Quotes about main
page 8

“Fair stood the wind for France,
When we our sails advance,
Nor now to prove our chance,
Longer will tarry;
But putting to the main
At Kaux, the mouth of Seine,
With all his martial train,
Landed King Harry.”

Michael Drayton (1563–1631) English poet

Source: To the Cambro-Britons and Their Harp, his Ballad of Agincourt (1627), Lines 1-8.

Chance, Training

“The Bill of Rights must be subjected to no 'interpretation' of any kind except in terms of the original intent of the Founding Fathers, a group of individuals who had just barely defeated the most overbearing, ruthless, and dangerously violent government in the history of the world. Even the British people were having trouble with it at the time.
The Bill of Rights represents an historic bargain between those who advocated a strong central government — and whose political ideas and wishes are expressed in the main body of the Constitution — and those who did not. Without the Bill of Rights, the Constitution ceases to be valid; any legitimate authority that derives from it ceases to exist.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Toward an International Bill of Rights Union," http://www.bigheadpress.com/lneilsmith/?p=36 31 August 2007.

People, World, History, Idea

“But ne'er the subject of your work proclaim
In its own colors and its genuine name;
Let it by distant tokens be conveyed,
And wrapped in other words, and covered in their shade.
At last the subject from the friendly shroud
Bursts out, and shines the brighter from the cloud;
Then the dissolving darkness breaks away,
And every object glares in open day.
Thus great Ulysses' toils were I to choose
For the main theme that should employ my Muse,
By his long labors of immortal fame
Should shine my hero, but conceal his name;
As one who, lost at sea, had nations seen,
And marked their towns, their manners, and their men,
Since Troy was leveled to the dust by Greece—
Till a few lines epitomized the piece.”
Jam vero cum rem propones, nomine nunquam Prodere conveniet manifesto: semper opertis Indiciis, longe et verborum ambage petita Significant, umbraque obducunt: inde tamen, ceu Sublustri e nebula, rerum tralucet imago Clarius, et certis datur omnia cernere signis. Hinc si dura mihi passus dicendus Ulysses, Non ilium vero memorabo nomine, sed qui Et mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes Naufragus, eversae post saeva incendia Trojae, Addam alia, angustis complectens omnia dictis.

Marco Girolamo Vida (1485–1566) Italian bishop

Book II, line 40
De Arte Poetica (1527)

Men, Color, Distant, Sea

“To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body. As black Americans living in a small Kentucky town, the railroad tracks were a daily reminder of our marginality. Across those tracks were paved streets, stores we could not enter, restaurants we could not eat in, and people we could not look directly in the face. Across those tracks was a world we could work in as maids, as janitors, as prostitutes, as long as it was in a service capacity. We could enter that world but we could not live there. We had always to return to the margin, to cross the tracks, to shacks and abandoned houses on the edge of town. There were laws to ensure our return. To not return was to risk being punished. Living as we did-on the edge-we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center. Our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an ongoing private acknowledgment that we were a necessary, vital part of that whole. This sense of wholeness, impressed upon our consciousness by the structure of our daily lives, provided us an oppositional world view-a mode of seeing unknown to most of our oppressors, that sustained us, aided us in our struggle to transcend poverty and despair, strengthened our sense of self and our solidarity. … Much feminist theory emerges from privileged women who live at the center, whose perspectives on reality rarely include knowledge and awareness of the lives of women and men who live in the margin. As a consequence, feminist theory lacks wholeness, lacks the broad analysis that could encompass a variety of human experiences. Although feminist theorists are aware of the need to develop ideas and analysis that encompass a larger number of experiences, that serve to unify rather than to polarize, such theory is complex and slow in formation. At its most visionary, it will emerge from individuals who have knowledge of both margin and center.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

p. xvii https://books.google.com/books?id=ClWvBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT8. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Preface

Women, Men, People, World

“100,000 soldiers are reported to have died in the Iraqi war. If you count 100 relatives of each soldier, it means that practically there are millions of people who now have antagonism toward the white people of America. These Arab people will remember this country whose main religion is Christianity, who came and destroyed all Iraqi facilities and industry. They won't easily forget this.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

Reverend Sun Myung Moon Speaks on New Heaven and New Earth Centering On Our Pledge http://www.unification.net/1991/910303.html 1991-03-03

War, People, Religion, Country

“We believe in peace and peaceful development, not only for ourselves but for people all over the world. Our main preoccupation is with economic and social development at home and peace and friendship abroad.”

Lal Bahadur Shastri (1904–1966) The second Prime Minister of the Republic of India and a leader of the Indian National Congress party

Peace

Friendship, People, World, Peace

“The Brahmans who were custodians of the idols and idol-houses, and “teachers of the infidels”, also received their share of attention from the soldiers of Allãh. Our citations contain only stray references to the Brahmans because they have been compiled primarily with reference to the destruction of temples. Even so, they provide the broad contours of another chapter in the history of medieval India, a chapter which has yet to be brought out in full. The Brahmans are referred to as magicians by some Islamic invaders and massacred straight away. Elsewhere, the Hindus who are not totally defeated and want to surrender on some terms, are made to sign a treaty saying that the Brahmans will be expelled from the temples. The holy cities of the Hindus were “the nests of the Brahmans” who had to be slaughtered before or after the destruction of temples, so that these places were “cleansed” completely of “kufr” and made fit as “abodes of Islam”. Amîr Khusrû describes with great glee how the heads of Brahmans “danced from their necks and fell to the ground at their feet”, along with those of the other “infidels” whom Malik Kãfûr had slaughtered during the sack of the temples at Chidambaram. Fîrûz Shãh Tughlaq got bags full of cow’s flesh tied round the necks of Brahmans and had them paraded through his army camp at Kangra. Muhmûd Shãh II Bahmanî bestowed on himself the honour of being a ghãzî, simply because he had killed in cold blood the helpless BrãhmaNa priests of the local temple after Hindu warriors had died fighting in defence of the fort at Kondapalli. The present-day progressives, leftists and dalits whose main plank is anti-Brahminism have no reason to feel innovative about their ideology. Anti-Brahminism in India is as old a the advent of Islam. Our present-day Brahmin-baiters are no more than ideological descendants of the Islamic invaders. Hindus will do well to remember Mahatma Gandhi’s deep reflection--“if Brahmanism does not revive, Hinduism must perish.””

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

Feeling, History, Teachers, Dance

“The further we move our main force to the westward, and still be within supporting distance of this garrison, the better, both for the preservation of the provision and forage of this State, as well as to les sen the general expense of transportation. And the greater stock of provision and forage we can leave in this State, and upon the communications, the less difficulty we shall find in giving support to this place, should the enemy approach it. I should re commend, therefore, to quarter the army as far wesir ward as Morristown or Baskingridge. The country is strong, secure from a surprise, happily situated to receive supplies of provisions and forage, and not very inconvenient for giving protection and cover to the inhabitants. It is true, it is considerably removed from this place. But were we to take a position at Suffern's or Pompton, the consumption of forage would be so great that it would destroy the possibility of keeping up a communication with the Western States, however pressing the necessity, before the grass sea son. Suppose the enemy should move up, early in the spring, and lay siege to West Point, and the supplies of this State prove unequal to our support, should we not be obliged to abandon it to its fate?”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (November 1779)

Fate, Spring, Communication, Support

“We have never said that the fight against the Iranian aggression and against the expansionist Persian tendencies (which have been demonstrated by various means under successive regimes in Iran) is the decisive battle for the Arabs. What we have said, and still say, is that the fight against Zionism is the main decisive battle for the Arabs. This is a great objective reality, which cannot be denied or underestimated except by someone who would not only harm the Arab nation and its main causes, but would also overlook the main danger.”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

President Saddam Hussein's Speech on National Day (1981)

Reality, Decision, Success, Fight

“The main difficulty in popularizing quantum physics is that we do not really know how to make images of it in our world. In this sense it is really counterintuitive.”

Alain Aspect (1947) French physicist

La principale difficulté pour vulgariser la physique quantique, c'est qu'on ne sait pas très bien comment en fabriquer des images dans notre monde. C'est en ce sens qu'elle est vraiment contre-intuitive. Interview http://www.canalacademie.com/Alain-Aspect.html on the occasion of the CNRS Gold Medal Award Ceremony in December 2005.

World, Sense

“Slowly at first, and now in growing numbers, from Maine to Alabama to California, from ghettos, suburbs and schools, young Americans are coming to Canada to resist the draft.”

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

Page 4.
Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada (1968)

School

“In the future it will be necessary on the one hand to establish a balance between the intimate and individualistic demands for housing, and on the other to take full account of general social conditions. Thus, for example, cooking should be transferred from the private single kitchen into the communal cooking laboratory; the main meal should be consumed in public eating establishments; and the rearing of children should become the responsibility of the kindergarten or the school... Presently our goal is the transition from housing as an agglomeration of many private dwellings to housing communes.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

Quote from: 'Communal Housing'
1926 - 1941, Rußland: Die Rekonstruktion der Architektur in der Sowjetunion' (1929)

Children, School, Communication, Future

“There’re all kinds of people in this world. But they break down into two main groups, one big and one smaller. There’s the people who get moved out of the way or into line, and then there’s the people who do the moving. It’s safer and a lot more comfortable to go where you’re pushed. You don’t take any of the responsibility, and if you do what you’re told, every once in a while you get thrown a fish.
“Being a mover isn’t safe, because you may be heading for a hole, and it isn’t comfortable because you do a lot of jostling back and forth, and what’s more, it’s up to you to get your own fish. But it’s a hell of a lot of fun.”

Algis Budrys book Rogue Moon

He looked into Hawks’ eyes. “Isn’t it?”
Source: Rogue Moon (1960), Chapter 1, Section 2 (pp. 12-13)

People, World, Way, Hell

“The freedom of the seemingly false opinion and our tolerance of it and our willingness to meet with it in the open help test the validity of truth while keeping alive the critical sense which is the main spring of all advancement of human thought and is the vital point, the very soul, of all human progress.”

Boris Sidis The Source and Aim of Human Progress

The Source and Aim of Human Progress (1919)

Truth, Soul, Spring, Sense

“The laboring classes constitute the main part of our population. They should be protected in their efforts peaceably to assert their rights when endangered by aggregated capital, and all statutes on this subject should recognize the care of the State for honest toil, and be framed with a view of improving the condition of the workingman.”

Grover Cleveland (1837–1908) 22nd and 24th president of the United States

Letter accepting the nomination for governor of New York (October 1882); later quoted in his letter to the Democratic National Convention (18 August 1884).

Effort, Parting

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

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

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

Life, People, Truth, Law

“The researches of the last thirty or forty years into the history of mathematics (I need only mention such names as those of [Carl Anton] Bretschneider, Hankel, Moritz Cantor, [Friedrich] Hultsch, Paul Tannery, Zeuthen, Loria, and Heiberg) have put the whole subject upon a different plane. I have endeavoured in this edition to take account of all the main results of these researches up to the present date. Thus, so far as the geometrical Books are concerned, my notes are intended to form a sort of dictionary of the history of elementary geometry, arranged according to subjects; while the notes on the arithmetical Books VII.-IX. and on Book X follow the same plan.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

p, 125
The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements (1908)

Books, History, Mathematics

“Ever since its emergence a few months ago, the declared ambition of the startup caliphate of the Islamic State has been to “wipe out every trace of Infidel influence” in areas under its control. Yet, with each passing day, it becomes more clear that, its deadly fantasies notwithstanding, the IS can’t escape from a world created and dominated by the Infidel. Start with the name that the IS, or Daesh in Arabic, has chosen for itself: ad-dawlat al-Islamiyah, or “Islamic Government.” The concepts of “state” and “government” are entirely Western, not adopted by Muslim peoples until the 19th century. The very words “state” and “government” are never mentioned in the Quran. Daesh’s “caliph” has also appointed a number of vizirs. This, too, is un-Islamic. Of Persian origin, the word vizir designated high officials of the pre-Islamic Sasanian Empire overthrown by Arab Muslim warriors in the 7th century. Mohammad had no vizirs, nor did any of his four immediate successors, the so-called “Well Guided caliphs…” The Islamic State’s most noteworthy embrace of the works of the “Infidel,” however, is surely its use of the satanic Internet. Its personnel, including converts from Europe and North America, regularly display across the Web what seems to be the main, if not the only, thing they’ve learned from Islam: cutting the throats of defenseless captives.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"The not-so-Islamic State: ISIS’ huge debt to the infidel" http://nypost.com/2014/11/20/the-not-so-islamic-state-isis-huge-debt-to-the-infidel/, New York Post (November 20, 2014). New York Post

People, World, Learning

“Last year (October 2004), the nation celebrated a week of reconciliation and forgiveness, supported by all our main religions and numerous civic organizations and individuals from all our ethnic groups. Some of those who had suffered particular hurt in 2000, questioned the motives behind this and did not feel they could take part. Their views must be respected. They endured an ordeal which left deep wounds.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

Religion, Feeling, Motivation, Forgiveness

“The sudden recent rise to prominence of cybernetics was due, immediately, to World War II. There existed then a series of problems which had not previously been met. The main one was that of range-finding for anti-aircraft guns in high-speed aerial warfare. The older systems involved human computers and these, with manually controlled locators, were wholly inadequate for the job in hand. The essence of the process involved was to track and predict the direction, velocity, and height of enemy aircraft. The human being's part in the operation was much too slow and inaccurate, and there were people available with machines already developed to do the job adequately; these machines were, of course, computing machines.”

Frank Honywill George (1921–1997) British psychologist

Source: The Brain As A Computer (1962), p.18

War, People, World, Problem

“The main problem in Britain is that there are too many competitions and too many games. There is no time to prepare properly for Europe or to introduce new ideas because there is far too much emphasis on domestic football.”

Johan Cruyff (1947–2016) Dutch association football player

International Football Hall of Fame http://www.ifhof.com/hof/cruyff.asp.

Game, Idea, Problem, Time

“Our main enemy is the Great Satan—America and the Zionists.”

Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejehei (1956) Iranian politician

Iranian Minister of Intelligence Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejehei: We Pursue, Arrest, Reform, and Sometimes Execute Spies in Iran, MEMRI, August 28, 2007 http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/1564.htm,

“The main thing is not to lose your identity and to continue working … You have a quartet. That is such joy! You can forget everything else in the world. I'm playing a lot of chamber music these days. Tomorrow we were going to give the first performance of two trios, but because of the mourning, all concerts have been canceled.”

David Oistrakh (1908–1974) Soviet violinist

The Night Stalin Died http://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/05/magazine/the-night-stalin-died.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias:r&pagewanted=2, New York Times (March 5, 1989).

World, Music, Joy, Forgetting

“My main problem was, naturally, religion: from it I moved later on to the principles of ethics. First to be examined was my positive religion [ie. Judaism]. It collapsed. So I wanted to base myself on naturaly religion: but my agony was so great, that this [foundation] also collapsed before my eyes. Nothing, nothing remained. I was the most miserable person in the world. I became an atheist.”

Moses Hess (1812–1875) German philosopher

Hess' Diary p. 40

World, Religion, Nature, Problem

“Of these two literatures, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge — theology, philosophy, history, art, science — to see the object as in itself it really is.”

Matthew Arnold On Translating Homer

On Translating Homer (1861)

Art, History, Literature, Knowledge

“The sex-energy is the greatest power of the mind and the body. This is the supreme strength in the human body, embodying all powers and assuming all forms. The mind and the body receive their strength and life from this sex-energy. Instead of allowing this Shakti or energy to become the gross seminal fluid, it is to be conserved, it is to be converted into a form of subtle energy called “Ojas” and thus made a source of spiritual life instead of the cause of physical death. With the extinction of sexual desires, the mind is released of its most powerful bond. Sex-energy moves towards two main directions, viz., one is downward and the other is upward. It takes the downward course in the form of gross sexual enjoyment; but when one tries to observe Brahmacharya (celibacy) in thought, word and deed, it takes the upward course. When the sex-energy always takes the downward course in a person, such a person becomes weak mentally and physically. From such a man or woman we cannot expect anything great and original. Sexual life dissipates the powers of the mind and the body.”

Swami Narayanananda (1902–1988) Indian guru

The Mysteries of Man, Mind and Mind-Functions (1951), p. 483f (2001 edition)

Life, Death, Sex, Personality

“Apart from cheese and tulips, the main product of the country is advocaat, a drink made from lawyers.”

Alan Coren (1938–2007) humorist and writer from the United Kingdom

"All You Need To Know About Europe", Netherlands.
The Sanity Inspector (1974)

Drink, Country

“At the first test I really started to go through a couple of names and I like the name Liz and Luscious Liz fits quite well, I think. It’s an attractive car, it’s quick and successful. But the main attribute naturally should be that she’s bloody quick.”

Sebastian Vettel (1987) German racing driver in Formula 1

http://www.formula1.com/news/interviews/2010/3/10504.html Interview, March 11, 2010.
About naming the RB6.
Sourced quotes

Cars, Nature, Thinking, Success

“If the question is do people (in the Liberal Party) believe that human beings are the main cause of the planet warming, then I'd say a majority don't accept that position”

Nick Minchin (1953) Australian politician

Xinhua News Agency http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-11/10/content_12423488.htm

People, Question

“But that was only a small part of the reason why I quit. The main reason was the disturbing new player-base. The game got bigger with every new expansion that was released, and as it got bigger, it brought in a vast amount of new players. I noticed that more and more “normal” people who had active and pleasurable social lives were starting to play the game, as the new changes catered to such a crowd. WoW no longer became a sanctuary where I could hide from the evils of the world, because the evils of the world had now followed me there. I saw people bragging online about their sexual experiences with girls… and they used the term “virgin” as an insult to people who were more immersed in the game than them. The insult stung, because it was true. Us virgins did tend to get more immersed in such things, because our real lives were lacking. I couldn’t stand to play WoW knowing that my enemies, the people I hate and envy so much for having sexual lives, were now playing the same game as me. There was no point anymore. My best friend Bradley, betrayed me by leaving me and going to some ginger named William. One day, I will get my revenge. I realized what a terrible mistake I made to turn my back on the world again. The world is brutal, and I need to fight for my place in it. My life was at a crucial turning point, and I couldn’t waste any more precious time.”

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

My Twisted World (2014), Thoughts at 19, Quitting World of Warcraft

Life, Hate, People, Pleasure

“Rough wind, the moanest loud
Grief too sad for song;
Wild wind, when sullen cloud
Knells all the night long;
Sad storm, whose tears are vain,
Bare woods, whose branches strain,
Deep caves and dreary main, —
Wail, for the world's wrong!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

A Dirge http://poetryarchive.bravepages.com/RSTU_poets/shelley_percy.b.htm#dirge (1821)

World, Sadness, Tear, Night

“The objects that we have known in better days are the main props that sustain the weight of our affections, and give us strength to await our future lot. The future is like a dead wall or a thick mist hiding all objects from our view; the past is alive and stirring with objects, bright or solemn, and of unfading interest.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On the Past and Future" Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Past, Future, Dead

“We all possess, in our unconscious minds, a kind of servant who performs certain automatic functions. When I learn to type or drive a car or learn a foreign language, I have to do it painfully and consciously; then, suddenly, my robot takes over and does it automatically; in fact, he does it far more quickly and efficiently than "I" could. The main trouble with this mechanical valet is that he often takes over functions I would prefer to keep for myself -- for example, when I am tired I eat "automatically," and so do not enjoy my food. In fact, this is the reason that so much of our experience seems oddly "unreal"; the robot has taken it over. When I am feeling low, I may live for whole days in a "robotic" state, so that experience flows off me like water off a duck's back. And because I am not receiving any "feedback" of pleasure or interest from my activities, I become duller than ever, and experience becomes progressively less interesting. (This is, of course, the mechanism of depression and nervous breakdown.) And this is also why explorers deliberately seek out hardship and danger -- to cheat the robot and "feel the life in them more intensely."”

Colin Wilson book The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders

Source: The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988), p. 89

Life, Pleasure, Food, Cars

“In spite of the insurmountable computational limits, we continue to pursue the many problems that possess the characteristics of organized complexity. These problems are too important for our well being to give up on them. The main challenge in pursuing these problems narrows down fundamentally to one question: how to deal with systems and associated problems whose complexities are beyond our information processing limits? That is, how can we deal with these problems if no computational power alone is sufficient?”

George Klir (1932–2016) American computer scientist

Source: Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic (1995), p. 2-3.

Question, Problem

“In Western Europe since Roman times, private property was considered sacrosanct. The principle enunciated by the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca that kings rule by the will of the people became fundamental to Western civilization, together with private property, which was the main source of productive wealth.”

Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

“Property and Freedom: The Inseparable Connection,” speech at an “Evenings at FEE” event, October 2004. https://fee.org/resources/property-and-freedom-the-inseparable-connection/

People, Time, Wealth

“The body is divided into three parts and nine sections. The three parts are the spine, the two arms and the two legs.1. Spine: the head, thorax and abdomen. These three sections make up the main trunk of the body.
2. Arms: the hands, elbows and shoulders. These three sections constitute the upper limbs.
3. Legs: the hips, knees and feet. These three sections constitute the body’s lower limbs.So the body is divided into upper, middle and lower vessels. The upper is from the chest and arms upwards, the middle constitutes waist and hips, and the lower vessel is from the thighs and knees downwards.”

Wu Kung-tsao (1902–1983) Chinese martial artist

Wu Family T'ai Chi Ch'uan (1980)

Parting

“The female body’s unbearable hiddenness applies to all aspects men’s dealings with women. What does it look like in there? Did she have an orgasm? Is it really my child? Who was my real father? Mystery surrounds women’s sexuality. This mystery is the main reason for the imprisonment man has imposed on women. Only by confining his wife in a locked harem guarded by eunuchs could he be certain that her son was also his.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 22

Women, Men

“The main object of cybernetics is to supply adaptive, hierarchical models, involving feedback and the like, to all aspects of our environment. Often such modelling implies simulation of a system where the simulation should achieve the object of copying both the method of achievement and the end result. Synthesis, as opposed to simulation, is concerned with achieving only the end result and is less concerned (or completely unconcerned) with the method by which the end result is achieved. In the case of behaviour, psychology is concerned with simulation, while cybernetics, although also interested in simulation, is primarily concerned with synthesis.
Most of the major developments in models and theories of artificial intelligence have taken place in the western world — mostly, indeed, in the US and Britain — and it was only relatively recently that "core developments", as opposed to more peripheral developments and applications, have spread over Europe and the Soviet Union.”

Frank Honywill George (1921–1997) British psychologist

George (1973) "Soviet Cybernetics, the militairy and Professor Lerner" in: New Scientist (March 15, 1973). Vol. 57, nr. 837. p. 613

World, Intelligence

“.. that my drawings which offer - also by variety of genre - a greater variety [compared to his paintings], especially after 1863, when my late friend jr. CCA Ridder van Rappard urged me to reserve especially for him all the new works I would make and such including the freedom not to limit myself exclusively to my main genre [churches]. In the environment around his estate in the Sticht where he stayed, it became therefore the treshing-floors of the farms and the house-interiors which immediately attracted and inspired me to achieve a new personal interpretation of these subjects.”

Johannes Bosboom (1817–1891) Dutch painter

citaat van Johannes Bosboom, in origineel Nederlands: ..dat mijner teekeningen, die ook door verscheidenheid van genre een grooter afwisseling aanbieden [dan zijn schilderijen] vooral na 1863, toen wijlen mijn vriend jhr. C. C. A. Ridder van Rappard er bij mij op aandrong om wat ik verder zou leveren voor hem te bestemmen en zulks met de vrijheid mij niet uitsluitend te houden bij mijn hoofdgenre [de kerken]. In den omtrek van het door hem betrokken landgoed in het Sticht waren het dan ook de boerendeelen en binnenhuizen, die mij dadelijk aantrokken en inspireerden tot een nieuwe eigen opvatting daarvan.
Source: 1880's, Een en ander betrekkelijk mijn loopbaan als schilder, p. 13-14

Freedom, Drawing, Painting, Housing

“Maine should be pleased that its animal
is not a waverer, and rather
than fight, lets the primed quill fall.
Shallow oppressor, intruder,
insister, you have found a resister.”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

Of the porcupine, in "Apparition of Splendor"
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)

Animals, Fight

“I think marriage is primarily about children, main purpose being to propagate & create environment for children to grow up. Its a good policy for society to support male/female marriage imo.”

Lucinda Creighton (1980) Irish politician

Creighton's comments on Twitter opposing same-sex marriage caused uproar across Ireland, particularly as she was the party's equality spokeswoman at this time. Gaelick http://www.gaelick.com/2012/02/sligo-lgbt-soc-protests-against-lucinda-creighton-with-marriage-ceremony/22059/.

Marriage, Children, Support, Thinking

“Outside in the garden, the greenhouse collapses. Masonry crashes from the roof and splashes into the moat. The grave-marker for the pig Hortense moves up out of the ground. The Maillol statue stands firm as the shrubs around it quiver. A water-main bursts in the yard sending a shower into the air. Trees fall as though whipped down to the ground. The water on the lake shimmers and ripples like a film run backwards.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Penultimate paragraph of the published script.
8 1/2 Women

Tree, Water

“Almost all medieval Muslim historians credit their heroes with desecration of Hindu idols and/or destruction of Hindu temples. The picture that emerges has the following components, depending upon whether the iconoclast was in a hurry on account of Hindu resistance or did his work at leisure after a decisive victory:
1. The idols were mutilated or smashed or burnt or melted down if they were made of precious metals.
2. Sculptures in relief on walls and pillars were disfigured or scraped away or torn down.
3. Idols of stone and inferior metals or their pieces were taken away, sometimes by cartloads, to be thrown down before the main mosque in (a) the metropolis of the ruling Muslim sultan and (b) the holy cities of Islam, particularly Mecca, Medina and Baghdad.
4. There were instances of idols being turned into lavatory seats or handed over to butchers to be used as weights while selling meat.
5. Brahmin priests and other holy men in and around the temple were molested or murdered.
6. Sacred vessels and scriptures used in worship were defiled and scattered or burnt.
7. Temples were damaged or despoiled or demolished or burnt down or converted into mosques with some structural alterations or entire mosques were raised on the same sites mostly with temple materials.
8. Cows were slaughtered on the temple sites so that Hindus could not use them again.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume I (1990)

Men, Decision, Victory, Dependency

“The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, 'This is jessamine, this violet, this rose'. But at last Dahoum drew me: 'Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all', and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. 'This,' they told me, 'is the best: it has no taste.”

T. E. Lawrence book Seven Pillars of Wisdom

My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.
Source: Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), Ch. 3

World, Dogs, Way, Flowers

“The main problem with current neo-liberal globalisation is that it detaches economic and political power from locality, tradition and interpersonal relationships. That’s because it makes a fundamental assumption about human nature: that we are essentially selfish, greedy, isolated individuals who seem to maximise our own individual happiness or short-term pleasure. Purely individual interests ultimately clash. This conflict is then supposedly resolved by the ‘invisible hand’ of the market and the visible hand of the state. In consequence we are left with an increasing centralisation of power, a growing concentration of wealth and an ever-more atomised society.”

Jon Cruddas (1962) British politician

The Common Good in an Age of Austerity Lecture, 9 July 2014 http://joncruddas.org.uk/sites/joncruddas.org.uk/files/ebor%20a.pdf

Pleasure, Nature, Problem, Selfishness

“The main difficulty in using either lazo or bolas, is to ride so well, as to be able at full speed, and while suddenly turning about, to whirl them so steadily round the head, as to take aim: on foot any person would soon learn the art. One day, as I was amusing myself by galloping and whirling the balls round my head, by accident the free one struck a bush; and its revolving motion being thus destroyed, it immediately fell to the ground, and like magic caught one hind leg of my horse; the other ball was then jerked out of my hand, and the horse fairly secured. Luckily he was an old practised animal, and knew what it meant; otherwise he would probably have kicked till he had thrown himself down. The Gauchos roared with laughter; they cried they had seen every sort of animal caught, but had never before seen a man caught by himself.”

Charles Darwin book The Voyage of the Beagle

Source: The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), chapter III: "Montevideo — Maldonado, etc.", page 51 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=70&itemID=F11&viewtype=image

Art, Jerk, Laughter, Learning

“Keynes’s design was in favour of the liberalization of the economy and the capital’s transfers, for the main purpose of monetary stability. To avoid devaluation of currencies - a practice followed by governments in order to sustain their export - Lord Keynes planned to introduce “Bancor”, a money of account to be accepted by all countries in international exchanges. The international body to be organized would get interests both from debtor and creditor countries, in order to finance the balance of payments system”

Nico Perrone (1935) Italian historian and writer

Source: The international economy from a political to an authoritative drive, p. 130

Money, Country

“There were many reasons why we did not gain complete success at Arnhem. The following in my view were the main ones. First. The operation was not regarded at Supreme Headquarters as the spearhead of a major Allied movement on the northern flank designed to isolate, and finally to occupy, the Ruhr - the one objective in the West which the Germans could not afford to lose. There is no doubt in my mind that Eisenhower always wanted to give priority to the northern thrust and to scale down the southern one. He ordered this to be done, and he thought that it was being done. It was not being done. Second. The airborne forces at Arnhem were dropped too far away from the vital objective - the bridge. It was some hours before they reached it. I take the blame for this mistake. I should have ordered Second Army and 1st Airborne Corps to arrange that at least one complete Parachute Brigade was dropped quite close to the bridge, so that it could have been captured in a matter of minutes and its defence soundly organised with time to spare. I did not do so. Third. The weather. This turned against us after the first day and we could not carry out much of the later airborne programme. But weather is always an uncertain factor, in war and in peace. This uncertainty we all accepted. It could only have been offset, and the operation made a certainty, by allotting additional resources to the project, so that it became an Allied and not merely a British project. Fourth. The 2nd S. S. Panzer Corps was refitting in the Arnhem area, having limped up there after its mauling in Normandy. We knew it was there. But we were wrong in supposing that it could not fight effectively; its battle state was far beyond our expectation. It was quickly brought into action against the 1st Airborne Division.”

Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein (1887–1976) British Army officer, Commander of Allied forces at the Battle of El Alamein

Concerning Operation Market Garden in his autobiography, 'The Memoirs of Field Marshal Montgomery' (1958)

War, Peace, Time, Success

“Perhaps the main motive behind my isolation was my desire to escape from the demands of relationships, which I consider very difficult in comparison to making rockets. All I desired was to be true to my way of life, to uphold the science of rocketry in my country and to retire with a clean conscience.”

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam book Wings of Fire

Source: Wings of Fire, p. 121.

Life, Way, Motivation, Science

“When I first began working with baboons, my main problem was learning to keep up with them while remaining alert to poisonous snakes, irascible buffalo, aggressive bees, and leg-breaking pig holes. Fortunately, these challenges eased over time, mainly because I was traveling in the company of expert guides—baboons who could spot a predator a mile away and seemed to possess a sixth sense for the proximity of snakes. Abandoning myself to their far superior knowledge, I moved as a humble disciple, learning from masters about being an African anthropoid. Thus I became (or, rather, regained my ancestral right to be) an animal, moving instinctively through a world that felt (because it was) like my ancient home.”

Barbara Smuts (1950) American anthropologist

Source: Reflections (1999), p. 109

World, Travel, Home, Knowledge

“The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters. This whole notion was advanced by Mary McCarthy and many others years ago, that the main function of the novel was to carry out a kind of moral criticism of life. But the writer has no business making moral judgments or trying to set himself up as a one-man or one-woman magistrate's court. I think it's far better, as Burroughs did and I've tried to do in my small way, to tell the truth.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

"J.G. Ballard on William S. Burrough's Naked Truth" by Richard Kadrey in Salon (2 September 1997) http://web.archive.org/web/20000511215816/http://www.salon.com/sept97/wsb2970902.html

Life, Truth, Way, Business

“One of the main reasons American liberals adore Europe is that Europe still worships its intellectuals. In America, intellectuals are mostly for entertainment. But across the pond, these folks get to do real damage. Why, just this spring a small Italian village had its barbershop cited by the local magistrate because its shaving brushes did not conform to the standard set by the European Union. I am not making this up.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

June 13, 2001 http://web.archive.org/web/20010105/www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldbergprint061301.html 2000s, 2001

Spring

“Available energy is the main object at stake in the struggle for existence and the evolution of the world.”

Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906) Austrian physicist

S. Rajasekar, N.Athavan, "Ludwig Edward Boltzmann"
Attributed

World

“Questions that pertain to the foundations of mathematics, although treated by many in recent times, still lack a satisfactory solution. Ambiguity of language is philosophy's main source of problems. That is why it is of the utmost importance to examine attentively the very words we use.”
Quaestiones, quae ad mathematicae fundamenta pertinent, etsi hisce temporibus a multis tractatae, satisfacienti solutione et adhuc carent. Hic difficultas maxime en sermonis ambiguitate oritur. Quare summi interest verba ipsa, quibus utimur attente perpendere.

Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932) Italian mathematician

Arithmetices principia, nova methodo exposita [The Principles of Arithmetic, presented by a new method] (1889)

Mathematics, Question, Problem, Time

“It is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Letters on Tactics (April 1917) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/x01.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 24. 1910s

Life, Truth, Reality

“The time has come to deal the enemy a terrific blow in Western Europe.
The blow will be struck by the combined sea, land and air forces of the Allies together constituting one great Allied team, under the supreme command of General Eisenhower.
On the eve of this great adventure I send my best wishes to every soldier in the Allied team.
To us is given the honour of striking a blow for freedom which will live in history; and in the better days that lie ahead men will speak with pride of our doings. We have a great and a righteous cause.
Let us pray that " The Lord Mighty in Battle " will go forth with our armies, and that His special providence will aid us in the struggle.
I want every soldier to know that I have complete confidence in the successful outcome of the operations that we are now about to begin.
With stout hearts, and with enthusiasm for the contest, let us go forward to victory.
And, as we enter the battle, let us recall the words of a famous soldier spoken many years ago :
"He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
Who dare not put it to the touch,
To win or lose it all. "

Good luck to each one of you. And good hunting on the main land of Europe.”

Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein (1887–1976) British Army officer, Commander of Allied forces at the Battle of El Alamein

Personal message to troops of 21st Army Group on the eve of D-Day

Men, Fate, Lie, Fear

“Our voices, our representation of ourselves, have been in the hands of others, namely men, since the beginning of the mediums of film and television. My main character in I've Heard the Mermaids Singing videotaped a confession that is used through the film. It's her way of having control over her definition of herself.”

Patricia Rozema (1958) Canadian film director

As quoted in When Women Call the Shots : The Developing Power and Influence of Women in Television and Film (1996) by Linda Seger, p. 117

Men, Way, Singing

“I believe that the main lesson which our generation has learnt is that we must find a new limit for the activities of government, a limit which leaves ample scope for sensible experimentation but which secures the freedom of the individual as the mainspring of all social and political activity. The whole purpose of these lectures has been to suggest that we can find such a limit if we are willing to revive and develop the ancient ideal of the Rule of Law.”

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

Lecture IV. The Decline of the Rule of Law - 25. The Task for Liberty- Loving Statesmen
1940s–1950s, The Political Ideal of the Rule of Law (1955)

Law, Freedom

“The Sultan is not slack in jihad. He never lets go of his spear or bridle in pursuing jihad by land and sea routes. This is his main occupation which engages his eyes and ears. He has spent vast sums for the establishment of the faith and the spread of Islam in these lands, as a result of which the light of Islam has reached the inhabitants and the flash of the true faith brightened among them. Fire temples have been destroyed and the images and idols of Budd have been broken, and the lands have been freed from those who were not included in the darul Islam, that is, those who had refused to become zimmis. Islam has been spread by him in the far east and has reached the point of sunrise. In the words of Abu Nasr al-Aini, he has carried the flags of the followers of Islam where they had never reached before and where no chapter or verse (of the Quran) had ever been recited. Thereafter he got mosques and places of worship erected, and music replaced by call to prayers (azan), and the incantations of fire-worshippers stopped by recitations of the Quran. He directed the people of Islam towards the citadels of the infidels and, by the grace of Allah, made them (the believers) inheritors of wealth and land and that country which they (the believers) had never trodden upon.”

Muhammad bin Tughluq (1290–1351) Turkic Sultan of Delhi

Tughlaq Kalina Bharata, Persian texts translated into Hindi by S.A.A. Rizvi, 2 Volumes, Aligarh, 1956-57. p. 325 ff. Vol I. (Shihabuddin Al Umari.) Also quoted (using a different translation) in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts. 8th to 15th Centuries, p. 274.

People, Faith, Music, Light

“There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

#68
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Men

“When Wadewitz showed Wikipedia's main page to her class one day, she found that the women featured were largely sexualised or portrayed as victims of a crime, while people of colour were represented as perpetrators of a crime.”

Adrianne Wadewitz (1977–2014) academic and Wikipedian

Garrison, Lynsea. (April 7, 2014). "How can Wikipedia woo women editors?" http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26828726. BBC News Magazine. BBC News. About

Women, People

“There are two main principles I've picked up over the years as they pertain to cultivating the type of faith that moves mountains. The first is this: Faith comes by looking at God, not at the mountain. The second is this: God gives us faith as we walk by his side.”

Bill Hybels (1951) American writer

Too Busy Not to Pray (2008, InterVarsity Press)

God, Faith, Mountain

“The Southwest was spectacular, but I have no interest in moving there. North Carolina is beautiful in spring and fall. But I can say I didn't find anyplace I'd rather live than Maine.”

Angus King (1944) United States Senator from Maine

Bowdoin Academic Spotlight interview (2011)

Beauty, Spring

“We can imagine that the Academy, which could be attended only by men of leisure, was a cradle of discontent. The author of the Laws was a disgruntled old man, full of political rancor, fearing and hating the crowd and above all their demagogues; his prejudices had crystallized and he had become an old doctrinaire, unable to see anything but the reflections of his own personality and to hear anything but the echoes of his own thoughts. The worst of it was that he, a noble Athenian, admired the very Spartans who had defeated and humiliated his fatherland. Plato was witnessing a social revolution (even as we are) and he could not bear it at all. His main concern was: how could one stop it.”

George Sarton (1884–1956) American historian of science

Source: A History of Science Vol.1 Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece (1952), Ch.16 "Plato and the Academy" p. 409.

Men, Hate, Fear, Law

“How does so much [false news] get into the American newspapers, even the good ones? Is it because journalists, as a class, are habitual liars, and prefer what is not true to what is true? I don't think it is. Rather, it is because journalists are, in the main, extremely stupid, sentimental and credulous fellows -- because nothing is easier than to fool them -- because the majority of them lack the sharp intelligence that the proper discharge of their duties demands.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Prejudices: A Selection, p. 220
1920s

Stupidity, Fools, Intelligence, Thinking

“If this apprehension of the facts be correct, and the documentary evidence would appear to verify it, then certain conclusions are bound to follow. A spring will cease to flow if its source be dried up; a tree will wither if its roots be destroyed. In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man — these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We can not continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)

People, World, Faith, Spring

“Rome has an ambiance, puerile yet unmatchable. Rome hints at the possibility of becoming the main actor in the drama of one’s own life. (The hint is false, of course; but the stolid northern cities do not even possess the hint.)”

Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) American writer

Source: The 10th Victim (1965), Chapter 2 (pp. 19-20)

Life, Falseness

“The main obligation is to amuse yourself.”

S.J. Perelman (1904–1979) American humorist, author, and screenwriter

As quoted in I Seem to be a Verb (Bantam Books, 1970), p. 62

“The reduction of poverty is the over-arching objective of the MDGs. Progress is not measured by national or global averages, but by how well the health of the poor improves. If we miss the poor, we miss the point. A health system that lacks commodities for managing high-mortality infectious diseases and the main killers of mothers and young children will not have an adequate impact.”

Margaret Chan (1947) Director-General of the World Health Organization

"Exclusive Interview with WHO's Dr. Margaret Chan" http://www.usaid.gov/news-information/frontlines/global-healthiraq/exclusive-interview-whos-dr-margaret-chan, April-May 2011.

Children, Health, Disease

“There are now electrical appliances with the main unit so sealed in that it cannot be got at for repair. There have always been human beings like that.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

“Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long. You can't be objective about Nixon.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

ibid.
1990s

“This past summer I realized that I am not the sort of woman to stand alone in life. Apart from the eternal worries about money, it is precisely the freedom I have had which was able to lure me away from myself. I would so much like to get to the point where I can create something that is me. It is up to the future to determine for us whether I'm acting bravely or not. The main thing now is peace and quiet for my work, and I have that most of all when I am at Otto Modersohn's side.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

In a letter to her friend Clara Rilke-Westhoff, 17 November 1906; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 206
1906 + 1907

Life, Money, Peace, Freedom

“My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age”

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

Letter to Robert Fulford, 1964. Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 300
1960s
Context: My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

Age

“Incoherence is not the monopoly of madness: all the main ideas of a sane man are irrational erections build up, for better or worse, to express his deepest feelings.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Les silences du colonel Bramble (The Silence of Colonel Bramble)

Feeling, Idea, Madness

“Most of the constantly rising burden of paperwork exists to give an illusion of transparency and control to a bureaucracy that is out of touch with the actual production process. Every new layer of paperwork is added to address the perceived problem that stuff still isn’t getting done the way management wants, despite the proliferation of paperwork saying everything has being done exactly according to orders. In a hierarchy, managers are forced to regulate a process which is necessarily opaque to them because they are not directly engaged in it. They’re forced to carry out the impossible task of developing accurate metrics to evaluate the behavior of subordinates, based on the self-reporting of people with whom they have a fundamental conflict of interest. The paperwork burden that management imposes on workers reflects an attempt to render legible a set of social relationships that by its nature must be opaque and closed to them, because they are outside of it. Each new form is intended to remedy the heretofore imperfect self-reporting of subordinates. The need for new paperwork is predicated on the assumption that compliance must be verified because those being monitored have a fundamental conflict of interest with those making the policy, and hence cannot be trusted; but at the same time, the paperwork itself relies on their self-reporting as the main source of information. Every time new evidence is presented that this or that task isn’t being performed to management’s satisfaction, or this or that policy isn’t being followed, despite the existing reams of paperwork, management’s response is to design yet another—and equally useless—form.”

Kevin Carson (1963) American academic

The Desktop Regulatory State (2016), Chapter 2
The Desktop Regulatory State (2016)

People, Way, Behavior, Nature

“I do not yet want to form a hypothesis to test, because as soon as you make a hypothesis, you become prejudiced. Your mind slides into a groove, and once it is in that groove, has difficulty noticing anything outside of it. During this time, my sense must be sharp; that is the main thing — to be sharp, yet open.”

Bernd Heinrich (1940) American ornithologist

Wondering how golden-crowned kinglets, which eat insects from open branches, survive the Maine winters, in "December 11 : Wind", p. 150
A Year in the Maine Woods (1995)

Sense, Time

“France is the daughter of freedom. In human progress, the essential part, the main force, is called man. Man is his own Prometheus.”

Jules Michelet (1798–1874) French historian

[Peface de la Histoire de France, Michelet, Jules, Flammarion, 1893-1894, VIII]
History of France, 1833-1867

Freedom, Parting, Daughters

“The main result reached by the new theory was that the classical mechanics can be made to account for the whole range of spectral phenomena, provided entirely new meanings are given to such symbols as p and q which had hitherto been taken to describe the position and motion of the electron…. The most significant of the new properties is that the product pq is no longer the same as the product qp - in other words the order in which the two factors are multiplied together is no longer a matter of indifference. The difference between pq and qp is found to be always the same, being Planck's constant h multiplied by a numerical multiplier.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Indifference

“As a student of Franz von Stück he Kandinsky still continued for a while to paint quite naturalistically. He admitted to me that he had always loved color, even as a child, far more than subject matter. Form and color were his main interests. To me he often remarked that 'objects disturb me.”

Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) German painter

But he could paint portraits, too.
Source: Interview by Edouard Roditi (1958), p. 116

Love, Color, Painting

“Segregating science and spirituality has been the greatest crime against humanity in the past century. These two main branches of knowledge that should have gone hand in hand were divided and practitioners were either labeled as modern scientists or representatives of religious faiths. “Only scientific discoveries apply to logic and intelligence. They are the only truth. Religious faith is blind and misguided.” This was the ideology that was popularized. All the recent natural disasters and the alarming changes in the global climate are challenging the further survival of this beautiful earth we live in. Now, many people cannot help thinking that all this may be the result of weighing science and spirituality on opposite sides of a scale and deeming that one is much greater than the other.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

From Amritanandamayi's Address at the United Nations Academic Impact Conference on Technology for Sustainable Development (2015)

People, Truth, Faith, Beauty

“Not all monotheisms are exactly the same, at the moment. They're all based on the same illusion, they're all plagiarisms of each other, but there is one in particular that at the moment is proposing a serious menace not just to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, but to quite a lot of other freedoms too. And this is the religion that exhibits the horrible trio of self-hatred, self-righteousness and self-pity. I am talking about militant Islam. Globally it's a gigantic power. It controls an enormous amount of oil wealth, several large countries and states, with an enormous fortune it's pumping the ideologies of wahhabism and salafism around the world, poisoning societies where it goes, ruining the minds of children, stultifying the young in its madrassas, training people in violence, making a cult of death and suicide and murder. That's what it does globally, it's quite strong. In our societies it poses as a cringing minority, whose faith you might offend, who deserves all the protection that a small and vulnerable group might need. Now, it makes quite large claims for itself, doesn't it? It says it's the Final Revelation. It says that God spoke to one illiterate businessman – in the Arabian Peninsula – three times through an archangel, and that the resulted material, which as you can see as you read it is largely plagiarized ineptly from the Old…and The New Testament, is to be accepted as the Final Revelation and as the final and unalterable one, and that those who do not accept this revelation are fit to be treated as cattle infidels, potential chattel, slaves and victims. Well I tell you what, I don't think Muhammad ever heard those voices. I don't believe it. And the likelihood that I am right – as opposed to the likelihood that a businessman who couldn't read, had bits of the Old and The New Testament re-dictated to him by an archangel, I think puts me much more near the position of being objectively correct. But who is the one under threat? The person who promulgates this and says I'd better listen because if I don't I'm in danger, or me who says "no, I think this is so silly you can even publish a cartoon about it"? And up go the placards and the yells and the howls and the screams – this is in London, this is in Toronto, this is in New York, it's right in our midst now – "Behead those who cartoon Islam". Do they get arrested for hate speech? No. Might I get in trouble for saying what I just said about the prophet Muhammad? Yes, I might. Where are your priorities ladies and gentlemen? You're giving away what is most precious in your own society, and you're giving it away without a fight, and you're even praising the people who want to deny you the right to resist it. Shame on you why you do this. Make the best use of the time you've got left. This is really serious. … Look anywhere you like for the warrant for slavery, for the subjection of women as chattel, for the burning and flogging of homosexuals, for ethnic cleansing, for antisemitism, for all of this, you look no further than a famous book that's on every pulpit in this city, and in every synagogue and in every mosque. And then just see whether you can square the fact that the force that is the main source of hatred, is also the main caller for censorship.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyoOfRog1EM&feature=youtu.be&t=16m36s
"Be It Resolved: Freedom of Speech Includes the Freedom to Hate", 15/11/2006.
2000s, 2006

Death, Women, God, Hate

“In every field there is a need for writing where the main objective is to extend the reader's field of acquaintance with the complex cases of the real world. Such writing does not have to be very exact or quantitative; it does not even have to formulate or to demonstrate hypotheses. It constitutes, as it were, travel over the field of study. Travel is certainly not enough, even for a geographer, but we would feel, I imagine, that a geographer who had never travelled would be under a serious handicap. Similarly the student of organizations who has never, even vicariously through reading, been in a hospital, a bank, a research laboratory, a large corporation, a Soviet factory, a revolution, an Egyptian civil service department, and so on, has missed something. His generalizations are apt to be based on too narrow a selection of the field.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding (1958) "Evidences for an Administrative Science: A review of the Administrative Science Quarterly, volumes 1 and 2". In Administrative Science Quarterly. vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 1-22.as cited in: John Van Maanen (1998) Qualitative Studies of Organizations. p.xx
1950s

World, Travel, Feeling, Imagination

“[M]y main task when I was artistic director at Thomson for four years: to make the company virtuous. Not because there was a desire there to do evil, but because they had simply forgotten their purpose in life - to be of service, to use their skills to be of service. It is essential to try to play the role of a friendly "enemy within". That is, to catch the interest of these big companies so that they make money available, and research facilities, and distribution networks, for this return to what is the origin of all their activities - to serve others. It even means changing the words they use. One of the things I did at Thomson was to change their name. Thomson used to be called TCE, Thomson Consumer Electronic, and I asked them: who wants to be a "consumer of electronics?"”

Philippe Starck (1949) French architect and industrial designer

Starck, 2000

Life, Money, Evil, Change

“So far as school education is concerned, many of the assumptions necessary for market efficiency fail, the main problems being imperfect information, imperfect capital markets, and external effects.”

Nicholas Barr (1943) British economist

Source: Economics Of The Welfare State (Fourth Edition), Chapter 13, School Education, p. 318

Education, School, Problem

“In general, success tends to breed slack. One of the main consequences of slack is a muting of problems of resource scarcity. Slack provides a source of funds for innovations that would not be approved in the case of scarcity but that have strong subgroup support.”

Richard Cyert (1921–1998) American economist

Source: A behavioral theory of the firm, 1959, p. 189; cited in: Pitelis, C. "A Note on Cyert and March (1963) and Penrose (1959): A Case for Synergy," at www.jbs.cam.ac.uk, 2006.

Support, Problem, Strong, Success

“I know what's what, and have always taken care of the main chance.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part I, Book III, Ch. 9.

Chance

“I have a heart. I have a heart for Maine people.”

Paul LePage (1948) American businessman, Republican Party politician, and the 74th Governor of Maine

As quoted by The Times. http://time.com/4172603/paul-lepage-chris-christie-maine-2016-election/ (January 8, 2016)

People, Heart

“On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Harry Hubbard, in Harlot's Ghost : A Novel (1991)

Winter

“We don't want to see just one forward up front. To win you have to score. To have chances you've got to have forwards close to the goal, I appreciated Leonardo a lot but I disagreed with him in how he fielded the team. Ronaldinho must play on the shoulder of the strikers even if he has a tendency to drift left. Ronaldinho has been linked in the media with a move away but Berlusconi was adamant the playmaker was staying. He is the No1 attraction at Milan," he said, "Ronaldinho does not want to leave. I'm sure he is happy to stay.
I would be happy for Gattuso to stay but we are not against people saying they want to leave, We can't exclude [the sale of Huntelaar] even if we are convinced of his qualities as a main striker.”

Silvio Berlusconi (1936) Italian politician

['New Milan manager must play two strikers,' says Silvio Berlusconi http://www.theguardian.com/football/2010/jul/20/milan-silvio-berlusconi], July 20, 2010.
2010

People, Chance, Happiness

“I often went fishing up in Maine during the summer. Personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I didn’t think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I didn't bait the hook with strawberries and cream. Rather, I dangled a worm or grasshopper in front of the fish and said: "Wouldn't you like to have that?"”

Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People

Why not use the same common sense when fishing for people?
Source: How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), Ch. 3.

People, Thinking, Sense, Fish

“We have created a false dichotomy between behaviors attributable to companion animals and those of other species that blinds us to the inherent worth and needs of all animals.
The problem is that we have constructed a society in which we are rarely forced to think about where what we consume comes from, and this extends to the animals reared for our consumption. While we pamper one set of animals, another set of animals becomes our food. The main difference is that we come to know one set of these animals, while the other set is raised and killed for us, delivered in plastic wrap and Styrofoam, and served up as dinner. If nothing else, this belies the deep moral confusion that we have about animals as a culture.”

Bob Torres American podcaster

Source: Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights (2007), p. 2

Food, Behavior, Problem, Thinking

“The proper management of pain remains, after all, the most important obligation, the main objective, and the crowning achievement of every physician.”

John Bonica (1917–1994) Anesthesiologist; pioneer in pain management

The Management of Pain (1954)

Pain

“Those who can create wealth — and know that they can — are able to dictate their own terms. Wealth is a means to happiness, but it is not the main one. What most people want is control over their lives. They want the ability to choose how they live: what work they do, the way they interact with friends and colleagues, the quality of their personal relationships, the way they view themselves.”

Richard Koch (1950) German medical historian and internist

Source: The 80/20 Individual (2003), Chapter: 80/20 Individuals in Organizations

People, Way, Personality, Wealth

“Notices for Vigil meetings were always posted on the main bulletin board in the first-floor corridor, directly across from the Headmaster's office. Archie was entertained by the location of the notice right under Leon's nose. The notice was simple, involving the words TRINTY HIGH SCHOOL at the top of the board. On the day of the meeting, the Y of Trinity was inverted. Which made it look, as Archie said, like an upright finger. Thus, the Vigils giving the finger to the world while calling a meeting. That's what the upside-down Y was called: the Finger.”

Robert Cormier book Beyond the Chocolate War

Source: Beyond the Chocolate War (1985), p. 96

World, School

“Yet for many of us, anti-Semitic feeling had little to do with our dedication [to Zionism]. I personally never suffered anti-Semitic persecution. Plonsk was remarkably free of it, or at least the Jews felt well protected in the cocoon of their community life. Nevertheless, and I think this very significant, it was Plonsk that sent the highest proportion of Jews to Eretz Israel from any town in Poland of comparable size. We emigrated not for negative reasons of escape but for the positive purpose of rebuilding a homeland, a place where we wouldn't be perpetual strangers and that through our toil would become irrevocably our own. Life in Plonsk was peaceful enough. There were three main communities: Russians, Jews and Poles. Each lived apart from the others. The Russians as the occupiers kept a firm hand on the civil administration. There were no Polish or Jewish officials. Officials or the police almost never interfered in dealings between Jewish and Polish communities. They disliked both equally and took an aloof attitude to the town's day-to-day life. The number of Jews and Poles in the city were roughly equal, about five thousand each. The Jews, however, formed a compact, centralized group occupying the innermost districts whilst the Poles were more scattered, living in outlying areas and shading off into the peasantry. Consequently, when a gang of Jewish boys met a Polish gang the latter would almost inevitably represent a single suburb and thus be poorer in fighting potential than the Jews who even if their numbers were initially fewer could quickly call on reinforcements from the entire quarter. Far from being afraid of them, they were rather afraid of us. In general, however, relations were amicable, though distant.”

David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) Israeli politician, Zionist leader, prime minister of Israel

Memoirs : David Ben-Gurion (1970), p. 36

Life, Peace, Feeling, Boy

“I am amazed that Roli Books should publish such thinly disguised plagiarism, and allow the author to hide in a cavalier manner behind a nom-de-plume. The book is clearly modelled on my career, even down to the name of the main character. That character's journalism is abysmal, and his views on Hindutva and Hinduism do not in any way reflect mine. I would disagree with them profoundly.”

Mark Tully (1935) British journalist

Source: Dean Nelson, " Former BBC correspondent Sir Mark Tully attacked in novel http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/7552715/Former-BBC-correspondent-Sir-Mark-Tully-attacked-in-novel.html," in The Telegraph, 5 April 2010 On the controversy created in a thinly-disguised novel which portrays him as a heartless philanderer and supporter of fanatics.

Books, Way

“My first concert - apart from Beethoven at School and Erik Satie at the opening of my exhibition in Kleve in 1960 - was at the gallery Parnass in Wuppertal in 1963. Dressed like a regular pianist in dark grey flannel, black tie and no hat, I played the piano all over – not just the keys – with many pairs of old shoes until it disintegrated. My intention was neither destructive nor nihilistic. 'Heal like with like' – similia similibus curantur – in the homeopathic sense. The main intention was to indicate a new beginning…. or simply a revolutionary act. This was my first public Fluxus appearance.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Quoted in: Joseph Beuys, Carin Kuoni. Joseph Beuys in America: Energy Plan for the Western Man. New York, 1993, p. 128; Comment on his first Fluxus performance in 1963 'Heal like with like'.
1970's, Interviews with Caroline Tisdall, 1974 & 1978

School, Shoe, Sense, Appearance

“1990s, North Korea was the main recipient of American aid in Asia.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Interview with Chad O'Carroll (2012)

“Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them. Like music, it acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses, the harmonious tones corresponding to the harmonies of sounds, but in painting, a unity is obtained which is not possible in music, where the accords follow one another, and the judgement experiences a continuous fatigue if one wants to reunite the end and the beginning. In the main, the ear is an inferior sense to the eye. The hearing can only grasp a single sound at one time, whereas the sight takes in everything and at the same time simplifies at its will.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

La peinture est le plus beau de tous les arts; en lui se résument toutes les sensations, à son aspect chacun peut, au gré de son imagination, créer le roman, d'un seul coup d'œil avoir l'âme envahie par les plus profonds souvenirs; point d'effort de mémoire, tout résumé en un seul instant. — Art complet qui résume tous les autres et les complète. — Comme la musique, il agit sur l'âme par l'intermédiaire des sens, les tons harmonieux correspondant aux harmonies des sons; mais en peinture on obtient une unité impossible en musique où les accords viennent les uns après les autres, et le jugement éprouve alors une fatigue incessante s'il veut réunir la fin au commencement. En somme, l'oreille est un sens inférieur à celui de l'œil. L'ouïe ne peut servir qu'à un seul son à la fois, tandis que la vue embrasse tout, en même temps qu'à son gré elle simplifie.
Quote of Gauguin from: Notes Synthéthiques (ca. 1884-1885), ed. Henri Mahaut, in Vers et prose (July-September 1910), p. 52; translation from John Rewald, Gauguin (Hyperion Press, 1938), p. 161.
1870s - 1880s

Beauty, Art, Music, Soul

“I think the main ingredient that’s needed when it comes to campaign finance reform is simply transparency more than anything. Right now it’s not transparent. You can be Coca Cola. You can donate a million dollars to a … you can donate a million dollars to me via the republican national committee and it will not be reported as coming from Coca Cola. So when it comes to campaign finance reform in my opinion what’s needed very simply is just one hundred percent transparency.”

Gary Johnson (1953) American politician, businessman, and 29th Governor of New Mexico

Statement made to representatives of the Pagan Newswire Collective (PNC)
2011-10-16
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/paganswithdisabilities/2011/10/full-transcript-of-qa-with-presidential-candidate-gary-johnson/
2012-02-24
Miscellaneous

Thinking

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Quotes about main
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