Quotes about kindness
page 65
Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 147
Fumito Ueda: Colossus in the Shadow https://medium.com/@SimonParkin/fumito-ueda-colossus-in-the-shadow-80e200a727dd (December 13, 2016)
as quoted in 'Tàpies: From Within', June/November 2013 - Presse Release text, Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC), p. 9
1971 - 1980, Memòria Personal', 1977
"Charley" Boarman's personal application sent along with his father's earlier letter
A Gentlemanly and Honorable Profession: The Creation of the U.S. Naval Officer Corps, 1794-1815 (1991)
XX. 248–249 (tr. R. Lattimore).
Iliad (c. 750 BC)
Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), Chapter 3
Serena Davies, "In the studio:Peter Blake, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/12/13/bastudio13.xml The Daily Telegraph, 2005-12-13
The "greatest gallery" refers to the National Gallery in London, where he was the associate artist in 1996.
Life
Astrology Karma & Transformation: The Inner Dimensions of the Birth Chart (1992, ISBN: 0-916360-54-7)
Memoirs of the Rev. Dr. Joseph Priestly (1809), p. 41
Source: "Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science," 1890, p. 466 : On the need of text-books on higher mathematics
Preface to King Arthur http://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/blackmore-king-arthur-I (1697)
?
The Journey Home: Autobiography of an American Swami (Tulsi Books, 2010)
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifi5KkXig3s "Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death"
Thompson (1991) Fast Foreword, from The American Replacement of Nature.
River out of Eden (1995)
Michael Halliday (1977). "Ideas about Language" Reprinted in Volume 3 of MAK Halliday's Collected Works. Edited by J.J. Webster. London: Continuum. p113.
1970s and later
From Trotsky to Tito (1951)
p, 125
Geometrical Lectures (1735)
The Peverel Papers
Source: The Paris Review interview (1981), p. 336
Source: 1950's, Interview by William Wright, Summer 1950, p. 144
Journal Intime (1882), Quotes used in the Introduction by Ward
Context: Ought I not to have been more careful to win the good opinion of others, more determined to conquer their hostility or indifference? It would have been a joy to me to be smiled upon, loved, encouraged, welcomed, and to obtain what I was so ready to give, kindness and goodwill. But to hunt down consideration and reputation — to force the esteem of others — seemed to me an effort unworthy of myself, almost a degradation. A struggle with unfavorable opinion has seemed to me beneath me, for all the while my heart has been full of sadness and disappointment, and I have known and felt that I have been systematically and deliberately isolated. Untimely despair and the deepest discouragement have been my constant portion. Incapable of taking any interest in my talents for their own sake, I let everything slip as soon as the hope of being loved for them and by them had forsaken me. A hermit against my will, I have not even found peace in solitude, because my inmost conscience has not been any better satisfied than my heart.
PENN Address (2004)
Context: It's not everywhere in fashion these days, Americanism. Not very big in Europe, truth be told. No less on Ivy League college campuses. But it all depends on your definition of Americanism.
Me, I'm in love with this country called America. I'm a huge fan of America, I'm one of those annoying fans, you know the ones that read the CD notes and follow you into bathrooms and ask you all kinds of annoying questions about why you didn't live up to that...
I'm that kind of fan. I read the Declaration of Independence and I've read the Constitution of the United States, and they are some liner notes, dude. As I said yesterday I made my pilgrimage to Independence Hall, and I love America because America is not just a country, it's an idea.
The History of Oracles, and the Cheats of the Pagan Priests (1688)
Context: It was to little purpose to excuse the matter, by saying, that the badness of the Verses was a kind of Testimony that they were made by a God, who nobly scorn'd to be tyed up to rules and to be confined to the Beauty of a Style. For this made no impression upon the Philosophers; who, to turn this answer into ridicule, compared it to the Story of a Painter, who being hired to draw the Picture of a Horse tumbling on his Back upon the ground, drew one running full speed: and when he was told, that this was not such a Picture as was bespoke, he turned it upside down, and then ask'd if the Horse did not tumble upon his back now. Thus these Philosophers jeered such Persons, who by a way of arguing that would serve both ways, could equally prove that the Verses were made by a God, whether they were good or bad.<!--pp. 219-220
Source: The Great Divorce (1944–1945), Ch. 9, p. 72; part of this has also been rendered in a variant form, and quoted as:
Context: 'But what of the poor Ghosts who never get into the omnibus at all?'
'Everyone who wishes it does. Never fear. There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.'
“When people keep telling you that you can't do a thing, you kind of like to try it.”
As quoted in "Nation: Madam Candidate" in TIME magazine (7 February 1964) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,870656-2,00.html
Misattributed
Context: I am running against no one. I'd like to be President. I think my experience and my record are greater than any other candidate or any other of the unannounced candidates. It's a real challenge, and that's one of the paramount things. When people keep telling you that you can't do a thing, you kind of like to try it.
Review of Magnolia in Chicago Sun-Times (7 January 2000) http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/magnolia-2000
Reviews, Four star reviews
Context: Magnolia is operatic in its ambition, a great, joyous leap into melodrama and coincidence, with ragged emotions, crimes and punishments, deathbed scenes, romantic dreams, generational turmoil and celestial intervention, all scored to insistent music. It is not a timid film. … The movie is an interlocking series of episodes that take place during one day in Los Angeles, sometimes even at the same moment. Its characters are linked by blood, coincidence and by the way their lives seem parallel. Themes emerge: the deaths of fathers, the resentments of children, the failure of early promise, the way all plans and ambitions can be undermined by sudden and astonishing events. … All of these threads converge, in one way or another, upon an event there is no way for the audience to anticipate. This event is not "cheating," as some critics have argued, because the prologue fully prepares the way for it, as do some subtle references to Exodus. It works like the hand of God, reminding us of the absurdity of daring to plan. And yet plan we must, because we are human, and because sometimes our plans work out.
Magnolia is the kind of film I instinctively respond to. Leave logic at the door. Do not expect subdued taste and restraint, but instead a kind of operatic ecstasy. At three hours it is even operatic in length, as its themes unfold, its characters strive against the dying of the light, and the great wheel of chance rolls on toward them.
Remarks regarding the shooting at practice for a congressional baseball game in Alexandria, Virginia (14 June 2017) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcH2i7um5sw
2010s, 2017
Context: I have just been informed that the alleged shooter at the Republican baseball practice is someone who apparently volunteered on my presidential campaign. I am sickened by this despicable act, and let me be as clear as I can be: Violence of any kind is unacceptable in our society and I condemn this action in the strongest possible terms. Real change can only come about through nonviolent action, and anything else runs against our most deeply held American values.
My hopes and prayers are that Representative Scalise, congressional staff and the Capitol Police Officers who were wounded make a quick and full recovery. I also want to thank the Capitol Police for their heroic actions to prevent further harm.
Source: Our Enemy, the State (1935), p. 35
Context: As far back as one can follow the run of civilization, it presents two fundamentally different types of political organization. This difference is not one of degree, but of kind. It does not do to take the one type as merely marking a lower order of civilization and the other a higher; they are commonly so taken, but erroneously. Still less does it do to classify both as species of the same genus — to classify both under the generic name of "government," though this also, until very lately, has been done, and has always led to confusion and misunderstanding.
A good understanding of this error and its effects is supplied by Thomas Paine. At the outset of his pamphlet called Common Sense, Paine draws a distinction between society and government. While society in any state is a blessing, he says, "government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one." In another place, he speaks of government as "a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world."
Interviewed on Les Hixon's show "In The Spirit" on WBAI New York (November 1972)
On Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
Bono: The Rolling Stone Interview (2017)
Context: These last two albums mix up the personal and the political so that you don't know which one you're talking to. That's a kind of magic trick, and realizing that of course all the problems that we find in the exterior world are just manifestations of what we, you know, what we hold inside of us, in our interior worlds. The biggest fucker, the biggest asshole, the biggest, the most sexist we can be, the most selfish, mean, cunning, all those characters you are going to see them in the mirror. And that is where the job of transformation has to start first. Is that not what experience tells us?
Source: A Letter to a Hindu (1908), III
Context: The recognition that love represents the highest morality was nowhere denied or contradicted, but this truth was so interwoven everywhere with all kinds of falsehoods which distorted it, that finally nothing of it remained but words. It was taught that this highest morality was only applicable to private life — for home use, as it were — but that in public life all forms of violence — such as imprisonment, executions, and wars — might be used for the protection of the majority against a minority of evildoers, though such means were diametrically opposed to any vestige of love.
"Susan Sontag Finds Romance," interview by Leslie Garis, The New York Times (2 August 1992)
Context: To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one's feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one's self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.
Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), p. 5
Context: Even those who have desired to work out a completely positive philosophy have been philosophers only to the extent that, at the same time, they have refused the right to install themselves in absolute knowledge. They taught not this knowledge, but its becoming in us, not the absolute but, at most, our absolute relation to it, as Kierkegaard said. What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement.
Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 8
Context: Do your neighbour good by all means in your power, moral as well as physical — by kindness, by patience, by unflinching resistance against every outward evil — by the silent preaching of your own contrary life. But if the only good you can do him is by talking at him, or about him — nay, even to him, if it be in a self-satisfied, super-virtuous style — such as I earnestly hope the present writer is not doing — you had much better leave him alone.
Source: Protection or Free Trade? (1886), Ch. 2
Context: The needs of labor require more than kind words, and are not to be satisfied by such soft phrases as we address to a horse when we want to catch him that we may put a bit in his mouth and a saddle on his back. Let me ask those who are disposed to regard protection as favorable to the aspirations of labor, to consider whether it can be true that what labor needs is to be protected?
To admit that labor needs protection is to acknowledge its inferiority; it is to acquiesce in an assumption that degrades the workman to the position of a dependent, and leads logically to the claim that the employee is bound to vote in the interest of the employer who provides him with work.
There is something in the very word "protection" that ought to make workingmen cautious of accepting anything presented to them under it. The protection of the masses has in all times been the pretense of tyranny — the plea of monarchy, of aristocracy, of special privilege of every kind. The slave owners justified slavery as protecting the slaves.
2010s, Why Penn Jillette is Terrified of a President Trump (2016)
Context: Someone who is paying attention can do the same thing that Trump is doing with hate, and do it with love, and become president … That’s kind of beautiful. There’s nothing more optimistic than that. … Donald Trump does, when it comes right down to it, fuck up everything … He fucks up his casinos. He fucks up his buildings.... Maybe he’ll fuck up his campaign before he fucks up the country.
The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)
Context: We are, the great spiritual writers insist, most fully ourselves when we give ourselves away, and it is egotism that holds us back from that transcendent experience that has been called God, Nirvana, Brahman, or the Tao.
What I now realize, from my study of the different religious traditions, is that a disciplined attempt to go beyond the ego brings about a state of ecstasy. Indeed, it is in itself ekstasis. Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, or self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.
1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)
Context: It would not be unjust to ask of every alien: What will you contribute to the common good, once you are admitted through the gates of liberty? Our history is full of answers of which we might be justly proud. But of late, the answers have not been so readily or so eloquently given. Our country must cease to be regarded as a dumping ground. Which does not mean that it must deny the value of rich accretions drawn from the right kind of immigration. Any such restriction, except as a necessary and momentary expediency, would assuredly paralyze our national vitality. But measured practically, it would be suicidal for us to let down the bars for the inflowing of cheap manhood, just as, commercially, it would be unsound for this country to allow her markets to be overflooded with cheap goods, the product of a cheap labor. There is no room either for the cheap man or the cheap goods.
What Is Life? (1944)
Context: In physics we have dealt hitherto only with periodic crystals. To a humble physicist's mind, these are very interesting and complicated objects; they constitute one of the most fascinating and complex material structures by which inanimate nature puzzles his wits. Yet, compared with the aperiodic crystal, they are rather plain and dull. The difference in structure is of the same kind as that between an ordinary wallpaper in which the same pattern is repeated again and again in regular periodicity and a masterpiece of embroidery, say a Raphael tapestry, which shows no dull repetition, but an elaborate, coherent, meaningful design traced by the great master.
Aphorism 129
Novum Organum (1620), Book I
Context: Further, it will not be amiss to distinguish the three kinds and, as it were, grades of ambition in mankind. The first is of those who desire to extend their own power in their native country, a vulgar and degenerate kind. The second is of those who labor to extend the power and dominion of their country among men. This certainly has more dignity, though not less covetousness. But if a man endeavor to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe, his ambition (if ambition it can be called) is without doubt both a more wholesome and a more noble thing than the other two. Now the empire of man over things depends wholly on the arts and sciences. For we cannot command nature except by obeying her.
Albert Einstein, in The World as I See It (1949) http://books.google.com/books?id=ZpdlRg2IJUcC&pg=PT32&dq=%22en+like+Democritus,+Francis+of+Assisi,+and+Spinoza+are+closely+akin+to+one+another%22&hl=en&ei=-J7LTqqNJaG90AHAir0E&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10&ved=0CGYQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=%22en%20like%20Democritus%2C%20Francis%20of%20Assisi%2C%20and%20Spinoza%20are%20closely%20akin%20to%20one%20another%22&f=false
Context: The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.
Lesson 34, Practice Random Acts of Kindness
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…and it’s all Small Stuff (1997)
Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 44
Context: In pondering why a battered woman does not leave, we must remember that gay men with a taste for violent “rough trade” have always paid for this kind of sex. Are women so perfect and angelic that we cannot imagine them having sadomasochistic impulses? When they are genuinely victimized, women deserve our pity. But victimization alone cannot explain everything in the tragicomedy of love.
“The new fire is laid, but the particular kind of match is missing.”
Vision of the Future Through Eyes of Science, News of the World, 31 October 1937
Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol IV, Churchill at Large, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 414.
The 1930s
Context: Three hundred years ago it would have seemed absurd to say that this black mineral, this sea-coal, which could be used as a substitute for wood to burn in one's grate, could be applied to revolutionize human affairs. Today we know that there is another source of energy a million times greater. We have not yet learned how to harness it or apply it, but it is there. Occasionally in complicated processes in the laboratory a scientist observes transmutations, re-arrangements in the core of the atom, which is known as the nucleus, which generate power at a rate hundreds of thousands of times greater than is produced when coal is burned and when, as the scientists put it, a carbon atom satisfied its affinity for an oxygen molecule. It can scarcely be doubted that a way to induce and control these effects can be found. The new fire is laid, but the particular kind of match is missing.
“Guitar.com: he tone of Euphoria Morning is kind of melancholy.”
On depression and suicide
Context: Guitar. com: he tone of Euphoria Morning is kind of melancholy.
Essay as "Mr. X" (1969)
Context: I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I've had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word "crazy" to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: "did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy."
Summation for the Prosecution, July 26, 1946
Quotes from the Nuremberg Trials (1945-1946)
Essay as "Mr. X" (1969)
Context: When I'm high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won't attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.
There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day.
“There are two kinds of power. "Power over" is very problematical. "Power within" is very exciting.”
Uncommon Knowledge (2005)
Context: There are two kinds of power. "Power over" is very problematical. "Power within" is very exciting. You can tell the difference by whether you are messing with other people or not.
As quoted in "Salman Rushdie talks with Terry Gilliam", in The Believer (March 2003) http://www.believermag.com/issues/200303/?read=interview_gilliam
Context: Well, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it — I do actually like it because it says certain things. It's about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we're just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television's saying, everything's saying "That's the world." And it's not the world. The world is a million possible things.
Stanza 7
Lady Clara Vere de Vere (1832)
“With this kind of baggage around your neck, you will choke your job-hunting opportunities”
Source: Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), p.25
Context: Employers are not going to hire a candidate who is stressed by cashflow and family problems. With this kind of baggage around your neck, you will choke your job-hunting opportunities.
Middlebury College Address (2004)
Context: Be brave. Be open-minded. Be kind. Be forgiving. Be generous. Be optimistic. Be grateful for the many unexpected lessons you will learn. Find the joy inside the hardship. It’s there. I assure you. And, too, be open to inspiration from unlikely sources.
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Poet
Context: is it not a right glorious thing, and set of things, this that Shakspeare has brought us? For myself, I feel that there is actually a kind of sacredness in the fact of such a man being sent into this Earth.
“I cannot think that choices of this kind are unimportant.”
Ce que je crois (1987) [What I Believe] translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley (1989), p. 140
Context: This is why there is such an incredible stress on information in our schools.
The important thing is to prepare young people to enter the world of information, able to handle computers, but knowing only the reasoning, the language, the combinations, and the connections between computers.
This movement is invading the whole intellectual domain and also that of conscience. … What is at issue here is evaluating the danger of what might happen to our humanity in the present half-century, and distinguishing between what we want to keep and what we are ready to lose, between what we can welcome as legitimate human development and what we should reject with our last ounce of strength as dehumanization. I cannot think that choices of this kind are unimportant.
American Communications Association v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382, 439 (1950)
Judicial opinions
Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter I, Sec. 9
Context: There is no kind of material, no body, and no thing that can be produced or conceived of, which is not made up of elementary particles; and nature does not admit of a truthful exploration in accordance with the doctrines of the physicists without an accurate demonstration of the primary causes of things, showing how and why they are as they are.
"A Defence of Baby-Worship"
The Defendant (1901)
Context: The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious reason, we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural. The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels; we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.
"Women and power in Cuba" (1985), p. 271
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)
Context: In the nuclear family the child is confronted by only two adults contrasted by sex. The tendency towards polarization is unavoidable. The duplication of effort in the nuclear family is directly connected to the family's role as the principal unit of consumption in consumer society. Each household is destined to acquire a complete set of all the consumer durables considered necessary for the good life and per caput consumption is therefore maintained at its highest level. In sex, as in consumption, the nuclear family emphasizes possession and exclusivity at the expense of the kinds of emotional relationships that work for co-operation and solidarity.
Pt. III, sec. 2, ch. 24 Lectures on the History of History Vol 1 p. 21 John Sibree translation (1857), 1914
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1
Context: Although Freedom is, primarily, an undeveloped idea, the means it uses are external and phenomenal; presenting themselves in History to our sensuous vision. The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole springs of action — the efficient agents in this scene of activity. Among these may, perhaps, be found aims of a liberal or universal kind — benevolence it may be, or noble patriotism; but such virtues and general views are but insignificant as compared with the World and its doings. We may perhaps see the Ideal of Reason actualized in those who adopt such aims, and within the sphere of their influence; but they bear only a trifling proportion to the mass of the human race; and the extent of that influence is limited accordingly. Passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are on the other hand, most effective springs of action. Their power lies in the fact that they respect none of the limitations which justice and morality would impose on them; and that these natural impulses have a more direct influence over man than the artificial and tedious discipline that tends to order and self-restraint, law and morality. When we look at this display of passions, and the consequences of their violence; the Unreason which is associated not, only with them, but even (rather we might say especially) with good designs and righteous aims; when we see the evil, the vice, the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the mind of man ever created, we can scarce avoid being filled with sorrow at this universal taint of corruption: and, since this decay is not the work of mere Nature, but of the Human Will — a moral embitterment — a revolt of the Good Spirit (if it have a place within us) may well be the result of our reflections.
Encounter the Enlightened (2001)
Context: The spiritual process is just to create the right kind of chemistry, where you are naturally peaceful, naturally joyous. When you are joyous by your very own nature, when you don't have to do anything to be happy, then the very dimension of your life, the very way you perceive and express yourself in the world will change. The very way you experience your life will change.
American Communications Association v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382, 438 (1950)
Judicial opinions
Civil Disobedience (1849)
Context: To speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? — in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.
The Greening of America turns 40 (2010)
Context: I see self-destruction now on a grand scale. That is, the unwillingness to pay for the things society needs. That's the most basic kind of self-destruction. That we're not prepared to pay for schools, we're not prepared to pay for highways. That is self-destruction. What are we doing to ourselves? It is nuts.
“Where there is no pitsand, we must use the kinds washed up by rivers or by the sea”
Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter II, Sec. 8
Context: Economy denotes the the proper management of materials and of site, as well as a thrifty balancing of cost and common sense in the construction of works.... the architect does not demand things which cannot be found or made ready without great expense. For example: it is not everywhere that there is plenty of pitsand, rubble, fir, clear fir, and marble... Where there is no pitsand, we must use the kinds washed up by rivers or by the sea... and other problems we must solve in similar ways.
On using the name "Elvis" as a stage name in The First 10 Years Podcast Series http://www.elviscostello.com/media.aspx - Episode Two
Context: I had a lot of problems with my name … my first name Declan is really not very well known outside of Ireland, MacManus is a name they could never spell... if you think about the names of '76, '77 … I got off kind of lightly — with a name you could live with, you know, in time. … I kind of liked the dare of it. Of course we weren't to know that within a month of my first album actually being issued Elvis Presley would die, and it would actually be a talking point. … Let me put it this way — people don't forget you with that name. It's sort of receded as — and this may sound terribly disrespectful and heretical — but as Elvis Presley has receded as a musical force, people make much less of a case about it. Elvis is a sort of cultural figure but there is no direct line between the music of Elvis Presley and the music of today. There is none whatsoever, he's no influence whatsoever, that I can detect, on music made today. Other than people who consciously retro in styling themselves after his ideas. There is no direct impact in the way that you can hear the influence of The Beatles or Stevie Wonder or numerous other people.
In a conversation https://intelligence.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/01-16-2014-conversation-on-existential-risk.pdf with Luke Muehlhauser and Eliezer Yudkowsky, January 2014; part of this is quoted by Carl Shulman in "Population ethics and inaccessible populations" https://reflectivedisequilibrium.blogspot.com/2014/08/population-ethics-and-inaccessible.html
Context: So one crazy analogy to how my morality might turn out to work, and the big point here is I don't know how my morality works, is we have a painting and the painting is very beautiful. There is some crap on the painting. Would I like the crap cleaned up? Yes, very much. That's like the suffering that's in the world today. Then there is making more of the painting, that's just a strange function. My utility with the size of the painting, it's just like a strange and complicated function. It may go up in any kind of reasonable term that I can actually foresee, but flatten out, at some point. So to see the world as like a painting and my utility of it is that, I think that is somewhat of an analogy to how my morality may work, that it's not like there is this linear multiplier and the multiplier is one thing or another thing. It's: starting to talk about billions of future generations is just like going so far outside of where my morality has ever been stress-tested. I don't how it would respond. I actually suspect that it would flatten out the same way as with the painting.
2010s, Why Penn Jillette is Terrified of a President Trump (2016)
Context: The problem is, I know Trump, so my optimism has been squashed like a baby bird … Everything bad I had to say about him, I said to his face. … I think he’s very good, very compelling on that show [Celebrity Apprentice] … I really like him because of his absence of filters. I really like the glimpse we get into the human heart we get when someone loses their filters … If he weren’t running for president, you’d be seeing essays from me about how much I learned from Donald Trump and how much I loved being on the show … I’m feeling so, so, so guilty, because I feel like, along with millions of other people, I played right into this. The cynicism of the Clintons, the careful, tightrope walk of all politicians, forced me, as an atheist, to get down on my knees and pray that someone would come along with some kind of authenticity … Well, someone called my bluff, goddamn it. … I’m a pure and utter peacenik. I want a president who sings the praises of people, sings the praises of peace and sings the praises of working together for a great country … Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t have laughed about waterboarding … If you told me right now I could have another eight years of Obama, I would not hesitate to grab at it. … He is unquestionably good and unquestionably smarter than I am, which is putting the bar pretty low. I want a president that is kinder, smarter and more measured than me.
"Something Good This Way Comes" - YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-m_SPZh2-wY
Seeing Things (2008)
No. 225.
The Tatler (1711–1714)
Context: At the same time that I think discretion the most useful talent a man can be master of, I look upon cunning to be the accomplishment of little, mean, ungenerous minds. Discretion points out the noblest ends to us, and pursues the most proper and laudable methods of attaining them: cunning has only private selfish aims, and sticks at nothing which may make them succeed. Discretion has large and extended views, and, like a well-formed eye, commands a whole horizon: cunning is a kind of short-sightedness, that discovers the minutest objects which are near at hand, but is not able to discern things at a distance. Discretion the more it is discovered, gives a greater authority to the person who possesses it: cunning, when it is once detected, loses its force, and makes a man incapable of bringing about even those events which he might have done had he passed only for a plain man. Discretion is the perfection of reason, and a guide to us in all the duties of life: cunning is a kind of instinct, that only looks out after our immediate interest and welfare. Discretion is only found in men of strong sense and good understandings, cunning is often to be met with in brutes themselves, and in persons who are but the fewest removes from them.
1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)
Context: Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means enterprise, it means the capacity for doing without. The free man is one who has won a small and precarious territory from the great mob of his inferiors, and is prepared and ready to defend it and make it support him. All around him are enemies, and where he stands there is no friend. He can hope for little help from other men of his own kind, for they have battles of their own to fight. He has made of himself a sort of god in his little world, and he must face the responsibilities of a god, and the dreadful loneliness.
Speech at the Nobel Banquet (1991)
Context: I certainly find being the recipient at this celebratory dinner more pleasurable and rewarding than chicken-pox, having now in my life experienced both. But the small girl was not entirely wrong. Writing is indeed, some kind of affliction in its demands as the most solitary and introspective of occupations.
Source: The Life and Adventures of John James Audubon, the Naturalist (1868), Ch. X, p. 139
Context: Captain Hall expressed some doubts as to my views respecting the affection and love of pigeons, as if I made it human, and raised the possessors quite above the brutes. I presume the love of the mothers for their young is much the same as the love of woman for her offspring. There is but one kind of love; God is love, and all his creatures derive theirs from his; only it is modified by the different degrees of intelligence in different beings and creatures.
"There are Two Seas" http://www.ciadvertising.org/student_account/spring_01/adv382j/suz/two_seas.htm, McCall's magazine (1928); reprinted in the Reader's Digest (1946)
Context: There are two seas in Palestine. One is fresh, and fish are in it. Splashes of green adorn its banks. Trees spread their branches over it and stretch out their thirsty roots to sip of its healing waters... The Sea of Galilee receives but does not keep the Jordan. For every drop that flows into it another drop flows out. The giving and receiving go on in equal measure. The other sea is shrewder, hoarding its income jealously. It will not be tempted into any generous impulse. Every drop it gets, it keeps. The Sea of Galilee gives and lives. The other sea gives nothing. It is named The Dead. There are two kinds of people in the world. There are two seas in Palestine.
Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 24
Context: All, we see, is done by certain laws of matter, so that it becomes a question of extreme interest, what are such laws? All that can yet be said, in answer, is, that we see certain natural events proceeding in an invariable order under certain conditions, and thence infer the existence of some fundamental arrangement which, for the bringing about of these events, has a force and certainty of action similar to, but more precise and unerring than those arrangements which human society makes for its own benefit, and calls laws. It is remarkable of physical laws, that we see them operating on every kind of scale as to magnitude, with the same regularity and perseverance.
“It's all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while.”
The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
Context: For Children: You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It's quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a chicken. Like most things, of course, it isn't quite that simple. The fried egg isn't properly a fried egg until it's been put in a frying pan and fried. This is something you wouldn't do to a Friday, of course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, if you like, or on a cooker. It's all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while.
Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter VII, Sec. 1
Context: The stone in quarries is found to be of different and unlike qualities. In some it is soft... in others it is medium... in still others it is hard as in lava quarries. There are also numerous other kinds: for instance, in Campania, red and black tufas; in Umbria, Picenum, and Venetia, white tufa which can be cut with a toothed saw like wood.
"Handy tips on how to behave at the death of the world" in Whole Earth Review (Spring 1995), p. 88 http://archive.is/20120715140307/findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1510/is_n85/ai_16816244
Context: Eschew blandness. Eschew causing others pain. We are all the target so wear bright colors and dance with those you love. Falling in love has always been a bit too much to apply to one person. Falling in love is appropriate for now, to love all these things which are about to leave. The rocks are watching, and the squirrels and the stars and the mlklk tired people in the street. If you love them, let them know, with grace and non-invasive extravagance. Care about the beings you care about in gorgeous and surprising ways. Color outside the lines. Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty. This is your last chance.
Source: On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (1960), Ch. 2 : The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism<!-- , p. 35 -->
Context: Here I need not go into the paradoxes and mysteries of Kabbalistic theology concerned with the seflroth and their nature. But one important point must be made. The process which the Kabbalists described as the emanation of divine energy and divine light was also characterized as the unfolding of the divine language. This gives rise to a deep-seated parallelism between the two most important kinds of symbolism used by the Kabbalists to communicate their ideas. They speak of attributes and of spheres of light; but in the same context they speak also of divine names and the letters of which they are composed. From the very beginnings of Kabbalistic doctrine these two manners of speaking appear side by side. The secret world of the godhead is a world of language, a world of divine names that unfold in accordance with a law of their own. The elements of the divine language appear as the letters of the Holy Scriptures. Letters and names are not only conventional means of communication. They are far more. Each one of them represents a concentration of energy and expresses a wealth of meaning which cannot be translated, or not fully at least, into human language. There is, of course, an obvious discrepancy between the two symbolisms. When the Kabbalists speak of divine attributes and sefiroth, they are describing the hidden world under ten aspects; when, on the other hand, they speak of divine names and letters, they necessarily operate' with the twenty-two consonants of the Hebrew alphabet, in which the Torah is written, or as they would have said, in which its secret essence was made communicable.
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
Context: The production of motion, molar or molecular, is governed by physical laws, which it is the business of the philosopher to find out and correlate. The law of the conservation of energy overrides all laws, and it is a preeminent canon of scientific belief that for every act done a corresponding expenditure of energy must be transformed.
No work can be effected without using up a corresponding value in energy of another kind. But to us the other side of the problem is even of more importance. Granted the existence of a certain kind of molecular motion, what is it that determines its direction along one path rather than another?
“Even now I do not consider myself to be some kind of great, sexy beauty.”
I don’t mind the way I’m ageing. No reason to panic just yet. I think I look my age, and that’s fine. The lord God almighty has done me proud with my features which I'm proud of and have no desire to alter them. I say " let nature take its course ".
Marie Clare, Kate Winslet interview by Harvey Marcus on Thursday 30 April 2009 http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/celebrity/interviews/322173/kate-winslet-interview.html
"One culture and the new sensibility", p. 296
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
Context: Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have been radically extended.... Painters no longer feel themselves confined to canvas and paint, but employ hair, photographs, wax, sand, bicycle tires, their own toothbrushes and socks. Musicians have reached beyond the sounds of the traditional instruments to use tampered instruments and (usually on tape) synthetic sounds and industrial noises.
Lecture in Los Altos, CA (1 September 1967)
Context: So I say, ‘Oh, I am sorry but soon you will see the bright sunrise every morning and beautiful sunset in the evening, every evening, but right now perhaps you…under your situation it may be impossible to see the beautiful sunset or bright sunrise, or beautiful flower in your garden, and it is impossible to take care of your garden, but soon you will see the beauty of the flowers and you will cut some flowers for your room.’ When you start to do this kind of thing you are alright. Don’t worry a bit. It means when you become you, yourself, and when you see things as they are, and when you become at one with your surrounding, in its true sense, there is true self.
“I feel we are in that kind of phase.”
Beautiful Minds (2010)
Context: I have this sense that we need to picture cosmology, the evolution of the universe in a whole new way. I'm probably not one that can achieve this new thinking but somebody will and I feel at the moment we're kind of waiting for it to happen. A bit like a pregnant pause. A bit like what happens when there's a snowfall, first snowfall of the year, when everything goes quiet and kind of waits. I feel we are in that kind of phase.
“Critics, you have been so kind,
I would not have you think me blind”
Apologia
The Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems (1907), Forest of Wild Thyme
Context: Critics, you have been so kind,
I would not have you think me blind
To all the wisdom that you preach;
Yet before I strictlier run
In straiter lines of chiselled speech,
Give me one more hour, just one
Hour to hunt the fairy gleam
That flutters through this childish dream.
1940s, Third inaugural address (1941)