Quotes about left
page 24

“"High (drive/fly ball) into (left/center/etc.) field, and deep. Back goes (fielder's name), a-way back, it's gone!" (Or "… to the [warning] track, to the [fence/wall], gone!")”

Vin Scully (1927) American sports broadcaster

Variations of his most common home run call

Way, Flying

“It doesn't mean much;
It doesn't mean anything at all.
The life I've left behind me
Is a cold room.
I've crossed the last line
From where I can't return.
Where every step I took in faith
Betrayed me
And led me from my home.And sweet sweet surrender
Is all that I have to give.”

Sarah McLachlan (1968) Canadian musician, singer, and songwriter

Sweet Surrender
Song lyrics, Surfacing (1997)

Life, Faith

“When they were growing up, I was working from morning to night. When I left, they were asleep, when I came back, they were asleep," once he told a magazine. Even when they were young, he couldn't visit their school as Shweta and Abhishek asked him not to visit them to avoid too much commotion”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

His biggest regret is not to share the "growing up moments" of his children quoted in "Bachchan Receives Lifetime Achievement Award at DIFF".

School, Night

“While the lime-burner was struggling with the horror of these thoughts, Ethan Brand rose from the log, and flung open the door of the kiln. The action was in such accordance with the idea in Bertram's mind, that he almost expected to see the Evil One issue forth, red-hot, from the raging furnace.
Hold! hold!" cried he, with a tremulous attempt to laugh; for he was ashamed of his fears, although they overmastered him. "Don't, for mercy's sake, bring out your Devil now!"
"Man!" sternly replied Ethan Brand, "what need have I of the Devil? I have left him behind me, on my track. It is with such half-way sinners as you that he busies himself. Fear not, because I open the door. I do but act by old custom, and am going to trim your fire, like a lime-burner, as I was once."
He stirred the vast coals, thrust in more wood, and bent forward to gaze into the hollow prison-house of the fire, regardless of the fierce glow that reddened his face. The lime-burner sat watching him, and half suspected this strange guest of a purpose, if not to evoke a fiend, at least to plunge into the flames, and thus vanish from the sight of man. Ethan Brand, however, drew quietly back, and closed the door of the kiln.
"I have looked," said he, "into many a human heart that was seven times hotter with sinful passions than yonder furnace is with fire. But I found not there what I sought. No, not the Unpardonable Sin!"”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

"Ethan Brand" (1850)

Fear, Way, Idea, Business

“The cultural left, and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world.”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

Introduction, pp. 1–2
Books, The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left And its Responsibility for 9, 11 (2007)

World, Universe, Anger

“Forced from home and all its pleasures
Afric's coast I left forlorn,
To increase a stranger's treasures
O'er the raging billows borne.
Men from England bought and sold me,
Paid my price in paltry gold;
But, though slave they have enrolled me,
Minds are never to be sold.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

Source: The Negro's Complaint (1788), Lines 1-8

Men, Pleasure, Home, Rage

“So What's Left? Let's consider where we are, circa early 2030s. We've eliminated the hearth, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the hormone-producing organs, kidneys, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestines, large intestines, and bowel. What we have left at this point is the skeleton, skin, sex organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

Source: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005), p. 307

Sex

“We must completely support the civil resistance throughout the Arab world. Corrupt secular nationalist rulers are as bad as corrupt undemocratic religious rulers. We must support the people all over the Muslim world with friendship and solidarity in support of democracy. We should be their partner in building mass popular trade unions to prevent them from exploitation in the market storm they are moving towards in their modernisation plans. Who on the left in Italy is working with the resistance to Gaddafi? I don’t know the answer to that but my suspicion is that there are not many. Again, you are on the wrong side of history on that. Support for democracy, for a democratic organised society, for resistance to capitalist domination and state despotism. That is the Blue Labour position. It goes without saying that China is the worst of all worlds, it combines market exploitation with state dictatorship. Blue Labour places unreserved solidity and support to the free democratic trade unions in China, and that is an important struggle for the Labour Movement all over the world.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

A Conversation with Maurice Glasman, Europa Quotidiano, 3 June 2011 http://europa.118.aws.dol.it/gw/producer/dettaglio.aspx?id_doc=127105

Friendship, People, World, Democracy

“Has not the famous political Fable of the Snake, with two Heads and one Body, some useful Instruction contained in it? She was going to a Brook to drink, and in her Way was to pass thro’ a Hedge, a Twig of which opposed her direct Course; one Head chose to go on the right side of the Twig, the other on the left, so that time was spent in the Contest, and, before the Decision was completed, the poor Snake died with thirst.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Queries and Remarks Respecting Alterations in the Constitution of Pennsylvania reported in Albert H. Smyth, ed., The Writings of Benjamin Franklin (1907), vol. 10, pp. 57–58.
Decade unclear

Way, Drink, Decision, Time

“A restless flame
Someone calls your name
Through the empty hall
Casting shadows on the wall
In the sound of emptiness
Isolation
Nowhere left to run
Now the time has come…”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Heaven's Open (1991)

Time

“The left side of the brain is responsible for speech, but then it would say that.”

Harry Hill (1964) English comedian, doctor

"Hooves" Live

“Jesus once said that the dead should left to bury the dead (Luke 9:60). This shows no disrespect for the dead. It shows an awareness that there are some functions in society that will be well taken care of without Christians investing their creativity in those functions. Someone else, in meeting such needs, can make a stable living. Burying the dead is still one of the businesses in which you can make a stable living. There are other such services that we can count on society handling by itself. Leadership in government and business are among these. Let us reserve our limited creativity for functions that will not be taken care of if we do not to it.”

John Howard Yoder (1927–1997) 20th century American Mennonite theologian

Source: Radical Christian Discipleship (2012), p. 41

Business, Dead

“and tho you lost your way it’s not too late
god knows you damn well tried
and all the stones you tossed they’re ripples now
waves you left behind
they’re leading you back you can go home again”

Alicia Witt (1975) American actress

Theme from Pasadena (You Can Go Home)
Lyrics, Revisionary History (2015)

God, Way, Home

“When I was three
Three, maybe four
She left us at that video store”

Sufjan Stevens (1975) American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist

"Should Have Known Better"
Lyrics, Carrie and Lowell (2015)

“To his teaching we owe it there is such a thing as Irish Nationalism and to the memory of the deed he nerved his generation to do, to the memory of ‘98, we owe it that there is any manhood left in Ireland.”

Patrick Pearse (1879–1916) Irish revolutionary, shot by the British Army in 1916

Address delivered at the Grave of Wolfe Tone in Bodenstown Churchyard, Co. Kildare, 22 June 1913

Memory

“When you’re only doing it for one play and you’re just not where you’re supposed to be, and freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, boy are you going to clean somebody’s clock for that one play.”

Randy Pausch book The Last Lecture

The Last Lecture (2007)

Boy, Freedom

“I know you have a little life in you yet.
I know you have a lot of strength left.”

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

Song lyrics, The Sensual World (1989)

Life

“Ideologically, Pelosi is a far-left talking points machine. Tactically, she knows nothing else other than how to attack. Her worldview admits of no compromise and there seems to be no space in her imagination for new ideas. She has refashioned her dwindling caucus in her image, as the moderate, red-state Democrats have been steadily decimated, leaving nothing but the bicoastal liberals representing the inner city poor and the elite suburban gentry. She feels no pressure to change or to improve.”

Joel Pollak (1977) Politician, writer

Nancy Pelosi Is Leading Her Party into Oblivion http://www.breitbart.com/california/2017/01/31/nancy-pelosi-leading-party-oblivion/ (January 31, 2017)

Feeling, Imagination, Idea, Change

“And this is woman's fate:
All her affections are called into life
By winning flatteries, and then thrown back
Upon themselves to perish; and her heart,
Her trusting heart, filled with weak tenderness,
Is left to bleed or break!”

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

The Castilian Nuptuals from The London Literary Gazette (28th September 1822) Poetical Sketches. 3rd series - Sketch the Fourth
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Life, Fate, Heart

“But love like that doesn’t just disappear, does it? No matter how powerful the hate, there’s always a little love left, underneath.
Yes. Horrible, isn’t it?”

N. K. Jemisin book The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

Source: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (2010), Chapter 12 (p. 144)

Love, Hate

“And, (relief pitcher Dennis Eckersley) walked (pinch-hitter Mike Davis) … and look who's comin' up!
(36 seconds of crowd cheering)
All year long, they looked to him to light the fire, and all year long, he answered the demands, until he was physically unable to start tonight—with two bad legs: the bad left hamstring, and the swollen right knee. And, with two out, you talk about a roll of the dice … this is it. If he hits the ball on the ground, I would imagine he would be running 50 percent to first base. So, the Dodgers trying to catch lightning right now!
Fouled away.
He was, you know, complaining about the fact that, with the left knee bothering him, he can't push off. Well, now, he can't push off and he can't land. … 4-3 A's, two out, ninth inning, not a bad opening act!
Mike Davis, by the way, has stolen 7 out of 10, if you're wondering about Lasorda throwing the dice again. 0-and-1.
Fouled away again. … 0-and-2 to Gibson, the infield is back, with two out and Davis at first. Now Gibson, during the year, not necessarily in this spot, but he was a threat to bunt. No way tonight, no wheels.
No balls, two strikes, two out.
Little nubber … foul—and, it had to be an effort to run that far. Gibson was so banged up, he was not introduced; he did not come out onto the field before the game. … It's one thing to favor one leg, but you can't favor two. 0-and-2 to Gibson.
Ball one. And, a throw down to first, Davis just did get back. Good play by Ron Hassey using Gibson as a screen; he took a shot at the runner, and Mike Davis didn't see it for that split-second and that made it close.
There goes Davis, and it's fouled away! So, Mike Davis, who had stolen 7 out of 10, and carrying the tying run, was on the move.
Gibson, shaking his left leg, making it quiver, like a horse trying to get rid of a troublesome fly. 2-and-2! … Tony LaRussa is one out away from win number one. … two balls and two strikes, with two out.
There he goes! Wa-a-ay outside, he's stolen it! … So, Mike Davis, the tying run, is at second base with two out. Now, the Dodgers don't need the muscle of Gibson, as much as a base hit, and on deck is the lead-off man, Steve Sax. 3-and-2. Sax waiting on deck, but the game right now is at the plate.
High fly ball into right field, she i-i-i-is gone!!
(67 seconds of cheering and organ music)
In a year that has been so improbable … the impossible has happened!
And, now, the only question was, could he make it around the base paths unassisted?!
You know, I said it once before, a few days ago, that Kirk Gibson was not the Most Valuable Player; that the Most Valuable Player for the Dodgers was Tinkerbell. But, tonight, I think Tinkerbell backed off for Kirk Gibson. And, look at Eckersley—shocked to his toes!
They are going wild at Dodger Stadium—no one wants to leave!”

Vin Scully (1927) American sports broadcaster

Kirk Gibson's World Series-game-winning home run, October 15, 1988, transcribed from mlb.com archives <nowiki>[</nowiki>excising comments by color commentator Joe Garagiola]

Music, Way, Imagination, Game

“The prince has consequently issued orders: "Attack them! I shall supply the army and media. You come up with the ideas." So, right-wing intellectuals spend their time insulting their left-wing counterparts, and because of the Zapatista movement's international impact, they are now busy rewriting our story to suit the demands of the prince.”

Subcomandante Marcos (1957) Mexican activist

Le Monde Diplomatique (August 2000) " Ideas Are Also Weapons http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Mexico/Ideas_weapons.html"

Idea, Business, Time

“Ascetic Christianity called the world evil and left it. Humanity is waiting for a revolutionary Christianity which will call the world evil and change it.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.2 The Social Aims of Jesus, p. 91

World, Evil, Change, Waiting

“The Bible says, God made a perfect world. Man wrecked it. By one man sin came into the world, and death by sin. It was Adam's fault. You can't blame a wrecked car on the manufacturer. Send a picture to the manufacturer of a wreck and say, "Why did you build a car like this?" It didn't look like this when it left the factory. Today, folks, we are living in a junkyard. Now I like living on planet earth, and Knoxville is a beautiful place; but, I'm telling you, folks, this is nothing compared to what Adam and Eve saw. This is a junkyard, but God's going to fix it back.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

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

Death, God, World, Beauty

“A coldness had come over Blaine in the hot, windy, smoky air. It was a chill that never quite left you after it had gotten inside you, he would find out later, but sometimes welled up again from nowhere, leaving you not afraid exactly, but believing that nothing could ever work out for the better in this world.”

Jamil Nasir (1955) American writer

Source: Tower of Dreams (1999), Chapter 13 (p. 181)

World

“That’s the left wing of the CIA debating the right wing of the CIA.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

Discussing CNN’s Crossfire as quoted in Rolling Stone (14 December 1989)

“He wondered if she would dream about a man who never left her, about some unemployed agoraphobic Indian warrior who liked to wash dishes.”

Sherman Alexie (1966) Native American author and filmmaker

Ten Little Indians (2003)

Dreams

“It left me there, the Compleat Young Girl, hell on wheels. I could build one-fifteenth of a log cabin, kill one-thirty-first of a tiger, kiss, do needlepoint, pass through an obstacle course, and come pretty close (in theory) to killing somebody with my bare hands. What did I have to worry about?”

Alexei Panshin book Rite of Passage

Source: Rite of Passage (1968), Chapter 14 (p. 187).

Girl, Hell, Kiss

“It is only through the discovery of History — more precisely by the awakening of the historical consciousness in Judaeo-Christianity and its propagation by Hegel and his successors — it is only through the radical assimilation of the new mode of being represented by human existence in the world that myth could be left behind. But we hesitate to say that mythical thought has been abolished. As we shall soon see, it managed to survive, though radically changed (if not perfectly camouflaged). And the astonishing fact is that, more than anywhere else it survives in historiography!”

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher

Source: Images and Symbols (1952), p. 113.

World, History, Change

“You have come from my home,
So you must know about things at home.
On the day you left—in front of my open-work window,
Had the winter plum opened into blossom yet?”

Wang Wei (699–759) a Tang dynasty Chinese poet, musician, painter, and statesman

"Tsa shih"

Home, Winter

“If there are 500 tigers left in India, I'd be surprised. They are even skinning the tigers in Indian zoos.”

Maneka Gandhi (1956) Indian politician and activist

On poaching of tigers in India, as quoted in "Hunting down the hunter: A dying breed" http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/hunting-down-the-hunter-a-dying-breed-473821.html, The Independent (12 April 2006) <br class="br">2001-2010

“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion", and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.”

I. J. Good (1916–2009) British statistician, cryptographer

"Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine" http://www.stat.vt.edu/tech_reports/2005/GoodTechReport.pdf, Advances in Computers, vol. 6, 1965

Intelligence

“The process in which something functions as a sign may be called '. This process, in a tradition which goes back to the Greeks, has commonly been regarded as involving three (or four) factors: that which acts as a sign, that which the sign refers to, and the effect on some interpreter in virtue of which the thing in question is a sign to that interpreter. These three components in semiosis may be called, respectively, the sign vehicle, the designatum, and the interpretant; the interpreter may be included as a fourth factor. These terms make explicit the factors left undesignated in the common statement that a sign refers to something for someone.”

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Signs," 1938, p. 3

Question

“It is all a matter of comparing one’s own life with something worse and consoling oneself with the relativity of human fortunes. When I was eight or nine I had an experience which came clearly to mind when I read your advice. I used to know a family in a little village near mine: father, mother and sons: they were small landowners and had an inn. Very energetic people, especially the woman. I knew (I had heard) that besides the sons we knew, this woman had another son nobody had seen, who was spoken of in whispers, as if he were a great disgrace for the mother, an idiot, a monster or worse. I remember that my mother referred to this woman often as a martyr, who made great sacrifices for this son, and put up with great sorrows. One Sunday morning about ten, I was sent to this woman’s: I had to deliver some crocheting and get the money. I found her shutting the door, dressed up to go out to mass, she had a hamper under her arm. On seeing me she hesitated then decided. She told me to accompany her to a certain place, and that she would take delivery and give me the money on our return. She took me out of the village, into an orchard filled with rubbish and plaster; in one corner there was a sort of pig sty, about four feet high, and windowless, with only a strong door. She opened the door and I could hear an animal-like howling. Inside was her son, a robust boy of 18, who couldn’t stand up and hence scraped along on his seat to the door, as far as he was permitted to move by a chain linked to his waist and attached to the ring in the wall. He was covered with filth, and his eyes shone red, like those of a nocturnal animal. His mother dumped the contents of her basket – a mixed mess of household leftovers – into a stone trough. She filled another trough with water, and we left. I said nothing to my mother about what I had seen, so great an impression it had made on me, and so convinced was I that nobody would believe me. Nor when I later heard of the misery which had befallen that poor mother, did I interrupt to talk of the misery of the poor human wreck who had such a mother.”

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) Italian writer, politician, theorist, sociologist and linguist

Gramsci, 1965, p. 737 cited in Davidson, 1977, p. 35.

Life, Money, People, Family

“He left an estate of eleaven thousand pounds per annum. Sir John Danvers, who knew him, told me that he had heard one say to him, reflecting on his great scraping of wealth, that his sonnes would spend his Estate faster than he gott it; he replyed, They cannot take more delight in the spending of it than I did in the getting of it.”

John Aubrey book Brief Lives

"Sir Edward Coke"
Brief Lives

Wealth

“My father was in the wholesale tea, coffee, and cigar business, with a firm called Bennett-Sloan and Company. In 1885 he moved the business to New York City, on West Broadway, and from the age of ten I grew up in Brooklyn. I am told I still have the accent. My father's father was a schoolteacher. My mother's father was a Methodist minister. My parents had five children, of whom I am the oldest. There is my sister, Mrs. Katharine Sloan Pratt, now a widow. There are my three brothers — Clifford, who was in the advertising business; Harold, a college professor; and Raymond, the youngest, who is a professor, writer, and expert on hospital administration. I think we have all had in common a capability for being dedicated to our respective interests.
I came of age at almost exactly the time when the automobile business in the United States came into being. In 1895 the Duryeas, who had been experimenting with motor cars, started what I believe was the first gasoline-automobile manufacturing company in the United States. In the same year I left the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a a BS. in electrical engineering, and went to work for the Hyatt Roller Bearing Company of Newark, later of Harrison, New Jersey. The Hyatt antifriction bearing was later to become a component of the automobile, and it was through this component that I came into the automotive industry. Except for one early and brief departure from it, I have spent my life in the industry.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 37

Life, Children, Age, Cars

“He was the first to advocate that eight hours a day in the workshop was best for industrial efficiency. The best employers in the land are now of that opinion. He did not fail there. Who can tell the horrors of industry which children suffered in factories at the beginning of the last century? Were not the Factory Acts acts of mercy? The country owed them to Robert Owen's inspiration. … He was the first who looked with practical intent into the kingdom of the unborn. He saw that posterity — the silent but inevitable master of us all — if left untrained may efface the triumphs, or dishonour, or destroy the great traditions of our race. He put infant schools into the mind of the world. Have they been failures? He, when it seemed impossible to anyone else, proposed national education for which now all the sects contend. Has that proposal been a failure?”

George Holyoake (1817–1906) British secularist, co-operator, and newspaper editor

Memorial dedication (1902)

Children, World, Education, School

“Yes, we had one and all left our native planets in order to discover whether, regarding the cosmos as a whole, the spirit which we all in our hearts obscurely knew and haltingly prized, the spirit which on Earth we sometimes call humane, was Lord of the Universe, or outlaw; almighty, or crucified. And now it was becoming clear to us that if the cosmos had any lord at all, he was not that spirit but some other, whose purpose in creating the endless fountain of worlds was not fatherly toward the beings that he had made, but alien, inhuman, dark.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter VI: Intimations of the Star Maker (p. 71)

World, Universe, Heart

“Zenit was always in my heart. That's where I won my first European title. When I left Saint Petersburg in 2009, the fans followed me to the airport, and I promised, I will return to Russia.”

Anatoliy Tymoshchuk (1979) Ukrainian footballer

http://www.sports.ru/football/150688480.html (2013)

Heart

“Pooh looked at his two paws. He knew that one of them was the right, and he knew that when you had decided which one of them was the right, then the other one was the left, but he never could remember how to begin.”

A.A. Milne book The House at Pooh Corner

Source: The House at Pooh Corner (1928), Chapter Seven.

“When Berkeley does not feel like some kind of vast exercise in collective dystopia—a kind of left-wing Plymouth Plantation in which a man may be pilloried for over-illuminating his house at Christmastime—then paradoxically it often feels like a place filled with people incapable of feeling or acting in concert with each other.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

The Mysteries of Berkeley (March 2002)

People, Feeling, Exercises, Housing

“Pushing through the market square, so many mothers sighing
News had just come over, we had five years left to cry in.
News guy wept and told us, earth was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet, then I knew he was not lying.”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

Five Years
Song lyrics, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)

Guy, Lying, Cry

“If, therefore, our personal religious life is likely to be sapped by our devotion to social work, it would be a calamity second to none. But is it really likely that this will happen? The great aim underlying to whole social movement is the creation of a free, just, and brotherly social order. This is the greatest moral task conceivable. Its accomplishment is the manifest will of God for this generation. Every Christian motive is calling us to do it. If it is left undone, millions of lives will be condemned to a deepening moral degradation and to spiritual starvation. Does it look probable that we will lose our contact with God if we plunge too deeply into this work? Does it stand to reason that we shall go astray from Jesus Christ if we engage in the unequal conflict with organized wrong? What kind of ‘spirituality’ is it which is likely to get hurt by being put to work for justice and our fellow-men?”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianizing the Social Order (1912), p. 104

Life, Men, God, Justice

“[Consumer credit] is like giving yourself a blood transfusion from your left arm to your right. Nothing is accomplished, except the possibility of spilling blood on the floor. But it's not even that benign.”

Peter D. Schiff (1963) American entrepreneur, economist and author

Debt is No Salvation http://www.europac.com/commentaries/debt_no_salvation

“Those soldiers hacked and slashed. Their faces were distorted with the horror of their actions but they were out of control, far past the point where they could stop. The flicker of firelight made everything seem more hellish and surreal.
I had seen this before. I had seen my own brothers this way, a few times, back in the north. The blood smell takes control and kills the mind and deadens the soul and there is nothing human left.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 71 (p. 197)

Way, Soul, Time, Past

“On the subject of the left’s latest cause du jour, the “white phosphorus” fairy tale, Michael Moynihan asks a question to which LGF readers probably already know the answer: How Credible is Jeff Englehart?”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

November 09, 2005 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=18177&only

Question

“Its literary merits must be left to the judgment of its readers; as to its truth, I should not hesitate to make the confident assertion that from the first word to the last I have aimed at nothing else.”

Flavius Josephus (37–100) first-century Romano-Jewish scholar, historian and hagiographer

Closing words, trans. G. A. Williamson
The Jewish War (c. 75 CE)

Truth, Confidence

“Of course, sometimes a species’ invention only benefited itself. Goats developed an ability to eat almost anything, right down to the roots. Goats proliferated. Deserts spread behind them.
Then another creature appeared, one whose originality was unprecedented. Its numbers grew. And in its wake some other types did flourish. The common cat and dog. The rat. Starlings and pigeons. And the cockroach. Meanwhile, opportunity grew sparse for those less able to share the vast new riches—huge expanses of plowed fields and mowed lawns, streets and parking lots…
The coming of the grasses had left its mark indelibly on the history of the world.
So would the Age of Asphalt and Concrete.”

David Brin book Earth

Part II (p. 122)
Earth (1990)

Age, World, Dogs, History

“A painter can leave you with nothing left to say. A writer leaves you with everything to say.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Georg Christoph Lichtenberg', p. 405
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

“Psychiatrist R. D. Laing, among others, has said that the growing incidence of mental illness these days may be explained in part by the fact that the world we call real and which we ask people to live within and understand is itself open to question. The environment we live in is no longer connected to the mix of planetary processes which brought us all into being. It is solely the product of human mental processes. It is real, but only in the way that a theatrical play or a fun house is real. Our artificial environment is there and we can experience it, yet it has been created on purpose by other humans. It is an interpretation of reality; it no longer reveals how nature works and it cannot provide much useful information to human beings who seek to see their own lives as part of some wider natural process. We are left with no frame of reference untouched by human interpretation.”

Jerry Mander (1936) American activist

Source: Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), p. 87

People, World, Way, Understanding

“And if God does not help me to go on, then I shall have to help God. — The surface of the earth is gradually turning into one great prison camp, and soon there will be nobody left outside. … I don't fool myself about the real state of affairs, and I've even dropped the pretense that I'm out to help others. I shall merely try to help God as best I can, and if I succeed in doing that, then I shall be of use to others as well. But I mustn't have heroic illusions about that either.”

Etty Hillesum (1914–1943) Jewish diarist

11 July 1942, p. 484-85
Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943

God, Fools, Help

“Cause I live and breathe this Philadelphia freedom.
From the day that I was born I've waved the flag.
Philadelphia freedom took me knee-high to a man.
Yeah gave me peace of mind my daddy never had.Oh Philadelphia freedom shine on me, I love you.
Shine a light through the eyes of the ones left behind.
Shine a light, shine a light
Shine a light, won't you shine a light.
Philadelphia freedom I love you, yes I do.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Philadelphia Freedom (1975)
Song lyrics, Singles

Love, Peace, Freedom, Light

“Though I have usually posed as a Catholic, I have not done my duty for 15 years, and have not the slightest tincture of faith left…”

James Connolly (1868–1916) Irish republican and socialist leader

Letter from James Connolly to John Carstairs Matheson, 30 January 1908. Socialism Today - The Connolly & religion debate http://www.socialismtoday.org/103/connolly.html

Faith

“The whole landscape flashes while the hero now wraps about his body the fleece with its starry tufts of hair, now shifts it to his neck, now folds it upon his left arm.”
Micat omnis ager villisque comantem sidereis totos pellem nunc fundit in artus, nunc in colla refert, nunc implicat ille sinistrae.

Gaius Valerius Flaccus book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica, Book VIII, Lines 122–124

“I was a regular visitor to the headmaster's office, so it was unsurprising that I left with no qualifications at the earliest moment I legally could, when I was barely sixteen.”

Shaun Ellis (1977) American football player, defensive end

The Man who lives with Wolves (2010)

“Bernie wants us to live under the heavenly socialist–communist system like China. We never hear the left criticize that Mao Tse-Tung killed over 80 million people—the Chinese government admits—biggest mass murder in history. That's why there's so many liberal trendy places in Austin, in Denver, in New York, in LA, and San Francisco named after Mao. And people go and love play on their iPhones and the free market and their Chinese slave goods, and they drink beer and expensive wine and giggle about how fun it is to wear red stars. You couldn't put more bad luck on you, you couldn't trash your mojo better. Wearing swastika armbands, you stupid snot-nosed crud! That live off the backs of everybody that fought Nazism and Communism. You need to have your jaws broken! Don't you worry, reality is gonna crash in on you, trash! Who lowered our defenses and brought the Republic down; oh, we're already gone! And you celebrate it like you've joined the globalists mounting America's head on the wall, your great victory! A mass rape of women across Europe. The national draft coming in for women! The families falling apart! Women degraded into nothing but sexual objects! ALL in the name of Gloria Steinem and the Central Intelligence Agency program! And a Bernie Sanders with his fake Einstein hair, and his 'I'm a man of the people!' We go out and talk to Bernie Sanders' supporters, they can hardly talk—they're like him—'Free! Free! I want free stuff!' As if the New World Order is gonna give you anything free! Oh, it's free like a piece of cheese. And a little mouse comes out and it smells it and goes to bite it and, WA BAM! Breaks your neck. But your stupider than the little mouse. You can see all the countries and all the people caught in the mouse traps, caught in the big bear traps. You know what you do? You go into a trendy shop. On some capitalist strip. And you go in and you snuggle in with that credit card that daddy put money in for the trust fund. And you put on that little fur-rimmed coat and you're all sexy with your hammer and sickle on, and your Che Guevara and, you know, shirt from Rage Against the Machine, and the whole capitalist record company system selling it to you, and you go out on the street and you walk into McDonald's and you have yourself a double latte, oh yeah. Pathetic! Scum! Oh, how you'll burn in the camps, later. Wishing you had done something; I mean, you are the ultimate chumps, the ultimate buffoons, the ultimate schmucks!… But the public had so much freedom! They were so wealthy, even our poorest, they had no idea that what they were replacing it with was abject slavery.”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

"Sanders Supporters are Pathetic Scum" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooNxJnf_UAI, February 2016

Love, Women, Money, Bad luck

“Then I (al- Sadiq) asked him (the thief) about his act. He said: 'perhaps, you are Ja'far b. Mohammed?' 'Yes,' I said. He said to me:'What does your noble origin avail you while you are ignorant?' 'Which verse of the Quran am I ignorant at?' I asked. He said these Words of Allah, the Great and Almighty:Whoever brings a good deed, he shall have ten like it, and whoever brings and evil deed he shall be recompensed only with the like of it.(Quran, 6:160) 'When I stole the two loaves of bread, they were two evil deeds. And When I stole the two pomegranates, they were two evil deeds, too. So these are four evil deeds. When I gave each one of them as alms, Allah has subtracted 4 evil deeds from 40 good deeds. So, I have 36 good deeds.' I (al- Sâdiq) said: 'May your mother loses you! It is you who are ignorant at the Book of Allah. Have you not heard that Allah said: (Allah) accepts-(deeds) from the pious only.(Quran, 5:27) When you stole the two loaves of bread, they were two evil deeds. And when you stole the two pomegranates, they were two evil deeds, too. And when you gave them to other than their owner without the permission of their owner, you have added four evil deeds to the four evil deeds, and you have not added four evil deeds to forty good deeds. So, he began looking at me. Then I left him and went away.”

Ja'far al-Sadiq (702–765) Muslim religious person

Tafsir

Books, Evil

“Liberalism supplies at once the higher impulse and the practicable path; it appeals to persons by sentiments of generosity and humanity; it proceeds by courses of moderation. By gradual steps, by steady effort from day to day, from year to year, Liberalism enlists hundreds of thousands upon the side of progress and popular democratic reform whom militant Socialism would drive into violent Tory reaction … The cause of the Liberal Party is the cause of the left-out millions.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The People's Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 152-153
Early career years (1898–1929)

Effort, Personality

“To have loved and lost, either by that total disenchantment which leaves compassion as the sole substitute for love which can exist no more, or by the slow torment which is obliged to let go day by day all that constitutes the diviner part of love — namely, reverence, belief, and trust, yet clings desperately to the only thing left it, a long-suffering apologetic tenderness — this lot is probably the hardest any woman can have to bear.”

Dinah Craik (1826–1887) English novelist and poet

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 10

Love, Suffering, Parting

“After Riemann had made known his discoveries, mathematicians busied themselves with working out his system of geometrical ideas formally; chief among these were Christoffel, Ricci, and Levi-Civita. Riemann… clearly left the real development of his ideas in the hands of some subsequent scientist whose genius as a physicist could rise to equal flights with his own as a mathematician. After a lapse of seventy years this mission has been fulfilled by Einstein.”

Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) German mathematician

Source: Space—Time—Matter (1952), Ch. 2 "The Metrical Continuum"

Idea, Business

“I don't think that Kandinsky was ever really a communist. He just happened to be in Russia [Kandinsky went to Russia in 1914, because of the outbreak of the war, ànd his Russsian nationality] and to become involved in some revolutionary artistic activities because of his reputation as a revolutionary in the arts. In any case, he left Russia as soon as an opportunity arose. But we had parted, by that time, and I prefer not to express any opinion on Kandinsky's later ideas and beliefs, with which I was never familiar.”

Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) German painter

Source: Interview by Edouard Roditi (1958), pp. 118-119

War, Art, Idea, Thinking

“I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of men
Hath oftener left me mourning.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Simon Lee, st. 12 (1798).
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)

Men, Heart, Gratitude

“First we try to preserve ourselves, until we see that we can't. Then we try to preserve our children, until we see we can't. Then we act to preserve our kin, and then our village or tribe, and when we see we can't preserve even them, then we act in order to preserve our memory. And if we can't do that, what is left?”

Orson Scott Card book Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus

Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (1996)

Children, Memory

“I joined the Labour Party not because it was Left Wing, but because it was definitely internationalists and would seem to be the group in the Labour Party which would serve my purpose best for propaganda along internationalist lines.”

Norman Angell (1872–1967) British politician

After All (1951)

“Without complete and accurate data, we are left with 'ideological thunderbolts'. And that helps spark unrest and distrust and does not help us get better. Because we must get better, I intend for the FBI to be a leader in urging departments around this country to give us the facts we need for an informed discussion, the facts all of us need, to help us make sound policy and sound decisions with that information.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Decision, Help, Country

“The political history of the 20th century is the history of social-engineering projects executed by well-intentioned people that began well and ended badly. There were big errors like communism, but also lesser ones, like a Vietnam War designed by the best and the brightest, urban renewal efforts that decimated neighborhoods, welfare policies that had the unintended effect of weakening families and development programs that left a string of white elephant projects across the world.These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell. These writers — some left, some right — had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.”

David Brooks (1961) American journalist, commentator and editor

[David, Brooks, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/opinion/24brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion, The Big Test, New York Times, February 23, 2009, February 24, 2009]
2000s

War, People, School, Family

“Her style looks absurdly simple — an effortless act of projection, a serpentine lasso whereby her voice casually winds itself around our most vulnerable fantasies. But it is not easy. It is what remains when ingratiation, sentimentality and the manifold devices of heart-warming crap have been ruthlessly pared away. Steel and silk are left, shining and durable.”

Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980) English theatre critic and writer

"Marlene Dietrich" (1967), p. 215
Profiles (1990)

Heart

“This great man, Guru Kelucharan Mahapatra, a Padmashri and Padma Bhushan, would clean the gutter outside his house. He used to beat me. One slap from my dad and I had left the house. And my guru slapped me a couple of times because I was arrogant. I would be so angry I would pack my bags. But I knew I was there because I wanted to be there not because he wanted me to be there. And when I touched his feet it was not by rote. When I touched his feet he and I both cried because he had waited long enough for me to come to that.”

Protima Bedi (1948–1998) Indian model and dancer

About her Guru quoted in "I have been a hippie all my life".

Time, Waiting, Housing

“The chief impression left by a study of Crowley's life and works is that he wasted an immense amount of time and energy trying to shock everyone he came into contact with, and his dislike of orthodoxy turned him into an unconsciously comic figure, like Don Quixote.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast (1987), p. 153-154

Life, Study, Time

“Goniface was thinking how like his own was the destiny of the whole Hierarchy and of every priest in it. Whether they murdered their families—and their own youth—actually or only in spirit, it amounted to the same thing. They betrayed and deserted them, left them for dead, to enjoy the power and pleasures of a sterile tyrant class.”

Fritz Leiber book Gather, Darkness!

Source: Gather, Darkness! (1950), Chapter 19 (p. 207)

Pleasure, Youth, Family, Thinking

“It took centuries of intellectual, philosophical development to achieve political freedom. It was a long struggle, stretching from Aristotle to John Locke to the Founding Fathers. The system they established was not based on unlimited majority but on its opposite: on individual rights, which were not to be alienated by majority vote or minority plotting. The individual was not left at the mercy of his neighbors or his leaders: the Constitutional system of checks and balances was scientifically devised to protect him from both. This was the great American achievement—and if concern for the actual welfare of other nations were our present leaders' motive, this is what we should have been teaching the world. Instead, we are deluding the ignorant and the semi-savage by telling them that no political knowledge is necessary—that our system is only a matter of subjective preference—that any prehistorical form of tribal tyranny, gang rule, and slaughter will do just as well, with our sanction and support. It is thus that we encourage the spectacle of Algerian workers marching through the streets [in the 1962 Civil War] and shouting the demand: "Work, not blood!"—without knowing what great knowledge and virtue are required to achieve it. In the same way, in 1917, the Russian peasants were demanding: "Land and Freedom!" But Lenin and Stalin is what they got. In 1933, the Germans were demanding: "Room to live!" But what they got was Hitler. In 1793, the French were shouting: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!"”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

What they got was Napoleon. In 1776, the Americans were proclaiming "The Rights of Man"—and, led by political philosophers, they achieved it. No revolution, no matter how justified, and no movement, no matter how popular, has ever succeeded without a political philosophy to guide it, to set its direction and goal.
The Ayn Rand Column

War, World, Way, Motivation

“I expected you on every hour, and was impatient to get forward that I might be able to give some account of the country when you came up. Before I left Crompond, I desired Mr. Pettit to wait upon you at your arrival, and take your orders, and if there was any thing special to forward it by express.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (July 1778)

Waiting, Country

“Spade’s thick fingers made a cigarette with deliberate care, sifting a measured quantity of tan flakes down into curved paper, spreading the flakes so that they lay equal at the ends with a slight depression in the middle, thumbs rolling the paper’s inner edge down and up under the outer edge as forefingers pressed it over, thumbs and fingers sliding to the paper cylinder’s ends to hold it even while tongue licked the flap, left forefinger and thumb pinching their ends while right forefinger and thumb smoothed the damp seam, right forefinger and thumb twisting their end and lifting the other to Spade’s mouth.”

Dashiell Hammett book The Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon (1930)

“My mother, my dad and I left Cuba when I was two [January, 1959]. Castro had taken control by then, and life for many ordinary people had become very difficult. My dad had worked [as a personal bodyguard for the wife of Cuban president Batista], so he was a marked man. We moved to Miami, which is about as close to Cuba as you can get without being there. It's a Cuba-centric society. I think a lot of Cubans moved to the US thinking everything would be perfect. Personally, I have to say that those early years were not particularly happy. A lot of people didn't want us around, and I can remember seeing signs that said: "No children. No pets. No Cubans." Things were not made easier by the fact that Dad had begun working for the US government. At the time he couldn't really tell us what he was doing, because it was some sort of top-secret operation. He just said he wanted to fight against what was happening back at home. [Estefan's father was one of the many Cuban exiles taking part in the ill-fated, anti-Castro Bay of Pigs invasion to overthrow dictator Fidel Castro. ] One night, Dad disappered. I think he was so worried about telling my mother he was going that he just left her a note. There were rumours something was happening back home, but we didn't really know where Dad had gone. It was a scary time for many Cubans. A lot of men were involved -- lots of families were left without sons and fathers. By the time we found out what my dad had been doing, the attempted coup had taken place, on April 17, 1961. Intitially he'd been training in Central America, but after the coup attempt he was captured and spent the next wo years as a political prisoner in Cuba. That was probably the worst time for my mother and me. Not knowing what was going to happen to Dad. I was only a kid, but I had worked out where my dad was. My mother was trying to keep it a secret, so she used to tell me Dad was on a farm. Of course, I thought that she didn't know what had really happened to him, so I used to keep up the pretence that Dad really was working on a farm. We used to do this whole pretending thing every day, trying to protect each other. Those two years had a terrible effect on my mother. She was very nervous, just going from church to church. Always carrying her rosary beads, praying her little heart out. She had her religion, and I had my music. Music was in our family. My mother was a singer, and on my father's side there was a violinist and a pianist. My grandmother was a poet.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

The [London] Sunday Times (November 17, 2006)
2007, 2008

Life, Men, Fate, Happiness

“Pollock.... left us [c. 1958] at the point where we must be preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-Second Street [New York].... Objects of every sorts are materials for the new art, paints, chairs, food, electric and neon-lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things which will be discovered by the present generation of artists.... All will become materials for this new concrete art.”

Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) American artist

In his essay 'The legacy of Jackson Pollock', published in 'ARTnews', Fall of 1958; as quoted by Christina Bryan Rosenberger, in 'Drawing the Line: The Early Work of Agnes Martin', Univ. of California Press, July 2016, p 121
this essay of 1958 became more or less an art-manifesto for the generation American artists after Abstract Expressionism

Life, Food, Dogs, Art

“When I left Paris in 1954, I saw no art that was being 'made' like mine and returning to the U. S. I found no one 'making' art that way either. In my own work, I have never been interested in painterliness (or what I find is) a very personal handwriting, putting marks on a canvas. My work is a different way of seeing and making something and which has a different use.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

Source: 1969 - 1980, In: "Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper," 1987, p. unknown : 'Notes from 1969'

Art, Way, Personality

“Cesalpino, a celebrated botanist, conceived that fossil shells had been left on the land by the sea, and had concreted into stone during the consolidation the soil; and in the following year (1597), Simeone Majoli went still farther, and coinciding for the most part with views of Cesalpino, suggested that the shells and matter of the Veronese, and other districts, might have cast up, upon the land, by volcanic explosions, like those gave rise, in 1538, to Monte Nuovo, near Puzzuoli.- This hint was the first imperfect attempt to connect the position fossil shells with the agency of volcanoes, a system more fully developed by Hooke, [Antonio] Lazzaro Moro, Hutton, and other writers. Two years afterwards, Imperati advocated the animal origin of fossilized shells, yet admitted that stones could vegetate by force of 'an internal principle,' and, as evidence of this, he referred to the teeth of fish, and spines of echini found petrified.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Ref. Ferrante Imperato, Dell'Historia Naturale http://books.google.com/books?id=heGCGe1Rn3YC& (1599)<br>Chpt.3, p. 30 <br class="br">Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Fish, Animals, Parting, Sea

“He fled to his usual refuge, that of hoping for some unforeseen turn of fortune, some favourable chance which would save him from unpleasant consequences – perhaps even justify his insincerity by manifesting prudence.
In this point of trusting in some throw of fortune's dice, Godfrey can hardly be called old-fashioned. Favourable Chance is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in. Let even a polished man of these days get into a position he is ashamed to avow, and his mind will be bent on all the possible issues that may deliver him from the calculable results of that position. Let him live outside his income, or shirk the resolute honest work that brings wages, and he will presently find himself dreaming of a possible benefactor, a possible simpleton who may be cajoled into using his interest, a possible state of mind in some possible person not yet forthcoming. Let him neglect the responsibilities of his office, and he will inevitably anchor himself on the chance, that the thing left undone may turn out not to be of the supposed importance. Let him betray his friend's confidence, and he will adore that same cunning complexity called Chance, which gives him the hope that his friend will never know. Let him forsake a decent craft that he may pursue the gentilities of a profession to which nature never called him, and his religion will infallibly be the worship of blessed Chance, which he will believe in as the mighty creator of success. The evil principle deprecated in that religion, is the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 9 (at page 73-74)

Men, God, Religion, Law

“He left the name at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral, or adorn a tale.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Source: Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), Line 221

World

“The Left's experiment in training Americans to be passive and expect the government to do absolutely everything for them has been overwhelmingly successful in creating an infantile mindset, with the result being that in New Orleans and entire segment of the population, mostly black - the Left's guinea pigs in this endeavor — apparently no longer have the requisite brains and common sense to get out of the way of a Category 5 hurricane.”

Mark Williams American conservative activist, radio talk show host and author

On Hurricane Katrina (9 September 2005 CNN HN)

Way, Sense, Success, Training

“When Voltaire was bornreally but one church which, of course, was ignorant, tyrannical and barbarous in the extreme. All creeds are alike, and whenever there is but one, and the rulers honestly believe in that one, they are bound to be ignorant, barbarous and cruel. All sorts of heresies were punishable by death. If anyone dared to write a pamphlet or book that questioned any part of the accepted faith, the book was at once consigned to flames and the author was lucky if he did not meet the same fate. Religion was not maintained by the precepts of the priest, but by the prison, the torture chamber and the fagot. Everyone believed; no one questioned. The religious creeds, while strict and barbarous, did not interfere with the personal conduct of any of the rulers. They were left free to act as they pleased, so long as they professed to believe in the prevailing faith.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Voltaire (1916)

Death, Fate, Books, Faith

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

Jo Cox (1974–2016) UK politician

A new progressive internationalism (17 June 2016)

World, Thinking, Time

“In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!" At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Autobiography (1873)

Life, Happiness, Question, Change

“One restless dawn, unable to suppress the itch
of wanderlust, with a heavy door left ajar
semi-deliberately, and a new light teasing in Some piece of immobility will finally quit
suddenly nimble on wooden limbs
as fast as a horse, fleeing the stable.”

Yahia Lababidi (1973)

"Dawning" online at Poet's Encyclopedia http://www.poetsencyclopedia.com/lababidi.shtml

Light, Horse

“He sat down next door in the seat she had left and watched the grim suburbs of Philadelphia showing their sores, like beggars, to the rich train.”

Ian Fleming book Live and Let Die

Source: Live and Let Die (1954), Ch. 10

Training

“In the fall, acorns, filberts, and hickory nuts are gathered by wildlife as winter stores. Field and pack rats bring in smaller seed such as wild rice from the marshes. If storages are provided, these foragers will fill hollow pipes or logs, or smaller pipes, old vehicle engine manifolds, and nest boxes or wall cavities. Seed so collected is sound, clean, and neatly stored. Providing some 15% is left, and given over to winter food for these workers, 85% can be collected for human use. A few people regularly collect their hickory nuts or wild rice in this way, by providing dens for squirrels or pack rats. It is a question of cooperation and provision for others, instead of attempting to kill off the experts and do the job yourself.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 12.15

People, Food, Way, Question

“I saw a sign that said "Left Lane Closed." So I went someplace else.”

Jay London (1966) American comedian

One-liners

“Secularism per se is a doctrine which arose in the modem West as a revolt against the closed creed of Christianity. Its battle-cry was that the State should be freed from the stranglehold of the Church, and the citizen should be left to his own individual choice in matters of belief. And it met with great success in every Western democracy. Had India borrowed this doctrine from the modem West, it would have meant a rejection of the closed creeds of Islam and Christianity, and a promotion of the Sanatana Dharma family of faiths which have been naturally secularist in the modern Western sense. But what happened actually was that Secularism in India became the greatest protector of closed creeds which had come here in the company of foreign invaders, and kept tormenting the national society for several centuries.
We should not, therefore, confuse India's Secularism with its namesake in the modern West. The Secularism which Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru propounded and which has prospered in post-independence India, is a new concoction and should be recognized as such. We need not bother about its various definitions as put forward by its pandits. We shall do better if we have a close look at its concrete achievements.
Going by those achievements, one can conclude quite safely that Nehruvian Secularism is a magic formula for transmitting base metals into twenty-four carat gold. How else do we explain the fact of Islam becoming a religion, and that too a religion of tolerance, social equality, and human brotherhood; or the fact of Muslim rule in medieval India becoming an indigenous dispensation; or the fact of Muhammad bin Qasim becoming a liberator of the toiling masses in Sindh; or the fact of Mahmud Ghaznavi becoming the defreezer of productive wealth hoarded in Hindu temples; or the fact of Muhammad Ghuri becoming the harbinger of an urban revolution; or the fact of Muinuddin Chishti becoming the great Indian saint; or the fact of Amir Khusru becoming the pioneer of communal amity; or the fact of Alauddin Khilji becoming the first socialist in the annals of this country; or the fact of Akbar becoming the father of Indian nationalism; or the fact of Aurangzeb becoming the benefactor of Hindu temples; or the fact of Sirajuddaula, Mir Qasim, Hyder Ali, Tipu Sultan, and Bahadur Shah Zafar becoming the heroes of India's freedom struggle against British imperialism or the fact of the Faraizis, the Wahabis, and the Moplahs becoming peasant revolutionaries and foremost freedom fighters?
One has only to go to the original sources in order to understand the true character of Islam and its above-mentioned luminaries. And one can see immediately that their true character has nothing to do with that with which they have been invested in our school and college text-books. No deeper probe is needed for unraveling the mysteries of Nehruvian Secularism.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Tipu Sultan - Villain or Hero (1993)

Books, School, Family, Faith

“The personal things should be left out of platforms at conventions…. You can argue yourself blue in the face, and you’re not going to change each other’s minds. It’s a waste of your time and my time.”

Barbara Bush (1925–2018) former First Lady of the United States

On the abortion debate, in which her stance was the opposite of her husband's, as quoted in TIME magazine (24 August 1992)

Change, Time, Personality

“To the modern Western mind, it is not conceivable that men would fight and die in such numbers over mere differences of religion; there have to be some other “genuine” reasons underneath the religious veil. We are prepared to allow religiously defined conflicts to accredited eccentrics like the Northern Irish, but to admit that an entire civilization can have religion as its primary loyalty is too much. Even to suggest such a thing is regarded as offensive by liberal opinion, always ready to take protective umbrage on behalf of those whom it regards as its wards. This is reflected in the present inability, political, journalistic, and scholarly alike, to recognize the importance of the factor of religion in the current affairs of the Muslim world and in the consequent recourse to the language of left-wing and right-wing, progressive and conservative, and the rest of the Western terminology, the use of which in explaining Muslim political phenomena is about as accurate and as enlightening as an account of a cricket match by a baseball correspondent.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Return of Islam (1976)

Men, World, Religion, Fight

“[Director Christopher] Nolan … gives us enough multilayered subplots to at least fool us into thinking this is a work of intellectual and moral complexity. But as a piece of visual storytelling, from shot to shot, The Dark Knight is a mess. Characters disappear from one locale and show up inexplicably in another, thanks to the magic of editing. At one point, we learn two characters have been abducted, but Nolan doesn't bother to show us who did it or how. (Later, he explains the "who did it" with dialogue -- the lazy way.) At the end, a major character is left hanging, literally, as we are figuratively. If this is genius, give me hackery.”

Stephanie Zacharek (1963) American film critic

Review http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2008/07/17/dark_knight/index.html of The Dark Knight (2008)

Fools, Way, Thinking, Learning

“Whatever it was that darkened the love between the uncle and his niece, their quarrels became more violent and at the end of the summer of 1931 Geli announced that she was returning to Vienna to resume her voice studies. Hitler forbade her to go. The next morning Geli Raubal was found shot dead in her room. The coroner reported that a bullet had gone through her chest below the left shoulder and penetrated the heart; it seemed beyond doubt that the shot was self-inflicted. Yet for years afterward in Munich there was murky gossip that Geli Raubal had been murdered -- by Hitler in a rage, by Himmler to eliminate a situation that had become embarrassing to the party. But no credible evidence ever turned up to substantiate such rumors.”

William L. Shirer book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Source: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), pp. 131,132

Love, Study, Rage, Heart

“Why, gentlemen, humor is one of the most valuable things in the human brain. It is the torch of the mind -- it sheds light. Humor is the readiest test of truth -- of the natural, of the sensible -- and when you take from a man all sense of humor, there will only be enough left to make a bigot.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

Truth, Nature, Sense, Light

“What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

Source: The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859), Ch. I.

Nature

“We have to be careful not to allow this to get any legitimacy. I’m taking this seriously in that I’m old enough to remember what happened in the 1960s when the left-wing took to the streets and somehow the media glorified them and it ended up shaping policy. We can’t allow that to happen.”

Peter T. King (1944) American politician

On Occupy Wall Street movement, Rep. Peter King Calls Occupy Wall Street Protesters 'Ragtag Mob,' 'Anarchists' http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/07/peter-king-occupy-wall-street_n_1000318.html, 2011

“I was understandably deeply disappointed that the highest National Socialist leaders did not stand up and answer for the deeds they had done in the past and left those of us who could not be made personally responsible in the lurch.”

Karl Wolff (1900–1984) SS general

The World at War: the Landmark Oral History from the Classic TV Series (2007) by Richard Holmes, Page 582

Disappointment, Understanding, Past, Personality

“When you’re 90 years old, you are somewhere near the end of your life; got to be… It doesn’t feel like the end yet, but statistically, demographically, there can’t be much left. But that’s not part of my daily baggage.”

Robert L. Kahn (1918–2019) American psychologist

Source: " Robert Kahn http://home.isr.umich.edu/research/researcher-profiles/robert-kahn/," by Susan Rosegrant at isr.umich.edu, March 2009.

Life, Feeling, Parting

“Reading O'Rahilly's life of Father William Doyle. I'm surprised this book hasn't left a deeper mark, for it contains - often in parallel terms - the whole teaching of the Little Way which created such a stir in the case of Thérèse. But it seems people prefer to accept such things from a lovely young girl complete with smile, roses and veil. One can't help wondering whether Thérèse would have met with the same enormous response had she been hopelessly ugly - a hunchback with a squint, or old…”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57

Love, Life, People, Books

“It pains to see that some investors are importing raw commodities, although just on their door steps, similar produces are left to decay.”

Ali Mohamed Shein (1948) President of Zanzibar

Insisting investors to give local produce first priority. 2007-11-14 http://www.ippmedia.com/ipp/guardian/2007/11/14/102447.html

Pain

“Almost half of the bankruptcies in the United States are connected to an illness in the family, whether people had health insurance or not. Middle-class Americans, who had the misfortune of either experiencing a medical emergency themselves or watching a family member suffer, were then forced to face the daunting task of pulling themselves out of debt. Bankruptcy law has allowed them to start over. It has given hope. Now this new law will put people on their own. Illness or emergency creates medical bills. We are telling the people that they themselves are to blame. At the same time, we are removing protections that would stay an eviction, that would keep a roof over the head of a working family. We allow the credit industry to trick consumers into using subprime cards, with exorbitant interest rate hikes and fees. Then we hand those same consumers over to an unforgiving prison of debt, to be put on a rack of insolvency and squeezed dry by the credit card industry. We are protecting the profits of the credit card industry instead of protecting the economic future of the American people. Americans are left on their own. That's what this Administration's "Ownership Society" is all about — you're on your own — and your ship is sinking.”

Dennis Kucinich (1946) Ohio politician

Speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, Congressional Record (14 April, 2005) http://frwebgate5.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/waisgate.cgi?WAISdocID=240761331899+3+0+0&WAISaction=retrieve.

People, Health, Family, Law

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Quotes about left
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