Quotes about nothing (10000 quotes, page 43)

“There have been men before … who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself… as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

Source: The Great Divorce (1944–1945), Ch. 9

Men , God , Christ

“Organized perception is what is art all about... It is a process. It has nothing to do with any external form the painting takes, it has to do with a way of building a unified pattern of seeing…”

Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) American pop artist

Source: 1960's, What is Pop Art? Interviews with eight painters' (1963), pp. 25-27

Art , Way , Painting

“It kind of reminds… I could use the Third Reich, the Big Lie. You say something over and over and over and over again, and people will believe it, and that's their strategy… A hot summer has nothing to do with global warming. Let's keep in mind it was just three weeks ago that people were saying, "Wait a minute; it is unusually cool."”

James Inhofe (1934) American politician

[Heat wave has senator sticking to beliefs, Jim Myers, Tulsa World, http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?articleID=060722_Ne_A1_Heatw7204]

People , Lie , Waiting , Summer

“My quarrel with him is, that his works contain nothing worth quoting; and a book that furnishes no quotations, is, me judice [in my opinion], no book - it is a plaything.”

Thomas Love Peacock book Crotchet Castle

Crotchet Castle, chapter IX. Though not named, the author under discussion is clearly Sir Walter Scott.

Books , Quotes

“He's not out
seeing a sight but the rock
crystal thing to see — the startling El Greco
brimming with inner light — that
covets nothing that it has let go. This then you may know
as the hero.”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

"The Hero"
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)

Light

“The most of my sufferings and sorrows were occasioned by my own unwillingness to be nothing, which I am, and by struggling to be something.”

Edward Payson (1783–1827) American religious leader

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 335.

Suffering

“Ron Paul: What's happening is, there's transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy. This comes about because of the monetary system that we have. When you inflate a currency or destroy a currency, the middle class gets wiped out. So the people who get to use the money first which is created by the Federal Reserve system benefit. So the money gravitates to the banks and to Wall Street. That's why you have more billionaires than ever before. Today, this country is in the middle of a recession for a lot of people… As long as we live beyond our means we are destined to live beneath our means. And we have lived beyond our means because we are financing a foreign policy that is so extravagant and beyond what we can control, as well as the spending here at home. And we're depending on the creation of money out of thin air, which is nothing more than debasement of the currency. It's counterfeit… So, if you want a healthy economy, you have to study monetary theory and figure out why it is that we're suffering. And everybody doesn't suffer equally, or this wouldn't be so bad. It's always the poor people -- those who are on retired incomes -- that suffer the most. But the politicians and those who get to use the money first, like the military industrial complex, they make a lot of money and they benefit from it.
John McCain: Everybody is paying taxes and wealth creates wealth. And the fact is that I would commend to your reading, Ron, "Wealth of Nations," because that's what this is all about. A vibrant economy creates wealth. People pay taxes. Revenues are at an all time high.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

GOP debate, Dearborn, Michigan, October 9, 2007 http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071009/NEWS02/71009073
2000s, 2006-2009

Money , People , Home , Study

“Well then you thought that the end was in sight
And then you thought there was nothing to fight
But you had opened your heart with your mind
Oooh here comes one.”

Becky Stark (1976) American singer

Here Comes One
Imagine Our Love (2007)

Heart , Fight

“My fire was in all its glory about midnight, and, having made a bark shed to shelter me from the rain and partially dry my clothing, I had nothing to do but look and listen and join the trees in their hymns and prayers.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Travels in Alaska http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/travels_in_alaska/ (1915), chapter 2: Alexander Archipelago and the Home I Found in Alaska
1910s

Tree , Clothes

“Programming is the Great Game. It consumes you, body and soul. When you're caught up in it, nothing else matters. When you emerge into daylight, you might well discover that you're a hundred pounds overweight, your underwear is older than the average first grader, and judging from the number of pizza boxes lying around, it must be spring already. But you don't care, because your program runs, and the code is fast and clever and tight. You won.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

How Software Companies Die

Soul , Game , Spring , Lying

“The art of teaching is also to know when to stop. It is good when people want to be better, physically, morally, spiritually, intellectually. But a fashion? No! Yoga is a painful art. It’s not like dance or music, where the person watching gets pleasure. Only the person doing it finds joy. It has nothing to do with externals.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: BKS Iyengar – obituary http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11045993/BKS-Iyengar-obituary.html, The Telegraph, 20 August 2014

Pain , People , Pleasure , Art

“I realized then why we respond to the sound of the waves, and the falling of rain, and wind in the trees. Because they are meaningless. They are nothing to do with us. They are outside our control. They remind us of a time, very early in our lives, when we did not understand the noises around us but simply accepted them in our ears; and so they provide blessed relief from our continual needy attempts to change our world in magic deed or endless thought. Meaningless sound, which welove against the anxiety of action, of pattern-making, of seeking to comprehend and change. As soon as we picked up someting and used it for a purpose, we were both made and damned. Tool-making gave us the world, and we lost our minds.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Epilogue - Cannon Beach
The Lonely Dead (2004)

World , Understanding , Tree , Change

“In the groundes bordering uppon tile woods of Arden, which are verie colde, they use lime instead of dung, and thereby they make ye earth most fruitful which was barren before, Now if lime (which is nothing else but a baked or burnt stone within those fierie furnaces, and whose moisture is altogether exhaled, so as there remaineth therin nothing else, but the terrestriall parts replenished with a fierie vertue) be found so rich a soile, I know not why the heat of marle may not nmch better be endured”

Hugh Plat (1552–1608) writer

Source: Diverse new Sorts of Soylenot yet brought into any publique Use, 1594, p. 21-22; Cited in: Malcolm Thick, " Sir Hugh Plat and the Chemistry of Marling. http://www.bahs.org.uk/AGHR/ARTICLES/42n2a5.pdf" Agr. Hist. Rev 42 (1994): 156-157.

Parting

“…at the end of the day, nothing makes me feel more positive than something I can get really pissed off about.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/9768-What-Not-to-Hate-About-E3.2
Other Articles

Feeling

“Gentlemen, the time is coming when there will be two great classes, Socialists, and Anarchists. The Anarchists want the government to be nothing, and the Socialists want government to be everything. There can be no greater contrast. Well, the time will come when there will be only these two great parties, the Anarchists representing the laissez faire doctrine and the Socialists representing the extreme view on the other side, and when that time comes I am an Anarchist.”

William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) American academic

per Irving Norton Fisher in a speech to the Yale socialists club 1911 http://praxeology.net/WGS-Anarchy.htm.

Time

“The Treatise is also one of the most important books of Western thought ever written. Spinoza was the first to argue that the Bible is not literally the word of God but rather a work of human literature; that “true religion” has nothing to do with theology, liturgical ceremonies, or sectarian dogma but consists only in a simple moral rule: love your neighbor; and that ecclesiastic authorities should have no role whatsoever in the governance of a modern state.”

Steven Nadler (1958) American philosopher

Preface
A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise (2011)

Love , God , Books , Religion

“Do you believe in God?
I, I believe in nothing but God!”

Frederick Franck (1909–2006) Dutch painter

Source: Echoes from the Bottomless Well (1985), p. 65

God

“What Americans were really objecting to had nothing to do with constitutional principles. their objection was not to Parliament's constitutional right to levy certain kinds of taxes as opposed to others, but to its effort to collect any.”

Bernard Bailyn book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter V, TRANSFORMATION, p. 218.

Effort

“"Do nothing" does not mean "don’t do anything", "mu" or "nothing" is not merely the lack of something. It refers to the state in which the mind has grown imperceptibly calm, and then allowed things to take their natural course. If you can leave things entirely up to the universe and not put up the slightest resistance, then you can pass the highest level of ki tests.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

24
Ki Sayings (2003)

Nature , Universe

“We must take note of the fact that the artist nowadays is occupied with painting flags, posters, pots and pans textiles and things like that. What is referred to as 'artistic work' has on the vast majority of occasions nothing whatever to do with creative effort: and the term 'artistic work' is used in order to demonstrate the 'sacredness' of the work which the artist does at his easel. The conception of 'artistic work' presupposes a distinction between useful and useless work and as there are only a few artists buyers can be found even for their useless products. The artist's work lies beyond the boundaries of the useful and the useless.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

1915 - 1925, Suprematism' in World Reconstruction (1920)

Effort , Painting

“The prototype of the rule creator, but not the only variety as we shall see, is the crusading reformer. He is interested in the content of rules. The existing rules do not satisfy him because there is some evil which profoundly disturbs him. He feels that nothing can be right in the world until rules are made to correct it. He operates with an absolute ethic; what he sees is truly and totally evil with no qualification. Any means is justified to do away with it. The crusader is fervent and righteous, often self-righteous.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Source: Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963), p. 147.

World , Feeling , Evil

“The philosophers likewise assume that in Nature there is nothing in vain, so that everything that is not the product of human industry serves a certain purpose, which may be known or unknown to us.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.25

Nature

“Large number of tribes, Dalits and Backward Castes have a historical food culture of beef. The anti-beef agenda has been in the Brahmanical fold. It began with the South Indian Brahmins and then spread to the North and became part of the Gandhian movement. My question is, how can the state impose a certain food culture on people? The state has nothing to do with food. They can give certain food to people depending on the market, but cannot impose that you can or cannot eat certain food items. If beef eating is bad for Brahmins or Baniyas or certain upper castes, then the state is imposing that on the rest of the society. So the state is actually becoming a theocratic state.”

Kancha Ilaiah (1952) Indian scholar, activist and writer

Quoted in DNA India (04 March 2015) http://www.dnaindia.com/india/interview-maharashtra-s-beef-ban-is-not-merely-communal-it-is-theocratic-kancha-ilaiah-2066223.

People , Food , Question , Parting

“Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than freedom to stagnate, to live without dreams, to have no greater aim than a second car and another television set.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

"Putting First Things First", Foreign Affairs (January 1960)

Dreams , Cars , Freedom

“I see Legros less often sometimes at Andler's as little as possible it means I get to bed late and I am short of funds, it is very pleasant nonetheless Courbet is so charming, Legros often goes there they get on very well he has some superb articles in the figaro. in the gazette des Beaux Arts.... then he will have one in the courrier du Commerce those are the ones I know about. success, women, good food, wine, beer, new acquaintances as a result of these articles, in short an accolade!!!!!!!!.... success can be harmful, it makes you relax, you sit on it and are distracted.... you alone should correct the faults, you know what I think of advice, correction. the gifted man should walk alone, straight to his goal, what happens is nothing, rejection, success, selling pleasing, all that is nonsense.”

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) painter from France

quote from a letter of Fantin-Latour, Paris, 26 June 1859, to James Whistler in London; from The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler - Repository: Glasgow University Library http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/people/display/?cid=1073&nameid=Fantin_Latour_IH&sr=0&rs=1&surname=Fantin-latour&firstname= - System Number: 01073; Call Number: MS Whistler F 4.

Women , Food , Art , Beer

“You can have news that (Cristiano) Ronaldo went to the toilet three times a day, and that's the news. I make semi-finals and nothing.”

João Sousa (1989) Portuguese tennis player

On tennis' lack of public visibility in Portugal when compared with football, during 2015 ATP Dubai tournament.
Source: From Novak Djokovic to Joao Sousa: ATP Dubai quotes of the week, Sport 360, 2 November 2015 http://sport360.com/article/dubai-tennis-championship/33436/novak-djokovic-joao-sousa-atp-dubai-quotes-week,

Time

“The Almighty-God idea came under attack because it explained nothing; it simply pushed all explanations one stage farther away. In the nineteenth century atheistic positivism started displacing the Almighty-God notion in that minority of the population that bathed regularly. Atheism had a limited run, as it, too, explains nothing, being merely Godism turned upside down.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Cat Who Walks Through Walls

Source: The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985), p. 564

God , Idea

“Wars always bring about a conservative reaction. They overwhelm and destroy patient and careful efforts to improve the condition of man. Nothing can be heard in the cannon's roar but the voice of might. All the safeguards laboriously built to preserve individual freedom and foster man's welfare are blown to pieces with shot and shell. In the presence of the wholesale slaughter of men the value of life is cheapened to the zero point. What is one life compared with the almost daily records of tens of thousands or more mowed down like so many blades of grass in a field? Building up a conception of the importance of life is a matter of slow growth and education; and the work of generations is shattered and laid waste by machine guns and gases on a larger scale than ever before. Great wars have been followed by an unusually large number of killings between private citizens and individuals. These killers have become accustomed to thinking in terms of slaying and death toward all opposition, and these have been followed in turn by the most outrageous legal penalties and a large increase in the number of executions by the state. It is perfectly clear that hate begets hate, force is met with force, and cruelty can become so common that its contemplation brings pleasure, when it should produce pain.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Source: The Story of My Life (1932), Ch. 26 "The Aftermath Of The War"

Life , Death , Men , Pain

“The offer to direct an animated version of Blue Dragon came in February of last year [2006]. Studio Pierrot approached me regarding it. I knew that Sakaguchi had been working on assembling staff to produce a game, although at the time Blue Dragon hadn't yet been formally announced. According to the materials, it was to be a fantasy world like Lord of the Rings, with a detailed world view and story. This may be my final anime, I'm a little worried (about it). There's incredible pressure, but at the same time, there's a sense of accomplishment — that it's worth doing. Blue Dragon will be a masterpiece, not simply because I'm working hard on it, but because the staff is expecting nothing less.”

Akira Toriyama (1955) manga artist and video game character designer

Last anime?

World , Game , Sense , Time

“John Lofton: Do you think abortion is murder?
Ron Paul: Yes, but we have in our state laws, which enforce the law against murder, there are degrees. You have 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree murder. I think somebody who takes a pill the day after probably isn't committing quite the horrible murder when you see somebody lying on the floor and somebody takes a gun and puts it to their head. I don't equate those…
John Lofton: What do you think ought to be the penalty for the abortionist and for the person who gets the abortion?
Ron Paul: I really don't have the wisdom to know exactly what it should be… The girl who goes and gets an abortion, she's a participant in it, I don't think she deserves the death penalty… But there are some abortionists that it wouldn't be very hard to give them a pretty harsh punishment, because, you know, nothing annoys me more than the fact that an abortionist can make money killing a live viable fetus, in the 3rd trimester, and they think nothing about it, and they make a living doing this. Any yet, one minute after birth, that same mother, who might throw the child away, rightfully is called to task, and actually charged with murder. So that inconsistency has to be resolved.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

The American View, August 25, 2007 http://theamericanview.com/index.php?id=898
2000s, 2006-2009

Death , Wisdom , Money , Law

“At the helm of freshly-baked, forgive me, independent governments there will appear executives tested and appointed by us. Chaos will generate more chaos. Where this would prove impossible, power will be grabbed by plain old degenerates. Or political prostitutes, dear Vladimir Ilyich. Or simply nothings.”

Yurii Andrukhovych book The Moscoviad

The Moscoviad
Source: The Moscoviad. Yuri Andrukhovych. Spuyten Duyvil, New York City. ISBN1933132523, p. 176

Forgiveness , Appearance

“What really matters most is your relationship with God. If you hear and heed nothing else in this book, what I hope and pray what you take with you is a renewed sense of trust in the plans and purpose our loving God has for your life. With Him, you will have everything you need to best to live, learn, and lead.”

Don Soderquist (1934–2016)

Don Soderquist “ Live Learn Lead to Make a Difference https://books.google.com/books?id=s0q7mZf9oDkC&lpg=pg=PP1&dq=Don%20Soderquist&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false, Thomas Nelson, April 2006 p. 174.
On Trusting God

Love , Life , God , Books

“Yoga, as it was understood by its sages, is designed to satisfy all the human needs in a comprehensive, seamless whole. Its goal is nothing less than to attain the integrity of oneness –oneness with ourselves and as a consequence oneness with all that lies beyond ourselves. We become the harmonious microcosm in the universal microcosm. Oneness, what I call integration, is the foundation for wholeness, inner peace, and ultimate freedom.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, P.xiii

Peace , Freedom , Universe

“Nothing would please me more, but who else would pump the oil that we need? God damn America.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

Response to a question on expelling Americans from Libya (March 1973), quoted in Time (2 April 1973) " The Arab World: Oil, Power, Violence http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907040-6,00.html"

God

“Wrongly do the Greeks suppose that aught begins or ceases to be; for nothing comes into being or is destroyed; but all is an aggregation or secretion of pre-existent things: so that all-becoming might more correctly be called becoming-mixed, and all corruption, becoming-separate.”

Anaxagoras (-500–-428 BC) ancient Greek philosopher

quoted in Heinrich Ritter, Tr. from German by Alexander James William Morrison, The History of Ancient Philosophy, Vol.1 http://books.google.com/books?id=pUgXAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA284 (1838)

Secret

“Wicked people have nothing human about them except passions: they are almost their virtues.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

People , Passion

“Man has learned nothing: there are people who are still sanctimonious in their opposition to violence regardless of the state of the world, and who will presumably continue in the same way until the end. Frolicking in peace and love must be sweet – no doubt about that. Yet it is a nonsensical and disastrous attitude. With a smothering shroud of six billion people and all their demands covering the surface of the earth, pacifism is dead.”

Pentti Linkola (1932) Finnish ecologist

Can Life Prevail?: A Revolutionary Approach to the Environmental Crisis. page 169

Love , People , World , Peace

“Over and over again courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands: taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant.”

Learned Hand (1872–1961) American legal scholar, Court of Appeals judge

Commissioner v. Newman https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6284821606579578514, 159 F2d 848 (1947).
Judicial opinions

Law

“Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves — that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

Problem , Thinking , Suffering

“It was once said by Abraham Lincoln that this Republic could not long endure half slave and half free; and the same may be said with even more truth of the black citizens of this country. They cannot remain half slave and half free. They must be one thing or the other. And this brings me to consider the alternative now presented between slavery and freedom in this country. From my outlook, I am free to affirm that I see nothing for the negro of the South but a condition of absolute freedom, or of absolute slavery. I see no half-way place for him. One or the other of these conditions is to solve the so-called negro problem. There are forces at work in both of these directions, and for the present that which aims at the re-enslavement of the negro seems to have the advantage. Let it be remembered that the labor of the negro is his only capital. Take this from him, and he dies from starvation. The present mode of obtaining his labor in the South gives the old master-class a complete mastery over him. I showed this in my last annual celebration address, and I need not go into it here. The payment of the negro by orders on stores, where the storekeeper controls price, quality, and quantity, and is subject to no competition, so that the negro must buy there and nowhere else–an arrangement by which the negro never has a dollar to lay by, and can be kept in debt to his employer, year in and year out–puts him completely at the mercy of the old master-class. He who could say to the negro, when a slave, you shall work for me or be whipped to death, can now say to him with equal emphasis, you shall work for me, or I will starve you to death… This is the plain, matter-of-fact, and unexaggerated condition of the plantation negro in the Southern States today.”

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

Speech http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-nations-problem/

Death , Truth , Way , Problem

“After years of patient study (and with cricket there can be no other kind), I have decided that there is nothing wrong with the game that the introduction of golf carts wouldn't fix in a hurry.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

In a Sunburned Country (US), Down Under (UK) (2000)

Game , Study

“"Ultra-nationalism" stands naked as nothing but a euphemism for the worship of violence in service of autocratic goals - be they the terrorism and holy war of Islamic fundamentalists or the refusal of dictatorial systems to accept political democracy.”

Liu Xiaobo (1955–2017) Chinese literary critic, writer, professor, and human rights activist

"Bellicose and Thuggish: The Roots of Chinese "Patriotism" at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century" (2002)
No Enemies, No Hate: Selected Essays and Poems

War , Democracy

“Gallantry to women (the sure road to their favor) is nothing but the appearance of extreme devotion to all their wants and wishes, a delight in their satisfaction, and a confidence in yourself as being able to contribute toward it.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

" On Disagreeable People http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Hazlitt/Disagreeable.htm" (August 1827)
Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)

Women , Confidence , Appearance

“Today, citizens from all across the country came to Washington to honor the precious gift of life, The March for Life movement has for nearly four decades given a voice to those who have no voice. It is a privilege to stand together with thousands of Americans in solidarity and faithful commitment to our solemn duty to protect and defend the lives of the most innocent among us. The Republican majority in Congress has pledged to protect the sanctity of life by ensuring no tax dollars are used for abortion, a policy supported by the vast majority of America. Appreciation goes to those whose tireless efforts continue to shine a light on the need to protect the sanctity and value of human life. May we never forget that our cause is just and timeless because there is nothing more fundamental to our humanity than to defend life.”

Tom Price (U.S. politician) (1954) former United States Secretary of Health and Human Services; former Congressman of Georgia

Price Statement on March for Life https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/trumps-new-hhs-secretary-there-is-nothing-more-fundamental-to-our-humanity (January 24, 2011)

Life , Faith , Support , Effort

“You can't possibly care about debt relief and the Simpsons. If you listen to Ligeti and James Macmillan then why would you want to know who won the United game last night or which Cabernet Sauvignon to drink with your meal tonight? Get back into your box.
Something else missing from the Times of 1968 was anything to do with the home or emotional life. There is nothing about marriage, divorce, children, schools, au pairs, depression, drinking, health, drugs, teenagers, affairs, fashion, sex, successful relationships, failing relationships, interior decor, cancer, infertility, faith, grandparents - or any of the other things that make up the texture of our non-working lives.”

Alan Rusbridger (1953) British newspaper editor

Rusbridger (2000) " Versions of seriousness http://www.theguardian.com/dumb/story/0,7369,391891,00.html", The Guardian. 4 November 2000: Cited in: Raymond Boyle (2006) Sports Journalism: Context and Issues. p. 11
According to Boyle 2006 Rusbridger argued that "changes in the broadsheet press simply reflects wider cultural shift in taste and the breaking down of areas of supposedly high and low culture."
2000s

Life , Marriage , Children , Health

“It's nothing to do with you anyway.”

Kazuo Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go

Source: Never Let Me Go (2005), Chapter 1, p. 11

“He read because it gave him instant gratification in a way nothing else did, and, as was the case with all addicts, gratification was the important thing. He liked history, travel, anthropology, cookbooks (which he read in the same way as other books for pleasure); he liked books with specialized information.”

Jeet Thayil book Narcopolis

Source: Narcopolis, p. 202

Pleasure , Books , Way , Travel

“We are in agreement with him in his conviction that the laborer must be protected 'against the burdens of the good-for-nothing'. We want no such additions to our population as those who prey upon our institutions or our property. America has, in the popular mind, been an asylum for those who have been driven from their homes in foreign countries because of various forms of political and religious oppression. But America can not afford to remain an asylum after such people have passed the portals and begun to share the privileges of our institutions.”

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

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

People , Home , Country

“We'll be sending a print to the MPAA, we say nothing about it and hope they sleep through the movie.”

Uwe Boll (1965) German restaurateur and former filmmaker

About getting Postal rated Uwe Boll - Transforming Games into Movies http://breakpoint.untergrund.net/torrents/BP07_Seminar_UweBoll_GamesToMovies_XVID.avi.torrent
2000s

Hope , Sleep

“Perceptual space is not a special space in addition to physical space, but physical space which we endow with a special subjective metric. …apart from the definition of congruence in physics and that based on perception, there is no third one derived from pure visualization. Any such third definition is nothing but the definition of physical congruence to which our normative function has adjusted the subjective experience of congruence.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

“Girl-power feminists who got where they are by marrying men with money or power — Hillary Rodham Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Arianna Huffington and John Kerry — love to complain about how hard it is for a woman to be taken seriously. It has nothing to do with their being women. It has to do with their cheap paths to power. Kevin Federline isn't taken seriously either.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

I am woman, hear me bore
2007-01-24
Townhall
http://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2007/01/24/i_am_woman,_hear_me_bore/page/full/
2007

Love , Women , Men , Money

“Later, every form of religious belief seemed absurd to me, and death was as if disfigured. […] Today I would never say: he has gone away. I’ve lost the sense of the crossing over: nothing goes up to heaven, we don’t move to another world, we don’t return, we aren’t reborn. We remain definitively immobile; death is the last point on the segment of life that has chanced to be ours.”

Elena Ferrante (1943) Italian writer

"Elena Ferrante: ‘My belief in some kind of beyond, acquired during childhood, has faded’" https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/feb/10/elena-ferrante-life-after-death, The Guardian, 10 February 2018.

Life , Death , World , Sense

“He stood very straight and thought of nothing, or at least thought of thinking nothing.”

Ray Bradbury book The October Country

Homecoming (1946)
The October Country (1955)

Thinking

“Science has adapted itself entirely to the wealthy classes and accordingly has set itself to heal those who can afford everything, and it prescribes the same methods for those who have nothing to spare.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What then must we do? (1886)

Science

“With new technologies of surveillance, economies of scale overcome problems of cost. Since all their electronic communications can be accessed, it is no longer necessary to segregate the inmates from one another. As there is no outside world, escape becomes unimaginable. Technological progress has brought into being a system of surveillance more far-reaching than any Bentham could have conceived. Enclosing the entire population in a virtual Panopticon might seem the ultimate invasion of freedom. But universal confinement need not be experienced as a privation. If they know nothing else, most are likely to accept it as normal. If the technology through which surveillance operates also provides continuous entertainment, they may soon find any other way of living intolerable.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

In the Puppet Theatre: A Universal Panopticon (p. 125)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

World , Way , Communication , Problem

“A set of phrases learnt by rote;
A passion for a scarlet coat;
When at a play to laugh, or cry,
Yet cannot tell the reason why:
Never to hold her tongue a minute;
While all she prates has nothing in it.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

The Furniture of a Woman's Mind (1727)

Passion , Cry

“Here [in the Netherlands] there is absolutely nothing, nowhere and permanently committees to deliver the visual artists some money, since all are hungry. It is such a difficult time for Holland. I had flu, I was very sick and I am still too weak to work.”

Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876–1923) Dutch painter

translation from Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
version in Dutch / citaat van Jacoba van Heemskerck, in het Nederlands vertaald: Hier [in Nederland] is absoluut niets, nergens geld en voortdurend comités om de beeldende kunstenaars geld te bezorgen, aangezien allen honger lijden. Voor Holland zijn het zo moeilijke tijden. Ik had griep, was erg ziek en ben nog te zwak om te werken.
In her letter to Herwarth Walden, 17 Feb. 1922; as cited in Jacoba van Heemskerck van Beest, 1876 – 1923: schilderes uit roeping, A. H. Huussen jr. (ed. Marleen Blokhuis), (ISBN: 90-400-9064-5); Waanders, Zwolle, 2005, p. 183
Jacoba is often ill these last years and rather vulnerable, but nevertheless busy with her designs of ordered glass-windows.
1920's

Money , Time

“The eye of the trilobite tells us that the sun shone on the old beach where he lived; for there is nothing in nature without a purpose, and when so complicated an organ was made to receive light, there must have been light to enter it.”

Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) Swiss naturalist

Geological Sketches (1870), ch. 2, pp. 31–32 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044018968388;view=1up;seq=49

Nature , Light , Sun

“For remember that until one has given all, one has given nothing.”

Georges Guynemer (1894–1917) French flying ace

The Secret Battalion By Michael J. Bird (1964) p. 76

“There is nothing like a parade to elicit the proper respect for the military from the populace.”

Irving Kristol (1920–2009) American columnist, journalist, and writer

Quoted in Wilford, H: The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution, Manchester University Press, 1995.
1990s

“Monday
In Other Place. Did nothing.”

Jonathan Stroud (1970) British writer of fantasy fiction

The Bartimaeus Trilogy Official Website, Bart's Journal

“In a detached person nothing merely temporal is born in possessiveness. His eyes are opened. He becomes fully aware and, receiving his blessed existence and life, is one with Him; for all things are here one in the He becomes fully aware and, receiving his blessed existence and life, is one with Him; for all things are here one in the One One.”

Henry Suso (1295–1366) Dominican friar and mystic

The Exemplar, The Life of the Servant

Life , Personality

“Thousands of pulpit orators have swayed their audiences as a wind sways standing corn; but in the result, those who were most affected differed nothing from their former selves. An effect of eloquence is sufficient to account for a vast amount of feeling at the moment; but to trace to this a moral power, by which a man, for his life long, overcomes his besetting sins, and adorns his name with Christian virtues, is to make sport of human nature.”

William Arthur (minister) (1819–1901) Wesleyan Methodist minister and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 322.

Life , Feeling , Nature , Sport

“Human history is in truth nothing but the history of the slow, uncertain, and surprising fulfillment of the Promise.”

Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928) Peruvian theologian

Source: A Theology of Liberation - 15th Anniversary Edition, Chapter Nine, Liberation And Salvation, p. 91-92

Truth , History

“As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of colour. The great musicians knew this. w:Beethoven and the rest wrote music — simply music; symphony in this key, concerto or sonata in that... Art should be independent of all claptrap — should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works 'arrangements' and 'harmonies.”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

Propositions, 2
also in a letter to 'The World', London 22 Mai, 1878; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 186
1870 - 1903, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies' (1890)

Love , Art , Music , Sense

““Ritual” might be an acceptable term, if shorn of its overtly religious connotations. For me, breaking taboos became nothing less than a stylistic means. I allowed my body, my self, to be pushed into such extreme situations that certain norms of social behaviour could only appear utterly absurd to me.”

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 163 (1984)

Appearance

“The obstinancy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinancy of folly and inanity.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) Abolitionist, author

Source: Little Foxes (1865), Ch. 4.

“Novelist Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park as a screenplay option for the Steven Spielberg flick. I am ambiguous about Crichton’s body of work, as it includes dubious anti-scientific elements. But I can’t be too upset about a fellow who includes me in the acknowledgements of his bestselling novel. I ended up doing some preliminary studies of Tyrannosaurus and Deinonychus for the movie(s). These were significantly altered by Spielberg and Stan Winston and his effects team for copyright purposes. In the film, some of my skeletals show up posted on Sam Neill's (ak. a. Dr. Grant's) trailer wall. I was accidentally responsible for the avian term 'raptor' being improperly applied to dromaeosaurs. In another Hunteria paper and PDW, I synonymized Deinonychus with Velociraptor, which Crichton picked up on and shortened into the convenient handle 'raptor'. The movie was okay, but I will never forgive them for presenting Brachiosaurus as such a heavy limbed clunker. I had nothing to do with that. I thought it was too bad the potentially omnivorous brachiosaurs – which were unlikely to have been as placid as cattle – missed the opportunity to snarf up the bratty kids when they were up in the tree.”

Gregory Scott Paul (1954) U.S. researcher, author, paleontologist, and illustrator

Autobiography, part IV http://gspauldino.com/part4.html, gspauldino.com

Forgiveness , Tree , Study

“We have now become pretty well acquainted with the sugar-growing part of Texas. The life of a planter who has a fair start in the world is one of the most independent imaginable. We here find the pleasures of fashionable life without its tyranny. I doubt, however, whether a person of Northern education could so far forget his home-bred notions and feelings as ever to be thoroughly Southern on the subject of slavery. We have seen none of “the horrors” so often described, but on the other hand I have seen nothing to change my Northern opinions.”

Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) American politician, 19th President of the United States (in office from 1877 to 1881)

Letter to his mother, Sophia Birchard Hayes (27 January 1849)
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922 - 1926)

Life , Pleasure , World , Education

“Here then (belove reader) thou hast this work devided into two treatises, the first is the said introduction and reasoning, for investigation of the true sense of every cheife Theological tearme and date contained in the Revelation, whereby, not onely is it opened, explained and interpreted, but also that same explanation and interpretation is proved, confirmed and demonstrated, by evidente proofe and coherence of scriptures, agreeable with the event of histories. The seconde is, the principall treatise, in which the whole Apocalyps, Chapter by chapter, Verse by verse, and Sentence by sentence, is both Paraphrastically expounded and Historically applyed. …And because this whole work of Revelation concerneth most the discoverie of the Antichristian and Papisticall kingdome, I have therefore (for removing of all suspition) in al histories and prophane matters, taken my authorities and cited my places either out of Ethnick auctors, or then papistical writers, whose testimonies by no reason can be refuted against themselves. But in matters of divinitie, doctrine & interpretation of mysteries (leaving all opinions of men) I take me onely to the interpretation and discoverie thereof, by coherence of scripture, and godly reasons following thereupon; which also not only no Papist, but even no Christian may justly refuse. And forasmuch as our scripturs herein are of two fortes, the one our ordinary text, the other extraordinary citations; In our ordinary text, I follow not altogether the vulgar English translation, but the best learned in the Greek tong, so that (for satisfying the Papists) I differ nothing from their vulgar text of S. Jerome, as they cal it, except is such places, where I prove by good reasons, that hee differeth from the Original Greek. In the extraordinary texts of other scriptures cited by me, I followe ever Jeromes latine translation, where any controverse stands betwixt us and the Papists, and that moveth me in divers places to insert his very latine text, for their cause, with the just English thereof, for supply of the unlearned.”

John Napier (1550–1617) Scottish mathematician

A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John (1593)

Men , History , Sense , Learning

“There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe. And yet there are very few, that will give themselves the trouble to consider the original and foundation of this right.”

William Blackstone book Commentaries on the Laws of England

Book II, ch. 1 http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/blackstone_bk2ch1.asp: Of Property in General.
Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769)

World , Exercises , Imagination , Universe

“In other periods of depression it has always been possible to see some things which were solid and upon which you could base hope, but as I look about, I now see nothing to give ground for hope — nothing of man. But there is still religion, which is the same yesterday, today, and forever. That continues as a solid basis for hope and courage.”

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

Conversation with Charles Andrews (1 January 1933), quoted in Coolidge: An American Enigma (2000).
1930s

Religion , Hope , Courage

“Ikenobo Sen'o, a master of flower arranging, once said (the remark is to be found in his Sayings): "With a spray of flowers, a bit of water, one evokes the vastness of rivers and mountains." The Japanese garden too, of course symbolizes the vastness of nature. The Western garden tends to be symmetrical, the Japanese garden asymmetrical, and this is because the asymmetrical has the greater power to symbolize multiplicity and vastness. The asymmetry, of course, rests upon a balance imposed by delicate sensibilities. Nothing is more complicated, varied, attentive to detail, than the Japanese art of landscape gardening. Thus there is the form called the dry landscape, composed entirely of rocks, in which the arrangement of stones gives expression to mountains and rivers that are not present, and even suggests the waves of the great ocean breaking in upon cliffs.”

Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) Japanese author, Nobel Prize winner

Japan, the Beautiful and Myself (1969)

Art , Mountain , Flowers , Nature

“Bracquemond tells me that he looked attentively at my works at our exhibition. Far from objecting to them, as I expected, he said they were compactly drawn, and modeled, but he is shocked by the dots; he enjoined me to stick to divisionism but not to use the dot. - I said nothing to him of our experiments. He told me that of all the impressionist painters he liked my work best; this was not the first time he had said this; to each one his own taste. He does completely accept my view that the old disorderly method of execution has become impossible.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote of Camille Pissarro, in a letter, Eragny, 23 January 1887, to his son Lucien; in Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 97
1880's

Time

“If girls could do nothing else in this world, they were supposed to be able to keep their blood from showing.”

Colette Dowling (1938)

Source: The Frailty Myth: Women Approaching Physical Equality (2000), p. 40

World , Girl

“O Adolescence, O Adolescence
I wince before thine incandescence...
When anxious elders swarm about
Crying "Where are you going?", thou answerest "Out,"...
Strewn! All is lost and nothing found
Lord, how thou leavest things around!...”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

"Tarkington, Thou Should'st Be Living in This Hour"
Versus (1949)

Cry

“Time past was nothing, no matter how long. Time ahead was everything, no matter how brief.”

Sheri S. Tepper book Grass

Source: Grass (1989), Chapter 17 (p. 385)

Time , Past

“Whoever wants to love is better knowing nothing than too much.”

Adrienne von Speyr (1902–1967) Swiss doctor and mystic

Source: Lumina and New Lumina (1969), p. 20

Love

“There is nothing more dangerous than to leap a chasm in two jumps.”

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

As quoted in Design for Power : The Struggle for the World (1941) by Frederick Lewis Schuman, p. 200; This is the earliest citation yet found for this or similar statements which have been attributed to David Lloyd George, as well as to Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill, Vaclav Havel, Jeffrey Sachs, Rashi Fein, Walter Bagehot and Philip Noel-Baker. It has been described as a Greek, African, Chinese, Russian and American proverb, and as "an old Chassidic injunction". Variants:
Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.
The most dangerous thing in the world is to try to leap a chasm in two jumps.
Later life

“Rolling Stone: Nevertheless, you've often talked about how technology can empower people, how it can change their lives. Do you still have as much faith in technology today as you did when you started out 20 years ago?
Jobs: Oh, sure. It's not a faith in technology. It's faith in people.
Rolling Stone: Explain that.
Jobs: Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them. It's not the tools that you have faith in — tools are just tools. They work, or they don't work. It's people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I'm still optimistic I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes but not for long.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

1990s

People , Faith , Change

“From France to the Philippines, from Jamaica to Japan, from Malaysia to Mexico, from Sri Lanka to Singapore, privatisation is on the move…The policies we have pioneered are catching on in country after country. We Conservatives believe in popular capitalism—believe in a property-owning democracy. And it works! … The great political reform of the last century was to enable more and more people to have a vote. Now the great Tory reform of this century is to enable more and more people to own property. Popular capitalism is nothing less than a crusade to enfranchise the many in the economic life of the nation. We Conservatives are returning power to the people. That is the way to one nation, one people.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Conservative Party Conference (10 October 1986) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=106498
Second term as Prime Minister

Life , People , Way , Democracy

“Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes.”

Tom DeLay (1947) American Republican politician

From a speech made to bankers 2003 March 12 [citation needed]
2000s

War

“The relevance of canonicity has nothing to do with the notion of codified establishments of hierarchical judgment (for which it typically attracts revisionist hostility). Instead, canonicity is important as the capacity to permit vibrant reading relationships to works from the past. … Whatever else the canon may do, its primary function has been the preservation of the reception of literature across periodic borders, thereby calling into question the significance of those borders or the fetishism of contexts. The canon tunnels under the Berlin Wall that periodizers erect between literary regimes. As a fundamental level, therefore, periodization stands at odds with canonicity. Canonicity maintains, cultivates, and develops community over time and across generations; periodization breaks up that identity and suppresses the historical continuities through a strategy of temporal separation.”

Russell Berman (1950) American academic

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 19.

Hostility , Communication , Literature , Question

“She gives me hope
When there's nothing but pain;
I can't explain it:
Two different leaves
But the branch is the same…
Forever let it be!
She takes the rain…”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Earth Moving (1989)

Pain , Hope

“For in the end what is at issue in this idea of the cooperative is as clear as day. It is a means of preparing the daily bourgeois stew [pot-au-feu bourgeois] at all costs, divorced from any political thought, from any revolutionary struggle. It is the political and social abdication of the proletariat under the pretext of socialism; indeed it is not even that! Everyone is careful to insist and to prove that socialism has nothing to do with it, which is the truth.”

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

"Letter to Blanqui’s Supporters in Paris" (18 April 1866)

Truth , Idea

“In life there's stuff you can control and stuff you can't. There's nothing you can do about it. No point getting angry and upset because it's beyond your control. As a professional athlete, you learn to roll with the punches.”

Sania Mirza (1986) Indian tennis player

Source: Prajwal Hegde I am enjoying my partnership with Cara Black: Sania Mirza http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/tennis/top-stories/I-am-enjoying-my-partnership-with-Cara-Black-Sania-Mirza/articleshow/23377486.cms, The Times of India, 2 October 2013

Life , Learning

“I don't rack my brains much over the subject of good and evil, but, on average, I haven't discovered much 'good' in men. Based on what I know of them, they are for the most part nothing but scoundrels.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Correspondance avec le pasteur Pfister, 1909-1939, Gallimard, 1991, p.103; as quoted in Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World by Matthieu Ricard
Attributed from posthumous publications

Men , Evil , Parting

“In my opinion we learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men’s behaviour. We study it, as we listen to music or read poetry, for pleasure, not for instruction”

A.J.P. Taylor (1906–1990) Historian

"The Radical Tradition: Fox, Paine, and Cobbett", p 34
The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)

Men , Pleasure , Music , History