Quotes about leave (4299 quotes, page 24)

“A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.”

René Char (1907–1988) 20th-century French poet

Un poète doit laisser des traces de son passage, non des preuves. Seules les traces font rêver.
As quoted in The French-American Review (1976) by Texas Christian University, p. 132
Variant translation: A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Only traces bring about dreams.
As quoted in Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics (2000) by Roland Bleiker, p. 50

Dreams

“Everything is flowing — going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water. Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rocks …. While the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood globules in Nature's warm heart.”

John Muir book My First Summer in the Sierra

Terry Gifford, EWDB, page 277
1860s, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1869

Beauty , Music , Star , Nature

“Sitcoms routinely portray women hitting men, almost never portray men hitting women. When he fails to leave, it is not called “Battered Man Syndrome”; it is called comedy.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

Women , Men

“Mathematics is the fruitful Parent of, I had almost said all, Arts, the unshaken Foundation of Sciences, and the plentiful Fountain of Advantage to Human Affairs. In which last Respect, we may be said to receive from the Mathematics, the principal Delights of Life, Securities of Health, Increase of Fortune, and Conveniences of Labour: That we dwell elegantly and commodiously, build decent Houses for ourselves, erect stately Temples to God, and leave wonderful Monuments to Posterity: That we are protected by those Rampires from the Incursions of the Enemy; rightly use Arms, skillfully range an Army, and manage War by Art, and not by the Madness of wild Beasts: That we have safe Traffick through the deceitful Billows, pass in a direct Road through the tractless Ways of the Sea, and come to the designed Ports by the uncertain Impulse of the Winds: That we rightly cast up our Accounts, do Business expeditiously, dispose, tabulate, and calculate scattered 248 Ranks of Numbers, and easily compute them, though expressive of huge Heaps of Sand, nay immense Hills of Atoms: That we make pacifick Separations of the Bounds of Lands, examine the Moments of Weights in an equal Balance, and distribute every one his own by a just Measure: That with a light Touch we thrust forward vast Bodies which way we will, and stop a huge Resistance with a very small Force: That we accurately delineate the Face of this Earthly Orb, and subject the Oeconomy of the Universe to our Sight: That we aptly digest the flowing Series of Time, distinguish what is acted by due Intervals, rightly account and discern the various Returns of the Seasons, the stated Periods of Years and Months, the alternate Increments of Days and Nights, the doubtful Limits of Light and Shadow, and the exact Differences of Hours and Minutes: That we derive the subtle Virtue of the Solar Rays to our Uses, infinitely extend the Sphere of Sight, enlarge the near Appearances of Things, bring to Hand Things remote, discover Things hidden, search Nature out of her Concealments, and unfold her dark Mysteries: That we delight our Eyes with beautiful Images, cunningly imitate the Devices and portray the Works of Nature; imitate did I say? nay excel, while we form to ourselves Things not in being, exhibit Things absent, and represent Things past: That we recreate our Minds and delight our Ears with melodious Sounds, attemperate the inconstant Undulations of the Air to musical Tunes, add a pleasant Voice to a sapless Log and draw a sweet Eloquence from a rigid Metal; celebrate our Maker with an harmonious Praise, and not unaptly imitate the blessed Choirs of Heaven: That we approach and examine the inaccessible Seats of the Clouds, the distant Tracts of Land, unfrequented Paths of the Sea; lofty Tops of the Mountains, low Bottoms of the Valleys, and deep Gulphs of the Ocean: That in Heart we advance to the Saints themselves above, yea draw them to us, scale the etherial Towers, freely range through the celestial Fields, measure the Magnitudes, and determine the Interstices of the Stars, prescribe inviolable Laws to the Heavens themselves, and confine the wandering Circuits of the Stars within fixed Bounds: Lastly, that we comprehend the vast Fabrick of the Universe, admire and contemplate the wonderful Beauty of the Divine 249 Workmanship, and to learn the incredible Force and Sagacity of our own Minds, by certain Experiments, and to acknowledge the Blessings of Heaven with pious Affection.”

Isaac Barrow (1630–1677) English Christian theologian, and mathematician

Source: Mathematical Lectures (1734), p. 27-30

Life , God , War , Health

“In the intellectual market the quantity of the demand rises in proportion to that of the supply, but its quality does not keep pace with this increase. For example, the Old Testament of pianoforte players, Bach’s “Wohltenoerurtes Klavier” is perhaps in almost as many hands as the New Testament, Beethoven’s Pianoforte Sonatas, but in few more heads than it was in former years, when it could only be had for six times the present price. Doubtless, its leaves are somewhat oftener turned over, but now, as then, about the sixth part, likely enough just the first sixth, is all that is studies in the real meaning of the word. Here truly is little more gained than a merely superficial acquaintance with the great father of German music.”

Hans von Bülow (1830–1894) German musician

Preface to Instructive ausgabe. Klavier-Etuden von Fr. Chopin, 1880.

Music , Study , Time , Parting

““I don’t understand what you mean,” I confessed in a baffled tone. Niamh gave me a long, cool, faintly amused glance.
“Don’t you? No, I can see that you do not,” she said. And with that she rolled over, her face turned from me, and fell asleep…leaving me staring at the ceiling, completely mystified, pondering the inexplicable perversities of the female mind.”

Lin Carter book Under the Green Star

Source: Under the Green Star (1972), Chapter 17, “A Knife in the Dark” (pp. 112-113)

Understanding

“Glorious are the woods in their latest gold and crimson,
Yet our full-leaved willows are in the freshest green.
Such a kindly autumn, so mercifully dealing
With the growths of summer, I never yet have seen.”

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) American romantic poet and journalist

The Third of November, 1861. Thirty Poems. Appleton, New York. pp. 112-115. (1864)

Autumn , Summer

“322. Although the sun shine, leave not thy cloake at home.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

Home , Sun

“Let those whose Hearts and Hands are strong
Tell eager Tales of mighty Deeds;
Enough if my sequestered song
To hush'd and twilight Gardens leads!

Clear Waters, drawn from secret Wells
Perchance may fevered Lips assuage;
The Tales an elder Pilgrim tells
To such as go on Pilgrimage.

Such the soft Path my Words would trace,
Thus with the moving Waters move;
So leave, across the Ocean's Face,
A glimmering Stair to Hope and Love.”

A. C. Benson (1862–1925) English essayist, poet, author and Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge

Prologue.
The Isles of Sunset (1904)

Love , Secret , Hope , Strong

“To hurry pain is to leave a classroom still in session.”

Yahia Lababidi (1973)

Signposts to Elsewhere (2008)

Pain

“[…] a stone rolled down hill by an idle truant boy […]. Even such is the course of a narrative like that which you are perusing. The earlier events are studiously dwelt upon, that you, kind reader, may be introduced to the character rather by narrative, than by the duller mdium of direct description; but when the story drwas near its close, we hurry over the circumstances, however important, which your imagination must hvae forestalled, and leave you to suppose those things which it would be abusing your patience to relate at length.”

Walter Scott book Waverley

Source: Waverley (1814), Chapter LXX

Imagination , Boy , Patience

“If something happened along the route and you had to leave your children with Bob Dole or Bill Clinton, I think you would probably leave them with Bob Dole.”

Bob Dole (1923) American politician

Reported in New York Magazine‎ (April 29, 1996), v. 29, no. 17, p. 13.

Children , Thinking

“"With these victories to which you refer, the Confederate States do seem to have retrieved their falling fortunes," Lord Lyons said. "I have no reason to doubt that Her Majesty's government will soon recognize that fact." "Thank you, your excellency," Lee said quietly. Even had Lincoln refused to give up the war- not impossible, with the Mississippi valley and many coastal pockets held by virtue of Northern naval power and hence relatively secure from rebel AK-47s- recognition by the greatest empire on earth would have assured Confederate independence. Lord Lyons held up a hand. "Many among our upper classes will be glad enough to welcome you to the family of nations, both as a result of your successful fight for self-government and because you have given a black eye to the often vulgar democracy of the United States. Others, however, will judge your republic a sham, with its freedom for white men based upon Negro slavery, a notion loathsome to the civilized world. I should be less than candid if I failed to number myself among that latter group." "Slavery was not the reason the Southern states chose to leave the Union," Lee said. He was aware he sounded uncomfortable, but went on, "We sought only to enjoy the sovereignty guaranteed us under the constitution, a right the North wrongly denied us. Our watchword all along has been, we wish but to be left alone."”

Harry Turtledove book The Guns of the South

Source: The Guns of the South (1992), p. 182-183

Men , War , World , Family

“Then all you lovers have good heed
Vex not young Love in word or deed:
Love never leaves an unpaid debt,
He will not pardon nor forget.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"Advice To Lovers".
Country Sentiment (1920)

Love , Lovers , Forgetting

“We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don't know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.”

Richard Feynman book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

from lecture "What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society", given at the Galileo Symposium in Italy (1964)
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999)

People , World , Search , Question

“Practical enough to leave the people who do the funny stuff alone.”

Chetan Bhagat book Revolution 2020

Revolution 2020 (2011)

People

“People who leave groups generally sell less records. I feel better and more worthwhile selling less than the last Bunnymen record. I feel more important.”

Ian McCulloch (1959) singer, musician

Rolling Stone (1990)

People , Feeling

“I consider myself British and have very happy memories of the UK. I spent the first 14 years of my life in England and never wanted to leave. When I was in Australia I went back to England a lot.”

Naomi Watts (1968) British actress and film producer

[Watts turns back on Australia, April 24 2007, http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,21607413-5006002,00.html, The Daily Telegraph, 2007-04-24, https://archive.is/LR0E, 2012-05-29]

Life , Memory , Happiness

“Well, you know, a lot of work nowadays [c. 1991] tends to be illustrative of theory already written, and some of it tends to be quite consciously didactic, as if the determination is to teach somebody something. And letting that go for the moment, as far as its value is concerned, it's exactly the opposite of what I seem to find most useful, and that is to leave things open and not determine anything except the very clear form. The form is always very simple and clear. What is experienced is uncertain and unforeseeable, which is why I do it, and its point is never clear to me, even after I've done it. So that's a very, very different way of looking at the nature of our responsibility in the world.”

Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) American artist

In an interview with Robert C. Morgan, 1991; in the 'Journal of Contemporary Art, 4', no. 2, p. 56-69

World , Way , Nature

“We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

Space and the Spirit of Man (1965)

Death , Birth , Thinking , Water

“"Leaves, some the wind scatters on the ground—So is the race of man." Leaves, also, are thy children; and leaves, too, are they who cry out so if they are worthy of credit, or bestow their praise, or on the contrary curse, or secretly blame and sneer; and leaves, in like manner, are those who shall receive and transmit a man's fame to after-times. For all such things as these "are produced in the season of spring," as the poet says; then the wind casts them down; then the forest produces other leaves in their places. But a brief existence is common to all things, and yet thou avoidest and pursuest all things as if they would be eternal.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

X, 34
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X

Children , Spring , Time , Cry

“that we not leave them to themselves — they are unfit for self-government — and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's wars; and”

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

War

“My uncle [mother’s brother] wrote rather twee books of memoirs in the period between the two World Wars. They’d be deeply embarrassing to read today. In the 19th century my mother’s family were involved with the Pre-Raphaelites, and a direct ancestor of mine was Lady Byron’s lawyer, who advised her to leave the poet because of her husband’s affair with his half-sister. A much earlier ancestor on my mother’s side was chaplain to Richard Corbet, Bishop of Oxford, who wrote the poem ‘Farewell Rewards and Fairies’. In his ‘Brief Lives’ Aubrey describes them getting drunk together in the cellars of Christchurch, Oxford.”

Edward Lucie-Smith (1933) British art critic, writer and curator

From an interview http://rimbaud.org.uk/q-lucie-smith.html

War , Books , World , Family

“Though it would be unfair to blame all on him, there is no escaping the fact that President Barack Obama has been an exceptionally divisive figure. Failing to find formulae for working with a hostile Congress he has tried to circumvent the legislature whenever possible, adding fuel to the fire of division. He leaves behind a deeply divided government. By turning his power base into a coalition of racial, ethnic and religious minorities, Obama has pushed the majority towards radical messages they had shunned for generations. He leaves behind a divided society. Today, even the two main parties, Democrat and Republican, are split with surprising reversals of alliances within each. He leaves behind a divided establishment.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Opinion: Clinton or Trump – Better or Less Bad? http://english.aawsat.com/2016/11/article55361471/opinion-clinton-trump-better-less-bad, Ashraq Al-Awsat (November 4, 2016)

Hostility

“Starting from Einstein's theory of general relativity, Oppenheimer and Snyder found solutions… that described what happens to a massive star when it has exhausted its supplies of nuclear energy. The star collapses gravitationally and disappears from the visible universe, leaving behind only an intense gravitational field to mark its presence. The star remains in a state of permanent free fall, collapsing endlessly inward into the gravitational pit without ever reaching the bottom. … In my opinion, the black hole is incomparably the most exciting and the most important consequence of general relativity. But Einstein … was actively hostile to the idea of black holes. … Oddly enough, Oppenheimer too in later life was uninterested in black holes, although… they were his most important contribution to science. … Oppenheimer in his later years believed that the only problem worthy of attention of a serious theoretical physicist was the discovery of fundamental equations of physics. Einstein certainly felt the same way.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

Life , Hostility , Way , Star

“There is exact correspondence between a world where everything seems to be in a state of mere “becoming,” leaving no place for the changeless and permanent, and the state of mind of men who find all reality in this same “becoming,” denying by implication true knowledge as well as the object of that knowledge, by which we mean the transcendent and universal principles.”

René Guénon (1886–1951) French metaphysician

Source: The Crisis of the Modern World (1927), p. 51

Men , World , Knowledge , Reality

“For though he builds glorious temples, 'tis odd
He leaves never a doorway to get in a god.”

James Russell Lowell A Fable for Critics

A Fable for Critics (1848)

God

“He is making money but I am earning love. His money will get spent, but the respect and love that I get will remain for him when I leave. I only hope he keeps it up. Somewhere he will take care of my respect and love.”

Sunil Dutt (1929–2005) Hindi film actor

About his son in [Dawar, Ramesh, Bollywood: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, http://books.google.com/books?id=TO6Fmi8FraUC&pg=RA1-PT24, 1 January 2006, Star Publications, 978-1-905863-01-3, 135]

Love , Money , Hope

“Paint. Just paint. This is my advice. And leave the clever talk to the poor sods who can't.”

John Fowles book The Ebony Tower

The Ebony Tower (1974)

Painting

“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.”

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

Planned speech to the National Security Council — Various sources (e.g. The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/may/13/counter-terrorism-bill-extremism-disruption-orders-david-cameron, BBC http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-32714802) (13 May 2015)
2010s, 2015

Law

“Jail's like school but you can't leave.”

Boy George (1961) English musician

Boy George: 'Jail's like school but you can't leave' http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/oct/12/boy-george-interview, guardian.co.uk, 12 October 2010

School

“While it is well enough to leave footprints on the sands of time, it is even more important to make sure they point in a commendable direction.”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

Beyond Life (1919) Ch. VI : Which Values the Candle, § 2, p. 173

Time

“Lord Southrop was, of course, eccentric in his views; and you never knew — here the housekeeper, with a despondent head-shake, paused, leaving unspoken the suggestion that a man who did not think or behave like other people might go mad at any moment.”

Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956) British writer

11. "The Unknown Peer"
Trent Intervenes (1938)

People , Thinking , Madness

“I leave with no regrets or burdens. If anything, I leave as I started; just a regular guy humbled by the chance to do a big job.”

John Boehner (1949) Former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives

Farewell speech https://archive.is/cPZnT (29 October 2015).
2010s, 2015

Guy , Chance

“The paths to the house I seek to make,
But leave to those to come the house itself.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Thou Mother with thy Equal Brood, 1
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Housing

“I found at this point that effective acting wasn't what I wanted to do, that I didn't want to make effects, that I wanted, as it were, to leave an impression of a particular kind of human being.”

Paul Scofield (1922–2008) English actor

Quoted in Garry O'Connor, Paul Scofield: An Actor for All Seasons (Applause Books, 2002, ISBN 1-557-83499-7), ch. 22 (p. 131)

“Late at night
I drift away -
I can hear you calling,
and my name
is in the rain,
leaves on trees whispering,
deep blue sea's mysteries.”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Song lyrics, Amarantine (2005)

Tree , Sea , Night

“It is the month of June,
The month of leaves and roses,
When pleasant sights salute the eyes,
And pleasant scents the noses.”

Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806–1867) American magazine writer, editor, and publisher

The Month of June.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)

“759. Give not S. Peter so much, to leave Saint Paul nothing.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

“The apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, of forms of the neutral and of indifference. I will leave it to be considered whether there can be a romanticism, an aesthetic of the neutral therein. I don't think so — all that remains, is the fascination for desertlike and indifferent forms, for the very operation of the system that annihilates us. Now, fascination (in contrast to seduction, which was attached to appearances, and to dialectical reason, which was attached to meaning) is a nihilistic passion par excellence, it is the passion proper to the mode of disappearance. We are fascinated by all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance. Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparency.
I am a nihilist.
I observe, I accept, I assume the immense process of the destruction of appearances (and of the seduction of appearances) in the service of meaning (representation, history, criticism, etc.) that is the fundamental fact of the nineteenth century.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

Source: 1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1988), Ch. 18 : On Nihilism, translation by Sheila Faria Glaser.

History , Thinking , Appearance , Passion

“Harm is in us.
Harm in us, but power to arm.
Harm is in us.
Leave it open!”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Dreaming (1982)

“…there must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientist, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.”

Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer

"Brave Words for a Startling Occasion" (1953), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 153.

Truth , History

“This is organized crime and there is a network all over the country. It's been going on for centuries and is passed down from generation to generation. The mothers teach their daughters… The psychics you see in the storefront who are dressed kind of shabby and don't have that much money actually are the same people who when they drive away go live in a million dollar house on the Intracoastal and they're driving around in a Maserati… It leaves the victims penniless and emotionally broken.”

Bob Nygaard private detective specializing in psychic fraud

Bob Nygaard: Boca Raton private investigator says south Florida is a hotbed for fake fortune tellers https://web.archive.org/web/20160414094952/https://www.wptv.com/news/region-s-palm-beach-county/boca-raton/a-boca-raton-private-investigator-says-south-florida-is-a-hotbed-for-fake-fortune-tellers, WPTV West Palm Beach (14 April 2016)

Money , People , Housing , Daughters

“"You. Are. Not. Leaving. Me." His eyes blazed — burning brighter than I had ever seen them, blue flames.”

Stephenie Meyer book The Host

Ian O'Shea to Wanderer, p. 572
The Host (2008)

“Don’t wag the tail of life if it goes well,
But leave in undisturbed. If it should go
Badly, rock it until it straightens up.”

Theognis of Megara (-570–-485 BC) Greek lyric poet active in approximately the sixth century BC

Source: Elegies, Lines 303-305, as translated by Dorothea Wender.

Life

“The most significant feature of our histories, however, is the religious zeal felt or exhibited by the swordsmen of Islam before and after the “infidels” who resisted “were sent to hell”, the Brahmans massacred or molested or expelled, idols desecrated, temples demolished, and mosques raised in their stead. The prophet of Islam appears in a dream and bids a sultãn to start on the “holy expedition”, leaving no doubt that the “victory of religion” was assured. Amîr Khusrû was very eloquent about the transformation that was taking place. When the hordes of Alãu’d-Dîn Khaljî sacked the temple of Somnath, he exulted, “The sword of Islãm purified the land as the Sun purifies the earth.” His enthusiasm broke all bounds when the same hordes swept over South India: “The tongue of the sword of the Khalifa of the time, which is the tongue of the flame of Islãm, has imparted light to the entire darkness of Hindustãn by the illumination of its guidance… and several capitals of the gods of the Hindus in which Satanism had prevailed since the time of Jinns, have been demolished. All these impurities of infidelity have been cleansed by the Sultãn’s destruction of idol-temples, beginning with his first expedition to Deogîr, so that the flames of the fight of the law illumine all these unholy countries… God be praised!” One wonders whether the poet of Islam is being honoured or slandered when he is presented in our own times as the pioneer of Secularism. Or, perhaps, Secularism in India has a meaning deeper than that we find in the dictionaries or dissertations on political science. We may not be much mistaken if, seeing its studied exercise in blackening everything Hindu and whitewashing everything Islamic, we suspect that this Secularism is nothing more than the good old doctrine of Islam in disguise.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

God , Religion , Law , Dreams

“Inanity is pretending that Afghanistan will go away if we leave.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Morning Meeting on MSNBC http://rawstory.com/rawreplay/?p=4373 (2009-12-04): On the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan
2000s, 2009

“If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling. Corrupt successes, disgraceful failures, or sheeplike vegetation are all it has to offer. I prefer Art, which gives me a sixth sense of beauty, with self-respect: perhaps also an immortal reputation in return for honest endeavour in a labour of love.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

1900s, Love Among the Artists (1900)

Love , World , Beauty , Art

“The pattern of sex differences found in our species mirrors that found in most mammals and in many other animals. As such, considerations of parsimony suggest that the best explanation for the human differences will invoke evolutionary forces common to many species, rather than social forces unique to our own. When we find the standard pattern of differences in other, less culture-bound creatures, we inevitably explain this in evolutionary terms. It seems highly dubious, when we find exactly the same pattern in human beings, to say that, in the case of this one primate species, we must explain it in terms of an entirely different set of causes — learning or cumulative culture — which coincidentally replicates the pattern found throughout the rest of the animal kingdom. Anyone who wishes to adopt this position has a formidable task in front of them. They must explain why, in the hominin lineage uniquely, the standard evolved psychological differences suddenly became maladaptive, and thus why natural selection “wiped the slate clean” of any biological contribution to these differences. They must explain why natural selection eliminated the psychological differences but left the correlated physical differences intact. And they must explain why natural selection would eliminate the psychological differences and leave it all to learning, when learning simply replicated the same sex differences anyway. How could natural selection favor extreme flexibility with respect to sex differences if that flexibility was never exercised and was therefore invisible to selection?”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), pp. 142-143

Sex , Exercises , Nature , Learning

“When it was clear that I was leaving Ajax [in 1973], I was sent all kinds of poisonous messages and lots more of that kind of nonsense. But the worst thing for me was that Ajax gave my mother, who had always done her best for the club, an inferior seat in the stadium. Behind a pole. That absolutely crushed me.”

Johan Cruyff (1947–2016) Dutch association football player

reported in Johan Cruyff (2016). My Turn: The Autobiography.

“I was seized with a guilt that I knew would never leave me, and I knew I didn't deserve to be free of it. I hadn't quite reached the end of my rope, but I was close enough.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Page 145
2000s, (2008)

“As Arp and I are sitting in the large living room of my house on Central Park in November 1958, we try again and again to understand the significance of Dada for ourselves and for others. Many elements surfaced in me and in the 'Fantastic Prayers' [his poems Phantastische Gebete, Zurich 1916] at the same time; resistance against the 'civilization' we live in, fury about a purely factual world which leaves out personality and thus creative power, the means of irony and underlying religiousness. Ball turned religious during the times of dadaism, Arp is a religious person today, and I have always been one, without wanting to realize it, perhaps without knowing it.”

Richard Huelsenbeck (1892–1974) German poet

Quote in his 'Preface' by Richard Huelsenbeck, New York, November 1958, in Phantastische Gebete; published by Arche Verlag, Zurich, 1960 (transl. by Johannes Beilharz, 2000)

World , Understanding , Time , Housing

“I like the American-Canadian border, 'cause if you're walking on the border with a friend, and you push your friend into Canada, he can't push you back right away, 'cause first he has to go through customs. "What brings you to Canada?":[Points to the side] "That asshole." "When are you leaving?"”

Mitch Hedberg (1968–2005) American stand-up comedian

"As soon as I regain my equilibrium!"
Just For Laughs: On The Edge - 2002

“to Joshua Kirby, Esq. - to be left at the Turk's Head, Gerrard Street, St. Ann's, London - Mr. President and Gentlemen, Directors of the Society of Artists of Great Britain. I thank ye for the honor done me in appointing me one of your Directors, but for a particular reason I beg leave to resign, and am. Gentlemen, your most obliged and obedient Humble Servant.”

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) English portrait and landscape painter

Quote from Gainsborough's letter, Bath, 5 Dec. 1768; as cited in Thomas Gainsborough, by William T, Whitley https://ia800204.us.archive.org/6/items/thomasgainsborou00whitrich/thomasgainsborou00whitrich.pdf; New York, Charles Scribner's Sons – London, Smith, Elder & Co, Sept. 1915, p. 397 (Appendix B)
18 October 1768, Gainsborough was elected to a Directorship of the Society of Artists, and on the same day his old Ipswich friend, Joshua Kirby, was made President. Gainsborough, however, declined to accept office, and his letter of refusal must have grieved Kirby
1755 - 1769

“If he was a good man, how could he leave me? So he must not be a good man. But if he isn't good, then why does it hurt so much to lose him? Is it just my pride that's wounded?”

Orson Scott Card Enchantment

Enchantment (1999)

Hurt

“Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 7 (“Curator”), p. 266

Intelligence

“In all cases, not only in the two which we have analyzed, recovery came of itself. There is certainly this much of truth in the talk about the recuperative powers of our industrial system. But this is not all: our analysis leads us to believe that recovery is sound only if it does come of itself. For any revival which is merely due to artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone and adds, to an undigested remnant of maladjustment, new maladjustment of its own which has to be liquidated in turn, thus threatening business with another crisis ahead. Particularly, our story provides a presumption against remedial measures which work through money and credit. For the trouble is fundamentally not with money and credit, and policies of this class are particularly apt to keep up, and add to, maladjustment, and to produce additional trouble in the future.”

Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883–1950) Austrian economist

"Depressions: Can we learn from past experience?" in Schumpeter, Joseph A.; Chamberlin, Edward; Leontief, Wassily W.; Brown, Douglass V.; Harris, Seymour E.; Mason, Edward S.; Taylor, Overton H., The economics of the recovery program (1934)

Money , Truth , Business , Future

“In preparing this record, penned by my own hand, of my life and my participation in our great struggles for national existence, human liberty and political equality, I make no pretence to literary merit. The motive that induces me is not authorship. The import of the subject matter of my narrative is my only claim to attention. The statements of facts are a matter of documentary evidence. The comments are my own and show how I saw the matters treated of, whether others saw them in the same light or not. Respectfully dedicating this work to the millions of armed men and devoted women who participated in the great wars of this country, I leave it as a heritage to my wife and son.”

Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) U.S. Army general of the army, field marshal of the Army of the Philippines

Source: Reminiscences (1964), p. vi

Life , Women , Men , War

“You who witnessed these horrors, you who saw your parents, wives, children fall under German bullets, how could you be expected to understand and stand idly by if today, after our victory, there were people sufficiently blind to advise you to leave unpunished the actions of such outrages, and to allow Germany to keep the indemnities she owes…That kind of behaviour…was encouraged or tolerated by all Germans; all Germans abetted the sacking and firing of the unfortunate provinces in the North and East…We shall see to it that they repair the damage”

Raymond Poincaré (1860–1934) 10th President of the French Republic

Speech at Triaucourt (c. 1922), quoted in Herbert Tint, The Decline of French Patriotism 1870-1940 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964), p. 172.

Children , People , Understanding , Parent

“Today we have media … which actually specialize in the kind of obscenity which the cultivated, not the prurient, find repugnant. … It is contended that such material is the raw stuff of life, and that it is the duty of the organs of public information to leave no one deceived about the nature of the world. The assertion that this is the real world begs the most important question of all. The raw stuff of life is precisely what the civilized man desires to have refined, or presented in a humane framework, for which sentiment alone can afford the support. … One of the great conspiracies against philosophy and civilization, a conspiracy immensely aided by technology, is just this substitution of sensation for reflection.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), pp. 28-30.

Life , World , Question , Support

“Midnight is a wonderful thing in a vast city—and midnight was upon Vienna. The shops were closed, the windows darkened, and the streets deserted—strange that where so much of life was gathered together there could be such deep repose; yet nothing equals the stillness of a great town at night. Perhaps it is the contrast afforded by memory that makes this appear yet more profound. In the lone valley, and in the green forest, there is quiet even at noon—quiet, at least, broken by sounds belonging alike to day and night. The singing of the bee and the bird, or the voice of the herdsman carolling some old song of the hills—these may be hushed; but there is still the rustle of the leaves, the wind murmuring in the long grass, and the low perpetual whisper of the pine. But in the town—the brick and mortar have no voices of their own. Nature is silent—her soft, sweet harmonies are hushed in the great human tumult—man, and man only, is heard. Through many hours of the twenty-four, the ocean of existence rolls on with a sound like thunder—a thousand voices speak at once. The wheels pass and re-pass over the stones—music, laughter, anger, the words of courtesy and of business, mingle together—the history of a day is the history of all time. The annals of life but repeat themselves.”

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

The Monthly Magazine

Life , Music , History , Business

“The rains tumble down in the sky,
Young swallows have learned how to fly,
The leaves that were green are no longer so green,
And it looks like the summer is over.”

Tom Springfield (1934) English musician, songwriter and record producer

Song Summer Is Over.

Learning , Summer , Flying

“Islamism immediately revived the lost cause of Urdu behind the smoke-screen of this Communist campaign against Hindi. It lauded loudly when progressive Urdu poets like Firaq Gorakhpuri lampooned Hindi in a language which was largely unprintable. Simultaneously, Islamism started parading Urdu as the great language of culture and refinement which will be lost to India for good if Urdu was allowed to go under. No Communist came forward to examine this “culture and refinement as a legacy of decadent Muslim courts and a frivolous Muslim aristocracy. No Communist questioned the heavy Persianisation and Arabicisation of Urdu which made it incomprehensible even to educated people, leave alone the man in Chandni Chowk. The recognition of Urdu as a second language has today become a sine qua non of Secularism.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Society under Siege (1981, revised 1992)

People , Education , Question

“Already into the last week of October! The dying fall holds only loneliness. In the garden the chrysanthemums bloom, beautiful, peaceful, as they did a year ago, but the autumn leaves, falling one by one, only make me sad.”

Park Chung-hee (1917–1979) Korean Army general and the leader of South Korea from 1961 to 1979

Diary entry (October 1974), as quoted in The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Revised and Updated http://books.google.com/books?id=yJZKpYXh2SAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Two+Koreas:+A+Contemporary+History+revised+updated&hl=en&sa=X&ei=X-xvU5TRFPOisQSa34CIBA&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=already%20into%20the%20last%20week&f=false (2001), by Don Oberdorfer, p. 55.
1970s

Sadness , Peace , Beauty , Autumn

“Character assassination is at once easier and surer than physical assault; and it involves far less risk for the assassin. It leaves him free to commit the same deed over and over again, and may, indeed, win him the honors of a hero in the country of his victims.”

Alan Barth (1906–1979) American journalist

The Rights of Free Men: An Essential Guide to Civil Liberties (1984).

Country

“In order to join vigorously in the moral work of the world I must believe that somehow the best I can accomplish will endure, will leave its trace on things, will aid the final consummation.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Section 4 : Moral Ideals
Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)

World

“I must say that when my Southern Christian Leadership Conference began its work in Birmingham, we encountered numerous Negro church reactions that had to be overcome. Negro ministers were among other Negro leaders who felt they were being pulled into something that they had not helped to organize. This is almost always a problem. Negro community unity was the first requisite if our goals were to be realized. I talked with many groups, including one group of 200 ministers, my theme to them being that a minister cannot preach the glories of heaven while ignoring social conditions in his own community that cause men an earthly hell. I stressed that the Negro minister had particular freedom and independence to provide strong, firm leadership, and I asked how the Negro would ever gain freedom without his minister's guidance, support and inspiration. These ministers finally decided to entrust our movement with their support, and as a result, the role of the Negro church today, by and large, is a glorious example in the history of Christendom. For never in Christian history, within a Christian country, have Christian churches been on the receiving end of such naked brutality and violence as we are witnessing here in America today. Not since the days of the Christians in the catacombs has God's house, as a symbol, weathered such attack as the Negro churches.
I shall never forget the grief and bitterness I felt on that terrible September morning when a bomb blew out the lives of those four little, innocent girls sitting in their Sunday-school class in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. I think of how a woman cried out, crunching through broken glass, "My God, we're not even safe in church!" I think of how that explosion blew the face of Jesus Christ from a stained-glass window. It was symbolic of how sin and evil had blotted out the life of Christ. I can remember thinking that if men were this bestial, was it all worth it? Was there any hope? Was there any way out?… time has healed the wounds -- and buoyed me with the inspiration of another moment which I shall never forget: when I saw with my own eyes over 3000 young Negro boys and girls, totally unarmed, leave Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church to march to a prayer meeting -- ready to pit nothing but the power of their bodies and souls against Bull Connor's police dogs, clubs and fire hoses. When they refused Connor's bellowed order to turn back, he whirled and shouted to his men to turn on the hoses. It was one of the most fantastic events of the Birmingham story that these Negroes, many of them on their knees, stared, unafraid and unmoving, at Connor's men with the hose nozzles in their hands. Then, slowly the Negroes stood up and advanced, and Connor's men fell back as though hypnotized, as the Negroes marched on past to hold their prayer meeting. I saw there, I felt there, for the first time, the pride and the power of nonviolence.
Another time I will never forget was one Saturday night, late, when my brother telephoned me in Atlanta from Birmingham -- that city which some call "Bombingham" -- which I had just left. He told me that a bomb had wrecked his home, and that another bomb, positioned to exert its maximum force upon the motel room in which I had been staying, had injured several people. My brother described the terror in the streets as Negroes, furious at the bombings, fought whites. Then, behind his voice, I heard a rising chorus of beautiful singing: "We shall overcome."”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Tears came into my eyes that at such a tragic moment, my race still could sing its hope and faith.
Interview in Playboy (January 1965) https://web.archive.org/web/20080706183244/http://www.playboy.com/arts-entertainment/features/mlk/04.html
1960s

Life , Men , God , People

“Man is not the most majestic of the creatures; long before the mammals even, the dinosaurs were far more splendid. But he has what no other animal possesses: a jigsaw of faculties, which alone, over three thousand million years of life, made him creative. Every animal leaves traces of what he was. Man alone leaves traces of what he created.”

Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man

The Ascent of Man (1973)

Life , Animals

“She doeth little kindnesses
Which most leave undone, or despise.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

My Love. iv.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Well, you must now imagine my friend at my age or almost there. You must picture him growing gray, tired of life and convinced that he had at last discovered the secret of peace. At this time he met, while visiting some relatives in a country house, a mere girl of twenty, who was the image, the haunting image of her whom he had hoped to marry thirty years before. It was one of those strange resemblances which extend from the color of the eyes to the 'timbre' of the voice, from the smile to the thought, from the gestures to the finest feelings of the heart. I could not, in a few disjointed phrases describe to you the strange emotions of my friend. It would take pages and pages to make you understand the tenderness, both present and at the same time retrospective, for the dead through the living; the hypnotic condition of the soul which does not know where dreams and memories end and present feeling begins; the daily commingling of the most unreal thing in the world, the phantom of a lost love, with the freshest, the most actual, the most irresistibly naïve and spontaneous thing in it, a young girl. She comes, she goes, she laughs, she sings, you go about with her in the intimacy of country life, and at her side walks one long dead. After two weeks of almost careless abandon to the dangerous delights of this inward agitation imagine my friend entering by chance one morning one of the less frequented rooms of the house, a gallery, where, among other pictures, hung a portrait of himself, painted when he was twenty-five. He approaches the portrait abstractedly. There had been a fire in the room, so that a slight moisture dimmed the glass which protected the pastel, and on this glass, because of this moisture, he sees distinctly the trace of two lips which had been placed upon the eyes of the portrait, two small delicate lips, the sight of which makes his heart beat. He leaves the gallery, questions a servant, who tells him that no one but the young woman he has in mind has been in the room that morning.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

Pierre Fauchery, as quoted by the character "Jules Labarthe"
The Age for Love

Love , Life , Secret , Age

“The canker which the trunk conceals is revealed by the leaves, the fruit, or the flower.”

Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782) Italian poet and librettist (born 3 January 1698, died 12 April 1782)

D'ogni pianta palesa l'aspetto
Il difetto, che il tronco nasconde
Per le fronde, dal frutto, o dal fior.
Part I.
Giuseppe Riconosciuto (1733)

Flowers

“Waiting for Cronulla to win a premiership is like leaving the porch lamp on for Harold Holt.”

Jack Gibson (1929–2008) Australian rugby league player and coach

Gibson on Cronulla Sharks' long premiership drought.

Waiting

“The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.”

Raymond Chandler book The Big Sleep

Source: The Big Sleep (1939), chapter 2

Men , Dead

“When will my soul forget the look
With which one single stem she took
From out the wreath?—a tulip flower;
But, touch'd as by some withering power,
The painted leaves were drooping round
The rich but burning heart they bound.”

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

The Golden Violet - The Wreath
The Golden Violet (1827)

Soul , Flowers , Heart , Painting

“Hubert Ronson, as I was to discover later, is the sort of European you are always coming across in Africa. I never made up my mind whether such men leave Europe because their talents are unappreciated in the politer civilisations, or whether they develop them after they arrive. Bullies, thugs, warm-hearted layabouts, at heart they are all the same sentimental, anxious extroverts, with the same endless fund of dirty stories, and the same secret loathing and longing for the cultures they have escaped.”

John Pearson (author) (1930) author

Gone to Timbuctoo (1961), Ch. 11

Men , Secret , Heart

“I renew my call for the occupier (the United States) to leave our land. The departure of the occupier will mean stability for Iraq, victory for Islam and peace and defeat for terrorism and infidels.”

Muqtada Sadr (1973) Iraqi politician

Radical Cleric Blames U.S. for Iraq Woes http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/03/30/ap3567801.html 30 March 2007

Peace , Departure , Victory

“This was Saudi Arabia, where Islam originated, governed strictly according to the scriptures and example of the Prophet Muhammad. And by law, all women in Saudi Arabia must be in the care of a man. My mother argued loudly with the Saudi immigration official, but he merely repeated in an ever louder voice that she could not leave the airport without a man in charge.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

Source: Infidel (2007), Chapter 3: Playing Tag in Allah's Palace

Women , Law

“Humans brain function and it s learning capacity can reform from the simplest abacus and calculators to super and gigantic computers. Based on such example, the brains functionality and ability of most humans has stalled at the level of abacus. This condition has made the brain to stay in that level like a rusted metal. Start improving your brain ability based on what I have taught you about “Thinking”, then the rustiness of your brain will begin to reduce and your brain functionality will increase so it can reach higher levels. You can plough your land, plant wheat and wait for months, then you take care of it and harvest your land and then using mill to produce flour and by that you make bread. With so much effort you can end up in making bread but with so much easier paths without spending energy, you can get the bread or any other food. Unfortunately most of humans are like those who spend their life time to make bread in worst ways possible, the longest and hardest. Don’t be one of them, and if you are try to leave them. Use the best and easiest methods for solving your issues.”

Elia M. Ramollah (1973) founder and leader of the El Yasin Community

The Great Master of Thought (Amen- Vol.3), Observing management

Life , Food , Way , Thinking

“[about Phil Fish leaving the game industry] "My first reaction, when thinking about covering this, was just to finish by saying, 'NNNope!' and go straight onto the next segment."”

TotalBiscuit (1984–2018) British game commentator

The Content Patch, Episode 122

Game , Thinking , Fish

“Shipping board. The form of the organization of the Shipping Board was based originally on its functions as a semi judicial body in regulation of rates. During the war it was loaded with enormous administrative duties. It has been demonstrated time and again that this form of organization results in indecision, division of opinion and administrative functions, which make a wholly inadequate foundation for the conduct of a great business enterprise. The first principle in securing the objective set out by Congress in building up the American merchant marine upon the great trade routes and subsequently disposing of it into private operation can not proceed with effectiveness until the entire functions of the board are reorganized. The immediate requirement is to transfer into the Emergency Fleet, Corporation the whole responsibility of operation of the fleet and other property, leaving to the Shipping Board solely the duty of determining certain major policies which require deliberative action.”

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

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

War , Business , Time , Indecision

“During the next 10 years about 1.2 billion young 15-to-30-year-olds will be entering the job market and with the means now at our disposal about 300 million will get a job. What will we offer these young, about a billion of them? — or will we leave them to be recruited by criminal leagues and terrorists? … I think this is one of the greatest challenges if we want to achieve peaceful development and hope for these young.”

Martti Ahtisaari (1937) Finnish politician and former President of Finland

Interview with Finnish YLE TV, quoted in "Nobel Peace Prize winner wants jobs for the young" in International Herald Tribune (11 October 2008) http://web.archive.org/web/20081012063102/http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/10/11/europe/EU-Finland-Nobel-Peace.php

Peace , Hope , Thinking

“One must know how to enter the ideas of others and how to leave them. One must know how to leave one's own ideas and how to come back to them.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Idea

“Our treatment of both older [people and children] reflects the value we place on independence and autonomy. We do our best to make our children independent from birth. We leave them all alone in rooms with the lights out and tell them, Go to sleep by yourselves. And the old people we respect most are the ones who will fight for their independence, who would sooner starve to death than ask for help.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

As quoted in "Growing Old in America" by Grace Hechinger, in Family Circle magazine (25 July 25 1977)
1970s

Death , Children , People , Birth

“The second Transformers movie came out this year. I didn't fight for a ticket. I'd caught the first one by accident. It was like being pinned to the ground while an angry dishwasher shat in your face for two hours. Any human dumb enough to voluntarily sit through a second helping of that unremitting fecal spew really ought to just get up and leave the planet via the nearest window before their continued presence does lasting damage to the gene pool.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

The Guardian, 3 August, 2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/03/hollywood-ideas-charlie-brooker
Guardian columns

Help , Fight

“We were very young. I don't think I ever slept that year, but I had a friend who slept even less than I did. Some mornings you could see him strolling up and down in front of the station when the first trains were arriving and leaving.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Incipit
The devil in the hills (1949)

Thinking , Training

“…the policy of separate development can be tested by any unprejudiced person against the requirements of Christianity and morality, and it will be found to meet all those requirements. … for conditions such as those in South Africa there is no other policy[, for without it] you will have chaos and ultimately bring about the downfall of all population groups here in South Africa. South Africa's problems are unique and South Africa has chosen its solution. …we, the Whites, the Coloureds, the Asians and the Bantu, will work out our own solutions here in South Africa. …we instituted the policy of separate development, not because we considered ourselves better than others, not because we considered ourselves richer or more educated than others. We instituted the policy of separate development because we said we were different from others. We prize that otherness and are not prepared to relinquish it. … We have our land and we and we alone will have authority over it. We have our Parliament and in that Parliament we and we alone will be represented; that is why [during] this past session it was my pleasant privilege to … abolish Coloured representation in Parliament; and it has been abolished once and for all. … but one should also put something in its place. That is why the National Party … for the first time [has given] the Coloureds in the Republic a Coloured Persons Representative Council in their own political area [where they] can exercise their political rights in their own way and by their own people. That is morality, that is policy, that is standpoint. … We said you may not attend my university, but we did not leave it at that. We said we shall give you a university of your own. We said you may not attend my school but we said we shall give you a school of your own. That is morality, that is Christianity …”

John Vorster (1915–1983) politician from South Africa and seventh Prime Minister of South Africa

John Vorster in his Heilbron speech http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/extract-speech-made-heilbron-16-august-1968 on 16 August 1968, as quoted in sahistory.org.za

People , Education , School , Way

“I recognize that the findings in our report may leave some to wonder how the department’s findings can differ so sharply from some of the initial, widely reported accounts of what transpired. I want to emphasize that the strength and integrity of America’s justice system has always rested on its ability to deliver impartial results in precisely these types of difficult circumstances – adhering strictly to the facts and the law, regardless of assumptions. Yet it remains not only valid – but essential – to question how such a strong alternative version of events was able to take hold so swiftly, and be accepted so readily.”

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

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Justice , Law , Question , Strong

“The dreams of "leaving it up to the market" or of returning to a politically neutral gold standard cannot succeed because the nature of the monetary system has a profound impact on the interests of powerful groups and states. Affected groups and states will always try to intervene in the operation of the system to make it serve their interests.”

Robert Gilpin (1930–2018) Political scientist

Source: The Political Economy of International Relations (1987), Chapter Four, International Money matters, p. 170

Dreams , Nature

“There's a dark cloud rising from the desert floor.
I packed my bags and I'm heading straight into the storm.
Gonna be a twister to blow everything down
That ain't got the faith to stand its ground.
Blow away the dreams that tear you apart,
Blow away the dreams that break your heart.
Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"The Promised Land"
Song lyrics, Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978)

Faith , Dreams , Tear , Heart

“All of us live by the employment of countless untested assumptions, the truth or falsehood of which we can determine only through the hazard of our lives. Since most of us value our lives more than the truth, we leave such drastic tests for the fanatics.”

Robert Sheckley book Mindswap

Source: Mindswap (1966), Chapter 14 (p. 70)

Truth

“I shall present as certain only those data corroborated by exhaustive research, or by my own personal investigations, as I am not untraveled for a bookish man. Wherever doubt exists, I shall unambiguously state its degree and nature, along with whatever grounds I may have for preferring one hypothesis over another. If, despite all I have said, the reader disdains such honest ambiguity, and stubbornly prefers the unequivocal assertiveness to be found in factitious travelogues penned by raffish “explorers,” or in the specious “natural histories” compiled by crapulous and unprincipled hacks who have never left their squalid lofts in Scrivener’s Row, then there is nothing further I can do, and I leave him, with apologies, to his deception.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Prologue (p. 10)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

History , Nature , Personality

“When we have done our best, we also have to learn that we still need to rely on God. Our best – no matter how good – is incomplete if we leave God out of the picture.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 146

God , Learning

“…in fact, the war against Iraq is continuing. And it's continuing now by the means which the administration described as contemptible and useless, when they were put forth as an alternative to an actual all-out aerial bombardment. Namely, economic sanctions, which do have the effect of slowly starving and crippling the population of Iraq, while leaving the military caste of Saddam Hussein and his criminal Baath Party in charge. I was asked the other day … why do you think the administration decided to spare Saddam Hussein … and I said I think because they thought they might need him again…”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

1992
NPR
Talk of the Nation with John Hockenberry
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcXsync4bD8
1990s

War , Thinking

“You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”

William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) United States Secretary of State

Cross of Gold Speech (1896)

Spring , Grass , Country

“The message of love can never come into a human soul, and pass away from it unreceived, without leaving that spirit worse, with all its lowest characteristics strengthened, and all its best ones depressed, by the fact of rejection.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 493.

Love , Soul

“Listen what happened to me when I was in the fifth form (ca. 1904), in the drawing lesson. An old-timer in the front row, the one who pinched me the most often, suddenly showed me a sketch on tissue paper, copied from the magazine "Niva": The Smoker. In this pandemonium! Leave me alone. I don't remember very well but this drawing, done not by me but by that fathead, immediately threw me into a rage. It roused a hyena in me. I ran to the library, grabbed that big volume of "Niva" and began to copy the portrait of the composer Rubinstein, fascinated by his crow's-feet and his wrinkles, or by a Greek woman and other illustrations; maybe I improvised some too, I hung them all up in my bedroom..”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

Quote in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, pp. 24-25
1920's, My life (1922)

Rage , Drawing

“The art of painting is only the art of expressing the invisible by the visible. Whether its roads be great or small, they are sown with problems which it is permitted to sound for one's self as truth, but which it is well to leave in their darkness as mysteries.”

Eugène Fromentin (1820–1876) French painter

Quote from The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland - Les Maitres d’Autrefois, 'Preface', Eugène Fromentin; ed. Mary Caroline Robbins, publisher: J. R. Osgood and company, Boston 1882, p. iv

Truth , Art , Problem , Painting

“The movement known as the Ghost Dance first appeared around 1870… soon after the Union Pacific Railroad completed its first transcontinental run. …that event inspired the vision of the prophet Wodziwob, who declared that a big train was coming to bring back dead ancestors… a cataclysm would swallow up all the whites and leave behind their goods for his followers.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Appearance , Dance , Training , Dead