Quotes about last
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“Modern human beings since their beginnings have been moved by the faith that the mastery of nature would lead to the overcoming of hunger and labour, disease and war on so widespread a scale that at last we could build the world-wide society of free and equal people. One must never think about technological destiny without looking squarely at the justice in those hopes. Let none of us who live in the well-cushioned west speak with an aesthetic tiredness about our 'worldliness.”

George Grant (1918–1988) Canadian philosopher

Technology and Justice (Notre Dame: 1986), p. 15

Hunger, War, People, World

“I've been blessed with playing the drums and having a young mind and staying healthy. I’m a vegetarian, I take good care of myself. I'll be the last Skynyrd standing. All those guys smoke themselves to death. They all drank themselves to death, drugs. … I still have stainless steel from the knee down in my right leg; I have bone against bone against stainless steel against nerve ending. Every step I take is painful, but when I play drums I push everything away, I get into the zone and I do what I’m supposed to do. … I play Lynyrd Skynyrd music because that's who I am. Everything else has been taken from me, my reputation, my world, my money has all been stolen from me by people that I thought loved me. However they can't take away my ability to play drums.”

Artimus Pyle (1948) American musician

"Rock Survivor: Lynyrd Skynyrd drummer Artimus Pyle keeps the music alive his way" http://tbrnews.com/lifestyle/rock-survivor-lynyrd-skynyrd-drummer-artimus-pyle-keeps-the-music/article_1c30bfee-1501-11e3-8bdb-001a4bcf887a.html, interview with The Beach Reporter (4 September 2013).

Love, Death, Money, Pain

“The last two years show that what Enoch [Powell] says today Edward [Heath] will be proclaiming as Tory policy anything from three to six months later…Selsdon Man is not just a lurch to the right, it is an atavistic desire to reverse the course of twenty-five years of social revolution. What they are planning is a wanton, calculated and deliberate return to greater inequality…The message to the British people would be simple and brutal. It would say, "You're out on your own."”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Nottingham (6 February 1970), quoted in The Times (7 February 1970), p. 1 and Philip Whitehead, The Writing on the Wall: Britain in the Seventies (London: Michael Joseph, 1985), p. 40
Prime Minister

People

“No, no, lot of things are going on folks, lot of things. I think she's actually getting pumped up, if you want to know the truth, she's getting pumped up, you understand? In fact we're going to be talking about that in a few minutes. She's getting pumped up for Wednesday night. Let's see. You know, I don't know, maybe, we're like athletes, right? Hey, look, I beat seventeen senators, governors, I beat all these people, we're like athletes. Hillary beat Bernie, although it looks like Bernie got a little bit of a bad deal based on Wikileaks, right? If you look at Wikileaks. But we're like athletes, right? So athletes, they're making them more and more, but athletes, they make them take a drug test, right? I think we should take a drug test prior to the debate, I do. I think we should, why don't we do that? We should take a drug test, prior, because I don't know what's going on with her. But at the beginning of her last debate, she was all pumped up at the beginning, and at the end it was like, "Uh, take me down."”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

She could barely reach her car. So I think we should take a drug test, I'm, er, anyway I'm willing to do it. At a rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, about his rival Hillary Clinton's performance during the presidential debates https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mE7YkeasOA (15 October 2016) 2010s, 2016, October

People, Truth, Cars, Understanding

“I wanted the State of Massachusetts, which was called a Commonwealth but was filled with private wealth and private property, to change, as the early Christians had changed. They "had all things in common, and sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all men as every man had need."
… at St. Francis Acres, the intentional community to which I belonged for about twenty years, for the last fifteen years we "divided the proceeds among the fellowship [the members] according to individual needs," even as we tried to share outside the community as well.”

Dave Dellinger (1915–2004) American activist

From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of A Moral Dissenter (1993).

Men, Communication, Change, Parting

“To-day Europe is neither at war nor at peace, but stands at armed attention…That, in itself, is a sufficiently melancholy, devastating reply to all the efforts of the lovers of peace. But what is much worse is this: peace in some quarters is proclaimed as a bad dream, and war sanctified as an ideal for rational men. As long as the British Empire lasts we will raise our voices against these false gods.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Empire Rally of Youth at the Royal Albert Hall (18 May 1937), quoted in Service of Our Lives (1937), pp. 163-164.
1937

Men, God, War, Peace

“What was intended is plain. It was intended to appease them. Why was this particular moment selected for their appeasement? I will tell your Lordships why. It was because a grave threat had been made subversive of civil government in India. … I have had occasion in the last six years to make such study of Indian history as my abilities have qualified me to undertake, and I have drawn one deep lesson. The way to discharge our fiduciary obligations to India is never to yield to threats—never, never! The moment in which to make gestures of appeasement is not when you are threatened by men of influence and authority with a general campaign of civil disturbance. And what a method to select! You address the politically-minded classes of India. They are the only ones with which you are dealing, for you do not suppose that the 290,000,000 of peasants who cannot read are being appeased; they do not need appeasement and we were long since told of their pathetic contentment. What was the object of making this statement at this moment?”

F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead (1872–1930) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1929/nov/05/india-the-viceroys-statement in the House of Lords (5 November 1929)

Men, Law, Way, History

“The hope that clings to the least glimpse of blue
Amid a sky of murkiness; the fear
That sickens at itself; the fond deceit,
That will not see the truth; the tenderness,
That only asks to trust; and, at the last,
The knowledge we have known in vain so long
Comes like a thunderbolt, and crashes.”

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

(24th July 1824) Poetic Sketches - 5th Series. Sketch the Second. - Infidelity
(31st July 1824) Poetic Sketches - 5th Series. Sketch the Third.—The Knight’s Tale. See The Vow of The Peacock
The London Literary Gazette, 1824

Truth, Fear, Hope, Knowledge

“It's difficult for me to know where to start with rugby. I come from a fanatically rugby-conscious Welsh miner's family, know so much about it, have read so much about it, have heard with delight so many massive lies and stupendous exaggerations about it and have contributed my own fair share, and five of my six brothers played it, one with some distinction… it's difficu1t for me to know where to start so I’ll begin with the end. The last shall be first, as it is said, so I'll tell you about the last match I ever played in…I had played the game representatively from the age of ten until those who employed me in my profession, which is that of actor, insisted that I was a bad insurance risk against certain dread teams in dead-end valleys who would have little respect, no respect, or outright disrespect for what I was pleased to call my face. What if I were unfortunate enough to be on the deck in the middle of a loose maul…they murmured in dollar accents?”

Richard Burton (1925–1984) Welsh actor

In Richard Burton’s Last Match From Take the Ball and Run – A Rugby Anthology by Godfrey Smith http://wesclark.com/rrr/burton.html, Wesclark, 1953.

Age, Family, Game, Reading

“The excursus upon the origin of Odysseus’ scar is not basically different from the many passages in which a newly introduced character, or even a newly appearing object or implement, though it be in the thick of a battle, is described as to its nature and origin; or in which, upon the appearance of a god, we are told where he last was, what he was doing there, and by what road he reached the scene; indeed, even the Homeric epithets seem to me in the final analysis to be traceable to the same need for an externalization of phenomena in terms perceptible to the senses. Here is the scar, which comes up in the course of the narrative; and Homer’s feeling simply will not permit him to see it appear out of the darkness of an unilluminated past; it must be set in full light, and with it a portion of the hero’s boyhood. … To be sure, the aesthetic effect thus produced was soon noticed and thereafter consciously sought; but the more original cause must have lain in the basic impulse of the Homeric style: to represent phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations. Nor do psychological processes receive any other treatment: here too nothing must remain hidden and unexpressed. With the utmost fullness, with an orderliness which even passion does not disturb, Homer’s personages vent their inmost hearts in speech; what they do not say to others, they speak in their own minds, so that the reader is informed of it. Much that is terrible takes place in the Homeric poems, but it seldom takes place wordlessly: Polyphemus talks to Odysseus; Odysseus talks to the suitors when he begins to kill them; Hector and Achilles talk at length, before battle and after; and no speech is so filled with anger or scorn that the particles which express logical and grammatical connections are lacking or out of place.”

Erich Auerbach Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Source: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), p. 5

God, Feeling, Nature, Sense

“A large group of Iranians have doubts about last month's (June) disputed presidential election … something should be done about the situation., on the 2009 presidential election.”

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1934–2017) Iranian politician, Shi'a cleric and Writer

Remarks at a Friday prayer http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-08/10/content_11859213.htm (August 10, 2009) 2009

“Those numbers ay not sound like a bid deal until one reflects that average global temperatures were "only" 5 degrees cooler at the height of the last Ice Age.”

Jared Diamond book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

About global warming. Chapter "The world as a polder: what does it all mean to us today?", section "The most serious problems" (Penguin Books, 2011, page 493, ISBN 978-0-241-95868-1.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005)

Age

“All of you know I'm having to become quite an expert in this business of asking for forgiveness. And I ----. It gets a little easier the more you do it. And if you have a family, an Administration, a Congress and a whole country to ask, you're going to get a lot of practice. But I have to tell that in these last days it has come home to me again, something I first learned as President, but it wasn't burned in my bones -- and that is that in order to get it, you have to be willing to give it. And all of us -- the anger, the resentment, the bitterness, the desire for recrimination against people you believe have wronged you -- they harden the heart and deaden the spirit and lead to self-inflicted wounds. And so it is important that we are able to forgive those we believe have wronged us, even as we ask for forgiveness from people we have wronged. And I heard that first -- first -- in the Civil Rights Movement. Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

On August 28, 1998 at Union Chapel in Oak Bluff, Massachusetts, speaking on the 35th anniversary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Published in the August 29, 1998 edition of The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/29/us/in-clinton-s-remarks-a-focus-on-interdependence-and-forgiveness.html?pagewanted=5 1990s

Love, People, Family, Home

“math> (\left|x\right\rang \left|y\right\rang- \left|y\right\rang \left|x\right\rang) … was my first lesson in quantum mechanics, and in a very real sense my last, since the rest is mere technique, which can be learnt from books.”

John Clive Ward (1924–2000) British-Australian nuclear physicist

J. C. Ward, Memoirs of a Theoretical Physicist (Optics Journal, Rochester, 2004).

Books, Sense

“I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labour and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science. But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting farther from your goal instead ofnearer to it — at that very moment I predict that you will reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian author

The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)

Love, Men, People, Dreams

“Actually, one of the real problems that always bothers me [in creating a painting] is sustaining a feeling. I mean, when I look at Poussin now, well, I think that's the most incredible thing to maintain the feeling for a year, however long it took Poussin, I'm telling you, to paint this vast structure. Bur perhaps that is not given to us now. I don't know…. Actually all all modern art puzzles me. I don't understand it. II really don't. I don't know whether it is fragmentary [as David Sylvester the interviewer suggested]. I have a sickening nostalgia for this other state of sustaining a feeling for months, being able to construct and build a picture. Well Mondrian, I think, did that, of course. He was almost one of the last artists to do that. I wish I could get there.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1950 - 1960, Interview with David Sylvester, BBC (March 1960), pp. 91-92

Art, Feeling, Understanding, Problem

“Among the spiritual forces secretly working in the camp of Germany's enemies and their allies in this war, as in the last, stands Freemasonry, the danger of whose activities has been repeatedly stressed by the Fuehrer in his speeches. The present brochure, now made available to the German and European peoples in a 3rd edition, is intended to shed light on this enemy working in the shadows. Though an end has been put to the activities of Masonic organizations in most European countries, particular attention must still be paid to Freemasonry, and most particularly to its membership, as the implements of the political will of a supra-governmental power. The events of the summer of 1943 in Italy demonstrate once again the latent danger always represented by individual Freemasons, even after the destruction of their Masonic organizations. Although Freemasonry was prohibited in Italy as early as 1925, it has retained significant political influence in Italy through its membership, and has continued to exert that influence in secrecy. Freemasons thus stood in the first ranks of the Italian traitors who believed themselves capable of dealing Fascism a death blow at a critical juncture, shamelessly betraying the Italian nation. The intended object of the 3rd printing of this brochure is to provide a clearer knowledge of the danger of Masonic corruption, and to keep the will to self-defence alive.”

Ernst Kaltenbrunner (1903–1946) Austrian-born senior official of Nazi Germany executed for war crimes

Foreword in "Freemasonry: Ideology, Organization, and Policy," first published in 1944.

Death, War, People, Knowledge

“All this of Liberty and Equality, Electoral suffrages, Independence and so forth, we will take, therefore, to be a temporary phenomenon, by no means a final one. Though likely to last a long time, with sad enough embroilments for us all, we must welcome it, as the penalty of sins that are past, the pledge of inestimable benefits that are coming.”

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

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

Sadness, Penalty, Time, Past

“The day is past, and the moonbeams weep
O'er the many that rest in their last cold sleep;
Near to the gashed and the nerveless hand
Is the pointless spear and the broken brand;
The archer lies like an arrow spent,
His shafts all loose and his bow unbent;
Many a white plume torn and red,
Bright curls rent from the graceful head,
Helmet and breast-plate scattered around,
Lie a fearful show on the well-fought ground;
While the crow and the raven flock overhead
To feed on the hearts of the helpless dead,
Save when scared by the glaring eye
Of some wretch in his last death agony.”

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

The Warrior from The London Literary Gazette (25th October 1823) Sketch
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Death, Lie, Fear, Sleep

“Theological writing always transgresses itself, just as theological speech feeds on the silence in which, at last, it speaks correctly.”

Jean-Luc Marion (1946) French philosopher

Source: God Without Being (1982), p. 1

Silence

“While I always wait for the final details of any piece of legislation before deciding whether to support it or not, the framework released last week emphasized two main goals that I wholeheartedly support: economic growth and simplicity.”

Ted Budd (1971) American politician

Why we need tax reform http://www.greensboro.com/opinion/columns/u-s-rep-ted-budd-why-we-need-tax-reform/article_7ce96e8e-96d8-5a6d-9f5c-5e9bb26c3a36.html (October 23, 2017)

Support, Waiting

“Joseph being informed of the precise situation of affairs, he got a horse of Father Johnson, and started without delay, with Hyrum, for Kirtland. On his arrival there, the brethren were collected for meeting. Joseph went upon the stand, and informed the brethren that they were under a great mistake, that the church had not transgressed; "And, as for the keys of the kingdom," said he, "I, myself, hold the keys of this last dispensation, and will for ever hold them, both in time and in eternity; so set your hearts at rest upon that point, all is right."”

Lucy Mack Smith (1775–1856) American religious leader

The History of Joseph Smith by His Mother (1853), "Rigdon's Depression"

Time, Heart, Horse

“For the moment we will put aside the consideration of the effect upon others — which is so infinitely more important — and think only of the results for the man himself. It is necessary to do this because one of the objections frequently brought against vegetarianism is that it is a beautiful theory, but one the working of which is impracticable, since it is supposed that a man cannot live without devouring dead flesh. That objection is irrational, and is founded upon ignorance or perversion of facts. I am myself an example of its falsity; for I have lived without the pollution of flesh food — without meat, fish or fowl — for the last thirty-eight years, and I not only still survive, but have been during all that time in remarkably good health. Nor am I in any way peculiar in this, for I know some thousands of others who have done the same thing. I know some younger ones who have been so happy as to be unpolluted by the eating of flesh during the whole of their lives; and they are distinctly freer from disease than those who partake of such things.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: Vegetarianism and Occultism (1913), p. 4-5

Happiness, Health, Disease, Food

“Over the last few months, these goals have driven President Obama and me to announce a series of Administration proposals that will enable us to help heal mistrust wherever it is found – from a National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, to a historic new Task Force on 21st Century Policing – which will provide strong, federal support to law enforcement at every level, on a scale not seen since the Johnson Administration. These aims have also led me to travel throughout the country – to Atlanta, Cleveland, Memphis, Chicago, Philadelphia, Oakland and San Francisco – to convene a series of roundtable discussions dedicated to building trust and engagement between law enforcement, civil rights, youth and community leaders from coast to coast.”

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

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Youth, Justice, Law, Travel

“Economic systems come, and economic systems go. No economic system lasts forever. Capitalism is not likely to last forever, either.”

Jim Stanford (1961) Canadian economist

Part 1, Chapter 3, Economic History, p. 43
Economics For Everyone (2008)

“Bob Hope: By the way, this is where Bing did his last show and I think they've done very nicely. They've gotten most of it out of the curtains.”

Jack Benny (1894–1974) comedian, vaudeville performer, and radio, television, and film actor

The Jack Benny Program (Radio: 1932-1955), The Jack Benny Program (Television: 1950-1965)

Hope, Way, Thinking

“The American Revolution and the Civil War were not merely discrete events. They constitute the first and last acts of a single drama. The fourscore and seven years between the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address comprehended the action of a tremendous world-historical tragedy.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

How to Think about the American Revolution: A Bicentennial Cerebration https://books.google.com/books?id=iKGGAAAAMAAJ (1978) p. 53 Also quoted in Vindicating the Founders https://books.google.com/books?id=DjlpSl-x1gMC, by Thomas G. West, p. 32 1970s

War, World

“In the last resort, the moral quality of a government—of any government—is conditioned by the moral quality of the people whom it governs: for it is the people themselves who produce the personnel of the great administrative machinery which we describe as "government."”

Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) Austro-Hungarian writer and academic

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Calling All Muslims, Radio Broadcast # 7, p 116

People

“Greece expects you not merely to die for her, for that is little, indeed; she expects you to conquer. That is why each one of you, even in dying, should be possessed by one thought alone – how to conserve your strength to the last so that those who survive may conquer.
And you will conquer, I am more than sure of this.”

Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936) Greek politician

Venizelos speaking to Greek sailors at the beginning of the First Balkan War.
Source: [Chester, S. M., Life of Venizelos, with a letter from His Excellency M. Venizelos, Constable, 1921, London, http://www.archive.org/download/lifeofvenizelosw00chesuoft/lifeofvenizelosw00chesuoft.pdf], p. 162

“6401. The Love of a Woman, and a Bottle of Wine,
Are sweet for a Season; but last a short Time.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Love, Wine, Time, Season

“take one last look behind
commit this to memory and mind
don't miss this wasteland, this terrible place
when you leave
keep your heart off your sleeve”

Natalie Merchant (1963) American singer-songwriter

Song lyrics, Motherland (2001), Motherland

Memory, Heart

“Vickery points out that the Kissinger-Nixon policy during the last two years of the war was a “major mystery,” for which he suggests an explanation that appears to us quite plausible. Referring to the “Sonnenfeldt Doctrine,” which holds that “pluralistic and libertarian Communist regimes will breed leftist ferment in the West,” he suggests that “when it became clear [to U. S. leaders] that they could not win in Cambodia, they preferred to do everything possible to ensure that the post-war revolutionary government be extremely brutal, doctrinaire, and frightening to its neighbors, rather than a moderate socialism to which the Thai, for example, might look with envy.” In short, though it was understood that the United States had lost the war in Cambodia (even though it was, quite clearly, still trying to win it in Vietnam), the destruction of rural Cambodia, by imposing the harshest possible conditions on the eventual victors, would serve two classic ends: retarding social and economic progress, and maximizing the brutality of the eventual victors. Then the aggressors would at least be able to reap a propaganda victory from the misery they had sown.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, pp. 218-219

War, Appearance, Victory, Envy

“I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys.”

Albert Camus book The Stranger

The Stranger (1942)

Life, Memory, Joy

“Don’t children have the same rights to life and equal concern as adults? Don’t we have moral reasons to concern ourselves with the welfare of nonrational beings, such as animals? Mustn’t that status rest on some value independent of the rational nature in persons?
Kantian ethics must answer the last question in the negative, but it answers the other two in the affirmative. I think the right account of the moral status of nonrational living things and of human beings who lack personality in the strict sense can best be derived from Kantian principles, even though Kant himself did not worry about these questions as much as he should have, and some of the things he said about them do not seem to me entirely cogent, or to be the best account available to him.”

Allen W. Wood (1942) academic

Kantian Ethics (2008)

Life, Children, Question, Nature

“If we study the history of science we see happen two inverse phenomena… Sometimes simplicity hides under complex appearances; sometimes it is the simplicity which is apparent, and which disguises extremely complicated realities.
…No doubt, if our means of investigation should become more and more penetrating, we should discover the simple under the complex, then the complex under the simple, then again the simple under the complex, and so on, without our being able to foresee what will be the last term. We must stop somewhere, and that science may be possible, we must stop when we have found simplicity. This is the only ground on which we can rear the edifice of our generalizations.”

Henri Poincaré book Science and Hypothesis

Science and Hypothesis (1901)

History, Reality, Study, Appearance

“I do not believe that history is writ clear and unchallengeable. It doesn't just happen. History is made by people: its movement depends on small currents as well as great tides, on ideas, perceptions, will and courage, the ability to sense a trend, the will to act on understanding and intuition. It is up to us to give intellectual content and political direction to these new dissatisfactions with socialism in practice, with its material and moral failures, we must convert disillusion into understanding. If we fail, the tide will be lost. But if it is taken, the last quarter of our century can initiate a new renaissance matching anything in our island's long and outstanding history.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to the Zurich Economic Society “The New Renaissance” (14 March 1977) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103336 Leader of the Opposition

People, History, Idea, Failure

“Communal mobilisation in the long run will not succeed in India because Indian society cannot be mobilized communally. Even the last elections have shown that communities, religious communities, castes did not vote solidly for one party.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Shri K. R. Narayanan President of India in Conversation with N. Ram on Doordarshan and All India Radio

Communication

“We live far enough away from those times of test and trial to know that sincerity and honesty did not all lie on either side. We know the conflicts of loyalties, traditions, ancestry, and interest which drew men to one side and the other. I doubt if there ever was another so great and elemental a conflict from which men emerged with so much of mutual respect, with so little of bitterness and lingering hostility. The struggle brought the whole Nation at last to see that its only assurance was in unity. United, it could go its way in all security; divided, both sections becoming the prey of jealousy and intrigue, would have dissipated all the power they now have for good in the world.”

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

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

Men, Hostility, Lie, World

“It is my ambition that parents can send their children to school with the prospects that they are as interested and excited to learn on their last day of school as they were on the very first.”

Lars Løkke Rasmussen (1964) Danish politician

From his New Year Address http://www.stm.dk/_p_13032.html (1 January 2010). 2010s, 2010

Children, School, Parent, Learning

“A girl of seven or ten years old is held to be the equal partner in a crime where another and a stronger is the principal; because she is in so many ways hampered and harmed by laws and customs pertaining to the past, we reach out hands of help especially to her that she may overtake the swift-marching procession of progress, for its sake that it may not slacken its speed on her account as much as for hers that she be not left behind.
I brought to the last Council our petition to Congress for the protection of women, which was responded to by raising the age of consent from ………. to sixteen years.”

Frances Willard (1839–1898) American suffragist

February 1891 https://prohibition.osu.edu/willard/speech

Women, Age, Law, Way

“The last monk, upon entering, paused in the lock. He stood in the open hatchway and took off his sandals. "Sic transit mundus," he murmured, looking back at the glow. He slapped the soles of his sandals together, beating the dirt out of them.”

Walter M. Miller, Jr. book A Canticle for Leibowitz

Ch 30
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Voluntas Tua

“Here, India will be a global player of considerable political and economic impact. As a result, the need to explicate what it means to be an Indian (and what the ‘Indianness’ of the Indian culture consists of) will soon become the task of the entire intelligentsia in India. In this process, they will confront the challenge of responding to what the West has so far thought and written about India. A response is required because the theoretical and textual study of the Indian culture has been undertaken mostly by the West in the last three hundred years. What is more, it will also be a challenge because the study of India has largely occurred within the cultural framework of America and Europe. In fulfilling this task, the Indian intelligentsia of tomorrow willhave to solve a puzzle: what were the earlier generations of Indian thinkers busy with, in the course of the last two to three thousand years? The standard textbook story, which has schooled multiple generations including mine, goes as follows: caste system dominates India, strange and grotesque deities are worshipped in strange andgrotesque ways, women are discriminated against, the practice of widow-burning exists and corruption is rampant. If these properties characterize India of today and yesterday, the puzzle about what the earlier generation of Indian thinkers were doing turns into a very painful realization: while the intellectuals of Europeanculture were busy challenging and changing the world, most thinkersin Indian culture were apparently busy sustaining and defendingundesirable and immoral practices. Of course there is our Buddha andour Gandhi but that is apparently all we have: exactly one Buddha and exactly one Gandhi. If this portrayal is true, the Indians have butone task, to modernize India, and the Indian culture but one goal: to become like the West as quickly as possible.”

S. N. Balagangadhara (1952) Indian philosopher

Foreword by S. N. Balagangadhara in "Invading the Sacred" (2007)
Source: Balagangadhara, S.N. (2007), "Foreword." In Ramaswamy, de Nicolas & Banerjee (Eds.), Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America . Delhi: Rupa & Co., pp. vii–xi.

Women, Pain, World, School

“I've been thinking like this since 1968, talking about it like this since 1980, but I never knew what… how it would come or what it would be. In the last few years, with the rise of a technological, a cultural artefact like the internet, I now see how it will make its way into the world. We are building the nervous system of the human oversoul. We are individual units operating under social rules that are pushing us ever closer toward dissolving our societies… societies—human groups run by rules—into telepathic collectivities of some sort. … We have come to the end of our sojourn in matter. We have come to the end of our separateness.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Light of the Third Millenium https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVejlx3dZNw&t=50m09s Chicago, 1996, 50m09s

World, Way, Thinking

“There are very different programming styles. I tend to see them as Mozart versus Beethoven. When Mozart started to write, the composition was finished. He wrote the manuscript and it was 'aus einem Guss' (from one cast). In beautiful handwriting, too. Beethoven was a doubter and a struggler who started writing before he finished the composition and then glued corrections onto the page. In one place he did this nine times. When they peeled them, the last version proved identical to the first one.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (2001) Source: Denken als discipline https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Uae9_pgZzE#t=280, a program from Dutch public TV broadcaster VPRO from April 10th, 2001 about Dijkstra 2000s

Beauty, Time

“We declare pragmatism to be bad, not indeed in its moral consequences (which, as a matter of fact, ought not to count in philosophy), but because it introduces into our fashion of thinking a degrading sophistry. Pragmatism, in its modern systematized form, would scarcely have been possible in earlier times. It has, however, become so since erudite scholars and original thinkers have deemed it fit to cater to a public incapable of taking a genuine interest in their researches and their speculations, a public which in the last resort wishes simply to amuse itself with these as it amuses itself with everything else, — the public of our modern democracies. We feel flattered by the plaudits of the crowd, and to procure these we are satisfied to get down to the level of those whom as thinkers we should disdain. Popular science, popular art, popular theology — only one thing was lacking — popular philosophy.”

Albert Schinz (1870–1943) American writer

Anti-Pragmatism; an Examination into the Respective Rights of Intellectual Aristocracy and Social Democracy (1909), p. xv.

Art, Feeling, Democracy, Fashion

“One word more, a final caution: Do not forget whom to fear at the last. I have had to be content with killing and torment; but now my plans are laid, and I have begun. I shall not rest until I have eradicated hope from the Earth. Think on that, and be dismayed!”

Stephen R. Donaldson book Lord Foul's Bane

Lord Foul, Lord Foul's Bane

Fear, Hope, Thinking, Forgetting

“last|perl -pe '$_ x=/(..:.)…(.*)/&&"'$1'"ge$1&&"'$1'"lt$2'That's gonna be tough for Randal to beat…”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[1991Apr29.072206.5621@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov, 1991]
Usenet postings, 1991

“But now we come upon another objection, which I judge will be the last you can raise. You will say, I suspect, that this world of freedom, self-equipped for sin, is indeed a world which "lieth in wickedness," that in truth there is no real hope of good in it: it is a world of inherent and inexpugnable wrong, and not only damnable, but in fact already damned.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.372

Truth, World, Hope, Freedom

“With all our differences, we're not that different. Our quests are similar. The need for peace is not created by a document. It is created by a fundamental desire innate to all human beings, regardless of whether they are rich or poor, successful or unsuccessful. It is that innate desire that has, throughout history, pushed us again and again to find peace. The want, the concept, the idea of peace did not start this year or last year or the year before.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Address at the Universal Forum of Cultures, Barcelona (2004)]
2000s

Peace, History, Idea, Success

“In one point, and that too of more importance than is generally attached to it, the puritans of the two epochs bear a critical resemblance, namely, their hostility to rural and athletic sports: to those sports, which string the nerves and strengthen the frame, which excite an emulation in deeds of hardihood and valour, and which imperceptibly instill honour, generosity, and a love of glory, into the mind of the clown. Men thus formed are pupils unfit for the puritanical school; therefore it is, that the sect are incessantly labouring to eradicate, fibre by fibre, the last poor remains of English manners. And, sorry I am to tell you, that they meet with but too many abettors, where they ought to meet with resolute foes. Their pretexts are plausible: gentleness and humanity are the cant of the day. Weak men are imposed on, and wise men want the courage to resist. Instead of preserving those assemblages and those sports, in which the nobleman mixed with his peasants, which made the poor man proud of his inferiority, and created in his breast a personal affection for his lord, too many of the rulers of this land are now hunting the common people from every scene of diversion, and driving them to a club or a conventicle, at the former of which they suck in the delicious rudiments of earthly equality, and, at the latter, the no less delicious doctrine, that there is no lawful king but King Jesus.”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

Political Register (27 February 1802).

Love, Men, Hostility, People

“At long last I am able to say a few words of my own… You must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.”

Edward VIII of the United Kingdom (1894–1972) king of the United Kingdom and its dominions in 1936

Abdication Speech, December 11, 1936, via radio to a worldwide audience. http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/edward.htm

Love, Support, Help

“In this country — the most favored beneath the bending skies — we have vast areas of the richest and most fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, and millions of eager workers ready to apply their labor to that machinery to produce in abundance for every man, woman, and child — and if there are still vast numbers of our people who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes to their rescue and lulls these hapless victims to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty: it cannot be charged to nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest of all humanity…”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

Federal Court statement (1918)

Death, People, Youth, Age

“Last time I had my hands on you, you felt like a bird - struggling to escape. You'll never escape now…”

Agatha Christie book Towards Zero

MacWhirter
Towards Zero (1944)

Bird, Time

“But she’s your daughter!” “You think I don’t know that?” Donna Mitchell’s dark eyes, so like Allison’t own, drilled into her. “But I don’t do her any favors if I keep enabling her. I’m not going to rescue Lindsay from the consequences of her own self-destructive behavior anymore. The last time she was here, I told her if she left that was it. And she still did.”

Lis Wiehl (1961) American legal scholar

Source: Heart of Ice A Triple Threat Novel with April Henry (Thomas Nelson), p. 102

Behavior, Thinking, Time, Daughters

“Looks didn’t last forever and she wasn’t ready for religion yet. Money was kind of a good compromise, staked up somewhere between cosmetics and eternity.”

Edward St. Aubyn (1960) British writer

Some Hope, Chapter 7

Money, Religion

“[M]ost of the pop music out today I consider to have become a homogenized product. It gets to the point that so much of what is going on is copying everything else that is out, because there is a businessman that knows what he has just sold millions of records with, and so he keeps trying to get every group that comes in to do it, you know. You know, you approach somebody who is well known as a booker or manager, and the first remark will be, "I love what you do, but you would have to change this to this, and that to that, and this to this, in order for me to be able to sell it." Well, by the time you've changed that, of course, it's like everything else that is out there. And when Prince first started sending me songs, I thought maybe that by the time I had done four arrangements that I would have started getting some sort of a repetitive something or other. I have been extremely surprised to find that each one is as different from the last as the next one is going to be different. Some of them are like little art songs. Some of them have dealt with heavy things like friendship and death. I mean, death of a friend. And yet, some of them are as baudy as…”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Radio interview, circa 1985, by Ben Sidran, as quoted in Talking Jazz With Ben Sidran, Volume 1: The Rhythm Section https://books.google.com/books?id=O3hZDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT456 (1992, 2006, 2014)

Love, Death, Friendship, Art

“Up to this time, as I believe, slavery had been let alone, as it claimed to be, in good faith. Up to this time it is clear enough in our history that there was no general perception of the terrible truth that slavery was a system aggressive in its very nature, and necessarily destructive of Constitutional rights and liberties. Up to this time there had been a general blindness to the fact that, under the plea, which was allowed, that it was a local and State institution, slavery had acquired an absolute national supremacy, and if not checked would presently declare itself in national law as the national policy. I think that the eyes of the people were opened rather by the frank statements and legislative action in Congress of the slave party; by the speeches of Mr. Calhoun, filtered through lesser minds and mouths than his; at last by the events in Kansas forcing every man to consider whether, while we had let slavery alone, it had also let us alone; and forcing him to see that its hand was already upon the throat of freedom in this country. I think that by the cuts of the slave party, not by the words of the technical abolitionists, the country was at last aroused. The moral wrong and the political despotism of the system were at last perceived, and a reconstruction of political parties was inevitable. For in human society, while the individual conscience is the steam or motive power, political methods are the engine and the wheels by which progress is effected and secured.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

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

People, Truth, Faith, Law

“What has occurred over the course of the last few centuries is a growing (but by no means universal or certain) recognition that science gets the job done, while religion makes excuses. Sometimes they are very pretty excuses that capture the imagination of the public, but ultimately, when you want to win a war or heal a dying child or get rich from a discovery or explore Antarctica, you turn to science and reason, or you fail.”

PZ Myers (1957) American scientist and associate professor of biology

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/09/12/saving-gods-by-making-them-eve/
Saving gods by making them even emptier of meaning
Pharyngula
2009-09-12

War, Religion, Imagination, Universe

“Last year, when the need to form a fact-finding team to undertake a thorough investigation concerning the hidden elements involved in September 11 incident was brought up; an idea also endorsed by all independent governments and nations as well as by the majority in the United States, my country and myself came under pressure and threat by the government of the United States. Instead of assigning a fact-finding team, they killed the main perpetrator and threw his body into the sea. Would it not have been reasonable to bring to justice and openly bring to trial the main perpetrator of the incident in order to identify the elements behind the safe space provided for the invading aircraft to attack the twin world trade towers? Why should it not have been allowed to bring him to trial to help recognize those who launched terrorist groups and brought wars and other miseries into the region? Is there any classified information that must be kept secret?”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Speech to the United Nations General Assembly (22 September 2011). http://gadebate.un.org/node/186 2011

War, Secret, World, Justice

“When it's claimed, as it was last week on British television, that Muslims in Britain are victims of British intolerance — yeah right, 1600 mosques worth of intolerance so far, and still building — I think the truth is that, if they are victims of anything, it's Muslim intolerance, because if you are an ordinary Muslim, then surely the last thing you need is a bunch of Islamists speaking for you, because everything they do and say reflects back on you. When they try to force unwanted Islamic values into our education system, for example, or when one of their representatives crudely insults this country by comparing it with Nazi Germany, that reflects on all Muslims, because these people speak for all Muslims. Don't they? No? Well maybe somebody should tell them that.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Islam is not a victim" (20 July 2008) http://youtube.com/watch?v=5F5aCUNE4Z8 2008

People, Truth, Education, Thinking

“All Marie was earth before it became marle, it is a kinde of clay ground, and chalke it selfe was marle before it became chalke. And that which is more, that which is yet chalke within the Matrix of the earth, wil in time harden into a white stone, And last of all, wheresoever there bee any stones that be subiect to calcination, they were first marle before they were stones, for otherwise by their calcination they could not possibly amend any barren grounds … Also chalke and lime, after the frostes have taken them, whereby they crumble into powder, do become good marle, and serve in stead thereof.”

Hugh Plat (1552–1608) writer

Source: Diverse new Sorts of Soylenot yet brought into any publique Use, 1594, p. 23-24; Cited in: Malcolm Thick (1994)

Bee, Time

“I think it is a great day for freedom. I watched the scenes on television last night and again this morning because I felt one ought not only hear about them but see them because you see the joy on people's faces and you see what freedom means to them; it makes you realise that you cannot stifle or suppress people's desire for liberty and so I watched with the same joy as everyone else and I hope that they will be a prelude to the Berlin Wall coming down.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Remarks on the Berlin Wall (10 November 1989) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107819 Third term as Prime Minister

People, Hope, Thinking, Freedom

“I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime; I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last.”

Charlotte Brontë book Jane Eyre

Helen Burns to Jane (Ch. 6)
Jane Eyre (1847)

Forgiveness, Sincerity

“And all that time I couldn’t work. So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them. War didn’t trouble those deep sea-caves, but not there was something of infinitely greater importance to me than war, than my novel – the end of love. That was being worked out not, like a story: the pointed word that sent her crying, that seemed to have come so spontaneously to the lips, had been sharpened in those underwater caverns. My novel lagged, but my love hurried like inspiration to the end.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Bk. 1, ch. 6
The End of the Affair (1951)

Love, War, Appearance, Time

“I got bitten last night actually. Just some bloke bit me. I wasn't doing anything and he just bit me. I was in a public telephone box in the centre of London and some fella came up and started biting me. Nah, I didn't bite him back. I hit him with a telephone, right on the hooter and it exploded like a ripe tomato”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

July, 2003
Miscellaneous

Night, Box

“I have to teach myself to do nothing. In the last phase of a man's life, according to the Hindu tradition, you're meant to be a forest dweller.”

Khushwant Singh (1915–2014) Indian novelist and journalist

Khushwant Singh releases his last book

Life

“What the Divine wants is for man to embody Him here, in the individual and in the collectivity… to realise God in life. The old system of yoga could not harmonise or unify Spirit and life; it dismissed the world as Maya or a transient play of God. The result has been a diminution of life-power and the decline of India. The Gita says, utsideyur ime loka na kuryam karma cedaham ["These peoples would crumble to pieces if I did not do actions," 3.24]. Truly 'these peoples' of India have gone to ruin. What kind of spiritual perfection is it if a few Sannyasins, Bairagis and Saddhus attain realisation and liberation, if a few Bhaktas dance in a frenzy of love, god-intoxication and Ananda, and an entire race, devoid of life, devoid of intelligence, sinks to the depths of extreme tamas?… But now the time has come to take hold of the substance instead of extending the shadow. We have to awaken the true soul of India and in its image fashion all works…. I believe that the main cause of India's weakness is not subjection, nor poverty, nor a lack of spirituality or Dharma, but a diminution of thought-power, the spread of ignorance in the motherland of Knowledge. Everywhere I see an inability or unwillingness to think… incapacity of thought or 'thought-phobia'…. The mediaeval period was a night, a time of victory for the man of ignorance; the modern world is a time of victory for the man of knowledge. It is the one who can fathom and learn the truth of the world by thinking more, searching more, labouring more, who will gain more Shakti. Look at Europe, and you will see two things: a wide limitless sea of thought and the play of a huge and rapid, yet disciplined force. The whole Shakti of Europe lies there. It is by virtue of this Shakti that she has been able to swallow the world, like our Tapaswins of old, whose might held even the gods of the universe in awe, suspense and subjection. People say that Europe is rushing into the jaws of destruction. I do not think so. All these revolutions, all these upsettings are the initial stages of a new creation….. We, however, are not worshippers of Shakti; we are worshippers of the easy way…. Our civilisation has become ossified, our Dharma a bigotry of externals, our spirituality a faint glimmer of light or a momentary wave of intoxication. So long as this state of things lasts, any permanent resurgence of India is impossible…. We have abandoned the sadhana of Shakti and so the Shakti has abandoned us…. You say what is needed is emotional excitement, to fill the country with enthusiasm. We did all that in the political field during the Swadeshi period; but all we did now lies in the dust…. Therefore I no longer wish to make emotional excitement, feeling and mental enthusiasm the base. I want to make a vast and heroic equality the foundation of my yoga; in all the activities of the being, of the adhar [vessel] based on that equality, I want a complete, firm and unshakable Shakti; over that ocean of Shakti I want the vast radiation of the sun of Knowledge and in that luminous vastness an established ecstasy of infinite love and bliss and oneness. I do not want tens of thousands of disciples; it will be enough if I can get as instruments of God a hundred complete men free from petty egoism. I have no faith in the customary trade of guru. I do not want to be a guru. What I want is that a few, awakened at my touch or at that of another, will manifest from within their sleeping divinity and realise the divine life. It is such men who will raise this country.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

April, 1920, Letter to Barin Ghose, Sri Aurobindo's brother, Translated from Bengali
India's Rebirth

Love, Life, Men, God

“In the last centuries of the empire, educational standards and literacy had fallen. In the dulled heads of the masses, distracted by cheap food and the barbaric spectacles of the coliseums, the values on which Rome had been founded and the ancient rationalism of the Greeks had been replaced by mysticism and superstition. It was—Honorius had explained to his pupil—as if a whole culture was losing its mind. People were forgetting how to think, and soon they would forget they had forgotten. And, to Honorius’s thinking, Christianity only exacerbated that problem.
“You know, Augustine warned us that belief in the old myths was fading—even a century and a half ago, as the dogma of the Christians took root. And with the loss of the myths, so vanishes the learning of a thousand years, which are codified in those myths, and the monolithic dogmas of the Church will snuff out rational inquiry for ten more centuries. The light is fading, Athalric.””

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 15 “The Dying Light” section III (p. 502)

People, Education, Food, Problem

“You mad at the last album, I apologize for it
Yo, I can't call it, man muh'fuckin' Wyclef spoiled it”

Danny! (1983) American rapper

"Intro"
Albums, F.O.O.D. (2005)

Madness

“Indoors or out, no one relaxes
In March, that month of wind and taxes,
The wind will presently disappear,
The taxes last us all the year.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

"Thar She Blows"
Versus (1949)

“What will we do when they start capturing our people?" Klein asked. "They will, you know, if they haven't by now. Things go wrong." Heydrich's fingers drummed some more. He didn't worry about the laborers who'd expanded this redoubt- they'd all gone straight to the camps after they did their work. But captured fighters were indeed another story. He sighed. "Things go wrong. Ja. If they didn't, Stalin would be lurking somewhere in the Pripet Marshes, trying to keep his partisans fighting against us. We would've worked Churchill to death in a coal mine." He barked laughter. "The British did some of that for us, when they threw the bastard out of office last month. And we'd be getting ready to fight the Amis on their side of the Atlantic. But… things went wrong." "Yes, sir." After a moment, Klein ventured, "Uh, sir- you didn't answer my question." "Oh. Prisoners." Heydrich had to remind himself what his aide was talking about. "I don't know what to do, Klein, except make sure our people all have cyanide pills." "Some won't have the chance to use them. Some won't have the nerve," Klein said. Not many men had the nerve to tell Reinhard Heydrich the unvarnished truth. Heydrich kept Klein around not least because Klein was one of those men. They were useful to have. Hitler would have done better had he seen that. Heydrich recognized the truth when he heard it now; one more thing Hitler'd had trouble with.”

Harry Turtledove (1949) American novelist, short story author, essayist, historian

Source: The Man With the Iron Heart (2008), p. 56-57

Death, Men, People, Truth

“God not only told them what to do and how to live before the Flood, He also told them what to eat. He gave them a perfect diet. God said, I want you to eat the herbs. Kids, eat your vegetables, the fruit, and the seeds (Genesis 1:29). We don't do that much. We eat the hamburger, french fries, and Coke. God said eat the fruit, vegetables, and seeds. When you eat the fruit, you should eat the seed. When you eat a peach, eat the seed. You say that thing's hard. Well, crack it open with a hammer. The seed is inside the hull, okay. […] Now be sure to get organically grown seeds, not the ones grown on steroids and pesticides. But the seeds contain a bitter substance called cyanide. That'll give you a pucker that'll last about an hour and a half. […] But these seeds contain a vitamin called vitamin B-17 which is half cyanide. You say, oh, that's poison. Oh, it's not either! […] So the cyanide found in the seeds is mixed with benzaldehyde. Both are poison, but together they're harmless. Until they bump into a cancer cell!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Garden of Eden

God, Perfection

“Here lies James Quinn. Deign, reader, to be taught,
Whate’er thy strength of body, force of thought,
In Nature’s happiest mould however cast,
To this complexion thou must come at last.”

David Garrick (1717–1779) English actor, playwright, theatre manager and producer

Epitaph on Quinn. Murphy’s Life of Garrick. Vol. ii. p. 38.

Nature

“Vertically striped sheets of paper, the bands of which are 8.7 cms wide, alternate white and colored, are stuck over internal and external surfaces: walls, fences, display windows, etc.; and/or cloth/canvas support, vertical stripes, white and colored bands each 8.7 cms, the two ends covered with dull white paint.
I record that this is my work for the last four years, without any evolution or way out. This is the past: it does not imply either that it will be the same for another ten or fifteen years or that it will change tomorrow.
The perspective we are beginning to have, thanks to these past four years, allows a few considerations of the direct and indirect implications for the very conception of art. This apparent break (no research, or any formal evolution for four years) offers a platform that we shall situate at zero level, when the observations both internal (conceptual transformation as regards the action/praxis of a similar form) and external (work/production presented by others) are numerous and rendered all the easier as they are not invested in the various surrounding movements, but are rather derived from their absence.”

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, Color, Way, Support

“Neither lemonade nor anything else can prevent the inroads of old age. At present, I am stoical under its advances, and hope I shall remain so. I have but one prayer at heart; and that is, to have my faculties so far preserved that I can be useful, in some way or other, to the last.”

Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist

1860s Source: Letter to Harriet Seward http://www.bartleby.com/66/72/12272.html (1869)

Age, Hope, Way, Heart

“Visson has said, "Today's profits are yesterday's good will ripened," and though friendship is no basis for Business yet Business is an excellent basis for lasting friendship. To cement this friendship the Businessman recalls the fact that the memory of quality remains long after the price is forgotten, and keeps Buskin's dictum in mind that there is nothing in this world that cannot be made a little worse and sold a little cheaper. While it is equally true that men will make a beaten path to your door to acquire a better quality article even if it be a mouse trap. Nevertheless, a man is known by the Company he floats, or the Secretaries he employs, though the latter fluctuate more than the market, especially if of the gentler sex!”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), Businessmen

Men, Friendship, World, Sex

“Many people are frustrated in the Arab world. Many give in to the anger because they are accused of violence. But instead we should get up, explain who we are and what we believe in. … Over the last three years, most victims of terrorism have been Muslim. So there’s not a war between Muslims and non-Muslims, but between extremists and moderates of all the religions. … What is important is not to live in fear. The most dangerous [thing to do] is to give up and lose hope. The main enemy is not terrorism or extremism, but ignorance.”

Queen Rania of Jordan (1970) Queen consort of Jordan

Interview with Corriere della Sera, as quoted in "Muslim women don't have to wear veils: Rania" in Khaleej Times (9 February 2007)

War, People, World, Fear

“It seems that, notwithstanding the dramatic increases in manmade CO2 emissions over the last decade, the world's warming has stopped.”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

Quoted in "2009 Australia's second warmest year ever, according to Bureau of Meteorology figures" http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/australias-second-warmest-year-ever-according-to-bureau-of-meteorology-figures/story-e6frf7jo-1225816322149 in the Herald Sun, January 5, 2010. 2010

World

“I can tell you that I may be a lot of things but I am not dumb. And I wrote about going to Bosnia in my book in 2004, I laid it all out there. And you’re right, on a couple of occasions in the last weeks I just said some things that weren’t in keeping with what I knew to be the case and what I had written about in my book. And you know, I‘m embarrassed by it. I‘m very sorry I said it. I have said that, you know, it just didn‘t jive with what I had written about and knew to be the truth. So I know that it is something that some people have said, “Wait a minute. What happened here?””

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

But I have talked about this and written about it and then, unfortunately, in a few occasions I was not as accurate as I have been in the past. April 16, 2008, Pennsylvania Democratic Presidential Debate, Philadelphia, when asked about her dishonesty concerning her recent comments about Bosnia. http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iySWjciIrjB8hbu450lIABfnYcjwD903ANA80 http://youtube.com/watch?v=Cm_Cj6LNWmw http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/us/politics/16text-debate.html?pagewanted=9&_r=1 Presidential campaign (January 20, 2007 – 2008)

People, Truth, Books, Waiting

“My government pledges itself to fulfill in every way the mandate given to it by the people. In doing so, it will not take the people for granted or assume they know nothing and that the government alone knows all answers and solutions. The traumatic experience of the last two years [Emergency] during which many atrocities were committed on the people and they had to undergo untold sufferings and some have even died, has brought home the relevance of this.”

Basappa Danappa Jatti (1912–2002) Indian politician

Presidential Addresses to Parliament

People, Way, Home, Suffering

“We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet, probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you'll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there's still one more tier to all this; there is always one person who you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it always happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of those lovable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. You will remember having conversations with this person that never actually happened. You will recall sexual trysts with this person that never technically occurred. This is because the individual who embodies your personal definition of love does not really exist. The person is real, and the feelings are real--but you create the context. And context is everything. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they're often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else.”

Chuck Klosterman book Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story (2005)

Love, Life, People, Feeling

“However, such myths developed earlier in the Byzantine periphery. In the heart of the Empire, it was really only in its final phase from 1261, under the Palaeologan emperors, after the chastening experience of the Sack of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204, and the subsequent period of ‘penance’ in the Nicene Empire, that we can begin to speak of a definite Greek ethnic component fuelled by strong anti-Latin sentiment, alongside the Universal Church and its mission to outsiders (see Raynes and Moss 1969: 33—6). In fact, a strong Greek ethnic sentiment had developed already at Nicaca. In John Armstrong’s words: At Nicaea after the Crusader conquest of Constantinople, the literati demanded that the emperor in-exile entitle himself king of the Hellenes”. Two centuries later the last emperor was mourned as Constantine the Hellene (Armstrong 1981: 179). For Armstrong, this was partly the result of a long-term homogenizing socialization process required for a powerful, integrated, and hierarchical central bureaucracy. But it was also due to Greek adherence to classical learning and literature, and to Byzantine unwillingness to accept the parity of Latin as a language of empire”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Armstrong 1982.: 178—8 I, 116—17
Chosen Peoples (2003)

Literature, Strong, Learning, Universe

“"Man's inhumanity to man" is not the last word. The truth lies deeper. It is economic slavery, the savage struggle for a crumb, that has converted mankind into wolves and sheep.”

Alexander Berkman book Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912), Ch. 18: "The Solitary" http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_Archives/bright/berkman/prison/chapter18ii.html

Truth

“I will not end on a happy note, because there isn't one. But neither do I despair. One doesn't fight only when one is optimistic. One fights because it is the right thing to do and because America remains, as Lincoln said, 'the last best hope of earth.”

Dennis Prager (1948) American writer, speaker, radio and TV commentator, theologian

2010s, A Dark Time in America (2016)

Happiness, Hope, Fight, Despair

“[I]t's very important to understand that this is the dictators always operate short-term, and democracies must operate long-term because it’s not about one individual who’s currently running the country, whether it’s president or prime minister. It’s about the success of the country. It’s about the success of the system. It’s about pressing, you know, all advantages and their strategic, lasting institutions that could make the difference even when the president or prime minister is no longer in the office.”

Garry Kasparov (1963) former chess world champion

2010s, Interview with Bill Kristol (2016)

Democracy, Understanding, Success, Country

“If anything does change man,” he said, “it’s science and technology. Just think about the fact—while it lasts—that parents need not take for granted some of their babies will die. You get a completely different concept of what a child is.”

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 6 (p. 60)

Thinking, Parent, Science, Change

“For generations prior to the last war, the central problem of admissions at Amherst and similar institutions had been one of recruitment—finding enough qualified candidates to fill each entering class. Since 1946, however, the central problem of admissions has increasingly been one of selection— picking the "best" candidates from a great excess of qualified applicants.”

Eugene S. Wilson (1905)

Said in 1959 per Elizabeth Duffy and Idana Goldberg, Crafting a Class: College Admissions and Financial Aid, 1955–1994, Princeton University Press, 1998, p. 37
Attributed

War, Problem

“Slate's Dave Cullen thought he had solved the why riddle in his article, "The Depressive and the Psychopath: At Last We Know Why the Columbine Killers Did It", published on April 20, 2004, the fifth anniversary of the massacre. Cullen wrote, "[Eric Harris] was a brilliant killer without a conscience, searching for the most diabolical scheme imaginable. If he had lived to adulthood and developed his murderous skills for many more years, there is no telling what he could have done. His death at Columbine may have stopped him from doing something worse."”

Mark Ames (1965) American writer and journalist

Cullen's breakthrough, like the Richmond Enquirers, is essentially this: Eric Harris murdered because he was an evil murderer.
Part II: The Banality of Slavery, page 58.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)

Death, Imagination, Search, Evil

“We will not bend or fail until the blood of every last Jew from the youngest child to the oldest elder is spilt to redeem our land!”

Yasser Arafat (1929–2004) former Palestinian President, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

In his speech "The Impending Total Collapse of Israel" at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, Sweden, January 30, 1996 as quoted in “The Legacy of Islamic AntiSemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History”, by Andrew Bostom, Prometheus Books, c.2008, pg. 682.
1990s

“My wife and I had an argument last week that was so stupid, it bears repeating. My wife collects twist ties. Welcome to my world.”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

Cheap Drunk: An Autobiography (2002)

Stupidity, World

“The third and last classification of projects under this measure, Mr. President, are urgent infrastructure, socio-economic, rehabilitation and reconstruction projects which are not funded in any existing appropriation laws. These projects, such as the MRT 3 Rehabilitation and Capacity Extension, the updating of DSWD’s National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR), or the Emergency Housing Assistance for Victims of Typhoon Yolanda, constitute crucial development initiatives that shall benefit displaced and poverty-stricken Filipinos.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the Supplemental Appropriations for FY 2014

Law, Housing

“.. the art of futurism…. achieved great momentum in the first quarter of the Twentieth Century and remains a basic stimulus in the following forms of new art: Suprematism, Simultaneism, Purism, Odorism, Pankinetism, Tactilism, Haptism, Expressionism and Légerísm [referring to Fernand Léger in the last… ism, mentioned]”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

1910 - 1920
Source: 'Cubofuturism', Malevich, in Essays on Art, op. cit., vol 2; as quoted in Futurism, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 59

Art, Future

“As translated by Julio Antonio Gonzalo (2008). The Intelligible Universe: An Overview of the Last Thirteen Billion Years.”

Augustin Louis Cauchy (1789–1857) French mathematician (1789–1857)

World Scientific. p. 301.
Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1850). Considérations sur les ordres religieux adressées aux amis des sciences. Pommeret et Moreau. p. 26.
Original: Je suis catholique sincère comme l’ont été Corneille, Racine, La Bruyère, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Fénelon ; comme l’ont été et le sont encore un grand nombre des hommes les plus distingués de notre époque, de ceux qui ont fait le plus d’honneur à la science, à la philosophie, à la littérature, qui ont le plus illustré nos académies. Je partage les convictions profondes qu'ont manifestées par leurs paroles, par leurs actions et par leurs écrits tant de savants de premier ordre , les Rutfini, les Haûy, les Laennec, les Ampère, les Pelletier, les Freycinet, les Coriolis; et si j'évite de nommer ceux qui restent, de peur de blesser leur modestie, je puis dire du moins que j'aimais à retrouver toute la noblesse, toute la générosité de la foi chrétienne dans mes illustres amis, dans le créateur de la cristallographie (le chanoine Haùy), dans le navigateur célèbre que porta l'Uranie (Claude-Marie de Freycinet), et dans l'immortel auteur de l'électricité dynamique (André-Marie Ampère)

World, Intelligence, Universe

“He gave a cry. At the last, falling backward, his face appearing to us for a second upside down before he was smothered on the floor by a pile of white uniforms, he let himself cry out: A sound of cornered-animal fear and hate and surrender and defiance, that if you ever trailed coon or cougar or lynx is like the last sound the treed and shot and falling animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn't care any more about anything but himself and his dying.”

Ken Kesey book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Source: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), Ch. 29

Hate, Fear, Dogs, Appearance

“V has come to be my last Metal Gear.
It has been an honor and a joy to have been given the opportunity to work on Metal Gear for nearly twenty amazing years.
Tоday's computer graphics, technology, and hardware—compared to those of twenty years ago—have evolved so significantly. As a result, the art that can be created has dramatically changed.
However, the process of conceptualizing and creating a character by understanding their personality, their habits, their backstory, and the role they play—this has fundamentally remained the same. Refining ideas and doing countless sketches over and over are tasks that at times feel formidable and complex. At the same time, they are very fun and gratifying.”

Yoji Shinkawa (1971) Japanese illustrator

Foreword to The Art of Metal Gear Solid V, Dark Horse Comics, 2016, p. 7 https://books.google.it/books?id=BerxDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA7.

Art, Feeling, Idea, Understanding

“If I were president, I would try to be one who says, you know what, I'm a Reagan Conservative. I'm someone who believes in peace through strength, and I would try to lead the country in that way knowing that our goal is peace, and that war is the last resort, not the first resort. And, that when we go to war, we go to war in a constitutional way, which means that we have to vote on it, that war is initiated by congress, not by the president, that we go to war electively (ph). That when we go to war, we don't fight with one arm tied behind our back, we fight all out to win, but then we come home.”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

2015-09-16
CNN REAGAN LIBRARY DEBATE: Later Debate Full Transcript
CNN
http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2015/09/16/cnn-reagan-library-debate-later-debate-full-transcript/
2010s

War, Peace, Way, Home