Quotes about news
page 22

“It will reward enough for me if, by the publication of the present experiment, I have directed the attention of investigators to this subject, which still promises much for physicial optics and appears to open a new field.”

Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787–1826) German optical physicist

In The Wave Theory, Light and Spectra. Prismatic and Diffraction Spectra. Memoirs by Joseph Von Fraunhofer (1981), p. 38

Appearance

“I was attracted to video art because it allowed me to combine a strong sense of content with formal innovation. The field was wide open and allowed for a great deal of experimentation for creating new forms.”

Beryl Korot (1945) American artist

Source: Meeker, Carlene. " Beryl Korot http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/korot-beryl." Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 March 2009. Jewish Women's Archive. (Viewed on July 9, 2015)

Art, Sense, Strong

“With every experience in life, you have two choices: One, you can choose to enjoy and learn from the encounter, even if it is something you don't like. Two, you can struggle through the experience, blaming everyone and everything else around you the entire time. What if you were to view any unfavorable experience in a new way? What if you simply accepted the experience as momentary and learned what you could from it? Think how peaceful that experience would become.”

Scott Shaw (1958) American actor

About Peace

Life, Peace, Way, Thinking

“Gravitational force is simple, and a thing by itself, as also are electric and magnetic forces as long as the electric and magnetic poles stand at rest. But as soon as motion comes into the picture, the whole situation is changed. Forces of new kinds come into play, for moving electric charges exert magnetic forces in addition to the electric forces they exert when at rest, while moving magnets exert electric forces in addition to the magnetic forces they exert while at rest. When the exact laws governing these intricate laws had been discovered by a great number of experimenters, Clerk Maxwell succeeded in expressing them in a mathematical form which was both simple and elegant.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Law, Mathematics, Change

“We worked together for seven years. Tenniel and other artists declared I would not work with Carroll for seven weeks! I accepted the challenge, but I, for that purpose, adopted quite a new method. No artist is more matter-of-fact or businesslike than myself: to Carroll I was not Hy. F., but someone else, as he was someone else. I was wilful and erratic, bordering on insanity. We therefore got on splendidly.”

Harry Furniss (1854–1925) Irish artist and illustrator

On Lewis Carroll; pp.104-5.
"Confessions of a Caricaturist", vol. 1 (1901)

“Sirs, I have tested your machine. It adds a new terror to life and makes death a long-felt want.”

Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852–1917) English actor and theatre manager

Page 183
His reply to a gramophone company who had asked for a testimonial.
Beerbohm Tree (1956)

Life, Death

“The new magic formula is pull by resonance.”

Peter Kruse (1955–2015) German psychologist

Peter Kruse, Google's Think Quarterly, "Soft Values, Hard Facts" (March 2011). Think Quarterly http://www.thinkwithgoogle.co.uk/quarterly/data/peter-kruse-next-practice.html

“Sometimes it's great fun to be silly, like children playing statues and dying of laughter. And sometimes being silly breaks the even pace and lets you get a new start.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), unplaced by chapter

Children, Laughter

“SCANALYZER is the one single, the ONLY study of the news in depth that’s processed by General Technics’ famed computer Shalmaneser, who sees all, hears all, knows all save only that which YOU, Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere, wish to keep to yourselves.”

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

context (1) “Scanalyze My Name“
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

Study

“[David Sylvester asked Gottlieb, he is aware of the impact of the city New York on his painting:] Definitely I am. When I was in Paris last spring, my original plan was to go for four months and to paint there, and a number of people urged me to stay. That wanted to see what would happen, how my painting would change. But I felt strongly after being there less than a month that it was necessary for me to come back to New York, because I feel a certain rhythm in New York I don't feel in Paris.... there is a tempo in the life of New York which is exhilarating and I feel that this gets into one's painting. It's the pulse, not the look. I'am not involved with the external appearance of the city; it’s the vibrations. ]”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

In an interview (March 1960) with David Sylvester, edited for broadcasting by the BBC first published in ‘Living Arts, June 1963; as quoted in Interviews with American Artists, by David Sylvester; Chatto & Windus, London 2001, p. 33
1960s

Life, People, Feeling, Spring

“In the decade after the war Freud’s theories dominated the narrow circles of British intellectuals. His psycho-analysis was accepted warmly for many reasons. It was new and exciting, it was shocking, it debunked religion and morals, it promised an internal liberation from all restraints. Nevertheless, it was essentially a creed of escape into an inner world of complexes and repressions and away from social and economic realities.”

John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) British scientist

Bernal (1937) "Psycho-Analysis and Marxism" in: The Labour Monthly, Vol. 19, July 1937, No. 7, pp. 435-437. Online here http://www.marxists.org/archive/bernal/works/1930s/psycho.htm on Marxists Internet Archive (2010).

War, World, Religion, Reality

“He came to a halt in a hollow and got his breath back. He felt himself freed of a great burden by getting out of sight of other people. The previous days and nights had been eventful, and he had lost himself. But now he was sure he would find himself again, like a dead man who finds himself, little by little, in the next world. In spite of everything, and although he was in reality a newborn babe in this new world, it was delightful to be born anew and to own a share of the sun like others instead of having to wait half the year perhaps for one little ray of sunshine.... No, there's probably no way of making something cease to exist once it has come into existence. He was no longer afraid of the immortality of the soul, that doctrine which for a time had seemed to him the height of human cruelty. Today it was the many and various abodes of the Creator which enchanted the mind.... and death did not exist.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

Death, People, World, Way

“These 100 books do not agree on everything – and that's OK too. You don't need total agreement when you're an open-hearted, decentralist, experimentalist New Ager. After the Prison and its institutions lose their hold over us, you won't even want such agreement. Within the parameters of certain life-affirming values, you'll want a hundred flowers to bloom. Synergy is all; cooperation and coordination is all.”

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

Page 180. The phrase "100 books" refers to Satin's list of 100 great New Age political books published since 1976. The term "Prison" refers to the Prison of consciousness, the basal concept in Satin's book.
New Age Politics: Our Only Real Alternative (2015)

Life, Books, Flowers, Heart

“Legend has it that every new technology is first used for something related to sex or pornography. That seems to be the way of humankind.”

Tim Berners-Lee (1955) British computer scientist, inventor of the World Wide Web

"The Guardian profile : Tim Berners-Lee"(12 August 2005) http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2005/aug/12/uknews.onlinesupplement

Sex, Way

“It was he who first taught the people the then strange truth that Causation was the law of nature and of mind, and unless we looked for the cause of an evil, we might never know the remedy. Every man of sense in Church and State acts on this truth now, but so few knew it in Owen's day that he was accused of unsettling the morality of the world. It was the fertility and newness of his suggestions, as a man of affairs, that gave him renown, and his influence extends to us. This memorial before us would itself grow old, were we to stay to describe all the ideas the world has accepted from Owen. I will name but one more, and that the greatest.
He saw, as no man before him did, that environment is the maker of men. Aristotle, whose praise is in all our Universities, said "Character is Destiny." But how can character be made? The only national way known in Owen's day was by prayer and precept. Owen said there were material means, largely unused, conducive to human improvement. Browning's prayer was — "Make no more giants, God; but elevate the race at once."”

George Holyoake (1817–1906) British secularist, co-operator, and newspaper editor

This was Owen's aim, as far as human means might do it.
Memorial dedication (1902)

Men, God, People, Truth

“Some people spend their time just runnin' round in circles
Always chasing some exotic bird
I prefer to spend some time just listening for that special something
That I've never ever heard
I like a new song to sing, another show or somewhere entirely different to be
But baby you make me feel so free.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

You Make Me Feel So Free
Song lyrics, Into the Music (1979)

People, Feeling, Bird, Singing

“Scientology is bullshit! Man, I was there the night L. Ron Hubbard invented it, for Christ's sakes! … We were sitting around one night… who else was there? Alfred Bester, and Cyril Kornbluth, and Lester del Rey, and Ron Hubbard, who was making a penny a word, and had been for years. And he said "This bullshit's got to stop!" He says, "I gotta get money." He says, "I want to get rich". And somebody said, "why don't you invent a new religion? They're always big." We were clowning! You know, "Become Elmer Gantry! You'll make a fortune!"”

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer

He says, "I'm going to do it."
"The Real Harlan Ellison" in Wings (November-December 1978) p. 32

Money, Religion, Christ, Night

“Americans cleave to the things of this world as if assured that they will never die,… They clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose grip as they hurry after some new delight. An American will build a house in which to pass his old age and sell it before the roof is on; he will plant a garden and rent it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he will clear a field and leave others to reap the harvest; he will take up a profession and leave it, settle in one place and soon go off elsewhere with his changing desires. If his private business allows him a moment’s relaxation, he will plunge at once into the whirlpool of politics. Then, if at the end of a year crammed with work he has a little spare leisure, his restless curiosity goes with him traveling up and down the vast territories of the United States. Thus he will travel five hundred miles in a few days as a distraction from his happiness. Death steps in in the end and stops him before he has grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes him. At first sight there is something astonishing in this spectacle of so many lucky men restless in the midst of abundance. But it is a spectacle as old as the world; all that is new is to see a whole people performing in it.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book Two, Chapter XIII.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Two

Death, Men, People, Age

“And why do I sew each new chapeau
With a style they most look positively grim in?
Strictly between us, entre-nous
I hate women.”

Sylvia Fine (1913–1991) American lyricist and songwriter

Song Anatole of Paris

Women, Hate

“I got a new Ford and learned to drive it – I even painted – and I laughed a great deal – I went every place that I had time for – and I am ready to go back East as long as I have to go sometime – If it were not for the Stieglitz [her husband then]] call I would probably never go – but that is strong – so I am on the way... I hope a little of it stays with me till I see you – It is my old way of life – you wouldn't like it – it would seem impossible to you as it does to Stieglitz, probably – but it is mine – and I like it – I would just go dead if I couldn't have it..”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

Source: 1917 - 1929, Letter to Ettie Stettheimer' (August 1929), p. 227

Life, Hope, Way, Strong

“The new Christian ideal of life did not at first alter the outward forms of art, but did alter its social function.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

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

Life, Art

“In today's volatile world, organizational design is an everyday, ongoing activity and challenge for every executive, whether managing a global enterprise or a small work team. Globalization, worldwide competition, deregulation, and ever-new technologies drive the ongoing reassessment of the organization. The executive response has been many new forms of organizational design: virtual, learning, modular, cellular, network, alliance, or spaghetti – to name a few. New organizational forms challenge old ways of organizing for efficiency and effectiveness. Yet fundamental design principles underlie any well-functioning organization. Organizations still require a formal design.”

Gerardine DeSanctis (1954–2005) American organizational theorist

Richard M. Burton ‎Børge Obel, ‎Gerardine DeSanctis (2011). Organizational Design: A Step-by-Step Approach. p. 3

World, Way, Learning

“Hillary Clinton did what she did for the sake of her agenda of personal ambition, carefully planned and worked out over months in which she was using and abusing the state of New York — because she looked at several other states--as a platform for her personal ambition. I, on the other hand, have responded to the call of the people of Illinois who have asked me to come and help them with a crisis situation. It doesn't violate my principal understanding of federalism, because federalism has two parts: state sovereignty and national unity.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

Alan Keyes on CNN's American Morning, August 11, 2004. http://www.renewamerica.us/archives/media/interviews/04_08_11cnn.htm. 2004 Illinois U.S. Senate race

People, Understanding, Help, Parting

“[T]he last 15 years have witnessed the ascent of an alternative view, that of embodied or enactive cognition. This new wave arose because the computationalist doctrine failed to account even for the most elementary coping with the world: walking, perceiving object in a natural setting, imagination. Slowly the cards turned into considering that the basis of mind is the body in coupled action, that is, the sensory-motor circuits establish the organism as viable in situated contexts. From this perspective the brain appears as a dynamical process (and not a syntactic one) of real time variables with a rich self-organizing capacity (and not a representational machinery). So in this sense the mind is not in the head since it is roots in the body as a whole and also in the extended environment where the organism finds itself.”

Francisco Varela (1946–2001) Chilean biologist

Varela (1998) " The Cosmos Letter http://www.expo-cosmos.or.jp/letter/letter12e.html", Expo'90 Foundation, Japan

World, Imagination, Nature, Sense

“Aping Urbanity, Oozing with Vanity
Plump as a Manatee, Faking Humanity
Journalistic Calamity, Intellectual Inanity
Fox News Insanity, You're a profanity
Hannity”

John Cleese (1939) actor from England

"Ode To Sean Hannity", sent by Cleese to Keith Olbermann, and read publicly on Countdown with Keith Olbermann (8 August 2009) http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-US&brand=msnbc&vid=1211bdfc-2a9a-4e72-911f-e2d954bfe909

“If you come up with a big new idea in our world and everyone says "Hey, that's great, definitely go ahead with that," then you know it's not a big new idea at all. Anything really new brings out all the reasons why it can't possibly work, and why it's crazy to even think about it.”

Adam Steltzner (1963) American aerospace engineer

Marc Kaufman. Mars Up Close: Inside the Curiosity Mission https://books.google.com/books/about/Mars_Up_Close.html?id=o6XaCwAAQBAJ&hl=en. National Geographic page 15. ISBN 978-1-4262-1278-9.

World, Idea, Thinking

“We're all talking about the same thing, whether it's religious people or New Age spiritual people or Buddhists or scientists. We're all talking about having a sense of awe and wonder at something grander than ourselves.”

Michael Shermer (1954) American science writer

quoted in [Berger, Kevin, August 23, 2006, http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/08/23/shermer/print.html, "The joys of life without God", Salon.com, 2006-08-26]

People, Age, Sense

“I fight for the family of Matthew Stanley of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. Matthew died serving our country in Iraq. I wear his bracelet and think of him every day. I intend to honor their sacrifice by making sure the country their son loved so well and never returned to remains safe from its enemies.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

2000s, 2008, (2008)

Love, Family, Thinking, Fight

“The ultimate enjoyment for a composer is when his compositions get recognised and appreciated. For me, a small village in Kanyakumari is as important as New York or France.”

A. R. Rahman (1966) Indian singer and composer

The A R Rahman Chat

“My efforts over the years had been successful to the extent, to take an example, that fractals made many mathematicians learn a lot about physics, biology, and economics. Unfortunately, most were beginning to feel they had learned enough to last for the rest of their lives. They remained mathematicians, had been changed by considering the new problems I raised, but largely went their own way.”

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

A Theory of Roughness (2004)

Way, Feeling, Problem, Effort

“The Sultan left Banarasi [Cuttack] with the intention of pursuing the Rai of Jajnagar, who had fled to an island in the river News was then brought that in the jangal were seven elephants, and one old she-elephant, which was very fierce. The Sultan resolved upon endeavouring to capture these elephants before continuing the pursuit of the Rai…. After the hunt was over, the Sultan directed his attention to the Rai of Jajnagar, and entering the palace where he dwelt he found many fine buildings. It is reported that inside the Rais fort, there was a stone idol which the infidels called Jagannath, and to which they paid their devotions. Sultan Firoz, in emulation of Mahmud Subuktigin, having rooted up the idol, carried it away to Delhi where he placed it in an ignominious position.”

Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309–1388) Tughluq sultan

Puri (Orissa) .Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi, Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. Elliot and Dowson. Vol. III, p. 313 ff

“It was the realisation of a lifelong ambition to be the MP for my home town. It was by no means the end of a journey, but rather the beginning of a new chapter both for me and for the people of Batley and Spen.”

Jo Cox (1974–2016) UK politician

Column: Jo Cox – After a hard day’s night, the real work starts http://www.batleynews.co.uk/news/local/column-jo-cox-after-a-hard-day-s-night-the-real-work-starts-1-7264438 (16 May 2015)

People, Home

“Let's transplant the primitive soul to the ultramodern New York, inject his soul with the noise of the subway, of the 'el', and may his brain become a long street of buildings 224 stories high.”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

Barcelona - Dada, 1917
1915 - 1940
Source: a letter to Enric C. Ricart, 1 October 1917; as quoted in Calder Miró, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 47

Soul

“Contemporary art -- the field we are usually working in because there's money -- is mostly concerned with systems or systematic concepts. In the context of their work, artists adapt models of individual art-specific or economic or political systems like in a laboratory, to reveal the true nature of these systems by deconstructing them. So would it be fair to say that by their chameleon-like adaptation they are attempting to generate a similar system? Well… the corporate change in the art market has aged somewhat in the meantime and looks almost as old as the 'New Economy'. Now even the last snotty brat has realized that all the hogwash about the creative industries, sponsoring, fund-raising, the whole load of bullshit about the beautiful new art enterprises, was not much more than the awful veneer on the stupid, crass fanfare of neo-liberal liberation teleology. What is the truth behind the shifting spheres of activity between computer graphics, web design and the rest of all those frequency-orientated nerd pursuits? A lonely business with other lonely people at their terminals. And in the meantime the other part of the corporate identity has incidentally wasted whole countries like Argentina or Iceland. That's the real truth of the matter.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

Interview on Furtherfield http://www.furtherfield.org/interviews/interview-johannes-grenzfurthner-monochrom-part-1

Money, People, Truth, Age

“The national research effort, upon which so much depends, will remain healthy only so long as there is sound core of disinterested search for new knowledge and an adequate number of men and women trained for carrying on such research and for teaching young scientists.”

Alan Tower Waterman (1892–1967) American physicist

in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (March 1953), Vol. 9, No. 2,ISSN 0096-3402, published by Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, Inc., p. 38.

Women, Men, Search, Knowledge

“The job of theorists, especially in biology, is to suggest new experiments. A good theory makes not only predictions, but surprising predictions that then turn out to be true. (If its predictions appear obvious to experimentalists, why would they need a theory?) ”

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

p, 125
What Mad Pursuit (1988)

Appearance

“O love, o wonder; love new born, new bred,
Now groan, now armed, this champion captive led.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Oh meraviglia! Amor, ch'appena è nato,
Già grande vola, e già trionfa armato.
Canto I, stanza 47 (tr. Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

Love

“Never trample on any soul though it may be lying in the veriest mire; for that last spark of self-respect is its only hope, its only chance; the last seed of a new and better life: — the voice of God that whispers to it: "You are not what you ought to be, and you are not what you can be. You are still God's child, still an immortal soul. You may rise yet. and fight a good fight yet, and be a man once more, after the likeness of God who made you, and Christ who died for you!"”

Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) English clergyman, historian and novelist

Source: Attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 84.

Life, God, Hope, Soul

“Now was the quiet, fierce solitude of the primeval forest broken by new, strange cries. No longer was there safety for bird or beast. Man had come.
Other animals passed up and down the jungle by day and by night — fierce, cruel beasts — but their weaker neighbors only fled from their immediate vicinity to return again when the danger was past.
With man it is different. When he comes many of the larger animals instinctively leave the district entirely, seldom if ever to return; and thus it has always been with the great anthropoids. They flee man as man flees a pestilence.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 12 : Man's Reason

Bird, Solitude, Past, Animals

“"Well, Nasreddin. I know you lose your only donkey. Life may be difficult without it. But, don't be too sad brother," the man tried to cheer him up.
"Do I look sad?"
"Yes, you look very sad. You looked much sadder than you did when your wife died." […]
"At that time you all tried to cheer me up by saying 'Don't be too sad, my brother Nasreddin. We'll get you a new wife.'”

Nasreddin (1208–1284) philosopher, Sufi and wise man from Turkey, remembered for his funny stories and anecdotes

But now you see, nobody offers me a donkey to replace my lost one."
Sugeng Hariyanto, Nasreddin, A Man Who Never Gives Up (1998), ISBN 9789796721597, p. 13

Life, Sadness, Time

“I know this of my own knowledge, because when the garrison of Baton Rouge was sent to the Rio Grande to assist in protecting that frontier against the guerrilla Cortina, who had cause of offense against the Texan people, Governor Moore made strong complaints and demanded a new garrison for Baton Rouge, alleging as a reason that it was not prudent to have so much material of war in a parish where there were 20,000 slaves and less than 5,000 whites, and very shortly after this he and Bragg, backed by the militia of New Orleans, made 'prisoners of war' of that very garrison, sent there at their own request.”

William T. Sherman (1820–1891) American General, businessman, educator, and author.

1860s, 1864, Letter to James Guthrie (August 1864)

War, People, Knowledge, Strong

“Whether I serve one or two terms in the Presidency, I will find myself at the end of that period at what might be called the awkward age — too old to begin a new career and too young to write my memoirs.”

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

Quoted in A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, Arthur Schlesinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), page 1017. http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations.aspx According to a footnote in Schlesinger's manuscript (1st draft, page 1378), this was stated on February 13, 1961. Attributed

Age

“The dull pulse-like beat started at eleven o’clock at night. It was a new kind of music called ‘rap’. It baffled Ananda even more than disco. He had puzzled and puzzled over why people would want to listen and even move their bodies to an angry, insistent onrush of words – words that rhymed, apparently, but had no echo or afterlife. It was as if they were an extension of the body: never had words sounded so alarmingly physical, and pure physicality lacks empathy, it’s machine-like.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Odysseus Abroad (2014)

People, Music, Night

“.. I am not going to New York, I am leaving Paris. That's quite different. Long before the war [World War 1. ] I already had a distaste for the 'artistic life' I was involved in. – It's quite the opposite of what I'm looking for. – And so I tried, through the Library, to escape from artists somewhat. Then, with the war, my incompatibility with this milieu grew. I wanted to go away at all costs. Where to? My only option was New York where I knew you [ Walter Pach, artist and friend of Duchamp] and where I hope to be able to escape leading the artistic life, if needs be through a job which will keep me very busy. I ask you to keep all this from my brothers [all his brothers were artists as well] because I know my leaving will be very painful for them.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

the same goes for my father and sisters.
Quote in Duchamp's letter to Walter Pach, Paris 27 April 1915; as quoted in The Duchamp Book, ed. Gavin Parkinson, Tate Publishing, London 2008 p. 157
1915 - 1925

Life, Pain, War, World

“Productivity, however, is exactly the wrong thing to care about in the new economy.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995), New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1999)

“In the long run, though, the greatest IT risk facing most companies is more prosaic than a catastrophe. It is, simply, overspending. IT may be a commodity, and its costs may fall rapidly enough to ensure that any new capabilities are quickly shared, but the very fact that it is entwined with so many business functions means that it will continue to consume a large portion of corporate spending.”

Nicholas Carr (1959) American writer

Why IT Doesn't Matter Anymore http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/3520.html, Harvard Business Review, June 9, 2003.

Business

“You will keep America out of the hands of communists by what you do here, you will keep it by making it seem unnecessary to the disadvantaged. It has been the New Deal, it has been democratic socialism which has been a major force from keeping the world from communism.”

Norman Thomas (1884–1968) American Presbyterian minister and socialist

Debate with Barry Goldwater, University of Arizona campus, Tucson, Arizona, November 1961

World, Communication

“Most, if not all, of the great ideas of modern mathematics have had their origin in observation. Take, for instance, the arithmetical theory of forms, of which the foundation was laid in the diophantine theorems of Fermat, left without proof by their author, which resisted all efforts of the myriad-minded Euler to reduce to demonstration, and only yielded up their cause of being when turned over in the blow-pipe flame of Gauss’s transcendent genius; or the doctrine of double periodicity, which resulted from the observation of Jacobi of a purely analytical fact of transformation; or Legendre’s law of reciprocity; or Sturm’s theorem about the roots of equations, which, as he informed me with his own lips, stared him in the face in the midst of some mechanical investigations connected (if my memory serves me right) with the motion of compound pendulums; or Huyghen’s method of continued fractions, characterized by Lagrange as one of the principal discoveries of that great mathematician, and to which he appears to have been led by the construction of his Planetary Automaton; or the new algebra, speaking of which one of my predecessors (Mr. Spottiswoode) has said, not without just reason and authority, from this chair, “that it reaches out and indissolubly connects itself each year with fresh branches of mathematics, that the theory of equations has become almost new through it, algebraic 31 geometry transfigured in its light, that the calculus of variations, molecular physics, and mechanics” (he might, if speaking at the present moment, go on to add the theory of elasticity and the development of the integral calculus) “have all felt its influence.”

James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897) English mathematician

James Joseph Sylvester. "A Plea for the Mathematician, Nature," Vol. 1, p. 238; Collected Mathematical Papers, Vol. 2 (1908), pp. 655, 656.

Law, Mathematics, Idea, Effort

“I bought a new camera. It's very advanced. You don't even need it.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

When the Leaves Blow Away (2006), I Still Have a Pony (2007)

“America is a new kind of society that produces a new kind of human being. That human being—confident, self-reliant, tolerant, generous, future oriented—is a vast improvement over the wretched, servile, fatalistic, and intolerant human being that traditional societies have always produced, and that Islamic societies produce now.”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

Source: Books, What's So Great About America (2003), Ch. 6: America the Beautiful

Confidence, Future

“Truth is a new word in Europe (and elsewhere).”

Alain Badiou (1937) French writer and philosopher

Original French: La vérité est un mot neuf en Europe (et ailleurs).
From L'être et l'événement. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988. .
The quote is a variation on Louis de Saint-Just, "Happiness is a new idea in Europe".

Truth

“He [Giovanni Ardini, Italian master-carver] opened up a new vista for me of the quality of form, light, and colour contained in the Mediterranean conception of carving.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Hepworth's quote in: 'Approach to Sculpture', The Studio, London, October 1946, Vol. CXXXII, no. 643, p. 97
Hepworth is here referring to Giovanni Ardini's remark that "marble changes colour under different people's hands"
1932 - 1946

Light

“I think that there is a whole lot turning upside down at rock radio -- not -- excuse me, talk radio particularly. Radio as we know it is pretty much changing completely. You know, the diversity of the taste of the folks that are watching the show right now is way more than what is available in the little Motorola in your car today. And where are the new personalities? Where is the new Stern, somebody who has that much impact? Where is the new.”

David Lee Roth (1954) Rock vocalist; lead singer with Van Halen

Neil Cavuto (June 16, 2006) "Interview with David Lee Roth", Share Your World With Neil Cavuto, Fox News Network.

Cars, Way, Thinking, Change

“I feel a great deal of sympathy for the families of the four brave Americans that we lost at Benghazi. And I certainly can’t even imagine the grief that she has for losing her son, but she’s wrong. She’s absolutely wrong. I and everybody in the administration, all the people she named, the president, the vice president, Susan Rice, we were scrambling to get information that was changing, literally by the hour. And when we had information, we made it public. But then sometimes we had to go back and say we have new information that contradicts it. So I testified for 11 hours. … We have captured one of the lead terrorists and he admits it was both a terrorist attack and it was influenced by the video. This was fog of war. This was complicated. The most effective, comprehensive reports and studies demonstrate that. … I deeply regret that we lost four Americans. And I of course sympathize with members of the families who are still, you know, very much grieving. And I wish that there could be an easy answer at the time, but we learned a lot, and the intelligence kept improving, and we learned enough to say what we think happened at Benghazi.”

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

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

War, People, Family, Feeling

“This work… was designed in the first instance to be a second edition of a Treatise on Algebra, published in 1830, and which has been long out of print; but I have found it necessary, in carrying out the principles developed in that work, to present the subject in so novel a form, that I could not with propriety consider it in any other light than as an entirely new treatise.”

George Peacock (1791–1858) Scottish mathematician

Vol. I: Arithmetical Algebra Preface, p. iii
A Treatise on Algebra (1842)

Light

“Some new works of art have values of some kind or another. Others, the majority, have little or none. But newness as such, in art, is never a value.”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

Things I Didn't Know (2006)

Art

“Too many Oregonians know the heartbreak of a jobless economic recovery. To create new, high-paying jobs, we need investment in Main Street as well as Wall Street.”

David Wu (1955) American politician

David Wu (January 20, 2004) "Oregon Issues and the President's State of the Union." United States House of Representatives. ( Available online at 108th Congress (2003-2004) http://www.house.gov/wu/floor_speeches.shtml)

““Still feeling guilty, are we? I’d have thought you’d be over that by now.”
“I have a nettlesome little thing called a conscience,” Emily hissed. “Ever hear of it?”
“They’re out of fashion in New York,” Stanton said, and though she guessed she was joking, he didn’t sound humorous.”

M. K. Hobson book The Native Star

Source: The Native Star (2010), Chapter 5, “The Aberrancy” (p. 74)

Feeling, Fashion

“The main lesson for Europe and the world is clear: as a matter of urgency, globalization must be fundamentally re-oriented. The main challenges of our times are the rise in inequality and global warming. We must therefore implement international treaties enabling us to respond to these challenges and to promote a model for fair and sustainable development. Agreements of a new type can, if necessary, include measures aimed at facilitating these exchanges. But the question of liberalizing trade should no longer be the main focus. Trade must once again become a means in the service of higher ends. It never should have become anything other than that.”

Thomas Piketty (1971) French economist

We must rethink globalization, or Trumpism will prevail (16 November 2016)

World, Question, Time

“This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.”

Ted Hughes book The Hawk in the Rain

"Wind"
The Hawk in the Rain (1957)

Light, Housing, Sea, Madness

“If the public gets out of the habit of reading they will not come back to it. We shall enter a new phase of our history from which there is no turning back.”

Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) French writer

Source: Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters] (1937), p. ix

History, Reading

“There has never been just one best way to teach quantum mechanics. My goal is neither to sow nostalgia for the philosophically engaged style of Oppenheimer and Nordheim, nor to condemn the pragmatic approach of Fermi, Bethe and Feynman. It is rather to highlight the choices that physicists must always make when stepping into the classroom. Choices of topics to discuss and problems to assign reflect deeper decisions about the ideal type of physicist one seeks to train. Should the new generation be philosophically attuned, concerned with minute details of conceptual interpretation? Or should physicists hone their ability to calculate, pushing Heisenberg’s and Schrödinger’s equations into the service of ever more elaborate problems to solve and phenomena to analyse? Competing ideals have flourished under different pedagogical conditions.”

David Kaiser (1971) American physicist

Turning physicists into quantum mechanics (2007)

Way, Problem, Decision, Nostalgia

“We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries. The three or four years' course of lectures, the bachelor who knows some, the master who knows most, the doctor who knows all, are ideas that have come down unimpaired from the Middle Ages. Nowadays no one should end his learning while he lives and these university degrees are preposterous. It is true that we have multiplied universities greatly in the past hundred years, but we seem to have multiplied them altogether too much upon the old pattern.. [A] new university is just another imitation of all the old universities that have ever been. Educationally we are still for all practical purposes in the coach and horse and galley stage.”

H. G. Wells book World Brain

World Brain (1938)

Age, Education, Way, Idea

“When a normal ensign looked at his commander, he ought to see a godlike being, not a, a… future subordinate. New ensigns were supposed to be a subhuman species anyway.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, The Vor Game (1990)

Future

“The Conservative Party in the House of Commons has played ball with Paisley for 18 months, during which he has sat among them on the government benches but voted against them…For was he not the secret weapon of those who wanted to send Ulster the way of white Rhodesia? … That is why the Northern Ireland Secretary, Mr Humphrey Atkins, and the Northern Ireland Office spent the first year-and-a-half of this Parliament building up Ian Paisley and whispering to him and to everybody else that he was going to be the big white chief under a new set-up which they planned to introduce. They recognized in him a man with no dedication to the Union, a man who would abuse the Parliament of the Union to its face and declared that he owed it no allegiance…He is afraid for his own skin, and afraid of the fringe men of violence on whose backs he would fain ride, provided he can distance himself from them when serious trouble looms. The old adage holds good; all bullies are cowards, and most cowards are bullies. That is the last trait which completed the portrait of the man who the enemies of the Union are hoping against hope will put them in business again.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Source: Speech in Belfast (8 May 1981), reported in The Times (9 May 1981), p. 2

Men, Secret, Hope, Way

“…it all happened so quickly you got a lot of bewilderment; you get a lot of people who are basically meat-and-three-veg quarter-acre New Zealanders who find themselves eating dim sims with chopsticks and they can't cope.”

David Lange (1942–2005) New Zealand politician and 32nd Prime Minister of New Zealand

Referring to the reforms of the 1980s.
Source: New Zealand Wit & Wisdom (1998), p. 156.

People

“Physicists however will be forced to recognize that the energy within molecular structures has its origin elsewhere. They will be forced to postulate the existence of an unknown force, always existing despite newer current theories. No postulated new force theory will be able to explain reality.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 410, Page 284
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 8

Reality

“I was born in the south of India but I've never lived there. I went to school in Bombay, and in Hong Kong and in New York. But the place I've lived in the most is Bombay, because I've been there at various stages of my life.”

Jeet Thayil (1959) Indian writer

On his being asked Where was he born?
Jeet Thayil on why 'Where are you from?' is a complicated question for all of us

Life, School

“There are times when a company’s know-how, product range, and labor relations are in harmony with the world around it. The business situations are familiar, the company is well organized, and employees are trained and prepared. During those times, managers do not need to develop and implement new ideas. Their job is to allocate resources to promote growth and development, channeling capital and people to the parts of the organization best positioned to benefit from the current state of affairs. Those parts of the organization then become larger, better established, and more powerful.
But just when the company has organized itself, outside circumstances may change. New technologies come on the scene, markets shift, interest rates fluctuate, consumers’ tastes change, and the company must enter a new phase of life. In order to stay in sync with the outside world, it must be able to alter its marketing strategy, its product range, its organizational form, and where and how it does its manufacturing. And once a company has adapted to a new environment, it is no longer the organization it used to be; it has evolved. That is the essence of learning.”

Arie de Geus (1930) Dutch businessman

Cited in: Richard C. Huseman, Jon P. Goodman (1998), Leading with Knowledge: The Nature of Competition in the 21st Century. SAGE Publications, p. 72.
The Living Company, 1997

Life, People, World, Idea

“Primarily, they (ideas) come from daydreaming or every day occurrences. I try to get out and about, especially new places to let the environment inspire me. I start an illustration of a building I see and then the elements of different characters will populate in my mind like a set and actors on a stage. If nothing comes up I continue to draw until something unfolds.”

Lorin Morgan-Richards (1975) American poet, cartoonist, and children's writer

Regarding how he comes up with ideas for his comic strips The Goodbye Family and The Noodle Rut (1 June 2017). Source: Lorin Morgan-Richards Newsletter #2, Us6.campaign-archive2.com, 2017-06-26 http://us6.campaign-archive2.com/?u=51e751ef352e602deca0ecdc7&id=2e82f26313,

Idea, Drawing

“Plastic automatism.... as employed by modern masters, like Masson, Miro, [both artists of Surrealism] and Picasso, is actually very little a question of the unconsciousness. It is much more a plastic weapon with which to invent new forms. As such it is one of the twentieth century greatest formal inventions.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Modern Painter's World, Robert Motherwell , Dyn, Nov. 1942, p. 13
1940s

Question

“How fast we learn in the day of sorrow! Scripture shines out in a new effulgence; every verse seems to contain a sunbeam, every promise stands out in illuminated splendor; things hard to be understood become in a moment plain.”

Horatius Bonar (1808–1889) British minister and poet

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 555.

Learning

“Cosmic Consciousness is a third form which is as far above Self Consciousness as is that above Simple Consciousness. With this form, of course, both simple and self consciousness persist (as simple consciousness persists when self consciousness is acquired), but added to them is the new faculty”

Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1902) prominent Canadian psychiatrist in the late 19th century

First Words
Cosmic Consciousness (1901)
Context: Cosmic Consciousness … is a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary man. This last is called Self Consciousness and is that faculty upon which rests all of our life (both subjective and objective) which is not common to us and the higher animals, except that small part of it which is derived from the few individuals who have had the higher consciousness above named. To make the matter clear it must be understood that there are three forms or grades of consciousness. (1) Simple Consciousness, which is possessed by say the upper half of the animal kingdom. By means of this faculty a dog or a horse is just as conscious of the things about him as a man is; he is also conscious of his own limbs and body and he knows that these are a part of himself. (2) Over and above this Simple Consciousness, which is possessed by man as by animals, man has another which is called Self Consciousness. By virtue of this faculty man is not only conscious of trees, rocks, waters, his own limbs and body, but he becomes conscious of himself as a distinct entity apart from all the rest of the universe. It is as good as certain that no animal can realize himself in that way. … The animal is, as it were, immersed in his consciousness as a fish in the sea, he cannot, even in imagination, get outside of it for one moment so as to realize it. … Cosmic Consciousness is a third form which is as far above Self Consciousness as is that above Simple Consciousness. With this form, of course, both simple and self consciousness persist (as simple consciousness persists when self consciousness is acquired), but added to them is the new faculty … The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is, as its name implies, a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe … Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs an intellectual enlightenment or illumination which alone would place the individual on a new plane of existence — would make him almost a member of a new species. To this is added a state of moral exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation and joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense, which is fully as striking and more important both to the individual and to the race than is the enhanced intellectual power. With these come, what may be called, a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have this, but the consciousness that he has it already.

“Paris [1933 - 1944] with its wonderful (intense soft) light had relaxed my palette — there were other colors, other entirely new forms, and some that I had used years earlier. Naturally I did all this unconsciously.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote from his letter to Alfred Barr, Jr., 16 July, 1944; as cited in Vivian Endicott Barnett, et al., 'Kandinsky', exh. cat. [New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2009], p. 70
1930 - 1944

Color, Nature, Light

“[I call for] imagination and courage in the endless endeavor to make human life more meaningful and significant, more nearly expressive of the values we cherish… A national policy for the family will earn affirmation and as such should give re-direction to what we are now doing in our social life, and new hope and inspiration to individual men and women and new promise to youth.”

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

Cited in: Ruth H. Jewson, James Walters (1988) The National Council on Family Relations: a fifty year history. p. 15
National Policy for the Family (1948)

Life, Women, Men, Youth

“Against all these assertions Grotius published to the world a demonstration that no such rights could exist. His whole argument was mainly a development of two postulates. The first of these was that the right of nations to communicate with one another had been universally recognized; that it was based on a fundamental law of humanity; that the liberty of the sea being necessary to enable nations to communicate with one another, it could not be taken away by any power whatever. The second was that every attempt to make an ocean highway a monopoly of any single nation is forbidden by the immensity of the sea, its lack of stability, its want of fixed limits. This argument in places seemed thin. The book [Mare Liberum], after the custom of the time, was filled with an array—far more than sufficient—of learned citations; but its most significant feature—that which went to make it the herald of a new epoch—was that it took its stand upon the inalienable rights of mankind,—that it mainly deduced these rights neither from revelation nor from national enactments, but from natural law as ascertained by human reason.”

Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) American politician

Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 61

Books, World, Law, Communication

“We –finally—look upon change, the every-unfolding future, with confidence rather than doubt, hope rather than fear. We, as a people, were born of revolution. And we have lived by change—always a frontier people, exploring—if not new wilderness—then new science and new knowledge.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

1950s, Address at the Philadelphia Convention Hall (1956)

People, Fear, Hope, Confidence

“The religious principle of Jesus was thus certainly freed by Paul from its original Jewish and national husk, but only to be immediately clothed again in a new supernaturalistic envelope, the origin of which likewise lay in the historically given ideas of Hellenism and Pharisaism. Therefore the Pauline Christ can just as little be for us a binding object of faith as the Jesus of history.”

Otto Pfleiderer (1839–1908) German Protestant theologian

Source: Evolution and Theology (1900), p. 23.

Faith, History, Idea, Christ

“We had 45 lakh cases pending from 2003–2004, to which 65 lakh new cases were added, making it more than one crore pending cases. After our initiatives, there are only 20 lakh pending court cases. Now my target is that by 2010, when Gujarat will complete 50 years, we will make it no-pendency. Cases will be disposed of in the very year they are filed.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

2009, "The nation is waiting for a strong, experienced leader", 2009

“The larger the big corporations grow and the closer they become connected with the State bureaucracy, the fewer changes there are for the rise of new competitors.”

Günter Reimann (1904–2005) German economist

Source: The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism, 2014, p.187

Change

“I always try to use new media for the gallery, but I realize that pixels and mosaics are mainly my signature.”

Invader (artist) (1969) French urban artist

"http://www.complex.com/style/2014/07/space-invader-interview"

“At last the bourgeois has a theatre of his own in which he really feels at home. In every little town there is a modest building, and in the big cities those new palaces of stone or marble whose remains still survive.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

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

Feeling, Home

“In the shift from direct democracy to representational democracy, the printed book became an embodiment of thought for the physically absent author; and so the popular art form of the popular book and the pamphlet re-presented ideas and contributed to the public space of political philosophies of the Enlightenment. Television, however, now brings forth this new kind of public space, and it calls into being this new world, not of the educated citizenry in a republic, but of the electropeasantry in the state of Entertainment. Recall how people stopped singing in pubs when they brought in the TV set, and you will appreciate the new passivity in which people stop voting for their representatives as TV takes over the electoral campaigns.”

William Irwin Thompson (1938) American writer

Thompson (1991) Play, from The American Replacement of Nature.

People, Books, World, Education

“To work for peace and reconciliation is central to the mission of the Church. For the Church exists in order to carry on the saving work of Jesus under the guidance of the Spirit. And his saving work is interpreted in the New Testament as reconciliation and peace-making. According to Paul, God was in Christ Jesus reconciling the world to himself.”

Kurien Kunnumpuram (1931–2018) Indian theologian

Kunnumpuram, K. (ed) (2007) World Peace: An Impossible Dream? , Mumbai: St Pauls
On Peace

God, World, Peace, Christ

“Culture produces relative consciousness of the changeable expression of reality. When this consciousness is attained, a revolt takes place: the beginning of the deliverance from that expression of reality. Destruction of its limitation follows. The culture of the intuitive faculties has conquered. A clearer perception of constant reality is possible. A new realism appears.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Source: 1940's, A New Realism', 1943-1945, p. 18

Reality, Appearance

“The goal of deriving all the phenomena of nature from a few basic physical laws and the axioms of mathematics had been set by Galileo…
In studying curvilinear motions on the earth Galileo had found the parabola to be the basic curve. In the heavens… Kepler… had found the ellipse to be the basic curve. Why this difference? …since parabola and ellipse are both conic sections there was the provocative suggestion that perhaps some physical law unified these related paths of motion. …
It has often happened in the history of mathematics and science that major problems remained outstanding… great minds… succeeded only in revealing the true difficulties… and in generating an atmosphere of dispair… Then a genius appeared… with ideas that seemed remarkably simple once propounded, clarified the entire situation, dispelled the confusion, restored order, and produced a new synthesis that embraced far more even than the phenomena under consideration. The genius who… picked up the torch of science dropped by Galileo, was Isaac Newton.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematics and the Physical World (1959), p. 225

Law, History, Mathematics, Idea

“The exciting thing about seeing a new show is that you are taken on a journey of surprises, if you know what’s coming it takes away the fun.”

Kerry Ellis (1979) English stage actress and singer

As quoted in "Brian May/Kerry Ellis: Exclusive Interview" (21 February 2011) http://queenonline.com/en/features/brian-maykerry-ellis-exclusive-interview/

“For me personally, the greatest art to date has been created in New York and the most uptight and conventional art in Berlin. Obviously, I am an exception to this rule!”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

living and working in Berlin
after 2010, Isa Genzken, the artist who doesn't do interviews' (2014)

Art, Personality

“I simply don't understand why the Nobel academy gave him a peace prize or why Charlie Dimmock and Alan Titchmarsh gave him a new garden. And I don't see why he should be given a statue in Trafalgar Square, either. If we're after someone who stands up for the oppressed, what about Jesus? I feel fairly sure he never blew up a train.”

Jeremy Clarkson (1960) English broadcaster, journalist and writer

Mandela Just Doesn't Deserve His Pedestal, p. 239
The World According to Clarkson (2005)

Peace, Feeling, Understanding, Training

“The new information technologies can be seen to drive societies toward increasingly dynamic high-energy regions further and further from thermodynamical equilibrium, characterized by decreasing specific entropy and increasingly dense free-energy flows, accessed and processed by more and more complex social, economic, and political structures.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Laszlo (1992) "Information Technology and Social Change: An Evolutionary Systems Analysis". Behavioral Science 37: p. 247.

“In Somalia, we know exactly what they had to gain because they told us. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, described this as the best public relations operation of the Pentagon that he could imagine. His picture, which I think is plausible, is that there was a problem about raising the Pentagon budget, and they needed something that would be, look like a kind of a cakewalk, which would give a lot of prestige to the Pentagon. Somalia looked easy. Let's look back at the background. For years, the United States had supported a really brutal dictator, who had just devastated the country, and was finally kicked out. After he's kicked out, it was 1990, the country sank into total chaos and disaster, with starvation and warfare and all kind of horrible misery. The United States refused to, certainly to pay reparations, but even to look. By the middle of 1992, it was beginning to ease. The fighting was dying down, food supplies were beginning to get in, the Red Cross was getting in, roughly 80% of their supplies they said. There was a harvest on the way. It looked like it was finally sort of settling down. At that point, all of a sudden, George Bush announced that he had been watching these heartbreaking pictures on television, on Thanksgiving, and we had to do something, we had to send in humanitarian aid. The Marines landed, in a landing which was so comical, that even the media couldn't keep a straight face. Take a look at the reports of the landing of the Marines, it must've been the first week of December 1992. They had planned a night, there was nothing that was going on, but they planned a night landing, so you could show off all the fancy new night vision equipment and so on. Of course they had called the television stations, because what's the point of a PR operation for the Pentagon if there's no one to look for it. So the television stations were all there, with their bright lights and that sort of thing, and as the Marines were coming ashore they were blinded by the television light. So they had to send people out to get the cameramen to turn off the lights, so they could land with their fancy new equipment. As I say, even the media could not keep a straight face on this one, and they reported it pretty accurately. Also reported the PR aspect. Well the idea was, you could get some nice shots of Marine colonels handing out peanut butter sandwiches to starving refugees, and that'd all look great. And so it looked for a couple of weeks, until things started to get unpleasant. As things started to get unpleasant, the United States responded with what's called the Powell Doctrine. The United States has an unusual military doctrine, it's one of the reasons why the U. S. is generally disqualified from peace keeping operations that involve civilians, again, this has to do with sovereignty. U. S. military doctrine is that U. S. soldiers are not permitted to come under any threat. That's not true for other countries. So countries like, say, Canada, the Fiji Islands, Pakistan, Norway, their soldiers are coming under threat all the time. The peace keepers in southern Lebanon for example, are being attacked by Israeli soldiers all the time, and have suffered plenty of casualties, and they don't like it. But U. S. soldiers are not permitted to come under any threat, so when Somali teenagers started shaking fists at them, and more, they came back with massive fire power, and that led to a massacre. According to the U. S., I don't know the actual numbers, but according to U. S. government, about 7 to 10 thousand Somali civilians were killed before this was over. There's a close analysis of all of this by Alex de Waal, who's one of the world's leading specialists on African famine and relief, altogether academic specialist. His estimate is that the number of people saved by the intervention and the number killed by the intervention was approximately in the same ballpark. That's Somalia. That's what's given as a stellar example of the humanitarian intervention.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Responding to the question, "what did the United States have to gain by intervening in Somalia?", regarding Operation Provide Relief/Operation Restore Hope/Battle of Mogadishu.
Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999, Sovereignty and World Order, 1999

People, World, Peace, Food

“I'm not so sure I could have done otherwise, but I wish I... I'm re-going to a French shrink now, and she's helped me a lot. I wish I'd gone sooner, because I think women are inclined more than men to be self-destructive, and I really think I had the masochistic medal there for a while, and I, you know, I want to, that I wish I had stopped. I think it's also very masochistic to sit and cry in my spilt Scotch for areas in my life that have been very creepy and that I should have cut, left sooner. So what's, that's, I feel sorry about that. But I'm getting to [me, be] perhaps more, oh, I don't know, trying to look at that in a more positive way. Maybe I got something out of that too, I don't know... Maybe. I mean... I feel also uncomfortable about staying in France, but then, if I could only make sort of a.., instead of saying negative, 'I'm too lazy to move,' a positive thing, 'I really like this house. I really like this view. I really like Paris better than New York”

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) American painter

or not better, or equally, or differently, or something, which is quite true - instead of sitting - which I can do, I used to do - and missing the country and missing New York, or missing France.
Tape number two, side A
1975 - 1992, Oral history interview with Joan Mitchell, 1986

Life, Women, Men, Way

“We wear the clothes and embrace the forms of democracy. Are they worth anything? We don't know yet. But we do know one thing. We know it for sure. That some of the largest and most civilized nations of Europe have discarded those clothes and have acquired new ones. Did they get rid of them forever? Other nations are doing their best to dispose of them and to get new ones also. Why? Have all nations gone mad? Are the Rumanian politicians the only wise men in the world? Somehow I doubt it.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

Men, World, Democracy, Madness

“The playing of Soviet pianists of the younger generation differed significantly from the composer’s performing style, as discussed above. (Here I am referring to the generation of Richter and Gilels or younger, as opposed to Prokofiev’s coevals such as Neuhaus and Samuil Feinberg, who also had Prokofiev’s works in their repertoires.) Since we know that Prokofiev appreciated their playing, does it mean that he accepted their approach? Should we regard the new generation’s playing as a distortion of the composer’s intentions or as a natural evolution of interpretive style?
I believe that Prokofiev, having been exposed to the new performing style of the Soviet pianists, accepted at least some of its qualities. We can mention assertive muscular playing, open expressivity, and a gripping commitment to the music among those traits that brought recognition to Soviet pianists and assured their success in the international arena. These characteristics were concordant with the evolving compositional style of Prokofiev, whose later works became both more virile (often heroic) and expressive in a warmer and more open way.”

Boris Berman (1948) Russian/American musician

Prokofiev’s piano sonatas : a guide for the listener and the performer (2008), Prokofiev the pianist

Music, Way, Nature, Success

“"They (CAG auditors) are the best in the world. Both developing and developed countries send their auditors to train with us at our academies. Effectiveness and robustness of our processes have led us to being appointed auditor for global agencies." - Vinod Rai at a seminar on 'Public Accountability and the Role of CAG' organized by the Institute of Public Auditors of India at New Delhi on 28/03/2012.”

Vinod Rai (1948) Comptroller and Auditor General of India

World, Training, Country

“[From Ernest von Hermanstadt]; Action—action in the sunshine—passion—but little feeling, and less thought: such was meant to be our existence. But we refine—we sadden and we subdue—we call up the hidden and evil spirits of the inner world—we wake from their dark repose those who will madden us. The heart is like the wood on yonder flickering hearth: green and fresh, haunted by a thousand sweet odours, bathed in the warm air, and gladdened by the summer sunshine—so grew it at first upon its native soil. But nature submitteth to art, and man has appointed for it another destiny: it is gathered, and cast into the fire. It seems, then, as if its life had but just begun. A new spirit has crept into the kindled veins—a brilliant light dances around it—it is bright—it is beautiful—and it is consumed! What remains?—A warmth on the atmosphere soon passing away, and a heap of blackened ashes! What more will remain of the heart?”

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

The Monthly Magazine

Life, World, Beauty, Art

“For perennialists, too, the nation is immemorial. National forms may change and particular nations may dissolve, but the identity of a nation is unchanging. Yet the nation is not part of any natural order, so one can choose one's nation, and later generations can build something new on their ancient ethnic foundations. The task of nationalism is to rediscover and appropriate a submerged past in order the better to build on it.”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

As cited by Eric G.E. Zuelow " Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and the Reconstruction of Nations http://www.nationalismproject.org/what/smith1.htm" on nationalismproject.org. 1999-2007. Gastronomy or Geology? The Role of Nationalism in the Reconstruction of Nations. (1994)

Nature, Change, Past, Parting