Quotes about meaning
page 46

“I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.”

Huey P. Newton book Revolutionary Suicide

Source: Revolutionary Suicide (1973), p. 196

Life, Communication, Time

“The charge of "sentimentalism" is frequently brought against those who plead for animals' rights. Now "sentimentalism," if any meaning at all can be attached to the word, must signify an inequality, an ill balance of sentiment, an inconsistency which leads men into attacking one abuse, while they ignore or condone another where a reform is equally desirable. That this weakness is often observable among "philanthropists" on the one hand, and "friends of animals" on the other, and most of all among those acute "men of the world," whose regard is only for themselves, I am not concerned to deny; what I wish to point out is, that the only real safeguard against sentimentality is to take up a consistent position towards the rights of men and of the lower animals alike, and to cultivate a broad sense of universal justice (not "mercy") for all living things. Herein, and herein alone, is to be sought the true sanity of temperament.”

Henry Stephens Salt (1851–1939) British activist

Source: Animals' Rights, Chapter 1

Men, World, Justice, Sense

“They [Jawlensky and Münter] often lived here in our Murnau house. But Paul Klee and Franz Marc were also close friends, and August Macke, too, whenever he was in Munich... Klee was never as active a theorist, in those years, as Kandinsky or Marianne de Werefkin. Besides, it took Klee much longer to become a truly and conscious modern artist... As you can see in my portrait of Klee, which is painted in 1913 – I mean the one where he is seen seated in one of the rooms here downstairs and wearing white summer slacks – he is not very communicative. That is why I depicted him all hunched up and tense, as if he were constraining some mainspring within himself. In my eyes, it was almost a portrait of silence rather than of Klee, and for many years it no longer occurred to me that he had been my model. But Klee was always a close friend of ours, and Kandinsky and I had great confidence in his talent and his future.”

Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) German painter

Source: Interview by Edouard Roditi (1958), p. 120

Confidence, Communication, Silence, Future

“It is an assumption that there is always one single dimension for assessing persons and their actions that has canonical priority. This is the dimension of moral evaluation; “good/evil” is supposed always to trump any other form of evaluation, but that is an assumption, probably the result of the long history of the Christianisation and then gradual de-Christianisation of Europe, which one need not make. Evaluation need not mean moral evaluation, but might include assessments of efficiency, … simplicity, perspicuousness, aesthetic appeal, and so on.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), p. 39.

History, Evil, Personality

“In lecturing on cookery, as on housebuilding, I divide the subject into, not four, but five grand elements: first, Bread; second, Butter; third, Meat; fourth, Vegetables; and fifth, Tea — by which I mean, generically, all sorts of warm, comfortable drinks served out in teacups, whether they be called tea, coffee, chocolate, broma, or what not. I affirm that, if these five departments are all perfect, the great ends of domestic cookery are answered, so far as the comfort and well-being of life are concerned.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) Abolitionist, author

Source: Household Papers and Stories (1864), Ch. 10.

Life, Coffee, Drink, Tea

“[Central banks might have to intervene to counter "perverse" or "grossly excessive" speculation. ] By such means, the monetary authorities can attempt to make the market for foreign exchange approximate toward what it would have been if there had been free competitive speculation with correct foresight of future movements. In this case all that the authorities have to do is to anticipate more correctly than private speculators the future course of exchange rates. And in so far as they do so they will make a profit at the expense of the private speculator.”

James Meade (1907–1995) British economist

James Meade (1951), The theory of international economic policy, Vol. 1, p. 224; as cited in: Peter B. Kenen (1994), Exchange Rates and the Monetary System, p. 74

Future

“Paul Krugman is a very smart and very annoying person. Over the past few years he's been hammering away at political and economic advocates for austerity policies with unmitigated glee and derision. He does so with a brio and condescension that some people can find off-putting -- but that doesn't mean that he's wrong. … Look, I think Paul Krugman has a few policy blind spots. His method of argumentation alienates as many people as it attracts. But he's not wrong when he's talking about austerity. In his response, Michael Kinsley has managed to embody the conventional wisdom in Washington -- and in doing so, embody every policy caricature of Paul Krugman's worldview.”

Daniel Drezner (1968) American journalist

The worst piece of conventional wisdom you will read this year http://www.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/05/16/the_worst_piece_of_conventional_wisdom_you_will_read_this_year (MAY 16, 2013)

Wisdom, People, Thinking, Past

“In such an environment there operates an unfortunate natural selection. Since not only the rewards but also the means and opportunities of public activity belong to the organized system, a bright boy will try to get ahead in it. He will do well in school, keep out of trouble, and apply for the right jobs. It would follow from this that the organized system is sparked by a good proportion of the bright boys, and so it is. On the other hand, in sheer self-protection, smart boys who are sensitive, have strong animal spirits or great souls, cannot play that game. There are two alternative possibilities: (1) Either the advantages of the organized system cause them to inhibit their powers, and they turn into cynical pushers or obsessional specialists or timid hard workers that make up the middle status of the system. Or (2) their natural virtues and perhaps alternative training are too strong and they become independents; but as such they are hard put, not so much hard put for money as for means to act; and so they are likely to become bitter, eccentric, etc., and so much the less effective in changing the system they disapprove”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 157.

Money, School, Soul, Game

“I speak of God, I mean something other than an Identity wherein all differences vanish, or a Unity which includes but does not transcend the differences which it somehow holds in solution. I mean a God whom men can love, a God to whom men can pray, who takes sides, who has purposes and preferences, whose attributes, howsoever conceived, leave unimpaired the possibility of a personal relation between Himself and those whom He has created.”

Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) British Conservative politician and statesman

Theism and humanism

Love, Men, God, Personality

“I want to make it very expensive for the other political parties to compete. I want them to feel the pinch. Even if I don't win, if they win, I will make it very hard for them to make money. So, they will be splurging lot more than what they are doing right now, and in addition to that, they will not be able to make more money than what they are doing right now. That means, the business of politics will not be so opportunistic any more.”

Dilip Sankarreddy Business professional

From the 2013 speech at Pecha Kutcha referring to his "Dilip for Malkajgiri" campaign. Speech at Pecha Kutcha, Hyderabad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3MRP2afrYg Politics

Money, Feeling, Business

“Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate voice; that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the heart of it means!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Poet

Heart

“A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue, which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.”

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet

Source: Paris Review interview (1972), p. 251

“There are two Christmas traditions I've inherited from my mother. One is the feeling that Christmas isn't complete if you haven't got a ham as well as a turkey. It means that the leftovers are much better. And in a curious way, despite the fact that we're talking about Christmas and ham, it's a very Jewish thing to want to provide a huge spread. I always cook for eight, but make enough to feed 30…”

Nigella Lawson (1960) British food writer, journalist and broadcaster

As quoted in "An angel at our table" by Harriet Lane in The Guardian http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/houseandgarden/story/0,6000,412368,00.html (17 December 2000)

Way, Feeling, Christmas, Cooking

“Here, then, is another way to understand the intentions of the social theoretical project that this critical analysis of the contemporary situation of social thought prepares and suggests. Philosophical disputes about the social ideal have increasingly come to turn on an unresolved ambivalence toward the naturalistic premise, an incomplete rebellion against it. The visionary imagination of our age has been both liberated and disoriented. It has been liberated by its discovery that social worlds are contingent in a more radical sense than people had supposed; liberated to disengage the ideas of community and objectivity from any fixed structure of dependence and dominion or even from any determinate shape of social life. It has also, however, been disoriented by a demoralizing oscillation between a trumped-up sanctification of existing society and would-be utopian flight that finds in the land of its fantasies the inverted image of the circumstance it had wanted to escape; disoriented by the failure to spell out what the rejection of the naturalistic view means for the vision of a regenerate society. The social theory we need must vindicate a modernist—that is to say, a nonnaturalistic—view of community and objectivity, and it must do so by connecting the imagination of the ideal with the insight into transformation.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Social Theoryː Its Situation and Its Task (1987), p. 47

Life, People, Age, World

“It’s a long step down the road to paranoia, but it’s been a proverb for a hundred years that being paranoid does not mean that they aren’t out to get you.”

John Barnes book Mother of Storms

Source: Mother of Storms (1994), p. 126

“My enemy is not the man who wrongs me, but the man who means to wrong me.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Golden Sayings of Democritus

“I said, 'Whoa, wait a minute. You guys have been talking for two weeks now [meaning the Colts' fans and the media] and I'm tired of hearing it.' I said, 'I've got news for you. We're gonna win the game. I guarantee it.”

Joe Namath (1943) American football player

Quoted in "He guaranteed it" http://www.profootballhof.com/news/he-guaranteed-it1/, ProFootballHOF.com (January 1, 2005).

Guy, Game, Waiting

“Indeed, the frequency of crashes in the Monte Carlo simulations was much smaller than the frequency of crashes in the real data: if one of the most frequently used benchmarks of the industry is incapable of reproducing the observed frequency of crashes, this indeed means that there is something to explain that may require new concepts and methods.”

Didier Sornette (1957) French scientist

Source: Why Stock Markets Crash - Critical Events in Complex Systems (2003), Chapter 9, Prediction Of Crashes And Antibubbles, p. 327.

“Monumentality is an affair of relativity. The truly monumental can only come about by means of the most exact and refined relation between parts. Since each thing carries both a meaning of its own and an associated meaning in relation to something else — its essential value is relative. We speak of the mood we experience when looking at a landscape. This mood results from the relation of certain things rather than from their separate actualities. This is because objects do not in themselves possess the total effect they give when interrelated.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Excerpts from the Teaching of Hans Hofmann', p. 68
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Mood, Parting

“All this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I'm wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don't know anything, and I'm the first one to admit it.”

Raymond Carver book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)

Love, Way, Thinking, Memory

“Above everything else, perhaps, was today’s concept of working together. I don’t mean its totalitarian version, for which Jack Havig had total loathing, or that “togetherness,” be it in a corporation or a commune, which he despised. I mean an enlightened pragmatism that rejects self-appointed aristocrats, does not believe received doctrine is necessarily true, stands ready to hear and weigh what anyone has to offer, and maintains well-developed channels to carry all ideas to the leadership and back again.”

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 14 (p. 155)

Communication, Idea

“Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips
Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract

“In a previous paper we showed that a static (nonrotating) black hole cannot be endowed with exterior scalar-meson or massive vector-meson fields. Here we show that the same is true for massive spin-2 meson fields. We also extend the above results to the case of a rotating stationary black hole. We conclude from our results that a black hole in its final (static or stationary) state cannot interact with the exterior world via the strong interactions which are mediated by meson fields such as the π (scalar), ρ (vector), and ƒ (spin-2). A direct consequence of this is the impossibility of determining the baryon number of the black hole by means of exterior measurements alone. This results in the transcendence of the law of baryon-number conservation as originally predicted by Wheeler.”

Jacob Bekenstein (1947–2015) Mexican-Israeli physicist

[Nonexistence of baryon number for black holes. II, Physical Review D, 5, 10, 15 May 1972, 2403–2412, 10.1103/PhysRevD.5.2403]

World, Law, Strong

“The seeing eye! It is this that discloses the inner harmony of things; what Nature meant, what musical idea Nature has wrapped up in these often rough embodiments. Something she did mean. To the seeing eye that something were discernible. Are they base, miserable things? You can laugh over them, you can weep over them; you can in some way or other genially relate yourself to them; — you can, at lowest, hold your peace about them, turn away your own and others' face from them, till the hour come for practically exterminating and extinguishing them!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Poet

Peace, Music, Way, Idea

“We now look into history with the generous pride of the nationalist, not with the cramped prejudice of the partisan. We do homage to Irish valour, whether it conquers on the walls of Derry, or capitulates with honour before the ramparts of Limerick; and, sir, we award the laurel to Irish genius, whether it has lit its flames within the walls of old Trinity, or drawn its inspiration from the sanctuary of Saint Omer’s. Acting in this spirit, we shall repair the errors and reverse the mean condition of the past. If not, we perpetuate the evil that has for so many years consigned this Country to the calamities of war and the infirmities of vassalage, "We must tolerate each other," said Henry Grattan, the inspired preacher of Irish nationality — he whose eloquence, as Moore has described it, was the very music of Freedom — "We must tolerate each other, or we must tolerate the common enemy…"But, sir, whilst we must endeavour wisely to conciliate let us not, to the strongest foe, nor in the most tempting emergency, weakly capitulate…Let earnest truth, stern fidelity to principle, love for all who bear the name of Irishmen, sustain, ennoble and immortalise this cause. Thus shall we reverse the dark fortunes of the Irish race, and call forth here a new nation from the ruins of the old.Thus shall a Parliament moulded from the soil, pregnant with the sympathies and glowing with the genius of the soil, be here raised up. Thus shall an honourable kingdom be enabled to fulfil the great ends that a bounteous Providence hath assigned her—which ends have been signified to her in the resources of her soil and the abilities of her sons.”

Thomas Francis Meagher (1823–1867) Irish nationalist & American politician

Legislative "Union" with Greath Britain (1846)

Love, War, Truth, Music

“We hold that efficiency cannot itself be a "value." Rather, it operates in the interstices of a value system; it prescribes relationships (ratios or proportions) among parts of the value system; it receives its "moral content" by syntax, by absorption. Things are not simply "efficient" or "inefficient." They are efficient or inefficient for given purposes, and efficiency for one purpose may mean inefficiency for another.”

Dwight Waldo (1913–2000) American political scientist

Source: The Administrative State, 1948, p. 202

Parting

“For me, that term "pop" is like a candy bar. You buy it because you like it, you eat it, and then you throw it away. It has no long-term meaning or value.”

The Edge (1961) Irish rock musician, guitar player of U2

1985
On pop music

“I remember Nessim once saying [-] that Alexandria was the great winepress of love; those who emerged from it were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets-I mean all who have been deeply wounded in their sex.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Justine (1957)

Love, Men, Sex

“A central problem in teaching mathematics is to communicate a reasonable sense of taste—meaning often when to, or not to, generalize, abstract, or extend something you have just done.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Communication, Mathematics, Problem, Sense

“It is important that in the process of change, existing institutions of value and means of production are not destroyed. The fabric of society, however critical one may be of its present structures, should be adopted and modified where required, but not destroyed.”

Harry Schwarz (1924–2010) South African activist

Lecture at University of British Columbia (12 October 1976).
Parliament (1974-1991)

Change

““Rodney, whatever is the opposite of philosophy?”
“My dear, the opposite of philosophy is terror.”
“Terror? You mean fear of death?” I asked.
“I don’t think so…”
“Fear of what, then?”
“Of never having lived.””

Andrea Lewis (writer) Microsoft employee

“The Empire Pool” Conclave: A Journal of Character, Issue 5, (Spring, 2013)
2010-

Death, Fear, Thinking

“I'm an archaeologist,' said Hildy. 'I dig up the past.'
The King raised an eyebrow. 'You mean you refresh old quarrels and keep alive old grievances? Surely not.”

Tom Holt book Who's Afraid of Beowulf?

Who's Afraid of Beowulf? (1988)

Past

“As educators of linguistically and culturally diverse students we face choices with respect to how we view language and human potential. Is language the means of interpreting our increasingly complex world and mobilizing intellect, imagination, and identity to create new knowledge and act on social realities or is it simply a set of sounds and symbols and the codes that bind them? Can our society benefit from all the intelligence, imagination, and multilingual talent it can get or should schools develop these attributes only among a privileged elite while focusing on English-only basic skills for those constructed as incapable of independent learning?”

Jim Cummins (professor) (1949) professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto

Language and the Human Spirit (2003)

World, Education, School, Imagination

“The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word.”

Stanisław Lem book Solaris

Source: Solaris (1961), Ch. 8 "The Monsters", p. 120

Men, Fate, History, Sense

“The imagination works by a principle of sympathy with the suppressed and subversive elements in experience. It sees the residues, memories, and reports of past or faraway social worlds and neglected or obscure perceptions as the main stuff with which we remake our contexts. It explains the operation of a social order by representing what the remaking of this order would require. It generalizes our ideas by tracing a penumbra of remembered or intimated possibility around present or past settlements, and it then subhjects this enlarged sense of possibility to the tests of further comparison and practice. By all these means it undermines the identification of the actual with the possible.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Social Theoryː Its Situation and Its Task (1987), p. 204

World, Imagination, Idea, Sense

“He reached his hand toward me. “You don’t mind my asking, do you?” “Of course not,” I say calmly as I reverse the lit end of the cigarette so that the flame is cupped in the palm. I reach for his handshake. He screams like a woman in distress with her skirt held high. I puff my meanness as he licks at the burn and whimpers, “You sonofagun. You’ve burned the dickens out of my hand.” “I know.” “But why? I didn’t do anything. I don’t even know you.” “I guess it’s my Samoan blood.” Sal rushes to my defense. He points his finger at the fag. “Out!” “But I didn’t do anything.” “Out, out!””

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

he shouts, his hands stiffly on the bar. The old fag picks himself up and begins to drag himself out.
Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 68.

“I think most human misery is due to well-meaning fanatics like him.”

Poul Anderson (1926–2001) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Time Patrol (p. 42)
Time Patrol

Thinking

“The second level of legitimation contains theoretical propositions in a rudimentary form. Here may be found various explanatory schemes relating sets of objective meanings. These schemes are highly pragmatic, directly related to concrete actions. Proverbs, moral maxims and wise sayings are common on this level. Here, too, belong legends and folk tales, frequently transmitted in poetic forms.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

1991; 112
The Social Construction of Reality, 1966

“Just because you’re living in blissful oblivion doesn’t mean you’re not responsible.”

Arthur M. Jolly (1969) American writer

DIane, Act I, Scene 2
Trash (2012)

“Now, to the great artist, everything in nature has character; for the unswerving directness of his observation searches out the hidden meaning of all things. And that which is considered ugly in nature often presents more character than that which is termed beautiful, because in the contractions of a sickly countenance, in the lines of a vicious face, in all deformity, in all decay, the inner truth shines forth more clearly than in features that are regular and healthy.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. II. To the artist, all in nature is beautiful, p. 46

Truth, Beauty, Search, Nature

“Most male gorillas either have a harem or do not have a mate; in contrast, most men who have more than zero mates have only one. This means that, whereas only harem-holding male gorillas contribute to the gene pool of the next generation, most human males who contribute to the gene pool do so in the context of a pair bond. Consequently, our evolved sexual nature has been shaped more by pair bonding than by harem polygyny.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 150

Men, Nature

“Manufacture is a word, which, in the vicissitude of language, has come to signify the reverse of its intrinsic meaning, for it now denotes every extensive product of art, which is made by machinery, with little or no aid of the human hand; so that the most perfect manufacture is that which dispenses entirely with manual labour.”

Andrew Ure (1778–1857) Scottish doctor and chemist

Source: The Philosophy of Manufactures, 1835, p. 1

Art, Perfection

“She [Cleopatra] was then a very young girl, but had already begun to look upon the world as a mean, dark place, in which fortune and brightness were to be had only be seizing from others what one could and keeping it in one’s hold as long as possible. Believing that there were not enough desirable things for all to have share in them, she made up her mind that the happiest person was the one who was the cleverest thief. She worked with vicious fanaticism to have what she coveted; thinking that none knew so well as herself the joy of possessing and none therefore deserved so much. When she had won her way she softened as a goddess to mortals—pouring out affection and benevolence with an abandon that was unmatchable and frightening, but irresistible. Then she was happy, and felt virtuous.”

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

Lives of Wives (London: Cassell, 1939)

World, Way, Girl, Thinking

“The point about digitization, just to explain what I mean by that, is the way that information is no longer a physical commodity. It doesn't have a mass like it used to. So it used to be that if you wanted to leak a bunch of documents, you physically had to carry away these huge boxes of documents and then you had to physically photocopy them somehow. And they had this physical mass, and it was through that mass that they could be controlled by people in power. When information is digitized, it loses that mass for the most part. It becomes almost ephemeral, it's like an idea; it's like a thought. And it spreads and it can be shared almost instantaneously. So you can take that, and then you combine it with the internet, which is this web in which everybody is talking to each other and sharing information. And you've got the makings of what I think is a digital revolution, which nobody quite knows how to handle it, what to do with it.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Attributed, Chatham House Talk (September 28, 2011)

People, Way, Idea, Thinking

“I am aware that this last statement may be disputed and individual testimony perhaps adduced to show that in ante-bellum days the ballot was as untrammelled in the south as in any section of the country; but in the face of any such contradiction I reassert the statement. The shot-gun was not resorted to. Masked men did not ride over the country at night intimidating voters; but there was a firm feeling that a class existed in every State with a sort of divine right to control public affairs. If they could not get this control by one means they must by another. The end justified the means. The coercion, if mild, was complete.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

Source: 1880s, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885), Ch. 16.

Men, Feeling, Night, Country

“That means I'll have to use $ans to suppress newlines now.Life is ridiculous.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

Source code, <code>Configure</code>

“The world has certain rules — Hollywood has certain rules — but it doesn't mean you have to play by them, and I don't, or I'd be a miserable person.”

Sherilyn Fenn (1965) American actress

Sherilyn Fenn, quoted in "Fenn Fatale", by Mike Bygrave. Sky Magazine (UK). July 1992. p. 6-10.

World, Personality

“The man who has stolen in order never to thieve again remains a thief. Nobody who has ever betrayed his principles can have a pure relationship with life. Therefore when a film-maker says he will produce a pot-boiler in order to give himself the strength and the means to make the film of his dreams — that is so much deception, or worse, self-deception. He will never now make his film.”

Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 124

Life, Dreams

“Among the basic freedoms to which men aspire that their lives might be full and uncramped, freedom from fear stands out as both a means and an end. A people who would build a nation in which strong, democratic institutions are firmly established as a guarantee against state-induced power must first learn to liberate their own minds from apathy and fear.”

Aung San Suu Kyi book Freedom from Fear

Freedom from Fear (1991)

Men, People, Fear, Freedom

“Man seeks objectives that enable him to convert the attainment of every goal into a means for the attainment of a new and more desirable goal. The ultimate objective in such a sequence cannot be obtainable; otherwise its attainment would put an end to the process. An end that satisfies these conditions is an ideal…
Thus the formulation and pursuit of ideals is a means by which to put meaning and significance into his life and into the history of which he is part.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1970s, On purposeful systems., 1972, p. 237, as cited in: William E. Smith (2008) The Creative Power. p. 58.

Life, History, Parting

“Understanding music simply means not being irritated or puzzled by it.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 1 : The Frontiers of Nonsense

Music, Understanding

“Mars is essentially in the same orbit. … Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.”

Dan Quayle (1947) American politician, lawyer

Press comment on Mars exploration http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN89/wn090189.html (11 August 1989), televised on CNN, and referenced in "A Quayle Vision of Mars" in The Washington Post (1 September 1989)

Water, Sun

“We live a dying dream / If you know what I mean”

Noel Gallagher (1967) British musician

Falling Down
Dig Out Your Soul (2008)

Dreams

“He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place when all the stars are rotating about it.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Variant: The Master said, "He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it."
Source: The Analects, Other chapters

Exercises, Star

“The (ROC) government’s stance on cross-strait ties is based on the 1992 consensus and our stance that ‘one China’ means the ROC is unequivocal and has never changed.”

Wang Yu-chi (1969) Taiwanese politician

Wang Yu-chi (2013) cited in " Wu returns from Beijing, dismisses DPP’s criticism http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2013/06/15/2003564825/1" on The Taipei Times, 15 June 2013

Change

“As soon as we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse which breaks with the received historical discourse, and as soon as we admit that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs, then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks down.”

Jacques Derrida book Writing and Difference

"Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Writing and Difference, tr. w/ intro & notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1978. p. 285

Idea

“Mr. Soame Jenyns, a writer of verse and member of the Board of Trade… In twenty three very small pages he had disposed of the "Objections to the Taxation of Our American Colonies" in a manner highly satisfactory to himself and doubtless also to the average reading Briton, who understood constitutional questions best when they were "briefly considered," and when they were humorously expounded in pamphlets that could be had for sixpence…. The heart of the question was the proposition that there should be no taxation without representation; upon which principle it was necessary to observe only that many individuals in England, such as copyholders and leaseholders, and many communities, such as Manchester and Birmingham, were taxed in Parliament without being represented there. "… are they only Englishmen when they solicit protection, but not Englishmen when taxes are required to enable this country to protect them?" As for "liberty," the word had so many meanings, "having within a few years been used as a synonymous term for Blasphemy, Bawdy, Treason, Libels, Strong Beer, and Cyder," that Mr. Jenyns could not presume to say what it meant.”

Carl L. Becker (1873–1945) American historian

The Eve of the Revolution (1918)

Communication, Beer, Question, Strong

“Sociologists and anthropologists have long been concerned with how individuals are linked to one another and how these bonds of affiliation serve as both a lubricant for getting things done and a glue that provides order and meaning to social life. The attention to networks of association, which began in earnest in the 1970s, provided welcome texture and dynamism to portraits of social life. This work stood in stark contrast to the reigning approaches in the social sciences. In contrast to deterministic cultural (oversocialized) accounts, network analysis afforded room for human agency, and in contrast to individualist, atomized (undersocialized) approaches, networks emphasized structure and constraint (Granovetter, 1985). Network studies offered a middle ground, a third way, even if no one was quite sure whether networks were a metaphor, a method, or a theory (Barnes 1979). But the sociologists and anthropologists who initially studied networks did not pay sustained attention to economic activity, although some industrial sociologists (Roy, 1954; Dalton, 1959) had long stressed the role of informal networks as an antidote to formal organization practices and structures.”

Walter W. Powell (1948) American sociologist

Walter W. Powell and Laurel Smith-Doerr. "Networks and economic life." The handbook of economic sociology. (1994). p. 368-380; introduction.

Life, Way, Study, Science

“Other women who flew were women of independent means. But I had to do something with it.”

Nancy Bird Walton (1915–2009) Australian aviatrix

Nancy Bird Walton in March 2004 http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/aviation/aviatrices/

Women

“Without religion, man is an atheist, woman is a monster. As daughter, sister, wife, and mother, she holds in her hands, under God, the destinies of humanity. In the hours of gloom and sorrow we look to her for sympathy and comfort. Where shall she find strength for trial, comfort for sorrow, save in that gospel which has given a new meaning to the name of "mother", since it rested on the lips of the child Jesus?”

Henry Benjamin Whipple (1822–1901) Bishop of Minnesota

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 618.

God, Religion, Sister, Daughters

“The meaning of life is not to be discovered only after death in some hidden, mysterious realm; on the contrary, it can be found by eating the succulent fruit of the Tree of Life and by living in the here and now as fully and creatively as we can.”

Paul Kurtz (1925–2012) American professor of philosophy

Paul Kurtz, ‎Vern L. Bullough, ‎Tim Madigan (eds.). Toward a New Enlightenment: The Philosophy of Paul Kurtz. (1994) p. 20

Life, Death, Tree

“It seems too, that the Method of exacting their Revenues, newly invented by the Lords, diminishes both the Inhabitants, and the Spirit of Agriculture in Russia. Almost all the Villages are heavily taxed. The Lords, who seldom or never reside in their Villages, lay an Impost on every Head of one, two, and even five Rubles, without the least Regard to the Means by which their Peasants may be able to raise this Money.
It is highly necessary that the Law should prescribe a Rule to the Lords, for a more judicious Method of raising their Revenues; and oblige them to levy such a Tax, as tends least to separate the Peasant from his House and Family; this would be the Means by which Agriculture would become more extensive, and Population be more increased in the Empire.”

Catherine the Great (1729–1796) Empress of Russia

Proposals for a New Law Code (1768)

Money, Family, Law, Housing

“It's extremely dangerous trying to resolve political problems outside the framework of the law — first the ‘Rose Revolution', then they'll think up something like blue. [word play here: "rose" having the colloquial sense of "lesbian" in modern Russian, and "blue" meaning "gay"]”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

On the "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine and the "Rose Revolution" in Georgia, News conference http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/markets/russia/article405454.ece, (23 December 2004). On Ukraine

Law, Problem, Thinking, Sense

“There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Speech to a joint session of the Dail and the Seanad, Dublin, Ireland (28 June 1963)
1963

Fools, Feeling, History, Past

“Music has its existence on the borderline between meaning and nonsense. That is why most attempts to attribute a specific meaning to a piece of music seem to be beside the point—even when the attribution is authoritative, even when it is made by the composer himself.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 3 : Explaining the Obvious

Music

“They are vampires, I guess, Seth allowed after a minute, compensating for Leah's reaction. I mean, it makes sense. And if [drinking blood] helps Bella, it's a good thing, right?
Both Leah and I stared at him. […]
Mom dropped him a lot when he was a baby, Leah told me.
On his head, apparently.”

Stephenie Meyer (1973) American author

Seth Clearwater, Leah Clearwater, and Jacob Black, p. 266
Twilight series, Breaking Dawn (2008)

Moms, Drink, Sense, Help

“If to be great means to be good, then Denis Diderot was a little man. But if to be great means to do great things in the teeth of great obstacles, then none can refuse him a place in the temple of the Immortals.”

Evelyn Beatrice Hall book The Friends of Voltaire

Source: The Friends of Voltaire (1906), Ch. 2 : Diderot : The Talker, p. 61

“Well, what that means is that it doesn’t happen very often. Now it’s happened to one small group of people—us—twice in a short time. That would seem to indicate that,” he ticked a finger, “something’s seriously out of whack in general, or,” he ticked the next finger, “someone’s out to get us in particular; which I feel is quite unlikely. At times in my paranoid past I would have assumed that the Universe is teaming up to get me, but now I’m more objective and I don’t believe that. I think it, but I don’t believe it.”

Michael Kurland book The Unicorn Girl

Source: The Unicorn Girl (1969), Chapter 4 (p. 40)

People, Feeling, Thinking, Universe

“This theme of literal creation is so inwrought into the structure of historic thinking, that it will require a long struggle on the part of criticism to get rid of it. Through the influence of the Church and the philosophical schools, it may be said to have become in fact institutional, so that combating it is like fighting organised civilisation itself. Yet one can make the truth clear, that only by the dislodgment of it is the success of the deeper principle possible which is the real soul of civilisation, — I mean the principle of moral life, the life of duty freely followed.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Appendix B: The System in its Ethical Necessity and its Practical Bearings, p.394

Life, Truth, School, Soul

“It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning.”

P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947) Russian esotericist

As quoted in Zen and the Art of Making a Living : A Practical Guide to Creative Career Design (1999) by Laurence G. Boldt, p. 118

Life

“People back home call me a heckler, a troublemaker, an irritant, a rebel, an activist, the voice of the people. But that wasn't always me. Growing up, I had a nickname. They used to call me Softy, meaning the soft, harmless boy. Like every other human being, I avoided trouble. In my childhood, they taught me silence. Don't argue, do as you're told. In Sunday school, they taught me don't confront, don't argue, even if you're right, turn the other cheek. This was reinforced by the political climate of the time. Kenya is a country where you are guilty until proven rich. Kenya's poor are five times more likely to be shot dead by the police who are meant to protect them than by criminals. This was reinforced by the political climate of the day.”

Boniface Mwangi (1983) Kenyan photojournalist

The day I stood up alone

People, School, Home, Boy

“The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Question period following Lecture 11 of Leonard Peikoff's series "The Philosophy of Objectivism," 1976

Evil

“From the point of view of semantics, errors must be accidents: if in the extension of "horse" there are no cows, then it cannot be required for the meaning of "horse" that cows be called horses. On the other hand, if "horse" did not mean that which it means, and if it were an error for horses, it would never be possible for a cow to be called "horse." Putting the two things together, it can be seen that the possibility of falsely saying "this is a horse" presupposes the existence of a semantic basis for saying it truly, but not vice versa. If we put this in terms of the crude causal theory, the fact that cows cause one to say "horse" depends on the fact that horses cause one to say "horse"; but the fact that horses cause one to say "horse" does not depend on the fact that cows cause one to say "horse"…”

Jerry Fodor (1935–2017) American philosopher

Fodor (1990). A Theory of Content and Other Essays. The MIT Press.

Error, Horse, Dependency, Falseness

“Included in the problems of systems engineering are those of complexity and of choice. Of all the available facts about a system or the needs for a system, which are of most significance for the present circumstances and for their probable future course? How much information is needed and how should it be used to make a satisfactory decision, considering the time and resources available and the purpose to which these data are to be applied? Since most of the means of understanding which we as individuals use, or which are used by the automatic decision-making processes which we employ, are serial processes, we are continually faced with choices of how to divide the jobs to be done and to select an order or an arrangement for systematically handling the abundance of data which are available.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. 1

Understanding, Problem, Decision, Time

“You have to help another person. But it’s not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you’re doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn’t enough. You have to…be in touch. He isn’t in touch. No one else, no thing even, has an existence of its own for him; he sees the world only as a means to his end. It doesn’t make any difference if his end is good; means are all we’ve got.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Lathe of Heaven

Source: The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Chapter 10 (Orr)

God, People, World, Motivation

“[Plant-based diet] changed my whole metabolism, and I lost 24 pounds, and I got back basically what I weighed in high school. But I did it for a different reason. I mean, I wanted to lose a little weight. But I never dreamed this would happen. I did it because, after I had this stent put in, I realized that, even though it happens quite often after you have bypass, you lose the veins, because they're thinner and weaker than arteries. The truth is that it clogged up, which means that the cholesterol was still causing buildup in my vein that was part of my bypass. And thank God I can take the stents. I don't want it to happen again. So I did all this research. And I saw that 82 percent of the people since 1986 who have gone on a plant-based, no dairy, no meat … 82 percent of the people who have done that have begun to heal themselves. Their arterial blockage cleans up. The calcium deposit in their heart breaks up.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

Interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1009/21/sitroom.02.html , September 21, 2010. 2010s

God, People, Truth, School

“In a world in which training and functions of individuals and groups are growing more and more specialized the number of ways to accomplish any particular result increasing. Different design, different facilities, different equipment, different methods, and different organizational means are available to meet the needs of man. It is highly desirable that we have trained persons look at these varied possibilities to compare their effectiveness, and to point the way to sound engineering decisions. Systems Engineering Methods is directed towards the development of a broad systems engineering approach to help such people improve their decision-making capability. Although the emphasis is on engineering, the systems approach can also has validity for many other areas in which emphasis may be social, economic, or political.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. vii

People, World, Way, Decision

“We cannot here analyze the entire contradictory and tragic history of the events of the last twenty years, in the course of which the Arabs and Israel, along with historically justified actions, carried out reprehensible deeds, often brought about by the actions of external forces.
Thus, in 1948, Israel waged a defensive war. But in 1956, the actions of Israel appeared reprehensible. The preventive six-day war in the face of threats of destruction by merciless, numerically vastly superior forces of the Arab coalition could have been justifiable. But the cruelty to refugees and prisoners of war and the striving to settle territorial questions by military means must be condemned.”

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

Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, Vietnam and the Middle East

War, History, Question, Appearance

“The third dimension of three-dimensional economics, change, suggests that studying economics also means studying history. The process of change in society cannot be understood without considering the past and how it changed, eventually becoming the present. Change in political economy may be contrasted with the static approach of conventional economics that freezes time at a moment.”

Samuel Bowles (1939) American economist

Source: Understanding Capitalism: Competition, Command, and Change, 2005, p. 57

History, Study, Change, Time

“Anthony Carthew (ITN): And, I suppose, in love?
Lady Diana Spencer: Of course!
Charles, Prince of Wales: Whatever 'in love' means.”

Charles, Prince of Wales (1948) son of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom

" Anthony Carthew http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-2559197,00.html" (Obituary), The Times, 22 January 2007. On announcing his engagement to Lady Diana Spencer (1981 Feb-July) 1980s

Love

“The labyrinth is conceived as a network of constructs, each of which is essentially an abstraction and, as such, can be picked up and laid down over many, many different events in order to bring them into focus and clothe them with personal meaning. Moreover, the constructs are subject to continual revision, although the complex interdependent relationship between constructs in the system often makes it precarious for the person to revise one construct without taking into account the disruptive effect upon major segments of the system.”

George Kelly (psychologist) (1905–1967) American psychologist and therapist

George A. Kelly, "Man's construction of his alternatives." Assessment of human motives (1958): 33-64.

Personality, Clothes

“The only possible way of decreasing Negro population is by means of controlling fertility.”

Gunnar Myrdal book An American Dilemma

Source: An American Dilemma (1944), p. 170

Way

“People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize. By presuppositions we mean the basic way an individual looks at life, his basic world view, the grid through which he sees the world. Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists. People's presuppositions lay a grid for all they bring forth into the external world. Their presuppositions also provide the basis for their values and therefore the basis for their decisions.”

Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984) American theologian

Life, People, Truth, World

“While National Socialism brought about a new version and formulation of European culture, Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself. It is not only anti-bourgeois, it is anti-cultural. It means, in the final consequence, the absolute destruction of all economic, social, state, cultural, and civilizing advances made by western civilization for the benefit of a rootless and nomadic international clique of conspirators, who have found their representation in Jewry.”

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

Speech at the Nazi party Congress at Nuremberg (September 1935) http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb58.htm 1930s

War

“This concept of capital-rebuilding is so important that it may be desirable to digress for a moment. In the broadest sense of the word, capital means the sum total of the valuable things possessed by the individuals of a society, excluding "claims," that is, mere titles to property. The word is used to mean both the inventory of these valuable things; the houses, factories, machines, livestock, stocks of raw materials, and goods in all stages of completion; and also to mean the sum of the values of these things. It should generally be clear from the context which of these two meanings is intended.”

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

Source: 1940s, The Economics of Peace, 1945, p. 5

Sense, Housing

“[L]ook at yourself right now… hoping to lose yourself—your home, your certainties, the borders and boundaries of your life—by means of a bundle of wood pulp, sewn and glued and stained with blobs of pigment and resin. People with Books.”

Michael Chabon book Gentlemen of the Road

… It makes me want to laugh.
Afterword
Gentlemen of the Road (2007)

Life, People, Books, Hope

“Everybody has called Pop Art 'American' painting, but it's actually industrial painting. America was hit by industrialism and capitalism harder and sooner and its values see more askew... I think the meaning of my work is that it’s industrial; it’s what all the world will soon become. Europe will be the same way, soon, so it [Pop Art] won’t be American; it will be universal.”

Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) American pop artist

Source: 1960's, What is Pop Art? Interviews with eight painters' (1963), pp. 25-27

World, Art, Way, Thinking

“Then this song came on—I will never forget it—it was called "The Funk Soul Brother." And I will always remember that because it was also all of the lyrics… and, er, it was that school of songwriting, you know, very easy on the words in case they get wasted, I don't know what— there's a shortage, and… it sounded like a million fire engines chasing ten million ambulances through a war zone and was played at a volume that made the empty chair beside me bleed. And it went, erm, "Funk soul brother… right about now… yeah… it's the, it's the funk soul brother… check it out. It's, er, well… it's the funk soul brother, essentially. He's, er, he's coming. He's coming at you. It's the… well… it's the funk soul brother." And after a while, I began to penetrate the meaning of this song, you know? I gathered that somebody was about to arrive, and everybody else was terribly excited—maybe he was bringing cake, or something, they didn't say—but the thing was, you see, he wasn't there yet. Ha ha, that was the hook! And I'm not saying it's a bad song, you know, or anything like that. All I'm saying is that if you get, I don't know, a broom, say, and dip it in some brake fluid, put the other end up my arse, stick me on a trampoline in a moving lift, and I would write a better song on the walls. That's all I'm saying.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

On The Rockafeller Skank by Fatboy Slim
Monster (2004)

War, School, Soul, Forgetting

“The chief thing was to select a name totally different from those under which he had hitherto written: so that when he used the name, he would feel like a different person, and in consequence write from a somewhat different angle. I have been told - by men who do not write - that this is all fanciful. This only means that they don't understand.”

Charles Hamilton (writer) (1876–1961) English writer of school stories

Explaining why he used many different pseudonyms.
Oxford Companion to Children's Literature: "Charles Hamilton" (pages 235-7)

Men, Feeling, Understanding, Personality

“The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.”

Honoré de Balzac book A Woman of Thirty

La sainteté des femmes est inconciliable avec les devoirs et les libertés du monde. Emanciper les femmes, c'est les corrompre.
Source: A Woman of Thirty (1842), Ch. III: At Thirty Years.