Quotes about middle
page 7

“Savages…are by nature rash. They have no middle gear. The middle gear of any man is self-discipline.”

The Mission Song (2006)

“The official style is at once humble, polite, curt and disagreeable: it derives partly from that used in Byzantine times by the eunuch slave-secretariat, writing stiffly in the name of His Sacred Majesty, whose confidence they enjoyed, to their fellow-slaves outside the palace precincts — for the Emperor had summary power over everyone; and partly from the style used by the cleric-bureaucracy of the Middle Ages, writing stiffly in the name of the feudal lords to their serfs and, though cautious of offending their employers, protected from injury by being servants of the Church, not of the Crown, and so subject to canon, not feudal, law. The official style of civil servants, so far as it recalls its Byzantine derivation, is written by slaves to fellow-slaves of a fictitious tyrant; and, so far as it recalls its mediaeval derivation, is written by members of a quasi-ecclesiastical body, on behalf of quasi-feudal ministers (who, being politicians, come under a different code of behaviour from theirs) to a serflike public.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

Source: The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1943), Ch. 4: "The Use and Abuse of Official English".

Age, Law, Confidence, Time

“Eight years before he became vice president, Richard Cheney spelled out this premise in his "Defense Strategy for the 1990s." Either before or soon after 9/11, he and his close associates chose Iraq as the first major target, apparently to remove a threat to Israel and to have Iraq serve as our permanent military, economic, and political base in the Middle East.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Page 100
Post-Presidency, Our Endangered Values (2005)

“I can tell you I'm pretty middle-class.”

John Prescott (1938) Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1997–2007)

BBC Radio 4 Today program interview (12 April 1996)

“We started out in the middle ages creating music which had certain desirable physical properties (for example, a major chord sounds "nice" because the frequencies are in integer ratios to each other). And then as society evolved, we created these emotional contexts for certain instruments and progressions. Major-chord arpeggios sound "happy", minor chords sound "sad", chromatic scales can sound "scary", et cetera. In the 20th century, film soundtracks reinforced this point as people associated certain kinds of music with certain visual and emotional experiences. It's a giant feedback loop, really; once you grow up in a given culture, it leaves this musical fingerprint on you which colors your experiences.”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Andrew Sega Shrine interview, 2011

Happiness, People, Age, Sadness

“In the Middle Ages the king offered protection to his subjects in return for their loyalty, and the subjects were doubly protected, for the church also sheltered them. The need for shelter - for a father image that cares and will hopefully provide and give some meaning to human lives - remains as real as it was in the Middle Ages, but modern technocracy has no place for either the father or the church and provides no substitute.”

Pierre Stephen Robert Payne (1911–1983) British lecturer, novelist, historian, poet and biographer

A Vision of the Uncorrupted Society, p. 292 ( See also: Social contract..)
The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America (1975)

Age, Loyalty

“It was always something of a puzzle to observers of Australia to explain the high standing of working men and the prevalence of their values in the culture. The easy answer was to say the middle-class was numerically weak. But in a capitalist society their values should be predominant whatever their numbers. So was it that they lacked the will to rule? I have suggested here that convict origins help to explain this puzzle. The bourgeoisie, sharing the shame of the nation, looked for respectability through White Australia and military prowess, and the forms these took had a strong proletarian cast; the working man was elevated by one and was the most notable embodiment of the other.”

John Hirst (1942–2016) Australian historian

"An Oddity from the Start" https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2008/july/1277335186/john-hirst/oddity-start, The Monthly, July 2008.

Men, Strong, Help

“Gentlemen, the melancholy event of yesterday reads to us an awful lesson against being too much troubled about any of the objects of ordinary ambition. The worthy gentleman, who has been snatched from us at the moment of the election, and in the middle of contest, whilst his desires were as warm, and his hopes as eager as ours, has feelingly told us, what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Speech at Bristol on declining the poll (9 September 1780), referring to a Mr. Richard Coombe.
1780s

Hope, Reading

“She is so deluded that she genuinely believes she speaks for all women. She's a victim of her own success. I liked the early Steinem. There was once a survey conducted for Time about who would make a good candidate for the first female president, and I wrote in Gloria Steinem. But now? Gloria Steinem is dissing men and dissing fashion and she's out having her hair streaked at Kenneth's. She became a socialite with a coterie. A lot of middle-aged white ladies still love her, but the media have been negligent regarding her.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

On Gloria Steinem
Playboy interview (May 1995)

Love, Women, Men, Age

“And for me, it's pretty clear-cut that until we learn some better explanation for how life began, there is a God who always existed and created the heavens and the earth. And until somebody gives me a better explanation, I'll go for it. And it doesn't scare me at all when scientists say, "Oh, but that can't be proved," because neither can any of the Darwinian hypotheses about how life began be proved. Anyway, I couldn't give a [profanity] whether a person calls himself a scientist. It doesn't earn any extra respect from me, because it's not as if science has covered itself with glory, morally, in my time. Scientists were the people in Germany telling Hitler that it was a good idea to kill all the Jews. Scientists were telling Stalin it was a good idea to wipe out the middle-class peasants. Scientists were telling Mao Tse-Tung it was fine to kill 50 million people in order to further the revolution.”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

Interviews: Ben Stein is Expelled! Christianity Today Movies, Christianity Today Movies: Interview with Ben Stein, 15 April 2008, 2008-04-18 http://www.christianitytoday.com/movies/interviews/benstein.html,

Life, God, People, Idea

“Slowly his eyes left my hair and traveled downwards. This time he really took in my outfit and then that Look that I’m always encountering; that special one composed in equal parts of amusement, astonishment and horror came over his face.
I am not a moron and I can generally guess what causes this look. The trouble is, it’s always something different.
I squirmed uncomfortably, feeling his eyes bearing down on my bare shoulders and breasts.
"What the hell are you doing in the middle of the morning with an evening dress on?” he asked me finally.
"Sorry about that,” I said quickly, "but it’s all I’ve got to wear. My laundry hasn’t come back yet.””

Elaine Dundy (1921–2008) American journalist, actress

Part One, One
The Dud Avocado (1958)

Travel, Feeling, Hell, Time

“It is unrealistic to imagine a US geostrategic vision which sees its pivotal interests linked exclusively to the Pacific region. More appropriately, we need to consider the wider Middle East, Central Asia and North-East Africa to be bound together in a geopolitical unit of pivotal importance.”

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

The Pivot Expanded http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/the-pivot-expanded - Small Wars Journal, October 2013

Imagination

“In the Far West, the United States of America openly claimed to be custodians of the whole planet. Universally feared and envied, universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character of man’s existence. By this time every human being throughout the planet made use of American products, and there was no region where American capital did not support local labour. Moreover the American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph and televisor ceaselessly drenched the planet with American thought. Year by year the aether reverberated with echoes of New York’s pleasures and the religious fervours of the Middle West. What wonder, then, that America, even while she was despised, irresistibly moulded the whole human race. This, perhaps, would not have mattered, had America been able to give of her very rare best. But inevitably only her worst could be propagated. Only the most vulgar traits of that potentially great people could get through into the minds of foreigners by means of these crude instruments. And so, by the floods of poison issuing from this people’s baser members, the whole world, and with it the nobler parts of America herself, were irrevocably corrupted.
For the best of America was too weak to withstand the worst. Americans had indeed contributed amply to human thought. They had helped to emancipate philosophy from ancient fetters. They had served science by lavish and rigorous research. In astronomy, favoured by their costly instruments and clear atmosphere, they had done much to reveal the dispositions of the stars and galaxies. In literature, though often they behaved as barbarians, they had also conceived new modes of expression, and moods of thought not easily appreciated in Europe. They had also created a new and brilliant architecture. And their genius for organization worked upon a scale that was scarcely conceivable, let alone practicable, to other peoples. In fact their best minds faced old problems of theory and of valuation with a fresh innocence and courage, so that fogs of superstition were cleared away wherever these choice Americans were present. But these best were after all a minority in a huge wilderness of opinionated self-deceivers, in whom, surprisingly, an outworn religious dogma was championed with the intolerant optimism of youth. For this was essentially a race of bright, but arrested, adolescents. Something lacked which should have enabled them to grow up. One who looks back across the aeons to this remote people can see their fate already woven of their circumstance and their disposition, and can appreciate the grim jest that these, who seemed to themselves gifted to rejuvenate the planet, should have plunged it, inevitably, through spiritual desolation into senility and age-long night.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter II: Europe’s Downfall; Section 1, “Europe and America” (p. 33)

Fate, People, Pleasure, Youth

“The truth is, about the Middle East is, had there been no oil there, it would be like Africa. Nobody is threatening to intervene in Africa.”

Wesley Clark (1944) American general and former Democratic Party presidential candidate

92nd Street Y Cultural Center (2007)

Truth

“The unity of the Middle Ages as a historical period is quite artificial. In reality they fall into three entirely distinct cultural periods—the natural economy of the early Middle Ages; the courtly chivalry of the high Middle Ages; and the urban bourgeois culture of the late Middle Ages. At any rate, the divisions between these three epochs go deeper than those which mark the beginning and the end of the Middle Ages as a whole.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

The Social History of Art, Volume I. From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, 1999, Chapter IV. The Middle Ages

Age, Nature, Reality

“I think we have to get NATO to go into the Middle East with us, in addition to surrounding nations, and we have to knock the hell out of ISIS, and we have to do it fast, when ISIS formed in this vacuum created by Barack Obama and Secretary Clinton. And believe me, you were the ones that took out the troops. … When they formed, this is something that never should have happened. It should have never happened. Now, you're talking about taking out ISIS. But you were there, and you were secretary of state when it was a little infant. Now it's in over 30 countries. And you're going to stop them? I don't think so.”

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

2010s, 2016, September, First presidential debate (September 26, 2016)

Hell, Thinking, Country

“They (the enemy) pottered off through Idiot's Utterly, High Hiccough, Malpaquet Middling and Mome.”

T. H. White book Mistress Masham's Repose

Mistress Masham's Repose (1946)

“Herzen: Marx is a bourgeois from the anus up.
Natalie : Alexander! I won't have that word…
Herzen: Sorry, middle-class.”

Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright

The Coast of Utopia: Shipwreck (2002)

“We declare war against socialism, not because it is socialism, but because it has opposed nationalism…. We intend to be an active minority, attract the proletariat away from the official Socialist party. But if the middle class thinks that we are going to be their lightning rods, they are mistaken.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

Mussolini’s speech in Milan (March 23, 1919), quoted in Stanislao G. Pugliese, Fascism, Anti-fascism, and the Resistance in Italy: 1919 to the Present, Oxford, England, UK, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., (2004) p. 43
1910s

War, Thinking

“Cause it's a good night
To be out there soakin' up the moonlight.
Stake out a little piece of shoreline.
I've got the perfect place in mind.
It's in the middle of nowhere; only way to get there
You got to get a little mud on the tires.”

Brad Paisley (1972) American country music singer

Mud on the Tires, written by Brad Paisley and Chris DuBois.
Song lyrics, Mud on the Tires (2003)

Way, Perfection, Night

“Somnat - A celebrated city of India, is situated on the shores of the sea, and washed by its waves. Among the wonders of that place was the temple in which was placed the idol called Somnat' When the Sultan Yaminu-d Daula Mahmud bin Subuktigin went to wage religious war against India, he made great efforts to capture and destroy Somnat, in the hope that Hindus would become Muhammadans. He arrived there in the middle of Zil K'ada AH 416 (December AD 1025). The Indians made a desperate resistance' The number of slain exceeded 50,000.”

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) Sultan of Ghazni

Elliot and Dowson, Vol. I : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 97-98
Quotes from The History of India as told by its own Historians

War, Hope, Effort, Sea

“Donald Trump and I believe that Captain Humayun Khan is an American hero and his family, like all Gold Star families, should be cherished by every American. Captain Khan gave his life to defend our country in the global war on terror. Due to the disastrous decisions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, a once stable Middle East has now been overrun by ISIS. This must not stand. By suspending immigration from countries that have been compromised by terrorism, rebuilding our military, defeating ISIS at its source and projecting strength on the global stage, we will reduce the likelihood that other American families will face the enduring heartbreak of the Khan family.”

Mike Pence (1959) 48th Vice President of the United States

About the statements of Donald Trump on the fallen Captain Humayun S. M. Khan's family — Facebook https://www.facebook.com/mikepence/posts/10153921668637862 (July 26, 2016) Trump/Pence 2016 Presidential Campaign

Life, War, Family, Star

“Take a look at the simplest of objects. Let's take, for example, an old chair. It seems like nothing. But think of the universe comprised within it: the sweaty hands cutting the wood that used to be a robust tree, full of energy, in the middle of a luxuriant forest by some high mountains. The loving work that built it, the joyful anticipation of the one who bought it, the tired bodies it has helped, the pains and the joys it must have endured, whether in fancy halls or in a humble dining room in your neighbourhood. Everything, everything shares life and has its importance! Even the most worn down of chair carries inside the initial force of the sap climbing from the earth, out there in the forest, and will still be useful the day when, broken into kindling, it burns in some fireplace.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

describing a children's game in his essay, Tàpies suggests looking at a chair
1945 - 1970
Source: 'El joc de saber mirar' ('The Game of Knowing How to Look'), Antoni Tàpies, Cavall Fort, núm 82, Barcelona, gener de 1967 - translated from Catalan; as quoted in: 'Tàpies: From Within', June ─ November, 2013 - Presse Release, Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC )p. 16, note 9

Love, Life, Pain, Mountain

“Punk: Wow, everybody, it's John Cena. He comes out here every Monday night, he's excitable, he throws his hat at somebody, everybody loves it. I am so impressed at how you do that. You get all these people to believe you're that friendly, smiling, everyday man, when I know the truth. And the truth, John Cena, is you're thoughtless, you're heartless, and above all else, you are dishonest. I'm sure there's millions of people worldwide, including yourself, that would love to believe this is over a spilled diet soda, but John, this goes way beyond my spilled diet soda. Yeah. John, you were fired from the WWE. You were gone. You gave a very tear-inducing speech in the middle of the ring about how you finally get to see your mom and hang out with your little brother, and you said you were gonna go away. You were gonna be a man of your way, but what happened? You came back later that night, and then you came back the next week, and then you came back the next week, showing all of these people who aren't intelligent to see through your facade what I have known all along—that your word is absolutely worthless. And then there's TLC, you have the man beaten. Wade Barrett, a very tough individual, and you have him beat in a chairs match, but that's not good enough for you. You don't take the high ground, you can't walk off into the sunset with your victory; you drag the man off to the side of the stage and you drop fifteen steel chairs on him, and I wanna know exactly why you think that's acceptable behavior. I wanna know why you think it's okay to show up the next night on Raw and humiliate the poor guy…
Cena: That is balderdash! Fifteen steel chairs? That's insane. It was 23 steel chairs. And in case you forgot, Wade Barrett and the Nexus gave me about five thousand beat-downs, made me their personal slave, and ended my career.
Punk: You wanna talk about ended careers, you hypocrite? This is exactly what I'm talking about. You ended the career of my good friend Dave Batista. John! John, look at me when I'm talking to you. This is a reoccurring pattern with you. Once again, you have the man beaten—last man standing, he verbally submits, how humiliating, the match is won. But, no, you AA him off a car through the very steel ramp that I'm sitting on, which facilitated the end of his career. Now we'll talk about Vickie Guerrero. I'm surprised the lovely Vickie Guerrero doesn't up and quit based on all the abuse you heap on her. It's not just the physical things to the Wade Barretts and the Dave Batistas, but it's the name-calling, it's the mental abuse to somebody as gorgeous and beautiful as Vickie Guerrero.
Cena: "It's the this… it's the that." Okay, CM Punk is gonna play Mr. Fingerpointer. Well…1.—Dave Batista broke my neck; 2.—He showed up on Raw the next night and quit on his own terms. And C—I didn't just single out Vickie Guerrero. In case you haven't been watching for the past… eight years, I talk about everybody. Uh… Michael Cole. Michael Cole has an anonymous fetish with Justin Bieber and has the word "The Miz" man-scaped right below his belly button. Me! Look at me. I look like the crazy sex child of the Incredible Hulk and Grimace. And then there's you.
Punk: Yeah, and then there's me, who happens to not be laughing. I don't know if you noticed that. You're not funny.”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

December 27, 2010
WWE Raw

Love, People, Truth, Smile

“The five attitudes are: Upper, Middle, Lower, Right Side, and Left Side. These are the five. Although attitude has these five dimensions, the one purpose of all of them is to cut the enemy. There are none but these five attitudes.
Whatever attitude you are in, do not be conscious of making the attitude; think only of cutting.”

Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese martial artist, writer, artist

Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Water Book

Thinking

“Something appears midway between order and chaos, these forms, these expressions occupy a middle position.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

1973 - from CF,35; p. 67
Karel Appel, a gesture of colour' (1992/2009)

Appearance

“The basic hypothesis is that, while the total supply of entrepreneurs varies among societies, the productive contribution of the society's entrepreneurial activities varies much more because of their allocation between productive activities such as innovation and largely unproductive activities such as rent seeking or organized crime. This allocation is heavily influenced by the relative payoffs society offers to such activities. This implies that policy can influence the allocation of entrepreneurship more effectively than it can influence its supply. Historical evidence from ancient Rome, early China, and the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe is used to investigate the hypotheses.”

William J. Baumol (1922–2017) American economist

Source: "Entrepreneurship: Productive, unproductive, and destructive," 1996, p. 3

Age

“I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Source: Daniel Martin (1977), Ch. 1, p. 1

History, Parent

“(On performing in Costa Rica for the first time) It was like finding some weird tribe in the middle of the jungle and, you know, they all come out and go: "Fear of the Dark. Favorite Album."”

Bruce Dickinson (1958) English musician, airline pilot, and broadcaster

What?!?
Iron Maiden: Flight 666

Fear, Time

“What we have now come to regard as typical of Middle Eastern regimes is not typical of the past. The regime of Saddam Hussein, the regime of Hafiz al Assad, this kind of government, this kind of society, has no roots either in the Arab or in the Islamic past. It is due and let me be quite specific and explicit it is due to an importation from Europe, which comes in two phases.
Phase one, the 19th century, when they are becoming aware of their falling behind the modern world and need desperately to catch up, so they adopt all kinds of European devices with the best of intentions, which nevertheless have two harmful effects. One, they enormously strengthen the power of the state by placing in the hands of the ruler, weaponry and communication undreamt of in earlier times, so that even the smallest petty tyrant has greater powers over his people than Harun al-Rashid or Suleyman the Magnificent, or any of the legendary rulers of the past.
Second, even more deadly, in the traditional society there were many, many limits on the autocracy, the ruler. The whole Islamic political tradition is strongly against despotism. Traditional Islamic government is authoritarian, yes, but it is not despotic. On the contrary, there is a quite explicit rejection of despotism. And this wasn't just in theory; it was in practice too because in Islamic society, there were all sorts of established orders in society that acted as a restraining factor. The bazaar merchants, the craft guilds, the country gentry and the scribes, all of these were well organized groups who produced their own leaders from within the group. They were not appointed or dismissed by the governments. And they did operate effectively as a constraint.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Bernard Lewis (2006)

People, World, Communication, Time

“A good rule of thumb is every couple of hours take fifteen minutes off. Naps are also very helpful, short naps. Even a ten or fifteen minute nap in the middle of the day can be the equivalent of an hour and a half of extra sleep the night before, and it can raise your effective IQ by ten points.”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

Talks at Google (Oct 28, 2014)

Sleep, Help, Night

“While II was looking for a good enough excuse to run away from Anand; I was befriended by Tribhuvandas Patel, the young cooperative chairman and almost without realizing it I began to share his dream of building a strong organization that would free the famers from clutches of the middle man. In one of my weker moments I accepted |w:Tribhuvandas Kishibhai Patel|Tribhuvandas’s]] suggestion that I work for the nascent Kaira Cooperative. I have never regretted that decision in my 33-year career as an employee of the farmers.”

Verghese Kurien (1921–2012) Indian founder of dairy-cooperative Amul

In p. 74
Quote, Our Leaders

Dreams, Decision, Strong

“The system of scholastic disputations encouraged in the Universities of the middle ages had unfortunately trained men to habits of indefinite argumentation, and they often preferred absurd and extravagant propositions, because greater skill was required to maintain them; the end and object of such intellectual combats being victory and not truth.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.3, p. 28
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Men, Truth, Age, Universe

“You cannot expect English people to be attracted by the brutal intolerances of Nazidom. … We certainly do not wish to pursue a policy inimical to the legitimate interests of Germany, but you must surely be aware that when the German Government speaks of friendship with England, what they mean is that we shall give them back their former Colonies, and also agree to their having a free hand so far as we are concerned in Central and Southern Europe. This means that they would devour Austria and Czecho-Slovakia as a preliminary to making a gigantic middle Europe-block. It would certainly not be in our interests to connive at such policies of aggression.”

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

Letter to Lord Londonderry (23 October 1937), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 873
The 1930s

Friendship, People

“Until now, neither the distinction between “worthy, since durable” and “vain, since transient,” nor the unbridgeable abyss separating the two, has disappeared for a moment from reflections on human happiness. Nonentity, the demeaning and humiliating insignificance of the individual bodily presence in the world by comparison with the unperturbed eternity of the world itself, has haunted philosophers (and non-philosophers, during their brief spells of falling into and staying in a philosophical mood) for more than two millennia. In the Middle Ages it was raised to the rank of the highest purpose and supreme concern of mortals, and deployed to promote spiritual values over the pleasures of the flesh—as well as to explain (and, hopefully argue away) the pain and misery of the brief earthly existence as a necessary and therefore welcome prelude to the endless bliss of the afterlife. It returned with the advent of the modern era in a new garb: that of the futility of individual interests and concerns, shown to be abominably short-lived, fleeting and vagrant when juxtaposed with the interests of “the social whole”—the nation, the state, the cause.”

Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) Polish philosopher and sociologist

Source: The Art of Life (2008), p. 31.

Pain, Happiness, Pleasure, Age

“By The middle of The 1920s General Motors had accomplished some things, but apart from survival and reorganization, they were more in the realm of the mind than of reality. We knew, as I have related, the strategy with which we proposed to approach the car business, how we proposed to manage the enterprise financially, and the relationships we wanted to establish among persons in different roles. But by the end of 1924 little of this was reﬂected in Our activities in the automobile market. That our volume of business had increased after the slump of 1921 — and especially in 1923 — could be attributed less to our own wits than to the improvement in the general economy and the rising demand for automobiles. While internally we had made much progress, externally we had marked time. But the time had come to act.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 149

Cars, Business, Reality, Time

“One of the unique things is that whether we were out at sea or in the middle of the water tank, a lot of times you just couldn't leave. Especially when we were out at sea.”

John C. Reilly (1965) American actor

Water, Time, Sea

““The poor and the middle class work for money.” “The rich have money work for them.””

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

Money

“It pleased the great Creator of the world to make three sorts of living creatures. Angels he made pure spirits, without flesh, and therefore he made them only for heaven and not to dwell on earth. Beasts were made flesh, without immortal souls, and therefore they were made only for the earth and not for heaven: Man is of a middle nature between both, as partaking of both flesh and spirit, so is he made for earth, but as his passage or way to heaven, and not that this should be his home or happiness. The blessed state that man was made for was to behold the glorious majesty of the Lord and to praise him among his holy angels; and to love him, and to be filled with his love forever.”

Richard Baxter book A Call to the Unconverted to Turn and Live

A Call to the Unconverted to Turn and Live, Sermon 1

Love, Happiness, World, Angels

“When Henry Mulcahy, a middle-aged instructor of literature at Jocelyn College, Jocelyn, Pennsylvania, unfolded the President's letter and became aware of its contents, he gave a sudden sharp cry of impatience and irritation, as if such interruptions could positively be brooked no longer.”

Mary McCarthy book The Groves of Academe

Source: The Groves of Academe (1952), Ch. I, p. 293, first lines of novel

Age, Literature, Cry

“Outside, the main doors behind him, he was hit full in the chest by autumn. The doggy wind leapt about him and nipped; leaves skirred along the pavement, the scrape of the ferrules of sticks; melancholy, that tetrasyllable, sat on a plinth in the middle of the square. English autumn, and the whistling tiny souls of the dead round the war memorial.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Doctor is Sick (1960)

War, Soul, Autumn, Memory

“They had left him for dead in the middle of a pool of blood in his own bedroom, his belly slit open like gaping barn doors, the hilt of the knife wedged against his sternum. But the only trouble was that he had stayed alive somehow, his life pumping out, managing to knock the telephone off the little table and dial me. Now he was looking up at me with seconds left and all he could do was force out the words, "Mike …there was no reason."”

Mickey Spillane (1918–2006) American writer

Survival...Zero! (1970)

Life, Dead

“For Queen Diana did my body change
Into a fork-tongued dragon flesh and fell,
And through the island nightly do I range,
Or in the green sea mate with monsters strange,
When in the middle of the moonlit night
The sleepy mariner I do affright.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

The Earthly Paradise (1868-70), The Lady of the Land

Change, Sea, Night

“Temptations came to him, in middle age, tentatively and without insistence, like a neglected butcher-boy who asks for a Christmas box in February for no more hopeful reason than that he didn't get one in December.”

Saki (1870–1916) British writer

"The Reticence of Lady Anne"
Reginald in Russia (1910)

Age, Hope, Boy, Christmas

“In the end, both extremes had more in common with each other than either did with the middle.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Source: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 24 (p. 470)

“I'm telling you right now, we're going to write fairer rules for the middle class and we are going to raise taxes on the middle class!”

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

Clinton: 'Raise Taxes On The Middle Class!' 8-1-2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ua13_gYQn0; as quoted in "Hillary Promises ‘We Are Going To Raise Taxes On The Middle Class’ <nowiki>[Video http://dailycaller.com/2016/08/03/hillary-promises-we-are-going-to-raise-taxes-on-the-middle-class-video/</nowiki>"] by Derek Hunter, The Daily Caller (3 August 2016). Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016)

“Neoconservatives are still in the business of creating their own parallel reality and forcing ordinary Americans, Europeans and Middle-Easterners to inhabit the ruins.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“Donald, Don’t Let Fox News Roger America… Again,” https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/09/ilana-mercer/finally-a-just-war/ LewRockwell.com, September 25, 2015. 2010s, 2015

Business, Reality

“The poor and middle class all too often allow the power of money to control them. By simply getting up and working harder, failing to ask themselves if what they do makes sense, they shoot themselves in the foot as they leave for work every morning. By not fully understanding money, the vast majority of people allow the awesome power of money to control them. The power of money is used against them.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

Money, People, Understanding, Sense

“Politically I am neither left nor right! And this kind of political-ethical standpoint-- being in the middle-- usually brings about seclusion and isolation! But now I do not mind it anymore and, instead, I work more and more in my self-made solitude!”

Javad Alizadeh (1953) cartoonist, journalist and humorist

Quoted in "About me" in his 4D Humor website http://javad.8m.com/about.html

Solitude

“Before the endgame, the Gods have placed the middle game.”

Siegbert Tarrasch (1862–1934) German chess player, chess writer, and chess theoretician

As quoted in Cunning Exiles : Studies of Modern Prose Writers (1974), by Don Anderson and Stephen Thomas Knight, p. 41

God, Game

“All civilizations go though similar processes of emergence, rise, and decline. The West differs from other civilizations not in the way it has developed but in the distinctive character of its values and institutions. These include most notably its Christianity, pluralism, individualism, and rule of law, which made it possible for the West to invent modernity, expand throughout the world, and become the envy of other societies. In their ensemble these characteristics are peculiar to the West. Europe, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has said, is “the source — the unique source” of the “ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and cultural freedom. . . . These are European ideas, not Asian, nor African, nor Middle Eastern ideas, except by adoption.” They make Western civilization unique, and Western civilization is valuable not because it is universal but because it is unique. The principal responsibility of Western leaders, consequently, is not to attempt to reshape other civilizations in the image of the West, which is beyond their declining power, but to preserve, protect, and renew the unique qualities of Western civilization. Because it is the most powerful Western country, that responsibility falls overwhelmingly on the United States of America.
To preserve Western civilization in the face of declining Western power, it is in the interest of the United States and European countries … to recognize that Western intervention in the affairs of other civilizations is probably the single most dangerous source of instability and potential global conflict in a multicivilizational world.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Ch. 12 : The West, Civilizations, and Civilization, § 2 : The West In The World, p. 311

World, Law, Way, Democracy

“German’ socialism came to be wholly associated with the extreme anti-liberal politics of the antisemitic and völkisch movement. The appeal here was mainly to the lower-middle classes—traders, craftsmen, small farmers, lower civil servants—and rooted in a combination of antisemitism, extreme nationalism, and vehement anti-capitalism”

Ian Kershaw (1943) British historian

usually interpreted as ‘Jewish’ capitalism
Source: Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (1999), p. 135

“In my middle years, I have exchanged the position of the fetus for the position of a corpse.”

Joseph Heller book Something Happened

Something Happened (1974)

“The people of China forged their own literature apart from letters. And today this is what lives, to be part of what is to come, and all the formal literature, which was called art, is dead. The plots of these novels are often incomplete, the love interest is often not brought to solution, heroines are often not beautiful and heroes often are not brave. Nor has the story always an end; sometimes it merely stops, in the way life does, in the middle of it when death is not expected.
In this tradition of the novel have I been born and reared as a writer.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

The Chinese Novel (1938)

Love, Life, Death, People

“My friends, the Republican Party did not win the midterm election in November: We lost that election. We lost because voter turnout was abysmally, embarrassingly low, and millions of working people, young people and people of color gave up on politics as usual and they stayed home. That’s a fact. In my view, Democrats will not retain the White House, will not regain the Senate or the U. S. House, will not be successful in dozens of governor races across the country, unless we generate excitement and momentum and produce a huge voter turnout. With all due respect – and I do not mean to insult anyone here – that turnout, that enthusiasm, will not happen with politics as usual. The people of our country understand that given the collapse of the American middle class, and given the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality we are experiencing, we do not need more establishment politics or establishment economics.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Address to the Democratic National Committee’s Summer Meeting, Bernie Sanders Warns Democrats They May Not Win in 2016 Without Him http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/08/28/bernie-sanders-warns-democrats-they-may-not-win-in-2016-without-him/, The New York Times (28 August 2015) https://www.youtube.com/embed/NU4iNAtg6W0?start=275&end=421 2010s, 2015

People, Color, Home, Understanding

“In short, enjoy the blessing of strength while you have it and do not bewail it when it is gone, unless, forsooth, you believe that youth must lament the loss of infancy, or early manhood the passing of youth. Life's race-course is fixed; Nature has only a single path and that path is run but once, and to each stage of existence has been allotted its own appropriate quality; so that the weakness of childhood, the impetuosity of youth, the seriousness of middle life, the maturity of old age—each bears some of Nature's fruit, which must be garnered in its own season.”
Denique isto bono utare, dum adsit, cum absit, ne requiras: nisi forte adulescentes pueritiam, paulum aetate progressi adulescentiam debent requirere. cursus est certus aetatis et una via naturae eaque simplex, suaque cuique parti aetatis tempestivitas est data, ut et infirmitas puerorum et ferocitas iuvenum et gravitas iam constantis aetatis et senectutis maturitas naturale quiddam habet, quod suo tempore percipi debeat.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

section 33 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2007.01.0039%3Asection%3D33 Cato Maior de Senectute – On Old Age (44 BC)

Life, Youth, Age, Nature

“Islam and freedom are not compatible. You see it in almost every country where it dominates. There is a total lack of freedom, civil society, rule of law, middle class; journalists, gays, apostates — they are all in trouble in those places. And we import it.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Interview with USA TODAY http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/02/21/exclusive-usa-today-interview-with-dutch-anti-islam-politician-geert-wilders/98146112/ (21 February 2017) 2010s

Law, Freedom, Country

“What we kids didn't understand was that we were living in a commercial, commodity culture. Everything in our environment had been bought and sold. As middle class Americans, we basically grew up on a movie set. The conscious values that are pushed are only part of the picture. The medium itself plays a much bigger part than anyone realizes: the creation of illusion. We are living surrounded by illusion, by professionally created fairy tales. We barely have contact with the real world.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 56

World, Understanding, Parting

“The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

"Joseph and His Brothers"; first published in The Saturday Review of Literature (6 June 1936)
Not Under Forty (1936)

Life, Men, Youth, Age

“It was the devout hope of Macaulay… and of many others, that the diffusion of new learning among the higher classes would see the dissolution of Hinduism and the widespread acceptance of Christianity. The missionaries were of the same view, and they entered the education field with enthusiasm, providing schools and colleges in many parts of India where education in the Christian Bible was compulsory for Hindu students. The middle classes accepted Western education with avidity and willingly studied Christian scriptures, but neither the dissolution of Hindu society so hopefully predicted nor the conversion of the intellectuals so devoutly hoped for showed any sign of materialization. On the other hand, Hinduism assimilated the new learning, and the effects were soon visible all over India in a revival of a universalistic religion based on the Vedanta.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

Education, School, Religion, Hope

“The relationship that in our time unites us with Money is completely abstract. That’s where our society resembles to the one in the Middle Ages: we fear a symbolic and invisible entity, like men feared God thousands of years ago. The stock exchange changes without our participation. Between the stock and us there’s a theology of money called “economy” that, in general, is in charge of rationally explaining something that doesn’t have more reason than it’s symbolic power.”

Jorge Majfud (1969) Uruguayan-American writer

"Teología del dinero" http://www.bitacora.com.uy/articulos/2002/noviembre/98/98general.htm Bitácora, magazine, La República, Uruguay (13 November 2002)

Men, Money, God, Age

“I have a lot of critics; we all know that. And I do kind of want to say — you know, put my middle finger up to everybody and say, think what you want about me. I am who I am. But at the end of the day, I'm an athlete that wants to win.”

Hope Solo (1981) American association football player

As quoted in Hope Solo: 'I speak the truth, and people either love me or they hate me'" http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlesports/2012/08/29/hope-solo-i-speak-the-truth-and-people-either-love-me-or-they-hate-me/#6489101=0, seattlepi.com (August 29, 2012) 2010s

Thinking

“What surprising fellows those French painters are. A Millet, Delacroix, Corot, Troyon, Daubigny, Rousseau, and a Daumier.... Something else about Delacroix - he had a discussion with a friend about the question of working absolutely from nature, and said on that occasion that one should take one's 'studies' from nature - but that the 'actual painting' had to be made 'by heart'. This friend was walking along the boulevard when they had this discussion - which was already fairly heated. When they parted the other man was still not entirely persuaded. After they parted, Delacroix let him stroll on for a bit - then (making a trumpet of his two hands) bellowed after him in the middle of the street - to the consternation of the worthy passers-by:
'By heart! By heart!”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

(Par coeur! Par coeur!) I can't tell you how much I enjoyed reading this article and some other things about Delacroix.. In his letter to Anthon van Rappard, from Nuenen, The Netherlands, 8 and c. 15 August 1885 - original manuscript, letter 526, at Van Gogh Museum, location Amsterdam - inv. nos. b8390 V/2006, http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let526/letter.html See for this anecdote, taken from Charles Blanc, Les artistes de mon temps, letter 496, n. 7. 1880s, 1885

Question, Nature, Study, Reading

“Now why, if freedom is striven after for love of the I after all — why not choose the I himself as beginning, middle, and end?”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Dover 2005, p. 163
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

Love, Freedom

“On the Coast of Coromandel
Where the early pumpkins blow,
In the middle of the woods
Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.
Two old chairs, and half a candle,—
One old jug without a handle,—
These were all his worldly goods.”

Edward Lear (1812–1888) British artist, illustrator, author and poet

St. 1. The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bongy-Bò http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ll/ybb.html (1877)

“A while ago there was an article in the New York Times about some women in Tennessee who wanted the middle grade text books removed from the school curriculum, not because they were inadequate educationally, but because these women were afraid that they might stimulate the childrens' imaginations.
What!?!
It was a good while later that I realized that the word, imagination, is always a bad word in the King James translation of the Bible. I checked it out in my concordance, and it is always bad.
Put them down in the imagination of their hearts. Their imagination is only to do evil.
Language changes. What meant one thing three hundred years ago means something quite different now. So the people who are afraid of the word imagination are thinking about it as it was defined three centuries ago, and not as it is understood today, a wonderful word denoting creativity and wideness of vision.
Another example of our changing language is the word, prevent. Take it apart into its Latin origin, and it is prevenire. Go before. So in the language of the King James translation if we read, "May God prevent us," we should understand the meaning to be, "God go before us," or "God lead us."
And the verb, to let, used to mean, stop. Do not let me, meant do not stop me. And now it is completely reversed into a positive, permissive word.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)

Women, God, Children, People

“But so far as the Hindus are concerned, this period was a prolonged spell of darkness which ended only when the Marathas and the Jats and the Sikhs broke the back of Islamic imperialism in the middle of the 18th century. The situation of the Hindus under Muslim rule is summed up by the author of Tãrîkh-i-Wassãf in the following words: “The vein of the zeal of religion beat high for the subjection of infidelity and destruction of idols… The Mohammadan forces began to kill and slaughter, on the right and the left unmercifully, throughout the impure land, for the sake of Islãm, and blood flowed in torrents. They plundered gold and silver to an extent greater than can be conceived, and an immense number of precious stones as well as a great variety of cloths… They took captive a great number of handsome and elegant maidens and children of both sexes, more than pen can enumerate… In short, the Mohammadan army brought the country to utter ruin and destroyed the lives of the inhabitants and plundered the cities, and captured their off-springs, so that many temples were deserted and the idols were broken and trodden under foot, the largest of which was Somnãt. The fragments were conveyed to Dehlî and the entrance of the Jãmi‘ Masjid was paved with them so that people might remember and talk of this brilliant victory… Praise be to Allah the lord of the worlds.””

Sita Ram Goel book The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1994)

Children, People, World, Religion

“Middle of 1698: ‘Hamid-ud-din Khan Bahadur who had been deputed to destroy the temple of Bijapur and build a mosque (there), returned to Court after carrying the order out and was praised by the Emperor.”

Aurangzeb (1618–1707) Sixth Mughal Emperor

Akhbarat. Jadunath Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Volume III, Orient Longman, New Delhi, 1972 reprint, pp. 185–89., quoted from Shourie, Arun (2014). Eminent historians: Their technology, their line, their fraud. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India : HarperCollins Publishers.
Quotes from late medieval histories, 1690s

“Generally young men are regarded as radicals. This is a popular misconception. The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Speech in New York City http://books.google.com/books?id=Bc7iAAAAMAAJ&q=&quot;Generally+young+men+are+regarded+as+radicals+This+is+a+popular+misconception+The+most+conservative+persons+I+ever+met+are+college+undergraduates&quot;+&quot;the+radicals&quot;+&quot;are+the+men+past+middle+life&quot;, (19 Nov 1905), The Papers of Woodrow Wilson 16:228 1900s

Life, Men, Past, Personality

“He said it was her fault.
She said it wasn't at all.
But the truth lies somewhere in the middle.”

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

Song lyrics, The Sensual World (1989)

Truth

“From the end of World War I until the middle of the middle of the 1970s, French public life was shaped and misshaped by three overlapping and intersecting forms of collective and individual irresponsibility. The first of these was political. Reading the history of interwar France, one is struck again and again by the incompetence, the insouciance and the culpable negligence of the men who governed the country and represented its citizens. This is not a political observation, in the partisan sense, but rather a cultural one.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Introduction: The Misjudgment of Paris
The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (1998)

Life, Men, War, World

“If done right, biotechnology can enhance the entire world's well-being. And that's why the radical middle is drawn to it. One of our key value commitments is maximizing human potential. … Although the biotech debate may seem hopelessly polarized, a third voice – nuanced, hopeful, adult – has begun to be heard. Call it the voice of cautious optimism. Call it the voice of the radical middle.”

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

Source: Radical Middle (2004), Chapter 11, "Long Live Biotech – With Adult Supervision," p. 116.

World, Hope, Optimism

“The candlelight dances off her mahogany-coloured skin as she un-robes, and she is smiling from the very middle of herself, and you look at them and you think "This is the one, this is it" and then—and then the cage comes down!”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

On love.
Like, Totally (2006)

Smile, Thinking, Dance

“He [Paolo Sarpi] was one of the two foremost Italian statesmen since the Middle Ages, the other being Cavour.”

Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) American politician

Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 3

Age

“In many ways, it (capitalism) resembles classic medieval feudalism, displaying the same tendency to create endless hierarchies of lords, vassals, and retainers. In other ways—notably in its managerialist ethos—it is profoundly different. And the whole apparatus, rather than replacing old-fashioned industrial capitalism, is instead superimposed on top of it, blending together in a thousand points in a thousand different ways. Hardly surprising, then, that the situation seems so confusing that even those directly in the middle don’t really know quite what to make of it.”

David Graeber book Bullshit Jobs

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)

Way, Fashion

“29 million people have no health insurance today in America. We pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. One out of five Americans can't even afford the prescriptions their doctors are writing. Millions of people have high deductibles and co-payments. I don't know what economists Secretary Clinton is talking to, but what I have said, is that the family right in the middle of the economy would pay $500 dollars more in taxes, and get a reduction in their healthcare costs of $5,000 dollars. In my view healthcare is a right of all people, not a privilege, and I will fight for that.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

2010s, 2016, Democratic Presidential Debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (11 February 2016)

People, Health, World, Family

“I agree with you that in politics the middle way is none at all.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Letter to Horatio Gates (23 March 1776)
1770s

Way

“If you would govern a state of a thousand chariots (a small-to-middle-size state), you must pay strict attention to business, be true to your word, be economical in expenditure and love the people. You should use them according to the seasons (i. e. You should not enlist farmers during seeding or harvest time).”

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

The Analects, Chapter I

Love, People, Business, Time

“Despite different cultures, middle-class youth all over the world seem to live their lives as if in a parallel universe. They get up in the morning, put on their Levi's and Nikes, grab their caps and backpacks, and Sony personal CD players and head for school.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies 1999

Youth, World, School, Universe

“Europe is to be turned into a banana republic by taxing labor – not finance, insurance or real estate (FIRE). Governments are to impose heavier employment and sales taxes while cutting back pensions and other public spending. … The financial privatization and credit-creation monopoly that governments have relinquished to banks is now to really pay off – at the price of breaking up Europe. … The unelected members of the European Central Bank have taken over planning power from elected governments. Beholden to its financial constituency, the ECB has convinced the EU commission to back the new oligarchic power grab. … In sum, the Neoliberal Revolution seeks to achieve in Europe what the United States has achieved since real wages stopped rising in 1979: doubling the share of wealth enjoyed by the richest 1%. This involves reducing the middle class to poverty, breaking union power, and destroying the internal market as a precondition.”

Michael Hudson (economist) (1939) American economist

Who Wins? http://michael-hudson.com/2010/10/who-wins/ (October 3, 2010) Michael-Hudson.com, 1998-

Wealth

“The night of the Middle Ages lasted for a thousand years. The first star that enriched the horizon of this universal gloom was Giordano Bruno. He was the herald of the dawn.”

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

The Great Infidels (1881)

Age, Star, Universe, Night

“As he lat in the relative comfort of a hard-sleeeper cot - relative to a hard-seater, that is - the puffy, balding, beady-eyed, twisted mouth, middle-aged writer Mo Yan wasn't sleepy at all. The overhead lights went out as the train carried him into the night leaving only the dim yellow glare of the floor lights to see by. I know there are many similarities between me and this Mo Yan, but many contradictions as well. I'm a hermit crab, and Mo Yan is the shell I'm occupying. Mo Yan is the rain gear that protects me from storms, a dog hide to ward off the chilled winds, a mask I wear to seduce girls from good families. There are times when I feel that this Mo Yan is a heavy burden, but I can't seem to cast it off, just as a hermit crab cannot rid itself of its shell.”

Mo Yan book The Republic of Wine

Source: The Republic of Wine (1992), Chapter 10, Section 2

Age, Family, Dogs, Feeling

“Louis Althusser puts it this way: because "class instinct is subjective and spontaneous," the class instinct of the middle classes and "thus of intellectuals" must undergo a painful and "revolutionary" transformation in order to become oppositional—that is, in order to become aligned with the methodology of the oppressed.”

Chela Sandoval (1956) Chicana and post-colonial feminist and theoretician

Methodology of the Oppressed (2000), p. 181

Pain, Way

“So he prayed to the Almighty for aid, and left Ghazni on the 10th of Sha'ban 414 H., with 30,000 horse besides volunteers, and took the road to Multan which place he reached in the middle of Ramazan. The road from thence to India was through a barren desert, where there were neither inhabitants or food. So he collected provisions for the passage, and loading 30,000 camels with water and corn, he started for Anhilwara. After he had crossed the desert, he perceived on one side a fort full of people, in which there were wells. people came down to conciliate him, but he invested the place, and God gave him victory over it, for the hearts of the inhabitants failed them through fear. So he brought the place under the sway of Islam, killed the inhabitants, and broke in pieces their images. His men carried away water with them from thence and marched for Anhalwara, where they arrived at the begging of Zi-l Ka'da.”

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) Sultan of Ghazni

Ali ibn al-Athir: Kamilu’t-Tawarikh, in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 469
Quotes from The History of India as told by its own Historians

Men, God, People, Fear

“It's difficult for me to know where to start with rugby. I come from a fanatically rugby-conscious Welsh miner's family, know so much about it, have read so much about it, have heard with delight so many massive lies and stupendous exaggerations about it and have contributed my own fair share, and five of my six brothers played it, one with some distinction… it's difficu1t for me to know where to start so I’ll begin with the end. The last shall be first, as it is said, so I'll tell you about the last match I ever played in…I had played the game representatively from the age of ten until those who employed me in my profession, which is that of actor, insisted that I was a bad insurance risk against certain dread teams in dead-end valleys who would have little respect, no respect, or outright disrespect for what I was pleased to call my face. What if I were unfortunate enough to be on the deck in the middle of a loose maul…they murmured in dollar accents?”

Richard Burton (1925–1984) Welsh actor

In Richard Burton’s Last Match From Take the Ball and Run – A Rugby Anthology by Godfrey Smith http://wesclark.com/rrr/burton.html, Wesclark, 1953.

Age, Family, Game, Reading

“I read a book twice as fast as anybody else. First, I read the beginning, and then I read the ending, and then I start in the middle and read toward whatever end I like best.”

Gracie Allen (1902–1964) American actress and comedienne

As quoted in Funny Ladies : The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women (2001) by Bill Adler, p. 51

Books, Reading

“From the preceding examples, we may get some idea of the change in perspective that may occur in our reading and interpretation of the philosophical works of antiquity when we consider them from the point of view of the practice of spiritual exercises. Philosophy then appears in its original aspect: not as a theoretical construct, but as a method for training people to live and to look at the world in a new way. It is an attempt to transform mankind. Contemporary historians of philosophy are today scarcely inclined to pay attention to this aspect, although it is an essential one. The reason for this is that, in conformity with a tradition inherited from the Middle Ages … they consider philosophy to be purely abstract-theoretical activity.”

Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) French historian and philosopher

trans. Michael Chase (1995), p. 107
La Philosophie comme manière de vivre (2001)

People, Age, World, Way

“And Israel is not only our ally; it is a beacon of what democracy can and should mean… If the people of the Middle East are not sure what democracy means, let them look to Israel.”

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

Hanukkah dinner speech http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0550,lombardi,70903,2.html at Yeshiva University (December 2005) Senate years (2001 – January 19, 2007)

People, Democracy

“The middle years, caught between children and parents, free of neither: the past stretches back too densely, it is too thickly populated, the future has not yet thinned out.”

Margaret Drabble book The Middle Ground

The Middle Ground (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980) p. 185

Children, Parent, Past, Future

“The long-range trend toward federal regulation, which found its beginnings in the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and the Sherman Act of 1890, which was quickened by a large number of measures in the Progressive era, and which has found its consummation in our time, was thus at first the response of a predominantly individualistic public to the uncontrolled and starkly original collectivism of big business. In America the growth of the national state and its regulative power has never been accepted with complacency by any large part of the middle-class public, which has not relaxed its suspicion of authority, and which even now gives repeated evidence of its intense dislike of statism. In our time this growth has been possible only under the stress of great national emergencies, domestic or military, and even then only in the face of continuous resistance from a substantial part of the public. In the Progressive era it was possible only because of widespread and urgent fear of business consolidation and private business authority. Since it has become common in recent years for ideologists of the extreme right to portray the growth of statism as the result of a sinister conspiracy of collectivists inspired by foreign ideologies, it is perhaps worth emphasizing that the first important steps toward the modern organization of society were taken by arch-individualists — the tycoons of the Gilded Age — and that the primitive beginning of modern statism was largely the work of men who were trying to save what they could of the eminently native Yankee values of individualism and enterprise.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R. (1955), Chapter VI, part II, p. 233

Men, Age, Fear, Business

“Well I don't know why I came here tonight.
I got the feeling that something ain't right.
I'm so scared in case I fall off my chair,
And I'm wondering how I'll get down the stairs.
Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right, here I am,
Stuck in the middle with you.”

Gerry Rafferty (1947–2011) Scottish singer and songwriter

Stuck in the Middle with You, written with Joe Egan, from the Stealers Wheel album Stealers Wheel (1972).
Song lyrics, With Stealers Wheel

Feeling

“…I would suggest that the removal of the regime of Saddam Husain presents the US with a historic opportunity that is as large as anything that has happened in the Middle East since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the entry of British troops into Iraq in 1917. Iraq is not Afghanistan. It is rich enough and developed enough and has the human resources to become as great a force for democracy and economic reconstruction in the Arab and Muslim world as it has been a force for autocracy and destruction. But for the world to be able to see the challenge in this way, it is necessary to change the terms of the debate over this coming war with Iraq.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"A Model for Post-Saddam Iraq", American Enterprise Institute (October 3, 2002)

War, World, Way, Democracy

“We do have to do more infrastructure spending. That will put many Americans to work. It’s a good job that gets you on the ladder to the middle class. We need to improve the conditions for manufacturing in our country and punish those companies that want to export jobs. We need them to be incentivized to create jobs right here in America.”

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

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Democratic Presidential Debate in Miami (March 9, 2016)

Country

“If we regard Iran as a nation, there is no reason it shouldn’t have correct relations with the United States or any other country. Decades of opinion polls show that a majority of Iranians have a good opinion of America. But Iran today suffers from a split personality: It is both a nation and, as the Islamic Republic, also a messianic cause. And the Islamic Republic of Iran, far from being part of the solution, is at the root of the conflict tearing the Middle East apart. It has built Shiite militias in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, not to mention Afghanistan, with the aim of “exporting” its Khomeinist ideology. The mullahs’ quest for an empire has provoked violent reaction from Sunni Arabs and enabled terrorist outfits such as al Qaeda in its many versions, including ISIS, to find a new audience and a narrative of victimhood. As long as Iran remains a “cause,” it can’t normalize relations with anybody, let alone America. Coexistence among nations is not the same as that among causes.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"Have the Mullah's Abandoned their Dreams of Empire?", Elaph.com, (November 16, 2014).

Tear, Suffering, Parting, Personality

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

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

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

God, People, Age, Religion

“I am going because the Army did not give me the political support to continue as commander and President of the nation. I am not one of those who abandon the ship in the middle of tempests or difficult hours such as those the nation is living in today. The people of the nation know this.”

Leopoldo Galtieri (1926–2003) Argentine military dictator

"AROUND THE WORLD; Former Argentina Chief Testifies on War" http://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/25/world/around-the-world-former-argentina-chief-testifies-on-war.html, The New York Times (March 25, 1983)

People, Support

“Haven't we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut's gonna do it again. Didn't we already, why are we doing it again?… shouldn't we be giving money to the middle?”

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

Remarks during a 2002 White House meeting referring to Bush's second tax cut proposal, as recalled by then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. Reported in Ron Suskind (2004), The Price of Loyalty, ISBN 0-7432-5545-3.
Attributed, Private/attributed

Money, People