Quotes about mass
page 8

“In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"The Muscular Opiate," The New York Times (1967-10-03)

“When people are afraid of the truth they've got nowhere to turn. All they have at their disposal is censorship and denial. And Swedish politicians are so deep in denial you can only feel pity for them, because you know that in some dark chamber of their subconscious these wretched people know what a terrible thing they're doing, and they know that history is going to revile them and their entire generation for it. But they just can't face up to it. Psychologically, they are simply not big enough as people to acknowledge, let alone confront, the enormity of their mistake. They've backed themselves into an ideological corner where their only option now is to double down on the insanity and brazen it out until the bitter end, while criminalising anyone who draws attention to it. Whatever social upheaval it may cause, and whatever the cost to Sweden's women, mass Islamic immigration must continue. Any restriction would be an admission that there's a problem, and that would fatally undermine everything they're so desperately pretending to believe in… If you say there's a problem, you'll be treated as a criminal – which means that there are now two problems. One: the Swedish people have an aggressive social cancer growing in their midst; and two: they're not allowed to talk about it.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Sweden Goes Insane" (19 May 2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_znVnOizU8 2014

Women, People, Truth, Feeling

“In titling this work The Second Coming of Christ, I am not referring to a literal return of Jesus to earth. He came two thousand years ago and, after imparting a universal path to God's kingdom, was crucified and resurrected; his reappearance to the masses now is not necessary for the fulfillment of his teachings. What is necessary is for the cosmic wisdom and divine perception of Jesus to speak again through each one's own experience and understanding of the infinite Christ Consciousness that was incarnate in Jesus. That will be his true Second Coming.”

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) Yogi, a guru of Kriya Yoga and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship

The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You, (2004) by Yogananda

Wisdom, God, Understanding, Universe

“… carry out merciless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and White Guards; unreliable elements to be locked up in a concentration camp outside the town.”

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

As quoted in George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (1981), page 103.
Attributions

“The working of great administrations is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.”

Giorgio De Santillana (1902–1974) American historian and philosopher

The Crime of Galileo http://books.google.com/books?id=34uQ6tlYHRgC&q=%22The+working+of+great+administrations+is+mainly+the+result+of+a+vast+mass+of+routine+petty+malice+self-interest+carelessness+and+sheer+mistake+Only+a+residual+fraction+is+thought%22&pg=PA290#v=onepage (1958)

“The lesson from Charlottesville is not how dangerous the neo-Nazis are. It is the unmasking of the Republican party leadership. In the wake of last weekend’s horror and tragedy, let us finally, finally rip off the veneer that Trump’s affinity for white supremacy is distinct from the Republican agenda of voter suppression, renewed mass incarceration and the expulsion of immigrants.”

Russ Feingold (1953) Wisconsin politician; three-term U.S. Senator

Commenting in the aftermath of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in [Feingold, Russ, How the Republican party quietly does the bidding of white supremacists, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/19/republican-party-white-supremacists-charlottesville, 20 August 2018, The Guardian, August 19, 2017]
2017

“The most reliable and best armed groups of the mass of revolutionary contingents organised to take extreme measures to overcome the famine shall be detailed for dispatch to all stations and all uyezds of the principal grain supplying gubernias. These groups, with the participation of railwaymen delegated by local railway committees, shall be authorised, firstly, to control the movement of grain freights; secondly, take charge of the collection and storage of grain; thirdly, adopt the most extreme revolutionary measures to fight speculators and to requisition grain stocks. When making any record of requisition, arrest or execution, the revolutionary contingents shall summon at least six witnesses to be selected from the poorest section of the population closest at hand.”

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

“Meeting of the Presidium of the Petrograd Soviet With Delegates From the Food Supply Organisations” (27 January 1918); Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 503.
1910s

Fight

“In 1982, the main problems were getting something out in front of the public and then figuring out how to sell it. Today, it is much easier to solve the mechanical problems of self-publishing and to reach an audience, but the fact that it’s easier creates another problem: how can you be heard above all the noise? The mass of information that is available today, through film, television, books, magazines, newspapers, and the Internet is really intimidating.”

John R. Erickson (1942) American author

John R. Erickson on the discipline of writing, the world of publishing, and (of course) dogs http://www.lonestarliterary.com/john-r.-erickson-061415.html (June 14, 2015)

Books, Problem

“I am never in a hurry to reach details. First and above all I am interested in the large masses and the general character of a picture; when these are well established, then I try for subtleties of form and color. I rework the painting constantly and freely, and without any systematic method.”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) French landscape painter and printmaker in etching

Quote from Corot's 'Notebooks', ca. 1850, as quoted in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, pp. 240-241
1850s

Color, Painting

“Most authorities in economics and sociology regard such an organization as a city an impossible structure, not only from the economic standpoint, but from the sociological and psychological as well. No creature of the highly nervous structure necessary to develop a culture, they point out, would be able to survive within such restricted limits. The result, if it were tried, these authorities say, would lead to mass neuroticism which in a short period of time would destroy the very culture which had built the city.”

Clifford D. Simak book City

Notes on the First Tale (pp. 9-10)
City (1952)

Time

“Dear God, here it is finished, this poor little Mass. Is this sacred music which I have written or music of the devil? I was born for opera buffa, as you well know. A little science, a little heart, that's all. Be blessed, then, and admit me to Paradise.”

Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868) Italian composer

Bon Dieu; la voilà terminée, cette pauvre petite messe. Est-ce bien de la musique sacrée que je viens de faire, ou bien de la sacré musique ? J'étais né pour l'opera buffa, tu le sais bien! Peu de science, un peu de coeur, tout est là. Sois donc béni et accorde-moi le Paradis.
Epigraph to his Petite Messe Solennelle (1863). Translation from Emanuele Senici (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Rossini (2004) p. 23.

God, Music, Science, Heart

“Today, after six years, there are… still many respectable people associated with German ‘dynamism’ who have not yet realized that their imagined national and racial rebirth amounts to nothing more than the adoption of the revolutionary system of ‘direct action’ as the fundamental principle of the carrying of the ‘mass revolt’ to completion. Direct action is defined as ‘direct integration by means of corporativism, militarism and myth;’ this is to replace democracy and parliamentarism.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (1939), p. 27

People, Democracy, Imagination

“Although the Russian bourgeois revolution of 1905-07 displayed no such “brilliant” successes as at time fell to the Portuguese and Turkish revolutions, it was undoubtedly a "real people's" revolution, since the mass of the people, their majority, the very lowest social groups, crushed by oppression and exploitation, rose independently and stamped on the entire course of the revolution the imprint of their own demands, their attempt to build in their own way a new society in place of the old society that was being destroyed.”

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

Ch. 3 http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch03.htm (1917)

People, Way, Time, Success

“The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

W.E.B. DuBois, Birth Control Review, June 1932. Quoted by Sanger in her proposal for the "Negro Project."
Misattributed

Children, Intelligence

“Market capitalism is the best thing that ever happened to the common man. The rich have always had access to entertainment, often in the comfort of their palaces and mansions. The rich have never had to experience the drudgery of having to beat out carpets, iron their clothing or slave over a hot stove all day in order to have a decent dinner. They could afford to hire people. Capitalism's mass production and marketing have made radios and televisions, vacuum cleaners, wash-and-wear clothing and microwave ovens available and well within the means of the common man; thus, sparing him of the boredom and drudgery of the past. Today, the common man has the power to enjoy much (and more) of what only the rich could afford yesteryear.”

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

2010s, Markets, Governments, and the Common Good

People, Past, Clothes

“Although the mass of the people accepted the white man's God, either under physical duress or because he seemed more powerful than their own Gods, they never assimilated the ideas of Christianity.”

Penny Lernoux (1940–1989) American writer and journalist

Cry of The People (1977).

God, People, Idea

“Our world is not an optimal place, fine tuned by omnipotent forces of selection. It is a quirky mass of imperfections, working well enough (often admirably); a jury-rigged set of adaptations built of curious parts made available by past histories in different contexts. […] A world optimally adapted to current environments is a world without history, and a world without history might have been created as we find it. History matters; it confounds perfection and proves that current life transformed its own past.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Flamingo's Smile

"Only His Wings Remained", p. 54
The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

Life, World, History, Optimism

“Not a coincidence it’s always men and boys committing mass shootings. The pattern is connected to ideas of toxic masculinity in our culture.”

Anita Sarkeesian (1983) American blogger

@femfreq (Oct 24, 2014) https://web.archive.org/web/20141228102607/https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/525793436025118721 Twitter

Men, Boy, Idea

“As part of the spring ritual of National Poetry Month, poets are symbolically dragged into the public square in order to be humiliated with the claim that their product has not achieved sufficient market penetration and must be revived by the Artificial Resuscitation Foundation (ARF) lest the art form collapse from its own incompetence, irrelevance, and as a result of the general disinterest among the broad masses of the American People. The motto of ARF's National Poetry Month is: "Poetry's not so bad, really."”

Charles Bernstein (1950) American writer

" Against National Poetry Month As Such http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/044106.html", from My Way: Speeches and Poems, 1999, University Of Chicago Press, ISBN 0226044092

People, Art, Spring, Parting

“Gaskell could not abide this indecorous version of his beloved linear progress theory. He could not bear to imagine that the grand procession from jellyfish to man, orchestrated by an ever-increasing mass of nervous tissue, once paused in its stately and orderly march toward human consciousness in order to execute a fancy little flip, a clever jig of inversion, just at the sublime and definitive moment of entrance into the vertebral home stretch.”

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

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 327
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Home, Imagination

“It took one tweet on Monday evening as I left the office to light the virtual touchpaper. At five past nine I tapped: "Now Guardian prevented from reporting parliament for unreportable reasons. Did John Wilkes live in vain?"… By the time I got home, after stopping off for a meal with friends, the Twittersphere had gone into meltdown. Twitterers had sleuthed down Farrelly's question, published the relevant links and were now seriously on the case. By midday on Tuesday "Trafigura" was one of the most searched terms in Europe, helped along by re-tweets by Stephen Fry and his 830,000-odd followers.
… One or two legal experts uncovered the Parliamentary Papers Act 1840, wondering if that would help? Common #hashtags were quickly developed, making the material easily discoverable. By lunchtime – an hour before we were due in court – Trafigura threw in the towel. The textbook stuff – elaborate carrot, expensive stick – had been blown away by a newspaper together with the mass collaboration of total strangers on the web. Trafigura thought it was buying silence. A combination of old media – the Guardian – and new – Twitter – turned attempted obscurity into mass notoriety.”

Alan Rusbridger (1953) British newspaper editor

Alan Rusbridger " The Trafigura fiasco tears up the textbook http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/oct/14/trafigura-fiasco-tears-up-textbook" The Guardian, Wednesday 14 October 2009; As cited in Paul Bradshaw, ‎Liisa Rohumaa (2013) The Online Journalism Handbook: Skills to survive and thrive in the Digital Age. p. 176. 2000s

Home, Search, Question, Light

“The Mass is Idolatry. All worshipping, honouring, or service invented by the brain of man in the religion of God, without his own express commandment, is idolatry. The Mass is invented by the brain of man, without any commandment of God; therefore it is idolatry.”

John Knox (1514–1572) Scottish clergyman, writer and historian

John Knox, A Vindication of the Doctrine that the Sacrifice of the Mass is Idolatry http://www.swrb.com/newslett/actualNLs/vindicat.htm, 1550; as quoted in Selected Writings of John Knox: Public Epistles, Treatises, and Expositions to the Year 1559

God, Religion

“Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

Hannah Arendt book The Origins of Totalitarianism

Part 3, Ch. 2 The Totalitarian Movement, page 80 https://books.google.de/books?id=I0pVKCVM4TQC&pg=PT104&dq=A+mixture+of+gullibility+and+cynicism+had+been+an+outstanding+characteristic+of+mob+mentality+before+it+became+an+everyday+phenomenon+of+masses.&hl=de&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=A%20mixture%20of%20gullibility%20and%20cynicism%20had%20been%20an%20outstanding%20characteristic%20of%20mob%20mentality%20before%20it%20became%20an%20everyday%20phenomenon%20of%20masses.&f=false The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) Context: A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible, world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything is possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

People, Lie, Time

“As for 'racism', the modern BNP opposes mass immigration and multi-culturalism on the grounds that human biocultural diversity is being exterminated by global capitalism. It demands for every single people and culture on planet Earth the right to self-preservation which it seeks for its own. Such a position is clearly out of step with the extermination-through-assimilation model of multi-culturalism promoted by the dominant ideology of the USA, but it equally clearly has nothing to do with 'hate' or wishing to harm others.”

Nick Griffin (1959) British politician

Nick Griffin, Civil liberty – the indivisible right.

Hate, People

“The scene has thoroughly changed. The six weeks' march to Paris has come world drama. Mass murder has become a monotonous task, and yet the final solution is not one step nearer. Capitalist rule is caught in its own trap, and cannot ban the spirit that it has Gone is the first mad delirium. Gone are the patriotic street demonstrations, the chase after suspicious-looking automobiles; the false telegrams, the cholera-poisoned wells. Gone the mad stories of Russian students who hurl bombs from every bridge of Berlin, or French men flying over Nuremberg; gone the excesses of spy-hunting populace, the singing through, the coffee shops with their patriotic songs; gone the violent mobs, ready to denounce, ready to persecute women, ready to whip themselves into a delirious frenzy over every wild rumor; gone the atmosphere of ritual murder, the Kishinev air that left the policeman at the corer as the only remaining representative of human dignity.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Source: The Junius Pamphlet (1915), Ch.1

Women, Men, World, Coffee

“I haven't really touched machinery except for a few elementary mechanisms like levers and balances. You see nature and then you try to emulate it. But, of course, when I met Mondrian [Paris, 1930] I went home and tried to paint [for a while]. The basis of everything for me is the universe. The simplest forms in the universe are the sphere and the circle. I represent them by disks and then I vary them. My whole theory about art is the disparity that exists between form, masses and movement. Even my triangles are spheres, but they are spheres of a different shape.”

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) American artist

Question, Which has influenced you more, nature or modern machinery?
1950s - 1960s, interview with Alexander Calder', (1962)

Art, Home, Nature, Universe

“Christianity is not a religion for the masses, let alone for all. Cultivated by few and translated into deeds, it is one of the most splendid blossoms that can grow in the soul of a good man.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Das Christentum ist keine Religion für viele, geschweige denn für alle. Von wenigen gepflegt und in die Tat umgesetzt, ist es eine der köstlichsten Blüten, die eine Kulturseele je getrieben hat.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Religion, Soul

“Theology, for the most part, adopts the personal point of view the point of view of our personal wants, fears, hopes, weaknesses, and shapes the universe with man as the centre. It has no trouble to believe in miracles, because miracles show the triumph of the personal element over impersonal law. Its strongest hold upon the mind of the race was in the pre-scientific age. It is the daughter of mythology, and has made the relation of the unseen powers to man quite as intimate and personal. It looks upon this little corner of the universe as the special theatre of the celestial powers powers to whom it has given the form and attributes of men, and to whom it ascribes curious plans and devices. Its point of view is more helpful and sustaining to the mass of mankind than that of science ever can be, because the mass of mankind are children, and are ruled by their affections and their emotions. Science chills and repels them, because it substitutes a world of force and law for a world of humanistic divinities.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. III: Science and Theology

Men, Children, Age, World

“Both pure and applied science have gradually pushed further and further the requirements for accuracy and precision. However, applied science, particularly in the mass production of interchangeable parts, is even more exacting than pure science in certain matters of accuracy and precision.”

Walter A. Shewhart (1891–1967) American statistician

Source: Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control, 1939, p. 120

Science, Parting

“There will always be some people who think for themselves, even among the self-appointed guardians of the great mass who, after having thrown off the yoke of immaturity themselves, will spread about them the spirit of a reasonable estimate of their own value and of the need for every man to think for himself.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

What is Enlightenment? (1784)

People, Thinking

“Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human.
It’s night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore’s Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 1027 kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 1023 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 1023 MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system’s installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold—one million instructions per second per gram of matter. After that, singularity—a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to single-digit years …”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 2 (“Troubadour”), pp. 38-39

Women, World, Law, Intelligence

“In this country — the most favored beneath the bending skies — we have vast areas of the richest and most fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, and millions of eager workers ready to apply their labor to that machinery to produce in abundance for every man, woman, and child — and if there are still vast numbers of our people who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes to their rescue and lulls these hapless victims to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty: it cannot be charged to nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest of all humanity…”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

Federal Court statement (1918)

Death, People, Youth, Age

“In the Middle Ages, people still reckoned on God - the cathedrals they built make that plain. But as time went by man tried to get rid of God. Marxism is nothing else than a gigantic attempt to put God on the shelf. They have tried to replace Him by technology. Scholars, in their attempt to prove that God does not exist, have resorted to the pen. And the masses have shouted: "Religion is the opium of the people.”

Wilhelm Busch (pastor) (1897–1966) German pastor and writer

Not for me! We use it when we shouldn't. p. 157
Jesus Our Destiny

God, People, Age, Religion

“From the attacks of 9/11 to Monday's school shooting, after every mass murder there is an overwhelming urge to "do something" to prevent a similar attack.
But since Adam ate the apple and let evil into the world, deranged individuals have existed.
Most of the time they can't be locked up until it's too late. It's not against the law to be crazy — in some jurisdictions it actually makes you more viable as a candidate for public office.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

"Let's Make America a 'Sad-Free Zone'!" (18 April 2007) http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=20329. 2007

World, School, Law, Evil

“In the last centuries of the empire, educational standards and literacy had fallen. In the dulled heads of the masses, distracted by cheap food and the barbaric spectacles of the coliseums, the values on which Rome had been founded and the ancient rationalism of the Greeks had been replaced by mysticism and superstition. It was—Honorius had explained to his pupil—as if a whole culture was losing its mind. People were forgetting how to think, and soon they would forget they had forgotten. And, to Honorius’s thinking, Christianity only exacerbated that problem.
“You know, Augustine warned us that belief in the old myths was fading—even a century and a half ago, as the dogma of the Christians took root. And with the loss of the myths, so vanishes the learning of a thousand years, which are codified in those myths, and the monolithic dogmas of the Church will snuff out rational inquiry for ten more centuries. The light is fading, Athalric.””

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 15 “The Dying Light” section III (p. 502)

People, Education, Food, Problem

“I have endeavoured to show that the ability to pay taxes depends, not on the gross money value of the mass of commodities, nor on the net money value of the revenue of capitalists and landlords, but on the money value of each man's revenue compared to the money value of the commodities which he usually consumes.”

David Ricardo (1772–1823) British political economist, broker and politician

Advertisement To The Third Edition, p. 3
The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821) (Third Edition)

Money, Dependency

“Art today is an absolutely secondary matter. Anyone who is able to look further than the walls of his own studio can see this... All the same, art is a business that demands a very clear decision from anyone who undertakes it. It is not immaterial where you stand in this business... Are you on the side of the exploiters or on that of the masses, who want to wring the exploiters' necks?”

George Grosz (1893–1959) German artist

Grosz, Nov. 1920 in: 'Zu meinen neuen Bildern', Das Kunstblatt 5., no. 1 (1921): as cited in 'Portfolios', Alexander Dückers; in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings - Essays Vol 1.; published by Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California & Prestel-Verlag, Germany, 1986, pp. 91-92

Art, Business, Decision

“I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European governments.”

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

Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington, Paris, (16 January 1787)
1780s

Happiness

“There's a leveling homogeneity in America today created by television. Each day it passes over the vast land mass, over the states nudging each other like the sovereignties of the Balkans, creating a unifying cloud of aesthetic properties and experience. East and West, North and South are wrapped in a sort of over-soul of images, facts, happenings, celebrities. This debris is as sacred to our current fiction as gossip about the new vicar was to Trollope. And there it is on the page, informing the domestically restless households, father off somewhere, mother chagrined. Sons and daughters writing the books.”

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) Novelist, short story writer, literary critic

"Locations: An Introduction" (pp. xix-xx)
American Fictions (1999)

Books, Soul, Daughters

“Unity…. Unity of purpose is shown by continuity, or the proper relationship of the parts with each other, and with the whole as one sees it best expressed in the human form. Unity of mass is obtained by giving predominance of mass to some one feature…”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)

Parting

“I hope and believe cultural history will make progress if it also fixes its attention firmly on the individual human being. Movements, as distinct from periods, are started by people. Some of them are abortive, others catch on. Each movement in its turn has a core of dedicated souls, a crowd of hangers-on, not to forget a lunatic fringe. There is a whole spectrum of attitudes and degrees of conversion. Even within the individual there may be various levels of conviction, various conscious and unconscious fluctuations in loyalty. What seemed acceptable during the mass rally or revivalist meeting may look pretty crazy on the way home. But movements would not be movements if they did not have their badges, their outward signs, their style of behaviour, style of speech and of dress. Who can probe the motives which prompt individuals to adopt some of these, and who would venture in every case to pronounce on the completeness of the conversion this adoption may express? Knowing these limitations, the cultural historian will be a little wary of the claims of cultural psychology.”

Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) art historian

In Search of Cultural History (1969)

People, Hope, Way, Home

“The curtains were drawn, and the only source of light - indeed, the object to which my attention was suddenly exclusively drawn - was a lit candle on the kitchen table, that had probably originally been shaped like Snoopy but was now a mass of melted rivulets, as if Snoopy had fallen victim to some kind of flesh-eating virus.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

Source: Fullyramblomatic Novels, Fog Juice, Chapter One

Light

“In the book of which I have spoken before, are the Ten Commandments. Maybe we should add three additional ones: "You, your children and your children's children shall never become perpetrators"; "You, your children and your children's children shall never never allow yourselves to become victims"; and "You, your children and your children's children shall never, but never, be passive onlookers to mass murder, genocide, or (let us hope it may never be repeated) to a Holocaust-like tragedy."”

Yehuda Bauer (1926) Israeli historian of the Holocaust

Address to the Bundestag (27 January 1998) https://web.archive.org/web/20050307015224/http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/1990_1999/1998/1/Address%20to%20the%20Bundestag-%20by%20Professor%20Yehuda%20Baue

Children, Books, Hope

“It was the mass sale and distribution of novels and newspapers that was critical to the rise of the imagined nation.”

George Ritzer (1940) American sociologist

Source: Globalization - A Basic Text (2010), Chapter 6, Global Political Structures and Processes, p. 148

Imagination

“Big Dams are to a nation's 'development' what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal. They're both weapons of mass destruction. They're both weapons governments use to control their own people. Both twentieth-century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They're both malignant indications of a civilization turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link -- the understanding-- between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life, and the earth to human existence.”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

The Greater Common Good May, 1999 http://www.narmada.org/gcg/gcg.html. Articles

Life, People, Food, Intelligence

“My convictions, positive and negative, on all the matters of which you speak, are of long and slow growth and are firmly rooted. But the great blow which fell on me seemed to stir them to their foundation, and had I lived a couple of centuries earlier I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me and them — and asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind? To which my only reply was and is — Oh devil! Truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

1860s, Reply to Charles Kingsley (1860)

Truth, Lie, Penalty, Hope

“The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the U. S. reactionaries use to scare people. it looks terrible but in fact it isn't. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter, but the outcome of a war is decided by the people--not by one of two new types of weapon.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

"Talk with the American Correspondent Anna Louise Strong"(August 1946)

War, People

“In every human soul there is a socialist and an individualist, an authoritarian and a fanatic for liberty, as in each there is a Catholic and a Protestant. The same is true of the mass movements in which men marshal themselves for common action.”

R. H. Tawney (1880–1962) English philosopher

Part IV, Ch. 2
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

Men, Soul

“Bears when first born are shapeless masses of white flesh a little larger than mice, their claws alone being prominent. The mother then licks them gradually into proper shape.”

Pliny the Elder book Natural History

Book VIII, sec. 126.
Naturalis Historia

“A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass of thought engenders a system of values.”

Ferdinand de Saussure book Course in General Linguistics

Source: Cours de linguistique générale (1916), p. 120

Idea

“There is a relation belonging to this species of property, unlike that of the apprentice or the hired man, which awakens whatever there is of kindness or of nobility of soul in the heart of him who owns it; this can only be alienated, obscured, or destroyed, by collecting this species of property into such masses that the owner is not personally acquainted with the individuals who compose it.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Senate speech, 1860.
1860s

Soul, Heart, Personality

“The first thing you see will be the two Cyanean Rocks, at the end of the straits. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever made his way between them, for not being fixed to the bottom of the sea they frequently collide, flinging up the water in a seething mass which falls on the rocky flanks of the straits with a resounding roar. Now if, as I take it, you are god-fearing travellers and men of sense, you will be advised by me: you will not rashly throw away your lives or rush into danger with the recklessness of youth. Make an experiment first. Send out a dove from Argo to explore the way. If she succeeds in flying in between the Rocks and out across the sea, do not hesitate to follow in her path, but get a firm grip on your oars and cleave the water of the straits. For that is the time when salvation will depend, not on your prayers, but on your strength of arm. So think of nothing else, be firm, and spend your energies on what will pay you best. By all means pray to the gods, but choose an earlier moment. And if the dove flies on, but comes to grief midway, turn back. It is always better to submit to heaven; and you could not possibly escape a dreadful end. The Rocks would crush you, even if Argo were an iron ship.”

Apollonius of Rhodes book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book II. Onward to Colchis, Lines 317–340

Men, God, Youth, Fear

“At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain, wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring
The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the ground-swell shook the beds of granite. I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established sea-marks, felt behind me
Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent, before me the mass and double stretch of water.”

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) American poet

"Continent's End" in Tamar and Other Poems (1924)

Mountain, Spring, Water, Waiting

“Thought based on images can be neither abstract nor critical. … again in this case intellectuals have worked out theories to justify the inevitable. For unconsciously, they could not avoid being subjected to the enormous weight of billions of images (just like other people). Yet consciously, they were well aware that maintaining the demands of critical and independent thought involves a complete break with the rest of humankind. This would make it impossible for them to play their role as genuine intellectuals. They must think like everyone else if they expect to be at all believed by the masses. Thus their conscious and unconscious minds agree in taking them down the path of thought that involves images, evidence, and emotivity.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 214
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

People, Thinking

“If two stones were placed… near each other, and beyond the sphere of influence of a third cognate body, these stones, like two magnetic needles, would come together in the intermediate point, each approaching the other by a space proportional to the comparative mass of the other.”

Johannes Kepler book Astronomia nova

As quoted by Bryant, ibid.
Astronomia nova (1609)

“Nuclear weapons began to exert an important influence on military policy immediately following World War II, although their capabilities, limitations, and political implications were only vaguely understood. But it seemed clear they they represented destructiveness at a cheap price. This point was important because of the need to replace the armed forces demobilized so thoroughly and wastefully at the end of World War II in the furor to "bring the boys home." To have rebuilt similar forces in the succeeding years would have been costly both in dollars and in political "face." Neither the Truman administration nor the American people were prepared to foot such a bill, particularly that part of the program which would have been a tacit admission of lack of foresight. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that the idea of relying on nuclear weapons and strategic bombing for national defense had great appeal. Such a military program appeared to offer us a way out of fighting dirty, costly wars with Communist masses on the ground. It was a way to meet manpower with mechanical power. Its apparent cheapness gave rise to the slogan, "More bang for a buck."”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

But this reliance on Massive Retaliation overlooked the fact that atomic bangs could eventually be bought for rubles as well as dollars.
Source: The Uncertain Trumpet (1960), p. 12-13

War, People, World, Way

“For the great mass of mankind the only saving grace that is needed is steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart in the short moment of each human effort.”

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-British writer

Notes on Life and Letters (1921), Part II,, "Tradition"

Effort, Heart

“The average Russian of mature age today may some day have the moral satisfaction of seeing his government exercise a power unprecedented in history over the land masses of Asia and Europe. But it is not likely that he will ever know the comforts, in the line of housing, clothing, and other conveniences of civilized living, comparable to those that have existed in the advanced countries of the West. That renunciation of comfort is his involuntary contribution to something: either to the future comfort of his own children or to the increased military power of Russia. He hopes — and we hope with him — that it will not be only the latter.”

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) American advisor, diplomat, political scientist and historian

Memoirs 1925 - 1950 (1967), Russia — Seven Years Later (September 1944)

Children, Age, Hope, Exercises

“I come back to speed, and I want my last words to be on speed. I see a danger ahead that our people may become mechanised, not only in body, but mechanised in mind. I dread the mass mind. I dread the loss of that independent individualist character which has made this nation what it is. I dread the growth of that materialistic view of life which, to my mind, is a danger both to body and to soul. We must see to it that in some way we can preserve the character of our people to meet the changed conditions of the age, and see that our character triumphs over our environment.”

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

Speech to the Federation of British Industries (13 April 1937), quoted in Service of Our Lives (1937), pp. 116-117.
1937

Life, People, Age, Way

“Ultimately, the economic foundations of this country must be shaken if black people are to control their lives. The colonies of the United States—and this includes the black ghettoes within its borders, north and south—must be liberated. For a century, this nation has been like an octopus of exploitation, its tentacles stretching from Mississippi and Harlem to South America, the Middle East, southern Africa, and Vietnam; the form of exploitation varies from area to area but the essential result has been the same—a powerful few have been maintained and enriched at the expense of the poor and voiceless colored masses. This pattern must be broken.”

Stokely Carmichael (1941–1998) American activist

"What We Want," http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1966/09/22/what-we-want/ New York Review of Books, Septmber 22, 1966

People, Color, Country

“Mass-murderers are simply people who have had ENOUGH.”

Quentin Crisp book The Naked Civil Servant

Source: The Naked Civil Servant (1968), Ch. 29

People

“For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human. […] Today's children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from Playboy to music videos to the blank female torsos in women’s magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman.”

Naomi Wolf book The Beauty Myth

Source: The Beauty Myth (1991), Chapter 5 : 'Sex', p. 162

Women, Men, Children, Music

“This book was born out of astonishment. At a time when the waves of the anti-imperialist struggle are sweeping across the world, when movements of revolt are bursting out at the very heart of advanced capitalism, when the revival of working-class action is creating a new political situation in Europe, ‘urban problems’ are becoming an essential element in the policies of governments, in the concerns of the mass media, and consequently, in the everyday life of a large section of the population.”

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

Source: The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach, 1977, p. 1

Life, Books, World, Problem

“The working of great administrations is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

Giorgio de Santillana (1902-1974) The Crime of Galileo http://books.google.com/books?id=34uQ6tlYHRgC&q=%22The+working+of+great+administrations+is+mainly+the+result+of+a+vast+mass+of+routine+petty+malice+self-interest+carelessness+and+sheer+mistake+Only+a+residual+fraction+is+thought%22&pg=PA290#v=onepage (1958) Many sources mistakenly attribute this quote to Santayana, and one http://books.google.com/books?id=e4tzpkw4caAC&q=%22The+working+of+great+institutions+is+mainly+the+result+of+a+vast+mass+of+routine+petty+malice+self-interest+carelessness+and+sheer+mistake+Only+a+residual+fraction+is+thought%22&pg=PA283#v=onepage even identifies the correct book, without realizing that George Santayana and Giorgio de Santillana are two different people Misattributed

“I do feel strongly that this is nonsense! … So perhaps I could entertain future historians by saying I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. … I don’t like it that they’re not calculating anything. … why are the masses of the various particles such as quarks what they are? All these numbers … have no explanations in these string theories – absolutely none! … I don’t like that they don’t check their ideas. I don’t like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, “Well, it might be true.” For example, the theory requires ten dimensions. Well, maybe there’s a way of wrapping up six of the dimensions. Yes, that’s all possible mathematically, but why not seven? When they write their equation, the equation should decide how many of these things get wrapped up, not the desire to agree with experiment. In other words, there’s no reason whatsoever in superstring theory that it isn’t eight out of the ten dimensions that get wrapped up and that the result is only two dimensions, which would be completely in disagreement with experience. So the fact that it might disagree with experience is very tenuous, it doesn’t produce anything.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

interview published in Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (1988) edited by Paul C. W. Davies and Julian R. Brown, p. 193-194

Way, Feeling, Mathematics, Idea

“The fine art world and the commercial art industry are both all about money. It's hard to say which is more contemptible: the fine art world with its double talk and pretensions to the cultural high ground, or the world of commercial art trying to sell to the largest mass market it can reach. A serious artist really shouldn't be too deeply involved in either of these worlds. It's best to be on the fringe of them. In general, if you want to be a success and make the money, you have to play the game. It's no different in the fine art world, it's just a slightly different game. Essentially, you're marketing an illusion. It's much easier to lie to humans and trick them than to tell them the truth. They'd much rather be bamboozled than be told the truth, because the way to trick them is to flatter them and tell them what they want to hear, to reinforce their existing illusions. They don't want to know the truth. Truth is a bring-down, a bummer, or it's just too complicated, too much mental work to grasp.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 297

Money, Truth, Lie, World

“I think we all thought the show would be good, but I didn't ever assume it would catch on in a mass audience sort of way, that's unexpected, and we're flattered and relieved. Our characters act silly, even totally ridiculous at times, and most of our jokes don't come out of pop cultural references, he added. It seems like we're aiming at a child audience, but everyone can laugh at the basic human traits that are funny. It's playful, the humor is playful, the world is playful. You can kind of let go.”

Stephen Hillenburg (1961–2018) American marine biologist, cartoonist, animator, storyboard artist, director, producer, and writer

FOR YOUNG VIEWERS; For This Scientist, Children Are Like, er, Sponges http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/29/tv/for-young-viewers-for-this-scientist-children-are-like-er-sponges.html (July 29, 2001)

World, Way, Thinking, Time

“It returns us to the dark ages of human oppression, which America was founded to remove humanity from, and it is the whole point of the push for homosexual marriage and homosexual rights. The aim is not compassion for homosexuals, respect for homosexuals and all of this; the aim in the mind of these hardheaded, calculating, leftist, Communist, totalitarians is to destroy the family and to establish the notion that once you have seized power there is no limit whatsoever to what you can do. If you want to tolerate abuses then those abuses can be imposed upon the people. Once you establish that, the abuses are then not going to be confined to egregious outrages like this; those abuses are going to be committed against the whole society and they will in the end include the murder of the masses as has occurred in all Communist regimes that existed.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

2013-04-12
The Talk to Solomon Show Live, quoted in * 2013-04-12
Keyes: Gay Marriage Will Lead to Communism and 'The Murder of the Masses'
Brian
Tashman
Right Wing Watch
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/keyes-gay-marriage-will-lead-communism-and-murder-masses
2009

Marriage, People, Age, Family

“Q: Do you feel a need to be distinctive and mass-produced? Q: Are you in the groove? That is, are you moving in ever-diminishing circles? Q: How often do you change your mind, your politics, your clothes?”

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

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 121-125

Feeling, Change, Clothes

“Today, the Israelis tightened the noose on the mass media in northern occupied Palestine and occupied Palestine. No one can report any news or broadcast any footage. [News reports] are subject to the Israeli censorship which permits and disseminates them. Even you at Al-Jazeera Channel were subjected to arrests, interrogation, restricted activities, and the like. Why do the Israelis resort to concealing the truth on the other side? Why? Do they do that only because they accuse the media outlets of setting the coordinates? This is nonsense. We have the coordinates of these Israeli settlements and military positions in the north, centre, or in any part of occupied Palestine. We do not need anybody to give us information, images, or the like. In that case, they want to conceal the true scene of the war on the other side because it will have definite impact on the Israeli street and media and the morale of the Israelis.”

Hassan Nasrallah (1960) Secretary General of Hezbollah

Hassan Nasrallah, Al-Jazeera interviews Hezbollah chief http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=AL-20060722&articleId=2790 Al-Jazeera 20 July 2006 Quote, 2006

War, Truth, Parting

“I can see no practical application of molecular biology to human affairs… DNA is a tangled mass of linear molecules in which the informational content is quite inaccessible.”

Frank Macfarlane Burnet (1899–1985) Australian virologist

Burnet, F.M. (1970) Immunological Surveillance. Pergamon Press. pp. 240-241.

“Present-day society is wholly based on the exploitation of the vast masses of the working class by a tiny minority of the population, the class of the landowners and that of the capitalists. It is a slave society, since the “free” workers, who all their life work for the capitalists, are “entitled” only to such means of subsistence as are essential for the maintenance of slaves who produce profit, for the safeguarding and perpetuation of capitalist slavery.”

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

Collected Works, Vol. 10, pp. 83–87.
Collected Works

Life

“Stone can effectively resist compression but is relatively weak in tension. Because of its mass and weight it may be used advantageously in structural types that can be made stable by the proper weight (dead load, gravity) and are but slightly exposed to lateral forces.”

Eduardo Torroja (1899–1961) Spanish architect

p, 125
Philosophy of Structures (1958)

Dead

“India is the meeting-place of the religions and among these Hinduism alone is by itself a vast and complex thing, not so much a religion as a great diversified and yet subtly unified mass of spiritual thought, realisation and aspiration. What will finally come out of all this stir and ferment, lies yet in the future.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

The Renaissance in India (1918)

Religion, Future

“Industrial history shows that in modern competitive industry the motive of personal gain is most wastefully applied. On the one hand, the great mass of intelligent workers have no opportunity of securing an adequate reward for any special application of intelligence in mechanical invention or other improvement of industrial arts. Few great modern inventors have made money out of their inventions. On the other hand, the entrepreneur, with just enough business cunning to recognise the market value of an improvement, reaps a material reward which is often enormously in excess of what is economically required to induce him to apply his "business" qualities to the undertaking.”

J.A. Hobson (1858–1940) English economist, social scientist and critic of imperialism

The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production (1906), Ch. XVII Civilisation and Industrial Development

Money, Art, History, Intelligence

“What he had been talking about all the time as Quality was here the Tao, the great central generating force of all religions, Oriental and Occidental, past and present, all knowledge, everything.
Then his mind's eye looked up and caught his own image and realized where he was and what he was seeing and…I don't know what really happened…but the slippage that Phædrus had felt earlier, the internal parting of his mind, suddenly gathered momentum, as do the rocks at the top of a mountain. Before he could stop it, the sudden accumulated mass of awareness began to grow and grow into an avalanche of thought and awareness out of control; with each additional growth of the downward tearing mass loosening hundreds of times its volume, and then that mass uprooting hundreds of times its volume more, and then hundreds of times that; on and on, wider and broader, until there was nothing left to stand.
No more anything.
It all gave way from under him.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 20

Religion, Way, Mountain, Knowledge

“Here is this mass of jelly - three pound mass of jelly - that you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space, it can contemplate the meaning of infinity, and it can contemplate itself contemplating the meaning of infinity.”

V.S. Ramachandran (1951) Neuroscientist

A journey to the center of your mind, TED talks.

“[T]he view that anti-Communism equals Fascism remained obligatory in countries subject to Communist censorship until the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost. It was prevalent also in foreign ‘progressive’ circles. Western scholars who had the temerity to link Mussolini or Hitler with Communism in any way or to depict their regimes as genuine mass movements risked verbal or other forms of harassment.”

Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 241

Way, Communication, Country

“It's been warmer than today's climate in the past, much warmer. It has been colder than this climate in the past, much colder. We know this for a fact. We know that this happens with or without our activities…. So why do we insist that we are the ones causing it when for over half a million years it happened several times and we’ve only had this supposedly evil earth killing CO2 belching technology a mere speck of that time? Because, many believe global warming is real and there are people in our political world who want the masses to hand over power over their lives to them, so they say "let us handle it". To make that transition easier, they trot out this false premise, that we are totally responsible for natural occurrences in the long span of our planetary history.”

Anthony Watts (1958) American television meteorologist

The adapability of man to his climate http://wattsupwiththat.com/2007/04/07/the-adapability-of-man-to-his-climate/, wattsupwiththat.com, April 7, 2007. 2007

People, World, History, Nature

“Income taxation appeals to the governing class because in its everlasting urgency for power it needs money. Income taxation appeals to the mass of people because it gives expression to their envy; it salves their sense of hurt. The only beneficiaries of income taxation are the politicians, for it not only gives them the means by which they can increase their emoluments but it also enables them to improve their importance. The have-nots who support the politicians in the demand for income taxation do so only because they hate the haves; although they delude themselves with the thought that they might get some of the pelt the fact is that the taxing of incomes cannot in any way improve their economic condition. So that, the sum of all the arguments for income taxation comes to political ambition and the sin of covetousness.”

Frank Chodorov (1887–1966) American libertarian thinker

Source: The Income Tax: Root of All Evil (1954), p. 27

Money, Hate, People, Way

“Everybody in Palma knew that my son was a lieutenant in the Phalange, and I was often seen at mass. For months I had been friendly with insurgent leaders who were feared by all the suspects. And yet people I hardly knew spoke freely to me, when the slightest indiscretion on my part would have cost their liberty, or their lives. I'll tell you why it was. It was because it is still known in the world that a Frenchman doesn't let himself become a policeman's pawn - that's why. Because a Frenchman is a free man.”

Georges Bernanos book Les grands cimetières sous la lune

Source: Les grands cimetieres sous la lune (A Diary of My Times) 1938, p.109

People, World, Fear, Parting

“Obama is neither a socialist, nor a mere political accountant. He has some modest ideals, and may yet be an excellent president. But what is needed to revive liberal idealism is a set of new ideas on how to promote justice, equality and freedom in the world. Reagan, Thatcher, and Gorbachev, assisted in the end of an ideology, which once offered hope, and inspired real progress, but resulted in slavery and mass murder. We are still waiting for a new vision, which will lead to progress, but this time, we hope, without tyranny.”

Ian Buruma (1951) Dutch writer and academic

What’s Left After 1989? http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/buruma31

World, Justice, Hope, Idea

“This is how Tam Dalyell is feeling -- about the Belgrano, about Westland, the miners' strike, Libya, GCHQ, Zircon, the Peter Wright affair… this book is really just a cry of rage: "I was right -- surely you can see -- look, here is the evidence -- let's go through it all carefully again -- how can anyone disagree..?" But the thrust of the book, and the detailed evidence assembled, are for the most part familiar. Writing it all up, again, and publishing it in this way, is just one more try at persuading somebody (I don't think Mr Dalyell is quite sure whom) to say: "Yes, Tam, you were right. Off with Maggie's head!" How he loathes Mrs Thatcher. She is variously called pig-headed, a fishwife, and a mass murderess as the story proceeds. This element of personal vendetta seriously weakens his case because -- for all that he rests it upon alleged facts -- his gravest charges rely upon his imputing to her the worst imaginable motives consistent with those facts. One has to say -- without denying that his allegations of facts need answering -- that there is a certain sleight-of-hand here.”

Tam Dalyell (1932–2017) Scottish politician

Matthew Parris (Review of 'MISRULE - How Mrs Thatcher has misled Parliament from the sinking of the Belgrano to the Wright affair' by Tam Dalyell, 1987)
About

Books, Way, Feeling, Imagination

“In recent years, demagogy, violence, cruelty, and vileness have seized a great country embarked on the path of socialist development. I refer, of course, to China. It is impossible without horror and pain to read about the mass contagion of anti-humanism being spread by "the great helmsman" and his accomplices, about the Red Guards who, according to the Chinese radio, "jumped with joy" during public executions of "ideological enemies" of Chairman Mao.
The idiocy of the cult of personality has assumed in China monstrous, grotesquely tragicomic forms, carrying to the point of absurdity many of the traits of Stalinism and Hitlerism. But this absurdity has proved effective in making fools of tens of millions of people and in destroying and humiliating millions of intelligent citizens.”

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

Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, Police Dictatorships

Pain, People, Fools, Intelligence

“…that shapeless, formless, fibreless mass of platitudes which in official cant is called "unsectarian religion."”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Quarterly Review, 113, 1863, p. 266
1860s

Religion

“After making public the gruesome discoveries made at the wasteland near Minsk, dozens of reports appeared in the press about similar mass graves uncovered in all regional centres of the Republic and many lesser towns. Who lies in these graves, who were the people shot in all those years, and - most importantly - who were the murderers? We have no answer yet to these questions, and one gets an impression that there are powerful forces not interested at all in such answers ever being given.”

Vasil Bykaŭ (1924–2003) Belarusian writer

'Zhazhda peremen' ['Thirst for Change'], Pravda, 24 November 1989, p.4. Source: [Modernity and Ambivalence, Zygmunt Bauman, 68, 2013, John Wiley & Sons, 9780745638119]

People, Question, Appearance

“The construction of an economic model, or of any model or theory for that matter (or the writing of a novel, a short story, or a play) consists of snatching from the enormous and complex mass of facts called reality, a few simple, easily-managed key points which, when put together in some cunning way, become for certain purposes a substitute for reality itself.”

Evsey Domar (1914–1997) American economist

Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth (1957)

Way, Reality

“There are many who say in effect that public opinion has little to do with war, that it is explained by the influence of the vested interests who profit by it — armament makers or groups of capitalists. But even when we have admitted that those interests do exert great influence, it only pushes the question further back. Why are the mass of men, millions, powerless in this matter as against a tiny minority, a few dozen or a few score or a few hundred who profit by the general disaster? There are undoubtedly some who say to the millions in effect: "We should like you to go to war because it would expand our profits."”

Norman Angell (1872–1967) British politician

But why do the millions obey?
Peace and the Public Mind (1935)

Men, War, Question

“The richest source of power to wage war lies in the masses of the people. It is mainly because of the unorganized state of the Chinese masses that Japan dares to bully us. When this defect is remedied, the the Japanese aggressor, like a mad bull crashing into a ring of flames, will be surrounded by hundreds of millions of our people standing upright, the mere sound of their voices will strike terror into him, and he will be burned to death.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On Protracted Warfare (1938)
Original: (zh-CN) 战争的伟力之最深厚的根源，存在于民众之中。日本敢于欺负我们，主要的原因在于中国民众的无组织状态。克服了这一缺点，就把日本侵略者置于我们数万万站起来了的人民之前，使它像一匹野牛冲入火阵，我们一声唤也要把它吓一大跳，这匹野牛就非烧死不可。

Death, War, People, Madness

“Witness the tragic condition of Russia. The methods of State centralization have paralysed individual initiative and effort; the tyranny of the dictatorship has cowed the people into slavish submission and all but extinguished the fires of liberty; organized terrorism has depraved and brutalized the masses and stifled every idealistic aspiration; institutionalized murder has cheapened human life, and all sense of the dignity of man and the value of life has been eliminated; coercion at every step has made effort bitter, labour a punishment, has turned the whole of existence into a scheme of mutual deceit, and has revived the lowest and most brutal instincts of man. A sorry heritage to begin a new life of freedom and brotherhood.”

Emma Goldman book My Disillusionment in Russia

My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)

Life, People, Sense, Effort

“[Their foremost task] … is to denounce the violence on which the present system is based, and all the evil — material and spiritual — this entails for the masses of menu throughout the world…. So long as we are not dealing honestly and adequately with this ninety percent of our problem, there is something ludicrous, and perhaps hypocritical, about our concern over the ten percent of violence employed by the rebels against oppression.”

A. J. Muste (1885–1967) Christian pacifist and civil rights activist

As quoted in American Power and the New Mandarins (2002) by Noam Chomsky, p. 160.

World, Problem, Evil

“The right hon. Gentleman [Neil Kinnock] leads a party which claims to support democracy but repudiates those miners who have voted democratically to remain at work and have done so in accordance with their union procedures. He leads a party which condemns violence in general but supports the mass picketing which inevitably ends in violence. He leads a party which has allied itself to the wreckers against the workers. The forces to which the right hon. Gentleman has lent his voice and support have no more love for parliamentary democracy than for the jobs and homes of those who oppose them. Sooner or later, when he has ceased to be of value to their purpose, they will turn on him, just as surely as they have turned on the police, on the steel workers, and on working miners and their families. There is only one word to describe the policy of the right hon. Gentleman when faced with threats, whether from home or abroad, and that word is appeasement. He will live to regret it. It is no policy for Britain.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech in the House of Commons (31 July 1984) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105732 on the Labour Party and the Miners' Strike Second term as Prime Minister

Love, Family, Democracy, Home

“Video games are sexy. People need to be aware that GNU/Linux is more than just something to drive your webservers… A lot of people (myself included) feel that video games are a major factor in getting GNU/Linux to the masses. I can't count the number of people that have said, "Thanks for porting [GAME X]! It was the only reason I kept a Windows partition around!"”

Ryan C. Gordon (1978) Computer programmer

Quoted in Robin Miller, "LinuxWorld Exhibitors' Responses to Slashdot Questions" http://interviews.slashdot.org/interviews/03/01/27/184257.shtml?tid=106&tid=163 Slashdot (2003-01-27)

People, Feeling, Game

“When will Sweden be full of Muslims? The short answer is never. They've talked themselves into such a tight corner, and so demonised anyone who questions mass immigration that they could no sooner put a limit on it now than they could click their heels and give a Nazi salute. It's out of the question. So on and on it will go, forever. A hundred thousand or more a year, every year, year after year. It will never stop. Not even when there's a mosque on every street corner blaring the call to prayer five times a day through loudspeakers into your face. That's what's coming, Sweden, and nobody deserves it more than you. Oh yes, you're a real shining "progressive" beacon, all right, a real example to us all – like the guy who dives head first into a thimble of water is an example to us all. … You deserve to see your culture destroyed. You're clearly not worthy of it. You deserve what's coming, but your children and grandchildren don't, and they're the ones who will pay the price for your irresponsible stupidity and cowardice. They will curse your memory for what you've done to them, especially the female ones, you nation of traitors, you society of lemmings, you ship of fools.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Sweden — Ship of fools" (13 October 2014) https://youtube.com/watch/?v=RZsvdg1dkJ4 2014

Children, Stupidity, Fools, Guy

“Be brief, be pointed, let your matter stand
Lucid in order, solid and at hand;
Spend not your words on trifles but condense;
Strike with the mass of thought, not drops of sense;
Press to close with vigor, once begun,
And leave, (how hard the task!) leave off, when done.”

Joseph Story (1779–1845) US Supreme Court justice

"Advice to a Young Lawyer", The American jurist and law magazine: Volume 5 (1831), p. 298.

Sense

“What is our task in the question of peace? It does not consist merely in vigorously demonstrating at all times the love of peace of the Social Democrats; but first and foremost our task is to make clear to the masses of people the nature of militarism and sharply and clearly to bring out the differences in principle between the standpoint of the Social Democrats and that of the bourgeois peace enthusiasts.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Peace Utopias (1911)

Love, People, Peace, Question

“When in the summer of 1941 he (Hitler) gave me the order to prepare installations at Auschwitz where mass exterminations could take place, and personally to carry out these exterminations, I did not have the slightest idea of their scale or consequences. It was certainly an extraordinary and monstrous order. Nevertheless the reasons behind the extermination programme seemed to me right. I did not reflect on it at the time: I had been given an order, and I had to carry it out. Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view.”

Rudolf Höss (1901–1947) German war criminal, commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp

Quoted in "Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess" - Page 144 - by Rudolf Hoess, Constantine Fitzgibbon, Primo Levi, Joachim Neugroschel - History - 2000

Idea, Time, Summer, Personality