Quotes about most (10000 quotes, page 82)

“I certainly believe that the simple landscape which seems less impressive is the nature that is most proper to paint. (translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)”

Willem Roelofs (1822–1897) Dutch painter and entomologist (1822-1897)

(original Dutch: citaat van Willem Roelofs, in het Nederlands:) Ik geloof beslist dat de natuur die het meest geschikt is om na te schilderen, het eenvoudige landschap is dat weinig indrukwekkend lijkt.
as cited in Zó Hollands - Het Hollandse landschap in de Nederlandse kunst sinds 1850, Antoon Erftemeijer https://www.franshalsmuseum.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/zohollands_eindversie_def_1.pdf; Frans Hals museum | De Hallen, Haarlem 2011, p. 16 – note 2
undated quotes

Nature , Painting

“The most famous Scientology wedding was between Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes on November 18, 2006, in Italy. Although it may seem frivolous to focus on such an event when considering an extraordinary group, this wedding for much of the world brought Scientology to the front page. … The significance of Scientology to Cruise was underscored by his selection of David Miscavige, head of the Church of Scientology since the death of L. Ron Hubbard, as his best man.”

David Miscavige (1960) leader of the Church of Scientology

[Zellner, William W., Richard T. Schaefer, Extraordinary Groups: An Examination of Unconventional Lifestyles, Worth Publishers, 2007, Church of Scientology: Social Positions, 304, 0716770342].
About

Death , World , Wedding

“I was a French Quarter rat from the moment I could get on a bus by myself and go to the French Quarter. I played music most of my early life and it just seemed that to entertain people was a really good thing to do.”

John Larroquette (1947) born 1947; American film, television and stage actor

Responding to the question, "When did you know that the acting thing was for you?" during an interview with Tavis Smiley, http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200804/20080411_larroquette.html Tavis Smiley Tonight (2008-10-18).

Life , People , Music

“One of the most melancholy consequences of this habit of deferring to other nations, and to other systems, is the fact that it causes us to undervalue the high blessings we so peculiarly enjoy; to render us ungrateful towards God, and to make us unjust to our fellow men, by throwing obstacles in their progress towards liberty.”

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) American author

A Letter to His Countrymen (1834)

Men , God

“Of all that is most beauteous, imaged there
In happier beauty; more pellucid streams,
An ampler ether, a diviner air,
And fields invested with purpureal gleams.”

William Wordsworth Laodamia

Stanza 18.
Laodamia (1814)

Beauty

“The business of the English Commander-in-Chief being first to bring an Enemy's Fleet to Battle, on the most advantageous terms to himself, (I mean that of laying his Ships close on board the Enemy, as expeditiously as possible;) and secondly, to continue them there, without separating, until the business is decided.”

Horatio Nelson (1758–1805) Royal Navy Admiral

"Plan of Attack" (1805), drawn up during pursuit of the French fleet to the West Indies, as published in The Dispatches and Letters of Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson with Notes (1866) edited by Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas, Vol. VI : May 1804 - July 1805, p. 443
The Battle of Trafalgar (1805)

Business

“All parties are deeply committed to intervention in the lives of the people. The goal of some is to convert the state into a universal Providence. Character is built up by innumerable acts of choice. If all or most of the crucial choices in life are made for you by the State, when then becomes of the democratic ideal…the management of and responsibility for our own lives, whether we be clever or stupid, good or bad?”

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

The John Clifford Lecture at Coventry (14 July 1930), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 47
1930

Life , People , Stupidity , Universe

“It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none.
But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously argued in favour of diligence; only there is something to be said against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say.”

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer

An Apology for Idlers.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

People , Fools , Personality , Indifference

“With a little effort, we can help fat people help themselves. But first we have to make sure that "fat acceptance", perhaps the most alarming and irresponsible idea to come out of leftist victimhood and grievancean politics, is given the heart attack it deserves.”

Milo Yiannopoulos (1984) British journalist

Science Proves It: Fat-Shaming Works http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/07/05/fat-shaming-is-good-science/, Breitbart (5 July 2016)
2016

People , Idea , Effort , Help

“Properly understood, then, the desire to act justly derives in part from the desire to express most fully what we are or can be, namely free and equal rational beings with the liberty to choose.”

John Rawls book A Theory of Justice

Source: A Theory of Justice (1971; 1975; 1999), Chapter IV, Section 40, p. 256

Parting

“Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Friendship

Search , Parting , Sincerity

“In Aristotle the mind, regarded as the principle of life, divides into nutrition, sensation, and faculty of thought, corresponding to the inner most important stages in the succession of vital phenomena.”

Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) German physician, physiologist, philosopher and professor

Source: Principles of Physiological Psychology, 1904, p. 22

Life , Success

“The citizens of democracies are the least likely to be murdered by their own government; the citizens of totalitarian, especially Marxist systems, the most likely.”

Rudolph Rummel book Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder since 1917

Source: Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder since 1917 (1990), p. xi

Democracy

“The history of credulity would be the most singular page in the great history of mankind. From those vast beliefs which have founded religions and empires, down to the inventions that garnish the last new murder, there has always been a tendency in the human mind to believe with as little expense of the reasoning faculty as possible.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Literary Remains

Religion , History

“Of all the clever people round me here
I most delight in Me –
Mine is the only voice I care to hear,
And mine the only face I like to see.”

Roy Campbell (poet) (1901–1957) South African poet

"Home Thoughts in Bloomsbury," lines 1-4
Adamastor (1930)

People

“The possibility to create the context in which people’s lives really matter is undoubtedly the most profound opportunity available to anyone, ever.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

The Graduate Review (April 1980)

People

“What is necessary is for workers and the left to obtain all the lessons the Chilean experience can offer, so that we never again make these errors. That’s why I maintain, that in Chile the left has not failed, socialism has not failed, nor has the revolution failed, nor have workers failed. What came to a tragic end in Chile was the reformist illusion of modifying socio-economic structures and making revolutions before the pasive consent of those to be most affected: the ruling classes.”

Miguel Enríquez (1944–1974) Chilean politician

Answer to the question: "In your opinion does the downfall of the left cancel for a long period the struggle for socialism in Chile?"

Error

“[…] Perhaps the easiest way to convince yourself is by scanning the literature of soft psychology over the last 30 years and noticing what happens to theories. Most of them suffer the fate that General MacArthur ascribed to old generals—They never die, they just slowly fade away. In the developed sciences, theories tend either to become widely accepted and built into the larger edifice of well-tested human knowledge or else they suffer destruction in the face of recalcitrant facts and are abandoned, perhaps regretfully as a “nice try.” But in fields like personology and social psychology, this seems not to happen. There is a period of enthusiasm about a new theory, a period of attempted application to several fact domains, a period of disillusionment as the negative data come in, a growing bafflement about inconsistent and unreplicable empirical results, multiple resort to ad hoc excuses, and then finally people just sort of lose interest in the thing and pursue other endeavors.”

Paul E. Meehl (1920–2003) American psychologist

Theoretical Risks and Tabular Asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the Slow Progress of Soft Psychology (1978)

Fate , People , Way , Literature

“If only there were a lexicographer of Liang Shih-ch'iu's ability who also had the perspicuity to arrange his dictionary by sound rather than radical! … No wonder most of us are so sour and gray by the time we reach fifty! The amount of time consumed and the spirit expended in this sort of meaningless, not to mention destructive, type of activity is beyond calculation.”

Victor H. Mair (1943) American sinologist and linguist

The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese (February 1986).

Time

“Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly.”

E. B. White (1899–1985) American writer

Paris Review interview (1969)

Children , Question

“We live in an age of belief-belief in the omnipotence of science. This belief is bolstered by the fact that the problems scientists are called on to solve are for the most part selected by the scientists themselves.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Source: 1960s, "The Use and Misuse of Game Theory," 1962, p. 108

Age , Problem , Science , Parting

“In short, greatly as I admire all that has been said here to-night, gladly and gratefully as I recognise the genuinely philosophic temper and the authentic philosophic place it all most certainly has, I am still moved to say that my honoured colleagues, in this their common underlying conception, have to my mind all "missed the mark and come short of the glory of God." They have not seized nor expressed the complete Ideal of the Reason.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The City of God and the True God as its Head (In Royce’s “The Conception of God: a Philosophical Discussion Concerning the Nature of the Divine Idea as a Demonstrable Reality”), p.89

God , Night

“The Sultan requested the wise men to supply some rules and regulations for grinding down the Hindus, and for depriving them of that wealth and property which fosters disaffection and rebellion. … The people were brought to such a state of obedience that one revenue officer would string twenty khiits, mukaddims, or chaudharis together by the neck, and enforce payment by blows. No Hindu could hold up his head, and in their houses no sign of gold or silver, tonkas or jitals, or of any superfluity was to be seen. These things, which nourish insubordination and rebellion, were no longer to be found. Driven by destitution, the wives of the khuls and mukaddims went and served for hire in the houses of the Musulmans…. The Hindu was to be so reduced as to be left un- able to keep a horse to ride on, to carry arms, to wear fine clothes, or to enjoy any of the luxuries of life. …. I have, therefore, taken my measures, and have made my subjects obedient, so that at my command they are ready to creep into holes like mice. Now you tell me that it is all in accordance with law that the Hindus should be reduced to the most abject obedience. I am an unlettered man, but I have seen a great deal; be assured then that the Hindus will never become submissive and obedient till they are reduced to poverty. I have, therefore, given orders that just sufficient shall be left to them from year to year, of corn, milk, and curds, but that they shall not be allowed to accumulate hoards and property.”

Alauddin Khalji (1266–1316) Ruler of the Khalji dynasty

Tarikh-i Firoz Shahi, of Ziauddin Barani in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. III : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. p. 182 ff.
Quotes from Muslim medieval histories

Life , Men , People , Law

“His reasoning had been introverted, turned from an examination of men as mammals and devoted to a sorrow that sinful and aching souls should not more readily seek the security of a mystic process known as Conviction, Repentance, and Salvation, which he was assured by the noblest and most literate men he had ever known, was guaranteed to cure all woe. His own experience did not absolutely confirm this.”

Sinclair Lewis book Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry (1927)

Men , Soul

“We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driving at. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating directly to our experience. Logical ends, on the contrary, escape us. It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge. It too leans for support on what is most immediately expedient, and it is protected by the sentinels of common sense.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (Manifesto of Surrealism; 1924)

Age , Support , Problem , Sense

“Men see what they are most afraid of.”

Patricia A. McKillip book The Forgotten Beasts of Eld

Source: The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (1974), Chapter 4, p. 94.

Men

“One of the most characteristic new developments since the 1970s has been the rise of a type of religiosity that we usually call “fundamentalism” in most of the major world religions, including the three religions of God. A highly political spirituality, it is literal and intolerant in its vision. In the United States, which has always been prone to extremist and apocalyptic enthusiasm, Christian fundamentalism has attached itself to the New Right. Fundamentalists campaign for the abolition of legal abortion and for a hard line on moral and social decency.”

Karen Armstrong book A History of God

A History of God (1993)

God , World , Religion

“But the most remarkable thing about prehistoric naturalism is not that it is older than the geometric style, which makes so much more of a primitive impression, but that it already reveals all the typical phases of development through which art has passed in modern times and is not in any sense the merely instinctive, static, a-historical phenomenon which scholars obsessed with geometric and rigorously formal art declare it to be. This is an art which advances from a linear faithfulness to nature, in which individual forms are still shaped somewhat rigidly and laboriously, to a more nimble and sparkling, almost impressionistic technique.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

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

Faith , Art , Nature , Sense

“He has painted portraits of some of the world's most famous people - from US President George Bush to the Queen of England - and at the Joburg 2007 Sexpo, he was a huge hit.”

Pricasso (1949) Australian painter

[Lee Rondganger, Artist with unusual technique a Sexpo hit, The Star, South Africa, 28 September 2007, 2, Independent Online]
About

People , World , Painting

“If the golden gate of preferment is not usually opened to men of real merit, persons of no worth have entered it in a most extraordinary manner.”

Isaac D'Israeli (1766–1848) British writer

Royal Promotions.
Curiosities of Literature (1791–1834)

Men , Personality

“It seems to me that dominant cinema seems to require an empathy or a sympathy between the film and the audience which is basically to do with the manipulation of the emotions and it seems to me again -- and this is a very subjective position -- that most cinema seems to trivialise the emotions, sentimentalising or romanticising them.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

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

“The chronological inconsistencies are perhaps most clearly exemplified by the writings of Nicole Oresme. In his Traictie de la Premierere Invention des Monnies, written about 1360, he develops a theory of money which reveals a very different approach to economic problems from that of his fellow Churchmen.”

Eric Roll, Baron Roll of Ipsden (1907–2005) British economist

Source: A History of Economic Thought (1939), Chapter I, The Beginnings, p. 53

Money , Problem

“I think you can meet the right girl at the wrong time, and it gets screwed up. If you meet the right girl at the wrong time, that girl has to be the most understanding person in the world because there's going to be a lot more bumps in the road. And, hey, it might be the right time for the guy and not for the girl, but if it's not the right time for one of them, and the other one tries to control that, it's not gonna have a happy ending. Both people have to be ready, and they might not think they're ready… that's why I think it's the right girl first.”

Jake Johnson

New Girl's Jake Johnson Talks Married Life, Drinking, and Partying at Steven Speilberg's House (for Real) http://www.glamour.com/story/new-girls-jake-johnson-talks-t (August 22, 2013)

People , World , Guy , Girl

“Surely just about everybody has faced a moral dilemma and secretly wished, "If only somebody — somebody I trusted — could just tell me what to do!" Wouldn't this be morally inauthentic? Aren't we responsible for making our own moral decisions? Yes, but the virtues of "do it yourself" moral reasoning have their limits, and if you decide, after conscientious consideration, that your moral decision is to delegate further moral decisions in your life to a trusted expert, then you have made your own moral decision. You have decided to take advantage of the division of labor that civilization makes possible and get the help of expert specialists.We applaud the wisdom of this course in all other important areas of decision-making (don't try to be your own doctor, the lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client, and so forth). Even in the case of political decisions, like which way to vote, the policy of delegation can be defended. … Is the a dereliction of [one's] dut[y] as a citizen? I don't think so, but it does depend on my having good grounds for trusting [the delegate's] judgment. … That why those who have an unquestioning faith in the correctness of the moral teachings of their religion are a problem: if they themselves haven't conscientiously considered, on their own, whether their pastors or priests or rabbis or imams are worthy of this delegated authority over their own lives, then they are in fact taking a personally immoral stand.This is perhaps the most shocking implication of my inquiry, and I do not shrink from it, even though it may offend many who think of themselves as deeply moral. It is commonly supposed that it is entirely exemplary to adopt the moral teachings of one's own religion without question, because -- to put it simply — it is the word of God (as interpreted, always, by the specialists to whom one has delegated authority). I am urging, on the contrary, that anybody who professes that a particular point of moral conviction is not discussable, not debatable, not negotiable, simply because it is the word of God, or because the Bible says so, or because "that is what all Muslims [Hindus, Sikhs… ] [sic] believe, and I am a Muslim [Hindu, Sikh… ]" [sic], should be seen to be making it impossible for the rest of us to take their views seriously, excusing themselves from the moral conversation, inadvertently acknowledging that their own views are not conscientiously maintained and deserve no further hearing.”

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

Breaking the Spell (2006)

Life , Wisdom , God , Faith

“Commodification has led most people to view God as a device to be used rather than an all-powerful Creator to be revered.”

Skye Jethani

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

God , People

“Mel and I genuinely get on. It's like another marriage. He is very straightforward and never loses his rag. I run around in a frenzy most of the time. London cabbies will say to me, 'Your mate Mel's a miserable bastard', but he's far more grounded than me.”

Griff Rhys Jones (1953) British actor and comedian

Michael Odell, "This much I know: Griff Rhys Jones", The Guardian, November 5 2006.
Talking about Mel Smith

Marriage , Time

“In short, the avalanche of Turco- Mughal invaders, and the policy of their Government turned many settled agriculturists into tribals of the jungles…. For example, many Parihars and Parmars, once upon a time belonging to the proud Rajput castes, are now included in lower castes. So are the “Rajputs” counted in Backward Classes in South India. … in course of time many of these Jats and Khokhars were pushed into belonging to low castes of to-day. For the later times is the example of the Satnamis. This sect was an offshoot of the Raidasis….. At last Aurangzeb crushed them by sending 10,000 troops (March, 1672) and facing a most obstinate battle in which two thousand Satnamis fell on the field and many more were slain during the pursuit. Those who escaped spread out into small units so that today there are about 15 million Satnami Harijans….”

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

Source: The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (1992), Chapter 7

Time

“Students, young people, have the right to join together in order to guide their efforts towards a common goal, and they will use this right. As for their goal, it is simple: for them it is a matter of ensuring that the July revolution is not a lie; every edifice built by the Empire and the Restoration must be overthrown, and since not one single stone of this edifice is yet to fall, they will work indefatigably to demolish and destroy it. We call for the destruction of the university. We call for the destruction of the country’s most odious and harmful monopoly, of that which stifles civilization at its source and which is the cruellest insult inflicted on human intelligence.”

Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) French socialist and political activist

"Declaration of the Provisional Committee for Schools" (1831)

People , Lie , Intelligence , Effort

“Isn't the use by America and some Western governments of their fire against others in the world including, or in the forefront of whom are the Arabs and the Muslims, one of the most important reasons of the lack of stability in the world at the present time? Isn't the evil inflicted on America in the act of September 11, 2001, and nothing else, a result of this and other acts? This is the main question and this is what the American administration along with of the Western governments or the Western public opinion should answer in the first place with serenity and responsibility, without emotional reaction and without the use of the same old methods that America used against the world.”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

Open letter to the American peoples http://www.wadinet.de/news/iraq/nw273_saddamopenletter.htm (15 September 2001).

World , Question , Evil , Time

“Most of the writers I know in any field, especially science fiction, grew up late. They're so interested in doing what they do and in their science, they don't think about other things.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Playboy interview (1996)

Thinking , Science

“The most significant feature of our histories, however, is the religious zeal felt or exhibited by the swordsmen of Islam before and after the “infidels” who resisted “were sent to hell”, the Brahmans massacred or molested or expelled, idols desecrated, temples demolished, and mosques raised in their stead. The prophet of Islam appears in a dream and bids a sultãn to start on the “holy expedition”, leaving no doubt that the “victory of religion” was assured. Amîr Khusrû was very eloquent about the transformation that was taking place. When the hordes of Alãu’d-Dîn Khaljî sacked the temple of Somnath, he exulted, “The sword of Islãm purified the land as the Sun purifies the earth.” His enthusiasm broke all bounds when the same hordes swept over South India: “The tongue of the sword of the Khalifa of the time, which is the tongue of the flame of Islãm, has imparted light to the entire darkness of Hindustãn by the illumination of its guidance… and several capitals of the gods of the Hindus in which Satanism had prevailed since the time of Jinns, have been demolished. All these impurities of infidelity have been cleansed by the Sultãn’s destruction of idol-temples, beginning with his first expedition to Deogîr, so that the flames of the fight of the law illumine all these unholy countries… God be praised!” One wonders whether the poet of Islam is being honoured or slandered when he is presented in our own times as the pioneer of Secularism. Or, perhaps, Secularism in India has a meaning deeper than that we find in the dictionaries or dissertations on political science. We may not be much mistaken if, seeing its studied exercise in blackening everything Hindu and whitewashing everything Islamic, we suspect that this Secularism is nothing more than the good old doctrine of Islam in disguise.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

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

God , Religion , Law , Dreams

“The personality market, the most decisive effect and symptom of the great salesroom, underlies the all pervasive distrust and self-alienation so characteristic of metropolitan people. Without common values and mutual trust, the cash nexus that links one man to another in transient contact has been made subtle in a dozen ways, and made to bite deeper into all areas of life and relations. People are required by the salesman ethic and convention to pretend interest in others in order to manipulate them. In the course of time, and as this ethic spreads, it is got on to. Still, it is conformed to as part of one; s job and one's style of life, but now with a winking eye, for one knows that manipulation is inherent in every human contact. Men are estranged from one another as each secretly tries to make an instrument of the other, and in time a full circle is made: one makes an instrument of himself and is estranged from it also.”

C. Wright Mills book White Collar: The American Middle Classes

White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)

Life , Men , People , Way

“The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish.”

Marguerite Yourcenar book Memoirs of Hadrian

La mémoire de la plupart des hommes est un cimetière abandonné, où gisent sans honneurs des morts qu'ils ont cessé de chérir.
Source: Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), p. 209

Men , Lie , Memory , Dead

“He harms himself who does harm to another, and the evil plan is most harmful to the planner.”

Hesiod book Works and Days

οἷ γ᾽ αὐτῷ κακὰ τεύχει ἀνὴρ ἄλλῳ κακὰ τεύχων
ἡ δὲ κακὴ βουλὴ τῷ βουλεύσαντι κακίστη.
The man who does evil to another does evil to himself, and the evil counsel is most evil for him who counsels it.
He for himself weaves woe who weaves for others woe,
and evil counsel recoils on the counsellor. https://archive.org/stream/b24865898#page/432/mode/2up
Source: Works and Days (c. 700 BC), lines 265-266

Evil

“Emotional Ketchup Burst: The bottling up of opinions and emotions inside onself so that they explosively burst forth all at once, shocking and confusing employers and friends -- most of whom thought things were fine.”

Douglas Coupland (1961) Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and graphic designer

Definitions

“How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.”

Phillips Brooks (1835–1893) American clergyman and author

Actually said by Wendell Phillips, on the murder of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, which occurred on November 7, 1837.
Misattributed

Men , Forgetting

“In secondary immigration, as I await processing, I sit with people for whom I imagine the experience is less of a novelty. To be blunt, non-white people. Mexican and Arabian people, mostly—I assume, I don’t look at their passports; they don’t have them, they’re behind the desks with the border police, equally trapped and obese, behind the counter, often the same color as the people they’re casually harassing. “Who does this notion of nation most suit,” I wonder as I sit there, unable to use my phone. Proper rich people don’t encounter these rooms, these borders, these problems. For them the world is as it is when seen from space, without boundary, without limitation, full of fluid possibility and whispering wonder.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

People , World , Color , Imagination

“Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times.”

Ernest Hemingway book Death in the Afternoon

Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 11

People , Fools , Time

“The pattern of sex differences found in our species mirrors that found in most mammals and in many other animals. As such, considerations of parsimony suggest that the best explanation for the human differences will invoke evolutionary forces common to many species, rather than social forces unique to our own. When we find the standard pattern of differences in other, less culture-bound creatures, we inevitably explain this in evolutionary terms. It seems highly dubious, when we find exactly the same pattern in human beings, to say that, in the case of this one primate species, we must explain it in terms of an entirely different set of causes — learning or cumulative culture — which coincidentally replicates the pattern found throughout the rest of the animal kingdom. Anyone who wishes to adopt this position has a formidable task in front of them. They must explain why, in the hominin lineage uniquely, the standard evolved psychological differences suddenly became maladaptive, and thus why natural selection “wiped the slate clean” of any biological contribution to these differences. They must explain why natural selection eliminated the psychological differences but left the correlated physical differences intact. And they must explain why natural selection would eliminate the psychological differences and leave it all to learning, when learning simply replicated the same sex differences anyway. How could natural selection favor extreme flexibility with respect to sex differences if that flexibility was never exercised and was therefore invisible to selection?”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), pp. 142-143

Sex , Exercises , Nature , Learning

Ali Shariati (1933–1977) Iranian academic and activist

Source: Where Shall We Begin, 1997-2013, p. 1.

God , Soul , Communication

“At eleven o’clock this morning came to an end the cruellest and most terrible War that has ever scourged mankind. I hope we may say that thus, this fateful morning, came to an end all wars.”

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

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1918/nov/11/time-limit-for-reply in the House of Commons (11 November 1918)
Prime Minister

Fate , War , Hope

“What excited me was the recognition that this was simply another version of the problem that had obsessed me all of my life -- the problem of those moments when life seems entirely delightful, when we experience a sensation of what G. K. Chesterton called "absurd good news." Life normally strikes most of us as hard, dull and unsatisfying; but in these moments, consciousness seems to glow and expand, and all the contradictions seem to be resolved. Which of the two visions is true? My own reflections had led me to conclude that the vision of "absurd good news" is somehow broader and more comprehensive than the feeling that life is dull, boring and meaningless. Boredom is basically a feeling of narrowness, and surely a narrow vision is bound to be less true than a broad one?”

Colin Wilson book The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders

Source: The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988), p. 16

Life , Feeling , Problem

“Let most men have a finger, and they will have the whole hand before you know. Let a clan chief have a finger, and he will have the entire arm.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Sorilea
(15 October 1994)

Men

“For me personally and for most other Americans, this commitment to peace and diplomacy does not imply a blind or total pacifism. There are times when war is justified, and for many centuries the moral criteria for violence have been carefully delineated.”

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

Page 151
Post-Presidency, Our Endangered Values (2005)

War , Peace , Time , Personality

“We have come here today to honor the memory of Lafayette, because long ago he came to this country as a private citizen at his own expense and joined us in fighting for the maintenance and extension of our institutions. It was not so much to acquire new rights, as to maintain old rights, that the men of that day put their fortunes to the hazard of war. They were resisting usurpations; they were combating unlawful tyrannies. No doubt they wanted to be Americans, but they wanted most of all to be free. They believed in individual liberty, safeguarded by constitutional guarantees. This principle to them was dearer than life itself. What they fought to preserve and extend, we ought to be ready to fight to maintain.”

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)

Life , Men , War , Memory

“In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is — as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.”

Josef Albers (1888–1976) German-American artist and educator

Quoted in: Margaret Walch (1979) Color source book, p. 98

Art , Color

“I never worry about people not taking my work seriously as a result of the humor. In the end, the comic’s best trick is the illusion that comedy is effortless. That people imagine what he’s doing is easy is an occupational hazard. Cary Grant never won an Oscar, primarily, I suspect, because he made everything look so effortless. Why reward someone for having fun, for being charming? In "serious" fiction (as in "serious" film) you can feel the weight of the material. You expect to see the effort and the strain of all that heavy lifting, and we reward the effort as much as the success. Comedy is often just as serious, and to ignore that seriousness is misguided, of course, but most writers with comic world views have accustomed themselves to being sold at a discount. Most of us wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Richard Russo (1949) American novelist, short story writer and screenwriter

Interview with Richard Russo, Failbetter.com, Volume II, Issue III, Summer/Fall 2001, September 24, 2009 http://www.failbetter.com/04/Russo.htm,

People , World , Way , Feeling

“[T]he most important images for human beings are simply words, which are abstract symbols. …[E]volution has greatly enlarged the front lobes of the human brain, which govern the sense of the past and the future; and… they are probably the seat of our other images.”

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

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

Sense , Past , Future

“Look at yourself. You came into this world, but what you have to realize is that you came from Him and you must return to Him. The light within you has to merge with that One Light. Then the dark show of life will disappear. My love you, my children. This is the most important thing to understand in life.”

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (1900–1986) Sri Lankan Sufi leader

Come To The Secret Garden: Sufi Tales of Wisdom (1994)

Love , Life , Children , World

“I find in working always the disturbing intrusion of elements not a part of my most interested vision, and the inevitable obliteration and replacement of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds..”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

1911 - 1940, Notes on Painting - Edward Hopper (1933)

Parting

“Looked at from the perspective of twentieth-century earth, we see three great stages in the dynamic process of the universe. To this whole process, as it spreads out over perhaps ten billion years of time and ten billion light years of space, we give the name evolution, and we see three great patterns within it. The first is physical evolution. This presumably started with the development of the most elementary particles (whatever they may be); then of neutrons, protons, electrons, and radiations; then of elements from hydrogen to uranium and beyond formed by combining protons and electrons; then of chemical compounds; then finally of increasingly complex molecules from amino acids, and proteins to the great watershed of DNA, the beginnings of life.”

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

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 28

Life , Light , Universe , Time

“Let him fall if he cannot stand alone! If the Negro cannot live by the line of eternal justice, so beautifully pictured to you in the illustration used by Mr. Phillips, the fault will not be yours, it will be his who made the Negro, and established that line for his government. Let him live or die by that. If you will only untie his hands, and give him a chance, I think he will live. He will work as readily for himself as the white man. A great many delusions have been swept away by this war. One was, that the Negro would not work; he has proved his ability to work. Another was, that the Negro would not fight; that he possessed only the most sheepish attributes of humanity; was a perfect lamb, or an “Uncle Tom;” disposed to take off his coat whenever required, fold his hands, and be whipped by anybody who wanted to whip him. But the war has proved that there is a great deal of human nature in the Negro.”

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

1860s, What the Black Man Wants (1865)

War , Justice , Nature , Thinking

“Religion does not mean to surrender to dogmas and religious scriptures or conformity to rituals. But my religion constitutes an abiding faith in the perfect values of truth and the ceaseless attempt to realise them in the inner most part of our nature.”

Hans Ji Maharaj (1900–1966) Indian guru

Source: Satgurudev Shri Hans Ji Maharaj, (1970) Albion Press

Truth , Faith , Religion , Nature

“Unchecked, the tourist will climb over the fence and come right into your house to take pictures of you in your habitat. Cities mindful of tourists have built elaborate “tourist traps” which, luckily, work. Tourists are kept confined to these, and few escape. There is, of course, the type known as the “intrepid tourist.” This one has to be watched carefully or he can become most annoying. Little wonder these are so often the target of terrorists. If there is an aspect of benign terror about the tourist, there is also a great deal of tourist in the terrorist. Terrorists travel with only one thing in mind, just like the tourist, and the specifics of places escape them both. Terrorists travel for the purpose of shooting unsuspecting foreigners, just as tourists travel for the purpose of shooting them with a camera.”

Andrei Codrescu (1946) American writer

“The Tourist,” Raised by Puppets (1990).

Travel , Housing

“Of all god-gifted dispensers of joy, Johann Strauss is to me the most endearing. I willingly admit to having sometimes conducted the Perpetuum Mobile with far more pleasure than many a four movement symphony.”

Richard Strauss (1864–1949) German composer and orchestra director

Recollections and Reflections

God , Pleasure , Joy

“Like fish who do not know they swim in water, we are seldom aware of the atmosphere of the times through which we move, how strange and singular they are. But when we approach another age, its alienness stands out before us, almost as if that were its most obvious quality…”

Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

Introduction
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)

Age , Fish , Water , Time

“I've just finished a (for me) very important book about the parents (Louis Martin and Zélie Martin) of the Little Flower.. It confirms my thesis 100 per cent: that everything claimed by her super-heralds as her direct inspiration, her unique originality, in fact stemmed from inheritance, upbringing and repetition…Most interesting for me is the recognition how alien and remote this bourgeois piety of the late nineteenth century has become, even for cultivated contemporary Catholic writers - a veritable terra incognita; otherwise this so wide-spread legend of Thérèse's uniqueness could never have grown up.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights (Letters 1951-59).

Books , Flowers , Parent

“We are getting carried away by the on-the-move musicians. Most of the Carnatic concerts abroad are being organised by NRIs. The defining moment is when an artist is invited to a foreign land and applauded by the foreign nationals. They should forge artistic alliances and find new audiences by introducing people of other nationalities to our arts.”

M. Balamuralikrishna (1930–2016) Carnatic vocalist, instrumentalist and playback singer

Source: Chitra Swaminathan "He defines ‘style’ as tradition".

People , Art

“The warfare in Syria is a follow-on to the attacks on Iraq and Libya. We may recall General Wesley Clark’s claim in March 2007 that shortly after 9/11 a Pentagon official had shown him a Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz list of seven Middle East and North African countries that were scheduled for attack and regime change. Iraq and Libya, both on that list, have been attacked and transformed into U. S.-destroyed states with new or unsettled leadership. The United States has been supporting regime change forces in Syria as far back as 2011, but the job has not been completed, in part because of Russian support for president Assad. Truce efforts by the U. S. and Russia have regularly broken down because the U. S. still aims at regime change and supports the rebel forces that Russia targets, many or most of which are Al Qaeda- or ISIS-related and whose victory would mean another Libya-like failed state.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Herman, “U.S. Political and Moral Disarray”, Z Magazine, December 2016, pp. 15-17.
2010s

Support , Effort , Change , Victory

“The first half of the 20th century in the United States and much of the world was an era when racial and ethnic differences determined even the most uncontrived actions. Stepping into a restaurant, boarding a train, engaging in sexual relationships, or running or voting for a public office were all ruled by notions of differences between groups.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(History and the World, p. 121).
Book Sources, The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois (2003)

World , Training

“Should they answer that, if impunity were assured, they would do what was most to their selfish interest, that would be a confession that they were criminally minded; should they say that they would not do so, they would be granting that all things in and of themselves immoral should be avoided.”
Si responderint se impunitate proposita facturos, quod expediat, facinorosos se esse fateantur, si negent, omnia turpia per se ipsa fugienda esse concedant.

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

Book III, section 39; translated by Walter Miller
De Officiis – On Duties (44 BC)

Selfishness

“Like most artists and musicians, I considered myself detached from the political life…but I had an insight that maybe we would have a political contribution to make in the future.”

Gilberto Gil (1942) Brazilian singer, guitarist, songwriter and politician

[Oliver, Burkeman, http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1592188,00.html, Minister of counterculture, The Guardian, Guardian Media Group, 2005-10-14]

Life , Future

“[my goal is] to photograph not a factory but the work itself from the most effective point of view.... in order to show the grandness of a machine, one should photograph not all of it but give a series of snapshots.”

Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956) Russian artist and photographer

Quote, 1930: from Rodchenko lecture at the October group's meeting; as quoted by Margarita Tupitsyn in Chapter 'Fragmentation versus Totality: The Politics of (De)framing', in The great Utopia - The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932; Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1992, p. 486
the issue was not to take 'photo pictures' of the entire object but to make 'photo stills' of characteristic parts of an object

“… it is not men that most women worry about when they rise to the defense of the status quo. Their apparent endorsement of male supremacy is, rather, a pathetic striving for self-respect, self-justification, and self-pardon. After fifteen hundred years of subjection to men, Western woman finds it almost unbearable to face the fact that she has been hoodwinked and enslaved by her inferiors — that the master is lesser than the slave.”

Elizabeth Gould Davis book The First Sex

The First Sex, ch. 21 - The Prejudice Lingers On (1971).

Women , Men

“To hinder, besides, the farmer from selling his goods at all times to the best market, is evidently to sacrifice the ordinary laws of justice to an idea of public utility, to a sort of reasons of state; an act of legislative authority which ought to be exercised only, which can be pardoned only in cases of the most urgent necessity.”

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

Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter V, p. 584.

Justice , Law , Exercises , Idea

“I tell you, struggle is what is missing in the lives of most young people today. If they think I'm going to support them while they create great works of art, then they've missed the point of my work, of my life! In the process of becoming a writer or an artist one has to be willing to starve. Struggle is the most invaluable experience of all. Suffering seems to be the inevitable fate of the creative sensitive types. Poverty, disease, death, unrequited love affairs, and disappointments of every sort fan the flame of the artistic spirit. The greatest works of art were not created by spoiled brats. They were born for the most part out of a sense of despair, and if not despair then just plain hard work. Somewhere along the line the artist learns the art of transformation.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Reflections (1981)

Love , Life , Death , Fate

“The lives of such are most desirable, and the deaths of such will be most lamented, who make it their business to serve their generation.”

Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) English Puritan

A Cabinet of Jewels

Death , Business

“Government, the peace-officer at home, breathes war abroad, organizes it into a science, reduces it to a system, makes it a trade, and applauds it as if it were the most honorable work of nations.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

War (1816)

War , Peace , Home , Science

“In each of the cathedral churches there was a bishop, or an archbishop of fools, elected; and in the churches immediately dependent upon the papal see a pope of fools. These mock pontiffs had usually a proper suit of ecclesiastics who attended upon them, and assisted at the divine service, most of them attired in ridiculous dresses resembling pantomimical players and buffoons; they were accompanied by large crowds of the laity, some being disguised with masks of a monstrous fashion, and others having their faces smutted; in one instance to frighten the beholders, and in the other to excite their laughter: and some, again, assuming the habits of females, practised all the wanton airs of the loosest and most abandoned of the sex. During the divine service this motley crowd were not contended with singing of indecent songs in the choir, but some of them ate, and drank, and played at dice upon the altar, by the side of the priest who celebrated the mass. After the service they put filth into the censers, and ran about the church, leaping, dancing, laughing, singing, breaking obscene jests, and exposing themselves in the most unseemly attitudes with shameless impudence. Another part of these ridiculous ceremonies was, to shave the precentor of fools upon a stage erected before the church, in the presence of the populace; and during the operation, he amused them with lewd and vulgar discourses, accompanied by actions equally reprehensible. The bishop, or the pope of fools, performed the divine service habited in the pontifical garments, and gave his benediction to the people before they quitted the church. He was afterwards seated in an open carriage, and drawn about to the different parts of the town, attended by a large train of ecclesiastics and laymen promiscuously mingled together; and many of the most profligate of the latter assumed clerical habits in order to give their impious fooleries the greater effect; they had also with them carts filled with ordure, which they threw occasionally upon the populace assembled to see the procession. These spectacles were always exhibited at Christmas-time, or near to it, but not confined to one particular day.”

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

pg. 345
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Festival of Fools

People , Fools , Sex , Fashion

“to Joshua Kirby, Esq. - to be left at the Turk's Head, Gerrard Street, St. Ann's, London - Mr. President and Gentlemen, Directors of the Society of Artists of Great Britain. I thank ye for the honor done me in appointing me one of your Directors, but for a particular reason I beg leave to resign, and am. Gentlemen, your most obliged and obedient Humble Servant.”

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) English portrait and landscape painter

Quote from Gainsborough's letter, Bath, 5 Dec. 1768; as cited in Thomas Gainsborough, by William T, Whitley https://ia800204.us.archive.org/6/items/thomasgainsborou00whitrich/thomasgainsborou00whitrich.pdf; New York, Charles Scribner's Sons – London, Smith, Elder & Co, Sept. 1915, p. 397 (Appendix B)
18 October 1768, Gainsborough was elected to a Directorship of the Society of Artists, and on the same day his old Ipswich friend, Joshua Kirby, was made President. Gainsborough, however, declined to accept office, and his letter of refusal must have grieved Kirby
1755 - 1769

“Because most people are not sufficiently employed in themselves, they run about loose, hungering for employment, and satisfy themselves in various supererogatory occupations. The easiest of these occupations, which have all to do with making things already made, is the making of people: it is called the art of friendship.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"The Myth" from Anarchism Is Not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

Hunger , Friendship , People , Art

“The United States, as you point out, has been actually freer than most in terms of offering access to information. It doesn’t have to be this way. Openness is not the default in terms of how if you look back in time, or even around the world. We need to show how openness works better. That you end up with companies that thrive better. That you have, with standards, you have more competition that builds more jobs. That openness is a win.”

Brewster Kahle (1960) American computer engineer, founder of the Internet Archive

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle on Recode Decode https://www.recode.net/2017/3/8/14843408/transcript-internet-archive-founder-brewster-kahle-wayback-machine-recode-decode (March 8, 2017)

World , Way , Time

“It is easy for most of us to keep our hands from picking and stealing when picking and stealing plainly lead to prison diet and prison garments. But when silks and satins come of it, and with the silks and satins general respect, the net result of honesty does not seem to be so secure.”

Anthony Trollope book The Prime Minister

Source: The Prime Minister (1876), Ch. 11

“Most responses I have seen to the present crisis are polarized, either dismissing violent jihad as irrelevant to Islam or asserting that all Muslims should be treated as potential threats. In this book, I hope to clarify both the reality of violent jihad in Islam and a compassionate approach to our Muslim neighbors.”

Nabeel Qureshi (author) (1983–2017) Christian missionary, speaker and author who was a convert from his former Ahmadiyya background.

Source: Answering Jihad: A Better Way Forward (2016), p. 11, Preface

Books , Hope , Reality

“Today’s despisers of free speech have their roots in a different ideology from the tribal sort that was used to justify slaveholding and Puritanism. This newer ideology began with Karl Marx—or rather, with the struggle of Marxist intellectuals to explain the failure of the European proletariat to rise in violent revolution at the outbreak of World War I. Rather than joining in solidarity with the working classes of other nations, European workers rallied in dismaying numbers to their national flags, exhausted themselves in a four-year killing spree that beggared all previous descriptions of war, and then succumbed to waves of populist fascism. The only revolution that Marxists could tease out of the charnel house of the Great War was a coup d’état in the most backward and least industrially developed empire of Europe and, even then, only by the substitution of what Vladimir Lenin called a “vanguard” of Marxist elites rather than a spontaneous uprising of the workers.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Free Speech and Its Present Crisis (2018)

War , World , Failure , Housing

“As Prince Bismarck, in the ’60s, wanted to move the “Acheron” of socialism, … it was of course not love for socialism or knowledge of socialism that led Prince Bismarck to do this. He understood nothing about socialism at that time, and never did understand anything about it down to his death; in fact, he never had any conception of the moving forces of political and social life at all. There probably never lived at any time in any country a “statesman” who was less scientific, who had less knowledge, and who relied so purely on experience and a sort of half-gambler, half-peddler cunning, as Bismarck. Those offers to socialists place in the clearest light the untruthfulness of Prince Bismarck’s claim that he always regarded the social democracy as incompatible with the existence of the state. Bismarck wanted to use socialism for the purpose of breaking up and dissolving the bourgeois liberal opposition, especially the Progressive party. This, in itself, is the most conclusive proof that he had no conception of the real nature of socialism. Of course the fate of the boy magician was repeated. The elemental force which was conjured up grew over the head of the dabbler, and he did not get the best of socialism; socialism got the best of him.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

Love , Life , Death , Fate

“I wanted that work to carry the most important message … that a person mustn't sell himself. I made a chocolate bar that can't be bought, using a giant panel of concrete.”

Pavel 183 (1983–2013) Russian street artist

as reported by Vladimir Isachenkov "P183 Dead: Street Artist Known As 'Russian Banksy' Dies At 29 Years Old" at The Huffington Post (3 April 2013) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/03/p183-dead-street-artist-russian-banksy-dies_n_3006544.html

Personality

“Whatever in the gospel will not interfere with what we like to do, or feel we must do, we gladly believe; and to the rest we close our eyes. Most of us do this half-unconsciously, perhaps, but in our innermost selves we can hardly help knowing that we are not Christians, and that there is in the gospel something fundamental—a vital message, an essence—which we do not wish to understand.”

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

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 7

Feeling , Understanding , Help

“What is distinctive in Hinduism is the amount of attention it has devoted to identifying basic spiritual personality types and the disciplines that are most likely to work for each. The result is a recognition, pervading the entire religion, that there are multiple paths to God, each calling for its distinctive mode of travel.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)

God , Religion , Travel , Personality

“At a time when sentiments are so much divided, every man I trust, will give his vote with the recollection and the consciousness that it may depend upon his single vote whether the miseries, the crimes, the atrocities that I fear are now proceeding in China are to be discountenanced or not. We have now come to the crisis of the case. England is not yet committed. But if an adverse vote be given…England will have been committed. With you then, with us, with every one of us, it rests to show that this House, which is the first, the most ancient, and the noblest temple of freedom in the world, is also the temple of that everlasting justice without which freedom itself would be only a name or only a curse to mankind. And I cherish the trust and belief that when you, Sir, rise in your place to-night to declare the numbers of the division from the chair which you adorn, the words which you speak will go forth from the walls of the House of Commons, not only as a message of mercy and peace, but also as a message of British justice and British wisdom, to the farthest corners of the world.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1857/mar/03/resolution-moved-resumed-debate-fourth in the House of Commons (3 March 1857) against the Second Opium War.
1850s

Wisdom , World , Fear , Peace

“Under the old type of capitalism, when free competition prevailed, the export of goods was the most typical feature. Under modern capitalism, when monopolies prevail, the exporter of capital has become the typical feature.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Source: Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter Four, "The Export of Capital"

“The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch somebody else doing it wrong, without comment.”

T. H. White (1906–1964) author

The Godstone and the Blackymor (1959), p. 161.

World

“To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free.
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 11 “Soliloquies in Mishnory” (p. 151)

God , Question , Learning , Time

“I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

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

Address at a White House dinner honoring Nobel Prize winners (29 April 1962), quoted in The White House Diary, at the JFK Library http://www.jfklibrary.org/white%20house%20diary/1962/April/29
1962

Knowledge , Thinking , Housing

“Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

Il y a deux musiques: une petite, mesquine, de second ordre, partout semblable à elle-même, qui repose sur une centaine de phrases que chaque musicien s'approprie, et qui constitue un bavardage plus ou moins agréable avec lequel vivent la plupart des compositeurs.
Massimilla Doni http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Massimilla_Doni (1839), translated by Clara Bell and James Waring

Life , Music , Understanding