Quotes about might
page 22

“For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that dwells in a man is a correct measure of the man. If called to define Shakspeare's faculty, I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all under that. What indeed are faculties? We talk of faculties as if they were distinct, things separable; as if a man had intellect, imagination, fancy, &c., as he has hands, feet and arms. That is a capital error. Then again, we hear of a man's "intellectual nature," and of his "moral nature," as if these again were divisible, and existed apart. Necessities of language do perhaps prescribe such forms of utterance; we must speak, I am aware, in that way, if we are to speak at all. But words ought not to harden into things for us. It seems to me, our apprehension of this matter is, for most part, radically falsified thereby. We ought to know withal, and to keep forever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but names; that man's spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is essentially one and indivisible; that what we call imagination, fancy, understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of the same Power of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other, physiognomically related; that if we knew one of them, we might know all of them. Morality itself, what we call the moral quality of a man, what is this but another side of the one vital Force whereby he is and works? All that a man does is physiognomical of him. You may see how a man would fight, by the way in which he sings; his courage, or want of courage, is visible in the word he utters, in the opinion he has formed, no less than in the stroke he strikes. He is one; and preaches the same Self abroad in all these ways.”

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

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

Way, Error, Imagination, Courage

“Identical in the physical processes by which he originates—identical in the early stages of his formation—identical in the mode of his nutrition before and after birth, with the animals which lie immediately below him in the scale—Man, if his adult and perfect structure be compared with theirs, exhibits, as might be expected, a marvellous likeness of organization. He resembles them as they resemble one another—he differs from them as they differ from one another.—And, though these differences and resemblances cannot be weighed and measured, their value may be readily estimated; the scale or standard of judgment, touching that value, being afforded and expressed by the system of classification of animals now current among zoologists.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 83

Lie, Birth, Animals, Perfection

“I think faith in each other is much harder than faith in God or faith in crystals. I very rarely have faith in God; I occasionally have little spasms of it, but they go away, if I think hard enough about it. I am incandescent with rage at the idea of horoscopes and of crystals and of the nonsense of 'New Age', or indeed even more pseudo-scientific things: self-help, and the whole culture of 'searching for answers', when for me, as someone brought up in the unashamed Western tradition of music and poetry and philosophy, all the answers are there in the work that has been done by humanity before us, in literature, in art, in science, in all the marvels that have created this moment now, instead of people looking away. The image to me... is gold does exist, and for 'gold' say 'truth', say 'the answer', say 'love', say 'justice', say anything: it does exist. But the only way in this world you can achieve gold is to be incredibly intelligent about geology, to learn what mankind has learnt, to learn where it might lie, and then break your fingers and blister your skin in digging for it, and then sweat and sweat in a forge, and smelt it. And you will have gold, but you will never have it by closing your eyes and wishing for it. No angel will lean out of the bar of heaven and drop down sheets of gold for you. And we live in a society in which people believe they will. But the real answer, that there is gold, and that all you have to do is try and understand the world enough to get down into the muck of it, and you will have it, you will have truth, you will have justice, you will have understanding, but not by wishing for it.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

From Radio 4's Bookclub http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00f8l3b 2000s

Love, God, People, Truth

“GG Allin: I get letters from all over the world. People worship me. I'm gonna rape the girls. I might rape the guys. I might have sex. I want it all. I want it all and I'm gonna have it all 'cause I am everything.”

GG Allin (1956–1993) American singer-songwriter

GG Allin on The Jane Whitney Show July 16. 1993.
On The Jane Whitney Show

People, World, Sex, Guy

“The Girvan-Vanmanjari of Dhuniraj 119 written in 1702-04 during the reign of Aurangzeb, brings out this problem clearly. The book is written in the form of a catechism between two Brahmanas discussing the correct course of action to be adopted to put a stop to the injustices of Aurangzeb. One of them advocates protest and resistance. The other is of the view that such a course would still more exacerbate the tyranny of the King, but if they cooperated with the regime, they might obtain some relief and minimise the tribulations of the Hindus under the Mughal government. Centuries have rolled by, the country has been partitioned on religious lines, and yet the problem remains as a legacy of Muslim rule in India. How to live with the Muslims who cannot but discriminate between the faithful and the infidels? Through appeasement or confrontation? Not a happy legacy indeed.”

K. S. Lal book The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India

Source: The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (1992), Chapter 6

Happiness, Books, Faith, Problem

“You begrudge your fellow human beings what you yourself enjoy; taking wicked counsel in your soul, you consider not how you might distribute to others according to their needs, but rather how, after having received so many good things, you might rob others.”

Basil of Caesarea (329–379) Christian Saint

Source: Social Justice, I Will Tear Down My Barns, p. 62

Soul

“It's a DVD, and some of it might be shown on TV, so I'll be keeping it clean. There'll be no swearing, bad language or dirty talk. No, no, none of that. Because as my mother always says, "if you have to swear to get laughs, then you're obviously a cunt."”

Ed Byrne (1972) Irish comedian

Pedantic & Whimsical (2006)

“Yet there is a danger even greater danger than terrorist attacks, the scenario of America as the last man standing. The lights may go out in Europe faster than you can imagine. An Islamic Europe means a Europe without freedom and democracy, an economic wasteland, an intellectual nightmare, and a loss of military might for America – as its allies will turn into enemies, enemies with atomic bombs. With an Islamic Europe, it would be up to America alone to preserve the heritage of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

2000s, Speech at the Four Seasons, New York (25 September 2008)

Democracy, Imagination, Freedom, Light

“On the abolition of the Macedonian monarchy, the supremacy of Rome was not only an established fact from the Pillars of Hercules to the mouths of the Nile and the Orontes, but, as if it were the final decree of fate, pressed on the nations with all the weight of an inevitable necessity, and seemed to leave them merely the choice of perishing in hopeless resistance or in hopeless endurance. If history were not entitled to insist that the earnest reader should accompany her through good and evil days, through landscapes of winter as well as of spring, the historian might be tempted to shun the cheerless task of tracing the manifold and yet monotonous turns of this struggle between power and weakness, both in the Spanish provinces already annexed to the Roman empire and in the African, Hellenic, and the Asiatic territories which were still treated as clients of Rome. But, however unimportant and subordinate the individual conflicts may appear, they possess collectively a deep historical significance; and, in particular, the state of things in Italy at this period is only intelligible in the light of the reaction which the provinces exercised over the mother-country.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 3, pg. 1, translated by W.P. Dickson
The History of Rome - Volume 3

Fate, Exercises, History, Intelligence

“(on a line in the movie 2012) " 'The neutrinos have mutated.' Now, for the non-nerds here: neutrinos are tiny, sub-atomic, really really almost massless particles, they're released in nuclear breakdowns, like in the sun, for example. Five hundred trillion of them pass through your bodies every second. They can't mutate. Their structure is fundamental to the structure of the universe. Right? They can't just change. He might as well have gone, 'The electrons are angry'."”

Dara Ó Briain (1972) Irish comedian and television presenter

Dara Ó Briain: This is the Show (2010)

Universe, Change, Sun

“It is good to know that our nation's defenses against a conventional attack are impregnable, and an imperative that America remain vigilant against threats from terrorists. But as is the case with a human being, admirable characteristics of a nation are not defined by size and physical prowess. What are some of the other attributes of a superpower? Once again, they might very well mirror those of a person. These would include a demonstrable commitment to truth, justice, peace, freedom, humility, human rights, generosity, and the upholding of other moral values.”

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

Page 199
Post-Presidency, Our Endangered Values (2005)

Truth, Peace, Justice, Freedom

“People might gain insight the longer they live, but things never get easy. There will always be challenges and miscommunications and the temptation to eat greasy, bowel clogging fried food, and take others for granted. The secret is to keep moving and try to see people yo love for what they are: flawed, beautiful and as confused as you.”

Rob Payne (1973) Canadian writer

Source: Working Class Zero (2003), Chapter 34, p. 263

Love, People, Secret, Food

“We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

"Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death" http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/noam_chomsky_my_reaction_to_os/, Guernica, 6 May 2011. Quotes 2010s, 2011

“I must make a protest against the sort of exaggerations in which the noble Lord has indulged. He has described the railway launching 2,000 or 3,000 ruffians upon some quiet neighbourhood in a manner that might lead one to imagine the train conveyed a set of banditti to plunder, rack, and ravage the country, murder the people, burn the houses, and commit every sort of atrocity…they may conceive it to be a very harmless pursuit…Some people look upon it as an exhibition of manly courage, characteristic of the people of this country. I saw the other day a long extract from a French newspaper describing this fight as a type of the national character for endurance, patience under suffering of indomitable perseverance, in determined effort, and holding it up as a specimen of the manly and admirable qualities of the British race…I do not perceive why any number of persons, say 1,000 if you please, who assemble to witness a prize fight, are in their own persons more guilty of a breach of the peace than an equal number of persons who assemble to witness a balloon ascent. There they stand; there is no breach of the peace; they go to see a sight, and when that sight is over they return, and no injury is done to any one. They only stand or sit on the grass to witness the performance, and as to the danger to those who perform themselves, I imagine the danger to life in the case of those who go up in balloons is certainly greater than that of two combatants who merely hit each other as hard as they can, but inflict no permanent injury upon each other.”

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

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1860/may/15/papers-moved-for-1 in the House of Commons (15 May 1860) on the illegal prize-fight between Tom Sayers and J. C. Heenan. The Radical MP Colonel Dickson replied that although "He sat on a different side of the House from the noble Lord, and did not often find himself in the same lobby with him on a division; but he would say for the noble Viscount, that if he had one attribute more than another which endeared him to his countrymen it was his thoroughly English character and his love for every manly sport". Palmerston was rumoured to have attended the fight and he contributed the first guinea to the collection for Sayers in the House of Commons. 1860s

Life, People, Peace, Imagination

“The years will not
answer for what they have done, that much is
certain. There is no shaking them, we
might have foreseen this but refused.”

Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) English poet and professor

Integer Vitae http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/188/2#/20607403/0 Poetry

“I did speak extensively — often quite critically — about the reviled work of Richard Goldschmidt, particularly about aspects of his thought that might merit a rehearing. This material has often been confused with punctuated equlibrium by people who miss the crucial issue of scaling, and therefore regard all statements about rapidity at any level as necessarily unitary, and necessarily flowing from punctuated equilibrium. In fact, as the long treatment in Chapter 5 of this book should make clear, my interest in Goldschmidt resides in issues bearing little relationship with punctuated equilibrium, but invested instead in developmental questions that prompted my first book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny. The two subjects, after all, are quite separate, and rooted in different scales of rapidity — hopeful monsters in genuine saltation, and punctuated equilibrium in macroevolutionary punctuation”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

produced by ordinary allopatric speciation
Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 1005

People, Books, Hope, Question

“A soldier's first duty is to obey, otherwise you might as well do away with soldiering.”

Albert Kesselring (1885–1960) German Luftwaffe Generalfeldmarschall during World War II

To Leon Goldensohn, February 4, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004 - Page 322.

“The stately homes of England we proudly represent,
We only keep them up for Americans to rent.
Tho' the pipes that supply the bathroom burst
And the lavat’ry makes you fear the worst
It was used by Charles the First (quite informally),
And later by George the Fourth on a journey north,
The state apartments keep their historical reknown,
It's wiser not to sleep there in case they tumble down;
But still if they ever catch on fire
Which with any luck they might,
We'll fight for the stately homes of England.”

Noel Coward (1899–1973) English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer

The Stately Homes of England from Operette (1937).

Fear, Home, Sleep, Fight

“My dear Father, Charley wrote you in his letter to his Aunt Laura thanking you for your kindness in sending us a nice Christmas present. You must not think because I have not written you myself before this that I appreciated your kindness less. I have been so troubled with pains and weakness in my arm and hand as to be almost useless at times. I think it was nursing so much when the children were sick. I was so relieved when Anna's note to Charly arrived yesterday telling Frankie was better. It would have been dreadful for Mother to have gone out west at this miserable season of the year. I was wretchedly uneasy. I do hope poor Franky will get along nicely now. It will make him much more careful about exposing himself having had this severe attack. Charley received the enclosed letters Anna sent from Sister Eliza and Toad[? ]. I was very glad to get them. It is quite refreshing to read Sister Eliza's letters. They are so cheerful and happy. I had a letter from her on Friday. This Custom House investigating committee is attracting a great deal of attention and time here. It holds its sessions at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Mr. Broome was up on Tuesday evening until ten o'clock but was not called upon. It is very slow. He has been for three weeks passed preparing the statement for those summoned from the Public Stores. Mr. Broome sends Laura a paper to look at—The Fisk tragedy. What is Nora doing with herself this winter. She might write to me sometimes. Give much love to Mother. Ask her for her receipt for getting fat. I would like to gain some myself. It is so much nicer to grow fleshy as you advance in life than to shrivel and dry up. The children are all well and growing very fast. Lloyd has to study very hard this year. His studies are quite difficult. I suppose Charley Harris is working hard too. Mr. Broome sent you a paper with the Navy Register in this week. I received your papers and often Richard calls and gets them. I must close. Mr. Broome and children join me in love to you, Mother, Laura, Anna, Nora, Charly & all.
With much love,
Your devoted child, Mary Jane
I enclose Nancy letter which was written some time ago.”

Charles Boarman (1795–1879) US Navy Rear Admiral

Mary Jane Boarman in a Sunday letter to her father (January 21, 1872)
The people mentioned in Mary Jane's letter were her children Lloyd, Charley, and Nancy; her husband, William Henry Broome; her sisters Eliza, Anna, Laura, and Nora; her brother Frankie; and her nephew frontier physician Dr. Charles "Charley" Harris, son of her sister Susan.
John Broome and Rebecca Lloyd: Their Descendants and Related Families, 18th to 21st Centuries (2009)

Love, Life, Pain, Happiness

“I myself have not met a self-confessed liberal since the late fifties (and even then it was a tacky thing to admit, like coming from the middle class or the Middle West, those two gloomy seedbeds of talent), yet hardly a day passes that I don't read another attack on the "typical liberal" — as it might be announcing a pest of dinosaurs or a plague of unicorns.”

Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) English-American novelist and essayist

"Spock Mugged" (1973), p. 91
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Reading

“As if the butterfly, like the artist, were conscious of something not entirely congenial in the child's nature, it alternately sparkled and grew dim. At length it arose from the small hand of the infant with an airy motion that seemed to bear it upward without an effort, as if the ethereal instincts with which its master's spirit had endowed it impelled this fair vision involuntarily to a higher sphere. Had there been no obstruction, it might have soared into the sky and grown immortal. But its lustre gleamed upon the ceiling; the exquisite texture of its wings brushed against that earthly medium; and a sparkle or two, as of stardust, floated downward and lay glimmering on the carpet.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

"The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844)

Nature, Effort

“Well, I'm not talkin' bout locking down forever, baby.
That would be too demanding.
I'm just talkin' bout two lonely people
Who might reach a little understanding.
I'm not talkin' bout knocking out heaven
with whether we're wrong or we're right.
I'm not talkin' bout hooking up and hanging out,
I'm just talkin' bout tonight.”

Toby Keith (1961) American country music singer and actor

I'm Just Talkin' About Tonight, written with Scotty Emerick)
Song lyrics, Pull My Chain (2001)

People, Understanding, Baby

“It hadn’t had to take the form of this terrible bubble. It might as easily have been a sudden sharp burst behind his eyes or a slower, subtler gnawing at his vitals. But he’d known it was coming, as every man knows and tries to forget it is coming.”

Algis Budrys (1931–2008) American writer

The Burning World, p. 64
The Unexpected Dimension (1960)

Forgetting

“The Light, The Thunder, The Dunes of Sand, The Sun, The Moon, Man and the land. If we work a little, we might see, if we think and reflect on each rock and tree, there’s no measure to all it’s worth — sustainable earth.”

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

"Sustainable Earth"
For Whom The Troubadour Sings (2010)

Thinking, Tree, Light, Sun

“We are so accustomed to hear arithmetic spoken of as one of the three fundamental ingredients in all schemes of instruction, that it seems like inquiring too curiously to ask why this should be. Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic—these three are assumed to be of co-ordinate rank. Are they indeed co-ordinate, and if so on what grounds?
In this modern “trivium” the art of reading is put first. Well, there is no doubt as to its right to the foremost place. For reading is the instrument of all our acquisition. It is indispensable. There is not an hour in our lives in which it does not make a great difference to us whether we can read or not. And the art of Writing, too; that is the instrument of all communication, and it becomes, in one form or other, useful to us every day. But Counting—doing sums,—how often in life does this accomplishment come into exercise? Beyond the simplest additions, and the power to check the items of a bill, the arithmetical knowledge required of any well-informed person in private life is very limited. For all practical purposes, whatever I may have learned at school of fractions, or proportion, or decimals, is, unless I happen to be in business, far less available to me in life than a knowledge, say, of history of my own country, or the elementary truths of physics. The truth is, that regarded as practical arts, reading, writing, and arithmetic have no right to be classed together as co-ordinate elements of education; for the last of these is considerably less useful to the average man or woman not only than the other two, but than 267 many others that might be named. But reading, writing, and such mathematical or logical exercise as may be gained in connection with the manifestation of numbers, have a right to constitute the primary elements of instruction. And I believe that arithmetic, if it deserves the high place that it conventionally holds in our educational system, deserves it mainly on the ground that it is to be treated as a logical exercise. It is the only branch of mathematics which has found its way into primary and early education; other departments of pure science being reserved for what is called higher or university instruction. But all the arguments in favor of teaching algebra and trigonometry to advanced students, apply equally to the teaching of the principles or theory of arithmetic to schoolboys. It is calculated to do for them exactly the same kind of service, to educate one side of their minds, to bring into play one set of faculties which cannot be so severely or properly exercised in any other department of learning. In short, relatively to the needs of a beginner, Arithmetic, as a science, is just as valuable—it is certainly quite as intelligible—as the higher mathematics to a university student.”

Joshua Girling Fitch (1824–1903) British educationalist

Source: Lectures on Teaching, (1906), pp. 267-268.

Life, Truth, Education, School

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

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

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

History, Evil, Personality

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

James Meade (1907–1995) British economist

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

Future

“I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Paris Review interview (1958)

“I try to catch every sentence, every word you and I say, and quickly lock all these sentences and words away in my literary storehouse because they might come in handy.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Act II
The Seagull (1896)

“His picture to me seems always to have the enthusiasm and freshness of youth, moved with the high-minded and patriotic purpose of maturity. He displayed the same ambition for faithful service, whether he was leading his soldiers in the last charge for American liberty at Yorktown or rebuking the mob at Paris for its proposal to make him king. His part in the French Revolution is well known. He served the cause of ordered liberty in America; he was unwilling to serve any other cause in France. His admirers might say of him on the first anniversary of Bastile Day, 'He is galloping through the ages' But he refused to be a man on horseback. He knew that the welfare of his country lay in moderation. The people trusted him, but the extremists, whether Jacobin or Royalist, feared him. He urged the National Assembly to establish by constitutional guarantees what the Revolution had gained.”

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

1920s, Ordered Liberty and World Peace (1924)

People, Youth, Age, Fear

“SPAN ID=Indeed> Indeed, most of the time when we are listening to the noises people make or looking at the black marks on paper that stand for such noises, we are drawing upon the experiences of others in order to make up for what we ourselves have missed. Obviously the more an individual can make use of the nervous systems of others to supplement his own, the easier it is for him to survive. And, of course, the more individuals there are in a group cooperating by making helpful noises at each other, the better it is for all -- within the limits, naturally, of the group's talents for social organization. […] Societies, both animal and human, might almost be regarded as huge cooperative nervous system.

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), Cooperation, p. 11

People, Nature, Time, Help

“They're mostly foreigners, Mr. Merrick, who haven't yet fully mastered the English language. But," he added, thoughtfully, "a few among them might subscribe, if your country sheet contains any news of interest at all. This is rather a lonely place for my men and they get dissatisfied at times. All workmen seem chronically dissatisfied, and their women constantly urge them to rebellion. Already there are grumblings, and they claim they're buried alive in this forlorn forest. Don't appreciate the advantages of country life, you see, and I've an idea they'll begin to desert, pretty soon. Really, a live newspaper might do them good — especially if you print a little socialistic drivel now and then.”

L. Frank Baum book Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation

Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation (1912)
Novels published under the pseudonym Edith van Dyne

Life, Women, Men, Idea

“Then, my lords, permit me to say, that admitting the narrow and confined constitutional doctrines, which I have heard preached in this court, to be right, I am not guilty of the charge according to this Act! In the article of mine, on which the jury framed their verdict, which was written in prison, and published in the last number of my paper, what I desired to do was this, to advise and encourage my countrymen to keep their arms; because that is their inalienable right, which no Act of Parliament, no proclamation can take away from them. It is, I repeat, their inalienable right. I advised them to keep their arms; and further, I advised them to use their arms in their own defence against all assailants - even assailants that might come to attack them unconstitutionally and improperly, using the Queen's name as their sanction.”

John Martin (1812–1875) (1812-1875) Irish nationalist activist

“Something about the way your hair falls in your face
I love the shape you take when crawling towards the pillowcase
You tell me where to go and
Though I might leave to find it,
I'll never let your head hit the bed
Without my hand behind it.And if you want love,
We'll make it.
Swim in a deep sea
Of blankets.
Take all your big plans
And break them,
This is bound to be a while.”

John Mayer (1977) guitarist and singer/songwriter

Your Body Is a Wonderland
Song lyrics, Room for Squares (2001)

Love, Way, Sea

“The fact is that for complex systems like the bacterial flagellum no biologist has or is anywhere close to reconstructing its history in Darwinian terms. Is Darwinian theory therefore falsified? Hardly. I have yet to witness one committed Darwinist concede that any feature of nature might even in principle provide countervailing evidence to Darwinism. In place of such a concession one is instead always treated to an admission of ignorance. Thus it's not that Darwinism has been falsified or disconfirmed, but that we simply don't know enough about the biological system in question and its historical context to determine how the Darwinian mechanism might have produced it.”

William A. Dembski (1960) American intelligent design advocate

Is Intelligent Design Testable — A Response to Eugenie Scott
2011-01-24
The Golden Spiral
http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/2667/Default.aspx
2011-10-23
responding to Eugenie Scott's 2001-01-18 lecture at U.C. Berkeley, "Icons of Creationism: The New Anti-Evolutionism and Science"
2000s

History, Question, Nature

“But wow! This goofy child president we have on our hands now. He is demonstrably a fool and a failure, and this is only the summer of '03. By the summer of 2004, he might not even be living in the White House. Gone, gone, like the snows of yesteryear.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

2000s, Welcome to the Big Darkness (2003)

Fools, Failure, Summer, Housing

“But we need to stand up for every minority. The Bill of Rights isn't for the prom queen. The Bill of Rights isn't for the high-school quarterback. They're gonna be treated fairly; they always do fine. The Bill of Rights is truly for those who might be unorthodox, who might have an unusual idea, who might not look like everybody else. … I said to him, "You could take an American citizen and send them to Guantanamo Bay with no trial?" and he said, "Yeah, if they're dangerous." So I said, "It begs the question, doesn't it, who gets to decide who's dangerous and who's not?" Anybody remember Richard Jewell, the Olympic bomber—the so-called "Olympic bomber" as it turns out? Everybody thought he was guilty; he was "convicted" on t. v. within hours—but it turned out he wasn't—it wasn't him, he wasn't guilty. But could you imagine if he had been a black man in the South in 1920, what would have happened to him? The Bill of Rights is to protect minorities, whether it's the colour of your skin or the shade of your ideology. We need to be the party that protects the rights of everyone.”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

2010s

School, Imagination, Idea, Question

“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth's surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imagination too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, especially as we have no experimental evidence from that era to check our ideas against.”

Francis Crick (1916–2004) British molecular biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist; co-discoverer of the structure of DNA

New York NY: Simon & Schuster, 1981, p. 88.
Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (1981)

Life, Imagination, Idea, Knowledge

“His fertility cycles meant little to him. In his lifetime, he knew, he might make only one or two real contributions to the City’s genetic continuity, his viral gametes combining with others in the bodies of the night feeders to become morphologically active. It was abstractly pleasing, though, to realize he had cast his own essence into the ocean of probability, where it might come floating back unknown to him, as a fresh citizen with new and unique ideas and odors.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Blind Lake

Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 33 (p. 358)

Idea, Night

“An imagined threat might be an extremely powerful motivation to action; and an aspiration, even if built on fantasy, is not nothing, provided it really moves people to action. … Even illusions can have effects. The realist must take powerful illusions seriously as factors in the world that have whatever motivational power they in fact have for the population in question, that is, as something to be understood. This is compatible with seeing through them, and refusing steadfastly to make them part of the cognitive apparatus one employs oneself to try to make sense of the world.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), p. 11.

People, World, Imagination, Motivation

“One of my heroes, almost necessarily from what I'm saying, of course, is Borges, who is a supreme master of doing thing -- being a data bank -- and the beauty of this economy is that he could have written War and Peace in three or four pages; who knows, it might have been a better book.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

From an interview in Art and Design, no. 49
Interviews

War, Books, Peace, Beauty

“Hate must make a person productive; otherwise one might as well love.”

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist

Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)

Love, Hate, Personality

“One of my conjectures was solved in six months, a second in five years, a third in ten. But the basic conjecture, despite heroic efforts rewarded by two Fields Medals, remains a conjecture, now called MLC: the Mandelbrot Set is locally connected. The notion that these conjectures might have been reached by pure thought — with no picture — is simply inconceivable.”

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician

A Theory of Roughness (2004)

Effort

“That's wild! I'll start off with five stars and work backwards from there. Now there, to me, is the most perfect band in existence, whether you're thinking of it orchestrationally or in terms of Duke's immensely creative writing. I can't think of anybody I admire more than this man; nobody could even be compared with him, except Billy Strayhorn. Duke does something with this old, tired instrumentation of trumpets, trombones and saxophones, and he has a perfect way of utilizing the men's specific sounds. Anything he plays is a work of art. The band is out of tune, for instance, and it doesn't even matter. They almost have their own brand of intonation. Duke can take an exotic-sounding idea and create something – you might call it sophisticated crudity. It gives both the qualities that I look for – an earthy quality and the sophisticated quality.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Reviewing " Agra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6MDDbrAqqg" from Far East Suite, as quoted in "Clare Fischer: Blindfold Test" http://www.mediafire.com/view/fix6ane8h54gx/Clare_Fischer#2nmgk677qzm4cnu

Men, Art, Way, Star

“I despair of persuading people to drop the familiar and comforting tactic of dichotomy. Perhaps, instead, we might expand the framework of debates by seeking other dichotomies more appropriate than, or simply different from, the conventional divisions. All dichotomies are simplifications, but the rendition of a conflict along differing axes of several orthogonal dichotomies might provide an amplitude of proper intellectual space without forcing us to forgo our most comforting tool of thought.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle

Source: Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987), p. 8

People, Despair

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

Aung San Suu Kyi book Freedom from Fear

Freedom from Fear (1991)

Men, People, Fear, Freedom

“If there's a locked door, I start to make up all kinds of stories about what might be behind it. I feel like it's some kind of secret, and it leads to me making up lies. But if all the doors are open, physically and metaphorically, there's only the one truth.”

Dave Eggers book The Circle

Mae, to Bailey; p. 299
The Circle (2013)

Truth, Secret, Feeling

“Reason may be employed in two ways to establish a point: firstly, for the purpose of furnishing sufficient proof of some principle, as in natural science, where sufficient proof can be brought to show that the movement of the heavens is always of uniform velocity. Reason is employed in another way, not as furnishing a sufficient proof of a principle, but as confirming an already established principle, by showing the congruity of its results, as in astrology the theory of eccentrics and epicycles is considered as established, because thereby the sensible appearances of the heavenly movements can be explained; not, however, as if this proof were sufficient, forasmuch as some other theory might explain them.”

Thomas Aquinas book Summa Theologica

I, q. 32, art. 1, reply obj. 2
Summa Theologica (1265–1274)

Way, Nature, Appearance, Science

“What is the real issue at stake? Why this determination on the part of the South to maintain the color line and to fight back with all her strength against the combined efforts of certain groups in our Nation, white and black, to break down segregation and to destroy Southern ideals and customs? The answer is simple. The South stands for blood, for the preservation of the blood of the white race. To preserve her blood, the white South must absolutely deny social equality to the Negro regardless of what his individual accomplishments might be. This is the premise - openly and frankly stated - upon which Southern policy is based. This position is so thoroughly justified in the minds of white Southerners that it is sometimes difficult for them to comprehend the reasoning of those who seriously dispute it.”

Theodore G. Bilbo (1877–1947) American politician

Source: Take Your Choice, Separation or Mongrelization (1946), Chapter Four: Southern Segregation and the Color Line.

Color, Effort, Fight, Parting

“The malice of a true Christian attempting to destroy an opponent is something unique in the world. No other religion ever considered it necessary to destroy others because they did not share the same beliefs. At worst, another man's belief might inspire amusement or contempt—the Egyptians and their animal gods, for instance. Yet those who worshipped the Bull did not try to murder those who worshipped the Snake, or to convert them by force from Snake to Bull. No evil ever entered the world quite so vividly or on such a vast scale as Christianity did.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Source: 1960s, Julian (1964), Chapter 7, Priscus

God, World, Religion, Evil

“Who would be such a fool as to make advances to his reader, advances which might end in rejection or, worse still, in acceptance?”

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

“Her Shield”. p. 181
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Fools

“Jump blind and you might find yourself on the rim of a raging volcano, or smack in the middle of a battlefield during a savage war, or on a swiftly tilting ice floe in a tempest-tossed sea.”

Stephen R. Lawhead (1950) American writer

Source: The Skin Map (2010), p. 131

War, Rage, Sea

“God sifted a whole nation that he might send choice grain over into this wilderness.”

William Stoughton

Election Sermon at Boston, April 29, 1669. Compare: "God had sifted three kingdoms to find the wheat for this planting", Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Courtship of Miles Standish, iv.

God

“A few years after the Constitution was adopted Alexander Hamilton said to Josiah Quincy that he thought the Union might endure for thirty years. He feared the centrifugal force of the system. The danger, he said, would proceed from the States, not from the national government. But Hamilton seems not to have considered that the vital necessity which had always united the colonies from the first New England league against the Indians, and which, in his own time, forced the people of the country from the sands of a confederacy to the rock of union, would become stronger every year and inevitably develop and confirm a nation. Whatever the intention of the fathers in 1787 might have been, whether a league or confederacy or treaty, the conclusion of the children in 1860 might have been predicted. Plant a homogeneous people along the coast of a virgin continent. Let them gradually overspread it to the farther sea, speaking the same language, virtually of the same religious faith, inter- marrying, and cherishing common heroic traditions. Suppose them sweeping from end to end of their vast domain without passports, the physical perils of their increasing extent constantly modified by science, steam, and the telegraph, making Maine and Oregon neighbors, their trade enormous, their prosperity a miracle, their commonwealth of unsurpassed importance in the world, and you may theorize as you will, but you have supposed an imperial nation, which may indeed be a power of evil as well as of good, but which can no more recede into its original elements and local sources than its own Mississippi, pouring broad and resistless into the Gulf, can turn backward to the petty forest springs and rills whence it flows. 'No, no', murmurs the mighty river, 'when you can take the blue out of the sky, when you can steal heat from fire, when you can strip splendor from the morning, then, and not before, may you reclaim your separate drops in me.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

'Yes, yes, my river,' answers the Union, 'you speak for me. I am no more a child, but a man; no longer a confederacy, but a nation. I am no more Virginia, New York, Carolina, or Massachusetts, but the United States of America'.
1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Children, People, World, Fear

“Some people might say my life is in a rut, but I'm quite happy with what I've got.”

Paul Weller (singer) (1958) English singer-songwriter, Guitarist

Going Underground (1980)

Life, Happiness, People

“Encounters between strangers in the desert, while rare, were occasions of mutual suspicion, and masked by initial preparations on both sides for an incident that might prove either cordial or warlike.”

Walter M. Miller, Jr. book A Canticle for Leibowitz

Ch 1
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Homo

“There is presumably an upper limit to the carrying capacity of humans on earth—of the numbers that agriculture can support—and that number is usually estimated at between 13-15 billion, though some people think the ultimate numbers might be much higher.”

Niles Eldredge (1943) American biologist

2001 "The Sixth Extinction" http://www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/eldredge2.html, an ActionBioscience.org original article

People, Support, Thinking

“The New England Journal of Medicine has recently reported that speaking about one’s faults creates abnormalities in the pulsations of our heart. Tiny abnormalities? No. Abnormalities as great as those produced by riding a stationary bicycle to the point of either exhaustion or chest pain. Perhaps [the criticisms men exchange beginning with adolescence], then, contribute to men being four times more likely than women to suffer heart disease before age fifty. In essence, our sons might be practicing heart-disease training.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 186.

Women, Men, Pain, Age

“But if you shoot at everyone you see,
Can't be my friend 'cause you might shoot at me.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

When a Kid Goes Bad
Lyrics, The Last DJ (2002)

“But none of that kept me from picturing what a tsunami might look like if it did rise up and roar toward my little boat like some watery blue version of the Great Wall of China.”

Abby Sunderland (1993) Camera Assistant, Inspirational Speaker and Sailor

Source: Unsinkable: A Young Woman's Courageous Battle on the High Seas (2011), p. 97

“And yet — and yet! He had done the right thing, though the Lord alone knew how it would end. He began to pluck courage from his very melancholy, and hope from his reflexions on the transitoriness of life. He was austerely following Romance as he conceived it, and if that capricious lady had taken one dream from him she might yet reward him with a better.”

John Buchan book Huntingtower

Source: Huntingtower (1922), Ch. 6

Life, Dreams, Hope, Courage

“I have learned a great deal from Marxism as I do not hesitate to admit… The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun. The whole of National Socialism is based on it… National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: The Voice of Destruction (1940), p. 186

Learning

“…for the first time he [Philip] began to understand how Macedonia's outdated institutions of feudalism and aristocratic monarchy, so despised by the rest of Greece, might prove a source of strength when dealing with such opponents.”

Peter Green (1924) British historian

Alexander the Great, page 24.

Understanding, Time

“The writing of certain poems (eg 'The Guttural Muse and others)took me to the bottom of myself, something inchoate but troubled, you might say I had muddied the waters, but I felt these poems arrived from an older, deeper, cleaner spring.”

Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer

Other Quotes

Spring, Water

“Working for government ought to be one of the most dangerous jobs ever. Occupational hazard might just get us a better class of parasite.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“All the President's Women (Well, Almost),” http://www.wnd.com/2014/10/all-the-presidents-women-well-almost WorldNetDaily.com, October 2, 2014. 2010s, 2014

“Income inequality is increasing, and you might ask yourself: 'Why is that?' Well, that's what income does.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

“The viewpoint of the formalist must lead to the conviction that if other symbolic formulas should be substituted for the ones that now represent the fundamental mathematical relations and the mathematical-logical laws, the absence of the sensation of delight, called "consciousness of legitimacy," which might be the result of such substitution would not in the least invalidate its mathematical exactness. To the philosopher or to the anthropologist, but not to the mathematician, belongs the task of investigating why certain systems of symbolic logic rather than others may be effectively projected upon nature. Not to the mathematician, but to the psychologist, belongs the task of explaining why we believe in certain systems of symbolic logic and not in others, in particular why we are averse to the so-called contradictory systems in which the negative as well as the positive of certain propositions are valid.”

L. E. J. Brouwer (1881–1966) Dutch mathematician and logician

as translated by Arnold Dresden from: Brouwer, L. E. J. (1913). Intuitionism and formalism. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 20(2), 81–96. (quote on p. 84)

Law, Mathematics, Nature

“Although [in 1937] we might still hope to prevent the divisions of Europe into Fascist and anti-Fascist camps, our real affinities and interests, strategic as well as political, lay with France, a fact which some of my colleagues were most reluctant to realise.”

Anthony Eden (1897–1977) British Conservative politician, prime minister

Anthony Eden, The Eden Memoirs: Facing the Dictators (Cassell, 1962), pp. 486-7

Hope

“Your predator is close behind you and will infallibly be your death.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Carmody said, in a moment of strange calm.” But in terms of long-range planning, I never did expect to get out of this Universe alive.”
“That is meaningless,” the Prize said. “The fact is, you have lost everything.”
“I don’t agree,” Carmody said. “Permit me to point out that I am presently still alive.”
“Agreed. But only for the moment.”
“I have always been alive only for the moment,” Carmody said. “I could never count on more. It was my error to expect more. That holds true, I believe, for all of my possible and potential circumstances.”
“Then what do you hope to achieve with your moment?”
“Nothing,” Carmody said. “Everything.”
“I don’t understand you any longer,” the Prize said. “Something about you has changed, Carmody. What is it?”
“A minor thing,” Carmody told him. “I have simply given up a longevity which I never possessed anyhow. I have turned away from the con game which the Gods run in their heavenly sideshow. I no longer care under which shell the pea of immortality might be found. I don’t need it. I have my moment, which is quite enough.”
“Saint Carmody,” the Prize said, in tones of deepest sarcasm. “No more than a shadow’s breadth separates you and death! What will you do now with your pitiable moment?”

Robert Sheckley book Dimension of Miracles

“I shall continue to live it,” Carmody said. “That is what moments are for.”
Source: Dimension of Miracles (1968), Chapter 28 (pp. 189-190; closing words)

Death, God, Hope, Error

“Had population and food increased in the same ratio, it is probable that man might never have emerged from the savage state.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Source: An Essay on The Principle of Population (First Edition 1798, unrevised), Chapter XVIII, paragraph 11, lines 16-17

Food

“I had a letter from the Marquis, day before yester day. He writes me he is endeavouring to represent every thing in the most favorable colors to the Court of France, in order to wipe away the prejudices that the letters of some of the more indiscreet may make upon that Court, All the French officers are extravagantly fond of your Excellency; but the Admiral more so than any of the rest. They all speak of you with the highest reverence and respect. General Hancock made the Admiral a present of your picture. He was going to receive it on board the fleet by the firing a royal salute. But General Hancock thought it might furnish a handle for some of the speculative politicians to remark the danger of characters becoming too important. He therefore dissuaded the Admiral from carrying the matter into execution.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (September 1778)

Color

“We might as well hope for the termination of the struggle for existence by which, some philosophers tell us, the existence or the modification of the various species of organized beings upon our planet are determined. The battle for political power is merely an effort, well or ill-judged, on the part of the classes who wage it to better or to secure their own position. Unless our social activity shall have become paralyzed, and the nation shall have lost its vitality, this battle must continue to rage. In this sense the question of reform, that is to say, the question of relative class power, can never be settled.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Quarterly Review, 120, 1866, p. 273
1860s

Hope, Question, Sense, Effort

“Slip inside the eye of your mind / don't you know you might find / A better place to play
So I'll start a revolution from my bed / Because you said the brains I had went to my head.
Please don't put you're life in the hands / Of a rock 'n' roll band / Who'll throw it all away”

Noel Gallagher (1967) British musician

Don't Look Back In Anger
(What's the Story) Morning Glory? (1995)

Life

“In retrospect we might have been more cautious about allowing the creation in the 1950s of substantial Muslim communities here, although when one observes the, in some ways, greater problems which France and Germany have in this respect, it is an illusion to believe that in the integrated world of today any major country can remain exclusively indigenous.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

'On Race Relations and the Rushdie Affair', The Independent Magazine (4 March 1989), p. 16, quoted in Elham Manea, Women and Shari'a Law: The Impact of Legal Pluralism in the UK (I.B. Tauris, 2016), p. 256.
1980s

World, Way, Communication, Problem

“We believe we must be the family of America, recognizing that at the heart of the matter we are bound one to another, that the problems of a retired school teacher in Duluth are our problems; that the future of the child — that the future of the child in Buffalo is our future; that the struggle of a disabled man in Boston to survive and live decently is our struggle; that the hunger of a woman in Little Rock is our hunger; that the failure anywhere to provide what reasonably we might, to avoid pain, is our failure.”

Mario Cuomo (1932–2015) American politician, Governor of New York

Democratic National Convention Address (1984)

Hunger, Pain, School, Family

“The President of the United States openly betrayed his country on the world stage. We can argue why he did it – whether it was a mistake in judgment, a failure to lead or simply deference to a man who might very well be his handler. We cannot know why Mr. Trump did what he did in Helsinki, why he aided and abetted our most dangerous foreign adversary. But we watched a high crime play out on national television. We saw a president disqualify himself from office. And if he hasn’t resigned his position by the afternoon or offered an explanation while begging forgiveness, he should be removed for the good of the country.”

Jared Yates Sexton (1981)

About the 2018 Russia–United States summit, That was treason, Donald Trump. We all saw it https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-that-was-treason-donald-trump-we-all-saw-it/ (July 16, 2018), The Globe and Mail.

World, Failure, Forgiveness, Country

“Humor is a marvelous communications tool, as Reagan has demonstrated so well. He has weathered many a storm that others might not have. With Reagan, people just say, 'There he goes again.' A sense of humor allows a president to back off a little from the tensions of the moment and take a calmer view of things.”

Robert Orben (1928) American magician and writer

Phil Gailey (June 12, 1988) "Presidential politics should be more of a laughing matter", St. Petersburg Times, p. 5D.

People, Communication, Sense, Weather

“These days everything went through the filter of knowing that she might be dying. And not a lot made it through.”

Lis Wiehl (1961) American legal scholar

Source: Heart of Ice A Triple Threat Novel with April Henry (Thomas Nelson), p. 62

““Are you yourself a Christian?”
The young man made a negative sign. “The concepts of religion baffle me.”
“This inscrutability is perhaps not unintentional,” said the ex-priest. “It gives endless employment to dialecticians who otherwise might become public charges or, at very worst, swindlers and tricksters.””

Jack Vance Lyonesse Trilogy

Source: Lyonesse Trilogy (1983-1989), The Green Pearl (1985), Chapter 1, section 4 (p. 367)

Religion

“It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to π, or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out — without putting it in secretly!”

Richard Feynman book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

On the numerical value of α, the fine-structure constant, p. 129
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985)

God, Understanding, Nature, Dance

“You can grieve when someone dies. But when someone is near death, and there is the chance that you might prevent it if you make the right decision, anxiety takes over.”

Ross Thomas (1926–1995) 1926-1995 American writer

Cast a Yellow Shadow (1967)

Death, Decision, Chance

“A holy man will follow after purity of heart. He will dread all filthiness and uncleanness of spirit, and seek to avoid all things that might draw him into it. He knows his own heart is like tinder, and will diligently keep clear of the sparks of temptation. Who shall dare to talk of strength when David can fall? There is many a hint to be gleaned from the ceremonial law. Under it the man who only touched a bone or a dead body or a grave or a diseased person became at once unclean in the sight of God.”

J.C. Ryle (1816–1900) Anglican bishop

Holiness: Its Nature, Hindrances, Difficulties, and Roots (first published 1879).

God, Disease, Law, Heart

“…the news might be single-handedly trying to bring about an environmental catastrophe, which it will then report on.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

Newswipe

“We now have single corporate enterprises employing hundreds of thousands of workers, having hundreds of thousands of stockholders, using billions of dollars' worth of the instruments of production, serving millions of customers, and controlled by a single management group. These are great collectives of enterprise, and a system composed of them might well be called "collective capitalism."”

Gardiner C. Means (1896–1988) American economist

Source: The Corporate Revolution in America, 1957, p. 288

“God gives you the sight, the right, and the might to do great things, but you have to develop the fight!”

Tim Storey (1960) motivational speaker

Comeback & Beyond: How to Turn Your Setback into Your Comeback (2010)

God, Fight

“As a rule, white abolitionists either defended the industrial capitalists or expressed no conscious class loyalty at all. This unquestioning acceptance of the capitalist economic system was evident in the program of the women’s rights movement as well. If most abolitionists viewed slavery as a nasty blemish which needed to be eliminated, most women’s righters viewed male supremacy in a similar manner—as an immoral flaw in their otherwise acceptable society. The leaders of the women’s rights movement did not suspect that the enslavement of Black people in the South, the economic exploitation of Northern workers and the social oppression of women might be systematically related.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

Women, Race and Class (1983)

Women, People, Loyalty

“It seems well past time to reconsider our sweeping UPL [Unauthorized Practice of Law] prohibitions. The fact is nonlawyers already perform — and have long performed — many kinds of work traditionally and simultaneously performed by lawyers. Nonlawyers prepare tax returns and give tax advice. They regularly negotiate with and argue cases before the Internal Revenue Service. They prepare patent applications and otherwise advocate on behalf of inventors before the Patent & Trademark Office. And it is entirely unclear why exceptions should exist to help these sort of niche (and some might say, financially capable) populations but not be expanded in ways more consciously aimed at serving larger numbers of lower- and middle-class clients.... Consistent with the law of supply and demand, increasing the supply of legal services can be expected to lower prices, drive efficiency, and improve consumer satisfaction.”

Neil Gorsuch (1967) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

"Access to Affordable Justice: A challenge to the bench, bar, and academy" https://law.duke.edu/sites/default/files/centers/judicialstudies/judicature/judicature_100-3_gorsuch.pdf Judicature ("The Scholarly Journal for Judges"), Autumn 2016, Volume 100, Issue Number 3, page 49.

Law, Way, Time, Past

“A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

Death

“I have recently begun to look for people’s “vicar” nature. It is a technique I happened upon quite by chance, but I think it has a precedent in eastern mysticism. In Buddhism they talk of each of us having a “Buddha nature,” a divine self, the aspect of our total persona that is beyond our materialism and individualism. Well, that’s all well and good. What I’m into is people’s “vicar nature”—what a person would be like if they were a vicar. You can do it on anyone; it doesn’t have to be a vicar either if that isn’t your bag, it could be a rabbi or an imam or whatever. Simply think of someone you know, like, I dunno, Hulk Hogan, and imagine them as a devotional being. When I do, it helps me to see where their material persona intersects with a well-meaning spiritual aspect. Reverend Hogan would be, I suspect, a real fire-and-brimstone guy, spasming and retching in the pulpit but easily moved to tears, perhaps by the plight of a childless couple in his parish. Anyway, let’s not get carried away, it’s just a tool to help me see where a person’s essential self might dwell. Oddly, it’s really easy to do with atheists. I can imagine Richard Dawkins as a vicar in an instant, Calvinist and insistent. Dogmatic and determined, having a stern hearthside chat with a seventeen-year-old boy on the cusp of coming out. My point is that in spite of the lack of any theological title, Bobby Roth is like a priest.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

People, Guy, Imagination, Boy

“I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text.”

Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer

"OS Shock"
In the Beginning... was the Command Line (1999)

Beauty, Problem

“A policy therefor might be likened to strategy, the broad, overall, long term conception which gives direction and purpose to the tactics of immediately daily operations and decisions.”

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

Cited in: Atlee L. Stroup (1966) Marriage and Family: A Developmental Approach. p. 593
National Policy for the Family (1948)

Decision

“James Buchanan … produced several seminal contributions to the literature prior to the appearance of The Calculus, and a continual stream of books and articles afterward. I view Buchanan’s Nobel Prize as a reward for this great body of work, and not just limited to The Calculus. Pursuing this line of reasoning, Gordon Tullock’s prodigious research output following the publication of The Calculus also justifies a Nobel Prize. Indeed, Tullock’s (1967c) seminal analysis of rent seeking, and his subsequent work on this topic might be regarded as sufficient achievements for the awarding of a prize.”

Dennis Mueller (1940) American economist

James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and The Calculus (2012)

Books, Literature, Appearance

“In a few weeks, or at most a few months, thanks to the skill of the Allied Commanders and the bravery of their men, the objects for which we and they have endured more than four years of sacrifice and suffering have been attained. The lands upon which the enemy had laid his cruel and predatory hand are in course of being evacuated. The exiled peoples are returning in joyous crowds across the war frontiers to their homes. The military power of the enemy is broken. His resources are spent. His armaments are in course of being surrendered. Hope breathes again in the souls of the unhappy peoples whom he has trampled in the mire. The impious spirit that claimed that Might was superior to Right and that there was no law but that of successful violence in the world has been exorcised, let us hope for ever. The conflict for international honour, righteousness, and freedom has been won, and the authors of this vast and wicked conspiracy against the liberties of mankind are fugitives on the face of the earth. My Lords, this is a great hour. It has been a wonderful victory. Are we presumptuous if we see in it the judgment of a Higher Power upon panoplied arrogance and enthroned wrong?”

George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston (1859–1925) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1918/nov/18/the-armistice-address-to-his-majesty in the House of Lords (18 November 1918).

Men, War, People, World

“so you think there’s no validity at all in the subjective?
there may be, there may not. in either case, it should not be used as a basis for an objective truth, which is after all what we are seeking. i have no doubt that many of those who claim to have found god have indeed felt something, but i suspect that the “something” they felt was merely a self-induced mystic experience—akin to a drug trip. witness the great numbers of drug users who claim spiritual insights as a result of their experiences. witness also the evangelists and faith-healers who induce hysteria and frenzy into their audiences so that they might feel “the hand of god” upon them. to them, god is little more than a meaningful “high.””

David Gerrold book When HARLIE Was One

Section 15 (p. 75; Dr. Auberson, then HARLIE)
When HARLIE Was One (1972)

God, Truth, Faith, Feeling

“There was a time when philosophy might have been defined as the science of human activity, so all-comprehensive was it. The ambitious Greek who would attach his name to a philosophical system must include in his scheme all that could be known, done, and speculated about God, the world, and man. In the course of time and the specialization of the sciences this view of philosophy fell away, and was replaced by the more exact and narrower conception of modern times.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

" The Progress of Psychical Research http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_29/August_1886/The_Progress_of_Psychical_Research", in Popular Science Monthly (August, 1886) Vol. 29.

God, World, Science, Time

“Life isn't binary — and neither is politics. If you are adrift in the ocean, your enemy isn’t just sharks; it’s thirst, hunger, drowning, and despair itself. If you face your predicament assuming the only thing you have to worry about is being eaten by a shark, you might fend off the sharks, but you will also probably die. Indeed, by ignoring other threats, you’d probably make yourself more vulnerable to a shark attack.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2018, War on the Right (2018)

Life, Hunger, Despair

“As the only black kid in my primary school playground, animals had become my friends. By 15 I was vegan, although I didn't give up honey until 16. For a while my mother thought it was just "a rasta phase". … I can honestly say I've not been tempted to give up veganism in 27 years. I sometimes smell a chip shop and like the smell but then feel guilty because fish might be part of it. But I'll go home and make vegan chips. After all these years, my favourite food is my mother's butter bean stew with whole potatoes, yam and dasheen. I don't think I've ever made a meal for her, to be honest. I think she would consider it a failing of her motherhood and say "Boy, get out the kitchen."”

Benjamin Zephaniah (1958) English poet and author

"Interview: Benjamin Zephaniah" by John Hind, TheGuardian.com (18 July 2010) https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/18/benjamin-zephaniah-life-on-a-plate.

School, Food, Feeling, Home

“You and he were adversaries, but you were allied in a determination that the world should not be blown up. The danger which troubled my husband was that war might be started not so much by the big men as by the little ones. While big men know the need for self-control and restraint, little men are sometimes moved more by fear and pride.”

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929–1994) public figure, First Lady to 35th U.S. President John F. Kennedy

Letter to Nikita Khrushchev after JFK assassination, as quoted in One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (2009) by Michael Dobbs.

Men, War, World, Fear

““What is the Vienna Circle?” is a question which is neither rhetorical nor trivial. It is perhaps an attempt to ‘square the circle’ – which is, meanwhile, mathematically possible, as Karl Menger described as early as 1934.
This question might be also a problem of how the whole relates logically to the parts or the parts to the whole, which was already addressed by mereology (whole-part theory) according to Stanislaw (1916).
Of course, we are all familiar with the irritating fact that one and the same phenomenon can be described consistently by more than one theory”

Friedrich Stadler (1951) Austrian historian

underdetermination of a theory by observation
Source: "What is the Vienna Circle?" 2006, p. xi

Mathematics, Question, Problem, Parting

“I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything. There are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask "Why are we here?" I might think about it a little bit, and if I can't figure it out then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn't frighten me.”

Richard Feynman book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Source: No Ordinary Genius (1994), p. 239, from interview in "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" (1981): video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEwUwWh5Xs4&t=48m10s

Way, Feeling, Thinking, Universe

Quotes about might page 22

Quotes about might
page 22