Quotes about level
page 21

“But as to our country and our race, as long as the well compacted structure of our church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion—as long as the British Monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of the State, shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers, as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land—so long as the mounds and dykes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France.”

Edmund Burke A Letter to a Noble Lord

Source: A Letter to a Noble Lord (1796), pp. 52-53

Fear, Law, Country

“The Leaders have ever since gone…to propagate the principles of French Levelling and confusion, by which no house is safe from its Servants, and no Officer from his Soldiers, and no State or constitution from conspiracy and insurrection. I will not enter into the baseness and depravity of the System they adopt; but one thing I will remark, that its great Object is not, (as they pretend to delude worthy people to their Ruin) the destruction of all absolute Monarchies, but totally to root out that thing called an Aristocrate or Noblemen and Gentleman.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Letter to Lord Fitzwilliam (21 November 1791), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789–December 1791 (Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 451
1790s

People, Housing

“The images of Saddam Hussein endlessly repeated on our screens before the war (Saddam firing a rifle into the air) made him into some kind of Iraqi Charlton Heston — the president not only of Iraq, but also of the Iraqi Rifle Association. The true interest of these images, however, is that they remind us how the ideological struggle is fought out not only at the level of arguments but also at the level of images: which image will hegemonize a field, and function as the paradigmatic embodiment of an idea, a regime, a problem.”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

Slavoj Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, p. 2. ISBN 1844675408.

War, Idea, Problem

“Diabetes and high sugar levels kill up to 3.5 million people annually, while air pollution kills about 7 million people.3 So why do we fear terrorism more than sugar, and why do governments lose elections because of sporadic terror attacks but not because of chronic air pollution?”

Yuval Noah Harari book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

People, Fear

“The West suffers from an autoimmune disease. A part of our organism — an important part: our immune system, which ought to protect us — has turned itself against us. At every level, we are being weakened, undermined, and surrendered. Malicious, aggressive elements are led into our social bodies in unheard numbers, and the actual circumstances and consequences are obscured.”

Thierry Baudet (1983) Dutch writer and jurist

Het Westen lijdt aan een auto-immuunziekte. Een deel van ons organisme – een belangrijk deel: ons afweersysteem, datgene wat ons zou moeten beschermen – heeft zich tegen ons gekeerd. Op elk vlak worden we verzwakt, ondermijnd, overgeleverd. Kwaadwillende, agressieve elementen worden ons maatschappelijk lichaam in ongehoorde aantallen binnengeloodst, en de werkelijke toedracht en gevolgen worden verdoezeld. Thierry Baudet: Westen lijdt aan auto-immuunziekte. https://forumvoordemocratie.nl/actueel/toespraak-thierry-baudet-alv-fvd-2017 Address to the first Forum voor Democratie party congress on 14 January 2017.

Disease, Suffering, Parting

“We might more accurately think of nonattachment as nondependency. Much of our inner turbulence reflects the fear of loss: our dependence on people, circumstances, and things not really under our control. On some level we know that death, indifference, rejection, repossession, or high tide may leave us bereft in the morning. Still, we clutch desperately at things we cannot finally hold. Nonattachment is the most realistic of attitudes. It is freedom from wishful thinking, from always wanting things to be otherwise.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Four, People Changing

Death, People, Fear, Thinking

“Whatever their station or sophistication, the conspirators are linked, made kindred by their inner discoveries and earthquakes. You can break through old limits, past inertia and fear, to levels of fulfillment that once seemed impossible … to richness of choice, freedom, human closeness. You can be more productive, confident, comfortable with insecurity. Problems can be experienced as challenges, a chance for renewal, rather than stress. Habitual defensiveness and worry can fall away. It can all be otherwise.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter One, The Conspiracy

Fear, Confidence, Problem, Freedom

“Broader than reform, deeper than revolution, this benign conspiracy for a new human agenda has triggered the most rapid cultural realignment in history. The great shuddering, irrevocable shift overtaking us is not a new political, religious, or philosophical system. It is a new mind — the ascendance of a startling worldview that gathers into its framework breakthrough science and insights from earliest recorded thought. The Aquarian Conspirators range across all levels of income and education, from the humblest to the highest. The Aquarian Conspirators range across all levels of income and education, from the humblest to the highest. There are schoolteachers and office workers, famous scientists, government officials and lawmakers, artists and millionaires, taxi drivers and celebrities, leaders in medicine, education, law, psychology. Some are open in their advocacy, and their names may be familiar. Others are quiet about their involvement, believing they can be more effective if they are not identified with ideas that have all too often been misunderstood.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter One, The Conspiracy

Education, Law, History, Idea

“Acting on our own, by ourselves, we cannot establish justice throughout the world; we cannot insure its domestic tranquility, or provide for its common defense, or promote its general welfare, or secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. But joined with other free nations, we can do all this and more. We can assist the developing nations to throw off the yoke of poverty. We can balance our worldwide trade and payments at the highest possible level of growth. We can mount a deterrent powerful enough to deter any aggression. And ultimately we can help to achieve a world of law and free choice, banishing the world of war and coercion.”

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

Source: 1962, Address at Independence Hall

War, World, Justice, Law

“The issue at hand is whether it was right to use the gross or net level of our contribution to the European Union - that is a matter of free speech and the democratic process.”

Jacob Rees-Mogg (1969) British politician

Brexit: Boris Johnson ordered to appear in court over £350m claim https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-48445430 BBC News (29 May 2019) 2019

“Once we have left and we have control, there is a political argument about what levels of immigration we should have… that is really going to be a challenge and an issue for the competence of the Home Office. It is not so much a question of Brexit. It is Brexit which makes it possible, it is then administrative efficiency that will make it happen.”

Jacob Rees-Mogg (1969) British politician

No role for EU court after Brexit says Rees-Mogg https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-40788668 BBC News (1 August 2017) 2017

Making love, Home, Question

“Hinduism is the name for the Indian territorial form of worldwide Sanatanism (call it Paganism in English). The ideology of Hindutva should therefore be a Universal ideology: On the international level, the Sangh, as the apex organisational body of Hindutva ideology, should spearhead a worldwide revival, rejuvenation and resurgence of spiritualism, and of all the religions and cultures which existed all over the world before the advent of imperialist ideologies like Christianity, Islam, Fascism, Marxism, etc.”

Shrikant Talageri (1958) Indian author

Talageri in S.R. Goel (ed.): Time for Stock-Taking, p.227-228.

World, Religion, Universe

“Upon their casting vote depends the question whether Britain is to continue its honourable career as a pioneer in the path of human progress which, on the whole, it has pursued so nobly for generations, or whether it is in one leap to spring backward over 80 years and place itself on a level with the protectionist countries of the Continent of Europe, with their low wages, taxed food, fettered industries, and policy of international antagonisms, which interfere with prosperity and imperil the peace of the world. … Free trade is at issue. … I appeal fervently to Liberals not to walk straight into this booby trap set for them by the protectionists merely because it is decorated by the Union Jack.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Election address (25 October 1931), quoted in The Times (26 October 1931), p. 14
Later life

World, Peace, Food, Spring

“Now we move forward. We stand on our own legs. Let us face the future with hope, confidence and zeal … What happened in London is not a defeat but a victory. The other Commonwealth members were expected to have reached a level of maturity that would have allowed them to work with South Africa within the Commonwealth, especially in the fight against Communism, while retaining their differences outside the Commonwealth. Some of the Commonwealth countries were however too young, too new and too small. … Something big happened. A peaceful South Africa emerged with dangers and possible disadvantages averted. South Africa is going out stronger from this hour than ever before. South Africa has triumphed … we have set ourselves free from the yoke of the Afro-Asian countries that occupy the Commonwealth, because we are not willing to let them dictate to us. The current Commonwealth is one in which we no longer feel ourselves at home.”

Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966) Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 until his assassination in 1966

Peace, Hope, Feeling, Home

“And in terms of poverty and race in this country, again, you know, one of the things that I really, really wanted to stress is, the level of poverty specifically that you see in the African-American community is not accidental. It’s not accidental. This is part of the process. The process of enslavement involves stealing something from someone. It involves taking something from someone.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975) writer, journalist, and educator

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Reparations Are Not Just About Slavery But Also Centuries of Theft & Racial Terror, Democracy Now (20 June 2019)

Communication, Parting, Country

“The anti‐Semite understands nothing about modern society. He would be incapable of conceiving of a constructive plan; his action cannot reach the level of the methodical; it remains on the ground of passion. To a long‐term enterprise he prefers an explosion of rage analogous to the running amuck of the Malays. His intellectual activity is confined to interpretation; he seeks in historical events the signs of the presence of an evil power. Out of this spring those childish and elaborate fabrications which give him his resemblance to the extreme paranoiacs. In addition, anti‐Semitism channels evolutionary drives toward the destruction of certain men, not of institutions. An anti‐Semitic mob will consider it has done enough when it has massacred some Jews and burned a few synagogues. It represents, therefore, a safety valve for the owning classes, who encourage it and thus substitute for a dangerous hate against their regime a beneficent hate against particular people. Above all this naive dualism is eminently reassuring to he anti‐Semite himself. If all he has to do is to remove Evil, that means that the Good is already given.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Anti-Semite and Jew

He has no need to seek it in anguish, to invent it, to scrutinize it patiently when he has found it, to prove it in action, to verify it by its consequences, or, finally, to shoulder he responsibilities of the moral choice be has made. It is not by chance that the great outbursts of anti‐Semitic rage conceal a basic optimism. The anti‐Semite as cast his lot for Evil so as not to have to cast his lot for Good. The more one is absorbed in fighting Evil, the less one is tempted to place the Good in question. One does not need to talk about it, yet it is always understood in the discourse of the anti‐Semite and it remains understood in his thought. When he has fulfilled his mission as holy destroyer, the Lost Paradise will reconstitute itself. For the moment so many tasks confront the anti‐Semite that he does not have time to think about it. He is in the breach, fighting, and each of his outbursts of rage is a pretext to avoid the anguished search for the Good.
Pages 31-32
Anti-Semite and Jew (1945)

Men, Hate, People, Spring

“Neophil: …Leibniz, Wolff, and their various successors, to what a level of perfection and completeness they have brought philosophy! How proud Germany can be of them! Yet what does it help to claim more for oneself than is right? Let us always acknowledge that someone other than a German, I add further, someone other than a Christian, namely, Spinoza, has participated immensely in the work of bettering philosophy. Before the transition from the Cartesian to the Leibnizian philosophy could occur, it was necessary for someone to take the plunge into the monstrous abyss lying between them. This unhappy lot fell to Spinoza. How his fate is to be pitied! He was a sacrifice for the human intellect, but one that deserves to be decorated with flowers. Without him, philosophy would never have been able to extend its borders so far.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Moses Mendelssohn, in his Philosophical Writings (1755–77) [original in German]
M - R

Fate, Flowers, Lying, Help

“But as far as our own world is concerned, its gradual leveling-down — or, we might say, its death — appears to be proved. And how will this process affect the fate of our spirit? Will it wane with the degradation of the energy of our world and return to unconsciousness, or will it grow according as the utilizable energy diminishes and by virtue of the very efforts that it makes to retard this degradation and to dominate Nature?”

Miguel de Unamuno book The Tragic Sense of Life

for this it is that constitutes the life of the spirit. May it be that consciousness and its extended support are two powers in contraposition, the one growing at the expense of the other?
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), X : Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis

Death, Fate, World, Making love

“Any type of violence initiated by one intelligent being against another was wrong. Killing violence was worse than any other kind. How could it be condoned? In his brief moment of cosmic bliss, Khadaji had seen the value of intelligent life. Man and his self-created mues were alone in the galaxy as evolved intelligence. Certainly, there were artificials—computers and genetically altered animals—but no aliens had been discovered above the level of an unaltered dog. It was a big galaxy, plenty of room for every human or neo-human, it wasn’t necessary to kill any of them!”

Steve Perry book The Man Who Never Missed

Source: The Man Who Never Missed (1985), Chapter 15 (p. 131)

Life, Dogs, Intelligence, Animals

“In general, the books of RV level I (RV 4-6) are thoroughly South Asian and have reference to local climate, trees and animals. We therefore have to take them seriously at their word, and cannot claim that they belong just to Afghanistan.”

Michael Witzel (1943) German-American philologist

WITZEL 2000: The Languages of Harappa. Witzel, Michael. Feb. 17, 2000. (WITZEL 2000a:§13). Quoted in Talageri, S. G. (2010). The Rigveda and the Avesta. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

Books, Tree, Animals

“A living language can stand on a higher level of culture in comparison with another, but it can never in itself attain that perfection of development which a dead language quite easily attains. In the latter the connotation of words is fixed, and the possibilities of suitable combinations will also gradually become exhausted. Hence, he who wishes to speak this language must speak it just as it is; but, after he has once learnt to do this, the language speaks itself in his mouth and thinks and imagines for him.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte book Address to the German Nation

Consequences of the Difference p. 85
Addresses to the German Nation (Reden an die deutsche Nation) 1808, Fifth Address

Imagination, Thinking, Perfection, Dead

“Dharampal, the noted Gandhian, used British data during the colonial period to show that in the ninetheenth century, the shudras comprised a larger student body than any other community did. … Besides the large number of schools at that time, there were also approximately a hundred institutions of higher learning in each district of Bengal and Bihar. Unfortunately, these numbers rapidly dwindled all across India during the nineteenth century under British rule. The British also noted that Sanskrit books were being widely used to teach grammar, lexicology, mathematics, medical science, logic, law and philosophy. …. Furthermore, in the early British period in India, British officials noted that education for the masses was more advanced and widespread in India than it was in England. …. According to Dharampal, the British later replaced this Sanskrit-based system with their own English-based one, the goal being to produce low-level clerks for the British administration.”

Dharampal (1922–2006) Indian historian

Rajiv Malhotra, The Battle for Sanskrit

Books, Education, School, Law

“I voted against the nomination of Betsy DeVos, a billionaire Republican donor, because she is the most incompetent cabinet-level nominee I have ever seen.”

Betsy DeVos (1958) 11th United States Secretary of Education

Al Franken
https://www.franken.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=3615

“It is on this step that depends the fact that one can call upon the subject to re-enter himself in the unconscious—for, after all, it is important to know who one is calling. It is not the soul, either mortal or immortal, which has been with us for so long, nor some shade, some double, some phantom, nor even some supposed psycho-spherical shell, the locus of the defences and other such simplified notions. It is the subject who is called— there is only he, therefore, who can be chosen. There may be, as in the parable, many called and few chosen, but there will certainly not be any others except those who are called. In order to understand the Freudian concepts, one must set out on the basis that it is the subject who is called—the subject of Cartesian origin. This basis gives its true function to what, in analysis, is called recollection or remembering. Recollection is not Platonic reminiscence —it is not the return of a form, an imprint, a eidos of beauty and good, a supreme truth, coming to us from the beyond. It is something that comes to us from the structural necessities, something humble, born at the level of the lowest encounters and of all the talking crowd that precedes us, at the level of the structure of the signifier, of the languages spoken in a stuttering, stumbling way, but which cannot elude constraints whose echoes, model, style can be found, curiously enough, in contemporary mathematics.”

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist

Of the Network of Signifiers
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho Analysis (1978)

Truth, Beauty, Way, Soul

“No details of Vatsayana is known except the fact that he bore the surname Mallanaga… He was a law giver like Manu or Kauitilya and was anxious to reconcile Dharma, Artha and Kama the three recognized ends of life by emphasizing their equal importance and harmonious blending, and hence it was not possible for him to reduce his work to gross sexual level as did his successors or imitators in the subsequent erotic writing.”

Vātsyāyana Indian logician

Source: Literary Vision, p. 152

Life, Law

“There’s about 30 full time volunteers here who are really fighting to try to raise the level of true independent art and make a point that this festival has become dominated by real elitist force because they have a top-heavy bureaucrat, just like the American government, just like the major media conglomerates. The guys at the top who are all making a shit load of money and they’re driving the people below them into oblivion, into poverty.”

Lloyd Kaufman (1945) American film director

CraveOnline http://www.craveonline.com/film/articles/507781-exclusive-cannes-interview-lloyd-kaufman-on-nuke-em-high May 28, 2013 2013

Money, People, Making love, Art

“He was a phenomenal person, compassionate, sensitive, caring and broad-minded. He was instrumental in revitalizing an ancient art and taking it to an international level.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Harit Iyengar, his grandson
Yogacharya B.K.S. Iyengar passes away at 95

Art, Personality

“A couple of weeks ago, the 21-year-old was photographed with her feet up while watching a colleague playing in an international exhibition match in Perth, and the proximity of her toes to a nearby Indian flag raised temperatures in her home state to vindaloo levels.”

Sania Mirza (1986) Indian tennis player

Martin Johnson in: Sania Mirza is failing to fly the flag for India http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/tennis/australianopen/2289112/Sania-Mirza-is-failing-to-fly-the-flag-for-India.html, The Telegraph, 16 January 2008

Home

“The level of tolerance to criticism shown by him is the lowest. He gets easily provoked and retaliates instantaneously. He must have been feeling insecure while occupying the prime ministerial pedestal.”

H. D. Deve Gowda (1933) Indian politician

Girja Kumar, The Book on Trial: Fundamentalism and Censorship in India http://books.google.co.in/books?id=n-KUICFfA00C&pg=PA460&dq=Devegowda&hl=en&sa=X&ei=bJe6U8othJWTBe2mgLAD&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Devegowda&f=false, Har-Anand Publications, 1 January 1997

Feeling

“With all awards and accolades at the international level and his outstanding contribution to classical music, his appeal was not restricted to purists or the elite connoisseur. He endeared himself to the public at large by his tasteful rendering of light music and film songs.”

M. Balamuralikrishna (1930–2016) Carnatic vocalist, instrumentalist and playback singer

Jayalalithaa in: Balamuralikrishna deserves Bharat Ratna: Jayalalithaa http://www.hindu.com/2005/07/26/stories/2005072617030500.htm, Thee Hindu, 26 Jul y 2005.

Music, Light

“Thiago Silva is a top player, who has played at a very high level. Top clubs hardly ever lose that type of player.”

Thiago Silva (1984) Brazilian footballer

Pep Guardiola, 2011 http://globoesporte.globo.com/futebol/mundial-de-clubes/noticia/2011/11/guardiola-trata-neymar-como-mais-um-bom-jogador-e-elogia-thiago-silva.html From coaches and club directors

“This year, Thiago had an excellent season playing at Baresi’s level, but Franco had several fantastic seasons, not only one or two, but 15 or 16 and I think that at the moment this is the only difference between the two.”

Thiago Silva (1984) Brazilian footballer

Mauro Tassotti, 2011 https://www.acmilan.com/en/news/show/134347 From former and current footballers

Thinking, Season

“For energy, drive, hard work, range of friends at the highest levels, incredible recall, commitment to causes, he was peerless.”

Ramnath Goenka (1904–1991) Indian politician

Two Cars And An Express

“He also created opportunities for Kerala to prove its capabilities at the national and international levels.”

E. M. S. Namboodiripad (1909–1998) Indian politician

Above two quotes of Achuthanandan cited in 20 March 2009, 13 December 2013, The Hindu http://www.hindu.com/2009/03/20/stories/2009032059610300.htm, About E.M.S.

“In computer design three levels can be distinguished: architecture, implementation and realisation; for the ﬁrst of them, the following working deﬁnition is given: The architecture of a system can be defined as the functional appearance of the system to the user, its phenomenology.”

Gerrit Blaauw (1924–2018) Dutch computer scientist

Although the term architecture was introduced only ten years ago in computer technology (Buchholz), the concept of architecture is as old as the use of mechanism by man. When a child is taught to look at a clock, it is taught the architecture of the clock. It is told to observe the position of the short and the long hand and to relate these to the hours and the minutes. Once it can distinguish the architecture from the visual appearance, it can tell time as easily from a wrist watch as from the clock on the church tower.
The inner structure of a system is not considered by the architecture: we do not need to know what makes the clock tick, to know what time it is. This inner structure, considered from a logical point of view, will be called the implementation, and its physical embodiment the realisation.
Source: Computer architecture (1972), p. 154

Appearance

“Naguib Mahfouz, an Egyptian novelist who was the first Arabic writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature and who was often considered the greatest writer in the Arab world… lived his entire life in Cairo, which provided the inspiration and backdrop for almost all of his writing… He set most of his works in the ancient Islamic quarter of Cairo, with its mosques and serpentine alleys teeming with shopkeepers, metalsmiths, government workers, peasants, prostitutes and thieves. His vibrant novels portraying life at every level of society were often likened to those of such other writers of urban social realism as Charles Dickens, Honore de Balzac and Emile Zola.”

Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) Egyptian writer

Matt Schudel " Leading Arab Novelist Gave Streets a Voice http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/30/AR2006083000475.html" in: Washington Post, August 31, 2006

Life, World, Literature

“The next level of causal texturing we have called the disturbed reactive environment.”

Fred Emery (1925–1997) Australian psychologist

It may be compared with Ashby's ultra-stable system or the economists' oligopolic market.
Source: The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments (1963), p. 29.

“The fact of the matter is the President was expressing his support for her, and his disappointment in the kind of attacks that have been leveled at her to her, and his appreciation for her willingness to stand tall and express her opinion.”

Sandra Fluke (1981) American women's rights activist and lawyer

About, The White House, White House Press Secretary

Disappointment, Support

“English: For his high level of work, a contribute for the Albanian art and for preparing the new generation of artists.”

Sadik Kaceli (1914–2000) Albanian artist

Për nivel të lartë në krijimtari, një kontribut në shquar në artet figurative Shqiptare dhe një ndihmë të pakursyer në përgatitjen e brezave të artistëve të rinj.
Sali Berisha, President of Albania (22-03-1994)

Art

“What better emblem for our nation, after all, than a level playing field, shaped like an octagon, where people of diverse cultural ass-kicking traditions can meet as equals and immediately start kicking ass.”

John Hodgman book The Areas of My Expertise

June 11, 2007
The Areas of My Expertise (2005), Appearances on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

People

“For me, Paul Scholes is on the same level as Ronaldo. The real Ronaldo, not Cristiano. I always thought he was a great player but after I played alongside him I realised he was Manchester United’s greatest player of all time. He did his talking on the pitch which I respected most.”

Paul Scholes (1974) English footballer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkBSmp4IhAE
Fabien Barthez

Time

“If you ask footballers to pick out the player they most admire, so many of them will pick Paul Scholes. His passing and shooting is of the highest level and he’s the most consistent and naturally gifted player we’ve had for a long, long time.”

Paul Scholes (1974) English footballer

http://www.sportskeeda.com/2011/07/01/paul-scholes-the-ginger-prince/
Alan Shearer

Nature, Time, Football

“Gerrard has been my idol for 10 years and is one of the best players in the world. He is the example of what all midfield players aspire to. He is always there in the heat of the battle, leading by example. He is everywhere you look - in defence, in the middle of the pitch and in attack. I would love to be close to that level.”

Steven Gerrard (1980) English footballer

Daniele De Rossi, ( Source http://www.liverpoolfc.com/news/first-team/121199-de-rossi-gerrard-is-my-idol) (8th May 2015)

Love, World, Making love

“Alex Ferguson is obviously one of the most successful coaches the game has ever had. But I did find his comments about Steven Gerrard very strange. To say he is not a top player is wrong. For two or three years, Steven Gerrard was the best midfield player in the world. Even now he is playing at a high level for Liverpool and England.”

Steven Gerrard (1980) English footballer

Zinedine Zidane on Steven Gerrard, (23rd of October 2013): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2477801/Zinedine-Zidane-rubbishes-Sir-Alex-Fergusons-Steven-Gerrard-criticism.html

World, Game, Success

“Heath has touched so many people on so many different levels during his short life but few had the pleasure of truly knowing him. He was a down to earth, generous, kind-hearted, life-loving, unselfish individual who was extremely inspirational to many.”

Heath Ledger (1979–2008) Australian actor

Kim Ledger, father of Heath Ledger, in an on-camera public statement after learning of his son's death, in Perth, on January 23, BBC News, Entertainment|publisher=bbc.co.uk (BBC)|date=January 23, 2008|accessdate=2008-08-23}}
[Kareen Wynter, Actor Heath Ledger Dead at 28, http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/22/heath.ledger.dead/index.html#cnnSTCText, CNN, Web, cnn.com (Time Warner), January 22, 2008, Entertainment, 2008-08-22]

Love, Life, People, Pleasure

“Yeah, our view of reality, the one we conventionally take, is one among many. It’s pretty much a fact that our entire universe is a mental construct. We don’t actually deal with reality directly. We simply compose a picture of reality from what’s going on in our retinas, in the timpani of our ears, and in our nerve endings. We perceive our own perception, and that perception is to us the entirety of the universe. I believe magic is, on one level, the willful attempt to alter those perceptions. Using your metaphor of an aperture, you would be widening that window or changing the angle consciously, and seeing what new vistas it affords you.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

The Believer interview (2013)

Reality, Universe, Change

“Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed — chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. … It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods — trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries … God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools — only Uncle Sam can do that.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: 1900s, Our National Parks (1901), chapter 10: The American Forests

God, Making love, Disease, Beauty

“Deleuze is a key figure in postmodern French philosophy. Considering himself an empiricist and a vitalist, his body of work, which rests upon concepts such as multiplicity, constructivism, post-structuralism, difference and desire, stands at a substantial remove from the main traditions of 20th century Continental thought. His thought locates him as an influential figure in present-day considerations of society, creativity and subjectivity. Notably, within his metaphysics he favored a Spinozian concept of a plane of immanence with everything a mode of one substance, and thus on the same level of existence.”

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) French philosopher

Jon Roffe (2002-05) " Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) http://www.iep.utm.edu/deleuze/#SH3b" in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Last updated: July 12, 2005

“World-Poets too, those whom we are to take for perfect Poets, are settled by critics in the same way. One who rises so far above the general level of Poets will, to such and such critics, seem a Universal Poet; as he ought to do. And yet it is, and must be, an arbitrary distinction. All Poets, all men, have some touches of the Universal; no man is wholly made of that.”

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

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

Men, World, Way, Universe

“I would not have you believe for one minute tonight that there are not white persons of good will in the South. I am absolutely convinced that there are hundred and thousands, nay millions of white people of good will in the South, but most of them are silent today because of fear — fear of political, social and economic reprisal. God grant that the people of good will will rise up with courage, take over the leadership, and open channels of communication between races, for I think that one of the tragedies of our whole struggle is that the South is still trying to live in monologue, rather than dialogue, and I am convinced that men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because that don’t know each other and they don’t know each other because they don’t communicate with each other, and they don’t communicate with each other because they are separated from each other. And God grant that something will happen to open channels of communication, that something will happen because men of good will will rise to the level of leadership.”

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

1960s, Address to Cornell College (1962)

Men, God, Hate, People

“Trust your hunches... Hunches are usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level. Warning! Do not confuse your hunches with wishful thinking. This is the road to disaster.”

Joyce Brothers (1927–2013) Joyce Brothers

As quoted in Words of Wisdom : More Good Advice (1990) edited by William Safire and Leonard Safir, p. 199
Variant: Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level.
Trust your hunches. Hunches are usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level. But be warned, don't confuse hunches with wishful thinking.

Thinking

“Emotions are continually affecting our thought processes and decisions, below the level of our awareness. And the most common emotion of them all is the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Our thoughts almost inevitably revolve around this desire; we simply recoil from entertaining ideas that are unpleasant or painful to us. We imagine we are looking for the truth, or being realistic, when in fact we are holding on to ideas that bring a release from tension and soothe our egos, make us feel superior. This pleasure principle in thinking is the source of all of our mental biases. If you believe that you are somehow immune to any of the following biases, it is simply an example of the pleasure principle in action. Instead, it is best to search and see how they continually operate inside you, as well as learn how to identify such irrationality in others.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 1 : Master Your Emotional Self
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

Pain, Pleasure, Truth, Making love

“We humans are naturally compelled to compare ourselves with one another. We are continually measuring people’s status, the levels of respect and attention they receive, and noticing any differences between what we have and what they have. For some of us, this need to compare serves as a spur to excel through our work. For others, it can turn into deep envy—feelings of inferiority and frustration that lead to covert attacks and sabotage. Nobody admits to acting out of envy. You must recognize the early warning signs—praise and bids for friendship that seem effusive and out of proportion; subtle digs at you under the guise of good-natured humor; apparent uneasiness with your success. It is most likely to crop up among friends or your peers in the same profession. Learn to deflect envy by drawing attention away from yourself. Develop your sense of self-worth from internal standards and not incessant comparisons.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 10 : Beware the Fragile Ego
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

Friendship, People, Feeling, Nature

“We humans have a deep need to think highly of ourselves. If that opinion of our goodness, greatness, and brilliance diverges enough from reality, we become grandiose. We imagine our superiority. Often a small measure of success will elevate our natural grandiosity to even more dangerous levels. Our high self-opinion has now been confirmed by events. We forget the role that luck may have played in the success, or the contributions of others. We imagine we have the golden touch. Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last. Look for the signs of elevated grandiosity in yourself and in others—overbearing certainty in the positive outcome of your plans; excessive touchiness if criticized; a disdain for any form of authority. Counteract the pull of grandiosity by maintaining a realistic assessment of yourself and your limits. Tie any feelings of greatness to your work, your achievements, and your contributions to society.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 11 : Know Your Limits
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

Bad luck, Making love, Feeling, Imagination

“We have a side to our character that we are generally unaware of—our social personality, the different person we become when we operate in groups of people. In the group setting, we unconsciously imitate what others are saying and doing. We think differently, more concerned with fitting in and believing what others believe. We feel different emotions, infected by the group mood. We are more prone to taking risks, to acting irrationally, because everyone else is. This social personality can come to dominate who we are. Listening so much to others and conforming our behavior to them, we slowly lose a sense of our uniqueness and the ability to think for ourselves. The only solution is to develop self-awareness and a superior understanding of the changes that occur in us in groups. With such intelligence, we can become superior social actors, able to outwardly fit in and cooperate with others on a high level, while retaining our independence and rationality.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 14 : Resist the Downward Pull of the Group
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

People, Behavior, Feeling, Intelligence

“I have always been amazed that it seems to come as a shock to people that Mexicans are human beings. And on a philosophical level, I always remind interviewers that “the border” has nothing to do being Mexican or not. The border is simply a metaphor for what divides and wounds us as people – and I mean that “border” between any group of people, gay-straight, black-white, Muslim-Jewish, etc…”

Luis Alberto Urrea (1955) Mexican-American poet

On how the term border may be applied to other social divides in “Interview with Pulitzer Prize Finalist Luis Alberto Urrea” https://www.latinobookreview.com/interview-with-pulitzer-prize-finalist-luis-alberto-urrea--latino-book-review.html in Latino Book Review (2018 Feb 25)

People

“I know how unfashionable it is now to acknowledge in life or history any genius loftier than ourselves. Our democratic dogma has leveled not only all voters but all leaders; we delight to show that living geniuses are only mediocrities, and that dead ones are myths. … Since it is contrary to good manners to exalt ourselves, we achieve the same result by slyly indicating how inferior are the great men of the earth. In some of us, perhaps, it is a noble and merciless asceticism, which would root out of our hearts the last vestige of worship and adoration, lest the old gods should return and terrify us again. For my part, I cling to this final religion, and discover in it a content and stimulus more lasting than came from the devotional ecstasies of youth.”

Will Durant (1885–1981) American historian, philosopher and writer

The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time (2002) edited by John Little, Ch. 1 : The Shameless Worship of Heroes

Life, Men, God, Youth

“Look, whatever else happiness is, it’s also some kind of chemical reaction. Your body making and experiencing a cocktail of hormones and other molecules in response to stimulus. Brain reward. A thing that feels good when you do it. We’ve had millions of years of evolution that gave a reproductive edge to people who experienced pleasure when something pro-survival happened. Those individuals did more of whatever made them happy, and if what they were doing more of gave them more and hardier offspring, then they passed this on.”
“Yes,” I said. “Sure. At some level, that’s true of all our emotions, I guess.”

Cory Doctorow (1971) Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author

“I don’t know about that,” she said. “I’m just talking about happiness. The thing is, doing stuff is pro-survival—seeking food, seeking mates protecting children, thinking up better ways to hide from predators...Sitting still and doing nothing is almost never pro-survival, because the rest of the world is running around, coming up with strategies to outbreed you, to outcompete you for food and territory...If you stay still, they’ll race past you.”
Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Moon (2014), p. 130

Happiness, People, Pleasure, Making love

“Our ignorance of brain function is currently so very nearly total that we could not even begin to frame appropriate research strategies. We would stand before the open brain, fancy instruments in hand, roughly as an unschooled labourer might stand before the exposed wiring of a computer: awed perhaps, but surely helpless. A microanalysis of brain functions is, moreover, no more useful for understanding anything about thinking than a corresponding analysis of the pulses flowing through a computer would be for understanding what program the computer is running. Such analyses would simply be at the wrong conceptual level. They might help to decide crucial experiments, but only after such experiments had been designed on the basis of much higher-level (for example, linguistic) theories.”

Joseph Weizenbaum (1923–2008) German-American computer scientist

Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation (1976)

Understanding, Thinking, Help

“Perhaps the real difficulty facing anyone seeking intellectuals at the highest political levels in England is that the intellectual agenda which drove ideologically-configured political movements in continental Europe was quite absent in London.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Source: Thinking the Twentieth Century (2012), Ch. 2: London and Language: English Writer

“The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another; it is never the given that confers superiorities: "virtue", as the ancients called it, is defined at the level of "that which depends on us."”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Second Sex

In both sexes is played out the same drama of the flesh and the spirit, of finitude and transcendence; both are gnawed away by time and laid in wait for by death, they have the same essential need for one another; and they can gain from their liberty the same glory. If they were to taste it, they would no longer be tempted to dispute fallacious privileges, and fraternity between them could then come into existence.
The Second Sex (1949)

Dependency

“On this day the whole nation at all levels, in all its professions, occupations, and estates, acknowledges the dignity and blessedness of labour. On a day when in former times we heard the rattles of machine-guns and the hate-inspired songs of the class struggle and the Internationale, in this first year of Hitler’s government and the German people is assembled in unanimous, unswerving loyalty to the state, the race (Volk), and the German nation to which we all belong. Every difference is wiped away. The barriers of class hatred and the arrogance of social status that for over 50 years divided the nation from itself have been torn down. Germans of all classes, tribes (Stämme), professions, and denominations have joined hands across the barriers that separated them and have vowed henceforth to live as a community, to work and fight for the fatherland that unites us all. … The class struggle is at an end. The idea of the national community rises above the ruins of the bankrupt liberal-capitalist state. … Thus the German people marches into the future.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Speech at the first Labor Day celebration held under Nazi auspices (1 May 1933) Sheri Berman, Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancient Regime to the Present Day, New York, Oxford University Press, (2019) p. 254
1930s

Hate, People, Communication, Idea

“May the Christmastide bear you to the highest level of your desires, and the ebbing year leave you stranded upon the Golden Shores of Peace, Prosperity and Happiness”

John Kendrick Bangs (1862–1922) American author, editor and satirist

Quote from an old Christmas card.

Happiness, Peace

“If communication takes place between the artwork and the public, it is on the level of sensibility, through the emotions and their immanent modifications. It does not have anything to do with words, with collective, ideological or scientific representations, or with their critical, intellectual or literary formulations, in short, anything that is called culture. It is totally independent from that type of culture. This is why it is addressed to the group of people who ‘lack culture’. It is popular in the sense that it leads to what is most essential in each human being: one’s capacity to feel, to suffer and to love.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, Continuum, 2009, p. 73
Books on Culture and Barbarism, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky (1988)

Love, People, Making love, Feeling

“In spite of the lack of clarity in the concept of society, the word is doubtless necessary. In everyday language, words denoting local communities, large-scale society and global society exist, and all refer to actually existing entities, existing at different systemic levels. Humans are integrated in (that is, they participate in and contribute to) several social systems, some operating at a large scale, others at a small scale. When anthropologists delineate their field of study, the level of scale is determined by the issues at hand.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1962) Norwegian social anthropologist and professor

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 2 : Key Concepts

Communication, Study

“It’s all a bit anarchic, I suppose, but it’s also highly effective. Flexible, responsive, mobile, heuristic, with intelligence distributed to the lowest level...A bit like an ideal human society, I suppose; free individuals seeking out ways to advance the common good.”

Stephen Baxter book Timelike Infinity

Source: Timelike Infinity (1992), Chapter 12 (p. 266)

Way, Intelligence

“It is a cliche that the gun is a penis-symbol as well as a weapon. Gun organizations are conventionally masculine in cultural style; hunting and gun magazines dress their models in check shirts and boots to emphasize their masculinity. The gun lobby hardly has to labour the inference that politicians trying to take away our guns are emasculating us. At both symbolic and practical levels, the defense of gun ownership is a defence of hegemonic masculinity.”

Raewyn Connell book Masculinities

Source: Masculinities (1995), Chapter 9

“Many of the novels read in isolation can seem like lumber-rooms of ideas, cluttered and over-complex, as if attempting too much at once. Perhaps the fault lies in market circumstances and the terse Ace format for which Dick wrote. One could also argue that Dick's novels were a quarter the length they ought to have been to contain such complexity and richness. Even so, the marvellous, multi— levelled web of themes and concerns which emerges from this process of condensation gives Dick's work its specific feel, the very thing that makes it unique. Unrevised, eccentric and extravagant — even so, it's not too much to claim that Dick is perhaps the first real genius to have worked in the science-fictional mode since the days of Stapledon, a hybrid of Dickens and Dostoevsky, possessed of the comic delights and tragic depths of both, yet choosing work where his eccentricities were cherished. In any case, like so many SF writers, he learned to love the genre through the magazines long before his literary tastes were formed. He never quite recovered from that first infatuation with the forbidden van Vogtian delights.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

Брайан Олдисс, «Кутёж на триллион лет»

Love, Making love, Feeling, Idea

“If a new prototype of society is to emerge, rather than a coup d'etat, dialogue and debate must occur at the highest levels.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Five, The American Matrix for Transformation

“There has never been a time, until the last fifty years, when a majority of any population had regular and constant access to drama, and used this access. . . . It seems probable that in societies like Britain and the United States more drama is watched in a week or weekend, by the majority of viewers, than would have been watched in a year or in some cases a lifetime in any previous historical period. It is clearly one of the unique characteristics of advanced industrial societies that drama as an experience is now an intrinsic part of everyday life, at a quantitative level which is so very much greater than any precedent as to seem a fundamental qualitative change. Whatever the social and cultural reasons may finally be, it is clear that watching dramatic simulation of a wide range of experiences is now an essential part of our modern cultural pattern.”

Raymond Williams (1921–1988) philosopher

Television: Technology and Cultural Form

Life, Change, Time, Parting

“If our memories are as absorbent as research has demonstrated, our awareness as wide, our brains and bodies as sensitive; if we can will changes in our physiology at the level of a single cell; if we are heirs to such evolutionary virtuosity—how can we be performing and learning at such mediocre levels? If we're so rich, why aren't we smart?”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn, p. 279

Learning, Memory, Change

“If we respond to the message of pain or disease, the demand for adaptation, we can break through to a new level of wellness.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eight, Healing Ourselves

Pain, Disease

“Beyond our normal twenty-year outlook period, we recently attempted a forecast of the CO2 [carbon dioxide] build-up. We assumed different growth rates at different times, but with an average growth rate in fossil fuel use of about one percent per year starting today, our estimate is that the doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels might occur sometime late in the 21st century. That includes the impact of a synfuels industry. Assuming the greenhouse effect occurs, rising CO2 concentrations may begin to induce climactic changes around the middle of the 21st century.”

Edward E. David Jr. (1925–2017) American engineer

Keynote address at the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory on the Palisades, New York campus of Columbia University (October 26, 1982) ( Inventing the Future: Energy and the CO2 "Greenhouse Effect", October 26, 1982, December 22, 2018, Exxon, w:Edward E. David Jr., Edward E., David Jr. http://www.climatefiles.com/exxonmobil/inventing-future-energy-co2-greenhouse-effect/,)

Change, Time

“It's tough, the 400, I won't lie. The first 200 is pure speed and then the last 200, it shows who's got that speed endurance training in their legs. And obviously the last 50, you've just gotta pray because lactic is hitting hard. You need to be able to hold that endurance. … A lot of people had doubted me when I first became vegan, but my energy levels increased incredibly and my iron, my B12, everything that people said would become deficient, were amazing. I thought, I'm gonna make sure I'm beating them all on the track. I mean, we're all friends, but it was pretty cool to finish my Australian domestic season undefeated. And to win the nationals was obviously that little cherry on top.”

Morgan Mitchell (1994) Australian athlete

Interview in the documentary-film The Game Changers by Louie Psihoyos (2018).

People, Lie, Making love, Speed

“Even before we knew it was a coronavirus, I said it certainly sounds like a coronavirus-SARS type thing. As soon as it was identified, I called a meeting of top-level people and said, 'Let's start working on a vaccine right now.'”

Anthony Fauci (1940) American immunologist and head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

Response to the 2020 coronavirus epidemic, reported in Denise Grady, "Not his first epidemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci sticks to the facts", The New York Times (March 15, 2020).

People

“The sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important truths simply lack cognitive meaning and are interpretable only at the level of "Fuck You", so they can then elicit a perfectly predictable torrent of abuse in response. We've long ago reached that level.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

letter to Alexander Cockburn (1 March 1990), later paraphrased in Deterring Democracy (1992) p. 345.
Quotes 1990s, 1990–1994

Truth

“When the production process demands less work and distributes less and less wages, it gradually becomes obvious that the right to an income can no longer be reserved for those who have a job; nor, most importantly, can the level of incomes be made to depend on the quantity of work furnished by each person. Hence the idea of guaranteeing an income to every citizen which is not linked to work, or the quantity of work done.”

André Gorz (1923–2007) austrian philosopher

p. 203 https://books.google.com/books?id=WbpvDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA203 Critique of Economic Reason, 1988

Idea, Dependency, Personality

“The relationship between a woman and a man is built on the basis of mutual respect .. The woman is not required to bury herself in life because the man is unable to control his instincts like animals .. The woman raises the man's face, hair, height, width, smell, and even the voice of her is roughened, but the woman has learned to control her instincts. The man is also required to rise to the level of the woman.”

Habib Bourguiba (1903–2000) Tunisian politician

Life, Learning, Animals

“We need only look at the much lower level of anti-Americanism in Vietnam to realize that suffering incurred in wars does not necessarily dictate decades of animosity and fear between peoples. It’s what propaganda does with history — for contemporary political ends — that counts.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

"On the Recent Spate of 'Why North Korea Hates America' Articles" http://sthelepress.com/index.php/2017/05/27/1419/ (27 May 2017), Sthele Press 2010s

War, People, Fear, History

“21stC mindset different than 20th. There’s realization that either we will evolve into a higher level of compassion for everyone, or in time there will be no one left. Warmongers, climate change deniers, fossil fuel extractors, capitalists without conscience - they are dinosaurs.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Twitter https://twitter.com/marwilliamson (9 Jan 20) Williamson's quotes in social media

Change, Time

“There can be no question of a general overriding ‘Germanic’ or ‘Celtic’ identity amongst the different barbarian groups. Shared language might have facilitated communication and alliance but there is no evidence for or reason to suppose a higher level of ethnic identity on this basis.”

Guy Halsall (1964) English historian

Source: Quotaes, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568 (2007), p. 58

Communication, Question

“What we’re seeing is a manifestation of the layered nature of our descriptions of reality. At the deepest level we currently know about, the basic notions are things like “spacetime,” “quantum fields,” “equations of motion,” and “interactions.””

Sean Carroll (1966) American theoretical cosmologist

No causes, whether material, formal, efficient, or final. But there are levels on top of that, where the vocabulary changes.

Chap. 3 : The World Moves by Itself
The Big Picture (2016)

Nature, Reality

“It is very difficult for one person to change the actions of a government, but for one person to have a strong impact on a group at the local level is not impossible. This is happening all the time. People with something to say, with ideas that the community thinks are good and practical, are changing life in every country in the world. It is happening whether we are aware of it or not.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Source: The World Teacher for All Humanity (2007)

Life, People, World, Communication

“If you want democracy, you have to participate. That means action. That does not mean leaving it to somebody else to participate — you have to do it. At a local level the more you do, the more effective you can become. If you participate as a group on a local level, your effect on a local level can be much more positive, actually more effective than it can be on the abstract level of national and international politics.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The World Teacher for All Humanity (2007)

Democracy

“You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.”

Ken Thompson (1943) American computer scientist, creator of the Unix operating system

"Reflections on Trusting Trust" http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/360000/358210/reflections.pdf, 1983 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 27 (8), August 1984, pp. 761-763.

People

“Cars are free to circulate but still there are speed limits, therefore I do not see why, at the international level, we should not study ways to limit monetary movements. Bankers cannot act at will. ... Why should we not draw up some rules of the game?”

Jacques Delors (1925) French economist and politician

Speech to the European Parliament (17 September 1993), quoted in The Times (18 September 1993), p. 23
President of the European Commission

Cars, Way, Game, Study

“The crux is the reform of the treaty which would lead to common action. There must be a will to defend the central interests of Europe. If there is no majority voting, then the same level of impotence will continue.”

Jacques Delors (1925) French economist and politician

Speech to the European Parliament (23 October 1991), quoted in The Times (24 October 1991), p. 14
President of the European Commission

“The infinite vibratory levels,
The dimensions of interconnectedness
Are without end.
There is nothing independent.
All beings and things are residents”

Alex Grey (1953) American artist

Art Psalms (2008), The Vast Expanse

“…there are individual ways that we work our way through all of these systems that are corrosive and inescapable. But if there is a solution to the system itself, it’s at a collective level. It’s the level of policy and politics, it’s not at the level of individual choice.”

Jia Tolentino (1988) American writer and editor

On why her book Trick Mirror offers no solutions in “Jia Tolentino: What It’s Like Being the Most Talked About Millennial Writer” https://www.anothermag.com/design-living/11896/jia-tolentino-trick-mirror-book-interview-new-yorker-staff-writer-2019 in AnOther (2019 Sep 15)

Way

“From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiator's show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to fight—whereby the strongest, the swiftest and the cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

[The Struggle for Existence: A Programme, The Nineteenth Century, 23, February 1888, 161–180, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.a0012287587&view=1up&seq=173] (quote from p. 163)
1880s

World, Animals, Fight

“A severe action ensued from dawn to mid-day, when "the army of idolatry and damnation turned its back in flight from the line of battle.... fifty thousand infidels were despatched to hell by the sword... and from the heaps of the slain, the hills and the plains became of one level.”

Hasan Nizami Persian language poet and historian

Source: Elliot and Dowson, Vol 2. 230.

Hell

“At this point, it's not even a high-level controversy. This isn't House of Cards. Like, this isn't even Veep. It wouldn't even qualify for Blue's Clues.”

Trevor Noah (1984) South African comedian

Source: The Daily Show July 11th, 2017'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwr7pEgPqk4
A Russian, an Email and an Idiot: Did Donald Trump Jr. Incriminate Himself?: The Daily Show

Housing

“At all levels, the systems of life - from sociopolitical systems to solar systems - are repugnant and should be negated as MALIGNANTLY USELESS.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

Source: The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)

Life

“The United States shows more CASES than other countries, which the Lamestream Fake News Media pounces on daily, because it TESTS at such a high (and costly) level.”

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

2020s, 2020, October

Country

“In our secret depths, wherever we do our unspoken wishing, either we want life to be tidy, clear, fully understood, contained within definite limits, or we long for it to seem larger, wilder, stranger. Faced with some odd incident, either we wish to cut it down or to build it up.
On this level, below that of philosophies and rational opinions, either we reject or ignore the unknown, the apparently inexplicable, the marvellous and miraculous, or we welcome every sign of them. At one extreme is a narrow intolerant bigotry, snarling at anything outside the accepted world-picture, and at the other is an idiotic credulity, the prey of any glib charlatan. At one end the world becomes a prison, at the other a madhouse.”

J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) English writer

Source: Man and Time (1964), Ch. 8, p. 183

Life, Secret, World

“I have pointed out already how ideas seep down to wider and commoner levels of intelligence and feeling until at last they are believed to be solid realities.”

J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) English writer

Source: Man and Time (1964), Ch. 7, p. 159

Feeling, Intelligence, Idea, Reality

“We tend quite rightly to associate an age with its newest and most original ideas, and there is no harm in this as long as we remember that only a few men, at that time, may have actually held those ideas, and that many decades, often amounting to centuries, may pass before those ideas have seeped down to wider and commoner levels of belief, thought, and feeling.”

J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) English writer

Source: Man and Time (1964), Ch. 6, p. 140

Men, Age, Feeling, Idea

“The aims and ideals of the Soviet revolution inspired the patriotic enthusiasm of millions of people in the 1930s, during World War II, and in the postwar reconstruction period. This explains the Soviet Union's great leap forward, the achievement of a high level of industrial capacity in a very short time, the transformation of the Soviet Union into a major power in terms of science and culture. The historic victory in the Great Patriotic War against Nazism, which was a surprise not only for Hitler but also for the Western democracies is also explained by what we have said above. All this is true. But the historical truth is also that the regime and the system abused the faith of the people in these high ideals, turning them to its own advantage. Rule by the people, equality, justice, and the promise of a happy future — all these ideas were utilized for the sake of maintaining and strengthening totalitarianism.”

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

1990s, On My Country and the World (1999)

War, Happiness, People, Truth

“To demonize all Soviet "leaders" at all levels, to portray them as unqualified villains and evildoers, unprincipled self-seeking scoundrels who were indifferent to the interests and needs of the people — that is a shallow and frivolous approach. Of course there were villains, quite a few of them. But most of those who came to power had the intention of serving the "toiling masses" from which they themselves had come. That the system rendered their aspirations useless, reduced their efforts to nothing, and ultimately snuffed out their finer impulses — that is a separate question.”

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

1990s, On My Country and the World (1999)

People, Question, Effort, Self-confidence

“You talk of Paine with more respect than he deserves: He is utterly incapable of comprehending his subject. He has not even a moderate portion of learning of any kind. He has learnd the instrumental part of literature, a style, and a method of disposing his ideas, without having ever made a previous preparation of Study or thinking—for the use of it. ... [Paine] possesses nothing more than what a man whose audacity makes him careless of logical consequences, and his total want of honour and morality makes indifferent as to political consequences, may very easily write. They indeed who seriously write upon a principle of levelling ought to be answerd by the Magistrate—and not by the Speculatist.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Letter to William Cusac Smith (22 July 1791), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789–December 1791 (1967), pp. 303-304
1790s

Pain, Making love, Literature, Idea

Quotes about level page 21

Quotes about level
page 21