Quotes about most
page 69

“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

“In June of 1964 the research group and academic program moved to Penn bringing with it most of the faculty, students, and research projects. Our activities flourished in the very supportive environment that Penn and Wharton provided. The wide variety of faculty members that we were able to involve in our activities significantly enhanced our capabilities. By the mid-1960s I had become uncomfortable with the direction, or rather, the lack of direction, of professional Operations Research. I had four major complaints.
First, it had become addicted to its mathematical tools and had lost sight of the problems of management. As a result it was looking for problems to which to apply its tools rather than looking for tools that were suitable for solving the changing problems of management. Second, it failed to take into account the fact that problems are abstractions extracted from reality by analysis. Reality consists of systems of problems, problems that are strongly interactive, messes. I believed that we had to develop ways of dealing with these systems of problems as wholes. Third, Operations Research had become a discipline and had lost its commitment to interdisciplinarity. Most of it was being carried out by professionals who had been trained in the subject, its mathematical techniques. There was little interaction with the other sciences professions and humanities. Finally, Operations Research was ignoring the developments in systems thinking — the methodology, concepts, and theories being developed by systems thinkers.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Preface, cited in Gharajedaghi, Jamshid. Systems thinking: Managing chaos and complexity: A platform for designing business architecture http://booksite.elsevier.com/samplechapters/9780123859150/Front_Matter.pdf. Elsevier, 2011. p. xiii Towards a Systems Theory of Organization, 1985

Way, Mathematics, Support, Problem

“We have created trouble for ourselves in organizations by confusing control with order. This is no surprise, given that for most of its written history, leadership has been defined in terms of its control functions.”

Margaret J. Wheatley (1941) American writer

Source: Leadership and the New Science (1992), p. 12

History

“Despite tremendous pressure, this statesman put aside partisanship and made the tough decision, and became the first Republican to come out for the impeachment of President Nixon. That man was my dad, former Congressman Lawrence J. Hogan, Sr., who is here with us today. He put aside party politics and his own personal considerations in order to do the right thing for the nation. He taught me more about integrity in one day than most men learn in a lifetime, and I am so proud to be his son.”

Larry Hogan (1956) American politician

" Inaugural Address http://governor.maryland.gov/2015/01/21/inaugural-address-governor-larry-hogan/" (21 January 2015)

Men, Decision, Learning, Personality

“Friend John, forgive me if I pain. I showed not my feeling to others when it would wound, but only to you, my old friend, whom I can trust. If you could have looked into my very heart then when I want to laugh; if you could have done so when the laugh arrived; if you could do so now, when King Laugh have pack up his crown, and all that is to him — for he go far, far away from me, and for a long, long time — maybe you would perhaps pity me the most of all.”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

I was touched by the tenderness of his tone, and asked why.
“Because I know!”
Professor Van Helsing to Dr. John Seward, in Dr. Seward's Diary entry for 22 September
Dracula (1897)

Pain, Feeling, Forgiveness, Time

“Nor, though surrounded by such men, did the youngest manager pass unnoticed. At an age when most of those who distinguish themselves in life are still contending for prizes and fellowships at college, he had won for himself a conspicuous place in Parliament. No advantage of fortune or connection was wanting that could set off to the height his splendid talents and his unblemished honour. At twenty-three he had been thought worthy to be ranked with the veteran statesmen who appeared as the delegates of the British Commons, at the bar of the British nobility. All who stood at that bar, save him alone, are gone, culprit, advocates, accusers. To the generation which is now in the vigour of life, he is the sole representative of a great age which has passed away. But those who, within the last ten years, have listened with delight, till the morning sun shone on the tapestries of the House of Lords, to the lofty and animated eloquence of Charles Earl Grey, are able to form some estimate of the powers of a race of men among whom he was not the foremost.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘ Warren Hastings http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/hastings/txt_complete.html’, Edinburgh Review LXXIV (October, 1841), pp. 160–255. About

Life, Men, Age, Appearance

“The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its own citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.”

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

2010s, 2016, July, (21 July 2016)

“Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Ambassador Goldberg, distinguished Members of the leadership of the Congress, distinguished Governors and mayors, my fellow countrymen. We have called the Congress here this afternoon not only to mark a very historic occasion, but to settle a very old issue that is in dispute. That issue is, to what congressional district does Liberty Island really belong; Congressman Farbstein or Congressman Gallagher? It will be settled by whoever of the two can walk first to the top of the Statue of Liberty. This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power. Yet it is still one of the most important acts of this Congress and of this administration. For it does repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice. It corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American nation. Speaker McCormack and Congressman Celler almost 40 years ago first pointed that out in their maiden speeches in the Congress. And this measure that we will sign today will really make us truer to ourselves both as a country and as a people. It will strengthen us in a hundred unseen ways.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Remarks at the signing of the Immigration Bill (1965)

Pain, People, Justice, Way

“I have to tell you, you know, it's part of reporting this case, this election, the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama's speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often. No, seriously. It's a dramatic event. He speaks about America in a way that has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with the feeling we have about our country. And that is an objective assessment.”

Chris Matthews (1945) American news anchor

During live coverage of the presidential primaries on MSNBC, 12 February 2008 http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brad-wilmouth/2008/02/13/matthews-obama-speech-caused-thrill-going-my-leg

People, Way, Feeling, Parting

“Thank you, Donald, for that well-meant but rather pedestrian introduction. Regarding yourself, I quote from the third part of Shakespeare's Henry VI, Act Two, Scene One. Richard speaks, "Were thy heart as hard as steel/ As thou hast shown it flinty by thy deeds/ I come to pierce it, or to give thee mine." To translate into your own idiom, Donald; you're a yo-yo. Now I direct my remarks to Dean Martin, who is being honored here tonight… for reasons that completely elude me. No, I'm not being fair to Dean because - this is true - in his way Dean, and I know him very well, has the soul of a poet. I'm told that in his most famous song Dean authored a lyric which is so romantic, so touching that it will be enjoyed by generations of lovers until the end of time. Let's share it together. [Opens a songsheet for Dean's "That's Amore" and reads in a monotone] "When the moon hits your eye/ Like a big pizza-pie/ That's amore" Now, that's what I call 'touching', Dean. It has all the romanticism of a Ty-D-Bol commercial. "When the world seems to shine/ Like you've had too much wine/ That's amore" What a profound thought. It could be inscribed forever on a cocktail napkin. Hey, there's more. "Tippy-tippy-tay/ Like a gay tarantella" Like a gay tarantella? Apparently, Dean has a 'side Dean' we know nothing about. "When the stars make you drool/ Just like a pasta fazool…. Scuzza me, but you see/ Back in old Napoli/ That's amore" No, Dean; that's infermo, Italian for "sickened". Now, lyrics like that - lyrics like that ought to be issued with a warning: a song like that is hazardous to your health. Ladies and gentlemen… [motions to Dean] you are looking at the end result!”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Speech given at a Dean Martin Celebrity Roast. Viewable here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlKR0i-51S4.

Health, World, Way, Quotes

“In 1982, when he was 45 and Philadelphia 76er owner Harold Katz was hot after him, the Houston Chronicle's George White asked Elvin Hayes if Chamberlain could still play. "Some things about Wilt, you never forgot," Hayes said. "He was such an awesome physical specimen. To go up under Wilt Chamberlain, to be down there and look up at him when he's towering up over you waiting to dunk, was a terrifying picture. To see him poised up there, knowing he was about to sweep down with that big jam... that must be the most frightening sight in sports. The ball goes shooting through the net and you better have your body covered up because he could really hurt someone. I was scared. Everyone was scared when he got that look in his eye, that don't-try-to-stop-this look that he got when he really wanted it.... "I think Russell realized there was no way he could have stopped Wilt if he had been fully intent on making it a two-man game. No one who ever put on a uniform could have done it. When I played him, I kept this foremost in my mind: Above all, don't make him mad. Don't embarrass him. You wanted to keep him quiet as long as possible."”

Wilt Chamberlain (1936–1999) basketball player

[Heisler, Mark, Larger Than Life, The Los Angeles Times, 1999-10-13]
Post-NBA life

Way, Game, Thinking, Sport

“Given that a few days ago we had a terrible accident, a tragic terrorist attack in Barajas, in Madrid, I would like to propose to you that we show our complete condemnation, our most intense revulsion, and that we show profound solidarity with the victims.”

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (1960) Former Prime Minister of Spain

In reference to the ETA bombing at Madrid airport, El Confidencial http://www.elconfidencial.com/noticias/noticia.asp?id=20607 (Spanish). That same day, Zapatero said that calling the attack an 'accident' had been a slip of the tongue, but it was seized by the press and provoked anger, for example the slogan "Killing people is not an accident" used in the protests of March, 2007. As President, 2006

“The Bible is most dangerous book ever written on earth, keep it under lock and key.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

From Why You Should Never be a Christian (1987) by Ishaq 'Kunle Sanni and ‎Dawood Ayodele Amoo.
Misattributed

Books

““The Boss is an honorable man. After the Lord, the most godly person I've ever met." "You've met God?" "Certainly. I telephone Him every night.””

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982)

God, Personality, Night

“Experienced military and intelligence professionals know that torture, in addition to being illegal and immoral, is an unreliable means of extracting information from prisoners. Much is being made of former CIA official John Kiriakou's statement that waterboarding "broke" a high-value terrorist involved in the 9/11 plot. There are always those who, whether out of fear or inexperience, rush to push the panic button instead of relying on what we know works best and most reliably in these situations. I would caution those who would rely on this example. It is far from clear that the information obtained from this prisoner through illegal means could not have been obtained through lawful methods. The FBI was getting good intelligence from this prisoner before the CIA took over. And there are numerous examples of cases where relying on information obtained through torture has disastrous consequences. The reality is that use of torture produces inconsistent results that are an unreliable basis for action and policy. The overwhelming consensus of intelligence professionals is that torture produces unreliable information. And the overwhelming consensus of senior military leaders is that resort to torture is dishonorable. Use of such primitive methods actually puts our own troops and our nation at risk.”

Harry E. Soyster (1935) Recipient of the Purple Heart medal

"Former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency: Torture Produces Unreliable Information" http://web.archive.org/web/20070629145037/http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/blog/torture/2007/12/former-director-of-defense-intelligence.html, Human Rights First (2007-12-11)

Fear, Law, Intelligence, Reality

“But they have not rejected the Budget; they have only referred it to the people. On what principle do they refer Bills to the people? I remember the election of 1900, when a most powerful member of the Tory Cabinet said that the Nonconformists could vote with absolute safety for the Government, because no question in which they were interested would be raised. In two years there was a Bill destroying the School Boards. There was a Bill which drove Nonconformists into the most passionate opposition. What did the House of Lords do? Did they refer it to the people? Oh no, there was a vast difference between protecting the ground landlords in towns and protecting the village Dissenter. After all, the village Dissenter is too low down in the social scale for such exalted patronage, so he was left to the mercy of a Tory House of Commons without any of this high and powerful protection. Well, the Dissenters, despised as they may be, once upon a time taught a lesson to the House of Lords, and ere another year has passed they will be able to say, "Here endeth the second lesson".”

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

Speech to the National Liberal Club (3 December 1909), quoted in Better Times: Speeches by the Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P., Chancellor of the Exchequer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), p. 189.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

People, School, Question, Passion

“.. The thought crossed my mind, how society today in its fall, at moments seen against the light of a renewal, stands out as a large, gloomy silhouette. Yes, for me, the drama of storm in nature, the drama of sorrow in life, is the most impressive.”

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

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from The Hague, The Netherlands, Summer 1883; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 319) p. 21 1880s, 1883

Life, Nature, Light

“I can now report that the mathematics of the multiple focus are a most improbable thicket, and the useful service I enforced upon what I must call an absurd set of contradictions is one of my secrets. I know that thousands of scientists, at home and abroad, are attempting to duplicate my work; they are welcome to the effort. None will succeed. Why do I speak so positively? That is my other secret.”

Jack Vance (1916–2013) American mystery and speculative fiction writer

Section 3 (p. 169)
Short fiction, Rumfuddle (1973)

Secret, Home, Mathematics, Effort

“The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.”

Max Lerner (1902–1992) American journalist and educator

It Is Later Than You Think: The Need for a Militant Democracy http://books.google.com/books?id=szVGoBq-dkEC&q=%22actually+The+so-called+lessons+of+history+are+for+the+most+part+the+rationalizations+of+the+victors+history+is+written+by+the+survivors%22&pg=PA255#v=onepage (1939)

History, Parting

“Finally, there is a compelling moral argument against war in Iraq. Military force is justified only in self-defense; naked aggression is the province of dictators and rogue states. This is the danger of a new "preemptive first strike" doctrine. America is the most moral nation on earth, founded on moral principles, and we must apply moral principles when deciding to use military force.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

U.S. House of Representatives http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2002/cr090402.htm (September 4, 2002). 2000s, 2001-2005

War

“Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society… But for me, education means making creators… You have to make inventors, innovators, not conformists.”

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) Swiss psychologist, biologist, logician, philosopher & academic

Conversations with Jean Piaget (1980) by Jean Claude Bringuier

People, Education

“The ancient Greek philosopher, Democritus, propounded an hypothesis of the constitution of matter, and gave the name of atoms to the ultimate unalterable parts of which he imagined all bodies to be constructed. In the 17th century, Gassendi revived this hypothesis, and attempted to develope it, while Newton used it with marked success in his reasonings on physical phenomena; but the first who formed a body of doctrine which would embrace all known facts in the constitution of matter, was Roger Joseph Boscovich, of Italy, who published at Vienna, in 1759, a most important and ingenious work, styled Theoria Philosophiæ Naturalis ad unicam legem virium, in Natura existentium redacta. This is one of the most profound contributions ever made to science; filled with curious and important information, and is well worthy of the attentive perusal of the modern student. In more recent days, the theory of Boscovich has received further confirmation and extension in the researches of Dalton, Joule, Thomson, Faraday, Tyndall, and others.”

Alfred M. Mayer (1836–1897) American physicist

Alfred Marshall Mayer, Lecture-notes on Physics (1868) Part 1 https://books.google.com/books?id=hqsLAAAAYAAJ

Imagination, Science, Success, Parting

“Education is what most people receive, many pass on, and few have.”

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist

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

People, Education

“If eating meat why not eat the most highly organised form of meat, which is not beef or mutton, but human flesh? If you still believe in the eating of flesh, then you must admit that at least as far as the fitness of food is concerned the cannibal has the best of the argument.”

Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha'nish (1844–1936) German religious movement founder

Source: Mazdaznan Dietetics and Cookery Book (1913), p. 199

Food

“Great Britain is certainly suspect to Americans. They cannot make head or tail of her. She is a stuck-up old girl who owes a lot of money - an odd thing for such a highly respectable old lady to do. She is rather flighty, which is alarming in one so old - she never seems quite serious, that is - goes into giggles all of a sudden, or smiles enigmatically, if politely. She seems to the average American slightly phoney. Let us face up to that. She has many habits which baffle and put one on one's guard - the curious way she has of speaking English with a foreign accent, for instance. Then she must be the most quarrelsome old dame which ever stepped: always - umbrella in hand - getting into scraps with her neighbours, and spitting at them over the garden wall.”

Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) writer and painter

The Hitler Cult (Dent, 1949)

Money, Smile, Way, Girl

“This is a huge nation dominated by the most reactionary and violent ruling class in the history of the world, where the majority of the people just simply cannot understand that they are existing on the misery and discomfort of the world.”

George Jackson (activist) (1941–1971) activist, Marxist, author, member of the Black Panther Party, and co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family

Source: Blood in My Eye (1971), p. 72

People, World, History, Understanding

“Whoever accelerates the media of earth, water and air centrifugally perishes unconditionally, for in so doing they reduce the Blood of the Earth (water) to a pathogenic state and make it the most dangerous enemy of all living and growing things.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Implosion Magazine, No. 96, p. 4. (Callum Coats: Energy Evolution (2000))
Implosion Magazine

Water

“It (i. e., agriculture) was the most profound revolution in hominid living since Homo erectus had left the forest and committed themselves to the savannah. Compared to this phase shift, the advances of the future—even genetic engineering—were details. There would never be so significant a change again, not until humans themselves disappeared from the planet.”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 14 “The Swarming People” section II (p. 456)

Change, Future

“[Martin Luther King, Jr. ] concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the 'loving your enemies' sermon this way: "So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you,'I love you. I would rather die than hate you.'" Go ahead and reread that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you."”

Sarah Vowell The Wordy Shipmates

The Wordy Shipmates (2008)

Love, Hate, World, Beauty

“Why does God afflict the best of men with ill-health, or sorrow, or other troubles? Because in the army the most hazardous services are assigned to the bravest soldiers: a general sends his choicest troops to attack the enemy in a midnight ambuscade, to reconnoitre his line of march, or to drive the hostile garrisons from their strong places. No one of these men says as he begins his march, " The general has dealt hardly with me," but "He has judged well of me."”
Quare deus optimum quemque aut mala valetudine aut luctu aut aliis incommodis adficit? quia in castris quoque periculosa fortissimis imperantur: dux lectissimos mittit qui nocturnis hostes adgrediantur insidiis aut explorent iter aut praesidium loco deiciant. Nemo eorum qui exeunt dicit 'male de me imperator mervit', sed 'bene iudicavit'.

Seneca the Younger Moral Essays

De Providentia (On Providence), 4.8, translated by Aubrey Stewart
Moral Essays

Men, God, Hostility, Health

“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise or, at least, neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

Adam Smith book The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Section III, Chap. II.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part I

Universe, Time, Personality

“The true love is a state of half-madness, of some kind of soft obsession, ruling a so delicate kind of feeling that can lead a person from the greatest happiness to the most dreadful pain.”

Lima Barreto book Clara dos Anjos

Clara dos Anjos (1948)

Love, Pain, Happiness, Feeling

“We may also observe, that, upon these occasions, the female Nimrods dispensed with the method of riding best suited to the modesty of the sex, and sat astride on the saddle like the men; but this indecorous custom, I trust, was never general, nor of long continuance, even with the heroines who were most delighted with these masculine exercises. An author of the seventeenth century speaks of another fashion, adopted by the fair huntresses of the town of Bury in Suffolk. "The Bury ladies," says he, "that used hawking and hunting, were once in a great vaine of wearing breeches," which it seems gave rise to many severe and ludicrous sarcasms. The only argument in favour of this habit, was decency in case of an accident. But in a manner more consistent with the delicacy of the sex, that is, by refraining from those dangerous recreations.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 14
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Hunting

Men, Sex, Exercises, Fashion

“In her head, Elizabeth called what she did ‘The Game.’ The rules were simple: to pretend to be whatever someone else needed until they gave you whatever you needed. After that, there were no rules. The Game was fair, at least to Elizabeth’s way of thinking. Anyone could play it. In fact, she was sure most people were playing it; they just didn’t like to admit it. Sure, there were a few losers and idiots, suckers who, for whatever reason, didn’t mind getting played. And some people were so weak that they played poorly, basically inviting anyone to take advantage of them.”

Lis Wiehl (1961) American legal scholar

Source: Heart of Ice A Triple Threat Novel with April Henry (Thomas Nelson), p. 41

People, Way, Game, Thinking

“If Engels had not been the constant companion in arms of Marx in the revolutionary struggles of the 19th century, there is no doubt that he would be remembered chiefly as one of the foremost scientist-philosophers of the century. It was an ironical tribute paid to the correctness of his views as to the relations between politics and ideology that he suffered complete neglect from the scientists of the Victorian age. But time now has taken its revenge, and Engels’ contemporary views on 19th century science seem to us now in the 20th far more fresh and filled with understanding than those of the professional philosophers of science of his day, who for the most part are completely forgotten, while the few that linger on, such as Lange and Herbert Spencer, are only quoted as examples of the limitations of their times.”

John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) British scientist

Bernal (1930s) "Labour Monthly Pamphlets, No. 6" (No date). Online ( here http://www.marxists.org/archive/bernal/works/1930s/engels.htm) on Marxists Internet Archive (2008).

Age, Quotes, Understanding, Revenge

“The key is to test the areas that you are most worried about going wrong. That way you get the most benefit for your testing effort. It is better to write and run incomplete tests than not to run complete tests”

Kent Beck (1961) software engineer

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 98.

Way, Effort

“The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling which they overburden the inferior number is a shilling saved to their own pockets.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Federalist No. 10
1780s, Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

Justice

“I have a great respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me […]. Much of this fascination lies in the stunning historical paradox that organized religion has fostered, throughout Western history, both the most unspeakable horrors and the most heartrending examples of human goodness in the face of personal danger. (The evil, I believe, lies in an occasional confluence of religion with secular power. The Catholic Church has sponsored its share of horrors, from Inquisitions to liquidations—but only because this institution held great secular power during much of Western history. When my folks held such sway, more briefly and in Old Testament times, we committed similar atrocities with the same rationales.)”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Non-Overlapping Magisteria", p. 281
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Religion, History, Evil, Time

“Remember, early Christians weren't converted by the Scriptures. Instead, they were saved by a spoken message. Most couldn't read anyway. The New Testament hadn't been compiled. There was no such thing as the printing press.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think (2009)

Reading

“Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. …it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most nonscientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve. …by the time science becomes a closed—that is, computerizable—project, it is not science anymore. It is not in the area of the exploration of errors.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978)

Age, Error, Feeling, Imagination

“You have come a long way to talk to me, but I have a surprise for you: I have worked out most of the details already….”

Baba Amte (1914–2008) Indian freedom fighter, social worker

When Count Tarnowski, Polish, a polio affected person in a wheel chair came to his Anandwan to help him financially to set up learning centers in several trades for lepers, in page=17.
Baba Amte: A Vision of New India

Way

“I am speaking now of the highest duty we owe our friends, the noblest, the most sacred — that of keeping their own nobleness, goodness, pure and incorrupt…. If we let our friend become cold and selfish and exacting without a remonstrance, we are no true lover, no true friend.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) Abolitionist, author

Source: Little Foxes (1865), Ch. 3.

Lovers, Selfishness

“We seem to assume that if only someone could find the cure for our disease, some new plan, we should at once see that it was the cure and apply it. We ask for leaders and leadership. But if the right course, which the leader indicates, is regarded by the multitudes sincerely as the wrong one, they will declare that he is no leader but a misleader. Inevitably in a democracy the leader is he who expresses existing convictions in the most vivid way, who possesses, as someone puts it, "the common mind to an uncommon degree."”

Norman Angell (1872–1967) British politician

Peace and the Public Mind (1935)

Disease, Way, Democracy, Sincerity

“Every child and adult should have the skills and the tools to respond to the challenges of the world today and make the most of the opportunities that are available.”

Irina Bokova (1952) Bulgarian diplomat

leadersmag.com http://www.leadersmag.com/issues/2012.3_Jul/Women%20Leaders/LEADERS-Irina-Bokova-UNESCO.html.

World

“The innovation is hazardous, impossible for most producers. But if someone establishes a business having regard to this source of supply, and everything goes well, then he can produce a unit of product more cheaply, while at first the existing prices substantially continue to exist. He then makes a profit. Again he has contributed nothing but will and action, has done nothing but recombine existing factors. Again he is an entrepreneur, his profit entrepreneurial profit. And again the latter, and also the entrepreneurial function as such, perish in the vortex of the competition which streams after them. The case of the choice of new trade routes belongs here.”

Joseph Alois Schumpeter The Theory of Economic Development

The Theory of Economic Development (1934), Ch. 4 : Entrepreneurial Profit

Business

“It is not a little Surprising that Christianity, whose chief excellence consists of softening the human heart, in cherishing and improving its finer Feelings, should encourage a Practice so totally repugnant to the first Impression of Right and Wrong. What adds to the wonder is that this Abominable Practice has been introduced in the most enlightened Ages.”

Patrick Henry (1736–1799) attorney, planter, politician and Founding Father of the United States

As quoted in We Hold These Truths https://books.google.com/books?id=QQH6lsN4TIIC&pg=PA72, by Randall Norman Desoto, pp. 72&ndash;73 1770s, Letter to Robert Pleasants (1773)

Age, Feeling, Heart

“There are so many elements flying in so many different directions that you really have to go with what feels like instinctively. The nature of the universe is fairly whimsical and nonsensical. In the most somber, beatific peacefulness there's complete chaos and maniacal laughter. I think music that doesn't reflect that is boring.”

Beck (1970) American Musician (b.1970)

Guitar magazine, January 1999

Peace, Music, Feeling, Nature

“While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.”

Albert A. Michelson (1852–1931) American physicist

1894, dedication of Ryerson Physical Laboratory, quoted in Annual Register 1896, p. 159 https://books.google.com/books?id=HysXAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA159. Variants of this quote have been misattributed to Lord Kelvin since the 1980s, though there is no evidence that he said anything of the sort. The identity of the unnamed "eminent physicist" is unknown.

Truth, Science, Past, Future

“Iceland is not a little country. Iceland is the most big country in the world.”

Dorrit Moussaieff (1950) First Lady of Iceland

Said in Beijing (2008-08-22) and quoted in "Stórasta Land I Heiminu," http://www.dv.is/frettir/2008/8/22/storasta-land-i-heiminu/ DS.iv (2008-08-22). Note: "Stórasta" is more of a lapsus linguae than "most big," as to a native Icelandic speaker it would sound much worse grammatically than in English.

World, Country

“At any rate we may be sure that the political instinct of our bourgeois opponents, as soon as their class interests come into play, will lead them to take a position hostile to us. A classical example is furnished by Belgium, where, as already remarked, a compromise was concluded under the most favorable circumstances conceivable, between the socialists and the liberals. Our party was in undisputed possession of the leadership and was therefore in no danger of being cheated out of the fruits of the common victory. The end sought was universal, equal and direct suffrage. But the clerical party knows its boys, knows its Pappenheimers. It knows that the bourgeoisie has no class interest in giving the laborers, who, in modern industrial states, constitute a majority of the population, the universal suffrage and thereby the prospect of winning a majority and getting political supremacy. It made a counter demand for proportional representation with plural voting, that is, giving more votes to the rich, and thereby granting to the radical bourgeoisie a share in the government, if it would assist in defeating universal and direct suffrage. And behold, without a minute’s hesitation the gentlemen of the radical bourgeoisie broke their agreement with the socialists and joined the clericals in their fight against universal suffrage and the social democracy. Whoever is not convinced by this example that the emancipation struggle of the proletariat is a class struggle is one on whom further arguments would be wasted.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

Hostility, Democracy, Boy, Universe

“Though its fame is much restricted by its specialized nature, there is no doubt that Panini's grammar is one of the greatest intellectual achievements of any ancient civilization, and the most detailed and scientific grammar composed before the 19th century in any part of the world.”

Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian

Professor A. L. Basham in: Daya Kishan Thussu Communicating India's Soft Power: Buddha to Bollywood https://books.google.co.in/books?id=Ab_QAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA47, Palgrave Macmillan, 24 October 2013, p. 47.

World, Nature, Parting

“We never took a vote in the Cabinet that I can remember and the most important of all the Prime Minister's functions is to give a firm lead in Cabinet so that decisions can be taken quickly. The Prime Minister musn't always listen to those who talk most.”

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

Address to the Oxford University Law Society (14 June 1957), quoted in The Times (15 June 1957), p. 4.
1950s

Decision

“Don't let anyone tell you that our country is weak. We're not. Don't let anyone tell you we don't have what it takes. We do. And most of all, don't believe anyone who says: “I alone can fix it.””

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

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), (July 28, 2016)

Country

“A genuine faith lifts us above the bitterness of grief; a sense of Christ's living presence takes away all unbearable loneliness even when we are most alone. In our darkest hours, to know that our lost friend is still living, still loving us, still ours, in the highest and best sense, must be unspeakably consoling.”

Arthur Kenney (1776–1855) Irish dean

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 27.

Love, Faith, Sense, Christ

“Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He'd said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life.”

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

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

Love, Life, School

“I find that maybe, perhaps the Marc collection is the most sexy ’cause it’s the most youthful, and what I find sexy is youth.”

Marc Jacobs (1963) American fashion designer

Jonkers, Gert (2003). "Friendly homosexual fashion designer likes dogs but finds fashionable men terribly unsexy" http://www.buttmagazine.com/Issues/7_Jacobs.html buttmagazine.com (accessed April 19, 2007) On which of his three collections is sexiest

Youth

“Islamic literary sources provide far more extensive evidence of temple destruction by the Muslim invaders of India in medieval times. They also cover a larger area, from Sinkiang and Transoxiana in the North to Tamil Nadu in the South, and from the Seistan province of present-day Iran in the West to Assam in the East. As we wade through this evidence, we can visualise how this vast area, which was for long the cradle of Hindu culture, came to be literally littered with the ruins of temples and monasteries belonging to all schools of Sanãtana Dharma-Bauddha, Jaina, Šaiva, Šãkta, VaishNava and the rest. Archaeological explorations and excavations in modern times have proved unmistakably that most of the mosques, mazãrs, ziãrats and dargãhs which were built in this area in medieval times, stood on the sites of and were made from the materials of deliberately demolished Hindu monuments.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

School, Time

“One of the most potent ways to spiritualize the home is to create a sacred space, an altar, or a room used only for meditation, prayer, or spiritual reading. […] Your sacred place will become an area of high spiritual vibrations which will affect the entire house, thereby attracting pious personalities. Having a sacred space will also remind you that your home belongs to God and that you are simply the caretaker of it.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: Dreams: A State of Reality, p. 27

God, Way, Home, Reading

“Conventional economic theory is built is built on the assumption of diminishing returns. Economic actions engender a negative feedback that leads to a predictable equilibrium for prices and market shares. Such feedback tends to stabilize the economy because any major changes will be offset by the very reactions they generate. The high oil prices of the 1970s encouraged energy conservation and increased oil exploration, precipitating a predictable drop in prices by the early 1980s. According to conventional theory, the equilibrium marks the “best” outcome possible under the circumstances: the most efﬁcient use and allocation of resources.”

W. Brian Arthur (1946) American economist

Source: Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy, (1994), p. 1: Chapter 1. Positive feedback in economics

Change

“My early feeling that scientific truths are to the Christian religion much what brooks and rivers are to the ocean, has become my most vital conviction. Tempted as I was to drift with the tempest of passion, I had made shipwreck in these latter years, had not in my heaviest hours the Mercy of God, through your instrumentality, kept me always on the right path.”

Robert Mayer (1814–1878) German physicist

December 31 1851, as translated by Kneller, Karl Alois. 1911. pp. 18. Christianity and the Leaders of Modern Science https://archive.org/stream/christianitylead00kneluoft#page/18/mode/2up. London.

God, Truth, Religion, Feeling

“The characteristic method of social invention in general and of the development of negative capability in particular is to seize on deviant, subsidiary, or repressed elements in present or remembered experience and to push them toward a dominant position, all the while changing them in the course of this extension…. [T]he most successful transmutations over the long run—the ones least vulnerable to subversion by practical rivalry, moral indignation or aspiration, and by theoretical insight—are likely to be those that permit or invite further tinkering. Thus, they may be repeatedly corrected rather than entirely replaced.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), p. 336

Change, Success

“Most scripts are bad. I read a lot of them. Brick was a good script just to read. It was like, “Oh my God, these words feel so good in my mouth.” A lot of movies try to set up a world with cool sets, costumes, camera work. In Brick, the world is born from the words.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (1981) American actor, director, producer, and writer

Newsweek, March 31, 2006

God, World, Feeling, Reading

“She was a reader; there were many citizens who were not. The prevailing social explanation for illiteracy was that there were people who were temperamentally unsuited for reading—and indeed there were few callings in a computerized, video-saturated world that required literacy. Lilo accepted that, but had always had a feeling that most people never learned to read because they simply were not smart enough.”

John Varley book The Ophiuchi Hotline

Source: The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977), Chapter 5 (p. 49)

People, World, Feeling, Learning

“The search for the most effective conflict resolution procedure requires identification of the primary objective in resolving different kinds of disputes. This article focuses on the kind of disputes considered in the legal system and draws on the results of the authors' empirical studies to develop a general theory of procedure for attaining the objectives of "truth" and "justice" in situations of cognitive conflict, conflict of interest, and in "mixed" disputes.”

John Thibaut (1917–1986) American social psychologist

Source: "A theory of procedure." 1978, p. 541, Abstract

Truth, Justice, Search, Study

“Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime.”

Emma Goldman (1868–1940) anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches

Anarchism, What it Really Stands For (1910)
Anarchism, What it Really Stands For (1910)

Life, Hate, People, Law

“I think a lot of American people are infatuated with God, but we don't really love Him, and they don't really let Him love them. Being loved by God is one of the most painful things in the world. It's also the only thing that can bring us salvation. And it's like everything else that is really wonderful, there's a little bit of pain in it, little bit of hurt.”

Rich Mullins (1955–1997) American christian musician

Wheaton, Illinois http://www.kidbrothers.net/words/concert-transcripts/wheaton-illinois-sep1590-backup-copy.html (September 15, 1990) In Concert

Love, God, Pain, People

“The most important battle is one to conquer yourself.”

Yanni (1954) Greek pianist, keyboardist, composer, and music producer

Yanni in Words. Miramax Books. Co-author David Rensin

“My profession often gets bad press for a variety of sins, both actual and imagined: arrogance, venality, insensitivity to moral issues about the use of knowledge, pandering to sources of funding with insufficient worry about attendant degradation of values. As an advocate for science, I plead “mildly guilty now and then” to all these charges. Scientists are human beings subject to all the foibles and temptations of ordinary life. Some of us are moral rocks; others are reeds. I like to think (though I have no proof) that we are better, on average, than members of many other callings on a variety of issues central to the practice of good science: willingness to alter received opinion in the face of uncomfortable data, dedication to discovering and publicizing our best and most honest account of nature's factuality, judgment of colleagues on the might of their ideas rather than the power of their positions.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Dinosaur in a Haystack

"The Razumovsky Duet", p. 270
Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995)

Life, Imagination, Idea, Nature

“Beyond the slogans of "a common language and a common citizenship" a program of Americanization has not been accepted. America, the greatest immigration country in the world, has no national domestic policy whatsoever and no organization as a government for dealing with race assimilation, its most delicate and fundamental problem. Americans like to think hi a crude way of this country as a melting pot, with peasants from Ellis Island going in at the top and citizens in American clothes going out at the bottom. We now know there has been little real change accomplished, and we are beginning to wonder whether the new arrival needs as much change as we thought he did to become one of us.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

World, Way, Problem, Thinking

“You can't get rid of thoughts, and you can't get rid of thinking. To battle your mind is one of the most deceptive ways that the mind keeps you in its own domain.”

Adyashanti (1962) Spiritual teacher

The Basic Teachings - Part 1: Principles of the Teaching (2009)

Way, Thinking

“Herz, Thalberg, Heller, Felicien David and others were great virtuosos of their time, more famous than Chopin himself. They had their own personal styles, but the essence of their music was time-bound, nothing that could occupy generations after them. Chopin, in contrast, was someone special, someone who was completely different from all other artists, composers, and pianists. So too with his style. As a result, the aesthetic in approaching Chopin is distinctive: interpreting his music is the most difficult of all. For me personally, it’s the crowning of playing piano. Bach, Mozart, Chopin: these are the three who definitely created musical art in an all-embracing and overwhelming way.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Art, Music, Way, Time

“It's awfully considerate of you to think of me here, and I'm most obliged to you for making it clear that I'm not here.”

Syd Barrett (1946–2006) English musician

Jugband Blues

Thinking

“Once I was a shadow of man. Most dark nights my head was in it's hands.”

Ed Harcourt (1977) British musician

I'am The Drug.

Night

“An organization's mission statement (1) should contain its reasons for existence and its most general aspirations, its ideals. (2) It should identify in very general terms the way(s) by which the organization will pursue its ideals, that is, the business it wants to be in. (3) It should formulate the ways by which it will attempt to serve each of its stakeholder groups. (4) It should meet the preceding requirements in a way that is exciting and challenging to all its stakeholders. Finally, (5) it should establish the uniqueness of the organization.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1990s, Re-Creating the Corporation (1999), p. 83.

Way, Business

“I have discovered a goodness and decency in people as exhibited in all the letters, e-mails, flowers, gifts and prayers that have been directed my way. I am overwhelmed and humbled. I offer you my most sincere thanks and my deep and abiding gratitude. If I ever write my memoirs, I have some spellbinding material. How does the Joni Mitchell song go? "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone"? One thing I've discovered is that I love my job more than I thought I did, and I love my wife even more!”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

"Roger writes to readers" Chicago Sun Times (11 October 2006)

Love, People, Way, Flowers

“The essential difference between est and Scientology is two-fold. The first has to do with Scientology’s emphasis on survival and its idea that the purpose of life is survival. est sees the purpose of life as wholeness or completion – truth – not survival…The other main difference between est and Scientology lies in the treatment of knowing. Ron Hubbard seems to have no difficulty in codifying the truth and in urging people to believe it. But I suspect all codifications, particularly my own. In presenting my own ideas, I emphasize their epistemological context. I hold them as pointers to the truth, not as the truth itself. I don’t think anyone ought to believe the ideas that we use in est. The est philosophy is not a belief system and most certainly ought not to be believed. In any case, even the truth, when believed, is a lie. You must experience the truth, not believe it.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

Interview with William Warren Bartley, cited in — [Bartley, William Warren, w:William Warren Bartley, Werner Erhard: the Transformation of a Man: the Founding of est, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1978, New York, 157, 0-517-53502-5]

Life, People, Truth, Lie

“But make no mistake. My counterpart is capable of a great deal of ruthlessness in pursuit of a just cause. He believes he has right on his side. And men who think they have right on their side are always the most dangerous sort.”

Alastair Reynolds book Redemption Ark

Source: Redemption Ark (2002), Chapter 32 (p. 600)

Men, Thinking

“"Have you come, then, to rescue me?"
He laughed and said, "from what, 'Colleen'?"
You dried and dressed most willingly.
You corseted, and caught the dread disease
by which one comes to know such peace."”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Colleen
Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band (2007)

Disease, Peace

“The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations of Europe. In the neighbourhood of Canton many hundred, it is commonly said, many thousand families have no habitation on the land, but live constantly in little fishing boats upon the rivers and the canals. The subsistence which they find there is so scanty that they are eager to fish up the nastiest garbage thrown overboard from any European ship. Any carrion, the carcase of a dead dog or cat, for example, though half putrid and stinking, is as welcome to them as the most wholesome food to the people of other countries.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book I, Chapter VIII, p. 86.

People, Family, Food, Dogs

“The opportunities for heroism are limited in this kind of world: the most people can do is sometimes not to be as weak as they’ve been at other times.”

Angus Wilson (1913–1991) british author

Malcolm Cowley (ed.) Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series (New York: Viking Press, [1958] 1959) p. 261.

People, World, Time

“I left Cuba when I was two years old. They took away my country, they stole the most intimate thing a human being can have. How could I forget that Fidel Castro was the person who did me so much harm?”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

"Exito (online newspaper)" (October 1997)
2007, 2008

Personality, Country, Forgetting

“In my tender years and bairn-age, at schools, having on the one part contracted a loving familiaritie with a certain gentleman a papist, and on the other part being attentive to the sermons of that worthy man of God, Maister Christopher Goodman, teaching upon the Apocalyps, I was moved in admiration against the blindness of papists that could not most evidentlie see their seven hilled Citie of Rome, painted out there so lively by Saint John, as the Mother of all Spiritual Whoredome: that not onlie bursted I oute in continuall reasoning against my said familiar, but also from thence forth I determined with myself by the assistance of God's spirit to employ my study and diligence to search out the remanent mysteries of that holy booke (as to this houre praised be the Lord I have bin doing at all such times as convenientlie I might have occasion) &c.”

John Napier (1550–1617) Scottish mathematician

A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John (1593) Preface, as quoted by David Stewart Erskine Earl of Buchan, Walter Minto, An Account of the Life, Writings, and Inventions of John Napier, of Merchiston (1787) a reference to his education at the University of St. Andrews

Love, God, Books, Age

“Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data. History of science indicates that, particularly in the early developmental stages of a new paradigm, it is not even very difficult to invent such alternates. But that invention of alternates is just what scientists seldom undertake except during the pre-paradigm stage of their science’s development and at very special occasions during its subsequent evolution. So long as the tools a paradigm supplies continue to prove capable of solving the problems it defines, science moves fastest and penetrates most deeply through confident employment of those tools. The reason is clear. As in manufacture so in science—retooling is an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it. The significance of crises is the indication they provide that an occasion for retooling has arrived.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), VII. Crisis and the Emergence of Scientific Theories, p. 76 (2012 ed.)

Confidence, History, Problem, Science

“It's definitely the book that I can tell—I don't know if other people can tell but I can tell as a writer–-is probably the most divisive that I've written. It has an equal number of detractors as it does fans. It doesn't really hold true with the other books. It was the one that took the longest to write, and the one that seemed the most important at the time. It's an unwieldy book… I like it.”

Bret Easton Ellis (1964) American novelist

On Glamorama http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=571852

People, Books, Time

“Nothing was said. And on crawled the little procession in the direction of Summerhouses, men and animals, men-animals, five souls. The pale red sun grazed the surface of the moorland bluffs on this northern winter's morning which was really only an evening. And yet it was midday. The light gilded the clouds of snow flying over the moors so that they seemed one unbroken ocean of fire, one radiant fire of gold with streaming flames and glimmering smoke from east to west over the whole frozen expanse. Through this golden fire of frost, comparable in its magic to nothing but the most powerful and elaborate witchcraft of the Ballads, lay their homeward way.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book One, Part I: Icelandic Pioneers

Men, Way, Soul, Light

“At the very heart, that is. Other things, like humanity, and mercy, and charity, that most good men hold more precious than all else, they do not come first for the Light. Oh, sometimes they are there; often, indeed. But in the very long run the concern of you people is with the absolute good, ahead of all else. You are like fanatics. Your masters, at any rate. Like the old Crusaders—oh, like certain groups in every belief, though this is not a matter of religion, of course. At the centre of the Light there is a cold white flame, just as at the centre of the Dark there is a great black pit bottomless as the Universe.”

Susan Cooper (1935) English fantasy writer

Source: The Dark Is Rising (1965-1977), The Grey King (1975), Chapter 10 “The Pleasant Lake” (p. 115)

Men, People, Religion, Light

“The supreme Being is everywhere; but He is not equally visible everywhere. Let us seek Him in the simplest things, in the most fundamental laws of Nature, in the universal rules by which movement is conserved, distributed or destroyed; and let us not seek Him in phenomena that are merely complex consequences of these laws.”

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

Les Loix du Mouvement et du Repos, déduites d'un Principe Métaphysique (1746)

Law, Nature, Universe

“Firstly, I must of necessity express some obvious qualifications about my remarks. Foremost, I can never fully imagine, much less experience, the issues faced by any woman. I was born male in an advanced Western nation, to comfortably well off parents. I have never routinely experienced discrimination in my career, nor the apprehension of violence in my personal life. Far too many women regardless of nationality, religion, or class status have known both. Most benefits of masculinity and patriarchy have accrued to me. Nonetheless, I hope those considerable limitations in my perspective can in part be offset by my sincere intent to support women in my organisation to thrive in the absence of both.”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

Life, Women, Religion, Hope

“In fact, the French - who read and theorise the most - became so addicted to political experiment that in the two centuries since our own rather drab revolution they have exuberantly produced one Directory, one Consulate, two empires, three restorations of the monarchy, and five republics. That's what happens when you take writing too seriously.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

"Lincoln and the Priests of Academe"
1990s, United States - Essays 1952-1992 (1992)

Reading

“The man who claims to have no need of philosophy is the one most apt to be fooled by it.”

William Lane Craig (1949) American Christian apologist and evangelist

A Reasonable Response: Answers to Tough Questions on God, Christianity, and the Bible (2013)

Fools

“Yoga teaches that whatever we want in life we can have if we are willing to provide it for others. So if yogis want to be free, they understand that to deprive others of freedom will ultimately not benefit their project—to be free themselves. Following that logic, yogis abhor slavery and examine their own lives to find ways that they themselves might be condoning slavery and then eradicate those ways of acting. The fact is that animals who are raised for food are slaves. Making kind choices when it comes to the food we eat is one of the most basic ways to begin to ensure our own happiness and freedom. The cause for our own happiness, health, and freedom lies in how happy and free we can make the lives of others. The definition of others includes other animals.”

Sharon Gannon (1951) American yoga teacher

Simple Recipes for Joy (2014)

Life, Happiness, Health, Food

“Sometimes for us in Canada it seems as though the United States and the United Kingdom were cup and saucer, and Canada the spoon, for we are in and out of both with the greatest freedom, and we are given most recognition when we are most a nuisance.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Freedom

“If we feel less threatened today, if we feel as though we live in a non-violent society, it is only because we have ceded so much power over our daily lives to the state. Some call this reason, but we might just as well call it laziness. A dangerous laziness, it would seem, given how little most people say they trust politicians.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

Violence is Golden
A Sky Without Eagles (2014)

People, Feeling

“The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.”

Germaine Greer (1939) Australian feminist author

Chapter 2 http://books.google.com/books?id=7MGFAAAAIAAJ&q=%22The+management+of+fertility+is+one+of+the+most+important%22+%22of+adulthood%22&pg=PA40#v=onepage Sex and Destiny : The Politics of Human Fertility (1984)

Adulthood