Quotes about level
page 8

“In complex systems cause and effect are often not closely related in either time or space. The structure of a complex system is not a simple feedback loop where one system state dominates the behavior. The complex system has a multiplicity of interacting feedback loops. Its internal rates of flow are controlled by nonlinear relationships. The complex system is of high order, meaning that there are many system states (or levels). It usually contains positive-feedback loops describing growth processes as well as negative, goal-seeking loops. In the complex system the cause of a difficulty may lie far back in time from the symptoms, or in a completely different and remote part of the system. In fact, causes are usually found, not in prior events, but in the structure and policies of the system.”

Jay Wright Forrester (1918–2016) American operations researcher

Source: Urban dynamics (1969), p. 9

Lie, Behavior, Time, Parting

“The migrant and refugee crisis is deepening and reaching a critical level. It used to take refugees and migrants six to eight months to reach their destination countries. Now they can do it in just a few days. Today united Europe has more walls than divided Europe had during the Cold War. Greece is facing a possible humanitarian crisis, and there are armies in a state of alert deployed on the borders of Balkan countries”

Gjorge Ivanov (1960) President of Macedonia

War, Country

““Are you sharpness personified?”
Khouri poured herself a few final sips of coffee and then left the rest of it on the stove for when she got back. Coffee was her only vice, one acquired in her soldiering days on the Edge. The trick was to reach a knife-edge of alertness, but not be so buzzing that she could not point the weapon without shaking.
“I think I’ve reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level, if that’s what you mean.””

Alastair Reynolds book Revelation Space

Source: Revelation Space (2000), Chapter 2 (p. 27).

Coffee, Thinking

“In order to cultivate yourself and to drop no lower than the level of the milieu in which you have landed, it is not enough to read Pickwick and memorize a monologue from Faust…. You need to work continually day and night, to read ceaselessly, to study, to exercise your will…. Each hour is precious.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Letter to his brother, N.P. Chekhov (March 1886)
Original: Чтобы воспитаться и не стоять ниже уровня среды, в которую попал, недостаточно прочесть только Пикквика и вызубрить монолог из «Фауста». <…> Тут нужны беспрерывный дневной и ночной труд, вечное чтение, штудировка, воля… Тут дорог каждый час…

Exercises, Study, Reading, Night

“That passivity was the essence of the problem. The human being was intended to be passive only in a condition of fatigue, and not always then. Too much passivity of body produced surplus fat, short-windedness, indigestion: passivity of mind produced the same symptoms on the mental level. a feeling of spiritual dyspepsia. Since the average human being has no purposes that are not connected with the activities of keeping alive, the black room was bound to produce passivity, increasing dullness, a state in which the mind is at once awake and static, motionless, stagnant. This sense of dullness was nothing less than the collapse of the sense of reality and of values, the retreat into one's inner world.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Black Room (1975), p. 72

World, Feeling, Problem, Reality

“I don't know what monetarism is. If monetarism just means a good old-fashioned quantity theory, of course it has not failed. If it means the particular version of Milton Friedman, I think it has because he imagines that he can achieve — ascertain — a clear quantity relationship between a measurable quantity of money and the price level. I don't think that is possible. In fact, just about 40 years ago in the opening sentences of my book, Prices and Production, I wrote that it would be a great misfortune if people ever cease to believe in the quantity theory of money. It would be even worse ever to believe it literally. And that's exactly what Milton Friedman does.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

"Interview with F. A. Hayek", in Cato Policy Report (February 1983)
1980s and later

Money, People, Books, Imagination

“Ironically, the North Vietnamese victory could have come much sooner. In view of the increasing commitment of American troops in the mid- and late 1960s, General Giap would have been well advised to abandon the big-unit war, pull in his horns to take away the visible threat to South Vietnam's survival, and thereby delude the Americans that they had already achieved their goal of making the South Vietnamese self-sufficient. President Johnson had given Giap that chance at the Manila conference of 1966 when he had announced that once "the level of violence subsides," American and other foreign troops would withdraw within six months. That would have been eight years before the eventual South Vietnamese defeat, long before the South Vietnamese armed forces would have had any claim to self-sufficiency. Making that offer at the Manila conference may well have been an effort by President Johnson to rid himself of the albatross of South Vietnam, whatever the long-range consequences. For once the United States had pulled out under those circumstances and Giap had come back, what American President would have dared risk the political pitfalls involved in putting American troops back in?”

William Westmoreland book A Soldier Reports

Source: A Soldier Reports (1976), p. 406.

War, Effort, Chance, Victory

“Eight simple steps of what I think caused the Flood and explain all these strange phenomena on the planet. Then we'll go into a little bit more detail and then we'll close this down.
1. Noah and the animals got safely in the ark.
2. A 300 degree below zero ice meteor came flying toward the earth and broke up in space. As it was breaking up, some of the fragments got caught and became the rings around the planets. They made the craters on the Moon, the craters on some of the planets, and what was left over came down and splattered on top of the North and South pole.
3. This super cold snow fell on the poles mostly, burying the mammoths, standing up.
4. The dump of ice on the North and South pole cracked the crust of the earth releasing the fountains of the deep. The spreading ice caused the Ice Age effects. The glacier effects that we see. It buried the mammoths. It made the earth wobble around for a few thousand years. And it made the canopy collapse, which used to protect the earth. And it broke open the fountains of the deep.
5. During the first few months of the flood, the dead animals would settle out, and dead plants, and all get buried. They would become coal, if they were plants, and oil if they're animals. And those are still found today in huge graveyards. Fossils found in graveyards. Oil found in big pockets under the ground.
6. During the last few months of the flood, the unstable plates of the earth would shift around. Some places lifted up; other places sank down. That's going to form ocean basins and mountain ranges. And the runoff would cause incredible erosion like the Grand Canyon in a couple of weeks.
7. Over the next few hundred years, the ice caps would slowly melt back retreating to their current size. The added water from the ice melt would raise the ocean level creating what's called a continental shelf. It would also absorb carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere which allows for radiation to get in which is going to shorten people's life spans. And in the days of Peleg, it finally took affect.
8. The earth still today shows the effects of this devastating flood.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Hovind theory

Life, People, Age, Mountain

“January, 14th, 1835: We came to anchor in the spacious bay of Santa Barbara. There was only one vessel in the port. Beside the vessel, there was no object to break the surface of the bay… directly opposite the anchoring ground, lie the mission and town of Santa Barbara, on a low plain, but little above the level of the sea, covered with grass, though entirely without trees, and surrounded on three sides by an amphitheater of mountains, which slant off to the distance of fifteen or twenty miles. The mission stands a little back of the town, and is a large building, or rather a collection of buildings, in the center of which is a high tower, with a belfry of five bells. The whole, being plastered, makes quite a show at a distance, and is the mark by which vessels come to anchor. The town lies a little nearer to the beach — about half a mile from it — and is composed of one-story houses built of sun-baked clay, or adobe, some of them whitewashed, with red tiles on the roof. I should judge that there was about a hundred of them… The town is finely situated, with a bay in front, and an amphitheater of hills behind.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. book Two Years Before the Mast

Two Years Before the Mast (1840)

Lie, Mountain, Tree, Grass

““Don’t you agree with me?”
“On some distant theoretical level, just possibly.””

Alastair Reynolds book Chasm City

Source: Chasm City (2001), Chapter 12 (p. 177).

Distant

“A great prison structure was planned, whose different levels would correspond exactly to the levels of the centralized administration. The scaffold, where the body of the tortured criminal had been exposed to the ritually manifested force of the sovereign, the punitive theatre in which the representation of punishment was permanently available to the social body, was replaced by a great enclosed, complex and hierarchized structure that was integrated into the very body of the state apparatus.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter Three, The Gentle Way in Punishment

““How… how can”—savagely, he slashed an arm down before him in absolute negation of all he saw—“such be? How could God allow it?”
“God? You fool—there is no God!”
The words struck Faust like a great bronze clapper, shattering the crusted certainties of a lifetime, reverberating, setting up echoes that washed back and forth through his being in slowly lessening waves, leaving no atom unshaken, no belief untouched. There was no God. He knew this for the truth, recognized it as such on an almost physical level, for it summed up everything he had ever thought or reasoned. It resolved a thousand doubts. It left no question unanswered. There was no God! Everything was possible now. Nothing was forbidden.”

Michael Swanwick book Jack Faust

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 2, “Revelations” (pp. 30-31)

God, Truth, Fools, Question

“The growing complexity of software is the motivation behind work on industrializing software development. In particular, current research in the area of model driven engineering (MDE) is primarily concerned with reducing the gap between problem and software implementation domains through the use of technologies that support systematic transformation of problem-level abstractions to software implementations. The complexity of bridging the gap is tackled through the use of models that describe complex systems at multiple levels of abstraction and from a variety of perspectives, and through automated support for transforming and analyzing models. In the MDE vision of software development, models are the primary artifacts of development and developers rely on computer-based technologies to transform models to running systems.”

Bernhard Rumpe (1967) German computer scientist

Source: Model-driven development of complex software: A research roadmap (2007), p. 37

Motivation, Support, Problem

“The only difference between disappointment and depression is your level of commitment.”

Marc Maron (1963) Comedian

Tickets Still Available (2006)
Variant: I think, in most cases, the difference between depression and disappointment is your level of commitment.

Disappointment

“The backwardness of our religious and social developments is undoubtedly holding back the development of the intellectual and political levels.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 4, Historical Analysis, p. 122

“Did Romeo and Juliet have a … “relationship”? The term “relationship” … betokens a chaste egalitarianism leveling different ranks and degrees of attachment.”

Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician

Source: Love and Friendship (1993), p. 14.

“It would be wrong to suppose that the man of any particular period always looks upon past times as below the level of his own, simply because they are past. It is enough to recall that to the seeming of Jorge Manrique, "Any time gone by was better."… From A. D. 150 on, this impression of a shrinking of vitality, of a falling from position, of decay and loss of pulse shows itself increasingly in the Roman Empire. Had not Horace already sung: "Our fathers, viler than our grandfathers, begot us who are even viler, and we shall bring forth a progeny more degenerate still?"”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Horace, Odes, III.6]
Chap. III: The Height Of The Times
The Revolt of the Masses (1929)

Loss, Time, Past

“I want to drive home the message that we have to go beyond Copenhagen, beyond drawing room politics and sensitise ourselves, and try and make a change on an individual level.”

Manav Gupta (1967) Indian artist

"Beyond Politics, Beyond Copenhagen, For Our Children" : Treatise, Travelling trilogy, Lectures and Films on Sustainable development by Manav Gupta (2009 -2010), as quoted in Hindustan Times (25 December 2009)
2000s

Home, Change, Drawing

“By openly recognizing the inescapable rhythm of harmony and tension which is the form of all human processes unitary man achieves a far-reaching emancipation. Much that was concealed can now stand in the open. The neutrality and objectivity of the quantity symbolism seemed to dissociated man a guarantee of the liberation of the mind from anthropomorphic and subjective illusions. But at deeper level it expressed merely the desire to escape inner conflict in a harmony of static form. This escape was wholly illusory; the superficial neutrality of science left it open to abuse, and the spirit of man has been punished by its attempt to escape struggle in an intellectual harmony. Unitary man renounces such separation and partakes in the development of the whole. Man finds himself in the universal process, by finding the universal process within himself. Tension continues, but henceforward his struggle is with, not against, the process of nature.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 276

Nature, Universe, Science

“As in respect of the first wonder we are all on the same level, how comes it that the philosophic mind should, in all ages, be the privilege of a few? The most obvious reason is this: The wonder takes place before the period of reflection, and (with the great mass of mankind) long before the individual is capable of directing his attention freely and consciously to the feeling, or even to its exciting causes. Surprise (the form and dress which the wonder of ignorance usually puts on) is worn away, if not precluded, by custom and familiarity.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Aids to Reflection (1873), Sequelae to Aphorism 107

Age, Feeling

“What we have seen is that while the average person is working longer hours for lower wages, we have seen a huge increase in income and wealth inequality, which is now reaching obscene levels. This is a rigged economy, which works for the rich and the powerful, and is not working for ordinary Americans … You know, this country just does not belong to a handful of billionaires.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

[Staff, Bernie Sanders confirms presidential run and damns America's inequities, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/30/bernie-sanders-confirms-presidential-run-and-damns-americas-inequities, 29 April 2015, the Guardian, 2 May 2015]
2010s, 2015

Personality, Country, Wealth

“I am sure that a definite limit exists to the degree of equality which is desirable. We do not want complete equality of incomes, since extra responsibility and exceptional talent require and deserve a differential reward. We are not hostile, as our opponents sometimes foolishly suggest, to 'detached residences in Bournemouth where some elderly woman has obviously more than a thousand a year'. I do not myself want to see all private education disappear; nor the Prime Minister denied an official car, as in one Scandinavian country; nor the Queen riding a bicycle; nor the House of Lords instantly abolished; nor the manufacture of Rolls-Royces banned; nor the Brigade of Guards, nor Oxford and Cambridge, nor Boodle's nor (more doubtfully) the Royal Yacht Squadron, nor even, on a rather lower level, the Milroy Room, lose their present distinctive character; nor anything so dull and colourless as this.”

Anthony Crosland book The Future of Socialism

"The Future of Socialism" (Jonathan Cape, 1956) p. 149. The remark about 'detached residences in Bournemouth' refers to an article in catholic newspaper The Tablet http://archive.thetablet.co.uk/article/31st-may-1952/4/the-old-fabians-and-the-new titled "The Old Fabians and the New" (31 May 1952, p. 4) in which Roy Jenkins is presumed to be seeking to deprive their residents of their capital.

Hostility, Education, Cars, Housing

“I'm just saying, a lot of people are on medicine, they don't need to be. Because let's be honest folks, it isn't easy for anyone. And I think in most cases, the only difference between depression and disappointment is your level of commitment. And to be honest, in the day and age we live in now, if someone comes up to you and says, “I think you might be clinically depressed,” the proper response is, “Thank you, thank you very much. That means I’m awake." Is there any indication we shouldn’t be depressed— are you living on the same planet that I am? Did you ever think that depression is the reasonable human response to the crap we’re going through as a species, meant to propel us into the next evolutionary step, or at least into taking some different course of action so we might survive? Did you ever think that maybe it’s the happy people that are really screwed up in the head? Where’s that spin on the situation? Maybe it's those guys. "Hey, how ya doing?" "I don't know, I feel great, again!" "Really, well, that's creepy and weird. Maybe you should be on medication. Clearly you're self-centered, delusional, narcissistic. I don't know, but you're draining me with your happy. Could you move along because I'm doing the big work, creating a world that functions properly in my brain."”

Marc Maron (1963) Comedian

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/2ufif7/comedy-central-presents-bipolar-coaster
Comedy Central Presents (2007)

Happiness, People, Age, World

“Every piece of data suggests that workplaces are in dire shape and there is low levels of trust in leaders. For instance, data on employee engagement from Gallup show that worldwide only about 13% of employees report being engaged with their work, and in the U. S., the number is barely higher at 20%. Job satisfaction has declined almost linearly since 1987 to the present. The Edelman Trust index indicates that the public at large has low trust in leaders, while other surveys show that employees do not expect their own leaders to make ethical decisions or to consistently tell them the truth about difficult situations.”

Jeffrey Pfeffer (1946) American academic

Jeffrey Pfeffer in: Dan Schawbel. " Jeffrey Pfeffer: What Most People Don't Know About Leadership http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2015/09/15/jeffrey-pfeffer-what-most-people-dont-know-about-leadership," at Forbes.com, Sept. 15, 2015

Truth, Decision

“[T]here is no campaign trick or spending level or candidate whisperer that can prevent a party from committing political suicide if it wants to.”

Mike Murphy (political consultant) (1962) American political consultant

As quoted in "Debriefing Mike Murphy" https://www.weeklystandard.com/matt-labash/debriefing-mike-murphy (18 March 2016), by Matt Labash, The Weekly Standard 2010s

Suicide

“The career of a young theoretical physicist consists of treating the harmonic oscillator in ever-increasing levels of abstraction.”

Sidney Coleman (1937–2007) American physicist

Said during one of his lectures at Harvard University http://www.physics.harvard.edu/about/Phys253.html.

“Books are true levelers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

"Self-Culture", an address in Boston (September 1838) http://www.americanunitarian.org/selfculture.htm Context: I have insisted on our own activity as essential to our progress; but we were not made to live or advance alone. Society is as needful to us as air or food. A child doomed to utter loneliness, growing up without sight or sound of human beings, would not put forth equal power with many brutes; and a man, never brought into contact with minds superior to his own, will probably run one and the same dull round of thought and action to the end of llfe. It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are true levelers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race.

Books

“Well it seems to me absolutely scandalous to try to set wage levels which wipe out jobs. I mean these are people who are not on the dole. They want to work and if you price them out of the market its gonna be a lot worse for them and for the economy.”

Irwin Stelzer (1932) American economist and columnist

Newsnight debate (2010)

People

“My observation of the flight of buzzards leads me to believe that they regain their lateral balance when partly overturned by a gust of wind, by a torsion of the tips of the wings. If the rear edge of the right wing tip is twisted upward and the left downward the bird becomes an animated windmill and instantly begins to turn, a line from its head to its tail being the axis. It thus regains its level even if thrown on its beam’s end, so to speak, as I have frequently seen them. I think the bird also in general retains its lateral equilibrium, partly by presenting its two wings at different angles to the wind, and partly by drawing in one wing, thus reducing its area. I incline to the belief that the first is the more important and usual method….
My business requires that my experimental work be confined to the months between September and January and I would be particularly thankful for advice as to a suitable locality where I could depend on winds of about 15 miles per hour without rain or too inclement weather. I am certain that such localities are rare.”

Wilbur Wright (1867–1912) American aviation pioneer

Letter to Octave Chanute (13 May 1900)

Business, Bird, Thinking, Animals

“Humanity faces the most complex task of its history so far. Stated in a solution-oriented way, it is necessary gradually to reorganize this planet at two levels. One must deal with the competing necessities of biosphere and mankind with all their environmental and climatic consequences. On the other level, it is necessary to resolve the demands of competing nations and worlds within mankind's hierarchy of socioeconomic developmental levels and the "Christmas tree" of sociopolitical, ideological, and military consequences.”

Krafft Arnold Ehricke (1917–1984) German aerospace engineer

The Extraterrestrial Imperative (1978)

World, Way, History, Tree

“Dawn of the Dead is one of the most prophetic and disturbing films you’ll see, and I challenge you to find anyone who can find another film from that era which provides the same level of social commentary.”

Olly Blackburn Film director and screenwriter

[The Skinny, Scotland, http://www.theskinny.co.uk/film/features/44237-director_olly_blackburn_talks_donkey_punch, Radge Media, 10 November 2008, 23 February 2012, Director Olly Blackburn talks Donkey Punch, Michael, Gillespie]

“Our communion with Christ is not on a level of our common humanity, but we rise in it; we scale the heavens where He sitteth at the right hand of God; we send our longings up and ask to have attachments knit to Him; to be set in deepest, holiest, and most practical affinity with Him; and so to live a life that is hid with Christ in God. In such a life, we become partakers of His holiness, and, in the separating grace of that, partakers also of His power.”

Horace Bushnell (1802–1876) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 609.

Life, God, Christ

“Eloquence consists of persuading people of things they desperately want to believe. Demagoguery, I suppose, is eloquence sliding to some least moral energy level.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Komarr (1998)

People

“Economic theory makes a fundamental assumption that maximizing profits is the basic objective of every firm. But in recent years, profit maximization has been extensively qualified by theorists to refer to the long run; to refer to management’s rather than to owners’ income; to include non-financial income such as increased leisure for high-strung executives and more congenial relations between executive levels within the firm; and to make allowance for special considerations such as restraining competition, maintaining management control, warding off wage demands, and forestalling anti-trust suits. The concept has become so general and hazy that it seems to encompass most of men’s aims in life.
This trend reflects a growing realization by theorists that many firms, and particularly the big ones, do not operate on the principle of profit maximizing in terms of marginal costs and revenues…”

Joel Dean (1906–1979) American economics wrtier

Source: Managerial Economics, 1951, p. 28; Cited in: Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

Life, Men

“The bedrock of doubt is the total nothingness of death. Death is a leveler, not because everybody dies, but because nobody understands what death means.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter 8, p. 230

Death, Understanding

“There is a direct relationship between the absence of celebrity and the presence of good-to-great results. Why? First, when you have a celebrity, the company turns into “the one genius with 1,000 helpers.” It creates a sense that the whole thing is really about the CEO. At a deeper level, we found that for leaders to make something great, their ambition has to be for the greatness of the work and the company, rather than for themselves.”

James C. Collins (1958) American business consultant and writer

James C. Collins, in interview in: Fast Company online magazine, October 2001.

Sense

“What we call structure is a shorthand way of describing repetitive patterns, encounters that people keep coming back to, a recycling of rituals. This larger structure has the feel of externality; it seems thing-like, compulsory, resistant to change. This sense of constraint arises in part because the major institutions as repetitive networks are based on their distinctive interaction rituals, which have generated emotional commitments to their identifying symbols. It is characteristic of these intensely produced membership symbols that people reify them, treat them as things, as “sacred objects” in Durkheim’s sense. Organizations, states, as well as positions and roles within them, are sacred objects in just this sense: reified patterns of real-life interaction, cognitively raised above the level of the merely enacted, and treated as if they were self-subsistent entities to which individuals must conform. This symbolic social structuring of the world extends even to physical objects by making them into property appropriated under the sanction of social groups.”

Randall Collins (1941) American sociologist

Source: The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), pp. 28-29

Life, People, World, Way

“[The equilibrium model describes systems] which, in moving to an equilibrium point, typically lose organization, and then tend to hold that minimum level within relatively narrow conditions of disturbance.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. 40 as cited in: Jacquie L'Etang, Magda Pieczka (2006) Public Relations: Critical Debates and Contemporary Practice. p. 335.

“In India, if you are from the elite, dogs are extremely important. The breed of the dog indicates your wealth, that you are westernized. The cook, another human being, is on a much lower level than your dog. You see this all the time.”

Kiran Desai (1971) Indian author

Kiran Desai on the Costs Of Literary Celebrity http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117701272922375905.html (April 21, 2007) by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal

Dogs, Time, Cooking, Wealth

“Can Intelligence Survive? Looking at this nonclassical evolution of intelligence, one even begins to wonder whether it is such a small Law after all, even from the sun's point of view. Men create lakes and can level mountains; their atomic explosions have already shaken the whole earth's magnetic field; and they send out visible satellites and sensors that now range the solar system. Will the evolution of these powers of go on increasing? Or must it finally run down, was the sun does by the great Second Law?
f we think about this problem in the light of the physical and biological regularities of behavior that we now know, it seems to me that we are led to a further rather surprising conclusion: There is no thermodynamic reason why evolution should ever stop. What evolution leads to is the larger and larger control of environment by the organisms, first by genetic natural selection; then, with the growth of societies and language, by cultural natural selection; and finally by brains. And once we pass a certain threshold of brains and intelligence we begin to know how to insulate ourselves against all sorts of environmental changes.”

John R. Platt (1918–1992) American physicist

Cited in: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Vol. 24, Nr. 8 1968. p. 40
The step to man, 1966

Men, Law, Behavior, Mountain

“A state's potential power is based on the size of its population and the level of its wealth.”

John Mearsheimer book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

Source: The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), Chapter 2, Anarchy and the Struggle for Power, p. 43

Wealth

“When I was studying in Bangalore, temperature would be around 21 degree and now it is 31 degree. The drastic increase in the level of temperature is due to industrialisation.”

Maneka Gandhi (1956) Indian politician and activist

On global warming, as quoted in "Nature abuse leading to global warming: Maneka Gandhi" http://www.deccanherald.com/content/245606/nature-abuse-leading-global-warming.html, Deccan Herald (28 April 2012) 2011-present

Study

“[demonstrating the pickpocket mechanic] "I kid you not. That's actually Garry's Incident level of terrible."”

TotalBiscuit (1984–2018) British game commentator

WTF Is…? series, Guise of the Wolf (January 26, 2014)

“The people want government that works for them at every level. They want good government that begins at their doorstep in the barangay, and does not end before the closed door of a bureaucrat in Metro Manila.”

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (1947) The 14th President of the Philippines from 2001 to 2010

2005 State of the Nation Address (July 25, 2005) http://www.gov.ph/sona/sonatext2005.asp

People

“The difference between me and Bono is that he's quite happy to go and flatter people to get what he wants and he's very good at it, but I just can't do it. I'd probably end up punching them in the face rather than shaking their hand, so it's best that I stay out of their way. I can't engage with that level of bullshit. Which is a shame, really, and in a way it would help if I could, but I just can't. I admire the fact that Bono can, and can walk away from it smelling of roses.”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

source http://www.licc.org.uk/culture/thom-yorke-interview

Happiness, People, Way, Help

“He [Anthony Crosland] and his Socialist fellow-theoreticians did a terrific job in degrading scholastic standards in the name of equality, which meant dragging down the good to the level of the mediocre.”

George MacDonald Fraser (1925–2008) English-born author of Scottish descent

Dumbing Down, Down, Down... p. 247.
The Light's On At Signpost (2002)

“Along the road your steps may stumble
Your thoughts may start to stray
But through it all a heart held humble
Levels and lights your way.”

Dan Fogelberg (1951–2007) singer-songwriter, musician

Along the Road.
Song lyrics, Phoenix (1979)

Way, Light, Heart

“The growth in linguistic awareness about the problem, and the emergence of an associated activism, was one of the most exciting developments of the 1990s. Although awareness is still poor among the general public, the issues are now being much more widely discussed at professional levels, in a variety of international, national, regional, and local contexts. At one extreme, there are major campaigns such as those involved in promulgating the Barcelona Declaration of Linguistic Rights, or such initiatives as the `Red Book on Endangered Languages’ (part of the Tokyo Clearing House project). At the other extreme, there is lively debate taking place within many of the endangered communities themselves. Mechanisms and structures are now in place to channel energies.”

David Crystal (1941) British linguist and writer

Source: How Language Works, 2007, p. 216-7

Books, Communication, Problem, Parting

“Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt - and when I say corrupt, I'm talking about totally corrupt - political establishment [Obamacare] with a new government controlled by you, the American people. There is nothing the political establishment will not do. No lie that they won't tell to hold their prestige and power at your expense and that's what's been happening. The Washington establishment and the financial and media corporations that funded exist for only one reason: to protect and enrich itself. The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election. As an example, just one single trade deal they'd like to pass involves trillions of dollars controlled by many countries, corporations, and lobbyists. For those who controlled the levels of power in Washington, and for the global special interests, they partner with these people that don't have your good in mind. Our campaign represents a true existential threat like they haven't seen before.”

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

At a campaign rally in Florida (13 October 2016)
2010s, 2016, October

People, Lie, Country

“Since they are women, stooping to the level of gifting undergarments will defame them only.”

Pramod Muthalik (1963) Indian politician

On the Pink Chaddi Campaign, as quoted in " Mutalik rubbishes pink chaddi campaign http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/hubballi/Mutalik-rubbishes-pink-chaddi-campaign/articleshow/4107231.cms", The Times of India (9 February 2009)

Women

“After Ashoka's lavish sponsorship of Buddhism, it is perfectly possible that Buddhist institutions fell on slightly harder times under the Sungas, but persecution is quite another matter. The famous historian of Buddhism Etienne Lamotte has observed: "To judge from the documents, Pushyamitra must be acquitted through lack of proof."…The only reason to sustain the suspicion against Pushyamitra, once it has been levelled, is that "where there is smoke, there must be fire"”

Pushyamitra Shunga King of Sunga Dynasty

but that piece of received wisdom is presupposed in every act of slander as well.
E. Lamotte: History of Indian Buddhism, Institut Orientaliste, Louvain-la-Neuve 1988 (1958), quoted in Elst, K. (2002). Who is a Hindu?: Hindu revivalist views of Animism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and other offshoots of Hinduism.

Wisdom, Time

“We must remove, not erect, barriers to degree level education.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Principles and Priorities : Programme for Government (September 5, 2007)

Education

“The analogy between Shannon and codes in biology isn't something that sprang from my belief in God… except maybe on some deeper or more transcendent level.”

George Gilder (1939) technology writer

Interview with the Boston Globe (27 July 2005)

God

“This naturally leads us to the subject to Continence. Our soi-disant manly man with a false sneer of bravado and utter lack of stability considers that Continence is not possible, and like the ostrich tries to hide from the truth. For not only is Continence possible but it is practiced with brilliant success, voluntarily, by hundreds and hundreds of men and women in all walks of life and by all castes and creeds. (Please note the stress on the word voluntarily.) But its attainment needs courage and determination of the highest degree and which is naturally out of the reach of our flabby indolent moderns, who succumb to the slightest temptation and want to drag everyone down to their own low moral levels.”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Promiscuity & Continence

Life, Women, Men, Truth

“Confess your nothingness and ill-desert before God. Distrust yourself. Rely only upon God. Renounce all glory except from Him. Yield yourself heartily to His will and service. Avoid an aspiring, ambitious, ostentatious, assuming, arrogant, scornful, stubborn, willful, levelling, self-justifying behavior; and strive for more and more of the humble spirit that Christ manifested while He was here upon earth.”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 331.

God, Behavior, Christ

“I want the standard of living in Iran in ten years' time to be exactly on a level with that in Europe today. In twenty years' time we shall be ahead of the United States.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

As quoted in Marvin Zonis (1991), Majestic Failure: The Fall of the Shah, page 65
Attributed

Time

“Our solutions provide something that is 100% right, all the time. That is the idea. The cobbled together gunk never does […] It's unfortunate the application-level people are all caught up in cobble, cobble, cobble and just never learn how to evolve.”

Theo de Raadt (1968) systems software engineer

Comparing CARP and pfsync, the OpenBSD redundant firewall solution, to a collection of shell scripts
[Re: using OpenBSD instead of F5 Big-IP (was Cisco routers), MARC, openbsd-misc (Mailing list), https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=111163273330909, 2005-3-24, 2017-12-26]

People, Idea, Learning, Time

“The WTO was put in place following the signing of a "technical agreement" negotiated behind closed doors by bureaucrats. Even the heads of country-level delegations to Marrakech in 1994 were not informed regarding the statutes of the WTO, which were drafted in separate clossed sessions by technocrats.”

Michel Chossudovsky (1946) Canadian economist

Source: The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order - Second Edition - (2003), Chapter 1, The Globalization of Poverty, p. 25

Country

“Injustice happens at many levels, from the grass roots to the top. And one of the keys of SEWA’s vision and action is linking them.”

Ela Bhatt (1933) founder of the Self-Employed Women's Association of India (SEWA)

Discussion with Ela Bhatt, Founder, Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA)

Grass

“In our warm climate, we have not got the same incentive to exertion and we may never be able to attain the same level of prosperity as Western people.”

Mokshagundam Visveshvaraya (1860–1962) Indian engineer, scholar, statesman and the Diwan of Mysore

Quoted in Visvesvaraya, an engineer of modernity, 15 September 2010, 22 November 2013, The Hindu http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/visvesvaraya-an-engineer-of-modernity/article646018.ece,

People

“If any of you have got an A-level, it is because you have worked to get it. Go to any other country and when you have got an A-level you have bought it.”

Michael Portillo (1953) British politician turned television personality

Speech, quoted in The Guardian, 31 December 1994

Country

“The dominant system of power in the west has been Platonist — a system which functions on highly developed levels of structure and law. This is the school of pure rationality and fear of the undefined — fear of doubt. The minority system has been Socratic or humanist. It is interested in doubt and not overwhelmed by the Platonist-Hobbesian desperate need to tie things down.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Reflections of a Siamese Twin (1997)

Fear, School, Law

“First of all, why a descent into novelty rather than an ascent? It was my thing to do as I wanted to do it, and it seemed to me—the way I thought of time was I thought of it like a river. And so I thought of it as flowing toward its lowest level. And I thought of history as a river and Eternity as the ocean. So naturally history flows downhill to reach Eternity. I also like the fact that when the descent in elevation is rapid, the river runs faster, and when the landscape is almost flat, the river broadens out and meanders. So it was to preserve this idea of time as a fluid. The other reason is a mathematical reason. It has to do with the fact that if we have novelty moving downward, then the maximum of novelty is zero.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Talk at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, NYC https://web.archive.org/web/20120429183018/http://www.abrupt.org/abruptlog/logos/terence-mckenna-at-saint-johns-2785/ 25 April 1996

Way, History, Mathematics, Idea

“Canada is a great country, one of the hopes of the world. We can be a better one – a country of greater equality, justice, and opportunity. We can build a prosperous economy and a society that shares its benefits more fairly. We can look after our seniors. We can offer better futures for our children. We can do our part to save the world’s environment. We can restore our good name in the world. We can do all of these things because we finally have a party system at the national level where there are real choices; where your vote matters; where working for change can actually bring about change. In the months and years to come, New Democrats will put a compelling new alternative to you. My colleagues in our party are an impressive, committed team. Give them a careful hearing; consider the alternatives; and consider that we can be a better, fairer, more equal country by working together. Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done.”

Jack Layton (1950–2011) Leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada

"A letter to Canadians from the Honourable Jack Layton." https://pdf.yt/d/RKyhnDdu-DXG3J6s 20 August 2011. Released upon his death.

Children, World, Justice, Hope

“A dangerous tendency has shown itself of late among many of our personnel -- an unwillingness to share weal and woe with the masses, a concern for personal fame and gain. This is very bad. One way of overcoming it is to streamline our organizations in the course of our campaign to increase production and practice economy, and to transfer cadres to lower levels so that a considerable number will return to productive work. We must see to it that all our cadres and all our people constantly bear in mind that ours is a large socialist country but an economically backward and poor one, and that this is a very big contradiction. To make China prosperous and strong needs several decades of hard struggle, which means, among other things, pursuing the policy of building up our country through diligence and thrift, that is, practicing strict economy and fighting waste.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
Original: (zh-CN) 在我们的许多工作人员中间，现在滋长着一种不愿意和群众同甘苦，喜欢计较个人名利的危险倾向，这是很不好的。我们在增产节约运动中要求精简机关，下放干部，使相当大的一批干部回到生产中去，就是克服这种危险倾向的一个方法。要使全体干部和全体人民经常想到我国是一个社会主义的大国，但又是一个经济落后的穷国，这是一个很大的矛盾。要使我国富强起来，需要几十年艰苦奋斗的时间，其中包括执行厉行节约、反对浪费这样一个勤俭建国的方针。

People, Way, Strong, Fight

“We have been living in an ideological bubble — one of market fundamentalism.From the trauma of the Great Depression to 1973, there was a broad consensus across the democratic world that markets were absolutely essential to generate wealth, but they will also cause all sorts of problems if they are left unregulated. Economists like JM Keynes and JK Galbraith taught us that if you abolish markets, you get starvation; but if you abolish all the democratic checks and balances on markets, you get a system that eats itself. Unregulated businesses will cause unsustainable levels of pollution and inequality, and ultimately start pursuing unhinged business models that cause the whole system to collapse.”

Johann Hari (1979) British journalist

"Has Market Fundamentalism Had Its Day?" http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1269, The Independent (2008-03-20).

World, Business, Problem, Wealth

“The worker is by nature less imaginative, more level-headed than the capitalist. This is what prevents his becoming one. He is content with small gains. Trade Union officials think about the petty cash; the employer speculates in millions. You can see the difference in their representative institutions. There is no scheme too wild, no rumour too absurd, to be without repercussions on the Stock Exchange. The public house is the home of common sense.”

A.J.P. Taylor (1906–1990) Historian

"Dissenting Rivals: Urquhart and Cobden", p. 55
The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)

Home, Imagination, Nature, Thinking

“As we all know, the singularity in the art of Bach is the fusion of both levels and lines, the horizontal and vertical line. It’s a real wonder to see that the creation and forming of the horizontal line, the polyphonic structure, also results in this perfect, beautiful vertical line, the harmonic line. As we also know, Bach already used the full harmonic range and radius as no composer before him. My artistic aim of course is to point out the horizontal line in soloistic manner in a dynamically elastic way, but in the same breath to form the harmonic line in a bright field of color (I would call it “harmonic articulation”), to achieve a particular atmosphere of emotions and moods, drama, velocity, vividness, and so on. As we can imagine, these are high demands …”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Beauty, Art, Color, Way

“I know very well that I'm not the dancer that Danny is. He's on a completely different level. For the last four years, I've known who he is, and I just wanted to talk to him. So standing there with him tonight [as the final two] was the craziest thing.”

Danny Tidwell (1984) American dancer

Sabra Johnson, Starr Seibel, Deborah (2007-08-17). "Backstage at the So You Think You Can Dance Finale!" http://www.tvguide.com/news/dance-finale-sabra/070817-05 TVGuide.com. Retrieved 2007-08-17 About

“A variety of studies in widely different fields show that supervisors who are getting the best production, the best motivation, and the highest levels of worker satisfaction are employee-centred appreciably more often than production-centred.”

Rensis Likert (1903–1981) American statistician

Source: New patterns of management, (1961), p. 342

Motivation, Study

“GARDEN OF URANIUM: I moved to a house in Lincolnshire. The government were threatening to dump "low level" nuclear waste about fifteen miles away. The plans were dropped a few months before the last general election. The proposals now seem to have resurfaced somewhere under the North Sea!”

Roy Harper (singer) (1941) British musician

among other sites proposed since the election

Housing, Sea

“What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1963)

God, Feeling, Support

“Some years ago I found myself in discussion with a friend who entertained the notion that the general tendency of things in this world is towards equilibrium, the result of which would be peace and blessedness to the human race. My notion, was that equilibrium meant… death. No motive power is to be got from heat, save during its fall from a higher to a lower temperature, as no power is to be got from water save during its descent from a higher to a lower level. Thus also life consists, not in equilibrium, but in the passage towards equilibrium. In man it is the leap from the potential through the actual to repose.”

John Tyndall (1820–1893) British scientist

p, 125
New Fragments (1892)

Life, Death, World, Peace

“I just don’t get the time [to watch films], earlier I used to watch. Once I saw Paa on its launching with Amitabhji, and once with Anupamji I saw A Wednesday!. These two films in the past 10 years, and a film [that was] made on Swami Vivekanand on his 150[th birth] anniversary, that I saw because I also worked to make it successful. […] It was good. It is good for giving a message to the young generation, on an international level too. I liked that they did not show any miracles but kept it simple, the story of a social worker.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

2014, "GhoshanaPatra with Narendra Modi", 2014

Birth, Time, Success, Past

“I have nothing and therefore nothing to lose. I have conditioned myself for every conceivable shock and strain – physically, mentally, and emotionally. I fear nothing. No threat or prospect of danger deters me; I’ve faced them all, continuously and by choice. I am willing to suffer with those who suffer, to die with those who die, and to struggle in the most extreme manner for their liberation. I’ve lived the past decade with no pleasures, no amenities, and no entertainment. I’ve conditioned myself for every extreme. This is the level of commitment that our struggle demands, and the level of commitment that I have, and those who share this commitment have my complete loyalty.”

Kevin Rashid Johnson (1971) American prisoner and social activist

Defying the Tomb: Selected Prison Writings and Art of Kevin Rashid Johnson (2010)

Pleasure, Fear, Suffering, Past

“The world of their [the bourgeois’] predecessors was a backward, pre-technological world, a world with the good conscience of inequality and toil, in which labor was still a fated misfortune; but a world in which man and nature were not yet organized as things and instrumentalities. With its code of forms and manners. with the style and vocabulary of its literature and philosophy. this past culture expressed the rhythm and content of a universe in which valleys and forests, villages and inns, nobles and villains, salons and courts were a part of the experienced reality. In the verse and prose of this pre-technological culture is the rhythm of those who wander or ride in carriages. who have the time and the pleasure to think, contemplate, feel and narrate. It is an outdated and surpassed culture, and only dreams and childlike regressions can recapture it. But this culture is, in some of its decisive elements. also a post-technological one. Its most advanced images and positions seem to survive their absorption into administered comforts and stimuli; they continue to haunt the consciousness with the possibility of their rebirth in the consummation of technical progress. They are the expression of that free and conscious alienation from the established forms of life with which literature and the arts opposed these forms even where they adorned them. In contrast to the Marxian concept, which denotes man's relation to himself and to his work in capitalist society, the artistic alienation is the conscious transcendence of the alienated existence—a “higher level” or mediated alienation. The conflict with the world of progress, the negation of the order of business, the anti-bourgeois elements in bourgeois literature and art are neither due to the aesthetic lowliness of this order nor to romantic reaction—nostalgic consecration of a disappearing stage of civilization. “Romantic” is a term of condescending defamation which is easily applied to disparaging avant-garde positions, just as the term “decadent” far more often denounces the genuinely progressive traits of a dying culture than the real factors of decay. The traditional images of artistic alienation are indeed romantic in as much as they are in aesthetic incompatibility with the developing society. This incompatibility is the token of their truth. What they recall and preserve in memory pertains to the future: images of a gratification that would dissolve the society which suppresses it”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 59-60

Life, Fate, Pleasure, Truth

“For I think it is the case with genius that it is not when quiescent so very much above mediocrity as the difference between the two might lead us to think, but that it has the power and privilege of rising from that level to a height utterly far from mediocrity: in other words that its greatness is that it can be so great.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

Letter to A.W.M. Baillie (10 September 1864)
Letters, etc

Thinking

“…empires and civilizations do not collapse because of deficiencies on the military or the political levels.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

“I'd not only be cheating myself, but I'd be cheating my teammates if I continued to make the money that I was making and wasn't producing or putting out to the level of payment that I was receiving. That's just me.”

Marshall Faulk (1973) All-American college football player, professional football player, running back, Pro Football Hall of Fame memb…

The Seattle Times 2005-09-08.

Money, Cheating

“Islam is the best, but we Muslims are not the best. The West is neither corrupted nor degenerate. It is strong, well-educated, and organized. Their schools are better than ours. Their cities are cleaner than ours. The level of respect for human rights in the West is higher, and the care for the poor and less capable is better organized. Westerners are usually responsible and accurate in their words. Instead of hating the West, let us proclaim cooperation instead of confrontation.”

Alija Izetbegović (1925–2003) Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina

As quoted in The Two Faces of Islam, by Stephen Schwartz

Hate, Education, School, Strong

“My friends, the Republican Party did not win the midterm election in November: We lost that election. We lost because voter turnout was abysmally, embarrassingly low, and millions of working people, young people and people of color gave up on politics as usual and they stayed home. That’s a fact. In my view, Democrats will not retain the White House, will not regain the Senate or the U. S. House, will not be successful in dozens of governor races across the country, unless we generate excitement and momentum and produce a huge voter turnout. With all due respect – and I do not mean to insult anyone here – that turnout, that enthusiasm, will not happen with politics as usual. The people of our country understand that given the collapse of the American middle class, and given the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality we are experiencing, we do not need more establishment politics or establishment economics.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Address to the Democratic National Committee’s Summer Meeting, Bernie Sanders Warns Democrats They May Not Win in 2016 Without Him http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/08/28/bernie-sanders-warns-democrats-they-may-not-win-in-2016-without-him/, The New York Times (28 August 2015) https://www.youtube.com/embed/NU4iNAtg6W0?start=275&end=421 2010s, 2015

People, Color, Home, Understanding

“The Hunger Games is a reality television program. An extreme one, but that's what it is. And while I think some of those shows can succeed on different levels, there's also the voyeuristic thrill, watching people being humiliated or brought to tears or suffering physically. And that's what I find very disturbing. There's this potential for desensitizing the audience so that when they see real tragedy playing out on the news, it doesn't have the impact it should. It all just blurs into one program. And I think it's very important not just for young people, but for adults to make sure they're making the distinction. Because the young soldier's dying in the war in Iraq, it's not going to end at the commercial break. It's not something fabricated, it's not a game. It's your life.”

Suzanne Collins (1962) American television writer and novelist

Q&A with Hunger Games Author Suzanne Collins, July 31, 2013, Hannah Trierweiler Hudson, Scholastic.com http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/qa-hunger-games-author-suzanne-collins,

Life, Hunger, War, People

“If it is possible to walk twenty feet, it’s possible to walk twenty miles. So creationists insist there must be some “definite boundary” blocking the evolution of new “kinds”. But they won’t say where or what that boundary is. Creationists habitually misdefine their terms –if they can be forced to use definitions at all, because they will not be accountable. They can’t be, because they’ve decided in advance never to change their minds even if they’re proven wrong. If they were to find out that macroevolution was ever actually seen and proven to have happened for certain, their cultish faith would still forbid them to admit it. Instead they’d have to redefine their terms, to “move the goalposts” to some higher taxonomic level –but not so high as to have to admit where humans belong in the families of apes.”

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

"11th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm277H3ot6Y, Youtube (June 26, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Family, Faith, Change

“For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel - a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance - and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in de facto way for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle. This last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or difused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects; for they are themselves, consciously or unconsciously seeking to fit them into or exclude them from any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete at times fanatical, military inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes.”

Isaiah Berlin book The Hedgehog and the Fox

The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953). Editor Henry Hardy. Collaborator Michael Ignatieff. Editorial Princeton University Press, 2013. ISBN 1400846633, p. 2.

Way, Feeling, Idea, Understanding

“Progressively higher levels of organization are attained as catalytic cycles on one level interlock and form hypercycles: these are systems on a higher level of organization. Thus molecules emerge from a combination of chemically active atoms; protocells emerge from sequences of complex molecules; eukaryotic cells emerge among the prokaryotes; metazoa make their appearance among the protozoa and converge in still higher-level ecological and social systems.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

E. Laszlo (1994) Vision 2020: Reordering Chaos for Global Survival. Philadelphia: Gordon & Breach.

Appearance

“My agenda, pre-Trump, is the same agenda post-Trump. I am so glad that we have a president in the White House who wants to accomplish the things that the people of the state of Arizona, and people around this country, want to accomplish, I will be focused on things like border security, stopping illegal immigration, stopping rewarding people who came here illegally, and repealing Obamacare. I will be making sure the tax code is corrected, fair, and stimulates the economy’s growth — as well as making sure that America is energy independent. Those are things I have been fighting for since the first time I ran for the Arizona State Senate, trying to affect those things at the state level, and they are things that have been consistent even in my pre-political life.”

Kelli Ward (1969) American politician

Interview: Dr. Kelli Ward On Her Comments About Replacing John McCain https://bigleaguepolitics.com/interview-dr-kelli-ward-comments-replacing-john-mccain/ (July 21, 2017)

Life, People, Time, Fight

“The concept of "niche," initially borrowed by biologists from early social science, plays a central role in ecological theory… The niche… consists of all those combinations of resource levels at which the population can survive and reproduce itself.”

Michael T. Hannan (1943) US-American sociologist of Stanford University

Source: "The Population Ecology of Organizations," 1977, p. 946

Science

“China might seem quite successful in its controls, but it has only raised the water level. It’s like building a dam: it thinks there is more water so it will build higher. But every drop of water is still in there. It doesn’t understand how to let the pressure out. It builds up a way to maintain control and push the problem to the next generation.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, China’s Censorship Can Never Defeat the Internet, 2012

Way, Understanding, Problem, Thinking

“In 2014, one of the key agendas of the BJP’s election campaign was highlighting the dismal management of the Indian economy, ironically under an ‘economist’ prime minister and a ‘know-it-all’ finance minister. We all knew that the economy was in the doldrums but since we were not in government, we naturally did not have the complete details of the state of the economy. But, what we saw when we formed the government left us shocked! The state of the economy was much worse than expected. Things were terrible. Even the budget figures were suspicious. When all of this came to light, we had two options – to be driven by Rajneeti (political considerations) or be guided by Rashtraneeti (putting the interests of India First)… Rajneeti, or playing politics on the state of the economy in 2014, would have been extremely simple as well as politically advantageous for us. We had just won a historic election, so obviously the frenzy was at a different level. The Congress Party and their allies were in big trouble. Even for the media, it would have made news for months on end. On the other hand, there was Rashtraneeti, where more than politics and one-upmanship, reform was needed. Needless to say, we preferred to think of ‘India First’ instead of putting politics first. We did not want to push the issues under the carpet, but we were more interested in addressing the issue. We focused on reforming, strengthening and transforming the Indian economy. The details about the decay in the Indian economy were unbelievable. It had the potential to cause a crisis all over. In 2014, industry was leaving India. India was in the Fragile Five. Experts believed that the ‘I’ in BRICS would collapse. Public sentiment was that of disappointment and pessimism.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

Narendra Modi, Swarajya Interviews Prime Minister Modi, Interview, R Jagannathan- Jul 02, 2018 https://swarajyamag.com/economy/swarajya-interviews-prime-minister-modi-the-state-of-indian-economy 2018

Disappointment, Nature, Thinking, Light

“Communist writers likewise maintain that the Judaic-Christian code of ethics is "class" morality. By this they mean that the Ten Commandments and the ethics of Christianity were created to protect private property and the property class. To show the lengths to which Communist writers have gone to defend this view we will mention several of their favorite interpretations of the Ten Commandments. They believe that "Honor thy Father and thy Mother" was created by the early Hebrews to emphasize to their children the fact that they were the private property of their parents. "Thou shalt not kill" was attributed to the belief of the dominant class that their bodies were private property and therefore they should be protected along with other property rights. "Thou shalt not commit adultery" and "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife" were said to have been created to implement the idea that a husband was the master of the home and the wife was strictly private property belonging to him. This last line of reasoning led to some catastrophic consequences when the Communists came into power in Russia. In their anxiety to make women "equal with men" and prevent them from becoming private property, they degraded womankind to the lowest and most primitive level. Some Communist leaders advocated complete libertinism and promiscuity to replace marriage and the family.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Women, Men, Marriage, Children

“Lysenkoism is held up by bourgeois commentators as the supreme demonstration that conscious ideology cannot inform scientific practice and that "ideology has no place in science." On the other hand, some writers are even now maintaining a Lysenkoist position because they believe that the principles of dialectical materialism contradict the claims of genetics. Both of these claims stem from a vulgarisation of Marxist philosophy through deliberate hostility, in the first case, or ignorance, in the second. Nothing in Marx, Lenin or Mao contradicts the particular physical facts and processes of a particular set of natural phenomena in the objective world, because what they wrote about nature was at a high level of abstraction. The error of the Lysenkoist claim arises from attempting to apply a dialectical analysis of physical problems from the wrong end. Dialectical materialism is not, and has never been, a programmatic method for solving particular physical problems. Rather, dialectical analysis provides an overview and a set of warning signs against particular forms of dogmatism and narrowness of thought. It tells us, "Remember that history may leave an important trace. Remember that being and becoming are dual aspects of nature. Remember that conditions change and that the conditions necessary to the initiation of some process may be destroyed by the process itself. Remember to pay attention to real objects in space and time and not lose them utterly in idealized abstractions. Remember that qualitative effects of context and interaction may be lost when phenomena are isolated."”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

And above all else, "Remember that all the other caveats are only reminders and warning signs whose application to different circumstances of the real world is contingent."
"The Problem of Lysenkoism" by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, in Hilary and Steven Rose (eds.), The Radicalisation of Science, Macmillan, 1976, p. 58.

Hostility, World, Error, History

“The reality of the situation is obscured when population is expressed as a percentage proportion taken over the whole of the United Kingdom. The ethnic minority is geographically concentrated, so that areas in which it forms a majority already exists, and these areas are destined inevitably to grow. It is here that the compatibility of such an ethnic minority with the functioning of parliamentary democracy comes into question. Parliamentary democracy depends at all levels upon the valid acceptance of majority decision, by which the nation as a whole is content to be bound because of the continually available prospect that what one majority has decided another majority can subsequently alter. From this point of view, the political homogeneity of the electorate is crucial. What we do not, as yet, know is whether the voting behaviour of our altered population will be able to use the majority vote as a political instrument and not as a means of self-identification, self-assertion and self-enumeration. It may be that the United Kingdom will escape the political consequences of communalism; but communalism and democracy, as the experience of India demonstrates, are incompatible. That is the spectre which the Conservative party's policy of assisted repatriation in the 1960s aimed to banish; but time and events have swept over and passed the already outdated remedies of the 1960s. We are entering unknown territory where the only certainty for the future is the relative increase of the ethnic minority due to the age structure of that population which has been established.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Article on the 25th anniversary of his 'Rivers of Blood speech', The Times (20 April 1993), p. 18
1990s

Age, Democracy, Communication, Question

“On account of his extensive charities, scholars from Irãq, Khorãsãn and Mawãraun-Nahar started presenting themselves in his court and Islãm was spread. He held in great regard Sayyid Muhammad who was a very great scholar of the time, and strived to destroy the idols and temples of the infidels. He got demolished the famous temple of Mahãdeva at Bahrãre. The temple was dug out from its foundations and the hole (that remained) reached the water level. Another temple at Jagdar was also demolished… Rãjã Alamãdat had got a big temple constructed at Sinpur. He had come to know from astrologers that after 11 hundred years a king by the name of Sikandar would get the temple destroyed and the idol of Utãrid, which was in it, broken. He got this [forecast] inscribed on a copper plate which was kept in a box and buried under the temple. The inscription came up when the temple was destroyed [by Sikandar]…“…The value of currency had come down, because Sultãn Sikandar had got idols of gold, silver and copper broken and turned into coins…”

Nizamuddin Ahmad (1551–1594) historian

Sultãn Sikandar Butshikan of Kashmir (AD 1389-1413) Kashmir
Tabqãt-i-Akharî

Water, Time, Box

“I went vegetarian after watching Earthlings. I had no idea how intense and how horrible factory farms are. I have such a love for animals that I can’t justify having their heads cut off for me. And the slavery of the dairy industry motivates me to go more vegan. I can’t justify animal slavery for my enjoyment. … I feel stronger than I’ve ever been, mentally, physically, and emotionally. My plant-based diet has opened up more doors to being an athlete. It’s a whole other level that I’m elevating to. I stopped eating animals about a year ago, and it’s a new life. I feel like a new person, a new athlete.”

Hannah Teter (1987) snowboarder

"Hannah Teter, Gold-Medal Snowboarder, Carves a Meaningful Life", interview with the HuffPost (21 April 2010) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/avital-binshtock/hannah-teter-gold-medal-s_b_468137.html.

Love, Life, Feeling, Motivation

“This era of global challenges leaves no choice but cooperation at the global level. When States undermine the rule of law and violate the rights of their individual citizens, they become a menace not only to their own people, but also to their neighbours, and indeed the world. What we need today is better governance — legitimate, democratic governance that allows each individual to flourish, and each State to thrive.”

Kofi Annan (1938–2018) 7th Secretary-General of the United Nations

Nobel lecture (2001)

People, World, Law

“Let's bear in mind that the chances to multiply wealth are unlimited. All people can become rich. There is an error in our understandings - that all people cannot become equally rich. Wealth can not exist where the people are busy with mutual cheating, have no time for creating values and wealth. It is remarkable that we can find the greatest number of wealthy tradesmen and a population on a high standard of living in countries with a high level of business morality. On the other hand, we can find poor tradesmen and entrepreneurs and an impoverished population in countries with a low standard of business morality. This is natural because these people concentrate on cheating one another instead of trying to create value.
We are granting you the profit share not because we feel a need to give money to the people just out of the goodness of the heart. No, we are aiming at other goals by this step. By this measure we want to reach a further decrease of production costs. We want to reach the situation that the shoes are cheaper and workers earn even more. We think that our products are still too expensive and worker's salary too low.”

Tomáš Baťa (1876–1932) Czech businessman

Attributed to Tomáš Baťa in: Rybka, Zdeněk. Principles of the Bata Management System. Tomas Bata University, Faculty of Management and Economics, 2013.
Attributed to Tomas Bata

Money, People, Shoe, Error

“The Emperor by the divine guidance, had always in view to extirpate all the rebels in his dominions, to destroy all infidels root and branch, and to raze all Pagan temples level to the ground. Endowed with a heavenly power, he devoted all his exertions to the promulgation of the Muhammadan religion; and through the aid of the Almighty God, and by the strength of his sword, he used all his endeavours to enlarge his dominions and promote the religion of Muhammad…”

Jahangir (1569–1627) 4th Mughal Emperor

Nagarkot Kangra (Himachal Pradesh). Shash Fath-i-Kañgra Elliot and Dowson. History of India as told by its own historians, Vol. VI, p. 528.

God, Religion

“I am an international leader, the dean of the Arab rulers, the king of kings of Africa and the imam of Muslims, and my international status does not allow me to descend to a lower level.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

Remarks after insulting King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and having his microphone cut (30 March 2009), quoted in The Scotsman (31 March 2009) " Gaddafi walks out of summit after attack on Saudi king http://news.scotsman.com/world/Gaddafi-walks-out-of-summit.5123610.jp" by Salah Nasrawi

“The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw in the mysticism of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system, which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them; and for this obvious reason, that nonsense can never be explained.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to John Adams (5 July 1814). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-11_Bk.pdf, pp. 397–398 1810s

Understanding, Christ

“Later came 'the hour of solitude'. Inside my tiny bedroom-studio, I began my forty days in the desert; I do not know if they are over yet. With a desperate, feverish rage I took formal experimentation to maniacal levels. Each canvas was a battlefield where wounds multiplied ad infinitum. And then came the surprise. All that frenetic movement, all that gesticulation, all that unending dynamism, by dint of the scratches, blows, scars, divisions and subdivisions…. suddenly took a qualitative leap. My eye no longer perceived differences. Everything congealed in a uniform mass. What had been ardent ebullition transformed itself into static silence. It was like a great lesson in humility for the pride of my unbridled quest.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

1945 - 1970, A Report on the Wall' 1970

Solitude, Silence, Rage

Quotes about level page 8

Quotes about level
page 8