Quotes about kindness (7466 quotes, page 56)

“Though it lash the shallows that line the beach,
Afar from the great sea-deeps,
There is never a storm whose might can reach
Where the vast leviathan sleeps.
Like a mighty thought in a mighty mind
In the clear cold depths he swims;
Whilst above him the pettiest form of his kind
With a dash o'er the surface skims.”

John Boyle O'Reilly (1844–1890) Irish-born poet and novelist

Prelude to the amber whale.

Sleep , Sea

“People ask me if I have some kind of death wish, to keep saying the things I do. The answer is no: I would like to keep living. However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

Introduction
Infidel (2007)

Death , People , Silence , Time

“We do not wish to “judge” or assess out surrounding merely as a kind of expressive activity carelessly projected onto the world, but we wish to evaluate the world “correctly,” i. e., in according with that it truly is, and the desire to know is directed at determining what the world truly is.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), p. 40.

World

“By the logical syntax of a language, we mean the formal theory of the linguistic forms of that language -- the systematic statement of the formal rules which govern it together with the development of the consequences which follow from these rules. A theory, a rule, a definition, or the like is to be called formal when no reference is made in it either to the meaning of the symbols (for examples, the words) or to the sense of the expressions (e. g. the sentences), but simply and solely to the kinds and order of the symbols from which the expressions are constructed.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Source: Logical Syntax of Language, 1934/1937, p. 1

Sense

“Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected. … The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth.””

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

volume I; lecture 1, "Atoms in Motion"; section 1-1, "Introduction"; p. 1-1
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

Truth , Law , Nature , Knowledge

“He had the kind of handshake that ought never to be used except as a tourniquet.”

Denis Norden (1922–2018) British comedy scriptwriter and television presenter

You can't have your Kayak and heat it

“Of historic method, indeed, nothing wiser has ever been said than a word which will be found in Gibbon's youthful Essay on the Study of Literature. Facts, the young sage instructs us, are of three kinds: those which prove nothing beyond themselves, those which serve to illustrate a character or explain a motive, and those which dominate the system and move its springs.”

G. M. Young (1882–1959) English historian

Portrait of an Age (1936)

Youth , Spring , Literature , Motivation

“I’m kind of at the point where I’m doing the second of those things and surprised by what I have done. And it is not necessarily a big master plan, but I look at the number of recordings I’ve made and I’m kind of shocked.”

Hilary Hahn (1979) American violinist

Why Violinist Hilary Hahn Will Never Just Stick to the Classical Repertoire (2012)

“Divisionism, a product of all kinds of prejudices, false ideas and lies; sectarianism, dogmatism, a lack of breadth in analyzing the role of each social layer, its parties, organization and leaders - these obstruct the necessary united actions of the democratic and progressive forces of our people.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

The Second Declaration of Havana (1962)

People , Idea

“When all authority of every kind is put aside, denied, then you can find out for yourself.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

4th Public Talk, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (28 May 1967)
1960s

“In the Greek world in which Homer's songs were sung, it was taken for granted that everyone's life is ruled by fate and chance. For Homer, human life is a succession of contingencies: all good things are vulnerable to fortune. Socrates could not accept this archaic tragic vision. He believed that virtue and happiness were one and the same: nothing can harm a truly good man. So he re-envisioned the good to make it indestructible. Beyond the goods of human life - health, beauty, pleasure, friendship, life itself - there was a Good that surpassed them all. In Plato, this became the idea of the Form of the Good, the mystical fusion of all values into a harmonious spiritual whole - an idea later absorbed into the Christian conception of God. But the idea that ethics is concerned with a kind of value that is beyond contingency, that can somehow prevail over any kind of loss or misfortune, came from Socrates. It was he who invented 'morality.”

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

The Vices of Morality: Socrates, the inventor of morality (p. 106)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Life , God , Friendship , Fate

“In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, act V, scene 1, we find this exchange between the two young lovers: JESSICA: I am never merry when I hear sweet music
LORENZO: The reason is, your spirits are attentiveThe opening of the finale of Beethoven' s 'Emperor' Concerto provides a splendid example of the kind of theme that is the inspiration for this book. A completely unified theme that hangs together beautifully, it nevertheless portrays vividly a series of contrasting sentiments in a succession that amounts to a small narrative …”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Prologue
Music and Sentiment (2010)

Books , Music , Lovers , Success

“Subject to a kind of disease, which at that time they called lack of money.”

Francois Rabelais book Gargantua and Pantagruel

Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Pantagruel (1532), Chapter 16.

Money , Disease , Time

“An author that's in now might be out in ten years. And vice-versa. Who knows when the final sifting is done, in the year 2050, say, who will be read of my generation? You'd like to think you will be one. But there has to be a constant weeding that goes on. The Victorians read all kinds of writers who we don't have time for now. Who reads Thackeray? An educated person reads Dickens, or reads some Dickens. But Thackeray?”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Salon interview (2000)

Education , Thinking , Time , Reading

“Creationists insist that macroevolution has never been observed, and the excuse they use to deny that it has requires the addition of a bogus condition that simply does not apply. Creationists argue that evolution can only occur within “definite limits”, and then only to subtle variance within their “kind”. They say new diversity is limited to rare and unviable hybrids between those “kinds”, and they usually say that the emergence of new species is impossible. No “Darwinist” would ever say any of these things.”

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

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

“They deny good luck, love, power, romance, and inspiration
From La Jac Brite ointment and incense of all kinds,
And condemn in writing skin brightening and whitening
and whitening of minds. There is upon the federal trade commission a burden of glory
So to defend the fact, so to impel
The plucking of hope from the hand, honor from the complexion,
Sprite from the spell.”

Josephine Miles (1911–1985) American poet, academic

"Government Injunction Restraining Harlem Cosmetic Co." (1941) St. 2–3; Collected Poems, University of Illinois Press, 1983

Love , Hope

“Let me endeavour, very briefly to sketch, in the rudest outline what the Turkish race was and what it is. It is not a question of Mohammedanism simply, but of Mohammedanism compounded with the peculiar character of a race. They are not the mild Mohammedans of India, nor the chivalrous Saladins of Syria, nor the cultured Moors of Spain. They were, upon the whole, from the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went a broad line of blood marked the track behind them, and, as far as their dominion reached, civilization vanished from view. They represented everywhere government by force as opposed to government by law. – Yet a government by force can not be maintained without the aid of an intellectual element. – Hence there grew up, what has been rare in the history of the world, a kind of tolerance in the midst of cruelty, tyranny and rapine. Much of Christian life was contemptuously left alone and a race of Greeks was attracted to Constantinople which has all along made up, in some degree, the deficiencies of Turkish Islam in the element of mind!”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. (1876)
1870s

Life , World , Law , History

“What the Universities have mainly done—what I have found the University did for me, was that it taught me to read in various languages and various sciences, so that I could go into the books that treated of these things, and try anything I wanted to make myself master of gradually, as I found it suit me. Whatever you may think of all that, the clearest and most imperative duty lies on every one of you to be assiduous in your reading; and learn to be good readers, which is, perhaps, a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading—to read all kinds of things that you have an interest in, and that you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in.”

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

1860s, On The Choice Of Books (1866)

Books , Imagination , Thinking , Learning

“In selecting our subject then we have two things to consider. First, is it as good as the conditions will let it be - that is, have we chosen the point of view which, with the present conditions, shows at its best pictorially, and secondly, if taken from this point now, are the alterations we would like, weather or light, to make for us of such a kind that we can introduce them for ourselves when printing, and, if so, what are those alterations.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Part II : Practical Pictorial Photography, Some practical suggestions on the selection of the subject and a note on the subject of motive

Light , Weather

“A real atheist, needless to say, will disregard what the dervishes think it expedient to say about the "New Testament" when they make their pitch to the ignorant. He will read the myths for himself and objectively consider and appraise them as a whole, including the social gospel that is, indeed, the most important and operative part of them. And he will shudder at the Judaic malevolence that inspires them, the vicious hatred of culture and civilization. They were designed to create a foul and squalid world in which every instinctive value of our race is negated and aborted--a world in which the natural ties of family and property have been severed, leaving only rootless and helpless individuals, isolated and lost in the terrible loneliness of crowds--a world without history, without philosophy, without science, without reason--a world without beauty of any kind, without art, without literature, without culture--a world without real love, the love that unites men and women, and without even the Aryan's instinctive feeling for the beauty of women and physical health.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"The Bear in the Bush", Liberty Bell (September 1990)
1990s

Love , Women , Men , Health

“If you're looking for adventure of a new and different kind,
And you come across a Girl Scout who is similarly inclined,
Don't be nervous, don't be flustered, don't be scared. Be prepared!”

Tom Lehrer (1928) American singer-songwriter and mathematician

"Be Prepared"
Songs by Tom Lehrer (1953)

Girl , Scouting

“After much consideration and many inquiries, I determined, in 1885, on experimenting with sweet peas, which were suggested to me both by Sir Joseph Hooker and by Mr. Darwin. …The result clearly proved Regression; the mean Filial deviation was only one-third that of the parental one, and the experiments all concurred. The formula that expresses the descent from one generation of a people to the next, showed that the generations would be identical if this kind of Regression was allowed for.”

Francis Galton (1822–1911) British polymath: geographer, statistician, pioneer in eugenics

Source: Memories of My Life (1908), Ch. XX Heredity (1909 ed.)

People , Parent

“I grew up in South Africa, so believe me when I say: Israel is not an apartheid state … The difference between the two countries could scarcely be more stark. Under apartheid, a legal structure of racial hierarchy governed all aspects of life. Black South Africans were denied the vote. They were required by law to live, work, study, travel, enjoy leisure activities, receive medical treatment and even go to the lavatory separately from those with a different colour of skin. Interracial relationships and marriages were illegal. It was subjugation in its rawest form. Contrast that with Israel, a country whose Arab, Druze, Bedouin, Ethiopian, Russian, Baha’i, Armenian and other citizens have equal status under the law. Anyone who truly understands what apartheid was cannot possibly look around Israel today and honestly claim there is any kind of parity.”

Ephraim Mirvis (1956) South African rabbi

New Statesman, 24 February 2016 http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2016/02/i-grew-south-africa-so-believe-me-when-i-say-israel-not-apartheid-state

Life , Marriage , Law , Travel

“The leading lady of this film (Yeti) happened to be Antonella Interlenghi, the daughter of Antonella Lualdi. The girl very obviously inherited her mother's beauty, but she had the silliest pseudonym I've ever heard. She called herself "Phoenix Grant". I mean, what kind of a name is this? It's just as if I called myself, say, Hyde Park Corner Montgomery. Or Hamburg Rommel, how about that?”

Donald O'Brien (actor) (1930–2003) Italian film and TV actor

Euro Trash Cinema magazine interview (March 1996)

Beauty , Girl , Daughters

“A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people.”

John Cleese (1939) actor from England

From an interview http://www.avclub.com/article/john-cleese-14197 with The A. V. Club (2008)

People , Laughter

“I come from Illinois, corn country. There are so many kinds of corn up there they have to number them. You'd be driving down the highway, you'll see BX65, don't mix it up with XL29, you know, something, blah-blah-blah. But I'll tell you what, folks, you can crossbreed your corn from now till the cows come home, and you'll always get corn. You'll never get a hamster, or a tomato or a whale to grow on that corn stalk, okay?”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

100 Reasons Evolution is So Stupid! (2001)

Home , Country

“Spring 1989 will always remain as a kind of watershed in intellectual and world history. In February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini delivered his infamous fatwa on Salman Rushdie. Immediately following in its wake came short interviews with or articles by Western intellectuals, Arabists, and Islamologists blaming Rushdie for bringing the barbarous sentence onto himself by writing the Satanic Verses. John Esposito, an American expert on Islam, claimed he knew “of no Western scholar of Islam who would not have predicted that [Rushdie’s] kind of statements would be explosive.” That is sheer hypocrisy coming from a man who has published extracts from Sadiq al-Azm’s previously quoted book, that had also dared to criticize Islam.”

Ibn Warraq (1946) Pakistani writer

Ibn Warraq: Why I am not a Muslim, Chapter 1
Why I am not a Muslim

Books , World , Quotes , History

“I think murdering Iraqi union leaders is criminal, for example. And a lot of what the insurgents have done is criminal. But, you know, you rank the priorities. Our priority is to stop major war crimes, like Fallujah for example. So yeah, what the resistance is doing, one can also criticize, harshly in fact. But in any kind of ranking, even if we're on Mars, and certainly if we're in the United States, what is vastly more important is our own crimes, which are much worse, and they're ours.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Quotes 2000s, 2005, Interview by Doug Henwood, 2004

War , Thinking

“The species is in a state of transition, one of many. This one began, generally speaking, when the species tried to step apart from nature in order to develop the unique kind of consciousness that is presently your own. That consciousness is not a finished product, however, but one meant to change, [to] evolve and develop. Certain artificial divisions were made along the way that must now be dispensed with. You must return, wiser creatures, to the nature that spawned you - not only as loving caretakers but as partners with the other species of the earth. You must discover once again the spirituality of your biological heritage.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 805, Page 45
The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, (1981)

Love , Way , Nature , Change

“She slapped Kestrel's face. Without thinking twice, Kestrel slapped her back, as hard as she could. The young woman burst into tears. The servant saw this, aghast. "Baby!" she exclaimed. "Oh, my poor baby!"
"You've been kind to me," said Kestrel, "and you're very beautiful, but if you hit me again I'll kill you."”

William Nicholson (1948) British screenwriter, playwright and novelist

Source: The "Wind on Fire" Trilogy (2000-2003), Slaves of the Mastery (Book 2), p. 85

Beauty , Thinking , Tear , Baby

“It's mind-boggling to consider that movies this bad are actually committed to film. The poor quality of The Pest in almost every category — humor, intelligence, creativity, and just plain entertainment value — ranks it somewhere between a bad infomercial and a local cable newscast. Rarely do I consider the act of seeing a movie to be a chore, but this kind of experience is the exception - Directed By Paul Miller.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/movies/p/pest.html of The Pest (1997).
Zero star reviews

Intelligence

“I never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition both of individual and of social improvement. But I thought that it had consequences which required to be corrected, by joining other kinds of cultivation with it. The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties, now seemed to me of primary importance. The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Autobiography (1873)

Feeling

“Send me no more reviews of any kind. — I will read no more of evil or good in that line. — Walter Scott has not read a review of himself for thirteen years.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Letter to his publisher, John Murray (3 November 1821).

Evil , Reading

“Until Abstract Expressionism you had to have something to paint about, some kind of subject matter. Even though Kandinsky and w:Arthur Dove were improvising earlier, it didn't take. They had to have symbols, suggested natural images or geometry, which was something real structurally. That gave them something to paint about. What was new was the idea that something you looked at could be like something you heard.”

Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) American artist

Kenneth Noland, p. 8
Conversation with Karen Wilkin' (1986-1988)

Idea , Nature , Painting

“It is important to see that my paintings are ultimately stimulating. They are not at all the kind of thing that inspires despair.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

short quotes, 2 November 1971 pp. 84-85
1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)

Painting , Despair

“If we took away women's right to vote, we'd never have to worry about another Democrat president. It's kind of a pipe dream, it's a personal fantasy of mine, but I don't think it's going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

interview with New York Observer 2007-10-02, quoted in * Coulter: "If we took away women's right to vote, we'd never have to worry about another Democrat president"
Media Matters for America
2007-10-04
http://mediamatters.org/research/200710040011
2007

Women , Dreams , Way , Thinking

“There is very good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism itself will no longer exist—most obviously, as ecologists keep reminding us, because it's impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet, and the current form of capitalism doesn't seem to be capable of generating the kind of vast technological breakthroughs and mobilizations that would be required for us to start finding and colonizing any other planets. Yet faced with the prospect of capitalism actually ending, the most common reaction—even from those who call themselves "progressives"—is simply fear. We cling to what exists because we can no longer imagine an alternative that wouldn't be even worse.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", pp. 381–382

Fear , Imagination

“Yes, and I know that when a supersexy older girl with hips and breasts and nice hair wants to take off your glasses and to paint you a smokey eye she's merely trying to enroll you in a beauty contest she's already won. It's the kind of slummy, condescending gesture, like when rich people ask poor people where they summer. To me, this smacks of a blatant, insensitive 'let them eat cake' type of chauvinism.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Damned

Damned (2011)

People , Beauty , Girl , Summer

“What do you say? cried they; do you call it Entelechy or Endelechy? Truly, truly, sweet cousins, quoth Panurge, we are a silly sort of grout-headed lobcocks, an't please you; be so kind as to forgive us if we chance to knock words out of joint. As for anything else, we are downright honest fellows and true hearts.”

Francois Rabelais book Gargantua and Pantagruel

Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Fifth Book (1564), Chapter 19 : How we arrived at the queendom of Whims or Entelechy

Forgiveness , Chance , Heart

“It was bizarre and … kind of a fluke … I'm very lucky, it kind of fell into my lap, honestly. I was auditioning for a part for an American project that was filming in Australia, and a manager kind of saw my tape through that, and sort of contacted my Australian representative, and it kind of all just fell into place.”

Maia Mitchell (1993) Australian actress

On her career as an actress in the U.S, in an interview on Kelly & Michael (2 July 2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q1OzzG5S24

Parting

“Economics, said Mr Stanley, is 50% psychology … What we need, apparently, is not statesman but hypnotists, not scientists, but witchdoctors, not confidence born of scientific prediction of the future, but confidence created by a political Confidence Trick. There is nothing surprising in this. It is the kind of mystic Mumbo-Jumbo to which capitalism is driven when austere reason pronounces sentence of death upon it. It is the primitive recoil from reality and the burdens of reality which lies at the root of Fascist psychology.”

Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960) Welsh politician

Tribune, 5 November 1937
1930s

Death , Confidence , Reality , Future

“The only thing that makes the modern sciences elevated beyond epistemic procedures seen in other times and other cultures is the fact that there is a mechanism beyond human political manipulation for the elimination of defective theories. Karl Popper is on that level just totally right. If it’s politically negotiable, it’s useless, it’s unscientific by definition. You don’t trust scientists, you don’t trust scientific theories, you don’t trust scientific institutions in so far as they have integrity, what you trust is the disintegrated zone of criticism and the criteria for criticism and evaluation in terms of repeated experiments, in terms of the heuristics that are built up to decide whether a particular theory has been defeated and eliminated by a superior theory. It’s that mechanism of selection that is the only thing that makes science important and makes it a system of reality testing. And this is obviously intrinsically directed against any kind of organic political community aiming to internally determine—through its own processes—the negotiation of the nature of reality. Reality has to be an external disruptive critical factor.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"‘The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation’ Interview with Nick Land" https://syntheticzero.net/2017/06/19/the-only-thing-i-would-impose-is-fragmentation-an-interview-with-nick-land/ (2017)

Communication , Nature , Reality , Science

“The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

“In 1925 Heisenberg made a new attempt, on entirely novel lines, to obtain an explanation of atomic spectra. Working in collaboration with Bohr, he had come to the conclusion that the imperfections of Bohr's theory had been a consequence of assuming too simple a model for the atom. For Bohr had not only assumed that the atom consisted of particles moving through space and time, but also that the particles inside atoms were of the same kind as the electrons outside atoms.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Time

“At carefree times in early boyhood I chose to believe that life was a kind of ball game, but with a mix of years and perception I learned better.”

Roger Kahn (1927–2020) American baseball writer

Source: The Boys Of Summer, Chapter 1, The Trolley Car That Ran By Ebbets Field, p. 43

Life , Game , Learning , Time

“We had adopted a kind of solar uniformitarianism," solar physicist John (Jack) Eddy suggested in retrospect. "As people and as scientists we have always wanted the Sun to be better than other stars and better than it really is.”

John A. Eddy (1931–2009) American astronomer

Source: Changing Sun, Changing Climate? by Spencer Weart http://www.aip.org/history/climate/solar.htm#M_27_

People , Star , Sun

“There are a couple of skills you take away from Housewives. You learn to be quick on your feet, stand your ground. I’ve always been kind of unapologetic, but you grow into that or into your own skin. You have a choice: you can either grow into your skin or you can back out. It will test your strength and patience - it will definitely run the gamut so you can figure out a little bit more of what you’re made of.”

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

Erika Jayne interview to Billboard https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop/8301673/erika-jayne-pretty-mess-interview (2018)

Learning , Patience

“Political equality is not merely a folly – it is a chimera. It is idle to discuss whether it ought to exist; for, as a matter of fact, it never does. Whatever may be the written text of a Constitution, the multitude always will have leaders among them, and those leaders not selected by themselves. They may set up the pretence of political equality, if they will, and delude themselves with a belief of its existence. But the only consequences will be, that they will have bad leaders instead of good. Every community has natural leaders, to whom, if they are not misled by the insane passion for equality, they will instinctively defer. Always wealth, in some countries by birth, in all intellectual power and culture, mark out the men whom, in a healthy state of feeling, a community looks to undertake its government. They have the leisure for the task, and can give it the close attention and the preparatory study which it needs. Fortune enables them to do it for the most part gratuitously, so that the struggles of ambition are not defiled by the taint of sordid greed. They occupy a position of sufficient prominence among their neighbours to feel that their course is closely watched, and they belong to a class brought up apart from temptations to the meaner kinds of crime, and therefore it is no praise to them if, in such matters, their moral code stands high. But even if they be at bottom no better than others who have passed though greater vicissitudes of fortune, they have at least this inestimable advantage – that, when higher motives fail, their virtue has all the support which human respect can give. They are the aristocracy of a country in the original and best sense of the word. Whether a few of them are decorated by honorary titles or enjoy hereditary privileges, is a matter of secondary moment. The important point is, that the rulers of the country should be taken from among them, and that with them should be the political preponderance to which they have every right that superior fitness can confer. Unlimited power would be as ill-bestowed upon them as upon any other set of men. They must be checked by constitutional forms and watched by an active public opinion, lest their rightful pre-eminence should degenerate into the domination of a class. But woe to the community that deposes them altogether!”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Quarterly Review, 112, 1862, pp. 547-548
1860s

Men , Feeling , Communication , Motivation

“Death, he remembered somebody saying once, was a kind of victory. To have lived a long good life, a life of prodigious pleasure and minimal misery, and then to die; that was to have won. To attempt to hang on forever risked ending up in some as-yet-unglimpsed horror future. What if you lived forever and all that had gone before, however terrible things had sometimes appeared to be in the past, however badly people had behaved to each other throughout history, was nothing compared to what was yet to come? Suppose in the great book of days that told the story of everything, all the gone, done past was merely a bright, happy introduction compared to the main body of the work, an unending tale of unbearable pain scraped in blood on a parchment of living skin?
Better to die than risk that.
Live well and then die, so that the you that is you now can never be again, and only tricks can re-create something that might think it is you, but is not.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 8 “Killing Time” section V (pp. 259-260).

Life , Death , Pain , People

“Honestly, ever since I found this way of eating I have endless amounts of energy. I can go all day, and after it all I never find myself getting tired. No matter what kind of shows I have done, or workouts I do on top of it, I still have to force myself to sleep at night. … Right from the first time that I started to really eat vegan I could feel how much it was affecting me. John Salley … always told me how the players who ate that way outperformed the others. I started to see that results for myself as well.”

Travis Barker (1975) American drummer and music producer

"Blink 182's Travis Barker: Why I'm Vegan" https://web.archive.org/web/20170321220957/https://www.mensjournal.com/entertainment/articles/blink-182s-travis-barker-why-im-vegan-w473107, interview with Men's Journal (March 2017).

Way , Feeling , Sleep , Time

“"The Itch" was an accident. I responded to [co-writer] Billy Steinberg's lyric because I thought even though we set it in this particular story of a girl in a relationship who isn't getting what she needs, it's really a metaphor for desire. Everything just coincided without my realizing it. I was playing Lucy in Dracula 2000, and she's a character who is totally open, sexual and curious and definitely has "The Itch" on many different levels. And it was just coincidence that all this stuff kind of like came together for me. Because I get the itch all the time. And to me that really means something.”

Colleen Fitzpatrick (1972) American singer and actress

Attributed

Girl , Time

“We must have the courage of men and be strong. But the will to resistance of a volk/people is linked to the kind of leadership which he chooses for himself. If he has the will to resistance, he searches for strong leadership and not weak leadership. If you want to be victorious, you have to be prepared to follow leaders who are not prepared to cave in.”

Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966) Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 until his assassination in 1966

Verwoerd in 1963, as quoted and translated by J. J. Venter in H.F. Verwoerd: Foundational aspects of his thought, Koers 64(4) 1999: 415–442

Men , People , Search , Courage

“A certain kind of rich man afflicted with the symptoms of moral dandyism sooner or later comes to the conclusion that it isn't enough merely to make money. He feels obliged to hold views, to espouse causes and elect Presidents, to explain to a trembling world how and why the world went wrong.”

Lewis H. Lapham (1935) American journalist

Money And Class In America (1989)
Source: Wordsmith.org, 2016.01.08

Money , World , Feeling , Affliction

“That the root of love is a thirst for disaster is exhibited throughout its erratic course. At its most elementary love is driven by a longing to be cruelly unrequited; fostering every kind of repellent self-abasement, awkwardness, and idiocy. Sometimes this provokes the contempt that is so obviously appropriate, and the tormented one can then luxuriate in the utter burning loss that each gesture becomes. One wastes away; expending health and finance in orgies of narcosis, breaking down one’s labour-power to the point of destitution, pouring one’s every thought into an abyss of consuming indifference. At the end of such a trajectory lies the final breakage of health, ruinous poverty, madness, and suicide. A love that does not lead such a blasted career is always at some basic level disappointed (…)”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

Source: The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (1992), Chapter 11: "Inconclusive communication", p. 134 (original emphasis)

Love , Health , Disappointment , Suicide

“Towards the end of his life Neurath referred to the ‘mosaic of the sciences’. In the spirit of this formulation we can arrive at an understanding of his life’s work by means of a kind of collage, employing the regulative idea of the unity of science and society.”

Friedrich Stadler (1951) Austrian historian

Friedrich Stadler (1996). "Otto Neurath—encyclopedia and utopia." In: E. Nemeth & F. Stadler (Eds.). Encyclopedia and utopia: The life and work of Otto Neurath (1882–1945), Boston: Kluwer. Stadler, 1996, p. 3

Life , Idea , Understanding , Science

“There have indeed been civilizations upon your planet that understood as well as you, and without your kind of technology, the workings of the planets, the positioning of the stars -- people who even foresaw "later" global changes. They used a mental physics. There were men before you who brought back data quite as "scientific" and pertinent. There were those who understood the "origin" of your solar system far better than you. Some of these civilizations did not need spaceships. Instead, highly trained men combining the abilities of dream-art scientists and mental physicists cooperated at journeys not only through time but through space.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The “Unknown” Reality: Volume One, (1977), p. 196, Session 702

Men , People , Dreams , Art

“The idea of creativity is for me the problem of the future. Since the creative power is not a simple thing. It has a rich structure. It is divided into a lot of different principles and represented by figures, and these figures you can also write down in a kind of symbolic mantra. It is important to work on every point of creativity and see how the human being stands in the energy that comes out from the surrounding world.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Quote in a conversation between Lama Sogyal Rinpoché and Joseph Beuys, 1982; republished in: Joseph Beuys, Carin Kuoni. Joseph Beuys in America: Energy Plan for the Western Man. New York, 1993. p. 197
1980's

World , Idea , Problem , Future

“There is a kind, I might almost say, of artistic satisfaction, when we are able to survey the enormous wealth of Nature as a regularly ordered whole — a kosmos, an image of the logical thought of our own mind.”

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) physicist and physiologist

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

Nature , Wealth

“I am going to build the kind of nation that President Roosevelt hope for, President Truman worked for and President Kennedy died for.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

The Sunday Times (27 Dec 1964)
1960s

Hope

“Posthumous fame, book fame, nerd fame is not like the good kind of fame. It might last for centuries and let antique egg heads torture the young from the grave, but it just doesn't pay the bills.”

Laura Penny (1975) Canadian journalist

Source: More Money than Brains (2010), Chapter Seven, If You're So Smart, Why Ain't You Rich?, p. 206 (See also: Henry David Thoreau, Karl Marx, James Joyce, Herman Mellville...)

Books

“People know what's going on with other people. So, we are wise if we live our lives as if there are no secrets. If we have nothing to hide, then there's nothing for people to discover, and we're clean. Living as if there is no such thing as a secret will keep you from all kinds of pain and suffering, and it will open the door for you to receive God's love more fully. Live as if there is nothing to hide and you will maintain innocence.”

Ted Haggard (1956) American minister

[Haggard, Ted, Letters from Home, Regal Books, March 2003, p. 18, ISBN 0830730583]

Love , God , Pain , People

“The individual self is subject to beginningless nescience, which has brought about an accumulation of karma, of the nature of both merit and demerit. The flood of such karma causes his entry into four kinds of bodies — heavenly, human, animal and plant beginning with that of Brahma downwards. This ingression into bodies produces the delusion of identity with those respective bodies (and the consequent attachments and aversions). This delusion inevitably brings about all the fears inherent in the state of worldly existence. The entire body of Vedanta aims at the annihilation of these fears. To accomplish their annihilation they teach the following:
(1) The essential nature of the individual self as transcending the body.
(2) The attributes of the individual self.
(3) The essential nature of the Supreme that is the inmost controller of both the material universe and the individual selves.
(4) The attributes of the Supreme.
(5) The devout meditation upon the Supreme.
(6) The goal to which such meditation, leads.
The Vedanta aims at making known the goal attainable through such a life of meditation, the goal being the realization, of the real nature of the individual self and after and through that realization, the direct experience of Brahman, which is of the nature of bliss infinite and perfect.”

Ramanuja (1017–1137) Hindu philosopher, exegete of Vishishtadvaita Vedanta school

Source: Vedartha Sangraham, 11th century, p. 9-10.

Life , Fear , Nature , Universe

“For the roar of Godzilla, I took out the lowest string of a contrabass and then ran a glove that had resin on it across the string. The different kinds of roars were created by playing the recording of the sound that I'd made at different speeds. Toho's sound engineers previously had tried to use the roars of many different animals for Godzilla's roar. They went to a zoo and recorded the roars of many different mammals, but no matter how the sounds were manipulated, they seemed too much like the roars of each of the animals. The sound engineers also tried to alter the call of a night heron bird, but that also was not successful.”

Akira Ifukube (1914–2006) Japanese composer

As quoted by David Milner, "Akira Ifukube Interview I" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/ifukub.htm, Kaiju Conversations (December 1992)

Bird , Success , Animals , Speed

“I am embarrassingly incompetent at football or any kind of team sport. I’m so bad it would anger you.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Sport , Football , Anger

“(Hillary Clinton) does herself a disservice to even mention it, really. … When I hear a statement like that coming from a woman candidate with any kind of perceived whine about that excess criticism, or maybe a sharper microscope put on her, I think, "Man, that doesn't do us any good, women in politics, or women in general, trying to progress this country."”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

When asked about sexism directed at Clinton, March 2008 text http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0908/Sexism_complaints_no_longer_whining.html?showall video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9Y8FKAsxmk
2008

Women , Thinking , Country

“… I do hear sometimes from programmers who are kind of sad that they don't have the opportunity to write game engines from scratch like I did and have it matter or make an impact… here's where some perspective really helps - I can remember when I was a teenager, I thought I had missed the Golden Age of 8-bit. And all of these are amazing! So, yeah, the opportunities that I had aren't there for people today - but there are new and better ones. And personally, I'm more excited about these than anything that's come before. So, thank you very much for this honor, but I'm just getting started.”

John D. Carmack (1970) American computer programmer, engineer, and businessman

BAFTA Fellowship acceptance speech, "BAFTA Games Awards 2016" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyjJrF2gJ34

People , Age , Sadness , Game

“I saw the 'Popstars' programme and to me it looked more like 'Opportunity Knocks' than the kind of cutting-edge postmoderism that The Guardian would like to have us believe it was. I think what it's more about is the public and the music industry's bloodlust. It's just like someone itching to say 'Oh, confound it all, let's bring back hanging, that was good entertainment.”

Luke Haines (1967) English musician and songwriter

http://uk.news.launch.yahoo.com/dyna/article.html?a=dotmusic_news/20674.html&e=l_news_dm

Music , Thinking

“There must be some deep-rooted anti-social principle in every man's nature, so dearly does he love aught that separates him from his kind; or is it but one of the many shapes taken by that mental kaleidoscope, vanity, the varying and the glittering, the desire of distinction, sinking into that of notice?”

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

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Love , Nature

“I was always amazed when people were kind to us.”

Patrick Modiano (1945) French writer

Out Of The Dark (1995)

People

“If the Democratic policies had been pursued over the last two or three years…we would not have had the kind of job growth we've had.”

Dick Cheney (1941) American politician and businessman

Lester Holt interview, MSNBC, March 2, 2004 whitehouse.archives.gov http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/03/20040302-8.html
2000s, 2004

“White collar conservative flashin' down the street,
Pointing that plastic finger at me,
Hoping soon my kind will drop and die,
But I'm gonna wave my freak flag high.”

Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) American musician, singer and songwriter

If 6 Was 9
Song lyrics, Axis: Bold as Love (1967)

Hope

“People like to grab stuff, hold things in their hands and make things happen. Children’s museums are ideal for these kinds of things. There’s nothing more fun, to me.”

Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer

[NewsBank, Mark Bennett, Bill Nye still rocking science - TV personality making weekend appearance in town to help open Children's Museum, The Tribune-Star, Terre Haute, Indiana, September 24, 2010]

Children , People

“Like racism and sexism, statism is the kind of moral vice that tends to enter the soul through self-deception, semi-conscious osmosis, and a kind of Arendtian banality, rather than through a forthright embrace; it is a form of spiritual blindness that can, and does, infect even those who are largely sincere and well-meaning.”

Roderick Long (1964) American philosopher

"Equality: the Unknown Ideal" (2001)

Soul , Sincerity

“Intelligence is always connective. The biosphere works this way, through continuous contacts, catalysts, neurons which touch and activate other neurons. Today, this all has not only biological and chemical consistency, but a technological and teleinformatics one: it is not just a metaphor, or a "virtual" reality, but a real entity, a kind of emanation of the biosphere.”

Caterina Davinio (1957) Italian writer

Source: Virtual Mercury House. Planetary & Interplanetary Events, p. 138

Way , Intelligence , Reality

“Of course, nothing can be said to argue that people are morally obliged to accept this ethic, for to do so would be inconsistent with the ideas that inspired it in the first place. It is an ethic that will be adopted – if at all – by those who find a certain stark beauty in kindness without reward, joy without purpose, and progress without lasting achievement.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 308

People , Beauty , Idea , Joy

“First, there are good people out there; they just don’t make so much of a racket. Second, if you don’t make waves, then the bad guys don’t get washed overboard. And third, nobody bothers to bad-mouth you unless they’re afraid of you. So think of it as kind of a compliment.”

Barbara Boxer (1940) American politician

Barbara Boxer, in Blind Trust, a novel, Chronicle Books, San Francisco 2009, p. 30. http://books.google.com/books?id=BehMxQNuLAMC&pg=PA30&lpg=PA30

People , Guy , Thinking

“The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Love

Love , People , Learning

“Sometimes I think that TV evangelism is one of Satan’s greatest weapons. They put these guys on a pedestal and all of a sudden they get caught with a prostitute, and every Christian I know then is under the gun. So you don’t think that’s kind of set up?”

Alice Cooper (1948) American rock singer, songwriter and musician

CNSNews interview (2014)

Guy , Thinking

“To deal with the much-discussed but still poorly understood complex of economic affairs known as globalization, we must examine its several forms from a Renewed Darwinian Theory point of view. Some can have positive effects for all parties while others inherently benefit the rich and strong at the expense of the poor and weak. Furthermore, some can be beneficial but also lend themselves to abuse, especially by people without a conscience, and therefore call for some kind of world-level impulse/check/balance control.”

Paul R. Lawrence (1922–2011) American business theorist

Excerpt from: " The Drive to Acquire’s Impact on Globalization http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-drive-to-acquires-impact-on-globalization," at hbswk.hbs.edu, 23 august 2010.
Driven to Lead: Good, Bad, and Misguided Leadership, 2010

People , World , Strong

“The country does want rest, we all want rest. Our very civilization wants it — and we mean that it shall have it. It shall have rest — repose — refreshment of soul and re-invigoration of faculty. And that rest shall be of life and not of death. It shall not be a poison that pacifies restlessness in death, nor shall it be any kind of anodyne or patting or propping or bolstering — as if a man with a cancer in his breast would be well if he only said he was so and wore a clean shirt and kept his shoes tied. We want the rest of a real Union, not of a name, not of a great transparent sham, which good old gentlemen must coddle and pat and dandle, and declare wheedlingly is the dearest Union that ever was, SO it is; and naughty, ugly old fanatics shan't frighten the pretty precious — no, they sha'n't. Are we babies or men? This is not the Union our fathers framed — and when slavery says that it will tolerate a Union on condition that freedom holds its tongue and consents that the Constitution means first slavery at all costs and then liberty, if you can get it, it speaks plainly and manfully, and says what it means. There are not wanting men enough to fall on their knees and cry: 'Certainly, certainly, stay on those terms. Don't go out of the Union — please don't go out; we'll promise to take great care in future that you have everything you want. Hold our tongues? Certainly. These people who talk about liberty are only a few fanatics — they are tolerably educated, but most of 'em are crazy; we don't speak to them in the street; we don't ask them to dinner; really, they are of no account, and if you'll really consent to stay in the Union, we'll see if we can't turn Plymouth Rock into a lump of dough'. I don't believe the Southern gentlemen want to be fed on dough. I believe they see quite as clearly as we do that this is not the sentiment of the North, because they can read the election returns as well as we. The thoughtful men among them see and feel that there is a hearty abhorrence of slavery among us, and a hearty desire to prevent its increase and expansion, and a constantly deepening conviction that the two systems of society are incompatible. When they want to know the sentiment of the North, they do not open their ears to speeches, they open their eyes, and go and look in the ballot-box, and they see there a constantly growing resolution that the Union of the United States shall no longer be a pretty name for the extension of slavery and the subversion of the Constitution. Both parties stand front to front. Each claims that the other is aggressive, that its rights have been outraged, and that the Constitution is on its side. Who shall decide? Shall it be the Supreme Court? But that is only a co-ordinate branch of the government. Its right to decide is not mutually acknowledged. There is no universally recognized official expounder of the meaning of the Constitution. Such an instrument, written or unwritten, always means in a crisis what the people choose. The people of the United States will always interpret the Constitution for themselves, because that is the nature of popular governments, and because they have learned that judges are sometimes appointed to do partisan service.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Life , Death , Men , People

“The principal and primary function of banks is to serve as an intermediary in the making of payments. In doing so they transform inactive money capital into active capital, that is, into capital producing a profit; they collect all kinds of money revenues and place them at the disposal of the capitalist class.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Source: Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter Two

Money

“I decided to look around for something else to worship. Something I could really count on. And immediately, I thought of the sun. Happened like that. Overnight I became a sun-worshiper. Well, not overnight, you can't see the sun at night. But first thing the next morning, I became a sun-worshiper. Several reasons. First of all, I can see the sun, okay? Unlike some other gods I could mention, I can actually see the sun. I'm big on that. If I can see something, I don't know, it kind of helps the credibility along, you know?…”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

You Are All Diseased (1999)

God , Sun , Help , Night

“People that under Tyrant Scepters live,
Should each to other kind Assistance give.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

Fab. XLVIII: Of the Horse and laden Ass, Moral
The Fables of Aesop (2nd ed. 1668)

People

“A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers. There exists some book, pamphlet, article in an encyclopaedia, or possibly an old clipping from a newspaper that once set you thinking; there may be many; indeed you may be one of those rare beings with whom a few lines of print are food enough or thought because, as Lamartine says, their thoughts think themselves. The sometimes evocative for you may be poetry, history, philosophy, the sciences, or moral sciences, i. e. the progress of mankind. Some people who go to sleep over a volume will be interested by a review which they think more condensed or better within their reach. Read reviews if they help you to think, that is. to say if they leave in your mind images that will go on living when you have forgotten where they came from. Read a Shakespeare calendar at the rate of four lines a day, if Shakespeare quotations have on you the magic influence they have on some people; read algebra, read the lives of great inventors or of great businessmen, read that kind of books which you and nobody else know to be thought-productive for you.”

Ernest Dimnet (1866–1954) French writer

Source: The Art of Thinking (1928), p. 122

People , Books , Food , History

“I wanna give you wild love
The kind that never slows down
I wanna take you high up
Let our hearts be the only sound”

James Bay (1990) British singer-songwriter

Wild Love
Lyrics

Love , Heart

“The Bible declares blasphemy to be a very serious offense, because any society which begins by profaning God and His authority will soon profane all things. Nothing will be sacred. No authority will stand. The alternative to authority is total terror by the power of State. This is why, as I’ve pointed out more than once, when the authority of God is destroyed, and when the doctrine of Creation was replaced with the doctrine of Evolution, Marx and Engels congratulated one another in that now their position was established. The foundations of all godly authority were shattered when God was no longer viewed as the creator. His Law, His Word, His person became thereby irrelevant to creation. If the Lord God of scripture did not make the Heavens and the earth and all things therein to the last atom, His Word does not govern creation. If Creation is a product of Evolution, then no law outside of itself can govern it. So the alternative to the authority of God is total terror by the power of State. Where there is no authority, there is soon no justice, because men then no longer speak the same moral languages of law and authority. The respect for God’s authority establishes communication and healthy dissent, the kind of dissent which thrives in an anarchist situation is the dissent of increasing evil, violence and destruction. Godly dissent is constructive, not destructive, and its goal is justice and holiness.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Blasphemy (n. d.)

Men , God , Justice , Law

“If someone asks us which of these is more perfect, intellect or sense, the intelligible or the sensible, we shall promise to answer promptly, if he will first give us an answer to the following question. You know, my inquiring friend, that there is some power in you which has a notion of each of these things—a notion, I say, of intellect itself and of sense, of the intelligible and the sensible. This is evident, for the same power which compares these to each other must at that time in a certain manner see both. Tell me, then, whether a power of this kind belongs to intellect or sense? … Sense, as you yourself have shown, can perceive neither itself nor intellect and the objects of intellect; whereas intellect knows both. … Therefore, intellect is not only more perfect than sense but is also, after perfection itself, in the highest degree perfect.”

Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) Italian philosopher

Source: Five Questions Concerning the Mind (1495), pp. 203-204

Intelligence , Question , Sense , Time

“A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.”

Albert Camus (1913–1960) French author and journalist

"The Failing of Prophecy" in Existentialism Versus Marxism : Conflicting Views on Humanism (1966) by George Edward Novack

Nature

“Disco was brand new then and there were a few jocks that had monstrous sound systems but they wouldn't dare play this kind of music. They would never play a record where only two minutes of the song was all it was worth. They wouldn't buy those types of records. The type of mixing that was out then was blending from one record to the next or waiting for the record to go off and wait for the jock to put the needle back on.”

Grandmaster Flash (1958) musician

Quoted in Rap Attack 2 (1991) by David Toop, p. 62 ISBN 1852422432

Music , Waiting

“God looked through eternity past and He saw you and He chose to reach out and redeem you by His own grace. It’s hard to imagine that kind of love.”

James MacDonald (1960) American pastor

Source: Always True (Moody, 2011), p. 102

Love , God , Imagination , Past

“The FBI and the CIA, I really thought they had everything under control. I thought they knew what was going on with everybody. I thought they had a camera in the air in a satellite right now taking very accurate pictures of my prostate. I thought they had that kind of technology. I thought they knew everything about everybody, but it turns out they’re really no different than many other government bureaucracies, say, the Post Office or the Department of Motor Vehicles. Just, uh, you know, 50-60 year old men waiting for their pensions to kick in. Except for the three that let the attack [9/11] happen. They’ve been promoted.”

Marc Maron (1963) Comedian

Not Sold Out (2002)

Men , Waiting

“How shall we define a god? Expressed in psychological terms (which are primary-there is no getting behind them) a god is something that gives us the peculiar kind of feeling which Professor Otto has called "numinous". Numinous feelings are the original god-stuff from which the theory-making mind extracts the individualised gods of the pantheon.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

"Meditation on the Moon"
Music at Night and Other Essays (1931)

God , Feeling

“… there are sometimes [in mixed marriages] some genetic advantages, there are sometimes genetic disadvantages, but there are generally markedly social disadvantages which tend to warp the child’s entire life. And these social factors are extremely strong. So in countries where you do have this kind of group, they do represent a rather bitter and an unhappy group, a rebellious group.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, The Law of Divorce (n.d.)

Life , Marriage , Strong , Country

“The odd time something happens and you go into some kind of enchantment (on stage). But you have to work very hard to get that. Most of the time you're just playing and singing the songs, and there's no guarantee that you are going to get anywhere….”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

As quoted in Can You Feel the Silence? Van Morrison: A New Biography (2003) by Clinton Heylin

Singing , Time

“It has always been my ambition since childhood to live such a life that one day my fellow citizens would call me to membership in this popular branch of the greatest lawmaking body in the world. Out of their confidence and partiality they have done this. It is now my sole purpose here to help enact such wise and just laws that our common country will by virtue of these laws be a happier and a more prosperous country. I have always dreamed of a country which I believe this should be and will be, and that is one in which the citizenship is an educated and patriotic people, not swayed by passion and prejudice, and a country that shall know no East, no West, no North, no South, but inhabited by a people liberty loving, patriotic, happy, and prosperous, with its lawmakers having no other purpose than to write such just laws as shall in the years to come be of service to human kind yet unborn.”

Sam Rayburn (1882–1961) lawmaker from Bonham, Texas

Maiden speech in the House (May 6, 1913); reported in Congressional Record, vol. 50, p. 1249.

Love , Life , People , World

“I think why people will love these monster films is the they are an homage to the originals, which means you’re gonna get complex characters. And the thing that I think is interesting about monsters is that they are always exaggerations of human attributes or human fears. For example, Frankenstein was a result of the kind of industrial and scientific revolution—are we playing God? Should we be playing God? And with the Wolfman there’s that worry of what happens if I lose control? What happens if I hurt the things around me that I love? There’s very human questions and worries and fears and darkness and cravings.”

Chris Morgan (writer)

Writer Chris Morgan on ‘Fate of the Furious’, the Franchise’s Future, Universal’s Monster Universe & More http://collider.com/chris-morgan-fate-of-the-furious-interview/#the-mummy (April 28, 2017)

Love , God , People , Fear

“I'm tired of being considered some kind of criminal or dangerous throwback for no other reason than that I value, exercise, and defend my rights under the first ten Amendments to the United States Constitution.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"I'm Tired (With Apologies to Pearl Bailey and Madeleine Kahn) Presented to the second annual Liberty Round Table Conclave near Estes Park, Colorado, 2 July 1998 http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle1998/libe40-19980709-01.html.

Exercises

“This is the visual world, using the most advanced advertising techniques that are familiar to the crowds in their daily life.... What kind of representational art do you want to inflict on these men then, when they’re solicited everyday by the cinema, radio, huge photo montages and advertising hoardings? How can you compete with these enormous modern mechanisms, which give you art to the 1000th degree?”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote, 1950, in: Fernand Léger - The Later Years, catalogue ed. Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 58
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1950's

Life , Men , World , Art

“Liberty, equality — bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice; and justice to the feeble becomes necessarily protection or kindness.”

Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881) Swiss philosopher and poet

Undated entry of December 1863 or early 1864, as translated by Humphry Ward (1893), p. 215
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries

Justice

“Greed for results, for something dramatic, undermines practice completely. The effects of meditation are subtle and take time to mature. When we are constantly looking for some kind of sign or attainment from our practice, we are essentially looking outside ourselves.”

Ken McLeod (1948) Canadian lama

Six Ways Not to Approach Meditation http://www.unfetteredmind.org/meditation-six-realm/0. Unfettered Mind http://www.unfetteredmind.org. (Topic: Practice)

Time

Quotes about kindness page 56

Quotes about kindness
page 56