for Passing (1962)

Life , People , Youth , World

“When my dad left, you know, I'd give my mum hell sometimes, but really she's the one that stayed, isn't she? Poor cow, she didn't need that kind of aggravation.”

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

6 Music Show

Hell

“Put forth thy leaf, thou lofty plane,
East wind and frost are safely gone;
With zephyr mild and balmy rain
The summer comes serenely on;
Earth, air, and sun and skies combine
To promise all that’s kind and fair:
But thou, O human heart of mine,
Be still, contain thyself, and bear.”

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) English poet

In a London Square http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/C/CloughArthurHugh/verse/poemsproseremains/londonsquare.html, st. 1.

Sun , Heart , Summer

“If I sound grumpy, it is only because I have come across too many idiots of the "it can't be done" persuasion lately, the kind of managers who have an aquarium in their office because fifteen brains think better than one.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: Upper limits of CL http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/b3b24fb7512f220f (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Thinking

“Human life will no longer be regarded with the kind of superstitious awe which it is accorded in traditional thought, and the lives of non-humans will no longer be a matter of indifference. This means that human life will, in a sense, be devalued, while the value granted to non-human life will be increased. A revised view of such matters as suicide and euthanasia, as well as a revised view of how we should treat animals, will result.”

James Rachels (1941–2003) American philosopher

Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (1990), p. 5

Life , Sense , Suicide , Animals

“Feeling must have a medium in order to function at all; in the same way, thought must have symbols. It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being, just as do responses tot the objects of the external world... The medium of painting is such changing and ordering on an ideal plane, ideal in that the medium is more tractable, subtle, and capable of emphasis (abstraction is a kind of emphasis) than everyday life.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Source: 1940s, Beyond the Aesthetics' (1946), pp. 38-39

Life , World , Art , Way

“How incomprehensible is woman's love! —it is not kindness that wins it, nor return that insures it; we daily see the most devoted attachment lavished on those who seem to us singularly unworthy. The Spectator shewed his usual knowledge of human nature, when, in speaking on this subject, he relates, that in a town besieged by the enemy, on the women being allowed to depart with whatever they held most precious, only one among them carried off her husband,—a man notorious for his tyrannical temper, and who had, moreover, a bad—or, as it turned out, a good—habit of beating his wife every morning. Well, all governments are maintained by fear—fear being our great principle of action; and fear, we are tempted to believe, heightens and strengthens the love of woman.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Love , Women , Fear , Nature

“For a philosophy based on faith is no longer philosophy. Perhaps it was this unresolved conflict which has prevented Western thought from ever coming to rest. Perhaps it is this conflict which is at the bottom of a kind of thought which is philosophic indeed but no longer Greek: modern philosophy. It is in trying to understand modern philosophy that we come across Machiavelli. Machiavelli is the only political thinker whose name has come into common use for designating a kind of politics, which exists and will continue to exist independently of his influence, a politics guided exclusively by considerations of 'expediency, which uses all means, fair or foul, iron or poison, for achieving its ends-its end being the ag grandizement of one's country or fatherland-but also using the father land in the service of the self-aggrandizement of the politician or statesman or one's party.”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

"Niccolo Machiavelli" (1987)

Faith , Understanding , Country

“The infinite and uncreated spirit that we usually call GOD, a substance of the highest virtue and excellency, produced everything else by emanative causality. God thus is the primary substance, the rest, the secondary; if the former created matter with a power of moving itself, he, the primary substance, is still the cause of that motion as well as of the matter, and yet we rightly say that it is matter which moves itself. "We may define this kind of spirit we speak of to be a substance indiscernible, that can move itself, that can penetrate, contract, and dilate itself, and can also penetrate, move, and alter matter," which is the third emanation.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume I, Chapter VII

God

“I’ve tried to make myself someone who can play a decent variety of stuff. I’ve even made myself learn things that I didn’t want to learn, a kind of picking or playing that I just never would’ve gotten into otherwise. It’s made me an all-around better player.”

Joe Trohman (1984) American musician

My Heart Will Always Be The B-Side To My Tongue (2004), Ultimate Guitar Interview (2008)

Learning

“Peace is that state in which fear of any kind is unknown.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Pilgrim's Way (1940), p. 117
Memory Hold-The-Door (1940)

Fear , Peace

“… if you really care about someone, you must remain unconcerned about how the person may perceive you. Friends or family members may feel disturbed that you won’t take drugs, drink alcohol, or even eat meat with them, and that you won’t let them do these things in your home. However, remember that caring about other people means that you don’t want to see them do harm to themselves. If a person doesn’t want to associate with you anymore, then you don’t need that kind of association.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: Dreams: A State of Reality, p. 27

People , Alcohol , Family , Feeling

“Roger: I think that we still do what the song is asking for; you can't really control what kind of songs come out while writing,, so if the songs needs horns, we'll do some horns, if not, then that's ok too. We really don't think too much about what our fans want us to write, we just try to stay true to what is best for the song.”

Roger Manganelli (1973) American musician

Thinking

“There was always some kind of strain, but it was workable. The bigger you get, the more of a strain it is, because in your everyday life, you're less used to compromising. As you get bigger, you have your own way. But in a partnership you always have to compromise. … When you get into a partnership, you're not the boss. There's no boss. That makes it hard.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

Interview with Jon Landau for Rolling Stone (1972); republished in The Rolling Stone Interviews: 1967-1980 (1989) edited by Peter Herbst, p. 211

Life , Way , Partnership

“…a detailed mathematical discussion shows that whatever kind of wave-packet we select to represent the electron, the product of the two uncertainties of position and momentum can never be less than h, which is precisely what Heisenberg found…”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Mathematics

“[Henry] Kissinger has always been a paradox for me. I was profoundly impressed by his book about European politics in the first half of the last century. One of his main theses was that peace agreements are valueless if a major party to the conflict is left out and sees in the agreement a threat to its basic interests. If ever this rule were true – as it surely is – this is the case with the Palestinians in the Middle East conflict. It is also true for the Soviet Union. Yet once he became the political genius of the Nixon and Ford administrations, Kissinger behaved as if he had never read his own book – the classic example of power blinding the intellectual. He tried to make peace of some kind without the Palestinians, treating the rulers of the various Arab countries as so many Metternichs and Castlereaghs, trying to push the Soviets out of the Middle East altogether. I strongly suspected him of obstructing any real move towards peace, favoring the salami approach of little pieces of peace, so as to keep everybody screaming for American support and dependent on American protection. This was the famous step-by-step approach.”

Uri Avnery (1923–2018) Israeli writer

My Friend, the Enemy (1986) – Page 144

Books , Peace , Support , Reading

“It is within the bonds of marriage that I, for one, found a greater freedom to be and to become and to share myself than I can imagine ever having found in any other kind of relationship.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation (1983)

Marriage , Imagination , Freedom

“What delighted me was that it's 30 years from now — not next week or next year. … That would be totally hopeless; that would be terrifying, in fact. Time is on our side in this one — that's why it's such a wonderful illustration of the process… I say 30 years is a good long time to do something about it if it is a problem … We should be thankful we have this kind of notice.”

Brian G. Marsden (1937–2010) British astronomer

On initial reports that Asteroid 1997 XF<sub>11</sub> could be on a trajectory to hit the Earth in 2028; as quoted in "Man in the News; A Cheery Herald of Fear: Brian Geoffrey Marsden" in The New York Times (13 March 1998) http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9401E2D91F30F930A25750C0A96E958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all.

Problem , Time

“If it really were the case, as popular opinion has tried to establish, that the genius were separated from ordinary men by a thick wall through which no sound could penetrate, then all understanding of the efforts of genius would be denied to ordinary men, and their works would fail to make any impression on them. All hopes of progress depend on this being untrue. And it is untrue. The difference between men of genius and the others is quantitative not qualitative, of degree not of kind.”

Otto Weininger book Sex and Character

Source: Sex and Character (1903), p. 121.

Men , Hope , Understanding , Effort

“We have only one real shot at "liberation," and that is to emancipate ourselves from within. It is the thesis of this book that personal, psychological dependency—the deep wish to be taken care of by others—is the chief force holding women down today. I call this "The Cinderella Complex"—a network of largely repressed attitudes and fears that keeps women in a kind of half-light, retreating from the full use of their minds and creativity. Like Cinderella, women today are still waiting for something external to "transform their lives."”

Colette Dowling (1938)

Source: The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence (1981), p. 31

Women , Books , Fear , Light

“Give me an adventure. I’m not talking about some massive adventure. Just something that would make getting fired seem small. Something that I might remember when I’m old.”
“I can’t predict the future,” I said, “but based on what little I know so far, I’m afraid it has to be a massive adventure or nothing.”
“Great!”
“Probably the kind of adventure that ends in a mass burial.”

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Cord and Erasmas, Part 6, "Peregrin"
Anathem (2008)

Future

“Consider the great elements of human enjoyment, the attainments and possessions that exalt man's life to its present height, and see what part of these he owes to institutions, to Mechanism of any kind; and what to the instinctive, unbounded force, which Nature herself lent him.”

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

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Life , Nature , Parting

“Even the managers. It was all a feudal style of management. If we had accepted that style, we would not have grown. It was simply not a scalable model. Of course, the easiest thing would have been to follow it. But we had a disruptive style of management. So we said, 'we don't want people carrying their wisdom in notebooks as if it is some kind of secretive operation.”

Mukesh Ambani (1957) Indian business magnate

Mukesh Ambani on how Reliance was built

Wisdom , People , Secret

“Gossip is mischievous, light and easy to raise, but grievous to bear and hard to get rid of. No gossip ever dies away entirely, if many people voice it: it too is a kind of divinity.”

Hesiod book Works and Days

Source: Works and Days (c. 700 BC), line 761.

People , Light

“One of the reasons why I don't get on with most fantasy writing - enchanted sword fantasy writing - is because I think it's emotionally untrue. People behave in very simple ways, unparadoxical ways. What I'm trying to do is bring into fantasy - as I hope I've been able to bring to horror - a certain kind of emotional realism. People have mentioned sex as being a major part of my fiction. An awful lot of horror fiction simply never contained that kind of material. Which seems to me to be extraordinary because most horror fiction is about the body in some way or other, and therefore it should be about sensuality and eroticism every bit as much as it's about corruption.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

Writer's Digest, March 1991

People , Hope , Sex , Way

“The moral systems of religion, I think, are superimportant. We've raised our kids in a religious way; they've gone to the Catholic church that Melinda goes to and I participate in. I've been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that's kind of a religious belief. I mean, it's at least a moral belief.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

Response when he was asked whether he believed in God, at his interview with the Rolling Stone Magazine http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/bill-gates-the-rolling-stone-interview-20140313#ixzz367A061i0. March 27, 2014.
The Rolling Stone Interview (2014)

World , Religion , Way , Thinking

“I have a message for my fellow plutocrats and zillionaires and for anyone who lives in a gated bubble world: Wake up. Wake up. It cannot last. Because if we do not do something to fix the glaring economic inequities in our society, the pitchforks will come for us, for no free and open society can long sustain this kind of rising economic inequality. It has never happened. There are no examples. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state or an uprising.”

Nick Hanauer (1959) American businessman

"Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming" TED (conference) August 2014 http://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocrats_the_pitchforks_are_coming/transcript?language=en

World

“For any picture, ask yourself what question or questions it might be answering. Since the picture could answer many, questions, we can decide what question we are interested in. The picture will, of course, suggest that some questions are likely to find answers in it. For instance, Owens's pictures of pantries and refrigerators clearly suggest that they will answer questions about what kinds of food the inhabitants of the houses store and presumably eat, while other pictures in Suburbia suggest that they will answer other questions about the housekeeping arrangements of these people.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Howard Becker (1974). "Art as Collective Action." American Sociological Review 39:767-76.

People , Food , Question , Housing

“I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and short-comings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self-assertion of youth.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

Table-Talk (1857)

Books , Youth , Fear , Hope

“conventional terms such as service work, intellectual labor, and cognitive labor all refer to aspects of immaterial labor, but none of them captures its generality. As an initial approach, one can concieve immaterial labor in two principle forms. The first for refers to labor, that is primarily intellectual or linguistic such as problem solving, symbolic and analytical tasks, and linguistic expressions. This kind of immaterial labor produces ideas, symbols, codes, texts, linguistic figures, images and other such products. We call the other principle form of immaterial labor "affective labor."”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Affective labor, then, is labor that produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion.
108
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Feeling , Idea , Problem , Passion

“Every system that we build will surprise us with new kinds of flaws until those machines become clever enough to conceal their faults from us.”

Marvin Minsky book The Emotion Machine

The Emotion Machine (2006)

“First let us rid our minds of the fallacy that guerrilla war is a wholly distinct thing in kind from regular war. It is nothing of the sort. War is a science whose fundamental principles are constant however wide or numerous the variations….”

Robert Erskine Childers (1870–1922) Irish nationalist and author

"War and the Arme Blanche", by Erskine Childers, Edward Arnold, (London, 1910), p. 231.
Literary Years and War (1900-1918)

War , Science

“The democratic ideal springs from the ideas of liberty, equality, majority rule through free elections, protection of the rights of minorities, and freedom to subscribe to multiple loyalties in matters of religion, economics, and politics rather than to a total loyalty to the state. The spirit of democracy is the idea of importance and worth in the individual, and faith in the kind of world where the individual can achieve as much of his potential as possible.”

Saul D. Alinsky (1909–1972) American community organizer and writer

Source: Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971), p. xxiv

World , Faith , Religion , Democracy

“So hurry up and run to the one that you love.
And blind him with your kindness.
And he'll make war, oh war,
On who you were before.
And he'll claim all that has spoiled in your heart.”

Conor Oberst (1980) American musician

Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002)

Love , War , Heart

“Historians of ideas, however scrupulous and minute they may feel it necessary to be, cannot avoid perceiving their material in terms of some kind of pattern.”

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) Russo-British Jewish social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas

Five Essays on Liberty (2002), Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century (1950)

Feeling , Idea

“It is in no way a digression to mention the horrors of war in connection with massacres of cattle and carnivorous banquets. People's diet corresponds closely to their morality. Blood calls for blood. In this connection, if one considers the various people he has known, there will be no doubt that in general, the agreeable manners, kindness of disposition, and equanimity of the vegetarians contrasts markedly with the qualities of the inveterate meat-eaters and avid drinkers of blood.”

Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) French geographer and writer

On Vegetarianism (1901), in Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: The Radical Social Thought of Elisée Reclus, edited by John P. Clark and Camille Martin (Lexington Books, 2004), p. 174 https://books.google.it/books?id=Dge71MovfE0C&pg=PA174.

War , People , Way

“There are most certainly two distinguishable kinds of truths, “truths of reason” (that two plus two equals four) and “truths of fact” (that the sky appears blue). By his resort to his daimon Socrates added the class of “truths of self,” personal truths.”

David L. Norton (1930–1995) American philosopher

Source: Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), p. 7

Truth , Appearance , Personality

“Liberty is on the march, and this year promises to be a great year in European history. Our Government is blind enough, and the Parliamentary majorities are more regarded than opinion out of doors. We must have another League of some kind, and our aristocracy must be made to submit again.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to Jonathan Priestman (26 March 1848) on the Revolutions of 1848, quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 183.
1840s

History

“The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it.”

David Hume book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Section 4 : Sceptical Doubts Concerning The Operations of The Understanding
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

Nature , Perfection

“Most of the men don't like officers up from the ranks, but they're kind of fond of Sharpe. He scares them. They want to be like him.'
'I can't see that scaring men is a virtue in an officer.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Escape (2003)

Men

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

Arlo Guthrie (1947) American folk singer

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

World , School , Way , Feeling

“The difficult thing for someone not living the experience of the revolution to understand is this close dialectical unity between the individual and the mass, in which the mass, as an aggregate of individuals, is interconnected with its leaders.
Some phenomena of this kind can be seen under capitalism, when politicians capable of mobilising popular opinion appear, but these phenomena are not really genuine social movements. (If they were, it would not be entirely correct to call them capitalist.) These movements only live as long as the persons who inspire them do, or until the harshness of capitalist society puts an end to the popular illusions which made them possible.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Understanding , Appearance , Personality

“Man can live without animal flesh; consequently the eating of this flesh is purely to gratify an appetite — and a perverted appetite at that. No normal appetite could possibly crave flesh of any kind. So that there is no possible excuse for the killing and eating of animals, than this — except, of course, ignorance. After all, that is the greatest factor! It is against this taking of life unnecessarily that the vegetarian protests…”

Hereward Carrington (1880–1958) Jersey parapsychologist

Source: The Natural Food for Man, p. 157

Life , Animals

“The pleasure of the flesh can be fulfilled only if a particular dimension is created, a kind of stereoscopic phenomenon, an imaginary hologram as real as reality... I need all these suddenly present images of my past that forms the fabric of my entire life.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980, Comment on deviant Dali, les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dali, p. unknown

Life , Pleasure , Reality , Past

“Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.”

Jerry Pournelle (1933–2017) American science fiction writer and journalist

Reference quote http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view408.html#Iron in Chaos Manor View 408, April 3-9, 2006
Assorted

Children , People , Education , Law

“When you're thinking about something that you don't understand, you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called confusion. It's a very difficult and unhappy business. And so most of the time you're rather unhappy, actually, with this confusion. You can't penetrate this thing. Now, is the confusion's because we're all some kind of apes that are kind of stupid working against this, trying to figure out [how] to put the two sticks together to reach the banana and we can't quite make it, the idea? And I get this feeling all the time that I'm an ape trying to put two sticks together, so I always feel stupid. Once in a while, though, the sticks go together on me and I reach the banana.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

Video interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lytxafTXg6c dated 1963

Stupidity , Feeling , Idea , Understanding

“Trump: No, I didn't use the word. I never said the word, Bill. I don't know who told you -- I would never use the word. I didn't say the word. I said, "you can tell them to go [beat of silence] themselves."
O'Reilly: But the lips kind of moved in the --
Trump: Well, they might have. No, I didn't say the word. I wouldn't do that. Even I -- hey Bill, even I wouldn't do that, okay. No, I never said the word.”

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

On an interview on The O'Reilly Factor (6 February 2016)
2010s, 2016, February

Silence

“Is base in kind, and born to be a slave.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

Source: Table Talk (1782), Line 28.

“To say that a thing is beautiful is simply an act of faith, not a measurement on some kind of scale.”

Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940) French painter

2 April 1891.
Private Journal - A collage of notes and images, sketches kept 1888-1895 & 1907 to 1940

Faith , Beauty

“I don't make boy sculptures. They become kind of personages, and sometimes they cry out to me that I should have been better or bigger, and mostly they tell me that I should have done that twelve years before -- or twenty years before”

David Smith (1906–1965) American visual artist (1906-1965)

1960s, The Fields of David Smith,' (1999)

Boy , Cry

“I was astonished to be invited to what became the meeting that originated the Agile Manifesto because my work had always been based around building models… The other signatories were kind enough, back in 2001, to write the manifesto using the word “software” (which can include executable models), not “code” (which is more specific.) As such I felt able, in good conscience, to become a signatory to the Manifesto while continuing to promote executable modeling. Ten years on we have a standard action language for agile modeling.”

Stephen J. Mellor (1952) British computer scientist

Mellor (2011) " A Personal Reflection on Agile Ten Years On http://www.infoq.com/articles/personal-reflection-agile-ten-years-mellor" in: InfoQ, Feb 11, 2011.