Quotes about kindness
page 51

“… the pattern of embarrassment behind the contemporary ideal of a language that will best promote good action by entirely eliminating the element of exhortation or command. Insofar as such a project succeeded, its terms would involve a narrowing of circumference to a point where the principle of personal action is eliminated from language, so that an act would follow from it only as a non-sequitur, a kind of humanitarian after-thought.”

Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) American philosopher

Source: A Grammar of Motives (1945), p. 90

Personality

“no groups of populations welcomed the opening of the career of talent to whatever kind more passionately than those minorities who had hitherto been disbarred not merely because they were not well-born, but because they suffered official and collective discrimination.”

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer

Source: The Age of Revolution (1962), Chapter 10, A Career Open to Talent

Suffering, Passion

“I kind of take Hilary as a role model because she started out at about the same age, she hadn't done much before starting her series, and I haven't either.”

Miley Cyrus (1992) American actor and singer-songwriter

Pittsburgh Post Gazette http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08003/846166-42.stm (January 2, 2008)

Age

“The Bill of Rights must be subjected to no 'interpretation' of any kind except in terms of the original intent of the Founding Fathers, a group of individuals who had just barely defeated the most overbearing, ruthless, and dangerously violent government in the history of the world. Even the British people were having trouble with it at the time.
The Bill of Rights represents an historic bargain between those who advocated a strong central government — and whose political ideas and wishes are expressed in the main body of the Constitution — and those who did not. Without the Bill of Rights, the Constitution ceases to be valid; any legitimate authority that derives from it ceases to exist.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Toward an International Bill of Rights Union," http://www.bigheadpress.com/lneilsmith/?p=36 31 August 2007.

People, World, History, Idea

“If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?…
Those of us who are forced by their own sensibilities to view their lives in this perspective — who recognize that there is no purpose they can comprehend and that amidst a countless myriad of stars their existence goes unknown and unchronicled — can fall prey all too easily to the ultimate anomie. … The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache … This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.”

Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor

Interviewed by Eric Nordern, Playboy (September 1968)

Love, World, Religion, Star

“I met [Meyerbeer] at the performance of my "Battle." Most of the composers then in Vienna were kind enough to undertake something or other in my orchestra, and the young man played the big drum. Ha! ha! ha! (a peal of laughter). I had reason not to be very well satisfied with him. He was always behindhand, and I had to give it him roundly. (New peal of laughter.) He must have felt mortified by my observations; but there is no reliance to be placed in him; he has not the courage to raise his arm at the proper moment.”

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770–1827) German Romantic composer

10th October, 1814
In: Johann Wenzel Tomaschek, "A Talk with Beethoven", The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, Vol. 33, Beethoven Supplement (Dec. 15, 1892)

Courage, Laughter

“Conquest brings no lasting happiness unless the person conquered was possessed of free will. Only then can there be doubt and anxiety and those continual victories over habit and boredom which produce the keenest pleasures of all. The comely inmates of the harem are rarely loved, for they are prisoners. Inversely, the far too accessible ladies of present-day seaside resorts almost never inspire love, because they are emancipated. Where is love's victory when there is neither veil, modesty, nor self-respect to check its progress? Excessive freedom raises up the transparent walls of an invisible seraglio to surround these easily acquired ladies. Romantic love requires women, not that they should be inaccessible, but that their lives should be lived within the rather narrow limits of religion and convention. These conditions, admirably observed in the Middle-Ages, produced the courtly love of that time. The honoured mistress of the chateau remained within its walls while the knight set out for the Crusades and thought about his lady. In those days a man scarcely ever tried to arouse love in the object of his passion. He resigned himself to loving in silence, or at least without hope. Such frustrated passions are considered by some to be naive and unreal, but to certain sensitive souls this kind of remote admiration is extremely pleasurable, because, being quite subjective, it is better protected against deception and disillusion.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

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

Love, Women, Happiness, Pleasure

“It's kind of fun to do the impossible.”

Walt Disney (1901–1966) American film producer and businessman

As quoted in Animated Architecture (1982) by Derek Walker, p. 10
Variant: It's kind of fun to do the impossible.

“Adam had turned down so many offers for help from Gansey. Money for school, money for food, money for rent. Pity and charity, Adam had thought. For so long, he'd wanted Gansey to see him as an equal, but it was possible that all this time, the only person who needed to see that was Adam.
Now he could see that it wasn't charity Gansey was offering. It was just truth.
And something else: friendship of the unshakable kind. Friendships you could swear on. That could be busted nearly to breaking and come stronger than before.”

Maggie Stiefvater (1981) American writer

pg 296
The Raven Cycle Series, Blue Lily, Lily Blue (2014)

Money, Friendship, Truth, School

“In sports, you learn competition means go after it, win it. And not to let anything else interfere. It's something you learn, and it sticks with you. I consider myself an expert in looking into a particular idea or goal and then going after it without anything else in mind… It's always the same kind of thing. You pick a goal, and then you just go after it, accomplish it, and get satisfaction out of that.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947) actor, businessman and politician of Austrian-American heritage

From Cowboys & Indians, the "magazine of the west" (September 2004).
When asked if big-screen success could bring him as much satisfaction as body-building victories
2000s

Idea, Sport, Learning

“The last decades of scientific development have led us to the recognition of a new universal law of all natural phenomena, which, from its extraordinarily extended range, and from the connection which it constitutes between natural phenomena of all kinds, even of the remotest times and the most distant places, is especially fitted to give us an idea of what I have described as the character of the natural sciences, which I have chosen as the subject of this lecture.”

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) physicist and physiologist

"On the Conservation of Force" (1862), p. 279
Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects (1881)

Law, Idea, Nature, Universe

“Nobody can predict the future, but there is nobody in my generation who wants to be on the board of a symphony orchestra or an opera company and raise the kind of money that's needed. I think that the energy that in the 19th century went into opera is, in the 20th century, going into films. Films have that same over-the-top, overwhelming, high impact--all of the senses knocked out--and vast popular following, with stars who are larger than life. Well, that's what opera did in the 19th century.”

Peter Sellars (1957) American theatre director

Source: Mark Swed, "For L.A., History's Knocking", Los Angeles Times, December 26, 1996

Life, Money, Star, Thinking

“There are two kinds of clocks. There is the clock that is always wrong, and that knows it is wrong, and glories in it; and there is the clock that is always right — except when you rely upon it, and then it is more wrong than you would think a clock could be in a civilized country.”

Jerome K. Jerome (1859–1927) English humorist

Clocks http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/jjclk10.txt.

Thinking, Country

“We know that these challenges can be overcome because history moves in the direction of justice. The evils of slavery were accepted and unchanged for centuries, yet eventually the human heart would not abide them. There is a voice of conscience and hope in every man and woman that will not be silenced, what Martin Luther King called a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. That flame could not be extinguished at the Birmingham jail. It could not be stamped out at Robben Island prison. It was seen in the darkness here at Goree Island, where no chain could bind the soul. This untamed fire of justice continues to burn in the affairs of man, and it lights the way before us. May God bless you all.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2003, Hope and Conscience Will Not Be Silenced (July 2003)

God, Justice, Hope, Way

“If one's son begins acting kind of gay, then when he is spanked he'll change his behavior.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

At the program Participação Popular on TV Câmara on 17 November 2010. Deputado federal defende na TV agressões físicas para mudar "filho gayzinho" http://www2.camara.leg.br/camaranoticias/noticias/DIREITOS-HUMANOS/151706-COMISSAO-VAI-DEBATER-DECLARACAO-DE-BOLSONARO-SOBRE-PUNICAO-A-FILHO-GAY.html. Folha de S.Paulo (25 November 2010).

Behavior, Change

“Anthropologists are interested in reconstructing the kinship system as it might have existed at the time of a proto-language. A kinship system can be regarded as composed of two correlated systems: a system of kinship terminology and a set of behaviors that are patterned in relation to the terminological system. We know of no way in which we can rigorously infer the kinds of behavior directly, but it is generally regarded as possible to reconstruct the terminology at least in part. If rigor can be introduced in the procedure of reconstructing kinship terminology, then a generalization of that rigorous procedure is lexical reconstruction.”

David Aberle (1918–2004) anthropologist

Isidore Dyen, ‎David F. Aberle (1974), Lexical Reconstruction: The Case of the Proto-Athapaskan Kinship System. p. 7

Way, Behavior, Time, Parting

“They left me, by the side of the road, with a plastic bag and all kinds of bitterness Well, in my mind, and I can say this forever I suppose, and people might laugh at it, but I don't think I ever really left The Libertines, nor can I ever leave The Libertines, you know, having been a founder of the band with Carl, but that sounds silly, doesn't it, seeing as they played all the festivals without me and made it difficult, no - impossible, for me to play live with them.”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

December 2004, Newsnight; when asked whether he left The Libertines or The Libertines left him
Music and politics

People, Thinking

“He had the settled expression of a certain kind of peasant—the kind that accepts, with protest but without malice, the vagaries of life. It is the gift life sends to compensate for the lack of a high I. Q.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

“Man on Bridge” pp. 90-91
Short fiction, Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)

Life

“I like to slip out in the middle of the night and take my Lamborghini and drive it really fast on the highway. There’s a particular one close to my house in Pasadena. I just roll down the windows, and it’s kind of like I just slip into the night.”

Erika Jayne (1969) American singer, actress and television personality

Erika Jayne interview to CR Fashion Book https://www.crfashionbook.com/fashion/a19743941/erika-jayne-pretty-mess-real-housewives-fashion/ (2018)

Housing, Night

“My father loved us dearly and deeply. There were eleven of us and our love for him was full of admiration. We held him in a kind of respectful awe, so powerful and formidable did he seem. I soon learned that beneath the exterior of a rough cavalryman he had a very good heart.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

Page 33
Publications, The Shah's Story (1980), On his father

Love, Learning, Heart

“I flatter my self to have demonstrated that, neither the Friendly Qualities and kind Affections that are natural to Man, nor the real Virtues he is capable of acquiring by Reason and Self-Denial, are the Foundation of Society; but that what we call Evil in this World, Moral as well as Natural, is the grand Principle that makes us sociable Creatures, the solid Basis, the Life and Support of all Trades and Employments without Exception: That there we must look for the true Origin of all Arts and Sciences, and that the Moment Evil ceases, the Society must be spoiled, if not totally dissolved.”

Bernard Mandeville book The Fable of the Bees

"A Search into the Nature of Society", p. 428
The Fable of the Bees (1714)

Life, World, Art, Support

“Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it’s a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. "Atheistic humanism" became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumamism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction. Post-Christian European culture is already post-cultural and, with its surging Muslim populations, will soon be post-European.”

Mark Steyn book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It

Source: America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (2006), Ch. 5, p. 98

Time, Future

“After Plotinus, says Schassler, fifteen centuries passed without the slightest scientific interest for the world of beauty and art. …In reality, nothing of the kind happened. The science of aesthetics … neither did nor could vanish, because it never existed. … the Greeks were so little developed that goodness and beauty seemed to coincide. On that obsolete Greek view of life the science of aesthetics was invented by men of the eighteenth century, and especially shaped and mounted in Baumgarten's theory. The Greeks (as anyone may read in Bénard's book on Aristotle and Walter's work on Plato) never had a science of aesthetics.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What is Art? (1897)

Life, Men, Books, World

“This seems to me to be more a day for a searching of the human soul perhaps than for any kind of scientific celebration.”

Bill Downs (1914–1978) American journalist

In discussing the Ivy Mike thermonuclear tests in an appearance on See It Now, November 2, 1952

Soul, Search

“Everything is conditioned by necessity of one kind or another; and if it were actually possible to find a person in conditions of total freedom, he would be like some deep water fish that had been dragged up to the surface. It's curious to reflect that Rublyov worked within the strictures of the canon! And the longer I live in the West the more curious and equivocal freedom seems to me. Freedom to take drugs? To kill? To commit suicide?”

Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 180

Fish, Suicide, Freedom, Water

“Pleasure's fun. It's great, but you can't keep it going forever; just accept the fact that it's here and it's gone, and maybe then again, it will come back, and you'll get to do it again. Joy lasts forever. Pleasure is purely self-centered. It's all about your pleasure: it's about you. It's a selfish, self-centered emotion, that is created by a self-centered motive of greed. Joy is compassion. Joy is giving yourself to somebody else, or something else. And it's a kind of thing that is, in its subtlety and lowness, much more powerful than pleasure. You get hung up on pleasure; you're doomed. If you pursue joy; you will find everlasting happiness.”

George Lucas (1944) American film producer

Academy of Achievement Address, published by Corporate Valley (12 August 2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54xWQPq0fuk 2010s

Happiness, Pleasure, Motivation, Joy

“The way in which the irrational numbers are usually introduced is based directly upon the conception of extensive magnitudes—which itself is nowhere carefully defined—and explains number as the result of measuring such a magnitude by another of the same kind. Instead of this I demand that arithmetic shall be developed out of itself.”

Richard Dedekind (1831–1916) German mathematician

Footnote: The apparent advantage of the generality of this definition of number disappears as soon as we consider complex numbers. According to my view, on the other hand, the notion of the ratio between two numbers of the same kind can be clearly developed only after the introduction of irrational numbers.
Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen (1872)

Way

“In fact, in the plantation areas conditions amounting to slavery were re‑established by the planters with the acquiescence of the Government. Some idea of the misery to which the population of these areas was reduced by this system of merciless exploitation in the interests of British capital may be gained from the Bengal Indigo Commission's Report and from some of the literature of the period. Nil Darpan or the Mirror of Indigo, a Bengali drama, created a sensation by throwing a little light on this dark corner of Britain's action in India, and the reaction in official circles was so great that a European missionary, Mr Long, who translated and published it in English, was fined and imprisoned. During the whole of this period, in fact till the rise of nationalism after the Great War, conditions in plantations were of a kind which showed the worst features of European relations with Asia.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

War, Literature, Idea, Light

“Do I worry about it? Somewhat. It's not good for us, but it also keeps the New Orleans brand out there, and it keeps people thinking about our needs and what we need to bring this community back. So it is kind of a two-edged sword.”

Ray Nagin (1956) politician, businessman

Responding to a TV reporter's question about the murder rate http://blog.nola.com/times-picayune/2007/08/nagin_calls_nos_dangerous_imag.html (August 2007) 2007

People, Communication, Thinking

“To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Pilgrim's Way (1940), p. 26
Memory Hold-The-Door (1940)

Education, Time

“Yes, we're lazy. Yet we also can't seem to sit still. So we've started making things like GO-GURT. That's yogurt for people on the go. Let me ask you, was there a big mobility problem with yogurt before? How time-consuming was it, really? [pretending to be on the phone:] "Hello?…Oh, hi, Tom…oh, I've been dying to see that movie…Umm, no…I just opened up some yogurt…Yeah, I'm in for the night…No, not even later-it's the kind with fruit on the bottom. Well, have fun. Thanks anyway."”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

Here and Now

People, Problem, Time, Night

“The big will have a different kind of bigness. The network economy encourages the middle space. It supplies technology (which the industrial age could not) to nurture mid-sized wonders.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995), New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1999)

Age

“I could never have believed that such kindness existed: to receive my wretched drawings and then thank me into the bargain. And you need not be so scrupulous about my drawings. Just use those you like.... But, I am madly, crazily happy at the thought that your prose [Devismes novel 'Cocotte'], like so many fireworks, will frame my daubs, that you should have offered me a helping hand on the arduous road towards getting known…”

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) French painter

Quote from Lautrec's letter, after he received Devismes' letter full of praise for the 23 illustrations he had sent
Source: 1879-1884, T-Lautrec, by Henri Perruchot, p. 61 - in a letter to his friend Etienne Devismes, Summer of 1881

Happiness, Help, Drawing

“He Robert Rauschenberg was a kind of enfant terrible at the time [around 1960] and I thought of him as an accomplished professional. He’d already had a number of shows, knew everybody, had been to Black Mountain College in South Carolina, working with all those avant-garde people.... Rauschenberg focused very much on working. I was prepared to do that, too. He was also involved with Merce Cunningham dance group and totally unconcerned with his success, in the cliché term. All of the activity had a lively quality, quite separate from any commercial situation.... [Rauschenberg moved into a loft in Jaser John's building and they very closely worked together for a couple of years]. You get a lot by doing. It's very important for a young artist to see how things are done. The kind of exchange we had was stronger than talking. If you do something then I do something then you do something, it means more than what you say.”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

Once Established, says Jasper Johns...,Grace Glueck, New York Times, 16 October 1977, sec. 2 pp. 1-31
1970s

People, Mountain, Time, Success

“Besides the theory there are a lot of small technical details that must be learned so well that you can recall them almost instantaneously, such as the trigonometric identities… put one part of the identity on one side of a 3 x 5 card and the other part on the other side. Using these flash cards you can, in the odd moments of your daily life, learn the mechanical parts of the course. …for this kind of low-level material many short learning sessions are much more efficient than a few long, intense ones; but this is not necessarily true for larger ideas. …most students will not use such trivial devices as flash cards; it seems to be beneath their dignity. They suffer accordingly.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Life, Idea, Suffering, Learning

“Sian Lloyd – what was she doing there? Why did you cast and pay for a kind of celebrity for your advert? You know, I could understand if your advert was based on weather, I could understand if your advert was based on her being upset because her boyfriend blew her out for a cheeky girl, right and she's crying, but I can't understand this. She's not even a mother, what's the point?”

Alan Sugar (1947) British business magnate, media personality, and political advisor

Episode 9
The Apprentice, Series 4

Girl, Understanding, Cry, Weather

“Loud Threatnings make men stubborn, but kind Words
Pierce gentle Breasts sooner than sharpest Swords.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

Fab. LXV: Of the Sun and Wind, Moral
The Fables of Aesop (2nd ed. 1668)

Men

“One day I was in rather a fix, so I went out. I strolled along in the dazzling sunlight of early spring, lost in thought, seeing and hearing nothing, really; forming no kind of picture of what was going on around me in the Saturday bustle of the country village. Nothing. Funny, it was so typical : one of those times when a writer feels stale, when his pen has been showing signs of going on of going on strike and will soon cease to obey him altogether. Driven by his restlessness, the writer goes away like a rat leaving a sinking ship…”

Marko Tapio

Marko Tapio, in: The Norseman, Vol. 15, 1957, p. 413

Feeling, Spring, Time, Country

“This (precognitive ability) steers the cell through mazes of probabilities, while allowing it to retain knowledge of its own greater fulfillment -- the ideas of itself, which is always alive in any given period of your time. On a different kind of scale, then, each individual has the same sort of idealized version of the self, and so does each species. Here I mean each species, and I am not simply referring to mankind. Obviously these are not apparent to the physical senses, yet they are strong energy centers that to some degree stimulate the physical senses toward activity. To that degree, then, there are indeed "tree gods," gods of the forest, and "gods of being" connected with each person.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The “Unknown” Reality: Volume One, (1977), p. 117; Session 691

God, Idea, Knowledge, Sense

“But I may say Dame Fortune has been very kind to me by endowing me with the genius of poetry. I remember how I felt when I received the spirit of poetry. It was in the year of 1877.”

William McGonagall (1825–1902) weaver, actor, poet

"The Autobiography of Sir William Topaz McGonagall", published in the Weekly News
McGonagall's "knighthood" was an honorary one conferred on him by King Theebaw of the Andaman Islands: "Knight of the White Elephant of Burmah".
Other works

“And so in City after City, street-barricades are piled, and truculent, more or less murderous insurrection begins; populace after populace rises, King after King capitulates or absconds; and from end to end of Europe Democracy has blazed up explosive, much higher, more irresistible and less resisted than ever before; testifying too sadly on what a bottomless volcano, or universal powder-mine of most inflammable mutinous chaotic elements, separated from us by a thin earth-rind, Society with all its arrangements and acquirements everywhere, in the present epoch, rests! The kind of persons who excite or give signal to such revolutions—students, young men of letters, advocates, editors, hot inexperienced enthusiasts, or fierce and justly bankrupt desperadoes, acting everywhere on the discontent of the millions and blowing it into flame,—might give rise to reflections as to the character of our epoch. Never till now did young men, and almost children, take such a command in human affairs.”

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

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), The Present Time (February 1, 1850)

Men, Children, Democracy, Universe

“Unfamiliar environments heighten adrenalin, which might work for stimulating excitement or against totally relaxing into any kind of intimacy.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Vanna Bonta Talks Sex in Space (Interview - Femail magazine)

“There’re all kinds of people in this world. But they break down into two main groups, one big and one smaller. There’s the people who get moved out of the way or into line, and then there’s the people who do the moving. It’s safer and a lot more comfortable to go where you’re pushed. You don’t take any of the responsibility, and if you do what you’re told, every once in a while you get thrown a fish.
“Being a mover isn’t safe, because you may be heading for a hole, and it isn’t comfortable because you do a lot of jostling back and forth, and what’s more, it’s up to you to get your own fish. But it’s a hell of a lot of fun.”

Algis Budrys book Rogue Moon

He looked into Hawks’ eyes. “Isn’t it?”
Source: Rogue Moon (1960), Chapter 1, Section 2 (pp. 12-13)

People, World, Way, Hell

“It always saddens me to think that after all I am not yet a proper musician; but I have more aptitude for the calling than probably many of the younger generation have as a rule. It gets knocked out of you. Boys should be allowed to indulge themselves in jolly music; the serious kind comes of its own accord, although the lovesick does not. How lucky is the man who, like Mozart and others, goes to the tavern of an evening and writes some fresh music. For he lives while he is creating.”

Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) German composer and pianist

Letter to Clara Schumann (12 February 1856) as quoted in Johannes Brahms : A Biography (1997) by Jan Swafford, p. 153

Music, Boy, Thinking

“I think we're in the end game there, in the next three to six months, Bob. We've got for the first time an Iraqi government elected on the basis of an Iraqi constitution. Either they're going to produce the kind of inclusive consensual government that we aspire to in the near term, in which case America will stick with it, or they're not, in which case I think the bottom's going to fall out.”

Thomas Friedman (1953) American journalist and author

Unidentified CBS program (31 January 2006), quoted in American Armageddon (2008) by Craig Unger.
"The next … months" in Iraq

Game, Thinking, Time

“In the writings of such "pagan" philosophers as Plutarch and Porphyry we find a humanitarian ethic of the most exalted kind, which, after undergoing a long repression during medieval churchdom, reappeared, albeit but weakly and fitfully at first, in the literature of the Renaissance, to be traced more definitely in the eighteenth century school of "sensibility." But it was not until after the age of Rousseau, from which must be dated the great humanitarian movement of the past century, that Vegetarianism began to assert itself as a system, a reasoned plea for the disuse of flesh-food.”

Henry Stephens Salt (1851–1939) British activist

The Humanities of Diet

Age, School, Food, Literature

“Children of any religion who have true faith must realize that God is the only One who knows all of everything. Therefore, only God can judge whether a person has faith, certitude, and determination or not and whether a person lives with that purity that can be called Islam or not. No one else can give that judgment. Do not wave your religion like a banner and go out to capture others. Only one kind of war is permissible in the eyes of God: the war you wage within yourself to defeat the demonic forces of lust, anger, jealousy, desire for revenge, and other evil feelings and attributes that may exist within your heart. God has sent each of the prophets as witnesses to the grace of God and as supports to help us in this inner war. This is the reason for the Qur'an. It is to help the true Muslim fight this inner battle and win victory over his own base desires that God sent the Messenger with the Qur'an.”

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (1900–1986) Sri Lankan Sufi leader

The True Meaning of Islam (undated)

God, War, Children, Jealousy

“Humor itself is a kind strange thing in the first place, it's kind of a short-circuit in the brain around horror that saves us from having to face it totally.”

James Jones (1921–1977) American author

0,861111111111111
Don Swaim interview (1975)

“There are not two kinds of human being, savage and civilized. There is only the human animal, forever at war with itself.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

An Old Chaos: Frozen Horses and Deserts of Brick (p. 25)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

War, Animals

“There are two kinds of cryptography in this world: cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files.”

Bruce Schneier (1963) American computer scientist

[John Wiley & Sons, 1996, Applied Cryptography 2nd edition Source Code in C, Bruce Schneier, http://www.schneier.com/book-applied.html]
Cryptography

World, Sister, Reading

“Whereas the conception of space and time as a four-dimensional manifold has been very fruitful for mathematical physicists, its effect in the field of epistemology has been only to confuse the issue. Calling time the fourth dimension gives it an air of mystery. One might think that time can now be conceived as a kind of space and try in vain to add visually a fourth dimension to the three dimensions of space. It is essential to guard against such a misunderstanding of mathematical concepts. If we add time to space as a fourth dimension it does not lose any of its peculiar character as time. …Musical tones can be ordered according to volume and pitch and are thus brought into a two dimensional manifold. Similarly colors can be determined by the three basic colors red, green and blue… Such an ordering does not change either tones or colors; it is merely a mathematical expression of something that we have known and visualized for a long time. Our schematization of time as a fourth dimension therefore does not imply any changes in the conception of time. …the space of visualization is only one of many possible forms that add content to the conceptual frame. We would therefore not call the representation of the tone manifold by a plane the visual representation of the two dimensional tone manifold.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

Music, Color, Mathematics, Thinking

“But, When persons are present to one another they can function not merely as physical instruments but also as communicative ones. This possibility, no less than the physical one, is fateful for everyone concerned and in every society appears to come under strict normative regulation, giving rise to a kind of communication traffic order…
(Incidentally, it is in this aspect of public order that most symptoms of mental disorder seem to make themselves felt initially.) The rules pertaining to this area of conduct I shall call situational proprieties.”

Erving Goffman (1922–1982) Sociologist, writer, academic

Source: 1950s-1960s, Behavior in Public Places, 1963, p. 23; Cited in: Philip Manning, Erving Goffman and Modern Sociology (Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 88.

Fate, Communication, Appearance, Personality

“Our future rates of gain will fall far short of those achieved in the past. Berkshire's capital base is now simply too large to allow us to earn truly outsized returns. If you believe otherwise, you should consider a career in sales but avoid one in mathematics (bearing in mind that there are really only three kinds of people in the world: those who can count and those who can't).”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

1998 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1998pdf.pdf Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

People, World, Mathematics, Past

“The Saudi government has been pumping money in a quiet kind of revolution to shape Islam in its own images since 1973, [with] oil price rises. It wasn't a noisy revolution like the Iranian revolution was. It didn't have so much hubbub and noise associated with it and all. But it was quietly done [with] Saudi influence, using money, and the building of [madrassas] -- that is, religious schools and mosques all across the world. … The very particular kind of Islam associated with Saudi Arabia … is an upstart. It was created in the 18th century. It was constrained and confined entirely to the Arabian Peninsula right through to the late 1960s. All of a sudden, this [Wahhabi] Islam -- which is espoused by these young men, which considers even a Muslim like myself, because of my Shiite background, to be dirty or not a real Muslim … [is] probably the dominant form [of Islam] in the United States. It spreads from one end of the world to the next. It's been a quiet, silent revolution that's been happening, and suddenly exploded on the scene with Sept. 11.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/interviews/makiya.html, PBS Frontline (2002)

Men, Money, World, School

“.. how with the [Dutch] Romantic movement after 1830 also the love awakened for everything that recalled former times to the mind - including the period of the middle-ages -, and how the sigh grew from it to collect all kind of objects that reassured the taste of those times. Here too, the celebrated [Dutch romantic painter] Nuyen stood in front.”

Johannes Bosboom (1817–1891) Dutch painter

version in original Dutch (citaat van Johannes Bosboom, in Nederlands): ..hoe met de Romantische beweging na 1830 ook de liefde ontwaakte voor alles wat vroegere tijden — ook het tijdvak der middeneeuwen — voor den geest riepen en hoe daaruit de zucht ontsproot tot het verzamelen van voorwerpen, die van den smaak dier tijden getuigden. Ook hierin stond de gevierde Nuyen vooraan. Quote of J. Bosboom, c. 1890; as cited in De Hollandsche Schilderkunst in de Negentiende Eeuw, G. H. Marius; https://ia800204.us.archive.org/31/items/dehollandschesch00mariuoft/dehollandschesch00mariuoft.pdf Martinus Nijhoff, s-'Gravenhage / The Hague, tweede druk, 1920, p. 108 translation from the original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek) the studio of Bosboom was more or less a small museum, exposing his collected objects from the middle-ages 1890's

Love, Age, Time

“To make peace in the world secure, the United Nations must have readily at its disposal, as a result of firm commitments undertaken by all of its members, military strength of sufficient dimensions to make it certain that it can meet aggressive military force with international military force, speedily and conclusively. If that kind of strength is made available to the United Nations […] in my view that strength will never again be challenged in war and therefore need never be employed. But military strength will not be enough. The moral position of the United Nations must ever be strong and unassailable; it must stand steadfastly, always, for the right.”

Ralph Bunche (1904–1971) American diplomat

Some Reflections on Peace in Our Time (1950)

War, World, Peace, Strong

“And so, as they kept coming together in greater numbers into one place, finding themselves naturally gifted beyond the other animals in not being obliged to walk with faces to the ground, but upright and gazing upon the splendor of the starry firmament, and also in being able to do with ease whatever they chose with their hands and fingers, they began in that first assembly to construct shelters. Some made them of green boughs, others dug caves on mountain sides, and some, in imitation of the nests of swallows and the way they built, made places of refuge out of mud and twigs. Next, by observing the shelters of others and adding new details to their own inceptions they constructed better and better kinds of huts as time went on.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter I, Sec. 2

Way, Mountain, Nature, Time

“There is little disagreement about what constitutes a healthy state of the organism. But there is much less agreement when one uses the notion of pathology analogically, to describe kinds of behavior that are regarded as deviant. For people do not agree on what constitutes healthy behavior… The medical metaphor limits what we can see much as the statistical view does. It accepts the lay judgment of something as deviant and, by use of analogy, locates its source within the individual, thus preventing us from seeing the judgment itself as a crucial part of the phenomenon.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Source: Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963), p. 5-6.

People, Behavior, Parting

“When I wrote about Hank Williams 'A hundred floors above me in the tower of song', it's not some kind of inverse modesty. I know where Hank Williams stands in the history of popular song. Your Cheatin' Heart, songs like that, are sublime, in his own tradition, and I feel myself a very minor writer.”

Hank Williams (1923–1953) American country music singer

Leonard Cohen, Who held a gun to Leonard Cohen's head? http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,1305765,00.html The Guardian (2006-06-20) About

Feeling, History, Heart

“You know, I could run for governor and all this but I'm basically a media creation. I've never really done anything. I've worked for my dad. I worked in the oil industry. But that's not the kind of profile you have to have to get elected to public office.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

In an interview with the Midland Reporter Telegram on 4 July 1989, quoted in Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential (John Wiley and Sons, 2003) by James Moore and Wayne Slater, p. 161.
1980s

“I've seen how other writers have approached the relationships in the Arthurian cycle in this century, and it does seem to me that while some of the characters get treated fairly, others do not. And the point is, it's one of those kinds of legends in which no one is totally wrong, not even Modred. It presents a collision of necessities, and Modred has his own political reality.”

C. J. Cherryh (1942) United States science fiction and fantasy author

The Camelot Project interview (1996)

Reality

“[In the introduction to his Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Topics, Averroes said] This art has three parts. The first part sets forth the speeches from which dialectical conversation is composed — i. e., its parts, and the parts of its parts on to its simplest components. This part is found in the first treatise on Aristotle's book.
The second part sets forth the topics from which syllogisms are drawn — syllogisms for affirming something or denying it with respect to every kind of problem occurring in this art. This is the next six treatises of Aristotle's book
The third part set forth how The third part sets forth how the questioner ought to question and the answerer answer. It also sets forth how many kinds of questions and answers there are. This is in the eighth treatise of Aristotle's book.”

Averroes (1126–1198) Medieval Arab scholar and philosopher

Averroës, Charles Edwin Butterworth (1977) Averroës' Three Short Commentaries on Aristotle's "Topics,". p. 92

Books, Art, Question, Problem

“I understand why people think we're gay. There isn't a definition in our culture for this kind of bond between women. So I get why people have to label it – how can you be this close without it being sexual?”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

About her friend Gayle King, in "Oprah: Gayle and I Are Not Gay" in People (16 July 2006) http://www.people.com/people/article/0,26334,1215402,00.html

Women, People, Understanding, Thinking

“The law of value is no longer simply a reflection of the relations of production; the monopoly capitalists — even while employing purely empirical methods — surround that law with a complicated scaffolding that turns it into a docile servant. The superstructure imposes a kind of art in which the artist must be educated. Rebels are subdued by the machine, and only exceptional talents may create their own work. The rest become shamefaced hirelings or are crushed.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Education, Law, Art

“We continue to live in ignorance concerning the harm we inflict on animals; very few of us have ever visited an industrial breeding site or a slaughterhouse. We maintain a kind of moral schizophrenia that has us lavishing pampering our pets and at the same time planting our forks in the pigs that have been sent to the slaughter by the millions, even though they are in no way less conscious, less sensitive to pain, or less intelligent than our cats and dogs.”

Matthieu Ricard (1946) French writer and Buddhist monk

Introduction, p. 4
A Plea for the Animals (2014)

Pain, Dogs, Way, Intelligence

“And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest father raper of them all, was coming over to me and he was mean 'n' ugly 'n' nasty 'n' horrible and all kind of things and he sat down next to me and said, "Kid, whad'ya get?" I said, "I didn't get nothing, I had to pay $50 and pick up the garbage." He said, "What were you arrested for, kid?" And I said, "Littering." And they all moved away from me on the bench there, and the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things, till I said, "And creating a nuisance."”

Arlo Guthrie (1947) American folk singer

And they all came back, shook my hand, and we had a great time on the bench.
Alice's Restaurant Massacree

Time

“The universality, invariance, and elegance of principles governing the universe may be reflected in principles of the minds that have evolved in that universe - provided that the mental principles are formulated with respect to the abstract spaces appropriate for the representation of biologically significant objects and their properties. (1) Positions and motions of objects conserve their shapes in the geometrically fullest and simplest way when represented as points and connecting geodesic paths in the six-dimensional manifold jointly determined by the Euclidean group of three· dimensional space and the symmetry group of each object. (2) Colors of objects attain constancy when represented as points in a three-dimensional vector space in which each variation in natural illumination is cancelled by application of its inverse from the three-dimensional linear group of terrestrial transformations of the invariant solar source. (3) Kinds of objects support optimal generalization and categorization when represented, in an evolutionarily shaped space of possible objects, as connected regions with associated weights determined by Bayesian revision of maximum entropy priors”

Roger Shepard (1929) American psychologist

R. N. Shepard, (1994). "Perceptual-cognitive universals as reflections of the world." Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 1, 2–28.

Color, Way, Optimism, Support

“In 1939, in a stadium much like this, in Munich Germany, they packed it out with young men and women in brown shirts, for a fanatical man standing behind a podium named Adolf Hitler, the personification of evil. And in that stadium, those in brown shirts formed with their bodies a sign that said, in the whole stadium, "Hitler, we are yours." And they nearly took the world. Lenin once said, "give me 100 committed, totally committed men and I'll change the world." And, he nearly did. A few years ago, they took the sayings of Chairman Mao, in China, put them in a little red book, and a group of young people committed them to memory and put it in their minds and they took that nation, the largest nation in the world by storm because they committed to memory the sayings of the Chairman Mao. When I hear those kinds of stories, I think 'what would happen if American Christians, if world Christians, if just the Christians in this stadium, followers of Christ, would say 'Jesus, we are yours'? What kind of spiritual awakening would we have?”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Speech at the Anaheim Angels sports stadium (17 April 2005); transcript and video http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-wilson/follow-jesus-like-nazis-f_b_158295.html

Women, Men, People, Books

“Even if the absence of evidence for a given god were not evidence of its absence, it would still be evidence that the belief in that god is unreasonable. That's the only proposition that any atheist of any kind has to demonstrate in order to win the argument. Because anything beyond that… is just having fun.”

Scott Clifton (1984) American television actor, musician, internet personality.

God, Atheism and Evidence, as Theoretical Bullshit, hosted on YouTube. (11 January 2010) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9stJ8h2ilZU

God

“Question: What is their external behaviour like?
Answer: They have few mannerisms, and they do not talk a lot; their words are simple and direct. They live modestly so that things pass through them without their involvement. They are composed in their use of the senses.
Question: Are all detached people like this?
Answer: More so or less so, depending on accidental circumstances. Essentially, however, they are the same.
Question: Do such people come to a full knowledge of the truth, or do they remain in the realm of opinion and imagining?
Answer: Since they remain basically human, they continue to have opinions and imaginings. But because they have withdrawn from themselves into that which is, they have a knowledge of all truth; for this is truth itself and they ignore themselves. But let this be enough for you. It is important to realize that everyone has five kinds of self One does not arrive at the goal by asking questions. It is rather through detachment that one comes to this hidden truth. Amen”

Henry Suso (1295–1366) Dominican friar and mystic

The Exemplar, The Little Book of Truth

People, Truth, Imagination, Question

“I pulled On The Road off the shelf and found myself reading it between classes, and at that time in my life it was exactly what I craved, exactly what I needed to hear. I thought, “That’s the way, that’s the ideal life, that’s great. You get in a car and you drive and you see your friends and you end up in a city for a night and you go out drinking and you catch up and you share these really intense experiences. And then you’re on the road and you’re doing it again.” The romance of the road, particularly from Kerouac’s work, encapsulated how I wanted to live. I found a way to do it by being a musician, which is what I always wanted to be. The traveling and the being on tour and being away from home set a precedent for me where I thought, “Oh yeah, this is how it works.”
But then in reading Big Sur, it’s the end of the road. You end up with a series of failed relationships and you end up being an alcoholic and in your late 30s, and not having any kind of real grip on the lives of the people around you. That’s the potential other end of the spectrum when you’re never tied to anybody or anything. I run the risk of losing touch with the people in my life that mean the most to me because I have made the decision to live like this.”

Ben Gibbard (1976) American singer, songwriter and guitarist

Source: The Meaning Of Life, I

Life, People, Alcohol, Cars

“I have reached far beyond my competence and have probably secured for good a reputation for flamboyant gestures. But the times still crowd me and give me no rest, and I see no way to avoid ambitious synthetic attempts; either we get some kind of grip on the accumulation of thought or we continue to wallow helplessly, to starve amidst plenty. So I gamble with science and write.”

Ernest Becker book The Denial of Death

Preface, p. xix
The Denial of Death (1973)

Way, Science, Time

“Men in general are neither very good nor very bad, but mediocre… Man with his vices, his weaknesses, his virtues, this confused medley of good and ill, high and low, goodness and depravity, is yet, take him all in all, the object on earth most worthy of study, of interest, of pity, of attachment and of admiration. And since we haven't got angels, we can attach ourselves to nothing greater and more worthy of our devotion than our own kind.”

Alexis De Tocqueville (1805–1859) French political thinker and historian

Letter to Eugene Stoffels (Jan. 3, 1845) as quoted by Thomas Molnar, The Decline of the Intellectual (1961) Ch. 11 "Intellectual and Philosopher"
Original text:
Les hommes ne sont en général ni très-bons, ni très-mauvais : ils sont médiocres. [...] L'homme avec ses vices, ses faiblesses, ses vertus, ce mélange confus de bien et de mal, de bas et de haut, d'honnête et de dépravé, est encore, à tout prendre, l'objet le plus digne d'examen, d'intérêt, de pitié, d'attachement et d'admiration qui se trouve sur la terre; et puisque les anges nous manquent, nous ne saurions nous attacher à rien qui soit plus grand et plus digne de notre dévouement que nos semblables.
1840s

Men, Angels, Study

“People do not exist just for organizations. They track all kinds of mud from the rest of their lives into the organization, and they have all kinds of interests that are independent of the organization.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1970s, Complex organizations, 1972, p. 4

People

“An examination of the characteristics required by the employees and heads of undertakings of every kind leads to the same conclusions as the foregoing study, which was confined largely to industrial concerns. In the home and in affairs of State, the need for administrative ability is proportional to the importance of the undertaking. Like every other undertaking, the home requires administration, that is to say planning, organization, command, coordination and control. Nothing but a theory of administration, which can be taught and then discussed by everybody, can put an end to the general uncertainty as to proper methods, which exists in the isolation of our households. There is therefore a universal need for a knowledge of administration.”

Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism

Source: Industrial and General Administration, 1916, p. 80; as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 7

Home, Knowledge, Study, Universe

“Each mental wave we send out from the mind,
Or base, or kind,
Completes its circuit, then with added force
Seeks its own source.”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) American author and poet

Effects.
Poetry quotes, New Thought Pastels (1913)

“Even if the barrier now should disappear and the Flowers withdraw their attention from our Earth, we still would have been shaken from the comfortable little rut which assumed that life as we know it was the only kind of life and that our road of knowledge was the only one that was broad and straight and paved.
There had been ogres in the past, by finally the ogres had been banished. The trolls and ghouls and imps and all the others of the tribe had been pushed out of our lives, for they could survive only on the misty shores of ignorance and in the land of superstition. Now, I thought, we’d know an ignorance again (but a different kind of ignorance) and superstition, too, for superstition fed upon the lack of knowledge. With this hint of another world—even if its denizens should decide not to flaunt themselves, even if we should find a way to stop them—the trolls and ghouls and goblins would be back with us again. There’d be chimney corner gossip of this other place and a frantic, desperate search to rationalize the implied horror of its vast and unknown reaches, and out of this very search would rise a horror greater than any the other world could hold. We’d be afraid, as we had been before, of the darkness that lay beyond the little circle of our campfire.”

Clifford D. Simak book All Flesh is Grass

Source: All Flesh is Grass (1965), Chapter 17 (p. 179)

Life, World, Way, Search

“Broadly stated, the task is to replace the global rationality of economic man with a kind of rational behavior that is compatible with the access to information and the computational capacities that are actually possessed by organisms, including man, in the kinds of environments in which such organisms exist.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Simon (1955) "A behavioral model of rational choice", The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 69 (1); As cited in: Gustavo Barros (2010, p. 462).
1940s-1950s

Behavior

“I spent the first half of my career being accused of being gay when I hadn't had anything like a gay relationship. So I spent my years growing up being told what my sexuality was really— which was kind of confusing.”

George Michael (1963–2016) English singer-songwriter, musician, producer

CNN Interview (April 1998), reported in Kara Fox, " 1998: George Michael comes out in CNN interview http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/26/entertainment/george-michael-cnn-interview-1998/index.html", CNN (December 26, 2016).

“If these gouaches [Bram van Velde recently made] live at all, it is because they are true, they derive from life. They are born of the unknown – and not of habit or know-how, or intention, or of some recipe.... there comes a time when serious work is no longer an effort. When demanding work of that kind no longer tires you.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

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

Life, Effort, Time

“regulation is useful and proper, when aimed at the prevention of fraud or contrivance, manifestly injurious to other kinds of production, or to the public safety, and not at prescribing the nature of the products and the methods of fabrication.”

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) French economist and businessman

Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Book I, On Production, Chapter XVII, Section II, p. 181

Fraud, Nature

“Charles Darwin's evolution theory states that the strong eat the weak. According to Darwin's evolution theory we are the worst people. But it is actually not so. It is a natural universal law. If we take Darwin's evolution theory literally then God is the worst kind of being. Because God planned creation in a certain way. When love is involved there is no evil. Even mother birds sacrifice their own lives for the sake of their babies.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

TRUE DAY OF ALL THINGS AND THE INITIATOR OF HARMONY http://www.unification.net/1997/970605.html, June 5, 1997

Love, God, People, Law

“Who has studied the works of such men as Euler, Lagrange, Cauchy, Riemann, Sophus Lie, and Weierstrass, can doubt that a great mathematician is a great artist? The faculties possessed by such men, varying greatly in kind and degree with the individual, are analogous with those requisite for constructive art. Not every mathematician possesses in a specially high degree that critical faculty which finds its employment in the perfection of form, in conformity with the ideal of logical completeness; but every great mathematician possesses the rarer faculty of constructive imagination.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A (1910), p. 290. ; Cited in: Moritz (1914, 184): Mathematics as a fine art.

Men, Art, Imagination, Study

“Hayley: I know what kind of music that I like, I love to sing. Bands like George and Missy Higgins are the guys that I like and that's the kind of music that I'd like to make.”

Hayley Jensen (1983) Australian singer

Australian Idol, Final Performances, Final 6

Love, Music, Guy, Singing

“"But there are two things that different kinds of people believe that are the worst, most dangerous, wrongest of all. Some people believe that the best way to solve a problem is with violence; they beat up or kill anyone who disagrees with them."
… "But what's the other worst kind of bad thinking?"
"Pacifism," she said. "That's just the opposite of the first kind of bad thinking. Pacificists believe that you should never lift a hand against another human being, no matter what he has done or what you know he's going to do." … "Some pacificists are cowards in disguise, but some really believe it's right to permit the murder of an innocent person rather than kill to stop it. They're wrong because by not fighting evil, they've become part of it."”

Dean Koontz book Lightning

Part II, Chapter 5.1; conversation between Laura and her son Chris
Lightning (1988)

People, Way, Problem, Thinking

“The trick is to maintain a kind of naïve amazement at each instant of experience—but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm.”

Sarah Bakewell book How to Live

Source: How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne in one Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010), p. 37.

Learning

“There's no dearth of kindness
In this world of ours;
Only in our blindness
We gather thorns for flowers.”

Gerald Massey (1828–1907) British poet

There's no Dearth of Kindness, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

World, Flowers

“One night at the diner over eggs,
Over easy she showed me the length of her legs,
But that gold plated cross on her neck, it was real
And you don't get that kind of money from pushing a meal.”

Ryan Adams (1974) American alt-country/rock singer-songwriter

Carolina Rain
29 (2005)

Money, Night

“I grew up in Hungary, lived through fascism and the Holocaust, and then had a foretaste of communism. I learned at an early age how important it is what kind of government prevails. I chose America as my home because I value freedom and democracy, civil liberties and an open society. When I had made more money than I needed for myself and my family, I set up a foundation to promote the values and principles of a free and open society.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

Why We Must Not Reelect President Bush (2004)

Money, Age, Family, Democracy

“This kind of thinking is taking a long view, in which one must also count the imponderables, such as the effort of prolonged depression upon restless social forces; the inevitable necessity for National Socialism to move very far to the Left, the possible revolt of the people everywhere against dawdling tactics of their leaders.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Source: "Let the Record Speak" 1939, p. 355 (newspaper column, “As Litvinov Goes,” May 5, 1939)

People, Thinking, Effort

“Protocols:
Number 1, paras. 9,10
If every State has two foes, and if in regard to the external foe it is allowed and not considered immoral to use every manner and art of conflict, as for example to keep the enemy in ignorance of plans of attack and defense, to attack him by night or in superior numbers, then in what way can the same means in regard to a worse foe, the destroyer of the structure of society and the commonweal, be called immoral and not permissible?
Is it possible for any sound logical mind to hope with any success to guide crowds by the aid of reasonable counsels and arguments,, when any objection or contradiction, senseless though it may be, can be made and when such objection may find more favor with the people, whose powers of reasoning are superficial?
Graves: The basic ideas are the same despite word changes like… “two kinds of enemies” versus, “two foes.””

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.74

People, Hope, Art, Way

“It was dry and cold, not bitter, but with the kind of steady chill that makes it hard to remember being any other way. I tried to imagine people living out here once, and couldn't. It must have been long ago. The land felt like it didn't want anyone bothering it anymore.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Prologue - Yakima
The Lonely Dead (2004)

People, Way, Imagination

“The prevailing style of management must undergo transformation. A system cannot understand itself. The transformation requires a view from outside. The aim of this chapter is to provide an outside view—a lens—that I call a system of profound knowledge. It provides a map of theory by which to understand the organizations that we work in. The first step is transformation of the individual. This transformation is discontinuous. It comes from understanding of the system of profound knowledge. The individual, transformed, will perceive new meaning to his life, to events, to numbers, to interactions between people. Once the individual understands the system of profound knowledge, he will apply its principles in every kind of relationship with other people. He will have a basis for judgment of his own decisions and for transformation of the organizations that he belongs to.”

W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993) American professor, author, and consultant

The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (1993)

Life, People, Understanding, Knowledge

“we will argue that the dominant form of contemporary production, which exerts its hegemony over the others, creates "immaterial goods" such as ideas, knowledge, forms of communication, and relationships. … what is produced in this case is not just material goods but actual social relationships and forms of life. We will call this kind of production "biopolitical" to highlight how general its products are and how directily it engages social life in its entirety.”

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

94
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Life, Communication, Idea, Knowledge

“"Why not just kill all the bad people? Isn't that kind of cruel to destroy the whole world? After all, the penguins didn't sin." Well, we know that God destroyed the whole world. I think there are some things to consider about this flood. Number one, the Flood left evidence where a miracle would not. If God had just said, "Okay, I want everybody to die, except for Noah and his family", then what evidence would be left behind from that? The effects are here today for us to see and remember the judgment of God on sin. Plus, by God telling Noah to build the boat, that gave everybody warning time. Here is Noah out there for many years, some people say seven years, some people say a hundred and twenty years. The Bible doesn't say, but Noah is building this ark for a long time. People are watching him put this big boat together and said, "Noah, are you crazy? What are you doing?" He says, "Man, it's going to rain." Now keep in mind, I don't think you can prove this dogmatically, but it probably never rained before the Flood came. So Noah was preaching about something that had never happened. He said, "Hey guys, guess what. Rain is going to fall out of the sky." Everybody is looking around saying, "Yeah right, that's never happened." They thought that he was nuts. Hey, we're doing the same thing today as Christians. We're going around saying, "Hey, one of these days and angel is going to come down with the Lord and they're going to come through the clouds and blow a trumpet and the Southern Baptists rise first, (you know the dead in Christ go first) and then the rest of us are going to take off for heaven." And everybody is looking at us and saying, "Yeah right. Nobody has ever heard a trumpet blown from a cloud and seen people take off for the clouds. That's just never happened." We are preaching that something is going to happen that has never happened in the history of humanity. That's what Noah was doing. He was preaching something that was going to happen and what he was preaching about had never happened. So while he was preaching, this gave people a chance to repent.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Hovind theory

God, People, World, Family

“I regard the death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash — and it may be well that we become so hardened.”

William T. Sherman (1820–1891) American General, businessman, educator, and author.

Letter to his wife (July 1864)
1860s, 1864

Death, Men

“If you hear yourself saying “I could never give up ice cream” (or something else), realize that you may just be short on vegucation. There are lots of rich, luscious nondairy ice creams on the market … If you have the necessary information and you're still saying “I could never give up…,” listen to yourself. You're affirming weakness. … You're bigger than that. You can eat plants and save lives. You can give your life exponentially more meaning by living in a way that decreases suffering just because you got up and chose a kind breakfast.”

Victoria Moran (1950) American writer

Source: The Good Karma Diet (2015), Ch. 2: The Good Karma Diet

Life, Way, Suffering

“I don’t get to just say what I want, as I work for a company and I have obligations, and so I can’t go around being disrespectful to everybody. However, with as much integrity and respect as possible, I would love any public opportunity to challenge conventional beliefs, especially ones religious in nature and especially ones that have affected my life. Someday it would be great to write a book on that kind of thing. I feel like I have something to say, and it’s not something everyone else is saying.”

Scott Clifton (1984) American television actor, musician, internet personality.

Responding to an interviewer's question, "Do you then see yourself being a motivational speaker, or a speaker who gets up and challenges ideology and religion?" in The Scott Clifton Interview – The Bold and the Beautiful, as quoted by Michael Fairman, hosted on Michaelfairmansoaps.com (20 September 2010)

Love, Life, Books, Feeling

“Parallelism' can be pointed out in the different parts of a single object, looked at alone; it is even more obvious when one puts several objects of the same kind next to each other. Now if we compare our own lives and customs with these appearances in nature, we shall be astonished to find the same principle repeated... When an important event is being celebrated, the people face and move in the same direction. These are parallels following each other..”

Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) Swiss artist

from: Die Kunst Ferdinand Hodlers, 1923

People, Nature, Appearance, Parting

“She was too alert, too alive not to have the kind of mind that probed and reached and got her into trouble now and then.”

Octavia E. Butler Wild Seed

Source: Wild Seed (1980), Chapter 1 (p. 18)

Quotes about kindness page 51

Quotes about kindness
page 51