Quotes about meaning
page 48

“The free placement of the means of expression is a privilege enjoyed exclusively by painting [different opinion with Theo van Doesburg]] ]. The sister arts, sculpture and architecture, are more restricted in this respect. The other arts enjoy even less scope in their employment of the means of expression.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote of Mondrian, c. Oct. 1917; as cited in Letters of the great artists, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963 (transl. Daphne Woodward), p. 237
1910's

Art, Sister, Painting

“For anyone who at the end of Western philosophy can and must still question philosophically, the decisive question is no longer merely “What basic character do beings manifest?” or “How may the being of beings be characterized?” but “What is this ‘being’ itself?” The decisive question is that of “the meaning of being,” not merely that of the being of beings.”

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) German philosopher

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 18

Question, Decision

“What is important is that our Volk overcomes the aggressor and hence wins a future for itself. In a few weeks, the National Socialist combat readiness must have transformed itself into a unity sworn unto life and death. And then the capitalist war agitators in England and its satellite states shall shortly realize what it means to have attacked Europe’s greatest Volk state without proper cause.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

As quoted in Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations by Max Domarus https://books.google.com/books?id=5tdVAAAAYAAJ 1930s

Life, Death, War, Future

“We often hear it said in this country, and the words have a familiar smack about them, that what is wanted is a period of either firm or strong government [for India]. It is very difficult to define what is meant by that, but, assuming for a moment that we are in agreement as to what it means, I would say this. That is perfectly possible, but you can only hope to succeed on that policy alone on two assumptions; I am coming to the history in a moment. Those two assumptions are, first, unanimity among the political parties at home, and, secondly, continuity of policy. It was because both these preliminary necessities were absent in the case of Ireland that the Irish question went on, as it did, for a generation, and culminated, as it did, between the alternatives of complete surrender or war. Opinions differ as to the solution that was chosen. I, as a member of the Government at the time, supported the solution of surrender. I did not like it at the time, but I did it from conviction.”

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

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1931/jan/26/india-1 in the House of Commons (26 January 1931). 1931

War, Hope, Home, History

“I'm not aware of too many things.
I know what I know if you know what I mean.”

Edie Brickell (1966) singer from the United States

"What I Am"
Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars (1988)

“The DeBeers people are almost saying what they really mean. You remember the old DeBeers slogan, "Diamonds are forever." Then they changed it to "This year, take her breath away." The new slogan is "Diamonds. Render her speechless." Why don't they just come out and say it: "Diamonds. That'll shut her up."”

Ron White (1956) American comedian

They Call Me Tater Salad

People, Change

“speak to me
don't mislead me, the calm I feel means a storm is swelling
there's no telling where it starts or how it ends”

Natalie Merchant (1963) American singer-songwriter

Song lyrics, Blind Man's Zoo (1989), Trouble Me

Feeling

“Work, mental or manual, is the means whereby attention is compelled, it is the instrument of all knowledge and virtue, the root whence all excellence springs.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 116

Spring, Knowledge

“Competition among capitalists requires that they constantly reduce the costs of production, by cutting wages or some other means, while increasing output through technological change and greater efficiency. The process, then, involves three intertwined aspects:
(1) capitalists control the means of production,
(2) laborers must sell their labor to survive because they lack access to the means of production, and
(3) there must be constant changes to increase production and cut costs.”

Ted C. Lewellen (1940–2006) American writer

Political Anthropology: An Introduction (2003), p. 213

Change

“I mean, the computer industry promises nothing. Did you ever read a shrink-wrapped license agreement? You should read one. It basically says, if this product deliberately kills your children, and we knew it would, and we decided not to tell you because it might harm sales, we're not liable. I mean, it says stuff like that. They're absurd documents. You have no rights.”

Bruce Schneier (1963) American computer scientist

[Hartford Advocate, 2006-04-27, Your computer is not secure]
Politics and societal issues of the digital age

Children, Reading

“If there be in nature such a principle as justice, it is necessarily the only political principle there ever was, or ever will be. All the other so-called political principles, which men are in the habit of inventing, are not principles at all. They are either the mere conceits of simpletons, who imagine they have discovered something better than truth, and justice, and universal law; or they are mere devices and pretences, to which selfish and knavish men resort as means to get fame, and power, and money.”

Lysander Spooner (1808–1887) Anarchist, Entrepreneur, Abolitionist

Section VIII, p. 15
Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882), Chapter II. The Science of Justice (Continued)

Men, Money, Truth, Justice

“You talk for talking’s sake,' she hissed. I asked if that was bad. 'I mean it,' the girl replied. 'You talk for talking’s sake.' I had heard her the first time and had understood the words but not the contempt with which they were charged. 'Would you be equally annoyed,' I asked, 'if I danced for dancing’s sake? […] I should have said, 'Would you hate me if I lived for living’s sake?' This would have been the total question — the one to which a full reply could have saved the world.”

Quentin Crisp (1908–1999) writer, Actor

How to Have a Life-Style

Hate, World, Girl, Question

“Recently there has been a falling off in ideological and political work among students and intellectuals, and some unhealthy tendencies have appeared. Some people seem to think that there is no longer any need to concern oneself with politics or with the future of the motherland and the ideals of mankind. It seems as if Marxism was once all the rage but is currently not so much in fashion. To counter these tendencies, we must strengthen our ideological and political work. Both students and intellectuals should study hard. In addition to the study of their specialized subjects, they must make progress both ideologically and politically, which means that they should study Marxism, current events and politics. Not to have a correct political point of view is like having no soul […] All departments and organizations should shoulder their responsibilities in ideological and political work. This applies to the Communist Party, the Youth League, government departments in charge of this work, and especially to heads of educational institutions and teachers.”

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

Chapter 12 https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch12.htm; originally published in "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People" (27 February 1957), 1st pocket ed., pp. 43-44 Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (The Little Red Book)

People, Youth, Education, Soul

“The Mountain is not merely something eternally sublime. It has a great historical and spiritual meaning for us … From it came the Law, from it came the Gospel in the Sermon on the Mount. We may truly say that the highest religion is the Religion of the Mountain.”

Jan Smuts (1870–1950) military leader, politician and statesman from South Africa

When he unveiled the Mountain Club War Memorial at Maclear's Beacon on the summit of Table Mountain (1923), as cited by Alan Paton in his final essay, A Literary Remembrance, published posthumously in TIME, 25 April 1988, p. 106

Religion, Law, Mountain

“The idea of vocation I picked up in those circles created distortion until I grew strong enough to discard it. I mean the idea that vocation, or calling, comes from a voice external to ourselves, a voice of moral demand that asks us to become someone we are not yet—someone different, someone better, someone just beyond our reach.
That concept of vocation is rooted in a deep distrust of selfhood, in the belief that the sinful self will always be “selfish” unless corrected by external forces of virtue. It is a notion that made me feel inadequate to the task of living my own life, creating guilt about the distance between who I was and who I was supposed to be.”

Parker Palmer (1939) American theologian

Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)

Life, Feeling, Idea, Strong

“The question was what's happening to the individual in America? Is the individual going the way of the environment, being destroyed? In other words, were we becoming the creatures of the machine?
That was the way people thought in the '60s. Now maybe that's passé today but that's the kind of thing people thought about. Are we turning into machines? They wanted to rebel against that.
Their rebellion cannot be called a success by any means, far from it. Those of us who tried are very grateful that we tried to the degree we did. Anybody who achieved any success against the machine feels good about it.”

Charles A. Reich (1928–2019) American lawyer

The Greening of America turns 40 (2010)

People, Way, Feeling, Question

“Determinism, in the strict sense, is self-contradictory. For if man’s mental processes—specifically, his attempts at reasoning—are not free, if they are determined by environment and heredity, then there is no means of claiming that theory x is true and y is false—since man can have no way of knowing that his mental processes might not be conditioned to force him to believe that x is logical, when in fact it is not.”

Roy A. Childs, Jr. (1949–1992) American libertarian essayist and critic

Source: “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism,” 1969, p. 23

Way, Sense, Falseness

“Laughing at his own son, who got his mother, and by his mother's means his father also, to indulge him, he told him that he had the most power of any one in Greece: "For the Athenians command the rest of Greece, I command the Athenians, your mother commands me, and you command your mother."”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Life of Themistocles

“I'm sure Chelsea do not like playing Liverpool. When they are talking and talking and talking before the game it means they are worried. Maybe they're afraid?”

Rafael Benítez (1960) Spanish association football player and manager

We don't need to give away flags for our fans to wave (2012)

Game

“A thought that has found a plastic expression must continue to expand in keeping with its own plastic idiom. A plastic idea must be expressed with plastic means just as a musical idea is expressed with musical means, or a literary idea with verbal means. Neither music nor literature are wholly translatable into other art forms; and so a plastic art cannot be created through a superimposed literary meaning. The artist who attempts to do so produces nothing more than a show-booth. He contents himself with visual story-telling. He subjects himself to a mechanistic kind of thinking which disintegrates into fragments.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 40-46
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Art, Music, Literature, Idea

“Creationists do deliberately misrepresent evolution many different ways in all their arguments. Even when they know better, they still say that evolution necessarily requires the godless origin of life from inorganic matter. But it doesn’t mean that, and never did. For one thing, all the building blocks of life were already organic long before the first organism, before anything could be considered alive. We’ve even detected vast amounts of organic matter in deep space. But creationists claim space evolved too, and that the big bang is part of the same evolutionary process as that which leads to new species on earth. So they often say that evolution requires “something coming from nothing”, which is ironic since creationists believe that themselves while strict scientists do not.”

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

"6th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3k0dDFxkhM, Youtube (February 2, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Life, Way, Parting

“Without the constantly living and articulated experience of absurdity, there would be no reason to attempt to do something meaningful. And on the contrary, how can one experience one's own absurdity if one is not constantly seeking meaning?”

Václav Havel book Disturbing the Peace

Source: Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 5 : The Politics of Hope, p. 114

“Belief in the stable state serves primarily to protect us from apprehension of the threats inherent in change. Belief in stability is a means of maintaining stability, or at any rate the illusion of stability. But the most threatening situations are those that confront us with uncertainty, and by ‘uncertainty’, I don’t mean risk, which is a probability ratio which we all know how to handle, particularly those who are managers of industry. We can deal with risk.”

Donald A. Schön (1930–1997) American academic

Donald Schon " REITH LECTURES 1970: Change and Industrial Society: Lecture 1: The Loss of the Stable State http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/1970_reith1.pdf" at the BBC, 15 November 1970 – Radio 4; cited in: Richard Duane Carter (1981) Future challenges of management education. p. 102

Change

“Racism should be viewed as an intervening variable. You give me a set of conditions and I can produce racism in any society. You give me a different set of conditions and I can reduce racism. You give me a situation where there are a sufficient number of social resources so people don't have to compete for those resources, and I will show you a society where racism is held in check. If we could create the conditions that make racism difficult, or discourage it, then there would be less stress and less need for affirmative action programs. One of those conditions would be an economic policy that would create tight labor markets over long periods of time. Now does that mean that affirmative action is here only temporarily? I think the ultimate goal should be to remove it.”

William Julius Wilson (1935) American sociologist

Interview with Mother Jones.

People, Thinking, Time

“Lemony Snicket: (narrating) When you are invited to dine, particularly with people you do not know very well, it always helps to have a conversational opener, a phrase which here means "an interesting sentence to say out loud in order to get people talking." Although lately it has become more and more difficult to attend dinner parties without the evening ending in gunfire or tapioca, I keep a list of good and bad conversational openers in my commonplace book in order to avoid awkward pauses at the dinner table. "Who would like to see an assortment of photographs taken while I was on vacation?" for instance, is a very poor conversational opener, because it is likely to make your fellow diners shudder instead of talk, whereas good conversational openers are sentences such as "What would drive a man to commit arson?," "Why do so many stories of true love end in tragedy and despair?," and "Madame diLustro, I believe I've discovered your true identity!," all of which are likely to provoke discussions, arguments, and accusations, thus making the dinner party much more entertaining.”

Daniel Handler book The Grim Grotto

The Grim Grotto (2004)

Love, People, Books, Help

“That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Prelude
Middlemarch (1871)

Life, Failure

“Earlier the films were given an 'A' certificate simply because they had lots of violence and horror, but nowadays there are a lot of sex and double-meaning dialogues. The themes become so predominantly vulgar and we can't possibly edit out a film's theme. So how do we re-censor these films to make them U or U/A?”

Pahlaj Nihalani

On implementing a new policy under which A-rated film cannot be recut and released for television, as quoted in " Shocker! Adult Films Won't Be Re-Censored For TV! http://www.9xe.com/3574" 9xe (9 July 2015)

Sex

“As the Genesis story teaches, knowledge cannot save us from ourselves. If we know more than before, it means only that we have greater scope to enact our fantasies. But – as the Genesis myth also teaches – there is no way we can rid ourselves of what we know. If we try to regain a state of innocence, the result can only be a worse madness. The message of Genesis is that in the most vital areas of human life there can be no progress, only an unending struggle with our own nature.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (pp. 79-80)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Life, Way, Nature, Knowledge

“No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the MEANS used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the PURPOSES to be achieved. Revolution is the negation of the existing, a violent protest against man's inhumanity to man with all the thousand and one slaveries it involves. It is the destroyer of dominant values upon which a complex system of injustice, oppression, and wrong has been built up by ignorance and brutality. It is the herald of NEW VALUES, ushering in a transformation of the basic relations of man to man, and of man to society.”

Emma Goldman book My Disillusionment in Russia

My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)

“You were both correct,” said Morningstar. “It is the same thing that you both describe, although neither of you sees it as it really is. Each of you colors reality in keeping with your means of controlling it. For if it is uncontrollable, you fear it. Sometimes then, you color it incomprehensible. In your case, a machine; in theirs, a demon.”

Roger Zelazny book Jack of Shadows

Source: Jack of Shadows (1971), Chapter 6 (p. 63)

Fear, Color, Reality

“By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet.”

Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi

Mes Apprentissages (1936)

Flowers, Memory

“I love money! Just because it's free doesn't mean I don't like money. And actually I've made more money this way than any distributor said I could possibly make, which isn't much because independent distributors are notoriously without money. So the most money any distributor told me I could possibly hope to make on this film, total, maximum, in my wildest dreams was $50,000, and they said much more realistic would be $10,000 or $25,000 and the biggest advance I was offered, I think, was $20,000 and that's for locking up all the rights.”

Nina Paley (1968) US animator, cartoonist and free culture activist

5m05s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eazIth4orfM#t=5m05s Power to the Pixel (2009)

Love, Money, Dreams, Hope

“My policies are based not on some economics theory, but on things I and millions like me were brought up with: an honest day's work for an honest day's pay; live within your means; put by a nest egg for a rainy day; pay your bills on time; support the police.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

The News of the World (20 September 1981), quoted in Chris Ogden, Maggie: An Intimate Portrait of a Woman in Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 342.
First term as Prime Minister

Support, Time

“Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.”

Philip Pullman book Lyra's Oxford

Lyra's Oxford (2003)

Reading

“Along with the loss of the sense of self has gone a loss of our language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other. This is one important side of the loneliness now experienced by people in the Western world.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 56

People, World, Communication, Sense

“He told me I might judge of the happiness of this state by this one thing - viz. that this was the state of life which all other people envied; that kings have frequently lamented the miserable consequence of being born to great things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great; that the wise man gave his testimony to this, as the standard of felicity, when he prayed to have neither poverty nor riches. He bade me observe it, and I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters.”

Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) English trader, writer and journalist

Source: Robinson Crusoe (1719), Ch. 1, Start in Life.

Life, People, Envy, Parting

“Ashlee Simpson did a special performance at Mall of America this week. Reports from those present say that the venue was completely packed; I mean seriously, people were like sardines, wall to wall, there had to be like ten of them…all pushed up against the giant stage they constructed…in the janitor's closet. Because she sucks.”

Tina Fey (1970) American comedian, writer, producer and actress

citation needed

People

“Made still a blund'ring kind of melody;
Spurred boldly on, and dashed through thick and thin,
Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in.
Free from all meaning, whether good or bad,
And in one word, heroically mad.”

John Dryden Absalom and Achitophel

Pt. II, line 413.
Absalom and Achitophel (1681)

Sense, Madness

“Turn up the TV. No one listening will suspect,
even your mother won't detect it,
no your father won't know.
they think that I've got no respect
but everything means less than zero.”

Elvis Costello (1954) English singer-songwriter

Less Than Zero
Song lyrics, My Aim Is True (1977)

Thinking

“Then there's a feller who got hit by a train! How the - how the heck do y'get hit by a train! I mean it's not like it'll jump up and attack ya at the last minute or nothin'! There's, like, a railroad there to give ya, y'know, a heads up sign! I tell ya, if you ever gonna get hit by a train, do this: [steps to side] TA-DA! There ya go! Attaboy!”

Larry the Cable Guy (1963) American stand-up comedian, actor, country music artist, voice artist

Git-R-Done (album)

Training

“Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book III, Chapter 4, "Morality and Psychoanalysis"
Mere Christianity (1952)

Life, God, War, Peace

“And what this could mean, as illustrated by what happened in 1854, the first real test of the Fugitive Slave Act? There was a slave named Anthony Burns in Virginia who stowed away on board a coastal vessel that then sailed to Boston. And Anthony Burns, who was apparently quite literate but not very smart, wrote a letter to his brother back in Virginia telling him where he was. Well, before Anthony Burns was returned to the State of Virginia, the President, Franklin Pierce, had sent an artillery regiment of marines to Boston. He had federalized the National Guard of Boston. He had 3,000 soldiers surrounding them, making sure that nobody could break the jail and let Anthony Burns out. This was an example of the way in which the federal police power would be used to make sure that slaves were returned to their masters or that slaves couldn’t escape from their masters. So this is the real issue.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

Way

“The use of pictures was creeping into the church already in the third century, because the council of Elvira in Spain, held in 305, especially forbids to have any picture in the Christian churches. These pictures were generally representations of some events, either of the New or of the Old Testament, and their object was to instruct the common and illiterate people in sacred history, whilst others were emblems, representing some ideas connected with the doctrines of Christianity. It was certainly a powerful means of producing an impression upon the senses and the imagination of the vulgar, who believe without reasoning, and admit without reflection; it was also the most easy way of converting rude and ignorant nations, because, looking constantly on the representations of some fact, people usually end by believing it. This iconographic teaching was, therefore, recommended by the rulers of the church, as being useful to the ignorant, who had only the understanding of eyes, and could not read writings. Such a practice was, however, fraught with the greatest danger, as experience has but too much proved. It was replacing intellect by sight. Instead of elevating man towards God, it was bringing down the Deity to the level of his finite intellect, and it could not but powerfully contribute to the rapid spread of a pagan anthropomorphism in the church.”

Walerian Krasiński (1795–1855) historian

Introductory dissertation to John Calvin's Treatise on Relics (1854)

God, People, Way, Imagination

“The word 'policy' generally refers to the principles that govern action directed towards given ends. Any study of policy therefore should concern itself with three things — what we want (the ends), how we get it (the means), and who are 'we,' that is, what is the nature of the organization or group concerned. Science is concerned with means rather than with ends. The study of "what we want" (objectives) extends beyond the boundaries of the social sciences into the field of ethics. It is not the business of the social sciences to evaluate the ultimate ends of human activity. The social sciences, therefore, cannot give a final answer to the question whether any given policy is right. The social scientist can study what people say they want, what they think they want and may even infer from their behaviour what they really want, but it is not the business of science to say whether people want right things.”

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

Source: 1950s, Principles of economic policy, 1958, p. 1-2

People, Question, Business, Nature

“There's a crisis of ideas in art, which is felt by many, many people. Not only in art: in social thinking, in politics. That's one of the other things about this poll, one of the attempts to get out of this, by some maybe funny means — humor helps — because we really don't know where to go. and what our next step has to be.
Artists now.”

Alexander Melamid (1945) Russian artist

Vitaly Komar, ‎Aleksandr Melamid, ‎JoAnn Wypijewski (1997). Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art p. 16

People, Art, Idea, Thinking

“A remedy is needed to meet the evil now existing in most of the southern states, but especially in that one which I have the honor to represent in part, the State of South Carolina. The enormity of the crimes constantly perpetrated there finds no parallel in the history of this republic in her very darkest days. There was a time when the early settlers of New England were compelled to enter the fields, their homes, even the very sanctuary itself, armed to the full extent of their means. While the people were offering their worship to God within those humble walls their voices kept time with the tread of the sentry outside. But, sir, it must be borne in mind that at the time referred to civilization had but just begun its work upon this continent. The surroundings were unpropitious, and as yet the grand capabilities of this fair land lay dormant under the fierce tread of the red man. But as civilization advanced with its steady and resistless sway it drove back those wild cohorts and compelled them to give way to the march of improvement. In course of time superior intelligence made its impress and established its dominion upon this continent. That intelligence, with an influence like that of the sun rising in the east and spreading its broad rays like a garment of light, gave life and gladness to the dark.”

Joseph Hayne Rainey (1832–1887) politician

1871, Speech on the the Ku Klux Klan Bill of 1871 (1 April 1871)

Life, God, People, Way

“A spontaneous, passionate, yet just, true-meaning man! Full of wild faculty, fire and light; of wild worth, all uncultured; working out his life-task in the depths of the Desert there.”

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

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

Life, Light, Passion

“As I understand it, the benefits of multiculturalism are that the sterile white-bread cultures of Britain, Canada and Australia get some great ethnic restaurants and a Commonwealth Games opening ceremony that lasts until two in the morning. But in the case of those Muslim ghettoes — in Sydney, in Oslo, in Paris, Copenhagen and Manchester — multiculturalism means that the worst attributes of Muslim culture — the subjugation of women — combine with the worst attributes of Western culture — licence and self-gratification. Tattoed, pierced Pakistani skinhead gangs swaggering down the streets of Northern England are as much a product of multiculturalism as the turban-wearing Sikh Mountie in the vice-regal escort at Rideau Hall. Yet even in the face of the crudest assaults on its most cherished causes — women's rights and gay rights — the political elite turns squeamishly away.”

Mark Steyn (1959) Canadian writer

Battered Westerner Syndrome inflicted by myopic Muslim defenders (2002)

Women, Game, Understanding

“There is another ground of hope that must not be omitted. Let men but think over their infinite expenditure of understanding, time, and means on matters and pursuits of far less use and value; whereof, if but a small part were directed to sound and solid studies, there is no difficulty that might not be overcome.”

Francis Bacon book Novum Organum

Aphorism 111
Novum Organum (1620), Book I

Men, Hope, Understanding, Thinking

“Just remember the guy who slit Danny Pearl's throat is in Gitmo, and now they're doing it on TV… In order to be an effective president… when you say something you have to mean it… You've got to kill them.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

"George W. Bush Bashes Obama on Middle East" http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-04-27/george-w-bush-bashes-obama-on-middle-east, by Josh Rogin, Bloomberg View (26 April 2015) 2010s, 2015

Guy

“The words we use are the most clumsy symbols for meanings, and to suppose that such words as "war," "glory," "justice," "liberty,” “home," mean the same in two languages, is an error.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Give Me Liberty (1936)

War, Justice, Error, Home

“The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Flamingo's Smile

"The Rule of Five", p. 199
The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

World, Soul, Sense

“A system with greater organizational diversity has a higher probability of having in hand some form that does a reasonably satisfactory job of dealing with the changed environmental conditions. Adaptation in such a system means reallocating resources from one type of existing organization to another, either by command or by market mechanisms, rather than trying to identify and create appropriate organizational forms.”

Michael T. Hannan (1943) US-American sociologist of Stanford University

Source: Organizational ecology, 1989, p. 8

Change

“Generally speaking, an Indian university must regard itself as one of the living organs of national reconstruction. It must discover the best means of blending together both the spiritual and the material aspects of life. It must equip its alumni irrespective of caste, creed or sex, with individual fitness, not for its own sake, not for merely adorning varied occupations and professions, but in order to teach them how to merge their individuality in the common cause of advancing the progress and prosperity of their motherland and upholding the highest traditions of human civilisation.”

Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–1953) Indian politician

Speech delivered at Nagpur University Convocation on 5th December 1936.

Life, Sex, Universe

“For me, from the moment when the first, still unformed, idea comes into my head until the projection of the rushes, the process of making a film constitutes a single piece of work. I mean that I cannot become interested in anything, day or night, which is not that film. Let no one imagine that this is a romantic pose — on the contrary. I become relatively more lucid, more attentive, and almost feel as if I were intelligent and more ready to understand.”

Michelangelo Antonioni (1912–2007) Italian film director and screenwriter

Cahiers du Cinema (1960)

Feeling, Imagination, Intelligence, Idea

“Serving as your First Lady is an honor and a privilege…but back when we first came together four years ago, I still had some concerns about this journey we'd begun. While I believed deeply in my husband's vision for this country…and I was certain he would make an extraordinary President…like any mother, I was worried about what it would mean for our girls if he got that chance.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2010s, Democratic National Convention speech (2012)

Girl, Chance, Country

“Shanne said, “You are quiet; are you sad?”
“In a way. Do you know why?”
She put her hand across his mouth. “Never speak of it. What must be, will be. What can never be—can never be.”
Ghyl turned to look at her, trying to divine every last scintilla of her meaning.
“But,” she added in a soft voice, “what can be—can be.””

Jack Vance book Emphyrio

Source: Emphyrio (1969), Chapter 12

Sadness, Way

“But the most common error among the whole-hearted abstractionists nowadays [in 1946] is to mistake the medium for an end in itself, instead of a means. On the other hand, the surrealists erred in supposing that one can do without a medium, that in attacking the medium one does not destroy just one means for getting into the unknown. Color and space relations constitute such a means because from them can be made structures which exhibit the various patterns of reality.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Source: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), pp. 39-40

Color, Error, Reality, Heart

“The "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence didn't mean radical individualism. It meant the pursuit of virtue.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, Interview with Peter Robinson (2009)

Happiness

“Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression. … by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking. … There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

English Prose Style (1928)
Literary Quotes

Thinking, Time

“God says in Jeremiah 16 — "Behold I will bring them the Jewish people again unto their land that I gave unto their fathers" — that would be Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - "Behold I will send for many fishers and after will I send for many hunters. And they the hunters shall hunt them" — that will be the Jews — "from every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks." If that doesn't describe what Hitler did in the Holocaust — you can't see that. So think about this — I will send fishers and I will send hunters. A fisher is someone who entices you with a bait. How many of you know who Theodore Herzl was? How many of you don't have a clue who he was? Woo, sweet God! Theodore Herzl is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew that at the turn of the 19th century said, "this land is our land, God wants us to live there". So he went to the Jews of Europe and said, "I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel". So few went, Herzl went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the Holocaust. Then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says — Jeremiah righty? — "they shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and out of the holes of the rocks", meaning: there's no place to hide. And that will be offensive to some people. Well, dear heart, be offended: I didn't write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, "my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel". Today Israel is back in the land and they are at Ezekiel 37 and 8. They are physically alive but they're not spiritually alive. Now how is God going to cause the Jewish people to come spiritually alive and say, "the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, He is God"?”

John Hagee (1940) American pastor, theologian and saxophonist

late 2005 sermon at Cornerstone Church, quoted in

God, People, Truth, Mountain

“[I]t turns out to be the case that torture's not very effective. And so if you're dealing with someone who has no moral qualms whatsoever, like Donald Rumsfeld, it might be worth pointing out that its not in his interests to continue a policy that's simply feeding us false information. I mean, somebody where you know that the moral - whatever part of the brain that deals with moral reactions, they're defunct at some point - but … it’s a good thing that we found that out. It’s a bit or argument that we can use to make abolishing torture more appealing to people. But supposing it did… I mean the whole point is… I mean you're talking about two very very different levels of objection, right? Supposing it were true that every time you tortured someone, they actually revealed what you couldn't get revealed in some other way. Would you then continue torturing? One of the problems with those arguments is that someone like Rumsfeld or whomever will be able to come up with a case - somebody who was tortured and did reveal information that intelligence wanted to know (there'll be 70 other cases where it didn't). But they'll be able to come up with one. And then what do you say? Well it's alright??”

Susan Neiman (1955) American academic

Beyond Belief conference (November 2006)

People, Way, Intelligence, Problem

“If the Easter Islanders couldn't solve their milder local problems in the past, how can the modern world hope to solve its big global problems? People who get depressed at such thoughts often then ask me, “Jared, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the world’s future?” I answer, “I am a cautious optimist.” By that, I mean that, on the one hand, I acknowledge the seriousness of the problems facing us. If we don’t make a determined effort to solve them, and if we don’t succeed at that effort, the world as a whole within the next few decades will face a declining standard of living, or perhaps something worse. That’s the reason why I decided to devote most of my career efforts at this stage of my life to convincing people that our problems have to be taken seriously and won’t go away otherwise. On the other hand, we shall be able to solve our problems – if we choose to do so.”

Jared Diamond book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Source: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), Chapter "The world as a polder: what does it all mean to us today?", section "Reasons for hope" (Penguin Books, 2011, page 521, .

Life, People, World, Hope

“And the sad fact is that all nanotech life out of our control—out of anyone’s control. The essence of nanotech life’s evolution is autonomy, self-will, and goals which have nothing to do with those of the harboring life form.
Humanity, you mean, said Lourdusamy.
Precisely.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 13 (p. 261)

Sadness, Life

“I didn't mean to hit the umpire with the dirt, but I did mean to hit that bastard in the stands.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

Revisiting the May 1922 dirt-throwing, fan-chasing incident, in The Babe Ruth Story; reproduced in "Babe Ruth Quotes" http://www.baseball-almanac.com/quotes/quoruth.shtml at Baseball Almanac

“For me the voice of God, of Conscience, of Truth or the Inner Voice or ‘the still small Voice’ mean one and the same thing. I saw no form. I have never tried, for I have always believed God to be without form. One who realizes God is freed from sin for ever…. But what I did hear was like a Voice from afar and yet quite near. It was as unmistakable as some human voice definitely speaking to me, and irresistible. I was not dreaming at the time I heard the Voice. The hearing of the Voice was preceded by a terrific struggle within me. Suddenly the Voice came upon me. I listened, made certain that it was the Voice, and the struggle ceased. I was calm. The determination was made accordingly, the date and the hour of the fast were fixed…. Could I give any further evidence that it was truly the Voice that I heard and that it was not an echo of my own heated imagination? I have no further evidence to convince the sceptic. He is free to say that it was all self-delusion or hallucination. It may well have been so. I can offer no proof to the contrary. But I can say this — that not the unanimous verdict of the whole world against me could shake me from the belief that what I heard was the true voice of God.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Harijan (1933, July 8); also in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Vol. 61), and in The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi (Prabhu and Rao, eds., 1967, pp. 33-34)
1930s

God, Truth, World, Dreams

“And even I can remember
A day when the historians left blanks in their writings,
I mean, for things they didn't know,
But that time seems to be passing.”

Ezra Pound The Cantos

Canto XIII
The Cantos

Time

“Fragments of information, indicative of a widespread poverty, fall under the following heads: Pauperism, the general distress, the number of evictions, the pauper burials; the overcrowding and insanitation due to improper housing; the death rate from tuberculosis; the amount of unemployment; and the number of accidents in certain trades. By means of such data as we have concerning these conditions, a partial, but of course a most imperfect, comparison can be made between the poverty of England and that of the United States.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Poverty (1912), p. 20

Death, Housing

“In a statesman’s transactions there are many things which cannot be communicated otherwise than by manner without inconvenient commitment or controversy; and that will be the most serviceable manner which can be expressive or inexpressive at pleasure, and be used as a dark lantern to his meanings.”

Henry Taylor (1800–1886) English playwright and poet

Source: The Statesman (1836), Ch. 31. p. 235

Pleasure, Communication

“Is anyone here prepared to say / Just what they mean or is it too late / For anyone here to try to do / Just what it takes to get through to you
Let's all make believe / That we're still friends and we like each other
Let's all make believe / That in the end we're gonna need each other
Strangle my hope and make me pray / To a God I've never seen but who I betray”

Noel Gallagher (1967) British musician

Let's All Make Believe, 7 February 2000
B-sides released by Oasis

God, Hope

“Now I have to define what I mean by "action". When a material body is transported from one point to another, it involves an action that depends on the speed of the body and on the distance it travels. However, the action is neither the speed nor the distance taken separately; rather, it is proportional to the sum of the distances travelled multiplied each by the speed at which they were travelled.”

Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters

Accord de différentes loix de la nature qui avoient jusqu’ici paru incompatibles (1744)

Travel, Dependency, Speed

“Being controversial in politics is inevitable. If an individual wants to be a leader and isn't controversial, that means he never stood for anything. In the world today, there are not many good choices — only choices between the half-good and the less half-good.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

Cited in Nick Thimmesch's "An interview with Nixon: 'Defeated, but not finished'" (Chicago Tribune (11 December 1978)
1970s

World

“The 'physical' does not mean any particular kind of reality, but a particular kind of denoting reality, namely a system of concepts in the natural sciences which is necessary for the cognition of reality. 'The physical' should not be interpreted wrongly as an attribute of one part of reality, but not of the other; it is rather a word denoting a kind of conceptual construction, as, e. g., the markers 'geographical' or 'mathematical', which denote not any distinct properties of real things, but always merely a manner of presenting them by means of ideas.”

Moritz Schlick book Théorie générale de la connaissance

Source: Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre, 1925, p. 27 i. ; as cited in: Adam Schaff (1962). Introduction to semantics, p. 83

Mathematics, Idea, Nature, Reality

““He posed me a question which I must answer correctly—else he will not co-operate.”
“Huh? What was the question?
“I’ll ask you. Martha, what is the meaning of life?”
“What! Why, what a stupid question!”
“He did not ask it stupidly.”
“It’s a psychopathic question, unlimited, unanswerable, and, in all probability, sense free.””

Robert A. Heinlein book Beyond This Horizon

Source: Beyond This Horizon (1948; originally serialized in 1942), Chapter 2, “Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief—”, p. 35; see also pages 31, 33

Life, Stupidity, Question, Sense

“Ask yourself this question: if you were one of America's Founders, and you'd just surprised the world (and yourself) by winning a war of secession against the most powerful and heavy-handed government on the planet, and the last thing in the world you wanted for yourself, for your children, or for your grandchildren was to fall beneath the heels of its jackboots again, what would you want the Bill of Rights to mean?
And if the first act, under martial law, of that powerful, heavy-handed government had been to try to take your guns away at Lexington and Concord, would you have written a Second Amendment to guarantee its 'right' to own and carry weapons? Would you have written a Second Amendment that was subject to whatever government claims is 'reasonable regulation?”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

Or would you have written the Second Amendment to forbid government from having anything to do with your guns? Anything whatever. "Police Reform," http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2009/tle501-20090111-02.html 11 January 2009.

War, Children, World, Law

“I'm not sure what this means and if it can be replicated, but we did something very unique and none of it was planned. There wasn't a $20 million marketing budget designed to make this; it just happened. The audience took the movie for its own and decided to make it an event, and that's pretty awesome. And by the way, there were people who liked the movie so much they were defending the film against people who were thrashing it. Completely mind-blowing. I've never had that happen, either.”

Anthony C. Ferrante American film director

'Sharknado' Director on Secrets, Sequels and Success of the Social Media Sensation http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/sharknado-director-secrets-sequels-success-social-media-sensation-584636 (July 12, 2013)

People, Way

“But he was a quick study. An autodidact. Anything that was technical, that was logical, that ran according to rules, Peter could figure out. And knew it. Didn’t bother to ask for help. So much quicker to work it out on his own than suffer through someone’s well-meaning efforts to educate him—and to forge an emotional connection with him in so doing. There was something, somewhere, that he could do better than most people.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Thanksgiving (prologue)
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

People, Education, Effort, Study

“It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value."”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

On Hacking (2002) http://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html 2000s

Thinking

“Langlands' life has been by no means as extravagant as Grothendieck's, but his romanticism is evident to anyone who reads his prose; the audacity of his program, one of the most elaborate syntheses of conjectures and theorems ever undertaken, has few equivalents in any field of scholarship.”

Michael Harris (1954) American mathematician

Source: Mathematics without Apologies: Portrait of a Problematic Vocation, 2015, p. 26

Life, Reading

“"Charm"—which means the power to effect work without employing brute force—is indispensable to women. Charm is a woman's strength just as strength is a man's charm.”

H. Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) British physician, writer, and social reformer

The Task of Social Hygiene, ch. 3 HTTP://BOOKS.GOOGLE.COM/books?id=nAoAAAAAYAAJ&q=%22charm+which+means+the+power+to+effect+work+without+employing+brute+force+is+indispensable+to+women+charm+is+a+woman%27s+strength+just+as+strength+is+a+man%27s+charm%22&pg=PA81#v=onepage

Women

“As the story unfolds it is at 55 Dropsie Avenue where Frimme Hersh deals with God; where the street singer fails to grasp his chance for gory. It is on Dropsie Avenue where a diminutive enemy defeats the super, and Willie comes of age. It is in an alley of Dropsie Avenue where Jacob Shtarkah tries to find the meaning of life. It is also on Dropsie Avenue, finally, where I undertake the biography of the street itself, through the physical evolution of the block, the rise and fall of the tenement building at No.55 and the ethnic and social changes of the stream of occupants.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

XIV-XV, December 2004
A Contract With God (2004)

Life, God, Age, Change

“.. can you [contemporary painters] ever get close, even vaguely, to the solidity, the transparency, the lyric strength of colour, to the clarity, the mystery, the emotion of any of the paintings of Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, Botticelli, Dürer, Holbein or of young Raphael? Friends, have you ever realized that with the oil colours used today this is absolutely impossible?... In the museums of Europe I have observed the work of the Flemish painters at length – those earlier, later as well as contemporary to the [brothers] Van Eycks – and I am convinced that the above mentioned brothers were not the discoverers of oil paint in its true sense, as is held today, but that what they did was introduce oil in emulsion with other substances, especially live and fossil resins, into so-called oil tempera emulsion, which was already known in the Flanders, to enable them through the use of veiling to give a greater finish, cleanliness and strength of colour to their painting.
'These oils which are their tempera' said Vasari, speaking of the Flemish [painters] in his Life of Antonello; and without doubt he was alluding to Flemish oil tempera emulsion, but it is sure, absolutely sure, that.... we are dealing with.... a tempera based mixture (egg, glue, resin, tempera etc) in which oil was only used as a means of unity and for the finish of the painting.”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Quote from De Chirico's text 'Pro tempera oratio', c. 1920; from 'PRO TEMPERA ORATIO' http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/475-480Metafisica5_6.pdf, p. 475 1920s and later

Life, Sense, Painting

“There is nothing that God has judged good for us that He has not given us the means to accomplish, both in the natural and the moral world.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 261
Undated

God, World, Nature

“The simple organization of a people into a national body, composite or otherwise, is of itself an impressive fact. As an original proceeding, it marks the point of departure of a people, from the darkness and chaos of unbridled barbarism, to the wholesome restraints of public law and society. It implies a willing surrender and subjection of individual aims and ends, often narrow and selfish, to the broader and better ones that arise out of society as a whole. It is both a sign and a result of civilization. A knowledge of the character, resources and proceedings of other nations, affords us the means of comparison and criticism, without which progress would be feeble, tardy, and perhaps, impossible. It is by comparing one nation with another, and one learning from another, each competing with all, and all competing with each, that hurtful errors are exposed, great social truths discovered, and the wheels of civilization whirled onward.”

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

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

People, Truth, Law, Error

“I go on Good Morning America yesterday and say that I'm personally sorry my analysis on WMDs before the war was wrong and I'm angry about the CIA mistake. I mean, any honest commentator would say that, but the left-wing press sees my admission as some kind of liberal policy vindication and is using my words to hammer the president. Well, that's dishonest. I still believe removing Saddam was the right thing to do and that history will prove it. And there's also the possibility that WMDs will be found, so I might have to apologize for my apology. I don't mind. I still hope they find WMDs.”

Bill O'Reilly (1949) American political commentator, television host and writer

2004-02-12
The WMD Controversy Heats Up
The O'Reilly Factor
Fox News
Television
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,111229,00.html

War, Hope, History, Personality

“In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of "the common good" and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed. In this world irrationality clings to man like his shadow so that the right things get done for the wrong reasons—afterwards, we dredge up the right reasons for justification. It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral; a world where "reconciliation" means that when one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it, then we have reconciliation.”

Saul D. Alinsky (1909–1972) American community organizer and writer

Source: Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971), p. 13

Life, Men, World, Law

“The idea that ancient equal years of accumulated wisdom is a fallacy. […] In medicine, 'ancient' also means developed before we understood the causes of disease, before germ theory. It was based on ignorance then and age makes it no truer. We misguidedly look back to a golden age that never was; ours is the golden age of safe tested medicine, effective beyond placebo, in which we've cut infant mortality and conquered diseases, then forgotten they existed.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

The Enemies of Reason, "The Irrational Health Service"
The Enemies of Reason (August 2007)

Wisdom, Age, Disease, Idea

“I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds,
Sniff them and think and sniff again and try
Once more to think what it is I am remembering,
Always in vain. I cannot like the scent,
Yet I would rather give up others more sweet,
With no meaning, than this bitter one.”

Edward Thomas (1878–1917) Poet and journalist

Poem Old Man http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/old-man/

Thinking

“Basically America (the USA) is not a warmongering but simply a commercial society: war as the continuation of business by other means.”

Max Frisch (1911–1991) Swiss playwright and novelist

Drafts for a Third Sketchbook (2013)

War, Business

“At the founding of this Movement we formed the decision that we would give expression to this idea of ours of the identity of the two conceptions: despite all warnings, on the basis of what we had come to believe, on the basis of the sincerity of our will, we christened it "National Socialist.' We said to ourselves that to be 'national' means above everything to act with a boundless and all-embracing love for the people and, if necessary, even to die for it. And similarly to be 'social' means so to build up the state and the community of the people that every individual acts in the interest of the community of the people and must be to such an extent convinced of the goodness, of the honorable straightforwardness of this community of the people as to be ready to die for it.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Munich - Speech of April 12, 1922 https://archive.org/stream/TheSpeechesOfAdolfHitler19211941/hitler-speeches-collection_djvu.txt 1920s

Love, People, Communication, Idea

“You can't say that New Age politics is "left wing" or "right wing". It is perfectly compatible with public or private ownership of the means of production, and it speaks equally much to rich and poor, young and old, white collar and blue.”

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

Page 11.
New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society (1978)

Age

“Personally, I feel that if the Lau Provincial Council votes for this Bill it means that they are supporting the amnesty clause, which is what the whole Bill is about. Do they understand that what they are actually doing is agreeing in principle to the removal of the late Turaga na Tui Nayau and condoning the coup perpetrators who were the very thugs who removed the Tui Nayau and brought anarchy to Fiji in the year 2000.”

Koila Nailatikau (1953) Fijian politician

On the government's proposed Reconciliation and Unity Commission, 24 July, 2005

Feeling, Understanding, Support, Personality

“The trisection of an angle was effected by means of a curve discovered by Hippias of Elis, the sophist, a contemporary of Hippocrates as well as of Democritus and Socrates. The curve was called the quadratrix because it also served (in the hands, as we are told, of Dinostratus, brother of Menæchmus, and of Nicomedes) for squaring the circle. It was theoretically constructed as the locus of the point of intersection of two straight lines moving at uniform speeds and in the same time, one motion being angular and the other rectilinear.”

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

p, 125
Achimedes (1920)

Time, Speed

“When I was a boy, the bestselling books were often the books that were on your piano teacher's shelf. I mean, Steinbeck, Hemingway, some Faulkner. Faulkner actually had, considering how hard he is to read and how drastic the experiments are, quite a middle-class readership. But certainly someone like Steinbeck was a bestseller as well as a Nobel Prize-winning author of high intent. You don't feel that now. I don't feel that we have the merger of serious and pop — it's gone, dissolving. Tastes have coarsened. People read less, they're less comfortable with the written word.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Salon interview (2000)

People, Books, Feeling, Boy

“I was approached to do a film script for the Beatles. I said it would have to be an absolutely original script. Paul McCartney said do whatever you like. I said that means you'll never be able to do it.”

Joe Orton (1933–1967) English playwright and author

Interview with Barry Hanson, programme notes of Peter Gill's Royal Court production of The Erpingham Camp and The Ruffian on the Stair http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/parade/abj76/PG/pieces/joe_orton.shtml (June 1967)