Quotes about matter
page 51

“Ideas matter. Legislative proposals matter. Slick campaigns and dazzling speeches can work for a while, but the magic always wears off.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2010s, 2010, One year out: Obama's fall (2010)

Idea

“He wanted me to understand two big things: First, that nobody, no group, is above others. Public servants are obliged to level with everybody, whether or not they'll like what he has to say. And second, that politics was a matter of personal honor. A man's word is his bond. You give your word, you keep it. For as long as I can remember, I've had a sort of romantic notion of what politics should be- and can be. If you do politics the right way, I believe, you can actually make people's lives better. And integrity is the minimum ante to get into the game. Nearly forty years after I first got involved, I remain captivated by the possibilities of politics and public service. In fact, I believe- as I know my grandpop did- that my chosen profession is a noble calling.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Pages xv-xvi
2000s, Promises to Keep (2008)

People, Way, Game, Understanding

“What struck me was some regularity in the anomaly. The rotational velocities were not just larger than expected, they became constant with radius. Why? Sure, if there was dark matter, the speed of stars would be greater, but the rotation curves, meaning the rotational speed drawn as a function of the radius, could still go up and down depending on its distribution. But they didn't. That really struck me as odd. So, in 1980, I went on my Sabbatical in the Institute for Advance Studies in Princeton with the following hunch: If the rotational speeds are constant, then perhaps we’re looking at a new law of nature. If Newtonian physics can’t predict the fixed curves, perhaps we should fix Newton, instead of making up a whole new class of matter just to fit our measurements.”

Mordehai Milgrom (1946) Israeli physicist

"The Physicist Who Denies that Dark Matter Exists," 2017

Law, Star, Nature, Study

“I never thought I'd be an action star, but now they're going to make little Xena action figures for kids. I still want to be a fine actress one day; it's just a matter of putting in the time and passion.”

Lucy Lawless (1968) New Zealand actress

Walt Belcher (May 25, 1996) "'Reformed villain' cuts men to size", The Tampa Tribune, p. 1.

Star, Passion, Time

“I assume that a precisely defined, verifiable, executable, and translatable UML is a Good Thing and leave it to others to make that case… In the summer of 1999, the UML has definitions for the semantics of its components. These definitions address the static structure of UML, but they do not define an execution semantics. They also address (none too precisely) the meaning of each component, but there are "semantic variation points" which allow a component to have several different meanings. Multiple views are defined, but there is no definition of how the views fit together to form a complete model. When alternate views conflict, there is no definition of how to resolve them. There are no defined semantics for actions…
To determine what requires formalization, the UML must distinguish clearly between essential, derived, auxiliary, and deployment views. An essential view models precisely and completely some portion of the behavior of a subject matter, while a derived view shows some projection of an essential view…
All we need now is to make the market aware that all this is possible, build tools around the standards defined by the core, executable UML, and make it so…”

Stephen J. Mellor (1952) British computer scientist

Mellor in Andy Evans et al. (1999) " Advanced methods and tools for a precise UML http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.115.2039&rep=rep1&type=pdf." UML’99—The Unified Modeling Language. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. p. 709-714.

Behavior, Summer

“A lot of people are afraid to accept mediocrity because they believe that if they accept it, they’ll never achieve anything, never improve, and that their life won’t matter.
This sort of thinking is dangerous. Once you accept the premise that a life is worthwhile only if it is truly notable and great, then you basically accept the fact that most of the human population (including yourself) sucks and is worthless. And this mindset can quickly turn dangerous, to both yourself and others.”

Mark Manson (1984) American writer and blogger

Source: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2016), Chapter 3, “You Are Not Special” (p. 61)

Life, People, Thinking

“Poor Naz. He wanted everything to be perfect, neat, wanted all matter organized and filed away so that it wasn't mess. He had to learn too: matter's what makes us alive—the bitty flow, the scar tissue, signature of the world's very first disaster and promissory note guaranteeing its last. Try to iron it out at your peril.”

Tom McCarthy (writer) book Déjà vu

Source: Remainder (2005), Ch. 16.

World, Learning, Perfection

“Prana is implicate to matter but explicate to mind; mind is implicate to prana but explicate to soul; soul is implicate to mind but explicate to spirit; and the spirit is the source and suchness of the entire sequence.”

Ken Wilber (1949) American writer and public speaker

Eye to Eye: The Quest for the New Paradigm (1984)

Soul

““When will you stop this metaphysical nonsense?” said Edward wearily. “But I suppose you’ve no other way to look at the matter, born as you were in an age of superstitious piety.””

Kage Baker book The Life of the World to Come

Source: The Life of the World to Come (2004), Chapter 20, “Alec Times Three” (p. 318)

Age, Way

“No matter how long we exist, we have our memories. Points in time which time itself cannot erase. Suffering may distort my backward glances, but even to suffering, some memories will yield nothing of their beauty or their splendor. Rather they remain as hard as gems.”

Anne Rice book Blood and Gold

Blood and Gold (2001)

Beauty, Suffering, Memory, Time

“Mitt Romney: Well, but will the people in Nevada not have to pay Nevada sales tax and in addition pay the 9% tax?
Herman Cain: Governor Romney, you're doing the same thing that they're doing. You're mixing apples and oranges. You're going to pay —
Mitt Romney: I'm —
Herman Cain: No, no, no, no. You're going to pay the state sales tax, no matter what.
Mitt Romney: Right.
Herman Cain: Whether you throw out the existing code and you put in our plan, you're still going to pay that. That's apples and oranges.
Mitt Romney: Fine. And I'm going to be getting a bushel basket that has apples and oranges in it because I've got to pay both taxes, and the people in Nevada don't want to pay both taxes.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

CNN Republican presidential debate, Los Angeles, , quoted in * 2011-10-18
Apples and Oranges: Mitt Rings Cain's Bell
Fox Nation
http://nation.foxnews.com/herman-cain/2011/10/18/apples-and-oranges-mitt-rings-cains-bell
2011-10-23
on Herman Cain's "9-9-9" tax plan
2011

People

“All natural philosophers, who wished to proceed mathematically in their work, have hence invariably (although unknown to themselves) made use of metaphysical principles, and must make use of such, it matters not how energetically they may otherwise repudiate any claim of metaphysics on their science.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Preface, Tr. Bax (1883)
(1786)

Mathematics, Nature, Science

“Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.”

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

Source: The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. III, Reason in Religion, Ch. VI

Religion, Lovers, Passion

“What matters,” he said earnestly, “is the display of skill, not the manners of the audience.”

Robert Silverberg book Lord Valentine's Castle

Book 1, Chapter 10 (p. 71)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

“Our society, it turns out, can use modern art. A restaurant, today, will order a mural by Míro in as easy and matter-of-fact a spirit as, twenty-five years ago, it would have ordered one by Maxfield Parrish. The president of a paint factory goes home, sits down by his fireplace—it looks like a chromium aquarium set into the wall by a wall-safe company that has branched out into interior decorating, but there is a log burning in it, he calls it a firelace, let’s call it a fireplace too—the president sits down, folds his hands on his stomach, and stares at two paintings by Jackson Pollock that he has hung on the wall opposite him. He feels at home with them; in fact, as he looks at them he not only feels at home, he feels as if he were back at the paint factory. And his children—if he has any—his children cry for Calder. He uses thoroughly advanced, wholly non-representational artists to design murals, posters, institutional advertisements: if we have the patience (or are given the opportuity) to wait until the West has declined a little longer, we shall all see the advertisements of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Smith illustrated by Jean Dubuffet.
This president’s minor executives may not be willing to hang a Kandinsky in the house, but they will wear one, if you make it into a sport shirt or a pair of swimming-trunks; and if you make it into a sofa, they will lie on it. They and their wives and children will sit on a porcupine, if you first exhibit it at the Museum of Modern Art and say that it is a chair. In fact, there is nothing, nothing in the whole world that someone won’t buy and sit in if you tell him it is a chair: the great new art form of our age, the one that will take anything we put in it, is the chair. If Hieronymus Bosch, if Christian Morgenstern, if the Marquis de Sade were living at this hour, what chairs they would be designing!”

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

“The Taste of the Age”, pp. 19–20
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

Children, Lie, Age, World

“Sociology is the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects which it produces. By "action" in this definition is meant the human behaviour when and to the extent that the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful […] the meaning to which we refer may be either (a) the meaning actually intended either by an individual agent on a particular historical occasion or by a number of agents on an approximate average in a given set of cases, or (b) the meaning attributed to the agent or agents, as types, in a pure type constructed in the abstract. In neither case is the "meaning" to be thought of as somehow objectively "correct" or "true" by some metaphysical criterion. This is the difference between the empirical sciences of action, such as sociology and history and any kind of a priori discipline, such as jurisprudence, logic, ethics, or aesthetics whose aim is to extract from their subject-matter "correct" or "valid" meaning.”

Max Weber (1864–1920) German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist

Max Weber, The Nature of Social Action, 1922

Way, History, Science

“The realization of justice is, in the actual state of things, a matter of life or death for society and for civilisation itself.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 55.

Life, Death, Justice

“Only empirical work - analysis based on observation and experience as opposed to theory - can answer the question of how labor force behavior is affected by changes in the tax system. Even intense armchair speculation on this matter must be regarded with considerable skepticism.”

Harvey S. Rosen (1949) American economist

Source: Public Finance - International Edition - Sixth Edition, Chapter 2, Tools of Positive Analysis, p. 22

Behavior, Question, Change

“What is the use of only being? I say to thee, Become, for therefore wast thou established as a man in this world of matter.”

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

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Karma

World

“Deliamber shrugged. “Such things are never fairly distributed. What makes you think that only the guilty are punished?”
“The Divine—”
“Why do you think the Divine is fair? In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is balanced with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that’s in the long run. We must live in the short run, and matters are often unjust there. The compensating forces of the universe make all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process.””

Robert Silverberg book Lord Valentine's Castle

Book 5 “The Book of the Castle”, Chapter 4 (pp. 424-425)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

Thinking, Universe

“I cannot recall a time when American education was not in a "crisis." We have lived through Sputnik (when we were "falling behind the Russians"), through the era of "Johnny can't read," and through the upheavals of the Sixties. Now a good many books are telling us that the university is going to hell in several different directions at once. I believe that, at least in part, the crisis rhetoric has a structural explanation: since we do not have a national consensus on what success in higher education would consist of, no matter what happens, some sizable part of the population is going to regard the situation as a disaster. As with taxation and relations between the sexes, higher education is essentially and continuously contested territory. Given the history of that crisis rhetoric, one's natural response to the current cries of desperation might reasonably be one of boredom.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

The Storm Over the University (December 6, 1990)

Books, Education, Sex, History

“But lo! the girl, like a frightened dove, that caught in the vast shadow of a hawk falls trembling on some man, no matter who he be, so doth she fling herself into his arms driven by strong fear.”
Ecce autem pavidae virgo de more columbae quae super ingenti circumdata praepetis umbra in quemcumque tremens hominem cadit, haud secus illa acta timore gravi mediam se misit.

Gaius Valerius Flaccus book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica, Book VIII, Lines 32–35

Fear, Girl, Strong

“No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.”

Niall Ferguson book Civilization: The West and the Rest

Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011)

Appearance

“To Lincoln, slavery undercut the free labor outlook on the world because it denied advancement and self-improvement. For Lincoln, the great attraction of any economic regime was the degree to which it permitted accumulation and self-promotion. He once described the ideal system as being one where the penniless beginner starts out working for somebody else, accumulates capital on his own by dint of savings, goes into business for himself, and then eventually becomes so successful that he hires others, who in turn continue the cycle. And he spoke of that as being the order of things in a society of equals. For him, the very notion of equality is a matter of equality of openness, aspiration, and opportunity.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

World, Business, Success

“By this lux as the first corporeal form Grosseteste did not, of course, mean simply visible light. As an emanation or propagation of substance and power lux was the basis of all bodily magnitude and of all natural operations, of which the manifestation of visible light was only one. One of the most important functions of lux was to be the intermediary between spirit and matter. It was the instrument by which God produced the macrocosm of the universe, and the instrument by which the soul made contact with the physical body and the things of sense in the microcosm of man.”

Alistair Cameron Crombie (1915–1996) Australian zoologist, historian of science

Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100-1700 (1953)

God, Soul, Nature, Sense

“Another portion say that, if a Republican President is elected, they will secede from the confederacy, and organize a separate and independent Confederacy of their own. Whether that constitutes treason or not, is a matter of opinion, and may be a matter of controversy; but it is, nevertheless, equally fatal to the perpetuity of the existing Government and the existing institutions of the country.”

Benjamin Stanton (1809–1872) American politician

Speech (1860)

Country

“The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.”

Lewis Mumford book The City in History

Source: The City in History (1961), Ch. 18

Art, Dead

“A dog will make eye contact. A cat will, too, but a cat’s eyes don’t even look entirely warm-blooded to me, whereas a dog’s eyes look human except less guarded. A dog will look at you as if to say, “What do you want me to do for you? I’ll do anything for you.” Whether a dog can in fact, do anything for you if you don’t have sheep (I never have) is another matter. The dog is willing.”

Roy Blount Jr. (1941) American writer

“Dogs Vis-A-Vis Cats,” Now Where Were We?, Random House (1989).

Dogs, Cats

“My job was to manage the editorial production of the first—and as yet only—Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health … My first day on the job, I was given the rules: No matter what the research indicated, the report could not recommend “eat less meat” as a way to reduce intake of saturated fat, nor could it suggest restrictions on intake of any other category of food. In the industry-friendly climate of the Reagan administration, the producers of foods that might be affected by such advice would complain to their beneficiaries in Congress, and the report would never be published.”

Marion Nestle American academic

Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, University of California Press (2002, 2013), Introduction, p. 3 https://books.google.it/books?id=39oVBbtt6IEC&pg=PA3

Health, Food, Way

“Women apparently achieve happiness more easily with energetic and virile men, men achieve it more easily with women who are affectionate and willing to be led. Very young women declare that they want to marry men whom they can dominate, but I have never discovered a woman who was truly happy with a man she did not admire for his strength and courage, nor a normal man who was perfectly happy with an Amazon. The fact is that the element of chance in these matters rarely allows a man or a woman to choose a life companion by an act of pure volition, and it is better so; instinct, despite its mistakes, is surer here than intelligence. The question Do I have to fall in love? should not be asked; one must feel the answer to it within oneself. The birth of love, like all other births, is the work of nature.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Loving

Love, Life, Women, Men

“Brother, sister, only words; but this, a reality, a destroyer at the gate. What could it have mattered, after all, to celebrate her hungry youth, and his, before the sword fell on her? All the plots and schemes, the moralities and codes of men, seemed dust in the face of death.”

Tanith Lee book Vazkor, Son of Vazkor

Book Two, Part III “The Island”, Chapter 2 (p. 215)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

Death, Men, Youth, Reality

“I was weak and pathetic and I couldn't control myself. An explanation, especially a bullshit one, doesn't alter the circumstances. I need to change, I have to change, and at this point, change is my only option, unless I am ready to die. All that matters is that I make myself something else and someone else for the future.”

James Frey book A Million Little Pieces

A Million Little Pieces (2003)

Change, Future

“[Attlee] reminded the delegates that it was vital to reduce costs by greater efficiency, which meant that both employers and employed had to seek in every way to attain it. He did not believe in lowering wages as a means of reducing costs, but equally it was necessary to realize that increases of wages that were not matched by increases of production would gravely impair their chances of getting rapidly over their difficulties. Increased demands for money payments, when there was no increase of goods to meet them led straight away to inflation. There was a danger that when a justifiable advance in wages for an under-paid section of the workers had been granted it resulted in demands from those who had enjoyed higher wages to maintain the same differential. This was bad economics and bad social morality. He had been disturbed at the evidence that some people were abusing the social services in such matters as sickness benefit. They could not have them sabotaged by misuse.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Trades Union Congress at Bridlington (7 September 1949), quoted 'Chronology, 18 August 1949 - 7 September 1949', Chronology of International Events and Documents, Vol. 5, No. 17 (18 August-7 September 1949), p. 583
1940s

Money, People, Way, Chance

“It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man’s fate is not important.
“If it is not, what is?”
He could not endure those remembered words.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, Rocannon’s World (1966), Chapter 9

Fate

“On all the matters that touch upon the critical moral issues, Arnold Schwarzenegger is on the evil side. This is a fact. A mere list of the positions he supports is enough to make this plain: abortion as a "right," cloning of human beings, governmental classification of citizens by race, public benefits for sexual partners outside of marriage, disrespect for property rights against environmental extremism, repudiation of the right to bear arms — no more need be said to show that this candidate is wrong where human decency, human rights and human responsibility bear directly on political issues. Last week, we saw Schwarzenegger does not deny habitual crude offenses against young women. Rather, he theatrically, vaguely and impersonally apologizes for them, before a roaring crowd of adoring fans, admitting neither any connection between action and character, nor any need for genuine penance or reformation. The Republicans who vote for Schwarzenegger will owe Bill Clinton an apology for having given the nation the impression that they sincerely believed character to be an issue for those claiming high office.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

" Arnold's corruption of Republican Party http://www.renewamerica.us/archives/columns/03_10_06wnd.htm", WorldNetDaily, October 6, 2003. Miscellaneous

Women, Marriage, Support, Evil

“Many years ago I used to read books like, for example, Ernest Thompson Seton's Lives of Game Animals to learn about animal behavior. But after a certain point, after living in the woods for a while, I developed an aversion to reading any scientific accounts. In some sense reading what the professional biologists said about wildlife ruined or contaminated it for me. What began to matter to me was the knowledge I acquired about wildlife through personal experience.”

Theodore Kaczynski (1942) American domestic terrorist, mathematician and anarchist

in Defining Danger: American Assassins and the New Domestic Terrorists
Interviews

Books, Behavior, Game, Knowledge

“Transparency is seen as the antidote to corruption because secrecy is, if not its cause, then at least a necessary precondition. This is especially so for corruption involving private enrichment from public goods. Transparency is a power-reducing mechanism so it matters whose affairs are made transparent and for what purpose.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Attributed, In the Media Source: Financial Times http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7ba47200-015c-11e6-99cb-83242733f755.html#axzz45lPGQfQg "Transparency thwarts the abuse of power to enrich the powerful", Column in the Financial Times, 13 April 2016.

“Well, I have been a strong supporter of ending discrimination, and particularly focusing on hate crimes and workplace bias and the like. And in our country, the issue of same-sex marriage, which is a -- is a matter left to each state, each state sets the rules -- is proceeding on a state-by-state basis. I think that is the best way for it to proceed. I have not supported same-sex marriage. I have supported civil partnerships and contractual relationships”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Speech and Townterview with Australian Broadcasting Company http://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2010/11/150516.htm (7 November 2010) Secretary of State (2009–2013)

Hate, Marriage, Sex, Way

“I have… attempted to throw some new light on the general properties of matter in other forms: and on the doctrine of heat, which is materially concerned in them; and to deduce some useful conclusions from a comparison of various experiments on the elasticity of steam, on evaporation, and on the indications of hygrometers.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

Preface
A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (1807)

Light

“Administrative efficiency is not merely a matter of paper clips, time clocks, and standardized economies of motion. These are but minor gadgets. Real efficiency goes much deeper down. It must be built into the structure of a government just as it is built into a piece of machinery. Fortunately the foundations of effective management in public affairs, no less than in private, are well known. They have emerged universally wherever men have worked together for some common purpose, whether through the state, the church, the private association, or the commercial enterprise. They have been written into constitutions, charters, and articles of incorporation, and exist as habits of work in the daily life of all organized peoples. Stated in simple terms these canons of efficiency require the establishment of a responsible and effective chief executive as the center of energy, direction, and administrative management.”

Louis Brownlow (1879–1963) American mayor

Source: Administrative management in the government of the United States. 1937, p. 2

Life, Men, People, Universe

“One thing we know about incentives is you can't incent a dead person. No matter what we do, Hawthorne will not produce any more works, [even if] we can give him all the money in the world.”

Lawrence Lessig (1961) American academic, political activist.

Debate http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etMwBOexmJM&t=41m with Jack Valenti at Harvard University Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society (1 October 2000)

Money, World, Personality, Dead

“Bear in mind that the novel—no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective—is always a historical projection of its own time.”

Samuel R. Delany book Nova

Source: Nova (1968), Chapter 4 (p. 116)

Time

“I'm convinced that faith is a matter of inspiration, not a matter of imposition. It is something a person models rather than mandates. Faith does not impose itself on other people. Imposition usually sacrifices somebody else; it seeks to injure or extort others. This is what the terrorist does in an attempt to impose his religion on the world.”

John Ashcroft (1942) American politician

Source: Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice (2006), p. 98

People, World, Faith, Religion

“Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong – you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

World, Feeling, Light, Night

““But then—you’re telling me they brought unrestricted communications with them?” he asked.
“Yup.” Rachel looked up from her console. “We’ve been trying for years to tell your leaders, in the nicest possible way: information wants to be free. But they wouldn’t listen. For forty years we tried. Then along comes the Festival, which treats censorship as a malfunction and routes communications around it. The Festival won’t take no for an answer because it doesn’t have an opinion on anything; it just is.”
“But information isn’t free. It can’t be. I mean, some things — if anyone could read anything they wanted, they might read things that would tend to deprave and corrupt them, wouldn’t they? People might give exactly the same consideration to blasphemous pornography that they pay to the Bible! They could plot against the state, or each other, without the police being able to listen in and stop them!”
Martin sighed. “You’re still hooked on the state thing, aren’t you?” he said. “Can you take it from me, there are other ways of organizing your civilization?”
“Well—” Vassily blinked at him in mild confusion. “Are you telling me you let information circulate freely where you come from?”
“It’s not a matter of permitting it,” Rachel pointed out. “We had to admit that we couldn’t prevent it. Trying to prevent it was worse than the disease itself.”
“But, but lunatics could brew up biological weapons in their kitchens, destroy cities! Anarchists would acquire the power to overthrow the state, and nobody would be able to tell who they were or where they belonged anymore. The most foul nonsense would be spread, and nobody could stop it—” Vassily paused. “You don’t believe me,” he said plaintively.
“Oh, we believe you alright,” Martin said grimly. “It’s just—look, change isn’t always bad. Sometimes freedom of speech provides a release valve for social tensions that would lead to revolution. And at other times, well—what you’re protesting about boils down to a dislike for anything that disturbs the status quo. You see your government as a security blanket, a warm fluffy cover that’ll protect everybody from anything bad all the time. There’s a lot of that kind of thinking in the New Republic; the idea that people who aren’t kept firmly in their place will automatically behave badly. But where I come from, most people have enough common sense to avoid things that’d harm them; and those that don’t, need to be taught. Censorship just drives problems underground.”
“But, terrorists!”
“Yes,” Rachel interrupted, “terrorists. There are always people who think they’re doing the right thing by inflicting misery on their enemies, kid. And you’re perfectly right about brewing up biological weapons and spreading rumors. But—” She shrugged. “We can live with a low background rate of that sort of thing more easily than we can live with total surveillance and total censorship of everyone, all the time.” She looked grim. “If you think a lunatic planting a nuclear weapon in a city is bad, you’ve never seen what happens when a planet pushed the idea of ubiquitous surveillance and censorship to the limit. There are places where—” She shuddered.”

Charles Stross book Singularity Sky

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 14, “The Telephone Repairman” (pp. 296-297)

People, Disease, Way, Communication

“Moving stranger,
Does it really matter,
As long as you're not afraid to feel?”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)

Feeling

“Politics is a subordinate matter; its form of appearance constantly changes depending on the needs of the masses, the same way cocottes adjust to the needs of men by transforming and masking themselves. Because of that it is not fundamental. That is about what endures, what is unique, what is in the stream of illusions – what is eliminated from the workings of the shadows.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

In a letter to Stephan Lackner, Amsterdam, 29 January 1938; as quoted in Max Beckmann – On my Painting, in the preface, Mayen Beckmann; Tate Publishing London, 2003
1930s

Men, Way, Appearance, Change

“The simple fact was that she no longer hated them as a matter of principle. It was also a source of shameful amazement that she could ever have wasted so much energy on groundless prejudice, when acceptance and tolerance would have been the easier, even the lazier, course.”

Alastair Reynolds book Century Rain

Source: Century Rain (2004), Chapter 36 (p. 567)

Hate

“Between the ages of five and nine I was almost perpetually at war with the educational system. …As soon as I learned from my mother that there was there was a place called school that I must attend willy-nilly—a place where you were obliged to think about matters prescribed by a 'teacher,' not about matters decided by yourself—I was appalled.”

Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) British astronomer

The Small World of Fred Hoyle: an Autobiography (1986)

War, Age, Education, School

“The work of Dr. Nares has filled us with astonishment similar to that which Captain Lemuel Gulliver felt when first he landed in Brobdingnag, and saw corn as high as the oaks in the New Forest, thimbles as large as buckets, and wrens of the bulk of turkeys. The whole book, and every component part of it, is on a gigantic scale. The title is as long as an ordinary preface: the prefatory matter would furnish out an ordinary book; and the book contains as much reading as an ordinary library. We cannot sum up the merits of the stupendous mass of paper which lies before us better than by saying that it consists of about two thousand closely printed quarto pages, that it occupies fifteen hundred inches cubic measure, and that it weighs sixty pounds avoirdupois. Such a book might, before the deluge, have been considered as light reading by Hilpa and Shallum. But unhappily the life of man is now three-score years and ten; and we cannot but think it somewhat unfair in Dr. Nares to demand from us so large a portion of so short an existence. Compared with the labour of reading through these volumes, all other labour, the labour of thieves on the treadmill, of children in factories, of negroes in sugar plantations, is an agreeable recreation.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

Review of a life of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley by Edward Nares, Edinburgh Review, 1832)
Attributed

Life, Children, Books, Thinking

“Most matters previously subject to state jurisdiction have been pulled into the orbit of the judiciary. So much for Alexander Hamilton's promise, in Federalist No. 78 (May 28, 1788), that the Judiciary would be the weakest of the three branches of his proposed government.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“Conned About Marriage, Constitution and States’ Rights” http://www.wnd.com/2014/01/conned-about-marriage-constitution-and-states-rights, WorldNetDaily.com, January 23, 2014. 2010s, 2014

“The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes—to me a beatitude—is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty women—or men—can suffer is to be bereft of their past.”

Shirley Abbott (1934)

Source: Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South (1983), p. 210

Women, Men, History, Suffering

“For that matter, where did I get off being critical of anyone?”

Fritz Leiber book The Big Time

The Big Time (1958)

“This method of Bare Attention, so helpful to mind-knowledge and, through it, to world-knowledge, tallies with the procedure and attitude of the true scientist and scholar: clear definition of subject-matter and terms; unprejudiced receptivity for the instruction that comes out of the things themselves; exclusion, or at least reduction, of the subjective factor in judgment; deferring of judgment until a careful examination of facts has been made.”

Nyanaponika Thera (1901–1994) German Buddhist monk

Source: The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 39

World, Knowledge, Help

“Teaching is a personal matter of the nursery of the mind and should not be on public display.”

Saul Gorn (1912–1992) computer scientist

Attributed to Saul Gorn in: National Association of Educational Broadcasters (1968) Educational Broadcasting Review Vol 2. p. 32; Article "Teaching As A Private Process"

Personality

“It’s not a matter of imaging, despite what a lot of people would feel that it is. I’ve never presented myself in a way that I don’t feel comfortable with; I’ve never presented myself in a way to appeal to anybody. For the most part the way I’ve always looked to not appeal to most people. Really, my aesthetic was really more of a terrorism or violence than it was something to attract; more of a representation of my detachment than anything else — though it’s not always a very conscious thing.”

Davey Havok (1975) American singer

Skinnie magazine, March 2010, p. 29

People, Way, Feeling, Parting

“We are Wikipedians. This means that we should be: kind, thoughtful, passionate about getting it right, open, tolerant of different viewpoints, open to criticism, bold about changing our policies and also cautious about changing our policies. We are not vindictive, childish, and we don't stoop to the level of our worst critics, no matter how much we may find them to be annoying.”

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

Wikipedia-l mailing list (18 December 2005, 15:39 UTC)

Passion, Change

“The Liberal does not meet opinions which he conceives to be false with toleration, as though they did not matter. He meets them with justice, and exacts for them a fair hearing as though they mattered just as much as his own.”

Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse (1864–1929) British sociologist

Source: Liberalism (1911), Chapter VI, The Heart Of Liberalism, p. 63.

Justice, Falseness

“"Some," answered Imlac, "have indeed said that the soul is material, but I can scarcely believe that any man has thought it, who knew how to think; for all the conclusions of reason enforce the immateriality of mind, and all the notices of sense and investigations of science, concur to prove the unconsciousness of matter.”

Samuel Johnson book The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

Source: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 48

Soul, Thinking, Sense, Science

“As far as transience is concerned... You see the whole story in those shoes, that's why I paint them so accurate. The physical attitude; crooked legs, a lump. Those shoes were talking to me, and then I thought: I can see that you were so and so big, but did you also had a wife? Children? What were you doing? And what really mattered to me is my own place between them. Between those stories, that mystery. That pitch-black background [in Jopie's paintings, till c.1979-80] - I had found it. A cry for attention. Those pants, that shirt, that background, that was: here I am. But then it become mannerism. So I carried on realistically but avoiding the black background at all costs. It is as Rutger Kopland says: Whoever found it did not look well. Now I want to paint people like this, like they are made of colored mud. Color spiritualizes.”

Jopie Huisman (1922–2000) Dutch painter

translation, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
version in original Dutch / citaat van Jopie Huisman, in het Nederlands: Wat de vergankelijkheid betreft.. .Je ziet het hele verhaal in die schoenen, daarom schilder ik ze zo scherp. De lichamelijke houding; kromme poten, een knobbel. Die schoenen praatten tegen me, en dan dacht ik: ik kan zien dat je zo en zo groot was, maar had je ook een vrouw? Kinderen? Wat deed je? En waar het me in wezen dan om ging is mijn plekkie daartussen. Tussen die verhalen, dat mysterie. Die pikzwarte achtergrond [in zijn schilderijen, tot c. 1979-80]; ik had het gevonden. Een schreeuw om aandacht. Die broek, dat hemd, die achtergrond, dat was: hier ben ik. Maar dan word je een maniërist. Dus ik ben realistisch doorgegaan, maar koste wat het kost die zwarte achtergrond vermijdend. Het is zoals nl:Rutger Kopland zegt: Wie het gevonden heeft, heeft niet goed gezocht. Nu wil ik de mensen zo schilderen, als zijn ze van gekleurde modder. De kleur die vergeestelijkt.
Mens & Gevoelens: Jopie Huisman', 1993

Children, People, Color, Shoe

“Science is a search for truth –whatever the truth may turn out to be, even if it’s evidently not what we wanted to believe it was. In science, it doesn’t matter what you believe; all that matters is why you believe it. This is why real science disallows faith, promising instead to remain objective, to follow wherever the evidence leads, and either correct or reject any and all errors along the way even if it challenges whatever we think we know now. But creationist organizations post written declarations of their unwavering obligation to uphold and defend their preconceived notions, declaring in advance their refusal to ever to let their minds be changed by any amount of evidence that is ever revealed. Anti-science evangelists display their statement of faith proudly on their own forums, as if admitting to a closed and dishonest mind wasn’t something to ashamed of or beg forgiveness for. They don’t want to do science. They want to un-do science! They try to segregate experimental science from historical science, ignoring the fact that both are based on empirical observations and both can be checked with testable hypotheses. Worse, they want to redefine science in general so that astrology, subjective convictions of faith, and excuses of magic can supplant the scientific method whenever necessary in defense of their beliefs. They’re only open to critical inquiry so long as that is not permitted to challenge the sacred scriptures nor vindicate any of the fields of study to which they’re already opposed. In short, everything science stands for, -or hopes to achieve- is threatened by the political agenda of these superstitious subversives.”

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

"12th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TkY7HrJOhc Youtube (April 19, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Truth, Faith, Hope, Way

“It was all a matter of hard work and luck, and Ryan didn't mind either of those. No, the stuff that wore you down was the parts where no amount or work seemed to make the difference, where luck simply wasn't there and wasn't coming and you couldn't seem to explain that to someone who had their heart set on the world being the way it was supposed to be, instead of the way it was.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Source: The Lonely Dead (2004), Ch. 4

World, Way, Heart, Parting

“There are ways to really live in the present moment. What's the alternative? It is always now. However much you feel you may need to plan for the future, to anticipate it, to mitigate risks, the reality of your life is now. This may sound trite… but it's the truth… As a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your life is always now. I think this is a liberating truth about the human mind. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand about your mind than that if you want to be happy in this world. The past is a memory. It's a thought arising in the present. The future is merely anticipated, it is another thought arising now. What we truly have is this moment. And this. And we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth. Repudiating it. Fleeing it. Overlooking it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we are continually hoping to become happy in the future, and the future never arrives.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, "Death and the Present Moment", speech at the Global Atheist Convention (April 2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITTxTCz4Ums&t=21m21s 2010s

Life, Truth, World, Hope

“As to sociology and anthropology, it is manifest that the importance of information and communication as mechanisms of organization proceeds beyond the individual into the community. On the other hand, it is completely impossible to understand social communities such as those of ants without a thorough investigation of their means of communication, and we were fortunate enough to have the aid of Dr. Schneirla in this matter. For the similar problems of human organization, we sought help from the anthropologists Drs. Bateson and Margaret Mead; while Dr. Morgenstern of the Institute for Advanced Study was our adviser in the significant field of social organization belong to economic theory. His very important joint book on games with Dr. von Neumann, by the way, represents a most interesting study of social organization from the point of view of methods closely related to, although distinct from, the subject matter of cybernetics. Dr. Lewin and others represented the newer work on the theory of opinion sampling and the practice of opinion making, and Dr. F. C. S. Northrup was interested in assaying the philosophical significance of our work.”

Norbert Wiener book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Introduction. p. 18-19
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)

Books, Way, Game, Communication

“Today no one who wishes to clean even a minimal regard for reason or evidence can espouse racist ideology as it was in its heyday, a system as comprehensive as Marxism and to some clearly equally as satisfying. However, thanks to Jensen and Eysenck and Shockley, the racist can cling to the periphery of his ideology; for example, he can provide a reasoned defence of his position on certain issues such as immigration and foreign policy. I do not wish to minimize the ground he has lost: the retreat from world history to little more than immigration quotas is a great defeat for the racist and a great source of satisfaction for all of his opponents. I am quite convinced that the refutation of racism in the light of reason is almost complete (the effort to eradicate it as a social force is a different matter and may never be fully accomplished). However, the last stand of the racist is not without importance, something I will attempt to demonstrate by giving a racist ideologue his say.”

James Robert Flynn (1934–2020) New Zealand scholar

not referring to any of the above mentioned persons
Source: Race, IQ, and Jensen (1980), p. 8

World, History, Effort, Light

“Competition is the final price determinant and competitive prices may result in profits which force you to accept a rate of return less than you hoped for, or for that matter to accept temporary losses.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 173 (2015 edition)

Hope, Loss

“Thus the Koran, in this matter of slavery, is the enemy of mankind … While the prescriptions by the Prophet regarding the just and humane treatment of slaves contained in the Koran are praiseworthy, there is nothing whatever in Islam that lends support to the abolition of this curse.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Source: Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946), p. 228

Support

“All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable. The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one's soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are not attractive — you are leaking.”

Fran Lebowitz book Metropolitan Life

"Manners" (p. 6).
Metropolitan Life (1978)

God, Children, Beauty, Error

“With a resounding yes I say we can reconcile and that it really is a matter of the heart.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

27 July 2005
Additional remarks about the proposed Reconciliation and Unity Commission

Heart

“The hypothesis of molecular vortices is defined to be that which assumes — that each atom of matter consists of a nucleus or central point enveloped by an elastic atmosphere, which is retained in its position by attractive forces, and that the elasticity due to heat arises from the centrifugal force of those atmospheres revolving or oscillating about their nuclei or central points.
According to this hypothesis, quantity of heat is the vis viva of the molecular revolutions or oscillations.”

William John Macquorn Rankine (1820–1872) civil engineer

"On the Centrifugal Theory of Elasticity as applied to Gases and Vapours" in The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science (July-December 1851), p. 510

“Miniaturization doesn't actually make sense unless you miniaturize the very atoms of which matter is composed. Otherwise a tiny brain in a man the size of an insect, composed of normal atoms, is composed of too few atoms for the miniaturized man to be any more intelligent than the ant. Also, miniaturizing atoms is impossible according to the rules of quantum mechanics.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

As quoted in Omni's Screen Flights/Screen Fantasies (1984) edited by Danny Peary, p. 5
General sources

Intelligence, Sense

“Some people worry that to say we are nothing but matter is to deny that we think or feel. It’s not. The strange fact is that, when suitably arranged, matter thinks and feels.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 160

People, Feeling, Thinking

“Further, humanity must never be complacent about the virtues of human nature. Therefore, everything must be done at all levels to prevent alienation, inequality, deprivation, fear, injustice, anarchy and the loss of the rule of law. History has shown repeatedly that humankind is capable of unthinkable brutality and injustice. This is often a result of what I call fear(survival)-induced pre-emptive aggression, which may occur no matter how calm the situation appears, although it is not necessarily inevitable. Moreover, where there is injustice that is perceived as posing a threat to survival, humankind will do whatever necessary to survive and be free. In such instances, might (military or otherwise) may not prevail or be the optimal solution.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Emotional amoral egoism (2008), pp.16-17

Fear, Law, History, Optimism

“Eventually the decision was reached to accept the armed chopper as an essential part of the air mobility concept but not to allow the Army to use the Mohawk as an attack aircraft, confining it to a reconnaissance role. Both were wise decisions. But prior to these decisions there were some hot and emotional sessions of the JCS. One concerned the armed Huey, which as then being used successfully in Vietnam to support ARVN operations, but which was considered by the Air Force as illegal poaching on their roles and missions. This was in the midsummer of 1964. General LeMay suddenly took his cigar out of his mouth and, gesticulating wildly, challenged General Johnson to an aerial duel. He screamed, "Johnson, you fly one of those damned Huey's and I'll fly an F-105, and we'll see who survives. I'll shoot you down and scatter your peashooter all over the goddamn ground." I was eager to defend my chief, both verbally and physically (LeMay would have made two Johnsons in body weight, if not in mental poundage) but Johnson motioned to me to keep quiet and responded quietly: "I'm not a flier, but I will be happy to get qualified and take you on- we can agree on a time and place later. But let's not waste the valuable time of our colleagues on such a trivial matter."”

Bruce Palmer Jr. (1913–2000) United States Army Chief of Staff

Source: The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (1984), p. 27

Support, Decision, Time, Parting

“The most basic and primitive emotion is love in its various manifestations. This has been neglected in medicine, neglected in psychiatry, and neglected in our society. We don't read in the newspapers about love. We don't read in the medical textbooks about love. We don't read in the psychiatric textbooks above love, except to study it in a pathological way. We must realize that love can activate our life energy and promote healing. This is a matter of vital medical importance. Medicine today pays little if any regard to love and its power to heal. Perhaps what is needed more than anything else is to put love back into medicine.”

John Diamond (doctor) (1934) Australian doctor

Source: Life Energy: Unlocking the Hidden Power of Your Emotions to Achieve Total Well-Being (1985), pp. 37-38

Love, Life, Way, Study

“All of them cite that toxic spew, even though there’s not a syllable of supporting evidence. Because the controversy itself became news. Save a country, save a world, save a child—it doesn’t matter. You don’t need proof or even evidence to burn down a man’s soul. All you need is accusation.”

Malcolm Azania book From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain

Source: From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (2007), Chapter 8 “Unrequited Hate” (p. 239)

World, Soul, Support, Country

“I have found little that is "good" about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud or perhaps even think.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Psycho-analysis and faith: the letters of Sigmund Freud & Oskar Pfister (1963 edition)
Attributed from posthumous publications

Thinking

“Contingency theories dominate scholarly studies of organization behavior, design, performance, planning and management strategy. While they vary widely in subject matter, they have the common proposition that an organizational outcome is the consequency of a "fit" or match between two or more factors. "Fit" is the key concept in this proposition, and the core problem common to contingency theories is not defining this term clearly. This paper examines three ways to define and test this concept of fit: Selection, Interaction, and Systems approaches. A critical discussion of these three approaches will clarify much of the current confusion in the literature on contingency theories, and suggest ways that future theorizing and research can become more systematic and constructive.”

Andrew H. Van de Ven (1945) American business theorist

Andrew H. Van de Ven and Robert Drazin (1984). The Concept of Fit in Contingency Theory http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA152603. No. SMRC-DP-19). Minneapolis: Minnesota University Minneapolis Strategic Management Research Center.

Way, Behavior, Literature, Problem

“The classification of subject matter may be carried out for all sort of special purposes - to arrange books on shelves, to group inventions in patents, to classify the raw materials, intermediates and products of importance to a particular manufacturer, and so on. All such arrangements have their particular uses and their particular problems.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Preface to the first edition.
Classification and indexing in science (1958)

Books, Problem

“Oh, many say that I'm too young
To let you know just where I come from.
Oh, but you will see that it's just a matter of time
My love will surely make you mine.Ooh, living in a world of ghetto life,
Everyone around seems so uptight.
Nothing's wrong.
It's alright with my man, my man.”

Curtis Mayfield (1942–1999) American singer, songwriter, and record producer

Something He Can Feel, performed by Aretha Franklin, from Sparkle (1976).
Song lyrics

Love, Life, World, Time

“V. Bérard attributed the [Greece and Israel] links mainly to the role of the Phoenicians. P. Jensen explained matters through the diffusion of the Gilgamesh Epic. …but their one-sidedness and exaggeration brought them, and indeed the problem itself, into disrepute among critical scholars. The history of the problem has been ably documented by W. Baumgartner…”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Introduction
The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962])

History, Problem

“I know this is going to sound cheesy and like I'm trying to be Miss America, but the most important responsibility a celebrity has is to set an example and be a role model. I want to make sure that no matter how long I go through this, I don't fall into the trap of changing and modifying how I do things that aren't a positive example. I want to remain somebody that the entire family can listen to or watch.”

Clay Aiken (1978) singer-songwriter, actor, record producer

—'Reuters, February 22, 2004.
On Celebrity

Family, Change

“When my ability to reason shows me that the suffering of another being is very similar to my own suffering and matters just as much to that other being as my own suffering matters to me, then my reason is showing me something that is undeniably true…. The perspective on ourselves that we get when we take the point of view of the universe also yields as much objectivity as we need if we are to find a cause that is worthwhile in a way that is independent of our own desires. The most obvious such cause is the reduction of pain and suffering, wherever it is to be found.”

Peter Singer (1946) Australian philosopher

p. 238 http://books.google.com/books?id=BoDMBgAAQBAJ&pg=PT238 Writings on an Ethical Life (2000)

Pain, Way, Suffering, Universe

“[Abraham Lincoln believed that] [t]he only reason people do not succeed in a capitalist environment is because they are improvident, they are lazy, they are good for nothing, or they experience some incredible turn of bad luck—that’s why "better luck next time." That may seem like vanishingly small consolation to people who’ve just come through a depression, but for Lincoln, that kind of hardship paled beside slavery. Slavery says that there is a category of people that can never be allowed to rise, that cannot improve themselves no matter how hard they try because they will always be slaves. It’s very much the classic disjuncture between the Enlightenment and feudalism. Feudalism talks about people being born with status, and everyone comes into this world equipped with a status. This status is either free or slave, serf or nobility, elect or damned, whatever. For the Enlightenment people come into this world armed with rights, and the ideal political system is the system that allows them to realize those rights, to use those rights in the freest and most natural fashion possible.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

Bad luck, People, World, Fashion

“In the present decade, the U. S. economy has undergone its first major depression since the 1930’s, to the accompaniment of inflation rates in excess of 10 percent per annum. These events have been transmitted […] to other advanced countries and in many cases have been amplified. These events did not arise from a reactionary reversion to outmoded, 'classical' principles of tight money and balanced budgets. On the contrary, they were accompanied by massive government budget deficits and high rates of monetary expansion, policies which, although bearing an admitted risk of inflation, promised according to modern Keynesian doctrine rapid real growth and low rates of unemployment. That these predictions were wildly incorrect and that the doctrine on which they were fundamentally flawed are now simple matters of fact, involving no novelties of economic theory. The task now […] is to sort through the wreckage, determining which features of that remarkable intellectual event called the Keynesian Revolution can be salvaged and put to use and which others must be discarded.”

Robert Lucas Jr. (1937) American economist

As contained in The Rational Expectations Revolution: Readings From the Front Line https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0262631555, Preston J. Miller, MIT Press (reprint 1994), pp. 5-6 "After Keynesian macroeconomics" 1978

Money, Country

“A number of social problems arose. I had been told that neither smoking nor alcoholic beverages were allowed in the [Saudi] Royal Presence. As I was the host at luncheon I raised the matter at once, and said to the interpreter that if it was the religion of His Majesty [Ibn Saud] to deprive himself of smoking and alcohol I must point out that my rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after, and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them. The King graciously accepted the position. His own cup-bearer from Mecca offered me a glass of water from its sacred well, the most delicious I had ever tasted.”

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

Discussion of an audience with Saudi King Ibn Saud at the Fayoum oasis, Egypt, on February 17, 1945; in The Second World War, Volume VI : Triumph and Tragedy (1953), Chapter 23 (Yalta: Finale), pp. 348-349.
Post-war years (1945–1955)

Life, Alcohol, Religion, Drink

“Even then, though, I cared about people, not theories. I had no wish to spin individual cases into some grandiose, ideologically driven legal theory. I no longer believed in utopian solutions, or the cynical politicians who used them to sucker voters, claiming to care about the poor while actually exploiting them. Not only was I sure that such solutions were doomed to failure, but I also feared that once they failed, the resulting disillusionment would make matters even worse. Yet it was taken for granted in the seventies that the purveyors of these elaborate nostrums were doing the right thing, and anyone who dared to challenge their effectiveness was hooted down. That prospect intimidated me, especially when it came to racial matters.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Page 115
2000s, (2008)

People, Fear, Failure

“Opticks was out of harmony with the ideas of 19th-century physics. …an exposition of the "wrong" (i. e., corpuscular) theory of light,—even though it also contained many of the basic principles of the "correct" (i. e., wave) theory. Not only had Newton erred in his choice… but also he apparently had found no insuperable difficulty in simultaneously embracing features of two opposing theories. …by adopting a combination of the two theories at once, he had violated one of the major canons of 19th-century physics… Today our point of view is influenced by the theory of photons and matter waves, or the… complementarity of Niels Bohr; and we may read with a new interest Newtons ideas on the interaction of light and matter or his explanation of the corpuscular and undulatory aspects of light.”

I. Bernard Cohen (1914–2003) American historian of science

I. Bernard Cohen, Preface to Opticks by Sir Isaac Newton (1952)

Idea, Light, Reading

“No matter how old an individual may be, no matter if he is young or old, if he thinks in accordance with the times he is immortal.”

Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904–1996) First President of Nigeria

Quoted in A Life of Azikiwe by K. A. B. Jones-Quartey (Penguin, 1965), p. 121

Thinking, Time

“The scientistic sociologist wishes people to feel that he is just as empirical and thoroughgoing as the natural scientist, and that his conclusions are based just as relentlessly on observed data. The desire to present this kind of façade accounts, one may suspect, for the many examples and the extensive use of statistical tables found in the works of some of them. It has been said of certain novelists that they create settings having such a wealth of realistic detail that the reader assumes that the plot which is to follow will be equally realistic, when this may be far from the case. What happens is that the novelist disarms the reader with the realism of his setting in order that he may “get away with murder” in his plot. The persuasiveness of the scene is thus counted on to spill over into the action of the story. In like manner, when a treatise on social science is filled with this kind of data, the realism of the latter can influence our acceptance of the thesis, which may, on scrutiny, rest on very dubious constructs, such as definitions of units. Along with this there is sometimes a great display of scientific preciseness in formulations. But my reading suggests that some of these writers are often very precise about matters which are not very important and rather imprecise about matters which are. Most likely this is an offsetting process. If there are subjects one cannot afford to be precise about because they are too little understood or because one’s views of them are too contrary to traditional beliefs about society, one may be able to maintain an appearance of scientific correctness by taking great pains in the expressing of matters of little consequence. These will afford scope for a display of scholarly meticulousness and of one’s command of the scientific terminology.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“Concealed Rhetoric in Scientistic Sociology,” pp. 148-149.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

Pain, People, Feeling, Nature

“We don't have a health care system. We have a health care maze. And we don't have a health care crisis. We have a health crisis. Eighty percent of the $2 trillion we spend on health care in this country is spent on chronic disease. If we don't change the health of this nation by focusing on prevention, we're never going to catch up with the costs no matter what plan we have. … And we've got a situation with 10,000 baby boomers a day signing up for Social Security, going into the Medicare system. And I just want to remind everybody when all the old hippies find out that they get free drugs, just wait until what that's going to cost out there.”

Mike Huckabee (1955) Arkansas politician

Republican Presidential Debate, 2007-10-21, quoted in [The Republican Debate on Fox News Channel, 2007-10-21, The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/us/politics/21debate-transcript.html?pagewanted=9, 2011-03-01]
Republican Debates

Health, Disease, Change, Waiting

“What matters most in life is good health and a good night's sleep.”

Waheeda Rehman (1938) Indian actress

Quote, Take risks and don't fear failure: Waheeda Rehman

Life, Health, Sleep, Night

“As a monarch who was given the chance of age and experience, that is rather long, since before the nation achieves independence until now, for Us, there is one matter that is the most precious to this country and could not be sold which is unity.”

Abdul Halim of Kedah (1927–2017) King of Malaysia

State Banquet for the end of the tenure https://www.bharian.com.my/node/223125, 10/12/2016

Age, Chance, Country

“In all my works.... I have always had recourse to one never-varying method. It consists in making the delineation of the objects represented heavily dependent on a system of necessities which itself looks strange. These necessities are sometimes due to the inappropriate and awkward character of the material used, sometimes to some strange obsessive notion [frequently changed for another]. In a word, it is always a matter of giving the person who is looking at the picture a startling impression that a weird logic has directed the painting of it, a logic to which the delineation of every object is subjected, is even sacrificed, in such a peremptory way that, curiously enough, it forces the most unexpected solutions, and, in spite of the obstacles it creates, brings out the desired figuration.”

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) sculptor from France

Quote of Dubuffet, in Peter Selz and Jean Dubuffet: The work of Jean Dubuffet, The Museum of Modern art, New York, 1962
1960-70's

Way, Change, Painting, Dependency

“Gazing at those beautiful stars, Bailey realized that nothing mattered to them. All the achievements of humankind were insignificant. Love and hate, death and life, honor and dishonor, knowledge or ignorance—what did any of that matter in the face of this austere and heartless splendor?”

Pat Murphy book There and Back Again

Source: There and Back Again (1999), Chapter 10 (p. 183)

Love, Life, Death, Hate

“The second conception of the world via the medium of matter required both a visual and a tactile perception of things. In this case the whole design process tends to emanate from the specific characteristics of the respective medium used. The leader of this movement (Tatlin) assumed.... that the intuitive and artistic mastery of materials would lead to inventions on the basis of which objects could be constructed. He believed he could prove this theory with his design for the 'Monument to the Third International' (1920), [never built]. He accomplished this task without having any special technical knowledge of construction.”

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

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

World, Knowledge

“I don't care what the unemployment rate is going to be. It doesn't matter to me. My campaign doesn't hinge on unemployment rates and growth rates.”

Rick Santorum (1958) American politician

2012-03-20
Santorum: "I don't care" about unemployment rate
Sam
Jacobs
Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/sns-rt-us-usa-campaign-santorum-joblessbre82j0nb-20120320,0,7898443.story
2012-03-20
http://web.archive.org/web/20120322201518/http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/sns-rt-us-usa-campaign-santorum-joblessbre82j0nb-20120320,0,7898443.story
2012-03-22

“We still make of prime importance matters about which Jesus said nothing. How can a matter be fundamental in a religion when the founder of the religion never mentioned it?”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.31

Religion