Quotes about making
page 93

“If I a fancy take
To black and blue,
That fancy doth it beauty make.”

John Suckling (1609–1642) English poet

Of thee (kind boy) I ask no red and white.
Other poems

“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

“I saw a picture of Prince William, HRH William, in the paper today. He's going bald. I reckon by the end of next year he will be bald and I'm glad about that. Because of his playboy prince status and that, it makes me feel insecure about my own looks.”

Russell Brand (1975) British comedian, actor, and author

6 Music Show

Feeling

“Although no man is an island, you can make quite an effective raft out of six.”

Simon Munnery (1967) British comedian

Attention Scum! (2001), Episode One

“In vain do individual great men seek to mint new concepts and to set them in circulation — it is pointless. They are used for only a moment, and not by many, either, and they merely contribute to making the confusion even worse, for one idea seems to have become the fixed idea of the age: to get the better of one's superior. If the past may be charged with a certain indolent self-satisfaction in rejoicing over what it had, it would indeed be a shame to make the same charge against the present age (the minuet of the past and the gallop of the present). Under a curious delusion, the one cries out incessantly that he has surpassed the other, just as the Copenhageners, with philosophic visage, go out to Dyrehausen "in order to see and observe," without remembering that they themselves become objects for the others, who have also gone out simply to see and observe. Thus there is the continuous leap-frogging of one over the other — "on the basis of the immanent negativity of the concept", as I heard a Hegelian say recently, when he pressed my hand and made a run preliminary to jumping. — When I see someone energetically walking along the street, I am certain that his joyous shout, "I am coming over," is to me — but unfortunately I did not hear who was called (this actually happened); I will leave a blank for the name, so everyone can fill in an appropriate name.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Journals IA 328, 1835
1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s

Men, Age, Idea, Past

“A little water makes a sea, a small puff of wind a Tempest.”

Thomas Browne (1605–1682) English polymath

On Dreams

Water, Sea

“In the West, we have easier ways now to make a killing than killing. If Sir Francis Drake, the great admiral-pirate of Elizabethan England, were a young man today, would he emigrate to Somalia to get a start in the piracy industry? Of course not. He’d apply for a job at Goldman Sachs.”

Steve Sailer (1958) American journalist and movie critic

Steven Pinker’s Peace Studies http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/steven-pinkers-peace-studies/, The American Conservative, October 31, 2011

Way

“.. since our past is the greatest in the world and thus all the more dangerous for our life!... We must smash, demolish and destroy our traditional harmony, which makes us fall into a 'gracefullness' created by timid and sentimental cubs”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

cubs refers sneering to the Cubists
as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008.
1912, Boccioni's 'Sculptural Manifesto', 1912,

Life, World, Past

“The most offensive egotist is he that fears to say "I" and "me." "It will probably rain "—that is dogmatic. "I think it will rain"—that is natural and modest. Montaigne is the most delightful of essayists because so great is his humility that he does not think it important that we see not Montaigne. He so forgets himself that he employs no artifice to make us forget him.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

Source: Epigrams, p. 364

Fear, Nature, Thinking, Forgetting

“Right after Andy died, we [Soundgarden] went to Europe, and it was horrible, because I couldn't talk about it, and there was no one who had loved him around. I wrote two songs, "Reach Down" and "Say Hello 2 Heaven". That was pretty much how I dealt with it. When we came back, I recorded them right away. They seemed different from what Soundgarden naturally does, and they seemed to fit together. They seemed like music he would like. I got the idea to release them as a single, and to get at least Stone and Jeff, or all of Love Bone, to play on it. I had the idea for a couple days, then, with an artist's lack of self-confidence, I decided it was a stupid idea. Somehow those guys heard the tape, and they were really, really excited. Stone and Jeff and our drummer, Matt, had been working on a demo for what ended up being Pearl Jam, so we had the idea that we would make an EP or a record, and maybe even do some of Andy's solo songs.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Temple of the Dog Era

Love, Stupidity, Music, Guy

“It is the virtue of God, the Parmatma, the creator to do justice and we as judges merely act as his agents. I always seek guidance from the creator so that we do not make a wrong judgment. We act without favour or fear, ill will or affection. For me it makes no difference.”

Rana Bhagwandas (1942–2015) Pakistani judge

Response when asked about feelings as first Pakistani acting-Chief Justice from a minority community, by Onkar Singh in Indian Rediff News interview (14 February 2006).

God, Fear, Justice

“There will be other crises in the national history which will make other demands for the fullest and most unselfish contribution to the national interest. No generation will be denied its opportunity, will be spared its duty, to put forth its best efforts. We devoutly hope that these contributions will not be demanded upon the field of battle. But they will be just as truly needed, just as urgently summoned, in the activities of peace, the efforts of industry, the performance of all the obligations of citizenship. We can not go out from this place and occasion without refreshment of faith and renewal of confidence that in every exigency our Negro fellow citizens will render the best and fullest measure of service whereof they are capable.”

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

1920s, The Progress of a People (1924)

Peace, Faith, Hope, Confidence

“Were the talents and virtues which heaven has bestowed on men given merely to make them more obedient drudges, to be sacrificed to the follies and ambition of a few? Or, were not the noble gifts so equally dispensed with a divine purpose and law, that they should as nearly as possible be equally exerted, and the blessings of Providence be equally enjoyed by all?”

Samuel Adams (1722–1803) American statesman, Massachusetts governor, and political philosopher

Speech in Philadelphia (1776)

Men, Law

“We must recognize that human development today is poised at the cross roads. The choices we make and the paths we seek to follow will determine how humanity will exist in the generations to come…Children, their welfare and development, are a subject unique in significance and compelling urgency. Representing as they do our lives relived, we need to devote to them the utmost attention.”

Shankar Dayal Sharma (1918–1999) Indian politician

Source: Commissions and Omissions by Indian Presidents and Their Conflicts with the Prime Ministers Under the Constitution: 1977-2001, p. 254.

Children

“The south also exists… the future of the north depends on the south. If we don't make that better world possible, if we fail, and through the rifles of the U. S. Marines, and through Mr. Bush's murderous bombs, if there is no coincidence and organization necessary in the south to resist the offensive of neo-imperialism, and the Bush doctrine is imposed upon the world, the world will be destroyed.”

Hugo Chávez (1954–2013) 48th President of Venezuela

Hugo Chávez during his closing speech at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. January 31, 2005. http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=1486 2005

World, Future, Dependency

“If someone tells you he is going to make "a realistic decision," you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.”

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) American writer

"The American Realist Playwrights", p. 296. First published in Harper's Magazine (July 1961)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

Understanding, Decision

“I emphatically call your attention to the obvious fact that the primitive Christian doctrine is a specific demand for the suicide of our race, which survived from the end of the Roman Empire to the present only because our ancestors, of fresh barbarian stock, simply ignored in practice a large part of the pernicious doctrine, especially in northern Europe under essentially aristocratic régimes. Until the disintegration of Protestantism made it possible for any ambitious tailor, clever confidence man, or disgruntled housewife to have "revelations" and pitch the woo at lower classes to make themselves important or fleece the suckers, the professional holy men either contented themselves with telling our people they were "sinful" or used the common devices of theologians to conceal the import of the holy book.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

Even so, however, the Catholic dervishes are obviously responsible for the eventual dominance of mestizos in "Latin" America, and many similar misfortunes.
The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

Men, People, Books, Confidence

“You can make no meaningful evaluations of the universe without the confidence that you are seeing it clearly.”

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 6, section 8 (p. 89)

Confidence, Universe

“Already well known to engineers all over the world as a pioneer in the development of automatic control, it may well turn out that Gordon Brown will make a still deeper mark on the engineering development of this century.”

Arnold Tustin (1899–1994) British engineer

Arnold Tustin (1955) in: Control Engineering. Vol. 2, Nr. 1-6. p. 11

World

“You cannot place a mother breastfeeding her baby on an equal footing with men. You cannot make women work in the same jobs as men do, as in communist regimes. You cannot give them a shovel and tell them to do their work. This is against their delicate nature.”

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (1954) 12th President of Turkey from 2014

As quoted in "Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: ‘women not equal to men’" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/24/turkeys-president-recep-tayyip-erdogan-women-not-equal-men, The Guardian (November 24, 2014)

Women, Men, Nature, Baby

“The ability to do, to make, to generate and contribute is the essence of a human being.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

State of the Art (2000)

“Environment, education, experience, make men conscious of passing reality but overwhelm their intuitive capacity when this is not very strong.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Source: 1940's, A New Realism', 1943-1945, p. 17

Men, Education, Reality, Strong

“All [knowledge] comes from experience, it is true, but experience is nothing if it does not form collections of similar facts. Now, to make collections is to count.”

Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis (1787–1872) French physician

Letter to Jean Cruveilhier (1837), as quoted by William Coleman, Death is a Social Disease: Public Health and Political Economy in Early Industrial France (1982)

Knowledge

“If you can imagine a solution, you can make it happen.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Source: Disrupt You! (2015), p.104

Imagination

“Friends and fellow citizens, I warmly congratulate you upon the highly interesting object which has caused you to assemble in such numbers and spirit as you have today. This occasion is in some respects remarkable. Wise and thoughtful men of our race, who shall come after us, and study the lesson of our history in the United States; who shall survey the long and dreary spaces over which we have traveled; who shall count the links in the great chain of events by which we have reached our present position, will make a note of this occasion; they will think of it and speak of it with a sense of manly pride and complacency.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1870s, Oratory in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (1876)

Men, Travel, History, Thinking

“Whatever name you give it; will, or steady purpose, or onepointedness of the mind, you come back to earnestness, sincerity, honesty. (…) We are complex beings, at war within and without. We contradict ourselves all the time, undoing today the work of yesterday. No wonder we are stuck. A little of integrity would make a lot of difference.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Will
Source: I am That, P.119.

War, Time, Sincerity

“These differences can make it difficult for female musicians to enter male-dominated musical cultures.”

Holly Kruse

Holly Kruse (1999). Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, pg. 94. Malden, Massachusetts. ISBN 0631212639.

Music

“Free-market fundamentalism trivializes the concern for public interest. It puts fear and insecurity in the hearts of anxiety-ridden workers. It also makes money-driven, poll-obsessed elected officials deferential to corporate goals of profit – often at the cost of the common good. … The free-market fundamentalism that prevails in the United States today promotes the pervasive sleepwalking of the populace. People see that the false prophets are handsomely rewarded — with money, status and access to more power. … We are experiencing the sad gangsterization of America — an unbridled grasp at power, wealth and status.”

Cornel West (1953) African-American philosopher and political/civil rights activist

"Cornel West: Democracy Matters" in The Globalist (24 January 2005) https://web.archive.org/web/20101203073821/http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=4262

Money, People, Sadness, Fear

“Disrespect, the feeling that what one has to offer in life has been rejected, the feeling that one has joined history's losers can make us as human beings more vulnerable to evil.”

Al Gore (1948) 45th Vice President of the United States

Quotes, Our Larger Tasks (2002)

Life, Feeling, History, Evil

“I think the subject of race has been so difficult and so polluted by malign ideas that most people have just left it alone, including geneticists. … Most genetic variation is neutral – it doesn't do anything for or against the phenotype, and evolution ignores it – so most previous attempts to look at race have concluded that there's little difference between races. I think this position is the one on which the social scientists are basing their position. … If you look at the genes that do make a difference, selected genes, which are a tiny handful of the whole, you do find a number of differences, not very many, but a number of interesting differences between races as to which genes have been selected. This, of course, makes a lot of sense, because once the human family dispersed from its homeland in Africa, people faced different environments on each continent, different climates, different evolutionary challenges, and each group adapted to its environment in its own way.”

Nicholas Wade (1942) British writer

"An interview with Nicholas Wade" http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/nicholas-wade, American Scientist (April 2006).

People, Family, Way, Idea

“The new vision of man and politics was never taken by its founders to be splendid. Naked man, gripped by fear or industriously laboring to provide the wherewithal for survival, is not an apt subject for poetry. They self-consciously chose low but solid ground. Civil societies dedicated to the end of self-preservation cannot be expected to provide fertile soil for the heroic and inspired. They do not require or encourage the noble. What rules and sets the standards of respectability and emulation is not virtue or wisdom. The recognition of the humdrum and prosaic character of life was intended to play a central role in the success of real politics. And the understanding of human nature which makes this whole project feasible, if believed in, clearly forms a world in which the higher motives have no place. One who holds the “economic” view of man cannot consistently believe in the dignity of man or in the special status of art and science. The success of the enterprise depends precisely on this simplification of man. And if there is a solution to the human problems, there is no tragedy. There was no expectation that, after the bodily needs are taken care of, man would have a spiritual renaissance—and this for two reasons: (1) men will always be mortal, which means that there can be no end to the desire for immortality and to the quest for means to achieve it; and (2) the premise of the whole undertaking is that man’s natural primary concern is preservation and prosperity; the regimes founded on nature take man as he is naturally and will make him ever more natural. If his motives were to change, the machinery that makes modern government work would collapse.”

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

“Commerce and Culture,” p. 284.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)

Life, Wisdom, Men, World

“Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.”

Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980) English theatre critic and writer

From Dada Manifesto 1918 (23 March 1918) by Tristan Tzara
Misattributed

Art, Understanding, Strong

“All American and Israeli goods and products should be boycotted in a way that undermines American and Israeli interests so as to act as deterrence to their war against Muslims and Islam that is being waged under the pretense of fighting terrorism. This boycott should become an overwhelming trend that makes these two states feel that their economies are in a real and actual danger.”

Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah (1935–2010) Lebanese faqih

Muslim News June 28, 2002 http://archive.muslimnews.co.uk/paper/index.php?article=697

War, Way, Feeling, Fight

“Humans are the animals that manufacture weakness. We take wolves and we make them into dogs. We take buffalo and we make them into cows. We take stallions and we make them into geldings. We make things weak so that we may use them.”

Mark Rowlands (1962) British philosopher

The Philosopher and the Wolf https://books.google.it/books?id=FSJbBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT0 (Pegasus Books, 2009), ch. 4.

Dogs, Animals

“I find it amoral if you're making a movie where the problem is solved with a guy standing in the back of pickup truck firing a machine at the bad guys. The morality of it is questionable because the repercussions of violence are incredibly far-reaching.”

David Fincher (1962) American film director

Fightin Words (1999)

Guy, Question, Problem

“Scientific information is faced with the following problem. On the one hand, we have the world’s literature of science and technology, past and present, in many languages; on the other, and enquirer with a question. How to select, from a vast mass of words, the few that are the most closely relevant to an enquiry? It is this selection process that makes use of classification.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Chapter 1: The need for classification, p. 3.

World, Literature, Question, Problem

“Thank you for your very detailed letter regarding Scientology. We haven't yet found a way to attack these jackals who feed on children and young adults who are too emotionally weak to stand by themselves when they reach the age of consent. It's too bad there isn't a 20th Century Charles Dickens to write about the terrible destruction of these 20th Century fagins who make themselves rich while they destroy the psyche of so many. At the present time, I can only encourage you to do more of what you have been doing.”

Leo Ryan (1925–1978) American teacher and politician

Letter to Ida Camburn (10 December 1976).

Children, Age, Way, Time

“Human minds settle into fixed ways of looking at the world. That’s always been true and it’s probably always going to be true and I think… I’ve always felt that death is the greatest invention of life. I’m sure that life evolved without death at first, and found that without death life didn’t work very well. Because it didn’t make room for the young, who didn’t know how the world was fifty years ago, who didn’t know how the world was twenty years ago. Who saw it as it is today without any preconceptions, and saw and dreamed how it could be based on that. Who were not satisfied based on the accomplishments of the last thirty years, but who were dissatisfied because the current state didn’t live up to their ideals. Without death there would be very little progress.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

Computer World interview with Daniel Morrow (April 1995)
1990s

Life, Death, World, Dreams

“We should love our country not just because it is ours, but also because it is good. America is far from perfect, and there is lots of room for improvement. In spite of its flaws, however, American life as it is lived today is the best life that our world has to offer. Ultimately America is worthy of our love and sacrifice because, more than any other society, it makes possible the good life, and the life that is good.”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

Articles, 10 Things to Celebrate: Why I'm an Anti-Anti-American (June 2003)

Love, Life, World, Perfection

“I don’t know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across there and I don’t care. I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

Interview in Chicago Tribune (25 May 1916)

World, History

“I'm damaged in many ways. And yet a lot of what my fight is about is pushing through that to live a meaningful, sane existence and make a difference and play to my strengths.”

Gillian Anderson (1968) American-British film, television and theatre actress, activist and writer

WSJ "Gillian Anderson: Reviving Blanche DuBois in Brooklyn" http://www.wsj.com/articles/gillian-anderson-reviving-blanche-dubois-in-brooklyn-1461975005 (April 29, 2016) 2010s

Way, Fight

“…except for the NCERT experts who specialise in making molehills of mountains, and vice versa.”

Sita Ram Goel book The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1994)

Mountain

“And Hindu society which constitutes the nation has been driven into a corner. Hindu leaders have been made to cry that they are not communalists, that they have renounced revivalism, that they cherish Islam as a great religion, that they regard Islamic heroes as their own heroes, that they have no use for people who regard the prevalent mode of secularism as perverse, and that they are fed up with that ‘lunatic fringe’ which still continues to take pride in the national heritage. …. The nation will never be able to get out of this tight corner till it clears up the terminological confusion, stops making use of meaningless words like communalism and revivalism, and rewrites its books of history, politics, and sociology in an exact and appropriate language. This exact language will substitute Nationalism for Hindu Communalism, National Resurgence for Hindu Revivalism, Islamic Atavism for Muslim Revivalism, and Islamic Imperialism for Muslim Communalism. Then alone the various elements and forces struggling for supremacy in the country at present will fall into their proper places, and come out in their true colours.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Muslim Separatism – Causes and Consequences (1987)

People, Books, Religion, History

“I call on you not to hate, because hate does not leave space for a person to be fair and it makes you blind and closes all doors of thinking.”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

Saddam Hussein Farewell Letter http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16368242/ (MSNBC online) Statement in a farewell letter written to the Iraqi people, written Nov. 5, 2006, released Dec. 27, 2006.

Hate, Thinking, Personality

“I started explaining to her that nothing is vulgar in itself but that talking and thinking make it so.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Source: The Beach (1941), Chapter 6, p. 36

Thinking

“I think that argument is completely morally bankrupt, and I think people know that when they make it. There's a very big difference between having a sincere, passionate interest in a topic and being a paid shill … Particularly for PR firms, it's something they should really very strongly avoid: ever touching an article.”

Jimmy Wales (1966) Wikipedia co-founder and American Internet entrepreneur

PRWeek (30 Jan 2007) http://www.prweek.com/us/login/required/629646 In response to suggestions Wikipedia might change policies to allow PR firms to edit the site without breaking a rule called "WP:AUTO".

People, Thinking, Passion, Sincerity

“Then came those years in which I was forced to recognize the existence of a drive within me that had to make itself small and hide from the world of light. The slowly awakening sense of my own sexuality overcame me, as it does every person, like an enemy and terrorist, as something forbidden, tempting, and sinful. What my curiosity sought, what dreams, lust and fear created — the great secret of puberty — did not fit at all into my sheltered childhood. I behaved like everyone else. I led the double life of a child who is no longer a child. My conscious self lived within the familiar and sanctioned world; it denied the new world that dawned within me. Side by side with this I lived in a world of dreams, drives and desires of a chthonic nature, across which my conscious self desperately built its fragile bridges, for the childhood world within me was falling apart. Like most parents, mine were no help with the new problems of puberty, to which no reference was ever made. All they did was take endless trouble in supporting my hopeless attempts to deny reality and to continue dwelling in a childhood world that was becoming more and more unreal. I have no idea whether parents can be of help, and I do not blame mine. It was my own affair to come to terms with myself and to find my own way, and like most well-brought-up children, I managed it badly.”

Hermann Hesse book Demian

Source: Demian (1919), p. 135

Life, Children, Secret, World

“I don't work from drawings and colour sketches into a final painting. Painting, I think, today – the more immediate, the more direct – the greater the possibilities of making a direct – of making a statement.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

Source: 1950's, Interview by William Wright, Summer 1950, p. 144

Thinking, Drawing, Painting

“Necessity, as well as patriotism and confidence, will make us all eager to receive treasury notes, if founded on specific taxes. Congress may borrow of the public, and without interest, all the money they may want, to the amount of a competent circulation, by merely issuing their own promissory notes, of proper denominations for the larger purposes of circulation, but not for the small. Leave that door open for the entrance of metallic money.”

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

Letter to Thomas Cooper, 1814. ME 14:189
Posthumous publications, On financial matters

Money, Confidence

“The state is taking action against people who have peacefully demonstrated their ideas. They are writers—all they did is to express their minds through the Internet. So the pattern is very clear. The state tries to maintain stability by crushing any thought of making change. It could happen to me, because I did the same thing and in many cases I went much further and deeper. But I always think the government can learn from their mistakes—they should learn and understand; they should be just as intelligent as anyone else.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, I have to speak for people who are afraid, 2010

People, Intelligence, Idea, Understanding

“We are happy in this world just in proporshun as we make others happy--i stand reddy tew bet 50 dollars on this saying.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

Happiness, World

“Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again, that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind set if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we're not really at war. I think that would be a terrible mistake for us.”

Dick Cheney (1941) American politician and businessman

Speaking about the choice Americans would soon make in the presidential election at a Des Moines, Iowa campaign appearance on September 7, 2004 whitehouse.archives.gov http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/09/20040907-8.html. 2000s, 2004

War, Way, Thinking

“But these young scholars who invade our hills,
Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
And travelling often in the cut he makes,
Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Blight http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/blight.htm, st. 2 1840s, Poems (1847)

Love, Making love, Travel, Flowers

“I started those [the 'Elisabeth Taylor' pictures, Warhol made from a publicity photo of her 1960 film 'BUtterfield 8 a long time ago when she was so sick and everybody said she was going to die [but she recovered]. Now I'm doing them all over, putting bright colors on her lips and eyes. My next series will be pornographic pictures, they will look blank; when you turn on the black lights, then you will see them - big breast and... If a cop came in, then you could just flick out the lights or turn to the regular lights. How could you say that was pornography?... Segal did a sculpture of two people making love, but he cut it all up, I guess because he thought it was too pornographic to be art... The thing I like about it is that it makes you forget about style and that sort of things; style isn't really important.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

Source: 1963 - 1967, What Is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters, Part 1 (1963), pp. 116-19

Love, People, Making love, Art

“We were about to board the planes for the flight back to the United States. Jim Jones didn't want us to leave, at least not alive. A tractor trailer loaded with men armed with shotguns and rifles pulled up and opened fire on us at that airstrip. Congressman Ryan was gunned down, having been shot 40 times. The first and only congressman in the history of this country to be assassinated during the line of duty. I was shot five times and left to bleed on that airstrip for 22 hours. Back at Jonestown, over 900 people lost their lives in a mass murder and suicide that night. This is what I awoke to on that long day. I was 28 years old, and I was waiting to die. I laid awake all night fearing some of the gunmen would come back and finish us off. Time passed, and local Guyanese people offered me rum to try and get me through the night. I had a lot of time to think. I promised God that if I lived, I would make every day count. I promised that I would make something out of my life if I was allowed to keep my life. Well, here I am. I have chosen a career as a public servant. One, I hope many of you will contemplate as you move forward in your lives.”

Jackie Speier (1950) American politician

Jackie Speier, Commencement Speaker http://www.sfsu.edu/~news/2006/spring/comm06.htm, San Francisco State University, 2006

Life, Men, God, People

“It is my belief that those who live here and really want to help some other country, can best accomplish that result by making themselves truly and wholly American. I mean by that, giving their first allegiance to this country and always directing their actions in a course which will be first of all for the best interests of this country. They cannot help other nations by bringing old world race prejudices and race hatreds into action here. In fact, they can best help other countries by scrupulously avoiding any such motives.”

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

1920s, The Genius of America (1924)
Context: It is my belief that those who live here and really want to help some other country, can best accomplish that result by making themselves truly and wholly American. I mean by that, giving their first allegiance to this country and always directing their actions in a course which will be first of all for the best interests of this country. They cannot help other nations by bringing old world race prejudices and race hatreds into action here. In fact, they can best help other countries by scrupulously avoiding any such motives. It can be taken for granted that we all wish to help Europe. We cannot secure that result by proposing or taking any action that would injure America. Nor can we secure it by proposing or taking any action that would seriously injure some European country.

World, Motivation, Help, Country

“Like many of her sex, Sophie was fiercely competitive with other women, working on the crackpot theory that if she could be better in some way, men would like her more, respect her. Make her happy. She never cottoned on that the men she was attracted to, the men who found her attractive, didn’t like women.”

Craig Ferguson book Between the Bridge and the River

Between the Bridge and the River (2006)

Women, Men, Happiness, Sex

“You can make any whole and dried bean, pea, or grain sprout in several days, without purchasing a seed sprouter to do the job. Use the common, wide-mouthed quart canning jar…”

Ken Kern American writer

p, 125
The Owner-Built Homestead (1977)

“Maps have been a successful form of representation for centuries by making the world understandable through systematic abstraction that retains the iconicity of space depicting space. Advances in methods and technologies are blurring the lines among maps and other forms of visual representation and pushing the bounds of “map” as a concept toward both more realistic and more abstract depiction. As a result, there are a variety of unanswered questions about the attributes and implications of “maps.””

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

Source: Research challenges in geovisualization (2001), p. 6-7

World, Understanding, Question, Success

“But are we seeing indications these years that we have become more selfish, that we have become inclined to first and foremost make demands, and make sure that we all get what we ourselves think we are entitled to? Are we becoming distrustful of each other, and beginning to ascribe less than pure motives to each other? If that is the case, we are not only in an economic crisis. Then it is our attitudes that are slipping. It is a crisis that is insidious because it creeps upon us and poisons our relationships with each other. It means that we are jeopardising something that may be irretrievable.”

Margrethe II of Denmark (1940) Queen of Denmark

New Year's Address 2010/2011 http://kongehuset.dk/english/Menu/news/her-majesty-the-queens-new-year-address-2010 (01 January 2011). Society

Motivation, Thinking, Selfishness

“The US has always taken velvet revolution into consideration by promoting Western culture in the society and by causing strife between people and the government through propaganda, organizing certain individuals, psychological warfare and making intentional use of media, intellectual circles, university student's establishments and feminism movements in order to implement its interfering policies.”

Ahmad Khatami (1960) Iranian ayatollah

Cleric says US seeks velvet revolution http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=16910&sectionid=351020101, Press TV, 20 Jul 2007. Velvet Revolution

People, Universe

“You know love may sometimes make you cry,
so let the tears go,
they will flow away,
for you know love will always let you fly
— how far a heart can fly away!”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Song lyrics, Amarantine (2005)

Love, Tear, Heart, Cry

“My grandmother—God bless her soul—a Yaqui Indian from northern Mexico, was the greatest teacher I’d ever had! And do you know what she taught me, she taught me that each and every day is un milagro given to us by God, and that work, that planting corn and squash with our two hands is holy. She taught me all this with kindness and invitation. Not with ridicule and looking down her nose at me and making me feel like less than human when I didn’t get it at first.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

God, Feeling, Soul, Teachers

“And if there is no lining to the world?
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"Meaning" (1991)

World, Sense, Night

“Narrated Abu Bakra: During the battle of Al-Jamal, Allah benefited me with a Word (I heard from the Prophet). When the Prophet heard the news that the people of the Persia had made the daughter of Khosrau their Queen (ruler), he said, "Never will succeed such a nation as makes a woman their ruler."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

[9, 88, 219]
Sunni Hadith

People, Daughters

“If you admit your wildest dream & uncover why you want it, you have a big key to make tomorrow a better day.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

28 May 2010 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/14933593727 Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

Dreams

“Spielberg had done his best with Schindler's List, but his best left some of us wondering just how useful a contribution it was, to make a movie about how some of the Jews had survived, when the real story was about all the Jews who hadn't.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Glamourising terror', on The Baader-Meinhof Complex.
Television and radio, Radio 4: A Point of View

“The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear. America has become a phobocracy.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Obama vs. the Phobocracy http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/03/AR2008020302526.html, Washington Post (February 4, 2008)

World, Fear, Democracy, Sense

“When we consider a human work, we believe we know where the "intelligence" which fashioned it comes from; but when a living being is concerned, no one knows or ever knew, neither Darwin nor Epicurus, neither Leibniz nor Aristotle, neither Einstein nor Parmenides. An act of faith is necessary to make us adopt one hypothesis rather than another. Science, which does not accept any credo, or in any case should not, acknowledges its ignorance, its inability to solve this problem which, we are certain, exists and has reality.”

Pierre-Paul Grassé (1895–1985) French zoologist

Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation (1977)

Faith, Intelligence, Fashion, Problem

“It has been said that man lives by truth, and that the truth will make us free. Nearly the opposite seems to me to be the case. Mankind has managed to live only by means of lies, and the truth may very well destroy us.”

Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.

p.15.

Truth

“Whenever we [public officials] make a mistake, some-one jumps on us for it, but whenever we do something well nobody pays any attention to us. We never get any recognition except when we get ‘bawled out’.”

Leonard D. White (1891–1958) American historian

Source: Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, 1926, p. 243-244

“If there is any test that can be applied to movies, it's that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.”

Pauline Kael book Hooked

"Ersatz," review of Stand By Me (1986-09-08), p. 197.
Hooked (1989)

Feeling

“I would then say that there are two kinds of feeling. The first is to feel in the sense of concentrating your emotions on something immediately available for your understanding: you make your understanding out of the emotions you have about it. The second is to feel in the sense of being affected without trying to understand: something is felt, you do not know what, and it is more important to feel it than to try to understand it, since once you try to understand it you no longer feel it.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"The Idea of God" from Essays from Epilogue (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001)

Feeling, Understanding, Sense

“If we make this readjustment to view Homo sapiens as an ultimate in oddball rarity, and life at bacterial grade as the common expression of a universal phenomenon, then we could finally ask the truly fundamental question raised by the prospect of Martian fossils. If life originates as a general property of the material universe under certain conditions (probably often realized), then how much can the basic structure and constitution of life vary from place to independent place?”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"War of the Worldviews", p. 352
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Life, Question, Universe

“One of the duties which devolve upon women in the present interesting crisis, is to prepare themselves for more extensive usefulness, by making use of those religious and literary privileges and advantages that are within their reach, if they will only stretch out their hands and possess them.”

Sarah Grimké (1792–1873) American abolitionist

Letter 15 (October 20, 1837).
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837)

Women

“Yes,” he said, “intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn’t matter. A cancer growing in someone’s body will go on growing in spite of denial. And a complex combination of genes that work together to make you intelligent as well as hierarchical will still handicap you whether you acknowledge it or not.”

Octavia E. Butler book Dawn

Part I “Womb” chapter 5 (p. 39)
Dawn (1987)

Intelligence

“Barack Obama has failed America. When he took office, the economy was in recession. He made it worse. And he made it last longer. Three years later, over 16 million Americans are out of work or have just quit looking. Millions more are underemployed. Three years later, unemployment is still above 8%, a figure he said his stimulus would keep from happening. Three years later, foreclosures are still at record levels. Three years later the prices of homes continue to fall. Three years later, our national debt has grown nearly as large as our entire economy. Families are buried under higher prices for food and higher prices for gasoline. It breaks my heart to see what's happening in this country. These failing hopes make up President Obama's own misery index. It's never been higher.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

Mitt Romney 2012 Presidential Campaign Announcement Speech http://blog.4president.org/2012/2011/06/mitt-romney-2012-presidential-campaign-announcement-speech-june-2-2011-stratham-new-hampshire-remark.html 2011

Family, Food, Hope, Home

“Many things can make you miserable for weeks; few can bring you a whole day of happiness.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Happiness, Happy

“I must make a protest against the sort of exaggerations in which the noble Lord has indulged. He has described the railway launching 2,000 or 3,000 ruffians upon some quiet neighbourhood in a manner that might lead one to imagine the train conveyed a set of banditti to plunder, rack, and ravage the country, murder the people, burn the houses, and commit every sort of atrocity…they may conceive it to be a very harmless pursuit…Some people look upon it as an exhibition of manly courage, characteristic of the people of this country. I saw the other day a long extract from a French newspaper describing this fight as a type of the national character for endurance, patience under suffering of indomitable perseverance, in determined effort, and holding it up as a specimen of the manly and admirable qualities of the British race…I do not perceive why any number of persons, say 1,000 if you please, who assemble to witness a prize fight, are in their own persons more guilty of a breach of the peace than an equal number of persons who assemble to witness a balloon ascent. There they stand; there is no breach of the peace; they go to see a sight, and when that sight is over they return, and no injury is done to any one. They only stand or sit on the grass to witness the performance, and as to the danger to those who perform themselves, I imagine the danger to life in the case of those who go up in balloons is certainly greater than that of two combatants who merely hit each other as hard as they can, but inflict no permanent injury upon each other.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1860/may/15/papers-moved-for-1 in the House of Commons (15 May 1860) on the illegal prize-fight between Tom Sayers and J. C. Heenan. The Radical MP Colonel Dickson replied that although "He sat on a different side of the House from the noble Lord, and did not often find himself in the same lobby with him on a division; but he would say for the noble Viscount, that if he had one attribute more than another which endeared him to his countrymen it was his thoroughly English character and his love for every manly sport". Palmerston was rumoured to have attended the fight and he contributed the first guinea to the collection for Sayers in the House of Commons. 1860s

Life, People, Peace, Imagination

“Judaism’s campaign to make divinity invisible has never fully succeeded. Images are always eluding moral control, creating the brilliant western art tradition. Idolatry is fascism of the eye. The western eye will be served, with or without the consent of conscience.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 139

Art

“As regards Ramakrishna’s “practice of Islam and Christianity” of which the Mission makes so much, it finds no mention in the Gospel, the earliest and most authentic account of Ramakrishna’s thoughts and experiences in his own words. In this work we find that though Ramakrishna reminisces often about his experiences and God-filled states, there is hardly a word about his so-called practice of Islam and Christianity…. It also seems that the practice of Islam and Christianity made a less than deep impression on Ramakrishna, for subsequently he does not mention on his own initiative either Muhammad or the Koran, neither Jesus nor the Bible. Not even once! Nor did he draw from” his practice such excessive and indiscriminate conclusions as Mission monks now do.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Ramakrishna Mission. (1986). Ramakrishna Mission: In search of a new identity.

God, Drawing

“I did speak extensively — often quite critically — about the reviled work of Richard Goldschmidt, particularly about aspects of his thought that might merit a rehearing. This material has often been confused with punctuated equlibrium by people who miss the crucial issue of scaling, and therefore regard all statements about rapidity at any level as necessarily unitary, and necessarily flowing from punctuated equilibrium. In fact, as the long treatment in Chapter 5 of this book should make clear, my interest in Goldschmidt resides in issues bearing little relationship with punctuated equilibrium, but invested instead in developmental questions that prompted my first book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny. The two subjects, after all, are quite separate, and rooted in different scales of rapidity — hopeful monsters in genuine saltation, and punctuated equilibrium in macroevolutionary punctuation”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

produced by ordinary allopatric speciation
Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 1005

People, Books, Hope, Question

“In the best painting as in authentic poetry one is aware of moral pressures exerted.. choices are important, moral pressure exists to make right and wrong choices.”

Stanley Kunitz (1905–2006) poet

Unsourced

Painting

“The idea of making machines that think has an unfailing fascination, not only for science fiction readers, but for all who can see it is a possible way of gaining some understanding of the working of our own minds. Thinking, however, is not an easily defined phenomenon, although it is often considered to be the process of solving problems.”

Edward Ihnatowicz (1926–1988) Cybernetic sculptor

Source: The Relevance of Manipulation to the Process of Perception, 1977, p. 133

Way, Idea, Understanding, Problem

“There is no way to divorce the decision determining the most sensible economic strategy from the personal values of those who make the choice.”

Kenneth R. Andrews (1916–2005) Business scholar

Source: Quote, The Concept of Strategy, 1971, p. 34

Way, Decision, Personality

“So that Christianity is so far from leaving us to live in the common ways of life, conforming to the folly of customs, and gratifying the passions and tempers which the spirit of the world delights in, it is so far from indulging us in any of these things, that all its virtues which it makes necessary to salvation are only so many ways of living above and contrary to the world, in all the common actions of our life. If our common life is not a common course of humility, self-denial, renunciation of the world, poverty of spirit, and heavenly affection, we do not live the lives of Christians.”

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

Source: A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728), Ch. I.

Life, World, Way, Passion

“We spent Friday evening with our friends at the boarding-house, and our curiosity was gratified by the sight of their fellow-inmates, Mrs. Drew and Miss Hook, Mr. Wynne and Mr. Fitzhugh; the latter is brother to Mrs. Lance, and very much the gentleman. He has lived in that house more than twenty years, and poor man, is so totally deaf that they say he could not hear a cannon, were it fired close to him; having no cannon at hand to make the experiment, I took it for granted, and talked to him a little with my fingers, which was funny enough.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter (1808-12-27) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

Housing

“It is impossible to repristinate a past world picture by sheer resolve, especially a mythical world picture, now that all of our thinking is irrevocably formed by science. A blind acceptance of New Testament mythology would be simply arbitrariness; to make such acceptance a demand of faith would be to reduce faith to a work.”

Rudolf Karl Bultmann (1884–1976) German theologian

Source: New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1941), p. 3

World, Faith, Thinking, Science

“Psychic disturbances are the consequences of the sexual chaos of society. For thousands of years, this chaos has had the function of psychically subjecting man to the prevailing conditions of existence, of internalizing the external mechanization of life. It has served to bring about the psychic anchoring of a mechanized and authoritarian civilization by making man incapable of functioning independently.”

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) Austrian-American psychoanalyst

General Survey
The Function of the Orgasm (1927)

Life

“I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Notes, 1964-65; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Techniques' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/techniques-5 1960's

Parting, Perfection

“The Lord being the author both of mirth and gravity, is it not lawful in itself for the truth to use either of these ways, when the circumstances do make it lawful?”

Martin Marprelate (1588–1589)

"Hay any Work for Cooper" (March 1589), p. 115.

Truth, Law, Way

“Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes it difficult to see scientific development as a process of accretion.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), I. Introduction: A Role of History

“Unfortunately, here in the Dominican, a lot of the time kids just quit school at 10, 11, 12 and play baseball full-time. It’s great for the kids who make it because they become superstars and [make] millions of dollars in the big leagues. But for 98 kids out of a hundred, it results in a kid who is 18, 19 with no education. So it’s kind of a win-lose here in the Dominican.”

Joe Kehoskie (1973) American baseball agent

Discussing amateur baseball in the Dominican Republic, from the PBS documentary Stealing Home http://www.pbs.org/stealinghome/transcript.html (18 June 2001)

Education, School, Time