Quotes about meaning
page 91

“I read a book not to find its meaning, but to find my happiness.”

Carson Cistulli (1979) American poet and writer

Some Common Weaknesses Illustrated (2006)

“Those who can create wealth — and know that they can — are able to dictate their own terms. Wealth is a means to happiness, but it is not the main one. What most people want is control over their lives. They want the ability to choose how they live: what work they do, the way they interact with friends and colleagues, the quality of their personal relationships, the way they view themselves.”

Richard Koch (1950) German medical historian and internist

Source: The 80/20 Individual (2003), Chapter: 80/20 Individuals in Organizations

Happiness, People, Way, Personality

“I've said consistently that no employer ever really accepts a union. They tolerate the unions. The very minute they can get a pool of unemployment they'll challenge the unions and try to get back what they call managements prerogatives, meaning hire, fire, pay what you want.”

Jimmy Hoffa (1913–1982) American labor leader

Source: Hoffa The Real Story (1975), Chapter 13, Outside Again, p. 213

“Life did what it did, purposelessly, and only humans strove to impose a meaning where no meaning was needed. She viewed herself as random flotsam upon the face of the deep. Without a religious foundation, she wasn’t bothered by any questions of an insult to God or the hubris of Prometheus that might have arisen.”

Justina Robson book Natural History

Source: Natural History (2003), Chapter 8 “Briefing” (p. 103)

Life, God, Question

“Whether naïve on my part or not, it seemed worth taking the time to try to convince others that their lives possessed beauty and meaning worth preserving and honoring.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(p. xiv).
Book Sources, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry (2014)

Beauty, Time, Parting

“And they say that after people make love there's a kind of melancholia that descends; la petite mort, you know, the little death. Well, I'm here to tell you, after a romantic night in with yourself, there's a very acute sensation of failed suicide. And I think a lot of that, if you're men is because of the quality of the gear you've got to work with. I mean it's horrible looking. Like a deep sea fish that ate its own arse after about an hour. What's going on down there?! Do something nice, like a kittens head… or something and you could just tickle its chin until it got sick… it would be alright…”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

On masturbation.
Monster (2004)

Love, Death, Men, People

“Just because we do not speak Hindi does not mean we are not Indians.”

Tathagata Satpathy (1956) Indian politician

On the proposal that Hindi be made the national language, as quoted " Is 'secularism' really being misused? http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/is-secularism-really-being-misused-115112700107_1.html" Business Standard (27 November 2015)

“The landed interest is the great foundation upon which rest the fabric of society, and the institutions of the country. I mean no disparagement to manufactures and commerce; I know how essential they are to the happiness and prosperity of the country, and how much they add even to the value of the land. But the land of the country is the country itself, and the owner of the land has the deepest and most permanent interest in its well-being; tied down to the soil, he must share the fortunes of his country, whether in its greatness or its fall.”

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

Speech in the House of Commons (3 March 1831), quoted in George Henry Francis, Opinions and Policy of the Right Honourable Viscount Palmerston, G.C.B., M.P., &c. as Minister, Diplomatist, and Statesman, During More Than Forty Years of Public Life (London: Colburn and Co., 1852), pp. 172-173.
1830s

Happiness, Country

“What do you mean "gangsters?"”

Abraham Polonsky (1910–1999) American politician

It's business.
Force of Evil (1948).

Business

“Several years ago I saw a video of a seal hunt in Canada and was shocked. I just couldn't believe that sort of thing was still happening in the 21st century. But it was. The way seals are killed is so inhumane. They're clubbed then pulled across the ice with big hooks. I mean, I have a pretty strong stomach from being on ER all these years, but it still disgusts me. Once you see a video like that it's really hard to sit on the sidelines and say "Who cares."”

Goran Višnjić (1972) Croatian actor

Way, Strong

“In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire,
Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned!
His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls
The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat
To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power,
On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry
He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more.
But when one, fearless, turned and clawed like bronze,
Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws,
And he would weigh the heavier on those after.
Who rests in God's mean flattery now? Your wealth
Is but his cunning to make death more hard.
Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking.
And he has made the market for your beauty
Too poor to buy, although you die to sell.
Only that he has never heard of sleep;
And when the cats come out the rats are sly.
Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn.
But he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots,
And in the morning some pale wonder ceases.
Things are not strange and strange things are forgetful.
Ah! if the day were arid, somehow lost
Out of us, but it is as hair of us,
And only in the hush no wind stirs it.
And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes,
And restlessness still shadows the lost ways.
The fingers shut on voices that pass through,
Where blind farewells are taken easily...
Ah! this miasma of a rotting God!”

Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) English poet

written 1916 or before
On Receiving News of the War (1914), God

Death, Women, Men, God

“(The story behind the name Celldweller) is hard to trace back completely but I guess in 1992 sometime, I wrote a song called 'Helldweller' and my studios and even places I have lived have traditionally been in basements. In cellars, so to speak. I am also a fairly introverted guy and I hardly ever come out. It was almost a joke initially from family and friends calling me a cell dweller or a cellar dweller. It evolved into Celldweller although that name holds more significance than that. Celldweller is more symbolic of an internal bondage, being restricted and retained internally so the name has many meanings. At the end of the day, it rolls off the tongue very easily so there it is.”

Klayton (1970) American musician

"Klayton Scott - Celldweller," (2003)

Family, Guy

“The action outcome, x, may then be said to be dependent upon a combination of effective personal force and effective environmental force, thus:
x = f (ff person, ff environment).
One is tempted to formulate the underlying relation between the two independent variables as an additive one, for if the effective environmental force is zero (which would mean that the combination of environmental factors neither hinders nor furthers the result at), then x will depend only on the effective personal force.”

Fritz Heider (1896–1988) German psychologist

Source: The psychology of interpersonal relations, 1958, p. 82

Dependency, Personality

“Religion is immediate self-consciousness. It liberates the individual from the determinative forces of society. … It is effective only in individuals, where "in-dividuals" means whose who are undivided, that is, who are liberated from the psychological, social, and logical consequences of the division of labor in society and who actually live concretely and historically, unfettered by abstract norms.”

Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt (1928–2002) German theologian

"Socialism in the Theology of Karl Barth"

Religion

“The paramount question of the day is not political, is not religious, but is economic. The crying-out demand of today is for a circle of principles that shall forever make it impossible for one man to control another by controlling the means of his existence.”

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) American anarchist writer and feminist

The Economic Tendency of Freethought (1890)

Question, Cry

“I had to tell him quite plainly that the Belgians had lost only 16,000 men in the war, and that, when all was said, Belgium had not made greater sacrifices than Great Britain. The truth is that we are always called upon to foot the bill. When anything has to be done it is "Old England" that has to do it. If the Rumanians have to be supplied with food and credits have to be given, in the final result England has to stand the racket. It is time that we again told the world what we have done. These things tend to be forgotten. Our policy is quite clear but imperfectly understood. We mean that the French shall have coal in the Saar Valley and that the Poles shall have access to the sea through Danzig; but we don't want to create a condition of affairs that will be likely to lead to another war. We don't want to place millions of Germans under the domination of the French and the Poles. That would not be for their benefit, and what is the use of setting up a lot of Alsace-Lorraines?”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Quoted in Lord Riddell's diary entry (31 March 1919), J. M. McEwen (ed.), The Riddell Diaries 1908-1923 (London: The Athlone Press, 1986), pp. 263-264
Prime Minister

Men, War, Truth, World

“The history of the Democratic Party can be concisely captured by referring to its steadfast allegiance to the four Ss. Slavery, Secession, Segregation, and Socialism. During the Obama presidency we have seen how hard old habits die, even for a black man whose race was the long-time victim of Democratic Party's bone-deep authoritarianism. Under this Democratic president we have seen a war waged on several fronts against America's young. Indeed, the Democrats' historic taste for and belief in slavery have resurfaced with a vengeance and indiscriminately under the Obama administration, whether white, black, yellow, red, male, or female America's young are dying and being forced to work for Obama and his lieutenants as they seek to maintain their party's hold on political power. How so? Well, America has never had a president and administration so eager to kill unborn Americans. Even with post-1973 science having proved irrefutably that the unborn are human beings, and even though American law always has defined them as U. S. citizens, Obama and his colleagues have strengthened at every point they could the absurd notion that unborn humans are the chattel property of the woman who bears them, and so can be disposed of, that is, murdered, at her whim. And, in what must be considered a masterpiece of Orwellian language, Obama and his team, and most Democrats since 1973, describe this federal government-issued license to kill as a woman's 'right', a means by which she manifests her equality with men. They then damn any one who questions the logic, sanity, or justice of this argument as an 'extremist'. Only in an America in which a political entity as devoted to the four 'Ss' as the Democratic Party could opposition to the cold-blooded murder of fellow citizens unable defend themselves be identified by the country’s best-educated as 'extremism'. If this is indeed a right, it is a right gives each woman the right to be a slave-owner and a Nazi. Such a 'right' really is no different than the rights sanctioned by the Dred Scott decision and the Nuremberg laws, each of which legally defined certain categories of people out of the human race in order to enslave or kill them. Since 1973, the application of this 'right' has produced precisely the same results as Dred Scott and the Nuremberg laws, though in numbers so immense, 55 million and climbing, that they make those acts seem rather tame and minimally destructive of humans.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

As quoted in "Obama and his party offer America's young … death, misery, and slavery" http://non-intervention.com/1143/obama-and-his-party-offer-america%E2%80%99s-young-%E2%80%A6-death-misery-and-slavery/ (21 November 2013), by M. Scheuer, Michael Scheuer's Non-Intervention. 2010s

Men, War, People, Education

“My veins are filled, once a week with a Neapolitan carpet cleaner distilled from the Adriatic and I am as bald as an egg. However I still get around and am mean to cats.”

John Cheever (1912–1982) American novelist and short story writer

Letter to Philip Roth (May 10, 1982); The Letters of John Cheever (1989).

Cats

“Hysteria will not help us to solve the problem that confronts us. We overstate the danger when we say that twelve millions seek, because of post-war conditions abroad, to come immediately to America. Ending June 30, 1914, the year's immigration figures were 1,218,480. Then came the war and a vast slump, from which we are just recovering. Calculations placed immigration statistics for the current year as 1,079,428—figures still below the prewar status. But even though we need have no grave fears, now is the time for a careful reexamination and revision of our immigration policies. We should have no more aliens to cope with, in the immediate months to come, than our institutions are able to handle. To assume burdens we can not easily meet would lie unfair both to us and to the alien. In protecting ourselves we are protecting him as well. We can not lower our standards, or allow them to be lowered, so as to include him. We must prepare him for our standards. And that means wise education. In the home, in the school, in industry, in citizenship, we have not heretofore applied thoroughly the human test, and that is our next step in the Americanization of the alien. Much work has yet to be done in the immediate months to come. Some protective measure, therefore, seems necessary.”

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

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

War, Lie, Education, Fear

“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 1: Predicament, Ch. 2: The Mandarin Dialect (p. 13)

Feeling

“The first stable conclusion I reached … was that the only thing brains could do was to approximate the responsivity to meanings that we presuppose in our everyday mentalistic discourse. When mechanical push comes to shove, a brain was always going to do what it was caused to do by current, local, mechanical circumstances, whatever it ought to do, whatever a God's-eye view might reveal about the actual meaning of its current states. But over the long haul, brains could be designed – by evolutionary processes – to do the right thing (from the point of view of meaning) with high reliability. … [B]rains are syntactic engines that can mimic the competence of semantic engines. … The appreciation of meanings – their discrimination and delectation – is central to our vision of consciousness, but this conviction that I, on the inside, deal directly with meanings turns out to be something rather like a benign "user-illusion."”

Daniel Dennett (1942) American philosopher

Source: Brain Children (1998), chapter 25, "Self-Portrait"

God

“The more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea. The corps de ballet were already calling me "the Phantom of the Opera," an intriguing sobriquet which appealed to me very strongly, until I realized that it would mean signing my ransom notes P. T. O. One did not wish to descend to the ridiculous!
O. G. I became and O. G. I have remained.
But I still liked to think of myself as the Phantom.”

Susan Kay Phantom

Erik (p. 360)
Phantom (1990)

Idea, Thinking

“I want to be a part of the grand plan. Being on board with God’s objectives means I understand that this is not about me.”

James MacDonald (1960) American pastor

Source: Always True (Moody, 2011), p. 91

God, Understanding, Parting

“It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Formal Phase: Symbol as Image

“The basis of social skill is the ability to relate to the situation of the ‘other.’ This means that whereas a given strategic actor has interests, he or she must take other people’s interests into account… to imaginatively identify with the states of others.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: "Social skill and institutional theory." 1997, p. 398

People, Imagination

“In combination with other infernal contraptions, like rockets to deliver bombs at large distances, chemical, biological and radioactive poisons, such a war must mean a degree of human suffering and degradation which is beyond the power of imagination. No country would be immune, but those with highly developed industry would suffer most. It is very doubtful whether our technological civilization would survive such a catastrophe.
One may be inclined to regard this as no great loss, but as a just punishment for its shortcomings and sins: the lack of productive genius in art and literature, the neglect of the moral teachings of religion and philosophy, the slowness to abandon outdated political conceptions, like national sovereignty. Yet we are all involved in this tragedy, and the instinct of self-preservation, the love of our children, makes us think about a way of salvation.”

Max Born (1882–1970) physicist

Physics in my generation (1956)

Love, War, Children, Religion

“Conquer by means of true virtue.”

Plautus Casina

Casina, Prologue, line 87
Casina (The Lot Drawers)

“[One thing] underpins, makes consistent, and gives meaning to all our other activities on behalf of animals. This one thing is that we take responsibility for our own lives, and make them as free of cruelty as we can. The first step is that we cease to eat animals. Many people who are opposed to cruelty to animals draw the line at becoming a vegetarian. It was of such people that Oliver Goldsmith, the eighteenth-century humanitarian essayist, wrote: "They pity, and they eat the objects of their compassion."”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals (1975), Ch. 4: Becoming a Vegetarian

People, Animals, Drawing

“The expropriated peasantry are “turned en masse into beggars, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances.” This is met with fierce legislation against vagrancy, by which means the vagabond population is subjected to “the discipline necessary for the wage system.””

Anthony Giddens (1938) British sociologist

Source: Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971), p. 32 (Quotes are from Marx, Capital (1970), vol. 1, p. 737).

“The process of transforming all direct experience into the supreme symbolic expression, language, monopolizes life. Like ideology, language conceals and justifies, compelling us to suspend our doubts about its claim to validity. It is the root of civilization, the dynamic code of civilization's alienated nature. As the paradigm of ideology, language stands behind all of the massive legitimation necessary to hold civilization together. It remains for us to clarify what forms of nascent domination engendered this justification, made language necessary as basic means of repression”

John Zerzan (1943) American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author

Elements of Refusal (1988)

Life, Nature

“By the logical syntax of a language, we mean the formal theory of the linguistic forms of that language -- the systematic statement of the formal rules which govern it together with the development of the consequences which follow from these rules. A theory, a rule, a definition, or the like is to be called formal when no reference is made in it either to the meaning of the symbols (for examples, the words) or to the sense of the expressions (e. g. the sentences), but simply and solely to the kinds and order of the symbols from which the expressions are constructed.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Source: Logical Syntax of Language, 1934/1937, p. 1

Sense

“Conceptual graphs are system of logic based on the existential graphs of Charles Sanders Peirce and the semantic networks of artificial intelligence. The purpose of the system is to express meaning in a form that is logically precise, humanly readable, and computationally tractable. With their direct mapping to language, conceptual graphs can serve as an intermediate language for translating computer-oriented formalisms to and from natural languages. With their graphic representation, they can serve as a readable, but design and specification language.”

John F. Sowa (1940) artificial intelligence researcher

Source: Conceptual graphs for knowledge representation, 1993, p. 3-51. cited in: Bernhard Ganter, Gerd Stumme, Rudolf Wille (2005) Formal Concept Analysis: Foundations and Applications. p. 87

Intelligence, Nature

“I heard it clearly, and so did everyone else, I’ll be bound. Your name, dear, not mine. I am very popular. You, it seems, are not.”
“What a surprise.” He dropped petals on the floor. “And what a good thing I don’t care.”
“How nice for you that you don’t have to.”
“Meaning,” he drawled, “that you do.”

Ellen Kushner book The Privilege of the Sword

“Just so.”
Part IV, Chapter V (p. 392)
The Privilege of the Sword (2006)

“There's an old African proverb that says "If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." We have to go far — quickly. And that means we have to quickly find a way to change the world's consciousness about exactly what we're facing, and why we have to work to solve it.”

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

Press conference at an Alliance for Climate Protection meeting (12 October 2007), after winning the Nobel Peace Prize ( Video at YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlDDu8mgPYQ).

World, Way, Change

“Conflict, not progress, is the word that defines man's path from darkness into light. No holiness is won by any other means than this, that wickedness should be slain day by day, and hour by hour.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 108.

Light

“We need a social theory that sees all social phenomena, including itself, as being partly the product of how people in a community deploy semiotic resources: how we mean, and what we mean, by every meaningful act.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics, 1995, p. 15

People, Communication

“It was early 1932, when Einstein and I both were at the California Institute of Technology in Pasedena, and we just decided to look for a simple relativistic model that agreed reasonably well with the known observational data, namely, the Hubble recession rate and the mean density of matter in the universe. So we took the space curvature to be zero and also the cosmological constant and the pressure term to be zero, and then it follows straightforwardly that the density is proportional to the square of the Hubble constant. It gives a value for the density that is high, but not impossibly high. That's about all there was to it. It was not an important paper, although Einstein apparently thought that it was. He was pleased to have a simple model with no cosmological constant. That's it.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

As quoted by Helge Kragh, Masters of the Universe: Conversations with Cosmologists of the Past (2014)

Universe

“On May 17, 1969, a show which was to become the seminal exhibition of video art in the U. S. opened at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York City. That exhibition, "TV as a Creative Medium," effectively pointed to the diverse potential of a new art form and social tool. Subsequently, the show became renowned for the inspiration it provided for many artists and future advocates of video. The artists represented in the show, a few of whom are still involved in the medium today, came from varied backgrounds-painting, filmmaking, nuclear physics, avant-garde music and performance, kinetic and light sculpture-and their approaches presented a primer of the directions which video would soon take. Theoretically, they variously saw video as viewer participation, a spiritual and meditative experience, a mirror, an electronic palette, a kinetic sculpture, or acultural machine to be deconstructed. Ripe with ideas and armed with a heady optimism about the future of communications, these artists used video as an information tool and as a means of gaining understanding and control of television, not solely as an art form. In "TV as a Creative Medium" alternative television was presented as a stepping stone to the promised communications utopia.”

Marita Sturken (1957) American academic

Marita Sturken. " TV as a Creative Medium: Howard Wise and Video Art http://www.vasulka.org/archive/4-30c/AfterImageMay84(1004).pdf," in: Afterimage, May 1984

Art, Music, Communication, Idea

“It is part of the meaning of suffering that it is that which cuts athwart our purposive movements. It represents the denial from beyond ourselves of our movement toward pleasure; or it is the frustration of our movement toward self-realization or toward the actualization of our potentialities.”

H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) American theologian

Source: The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy (1963), p. 61

Pleasure, Suffering, Parting

“Hence the ancient architects, following in the footsteps of nature, perfected the ascending rows of seats in theatres from their investigations of the ascending voice, and by means of the canonical theory of the mathematicians and that of the musicians, endeavoured to make every voice uttered on the stage come with greater clearness and sweetness to the ears of the audience. For just as musical instruments are brought to perfection of clearness in the sound of their strings by means of bronze plates or horn, so the ancients devised methods of increasing the power of the voice in theatres through the application of harmonics.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book V, Chapter IV, Sec. 8

Music, Nature, Perfection

“Someone from the Internet Writing Workshop sent me a link to the Gender Genie, where you paste in a section of text and it uses an algorithm to detect whether the author is male or female. Or, if you’re an author, you can tell whether you’re really nailing your opposite-sex characters. I mean, nailing their dialog.”

Max Barry (1973) Australian writer

August 8, 2005 weblog post http://www.maxbarry.com/2005/08/08/news.html#girlyman

Sex, Past

“For all my criticisms of the current system, it doesn't mean that I would like to return to the old one. I don't think we will ever go the way of Zimbabwe, but people are entitled to be concerned. I am hopeful about any future for whites in this country - but not entirely optimistic.”

Helen Suzman (1917–2009) South African politician

As quoted in "Democracy? It was better under apartheid, says Helen Suzman" https://web.archive.org/web/20120901223952/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1462042/Democracy-It-was-better-under-apartheid-says-Helen-Suzman.html (15 May 2004), by Jane Flanagan, The Telegraph 2000s

People, Hope, Way, Thinking

“Such was the man who was sent on an embassy to Ajmir, in order that the Rai (Pithaura) of that country might see the right way without the intervention of the sword, and that he might incline from the track of opposition into the path of propriety, leaving his airy follies for the institutes of the knowledge of Allah, and acknowledging the expediency of uttering the words of martyrdom and repeating the precepts of the law, and might abstain from infidelity and darkness, which entails the loss of this world and that to come, and might place in his ear the ring of slavery to the sublime Court (may Allah exalt it!) which is the centre of justice and mercy, and the pivot of the Sultans of the worldand by these means and modes might cleanse the fords of good life from the sins of impurity'…'The army of Islam was completely victorious, and 'an hundred thousand grovelling Hindus swiftly departed to the fire of hell'… After this great victory, the army of Islam marched forward to Ajmir, where it arrived at a fortunate moment and under an auspicious bird, and obtained so much booty and wealth, that you might have said that the secret depositories of the seas and hills had been revealed….'While the Sultan remained at Ajmir, he destroyed the pillars and foundations of the idol temples, and built in their stead mosques and colleges, and the precepts of Islam, and the customs of the law were divulged and established”

Muhammad of Ghor (1160–1206) Ghurid Sultan

About the conquest of Ajmer (Rajasthan) Hasan Nizami: Taju’l-Ma’sir, in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 213-216. Also quoted (in part) in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts.

Life, Secret, World, Justice

“When I read the rules of criticism, I immediately inquire after the works of the author who has written them, and by that means discover what it is he likes in a composition.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 115.
The Guardian (1713)

Reading

“(…) make your world perfect, by all means. If you believe in God, work with Him. If you do not, become one. Either see the world as a play or work at it with all your might. (…).”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

God
Source: I am That, P.156.

God, World, Perfection

“The turtle obviously had no sense of proportion; it differed so widely from myself that I could not comprehend it; and as this word occurred to me, it occurred also that until my body comprehended its body in a physical material sense, neither would my mind be able to comprehend its mind with any thoroughness. For unity of mind can only be consummated by unity of body; everything, therefore, must be in some respects both knave and fool to all that which has not eaten it, or by which it has not been eaten. As long as the turtle was in the window and I in the street outside, there was no chance of our comprehending one another.
Nevertheless, I knew that I could get it to agree with me if I could so effectually buttonhole and fasten on to it as to eat it. Most men have an easy method with turtle soup, and I had no misgiving but that if I could bring my first premise to bear I should prove the better reasoner. My difficulty lay in this initial process, for I had not with me the argument that would alone compel Mr. Sweeting to think that I ought to be allowed to convert the turtles — I mean I had no money in my pocket. No missionary enterprise can be carried on without any money at all, but even so small a sum as half a crown would, I suppose, have enabled me to bring the turtle partly round, and with many half-crowns I could in time no doubt convert the lot, for the turtle needs must go where the money drives. If, as is alleged, the world stands on a turtle, the turtle stands on money. No money no turtle. As for money, that stands on opinion, credit, trust, faith — things that, though highly material in connection with money, are still of immaterial essence.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Ramblings In Cheapside (1890)

Men, Money, World, Faith

“If vital interests under duress can be preserved by peaceful means, negotiations will find that out. If our adversary will accept nothing-less than a concession of our rights, negotiations will find that out. And if negotiations are to take place, this nation cannot abdicate to its adversaries the task of choosing the forum and the framework and the time.”

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

1961, Address at the University of Washington

Peace, Time

“Personally I am a sincere advocate of all means which would lead to the settlement of international disputes by methods such as those which civilization has so successfully set up for the adjustment of differences between individuals.
But I am also bound to say this — that I believe it is essential in the highest interests, not merely of this country, but of the world, that Britain should at all hazards maintain her place and her prestige amongst the Great Powers of the world. Her potent influence has many a time been in the past, and may yet be in the future, invaluable to the cause of human liberty. It has more than once in the past redeemed Continental nations, who are sometimes too apt to forget that service, from overwhelming disaster and even from national extinction. I would make great sacrifices to preserve peace. I conceive that nothing would justify a disturbance of international good will except questions of the gravest national moment. But if a situation were to be forced upon us in which peace could only be preserved by the surrender of the great and beneficent position Britain has won by centuries of heroism and achievement, by allowing Britain to be treated where her interests were vitally affected as if she were of no account in the Cabinet of nations, then I say emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours to endure.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at Mansion House (21 July 1911) during the Agadir Crisis, quoted in The Times (22 July 1911), p. 7
Chancellor of the Exchequer

World, Peace, Question, Time

“As the misfortune befell in November [1918], I threw myself into the woodcut... It is a technique that provokes one to confession, to the unmistakable statement of what one finally means. It, or far more she, enforces a certain general validity of expression... I have finished a number of large woodcuts that deal with all of the distress of the times.”

Ernst Barlach (1870–1938) German expressionist sculptor, printmaker and writer

Barlach in a letter to his cousin, 1919; in Erhard Gopel, Deutsche Holzschnitte des zwanzigsten Jahr- hunderts, Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1955, p. 44; as quoted in 'The Revival of Printmaking in Germany', I. K. Rigby; in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings - Essays Vol 1.; published by Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California & Prestel-Verlag, Germany, 1986, p. 46
Barlach explained why the woodcut spoke so poignantly to the current times

Time

“I kissed a girl and I liked it,
The taste of her cherry chap stick.
I kissed a girl just to try it,
I hope my boyfriend don't mind it.
It felt so wrong,
It felt so right,
Don't mean I'm in love tonight.
I kissed a girl and I liked it,
I liked it.”

Katy Perry (1984) American singer, songwriter and actress

I Kissed a Girl, written by Katy Perry, Lukasz Gottwald, Max Martin, and Cathy Dennis
Song lyrics, One of the Boys (2008)

Love, Hope, Girl, Kiss

“… the impulse of iconoclasmː refusing unconditional reality and value to the contingent and flawed worlds we build and affirming that there will always be more in us, individually and collectively, than there can ever be in them. The most complete expression of this iconoclastic commitment is the development of forms of life and consciousness that provide us with the means and occasions to resist and reform them. In this way, they save us from having to choose between engaging wholeheartedly in them and keeping the last word, of resistance and transcendence, to ourselves.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 70

Life, World, Way, Reality

“I don't buy into that pressure to be glamorous all the time. It's impossible, I mean, you get a pimple in the morning, you wake up with bags under your eyes, you see if you can use it in your work, maybe incorporate it into your character.”

Halle Berry (1966) American actress

Mike Szymanski (July 23, 2004 ) "Halle Berry: 'Catwoman for the new century' is in control", The Seattle Times, p. H20.

Time

“We are now approaching a social revolution, in which the old economic foundations of monogamy will disappear just as surely as those of its complement, prostitution. Monogamy arose through the concentration of considerable wealth in one hand — a man's hand — and from the endeavor to bequeath this wealth to the children of this man to the exclusion of all others. This necessitated monogamy on the woman's, but not on the man's part. Hence this monogamy of women in no way hindered open or secret polygamy of men. Now, the impending social revolution will reduce this whole care of inheritance to a minimum by changing at least the overwhelming part of permanent and inheritable wealth—the means of production—into social property. Since monogamy was caused by economic conditions, will it disappear when these causes are abolished?
One might reply, not without reason: not only will it not disappear, but it will rather be perfectly realized. For with the transformation of the means of production into collective property, wagelabor will also disappear, and with it the proletariat and the necessity for a certain, statistically ascertainable number of women to surrender for money. Prostitution disappears and monogamy, instead of going out of existence, at last becomes a reality—for men also.
At all events, the situation will be very much changed for men. But also that of women, and of all women, will be considerably altered. With the transformation of the means of production into collective property the monogamous family ceases to be the economic unit of society. The private household changes to a social industry. The care and education of children become? a public matter. Society cares equally well for all children, legal or illegal. This removes the care about the "consequences" which now forms the essential social factor—moral and economic—hindering a girl to surrender unconditionally to the beloved man. Will not this be sufficient cause for a gradual rise of a more unconventional intercourse of the sexes and a more lenient public opinion regarding virgin honor and female shame? And finally, did we not see that in the modern world monogamy and prostitution, though antitheses, are inseparable and poles of the same social condition? Can prostitution disappear without engulfing at the same time monogamy?”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1804) as translated by Ernest Untermann (1902); Full English text of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm - Full original-language German text of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me21/me21_025.htm

Women, Men, Money, Children

“Preparedness to use atomic bombs against men and women and children is a proclamation of faith, a confession of confidence in the rightness and effectiveness of human slaughter as a means of seeking safety and of maintaining justice.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Now is the Time to Prevent a Third World War (1950)

Women, Men, Children, Faith

“Understanding ecological interdependence means understanding relationships. It requires the shifts of perception that are characteristic of systems thinking—from the parts to the whole, from objects to relationships, from contents to patterns. …Nourishing the community means nourishing those relationships.”

Fritjof Capra (1939) American physicist

Epilogue: Ecological Literacy
The Web of Life (1996)

Communication, Understanding, Thinking, Parting

“I don't mean any disrespect. I truly don't. But Texas isn't nature. Texas is city and smog and humidity and heat.”

Donald Miller (1971) American writer

Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)

Nature

“He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene,
But with his keener eye
The axe's edge did try.”

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) English metaphysical poet and politician

Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland (1650)

“After much consideration and many inquiries, I determined, in 1885, on experimenting with sweet peas, which were suggested to me both by Sir Joseph Hooker and by Mr. Darwin. …The result clearly proved Regression; the mean Filial deviation was only one-third that of the parental one, and the experiments all concurred. The formula that expresses the descent from one generation of a people to the next, showed that the generations would be identical if this kind of Regression was allowed for.”

Francis Galton (1822–1911) British polymath: geographer, statistician, pioneer in eugenics

Source: Memories of My Life (1908), Ch. XX Heredity (1909 ed.)

People, Parent

“Love for all means coldness to something or someone. Even Jesus, let us recall, was unnecessarily rude to his mother at Cana.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 18

Love

“To listen to someone is to put oneself in his place while he is speaking. To put oneself in the place of someone whose soul is corroded by affliction, or in near danger of it, is to annihilate oneself. It is more difficult than suicide would be for a happy child. Therefore the afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
That is why there is no hope for the vagrant as he stands before the magistrate. Even if, through his stammerings, he should utter a cry to pierce the soul, neither the magistrate nor the public will hear it. His cry is mute. And the afflicted are nearly always equally deaf to one another; and each of them, constrained by the general indifference, strives by means of self-delusion or forgetfulness to become deaf to his own self.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Human Personality (1943), p. 71

Happiness, Hope, Soul, Suicide

“The problem of complexity is at the heart of mankind’s inability to predict future events with any accuracy. Complexity science has demonstrated that the more factors found within a complex system, the more chances of unpredictable behavior. And without predictability, any meaningful control is nearly impossible. Obviously, this means that you cannot control what you cannot predict. The ability ever to predict long-term events is a pipedream. Mankind has little to do with changing climate; complexity does.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

"The Real Science Behind Changing Climate", LewRockwell.com, August 1, 2014. https://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/08/lk-samuels/the-real-science-is-suppressed/

Behavior, Problem, Science, Change

“The human mind may know God, and learn of God, though it has no terms by which to explain Him; it may think of Him as Absolute, as Infinite, as Personal, while it may never in this life be able to fathom the full meaning of these sublime ideas.”

George C. Lorimer (1838–1904) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 267.

Life, God, Idea, Thinking

“The leading lady of this film (Yeti) happened to be Antonella Interlenghi, the daughter of Antonella Lualdi. The girl very obviously inherited her mother's beauty, but she had the silliest pseudonym I've ever heard. She called herself "Phoenix Grant". I mean, what kind of a name is this? It's just as if I called myself, say, Hyde Park Corner Montgomery. Or Hamburg Rommel, how about that?”

Donald O'Brien (actor) (1930–2003) Italian film and TV actor

Euro Trash Cinema magazine interview (March 1996)

Beauty, Girl, Daughters

“For 12 years I have had the honor of teaching geometry and mechanics applied to the arts, in favor of the industrial class… on the most important questions to the well-being, education, and morality of the workers, to the progress of national industry, to the development of all means of prosperity that work can produce for the splendor and happiness of our country.”

Charles Dupin (1784–1873) French mathematician

Charles Dupin (1831), Discours sur le Sort des Ouvriers [Discourse on the Condition of the Workers] Paris: Bachelier Librairie. p. 1. ; Translation Wren & Bedeian (2005, 73)

Happiness, Education, Art, Question

“Democracy prevents the politician's fulfillment of his obligations to the nation. Even the most well-meaning politician becomes, in a democracy, the slave of his supporters, because either he satisfies their personal interests or they destroy his organization. The politician lives under the tyranny and permanent threat of the electoral bosses. He is placed in a position in which he must choose between the termination of his lifetime work and the satisfaction of the demands of party members. And the politician, given such a choice, opts for the latter. He does so not out of his own pocket, but out of that of the country. He creates jobs, sets up missions, commissions, sinecures--all rostered in the nation's budget--which put increasingly heavy pressures on a tired people.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

People, Democracy, Support, Personality

“At first glance they [his Bedu companions] seemed to be little better than savages, as primitive as the Danakil, but I was soon disconcerted to discover that, while they were prepared to tolerate me as a source of very welcome revenue, they never doubted my inferiority. They were Muslims and Bedu and I was neither. They had never heard of the English, for all Europeans were known to them simply as Christians, or more probably infidels, and nationality had no meaning to them. They had heard vaguely of the war as a war between the Christians, and of the Aden government as a Christian government. Their world was the desert and they had little if any interest in events that happened outside it.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 36.

War, World

“Socialism is not the invention of an individual. It is essentially the outcome of economic and social conditions. The evils that Capitalism brings differ in intensity in different countries, but, the root cause of the trouble once discerned, the remedy is seen to be the same by thoughtful men and women. The cause is the private ownership of the means of life; the remedy is public ownership.”

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

The Labour Party in Perspective (Left Book Club, 1937), p. 15.
1930s

Life, Women, Men, Evil

“By the time I came to England at the age of sixteen I'd seen a great variety of landscapes. I think the English landscape was the only landscape I'd come across which didn't mean anything, particularly the urban landscape. England seemed to be very dull, because I'd been brought up at a much lower latitude — the same latitude as the places which are my real spiritual home as I sometimes think: Los Angeles and Casablanca. I'm sure this is something one perceives — I mean the angle of light, density of light. I'm always much happier in the south — Spain, Greece — than I am anywhere else. The English one, oddly enough, didn't mean anything. I didn't like it, it seemed odd. England was a place that was totally exhausted.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

Interviewed by James Goddard and David Pringle (1975)

Age, Angels, Home, Thinking

“When a man declares: "There are no blacks and whites [in morality]" he is making a psychological confession, and what he means is: "I am unwilling to be wholly good—and please don't regard me as wholly evil!"”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

Evil

“Ennui is the desire of activity without the fit means of gratifying the desire.”

George Bancroft (1800–1891) American historian and statesman

"Ennui" (1830), p. 48
Literary and Historical Miscellanies (1855)

“The truth is, that most men want knowledge, not for itself, but for the superiority which knowledge confers; and the means they employ to secure this superiority, are as wrong as the ultimate object, for no man can ever end with being superior, who will not begin with being inferior.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

Lecture IX : On the Conduct of the Understanding
Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy (1849)

Men, Truth, Knowledge

“Because you play football with your head, and your legs are there to help you. If you don't use your head, using your feet won't be sufficient. Why does a player have to chase the ball? Because he started running too late. You have to pay attention, use your brain and find the right position. If you get to the ball late, it means you chose the wrong position. Bergkamp was never late.”

Johan Cruyff (1947–2016) Dutch association football player

reported in Dennis Bergkamp (2013). Stillness and Speed: My Story.

Help, Football

“The easiest and shortest way to God-realization is through the contact of a Sadguru, which means keeping the company or sahavas of such a Master, obeying him and serving him. This remedy is like a special express train which carries you straight to your destination.”

Meher Baba (1894–1969) Indian mystic

Message at Meherabad (31 May 1926)
General sources

God, Way, Training

“Human beings learn from their errors and error during a process can have educational effect, but why the humans make the mistakes? Because the process of education is the one of learning from errors. It means that the ones make the mistakes and this gives them the power of motivational ability.”

Khosrow Bagheri (1957) Iranian philosopher of education

Source: Website of Mehr News Agency, 2017 http://www.mehrnews.com/news/3954046/%D9%BE%D8%B0%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%B4-%D8%AE%D8%B7%D8%A7-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D8%AA%D8%B1%D8%A8%DB%8C%D8%AA-%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%B3%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%B6%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B1%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA

Education, Error, Motivation, Learning

“But I think all of us would also agree that there's a very central part of your faith in how you approach public life. And I, frankly, would be really worried if somebody assured me that nothing in their faith would affect their judgments, because then I'd wonder, where's your judgment — how can you have judgment if you have no faith? And how can I trust you with power if you don't pray? Who you pray to, how you pray, how you come close to God is between you and God. But the notion that you're endowed by your creator sets a certain boundary on what we mean by America.”

Newt Gingrich (1943) Professor, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives

Republican debate http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2011/10/last-nights-gop-debate-transcript.html 2011-10-18 2010s

Life, God, Faith, Thinking

“They came, by what means he did not know, from outside, the vast abstraction that none of them had ever seen. He had a mental picture of a starry void in which men and monsters swam or battled, and then swiftly erased it. Such ideas did not conform with the quiet behavior of his companions; if they never spoke about outside, did they think about it?”

Brian W. Aldiss book Outside

Outside (1955)

Men, Behavior, Idea, Thinking

“I can say, if I wish, extremely mean and hateful things. I have read a great many religious papers and discussions and think that I now know all the infamous words in our language.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

My Reviewers Reviewed (lecture from June 27, 1877, San Francisco, CA)

Hate, Thinking, Reading

“What [is] the prevailing attitude today among those who call themselves religious but vigorously advocate tolerance? There are three main options, ranging from the disingenuous Machiavellian--1. As a matter of political strategy, the time is not ripe for candid declarations of religious superiority, so we should temporize and let sleeping dogs lie in hopes that those of other faiths can gently be brought around over the centuries.--through truly tolerant Eisenhowerian "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply religious belief — and I don't care what it is" --2. It really doesn't matter which religion you swear allegiance to, as long as you have some religion.--to the even milder Moynihanian benign neglect--3. Religion is just too dear to too many to think of discarding, even though it really doesn't do any good and is simply an empty historical legacy we can afford to maintain until it quietly extinguishes itself sometime in the distant and unforeseeable future.It it no use asking people which they choose, since both extremes are so undiplomatic we can predict in advance that most people will go for some version of ecumenical tolerance whether they believe it or not. …We've got ourselves caught in a hypocrisy trap, and there is no clear path out. Are we like families in which the adults go through all the motions of believing in Santa Claus for the sake of the kids, and the kids all pretend still to believe in Santa Claus so as not to spoil the adults' fun? If only our current predicament were as innocuous and even comical as that! In the adult world of religion, people are dying and killing, with the moderates cowed into silence by the intransigence of the radicals in their own faiths, and many afraid to acknowledge what they actually believe for fear of breaking Granny's heart, or offending their neighbors to the point of getting run out of town, or worse.If this is the precious meaning our lives are vouchsafed thanks to our allegiance to one religion or another, it is not such a bargain, in my opinion. Is this the best we can do? Is it not tragic that so many people around the world find themselves enlisted against their will in a conspiracy of silence, either because they secretly believe that most of the world's population is wasting their lives in delusion (but they are too tenderhearted — or devious — to say so), or because they secretly believe that their own tradition is just such a delusion (but they fear for their own safety if they admit it)?”

Daniel Dennett book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Breaking the Spell (2006)

People, Lie, World, Fear

“There’s a serious danger that the college education bubble may burst. As more and more people get college degrees, which inevitably have to become easier to get in order to increase the amount of graduates beyond its realistic levels, the market will eventually figure out that the degree doesn’t mean what it used to. It will become less useful as a heuristic for intelligence and achievement. And college graduates will find themselves with an asset—a degree—whose value is dropping while their debt remains high.”

John Carney

" What Obama Should Have Told The Kids Today http://www.businessinsider.com/john-carney-what-obama-should-have-told-the-kids-today-2009-9," The Business Insider magazine, 8 September 2009.

People, Education, Intelligence

“Ken Noland would use concentric circles; he'd want to get them in the middle [of the painting] because it's the easiest way to get them there, and he want them there in the front, on the surface of the canvas. If you're that much involved with the surface of anything, you're bound to find symmetry the most natural means.”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, Questions to Stella and Judd' - September 1966, p. 118

Way, Nature, Painting

“It is, then, the strife of all honorable men and women of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of the races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and imprudence and cruelty.”

W.E.B. Du Bois book The Souls of Black Folk

Source: The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. IX: Of the Sons of Master and Man

Women, Men, Beauty, Strong

“The term "ideographic" has been used not only by those who espouse its basic meaning but also by others who do not necessarily accept the concept but use the term out of mere force of habit as an established popular designation for Chinese characters. I find, to my chagrin, that in my previous publications I have been guilty of precisely this concession to popular usage without being aware of the damage it can cause. As a repentant sinner I pledge to swear off this hallucinogen. I hope others will join in consigning the term to the Museum of Mythological Memorabilia along with unicorn horns and phoenix feathers.”

John DeFrancis book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy

The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984, p. 148) http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984)

Hope

“Moral influence means persuading another that one can make that other more uncomfortable than that other can make oneself.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Moral Influence
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VI - Mind and Matter

“When language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself.”

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) German psychiatrist and philosopher

Man in the Modern Age (1933)

Communication

“It doesn’t mean I’m purer and nicer than others. But it means I have too much ignorance and mental defilement to remove.
I need Buddha's wisdom.”

Richard Gombrich (1937) British Indologist

"When I say I'm a Buddhist"[citation needed]

Wisdom

“Mother held no influence over [my father]; though he bestowed much reverence and attention upon Adela. When she swept his chamber, it was to him a great and momentous ceremony, one that he never omitted to witness, following Adela’s every movement with a mixture of fear and a shudder of delight. He ascribed to her every action some deeper, symbolic meaning, and when the girl pushed a long-handled brush across the floor, with youthful and bold thrusts, it was almost beyond his endurance.”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“The Birds” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/shops/birds.htm His father, Adela (the domestic servant)

Youth, Fear, Girl

“When I was young, I learned a quote in Sunday school that has stayed with me throughout my life. It said, 'teach us to number our days that we gain a heart of wisdom.' * Most of us will wake up 28,762 days- and then one day - we won’t. That means you have about 21,000 days left - and about 14,000 of them for your career. So herein lies the urgency.”

Steve Blank (1953) American businessman

NYU Commencement Speech, Blank to Millennials: 'Make the Days of Your Life Matter'" https://www.inc.com/zoe-henry/steve-blank-2016-commencement-speech-steve-jobs.html,"Steve, May 23, 2016.

Life, Wisdom, School, Quotes

“Finding true silence requires more than quieting our surroundings. It also means quieting our souls. This is the real dilemma of living in a wordy world.”

Skye Jethani

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

World, Soul, Silence

“One who adheres to the five (daily) prayers diligently, they shall be a means of illumination and salvation for him on the Day of Judgment.”

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

Kanzul `Ummal, Volume 7, Tradition 18862
Shi'ite Hadith

“Auguste Comte defines the feminine sex as the affective or emotional sex, and the male sex as the effective or active sex. This must be understood as meaning that with women there is a much close connection between mind and body. Woman's thought are less abstract than man's.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

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

Women, Sex

“Activism on behalf of the ways of Chassidus means that even when a chassid is in the marketplace, deeply involved in his business, he still thinks about what he can do for chassidic concerns and the welfare of chassidim…. Activism on behalf of the ways of Chassidus is a personal obligation, regardless whether one is great or limited in knowledge of Chassidus.”

Menachem Mendel Schneerson book Hayom Yom

From Schneerson, Menachem Mendel, "21 Av," Hayom Yom, Kehot Publication Society, 1942.

Way, Business, Knowledge, Thinking

“By depriving Islam of the means to destroy freedom, we are not violating freedom; we are preserving it.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

"Let's Lock The Door To Islam", Breitbart.com (28 September 2016)
2010s

Freedom

“I am poor, and I am glad that i am, for i find that wealth makes more people mean than it duz generous.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

People, Wealth

“I quote somewhere a correspondence with Ken Arrow, after he wrote Arrow and Hahn. I wrote to him and I said that the trouble is that neoclassical economists confuse risk with uncertainty. Uncertainty means non-probabilistic. And he said, 'Quite true, you're quite correct that Keynes is much more fruitful, but the trouble with the General Theory is, those things that were fruitful couldn't be developed into a nice precise analytical statement, and those things that could were retrogressions from Keynes but could be developed into a nice precise analytical statement.' That's why mainstream economics went that route. And my answer is, I would hope that even Nobel Prize winners didn't believe that regression is growth, which it clearly isn't. But that's right. The fear that everybody has, you see, is nihilism: you won't be able to say what's going to happen. Well, evolutionists don't worry about being unable to predict. You ask the evolutionists, who tell you what happened in the past, just what next species is going to appear, and the answer is, anything could. Right? Does that bother people? Explanation is the first thing in science. If you can't explain, you don't have anything. But you needn't necessarily predict. Now, if you know the future's uncertain, what does that mean? It means basically, the way Hicks put it in his later years, that humans have free will. The human system isn't deterministic or stochastic, which is deterministic with a random error. Humans can do thins to change the world.”

Paul Davidson (1930) Post Keynesian economist

quoted in Conversations with Post Keynesians (1995) by J. E. King

People, World, Fear, Hope

“The effectiveness of authority as a means of control depends first of all upon the ability to enforce it through the use of punishment. In the two organizations which have been the models for classical organization theory, the situation with respect to enforcement is clear. In the military, authority is enforceable through the court-martial, with the death penalty as the extreme form of punishment. In the Church, excommunication represents the psychological equivalent of the death penalty.”

Douglas McGregor (1906–1964) American professor

Source: The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), p. 27 (in 2006 edition)

Death, Penalty, Dependency

“I do have a relationship and I can tell you that he's very interested in what we're doing here today, he's probably very interested in what you and I are saying today, and I'm sure he is going to be seeing it in some form. But I do have a relationship with him, and I think, er, it's very interesting to see what's happened. I mean, look, he's done a very brilliant job in terms of what he represents and who he's representing, if you look at what he's done with Syria, if you look at so many of the different things, he has really eaten our president's lunch, let's not kid ourselves.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Trump responding to a question about whether he had a relationship with Vladimir Putin during an interview with MSNBC's Thomas Roberts while visiting Moscow for the Miss Universe competition http://www.msnbc.com/thomas-roberts/watch/trump-discusses-putin-in-2013-734124099973 (November 2013) 2010s, 2013

Thinking

“The dissociation of the typical adult European is a consequence not of any universal human nature, a term that has no meaning, but of the influence of an inadequately organized tradition.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 124

Nature, Universe