Quotes about lack
page 11

“Well I think that my main concern is that there is a market lack of desire for quote-unquote art that people are creating and appreciating. I think because there’s a lack of desire for that, which translates to the creation and elevation of art that then thereby lack substance because there’s no desire for it, there’s no appreciation for it. It self-perpetuates a world in which the hollow, the vapid and the greedy are elevated and revered. That bothers me because art is so important whether it’s design, fine art, film, fashion, things that are important to the world. It’s what makes me want to wake up in the morning, it drives me.”

Davey Havok (1975) American singer

Asked what concerns him the most about the society today. The Aquarian, November 2009 http://www.theaquarian.com/2009/11/06/interview-davey-havok-afi-conspicuous-composition/

People, World, Art, Quotes

“A novelist's lack of awareness of and critical distance to his own body of work is due to a phenomenon that I have noticed in myself and many others: as soon as it is written, every new book erases the last one, leaving me with the impression that I have forgotten it. I thought I was writing books one after the other in a disjointed way, in successive bouts of oblivion, but often the same faces, the same names, the same places, the same phrases keep coming back in book after book, like patterns on a tapestry woven while half asleep. While half asleep or while daydreaming. A novelist is often a sleepwalker, so steeped is he in what he must write, and it is natural to worry when he crosses the road in case he is run over. Do not forget, though, the extreme precision of sleepwalkers who walk over roofs without ever falling off.”

Patrick Modiano (1945) French writer

From Nobel Lecture (2014)

Books, Way, Nature, Success

“He usually lacks the originality of Henryson and the brilliance of Dunbar and Douglas. But what there is of him is good all through.”

David Lindsay (1490–1554) Scottish noble and poet

C. S. Lewis English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954) p. 100.
Criticism

“I am not saying that such a theory cannot be constructed, but only that I cannot see how to do it in any way that might be useful. The decisive point, anyway, is that a macrotheory of international politics would lack the practical implications of macroeconomic theory. National governments can manipulate system-wide economic variables. No agencies with comparable capabilities exist internationally. Who would act on the possibilities of adjustment that a macrotheory of international politics might reveal?”

Kenneth N. Waltz book Theory of International Politics

Source: Theory of International Politics (1979), p. 110

Way, Decision

“The Hindus lost Kabul for good only in the closing decade of the 10th century. In AD 963 Alaptigin, a Turkish slave of the succeeding Samanid dynasty, had been able to establish an independent Muslim principality in Kabul with his seat at Ghazni. It was his general and successor, Subuktigin, who conquered Kabul after a struggle spread over two decades. The Hindus under king Jayapala of Udbhandapur made a bold bid to recapture Kabul in AD 986-987. A confederate Hindu army to which the Rajas of Delhi, Ajmer, Kalinjar and Kanauj has contributed troops and money, advanced into the heartland of the Islamic kingdom of Ghazni. “According to Utbi, the battle lasted several days and the warriors of Subuktigin, including prince Mahmood, were ‘reduced to despair.’ But a snow-storm and rains upset the plans of Jayapala who opened negotiations for peace. He sent the following message to Subuktigin: ‘You have heard and know the nobleness of Indians - they fear not death or destruction… In affairs of honour and renown we would place ourselves upon the fire like roast meat, and upon the dagger like the sunrays.’” But the peace thus concluded proved temporary. The Muslims resumed the offensive and the Hindus were defeated and driven out of Kabul. Dr. Mishra concludes with the comment that Jayapala “was perhaps the last Indian ruler to show such spirit of aggression, so sadly lacking in later Rajput kings.””

Jayapala (964–1001) Ruler of the Kabal Shabi

S.R. Goel, (1994) Heroic Hindu resistance to Muslim invaders, 636 AD to 1206 AD. ISBN 9788185990187 , quoting Ram Gopal Misra, Indian Resistance to Early Muslim Invaders Upto 1206 A.D. (1983).

Death, Money, Fear, Peace

“The dead are free from Fortune; Mother Earth has room for all her children, and he who lacks an urn has the sky to cover him.”
Libera fortunae mors est; capit omnia tellus quae genuit; caelo tegitur qui non habet urnam.

Marcus Annaeus Lucanus book Pharsalia

Book VII, line 818 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia

Children, Dead

“"Llorio, you are a woman of surpassing beauty, though you would seem to lack that provocative warmth which draws man to woman, and adds dimension to the character."
The Murthe responded curtly: "The quality you describe is a kind of lewd obsequiousness which, happily, has now become obsolete. As for the 'surpassing beauty,' it is an apotheotic quality generated by the surging music of the female soul, which you, in your crassness, perceive only as a set of pleasing contours."”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

"The Murthe", chapter 3
Dying Earth (1950-1984), Rhialto the Marvellous (1984)

Beauty, Music, Soul, Drawing

“Republicans may be in control of the legislative branch, but they lack principled leadership. Consequently, true conservatives have faced an increasingly hostile environment from the DC establishment. It takes more than empty rhetoric to lead. The GOP must become a party of principle again. And in so doing, we have to learn to fight for conservatism and our Constitution again.”

Chris McDaniel (1971) American politician

Mississippi’s Chris McDaniel: Oust Boehner http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/01/05/mississippis-chris-mcdaniel-oust-boehner/ (January 5, 2015)

Hostility, Learning, Fight

“I believe that communities which lack the feminine influence are apt to fall into abstraction and the madness of systems which, being false, require violence to put into practice. We have, alas, seen too many examples of this. A masculine civilization like that of ancient Greece perishes through politics, metaphysics, and vanity. Women alone can give these doctrinary drones a sense of the real and simple values of the hive. No true civilization is possible without the collaboration of the two sexes, but there can be no real collaboration unless the differences between the sexes are accepted and a mutual respect established.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

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

Women, Sex, Communication, Sense

“For if society lacks the unity that derives from the fact that the relationships between its parts are exactly regulated, that unity resulting from the harmonious articulation of its various functions assured by effective discipline and if, in addition, society lacks the unity based upon the commitment of men's wills to a common objective, then it is no more than a pile of sand that the least jolt or the slightest puff will suffice to scatter.”

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) French sociologist (1858-1917)

Émile Durkheim (1903/1961, p. 102); Quoted in: Kenneth Allan (2012). Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory: Seeing the Social World: Seeing the Social World p. 151

Men, Parting

“We want to take into account the latest debates on the so-called Welfare State, to be found in the documents of the United Nations and of the European Union, in order to avoid sterile imitations and the most common dysfunction’s of this model: very high social expenditure, heavy-handed State control and an excessive bureaucracy, lack of efficiency in the distribution of resources, an excessive protectionism that engenders the dependency of the citizens, and the demobilization of social initiatives.”

Marc Forné Molné (1946) Andorran politician

At World Summit for Social Development, Copenhagen, Denmark, March 11 1995)

Dependency

“It is a mistake to assume that diplomacy can always settle international disputes if there is "good faith" and "willingness to come to an agreement". For in a revolutionary international order, each power will seem to its opponents to lack precisely these qualities. […] In the absence of an agreement on what constitutes a reasonable demand, diplomatic conferences are occupied with sterile repetitions of basic positions and accusations of bad faith, or allegations of "unreasonableness" and "subversion". They become elaborate stage plays which attempt to attach as yet uncommitted powers to one of the opposing systems.”

Henry Kissinger book A World Restored

A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-22 (1957), p. 2
1950s

Faith

“Dinosaurs first existed around 6,000 years ago. Because dinosaurs were land animals, and God made all the land animals on day six of the creation week, dinosaurs were created on day six. Dinosaurs could not have died out before this time because death, bloodshed, disease and suffering is a result of Adam's sin. Adam and Eve were also made on day six alongside the dinosaurs - so dinosaurs lived with people. Representatives of all the KINDS of land animals, including the dinosaur kinds went on board Noah's ark. All those that were left behind drowned in the cataclysmic circumstances of the Flood - many of their remains became fossils. After the Flood (around 4,500 years ago), the land animals (including dinosaurs) came off the ark and lived in the present world, beside people. Because of sin, the judgement of the curse and the effects of the Flood have greatly changed the earth. Since the Flood, many animals have died out from diseases, a lack of food, etc. The dinosaurs, like many other creatures, seem to have also died out. According to this view, there is no mystery about dinosaurs!”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Great Dinosaur Mystery Solved! (2000)

Death, God, People, World

“What I lack is the spiritual basis which under girded Romantic painting. We have lost the feeling of God's omnipresence in Nature. For us, everything is empty. Yet, these paintings [of a. o. Caspar David Friedrich ] are still there. They still speak to us. We continue to love them, to use them, to have need of them.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 109, note 62

Love, God, Feeling, Nature

“To make up for its lack of a moral compass, the British public is prey to sudden gusts of kitschy sentimentality followed by vehement outrage, encouraged by the cheap and cynical sensationalism of its press. Spasms of self-righteousness are its substitute for the moral life.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Who Killed Childhood? http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_oh_to_be.html (Spring 2004). City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Life

“Some economists believe that the Great Depression of the 1930s was aggravated by bad monetary policy and lack of American leadership. Britain was too weak to maintain an open international economy, and the United States was not living up to its new responsibilities.”

Joseph Nye (1937) American political scientist

Source: Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (6th ed., 2006), Chapter 7, Globalization and Interdependence, p. 218.

“We should not go to the people and say, "Here we are. We come to give you the charity of our presence, to teach you our science, to show you your errors, your lack of culture, your ignorance of elementary things." We should go instead with an inquiring mind and a humble spirit to learn at that great source of wisdom that is the people.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

On Revolutionary Medicine (1960)

Wisdom, People, Error, Learning

“Much of the prejudice against Islam in the West stems from a lack of understanding of the true nature of Islam as a religion professed by 1.4 billion people in the world.”

Abdullah Ahmad Badawi (1939) Malaysian politician

http://www.ikna.ir/en/news_detail.php?ProdID=126709 Malaysian PM derides West on Islam, Mideast http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=150733&version=1&template_id=45&parent_id=25

People, World, Religion, Understanding

“The need for general scientific understanding by the public has never been larger, and the penalty for scientific illiteracy never harsher… Lack of scientific fundamentals causes people to make foolish decisions about issues such as the toxicity of chemicals, the efficacy of medicines, the changes in the global climate.”

Peter Agre (1949) American chemist, recipient of Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Peter Agre's speech at the Nobel Banquet http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2003/agre-speech-e.html, December 10, 2003

People, Penalty, Understanding, Decision

“I'm sure for some people saying they’re bisexual feels less scary than making a statement that they're gay. For me, it’s not really an issue because I’m someone who believes being bisexual is actually a thing. It’s not made up. It’s not a lack of decision. It’s not being greedy or numerous other ignorant things I’ve heard at this point. For a bisexual, it’s not about gender. That’s not the deciding factor for who they’re attracted to.”

Anna Paquin (1982) Canadian-born New Zealand actress

I still like women': Pregnant Anna Paquin on why she will always be bisexual... despite being married to Stephen Moyer http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2138717/Anna-Paquin-bisexual-Actress-likes-women-despite-married-Stephen-Moyer.html By Daily Mail Reporter - Published: 3-5-2012 Anna Paquin: My Bisexuality 'Is Not Made Up' Despite Being Married To Stephen Moyer http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/03/anna-paquin-bisexuality-zooey-magazine-_n_1475128.html - Published: 5-3-2012.

People, Feeling, Decision

“She understood at once, and with the courageous goodwill that sustained her, resigned herself to the fact: there was always a drawback. There had to be. Sometimes it was the lack of light, or a factory nearby, or not enough rooms. Here, it was a railroad.”

Gabrielle Roy book The Tin Flute

Source: The Tin Flute (1945), P.281

Courage, Light

“The nuclear power industry, for example, lacks a strong union, has random public victims with delayed effects, has no safety board that is independent of licensing and regulatory functions, and does not see an immediate effect on its profits if safety flags (though a far more severe incentive exists to avoid a catastrophic accident which could shut down the industry)”

Charles Perrow book Normal Accidents

Source: 1980s and later, Normal Accidents, 1984, p. 127

Strong

“The happiness which is lacking makes one think even the happiness one has unbearable.”

Joseph Roux (1834–1905) French poet

Part 5, XXXVII
Meditations of a Parish Priest (1866)

Happiness, Thinking, Happy

“Public opinion* is the unseen product of education and practical experience. Education, in turn, is the function, in co-operation, of the family, the church and the school. If the family fails in its guiding influence and discipline and if the church fails in its religious instruction, then everything is left to the school, which is given an impossible burden to bear. It is just this situation which has arisen in the United States during the generation through which we are still passing. In overwhelming proportion, the family has become almost unconscious of its chief educational responsibility. In like manner, the church, fortunately with some noteworthy exceptions, has done the same. The heavy burden put upon the school has resulted in confused thinking, unwise plans of instruction and a loss of opportunity to lay the foundations of true education, the effects of which are becoming obvious to every one. Fundamental dis cipline, both personal and social, has pretty well disappeared, and, without that discipline which develops into self-discipline, education is impossible.
What are the American people going to do about it? If they do not correct these conditions, they are simply playing into the hands of the advocates of a totalitarian state, for that type of state is at least efficient, and it is astonishing to how many persons efficiency makes stronger appeal than liberty.
Then, too, we have many signs of an incapacity to understand and to interpret liberty, or to distinguish it from license. There is a limit to liberty, and liberty ends where license begins. It is very difficult for many persons to understand this fact or to grasp its implications. If we are to have freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of the press, why should we not be free to say and think and print whatever we like? The answer is that the limit between liberty and license must be observed if liberty itself is to last. To suppose, as many individuals and groups seem to do, that liberty of thought and liberty of speech* include liberty to agitate for the destruction of liberty itself, indicates on the part of such persons not only lack of common sense but lack of any sense o humor. If liberty is to remain, the barrier between liberty and license must be recognized and observed.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

Liberty-Equality-Fraternity (1942)

People, Education, School, Family

“The people of the United States will not tolerate another deep depression that arises not from any lack of natural resources, productive capacity or man and brain power, but solely from imperfections in the functioning of the system of finance capitalism.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Part V, Chapter XIX, The Reservoir Plan and Tradition, p. 234 (See also; Karl Marx, Capital)
Storage and Stability (1937)

People, Nature

“And the soul, my soul at least, longs for something else, not absorption, not quietude, not peace, not appeasement, it longs ever to approach and never to arrive, it longs for the never-ending longing, for an eternal hope which is eternally renewed but never wholly fulfilled. And together with all this, it longs for an eternal lack of something and an eternal suffering. A suffering, a pain, thanks to which it grows without ceasing in consciousness and longing. Do not write upon the gate of heaven that sentence which Dante placed over the threshold of hell, Lasciate ogni speranza! [Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate: All hope abandon, ye who enter in] Do not destroy time!”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), X : Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis

Pain, Peace, Hope, Soul

“He hath the sor which no man heleth,
The which is cleped lack of herte.”

John Gower Confessio Amantis

Bk. 4, line 334.
Confessio Amantis

“…for the teaching of this kind I will devote myself to translating what is said more fully by many authors, and especially those whom mother Greece educated, whilst the Latins were oppressed by lack,... of knowledge.”
...ad doctrinam huiusmodi copiosius a perpluribus dicta auctoribus, et praecipue ab his quos mater educavit Graecia, Latinorum cogente penuria, . . . transferenda conferam

Alfano I, Archbishop of Salerno (1015–1085) Archbishop of Salerno

From the preface to his translation http://www.sal.tohoku.ac.jp/phil/DIDASCALIA/2CHBURNE.PDF of the Premnon phisicon of Nemesius.

Education, Knowledge

“Here, under a stronger sun, I have found true what Pissarro said, and what Gauguin wrote to me as well, the simplicity, the lack of color, the gravity of great sunlight effects.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Arles, Oct. 1888; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 555) p. 28 1880s, 1888

Color, Sun

“I condemn the lack of proper investigation of the massacres and the impunity of those responsible for them.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

UN experts urge Iraq to establish the whereabouts of the seven missing residents of Camp Ashraf http://dezayasalfred.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/un-experts-urge-iraq-to-establish-the-whereabouts-of-the-seven-missing-residents-of-camp-ashraf/. 2013

“Personal responsibility is a big idea about which little is known. It has received far less study than other key conservative tenets, like economic choice. This lack of attention is striking because personal responsibility is a defining assumption in American thought.”

Mark Riebling (1963) American writer

Personal Responsibility: How the Framers coined a phrase as they created a nation (2010)

Idea, Study, Personality

“The European Union is happy to suck money from member states like a giant leech, with absolutely no respect for how it is spent. Whenever more transparency is called for, they simply hide behind smoke and mirrors and fancy words, and completely ignore common sense. They show a total lack of respect to the citizens of the European Union. The problem with the EU is that it spends money like it is going out of fashion, when actually it’s the Euro which is going out of fashion right now, with so many countries now questioning its membership.”

Jill Seymour (1958) British politician

Where is the transparency? More EU smoke and mirrors… http://jillseymourukip.org/where-is-the-transparency-more-eu-smoke-and-mirrors/ (February 28, 2017)

Money, Happiness, Fashion, Question

“There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity; maybe it's a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason.”

Roald Dahl (1916–1990) British novelist, short story writer, poet, fighter pilot and screenwriter

As quoted in New Statesman (1983); partly quoted in "The Candy Man" by Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker (11 July 2005) http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/07/11/050711crat_atlarge?printable=true

“Do you think it inconsistent for someone who lacks belief in the stork to object when public schools teach middle schoolers that that’s where babies come from? Likewise no history class should ever confuse students by playing any movie with Mel Gibson’s name in the credits, because they’re wrong, and it’s wrong to mislead students. It would be inconsistent for one who loves and seeks knowledge of truth not to object to lies or challenge liars. Everything religion teaches is wrong. Although public schools are not teaching about the stork, some of them are teaching creationism, which is just as demonstrably absurdly wrong; In either case, it’s a criminal immoral disservice, and should be corrected.”

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

Patheos, Anti-theist Answers to Christian Questions http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2015/11/22/anti-theist-answers-to-christian-questions/ (November 22, 2015)

Love, Truth, School, Religion

“We start with enthusiasm — out we go each of us to our task in all the brightness of sunrise, and hope beats along our pulses; we believe the world has no blanks except to cowards, and we find, at last, that, as far as we ourselves are concerned, it has no prizes; we sicken over the endless unprofitableness of labour most when we have most succeeded, and when the time comes for us to lay down our tools we cast them from us with the bitter aching sense, that it were better for us if it had been all a dream. We seem to know either too much or too little of ourselves — too much, for we feel that we are better than we can accomplish; too little, for, if we have done any good at all, it has heen as we were servants of a system too vast for us to comprehend. We get along through life happily between clouds and sunshine, forgetting ourselves in our employments or our amusements, and so long as we can lose our consciousness in activity we can struggle on to the end. But when the end comes, when the life is lived and done, and stands there face to face with us; or if the heart is weak, and the spell breaks too soon, as if the strange master-worker has no longer any work to offer us, and turns us off to idleness and to ourselves; in the silence then our hearts lift up their voices, and cry out they can find no rest here, no home. Neither pleasure, nor rank, nor money, nor success in life, as it is called, have satisfied, or can satisfy; and either earth has nothing at all which answers to our cravings, or else it is something different from all these, which we have missed finding — this peace which passes understanding — and from which in the heyday of hope we had turned away, as lacking the meretricious charm which then seemed most alluring.
I am not sermonizing of Religion, or of God, or of Heaven, at least not directly.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Confessions Of A Sceptic
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)

Life, Money, God, Pleasure

“As the months of agony advanced, there was bred in the warring peoples a genuine and even passionate will for peace and a united world. Out of the conflict of the tribes arose, at least for a while, a spirit loftier than tribalism. But this fervour lacked as yet clear guidance, lacked even the courage of conviction.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter I: Balkan Europe; Section 1, “The European War and After” (p. 18)

War, People, World, Peace

“Treatises may be didactic in tone, but essentially they lack the conclusiveness of an instruction which could be asserted, like doctrine, by virtue of its own authority. … Tirelessly the process of thinking makes new beginnings, returning in a roundabout way to its original object. This continual pausing for breath is the mode most proper to the process of contemplation. For by pursuing different levels of meaning in its examination of one single object it receives both the incentive to begin again and the justification for its irregular rhythm.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Source: Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [Origin of the German Mourning Play] (1925), p. 28

Way, Thinking

“The life of Camillus, the death of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their godlike state, of the victorious Gauls; the refusal of the republic to make peace with Hannibal, after the battle of Cannae, were not the consequences of a refined calculation of the probable personal advantage to result from such a rhythm and order in the shows of life, to those who were at once the poets and the actors of these immortal dramas. The imagination beholding the beauty of this order, created it out of itself according to its own idea; the consequence was empire, and the reward everlasting fame. These things are not the less poetry, quia carent vate sacro [because they lack a sacred bard]. They are the episodes of that cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of men.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

This passage has sometimes been paraphrased as "History is a cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of man". A Defence of Poetry http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html (1821)

Life, Death, Men, Peace

“The religious situation of our people is very unstable. This is because of the lack of religious teachers and other dedicated people. As a result Fiji Indians are like an unsteady boat in a whirlpool.”

Totaram Sanadhya (1876–1947) Fijian writer

My Twenty-One Years in the Fiji Islands (English translation by J.D. Kelly & U.K. Singh, Fiji Museum, 1991).

People, Teachers

“I believe that all men, whatever their religion or lack of it, pass on into another phase of being, to another class in God’s school.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.266

Men, God, School, Religion

“I was surprised and fascinated to experience the absolute lack of physical attraction, in terms of physical mass, in z-g.”

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

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

“His was a life which lacked, perhaps, the sublimer emotions which raised Man to the level of the gods, but it was undeniably an extremely happy one. He never experienced the thrill of ambition fulfilled, but, on the other hand, he never knew the agony of ambition frustrated. His name, when he died, would not live for ever in England's annals; he was spared the pain of worrying about this by the fact that he had no desire to live for ever in England's annals. He was possibly as nearly contented a human being can be in this century of alarms and excursions.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Something Fresh

Something Fresh (1915)

Life, God, Pain, Happiness

“I was watching the news reports from Baltimore and hearing all the condemnations from some about being kept down and the lack of jobs, opportunity, good schools — then why do these blacks keep voting for the same people? And this isn't a phenomenon isolated to Baltimore. Every single major urban center in America is run by Democrats — more specifically, liberal progressives, black or white. The morass that became Detroit. The killing fields of Chicago. The depravity of Washington, D. C. The shame of South Dallas. And yes, even the place that was once my home, Atlanta, even with all the successful black entertainers. Now, I remember the first black mayor of Atlanta, Maynard Jackson. That guy was a leader and even spoke at my high school Baccalaureate. But today, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed has done such a bang-up job that the Atlanta Braves are moving to Cobb County! Just do the assessment yourselves, who are the elected officials heading up the urban centers? And where does one find the most dire socio-economic statistics?”

Allen West (politician) (1961) American politician; retired United States Army officer

2010s, Dirty little secret no one wants to admit about Baltimore (2015)

People, School, Guy, Home

“[I]t would be a piece of ingenuousness to accuse the man of to-day of his lack of moral code. The accusation would leave him cold, or rather, would flatter him. Immoralism has become a commonplace, and anybody and everybody boasts of practising it.”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XV: We Arrive At The Real Question

“The evidence of racial bias comes not only from statistics, but also from remarks made by police, city and court officials. A thorough examination of the records – including a large volume of work emails – shows a number of public servants expressing racist comments or gender discrimination; demonstrating grotesque views and images of African Americans in which they were seen as the “other,” called “transient” by public officials, and characterized as lacking personal responsibility.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Personality

“Some say once gone you're gone forever
And some say you're going to come back.
Some say you rest in the arms of the Saviour
If in sinful ways you lack.
Some say that they're coming back in a garden,
Bunch of carrots and little sweet peas.
I think I'll just let the mystery be.”

Iris DeMent (1961) American singer and songwriter

Let the Mystery Be
Song lyrics, Infamous Angel (1992)

Way, Thinking

“Not everyone is concerned with the deep future,” Manfred interrupts. “It’s important! If we live or die, that doesn’t matter—that’s not the big picture. The big question is whether information originating in our light cone is preserved, or whether we’re stuck in a lossy medium where our very existence counts for nothing. It’s downright embarrassing to be a member of a species with such a profound lack of curiosity about its own future, especially when it affects us all personally! I mean, if there’s going to come a time when there’s nobody or nothing to remember us then what does –”
“Manfred?”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

He stops in midsentence, his mouth open, staring dumbly.
Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 8 (“Elector”), pp. 347-348

Question, Light, Time, Future

“You stared out of the window on the emptiness
Of a world exploding:
Stones and rubble thrown upwards in a fountain
Blasted sideways by the wind.
Every sensation except loneliness
Was drained out of your mind
By the lack of any motionless object the eye could
find.
You were a child again
Who sees for the first time things happen.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"To A Spanish Poet" (for Manuel Altolaguirre)
The Still Centre (1939)

World, Time, Loneliness

“Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time.”

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic

"Jorge Luis Borges: Medallions", p. 178
The Myth Makers: European and Latin American Writers (1979)

Time

“Many persons believed, or pretended to believe, and confidently asserted, that freed slaves would not make good soldiers; they would lack courage, and could not be subjected to military discipline. Facts have shown how groundless were these apprehensions. The slave has proved his manhood, and his capacity as an infantry soldier, at Milliken's Bend, at the assault upon Port Hudson, and the storming of Fort Wagner. The apt qualifications of the colored man for artillery service have long been known and recognized by the naval service.”

Edwin M. Stanton (1814–1869) American lawyer, judge and politician

Letter to Abraham Lincoln (5 December 1863); As quoted in Black Union Soldiers in the Civil War, by Hondon B. Hargrove, p. 108

Color, Confidence, Courage, Personality

“The retrieval process begins when a lack of information shows itself in a human mind and the decision is taken to ﬁnd out if this information has been discovered and published”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Source: Classification and indexing in the social sciences (1963), p. 86; As cited in: Mei Hong (2006, p. 44)

Decision

“Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

E 11
Variant translations: Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.
Nothing contributes more to a person's peace of mind than having no opinions at all.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook E (1775 - 1776)

Peace, Soul

“Grey was an ambitious man who always wished to lead, but his overt ambition during his youth made him unpopular. He lacked the warmth of personality that made Fox revered by his followers. Grey was respected but rarely loved. His achievements were few, but they were significant. He helped to keep liberal principles alive during the years of conflict with revolutionary France, and in 1832 he safeguarded the continuity of the British constitution into an era of increasingly rapid social and political change. In character he was a man of contradictions, headstrong but easily discouraged by failure, imperious but indecisive, cautious and introspective. He was at his best when in office, for he sought fame and reputation: in opposition he often became despondent. He was a man of principle and integrity, though not always successful in execution. His bearing and attitudes were aristocratic, and his instincts were fundamentally conservative. He was a whig of the eighteenth-century school, most at home among his deferential clients, tenants, and labourers at Howick, and he never came to terms with the new industrial society which was coming into being during his later years. It is greatly to his credit that his Reform Act, whatever its conservative purpose, smoothed the path for that new society to establish its dominance without destroying the old.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

E. A. Smith, ‘ Grey, Charles, second Earl Grey (1764–1845) http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11526’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2009, accessed 8 Sept 2012. About

Love, Youth, School, Home

“At present, there are hundreds of thousands of prisoners in Germany of all nationalities and degrees, partly in camps, but for the most part, however, as workers…The dangers of inter-mixing and bastardizing of our people are extraordinarily grave. They lie to a great extent in the almost unlimited lack of knowledge throughout our nation of the problems of blood.”

Günther Pancke (1899–1973) German general

(3 July 1940). Quoted in "Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals" - Page 117 - 1953

People, Lie, Knowledge, Problem

“In recent years, Britain has withdrawn from the world. On Syria, on Europe, on Ukraine this government has been on the periphery: all victim of the same lack of long-term strategic thinking about British foreign policy and the absence of a moral compass. It is time for the left to revive its ethical foreign policy and carve out a new long-term narrative that puts human rights and the protection of civilians centre stage once again.”

Jo Cox (1974–2016) UK politician

A new progressive internationalism (17 June 2016)

World, Thinking, Time

“Wherever big industries displaced manufacture, the bourgeoisie developed in wealth and power to the utmost and made itself the first class of the country. The result was that wherever this happened, the bourgeoisie took political power into its own hands and displaced the hitherto ruling classes, the aristocracy, the guildmasters, and their representative, the absolute monarchy. The bourgeoisie annihilated the power of the aristocracy, the nobility, by abolishing the entailment of estates – in other words, by making landed property subject to purchase and sale, and by doing away with the special privileges of the nobility. It destroyed the power of the guildmasters by abolishing guilds and handicraft privileges. In their place, it put competition – that is, a state of society in which everyone has the right to enter into any branch of industry, the only obstacle being a lack of the necessary capital.”

Friedrich Engels book Principles of Communism

Principles of Communism (1847)

Country, Wealth

“The actual effect of Rawls’s theory is to undercut theoretically any straightforward appeal to egalitarianism. Egalitarianism has the advantage that gross failure to comply with its basic principles is not difficult to monitor, There are, to be sure, well-known and unsettled issues about comparability of resources and about whether resources are really the proper objects for egalitarians to be concerned with, but there can be little doubt that if person A in a fully monetarized society has ten thousand times the monetary resources of person B, then under normal circumstances the two are not for most politically relevant purposes “equal.” Rawls’s theory effectively shifts discussion away from the utilitarian discussion of the consequences of a certain distribution of resources, and also away from an evaluation of distributions from the point of view of strict equality; instead, he focuses attention on a complex counterfactual judgment. The question is not “Does A have grossly more than B?”—a judgment to which within limits it might not be impossible to get a straightforward answer—but rather the virtually unanswerable “Would B have even less if A had less?” One cannot even begin to think about assessing any such claim without making an enormous number of assumptions about scarcity of various resources, the form the particular economy in question had, the preferences, and in particular the incentive structure, of the people who lived in it and unless one had a rather robust and detailed economic theory of a kind that few people will believe any economist today has. In a situation of uncertainty like this, the actual political onus probandi in fact tacitly shifts to the have-nots; the “haves” lack an obvious systematic motivation to argue for redistribution of the excess wealth they own, or indeed to find arguments to that conclusion plausible. They don't in the same way need to prove anything; they, ex hypothesi, “have” the resources in question: “Beati possidentes.””

Raymond Geuss (1946) British philosopher

“Liberalism and its Discontents,” pp. 22-23.
Outside Ethics (2005)

People, Way, Motivation, Failure

“Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved alongside each other over millions of years, both reproducing after their own kind before the ability to physically have sex evolved. They did this through "asexuality" ("without sexual desire or activity or lacking any apparent sex or sex organs"). Each of them split in half.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

Sexes without sex
Atheist Central
2008-12-01
http://raycomfortfood.blogspot.com/2008/12/sexs-without-sex.html
2011-10-21

Sex

“People have committed suicide because of their failure to realize the passions for love, power, fame, revenge. Cases of suicide because of a lack of sexual satisfaction are virtually nonexistent.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Source: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), p. 30

Love, People, Failure, Revenge

“Romania is dying because of a lack of men, not a lack of programs.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

Men

“While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. And now during these last three weeks of the march he had learned still another new, consolatory truth- that nothing in this world is terrible. He had learned that as there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and lack freedom. He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together….”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Bk. XIV, ch. 12
War and Peace (1865–1867; 1869)

Life, Happiness, Truth, World

“The fact is that pictures which are unlike reality ought not be approved, and even if they are technically fine, this is no reason why they should offhand be judged to be correct, if their subject is lacking in the principles of reality carried out with no violations.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book VII, Chapter V, Sec. 4

Reality

“Most events spring from causes equally small: we are unacquainted with them because most historians have been themselves ignorant of them, or have not had eyes capable of perceiving them. It is true, that, in this respect, the mind may repair their omissions; for the knowledge of certain principles easily compensates the lack of knowledge of certain facts.”

Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771) French philosopher

La plupart des évènements ont des causes aussi petites. Nous les ignorons, parce que la plupart des historiens les ont ignorées eux-mêmes, ou parce qu’ils n’ont pas eu d’yeux pour les appercevoir. Il est vrai qu’à cet égard l’esprit peut réparer leurs omissions : la connoissance de certains principes supplée facilement à la connoissance de certains faits.
Essay III, Chapter I
De l'esprit or, Essays on the Mind, and Its Several Faculties (1758)

Spring, Knowledge

“Some philosophers have believed that a philosophical clarification of space also provided a solution of the problem of time. Kant presented space and time as analogous forms of visualization and treated them in a common chapter in his major epistemological work. Time therefore seems to be much less problematic since it has none of the difficulties resulting from multidimensionality. Time does not have the problem of mirror-image congruence, i. e., the problem of equal and similarly shaped figures that cannot be superimposed, a problem that has played some role in Kant's philosophy. Furthermore, time has no problem analogous to non-Euclidean geometry. In a one-dimensional schema it is impossible to distinguish between straightness and curvature. …A line may have external curvature but never an internal one, since this possibility exists only for a two-dimensional or higher continuum. Thus time lacks, because of its one-dimensionality, all those problems which have led to philosophical analysis of the problems of space.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

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

Problem, Time

“Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Introduction to Men at War (1942)

Imagination

“An excess of storytelling has become the contemporary way of shrouding, in majesty, a lack; it is the Sun King principle. The lack is the human.”

James Wood (1965) literary critic

Hysterical realism
The Irresponsible Self (2004)

Way, Sun

“If your language lacks poetry and paradox, it’s unequal to the task of accounting for actuality. Otherwise anything radically new is literally unspeakable.”

Bob Black (1951) American anarchist

The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)

“I do not conceal my lack of admiration for a pain fully long list of redistributive measures undertaken by modern governments. Many serve no ethically accepted purpose such as compassion for the needy; indeed, they serve only as recognition of which groups possess or lack political influence.”

George Stigler (1911–1991) American economist

"The Effect of Government on Economic Efficiency." 1988

Pain

“What is good looking, as Horace Smith remarks, but looking good? Be good, be womanly, be gentle,—generous in your sympathies, heedful of the well-being of all around you; and, my word for it, you will not lack kind words of admiration.”

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

The Beautiful, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“The most difficult element is perhaps the lack of privacy in my life.”

Sania Mirza (1986) Indian tennis player

India's most wanted

Life

“We all know the type of American executive or professional man who does not allow himself to age, but by what appears to be almost sheer will keeps himself “well-preserved,” as if in creosote. … The will which burns within him, while often admirable, cannot be said to be truly “his”: it is compulsive; he has no control over it, but it controls him. He appears to exist in a psychological deep-freeze; new experience cannot get at him, but rather he fulfills himself by carrying out ever-renewed tasks which are given by his environment: he is borne along on the tide of cultural agendas. So long as these agendas remain, he is safe; he does not acquire wisdom, as the old of some cultures are said to do, but he does not lose skill—or if he does, is protected by his power from the consequences, perhaps the awareness, of loss of skill. In such a man, responsibility may substitute for maturity. Indeed, it could be argued that the protection furnished such people in the united States is particularly strong since their “youthfulness” remains a social and economic prestige-point and wisdom might actually, if it brought awareness of death and which the culture regarded as pessimism, be a count against them. … They prefigure … the cultural cosmetic that makes Americans appears youthful to other peoples. And, since they are well-fed, well-groomed, and vitamin-dosed, there may be an actual delay-in-transit of the usual physiological declines to partly compensate for lack of psychological growth. Their outward appearance of aliveness may mask inner sterility.”

David Riesman (1909–2002) American Sociologist

“Clinical and Cultural Aspects of the Aging Process,” p. 486
Individualism Reconsidered (1954)

Death, Wisdom, People, Youth

“I set up our labour union in 1935, because we - the popular musicians - had never had one. It was somehow a huge movement, but because of the lack of experience of some people, discussions and divisions started between us. However, I can recall everyone showed combativeness and we've got better wages, weekly rest and the end of workday at 4PM.”

Osvaldo Pugliese (1905–1995) Argentine pianist, tango composer

Unsourced

People

“I fear the future I wish for my children is at risk, so I'm taking action. Please join me. Our greatest risk is not terrorism, and it's not Iraq or the "Axis of Evil". Our greatest risk is a lack of leadership, a lack of honesty and a complete lack of consciousness. Unfortunately our current government cannot see the big picture. They think too small. They suffer from the “what's in it for me?” syndrome. The simple truth is that the current administration has squandered incredible opportunities to bring the world together, to promote peace in regions that have only known war, to encourage health in places that are ravaged with disease, to make us more secure by living up to our principles at home and abroad. The simple truth is that the policies of our current administration do not reflect what is great about America.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

From Madonna's open letter about the War in Iraq & the Bush administration http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,107771,00.html

War, Children, Health, Truth

“Mr. Martin Tanner, a baritone, of Dayton, Ohio made his Town Hall debut last night. He came well prepared, but unfortunately his presentation was not up to contemporary professional standards. His voice lacks the range of tonal color necessary to make it consistently interesting.
Full time consideration of another endeavor might be in order.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Mr. Tanner
Song lyrics, Short Stories (1974)

Color, Time, Night

“I must confess at the outset that I never felt at ease in dealing with Smith. Perhaps my insecurity stemmed in large part from my youth and lack of much previous experience in dealing with management people. Beyond this, Smith was known even to his associates as “a hard fellow to get to know.” He did not encourage informality. My meetings with him were generally held in his office, with an atmosphere of strictly business. Even when we had lunch together, the businesslike atmosphere prevailed. Had I been able to see him more than once a month, it might have been possible to reduce these barriers, although I am convinced that much of the problem would still have remained.
I now feel that my approach to Smith was too indirect and cautious. While I found many shortcomings in is pattern of managerial leadership, I never discussed these with him directly. Our talks centered on what he should do with Kraus, how group meetings might be stimulated, and so on—all matters in which Smith necessarily played a prominent role. No doubt he could infer from things I said some criticisms of his own behavior, but in our discussions I never confronted him with these criticisms.”

William Foote Whyte (1914–2000) American sociologist

Source: Making Mondragón, 1965, p. 176-177; As cited in: Ickis (2014)

People, Youth, Behavior, Feeling

“Every act is political and, whether one is conscious of it or not, the presentation of one's work is no exception. Any production, any work of art is social, has a political significance. We are obliged to pass over the sociological aspect of the proposition before us due to lack of space and consideration of priority among the questions to be analysed.”

Daniel Buren (1938) sculptor from France

" Beware!" ("Mise en garde!") http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/buren1.pdf, in Konzeption/Conception, translated by Charles Harrison and Peter Townsend (Leverkusen: Stadtischer Museum, 1969. 1960s

Art, Question

“Thought is born of failure. When action satisfies there is no residue to hold the attention; to think is to confess a lack of adjustment which we must stop to consider. Only when the human organism fails to achieve an adequate response to its situation is there material for the process of thought, and the greater the failure the more searching they become.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 1

Search, Failure, Thinking

“You know the funny thing about child pornography: […] the lack of credits at the end. No ego on that side of Hollywood, is there? “Who did the editing on this film, it's seamless! I want to use him on my independent documentary”— but no names. Not even a nom de plume. Some people are in it just for the art.”

Doug Stanhope (1967) American stand-up comedian, actor, and author

From Across The Street (2009)

People, Art

“Publicity is usually explained and justified as a competitive medium which ultimately benefits the public (the consumer) and the most efficient manufacturers - and thus the national economy. It is closely related to certain ideas about freedom: freedom of choice for the purchaser: freedom of enterprise for the manufacturer. The great hoardings and the publicity neons of the cities of capitalism are the immediate visible sign of "The Free World." For many in Eastern Europe such images in the West sum up what they in the East lack. Publicity, it is thought, offers a free choice.”

John Berger book Ways of Seeing

Source: Ways of Seeing (1972), p. 130

World, Idea, Freedom

“I would never have become an animal rights advocate if I had not first been a human rights advocate, especially for those humans (the very young and the very old, for example) who lack the understanding or power to assert their rights for themselves.”

Tom Regan book Empty Cages

Prologue
Empty Cages (2004)

Understanding, Animals

“In the State Department, one never lacks for helpful suggestions.”

Dean Acheson book Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), State Department Management, Leadership Perspectives

Help

“The values that Scientology states are universal values. Values that any good mother or father or friend couldn't possibly disagree with. They're the values of health and improvement. It's not a belief system where you have to sign up and believe something particularly. People of all religions study Hubbard, and Hubbard himself encouraged religions to flourish because in our day and age, in our mechanized society, what is lacking is the humanities and people with faith and beliefs. So that's one of our operations. We encourage that. I require a certain amount of ethics from anybody I work with.”

Chick Corea (1941) American jazz and fusion pianist, keyboardist, and composer

Interview at All About Jazz (30 October 2004) http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=15351

People, Health, Age, Faith

“Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.”

William Gibson book Spook Country

Source: Spook Country‎ (2007), Ch. 23, Two Moors, p. 117

Religion, Travel, Universe, Time

“The Scottish Communist is a much misunderstood person. When he is a true Caledonian, and not a Pole or an Irishman, he is simply the lineal descendant of the old Radical. The Scottish Radical was a man who held a set of inviolable principles on which he was entirely unable to compromise. It did not matter what the principles were; the point was that they were like the laws of Sinai, which could not be added to or subtracted from. When the Liberal party began to compromise, he joined Labour; when Labour began to compromise, by a natural transition he became a Communist. Temperamentally he has not changed. He is simply the stuff which in the seventeenth century made the unyielding Covenanter, and in the eighteenth the inflexible Jacobite. He is honesty incarnate, but his mind lacks flexibility.”

John Buchan book Castle Gay

Source: Castle Gay (1930), Ch. 14

Law, Nature, Change, Personality

“We might perhaps be more tolerant of rulers turning preachers if they were moral giants. But what citizen looks at the government today thinking how wise and virtuous it is? Public respect for politicians has long been declining, even as the population at large has been seduced into responding to each new problem by demanding that the government should act. That we should be constantly demanding that an institution we rather despise should solve large problems argues a notable lack of logic in the demos. The statesmen of times past have been replaced by a set of barely competent social workers eager to help 'ordinary people' solve daily problems in their lives. This strange aspiration is a very large change in public life. The electorates of earlier times would have responded with derision to politicians seeking power in order to solve our problems. Today, the demos votes for them.”

Kenneth Minogue (1930–2013) Australian political theorist

Introduction, p. 3
The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life

Life, People, Problem, Thinking

“Lacking much historical information and assuming (1) that victims of injustice generally do worse than they otherwise would and (2) that those from the least well-off group in the society have the highest probabilities of being the (descendants of) victims of the most serious injustice who are owed compensation by those who benefited from the injustices, … then a rough rule of thumb for rectifying injustices might seem to be the following: organize society so as to maximize the position of whatever group ends up least well-off in the society.”

Robert Nozick book Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Source: Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), pp. 231-232 http://books.google.com/books?id=fVITAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT138

“Lack of friends means, stranger in one's own country.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Nahj al-Balagha

Country

“The sun, heavy-eyed from lack of sleep, owing to the system of a staggered summer time, stumbled into the heavens, and with a heavy sigh set about its duties.”

S. J. Simon (1904–1948) British bridge player and writer, comic fiction writer

Envoy on Excursion

Sleep, Time, Sun, Summer

“We weep before the Blessed Mother's shrine,
To think upon her sorrows, but her joys
What nun could ever know a tithing of?
The precious hours she watched above His sleep
Were worth the fearful anguish of the end.
Yea, lack of love is bitterest of all.”

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) American writer and poet

"Marianna Alcoforando"
Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911)

Love, Fear, Thinking, Sleep

“This is what the visitor said the Ethicals had learned from the Ancients. The Creator, God, the One Spirit, call it what you will, forms all. It is the universe; the universe is it. But its body is formed of two essences. One is matter, the other, for lack of a better word, is nonmatter.”

Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) American science fiction writer

Source: The Riverworld series, The Magic Labyrinth (1980), Ch. 19

God, Learning, Universe

“In the years after 1936, whilst Hayek was working on The Pure Theory of Capital, most economists were convinced by Keynes, whose theory had an elegance and simplicity that Hayek’s did not. Keynes’ theory lacked Hayek’s theoretical rigor in that it was not based on equilibrium (on individual rationality), and there were places in the argument where Keynes relied on loose, informal arguments, preferring to put his trust in intuition rather than formal theory. Keynesians did not solve the problems with capital theory that Hayek had identified: they just bypassed or ignored them. According to Hayek’s methodological criteria, Keynes’ theory was decidedly inferior. Against this, Keynes’ theory provided opportunities for mathematical and statistical analysis that Hayek’s did not. Indeed, though Hayek paid some attention to data, he did so only minimally: he certainly made no attempt to test his theory against statistical data. The choice of Keynesian theory was, at least in part, a methodological one.”

Roger Backhouse (economist) (1951) British economist

"Hayek on money and the business cycle", 2006

Mathematics, Problem, Parting

“It's a lack of clarity that creates chaos and frustration. Those emotions are poison to any living goal.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 101

“What interests me about fascism is that it is a black hole of free will. It is a system which isn’t necessarily unique, but it absolves brutality, it absolves the lack of morals and it absolves people of their own decisions. When they tell you ‘you can kill these people because they are Jews, reds or homosexuals, or whatever!’ In this world you can permit a brutal action on the base of collective advice; that is what scares me.”

Guillermo del Toro (1964) Mexican film director

Lo que me interesa del fascismo es justamente que es un hoyo negro de la voluntad. Es un sistema que no necesariamente es único, pero absuelve la brutalidad, absuelve la falta de moral y absuelve la decisión propia. Cuando te dicen “Tú puedes matar a esta gente porque que son judíos, rojos o homosexuales, ¡lo que sea!” En ese mundo puedes permitir una acción brutal en base a un consejo colectivo, eso es lo que me asusta. Interview with Guillermo del Toro on 10/23/2006. http://www.fantasymundo.com/articulo.php?articulo=467

People, World, Decision

“Political leaders, lacking documents that could be kept secret (apart from the occasional exception), lacking media they could control, were of necessity brought into a direct and immediate relationship with their constituents, and therefore under more and direct and immediate control.”

Moses I. Finley (1912–1986) American historian

Source: Democracy Ancient And Modern (Second Edition) (1985), Chapter 1, Leaders and Followers, p. 18

Secret