Quotes about line
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“If I worked in a bank as a teller, there wouldn't be girls lined up outside of where I work when I'm done.”

Peter Steele (1962–2010) American musician

Source: Peter Steele biography "Soul on fire" by Jeff Wagner, p. 209

“As far as my own experience is concerned, I sometimes begin a drawing with no preconceived problem to solve, with only the desire to use pencil on paper, and make lines, tones, and shapes with no conscious aim; bur as my mind takes in what is so produced, a point arrives where some idea becomes conscious and crystallizes, and then a control and ordering begin to take place.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Source: 1925 - 1940, The sculptor speaks' (1937), p. 255

Idea, Problem, Drawing

“I find myself lined up with the surrealists because Surrealism means freedom for the creative side of man, for surprise & discovery & life, for an opening out & widening of mans consciousness, for changing life & against conserving worn out traditions, for variety not a uniformity, for opening not closing.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Source: 1925 - 1940, Unpublished notes' for 'The Sculptor Speaks' (1937), p. 123

Life, Freedom, Change

“In general, it is possible to say that in artists as deliberate, as careful as [Durer and Holbein], drawing is particularly tight and the color is as cold as the verity of mathematics. In other artists, on the contrary, in those who are the poets of the heart, like Raphael, Correggio, Andrea del Sarto, line has more suppleness and color, more winning tenderness. In others whom we call realists that is to say, whose sensibility is more exterior, in Rubens, Velasquez, Rembrandt, for example, line has a living charm with its force and its repose, and the color sometimes bursts into a fanfare of sunlight, sometimes fades into mist.
So, the modes of expression of men of genius differ as much as their souls, and it is impossible to say that in some among them drawing and color are better or worse than in others.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. V. Drawing and Color, p. 104-105

Men, Color, Soul, Mathematics

“Then the works of Max Weber, first translated from the German in the 1940s — he wrote around 1910, incredibly — began to find their way into social science thought. At first, with his celebration of the efficiency of bureaucracy, he was received with only reluctant respect, and even with hostility. All writers were against bureaucracy. But it turned out, surprisingly, that managers were not. When asked, they acknowledged that they preferred clear lines of communication, clear specifications of authority and responsibility, and clear knowledge of whom they were responsible to. They were as wont to say "there ought to be a rule about this," as to say "there are too many rules around here," as wont to say "next week we've got to get organized," as to say "there is too much red tape." Gradually, studies began to show that bureaucratic organizations could change faster than non-bureaucratic ones, and that morale could be higher where there was clear evidence of bureaucracy.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1970s, "The short and glorious history of organizational theory", 1973, p. 6

Hostility, Way, Communication, Knowledge

“I put my pencil upon the paper, doubtfully, and drew little lines, considering my theme. But I would not long hesitate in this manner, for I knew that all creation must be chaos first, and then gestures in the void before it can cast out the completed thing.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Source: The Four Men: A Farrago (1911), p. 160

“A deep and serene silence filled her structures composed of colors and surfaces. The exclusive use of horizontal and vertical rectangular planes in the work of art, the extreme simplification, exerted a decisive influence on my work. Here I found, stripped down to the limit, the essential elements of all earthly constructions: the bursting, upward surge of the lines and the planes toward the sky, the verticality of pure life, and the vast equilibrium, the sheer horizontality and expansiveness of dreamlike peace. Her work was for me a symbol of a divinely built 'house' which man in his vanity has ravaged and sullied.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

a remark on the art of Sophie Taeuber, whom he later married.
in Abstract Painting Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co., 1964, p. 58
1960s

Life, Peace, Art, Color

“At first we got along very well. Esipova even boasted outside the class that she had pupils who wrote sonatas (I completed Sonata, Op. 1, and played it to Esipova, who took it home and inserted pedaling). But before long trouble began. Esipova’s method of teaching was to try to fit everyone into a standard pattern. True, it was a very elaborate pattern, and if the pupil’s temperament coincided with her own, the results were admirable. But if the pupil happened to be of an independent cast of mind Esipova would do her best to suppress his individuality instead of helping to develop it. Moreover, I had great difficulty in ridding myself of careless playing, and the Mozart, Schubert and Chopin which she insisted on were somehow not in my line. At that period I was too preoccupied with the search for a new harmonic idiom to understand how anyone could care for the simple harmonies of Mozart.”

Anna Yesipova (1851–1914) Russian pianist

Sergei Prokofiev, Autobiography

Home, Search, Understanding, Help

“[The construal of context as a semiotic construct accompanies the construal of language as a metafunctionally organized system because of the realizational relationship between the two. And it is this relationship which helps to explain how language is learned:]
It is this that enables, and disposes, the child to learn the lexicogrammar: since the system is organized along functional lines, it relates closely to what the child can see language doing as he observes it going on around him.”

Michael Halliday (1925–2018) Australian linguist

Source: 1970s and later, Learning How to Mean--Explorations in the Development of Language, 1975, p. 122 cited in: M.A.K. Halliday, Jonathan Webster (2006) The Language of Early Childhood. p. 289.

Learning, Help

“It is a fearful responsibility, the exercise of influence : let our own conduct bring its own consequences — we may well meet the worst; not so when we have led another to pursue any given line of action : if they suffer, how tenfold is that suffering visited on ourselves!”

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

The Monthly Magazine

Fear, Exercises, Suffering

“A bird's-eye view of centralised and disempowered societies will reveal a strictly rectilinear network of streets, farms, and property boundaries. It is as though we have patterned the earth to suit our survey instruments rather than to serve human or environmental needs. We cannot perhaps blame Euclid for this, but we can blame his followers. The straight-line patterns that result prevent most sensible landscape planning strategies and result in neither an aesthetically nor functionally satisfactory landscape or stretscape. Once established, then entered into a body of law, such inane (or insane) patterning is stubbornly defended. But it is created by, and can be dismantled by, people.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 4.21

People, Law, Bird

“Our age has lost much of its ear for poetry, as it has its eye for color and line, and its taste for war and worship, wine and women.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Women, War, Age, Color

“The terrorists have won… What was their goal 15 long, sad years ago? To strip from the world's greatest power, their traditions of growing tolerance. To hamstring the international interests of a country that barely stuck to the international double-white line of the moral road, but came closer than any other. To take our energies from trying… to help the world move forward, and instead make us direct those energies inward, at one another, within our own borders.”

Keith Olbermann (1959) American sports and political commentator

"The Terrorists Have Won" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYHEmzIJwo (November 2016), The Closer, YouTube

World, Sadness, Help, Country

“Phallic symbols. You know Catholics. I used to draw people naked all the time in my art class and my nun teachers used to tell me I had to put clothes on them. So I just drew lines around their bodies. See-through clothes.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Madonna Interview : Island Magazine (October 1983), Island, 1983-10-01 http://allaboutmadonna.com/madonna-library/madonna-interview-island-magazine-october-1983, (When asked what she used to draw as a kid).

People, Art, Teachers, Time

“But after a while, some higher brain-center cut in, and I began being mentally able to fit the wildly changing scenery into a coherent four-dimensional whole. The process was really no more devious than the process by which one integrates the two hundred lines of a TV screen into a single two-dimensional image... which in turn is interpreted as a three-dimensional scene. It's just a matter of processing information. Impossible? I saw.”

Rudy Rucker (1946) American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author and philosopher

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 106

Change

“The manner in which time and space are bound up with each other in the four-dimensional continuum is variable. It is difficult to express this variability of the cross-connections between space and time in simple language, and different interpretations of it are possible, corresponding to different mathematical transformations of the fundamental line-element, e. g. a different choice of the variable which we interpret as "time." Perhaps the best way we can express it is by saying that the solution of the field-equations of the theory of relativity shows that there is in the universe a tendency to change its scale, which at the present time results in an expansion, but may perhaps at other times become, or have been, a shrinking. This is true of the grand scale model of the universe.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

Way, Mathematics, Universe, Change

“Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Pt. 2
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)

Life, Death, Food, Home

“I have no doubt in my mind that our chief national problems relating to the eradication of poverty, illiteracy and disease and the scientific production and distribution can be tackled only along socialistic lines. The Very first thing that our future national government will have to do is to set up a commission for drawing up a comprehensive plan for reconstruction.”

Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945) Indian nationalist leader and politician

As quoted in The Alternative Leadership 1936-1941 (1996) by Aleander Werth p. 63

Disease, Problem, Future, Drawing

“In sculpture the projection of the fasciculi must be accentuated, the foreshortening forced, the hollows deepened; sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump, not of clear, well-smoothed, unmodelled figures. Ignorant people, when they see close-knitted true surfaces, say that 'it is not finished.' No notion is falser than that of finish unless it be that of elegance; by means of these two ideas people would kill our art. The way to obtain solidity and life is by work carried out to the fullest, not in the direction of achievement and of copying détails, but in that of truth in the successive schemes. The public, perverted by académie préjudices, confounds art with neatness. The simplicity of the 'École' is a painted cardboard ideal, A cast from life is a copy, the exactest possible copy, and yet it has neither motion nor eloquence. Art intervenes to exaggerate certain surfaces, and also to fine down others. In sculpture everything depends upon the way in which the modelling is carried out with a constant thought of the main line of the scheme, upon the rendering of the hollows, of the projections and of their connections; thus it is that one may get fine lights, and especially fine shadows that are not opaque. Everything should be emphasised according to the accent that it is desired to render, and the degree of amplification is personal, according to the tact and the temperament of each sculptor; and for this reason there is no transmissible process, no studio recipe, but only a true law. I see it in the antique and in Michael Angelo. To work by the profiles, in depth not by surfaces, always thinking of the few geometrical forms from which all nature proceeds, and to make these eternal forms perceptible in the individual case of the object studied, that is my criterion. That is not idealism, it is a part of the handicraft. My ideas have nothing to do with it but for that method; my Danaids and my Dante figures would be weak, bad things. From the large design that I get your mind deduces ideas.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 61-63

Life, People, Truth, Law

“Why should there be any more the old dividing line between man and his brother-man? why should the fires of prejudice flare up anew between us? why should we not maintain this common ground which we have found at last, and hedge it round, and protect it — the stronghold of freedom and of all the humanities for the long years to come?”

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

Founding Address (1876)

Freedom

“Some men like Jack and some like Jill
I'm glad I like them both but still
I wonder if this freewheeling
Really is an enlightened thing,
Or is its greater scope a sign
Of deviance from some party line?
In the strict ranks of Gay and Straight
What is my status: Stray? Or Great?”

Vikram Seth (1952) Indian writer

Dubious from 'Mappings' (Writers Workshop, Calcutta, 1980). Repeated by Seth in online interview http://www.rediff.com/chat/vikchat.htm.

Men

“Is it true that the North hates slavery? My next proposition is that in the past the North has invariably exerted against slavery, all the power which it had at the time. The question merely was what was the amount of power it had to exert against it. They abolished slavery in that magnificent empire which you presented to the North; they abolished slavery in every Northern State, one after another; they abolished slavery in all the territory above the line of 36 30, which comprised about one million square miles. They have endeavored to put the Wilmot Proviso upon all the other territories of the Union, and they succeeded in putting it upon the territories of Oregon and Washington. They have taken from slavery all the conquests of the Mexican war, and appropriated it all to anti-slavery purposes; and if one of our fugitives escapes into the territories, they do all they can to make a free man of him; they maltreat his pursuers, and sometimes murder them. They make raids into your territory with a view to raise insurrection, with a view to destroy and murder indiscriminately all classes, ages and sexes, and when the base perpetrators are caught and brought to punishment, condign punishment, half the north go into mourning. If some of the perpetrators escape, they are shielded by the authorities of these Northern States-not by an irresponsible mob, but, by the regularly organized authorities of the States.”

Henry L. Benning (1814–1875) Confederate Army general

Speech to the Virginia Convention (1861)

Hate, War, Age, Sex

“The colour line must go; the line will be drawn at personal merit.”

John Ireland (bishop) (1838–1918) Catholic bishop

Sermon at St. Augustine Catholic Church (1890)

Personality

“Beck is finishing Bratton’s legacy of transforming the department. It’s Beck who will bring it over the line and say, yes, LAPD is a new police force with a new culture, a new outlook, a new way of treating the public — especially the minority public — and we will never go back to the days of Rodney King because we have changed the culture of the Los Angeles Police Department.”

Charlie Beck (1953) Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department

Civil rights lawyer Connie Rice — quoted in: December 5, 2014, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck earns good reviews; tough challenges lie ahead, Los Angeles Daily News, August 9, 2014, Brenda Gazzar http://www.dailynews.com/government-and-politics/20140809/lapd-chief-charlie-beck-earns-good-reviews-tough-challenges-lie-ahead, About

Angels, Way, Change

“Approaching it in one way, I see no essential difference between a line one calls 'abstract' and a 'fish'. But rather an essential likeness. This isolated line and the isolated fish alike are living beings with forces peculiar to them, though latent. They are forces of expression for these beings and of expression on human beings, because each has an impressive 'look' which manifests itself by its expression. But the voice of these latent forces is faint and limited. It is the environment of the line and the fish that brings about a miracle: the latent forces awaken, the expression becomes radiant… The environment is the composition. The composition is the organized sum of the interior functions (expressions) of every part of the work.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote of Kandinsky, in Paris, March 1935; as cited in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 451
1930 - 1944

Way, Fish, Parting

“My father, good or bad, mistakes or no, had a direct line from his heart to the music to the people, to the audience. He played with logic and his own inner truth.”

Arthur Rubinstein (1887–1982) Polish-American classical pianist

John Rubinstein — reported in Kevin Kelly (February 22, 1981) "Rubinstein a Chip Off Rubinstein: John Says His Father's Music Shaped His Approach to Acting", Boston Globe.
About

People, Truth, Music, Heart

“I can quite understand the effort he is making; it is a very good thing not to want to go on repeating oneself. But he has concentrated all his attention on line; the figures stand out against each other without any sort of relationship, and so the whole thing is meaningless. Renoir is no draughtman, and without the lovely colours he used to use so instinctively, he is incoherent.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

In a letter to his son w:Lucien Pissarro, 14th May 1887, as quoted in Renoir – his life and work, Francois Fosca, Book Club Associates /Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1975, p. 188
Pissarro's critical quote on Renoir's painting art
1880's

Love, Understanding, Effort

“With no words, with no song
You can dance the dream with your body on
And this curve, is your smile
And this cross, is your heart
And this line, is your path
Oh it's gonna be the way you always thought it would be
But it's gonna be no illusion
Oh it's gonna be the way you always dreamt about it
But it's gonna be really happening to ya…”

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

Song lyrics, The Red Shoes (1993)

Smile, Dreams, Way, Heart

“When a war starts people are forced to become soldiers. They carry guns and go to the front lines and have to kill soldiers on the other side. As many as they possibly can. Nobody cares whether you like killing other people or not. It's just something you have to do. Otherwise you're the one who gets killed." Johnnie Walker pointed his index finger at Nakata's chest. "Bang!"”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

he said. "Human history in a nutshell."
Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter 16

War, People, History

“Mr. Hodge plays with his accustomed ease, even carrying the thing so far as to repeat many of his lines with his eyes shut; and in a pretty spirit of reciprocity, many members of the audience sit through the play with their eyes shut. p. 175”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918–1923 (2014) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25758762M/Dorothy_Parker_Complete_Broadway_1918-1923, Chapter 3: 1920

“I foresee a universal information system (UIS), which will give everyone access at any given moment to the contents of any book that has ever been published or any magazine or any fact. The UIS will have individual miniature-computer terminals, central control points for the flood of information, and communication channels incorporating thousands of artificial communications from satellites, cables, and laser lines. Even the partial realization of the UIS will profoundly affect every person, his leisure activities, and his intellectual and artistic development. … But the true historic role of the UIS will be to break down the barriers to the exchange of information among countries and people.”

Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist

Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), The Human Rights Movement (1969-1979)

People, Books, Communication, Universe

“In any case paramount traditional heads of provinces should, in my view, welcome the fact that their people who have had education and experience can relieve them as in the traditional line of delegation from the many functions the chiefs are required to do now, particularly if they are public servants or have not had the background of education and service as their people.”

Epeli Ganilau (1951) Fijian politician

Views on the chiefly system

People, Education

“The greater part of the time I spent, when I talked at all, talking to men. I liked to take luncheon in some pub or other, sitting on a high stool at the snack-counter, barons of beef, hams, salads and dishes of pickle spread before me, the server in his tall white cap carving with skill. Other male eaters would be wedged against me, champing over newspapers, and there were a peculiar animal content in being among warm silent men, raising glasses in smacking silent toasts to themselves, the automatic ‘ah’ after the draught, the forkful of red beef and mustard pickle. Sitting with my gin or whisky afterwards I would often manage to get into conversation with some lonely man or other – usually an exile like myself – and the talk would be about the world, air-routes and shipping-lines, drinking-places thousands of miles away. Then I felt happy, felt I had come home, because home to people like me is not a place but all places, all places except the one we happen to be in at the moment.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Men, Happiness, People, World

“For when I construct lines and colour combinations on a flat surface, it is with the aim of portraying 'universally beauty' as consciously as possible. Nature (or that which I see) inspires me, provides me – as it does every painter – with the emotion by which I am moved to create something, but I want to approach the truth as closely as possible, abstracting everything until I come to the foundation – still only an outward foundation! – of things. It is for me a clear truth that one does not want to say something 'specific', it is then that one says what is most specific: the truth (which is of great universality).”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in a letter to H. P. Bremmer, Paris 29 January 1914; ; as cited in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 81
1910's

Truth, Beauty, Nature, Universe

“What I have given in the second book on the nature and properties of curved lines, and the method of examining them, is, it seems to me, as far beyond the treatment in the ordinary geometry, as the rhetoric of Cicero is beyond the a, b, c of children.”

René Descartes (1596–1650) French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist

Letter to Marin Mersenne (1637) as quoted by D. E. Smith & M. L. Latham Tr. The Geometry of René Descartes (1925)

Children, Books, Nature

“Fifty feet of mast lay in the heaving water, downed lines and shrouds holding it there.”

Abby Sunderland (1993) Camera Assistant, Inspirational Speaker and Sailor

Source: Unsinkable: A Young Woman's Courageous Battle on the High Seas (2011), p. 156

Water

“I knew metal working before I knew Calder [famous for his sculptures, made in sheet metal], and Calder is one of our great men and he is earlier by a few years than any of the rest of us [in American Abstract Expressionism ]. Calder had worked in Paris quite a bit in the early days, though he did go to school here in New York at the Art Student's League... After my first year in college I had worked on the assembly line in the Studebaker plants up in Indiana..”

David Smith (1906–1965) American visual artist (1906-1965)

In an interview with w:David Sylvester (1960), edited for BBC broadcasting: first published in 'Living Arts', April 1964; as quoted in Interviews with American Artists, by David Sylvester; Chatto & Windus, London 2001, p. 10
1960s

Men, School, Art

“Whereas: The unique features of this nation at its foundation was its establishment of a secular Constitution that separated government from religion — something never done before; and
Whereas: Our secular constitution has enabled people of all world views to coexist in harmony, undivided by sectarian strife; and
Whereas: President James Madison made clear the importance of maintaining this harmony when he said, "The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the endless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries"; and
Whereas: The diversity of our people requires mutual respect and equal protection for all our citizens, including minority groups, if we are to remain "One nation, indivisible"; and
Whereas: It is the unfettered diversity of ideas and world views that have made our nation the strongest and most productive in the world; and
Whereas: Eternal vigilance must be maintained to guard against those who seek to stifle ideas, establish a narrow orthodoxy, and divide our nation along arbitrary lines of race, ethnicity, and religious belief or non-belief.
Now Therefore, I, Jesse Ventura, Governor of Minnesota, do hereby proclaim that Thursday July 4, 2002 shall be observed as: Indivisible Day In the State of Minnesota.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

Indivisible Day Proclamation (2002)

People, World, Religion, Idea

“Punk: I can't help but feel a little resp… hell, who am I kidding? I feel like I started this whole thing. This is all my fault. I've been at the epicenter of everything controversial ever since you took over—actually, since before that, I'm sure you remember, John-Boy.
Cena: I was there.
Punk: You were there. I'm the guy that made walking out look cool. The thing about is I think everybody in the parking lot having a picnic right now have completely misunderstood what I was trying to do. See, I didn't break my contract, I didn't break my word. My contract expired, and I was trying to prove a point to an entire company, not just one man. If anybody has any reason to walk out of the WWE, well you can probably put me at the top of that list. I mean, my microphone constantly cuts out, your friend Kevin Nash runs through the… well, slowly, briskly runs through the crowd, jumps me and screws me not once, but twice. Somebody here doesn't want me to be the WWE Champion. The thing about it is this entire industry is based on men solving their problems in between these ropes. This is the company that gives you Hell in a Cell, this is the company that gives you the Elimination Chamber. I don't wanna sound like a broken record, but "unsafe working environment"? I thrive on that! Hell, this is professional wrestling, this ain't ballet! If you believe in something, you stand and you fight, and you fight on the front line; you don't have a hippie sit-in and grill tofu dogs in the parking lot like a bunch of hippies. [To Triple H] When I had a problem with you and your authority, I dealt with you personally. [To Cena] And you, you big boy scout, when I had a problem with you being the poster boy for this company, I dealt with you personally. Shea-Mo, I'm sure sooner or later, you're gonna step on my toes, I will deal with you personally. Now, I know you three smiley good guys look across the ring from me, and I'm the last guy you expect to see here, [to Triple H] and I know I'm the last guy you expect to see in the foxhole with you. But you know what? Here I am. So… so I got a question—what do we do now?
Triple H: "What do we do now?" That's a big question, "what do we do now?" I say we do what we do on Monday Night Raw—we shut up and fight! How about this? As long as you guys are in agreement, Sheamus, you got yourself a match, fella. Tonight, right here, right now, you will go one-on-one with… [Punk raises his hand] one John Cena. And since I'm the only guy kinda wearing stripes out here, I'll referee. And, foxhole buddy, I got a whole table over there lined up with headphones and pipe bombs just waiting for you with your name on it. And if you want, you can go over there and say anything you feel like.
Punk: You want me to do commentary?!
Triple H: I want you to do commentary.
Punk: Can I wear your blazer?!
Triple H: You can even wear my blazer!
Punk: I'm in!”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

October 10, 2011
WWE Raw

Men, Dogs, Guy, Feeling

“Self-pity is an ignoble emotion, but we all feel it, and the orthodox critical line that it represents some kind of artistic flaw is dubious, a form of emotional correctness.”

Nick Hornby book Songbook

Songbook (2003)

Feeling

“… if you rejoice in revenge, torture, and war […] you cannot say you're a follower of the guy who explicitly said "love your enemies" and "do good to those who hate you". The next line isn't, "And if that doesn't work, send a titanium-fanged dog to rip his nuts off". Jesus lays on that hippie stuff pretty thick! He has lines like, "do not repay evil with evil", and "do not take revenge on someone who wrongs you."”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

Really! It's in that book you hold up when you scream at gay people.
"New Rules" segment, May 13, 2011; discussing many Christians' support of Osama bin Laden assassinationn and terrorist torture
Real Time with Bill Maher

Love, Hate, War, People

“Of course, you have to remind yourself that you might be seeing things that were never there. You might be maneuvering your memories to bring them into line with what you’d want them to be. You can’t be sure you’re not just daydreaming.”

Algis Budrys book Who?

Source: Who? (1958), p. 119

Memory

“The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.”

Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) American poet

Poem: At the Fishhouses

Beauty, Fish

“It is remarkable that this generalization of plane geometry to surface geometry is identical with that generalization of geometry which originated from the analysis of the axiom of parallels. …the construction of non-Euclidean geometries could have been equally well based upon the elimination of other axioms. It was perhaps due to an intuitive feeling for theoretical fruitfulness that the criticism always centered around the axiom of parallels. For in this way the axiomatic basis was created for that extension of geometry in which the metric appears as an independent variable. Once the significance of the metric as the characteristic feature of the plane has been recognized from the viewpoint of Gauss' plane theory, it is easy to point out, conversely, its connection with the axiom of parallels. The property of the straight line as being the shortest connection between two points can be transferred to curved surfaces, and leads to the concept of straightest line; on the surface of the sphere the great circles play the role of the shortest line of connection… analogous to that of the straight line on the plane. Yet while the great circles as "straight lines" share the most important property with those of the plane, they are distinct from the latter with respect to the axiom of the parallels: all great circles of the sphere intersect and therefore there are no parallels among these "straight lines". …If this idea is carried through, and all axioms are formulated on the understanding that by "straight lines" are meant the great circles of the sphere and by "plane" is meant the surface of the sphere, it turns out that this system of elements satisfies the system of axioms within two dimensions which is nearly identical in all of it statements with the axiomatic system of Euclidean geometry; the only exception is the formulation of the axiom of the parallels.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The geometry of the spherical surface can be viewed as the realization of a two-dimensional non-Euclidean geometry: the denial of the axiom of the parallels singles out that generalization of geometry which occurs in the transition from the plane to the curve surface.
The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

Way, Feeling, Idea, Understanding

“To find the directions and quarters of the winds your method of procedure should be as follows. In the middle of the city place a marble amussium, laying it true by the level, or else let the spot be made so true by means of rule and level that no amussium is necessary. In the very center of that spot set up a bronze gnomon or "shadow tracker." At about the fifth hour in the morning, take the end of the shadow cast by this gnomon, and mark it with a point. Then, opening your compasses to this point which marks the length of the gnomon's shadow, describe a circle from the center. In the afternoon watch the shadow of your gnomon as it lengthens, and when it once more touches the circumference of this circle and the shadow in the afternoon is equal in length to that of the morning, mark it with a point. From these two points describe with your compasses intersecting arcs and through their intersection and the centre let a line be drawn to the circumference of the circle to give us the quarters of south and north…. and thus we have designed a figure equally apportioned among the eight winds.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter VI, Sec. 5-7

“They're feeding the people a line of bull, and they are spinning and people are dying.”

Ray Nagin (1956) politician, businessman

2005, Interview with New Orleans radio station WWL (2005)

People

“Hume's skepticism, therefore, descends in a direct line from Cartesian mathematicism.”

Étienne Gilson (1884–1978) French historian and philosopher

Methodical Realism

“Look, I understand that for a lot of people, the US is superior to their country of residence in myriad ways, but I'm Australian. We have it all: the weather, the beautiful cities, the brand of football that involves neither padding yourself up like Santa Claus nor standing in a line in front of goal and covering your testicles.”

Max Barry (1973) Australian writer

Great Writing interviewhttp://www.greatwriting.co.uk/content/view/1038/

People, Beauty, Way, Understanding

“Only now [1943] I become conscious that my work in black, white and little color planes has been merely 'drawing' in oil color. In drawing, the lines are the principal means of expressions... In painting, however, the lines are absorbed by the color planes; but the limitations of the planes show themselves as lines and conserve their great value.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

note from his postcard, late May 1943; as quoted in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 240
1940's

Color, Drawing, Painting

“I am a big Beatles fan. And, you know, unbeknownst to anyone, I used to be one. But I have no problems of putting titles and lines from other songs in my songs, because they're great lines and great titles. And some of them I even thought of. You know, I think this is the third time I've used "It Don't Come Easy." I used that on "Time Takes Time," I think, as well. So it's just a great line that, you know, expresses so much. So I just put it in again.”

Ringo Starr (1940) British musician, former member of the Beatles

Ringo Rama promotional interview with Jody Denberg (July 2003) http://abbeyrd.best.vwh.net/jodyringorama.html

Problem, Thinking, Time

“The proletariat thus shared its dictatorship with nobody. As to the question of the "majority", this never troubled Lenin much. In an article "Constitutional Illusions" (Aug. 1917; Works, vol. 25, p. 201) he wrote: "in time of revolution it is not enough to ascertain the ‘ will of the majority’ – you must prove to be stronger at the decisive moment and at the decisive place; you must win … We have seen innumerable examples of the better organized, more politically conscious and better armed minority forcing its will upon the majority and defeating it." (pg. 503) Trotsky, however, answers questions [in The Defence of Terrorism] that Lenin evaded or ignored. "Where is your guarantee, certain wise men ask us, that it is just your party that expresses the interests of historical development? Destroying or driving underground the other parties, you have thereby prevented their political competition with you, and consequently you have deprived yourselves of the possibility of testing your line of action." Trotsky replies: "This idea is dictated by a purely liberal conception of the course of the revolution. In a period in which all antagonisms assume an open character; and the political struggle swiftly passes into a civil war, the ruling party has sufficient material standard by which to test its line of action, without the possible circulation of Menshevik papers. Noske crushes the Communists, but they grow. We have suppressed the Mensheviks and the S. R. s [Socialist Republics] … and they have disappeared. This criterion is sufficient for us" (p. 101). This is one of the most enlightening theoretical formulations of Bolshevism, from which it appears that the "rightness" of a historical movement or a state is to be judged by whether its use of violence is successful. Noske did not succeed in crushing the German Communists, but Hitler did; it would thus follow from Trotsky’ s rule that Hitler "expressed the interests of historical development". Stalin liquidated the Trotskyists in Russia, and they disappeared – so evidently Stalin, and not Trotsky, stood for historical progress.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

pg. 510
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume II, The Golden Age

Men, War, Idea, Question

“Criticism, like so many other things, keeps to what has been said before and does not get out of the rut. This business of the 'Beautiful' some see it in curved lines, some in straight lines, but all persist in seeing it as a matter of line. I am now looking out of my window and I can see the most lovely countryside; lines just do not come into my head: the lark is singing, the river sparkles with a thousand diamonds, the leaves are whispering; where, I should like to know, are the lines that produce delicious impressions like these? They refuse to see proportion or harmony except between two lines: all else they regard as chaos, and the dividers alone are judge.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote from a letter to Léon Peisse, 15 July 1949; as cited in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 68
this quote refers to Delacroix's refusal to use the line as boundary of the form in his painting art, as a too sharp dividing force in the picture - in contrast to the famous classical painter in Paris then, Ingres
1831 - 1863

Love, Beauty, Business, Singing

“Personally, I think you can put any interpretation you want on anything, but when someone suggests that Can't Buy Me Love is about a prostitute, I draw the line. That's going too far.”

Paul McCartney (1942) English singer-songwriter and composer

The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics (1969), p 107 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=DKG-FXj_HNYC&pg=PA107&lpg=PA107&dq=%22I+think+you+can+put+any+interpretation+you+want+on+anything,+but+when+someone+suggests+that+Can%E2%80%99t+Buy+Me+Love+is+about+a+prostitute,+I+draw+the+line.+That%E2%80%99s+going+too+far.%22&source=bl&ots=dZZ8CWP3RD&sig=72RA2gERz8OtnW7coK4F0ND9sXc&hl=en#v=onepage&q=%22I%20think%20you%20can%20put%20any%20interpretation%20you%20want%20on%20anything%2C%20but%20when%20someone%20suggests%20that%20Can%E2%80%99t%20Buy%20Me%20Love%20is%20about%20a%20prostitute%2C%20I%20draw%20the%20line.%20That%E2%80%99s%20going%20too%20far.%22&f=false

Love, Thinking, Drawing, Personality

“The bottom line is that these agreements must be revised, modified or terminated.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

UN calls for suspension of TTIP talks over fears of human rights abuses http://www.theguardian.com/global/2015/may/04/ttip-united-nations-human-right-secret-courts-multinationals. 2015

“In Russia during the war, you seldom spoke of Communism versus capitalism. In the first place, we were then comrades-in-arms and the subject was not important. In the second place, the official line of the inevitable struggle between capitalism and Communism was a bit confused. Marshal of the Soviet Union Josef Stalin had indicated to Commander-in-Chief Franklin Roosevelt that the two systems could live in Diplomat-at-Large Wendell Willkie's One World side by side.”

Bill Downs (1914–1978) American journalist

A Cake of Soap (1948)

War, World, Communication

“Folk codes of pride and togetherness, pride in both senses, honor, and togetherness. Ring-fenced emotion permitted only at three o’clock for ninety minutes in the sanctuary of the stadium. Can we march that pride out of the gates and into the streets? Can we harness it? Direct it? Use it for something less stymied by white lines and whistles, that could pour from the terraces and into the oak-and-leather chambers, the steel-and-glass towers?”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Sense

“When Nathan read aloud one of his lines, 'I'm a lying, despicable crook, but I have no choice. I am a Broadway producer,' they all howled. And then they started to throw money at the project. They all wanted to produce the show.”

Nathan Lane (1956) American actor

Susan Stroman, on the casting of Lane in The Producers — reported in Iris Fanger (April 13, 2001) "'Stro' is once again at center stage", Christian Science Monitor, p. 20.
About

Money, Lying, Reading

“As these lines are being written, the circumstances under which I first clearly grasped the important generalisation that the laws of Heredity were solely concerned with deviations expressed in statistical units, are vividly recalled to my memory. It was in the grounds of Naworth Castle, where an invitation had been given to ramble freely. A temporary shower drove me to seek refuge in a reddish recess in the rock by the side of the pathway. There the idea flashed across me, and I forgot everything else for a moment in my great delight.”

Francis Galton (1822–1911) British polymath: geographer, statistician, pioneer in eugenics

Source: Memories of My Life (1908), Ch. XX Heredity ( 1909 ed. http://books.google.com/books?id=X9IIAQAAIAAJ)

Law, Idea, Memory

“Henry glanced hastily at the mirror. Yes, he did look rather old. He must have overdone some of the lines on his forehead. He looked something between a youngish centenarian and a nonagenarian who had seen a good deal of trouble.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

The Man with Two Left Feet (1917)

“I have been asked what I mean by 'word of honor.' I will tell you. Place me behind prison walls--walls of stone ever so high, ever so thick, reaching ever so far into the ground--there is a possibility that in some way or another I may escape; but stand me on the floor and draw a chalk line around me and have me give my word of honor never to cross it. Can I get out of the circle? No. Never! I'd die first!”

Karl G. Maeser (1828–1901) prominent Utah educator and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

BYU Honor Code http://honorcode.byu.edu/index.php?option=com_ezine&Itemid=4613

Way, Drawing

“The moral government of God is a movement in a line onwards towards some grand consummation, in which the principles, indeed, are ever the same, but the developments are always new,— in which, therefore, no experience of the past can indicate with certainty what new openings of truth, what new manifestations of goodness, what new phases of the moral heaven may appear.”

Mark Hopkins (educator) (1802–1887) American educationalist and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 284.

God, Truth, Appearance, Past

“By reason of Arthur's position as its climax as well as of the long line of other traditional heroes, events and associations, and of its breadth of treatment, simplicity, intensity, enthusiasm, accord with the supernatural, vitality of imagination, elevation and sometimes nobility and religious feeling, the poem is the nearest thing we have to a traditional racial epic.”

Layamon (1200) English poet

J. S. P. Tatlock The Legendary History of Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950) p. 485.
Criticism

Feeling, Imagination

“Those who say that all historical accounts are ideological constructs (which is one version of the idea that there is really no historical truth) rely on some story which must itself claim historical truth. They show that supposedly "objective" historians have tendentiously told their stories from some particular perspective; they describe, for example, the biasses that have gone into constructing various histories of the United States. Such an account, as a particular piece of history, may very well be true, but truth is a virtue that is embarrassingly unhelpful to a critic who wants not just to unmask past historians of America but to tell us that at the end of the line there is no historical truth. It is remarkable how complacent some "deconstructive" histories are about the status of the history that they deploy themselves.”

Bernard Williams (1929–2003) English moral philosopher

Source: Truth and Truthfulness (2002), p. 2

Truth, History, Idea, Past

“I discovered that the most interesting music of all was made by simply lining the loops in unison, and letting them slowly shift out of phase with each other…”

Steve Reich (1936) American composer

Source: Steve Reich, ‎Paul Hillier (2002) Writings on Music, 1965-2000, p. 20

Music

“Speed in itself is not exciting. As you sit in a Boeing, are you thrilled that it's ripping up the sky with a 500mph orgy of big numbers? No, and it's the same deal in a straight line in a straight road in a car. Two hundred mph. So what. What matters is acceleration and handling, an ability to take corners as though they're not there, and this is why the Ferrari F50 has been so well received by those who know. It's light, and simple, like a choux pastry in a world full of suet pudding.”

Jeremy Clarkson book Born to be Riled

32
Born to be Riled (1999)

World, Cars, Light, Speed

“I'm not sure, but I think I might be an adult…. Someone the other day told me I should act more like one, but I don't even know what it is. What's an adult? I blame it on my parents; they caught it before I was even born. When I break things now I have to pay for them. I rarely get cake at parties anymore. When people give me sheets of paper I'm not supposed to draw on 'em. I'm just supposed to put the letters of my name on a line. Where's the fun in that? People get funny when I say the obvious, like "you've got a big nose." All of a sudden I'm supposed to know about the weather. And have plans! I even checked on the internet and no one's working on a cure. I'm not sure I like it.”

Ze Frank (1972) American online performance artist

http://www.zefrank.com/wiki/index.php/the_show:_06-06-06
"The Show" (www.zefrank.com/theshow/)

People, Thinking, Parent, Drawing

“I was born to be an editor, I always edit everything. I edit my room at least once a week. Hotels are made for me. I can change a hotel room so thoroughly that even its proprietor doesn't recognize it… I edit people's clothes, dressing them infallibly in the right lines… I change everyone's coiffure — except those that please me — and these I gaze at with such satisfaction that I become suspect, I edit people's tones of voice, their laughter, their words. I change their gestures, their photographs. I change the books I read, the music I hear… It's this incessant, unavoidable observation, this need to distinguish and impose, that has made me an editor. I can't make things. I can only revise what has been made.”

Margaret Caroline Anderson (1886–1973) American magazine editor

My Thirty Years' War: An Autobiography (Knopf, 1930, 274 pages), p. 58.

People, Books, Music, Laughter

“In many of Albrecht Dürer’s engravings there are harrowing depictions of his own melancholia; the manic wheeling stars of Van Gogh are the precursors of the artist’s plunge into dementia and the extinction of self. It is a suffering that often tinges the music of Beethoven, of Schumann and Mahler, and permeates the darker cantatas of Bach. The vast metaphor which most faithfully represents this fathomless ordeal, however, is that of Dante, and his all-too-familiar lines still arrest the imagination with their augury of the unknowable, the black struggle to come:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
Ché la diritta via era smarrita.
In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path.
One can be sure that these words have been more than once employed to conjure the ravages of melancholia, but their somber foreboding has often overshadowed the last lines of the best-known part of that poem, with their evocation of hope. To most of those who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression, hence the frustrated sense of inadequacy found in the work of even the greatest artists. But in science and art the search will doubtless go on for a clear representation of its meaning, which sometimes, for those who have known it, is a simulacrum of all the evil of our world: of our everyday discord and chaos, our irrationality, warfare and crime, torture and violence, our impulse toward death and our flight from it held in the intolerable equipoise of history. If our lives had no other configuration but this, we should want, and perhaps deserve, to perish; if depression had no termination, then suicide would, indeed, be the only remedy. But one need not sound the false or inspirational note to stress the truth that depression is not the soul’s annihilation; men and women who have recovered from the disease — and they are countless — bear witness to what is probably its only saving grace: it is conquerable.”

William Styron book Darkness Visible

Source: Darkness Visible (1990), X

Life, Death, Women, Men

“I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night's light. but hey, that would be going into sexual details…”

Mark Sanford (1960) 115th Governor of South Carolina

From emails to Argentine mistress; reported in " Sanford-Maria e-mails shed light on governor's affair http://www.thestate.com/sanford/story/839350.html", The State (June 25, 2009).

Love, Beauty, Kiss, Light

“His musical inspiration operates in a world uncluttered by conventional bar lines, conventional chord changes, and conventional ways of blowing or fingering a saxophone. Such practical 'limitations' did not even have to be overcome in his music; they somehow never existed for him. Despite this--or more accurately, because of this--his playing has a deep inner logic. Not an obvious surface logic, it is based on subtleties of reaction, subtleties of timing and color that are, I think, quite new to jazz--at least they have never appeared in so pure and direct a form.”

Ornette Coleman (1930–2015) American jazz musician

Gunther Schuller, quoted in [All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century, 1983, Rockwell, John, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN 0394511638].
About

World, Music, Color, Way

“To draw a bright line from the founders to the Civil War has become one of the most difficult interpretative tasks confronting American historians, if only because we confront, on the one hand, truculent bands of neo-Confederates who struggle to disguise the fatal corruption of the Confederate rebellion in modern libertarian garb, and, on the other, the brigades of neo-Progressives who have been only too happy to sunder the founders from emancipation in order to subvert any notion that an 18th-century Constitution still has viability after being crisped up in the flames of the Civil War. What both neo- camps ignore is how hugely the accomplishment of the founders—whether in the secular language of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton or the sacred language of the Awakeners—represented a decisive break with all previous notions of human political organization. The achievement of Lincoln was to carry that break relentlessly forward against its oldest foe. The achievement of our times—if there will be one to write about—will depend largely on how we resist the newer, more subtle, forms of dehumanization which now, like the tireless tide, creep all around us again.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, The Logic of Liberty (2014)

War, Happiness, Decision, Time

“The fashionable ideology that "artificial" lacks the inherent goodness of "natural" is an appealing, but hopelessly simplistic notion of the intellectually chic. Artifice is the result of a deliberate intent to make. Nature also "makes" things, using a set of basic building blocks common throughout the universe. Exchanging infinite time for deliberate design, nature has ingeniously built plants, planets, galaxies and unimaginable constructs which seem to structure the universe itself. What we call "natural" is simply the result of whatever set of rules nature has followed in fashioning our observable reality. On planet Earth, nature has manipulated the common elements to fashion everything from bacteria to the molten core of the planet. Discoveries in the "nano" technologies of bio, molecular, and micro engineering will re-edit the nomenclature of "natural" versus "unnatural", blurring if not erasing the line of distinction between "machine" and "organism", "natural" and "unnatural", "God-given" and "man-made."”

Syd Mead (1933–2019) American concept artist

Future Concepts: The World of Syd Mead, p.15, Car Styling Magazine 088, May 1992

God, Fashion, Nature, Reality

“So, the bottom line is: if you want to live well and die well, you first have to find out what is really important to you and stick to it. With that, you can get out there and get yourself a life, a real one.”

Gian Domenico Borasio (1962) physician, specialist of palliative medicine

"It's not about dying", TEDxCHUV address (13 November 2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5WYNf1td-4

Life

“Well, a lot of times we are looking for a sign that tells us we're godly. We want to preach, or be a missionary or whatever, all to help ourselves believe that God is using us. We look everywhere but to God to make us feel godly. We try to convince others we are godly so that we can convince ourselves we are godly. The bottom line is that godliness is about relationship, not about image”

Donald Miller (1971) American writer

Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)

God, Feeling, Time, Help

“And I will always do my duty no matter what the price
I've counted up the cost, I know the sacrifice.
Oh, and I don't want to die for you,
But if dyin's asked of me,
I'll bear that cross with honor,
'Cause freedom don't come free.I'm an American soldier, an American
Beside my brothers and my sisters I will proudly take a stand
When Liberty's in jeopardy, I will always do what's right
I'm out here on the front line
Sleep in peace tonight
American soldier, I'm an American soldier.”

Toby Keith (1961) American country music singer and actor

American Soldier.
Song lyrics, Shock'n Y'all (2003)

Peace, Sister, Sleep, Freedom

“We hang on to every line,
And walk straight down the middle of it.”

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

Song lyrics, The Sensual World (1989)

“Most things that we and the people around us do constantly… have come to seem so natural and inevitable that merely to pose the question, 'Why are we doing this?' can strike us as perplexing – and also, perhaps, a little unsettling. On general principle, it is a good idea to challenge ourselves in this way about anything we have come to take for granted; the more habitual, the more valuable this line of inquiry.”

Alfie Kohn (1957) American author and lecturer

Punished by Rewards

People, Way, Idea, Question

“As for some countries’ concerns about Russia's possible aggressive actions, I think that only an insane person and only in a dream can imagine that Russia would suddenly attack NATO. I think some countries are simply taking advantage of people’s fears with regard to Russia. They just want to play the role of front-line countries that should receive some supplementary military, economic, financial or some other aid. Therefore, it is pointless to support this idea; it is absolutely groundless. But some may be interested in fostering such fears. I can only make a conjecture.

For example, the Americans do not want Russia's rapprochement with Europe. I am not asserting this, it is just a hypothesis. Let’s suppose that the United States would like to maintain its leadership in the Atlantic community. It needs an external threat, an external enemy to ensure this leadership. Iran is clearly not enough – this threat is not very scary or big enough. Who can be frightening? And then suddenly this crisis unfolds in Ukraine. Russia is forced to respond. Perhaps, it was engineered on purpose, I don’t know. But it was not our doing.

Let me tell you something – there is no need to fear Russia. The world has changed so drastically that people with some common sense cannot even imagine such a large-scale military conflict today. We have other things to think about, I assure you.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

2015-06-06, Interview to the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/49629 2011 - 2015

People, World, Fear, Dreams

“One young lady asserted that she had never looked at any of the cards in the cars in which she had been riding for years. When questioned further, it appeared that she knew by heart almost every advertisement appearing on the line (Chicago and Evanston line), and that the goods advertised had won her highest esteem. She was not aware of the fact that she had been studying the advertisements, and flatly resented the suggestion that she had been influenced by them. Some of the goods advertised were known to her only by these advertisements, yet she supposed that they had nothing to do with her esteem of the goods. She supposed that she had always known them, that they were used in her home, or that they had been recommended to her. She did not remember when she had first heard of them.”

Walter Dill Scott (1869–1955) President of Northwestern university and psychologist

Source: The Psychology of Advertising in Theory and Practice, 1908, p. 370-371

Cars, Home, Question, Study

“(Tagore is) 'making a statement of fact, just as the remembered lines from a child’s primer (jal pare/pata nare’; rain falls/the leaf trembles) that first drew Tagore to poetry state a fact. Here, Tagore seems to be telling us that no afflatus or elaboration is necessary, because the world is at its most compelling as it is.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

World

“Well, of course, Gwenda dear, you can always do that when you’ve exhausted every other line of approach, but I always think myself it’s better to examine the simplest and most commonplace explanations first.”

Agatha Christie book Sleeping Murder

Sleeping Murder (1976)

Thinking

“No one, who knows what the difficulties are, now believes that the crisis of physics is likely to be resolved by any simple trick or modification of existing theories. Something radical is needed, and it will have to go far wider than physics. A new world outlook is being forged, but much experiment and argument will be needed before it can take a definitive form. It must be coherent, it must include and illuminate the new knowledge of fundamental particles and their complex fields, it must resolve the paradoxes of wave and particle, it must make the world inside the atom and the wide spaces of the universe equally intelligible. It must have a different dimension from all previous world views, and include in itself an explanation of development and the origin of new things. In this it will fall naturally in line with the converging tendencies of the biological and social sciences in which a regular pattern blends with their evolutionary history.”

John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) British scientist

J.D. Bernal (1959/1969) Science in history Vol 3. p. 862; cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) General System Theory. p. 5-6

World, History, Intelligence, Nature

“Infinity is the land of mathematical hocus pocus. There Zero the magician is king. When Zero divides any number he changes it without regard to its magnitude into the infinitely small [great? ], and inversely, when divided by any number he begets the infinitely great [small? ]. In this domain the circumference of the circle becomes a straight line, and then the circle can be squared. Here all ranks are abolished, for Zero reduces everything to the same level one way or another. Happy is the kingdom where Zero rules!”

Paul Carus (1852–1919) American philosopher

"Logical and Mathematical Thought?" in The Monist, Vol. 20 (1909-1910), p. 69

Happiness, Way, Mathematics, Change

“I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, "Would he had blotted a thousand."”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

The Works of Ben Jonson, Second Folio (1640), Timber: or Discoveries

“The basis of the [scientific] method is a belief in natural uniformity – if two events are regularly connected in our observations we can conclude that they obey a universal law. But this is not a conclusion we reach by observation. No amount of evidence can demonstrate the existence of laws of nature, since new experience can always overturn them. Science rests on the belief that the future will be like the past; but that belief is rationally groundless. This is not a new line of thinking. David Hume argued that the expectation that the future will be like the past, which is the basis of induction, is a matter of habit. Hume wanted to show that since miracles transgress known laws of nature it was unreasonable to accept reports of them, in the Bible or anywhere else. But his arguments against induction showed that the laws of nature could not in fact be known, so events that seemed impossible could happen at any time. The upshot was that faith in miracles returned by the back door of sceptical doubt.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Cross-correspondences (p. 68)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

Faith, Law, Nature, Thinking

“The men of my group who are under indictment here were under my military command. If they had not executed the orders which they were given, they would have been ordered by me to execute them. If they had refused to execute the orders they would have had to be called to account for it by me. There could be no doubt about it. Whoever refused anything in the front lines would have met immediate death. If the refusal would have come about in any other way, a court martial of the Higher SS and Police Leader would have brought about the same consequences.”

Otto Ohlendorf (1907–1951) German general

At the Nuremberg Trials. Quoted in "Valhalla's Warriors: A History of the Waffen SS on the Eastern Front" - Page 186 - by Terry Goldsworthy - History - 2007.

Death, Men, Way

“A triumphalist corporate capitalism, free at last of the specter of Communism, has mobilized its economic power to relentlessly marginalize all nonmarket values; to subordinate every aspect of American life to corporate "efficiency" and the bottom line; to demonize not only government but the very idea of public service and public goods.”

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist

"Dreaming of War" http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011015/willis, The Nation (15 October 2001)

Life, Communication, Idea

“Haven't we heard enough from these ancient white guys? There is this silent agreement that everyone everywhere has made regarding old white men. They are the bottom line, the last word, no matter what. The saying "It's not over 'til the fat lady sings is erroneous, because women who are fat are never listened to."”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, INVISIBILITY

Women, Men, Guy, Singing

“Here's a viewer's guide to BP media briefings. Whenever you hear someone with a British accent talking about this on behalf of British Petroleum they are not telling you the truth. That's the bottom-line.”

Anthony Weiner (1964) American politician

Interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBIdZYOUNS8 on MSNBC (June 7, 2010)

Truth

“Touted as a legislation that will promote unity, it has done exactly the opposite. It has divided this country, apparently and sadly along racial lines. (on the government's controversial Reconciliation, Tolerance, and Unity Bill, which Ganilau opposes).”

Epeli Ganilau (1951) Fijian politician

Speech at the launch of the NAP campaign for the 2006 election, Rakiraki, 6 August 2005

Country

“The first law is the same for both light and material bodies; they both move in a straight line, as long as they are not deflected by an outside force.
The second law is also the same as that governing the reflection of an elastic ball from an impenetrable surface. Mechanics shows that such a ball is reflected from such a surface so that its angle of reflection equals its angle of incidence, as observed for light.
But the third law still requires a plausible explanation. The passage of light from one medium to another exhibits behavior that is totally different from a ball moving through different media.”

Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters

Accord de différentes loix de la nature qui avoient jusqu’ici paru incompatibles (1744)

Law, Behavior, Light

“The male sense of space must differ from that of the female, who has such interesting, active, and significant inner space. The space that interests men is outer. The fly ball high against the sky, the long pass spiraling overhead, the jet fighter like a scarcely visible pinpoint nozzle laying down its vapor trail at 40,000 feet, the gazelle haunch flickering just beyond arrow-reach, the uncountable stars sprinkled on their great black wheel, the horizon, the mountaintop, the quasar — these bring portents with them and awaken a sense of relation with the invisible, with the empty. The ideal male body is taut with lines of potential force, a diagram extending outward; the ideal female body curves around centers of repose.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

“The Disposable Rocket,” Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 1993)

Men, Star, Sense, Flying

“We have never heard Seurat, Cross, Luce, Van de Velde or indeed Van Rysselberghe or Angrand speak of dots. We have never seen them be preoccupied by Pointillism. Read these lines, dictated by Seurat to Jules Christophe, his biographer: 'Art is harmony; harmony is the analogy between opposites and between similar elements of tone, tint and line. By tone I mean light and dark; tint is red and its complementary: green, orange and its complementary: blue, yellow and its complementary: purple... The method of expression relies on the optical mixture of tones, tints and their reactions”

Paul Signac (1863–1935) French painter

shadows that follow very strict rules Quote from Maria Buszek, online - note 22 http://mariabuszek.com/mariabuszek/kcai/Expressionism/Readings/SignacDelaNeo.pdf Seurat's quote from: Jules Christophe, Seurat, in 'Les Hommes d'aujourd'hui', no. 368, March-April 1890 From Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, 1899

Art, Light, Reading

“It's just rock and roll. A lot of times we get criticized for it. A lot of music papers come out with: 'When are they going to stop playing these three chords?' If you believe you shouldn't play just three chords it's pretty silly on their part. To us, the simpler a song is, the better, 'cause it's more in line with what the person on the street is.”

Angus Young (1955) Scottish Australian guitarist

Interview with the Atlanta Gazette in May 1979

Music, Time, Parting, Personality

“And he waves the pages of the papers, black and white the way space was when the galaxies were being formed, and crammed—as space was then—with isolated corpuscles, surrounded by emptiness, containing no destination or meaning. And I think how beautiful it was then, through that void, to draw lines and parabolas, pick out the precise point, the intersection between space and time where the event would spring forth, undeniable in the prominence of its glow; whereas now events come flowing down without interruption, like cement being poured, one column next to the other, one within the other, separated by black and incongruous headlines….”

Italo Calvino book Cosmicomics

Pages 92-93, "How Much Shall We Bet?"
Cosmicomics (1965)

Beauty, Way, Spring, Thinking

“If this were true, the population of the world would be at a stand-still. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of death. I would suggest that the next edition of your poem should read: “Every moment dies a man, every moment 1 1/16 is born.” Strictly speaking, the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.”

Charles Babbage (1791–1871) mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable c…

New Scientist, 4 December 1958, pg.1428.
Comment in response to Alfred Tennyson’s poem Vision of Sin, which included the line Every moment dies a man, // every moment one is born.

Death, Truth, World, Birth

“The absolutely inaudible is rejected from music during the period of Viennese Classicism in which every musical line is potentially or imaginatively audible, but it makes a dramatic reappearance in the music of Schumann. The most striking of many examples is one of the episodes in the Humoresk, the last of the great piano works of Schumann's early years. … There are three staves: the uppermost for the right hand; the lowest for the left; the middle, which contains the melody, is not to be played. Note that the melody is no more to be imagined as a specific sound than it is to be played: nothing tells us that the melody is to be heard as vocal or instrumental. This melody, however, is embodied in the upper and lower parts as a kind of after-resonance-out of phase, delicate, and shadowy.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 1 : Music and Sound

Music, Imagination, Parting

“All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way-if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.”

John Knowles book A Separate Peace

Gene, on the enemy.
Source: A Separate Peace (1959), P. 196

Way