Quotes about lack
page 10

“Lack of confidence leads us into the dark waters of envy. We see men are functioning without hang-ups—and like girls who envy the unfettered freedom of older brothers, we find it easier to focus on how "lucky" the men are and how "unlucky" we are. Sequestered in an unfair situation, we don't have to do anything about achieving the competence and self-esteem we so admire in others.”

Colette Dowling (1938)

Source: The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence (1981), p. 128

Men, Confidence, Girl, Freedom

“The richest soil that was ever prepared would not grow a single blade of grass or the tiniest Weed if that soil were absolutely dry. …There must be water in the soil to dissolve out and transfer its elements in order that the rootlets of the plant shall be able to make the slightest use of these elements. …But …a plant may grow and thrive for a time quite without the presence of soil if its roots are placed in water. … some of the richest soils in the world are those that are absolutely barren and fully merit the designation of desert lands because water is lacking”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

How Plants are Trained to Work for Man (1921) Vol. 5 Gardening

World, Grass, Water, Time

“Josef Albers's [a former art teacher of Rauschenberg, on Black Mountain College ] rule is to make order. As for me, I consider myself successful when I do something that resembles the lack of order I sense. (around 1949 during Black Mountain College, fh).”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

In Robert Rauschenberg, Works, Writings and Interviews, Sam Hunter; as quoted in Ediciones Poligrafa, Barcelona, Spain, 2006, p. 37
1950's

Art, Mountain, Sense, Teachers

“Almost all Muslims, including the most enlightened, feel offended by Rushdie's novel or, rather, by reports they have read or heard about it. Very few people have actually read the dense and tortuous book, but they do not have to. The very idea of using the prophet Muhammad as a character in a novel is painful to many Muslims. The entire Islamic system consists of the so-called Hodud, or limits beyond which one should simply not venture. Islam does not recognize unlimited freedom of expression. Call them taboos, if you like, but Islam considers a wide variety of topics as permanently closed. Most Muslims are prepared to be broad-minded about most things but never anything that even remotely touches their faith… To Muslims religion is not just a part of life. It is, in fact, life that is a part of religion. Muslims cannot understand a concept that has no rules, no limits. The Western belief in human rights, which seems to lack limits, is alien to Islamic traditions… The fact that Rushdie propagated his heresy in a book is of especial significance to Muslims. Islam is the religion of the book par excellence.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Few cultures hold the written and printed word in so much awe as Muslims, even though the vast majority are illiterate. When a Muslim wants to clinch an argument he says, 'It is written.'
"Khomeini's Scapegoat", Times, London, (February 13, 1989).

Life, Pain, People, Books

“What must be acknowledged is that Kim Jong Il has evinced a genius for propaganda ever since managing the efflorescence of his father's cult in the 1960s. Even so, he cannot cover his lack of charisma completely; it's as if Hitler died and left the Third Reich to Goebbels.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2000s, Mother of All Mothers (September 2004)

“It's not a pretty face, I grant you. But underneath its flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character.”

Oscar Levant (1906–1972) American comedian, composer, pianist and actor

Describing himself, in lines he contributed to An American In Paris (1951), although officially credited to Alan Jay Lerner, as told in The Memoirs of an Amnesiac (1965); also quoted in The Dictionary of Biographical Quotation of British and American Subjects (1978) by Richard Kenin and Justin Wintle, p. 485.

“The man who in times of popular excitement boldly and unflinchingly resists hot-tempered clamor for an unnecessary war, and thus exposes himself to the opprobrious imputation of a lack of patriotism or of courage, to the end of saving his country from a great calamity, is, as to "loving and faithfully serving his country," at least as good a patriot as the hero of the most daring feat of arms, and a far better one than those who, with an ostentatious pretense of superior patriotism, cry for war before it is needed, especially if then they let others do the fighting.”

Carl Schurz (1829–1906) Union Army general, politician

"About Patriotism," Harper’s Weekly (16 April 1898)

Love, War, Courage, Time

“I will repeat what I once said to Guillaume Apollinaire: "For my part I have never avoided the influence of others. I would have considered it cowardice and a lack of sincerity toward myself."”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

original version in French: Je vous répéterai ce que je disais naguère à Guillaume Apollinaire: "Je n'ai, pour ma part, jamais évité l'influence des autres, j'aurais considéré cela comme une lâcheté et un manque de sincérité vis-à-vis de moi-même."
'Interview with Henri Matisse' by Jacques Guenne, in 'L'Art Vivant' (15 September 1925)
1920s

Parting, Sincerity

“Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.”

François de La Rochefoucauld book Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

On a fait une vertu de la modération pour borner l’ambition des grands hommes, et pour consoler les gens médiocres de leur peu de fortune, et de leur peu de mérite.
Maxim 308.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Men, People

“Bridges are thresholds to other realities, archetypal, primal symbols of shifting consciousness. They are passageways, conduits, and connectors that connote transitioning, crossing borders, and changing perspectives. Bridges span liminal (threshold) spaces between worlds, spaces I call nepantla, a Nahuatl word meaning tierra entre medio. Transformations occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries. Nepantla es tierra desconocida, and living in this liminal zone means being in a constant state of displacement--an uncomfortable, even alarming feeling. Most of us dwell in nepantla so much of the time it’s become a sort of “home.””

Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1942–2004) Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory

Though this state links us to other ideas, people, and worlds, we feel threatened by these new connections and the change they engender.
Original: (Un)natural bridges from This bridge we call home

People, World, Feeling, Home

“I have frequently had men describe the following scenario to me: "If at the beginning of a relationship, I keep the woman at a distance and don't want to get too close, she feels that I am pushing her away and that I am not making a commitment—that I am afraid to be intimate. When I finally let down my guard and try to be intimate and close, when I really make myself vulnerable and give up control, which is uncomfortable for me, then I feel really inadequate. She blames me for things that she never blamed me for when I kept my distance. When I start to get close, that's when I am accused of saying the wrong thing or trying to control her. So I am better off staying at a distance and letting her complain about a lack of intimacy."Stewart, age thirty-six, described it this way: "Maryann was liberated on the surface, but the undertow was very different. I would find out a couple of evenings after I had been with her that she was very angry and I wouldn't even know that I had done something wrong. She would be angry because she said I wasn't really involved enough. I didn't care enough about her. The irony is that the women in my life whom I've made the greatest effort to get close to are the ones who always wind up saying they are angry because I wasn't getting close. When I made no effort to get close and really kept my distance, I never got any complaints. The moment I felt I was really opening myself up to be intimate, that was when I was found to be failing. That is the double bind for me."Another such truth was experienced by Alex. He said, "If you keep the control, the distance, then the woman is kept insecure; and so long as she is insecure about the relationship, she will be less inclined to attack. If she's interested in you, but you keep her at a distance, she will be careful about attacking you. She won't criticize you because she's afraid of you. The moment you cross the barrier and actually start to get committed, you find that she begins to feel that you are inadequate as a partner. You know then and there that you are never going to be able to satisfy her."I found this to be true sexually. At the times when I personally thought I was the most sensitive and the most involved and caring as a lover, I would find out often that I was a failure. At the times when I allowed myself to be totally selfish, without apology and didn't give one thought to what the woman experienced, I never got any complaints. I was never told I was selfish as a lover. In fact, I was often told that I was wonderful."”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

Why men and women can't talk to each other: the hidden unconscious messages of gender, pp. 39–40
The Inner Male (1987)

Life, Women, Men, Truth

“The struggle for existence in a universe we did not choose, and the burden of being a member of the only race which values objective, verifiable truth as an end in itself, makes us sometimes long for escape from reality -- in some cases through a literature of the fantastic, of marvelous dream worlds, of free-ranging fantasy. But we must not confuse that necessary escape with what is real. Permit me to suggest to the reader that it is a waste of his time and energy to play with fantasies that lack the literary and aesthetic charm of poetry and imaginative prose fiction.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"Orage and New Age Consciousness", private letter, February 1977, published on National Vanguard http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=6657 (October 25, 2005) 1970s

Truth, World, Dreams, Imagination

“It makes sense to describe a core competence as a complex adaptive system, located in the lower regions of the I-Space between an ordered regime in which knowledge assets get frozen into technologies and a chaotic regime in which the stability necessary for effective organizational coordination and integration remains absent. Core competences, then, have their being in a region of the I-Space sandwiched between an excess of usable structure and a total lack of it. We hypothesize that the possession of a core competence is one measure of a firm’s ability to deal with complexity.”

Max Boisot (1943–2011) British academic and educator

Source: Knowledge Assets, 1998, p. 205

Knowledge, Sense

“One of the distinct features of XP is the lack of any documentation whatsoever, except for the code itself. This is a contraposition to the modeling techniques like the Unified Modeling Language (UML), which strongly focus on documentation. XP takes an extreme position there, not even documenting the architecture of the system. Often, it is very difficult to extract the overall structure, behavior or interactions with the environment from the code. The code is a rather detailed and fragile representation of the system’s tasks. Even though the code contains all necessary information about the system, this information is often burdened with details and it is tedious to extract the aspects one is interested in. Therefore, it would be useful to have a more compact system representation. The UML does provide a number of notations that are suited for this purpose. However, the tools so far are not capable of supporting UML in such a manner that it can be well-integrated with the approach of Extreme Programming.”

Bernhard Rumpe (1967) German computer scientist

Source: Executable Modeling with UML. A vision or a Nightmare (2002), p. 698

Behavior, Support

“As a mathematician, von Neumann was quick, brilliant, efficient, and enormously broad in scientific interests beyond mathematics itself. He knew his technical abilities; his virtuosity in following complicated reasoning and his insights were supreme; yet he lacked absolute self confidence.”

Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) Polish-American mathematician

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 4, Princeton Days, p. 76

Confidence, Mathematics, Self-confidence

“Lack of knowledge concerning all the factors and the failure to include them in our integral imposes false conclusions.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), The Wellspring of Reality

Failure, Knowledge, Falseness

“Two women and a child in a glade beside a spring. Beyond them, the varnished wilderness wherein bright birds cry. The child is chalk, Europe's daughter. Her dusky attendants, a green Indian and a maroon slave.
The scene, from Democracy in America, is discovered by that most famous European traveler to the New World, Alexis de Tocqueville, aristocratic son of the Enlightenment, liberal, sickly, gray, violet, lacking the vigor of the experiment he has set himself to observe… His description intends to show the African and the Indian doomed by history in corresponding but opposing ways.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

History is a coat cut only to the European.
Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Women, World, Way, Travel

“Modern positivism…expresses criticism against the naïve use of certain terms… by the general postulate that the question whether a given sentence has any meaning… should always be thoroughly and critically examined. This… is derived from mathematical logic. The procedure of natural science is pictured as an attachment of symbols to the phenomena. The symbols can, as in mathematics, be combined according to certain rules… However, a combination of symbols that does not comply with the rules is not wrong but conveys no meaning.
The obvious difficulty in this argument is the lack of any general criterion as to when a sentence should be considered meaningless. A definite decision is possible only when the sentence belongs to a closed system of concepts and axioms, which in the development of natural science will be rather the exception than the rule. In some case the conjecture that a certain sentence is meaningless has historically led to important progress… new connections which would have been impossible if the sentence had a meaning. An example… sentence: "In which orbit does the electron move around the nucleus?"”

Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) German theoretical physicist

But generally the positivistic scheme taken from mathematical logic is too narrow in a description of nature which necessarily uses words and concepts that are only vaguely defined.
Physics and Philosophy (1958)

Mathematics, Question, Nature, Decision

“The goal of creation is—to please the creation, i. e. the Creator wants to fill us with the very best. And until a man receives all the very perfect and the very best that has been ordained for him by the Creator, he experiences the lack of everything, and this is the sign that he hasn’t yet reached the goal of the creation.”

Baruch Ashlag (1907–1991) Polish rabbi

Dargot HaSulam

Perfection

“Since World War II there has been a growing heedlessness. You dated it, in the case of Britain, from about 1910 and I think quite rightly so. And the developments that led to War World I were a part of the decadence of the time, because very few when they went to war in that war had any recognition of what they were doing to civilization. And we came out of it. We went into it under the illusion that we were going to make the world safe for democracy. Our president Woodrow Wilson with his diplomacy was going to be the world messiah. And that term was applied to him. Well, we have only increased in our departure from a realistic assessment of things, from having any vision. And, of course, Proverbs tells us where there is no vision the people perish. And by vision it means a knowledge of what God’s reality is. And more literally the second part is the people perish, the people run naked. They are crazy. They are wild. So, lacking that vision, the people have been running wild. They have been running naked all over the world”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Decadence and the New Age (March 10, 1989)

God, War, People, World

“When in the summer of 1941 he (Hitler) gave me the order to prepare installations at Auschwitz where mass exterminations could take place, and personally to carry out these exterminations, I did not have the slightest idea of their scale or consequences. It was certainly an extraordinary and monstrous order. Nevertheless the reasons behind the extermination programme seemed to me right. I did not reflect on it at the time: I had been given an order, and I had to carry it out. Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view.”

Rudolf Höss (1901–1947) German war criminal, commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp

Quoted in "Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess" - Page 144 - by Rudolf Hoess, Constantine Fitzgibbon, Primo Levi, Joachim Neugroschel - History - 2000

Idea, Time, Summer, Personality

“Our foreign policy was an improvisation. Like Schacht's financial policy, it lacked foresight. The Nazis kept talking about a thousand-year Reich, but they couldn't think ahead for five minutes!”

Paul Schmidt (1899–1970) German translator, Nazi

To Leon Goldensohn (13 March 1946). Quoted in "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Thinking

“A general proof is difficult because of the lack of general criteria for the existence of steady states, but it can be given for special cases.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), 5. The Organism Considered as Physical System, p. 132

“The lack of collective dignity felt by so many in the Arab world is the result of a combination of internal autocratic and corrupt regimes, with predictable ineffective and unaccountable governance, supported by external actors with short-term geopolitical interests.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Dignity Deficit Fuels Uprisings in the Middle East http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/dignity-deficit-fuels-uprisings-middle-east - YaleGlobal, September 2013

World, Support

“One wonders at the docility of the students who evidently must be satisfied enough with the credentials to be uncaring about the lack of education.”

Jane Jacobs book Dark Age Ahead

Source: Dark Age Ahead (2004), Chapter Four, Science Abandoned, p. 79

Education

“We loved each other. No faithfulness my love did lack.
Love, you divine flame; you hole of colour: black.”

Paul-Jean Toulet (1867–1920) French poet

Coples

Love, Faith

“Man dwells apart, though not alone,
He walks among his peers unread;
The best of thoughts which he hath known
For lack of listeners are not said.”

Jean Ingelow (1820–1897) British writer

"Afterthought", reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“This dance is the joy of existence. I am filled with you.
Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul.
There's no room for lack of trust, or trust.
Nothing in this existence but that existence.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

"We Three" Ch. 11 : Union
The Essential Rumi (1995)

Soul, Joy, Dance

“To protect the right of expression is the central part of an artist’s activity..... In China many essential rights are lacking, and I wanted to remind people of this.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Who Is Ai Weiwei?, 2009

People, Parting

“The key to understanding Crowley is the same as the key to understanding the Marquis de Sade. Both wasted an immense amount of energy screaming defiance at the authority they resented so much, and lacked the insight to see that they were shaking their fists as at abstraction.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast (1987), p. 29

Understanding

“These burdens and frustrations are accepted by most Americans with maturity and understanding. They may long for the days when war meant charging up San Juan Hill-or when our isolation was guarded by two oceans — or when the atomic bomb was ours alone — or when much of the industrialized world depended upon our resources and our aid. But they now know that those days are gone — and that gone with them are the old policies and the old complacency's. And they know, too, that we must make the best of our new problems and our new opportunities, whatever the risk and the cost.
But there are others who cannot bear the burden of a long twilight struggle. They lack confidence in our long-run capacity to survive and succeed. Hating communism, yet they see communism in the long run, perhaps, as the wave of the future. And they want some quick and easy and final and cheap solution — now.
There are two groups of these frustrated citizens, far apart in their views yet very much alike in their approach. On the one hand are those who urge upon us what I regard to be the pathway of surrender-appeasing our enemies, compromising our commitments, purchasing peace at any price, disavowing our arms, our friends, our obligations. If their view had prevailed, the world of free choice would be smaller today.
On the other hand are those who urge upon us what I regard to be the pathway of war: equating negotiations with appeasement and substituting rigidity for firmness. If their view had prevailed, we would be at war today, and in more than one place.
It is a curious fact that each of these extreme opposites resembles the other. Each believes that we have only two choices: appeasement or war, suicide or surrender, humiliation or holocaust, to be either Red or dead. Each side sees only "hard" and "soft" nations, hard and soft policies, hard and soft men. Each believes that any departure from its own course inevitably leads to the other: one group believes that any peaceful solution means appeasement; the other believes that any arms build-up means war. One group regards everyone else as warmongers, the other regards everyone else as appeasers. Neither side admits that its path will lead to disaster — but neither can tell us how or where to draw the line once we descend the slippery slopes of appeasement or constant intervention.
In short, while both extremes profess to be the true realists of our time, neither could be more unrealistic. While both claim to be doing the nation a service, they could do it no greater disservice. This kind of talk and easy solutions to difficult problems, if believed, could inspire a lack of confidence among our people when they must all — above all else — be united in recognizing the long and difficult days that lie ahead. It could inspire uncertainty among our allies when above all else they must be confident in us. And even more dangerously, it could, if believed, inspire doubt among our adversaries when they must above all be convinced that we will defend our vital interests.
The essential fact that both of these groups fail to grasp is that diplomacy and defense are not substitutes for one another. Either alone would fail. A willingness to resist force, unaccompanied by a willingness to talk, could provoke belligerence — while a willingness to talk, unaccompanied by a willingness to resist force, could invite disaster.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1961, Address at the University of Washington

Men, Hate, War, People

“I believe that we have learned the importance of maintaining military strength as a means of preventing war. We have found that a sound military system is necessary in time of peace if we are to remain at peace. Aggressors in the past, relying on our apparent lack of military force, have unwisely precipitated war. Although they have been led to destruction by their misconception of our strength, we have paid a terrible price for our unpreparedness.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Special Message to the Congress on the Threat to the Freedom of Europe (1948)

War, Peace, Learning, Time

“Isn't the use by America and some Western governments of their fire against others in the world including, or in the forefront of whom are the Arabs and the Muslims, one of the most important reasons of the lack of stability in the world at the present time? Isn't the evil inflicted on America in the act of September 11, 2001, and nothing else, a result of this and other acts? This is the main question and this is what the American administration along with of the Western governments or the Western public opinion should answer in the first place with serenity and responsibility, without emotional reaction and without the use of the same old methods that America used against the world.”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

Open letter to the American peoples http://www.wadinet.de/news/iraq/nw273_saddamopenletter.htm (15 September 2001).

World, Question, Evil, Time

“We lack but open eye and ear
To find the Orient's marvels here;
The still small voice in autumn's hush,
Yon maple wood the burning bush.”

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery

The Chapel of the Hermits; comparable to Mrs. Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book vii

Autumn

“Success can come to you by courageous Devotion to the task lying in front of you I can assert with out fear of contradiction that quality of the Indian mind is equal to the quality of any Teutonic, Nordic, or Anglo-Saxon mind. What we lack is perhaps courage, what we lack is driving force which takes one any where. We have I think, developed an inferiority complex. I think what is needed in India today is the destruction of that defeatist spirit.”

C. V. Raman (1888–1970) Indian physicist

This is from his address to the young graduates in 1969 quoted in [Kalam, A P J Abdul, Ignited Minds: Unleashing The Power Within India, http://books.google.com/books?id=_PdboDsin90C&pg=PA28, 1 September 2010, Pearson Education India, 978-81-317-2960-1, 28–29]

Fear, Lying, Courage, Thinking

“Most Christians would say that evolution is one of God’s creative methods. But creationists reject that possibility outright, because the issue for them is not whether their God is true; but whether their dogma is true. It can’t be in any case. Even if current concepts of evolution were proven wrong tomorrow, Biblical creationism still couldn’t be true either, because it has already been disproved many times, many ways, and collapses on its own lack of merit. But of course believers can never admit that.”

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

"7th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8Q2Db17v5U, Youtube (February 27, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

God, Way, Time

“People are very much victims of their lack of education. This of course makes them a lot easier to control. It works the same way there as it does (in America). I wouldn't say that surprised me.”

Tod A (1965) American musician

(on extremism in Pakistan) Baltimore City Paper (June 11, 2008).

People, Education, Way

“The North Korean elite does have some sources of hope. The elite itself remains, on the surface at least, remarkably united. The lack of a civil society and very strong social control makes the emergence of resistance difficult.”

Andrei Lankov (1963) Russian academic

The Folly of an Inter-Korean Confederation (October 2015)

Hope, Strong

“We are sick today for lack of simple ideas which can help us be what we want to be.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

The Universe of Experience: A Worldview Beyond Science and Religion (1974)

Idea, Help

“I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.”

Alan Bennett (1934) English actor, author

An Englishman Abroad (1983).

“It seems to us that in intelligence there is a fundamental faculty, the alteration or the lack of which, is of the utmost importance for practical life. This faculty is judgment, otherwise called good sense, practical sense, initiative, the faculty of adapting one's self to circumstances. A person may be a moron or an imbecile if he is lacking in judgment; but with good judgment he can never be either. Indeed the rest of the intellectual faculties seem of little importance in comparison with judgment.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Source: The development of intelligence in children, 1916, p. 42-43

Life, Intelligence, Sense, Personality

“It must always be borne in mind that each and every individual is not only a producer but a consumer. In the final analysis of our conditions, we have to admit that it is not lack of consumption, but lack of production which is our present economic danger. The immigrant is needed, provided this fact is overcome, provided supply—whether in schools, in homes, or in shoes—does not fall behind demand. The public could today consume much more of the necessities of food, shelter and clothing than they are able to procure or have ever been able to procure in a country where the standard of living is so high. If, through cheap labor, and an increased willingness on the part of alien labor to live on the edge of existence, these standards are threatened, then is the time to bring legislative action to bear on the situation.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

School, Food, Shoe, Home

“It's sad and frustrating that we are surrounded by products that seem to testify to a complete lack of care. That's an interesting thing about an object. One object speaks volumes about the company that produced it and its values and priorities.”

Jonathan Ive (1967) English designer and VP of Design at Apple

In an interview in The Daily Telegraph newspaper (November 2005)

Sadness

“The tragedy in the long history of the German people is that it has seldom had real leaders. Not that it lacked military leadership. What was lacking was political leadership, the political idea, the Weltanschauung (worldview) that National Socialism gives. The S. A. man as a political soldier is the bearer of this Weltanschauung, this National Socialist idea. Political soldiery is the foundation of the state.”

Viktor Lutze (1890–1943) SA Stabschef

Quoted in "The Educational Philosophy of National Socialism" - Page 174 - by George Frederick Kneller - 1941.

People, History, Idea

“A civilization which is dominated by this matter-of-fact insight must prevail against any cultural scheme that lacks this element. This characteristic of western civilization comes to a head in modern science, and finds its highest material expression in the technology of the machine industry.”

Frank Knight (1885–1972) American economist

Source: "The Place of Science in Modern Civilization", 1906, p. 355

Science

“For a writer, talent is everything. Lots of people make a career out of writing, producing many works and knowing exactly what it takes to become a great writer. But they never break into the big time, because they lack one thing: talent, or a sufficient amount of it.”

Mo Yan book The Republic of Wine

Source: The Republic of Wine (1992), Chapter Four, Section 3

People, Time

“I've never been passionate about acting, and I find more and more that I work to live the life I want to live. An actor like Al Pacino lives to act. I'm not sure though, there's something about the detachment I have, the feeling of the lack of importance about what I do, that is healthy.”

Jeremy Irons (1948) English actor

King of all his castles
The New Zealand Herald
2005-05-14
Elaine
Lipworth
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10125499
2011-08-11

Life, Feeling, Passion

“[But] to sing of your face, a composition
in itself sublime and marvelous,
I lack knowledge, Lady, and wit and art.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Porém, pera cantar de vosso gesto
A composição alta e milagrosa
Aqui falta saber, engenho e arte.
The Collected Lyric Poems of Luis de Camoes (2016), trans. Landeg White, p. 25
Lyric poetry, Sonnets, Eu cantarei de amor tão docemente

Art, Knowledge, Singing

“Why study this fringe area …? If one considers it worthless, lacking in veracity, won't discussing it give it more credibility than it deserves? If we ignore it, perhaps it will go away.”

Stephen Williams (archeologist)

As quoted in Sumathi Ramaswamy: The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories (University of California Press, 2004) p.3

Study

“To cover up actual lack of knowledge, the tale develops an explanation which amounts to divine intervention. It is an easy and, to the primitive mind, a plausible and satisfactory way to explain something of which nothing at all is known.”

Clifford D. Simak book City

Notes on the Third Tale (p. 69)
City (1952)

Way, Knowledge

“Obama’s manner in dealing with other people and acting in the world fully exemplifies the cheerful impersonal friendliness—the middle distance—that marks American sociability. (Now allow me to speak as a critic. Remember Madame de Staël’s meetings that deprive us of solitude without affording us company? Or Schopenhauer’s porcupines, who shift restlessly from getting cold at a distance to prickling one another at close quarters, until they settle into some acceptable compromise position?) The cheerful impersonal friendliness serves to mask recesses of loneliness and secretiveness in the American character, and no less with Obama than with anyone else. He is enigmatic—and seemed so as much then as now—in a characteristically American way…. Moreover, he excelled at the style of sociability that is most prized in the American professional and business class and serves as the supreme object of education in the top prep schools: how to cooperate with your peers by casting on them a spell of charismatic seduction, which you nevertheless disguise under a veneer of self-depreciation and informality. Obama did not master this style in prep school, but he became a virtuoso at it nevertheless, as the condition of preferment in American society that it is. As often happens, the outsider turned out to be better at it than the vast majority of the insiders…. Together with the meritocratic educational achievements, the mastery of the preferred social style turns Obama into what is, in a sense, the first American elite president—that is the first who talks and acts as a member of the American elite—since John Kennedy …. Obama's mixed race, his apparent and assumed blackness, his non-elite class origins and lack of inherited money, his Third-World childhood experiences—all this creates the distance of the outsider, while the achieved elite character makes the distance seem less threatening.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Quoted in David Remnick, The Bridgeː The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (2010), p. 185-6
On Barack Obama

Money, People, Secret, World

“The town’s lack of special quirks was almost a peculiarity in itself.”

Jack Vance book Showboat World

Source: Showboat World (1975), Chapter 3 (p. 23)

“The further through life I drift
The more obvious it becomes that I am lacking in thrift.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

"A Penny Saved Is Impossible"
Good Intentions (1942)

Life

“I'm a man who falls in love so easily, and with such a reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

Love, Marriage

“Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists—whether through design or stupidity, I do not know—as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Evolution as Fact and Theory", p. 260
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

Stupidity, Quotes

“Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 24

Wisdom, People, Beauty

“Otherwise lacking internal support or external legitimacy, the US empire now banks on a pedigree of comprador intellectuals, homeless minds and guns for hire. All this to momentarily manufacture consent, to secure a selective memory, and to sustain a far more enduring collective amnesia that may perhaps serve immediate US imperial purposes well, but will ipso facto sustain its self-destructive force of building fictive sand castles near the factual waves of history. This empire will not last. No empire does. If empires lasted, the whole world would be speaking ancient Persian today.”

Hamid Dabashi (1951) American academic

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm Native informers and the making of the American empire

World, History, Support, Memory

“But on the other hand, the understanding, reflection, is also a gift of God. What shall one do with it, how dispose of it if one is not to use it? And if one then uses it in fear and trembling not for one’s own advantage but to serve the truth, if one uses it that way in fear and trembling and furthermore believing that it still is God who determines the issue in its eternal significance, venturing to trust in him, and with unconditional obedience yielding to what he makes use of it: is this not fear of God and serving God the way a person of reflection can, in the somewhat different way than the spontaneously immediate person, but perhaps more ardently. But if this is the case, does not a maieutic element enter into the relation to other man or to various other men. The maieutic is really only the expression for a superiority between man and man. That is exists cannot be denied-but existence presses far more powerfully upon the superior one precisely because he is a maieutic (because he has the responsibility) than upon the other. As far as I am concerned, there has been no lack of witnesses. All my upbuilding discourses are in fact in the form of direct communication. Consequently there can be a question only about this, something that has occupied me for a long time (already back in earlier journals): should I for one definitely explain myself as author, what I declare myself to be, how I from the beginning understood myself to be a religious author. But now is not the time to do it; I am also somewhat strained at the moment, I need more physical recreation.”

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

JP VI 6234 (Pap. IX A 222 1848)
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s

Men, God, Truth, Fear

“If time is treated in modern physics as a dimension on a par with the dimensions of space, why should we a priori exclude the possibility that we are pulled as well as pushed along its axis? The future has, after all, as much or as little reality as the past, and there is nothing logically inconceivable in introducing, as a working hypothesis, an element of finality, supplementary to the element of causality, into our equations. It betrays a great lack of imagination to believe that the concept of "purpose" must necessarily be associated with some anthropomorphic deity.”

Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) Hungarian-British author and journalist

Epilogue
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959)

Imagination, Reality, Time, Past

“I knew it long ago: I'm a compulsive teacher, but I can't teach. The godawful state of today's education system isn't what's stopping me. I lack at least two of the essential qualifications.
I cannot "suffer fools gladly." The smartest of my pupils would get all my attention, and the rest would have to fend for themselves. And I can't handle being interrupted.
Writing is the answer. Whatever I have to teach, my students will select themselves by buying the book. And nobody interrupts a printed page.”

Larry Niven book N-Space

Foreword: Playgrounds for the mind
N-Space (1989)

Books, Education, Fools, Suffering

“My distraction's my defense against this lack of inspiration
Against this slow deflation
Yeah the further the horizon
The more it holds my gaze
The foreground's out of focus but you know I kinda hope it's just a phase
Just a phase.”

Ani DiFranco (1970) musician and activist

Phase
Song lyrics

Hope

“The safety-obsessed church lacks the inner dynamic to foster profound missional impact in our time.”

Alan Hirsch (1959) South African missionary

Source: The Faith of Leap (2011), p. 58

Time

“We," he said, not without complacency, "are different. We attest the divine paradox. We are barren only to be fertile. We proclaim the primary reality of the world of the spirit which has an infinitude of mansions for an infinitude of human souls. And you too are different. Your destiny is of the rarest kind. You will live to proclaim the love of Christ for man and man for Christ in a figure of earthly love." Preacher's rhetoric; it would have been better in Italian, which thrives on melodious meaninglessness.
I said, with the same weariness as before, "My destiny is to live in a state of desire both church and state condemn and to grow sourly rich in the purveying of a debased commodity. I've just finished a novel which, when I'd read it through in typescript, made me feel sick to my stomach. And yet it's what people want -- the evocation of a past golden time when there was no Mussolini or Hitler or Franco, when gods were paid for with sovereigns, Elgar's Symphony Number One in A flat trumpeted noblimente a massive hope in the future, and the romantic love of a shopgirl and a younger son of the aristocracy portended a healthful inflection but not destruction of the inherited social pattern. Comic servants and imperious duchesses. Hansom cabs and racing at Ascot. Fascists and democrats alike will love it. My destiny is to create a kind of underliterature that lacks all whiff of the subversive.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

"Don't," Carlo said, "underestimate yourself."
Fiction, Earthly Powers (1980)

Love, God, People, Health

“Gentlemen on this floor and in the Senate, had repeatedly, during this discussion, asserted that slavery was a moral, political, and personal blessing; that the slave was free from care, contented, happy, fat, and sleek. Comparisons have been instituted between slaves and laboring freemen, much to the advantage of the condition of slavery. Instances are cited where the slave, having tried freedom, had voluntarily returned to resume his yoke. Well, if this be so, let us give all a chance to enjoy this blessing. Let the slaves, who choose, go free; and the free, who choose, become slaves. If these gentlemen believe there is a word of truth in what they preach, the slaveholder need be under no apprehension that he will ever lack bondsmen. Their slaves would remain, and many freemen would seek admission into this happy condition. Let them be active in propagating their principles. We will not complain if they establish Societies in the South for that purpose -- abolition societies to abolish freedom. Nor will we rob the mails to search for incendiary publications in favor of slavery, even if they contain seductive pictures, and cuts of those implements of happiness -- handcuffs, iron yokes and cat-o'-nine tails.”

Thaddeus Stevens (1792–1868) American politician

In Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens

Happiness, Truth, Search, Cats

“Many people think it impossible for guerrillas to exist for long in the enemy's rear. Such a belief reveals lack of comprehension of the relationship that should exist between the people and the troops. The former may be likened to water the latter to the fish who inhabit it. How may it be said that these two cannot exist together?”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On Guerilla Warfare http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1937/guerrilla-warfare/ch06.htm (1937), Chapter 6 - "The Political Problems of Guerilla Warfare" This is usually aphorized as "The people are the sea that the revolutionary swims in," or an equivalent.

People, Thinking, Fish, Water

“For a long time I was helpless before German influence, for, in Budapest and its vicinity, I lacked the means to check or thwart the joint action of the Germans and the Ministry for Home Affairs. As the defeat of Germany drew nearer, I regained, though slowly and imperfectly, a certain freedom of action. In the summer, I succeeded at last in having the possibility of freeing the Jews from the prohibitions and restrictions imposed on them by law. Of the innumerable requests that poured in, I rejected none. The deportations were supposed to be made to labour camps. Not before August did secret information reach me of the horrible truth about the extermination camps. It was Csatay, the Minister of War, who raised the matter at a Cabinet meeting and demanded that our government should insist on the Germans clarifying the situation. This demand was not met by the Cabinet. The Churches, I must here add, did what they could for those in distress by providing them with certificates of baptism. In this, they acted in accordance with the true wishes of our people.”

Miklós Horthy (1868–1957) Hungarian Admiral and Regent 1920-1944

Source: Memoirs, p. 268

War, People, Truth, Secret

“I was introduced to the great philosophical systems of the past to which the Western universities have given their blessing, arranging and classifying them with the delicate care lavished on museum pieces. When once these systems were so handled, it was natural that they should be regarded as monuments of human intellection. And monuments, because they mark achievements at their particular point in history, soon become conservative in the impression which they make on posterity. I was introduced to Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx and other immortals, to whom I should like to refer as the university philosophers. But these titans were expounded in such a way that a student from a colony could easily find his breast agitated by Conflicting attitudes. These attitudes can have effects which spread out over a whole society, should such a student finally pursue a political life. A colonial student does not by origin belong to the intellectual history in which the university philosophers are such impressive landmarks. The colonial student can be so seduced by these attempts to give a philosophical account of the universe, that surrenders his whole personality to them. When he does this, he loses sight of the fundamental social fact that he is a colonial subject. In this way, he omits to draw from his education and from the concern displayed by the great philosophers for human problems, anything which he might relate to the very real problem of colonial domination, which, as it happens, conditions the immediate life of every colonized African. With single-minded devotion, the colonial student meanders through the intricacies of the philosophical systems. And yet these systems did aim at providing a philosophical account ofthe world in the circumstances and conditions of their time. For even philosophical systems are facts of history. By the time, however, that they come to be accepted in the universities for exposition, they have lost the vital power which they had at their first statement, they have shed their dynamism and polemic reference. This is a result of the academic treatment which they are given. The academic treatment is the result of an attitude to philosophical systems as though there was nothing to them hut statements standing in logical relation to one another. This defective approach to scholarship was suffered hy different categories of colonial student. Many of them had heen handpicked and, so to say, carried certificates ofworthiness with them. These were considered fit to become enlightened servants of the colonial administration. The process by which this category of student became fit usually started at an early age, for not infrequently they had lost contact early in life with their traditional background. By reason of their lack of contact with their own roots, they became prone to accept some theory of universalism, provided it was expressed in vague, mellifluous terms. Armed with their universalism, they carried away from their university courses an attitude entirely at variance with the concrete reality of their people and their struggle. When they came across doctrines of a combative nature, like those of Marxism, they reduced them to arid abstractions, to common-room subtleties. In this way, through the good graces oftheir colonialist patrons, these students, now competent in the art of forming not a concrete environmental view of social political problems, but an abstract, 'liberal' outlook, began to fulfil the hopes and expectations oftheir guides and guardians.”

Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) Pan Africanist and First Prime Minister and President of Ghana

Source: Consciencism (1964), Introduction, pp. 2-4.

Life, People, Age, World

“Both art and the artist lack identity and define themselves only through their encounter with each other.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

Source: Art & Other Serious Matters, (1985), p. 155, "Willem de Kooning"

Art

“Acceptance is appreciation, and the high value of appreciation is such that to appreciate appreciation seems to be the fundamental prerequisite for survival. Mankind will not die for lack of information; it may perish for lack of appreciation.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

Source: Who Is Man? (1965), Ch. 5

“At its core, the argument against racism, at least as it works to further black interests, is an argument against collectivism. You're meant to avoid judging an entire people based on the color of their epidermis or the conduct of a statistically significant number of them. It is, however, deemed perfectly acceptable to malign and milk Europeans for all they're worth, based on the lack of pigment in their skin and their overall better socio-economic performance.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Europeans Abolished Slavery; Africans/Muslims Still Practice It." http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/263735/europeans-abolished-slavery-africansmuslims-still-ilana-mercer FrontPage Magazine 8/4/016. 2010s, 2016

People, Color

“The world would be a lot better off if it paid more attention to its philosophers and artists than to its own tiny egotistic spirit, which lacks an overview. People should place their belief in Beethoven and Socrates.”

Elfriede Jelinek book Wonderful, Wonderful Times

p 40
Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1990)

People, World

“There is not a single desirable attribute which, lacking in a plant, may not be bred into it. Choose what improvement you wish in a flower, a fruit, or a tree, and by crossing, selection, cultivation, and persistence you can fix this desirable trait irrevocably.”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

p, 125
The Training of the Human Plant (1907)

Flowers, Tree

““The free addition of a religious nature is to move from a starting point of a unity and common destiny, not saying: * “I will be saved but not you – I am inspired, the agent of a special mission but not you”. Instead saying: * “We are part of a unity and a common destiny, and if you are not aware of it, I will add to what you feel my feeling and my action in this way. And it might be that your lack of awareness in this might benefit me by deepening my awareness and religious consciousness.
Therefore my religious life will have two essential aspects:”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Hymn

Life, Way, Feeling, Nature

“[W]hen Eisenhower heard that the German residents of a nearby city "didn't know" about a death camp whose stench should have reached their nostrils, he marched them, well-dressed, through the rotting corpses, and made them help dispose of the dead. The mayor of Gotha and his wife, went home from this and hanged themselves. We lack Eisenhower's authority.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

Death, Home, Help, Dead

“Usha had said that males were not all that different, just bigger outside to make up for what they lacked within.”

Joan Slonczewski book A Door into Ocean

Part 3, Chapter 4 (p. 134)
A Door into Ocean (1986)

“Doing the wrong new things, things that usurp what God calls us to do, is dangerous. Focus tends to let it breathe. Lack of focus generally suffocates it.”

Craig Groeschel (1967) American priest

It – How Churches and Leaders Can Get It and Keep It (2008, Zondervan)

God

“Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“Terrorism, which means killing civilians in whatever name or title, lacks morality, and nobody who lacks such principle will go to heaven.”

Mohammad Khatami (1943) Iranian prominent reformist politician, scholar and shiite faqih.

During a speech at Council on American-Islamic Relations http://www.ghazali.net/archives2006/html/khatmi_blasts.html (dead link). (8 September 2006) Attributed

“Citizens’ right to document cruelty to animals — wherever it occurs — is crucial in helping local, state and federal officials enforce anti-cruelty laws. Authorities can’t be everywhere at once, and funding for enforcement of anti-cruelty laws is sorely lacking in most places. What we need are more cameras on factory farms, not fewer.”

Cloris Leachman (1926) American actress

"Don’t Cover Up Animal Cruelty" https://www.huffingtonpost.com/cloris-leachman/post_1981_b_854721.html, in the HuffPost (27 April 2011).

Law, Help, Animals

“As we do all of this work to counter the Islamist extremist ideology, let’s also recognise that we will have to enter some pretty uncomfortable debates – especially cultural ones. Too often we have lacked the confidence to enforce our values, for fear of causing offence. The failure in the past to confront the horrors of forced marriage I view as a case in point. So is the utter brutality of Female Genital Mutilation”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

FGM
2010s, 2015, Speech on extremism (20 July 2015)

Marriage, Fear, Confidence, Failure

“I saw Guillaumin. We went to look at my two latest paintings which were bought by Durand. All he said was 'there's no firmness in the foreground'. It was evening, we were seeing the paintings by gas-light, which neutralized the orange tones. As Seurat says, what they [the Impressionists]] look for is thick impasto; but at Clauzet's I saw a Guillaumin, also in the evening, and it looked made of tar, so much shellac was used at the base of this painting, which in my view is really old stuff; it must be admitted that he made an effort to tighten the design but then the harmonies are insignificant and lack logic - there is no drawing, there is a flurry of colors, but no modeling; it is one step from [w: Jules Dupré|Jules Dupreé]] - modernized.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote of Pissarro, in a letter, Paris, 6 December 1886, to his son Lucien; in Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 84
1880's

Color, Effort, Light, Drawing