Quotes about naming
page 25

Rosa Luxemburg photo
Garry Trudeau photo

“Whether you think we belong in Iraq or not, we can't tune it out; we have to remain mindful of the terrible losses that individual soldiers are suffering in our name.”

Garry Trudeau (1948) cartoonist

Reported in Kerry Soper, Garry Trudeau: Doonesbury and the Aesthetics of Satire (2008), p. 50.

Neil Diamond photo

“Shilo when I was young,
I used to call your name.
When no one else would come,
Shilo you always came and we'd play.”

Neil Diamond (1941) American singer-songwriter

Shiloh
Song lyrics, Just for You (1967)

William James photo
Julia Ward Howe photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

Thomas Henry Huxley photo

“Abram, Abraham became
By will divine
Let pickled Brian's name
Be changed to Brine!”

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

Poem in letter Joseph Dalton Hooker (4 December 1894) in response to hearing that Hooker's son had fallen into a salt vat. Huxley papers at Imperial College London HP 2.454
1890s

Emil M. Cioran photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Frederic Dan Huntington photo
Slavoj Žižek photo

“In the electoral campaign, President Bush named as the most important person in his life Jesus. Now he has a unique chance to prove that he meant it seriously: for him, as for all Americans today, "Love thy neighbor!" means "Love the Muslims!"”

Slavoj Žižek (1949) Slovene philosopher

OR IT MEANS NOTHING AT ALL.
"Reflections on WTC: Third Version" http://www.cosmos.ne.jp/~miyagawa/nagocnet/data/zizek.html#article01, Free Speech (7 October 2001)

Harry Chapin photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Anthony Burgess photo
Washington Irving photo
Báb photo
Muhammad photo

“It has been reported from Sulaiman b. Buraid through his father that when the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) appointed anyone as leader of an army or detachment he would especially exhort him to fear Allah and to be good to the Muslims who were with him. He would say: Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war, do not embezzle the spoils; do not break your pledge; and do not mutilate (the dead) bodies; do not kill the children. When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them. Then invite them to migrate from their lands to the land of Muhajirs and inform them that, if they do so, they shall have all the privileges and obligations of the Muhajirs. If they refuse to migrate, tell them that they will have the status of Bedouin Muslims and will be subjected to the Commands of Allah like other Muslims, but they will not get any share from the spoils of war or Fai' except when they actually fight with the Muslims (against the disbelievers). If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah's help and fight them. When you lay siege to a fort and the besieged appeal to you for protection in the name of Allah and His Prophet, do not accord to them the guarantee of Allah and His Prophet, but accord to them your own guarantee and the guarantee of your companions for it is a lesser sin that the security given by you or your companions be disregarded than that the security granted in the name of Allah and His Prophet be violated When you besiege a fort and the besieged want you to let them out in accordance with Allah's Command, do not let them come out in accordance with His Command, but do so at your (own) command, for you do not know whether or not you will be able to carry out Allah's behest with regard to them.”

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

Sahih Muslim, Book 019, Number 4294
Sunni Hadith

Alfred North Whitehead photo

“Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

1910s, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919)

Maimónides photo
Eric Clapton photo

“Would you know my name if I saw you in heaven? Would it be the same If I saw you in heaven?”

Eric Clapton (1945) English musician, singer, songwriter, and guitarist

Tears in Heaven (from the album Unplugged - 1992)

Will Eisner photo

“The tenement – the name derives from a fifteenth-century legal term for a multiple dwelling – always seemed to me a “ship afloat in concrete.” After all didn’t the building carry passengers on a voyage through life? No. 55 sat at the corner of Dropsie avenue near the elevated train, or the elevated as we called it in those days. It was a treasure house of stories that illustrated tenement life as I remembered it, stories that needed to be told before they faded from memory. Within its “railroad flats,” with rooms strung together train-like lived low-paid city employees or laborers and their turbulent families. Most were recent immigrants, intent n their own survival. They kept busy raising children and dreaming of the better lie they knew existed “uptown.” Hallways were filled with a rich stew of cooking aromas, sounds of arguments and the tinny wail from Victrolas. What community spirit there was stemmed from the common hostility of tenants to the landlord or his surrogate superintendent. Typically, the buildings tenants came and went with regularity, depending on the vagaries of their fortunes But many remained for a lifetime, imprisoned by poverty or old age. There was no real privacy or anonymity. Everybody knew about everybody. Human dramas, both good and bad, instantly gathered witness like ants swarming around a piece of dropped food. From window to window or on the stoop below, the tenants analyzed, evaluated and critiqued each happening, following an obligatory admission that it was really none of their business.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

XV-XVI, December 2004
A Contract With God (2004)

Richard J. Evans photo
Robert Davi photo
George Washington Plunkitt photo
Eddie Izzard photo
Paul Tillich photo
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston photo
Julius Streicher photo

“Heil Hitler! (when asked to state his name) You know my name well. Julius Streicher! The Bolsheviks will hang you one day! (to the hangman) Purim festival, 1946! I am now by God my father! Adele, my dear wife.”

Julius Streicher (1885–1946) German politician

Last words, 10/16/46, quoted in "The Quest for the Nazi Personality" - Page 157 by Eric A. Zillmer - History - 1995

Yogi Berra photo
Orson Welles photo

“My father once told me that the art of receiving a compliment is, of all things, the sign of a civilized man. He died soon afterwards, leaving my education in this important matter sadly incomplete; I'm only glad that, on this, the occasion of the rarest compliment he ever could have dreamed of, that he isn't here to see his son so publicly at a loss. In receiving a compliment, or in trying to, the words are all worn out by now. They're polluted by ham and corn. And, when you try to scratch around for some new ones, it's just an exercise in empty cleverness. What I feel this evening, is not very clever. it's the very opposite of emptiness. The corny old phrase is the only one I know to say it: my heart is full; with a full heart, with all of it, I thank you. This is Samuel Johnson, on the subject of what he calls contrarieties: "there are goods, so opposed that we cannot seize both, and, in trying, fail to seize either. Flatter not yourself, he says, with contrarieties. Of the blessings set before you, make your choice. No man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source, and from the mouth of the nile." For this business of contrarieties has to do with us. With you, who are paying me this compliment, and for me, who has strayed so far from this hometown of ours. Not that I am alone in this, or unique, I am never that; but there are a few of us left in this conglomerated world of us who still trudge stubbornly along this lonely rocky road; and this is in fact our contrariety. We don't move nearly as fast as our cousins on the freeway; we don't even get as much accomplished just as the family sized farm can't possibly raise as many crops or get as much profit as the agricultural factory of today. What we do come up with has no special right to call itself better it's just.. different. No if there's any excuse for us it all, it's that we're simply following the old American tradition of the maverick, and we are a vanishing breed. This honor I can only accept in the name of all the mavericks. And also, as a tribute to the generosity of all the rest of you; to the givers, to the ones with fixed addresses. A maverick may go his own way but he doesn't think that it's the only way, or ever claim that it's the best one, except maybe for himself. And don't imagine that this raggle-taggle gypsy-o is claiming to be free. It's just that some of the necessities to which I am a slave are different from yours. As a director, for instance, I pay myself out of my acting jobs. I use my own work to subsidize my work (in other words I'm crazy). But not crazy enough to pretend to be free. But it's a fact that many of the films you've seen tonight could never have been made otherwise. Or, if otherwise, well, they might have been better, but certainly they wouldn't have been mine. The truth is I don't believe that this great evening would ever have brightened my life if it wasn't for this: my own, particular, contrariety. Let us raise our cups, then, standing as some of us do on opposite ends of the river, to what really matters to us all: to our crazy, beloved profession, to the movies — to good movies, to every possible kind.”

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

Speech given upon his acceptance of the AFI Lifetime Achievement award. Viewable http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXJnxClGamA&list=HL1349840607&feature=mh_lolz

Rousas John Rushdoony photo
Ram Narayan photo

“At one time, sarangi exponents used to be called gurus and ustads because they were so learned that they could teach vocalists a thing or two. It wasn't surprising that many of them turned into vocalists and made a name for themselves independently.”

Ram Narayan (1927) classical sarangi player from India

[Patil, Vrinda, Dying strains of sarangi, The Tribune, 9 December 2000, http://www.webcitation.org/5pb57z9G6]

George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax photo
Cesar Chavez photo
Suzanne Vega photo

“My name is Luka.
I live on the second floor.
I live upstairs from you.
Yes, I think you've seen me before.”

Suzanne Vega (1959) American singer

Luka
Solitude Standing (1987)

William Hazlitt photo
Henry R. Towne photo
Heather Brooke photo
Anthony Trollope photo
George Galloway photo
Aldo Leopold photo
Thomas Carlyle photo

“Ever, as before, does Madness remain a mysterious-terrific, altogether infernal boiling-up of the Nether Chaotic Deep, through this fair-painted Vision of Creation, which swims thereon, which we name the Real.”

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

Bk. III, ch. 8.
1830s, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)

Max Heindel photo
George William Curtis photo

“Mayor Macbeth, of Charleston, told General Howard that he did not believe that a bureau at Washington could manage the social relations of the people from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. But the answer to Mayor Macbeth is that he and his companions have managed those relations at a cost to the country of four years of civil war, three thousand millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of lives. The Freedmen's Bureau will hardly be as expensive as that. And while such a bureau merely defends the rights of a certain class under the laws, the aid societies give them that education which in the present state of local feeling would be inevitably withheld. The mighty arch of Sherman, wasting and taming the land, is followed by the noiseless steps of the band of unnamed heroes and heroines who are teaching the people. The soldier drew the furrow, the teacher drops the seed. There is many and many a devoted woman, hidden at this moment in the lowliest cabins of the South, whose name poets will not sing nor historians record, but whose patient toil the eye that marks the sparrow's fall beholds and approves. Not more noble, not more essential, was the work of the bravest and most famous of the heroes who fell in the wild storm of battle, than that of many a woman to us unknown, faithful through privation and exposure and disease, and perishing at the lonely outpost of duty in the act of helping the nation keep its word.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Augustus De Morgan photo
George S. Patton photo
Robert Charles Wilson photo

“A Muslim is he who carries the fear of God in his heart and tries, by following the ways of Islam, to rise in spiritual stature: and not merely he who happens to have been born in a Muslim house and bears a Muslim name.”

Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) Austro-Hungarian writer and academic

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Calling All Muslims, Radio Broadcast # 7, p 117

Michael Savage photo

“I intend to make this day forward the first day of the rest of my life. We can change our lives. You say, 'Well, what's wrong with your life, Michael?' Well, it's not that there's anything wrong with my life, but it's not what I want it to be. I don't feel that I'm inspiring people in the way I want to inspire them. You see, you can inspire through hate; you can inspire through love, hope, humor – the positives. I look at the history of the world, and I look at the world today, and I realize that if we don't inspire each other through positive attributes – love, hope and humor – we're gonna descend into the barbarism of the Left and the barbarism of ISIS. You like me to be hard, you like me to be tough, you like me to give you the breaking news, you like me to be cynical, you like me to analytical, you like me to give you stuff that you don't hear anywhere else – I get that. But there's a limit to that. There's a lot of area beyond all that.I think of Christmas. Christianity is the religion of peace. Christianity is the true religion of peace. 'Turn the other cheek.' 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' These are messages that come from Christianity. What can you do in an age of deceit and lies and terror? You can go to church again. However un-needing you think you really are, you know in your heart that there's something missing in you. You know that you crave something greater. Because the human being is not a dog. We are unique creatures. And we need something different than the bear, the dog, the snake and the eagle. What is that thing that we need? It's that 'thing' called God.The media has promulgated the idea, and promoted the idea, that we only need food and fornication. And so when people are empty that's what they seek. And when they are really empty, what happens? They become drug addicts. They start with marijuana, they end up with heroin, crack, you name it. As God has been driven out of America, drugs have entered America. What does an empty soul look to do? An empty soul looks to fill itself. Just as an empty vessel needs to be filled with a liquid to be complete, an empty human being needs to fill itself to be complete. And how does it fill itself? I know, again, many of you will laugh because you're cynical; it's through those things I'm talking about – inspiration. Do you think a musician can play one day without inspiration from somewhere? The greatest artists in the history of the world were not drug-addicts. They were usually God-addicts. Look at the greatest art in history, you'll find most of them were super religious people, who literally saw God in their living room, and they took the power of God and that was transmitted through the paintbrush, or through that piece of marble. How could a man like Rodin take a piece of inert stone, and inside that stone see the essence of the human form, and sculpt from that block of inert stone, a marble, the portrait of a human being that looks so real – a hundred years later I go and look at them in the museum, and literally inside that carved eye I can see the person; how is that possible? How? It's a different show than I've ever done in my 21 years, because each day to me – I must tell you – I see as my last day, my last day on Earth.”

Michael Savage (1942) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, and Author

The Savage Nation (1995- ), 2015

“Rise again
Rise again
That her name not be lost to the knowledge of men.”

Stan Rogers (1949–1983) Folk singer

The Mary Ellen Carter (1979)

Pliny the Younger photo

“To name the man is to say all!”
Dixi omnia cum hominem nominavi.

Pliny the Younger (61–113) Roman writer

Letter 22, 4.
Letters, Book IV

Zell Miller photo
Larry Wall photo

“I won't mention any names, because I don't want to get sun4's into trouble…”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[11333@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV, 1991]
Usenet postings, 1991

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow photo

“And now, my classmates; ye remaining few
That number not the half of those we knew,
Ye, against whose familiar names not yet
The fatal asterisk of death is set,
Ye I salute!”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

St. 13.
Morituri Salutamus http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/longfellow/19229 (1875)

Will Cuppy photo
Martin Buber photo
Emily Dickinson photo
Antonie Pannekoek photo
William James photo

“Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And which has the superior view of the absolute truth, he or we? Which has the more vital insight into the nature of Jill's existence, as a fact? Is he in excess, being in this matter a maniac? or are we in defect, being victims of a pathological anesthesia as regards Jill's magical importance? Surely the latter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths revealed; surely poor Jill's palpitating little life-throbs are among the wonders of creation, are worthy of this sympathetic interest; and it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack realizes Jill concretely, and we do not. He struggles toward a union with her inner life, divining her feelings, anticipating her desires, understanding her limits as manfully as he can, and yet inadequately, too; for he also is afflicted with some blindness, even here. Whilst we, dead clods that we are, do not even seek after these things, but are contented that that portion of eternal fact named Jill should be for us as if it were not. Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jack's way of taking it - so importantly - is the true and serious way; and she responds to the truth in him by taking him truly and seriously, too. May the ancient blindness never wrap its clouds about either of them again! Where would any of us be, were there no one willing to know us as we really are or ready to repay us for our insight by making recognizant return? We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and important way.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

"What Makes a Life Significant?"
1910s, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (1911)

Bhakti Tirtha Swami photo
Dennis Miller photo
Matthew Lewis (writer) photo
Prem Rawat photo
Brian K. Vaughan photo
Neil Gaiman photo
Mitt Romney photo
Alfred North Whitehead photo
Taliesin photo
Kate DiCamillo photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Albert Pike photo
Trey Gowdy photo
Benjamin Tillman photo

“We reorganized the Democratic Party with one plank and only one plank, namely, that this is a white man's country and the white men must govern it.”

Benjamin Tillman (1847–1918) American politician

Regarding the Democratic Party's goals (1909), as quoted in Voices of Civil War America: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life https://books.google.com/books?id=1mwy-XB6bs8C&pg=PA27&lpg=PA27&dq=%22We+reorganized+the+Democratic+Party+with+one+plank+and+only+one+plank%22&source=bl&ots=z38s4iS5Oi&sig=-bHC9bf27SsAB3u_mTeTVENP1vs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAmoVChMI28L2gZqPxwIVgTI-Ch1lWgai#v=onepage&q=%22We%20reorganized%20the%20Democratic%20Party%20with%20one%20plank%20and%20only%20one%20plank%22&f=false, by Lawrence Kreiser and Ray B. Browne, p. 27.
1900s, 1909

Andy Partridge photo
Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey photo

“What I most heartily wish for is, a union between the two countries: by a union I mean something more than a mere word—a union, not of parliaments, but of hearts, affections, and interests—a union of vigour, of ardour, of zeal for the general welfare of the British empire. It is this species of union, and this only, that can tend to increase the real strength of the empire, and give it security against any danger. But if any measure with the name only of union be proposed, and the tendency of which would be to disunite us, to create disaffection, distrust, and jealousy, it can only tend to weaken the whole of the British empire. Of this nature do I take the present measure to be. Discontent, distrust, jealousy, suspicion, are the visible fruits of it in Ireland already: if you persist in it, resentment will follow; and although you should be able, which I doubt, to obtain a seeming consent of the parliament of Ireland to the measure, yet the people of that country would wait for an opportunity of recovering their rights, which they will say were taken from them by force.”

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

Speech in the House of Commons on the proposed unification of Great Britain and Ireland (7 February 1799), reported in The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803. Vol. XXXIV (London: 1819), p. 334.
1790s

Theodore Dalrymple photo
Sir Henry Hobart, 1st Baronet photo
Neville Chamberlain photo
Harun Yahya photo
Bruce Springsteen photo
Josh Billings photo

“If I had 4 fust rate dogs i would name the best one "Doubtful" and the other 3 "Useless."”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

“Strikes his echoing lyre, singing the while, and bequeaths a name to the sands.”
Percutit ore lyram nomenque relinquit harenis.

Source: Argonautica, Book V, Line 100

Rex Stout photo
Johann Gottlieb Fichte photo

“An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners' names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Zach Galifianakis photo

“I failed kindergarten because I couldn't spell my last name.”

Zach Galifianakis (1969) American actor and comedian

Live at the Purple Onion (2007)