Quotes about literate (679 quotes, page 6)

“The expected effects of a sea-level rise typify the many consequences of a global warming. On the one hand, they are so big we literally can't understand them. If there is a significant polar melting, the Earth's center of gravity will shift, tipping the globe in such a way that the sea level might actually drop at Cape Horn and along the coast of Iceland—I read this in a recent EPA report and found that I didn't really understand what it meant to tip the Earth, through I was awed by the idea. On the other hand, the changes ultimately acquire a quite personal dimension: Should I put in a wall in front of my house? Does this taste salty to you? And, most telling of all, the human response to the problems, the utterly natural human attempt to preserve the old natural way of life in this postnatural world, creates entirely new consequences. The ocean rises; I build a wall; the marsh dies, and, with it, the fish.”

Bill McKibben book The End of Nature

Source: The End of Nature (1989), p. 117-118

Life , World , Way , Idea

“I am more strongly confirmed than ever in the belief that the time devoted to chess is literally frittered away. It is, to be sure, a most exhilarating sport, but it is only a sport; and it is not to be wondered at that such as have been passionately addicted to the charming pastime should one day ask themselves whether sober reason does not advise its utter dereliction.”

Paul Morphy (1837–1884) American chess player

From Morphy's letter to Daniel Fiske, February 4, 1863 https://web.archive.org/web/20150722050734/http://www.edochess.ca/batgirl/Morphy_to_Fiske_Feb4.html

Sport , Passion , Time

“… the genetic code is in fact literally identical in all animals, plants and bacteria … All earthly living things are certainly descended from a single ancestor.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

River out of Eden (1995)

Animals

“I think President Obama is the most radical president this nation's ever seen. And in particular, I think he is a true believer in government control of the economy and of our everyday lives. In my judgment, we are facing what I consider to be the epic battle of our generation, quite literally the battle over whether we remain a free market nation.”

Ted Cruz (1970) American politician

Interview with Caroline May of the The Daily Caller, after his announcement to run for U.S. Senate for the first time; in Caroline May, " Partier for Senate http://dailycaller.com/2011/06/06/ted-cruz-cuban-ivy-league-tea-partier-for-senate/", The Daily Caller (June 6, 2011).
2010s

Thinking

“Gutenberg’s press flooded the market. In the early 1500s John Tetzel, the head pardoner for German territories, would sweep into a town with a collection of already printed indulgences, hawking them with a phrase usually translated as “When a coin a coffer rings / A soul for heaven springs.” The nakedly commercial aspects of indulgences, among other things, enraged Martin Luther, who in 1517 launched an attack on the Church in the form of his famous Ninety-five Theses. He first nailed the theses to a church door in Wittenberg, but copies were soon printed up and disseminated widely. Luther’s critique, along with the spread of Bibles translated into local languages, drove the Protestant Reformation, plunging the Church (and Europe) into crisis. The tool that looked like it would strengthen the social structure of the age instead upended it. From the vantage point of 1450, the new technology seemed to do nothing more than offer the existing society a faster and cheaper way to do what it was already doing. By 1550 it had become apparent that the volume of indulgences had debauched their value, creating “indulgence inflation”—further evidence that abundance can be harder for a society to deal with than scarcity. Similarly, the spread of Bibles wasn’t a case of more of the same, but rather of more is different—the number of Bibles produced increased the range of Bibles produced, with cheap Bibles translated into local languages undermining the interpretative monopoly of the clergy, since churchgoers could now hear what the Bible said in their own language, and literate citizens could read it for themselves, with no priest anywhere near. By the middle of the century, Luther’s Protestant Reformation had taken hold, and the Church’s role as the pan-European economic, cultural, intellectual, and religious force was ending.”

Clay Shirky (1964) American technology writer

Cognitive Surplus : Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2010)

Age , Way , Soul , Spring

“The real test of friendship is: can you literally do nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy those moments of life that are utterly simple?”

Eugene Kennedy (1928–2015) American psychologist

Eugene Kennedy, cited in: Kathy Wagoner (2002) The Promise of Friendship. p. 284

Deep , Friendship , Relationship , Cute

“I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

Minds, Brains and Programs (1980)

Cars , Understanding , Sense

“Culture is the personality of an organization. Therefore, culture governs much of how people think, act, interact, with others, and do their work. It is extremely powerful in determining the present and continuing success and the future direction of any organization Culture can literally determine whether a company has a future.”

Don Soderquist (1934–2016)

Don Soderquist “ The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World's Largest Company https://books.google.com/books?id=mIxwVLXdyjQC&lpg=PR9&dq=Don%20Soderquist&pg=PR9#v=onepage&q=Don%20Soderquist&f=false, Thomas Nelson, April 2005, p. 27.
On the Importance of Culture

People , Thinking , Success , Future

“… sometime around now, the rules for living successfully on earth shifted, and an opportunity, unseen before, began to reveal itself. This opportunity is a context-a particular space, or way of being-which unexpectedly creates the possibility for a person’s life to truly make a difference. In this context, the way each of us answers the question, ‘What is my life really going to be about?’ can literally alter the course of humanity.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

"The Context for Creating a Transformed World: A World That Works for Everyone." 'Article in 'The Graduate Review (April 1980) by Mary Earle & Neal Rogin.

Life , Way , Question , Personality

“He [Tolstoy] tried to persuade his wife to permit him to give away every penny of his possessions, to leave their large house, and to live in a peasant's cottage, where together they could share the manual labor of a small farm. The Countess was a most devoted wife but in this she could not follow her husband. …The Countess had to suffer all the trials which it is said the wife of every artist and genius must suffer and, in addition, some of those that must come to the wife of any man who tries to follow literally in modern society the teachings of Jesus. …He felt so keenly the opposition of his wife and children that he was led to believe what he said repeatedly—that the institution of the family was one of the greatest obstacles to a truly Christian life.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 38-41

Life , Children , Family , Suffering

“I wanted to photograph this subject because the signs’ shrieking blatancy literally cried out for a visual record. To my mind the faded, yellowing paper and the red paint were not particularly paint, able. In black and white the signs shouted, clamored for attention, in visual anarchy. At the same time, the shrewd business sense which plastered them solid over the entire window area produced, as it were by chance, an esthetic by-product: the whole has homogeneity and variety of texture, simultaneously, which give the picture interest.”

Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) American photographer

New Guide to Better Photography, 1953.

Business , Sense , Chance , Time

“The modern scientific worldview with all its hope for clarity and precision, has a "flipside," a complementary set of views which it generates as its train. And this is its misology, sophistry, its abandonment of rationality in the world of human significance. There is thus a quite literal type of schizophrenia in the world bequeathed to us by the Cartesians. It is, on the one hand, hyper-rational; it seeks to extend the purview of mathematical physics throughout the universe. On the other hand, it relegates the world in which the physicist himself dwells, the unique world of humanity and its communities, to the junkpile of the irrational. We who know so much are prohibited from knowing ourselves.”

David Roochnik (1951) American philosopher

The Tragedy of Reason: Toward a Platonic Conception of Logos (Routledge: 1991), p. 74.

World , Hope , Communication , Mathematics

“Experience is the consequence of activity. The manager literally wades into the swarm of "events" that surround him and actively tries to unrandomize them and impose some order: The manager acts physically in the environment, attends to some of it, ignores most of it, talks to other people about what they see and are doing.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Source: 1970s, Social Psychology of Organizing, (1979), p. 148

People

“I have encountered devil worshippers and even interviewed one on my podcast. They are not representative of Satanism. The Satanic Temple, for example, is entirely atheist, Satanists may be hedonists and may not necessarily be scientifically literate scholarly skeptics. So Satanists are not representative of atheists either. But I applaud them because the Satanic Temple has been very proficient in their defence of secular politics, much more so than typical science advocates who aren’t Satanic. Nobody cares what the nerds say. But when the Satanists speak up, then believers listen.”

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

Patheos, Satanic Panic and Exorcism in Schools? http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2016/09/21/satanic-panic-and-exorcism-in-schools/ (September 21, 2016)

Science

“There are seven causes of inconsistencies and contradictions to be met with in a literary work. The first cause arises from the fact that the author collects the opinions of various men, each differing from the other, but neglects to mention the name of the author of any particular opinion. In such a work contradictions or inconsistencies must occur, since any two statements may belong to two different authors. Second cause: The author holds at first one opinion which he subsequently rejects: in his work, however, both his original and altered views are retained. Third cause: The passages in question are not all to be taken literally: some only are to be understood in their literal sense, while in others figurative language is employed, which includes another meaning besides the literal one: or, in the apparently inconsistent passages, figurative language is employed which, if taken literally, would seem to be contradictories or contraries. Fourth cause: The premises are not identical in both statements, but for certain reasons they are not fully stated in these passages: or two propositions with different subjects which are expressed by the same term without having the difference in meaning pointed out, occur in two passages. The contradiction is therefore only apparent, but there is no contradiction in reality. The fifth cause is traceable to the use of a certain method adopted in teaching and expounding profound problems. Namely, a difficult and obscure theorem must sometimes be mentioned and assumed as known, for the illustration of some elementary and intelligible subject which must be taught beforehand the commencement being always made with the easier thing. The teacher must therefore facilitate, in any manner which he can devise, the explanation of those theorems, which have to be assumed as known, and he must content himself with giving a general though somewhat inaccurate notion on the subject. It is, for the present, explained according to the capacity of the students, that they may comprehend it as far as they are required to understand the subject. Later on, the same subject is thoroughly treated and fully developed in its right place. Sixth cause: The contradiction is not apparent, and only becomes evident through a series of premises. The larger the number of premises necessary to prove the contradiction between the two conclusions, the greater is the chance that it will escape detection, and that the author will not perceive his own inconsistency. Only when from each conclusion, by means of suitable premises, an inference is made, and from the enunciation thus inferred, by means of proper arguments, other conclusions are formed, and after that process has been repeated many times, then it becomes clear that the original conclusions are contradictories or contraries. Even able writers are liable to overlook such inconsistencies. If, however, the contradiction between the original statements can at once be discovered, and the author, while writing the second, does not think of the first, he evinces a greater deficiency, and his words deserve no notice whatever. Seventh cause: It is sometimes necessary to introduce such metaphysical matter as may partly be disclosed, but must partly be concealed: while, therefore, on one occasion the object which the author has in view may demand that the metaphysical problem be treated as solved in one way, it may be convenient on another occasion to treat it as solved in the opposite way. The author must endeavour, by concealing the fact as much as possible, to prevent the uneducated reader from perceiving the contradiction.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Introduction

Men , Way , Intelligence , Understanding

“[If I had literally heard the voice of Jesus] I'd check myself in to see a psychiatrist. I don't hear voices and anyone who does should really see a psychiatrist and get some help.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

AronRa vs Ray Comfort (September 17th, 2012), Radio Paul's Radio Rants

Help

“There is a limitation on debate, which is unlike other bills, for 20 hours, but there is no limitation on amendments. In other words, Republicans if they wanted to, and I suspect they do, could offer literally thousands of amendments and keep Senate in session for weeks and months.”

Rick Santorum (1958) American politician

2010-02-27
Fox & Friends Saturday
Fox News
Television, quoted in * 2010-02-27
Santorum's health care stall tactic: "Offer literally thousands of amendments" to keep Senate in session for months
Media Matters for America
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201002270003

“Socratic trustworthiness depends upon devices of irony, both spoken and acted. … The irony of words prevents Socrates from being taken as the source of doctrines. The irony of actions prevents Socrates from being made into the literal founder of a philosophic school. … The ironic voice does not seek to possess the student, but directs him, lustlessly, to the desire of philosophy itself.”

Mark D. Jordan (1953)

Authority and persuasion in philosophy (1985)

School , Dependency

“She [Clinton] has a terrible record as secretary of state. I mean, she's literally created ISIS. If you look at her, between her and Obama, they're the ones — we have this big ISIS problem they created with their bad policies and their bad thinking.”

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

On Fox & Friends, as quoted in "TRUMP: 'Hillary Clinton created ISIS with Obama'" http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-created-isis-obama-2016-1 by Colin Campbell, Business Insider (3 January 2016)
2010s, 2016, January

Problem , Thinking

“The kinds of landscape I try to find in my films…exist only in our dreams. For me a true landscape is not just a representation of a desert or a forest. It shows an inner state of mind, literally inner landscapes, and it is the human soul that is visible through the landscapes presented in my films.”

Werner Herzog (1942) German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and opera director

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

Dreams , Soul

“We're all grossly ignorant about most things that we use and encounter in our daily lives, but each of us is knowledgeable about tiny, relatively inconsequential things. For example, a baker might be the best baker in town, but he's grossly ignorant about virtually all the inputs that allow him to be the best baker. What is he likely to know about what goes into the processing of the natural gas that fuels his oven? For that matter, what does he know about oven manufacture? Then, there are all the ingredients he uses -- flour, sugar, yeast, vanilla and milk. Is he likely to know how to grow wheat and sugar and how to protect the crop from diseases and pests? What is he likely to know about vanilla extraction and yeast production? Just as important is the question of how all the people who produce and deliver all these items know what he needs and when he needs them. There are literally millions of people cooperating with one another to ensure that the baker has all the necessary inputs. It's the miracle of the market and prices that gets the job done so efficiently. What's called the market is simply a collection of millions upon millions of independent decision makers not only in America but around the world. Who or what coordinates the activities all of these people? Rest assuredly it's not a bakery czar.”

Walter E. Williams (1936) American economist, commentator, and academic

1970s, Economics for the Citizen (1978)

People , World , Disease , Question

“Creationism offers no explanation whatever for anything while evolution offers a very comprehensive and demonstrably accurate explanation for an awful lot. And evolution is universally supported by an overwhelming preponderance of objectively testable evidence from every relevant field of study, while creationism is supported by nothing whatsoever outside of frauds, falsehoods and fallacies. There is literally no truth to it.”

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

Patheos, Orwellian Legislative Duplicity on HB 1485 http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2017/05/05/orwellian-legislative-duplicity-hb-1485/ (May 5, 2017)

Truth , Support , Fraud , Study

“The most dangerous and at the same time most stupid explanation of fascism is the propaganda theory. In the first place, I have never been able to find anyone who could reconcile it with the fact that right up to the fascist victory—and in Italy beyond it—literally all means of propaganda were in the hands of uncompromising enemies of fascism. There was not one widely-read newspaper but poured ridicule on Hitler and Mussolini while the Nazi and the fascist press were unread and on the verge of bankruptcy. The radio in Germany, owned by the government, issued one anti-Nazi broadside after the other. More powerful than both, the established churches used all the enormous direct influence of the pulpit and the confessional to fight fascism and Nazism.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), pp. 7-8

Stupidity , Time , Reading , Victory

“Every minute everything is different everywhere. It is all flowing... The duty or beauty of a painting is that there is no reason to do it nor any reason not to. It can be done as a direct act or contact with the moment and that is the moment you are awake and moving. It all passes and is never true literally as the present again leaving more work to be done.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

Quote of Rauschenberg (1961), as cited in Introduction, Roberta Bernstein, from catalog 'The White and Black Paintings'
from a recording of a symposium in 1961, Larry Gagosian Gallery, New York, 1986
1960's

Beauty , Painting

“His [Christ’s] point of view, of the literal divine-son ship of every lowliest and most sinful and sinning spirit, committed him logically to the assertion of the implicit equality of all spirits with each other, far as concerns their moral powers and destination no matter what their actual and contingent state; and also of their potential equality with God. His doctrine may well be summarised in the consecrated phrase, usually applied only to himself, "The son of man is the son of God."”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Right Relation of Reason to Religion, p.251

God , Christ

“If the criminal appears as a nonconformist who is unable to meet the demand of technology that we behave in uniform and continuous patterns, literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 31

Appearance

“Only if you admit the existence of god does everything become meaningful. When we bring God into our lives, distinctions lessen and we feel that all people are our own. On the physical plane there is a difference between myself and others, but on the spiritual plane we are the same Satchidananda (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss Absolute). From that standpoint no one can help another—one is only helping oneself. The key to our philanthropy is this: In doing good to others, we try to forget the apparent distinctions between ourselves and other people. The welfare of others is my welfare—that is our attitude. Who does not want his own good? If you believe in God and serve society, you can never feel any resentment…. People may get social merit through philanthropic activities, but if their egos are involved in those activities, they will not get any spiritual merit. Even the result of a good action turns into a bondage if it is done with ego. On the other hand, unselfish actions destroys the bondage of action and bring literation to humanity.”

Swami Adbhutananda Disciple

In reply to western ladies who said that one should give higher place to philanthropy than to God.
Source: God Lived with Them, p.430

God , People , Feeling , Help

“We need an extreme movement because what is happening to animals is so extreme. Some misinformed people claim that animal rights activists are terrorists, but these people are simply ignorant of who the real terrorists are - the companies and industries that torture literally billions of animals each year.”

River Phoenix (1970–1993) American actor, musician, and activist

The Animals Voice Magazine (1989)

People , Animals

“Plato in his allegory of the soul—in the Phaedrus—though he apparently divides the passions which draw the human chariot into two classes, the heavenward and the earthward—figured by the white horse and the black horse respectively—does not recommend that the black horse should be destroyed or dismissed, but only that he (as well as the white horse) should be kept under due control by the charioteer. By which he seems to intend that there is a power in man which stands above and behind the passions, and under whose control alone the human being can safely move. In fact if the fiercer and so-called more earthly passions were removed, half the driving force would be gone from the chariot of the human soul. Hatred may be devilish at times—but after all the true value of it depends on what you hate, on the use to which the passion is put. Anger, though inhuman at one time is magnificent and divine at another. Obstinacy may be out of place in a drawing-room, but it is the latest virtue on a battlefield when an important position has to be held against the full brunt of the enemy. And Lust, though maniacal and monstrous in its aberrations, cannot in the last resort be separated from its divine companion, Love. To let the more amiable passions have entire sway notoriously does not do: to turn your cheek, too literally, to the smiter, is (pace Tolstoy) only to encourage smiting; and when society becomes so altruistic that everybody runs to fetch the coal-scuttle we feel sure that something has gone wrong. The white-washed heroes of our biographies with their many virtues and no faults do not please us. We have an impression that the man without faults is, to say the least, a vague, uninteresting being—a picture without light and shade—and the conventional semi-pious classification of character into good and bad qualities (as if the good might be kept and the bad thrown away) seems both inadequate and false.”

Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) British poet and academic

Defence of Criminals: A Criticism of Morality (1889)

Love , Hate , Feeling , Soul

“The sum total of such policies is a state that is what can only be described as—grammatical propriety notwithstanding—“uniquely unique.” Allow me to give you some examples: North Korea is the world’s sole communist hereditary dynasty, the world’s only literate-industrialized-urbanized peacetime economy to have suffered a famine, the world’s most cultish totalitarian system, and the world’s most secretive, isolated country—albeit one with the world’s largest military in terms of manpower and defense spending proportional to its population and national income. The result is a most abnormal state, one that is able to exercise disproportionate influence in regional politics despite its relatively small territorial and population size and its exceedingly meager economic, political, and soft power, principally through a strategy of external provocations and internal repression.”

Sung-Yoon Lee Korea and East Asia scholar, professor

A similar, shorter, quote also appears here:

Secret , World , Exercises , Suffering

“The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them. I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children.Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children's books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading…It's tosh. It's snobbery and it's foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn't hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian "improving" literature. You'll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)

Love , Children , Pleasure , Books

“The Simplification had ceased to have plan or purpose soon after it began, and became an insane frenzy of mass murder and destruction such as can occur only when the last traces of social order are gone. The madness was transmitted to the children, taught as they were — not merely to forget — but to hate, and surges of mob fury recurred sporadically even through the fourth generation after the Deluge. By then, the fury was directed not against the learned, for there were none, but against the merely literate.”

Walter M. Miller, Jr. book A Canticle for Leibowitz

Ch 6
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Homo

Hate , Children , Learning , Madness

“Who was the first discoverer of the horrible sword? How savage was he and literally iron!”
Quis fuit, horrendos primus qui protulit enses?<br/>quam ferus et vere ferreus ille fuit!

Tibullus (-50–-19 BC) poet and writer (0054-0019)

Quis fuit, horrendos primus qui protulit enses?
quam ferus et vere ferreus ille fuit!
Bk. 1, no. 10, line 1.
Elegies

“The first notion of constructing a free goal-seeking mechanism goes back a wartime talk with the psychologist, Kenneth Craik, whose untimely death was one of the greatest losses Cambridge has suffered in years. When he was engaged on a warjob for the Government, he came to get the help of an automatic analyzer with some very complicated curves he had obtained, curves relating to the aiming errors of air gunners. Goal-seeking missiles were literally much in the air in those days; so, in our minds, were scanning mechanisms. Long before the home study was turned into a workshop, the two ideas, goal-seeking and scanning, had combined as the essential mechanical conception of a working model that would behave like a very simple animal.”

William Grey Walter (1910–1977) American-born British neuroscientist and roboticist

Source: The Living Brain (1953), p. 82.

Death , Error , Home , Idea

“A great surgeon performs operations for stone by a single method; later he makes a statistical summary of deaths and recoveries, and he concludes from these statistics that the mortality law for this operation is two out of five. Well, I say that this ratio means literally nothing scientifically and gives us no certainty in performing the next operation; for we do not know whether the next case will be among the recoveries or the deaths. What really should be done, instead of gathering facts empirically, is to study them more accurately, each in its special determinism…. to discover in them the cause of mortal accidents so as to master the cause and avoid the accidents.”

Claude Bernard (1813–1878) French physiologist

Introduction à l'Étude de la Médecine Expérimentale (1865)

Death , Law , Study

“I knew the minute I heard the "gay inhale". He literally goes "Diva, what are you doing here?". It was heaven! I found my gay, even in Kandahar, Afghanistan! He plonks down next to me, puts the tray down, puts his gun down… he's like "Errghh, girl, I'm on graveyard tonight… I am a wreck… I'm exhausted… my roommates are all snoring, yee-ukk, they're pigs! Anyway, what's going on with Ben and J-Lo?"”

Kathy Griffin (1960) American actress and comedian

Allegedly (2004)

Girl

“The doctrine which thus comes to light, that in art man not only shares literally in the creative office of God, but enriches Nature with new members that express its divine Ground in a still higher form, will seem to many overbold — extravagant and irreverent. But its advocates are neither few nor inconsiderable; it is supported by the greatest names.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Art-Principle as Represented in Poetry, p.188-9

God , Art , Support , Nature

“A woman saying yes to a date with a man is literally insane and ill-advised, and the whole species' existence counts on them doing it. I don't know how they…how do women still go out with guys, when you consider the fact that there is no greater threat to women than men? We're the number one threat to women. Globally and historically, we're the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women. We're the worst thing that ever happens to them. That's true! You know what our number one threat is? Heart disease.”

Louis C.K. (1967) American comedian and actor

Oh My God

Women , Men , Disease , Guy

“As Nozick acknowledges, a modern state should not feel morally constrained by property holdings which might have had a Lockean pedigree but in fact do not. In this regard it is interesting that one of the main uses of Lockean theory these days is in defending the property rights of indigenous people—where a literal claim is being made about who had first possession of a set of resources and about the need to rectify the injustices that accompanied their subsequent expropriation.”

Jeremy Waldron (1953) American lawyer

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – "Property and Ownership" http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/property/

People , Feeling

“The life of Lord Krishna has been misunderstood by many Western commentators. Scriptural allegory is baffling to literal minds. A hilarious blunder by a translator will illustrate this point. The story concerns an inspired medieval saint, the cobbler Ravidas, who sang in the simple terms of his own trade of the spiritual glory hidden in all mankind:
Under the vast vault of blue
Lives the divinity clothed in hide.
One turns aside to hide a smile on hearing the pedestrian interpretation given to Ravidas' poem by a Western writer:
"He afterwards built a hut, set up in it an idol which he made from a hide, and applied himself to its worship."”

Paramahansa Yogananda book Autobiography of a Yogi

Source: Autobiography of a Yogi, Chapter 42 - "Last Days With My Guru"

Life , Smile , Clothes

“A Warning to all
Close minded, petty, or malicious, great and small spirits! Just as the whole plot of Parsifal of the festal play of Richard Wagner is only an allegory, a symbolical depiction with no real occurrence in the material world, so the above explanation of the Graal-secret is not to be understood as literal, personal, material, earthly, relative to vulgar events. But it is only to be understood as totally impersonal, symbolical, and relative on purely spiritual grounds.”

Theodor Reuss (1855–1923) German singer

II. Main Part : The Unveiling of the Secret.
Parsifal and the Secret of the Graal Unveiled (1914)

Secret , World , Personality

“One afternoon I went to visit him. [Jacob, an older and close friend of Jopie - a real freebooter]. I knew he was home, I took pen, ink and my sketchbook with me and did half a liter of gin in my pocket. He lived in the back of an alley and was sitting in his chair by the window.... I told him, 'You will get the whole bottle, but one condition. I want to make a beautiful drawing of you, so first you have to sit still for twenty minutes and look at me closely. If I look at you and you don't look at me, the deal is over....'Okay', he said. I never had a model like him before... Stock-still he sat.... and looked at me without a single blink of his eyes. Within half an hour he was there on the paper - razor-sharp... While I am writing this down, it is as if he is sitting in front of me again..”

Jopie Huisman (1922–2000) Dutch painter

translation, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
version in original Dutch / citaat van Jopie Huisman, in het Nederlands: Op een middag ging ik bij hem op bezoek. [bij Jacob, een oudere en hechte vriend van Jopie en een echte vrijbuiter]. Ik wist dat hij thuis was, nam pen en inkt en mijn schetsboek mee en deed een halve liter jenever in mijn zak. Hij woonde achter in een steegje en zat in zijn stoel bij het raam.. .Ik zei: 'Je krijgt de hele fles van me, onder één voorwaarde. Ik wil een prachtige tekening van je maken en daarvoor moet je eerst twintig minuten doodstil zitten en me strak aankijken. Als ik naar jou kijk en jij kijkt niet naar mij, dan gaat het over.. ..'Afgesproken', zei hij. Ik heb nog nooit zo’n model gehad!.. .Doodstil zat hij.. ..en keek me zonder ook maar één keer met zijn ogen te knipperen strak in mijn gezicht. Binnen een half uur stond hij haarscherp op het papier.. .Terwijl ik dit opschreef was het net alsof hij weer voor me zat.
Source: Jopie de Verteller' (2010) - postumous, p. 58

Beauty , Home , Drawing

“The homeostatic principle does not apply literally to the functioning of all complex living systems, in that in counteracting entropy they move toward growth and expansion.”

Daniel Katz (1903–1998) American psychologist

Source: The Social Psychology of Organizations (1966), p. 23

“The blueprints of verse can be used to build things made of literal, or nonpoetic material, which is why most verse is not poetry.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

“If you look at the graph of the growth of G. M. O. s, the growth of application of glyphosate and autism, it’s literally a one-to-one correspondence. And you could make that graph for kidney failure, you could make that graph for diabetes, you could make that graph even for Alzheimer’s.”

Vandana Shiva (1952) Indian philosopher

On the correlation of autism, kidney failure, diabetes and Alzheimer's with GMOs and glyphosate, as quoted in " Seeds of Doubt http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/25/seeds-of-doubt" by Michael Specter, The New Yorker (25 August 2014)

Failure

“It is never literally true that any form is meaningless and "says nothing." Every form in the world says something. But its message often fails to reach us, and even if it does, full understanding is often withheld from us. ] and, properly speaking, FORM IS THE OUTWARD EXPRESSION OF THIS INNER MEANING.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Part II. About painting : VI. The language of Form and Colour : Footnote
Similar quote in another translation:
There is no form, there is nothing in the world which says nothing. Often - it is true - the message does not reach our soul, either because it has no meaning in and for itself, or - as is more likely – because it has not been conveyed to the right place.. .Every serious work rings inwardly, like the calm and dignified words: 'Here I am!'
Partly cited in: Raymond Firth (2011) Symbols: Public and Private, p. 43
1910 - 1915, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911

World , Understanding

“To pragmatists, the letter Z is nothing more than a phonetically symbolic glyph, a minor sign easily learned, readily assimilated, and occasionally deployed in the course of a literate life. To cynics, Z is just an S with a stick up its butt.”

Tom Robbins book Wild Ducks Flying Backward

Wild Ducks Flying Backward (2005)

Life , Learning

“Literally everything is based on the capacity to attract, retain, and efficiently use talented workers.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 3, e-Business and the New Economy, p. 91

“The earliest achievement of this (of equality and the restriction on the powers of the constitutionally mandated magistrates), the most ancient opposition in Rome, consisted in the abolition of the life-tenure of the presidency of the community; in other words, in the abolition of the monarchy… Not only in Rome (but all over the Italian peninsula) … we find the rulers for life of an earlier epoch superseded in after times by annual magistrates. In this light the reasons which led to the substitution of the consuls for kings in Rome need no explanation. The organism of the ancient Greek and Italian polity through its own action and by a sort of natural necessity produced the limitation of the life-presidency to a shortened, and for the most part an annual, term… Simple, however, as was the cause of the change, it might be brought about in various ways, resolution (of the community),.. or the rule might voluntarily abdicate; or the people might rise in rebellion against a tyrannical ruler, and expel him. It was in this latter way that the monarchy was terminated in Rome. For however much the history of the expulsion of the last Tarquinius, "the proud", may have been interwoven with anecdotes and spun out into a romance, it is not in its leading outlines to be called in question. Tradition credibly enough indicates as the causes of the revolt, that the king neglected to consult the senate and to complete its numbers; that he pronounced sentences of capital punishment and confiscation without advising with his counsellors(sic); that he accumulated immense stores of grain in his granaries, and exacted from the burgesses military labours and task-work beyond what was due… we are (in light of the ignorance of historical facts around the abolition of the monarchy) fortunately in possession of a clearer light as to the nature of the change which was made in the constitution (after the expulsion of the monarchy). The royal power was by no means abolished, as is shown by the fact that, when a vacancy occurred, a "temporary king" (Interrex) was nominated as before. The one life-king was simply replaced by two [one year] kings, who called themselves generals (praetores), or judges…, or merely colleagues (Consuls) [literally, "Those who leap or dance together"]. The collegiate principle, from which this last - and subsequently most current - name of the annual kings was derived, assumed in their case an altogether peculiar form. The supreme power was not entrusted to the two magistrates conjointly, but each consul possessed and exercised it for himself as fully and wholly as it had been possessed and exercised by the king; and, although a partition of functions doubtless took place from the first - the one consul for instance undertaking the command of the army, and the other the administration of justice - that partition was by no means binding, and each of the colleagues was legally at liberty to interfere at any time in the province of the other.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 1, Book II , Chapter 1. "Change of the Constitution" Translated by W.P. Dickson
The History of Rome - Volume 1

Life , People , Justice , Way

“Frankfurt, discussing a stuntman: "He missed being killed in that shot be literally half an inch.”

Guillermo del Toro (1964) Mexican film director

“[T]he Christian philosopher of to-day has larger capacities and fuller knowledge than the Israelite of the time of Moses. What the one accepted as literal truth the other cannot accept save as a myth or figure. The children of Israel received without idealisation the statements of their great lawgiver. To them the tables of the law were true tablets of stone, prepared, engraved, broken, and re-engraved; while the graving tool which thus inscribed the law was held undoubtingly to be the finger of God. To us such conceptions are impossible. We may by habit use the words, but we attach to them no definite meaning.”

John Tyndall (1820–1893) British scientist

p, 125
New Fragments (1892)

God , Children , Truth , Law

“No one is truly literate who cannot read his own heart.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Section 159
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

Reading , Heart

“The reason of a commandment, whether positive or negative, is clear, and its usefulness evident, if it directly tends to remove injustice, or to teach good conduct that furthers the well-being of society, or to impart a truth which ought to be believed either on its own merit or as being indispensable for facilitating the removal of injustice or the teaching of good morals. There is no occasion to ask for the object of such commandments; for no one can, e. g., be in doubt as to the reason why we have been commanded to believe that God is one; why we are forbidden to murder, steal, and to take vengeance, or to retaliate, or why we are commanded to love one another. But there are precepts concerning which people are in doubt, and of divided opinions, some believing they are mere commands, and serve no purpose whatever, whilst others believe that they serve a certain purpose, which, however is unknown to man. Such are those precepts which in their literal meaning do not seem to further any of the three above-named results: to impart some truth, to teach some moral, or to remove injustice. They do not seem to have any influence upon the well-being of the soul by imparting any truth, or upon the well-being of the body by suggesting such ways and rules as are useful in the government of a state, or in the management of a household. …I will show that all these and similar laws must have some bearing upon one of the following three things, viz., the regulation of our opinions, or the improvement of our social relations, which implies two things, the removal of injustice, and the teaching of good morals.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.28

Love , God , People , Truth

“When I want to do a painting with one colour overlapping another, it has to be a real overlap, not a depicted overlap. I didn't want to paint an overlap, meaning that it would be a deception or illusion. I no longer wanted to depict space, but to make a work that existed in literal space. Thus, my recent works are one canvas as a relief over another canvas. Another important example of a panel painting that explores the idea of the mural was Red Yellow Blue White 1952. It's the only one I ever did using actual dyed fabric of ready-made colours, which moves the painting into the realm of real objects.”

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

1981 - 2008
Source: 'Colour Chart I', interview with Christoph Grunenberg, 1 May 2009; 'Sixty years at full intensity', Tate 2009

Idea , Painting

“The part that wasn't a jackpot was his baseball mound of red pubic hair that looked like it had literally been attached with a glue gun. I couldn't believe how much there was, and wondered how he had never heard of scissors, or--more appropriate for that kind of growth--hedge trimmers. I didn't understand what porn he was watching to not be aware of the trimming that was happening all across the world among his compatriots. I'm not a finicky person when it comes to pubic hair maintenance and I certainly don't expect men to shave it all off, leaving themselves to look like a hairless cat. That's even creepier then than seeing what Austin had, which could really only be compared to one thing: A clown in a leg lock.”

Chelsea Handler (1975) American comedian, actress, author and talk show host

Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea (2008)

Men , World , Cats , Understanding

“I recently had to wait two and a half hours in a doctor's office, just waiting to be seen. I literally was genuinely thinking "Well, maybe this is a time loop", because nothing seemed to be happening, no progress of any kind seemed to be being made, so I think we've all fallen into those time loops.”

Jane Espenson (1964) American television writer and producer

Interview at "Loopy" at BBC (2002) http://bbc.adactio.com/cult/buffy/interviews/espenson2002/page6.shtml

Thinking , Time , Waiting

“.. the thinking man is no longer the center of the universe, but the universe is the center of the man [referring to collaborations between artists, in which Klein was involved several times]. We shall then know 'prestige' in comparison to the 'vertigo' of before. Thus we shall become men of the air, we shall know the upward force of attraction, towards space, towards nowhere and everywhere at once; having thus mastered the earthly force of attraction we shall literally levitate in complete physical and spiritual freedom.”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

Quote in: "Discours pronounce a l'occasion de l'exposition Tinguely a Düsseldorf", Jan. 1959; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, (translated by Trista Selous), Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 127
before 1960

Men , Thinking , Freedom , Universe

“Since every man desires happiness, it is evidently no small matter whether he conceives of happiness in terms of work or of enjoyment. If he work in the full ethical sense that I have attempted to define, he is pulling back and disciplining his temperamental self with reference to some standard. In short, his temperamental self is, in an almost literal sense, undergoing conversion. The whole of life may, indeed, be summed up in the words diversion and conversion. Along which of these two main paths are most of us seeking the happiness to the pursuit of which we are dedicated by our Declaration of Independence? The author of this phrase, Thomas Jefferson, remarks of himself: "I am an Epicurean."”

Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) American academic and literary criticism

Source: "Democracy and Standards" (1924), pp. 137-138

Life , Sense , Happiness

“Some of the surveillance was ostensibly devoted to terrorism suspects. But great quantities of the programs manifestly had nothing to do with national security. The documents left no doubt that the NSA was equally involved in economic espionage, diplomatic spying, and suspicionless surveillance aimed at entire populations. Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimately simple conclusion: the US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide. Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe.”

Glenn Greenwald book No Place to Hide

Penguin Books 2015 edition, page 94.
No Place to Hide (2014)

People , Communication

“[Jensen] does not believe that [heritability] estimates alone can decide the issue of genetic versus environmental hypotheses. However, he argues that the probability of a genetic hypothesis will be much enhanced if, in addition to evidencing high [heritability], we find we can falsify literally every plausible environmental hypothesis one by one. He challenges social scientists who believe in an environmental explanation of the IQ gap between the races to bring their hypotheses forward. Given his competence and the present state of the social sciences, the result is something of a massacre…. Far too many of Jensen's critics have not taken up the challenge to refute him in any serious way, rather they have elected for various forms of escape, the most popular of which has been to seize on an argument put forward by the distinguished Harvard geneticist Richard C. Lewontin.”

James Robert Flynn (1934–2020) New Zealand scholar

Source: Race, IQ, and Jensen (1980), pp. 40, 54. Quoted from Nevin Sesardic, Making Sense of Heritability (2005), p. 136.

Way , Science

“During our brief stay on planet Earth, we owe ourselves and our descendants the opportunity to explore—in part because it's fun to do. But there's a far nobler reason. The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their "low contracted prejudices." And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace the cosmic perspective.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

2000s

People , World , Knowledge , Universe

“I find a way to ground myself, literally by using the ground of places near where I live.”

Anne Simpson (1956) Canadian poet

Susan Olding Interview (February 23, 2010)

Way

“As late as the summer of 1941, the Atlantic Monthly, then a still respected magazine for literates and edited by White men, published a long article by Albert Jay Nock, in which he proved that the Jews are an Oriental race that is incompatible with ours. He was not punished and the magazine was not destroyed, strange and almost incredible as that seems today.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"A World Grown Grey With Their Breath", Liberty Bell magazine (January 1988)
1970s, 1980s

Men , Summer

“The tendency of the families of wealth in every country to form a class by themselves, is deep-set in the human makeup. Rome carried the tendency one step further — she cemented the moneyed class in the various countries into an international combine. "Peace and order" were at last secure. An antitoxin against insomnia had been devised. Slave owners could now lay their heads on their pillows at night, without the fear of insurrection gnawing them through the night-watches. An uprising of the toiling masses, no matter how formidable, could be handled. Upon a rebellious district could be mobilized in shortest time six and twenty legions. The machinery of intimidation was complete. Man was undermost, and property paramount. The "Golden Age" — literally — set in. The Roman Empire, that apotheosis of property rights, fastened itself upon the world. Embracing all nations and tongues and climates, a motley crew, they had one cohering principle which swallowed up their diversities — the coherence of a common plunder.”

Bouck White (1874–1951) American author and novelist

Source: The Call of the Carpenter (1914), pp. 15-16

Money , Age , World , Fear

“The central assertion of this view, I repeat, is that each new stage of words literally created new perceptions and attentions, and such new perceptions and attentions resulted in important cultural changes which are reflected in the archaeological record.”

Julian Jaynes book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Book I, Chapter 6, p. 132 (Italics as per text...)
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)

Change

“My grandmother was a fearless Greek warrioress, and very protective of her land. She literally ordered some Nazi soldiers to get off one of her fields pointing a gun at them.”

Angelique Rockas South African actress and founder of Internationalist Theatre, London

On the Greek heritage to resist
Interview on Helenism .net (September 2011)

“I reluctantly concluded that there was no way for me to help bring into being the Muslim culture I'd dreamed of, the progressive, irreverent, skeptical, argumentative, playful and unafraid culture which is what I've always understood as freedom. Not me, not in this lifetime, no chance. Actually Existing Islam, which has all but deified its Prophet, a man who always fought passionately against such deification, which has supplanted a priest-free religion by a priest-ridden one, which makes literalism a weapon and redescription a crime, will never let the likes of me in.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

Address at Columbia University (1991)

Religion , Dreams , Way , Freedom

“It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. These are often as highly structured and selective as myths. Images and symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information, on our sensibility. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"The Great Ennui".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Sense , Past

“The Greeks, who were apparently strong on visual aids, originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier. The signs were cut or burnt into the body and advertised that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor — a blemished person, ritually polluted, to be avoided, especially in public places. Later, in Christian times, two layers of metaphor were added to the term : the first referred to bodily signs of holy grace that took the form of eruptive blossoms on the skin; the second, a medical allusion to this religious allusion, referred to bodily signs of physical disorder. Today the term is widely used in something like the original literal sense, but is applied more to the disgrace itself than to the bodily evidence of it. Furthermore, shifts have occurred in the kinds of disgrace that arouse concern. Students, however, have made little effort to describe the structural preconditions of stigma, or even to provide a definition of the concept itself. It seems necessary, therefore, to try at the beginning to sketch in some very general assumptions and definitions.”

Erving Goffman book Stigma

Source: 1950s-1960s, Stigma, 1963, p. 1-2 Lead paragraph

Sense , Effort , Strong , Time

“Within the scientific skeleton of truth, religious meaning attempts to flourish, often by denying the scientific framework itself — rather like sawing off the branch where you cheerily perch. The disgust is mutual because modern science gleefully denies virtually all the basic tenets of religion in general. According to the typical view of modern science, religion is not much more than a holdover from the childhood of humanity, with about as much reality as, say, Santa Claus. Whether the religious claims are more literal (Moses parting the Red Sea) or more mystical (religion invovlves direct spiritual experience) modern science denies them all, simply because there is no credible empirical evidence for any of them.”

Ken Wilber (1949) American writer and public speaker

The Marriage of Sense and Soul (1998)

Truth , Religion , Reality , Science

“Non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 41

Photo , Training

“When Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers in 1981, he told America he was literally willing to kill us all if we didn't give in to his wealth-transfer plan. It was so shocking that it worked. The air controller's union broke- and so did a whole way of life. Thanks to Ronald Reagan, we are all miserable wage slaves, or schoolyard wretches being pressed and prepared for life in the office world. There is no other choice but that, or death. The way this country supplicated before Reagan's corpse, elevating him to a kind of Khomeini status with the seven-day funeral and the endless orations about his humanity, his intelligence, and how wonderfully simple life was under his reign, only reinforced the most disturbing conclusion that I was reaching as I wrote this book: that Americans have become the perfect slaves, fools and suckers, while a small elite is cackling all the way to the offshore bank.”

Mark Ames (1965) American writer and journalist

Postscript, p. 241-242
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)

Life , Death , Books , World

“Immediately I knew that was problematic [being paired on a television show with John Lewis]. Because the show starts with our bios, and it starts with, ‘John Lewis, hero of the civil rights movement stood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. … He literally bled the southern soil red. And then it goes to me. ‘Cory Booker, riding his Big Wheel in affluent suburbia, falls off and skins his knee: He bled the New Jersey soil red.’ And so you are very aware if you were born after the civil rights movement, if you were born in my generation, that you stand on the shoulders of giants.”

Cory Booker (1969) 35th Class 2 senator for New Jersey in U.S. Congress

[Kopan, Tal, Black senators eye future generation, https://www.politico.com/story/2014/02/black-senators-meeting-tim-scott-103928, 21 August 2018, Politico, February 26, 2014]
2014

“We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. "No one sees the barn," he said finally. A long silence followed. "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn." He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others. We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies." There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. "Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism."”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

Another silence ensued. "They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.”
White Noise (1984)

People , Books , Cars , Color

“The panic over public health care is funny and sad, since America has had death panels and sinister bureaucrats for years. They're called Aetna, Humana, and Wellpoint, they make a killing, figuratively and literally.”

Laura Penny (1975) Canadian journalist

Source: More Money than Brains (2010), Chapter Five, Bully vs. Nerd, p. 139

Death , Health , Sadness

“Art in its unblemished nature, like religion and the search for truth, is thus literally a sacrament. The artist's calling and genius are sacred, and the men of old spoke with strict accuracy when they called the poet holy, and directed that he be venerated as a prophet.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Art-Principle as Represented in Poetry, p.199-200

Men , Truth , Religion , Art

“Since some ecclesiastics deem it right to stand always by the literal meaning of the holy scripture and do not agree that anything in it was said through enigmas and allegories for our benefit, I consider it necessary first to speak in defense of these things to those who bring such accusation against us, because in our view there is nothing unreasonable in our seriously studying all possible means of tracking down the benefit to be had from the divinely inspired scripture.”

Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) bishop of Nyssa

Commentary on the Song of Songs, As translated by Margaret M. Mitchell in Paul, the Corinthians and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics (2010)

Study

“Time expands in all directions, and away from any given point. The past is never finished, and the future is never completely formed. You choose to experience certain versions of events. You then organize these, nibbling at them, so to speak, a bit "at a time." The creativity of any given entity is endless, and yet all of the potentials for experience will be explored… You follow in terms of continuity one version of yourself at any given "time"… Quite literally, you live more than one life at a time. You do not experience your century simply from one separate vantage point, and the individuals alive in any given century have far deeper connections that you realize. You do not experience your space-time world, then, from one but from many viewpoints.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The “Unknown” Reality: Volume Two, (1979), p. 462-463

Life , World , Time , Past

“Becoming aware of the intense suffering of billions of animals, and of our own participation in that suffering, can bring up painful emotions: sorrow and grief for the animals; anger at the injustice and deception of the system; despair at the enormity of the problem; fear that trusted authorities and institutions are, in fact, untrustworthy; and guilt for having contributed to the problem. Bearing witness means choosing to suffer. Indeed, empathy is literally “feeling with.” Choosing to suffer is particularly difficult in a culture that is addicted to comfort—a culture that teaches that pain should be avoided whenever possible and that ignorance is bliss. We can reduce our resistance to witnessing by valuing authenticity over personal pleasure, and integration over ignorance.”

Melanie Joy book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows

Source: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (2010), pp. 142-143

Pain , Pleasure , Fear , Feeling

“[Labour will deal with racketeering in the price of land. ] I call that a socialist theme. Yes, and I should have thought a Liberal theme. That great modernizing party on this theme at least at Scarborough last week carried through an exercise in recidivism which places its present leadership some years behind the Liberals some 60 years ago. In 1909 and 1910 they filled the land with song—'God gave the land to the people'. Now in 1965 we have the first fruits of Liberal revisionism. While they would not intend to throw doubt on the Almighty's intention in this respect, their researches suggest he did not intend this declaration to be taken too literally.”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool (28 September 1965), quoted in The Times (29 September 1965), p. 5.

God , People , Exercises

“Shattuck and I were particularly concerned with the activities of Zeljko Raznatovic, popularly known as Arkan, one of the most notorious men in the Balkans. Even in former Yugoslavia, Arkan was something special, a freelance murderer who roamed across Bosnia and eastern Slavonia with his black-shirted men, terrorizing Muslims and Croats. To the rest of the world Arkan was a racist fanatic run amok, but many Serbs regarded him as a hero. His private army, the Tigers, had committed some of the war's worst atrocities, carrying out summary executions and virtually inventing ethnic cleansing in 1991-92. Western intelligence was convinced he worked, or had worked, for the Yugoslav secret police. (…) Althought the [Hague ICTY] Tribunal had handed down over fifty indictment by October 1995, these did not include Arkan. I pressed Goldstone [Richard Goldstone, ICTY president] on this matter several times, but because a strict wall separated the tribunal's internal deliberations from the American government, he wouold not tell us why Arkan had not been indicted. This was expecially puzzling given Goldstone's stature and his public criticisms of the international peacekeeping forces for not arresting any of the indicted war criminals. Whenever I mentioned Arkan's name to Milosevic, he seemed annoyed. He did not mind criticism of Karadzic or Mladic, but Arkan - who lived in Belgrade, ran a popular restaurant, and was married to a rock star - was a different matter. Milosevic dismissed Arkan as a "peanut issue", and claimed he had no influence over him. But Arkan's activities in western Bosnia decreased immediately after my complaints. This was hardly a victory, however, because Arkan at large remained a dangerous force and a powerful signal that one could still get away with murder - literally - in Bosnia.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), pp. 189-190

Men , War , Secret , World

“Sylvester: What about figuration in a more literal sense?”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

1950 - 1960, Interview with David Sylvester, BBC (March 1960)

Sense

“[bible_banging]But what we've got going wrong is we've got a kind of bifurcation [in cultural development]:
You take your classified telephone directory, and open up "Churches", and have a ruler in your hand. And you will find that the longest space is occupied by authoritarian, Bible-banging churches. And these people are barbarians, who take the written word of the Bible literally. Because they need terribly, they have a personal need, for something to depend on. … The government realizes that there is a very large number of people like that; and therefore, to keep their votes, they have to pander to those kind of people. And these are the boys who never grew up; they always need Papa. … The trouble is that the boys who need Papa, are violent. They have the guns. And they are the types of people who like to be soldiers, policemen — tough guys. And therefore they have a great deal of power.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Interviewed on Les Hixon's show "In The Spirit" on WBAI New York (November 1972)

People , Guy , Boy , Dependency

“The attraction is strong, because both men literally laid down their lives for their brothers. "Greater love hath no man than this." "Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." Che Guevara wrote this,”

Dorothy Day (1897–1980) Social activist

"On Pilgrimage — Our Spring Appeal," Catholic Worker (May 1970)
Context: "What do you mean by anarchist-pacifist?" First, I would say that the two words should go together, especially … when more and more people, even priests, are turning to violence, and are finding their heroes in Camillo Torres among the priests, and Che Guevara among laymen. The attraction is strong, because both men literally laid down their lives for their brothers. "Greater love hath no man than this." "Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." Che Guevara wrote this, and he is quoted by Chicano youth in El Grito Del Norte.

Love , Men , Feeling , Strong

“We define (and so come to feel) the individual in the light of our narrowed "spotlight" consciousness which largely ignores the field or environment in which he is found. "Individual" is the Latin form of the Greek "atom"—that which cannot be cut or divided any further into separate parts. We cannot chop off a person's head or remove his heart without killing him. But we can kill him just as effectively by separating him from his proper environment. This implies that the only true atom is the universe—that total system of interdependent "thing-events" which can be separated from each other only in name. For the human individual is not built as a car is built. He does not come into being by assembling parts, by screwing a head on to a neck, by wiring a brain to a set of lungs, or by welding veins to a heart. Head, neck, heart, lungs, brain, veins, muscles, and glands are separate names but not separate events, and these events grow into being simultaneously and interdependently. In precisely the same way, the individual is separate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being. This is—rather literally—to be spellbound.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 53

Fools , Cars , Way , Feeling

“The literacy rate is below 5%. I haven't talked to one person who is literate.”

Jared Lee Loughner (1988) Charged with 2011 Tucson shooting

MySpace post morning of shooting — —
Context: Goodbye friends. Please don't be mad at me. The literacy rate is below 5%. I haven't talked to one person who is literate. I want to make it out alive. The longest war in the history of the United States. Goodbye. I'm saddened with the current currency and job employment. I had a bully at school. Thank you. P. S. --plead the fifth!

Personality

“He {Wilhelm Reich} had a great capacity to arouse irrational hatred obviously, and that's because his ideas were radical in the most extreme sense of the word "radical." His ideas have something to offend everybody, and he ended up becoming the only heretic in American history whose books were literally burned by the government.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

"Robert Anton Wilson on Wilhelm Reich" (March 1995)
Context: He {Wilhelm Reich} had a great capacity to arouse irrational hatred obviously, and that's because his ideas were radical in the most extreme sense of the word "radical." His ideas have something to offend everybody, and he ended up becoming the only heretic in American history whose books were literally burned by the government.
Timothy Leary spent five years in prison for unorthodox scientific ideas. Ezra Pound spent 13 years in a nuthouse for unorthodox political and economic ideas. Their books were not burned.
Reich was not only thrown in prison, but they chopped up all the scientific equipment in his laboratory with axes and burned all of his books in an incinerator. Now that interests me as a civil liberties issue.
When I started studying Reich's works, I went through a period of enthusiasm, followed by a period of skepticism, followed by a period of just continued interest, but I think a lot of his ideas probably were sound. A lot probably were unsound. And, I'm not a Reichian in the sense of somebody who thinks he was the greatest scientist who ever lived and discovered the basic secrets of psychology, physics and everything else, all in one lifetime. But I think he has enough sound ideas that his unpopular ideas deserve further investigation.

Books , History , Idea , Sense

“The Master said: "Everything that exists is God." The pupil understood it literally, but not in the true spirit.”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

Saying 15
Râmakrishna : His Life and Sayings (1898)
Context: The Master said: "Everything that exists is God." The pupil understood it literally, but not in the true spirit. While he was passing through a street, he met with an elephant. The driver (mahut) shouted aloud from his high place, "Move away, move away!" The pupil argued in his mind, "Why should I move away? I am God, so is the elephant also God. What fear has God of Himself?" Thinking thus he did not move. At last the elephant took him up by his trunk, and dashed him aside. He was severely hurt, and going back to his Master, he related the whole adventure. The Master said, "All right, you are God. The elephant is God also, but God in the shape of the elephant-driver was warning you also from above. Why did you not pay heed to his warnings?"

God

“All literate men are sustained by the philosopher, the historian, the political analyst, the economist, the scientist, the poet, the artisan and the musician.”

Glenn T. Seaborg (1912–1999) American scientist

Statement upon being appointed as UC Berkeley chancellor in 1958, as quoted Biographical Memoirs (2000) edited by Darleane C. Hoffman, p, 252 
Context: There is a beauty in discovery. There is mathematics in music, a kinship of science and poetry in the description of nature, and exquisite form in a molecule. Attempts to place different disciplines in different camps are revealed as artificial in the face of the unity of knowledge. All literate men are sustained by the philosopher, the historian, the political analyst, the economist, the scientist, the poet, the artisan and the musician.

Men

“We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. …Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 4

Fate , Evil

“I literally thought when I was 15 that I was a musical genius and I could change the world, but in fact you're not and you can't and you don't, and that realisation is almost heartbreaking.”

Katie Melua (1984) British singer-songwriter

Context: The last verse [In My Secret Life] completely got to me, about how we all have great ideals but in reality we end up conforming, following everyone else. We want to be stronger so we lead that life inside, thinking of ourselves as these great brave souls. I literally thought when I was 15 that I was a musical genius and I could change the world, but in fact you're not and you can't and you don't, and that realisation is almost heartbreaking.

World , Music , Change

“A novel, or indeed any work of art, is not intended to be a literal transcription from Nature.”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

Writing on Charles Dickens, in "In Defence of an Obsolete Author" in William and Mary College Monthly (November 1897), VII, p. 3-4
Context: A novel, or indeed any work of art, is not intended to be a literal transcription from Nature. … Life is a series of false values. There it is always the little things that are greatest. Art attempts to remedy this. It may be defined as an expurgated edition of Nature.

Art , Nature

“All the circumstances stand ready. The fructifying minerals are literally jumping out of the ground. And nothing grows.”

R. A. Lafferty (1914–2002) American writer

The Day After the World Ended, notes for a speech at DeepSouthCon'79, New Orleans (21 July 1979), later published in It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs (1995)
Context: In its flexibility and in its wide-open opportunities, this is the total Utopia. Anything that you can conceive of, you can do in this non-world. Nothing can stop you except a total bankruptcy of creativity. The seedbed is waiting. All the circumstances stand ready. The fructifying minerals are literally jumping out of the ground. And nothing grows. And nothing grows. And nothing grows. Well, why doesn't it?

“Literal translations:”

Victor Hugo book The History of a Crime

On résiste à l'invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l'invasion des idées.
One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas.
One withstands the invasion of armies; one does not withstand the invasion of ideas.
Histoire d'un Crime (The History of a Crime) [written 1852, published 1877], Conclusion, ch. X. Trans. T.H. Joyce and Arthur Locker http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Histoire_d%E2%80%99un_crime_-_Conclusion#X.
Alternative translations and paraphrased variants:
One cannot resist an idea whose time has come.
No one can resist an idea whose time has come.
Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.
Armies cannot stop an idea whose time has come.
No army can stop an idea whose time has come.
Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come.
There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.
Many of these paraphrases have a closer match in a passage from Gustave Aimard's earlier-published novel Les Francs-Tireurs (1861):
there is something more powerful than the brute force of bayonets: it is the idea whose time has come and hour struck
Original French: Il y a quelque chose de plus puissant que la force brutale des baïonnettes: c'est l'idée dont le temps est venu et l'heure est sonnée
Source: [The Freebooters, Gustave, Aimard, (tr. unknown), 1861, London, Ward and Lock, 57, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/chi.087603619?urlappend=%3Bseq=67]
Source: [Les Francs Tireurs, Gustave, Aimard, 1861, Paris, Amyot, 68, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.$b596684?urlappend=%3Bseq=76]

“The Kabbalah, literally 'tradition,' that is, the tradition of things divine, is the sum of Jewish mysticism.”

Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) German-born Israeli philosopher and historian

Introduction
On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (1960)
Context: The Kabbalah, literally 'tradition,' that is, the tradition of things divine, is the sum of Jewish mysticism. It has had a long history and for centuries has exerted a profound influence on those among the Jewish people who were eager to gain a deeper understanding of the traditional forms and conceptions of Judaism. The literary production of the Kabbalists, more intensive in certain periods than in others, has been stored up in an impressive number of books, many of them dating back to the late Middle Ages. For many centuries the chief literary work of this movement, the Zohar, or 'Book of Splendor,' was widely revered as a sacred text of unquestionable value, and in certain Jewish communities it enjoys such esteem to this day.

“I literally never meet anybody who ever talks about God as something other than a kind of big man. I think God is a wondrous spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, but only interested in men as part of a giant creation which is pulsing with life.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Judith Grant interview (1999)
Context: I literally never meet anybody who ever talks about God as something other than a kind of big man. I think God is a wondrous spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, but only interested in men as part of a giant creation which is pulsing with life.
People say, when a relative dies: "Oh, how could God have taken her away so young and with so much before her?" God doesn't give a bugger about how young she is. He probably isn't noticing particularly. That's just the way a lot of things happen. A lot gets spilled, you know, in nature. When you look at what's going on out there now, those trees are dropping seeds by literally the hundreds of thousands and millions, and one or two of them may take on. I think that that is the way that God functions. He doesn't care nearly as much about individuals and individual fates as we would like to suppose. But by trying to ally ourselves with the totality of things, we may get into Tao as they say in the East and be part of it, really take part in it, and not just regard ourselves as a kind of miraculous creation and the rest just sort of stage scenery against which we perform.

Life , Men , God , Thinking

“The principal tenet of Jainism is non-harming. Observant Jains will literally not harm a fly.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Q&A with Sam Harris (2005) http://www.samharris.org/press/Q&A-with-Sam-Harris.pdf
2000s
Context: The principal tenet of Jainism is non-harming. Observant Jains will literally not harm a fly. Fundamentalist Jainism and fundamentalist Islam do not have the same consequences, neither logically nor behaviorally.

Flying

“Humans can be literally poisoned by false ideas and false teachings.”

Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) Polish scientist and philosopher

Source: Manhood of Humanity (1921), p. 71. Chapter: What is Man?
Context: Humans can be literally poisoned by false ideas and false teachings. Many people have a just horror at the thought of putting poison into tea or coffee, but seem unable to realize that, when they teach false ideas and false doctrines, they are poisoning the time-binding capacity of their fellow men and women. One has to stop and think! There is nothing mystical about the fact that ideas and words are energies which powerfully affect the physico-chemical base of our time-binding activities. Humans are thus made untrue to "human nature." … The conception of man as a mixture of animal and supernatural has for ages kept human beings under the deadly spell of the suggestion that, animal selfishness and animal greediness are their essential character, and the spell has operated to suppress their REAL HUMAN NATURE and to prevent it from expressing itself naturally and freely.

Idea , Falseness

“Born of necessity, the little fellow literally freed us of immediate worry.”

Walt Disney (1901–1966) American film producer and businessman

Quoted in A Walt Disney World Resort Outing : The Only Vacation Planning Guide Exclusively for Gay and Lesbian Travelers (2002) by Dann Hazel and Josh Fippen, p. 211, and Organisation And Complexity : Using Complexity Science to Theorise Organisational Aliveness (2004) by Jacco van Uden, p. 43
Context: Mickey Mouse is, to me, a symbol of independence. He was a means to an end. He popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner. Born of necessity, the little fellow literally freed us of immediate worry. He provided the means for expanding our organization to its present dimensions and for extending the medium of cartoon animation toward new entertainment levels. He spelled production liberation for us.

“I am speaking literally about a real happening, the end of the world in which we lived till fairly recent years.”

R. A. Lafferty (1914–2002) American writer

The Day After the World Ended, notes for a speech at DeepSouthCon'79, New Orleans (21 July 1979), later published in It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs (1995)
Context: Science Fiction has long been babbling about cosmic destructions and the ending of either physical or civilized worlds, but it has all been displaced babble. SF has been carrying on about near-future or far-future destructions and its mind-set will not allow it to realize that the destruction of our world has already happened in the quite recent past, that today is "The Day After The World Ended". … I am speaking literally about a real happening, the end of the world in which we lived till fairly recent years. The destruction or unstructuring of that world, which is still sometimes referred to as "Western Civilization" or "Modern Civilization", happened suddenly, some time in the half century between 1912 and 1962. That world, which was "The World" for a few centuries, is gone. Though it ended quite recently, the amnesia concerning its ending is general. Several historiographers have given the opinion that these amnesias are features common to all "ends of worlds". Nobody now remembers our late world very clearly, and nobody will ever remember it clearly in the natural order of things. It can't be recollected because recollection is one of the things it took with it when it went...

World

Quotes about literate page 6

Quotes about literate
page 6