Quotes about living
page 74

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist

Notebooks

“An example of such emergent phenomena is the origin of life from non-living chemical compounds in the oldest, lifeless oceans of the earth. Here, aided by the radiation energy received from the sun, countless chemical materials were synthesized and accumulated in such a way that they constituted, as it were, a primeval “soup.” In this primeval soup, by infinite variations of lifeless growth and decay of substances during some billions of years, the way of life was ultimately reached, with its metabolism characterized by selective assimilation and dissimulation as end stations of a sluiced and canalized flow of free chemical energy.”

Reinout Willem van Bemmelen (1904–1983) Dutch geologist

Source: "The Scientific Character of Geology," 1961, p. 458, as cited in: Reinout Willem van Bemmelen - Today In Science History http://todayinsci.com/V/VanBemmelen_RW/VanBemmelenRW-Quotations.htm, 1999-2014

Life, Way, Sun

“Handsome, strong, gay … She felt again the thro and lilt of her blood. She had loved Kameni in that moment. She loved him now. Kameni could take the place that Khay had held in her life. She thought: "We shall be happy together - yes, we shall be happy. We shall live together and take pleasure in each other and we shall have strong, handsome children. There will be busy days full of work … and days of pleasure when we sail on the River…Life will be again as I knew it with Khay…What could I ask more than that? What do I want more than that?"”

Agatha Christie book Death Comes as the End

Death Comes as the End (1945)

Love, Life, Happiness, Children

“It became evident to me long before the war was over that the effect of it, which would hit this country hardest in the years immediately succeeding, was the tragedy of the loss of the men who were just qualifying and getting ready to be the leaders of our younger men…There is nothing in the first twenty years after the war that can make good to this country the loss of so many men of that age. And that was an additional reason why we men who were middle-aged already when the war began should have banded ourselves together by the time the war ended under a vow to our better selves that we would give for the rest of our lives, as a thank-offering to the dead, nothing but the best services we could render to our country. It has become our lot not to seek the ease that we might legitimately seek, but to carry on to the end and help the next generation that is coming along—the generation that was too young to fight—help that to take its place as and when the time comes. It is, and it will be, a tremendous burden on the older men, but it is their proud contribution—the giving of the best they can to help a broken and a shattered world.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Leeds (13 March 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 63-64.
1925

Men, War, Age, World

“I mean seriously. If the book had a solid pub date, don't you think I'd mention it? Do you think I'd sit here at home, rubbing my hands together and chortling: "Yes! If I withhold this information another week, I'm sure to get another 100 e-mails asking me about the book!"
Yup. That's exactly what I'd do. Because obviously I am some sort of alien life form that lives on snarky fanmail and bitchy blog comments. Since I became stranded on your strange world years ago, they have been my only means of sustenance.”

Patrick Rothfuss (1973) American fantasy writer

A sign of things to come… (18 February 2010) http://blog.patrickrothfuss.com/2010/02/signs-of-things-to-come/comment-page-3/ Official site

Life, Books, World, Home

“Languages are not owned
by nations but by the people who use them
and make them live.”

Abdourahman A. Waberi (1965) Djiboutian writer

A contribution for the WikiAfrica Literature Project

People

“Some argue that the Bible doesn’t really say some of the things we can prove that it does, while others are convinced that it clearly does say things that it doesn’t really even hint at anywhere. For example, the idea that there was no death before “the fall”. The Bible doesn’t say that. In fact, it says there was death before the fall, because Adam and Eve had to ingest and digest living cells in order to survive, the very definition of what it means to be an animal. The only way around that was to eat of the fruit of the tree of eternal life, which directly contradicts the creationist’s interpretation, because it wouldn’t need to be there if they already had eternal life. It is an obvious metaphor representing a choice, perhaps between innocence and responsibility. That too is an interpretation. But it was obviously not an actual deciduous plant!”

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

"3rd Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnj7PlqmJ5o, Youtube (December 10, 2007) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Life, Death, Way, Idea

“I write this sitting in my hand-built adobe-style home looking out on the Bitterroot Valley… It's a place where the "Old" West and the "New" confront one another daily in often bazarre ways. …I'm sort of a New Westerner myself. Because of relatively recent inventions like solar panels, satellites, cell phones, composting toilets, and four-wheel drive vehicles, I'm able to live where no one has since the Salish had the valley. …perhaps it all just seems new because the prism through which we're accustomed to view the history of the region has only recently been polished sufficiently to gain the deep view.”

Dan Flores (1948) American historian

The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (2003)

Way, Home, History

“If there was a lot of emotion in my voice today, it's because we've all been waiting for this day for a long time. It felt so great, … the people at this company are doing the best work of their lives, the best work that Apple has ever done.”

Tim Cook (1960) American business executive

usatoday.com http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/09/09/tim-cook-interview-usa-today/15312749/

People, Time, Waiting

“As the strata of the earth preserve in succession the living creatures of past epochs, so the shelves of libraries preserve in succession the errors of the past and their expositions, which like the former were very lively and made a great commotion in their own age but now stand petrified and stiff in a place where only the literary palaeontologist regards them.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Vol. 2 "On Books and Writing" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims

Age, Error, Success, Past

“It is possible not to think about something for a long time, even something unpleasant that happened to you. But what's been claimed in these repressed-memory cases is something, by definition, that's too extreme to be explained by ordinary forgetting and remembering. They're saying that in order to go on in life, you had to wall off this memory, because it would be too painful to live with. Then finally you go into therapy and crack through the repression barrier and out comes this pristine memory. But there really is no credible scientific support for that notion.”

Elizabeth Loftus (1944) American cognitive psychologist

I could have sworn...Why you can’t trust your memory https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929310-400-i-could-have-sworn-why-you-cant-trust-your-memory/ (8/21/2013)

Life, Pain, Support, Thinking

“My dreams are over, I have ceased to cry
Against the fate that made men love my mouth
And left their spirits all too deaf to hear
The little songs that echoed through my soul.
I have no anger now. The dreams are done;
Yet since the Greeks and Trojans would not see
Aught but my body's fairness, till the end,
In all the islands set in all the seas,
And all the lands that lie beneath the sun,
Till light turn darkness, and till time shall sleep,
Men's lives shall waste with longing after me,
For I shall be the sum of their desire,
The whole of beauty, never seen again.”

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) American writer and poet

"Helen of Troy"
Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911)

Love, Men, Fate, Lie

“There are two defining political choices that every society must make… and neither of them is covered by the old political categories "left" and "right". The first choice has to do with this. Do we want our society to encourage us to seek rich individual experience and to be if service to others – or do we want our society to encourage us to seek material riches in the form of possessions and status?… The second choice has to do with this. Do we want our society to extend state and institutional control over our lives (for whatever reason) – or do we want our society to encourage us to be self-reliant and self-determining?”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

Page 11.
New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society (1978)

“He would be vigilant, but he would anticipate nothing, neither disaster nor revelation.
That was not to say he would give up looking to the future. True, he was just a Cuckoo: scared and weary and alone. But so, in the end were most of his tribe: it didn’t mean all was lost. As long as they could still be moved by a minor chord, or brought to a crisis of tears by scenes of lovers reunited; as long as there was room in their cautious hearts for games of chance, and laughter in the face of God, that must surely be enough to save them, at the last.
If not, there was no hope for any living thing.”

Clive Barker book Weaveworld

Part Nine “Into the Gyre”, Chapter v “A Fragile Peace”, Section 3 (p. 440)
Weaveworld (1987), BOOK TWO: THE FUGUE

God, Hope, Game, Lovers

“There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. … They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill.”

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer

An Apology for Idlers.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

People, Pleasure, Exercises, Nature

“Men live by production, but the State lives by appropriation. While the haves and the have-nots struggle over the division of existing wealth, it is the business of the State to improve itself at the expense of both; it picks up the marbles while the boys are fighting. That has been the story of men in organized society since the beginning.”

Frank Chodorov (1887–1966) American libertarian thinker

Source: The Income Tax: Root of All Evil (1954), p. 36

Men, Boy, Business, Fight

“Wanna be young, the rest of my life.
Never say no, try anything twice.
Til the angels come and ask me to fly.
Gonna be 18 til I die - 18 til I die.
Can't live forever, that's wishful thinkin'.
Whoever said that must have been drinkin'.
Don't wanna grow up, I don't see why.
I couldn't care less if time flies by.18 til I die - gonna be 18 til I die.
Yeah it sure feels good to be alive.
Someday I'll be 18 goin' on 55!”

Bryan Adams (1959) Canadian singer-songwriter

18 til I Die
Song lyrics, 18 til I Die (1996)

Life, Angels, Feeling, Time

“966. With customes wee live well, but lawes undoe us.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

Law

“Revolution without evolution is just a waste of lives.”

Yasser Harrak Canadian liberal writer, columnist and human rights activist

Yasser Harrak. ND. On the Arab Spring. Oximity News (former Oximity News was acquired by Scribd). https://www.oximity.com/user/Yasser-Harrak-1

“1963 is when prayer and Bible reading was taken out of the American school system. Anybody remember that? Madalyn Murray O’Hair? Her son, by the way, became a preacher. His mom used him to get prayer taken out. But in 1963, sexually transmitted diseases began to climb. This is for kids 10 to 14 years of age. 1963 is when divorce rates began to go up. By the way, premarital sex and divorce go hand and hand. If you don’t trust 'em before you’re married, you won’t trust 'em after you’re married. 1963 is when violent crimes began to increase. There’s been nearly a 1000% increase in violent crimes. 1963 is when unwed birthrates began to incline. 100% increase for girls 10 to 14. By the way, pregnancies have increased 553%. SAT scores have dropped off incredibly since 1963. 1963 is when we saw an incredible rise of married couples living together in adultery. Teen suicide rate has gone crazy.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Age of the Earth

Age, Disease, School, Sex

“This is what you should do: Go to your record store and buy all the GG ALLIN recordings you can find. If they dont have any in stock, tell them to order some. If they refuse, then do what you have to do. Call radio stations and demand GG Allin. Spray paint "GG ALLIN" everywhere. Make them aware that the disease and the Scumfuc tradition is still spreading. Write "GG ALLIN" on all your dollar bills. Any bills you have. People do not throw money away, so it would be a free way to get the message out. You must do it every day of your life. We must live for the Rock 'N' Roll underground. It CAN be dark and dangerous again. It CAN be threatning to our society as it was meant to be. IT MUST BE UNCOMPROMISING. And with me as your leader, it will happen. I am ready to lead you, my allies, into the real Rock 'N' Roll underground. Let's get started.”

GG Allin (1956–1993) American singer-songwriter

GG Allin: GG Allin Mission Statement http://ggallinonline.com/mission.php, GG Allin Online.com, 1991. GG Allin Mission Statement read March 1, 2010.

Life, Money, People, Disease

“Consider and act with reference to the true ends of existence. This world is but the vestibule of an immortal life. Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.”

Edwin Hubbell Chapin (1814–1880) American priest

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers, P. 6.

Life, World

“And when their bones into confusion fall,
Say ye, who knew the living man by sight,
Which is the villein now and which the knight?”

Walther von der Vogelweide (1170–1230) Middle High German lyric poet

Wer kan den hêrren von dem knehte gescheiden,
swâ er ir gebeine blôzez fünde,
het er ir joch lebender künde?
"Swer âne vorhte, hêrre got", line 10; translation by I. G. Colvin, from James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin (eds.) The Portable Medieval Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) p. 194.

“We can’t just conclude that science puts too much power into the hands of morally feeble technologists or corrupt, power-crazed politicians and decide to get rid of it. Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history. Advances in transportation, communication, and entertainment have transformed the world. The sword of science is double-edged.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

"Why We Need To Understand Science" in The Skeptical Inquirer Vol. 14, Issue 3 (Spring 1990)
Context: I know that science and technology are not just cornucopias pouring good deeds out into the world. Scientists not only conceived nuclear weapons; they also took political leaders by the lapels, arguing that their nation — whichever it happened to be — had to have one first. … There’s a reason people are nervous about science and technology.
And so the image of the mad scientist haunts our world—from Dr. Faust to Dr. Frankenstein to Dr. Strangelove to the white-coated loonies of Saturday morning children’s television. (All this doesn’t inspire budding scientists.) But there’s no way back. We can’t just conclude that science puts too much power into the hands of morally feeble technologists or corrupt, power-crazed politicians and decide to get rid of it. Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history. Advances in transportation, communication, and entertainment have transformed the world. The sword of science is double-edged. Rather, its awesome power forces on all of us, including politicians, a new responsibility — more attention to the long-term consequences of technology, a global and transgenerational perspective, an incentive to avoid easy appeals to nationalism and chauvinism. Mistakes are becoming too expensive.

War, World, History, Communication

“I now began to search for a new path in art [from 1914, with the outbreak of World War 1. ]. It was a major task. I understood that I did not have to paint what I saw, not even what I felt, but only that which lived within me, in my soul. To put it in symbolic terms, it is like this: I felt within myself, within my breast, the keyboard of an organ and I had to make it resonate. And the nature that was in front of me served me only as a prompter. And that was a key that unlocked this organ and made it resonate. In the beginning it was very difficult. But little by little, it became easy for me to use colours and forms to find what was within my soul.”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

In his letter, 12 June, 1938 to P. Willibrord Verkade, as quoted in Alexej von Jawlensky, der Maler und Mensch, , Clemens Weiler; Wiesbaden 1955, pp. 39 ff
1936 - 1941

War, World, Art, Soul

“Do not grieve for her! Who knows, but she may have found the joy she sought? Love and patience are all that make for happiness in this world; or in the world of the past or of the future; of the living or the dead. She dreamed her dream; and that is all that any of us can ask.”

Bram Stoker book The Jewel of Seven Stars

The Jewel of Seven Stars, Chapter XIX: The Great Experiment (1903)

Love, Happiness, World, Dreams

“The human is a narrative being. We construct emotional machines, so-called “stories”, to communicate, to share the world in which we live and make it collectively experienceable. And we are pretty good at doing that. Since the primordial soup at some point mendelized into primate brains, we have either been fleeing from big cats or telling others about our escapes from the clutches of big cats. Sitting around the campfire, interpreting and breaking down the world, charging it with aura. Initially this was all very mythopoeic, and slowly it became more differentiated. But even in the post-Enlightenment age, world interpretations are not necessarily particularly rational. Good stories sell well, and the best stories are the ones that hit you in the gut, regardless of whether they would hold up to a Wikipedia check or not.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

via Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2016/04/14/the-story-of-traceroute-about.html

Age, World, Communication, Cats

“You live only insofar as you live according to your own ideas.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Man lebt nur insofern man nach seinen eignen Ideen lebt. Die Grundsätze sind nur Mittel, der Beruf ist Zweck an sich.
“Ideas,” Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), § 82

Idea

“I DON’T KNOW IF YOU HAVE EVER LUNCHED WITH A VEGETARIAN. Probably you have. If you live in San Francisco you have. Then you’ve seen Dominic, his hand raised, fingers slightly crook’d to summon a waitress: Ma’am? (Pointing to the menu.) Is this dish made with meat stock? The waitress (a Chinese restaurant) takes a moment to divine the desired answer. No. (When in doubt.) So imperial, so sliding scale, so uncomprehending is her no, so wise is her no, finally, so Greek, so Arab, so Catholic, so Brown is her no, Dominic cannot be reassured. Dominic’s vegetarianism has to do with upholding the sacredness of life. He needs a puritan answer. Whereas Peter. Peter is the son of my friend Franz. Peter is as easy in the brown world of maybe as he is in his own white skin. He is wandering through India as I write this. Peter is handsome, gentle, Hindu-intoxicated, slightly blue; his skin is slightly blue. Peter’s veganism has to do with the sacredness of his own body; with the purity of his lungs and his bowels and his liver and his breath. Peter’s vigilance is maniacal: Do you place meat and vegetables on the same grill?”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Life, World

“I want to live in a city where the people who make the rules have to live by them.”

Martin Firrell (1963) British artist and activist

"I Want to Live in a City Where..." (2006)
Variant: I want to live in a city where half the people in charge are women.

People

“The art of living easily as to money, is to pitch your scale of living one degree below your means.”

Henry Taylor (1800–1886) English playwright and poet

Money.
Notes from Life (1853)

Money, Art

“Man is the only living being who has a developed self-awareness and death-awareness.”

Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–1975) geneticist and evolutionary biologist

Mourning and Funerals—For Whom (1977)

Death

“Ancient scriptures tell us that man is more than the physical body. In fact, we have two bodies: the physical and the astral, or subtle. But we are the soul! According to the ancient Vedic scriptures of India, the size of the soul is 1/10,000 the tip of a strand of hair. It is located in the heart region and is the actual life force. The physical, as well as the astral or subtle body, acts as a covering or costume that the soul wears in its journey throughout the material sphere. As we pass from costume to costume or from body to body through the process known as reincarnation, the impressions of previous lives imprint themselves on the subtle body and are carried with us during each lifetime. In the dream state, activity in the subtle body becomes more dominant than activity in the physical body. Our dream experiences are often impressions accumulated from many lifetimes.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: Dreams: A State of Reality, p. 18-19

Life, Dreams, Soul, Heart

“The natural sciences are sometimes said to have no concern with values, nor to seek morality and goodness, and therefore belong to an inferior order of things. Counter-claims are made that they are the only living and dynamic studies… Both contentions are wrong. Language, Literature and Philosophy express, reflect and contemplate the world. But it is a world in which men will never be content to stay at rest, and so these disciplines cannot be cut off from the great searching into the nature of things without being deprived of life-blood.”

Cyril Norman Hinshelwood (1897–1967) English physical chemist

Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood. "Presidential Address to Classical Association," 1959; Partly quotes in: Chemists through the years, part 1, The Royal Society of Chemistry, 1994.

Life, Men, World, Search

“I want to reassure the American people that the full resources of the federal government are working to assist local authorities to save lives and to help the victims of these attacks. Make no mistake: The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.
I've been in regular contact with the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, the national security team and my Cabinet. We have taken all appropriate security precautions to protect the American people. Our military at home and around the world is on high alert status, and we have taken the necessary security precautions to continue the functions of your government.
We have been in touch with the leaders of Congress and with world leaders to assure them that we will do whatever is necessary to protect America and Americans.
I ask the American people to join me in saying a thanks for all the folks who have been fighting hard to rescue our fellow citizens and to join me in saying a prayer for the victims and their families.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Remarks Upon Arrival at Barksdale Air Force Base https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Remarks_Upon_Arrival_at_Barksdale_Air_Force_Base (11 September, 2001) 2000s, 2001

People, World, Family, Home

“The devil is not abroad at night in the form of a cat or a wolf or any other animal. He lives eternally in the hearts of men.”

Craig Ferguson book Between the Bridge and the River

Between the Bridge and the River (2006)

Men, Cats, Wolf, Heart

“Collaboration is important not just because it's a better way to learn. The spirit of collaboration is penetrating every institution and all of our lives. So learning to collaborate is part of equipping yourself for effectiveness, problem solving, innovation and life-long learning in an ever-changing networked economy.”

Don Tapscott (1947) Canadian businessman

Don Tapscott, in: The spirit of collaboration is touching all of our lives http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/the-spirit-of-collaboration-is-touching-all-of-our-lives/article12409331/, The Globe and Mail, 7 June 2013

Life, Way, Problem, Learning

“When I experienced what was going on first hand, I just got sucked into the whole thing. Thank God I did. I met some amazing people and, hopefully, I’ve changed the lives of a lot of children. Just as important, I think it’s been an incredible growing and learning experience for me.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

About her work in Malawi Celebrity Parade With Jeanne Wolf, ABC, 2008-06-27 http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/Story?id=5251905,

God, Children, People, Thinking

“In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people's lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1950s, People and Places (1959), p. 198

Children, People, World, Way

“I've been a prima-donna. I was taken care of since I was 13. That's why I am the way I am today. I was spoiled, like a brat. I had anything I wanted. That's crazy to be that way all your life. Everybody's taking care of you, but manipulating you at the same time. Very few people have a life like that. Most people have to work like slaves their whole lives. I've never had a job in my life. What I know how to do is hurt big, tough men — in the street and off.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/boxing/2005-06-02-tyson-saraceno_x.htm
On himself

Life, Men, People, Way

“The problem with guys like Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary of George W. Bush, is that he’s drunk the inside-the-beltway political Kookaid for so long that he actually believes his own spin. Poor guy went down for the third time in the denial goo long ago. Donald Trump’s biggest critics all believe that the engine of all things good and serious emanates from the professional Fedzillacrats who apparently enjoy wallowing in the said goo of Washington, D. C. … Donald Trump is a mess? Maybe Mr. Fleischer should open up the political garbage can he and the majority of Fedzillacrats live in and take a look at the real, certifiable, rotting, stinking mess that has been caused by the professional scammers of both political stripes for the past 50 years. … If you want to watch a real political train wreck, witness a real mess in progress, you need look no further than the professional politicians who have borrowed and spent this country into oblivion. Trump that if you dare.”

Ted Nugent (1948) American rock musician

Give Trump the Medal of Freedom (August 7, 2015)

Guy, Problem, Time, Past

“At its 10th December Conference in Geneva the Future of Human Rights Forum endorsed new structures and mechanisms to advance the realization of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly 65 years ago. Among important initiatives discussed by a high level panel was the creation of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly aimed at empowering world citizens and giving them direct participation in the political processes that affect them. Democracy lives from consultation and participation and a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly can meaningfully advance this goal.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

2013 Future of Human Rights Forum http://dezayasalfred.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/2013-future-of-human-rights-forum/. 2013

World, Democracy, Universe, Future

“Every man lives in his neighborhood, and beyond his home and his job. To most men, except in the largest cities, the municipality is interpreted in terms of his neighborhood. Few men get beyond this except through occasional excursions into the larger world. America is a country of parallel neighborhoods; the native American in one section and the immigrant in another. Americanization is the elimination of the parallel line. So long as the American thinks that a house in his street is too good for his immigrant neighbor and tolerates discriminations in sanitation, housing, and enforcement of municipal laws, he can serve on all Americanization Committees that exist and still fail in his efforts.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)
Context: Every man lives in his neighborhood, and beyond his home and his job. To most men, except in the largest cities, the municipality is interpreted in terms of his neighborhood. Few men get beyond this except through occasional excursions into the larger world. America is a country of parallel neighborhoods; the native American in one section and the immigrant in another. Americanization is the elimination of the parallel line. So long as the American thinks that a house in his street is too good for his immigrant neighbor and tolerates discriminations in sanitation, housing, and enforcement of municipal laws, he can serve on all Americanization Committees that exist and still fail in his efforts. The immigrant neighborhood is often made up of people who have come from one province in the old country. Inevitably the culture of that neighborhood will be that of the old country; its language will persist and its traditions will flourish. It is not that we undervalue these, or desire to discredit them. But separated from the land and surroundings that gave them birth, from the history that cherishes them, they do not remain the strong, beautiful things they were on the other side. These aliens may retain some of the form of culture of the land of their birth long after its spirit has departed or has lost its savor in a new atmosphere. New opportunities, strange conditions, unforeseen adjustments, necessary sacrifices, and forces unseen and not understood affect the immigrant and his life here, and unless this culture is connected and fused with that of the new world, it loses its vitality or becomes corrupt.

Men, World, Law, Home

“Ah, well! We live and learn, or, anyway, we live.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Hermit's Emergency Shelf
How to Be a Hermit (1929)

Learning

“The digital revolution changed my process early on in terms of technique, but my early analog drawings and paintings had the same thematic intention as my latest digital work: the attempt to conjure, or render, a glimpse into an enigmatically layered and lively world that I sense and know to be reality, an energetic vibratory world of almost dreadful depth. In this respect, my process of making computer-robotic assisted paintings and animations have, until recently, been made up of an excessive concoction of ambiguous sexual body parts (morphed from both sexes) tied to the viral form. Philosophy has been, and is, a way of freeing myself enough to connect with this depth so as to process the phantasmagorical aspects of reality into art. This process of art making, for me, must hinge on a dynamic engagement and then wedding of image production and image resistance. The idea is to encourage subversive readings of computational media by presenting an artistic consciousness that articulates contemporary concerns regarding safety, truth, identity and objectivity.”

Joseph Nechvatal (1951) American artist

" An Interview with Joseph Nechvatal http://versejunkies.com/?p=6110#," at versejunkies.com. Posted On 10 August 2013.

Truth, World, Art, Sex

“Unless we proceed cautiously, there might well arise a few generations of mystics who conceive of the orgone metaphysically, divorced from non-living nature and who do not comprehend it from the standpoint of natural science. And it seems to me that we have more than enough mysticism as it is.”

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) Austrian-American psychoanalyst

Orgonotic Pulsation in International Journal of Sex-Economy and Orgone-Research, Vol. 3, No. 1, (March, 1944); Reich throughout his writings seems to use the word "mysticism" in a sense strongly related to claims of "mystical authority over others" and on the impositions made by such faith, rather than in its more common use as a word denoting a respect for "mystical insight apart from others" without necessarily any claim to authority over them.

Nature, Science

“I care not, Fortune, what you me deny;
You cannot rob me of free Nature's grace,
You cannot shut the windows of the sky,
Through which Aurora shows her brightening face;
You cannot bar my constant feet to trace
The woods and lawns, by living stream, at eve.
Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace,
And I their toys to the great children leave:
Of fancy, reason, virtue, naught can me bereave.”

James Thomson (poet) The Castle of Indolence

Canto II, Stanza 3.
The Castle of Indolence (1748)

Children, Health, Nature

“Psychoanalysis is unlikely to be repealed; people are not going to go back to reading novels in order to understand themselves and their lives.”

Geoffrey Nunberg (1945) American linguist

Geoffrey Nunberg (1983) The Decline of Grammar http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97mar/halpern/nunberg.htm, The Atlantic, December 1983 http://books.google.com/books?id=JuUmAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Psychoanalysis+is+unlikely+to+be+repealed+people+are+not+going+to+go+back+to+reading+novels+in+order+to+understand+themselves+and+their+lives%22&pg=PA38#v=onepage

People, Understanding, Reading

“Now, this… Mountain signified the Church of the living God; the Sun that shone thereon, the comfortable shining of his merciful Face on them that were therein; the Wall, I thought, was the Word, that did make separation between the Christians and the World; and the Gap which was in this Wall, I thought was Jesus Christ, who is the way to God the Father. But forasmuch as the Passage was wonderful narrow… it showed me that none could enter into Life, but those that were in downright earnest, and unless also they left this wicked World behind them; for here was only room for Body and Soul, but not for Body and Soul, and Sin.”

John Bunyan book Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners

Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666)

Life, God, World, Way

“We say an oath that we are a nation of liberty and justice for all, but that’s just words. It’s a civic faith, but I’m one of these people that says before you, "tell me about your religion, first show it to me in how you treat other people." Well, how are we living our civic gospel? How are we living our civic gospel that demands for us to reject the normalcy of injustice, the normalcy of apathy, the normalcy of indifference, and rise to the higher ground of activism, of engagement, of love?”

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

2018

Love, People, Faith, Religion

“Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live for it.”

Charles Caleb Colton (1777–1832) British priest and writer

Vol. I; XXV
Lacon (1820)
Variant: Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live for it.

Men, Religion, Fight

“Life has a tendency to obfuscate and bewilder,
Such as fating us to spend the first part of our lives
being embarrassed by our parents and the last part
being embarrassed by our childer.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

"What I Know About Life"
Versus (1949)

Life, Fate, Parent, Parting

“There has been a lot of talk about the formation of a new centre party. Some have even been kind enough to suggest that I might lead it. I find this idea profoundly unattractive. I do so for at least four reasons. First, I do not believe that such a grouping would have any coherent philosophical base…A party based on such a rag-bag could stand for nothing positive. It would exploit grievances and fall apart when it sought to remedy them. I believe in exactly the reverse sort of politics…Second, I believe that the most likely effect of such an ill-considered grouping would be to destroy the prospect of an effective alternative government to the Conservatives…Some genuinely want a new, powerful anti-Conservative force. They would be wise to reflect that it is much easier to will this than to bring it about. The most likely result would be chaos on the left and several decades of Conservative hegemony almost as dismal and damaging as in the twenties and thirties. Third, I do not share the desire, at the root of much such thinking, to push what may roughly be called the leftward half of the Labour Party…out of the mainstream of British politics…Fourth, and more personally, I cannot be indifferent to the political traditions in which I was brought up and in which I have lived my political life. Politics are not to me a religion, but the Labour Party is and always had been an instinctive part of my life.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech to the Oxford University Labour Club (9 March 1973), quoted in The Times (10 March 1973), p. 4
1970s

Life, Religion, Idea, Thinking

“Every neighborhood on the planet has a house like this on the block. We've all driven past it. A bunch of people living there, too old to be kids, but never gonna be adults… You can tell that by the "AEROSMITH ROCKS" banner in the living room window… Four sociopathic pitbulls roaming the yard at all times… The brown one has one leg, just flops to the fence every couple of hours… You can tell when the family's doubled their net worth 'cause they parked a new gutted Chevelle in the driveway… The mailman's afraid to bring the mail, so he just gives it to the cops, 'cause hell, they're gonna be there anyway… And if you don't recognize this house in your neighborhood, you live in this house in your neighborhood.”

Christopher Titus (1964) actor, writer, podcaster

Love is Evol (2009)

People, Family, Hell, Time

“I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.”

W. H. Auden September 1, 1939

Source: September 1, 1939 (1939), Lines 1–11

Death, Fear, Hope, Anger

“For most of her existence, Molly had not shied from a truth that most people understood but diligently suppressed: that every moment of every day, depending on the faith we embrace, each of us continues to live either by the merciful sufferance of God or at the whim of blind chance and indifferent nature.”

Dean Koontz book The Taking

Part 1, Chapter 2
The Taking (2004)

God, People, Truth, Faith

“His misfortune was that he loved youth — he was weak to it, it kindled him. If there was one eager eye, one doubting, critical mind, one lively curiosity in a whole lecture-room full of commonplace boys and girls, he was its servant. That ardour could command him. It hadn't worn out with years, this responsiveness, any more than the magnetic currents wear out; it had nothing to do with Time.”

Willa Cather book The Professor's House

Book I, Ch. 1
The Professor's House (1925)

Love, Youth, Girl, Boy

“You almost had to live through it to really know the gut ripping misery of the depression during the early thirties which led to labor's bloodiest and most violent days.”

Jimmy Hoffa (1913–1982) American labor leader

Source: Hoffa The Real Story (1975), Chapter 2, How It All Started, p. 27

“.. and since we are now living in the Summer-time, I don't have a trick to imagine me Winter so strongly that I would be able to paint one [a winter-landscape].... and you must have patience until next winter.”

Andreas Schelfhout (1787–1870) Dutch painter, etcher and lithographer

translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek (original Dutch, citaat van Schelfhout, uit zijn brief:) ..en daar wij nu in het Zomer leeven zijn heb ik geen truk [truc] van mij de Winter zoo danig voor den geest te halen dat ik in staat zoude zijn er een te kunnen schilderen.. ..en gij zou den gedult moeten nemen tot aanstaande winter. Quote of Schelfhout in a letter to his client nl:Johannes Immerzeel, June 1832; as cited in 'Andreas Schelfhout Onsterfelijk schoon', Simonis & Buunk 2005 https://www.simonis-buunk.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/catalogus_schelfhout.pdf, p. 17

Imagination, Winter, Time, Summer

“That abject, squalid, shameless avowal…It is a very disquieting and disgusting symptom…My mind turns across the narrow waters of Channel and the North Sea, where great nations stand determined to defend their national glories or national existence with their lives. I think of Germany, with its splendid clear-eyed youths marching forward on all the roads of the Reich singing their ancient songs, demanding to be conscripted into an army; eagerly seeking the most terrible weapons of war; burning to suffer and die for their fatherland. I think of Italy, with her ardent Fascisti, her renowned Chief, and stern sense of national duty. I think of France, anxious, peace-loving, pacifist to the core, but armed to the teeth and determined to survive as a great nation in the world. One can almost feel the curl of contempt upon the lips of the manhood of all these people when they read this message sent out by Oxford University in the name of young England.”

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

Speech to the Anti-Socialist and Anti-Communist Union (17 February 1933) after the Oxford Union passed the motion "that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country", quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 456
The 1930s

Love, War, People, Youth

“Life as we live it is obviously very brutal, and makes us insensitive, dull, heavy, stupid, and so we may hope through ideas, through ideational mentation, to bring about a certain quality of sensitivity.… But even when we are sharpened and quickened intellectually by argument, by discussion, by reading, this does not actually bring about that quality of sensitivity. And you know all those people who are erudite, who read, who theorize, who can discuss brilliantly, are extraordinarily dull people. So I think sensitivity, which destroys mediocrity, is very important to understand. Because most of us are becoming, I am afraid, more mediocre. We are not using that word in any derogative sense at all, but merely observing the fact of mediocrity in the sense of being average, fairly well educated, earning a livelihood and perhaps capable of clever discussion; but this leaves us still bourgeois, mediocre, not only in our attitudes but in our activities.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

Part V, Ch. 3 : 3rd Public Talk Madras 14th January 1968 "The Sacred" http://www.jiddu-krishnamurti.net/en/awakening-of-intelligence/1968-01-14-jiddu-krishnamurti-awakening-of-intelligence-the-sacred 1970s, The Awakening of Intelligence (1973)

Life, People, Stupidity, Education

“Until men learn to celebrate and operate on the feminine aspect of themselves and stop the oppression of women, children, the environment, other species, we don’t have a world to live in. It’s not a world that anyone chooses to live in.”

James Cromwell (1940) American actor and producer

"Tribeca Film Festival Interview: John and James Cromwell of A .45 at 50th" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cynthia-ellis/tribeca-film-festival-int_b_561477.html by Cynthia Ellis, in HuffingtonPost.com (4 July 2010)

Women, Men, Children, World

“My dad has hated me for as long as I can remember. That's a pretty sweeping statement, and I know how phony it sounds. It sounds petulant and really fantastic, the kind of weapon kids always use when the old man won't come across with the car for your heavy date at the drive-in with Peggy Sue or when he tells you that if you flunk world history the second time through he's going to beat the living hell out of you. In this day and age when everybody thinks psychology is God's gift to the poor old anally fixated human race and even the president of the United States pops a trank before dinner, it's really a good way to get rid of those Old Testament guilts that keep creeping up our throats like the aftertaste of a bad meal we overate. If you say your father hated you as a kid, you can go out and flash the neighborhood, commit rape, or burn down the Knights of Pythias bingo parlor and still cop a plea… But it also means that no one will believe you if it's true. You're the little boy who cried wolf. And for me it's true…I don't think Dad himself really knew it until then. Even if you could dig to the very bottom of his motives, he'd probably say - at the most - that he was hating me for my own good.”

Stephen King book Rage

Rage (1977)

God, Hate, Age, World

“I do not live for what the world thinks of me, but for what I think of myself.”

Jack London (1876–1916) American author, journalist, and social activist

Letter to Charles Warren Stoddard (21 August 1903)

World, Thinking

“Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep, — that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Mont Blanc http://www.readprint.com/work-1366/Percy-Bysshe-Shelley (1816), st. 3

Death, World, Soul, Business

“"So, Alec Baldwin; great actor or greatest actor?" I'm gonna say "greatest actor"; Greatest… living… American… actor… in… the Baldwin family… by a mile.”

Tina Fey (1970) American comedian, writer, producer and actress

"Ask Tina" segment from NBC's 30 Rock website

Family

“When you stop just existing and you start truly living, each moment of the day comes alive with wonder and synchronicity.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 124

“I cannot believe in a paradise
Glorious, undefiled,
For gates all scrolled and streets of gold
Are tales for a dreaming child.

I am too lost for shame
That it moves me unto mirth,
But I can vision a Hell of flame
For I have lived on earth.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"Visions" (1972)

Dreams, Hell

“[The Vijayanagar kings allowed] that every man may come and go, and live according to his own creed without suffering any annoyance, and without enquiring whether he is a Christian, Jew, Moor or Heathen. Great equity and justice is observed by all.”

Duarte Barbosa (1480–1545) Portuguese explorer and writer

The Book of Duarte Barbosa, vol. I, p. 202. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 2

Justice, Suffering

“He was the best troubadour of those who lived before him or came after him, and for that reason was called the master of the troubadours, a title which is still applied to him in the opinion of those who know something about poetry and love.”

Giraut de Bornelh (1138–1220) French writer

Anonymous 13th century Provençal biographer of Guiraut de Bornelh, cited from H. J. Chaytor The Troubadours of Dante (1902) pp. 29-30; translation from The Catholic Encyclopedia (1909) vol. 6. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06570b.htm Criticism

Love

“When recalling historical experience, the testimony of ancient times, the proofs of the present reality, and the things that we are experiencing today, we begin to truly understand God's words: "They are the enemies; so beware of them. The curse of Allah be on them!" Ibn Taymiyyah was right in his description of these people when they repudiated the people of Islam. He said: This is why they cooperated with the infidels and the Tartars… They were the main cause of the invasion of Muslim countries by Genghis Khan… Some of them cooperated with the Tartars and Franks (European Crusaders)… some of them (Shiites) backed the Christians….. They (Shiites) harbor more evil and rancor against Muslims, big and small, devout and non-devout, than anyone else…. They enjoy repudiating and cursing Muslim leaders, especially the orthodox caliphs and the ulema (clerics). To them, anyone who does not believe in the infallible Imam (Al-Mahdi) is a nonbeliever in God and the prophet… whenever Christians and infidels triumphed over, it was a day of jubilation… This is the end of what Shaykh-al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah said about them. It is as if he is living among us today, an eyewitness of what is taking place, and saying… They always support infidels, including Jews and Christians. They help them in killing Muslims.”

Abu Musab Zarqawi (1966–2006) Jordanian jihadist

Zarqawi Letter February 2004 Coalition Provisional Authority English translation of terrorist Musab al Zarqawi letter obtained by United States Government in Iraq https://2001-2009.state.gov/p/nea/rls/31694.htm, (April 6, 2004)

God, People, Understanding, Support

“Power and influence have been the center of—this is not necessarily an argument in favor of keeping it, but power and influence have been the center of the field of the study of politics from the beginning. And what’s more, they are the central elements in all of our lives, our daily lives and our family lives, this interview going on—and they’re enormously complex.”

Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) American political scientist

A Conversation with Robert A. Dahl (2009)

Family, Study

“In a State or Assemblage of People that live together in a Community, where there are Laws, Liberty can only consist in doing that which every One ought to do, and not to be constrained to do that which One ought not to do.”

Catherine the Great (1729–1796) Empress of Russia

Item 37
Proposals for a New Law Code (1768)

People, Law, Communication

“I had for a long time ceased to read newspapers, or pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be a passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not distant. But this momentous question, like a firebell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776 to acquire self-government and happiness to their country is to be thrown away, and my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it.”

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

On the Missouri Compromise, in a letter to John Holmes (22 April 1820), published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: 1816-1826 (1899) edited by Paul Leicester Ford, v. 10, p. 157; also quoted by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his Emancipation Proclamation Centennial Address http://www.nps.gov/anti/historyculture/mlk-ep.htm at the New York Civil War Centennial Commission’s Emancipation Proclamation Observance, New York City (12 September 1962) 1820s

Happiness, Confidence, Question, Distant

“… this refined language of Indian modernity – an Indian language that was actually first used as a first language by a home-grown cosmopolitan elite – enough to say, with or without humour, ‘Ami tomake bhalobashi’ (‘I love you’) or ‘Apni kothai thhaken?’ (‘Where do you live?). These stray statements performed an incantatory ‘open sesame’ – into the bounded, charmed, small-scale world of ‘Bengaliness’. The ‘honorary’ Bengali might be myopic; might be an aficionado of art-house cinema; might be politically left wing; might have taste for lyric poetry; a tendency towards the autobiographical; an appetite for fish; or display none of these traits.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

citation needed
On Modernity

Love, World, Art, Home

““Hasn’t all this taught you anything?” Annette asked Gabriel Baines as they waited for the simulacrum’s return and report.
“Like what?”
“That there is no perfect defense. There is no protection. Being alive means being exposed; it’s the nature of life to be hazardous—it’s the stuff of living.”

Philip K. Dick book Clans of the Alphane Moon

Source: Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964), Chapter 13 (p. 226)

Life, Nature, Waiting, Perfection

“Properly understood, the church is not an institution. It is the community of Jesus' followers on earth - men, women, an children filled with God's Spirit, living in communion with him, one another, and the world.”

Skye Jethani

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

Women, Men, God, Children

“My perspective has been forever altered by how difficult it was to eat wholesome, nutritious food on that budget, even for just a few days -- a challenge that 47 million Americans face every day, week, and year, I'm not suggesting everyone eat organic food from some high horse in the sky. I'm saying everyone should be able to afford fresh, real food. And if women were paid an equal wage, families might have more of a choice in the grocery aisles, not to mention in the rest of their lives.”

Gwyneth Paltrow (1972) American actress, singer, and food writer

Gwyneth Paltrow concedes defeat on $29 food stamp challenge http://www.ctvnews.ca/entertainment/gwyneth-paltrow-concedes-defeat-on-29-food-stamp-challenge-1.2332262 (April 17, 2015)

Women, Family, Food, Horse

“It is known that the mathematics prescribed for the high school [Gymnasien] is essentially Euclidean, while it is modern mathematics, the theory of functions and the infinitesimal calculus, which has secured for us an insight into the mechanism and laws of nature. Euclidean mathematics is indeed, a prerequisite for the theory of functions, but just as one, though he has learned the inflections of Latin nouns and verbs, will not thereby be enabled to read a Latin author much less to appreciate the beauties of a Horace, so Euclidean mathematics, that is the mathematics of the high school, is unable to unlock nature and her laws. Euclidean mathematics assumes the completeness and invariability of mathematical forms; these forms it describes with appropriate accuracy and enumerates their inherent and related properties with perfect clearness, order, and completeness, that is, Euclidean mathematics operates on forms after the manner that anatomy operates on the dead body and its members.
On the other hand, the mathematics of variable magnitudes—function theory or analysis—considers mathematical forms in their genesis. By writing the equation of the parabola, we express its law of generation, the law according to which the variable point moves. The path, produced before the eyes of the 113 student by a point moving in accordance to this law, is the parabola.
If, then, Euclidean mathematics treats space and number forms after the manner in which anatomy treats the dead body, modern mathematics deals, as it were, with the living body, with growing and changing forms, and thus furnishes an insight, not only into nature as she is and appears, but also into nature as she generates and creates,—reveals her transition steps and in so doing creates a mind for and understanding of the laws of becoming. Thus modern mathematics bears the same relation to Euclidean mathematics that physiology or biology … bears to anatomy. But it is exactly in this respect that our view of nature is so far above that of the ancients; that we no longer look on nature as a quiescent complete whole, which compels admiration by its sublimity and wealth of forms, but that we conceive of her as a vigorous growing organism, unfolding according to definite, as delicate as far-reaching, laws; that we are able to lay hold of the permanent amidst the transitory, of law amidst fleeting phenomena, and to be able to give these their simplest and truest expression through the mathematical formulas”

Christian Heinrich von Dillmann (1829–1899) German educationist

Source: Die Mathematik die Fackelträgerin einer neuen Zeit (Stuttgart, 1889), p. 37.

School, Law, Beauty, Mathematics

“You see the button with the picture of the guy with the tray, and you push it, AND HE ARRIVES WITH A SANDWICH! …And you think: "Yes! Yes! I control sandwich monkey! I live in magic land, magic land, magic land."”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

On hotel room telephone.
Monster (2004)

Guy, Thinking

“In a world where millions of human beings live in extreme poverty, die of malnutrition and lack medical care, where pandemics continue to kill, it is imperative to pursue good faith disarmament negotiations and to shift budgets away from weapons production, war-mongering, surveillance of private persons and devote available resources to address global challenges including humanitarian relief, environmental protection, climate change mitigation and adaptation, prevention of pandemics, and the development of a green economy.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

United Nations expert urges states to cut military spending and invest more in human development http://www.unog.ch/80256EDD006B9C2E/(httpNewsByYear_en)/D5D061E9891363C1C1257CB7003055E0?OpenDocument. 2014

War, World, Faith, Change

“To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity.
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered...”

Ezra Pound The Cantos

Canto LXXXI
The Cantos

Error

“When did you last bask in the sun, friends? When did you last dare drink from a creek? When did you last risk picking fruit and eating it straight from the tree? What were your doctor’s bills last year? Which of you live in cities where you don’t wear a filtermask? Which of you spent this year’s vacation in the mountains because the sea is fringed with garbage?”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

November “THERE IS HOPE YET”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Mountain, Drink, Tree, Sun

“Virtue alone is for real; all else is sham. Talent and greatness depend on virtue, not on fortune. Only virtue is sufficient unto herself. She makes us love the living and remember the dead.”

Baltasar Gracián book The Art of Worldly Wisdom

La virtud es cosa de veras, todo lo demás de burlas. La capacidad y grandeza se ha de medir por la virtud, no por la fortuna. Ella sola se basta a sí misma. Vivo el hombre, le haze amable; y muerto, memorable.
Maxim 300 (p. 168)
The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

Love, Dependency, Dead

“Were it not well, then, to begin with the substance, to learn to apprehend the reality of that kingdom which is all around us now, whether we recognize it or not, — to take our aims and endeavors into it, that they may be made part of it, however small, — to surrender ourselves to it, that our lives may do something towards its advancement, and that we may become fellow-workers, however humble, with all the wise and good who have gone before us, and with Him who made them what they are?”

John Campbell Shairp (1819–1885) British writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 269.

Reality, Learning, Parting

“Allen: That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it?
Woman: Yes, it is.
Allen: What does it say to you?
Woman: It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless, bleak straitjacket in a black, absurd cosmos.
Allen: What are you doing Saturday night?
Woman: Committing suicide.
Allen: What about Friday night?”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Play It Again, Sam (1972).

Love, Suicide, Universe, Night

“Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Letter to California student E. Holzapfel (March 1951) Einstein Archive 59-1013, p. 57
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)

Science

“At that time I was very friendly with Picasso. Our temperaments were very different, but we had the same idea. Later on it became clear, Picasso is Spanish and I am French; as everyone knows that mean a lot of differences, but during those days the differences did not count… We were living in Montmartre, we used to meet every day, we used to talk... In those years Picasso and I said things to each other that nobody will ever say again, that nobody could say any more... It was rather like a pair of climbers roped together.”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

Source: 1946 - 1963, In conversation with Dora Vallier' (1954), p. 264 - Braque's quote is referring to the early common starting years of Cubism in Paris with Picasso, ca. 1907 -1910

Idea, Time

“I can’t evaluate my opinions of right and wrong because I learned them from my parents and haven’t lived long enough to have formed opinions in disagreement with theirs.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Number of the Beast

Source: The Number of the Beast (1980), Chapter XI : “—citizens must protect themselves.”, p. 98

Parent, Learning

“In Blue Crush, we meet three Hawaiian surfers who work as hotel maids, live in a grotty rental, and are raising the kid sister of one of them. Despite this near-poverty, they look great; there is nothing like a tan and a bikini to overcome class distinctions.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/blue-crush-2002 of Blue Crush (16 August 2002) Reviews, Three star reviews

Sister

“We live in an age which eschews sentimentality as if it were a good deal more than the devil. (Actually, of course, a writer may be just as sentimental in laying undue emphasis on sexual crimes as on dying mothers: sentimental, like scientific, is an adjective that relates to method, not to matter.)”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"Ten Books," The Southern Review (Autumn 1935) [p. 8]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Age

“The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself! … Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.”

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

Lectures VI and VII, "The Sick Soul"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Life, Feeling, Cats, Bird

“The direction of the world overwhelms me at this time. In the long run, all the continents (yellow, black and brown) will spill over onto Old Europe. They are hundreds and hundreds of millions. They are hungry and they are not afraid to die. We no longer know how to die or how to kill. We could preach, but Europe believes in nothing. So, we must wait for the year 1000 or a miracle. For my part, I find it harder and harder to live before a wall.”

Albert Camus (1913–1960) French author and journalist

Correspondance: 1932-1960, p.220, Gallimard, 1981. Letter to Jean Granier, 1957 https://books.google.com.br/books?id=56VcAAAAMAAJ&q=le+train+du+monde+m%27accable+en+ce+moment.+a+longue+%C3%A9ch%C3%A9ance,+tous+les+continents+(jaune,+noir+et+bistre)&dq=le+train+du+monde+m%27accable+en+ce+moment.+a+longue+%C3%A9ch%C3%A9ance,+tous+les+continents+(jaune,+noir+et+bistre)&hl=pt-BR&sa=X&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAWoVChMIqfiA3aHcyAIVgw6QCh3IngRL

World, Time, Waiting, Parting

“As man lives, and moves, and has his Being in the Divine Nature, and is supported by it, whether his Nature be good or bad; so the Wrath of Man, which was awakened in the dark Fire of his fallen Nature, may, in a certain Sense, be called the Wrath of God, as Hell itself may be said to be in God, because nothing can be out of his Immensity; yet this Hell, is not God, but the dark Habitation of the Devil. And this Wrath which may be called the Wrath of God, is not God, but the fiery Wrath of the fallen Soul.
And it was solely to quench this Wrath, awakened in the human Soul, that the Blood of the Son of God was necessary, because nothing but a Life and a Birth, derived from him into the human Soul, could change this darkened Root of a self-tormenting Fire, into an amiable Image of the holy Trinity, as it was at first created.
This was the Wrath, Vengeance, and vindictive Justice that wanted to be satisfied, in order to our Salvation; it was the Wrath and Fire of Nature and Creature kindled only in itself, by its departing from true Resignation, and Obedience to God.”

William Law (1686–1761) English cleric, nonjuror and theological writer

Christian Regeneration.
The Grounds and Reasons of Christian Regeneration (1739)

Life, God, Justice, Soul

“If there is a hell, perhaps it consists in living up to all one’s promises.”

John Brunner book The Tides of Time

Source: The Tides of Time (1984), Chapter 11 (p. 202)

Hell

“Jim," she said earnestly, "if I was put down there in the middle of the night, I could find my way all over that little town; and along the river to the next town, where my grandmother lived. My feet remember all the little paths through the woods, and where the big roots stick out to trip you. I ain't never forgot my own country.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book II, Ch. 14
My Antonia (1918)