Quotes about kindness
page 72

“Kurt Student was a German professional soldier, typical of the best of his kind, totally devoted to his calling and to his country, though by no means in full sympathy with Nazi leadership.”

Kurt Student (1890–1978) German Luftwaffe general during World War II

Correlli Barnett.

Country

“If Rosenberg was to decide … we would only have rite, thing, myth and such kind of swindle.”

Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946) German architect and politician

Hermann Göring ("… [wenn Rosenberg das Sagen hätte] … gäbe es nur noch Kult, Thing, Mythos und ähnlichen Schwindel"; source: Goebbels, Ralf Georg Reuth; Piper; ISBN 3-492-03183-8, p. 304).

“The grimaces on these mocking distorted faces signalize disobedience, opposition and turmoil, as well as a kind of childlike autonomy in the depraved world of adults. The grin found on the faces of ill-treated children, a grotesque picture puzzle which includes both the martyrdom and subversion of mankind is entirely Helnwein’s invention. It is manifested in the metamorphic images of injured bodies. It is an obsessive pattern which is repeated in Helnwein’s pictoral representation of the world and in his staged artistic actions, serving as a metaphor for the invulnerability and invincibility deeply seated in man.”

Gottfried Helnwein (1948) Austrian photographer and painter

Peter Gorsen, about the depiction of wounded children in Helnwein's work, Albertina Museum catalogue, Gottfried Helnwein solo-exhibition, 1985, www.gottfried-helnwein-child.com http:////www.gottfried-helnwein-child.com/index.html

Children, World

“Today, we are all saddened by the loss of Brooke Astor, a quintessential New Yorker and one of the great philanthropists of our time. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers were the beneficiaries of Mrs Astor’s good will and kind nature, many unaware of the origins of the donations. Her contributions reached a wide variety of causes; The New York Public Library, and the entire city, would not be what they are today without her gracious support.”

Brooke Astor (1902–2007) Socialite, writer, Philanthropist

Michael Bloomberg, New York City mayor Brooke Astor, First Lady of New York, dies at 105 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2257401.ece Times Online (August 14, 2007)

Support, Nature, Loss, Time

“I get satisfaction of three kinds. One is creating something, one is being paid for it and one is the feeling that I haven’t just been sitting on my ass all afternoon.”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) American conservative author and commentator

As quoted in The Book of Positive Quotations (2007) by John Cook.

Feeling

“Aren’t we all, in one way or another, trying to find a solution to the problem of reality? If I get this job, this girl, this guy, these shoes. If I pass this exam, eat this pizza, drink this booze, go on this holiday. Learn karate, learn yoga. If West Ham stay up, if my dick stays up, if I get more likes on Facebook, more fancy cookbooks, a better kitchen, cure this itchin’, if she stops bitching. Isn’t there always some kind of condition to contentment? Isn’t it always placed in the future, wrapped up in some object, either physical or ideological? I know for me it is, and as an addict that always leads me to excess and then to trouble. Do you feel like that? Are you looking for something? It’s not just me, is it? Do you sometimes feel afraid, self-conscious, lonely, not good enough? I mean, you’re reading this, so you must want to change something. Don’t leave me out on a limb, all vulnerable and exposed. Are you reading this on a yacht, through your Ray-Bans with, I dunno, a pair of glistening Russian sisters and a gob oozing with lobster juice as the sun shines down on you and the sisters smile up at you? And even if you are, especially if you are, is it working, behind the salty tang and priapic pang, is it real, is it real, is it like God is holding your hand?”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

God, Smile, Shoe, Way

“A case could be made for Mr. Ellis as a covert moralist and closet sentimentalist, the best kind, the kind who leaves you space in which to respond as your predispositions nudge you, whether as a commissar or hand-wringer or, like me, as an admirer of his intelligence and craft.”

Bret Easton Ellis (1964) American novelist

George Stade, The New York Times Book Review.

Intelligence

“Ernest Bevin had many of the strongest characteristics of the English race. His manliness, his common sense, his rough simplicity, sturdiness and kind heart, easy geniality and generosity, all are qualities which we who live in the southern part of this famous island regard with admiration.”

Ernest Bevin (1881–1951) British labour leader, politician, and statesman

"Sir W. Churchill on 'a great Englishman'", The Times, 5 November 1953, p. 5
Winston Churchill's remarks on unveiling a bust of Bevin in the Foreign Office.

Sense, Heart, Parting

“Heath has touched so many people on so many different levels during his short life but few had the pleasure of truly knowing him. He was a down to earth, generous, kind-hearted, life-loving, unselfish individual who was extremely inspirational to many.”

Heath Ledger (1979–2008) Australian actor

Kim Ledger, father of Heath Ledger, in an on-camera public statement after learning of his son's death, in Perth, on January 23, BBC News, Entertainment|publisher=bbc.co.uk (BBC)|date=January 23, 2008|accessdate=2008-08-23}}
[Kareen Wynter, Actor Heath Ledger Dead at 28, http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/22/heath.ledger.dead/index.html#cnnSTCText, CNN, Web, cnn.com (Time Warner), January 22, 2008, Entertainment, 2008-08-22]

Love, Life, People, Pleasure

“If we make any kind of decent, useful life for ourselves we have less need to run from it to those diminishing pleasures of the movies. When we go to the movies we want something good, something sustained, we don’t want to settle for just a bit of something, because we have other things to do. If life at home is more interesting, why go to the movies? And the theatres frequented by true moviegoers — those perennial displaced persons in each city, the loners and the losers — depress us. Listening to them — and they are often more audible than the sound track — as they cheer the cons and jeer the cops, we may still share their disaffection, but it’s not enough to keep us interested in cops and robbers. A little nose-thumbing isn’t enough. If we’ve grown up at the movies we know that good work is continuous not with the academic, respectable tradition but with the glimpses of something good in trash, but we want the subversive gesture carried to the domain of discovery. Trash has given us an appetite for art.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

Life, Pleasure, Making love, Art

“It was the kind of collaboration I dream about actually. His voice sounded, you know, like an angel. Like a gift from God.”

Jeff Buckley (1966–1997) American singer, guitarist and songwriter

Gary Lucas – Guitarist from NBC Edgewise Tribute on MSNBC from 1997.

God, Dreams, Angels

“Anti-feminism is also operating whenever any political group is ready to sacrifice one group of women, one faction, some women, some kinds of women, to any element of sex-class oppression: to pornography, to rape, to battery, to economic exploitation, to reproductive exploitation, to prostitution. There are women all along the male-defined political spectrum, including both extreme ends of it, ready to sacrifice some women, usually not themselves, to the brothels or the farms. The sacrifice is profoundly anti-feminist; it is also profoundly immoral…”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

"Anti-feminism," Right Wing Women (1983), pp. 230-231.

Women, Sex

“I spend eight to nine months working abroad and cram in a holiday when I have the odd week off. This year, three of those months were spent in America playing gigs with my band, so we got to visit all kinds of places from Arizona to New York. After a few weeks, I really began to miss family and friends not to mention baked beans!”

Katie Melua (1984) British singer-songwriter

[York Membery, Travelling Life - Katie Melua, http://ultratravel.telegraph.co.uk/site/pages/ultra_experts/travelling_life_-_katie_melua_page1.php, The Telegraph, 2006-09-18]

Family, Holiday

“I say, life and figure are distinct attributes of one substance, and as one and the same body may be transmuted into all kinds of figures; and as the perfecter figure comprehends that which is more imperfect; so one and the same body may be transmuted from one degree of life to another more perfect, which always comprehends in it the inferior. We have an example of figure in a triangular prism, which is the first figure of all right lined solid triangular prism, which is the first figure of all right lined solid bodies, where into a body is convertible; and from this into a cube, which is a perfecter figure, and comprehends in it a prism; from a cube it may be turned into a more perfect figure, which comes nearer to a globe, and from this into another, which is yet nearer; and so it ascends from one figure, more imperfect to another more perfect, ad infinitum; for here are no bounds; nor can it be said, this body cannot be changed into a perfecter figure: But the meaning is that that body consists of plane right lines; and this is always chageablee into a perfecter figure, and yet can never reach to the perfection of a globe, although it always approaches nearer unto it; the case is the same in diverse degrees of life, which have indeed a beginning, but no end; so that the creature is always capable of a farther and perfecter degree of life, ad infinitum, and yet can never attain to be equal with God; for he is still infinitely more perfect than a creature, in its highest elevation or perfection, even as a globe is the most perfect of all other figures, unto which none can approach.”

Anne Conway (1631–1679) British philosopher

The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (1690)

Life, God, Change, Perfection

“When the history of his time is written he will stand forth as the great figure in the years which have been so crowded with events. He gained the entire confidence of the nation by his patriotism, wisdom and ability, just as he won its love by his kindness and goodness to all men.”

William McKinley (1843–1901) American politician, 25th president of the United States (in office from 1897 to 1901)

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. The Authentic Life of President McKinley, page 413.

Love, Wisdom, Men, Making love

“The confirmation of Sam Alito as U. S. Attorney for New Jersey is testimony to the commitment he has shown and the success of his efforts as a law enforcement official. I am confident that he will continue to do all he can to uphold the laws of this nation with the kind of determination and vigor that has been his trademark in the past.”

Samuel Alito (1950) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Former Senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ), Congressional Record, [1987-12-08], p. S17427.

Law, Confidence, Effort, Success

“The second class of evils comprises such evils as people cause to each other, when, e. g., some of them use their strength against others. These evils are more numerous than those of the first kind… they likewise originate in ourselves, though the sufferer himself cannot avert them.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.12

People, Suffering, Evil

“Because the god who created this universe, if it was created by a god, is quite clearly a maniac, an utter maniac, totally selfish. We have to spend our life on our knees thanking him? What kind of god would do that?”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

2010s, On what he would say to God were he to meet him, February 2015

Life, God, Universe, Selfishness

“That was funny, yet sad. Kind of like getting tit-fucked by a clown.”

Dave Attell (1965) comedian

"Captain Miserable"

Sadness

“There are two kinds of morality—the kind of morality that one imposes on oneself and the kind of morality that one imposes on others.”

Theodore Kaczynski (1942) American domestic terrorist, mathematician and anarchist

For the first kind of morality, that is, for self-restraint, I have the greatest respect. The second kind of morality I do not respect except when it constitutes self-defense. (For example, when women say that rape and wife-beating are immoral, that is self-defense.) I have noticed that the people who try hardest to impose moral code on others (not in self-defense) are often the least careful to abide by that moral code themselves.
"Morality and Revolution"
The Road to Revolution (2008)

“Is this some kind of fucking radio promotion? What the fuck is this? Let me just say that if whatever said radio station tries to blacklist us for my comments about their balloons, I would like them to know I want a written apology tomorrow for interrupting my song.”

Jack White (1975) American musician and record producer

AT The Greek Theatre in Berkeley, California after some balloons bearing a radio station's logo floated on stage. Chonin, Neva (2005). "White Stripes huge but not bloated" http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/08/15/DDGTAE7B261.DTL&type=music SFGate.com (accessed June 19, 2007) 2010

“Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced.”

Greta Garbo (1905–1990) Swedish-American actress

Roland Barthes, "The Face of Garbo," Mythologies (1957), trans. Annette Lavers [Farrar, Straus, 1986, ISBN 0-374-52150-6], p. 56

“Bryson. You’ve got three kinds of chromosomes: X, Y and fuck-head.”

Bill Bryson book Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe

Katz
Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe (1991)

“Pournelle, who if I recall correctly is a veteran of the Korean conflict, does mention logistical details more often than I expect in MilSF. Not the fun kind of logistics, involving the production of a million zillion Squamoid Hypermissiles, but the mundane sort, like who gets to dig the latrines. Latrines are not romantic, but nobody wants a battle called off because the men all have dysentery and are too busy shitting blood to fight.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

review of The Mercenary by Jerry Pournelle http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/the-hunter-and-the-bear, 2016 2010s

Men, Business, Fight

“Other countries may boast of this and that, but nobody can touch the United States for poisonous snakes. We have about twenty species, most of them deadly, and Europe has only five or six, none of them much good. We have fifteen kinds of Rattlesnakes alone and nobody else has even one.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

Footnote: There is a species in Central and South America, but it probably came from here.
The Rattlesnake
How to Become Extinct (1941)

Country

“Very old money was behind the Crow’s Nest. And enough of it that its Owners didn’t mind losing some every month to keep the place going. It was a kind of eleemosynary institution, created to serve not culture and not dukh, but a thing called the Purpose.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

And if Ty kept working there for another few decades, perhaps one of the Owners would sit him down one day in the Bolt Hole and deign to tell him what exactly the Purpose was.
"Five Thousand Years Later"
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

Money

“Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso / Bajo la especie de una biblioteca. I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.”

Jorge Luis Borges Dreamtigers

"Poem of the Gifts" ["Poema de los Dones"]
Dreamtigers (1960)

Imagination

“All I ask for is a chance to have the same kind of forum, the right to speak, the same credibility as thee wrong-ass ignant fools. But the producers of these types of shows think tht I will only talk about tai chi, where to get the best sushi on the West Side, how to feng-shui your office…the fact that the media at large look at my race before they hear my voice = fucked up shit.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

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

Fools, Thinking, Chance

“Send me no more reviews of any kind. — I will read no more of evil or good in that line.”

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

Walter Scott has not read a review of himself for thirteen years.
Letter to his publisher, John Murray (3 November 1821).

Evil, Reading

“I soon perceived that she possessed in combination, the qualities which in all other persons whom I had known I had been only too happy to find singly. In her, complete emancipation from every kind of superstition (including that which attributes a pretended perfection to the order of nature and the universe), and an earnest protest against many things which are still part of the established constitution of society, resulted not from the hard intellect, but from strength of noble and elevated feeling, and co-existed with a highly reverential nature.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/186/mode/1up p. 186

Happiness, Feeling, Nature, Universe

“I never really studied business in school. I kind of wish I had, but how boring is that?”

Mick Jagger (1943) British rock musician, member of The Rolling Stones

School, Business, Study

“Zealousness to learn from life is seldom found, but all the more frequently a desire, inclination, and reciprocal haste to be deceived by life. Undaunted, people do not seem to have a Socratic fear of being deceived, for the voice of God is always a whisper, while the demand of the age is a thousand-tongued rumor, not an all-powerful call that creates great men but a stirring in the offal that creates confused pates, an abracadabra that produces after its kind as is the case with all production. Even less do people seem to have above all a Socratic fear of being deceived by themselves, do not seem to be the least aware that if the self-deceived are the most miserable of all, then among these, again, the most miserable are those who are presumptuously deceived by themselves in contrast to those who are piously deceived.”

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

Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review. By Soren Kierkegaard, 1846 edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong 1978 Princeton University Press P. 10
1840s, Two Ages: A Literary Review (1846)

Life, Men, God, People

“Your task is the following: After any kind of success, analyze the components. See the element of luck that is inevitably there, as well as the role that other people, including mentors, played in your good fortune. This will neutralize the tendency to inflate your powers. Remind yourself that with success comes complacency, as attention becomes more important than the work and old strategies are repeated.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 11 : Know Your Limits
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

Bad luck, People, Success

“One of the most painful things about this path is to recognize things about yourself that aren’t “as they should be”. And the reason you think things should be a certain way is because you’ve been taught that they should. Every spiritual tradition, just like greater society, comes complete with all kinds of values, expectations and beliefs. These all add up to one thing: A SHOULD STANDARD. This is how you should be. This is how you should feel. This is what you should think. This is the reality you should perceive. And the reality is, you will always fall short of that should standard.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

Pain, Way, Feeling, Thinking

“To be manipulative is to speak and act in a way that guarantees that we get the response we want to get from other people. So you see, manipulation is how most of us try to get love. Manipulation is how most of us try to get safety… because we do not trust the world to be kind to us. Everyone is manipulative, we are simply more or less aware of that aspect within ourselves.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

Love, People, World, Making love

“You deserve a relationship where your feelings matter. And the fastest way to get to that kind of relationship is to decide that your emotions matter to YOU. If you stop abandoning yourself when you are experiencing negative emotions, you will come to trust that you will always be there for yourself. You will feel a deep sense of inner peace arise within you.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

book The Anatomy of Loneliness

Peace, Way, Feeling, Sense

“Your emotions are a translation, informing you at all moments of the day of where you stand energetically in relation to your higher self. When you are preventing the focused energy of your higher self, you quickly develop ailments of all kinds. When you create a lack of that energy flowing through you, you make yourself a match to illness, to accidents, and to absence instead of abundance and health.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

Health, Making love, Relation ships, Self-confidence

“To Sorrow
I bade good-morrow,
And thought to leave her far away behind;
But cheerly, cheerly,
She loves me dearly;
She is so constant to me, and so kind:
I would deceive her
And so leave her,
But ah! she is so constant and so kind.”

John Keats Endymion

Bk. IV, l. 173
Endymion (1818)

Love, Making love

“A grand gesture. But what does it period?
What does it osse? We were always adroiter
with objects than lives, and more facile
at courage than kindness: from the moment”

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet

Moon Landing (1969)

Courage

“he regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up factitious excellencies, -- belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human kind, -- and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues: but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)

https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/40/mode/1up p. 40

Hate, Truth, Making love, Feeling

“the correct statement would be, not that I disliked poetry, but that I was theoretically indifferent to it. I disliked any sentiments in poetry which I should have disliked in prose; and that included a great deal. And I was wholly blind to its place in human culture, as a means of educating the feelings. But I was always personally very susceptible to some kinds of it.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

'Long before I had enlarged in any considerable degree, the basis of my intellectual creed, I had obtained in the natural course of my mental progress, poetic culture of the most valuable kind, by means of reverential admiration for the lives and characters of heroic persons; especially the heroes of philosophy.'
Autobiography (1873)

Education, Feeling, Personality, Indifference

“Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: 'Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?' And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: 'What kind of evidence is there for that?”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.
"Good and Bad Reasons for Believing" [open letter to his daughter]
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

People, Thinking, Time

“Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, "I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection". I have dubbed this kind of fallacy "the Argument from Personal Incredulity."”

Richard Dawkins book River Out of Eden

Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience.
River out of Eden (1995)

Personality

“I agree that it's very difficult to come to an absolute definition of what's moral and what is not. We are on our own, without a god, and we have to get together, sit down together and decide what kind of society do we want to live in. Do we want to live in a society where people steal, where people kill, where people don't pull their weight paying their taxes, doing that kind of thing? Do we want to live in a kind of society where everybody is out for themselves in a dog-eat-dog world? And we decide in conclave together that that's not the kind of world in which we want to live. It's difficult. There is no absolute reason why we should believe that that's true - it's a moral decision which we take as individuals - and we take it collectively as a collection of individuals. If you want to get that sort of value system from religion I want you to ask yourself - whereabouts in religion do you get it? Which religion do you get it from? They're all different. If you get it from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition then I beg you - don't get it from your holy book! Because the morality you will get from reading your holy book is hideous. Don't get it from your holy book. Don't get it from sucking up to your god. Don't get it from saying “oh, I'm terrified of going to hell so I'd better be good””

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

that's a very ignoble reason to be good. Instead - be good for good reasons. Be good for the reason that's you've decided together with other people the society we want to live in: a decent humane society. Not one based on absolutism, not one based on holy books and not one based on sucking up to.. looking over your shoulder to the divine spy camera in the sky. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roFdPHdhgKQ&t=59m29s Richard Dawkins vs. Jonathan Sacks - BBC's RE:Think Festival (2012)

God, People, Books, World

“I love the word "faggot," because it describes my kind of guy! You see, I am a fag hag. Fag hags are the backbone of the gay community. Without us, you're nothing!”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

We have been there all through history guiding your sorry ass through the underground railroad! We went to the prom with you!
From Her Tours and CDs, I'm The One That I Want Tour

Love, Making love, Guy, Communication

“The experience of Negroes in America has been different in kind, not just in degree, from that of other ethnic groups. It is not merely the history of slavery alone, but also that a whole people were marked as inferior by the law. And that mark has endured.”

Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993) Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court

Regents of University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 400-401 (1978) (Marshall, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part).

People, Law, History

“Replicators are no longer peppered freely through the sea; they are packaged in huge colonies—individual bodies. And phenotypic consequences, instead of being evenly distributed throughout the world, have in many cases congealed into those same bodies. But the individual body, so familiar to us on our planet, did not have to exist. The only kind of entity that has to exist in order for life to arise, anywhere in the universe, is the immortal replicator.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 13. The Long Reach of the Gene

Life, World, Universe, Sea

“The problem with world hunger is that rich, powerful governments are more than happy to send guns and money to dictators and despots who’ll use food to control their populations and line their pockets. There is no ‘world hunger’ problem. There’s a corruption problem. There’s a greed problem. There’s a gullibility problem....”
“So there’s a corruption problem,” I said. “Point taken. How about if we make a solution for the corruption problem, then? Maybe we could build some kind of visualizer that shows you if your Congresscritter is taking campaign contributions from companies and then voting for laws that benefit them?”

Cory Doctorow (1971) Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author

“What, you mean like every single one of them?”
Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Moon (2014), p. 149 (ellipsis represents a brief elision of text)

Money, Hunger, Happiness, World

“Look, whatever else happiness is, it’s also some kind of chemical reaction. Your body making and experiencing a cocktail of hormones and other molecules in response to stimulus. Brain reward. A thing that feels good when you do it. We’ve had millions of years of evolution that gave a reproductive edge to people who experienced pleasure when something pro-survival happened. Those individuals did more of whatever made them happy, and if what they were doing more of gave them more and hardier offspring, then they passed this on.”
“Yes,” I said. “Sure. At some level, that’s true of all our emotions, I guess.”

Cory Doctorow (1971) Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author

“I don’t know about that,” she said. “I’m just talking about happiness. The thing is, doing stuff is pro-survival—seeking food, seeking mates protecting children, thinking up better ways to hide from predators...Sitting still and doing nothing is almost never pro-survival, because the rest of the world is running around, coming up with strategies to outbreed you, to outcompete you for food and territory...If you stay still, they’ll race past you.”
Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Moon (2014), p. 130

Happiness, People, Pleasure, Making love

“He was silent for a long while. Then: 'You do, sometimes, remind me of the kind of man who is tempted to put himself in prison in order to avoid being hit by a car.'”

James Baldwin book Giovanni's Room

Pt. 2, Ch. 3 - p.104
Giovanni's Room (1956)

Cars

“When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
2000s, Address at Stanford University (2005)

Life, Age, Personality, Country

“What is the Jew?...What kind of unique creature is this whom all the rulers of all the nations of the world have disgraced and crushed and expelled and destroyed; persecuted, burned and drowned, and who, despite their anger and their fury, continues to live and to flourish. What is this Jew whom they have never succeeded in enticing with all the enticements in the world, whose oppressors and persecutors only suggested that he deny (and disown) his religion and cast aside the faithfulness of his ancestors?!
The Jew — is the symbol of eternity. … He is the one who for so long had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind. A people such as this can never disappear. The Jew is eternal. He is the embodiment of eternity.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Attributed in "The Final Resolution", in Jewish World Periodical (1908), p. 189
Disputed

People, World, Faith, Religion

“When I was a kid, my mother told me about the time my sister got lost at the circus in New York in Madison Square Garden. ... She said out of the throng of people, suddenly after looking for a long time, she said a cop just appeared and he was holding my sister's hand — she was a little girl. My mother never forgot that picture in her mind. We never see those stories about each other. And I think the writer who wants us to have a better life must take on the responsibility of showing us those kinds of stories.”

James McBride (writer) (1957) American journalist

On writing stories that are considered unseen in "James McBride's Advice For New Writers: 'A Simple Story Is The Best Story'" https://www.npr.org/2020/02/29/810052791/james-mcbrides-advice-for-new-writers-a-simple-story-is-the-best-story in NPR (2020 Feb 29)

Life, People, Girl, Thinking

“I feel more sure that the end is nearing than I do what kind of end it will be.”

Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milner (1854–1925) British statesman and colonial administrator

Milner commenting to Arthur Glazebrook of Canada, about the United States entering the war, cited in Forgotten Patriot, 2007, Rosemont Publishing, p. 338.

Feeling

“Birds' songs express joy, beauty, and purity, and evoke in us vitality and love. So many beings in the universe love us unconditionally. The trees, the water, and the air don't ask anything of us; they just love us. Even though we need this kind of love, we continue to destroy them. By destroying the animals, the air, and the trees, we are destroying ourselves.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Love in Action: Writings on Nonviolent Social Change (1993), p. 131

Love, Making love, Beauty, Bird

“Two kinds of my community have no share in Islam. (They are): the extremists and the fatalists.”

Muhammad al-Baqir (677–733) fifth of the Twelve Shia Imams

Al-Khisal, p. 71
[Baqir Shareef al-Qurashi, Jasim al-Rasheed, The Life of Imam Muhammad ibn 'Ali al-Baqir, His traditions from the Prophet, 1999]

Communication

“This coronavirus, they're just — all of this panic is just not warranted. This, I'm telling you, when I tell you — when I've told you that this virus is the common cold. When I said that, it was based on the number of cases. It's also based on the kind of virus this is.”

Rush Limbaugh (1951) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, author, and television personality

The Rush Limbaugh Show, , quoted in " Rush Limbaugh: Coronavirus is like the common cold, and “all of this panic is just not warranted” https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/rush-limbaugh-coronavirus-common-cold-and-all-panic-just-not-warranted", Media Matters ( 2020s

“They are not a loquacious people, taciturn rather; but eloquent, gifted when they do speak. An earnest, truthful kind of men. They are, as we know, of Jewish kindred: but with that deadly terrible earnestness of the Jews they seem to combine something graceful, brilliant, which is not Jewish. They had "Poetic contests" among them before the time of Mahomet.”

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

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

Men, People, Truth, Time

“On the whole, we will repeat that this Religion of Mahomet's is a kind of Christianity; has a genuine element of what is spiritually highest looking through it, not to be hidden by all its imperfections. The Scandinavian God Wish, the god of all rude men, — this has been enlarged into a Heaven by Mahomet; but a Heaven symbolical of sacred Duty, and to be earned by faith and well-doing, by valiant action, and a divine patience which is still more valiant. It is Scandinavian Paganism, and a truly celestial element superadded to that. Call it not false; look not at the falsehood of it, look at the truth of it. For these twelve centuries, it has been the religion and life-guidance of the fifth part of the whole kindred of Mankind. Above all things, it has been a religion heartily believed.”

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

These Arabs believe their religion, and try to live by it! No Christians, since the early ages, or only perhaps the English Puritans in modern times, have ever stood by their Faith as the Moslem do by theirs, — believing it wholly, fronting Time with it, and Eternity with it.
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

Life, Men, God, Truth

“In first class, you count on your fellow passengers to make you feel good about yourself. You're supposed to look around with pride, telling yourself that these are your kind of people.”

David Sedaris (1956) American author

21.07.2001 - p.445
Theft by Finding: Diaries, Volume 1 (1977-2002) (2017)

People, Making love, Feeling

“Literary works do not take as their subjects characters and events which have impressed a writer primarily by the frequency of their appearance. For example, how many Jewish men, as we know them, have come nearly to the brink of plunging a knife into their only son because they believed God had commanded them to? The story of Abraham and Isaac derives its meaning from something other than its being a familiar, recognizable, everyday occurrence. The test of any literary work is not how broad is its range of representation — for all that breadth may be characteristic of a kind of narrative — but the depth with which the writer reveals whatever it may be that he has chosen to represent.”

Philip Roth (1933–2018) American novelist

Writing About Jews (1963)

Men, God, Appearance

“Jesus Christ has to suffer and be rejected. … Suffering and being rejected are not the same. Even in his suffering Jesus could have been the celebrated Christ. Indeed, the entire compassion and admiration of the world could focus on the suffering. Looked upon as something tragic, the suffering could in itself convey its own value, its own honor and dignity. But Jesus is the Christ who was rejected in his suffering. Rejection removed all dignity and honor from his suffering. It had to be dishonorable suffering. Suffering and rejection express in summary form the cross of Jesus. Death on the cross means to suffer and to die as one rejected and cast out. It was by divine necessity that Jesus had to suffer and be rejected. Any attempt to hinder what is necessary is satanic. Even, or especially, if such an attempt comes from the circle of disciples, because it intends to prevent Christ from being Christ. The fact that it is Peter, the rock of the church, who makes himself guilty doing this just after he has confessed Jesus to be the Christ and has been commissioned by Christ, shows that from its very beginning the church has taken offense at the suffering of Christ. It does not want that kind of Lord, and as Christ's church it does not want to be forced to accept the law of suffering from its Lord.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Discipleship (1937), Discipleship and the Cross, p. 84

Death, World, Making love, Law

“The world is far too complex, and variation between societal types is too vast, for a categorisation dividing it into two mutually exclusive kinds of society to be meaningful. In addition, as argued above, one cannot once and for all draw the boundaries of a society. For this reason, it is more accurate to state that anthropologists study social life rather than saying that they study societies.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1962) Norwegian social anthropologist and professor

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 2 : Key Concepts

Life, World, Study, Drawing

“To simplify somewhat, one may say that anthropology primarily offers two kinds of insight. First, its practitioners produce knowledge about the actual cultural variation in the world; studies may deal with, say, the role of caste and wealth in Indian village life, technology among highland people in New Guinea, religion in southern Africa, life on the Wall Street stock exchange, the political importance of kinship in the Middle East, or concepts about life and the cosmos in the Amazon basin. Although most anthropologists are specialists in one or two regions, it is necessary to be knowledgeable about global cultural variation, and about humanity as such, in order to be able to say anything interesting about one’s region, topic or people.
Second, anthropology offers methods and theoretical perspectives enabling the practitioner to explore, compare and understand these varied expressions of the human condition. In other words, the subject offers both things to think about and things to think with.
But anthropology is not just a toolbox; it is also a craft which teaches the novice how to obtain a certain kind of knowledge and what this knowledge might say something about.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1962) Norwegian social anthropologist and professor

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 1 : Why Anthropology?

Life, People, World, Religion

“Twiddling is one of my autistic things. I do it to calm me down. I twiddle frantically for a while, and I fantasize about all kinds of things while I twiddle.”

Jonathan Mitchell (1955) American writer and activist

American Normal: The Hidden World of Asperger Syndrome

“Already then, there was in my subconsciousness as unsatisfactoriness about powerlessness, which was accompanied by being locked in a cage, whereby made taking an initiative, of any kind, impossible”

Wilhelmina of the Netherlands (1880–1962) Queen of the Netherlands 1898 - 1948

“Distrust naturally creates distrust, and by nothing is good-will and kind conduct more speedily changed than by invidious jealousies and uncandid imputations, whether expressed or implied.”

John Jay Federalist Papers

1780s, The Federalist Papers, Federalist No. 5 (1787)

Jealousy, Nature, Change

“Pancho was a bandit boys
His horse was fast as polished steel
Wore his gun outside his pants
For all the honest world to feel
Pancho met his match you know
On the deserts down in Mexico
Nobody heard his dying words
That's the way it goes
All the federales say
They could have had him any day
They only let him hang around
Out of kindness I suppose”

Townes Van Zandt (1944–1997) singer-songwriter

Pancho and Lefty (1972)

World, Way, Feeling, Boy

“Our ability to block our experience is an evolutionary dead end. Rather than experiencing and transforming pain, conflict, and fear, we often divert or dampen them with a kind of unwitting hypnosis. Over a lifetime, more and more stress accumulates. There is no release, and our consciousness narrows. The floodlight shrinks into the slender beam of a flashlight. We lose the vividness of colors, sensitivity to sounds, peripheral vision, sensitivity to others, emotional intensity. The spectrum of awareness becomes ever narrower.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Three, Brains Changing, Minds Changing

Pain, Fear, Color, Dead

“Creativity is really about excess. And when you want to make something there is a kind of obsession that has to come with it in a healthy way, in a way that is intoxicating, you are engulfed by something.”

Annette Bening (1958) American actress

THR Actress Roundtable 2011, at 23 Min 01 Sec https://youtube.com/watch?v=4OePQsi3U-8?t=1381 From interview with The Hollywood Reporter Actress Roundtable

Making love, Way

“[A]rchitecture is more than a stage for the acting out of these performances. It offers a space for other social groups and kinds of social interactions. It is also important to remember that in examples such as the country house it was home to a large number of residents representing a variety of interests.”

Dana Arnold (1961) Middlessex uni prof

Source: Reading Architectural History (2002), Ch. 4 : A class performance : Social histories of architecture

Home, Housing, Country

“I kind of feel like Old Darko died. Like, when I think about myself, or myself when I was playing, I feel like I’m sort of thinking about someone who is dead.”

Darko Miličić (1985) Serbian basketball player

As quoted in "Finding Darko" http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/20211833/nba-bust-darko-milicic-finds-success-back-home-serbia (8 February 2017), by Sam Borden, ESPN 2010s

Feeling, Thinking, Dead

“To my mind, the Agni Yoga teachings constitute one of the major attempts of Hierarchy to prepare humanity for the new age. They are entirely relevant to the present----and future time. The first book of the series, The Call, was given by Maitreya Himself, and was intended to alert disciples to the fact of His imminent return. The Master Morya, as I have said elsewhere, is one of the first group of Masters to be seen by humanity, and is the stimulus behind the occult groups of all kinds. His immediate task is to regenerate and purify the teaching of these groups... [The Agni Yoga Teachings were given] by mental telepathy through Helena Roerich (a disciple of the Master Morya) in Russian... My information is that The Call is His [Maitreya's] sole personal contribution to the Agni Yoga series.. The Call is also titled: Leaves of Morya’s Garden, I.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Source: Maitreya's Mission Vol. I (1986), p. 300/1

Books, Age, Time, Future

“Everything of importance is already known, a sage said—the only thing is to rediscover it. Much of the current excitement about healing is a kind of collective remembering, a homecoming to the old wives and old doctors.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eight, Healing Ourselves

“These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lighten'd:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Stanza 2
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800), Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey (1798)

Love, Life, Pleasure, World

“...our progenitors, the kings of England, have before these times been lords of the English sea on every side...and it would very much grieve us if in this kind of defence our royal honour should be lost.”

Edward III of England (1312–1377) King of England

Letter to his admirals (18 August 1336), quoted in Ian Mortimer, The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation (Vintage, 2008), p. 130

Time, Sea

“We will and concede for us and all our heirs and successors, by the common counsel, assent and consent of the prelates, magnates, earls and barons and communities of our realm in our parliament that the Kingdom of Scotland, shall remain for ever separate in all respects from the Kingdom of England, in its entirety, free and in peace, without any kind of subjection, servitude, claim or demand.”

Edward III of England (1312–1377) King of England

Letters-patent (1 March 1328), quoted in G. W. S. Barrow, Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 333–334

Peace, Communication

“The relation between the social sciences and the natural sciences has long been fraught with difficulties. A minority of social scientists (including some anthropologists) regard their activity as an extension, or a branch, of biological research. Others argue that the social sciences ought to be sciences of the same kind as the natural sciences; that they should strive after the same kind of precision and the same kind of parsimonious clarity that can be achieved for instance in chemistry.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1962) Norwegian social anthropologist and professor

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 7 : Nature

Nature, Relation ships, Science

“Human beings have a kind of optical illusion, Einstein once said. We think ourselves separate rather than part of the whole. This imprisons our affection to those few nearest us.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Twelve, Human Connections: Relationships Changing

Thinking, Parting

“Many will know for the first time that they count, that they matter in the scheme of things. An unfamiliar sense of self-esteem will replace their present hopelessness; drugs of all kinds will cease their hold on men. Quietly, men’s tears will flow in humble gratitude and longing for the good.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The Awakening of Humanity (2008)

Men, Sense, Tear, Time

“If you have 1,000 people, you have 1,000 geniuses. They’re just different kinds of genius and a different degree of intensity.”

Brunello Cucinelli (1953) Italian entrepreneur and philanthropist

Source: 10 Productivity Tips From the King of Cashmere, Brunello Cucinelli https://medium.com/@om/10-productivity-tips-from-the-king-of-cashmere-brunello-cucinelli-79c9cf74d9de Medium, Om Malik, April 27, 2015

People

“I can see the fire burning
Burning right behind your eyes
I can see the fire burning, baby
Burning right behind your eyes
You must've swallowed a candle
Or some other kind of surprise.”

John Prine (1946–2020) American country singer/songwriter

"Daddy’s Little Pumpkin" (Prine, Pat McLaughlin)
Song lyrics, The Missing Years (1991)

Baby

“Of course, everybody says they're for peace. Hitler was for peace. Everybody is for peace. The question is: "What kind of peace?"”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Quotes 1960s–1980s, 1980s, Talk at University of California, Berkeley, 1984

Peace, Question

“There was a time when politicians like you preferred to use a dog whistle, but those days seem quaint now. There’s something to be said for using a foghorn to blast your racism across the continents. At least we all know what kind of politics you represent.”

Richard Wolffe (1968) American journalist

About Donald Trump.
Let's drop the euphemisms: Donald Trump is a racist president (2018)

Dogs, Time

“It is easy to romanticise, say, tigers or lions and cats. We admire their magnificent beauty, strength and agility. But we would regard their notional human counterparts as wanton psychopaths of the worst kind.”

David Pearce (philosopher) (1959) British transhumanist

1.10 On the Misguided Romanticisation of Feline Psychopaths https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/hedon1.htm#feline The Hedonistic Imperative https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/514875 (1995)

Beauty, Cats

“I simply don't think it is reasonable to use IQ tests to produce results of questionable value, which may then serve to justify racists in their own minds and to help bring about the kinds of tragedies we have already witnessed earlier in this century.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

"Alas, All Human" in Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1979
General sources

Question, Thinking, Help

“It seems, moreover, that my argument has some relevance to choices we must make even now. There are some species of large predatory animals, such as the Siberian tiger, that are currently on the verge of extinction. If we do nothing to preserve it, the Siberian tiger as a species may soon become extinct. The number of extant Siberian tigers has been low for a considerable period. Any ecological disruption occasioned by their dwindling numbers has largely already occurred or is already occurring. If their number in the wild declines from several hundred to zero, the impact of their disappearance on the ecology of the region will be almost negligible. Suppose, however, that we could repopulate their former wide-ranging habitat with as many Siberian tigers as there were during the period in which they flourished in their greatest numbers, and that that population could be sustained indefinitely. That would mean that herbivorous animals in the extensive repopulated area would again, and for the indefinite future, live in fear and that an incalculable number would die in terror and agony while being devoured by a tiger. In a case such as this, we may actually face the kind of dilemma I called attention to in my article, in which there is a conflict between the value of preserving existing species and the value of preventing suffering and early death for an enormously large number of animals.”

Jeff McMahan (philosopher) (1954) American philosopher

" Predators: A Response https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/predators-a-response/", The New York Times, 28 Sept. 2010

Death, Fear, Making love, Suffering

“Government violence is not the result of violent revolutions, but the product of government itself. Any movement that leaves the State intact will fail in ending the oppressions we are fighting against. A nonviolent movement that replaces one government with another—and this is the greatest victory a nonviolent movement has ever achieved in the history of the world—ends up betraying itself, allowing Power to change its masks without addressing the fundamental problems of society. Nonviolence as an analytical tool has no means of understanding this kind of defeat—the kind that looks like victory.”

Peter Gelderloos (1982) American anarchist

Source: "The Failure of Nonviolence" (2013) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-the-failure-of-nonviolence, Chapter 2. Recuperation is How We Lose

World, History, Understanding, Problem

“More than 99% of my wealth will go to philanthropy during my lifetime or at death. Measured by dollars, this commitment is large. In a comparative sense, though, many individuals give more to others every day.
Millions of people who regularly contribute to churches, schools, and other organizations thereby relinquish the use of funds that would otherwise benefit their own families. The dollars these people drop into a collection plate or give to United Way mean forgone movies, dinners out, or other personal pleasures. In contrast, my family and I will give up nothing we need or want by fulfilling this 99% pledge.
Moreover, this pledge does not leave me contributing the most precious asset, which is time. Many people, including — I’m proud to say — my three children, give extensively of their own time and talents to help others. Gifts of this kind often prove far more valuable than money.”

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

" My Philanthropic Pledge http://givingpledge.org/pdf/letters/Buffett_Letter.pdf" at The Giving Pledge (2010)

Death, Money, Children, People

“We have a lot of employment, but the quality of the jobs has collapsed over the last 10 years. The people who work now used to be people who had a job with good income, good benefits and good security. The jobs, overwhelmingly, created have none of those things: low wages—that’s why our wages have gone nowhere; bad benefits—those are shrinking, pensions and so on; and the security is virtually gone. One of our biggest problems in America is people don’t know one week to the next what hours they’re working, what income they’ll get. You can’t have a life like this. So, what we’ve done is we’ve ratcheted down the quality of jobs. We’ve made people use up their savings since the great crash of 2008, so they’re in a bind. They have really no choice but to offer themselves at lower wages or at less benefit or at less security than before, which is why there’s the anger, which is why there was the vote for Mr. Trump in the first place, because this talk of recovery really is about that stock market with the funny money that the Fed Reserve pumped in, but is not about the real lives of people, which are in serious trouble, hence the numbers, like a average American family can’t get a $400 emergency cost because it doesn’t have that kind of money in the background. So, you’ve undone the underlying economy, you have this frothy stock market for the 1 percent, and this is an impossible tension tearing the country apart.”

Richard D. Wolff (1942) American economist

We Need a More Humane Economic System—Not One That Only Benefits the Rich (December 26, 2018)

Life, Money, Bad luck, People

“Well, you know, the irony is, it’s one of the bizarre ways an economy works. There was no incentive to take all that money and go in and produce things that might have driven up prices and so on, because the people in America can’t afford to buy it. Our wages have been stagnant. The debts have been so big that people are afraid to borrow the way they once did, even though they still do, but not at the growing scale as before. So, all that extra money kind of went into the stock market to make itself make quick money by buying shares, hoping that they would go up. And if all the rich people who get it into their hands do that kind of thing, you see the stock market go up, but the underlying economy doesn’t go anywhere. And again, after a while, that’s not a sustainable arrangement.”

Richard D. Wolff (1942) American economist

On why hasn’t inflation increased dramatically in the U.S despite the Federal Reserve kept interest rates low.
We Need a More Humane Economic System—Not One That Only Benefits the Rich (December 26, 2018)

Money, People, Making love, Hope

“When I decided to make the film [Blue Is the Warmest Colour], I knew that it was going to be hard. I think I wanted that. I wanted to see how it was to go this far. […] Of course it was kind of humiliating sometimes, I was feeling like a prostitute. […] [Kechiche] was using three cameras, and when you have to fake your orgasm for six hours... I can't say that it was nothing. But for me it is more difficult to show my feelings than my body.”

Léa Seydoux (1985) French actress

"Blue is the Warmest Colour actresses on their lesbian sex scenes: 'We felt like prostitutes'" https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/blue-is-the-warmest-colour-actresses-on-their-lesbian-sex-scenes-we-felt-like-prostitutes-8856909.html, The Independent (4 October 2013).

Making love, Feeling, Thinking

“It could be really, really bad. I don't think it's gonna be, because I think we'd be able to do the kind of mitigation. It could be mild. I don't think it's going to be that mild either. It's really going to depend on how we mobilize.”

Anthony Fauci (1940) American immunologist and head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

Source: About the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in the United States, quoted in 'You don't want to go to war with a president' https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/03/anthony-fauci-trump-coronavirus-crisis-118961, 3 March 2020, Politico

Bad luck, Thinking, Dependency

“Our position is we want a confirmatory ballot. It's very difficult for us to move off that because I don't think our party would forgive us if we signed off on Tory Brexit without that kind of concession.”

Tom Watson (Labour politician) (1967) British politician

Brexit talks: Will Labour push a public vote option? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47817325 BBC News (4 April 2019) 2019

Forgiveness, Thinking

“Human nature is intractable stuff, hard jagged stuff, the kind of stuff that dreams are wrecked on.”

Elizabeth Goudge (1900–1984) English fiction writer

The White Witch (1958), Part 1, Chapter 12.2

Dreams, Nature

“A person’s things can be a kind of exterior morphology of their mind.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Aftermaths (p. 247). Note: Aftermaths was originally published as a standalone short story in 1986, but since then has usually been reprinted as a sort of appendix to Shards of Honor, which it follows naturally in the series arc.
Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986)

Personality

“One night you discover to your great surprise that you have not spent all your money that day, he said. Next morning you wake up early and go out and buy yourself a hat – and when you have got the hat you realize that you now have even more money in your pocket. You invite a friend, two or three of them perhaps, to come with you to a restaurant, and you eat your fill of all the best food and wines available there. When you simply can’t force down another bite and you leave the restaurant, you discover that you’ve made yet another haul while you were sitting inside. You become flurried and go and buy a house with a garden to try to rid yourself of this trash, but no sooner have you paid for the house cash down than you notice that your money has multiplied through the purchase. Now you are seized with a kind of frenzy that Björn of Brekkukot would never understand, far less your grandmother. You set off travelling round and round the world, pouring out money with both hands to other demented vagrants wherever you go, and you don’t even dare to open your letters because you know that they will all say the same thing: your deposits at I don’t know how many banks all over the world are still growing with ever increasing speed.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Money, World, Food, Travel

“Curiosity can be called a virtue or a vice, depending on what kind of elementary ethics one reads; in our house at Brekkukot, curiosity was considered on a par with thievishness.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Reading, Housing, Dependency

“That’s who I am. I don’t look much like him now with my foot wrapped up and all that kind of business.”

Scott Joplin (1868–1917) American composer, musician, and pianist

When asked by Joseph Lamb if he was Scott Joplin, as quoted in "The Day Joseph Lamb Met Scott Joplin" https://www.portlandpianolab.com/the-day-joseph-lamb-met-scott-joplin/ (2 January 2016), by Doug Hanvey, Music Appreciation & Analysis, Portland Piano Lab

Business

“Complacency results from separation — the sense that we are separate and that by competition we become superior — and that superiority allows us to live what we call ‘well’. But we cannot live ‘well’ when two-thirds of the world are living and dying in absolute poverty. It is not possible to do so with impunity, and we do not. The result is crime. The result is catastrophe of one kind or another — governments which create wars for oil, for example. That is a catastrophe, and it is only possible because we are complacent, because we do not acknowledge the needs of millions of people who cannot take for granted what we take for granted: regular food, leisure, education and healthcare.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The World Teacher for All Humanity (2007)

War, People, World, Education

Quotes about kindness page 72

Quotes about kindness
page 72