Quotes about nothing (10000 quotes, page 58)

“The distance is nothing; it is only the first step that is difficult.”

Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand (1697–1780) French salon-holder

La distance n'y fait rien; il n'y a que le premier pas qui coûte.
Comment on the legend told by the Cardinal de Polignac that St. Denis, carrying his head in his hands, walked two leagues. Letter to Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (1763-07-07). Voltaire wrote to Madame du Deffand (January 1764) that one of her bon-mots was quoted in the notes of La Pucelle, canto 1: "Il n'y a que le premier pas qui coûte.".

“Nothing is more perishable than worn-out apparel, yet, thanks to documentary evidence, to the custom of burying people of high rank in their robes, and to the practice of wrapping up relics of saints in pieces of precious stuffs, we are enabled to form a veiy good idea of what these stuffs were like and where they came from. In the first instance they appear to have come from Byzantium, and from the East generally; but the manufacture afterwards extended to Sicily, and received great impetus at the Norman conquest of that island; Roger I. even transplanting Greek workmen from the towns sacked by his army, and settling them in Sicily. Of course many of the workers would be Mohammedans, and the old patterns, perhaps with the addition of sundry animals, would still continue in use; hence the frequency of Arabic inscriptions in the borders, the Cufic character being one of the most ornamental ever used. In the Hotel de Clu^ny at Paris are preserved the remains of the vestments of a bishop of Bayonne, found when his sepulchre was opened in 1853, the date of the entombment being the twelfth century. Some of these remains are cloth of gold, but the most remarkable is a very deep border ornamented with blue Cufic letters on a gold ground; the letters are fimbriated with white, and from them issue delicate red scrolls, which end in Arabic sort of flowers: this tissue probably is pure Eastern work. On the contrary, the coronation robes of the German emperors, although of an Eastern pattern, bear inscriptions which tell us very clearly where they were manufactured: thus the Cufic characters on the cope inform us that it was made in the city of Palermo in the year 1133, while the tunic has the date of 1181, but then the inscription is in the Latin language. The practice of putting Cufic inscriptions on precious stuffs was not confined to the Eastern and Sicilian manufactures; in process of time other Italian cities took up the art, and, either because it was the fashion, or because they wished to pass off" their own work as Sicilian or Eastern manufacture, imitations of Arabic characters are continually met with, both on the few examples that have come down to us of the stuffs themselves, or on painted statues or sculptured effigies. These are the inscriptions which used to be the despair of antiquaries, who vainly searched out their meaning until it was discovered that they had no meaning at all, and that they were mere ornaments. Sometimes the inscriptions appear to be imitations of the Greek, and sometimes even of the Hebrew. The celebrated ciborium of Limoges work in the Louvre, known as the work of Magister G. Alpais, bears an ornament around its rim which a French antiquary has discovered to be nothing more than the upper part of a Cufic word repeated and made into a decoration.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

Quote was introduced with the phrase:
In the lecture on the weaver's art, we are reminded of the superiority of Indian muslins and Chinese and Persian carpets, and the gorgeous costumes of the middle ages are contrasted with our own dark ungraceful garments. The Cufic inscriptions that have so perplexed antiquaries, were introduced with the rich Eastern stuffs so much sought after by the wealthy class, and though, as Mr. Burges observes
Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 85; Cited in: " Belles Lettres http://books.google.com/books?id=0EegAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA143" in: The Westminster Review, Vol. 84-85. Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1865. p. 143

People , Art , Search , Flowers

“It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing.”
Satius est supervacua scire quam nihil.

Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist

Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXXXVIII: On liberal and vocational studies, Line 45.

“Put down the banks, and if this country could not be carried through the longest war against her most powerful enemy without ever knowing the want of a dollar, without dependence on the traitorous classes of her citizens, without bearing hard on the resources of the people, or loading the public with an indefinite burden of debt, I know nothing of my countrymen. Not by any novel project, not by any charlatanerie, but by ordinary and well-experienced means; by the total prohibition of all private paper at all times, by reasonable taxes in war aided by the necessary emissions of public paper of circulating size, this bottomed on special taxes, redeemable annually as this special tax comes in, and finally within a moderate period.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1815. http://www.yamaguchy.netfirms.com/7897401/jefferson/gallatin1.html ME 14:356
Posthumous publications, On financial matters

War , People , Time , Dependency

“…even in the folly of youth we know that nothing lasts, but … even in that folly we are afraid that maybe Nothing will last, that maybe Nothing will last forever, and anything is better than Nothing.… So now, as another poet sings, That Fancy passed me by And nothing will remain; which, praise the gods, is a damned lie since, praise, O gods! Nothing cannot remain anywhere since nothing is vacuum and vacuum is paradox and unbearable and we will have nothing of it even if we would, the damned-fool poet's Nothing.”

William Faulkner book The Town

Gavin Stevens in Ch. 8
The two lines quoted — not altogether accurately — are from A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad (1896), XVIII:<p>And now the fancy passes by
And nothing will remain.
The Town (1957)

God , Lie , Youth , Fools

“We owe nothing in our origins from Adam Smith, Ricardo, Pareto, Proudhon, Bakunin, Karl Marx, Lenin, or any of the rest of the political philosophies. We do owe a debt to J. Willard Gibbs, Nikola Tesla, Steinmetz, Mac and John Rusk, and a thousand other American chemists, engineers, scientists, and technologists.”

Howard Scott (1890–1970) American engineer

Howard Scott interviewed at Radio station KYW, Cleveland Interview with Howard Scott, 19 November 1964. Transcript online at technocracyincorporated.org, 2006.

“The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Leo
1900s, Getting Married (1908)

Secret , Forgiveness , Understanding

“I thank Our Lord that He let me find nothing but bitterness in human affections. I should have been caught easily, and had my wings clipped…Our Lord knew that I was far too weak to face temptation; He knew that I would certainly have burnt myself in the bewildering light of earthly things, and so He did not let it shine in my eyes. Where stronger souls find joy but remain detached because they are faithful, I found only misery.”

Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) French Discalced Carmelite nun

Quoted in The Hidden Face, Ida Gorres , p. 91
Story of a Soul (1897)

Faith , Soul , Light , Joy

“There is really nothing that can be done except by an individual. Only individuals can learn. Only individuals can think creatively. Only individuals can cooperate. Only individuals can combat statism.”

Leonard E. Read (1898–1983) American academic

Essays on Liberty (1954), Essays on Liberty https://books.google.com/books?id=SugpAQAAMAAJ&dq=There+is+really+nothing+that+can+be+done+except+by+an+individual.+Only+individuals+can+learn.+Only+individuals+can+think+creatively.+Only+individuals+can+cooperate.+Only+individuals+can+combat+statism.&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22There+is+really+nothing+that+can+be+done+except+by+an+individual.+Only+individuals+can+learn.+Only+individuals+can+think+creatively.+Only+individuals+can+cooperate.+Only+individuals+can+combat+statism.%22

Thinking , Learning

“Nature may certainly produce whatever can arise from habit: Nay, habit is nothing but one of the principles of nature, and derives all its force from that origin.”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 3, Section 16
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 1: Of the understanding

Nature

“They are afraid of nothing," I grumbled, watching their approach through the window. "Together they would brave Satan and all his legions.”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Mr. Lockwood (Ch. XXXIV).
Wuthering Heights (1847)

“Tis only Man, mischievous Man, that can make Death a Sport. Nature taught your Stomach to crave nothing but Vegetables; but your violent Fondness to change, and greater Eagerness after Novelties, have prompted you to the Destruction of Animals without Justice or Necessity, perverted your Nature and warp'd your Appetites which way soever your Pride or Luxury have call'd them.”

Bernard Mandeville book The Fable of the Bees

Remark P, pp. 193-4
The Fable of the Bees (1714)

Death , Justice , Way , Nature

“It is an easy and patriotic matter for the lawyer, minister, professor, employer, or investor, placed above the arena of competition, to proclaim the equal right of all races to American opportunities; to avow his own willingness to give way should even a better Chinaman, Hindu, or Turk come in to take his place; and to rebuke the racial hatred of those who resist this displacement. His patriotism and world-wide brotherhood cost him and his family nothing, and indeed they add to his profits and leisure.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

pgs. 115-16.
Races and Immigrants in America, 1907

World , Family , Way

“You don’t quench ambition by feeding it any more than you quench a fire the same way,” said Cletus. “To an ambitious man, what he already has is nothing. It’s what he doesn’t have that counts.”

Gordon R. Dickson book Tactics of Mistake

Source: Tactics of Mistake (1971), Chapter 16 (p. 280)

Way

“Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book One: All Respects to Heaven, I Like it Here

Pain

“(talking about how girls like mystery) Next time your lady leaves the room, take a dump on the floor! 'Cuz there is nothing more mysterious than a dump on the floor! And it always starts a conversation, am I right? Honey, what happened? You better hold me 'cause I'm afraid.”

Dave Attell (1965) comedian

Comedy Central Presents: Dave Attell

Girl , Time

“There’s nothing more humbling than seeing your best quotes in a list, and thinking they could have been written by a coma patient with a keyboard and spasms.”

Scott Adams (1957) cartoonist, writer

Source: Dilbert Blog, Quotes, 2007-02-26, http://web.archive.org/20070228095118/dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/02/quotes.html, 2007-02-28 http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/02/quotes.html,

Quotes , Thinking

“I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping! The sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is particularly remarkable in Shakspeare and Chaucer; but what the first effects by a strong act of imagination and mental metamorphosis, the last does without any effort, merely by the inborn kindly joyousness of his nature. How well we seem to know Chaucer! How absolutely nothing do we know of Shakspeare!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

15 March 1834
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Age , Imagination , Nature , Effort

“A saint a real saint never does anything, a martyr does something but a really good saint does nothing, and so I wanted to have Four Saints who did nothing and I wrote the Four Saints In Three Acts and they did nothing and that was everything.
Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing something.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch.3

“I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running — from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D Garner: it cost too much! Do you hear me? It cost too much.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

Tree , Housing , Daughters

“In the absence of love, there is nothing worth fighting for.”

Elijah Wood (1981) American actor

Quoted in M. Kumar, Dictionary of Quotations Page 136 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=N0VKD37eY94C&pg=PA136&dq=%22In+the+absence+of+love,+there+is+nothing+worth+fighting+for%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=7ns3T6XuNI6n8gOnpaWqAg&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22In%20the%20absence%20of%20love%2C%20there%20is%20nothing%20worth%20fighting%20for%22&f=false

Heartbreaking , Love , Fight

“In some quarters the films and books are lauded for their wholesome message, which is weird considering Bella is essentially deciding whether she'd rather shag a bat or a wolf. She's got zero interest in honest-to-goodness human-on-human action. No. It's magic farmyard creatures or nothing for her.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

Guardian columns

Books , Wolf

“In spirit, Alexander made a gesture to the Lydians' sensitivities, though his Greek crusade owed them nothing as they were not Greeks.”

Robin Lane Fox (1946) Historian, educator, writer, gardener

Source: Alexander the Great, 1973, p.128

“Hollywood is Hollywood. There’s nothing you can say about it that isn’t true, good or bad. And if you get into it, you have no right to be bitter — you’re the one who sat down, and joined the game.”

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

Quoted in The Orson Welles Story.

Game

“When these guitar mags bring up that stuff up and say such and such came up with this and that which is pushing the boundaries, I just say, "let's step back for a minute and admit something: nothing has happened for the last 100 years." And it's okay. It's not a bad thing … We're all working with "tools" that have been in existence for the last 100 years and there hadn't been a new "tool" for a long long time.”

Joe Satriani (1956) American guitar player

As quoted in RIP magazine (June 1994).

Time

“My own experience of mescalin is described in the appendix of Beyond the Outsider. My 'trip' was pleasant enough, although I experienced none of the visual effects described by Huxley; I was plunged into an agreeable but sluggish dreaminess. In this torpid state, I became aware of the problem mentioned by Huxley: 'How was this cleansed perception to be reconciled with a proper concern with human relations…?' -- in my case, with my concern for my wife and three-year-old daughter? Although I personally felt nothing but a sense of relaxation and trustfulness, I was aware that, in practice, the world is full of dangers, and in this state, I was incapable of the necessary vigilance; it made me feel guilty. I was neglecting my job of looking after them. Moreover, my ability to think was impaired. Huxley remarks that he found his own ability to remember and 'think straight' to be little, if at all, reduced. I could 'think straight', but I could not think to any purpose. Even the feeling of universal love was not particularly pleasant; I compared it to having a large alsation dog who puts his paws on your shoulder and licks your face.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Frankenstein's Castle (1980), p. 59-60

Love , World , Dogs , Feeling

“Organization begins when people, even if they be only two or more, combine their efforts for a given purpose. We have shown this by the simple illustration of two people uniting their efforts to lift and move some weighty object. This combination, however, is not the first principle of organization. It is only an illustration of organization itself. To find the first principle, let us carry the illustration a step further. The efforts of these two lifters must be coordinated, which means that they must act together. If first one lifted, and then the other, there would be no unity of action, and hence no true organization of effort. Here then we find the first principles of organization.
The next thing to do in order to explain is what we mean when we call coordination the first principle. We mean that this term expresses the principles of organization in toto; nothing less. This does not mean that there are no subordinated principles; it simply means that all the others are contained in this one of co-ordination. The others are simply the principles through which co-ordination operates, and thus becomes effective.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: Onward Industry!, 1931, p. 19

People , Effort

“Besides, he who follows another not only discovers nothing but is not even investigating.”
Praeterea qui alium sequitur nihil invenit, immo nec quaerit.

Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XXXIII

“If some New Testament miracle stories find no parallel in contemporary experience. they do have parallels, often striking ones, in other ancient writings that no one takes to be anything other than mythical or legendary. …The Gospels come under serious suspicion because there is practically nothing in them that does not conform to this “Mythic Hero Archetype.””

Robert M. Price (1954) American theologian

[Price, Robert M., w:Robert M. Price, Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition?, https://books.google.com/books?id=GmlB-KXsX8kC&pg=PA21, 2003, Prometheus Books, Publishers, 978-1-61592-028-0, 21]

“Last night I couldn't sleep till after four in the morning – I had been out to the canyon all afternoon – till late at night – wonderful color – I wish I could tell you how big – and with the night the colors deeper and darker – cattle on the pastures in the bottom looked line little pinheads. I can understand Pa Dow painting his pretty colored canyons – it must have been a great temptation – no wonder he fell. Then the moon rose right up out of the ground after we got out on the plains again – battered a little where he bumped his head but enormous – There was no wind – it was just big and still – so very big and still – long legged jack rabbits hopping across in front of the light as we passed – A great place to see the night time because there is nothing else.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

then I came home – not sleepy so I made a pattern of some flowers I had picked – They were like waterlilies – white ones – with the quality of smoothness gone.
Canyon, Texas, (September 14, 1916), pp. 186, 187
1915 - 1920, Letters to Anita Pollitzer' (1916)

Color , Home , Flowers , Understanding

“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface; of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it... I see everything that way, the surface of things, a kind of mental Braille. I just pass my hands over the surface of things.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

1973
1968 - 1974, Electric chair quote
Source: Warhol in his own words – Untitled Statements ( 1963 – 1987), selected by Neil Printz; as quoted in Andy Warhol, retrospective, Art and Bullfinch Press / Little Brown, 1989, pp. 457 – 467

Way , Painting

“A film is its own thing and in an ideal world I think a film should be discovered knowing nothing and nothing should be added to it and nothing should be subtracted from it.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

Scene by Scene interview BBC 2 (1999) http://web.archive.org/20040210020322/members.fortunecity.com/vanessa77/index2005.html

World , Thinking

“In Italy there is a fringe of imbeciles who believe they can resurrect communism. Bury the corpse of Marxism is not easy, because for many people it means to deny the entire existence. Of course Bertinotti is not of these: he knows nothing about Marxism, he doesn't care anything, he is a little clown, an Italian populist who stirs in the streets tides of poor devils and speaks again of the working masses, who sees only him.”

Indro Montanelli (1909–2001) Italian journalist

Corriere della Sera, 19 December 1997.
1950s - 1990s

People , Communication

“[S]ocialism’s durability as a concept owes almost nothing to economics and almost everything to the desire for power…”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2018, Socialism is So Hot Right Now (2018)

“The Goldberg Variations are, as explained in my booklet-text, in short, music that observes neither end nor beginning, music with neither real climax nor real resolution, music that, like Baudelaire’s lovers, “rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind.” Gould is referring here to the circular design of the work, a circularity whose development is polarized, inspired, and fed by more and more new energy fields. The result is a universe that in its significance resembles the alpha and omega of music in general, music that evolves out of nothing and disappears back into nothing as if in a state in which time stands still.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Music , Lovers , Universe , Time

“To live miserable we know not why, to have the dread of hunger, to work sore and yet gain nothing—this is the essence of poverty.”

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

Source: Poverty (1912), p. 2

Hunger

“If biological differences do exist, they cannot be wished away. However unpopular the investigation, we have to take the possibility of natural differences seriously. What is at stake is nothing less than the foundation of contemporary liberalism.”

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

Source: Books, The End of Racism (1995), Ch. 11

Nature

“To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom.”

André Gide book The Immoralist

Savoir se libérer n'est rien; l'ardu, c'est savoir être libre.
The Immoralist, Chapter 1 http://books.google.com/books?id=MPmRAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Savoir+se+lib%C3%A9rer+n'est+rien+l'ardu+c'est+savoir+%C3%AAtre+libre%22&jtp=17#v=onepage (1902)
The Immoralist (1902)

Freedom

“FRANCIS PICABIA
is an imbecile, an idiot, a pickpocket!!!
1921
BUT
He saved Arp from constipation!
The first mechanical work was created
by madam Tzara the Day she put
little Tristan into the world, however she
didn't know it
funny girl
Francis Picabia
is an imbecilic Spanish professor
who has never been dada
FRANCIS PICABIA IS NOTHING
FRANCIS PICABIS likes the morality of idiots
Arp's binocle is Tristan’s testicle
FRANCIS PICABIS IS NOTHING!!!!!!!!!!
But Arp was Dada before Dada.”

Francis Picabia (1879–1953) French painter and writer

Quote of Picabia in his 'Manifesto, 1921'; as cited in Manifesto: A Century of Isms, ed. Mary Ann Caws, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001, p 319
1920's

World , Girl

“Do nothing, only keep agitating, debating; and things will destroy themselves.”

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

Pt. I, Bk. VI, ch. 3.
1830s, The French Revolution. A History (1837)

“Education would be a divine thing, if it did nothing more than help us to think and love great thoughts instead of little thoughts.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 96

Love , Education , Thinking , Help

“The thing is, if you complain to me about it, you are basically complaining to the pig because your sausages were undercooked. I know my name is on the front of the cover in big fat serifed letters, but I've got nothing to do with distribution and sales or anything to do with Amazon. If you are dissatisfied with their service, then complain to them. Repeatedly. With sticks.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

16 September 2010 in regards to Mogworld issues on Amazon.com
Fully Ramblomatic

“There is nothing perhaps so generally consoling to a man as a well-established grievance; a feeling of having been injured, on which his mind can brood from hour to hour, allowing him to plead his own cause in his own court, within his own heart, — and always to plead it successfully.”

Anthony Trollope book Orley Farm

Source: Orley Farm (1862), Ch. 8

Feeling , Heart

“And what is the relationship of muscle to bone? Through its ability to contract or shorten itself, the muscle brings two bones into a new angular relationship.... The position of two bones toward each other must change if the muscle so decides.
Bones give support to the total organism; also when in motion.
Muscles have a higher function because they act beside each other.
One bends, the other stretches.
One bone alone achieves nothing.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

I.10 B, p. 28
1921 - 1930, Pedagogical Sketch Book, (1925)

Support , Change

“Dearest,
although everything has happened,
nothing has happened.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

"Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound"
All My Pretty Ones (1962)

“I have nothing and therefore nothing to lose. I have conditioned myself for every conceivable shock and strain – physically, mentally, and emotionally. I fear nothing. No threat or prospect of danger deters me; I’ve faced them all, continuously and by choice. I am willing to suffer with those who suffer, to die with those who die, and to struggle in the most extreme manner for their liberation. I’ve lived the past decade with no pleasures, no amenities, and no entertainment. I’ve conditioned myself for every extreme. This is the level of commitment that our struggle demands, and the level of commitment that I have, and those who share this commitment have my complete loyalty.”

Kevin Rashid Johnson (1971) American prisoner and social activist

Defying the Tomb: Selected Prison Writings and Art of Kevin Rashid Johnson (2010)

Pleasure , Fear , Suffering , Past

“I find that I would like now, best of all, to be a good conversationalist. I know I'm not one at present. Oh, I can sit and talk a little of this and that, but I realize that I haven't any definite or profound knowledge. I won't be satisfied with just a patter, a surface glaze of information. I don't want short-cuts to learning. I want to know all about the thing I study.
I'd like to be able to hold my own, to meet on a common ground, with scientists, inventors, clerics, doctors, athletes, authors.
The most worthwhile thing in life is to store your mind with knowledge.
I wish now that I had been able to go to college, if only so that I might have had appreciations earlier in the game.
People often say to me now that I have my home, my career, fame (if you call it that), there must be nothing left for me to live for. But there is everything left to live for. All the things I don't know about, all the things I want to know about.
Pictures, I've discovered, were practically all I did know about up to very recently. I've had to work so hard, to concentrate so closely, that I never have had time to read or to travel or to think about other things. I'm just at the beginning of living…”

Harold Lloyd (1893–1971) American film actor and producer

"Discoveries About Myself". Motion Picture, October 1930, pg. 58 & 90. (Brewster Publications). https://archive.org/stream/motionpicture1923040chic#page/n563/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/motionpicture1923040chic#page/n595/mode/2up

Life , People , Travel , Home

“Often we were joined by Maurice Princet. Although very young, he held an important post in an insurance company which he owed to his knowledge of mathematics. But outside his profession it was as an artist that he thought of mathematics, as a specialist in aesthetics that he evoked continuities in n dimensions. He liked to interest painters in the new visions of space that had been opened up by Victor Schlegel and several others. He succeeded. After having heard him by chance, Henri Matisse was caught reading an essay on hyperspace. Oh! it was only a potboiler [un ouvrage de vulgarisation]! but at least that shows that for the great 'fauve' the days of the painter who knows nothing, who runs towards a pretty subject with his beard blowing in the wind, was passed.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Cubism was born

Mathematics , Knowledge , Chance , Reading

“There is no object to life. To nature nothing matters but the continuation of the species.”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

Source: A Writer's Notebook (1946), p. 38. Maugham says something similar in The Summing up, Ch 22: "Love was only the dirty trick nature played on us to achieve the continuation of the species"

Life , Nature

“American feminism’s nose dive began when Kate Millet, that imploding beanbag of poisonous self-pity, declared Freud a sexist. Trying to build a sex theory without studying Freud, women have made nothing but mud pies.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 243

Women , Sex , Study

“Eh, gentlemen, let us reckon upon accidents! Life is a chaplet of little miseries which the philosopher counts with a smile. Be philosophers, as I am, gentlemen; sit down at the table and let us drink. Nothing makes the future look so bright as surveying it through a glass of chambertin.”

Alexandre Dumas book The Three Musketeers

Athos, Ch. 48: A Family Affair.
The Three Musketeers (1844)

Life , Smile , Drink , Future

“People are a bit blind. They don’t see life. Being a photographer I see life, every inch of it. I’m obsessed with nature and animals and the earth; I find concrete things that distract me. Most people are the opposite… they find life boring, squirrels or sparrows boring, whereas I find them fascinating. It has to do with the way we live. It probably started with religion which leads some people astray. To fight over whose god is better has nothing to do with love or spirituality. Perhaps it’s guilt. We are suppressed and spend our time trying to figure out who we are. The most shocking thing I’ve learned concerns abuse, child abuse, animal abuse, abuse to every living creature. There is a world of little Hitlers out there. Slaughterhouses, vivisection and experimenting on animals for no reason is sick. Luckily younger people are becoming more aware.”

Linda McCartney (1941–1998) American photographer

Interview with Linda McCartney http://oobujoobu.tumblr.com/post/10590341050/interview-with-linda-mccartney by Karen Fox, Diamond Hard Music Entertainment, 1989.

Love , Life , God , People

“What did Doctor Doom really want? He wanted to rule the world. Now, think about this. You could walk across the street against a traffic light and get a summons for jaywalking, but you could walk up to a police officer and say "I want to rule the world," and there's nothing he can do about it, that is not a crime. Anybody can want to rule the world. So, even though he was the Fantastic Four's greatest menace, in my mind, he was never a criminal!”

Stan Lee (1922–2018) American comic book writer

On Doctor Doom, in Stan Lee's Amazing Marvel Universe (2006) by Roy Thomas

World , Thinking , Light

“"You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don't realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don't see how you'll ever even move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment. Desirelessness. 'Cessation from all hankerings.' It's this business of desiring, if you want to know the goddam truth, that makes an actor in the first place. Why're you making me tell you things you already know? Somewhere along the line — in one damn incarnation or another, if you like — you not only had a hankering to be an actor or an actress but to be a good one. You're stuck with it now. You can't just walk out on the results of your own hankerings. Cause and effect, buddy, cause and effect. The only thing you can do now, the only religious thing you can do, is act. Act for God, if you want to — be God's actress, if you want to. What could be prettier? You can at least try to, if you want to — there's nothing wrong in trying." There was a slight pause. "You'd better get busy, though, buddy. The goddam sands run out on you every time you turn around. I know what I'm talking about. You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world."”

Jerome David Salinger book Franny and Zooey

Franny and Zooey (1961), Zooey (1957)

Life , God , Truth , World

“Although trade is important, there are other and stronger bonds of Empire, and since the Conference of 1926 nothing but common interests and traditions have held the Empire together. But those are mighty ties, incomprehensible to Europeans, which have drawn millions of men from the far corners of the earth to the battlefields of France, and we must trust to them to continue to draw us together.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Toronto (16 August 1929), quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, Volume 12: The Wilderness Years, 1929–1935 (Michigan: Hillsdale Press, 2012), p. 51
Early career years (1898–1929)

Men , Drawing

“Nothing is free of its own limits.”

Carlos Gershenson (1978) Mexican researcher

Source: Design and Control of Self-organizing Systems (2007), p. 38

“The thing framed says that nothing framed it; the tongue never made itself to speak, and yet talks against him that did; saying that which is made, is, and that which made it, is not. But this folly is infinite as hell, as much without light or bound as the chaos or the primitive nothing.”

Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667) English clergyman

"Apples of Sodom," part II, sermon XX of Twenty-Five Sermons for the Winter Half-Year, Preached at Golden Grove (1653)

Hell , Light

“a million thousand hundred nothings seem
—we are himself's own self; his very him”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

84
95 poems (1958)

“I really see nothing of other people. I'm trying to dig my way back again into my work. One absolutely has to dedicate oneself, every bit of oneself, to the one inescapable thing. That's the only way to get somewhere and to become something.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

In a letter to her parents, Worpswede, 10 September 1899; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 199
1899

People , Way

“Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought nothing out but loads of dung. That was their return cargo. London turns dirt into gold. Rome turned gold into dirt.”

William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) British historian

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter IV, "Intellect", pp. 383-4.

Wealth

“Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence. Now the sole reason why painters of this sort are not aware of their own error is that they have not learnt Geometry, without which no one can either be or become an absolute artist; but the blame for this should be laid upon their masters, who are themselves ignorant of this art.”

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) German painter, printmaker, mathematician, and theorist

The Art of Measurement (1525).

Art , Error , Knowledge

“To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down our throats — we know it not.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Section 59
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

Truth

“What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear. […] Walter Pater is to call her a 'vampire,' coasting through history on her secret tasks.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 154

Secret , Fear , History , Thinking

“I have read your religious works and I have found nothing inappropriate.”

Du Wenxiu (1823–1872) Chinese rebel leader

The Chinese sultanate: Islam, ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in southwest China, 1856-1873, David G. Atwill, 2005, Stanford University Press, 167, 0804751595, 2010-6-28 http://books.google.com/books?id=Da2M_viEclEC&pg=PA167&dq=Christian+beliefs+I+have+read+your+religious+works+and+i+have+found+nothing+inappropriate+muslims+and+christians+are+brothers&hl=en&ei=2de3TPeIL4OglAe30NiHCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=Christian%20beliefs%20I%20have%20read%20your%20religious%20works%20and%20i%20have%20found%20nothing%20inappropriate%20muslims%20and%20christians%20are%20brothers&f=false,

Reading

“As nothing is more easy than to think, so nothing is more difficult than to think well.”

Thomas Traherne (1636–1674) English poet

First Century, sect. 8.
Centuries of Meditations

Thinking

“Is there a solution? Probably not. Yet there is a glimmer of hope, and on my last days here, I offer it to you, gratis. Incorporate every township and village in the county. Take them out of the county's jurisdiction. Give the county supervisors nothing to do. They do it so well; why deprive them?”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

From "OC Forum: O.C. Can You Say?" https://books.google.com/books?id=FhEEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA8
Other Topics

Hope

“It having been said above that God bends all the reprobate, and even Satan himself, at his will, three objections are started. First, that this happens by the permission, not by the will of God. To this objection there is a twofold reply, the one, that angels and men, good and bad, do nothing but what is appointed by God; the second, that all movements are secretly directed to their end by the hidden inspiration of God…”

John Calvin book Institutes of the Christian Religion

Book I Ch. 18 "The Instrumentality of the Wicked employed by God, while He continues free from every taint" as translated by Henry Beveridge.
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

Men , God , Angels

“Must have counted twenty thousand cold county lines; nothing here will get my weary soul to ignite. Hold me, hold me. Put me back together, baby. Show me that you love me; feels so good together. Every single fire, started with a spark. We could feel it burn, when we're dancing in the dark. Take me in your arms, before I fall apart. Baby, we're a fire that started with a spark.”

Michelle Branch (1983) American singer-songwriter and guitarist

"Spark" https://listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=tDGSgZQPscY#t=40 (12 May 2013)
2010s, West Coast Time

Love , Feeling , Soul , Dance

“Colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness…”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

The Dharma Bums (1958)

World , School , Thinking , Time

“The spirit acquires an increase of knowledge and experience in each of his corporeal existences. He loses sight of part of these gains during his reincarnation in matter, which is too gross to allow of his remembering them in their entirety; but he remembers them as a spirit. It is thus that some somnambulists give evidence of possessing knowledge beyond their present degree of instruction, and even of their apparent intellectual capacity. The intellectual and scientific inferiority of a somnambulist in his waking state, therefore, proves nothing against his possession of the knowledge he may display in his lucid state. According to the circumstances of the moment and the aim proposed, he may draw this knowledge from the stores of his own experience, from his clairvoyant perception of things actually occurring, or from the counsels which he receives from other spirits; but, in proportion as his own spirit is more or less advanced, he will make his statements more or less correctly.”

Allan Kardec (1804–1869) systematizer of Spiritism

Source: The Spirits' Book, p. 221.

Knowledge , Parting , Drawing

“There is nothing about which a young Christian should be more anxious than maintaining the spirit, the love, the practice of private prayer j and nothing which should more seriously alarm him than any disposition to neglect it.”

John Angell James (1785–1859) British abolitionist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 470.

Love

“Nothing he said indicated that he was that angry. I mean, there’s a difference between angry and murderous. Isn’t there?
Less than you’d think.”

Alastair Reynolds book The Prefect

Source: The Prefect (2007), Chapter 5 (p. 52)

Thinking

“All your problems come down to love. Your love life is what your problem is, and everybody else's on earth. God in existence is man and woman. There's nothing else. And unless you have loved God in existence - your duality which is woman or man - unless you have united with that through love and devotion without going through your feelings of love, you're not going to be enlightened.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Love is not a feeling ~ The Interview (1995)

Love , Life , God , Feeling

“We dig up what is left of life crushed to carbon beneath us, and we burn it: to make important things, really—hospital intensive care units, synthetically derived insulin and steel beams for the new high school library. But we burn it for nothing, too, really, for vanity and emptiness.”

Laurie Zoloth (1950) American ethicist

"Interrupting Your Life: An Ethics for the Coming Storm" (2014)

Life , School

“Mind is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing, but is alone itself by itself.”

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

Frag. B 12, quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (1920), Chapter 6.

“How tell what remains? But it’s the end. Or have I been dreaming, am I dreaming? No no, none of that, for dream is nothing, a joke, and significant what is worse.”

Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) Irish novelist, playwright, and poet

The Calmative (1946)

Dreams

“You've never produced a Michleangelo or a Bach. You've never even produced a great chef. And if you talk to me about opportunity, all I can say is, are you joking? Have you ever lacked the opportunity, to give history a great chef? You've produced nothing great, nothing!”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

Oriana Fallaci (December 30, 1973), The Mystically Divine Shah of Iran (interview), Chicago Tribune
Interviews

History

“Come down the glorious steps of our banner. Every great record we have made we have vindicated with our blood and with our truth. It sweeps the ground, and it touches the stars. Come here, young man, and put in your young life where all is living, and where nothing is dead but the heroes that defended it.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1870s, An Appeal to Young Men (1879)

Life , Truth , Star , Dead

“If it is the drive of our time, after freedom of thought is won, to pursue it to that perfection through which it changes to freedom of the will in order to realize the latter as the principle of a new era, then the final goal of education can no longer be knowledge, but the will born out of knowledge, and the spoken expression of that for which it has to strive is: the personal or free man. Truth consists in nothing other than man's revelation of himself, and thereto belongs the discovery of himself, the liberation from all that is alien, the uttermost abstraction or release from all authority, the re-won naturalness. Such thoroughly true men are not supplied by school; if they are there, they are there in spite of school.”

Max Stirner book The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 21

Men , Truth , Education , School

“In short, nothing tends to increase love so much as the effects of marking with the nails, and biting.”

Vātsyāyana book Kama Sutra

Source: Kama Sutra, p. 45

Love

“If you play the tabloid game you get burned. I’d rather say nothing at all and let things roll. You just have to ride those things out.”

Craig David (1981) English singer

Jewish Chronicle interview 1 February 2008 http://website.thejc.com/home.aspx?AId=57854&ATypeId=1&search=true2&srchstr=loftus&srchtxt=0&srchhead=1&srchauthor=0&srchsandp=0&scsrch=0

Game

“Of the eternal incorporeal substance nothing is changed, is formed or deformed, but there always remains only that thing which cannot be a subject of dissolution, since it is not possible that it be a subject of composition, and therefore, either of itself or by accident, it cannot be said to die.”

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) Italian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer

As translated by Arthur Imerti (1964)
The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (1584)

Change

“Nothing is more certain than that war promotes science and increases comforts. Utopia may mean no more wars, but universal peace and plenty will never reign until at least one more war raises mankind to a plane of such comfort and ease that nobody on either side of a frontier can even imagine the possibility of resorting to arms. Comfort creates wars and comfort may someday end them.”

Malcolm de Chazal (1902–1981) Mauritian artist

Sens-plastique

War , Peace , Imagination , Universe

“Any extreme political creed brought only darkness in the long run; it lit up nothing. The best politics were those of caution, tolerance and moderation, Angus maintained, but such politics were, alas, also very dull, and certainly moved nobody to poetry.”

Alexander McCall Smith (1948) British writer

The Unbearable Lightness of Scones, chapter 30.
The 44 Scotland Street series

“He declared that he knew nothing, except the fact of his ignorance.”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Socrates, 16.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 2: Socrates, his predecessors and followers

“Your iron industry is dead; dead as mutton. Your coal industries, which depend greatly upon the iron industries, are languishing. Your silk industry is dead, assassinated by the foreigner. Your woollen industry is in articulo mortis, gasping, struggling. Your cotton industry is seriously sick. The shipbuilding industry, which held out longest of all, is come to a standstill. Turn your eyes where you like, survey any branch of British industry you like, you will find signs of mortal disease. The self-satisfied Radical philosophers will tell you it is nothing; they point to the great volume of British trade. Yes, the volume of British trade is still large, but it is a volume which is no longer profitable; it is working and struggling. So do the muscles and nerves of the body of a man who has been hanged twitch and work violently for a short time after the operation. But death is there all the same, life has utterly departed, and suddenly comes the rigot mortis…But what has produced this state of things? Free imports? I am not sure; I should like an inquiry; but I suspect free imports of the murder of our industries much in the same way as if I found a man standing over a corpse and plunging his knife into it I should suspect that man of homicide, and I should recommend a coroner's inquest and a trial by jury…”

Lord Randolph Churchill (1849–1895) British politician

Speech in Blackpool (24 January 1884), quoted in Robert Rhodes James, Lord Randolph Churchill (London: Phoenix, 1994), p. 137

Life , Death , Disease , Way

“I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Diary entry of Friday (2 February), concerning a card game
Nausea (1938)

Thinking , Time

“The word "Sanskrit" means "prepared, pure, refined or perfect". It was not for nothing that it was called the "devavani" (language of the Gods). It has an outstanding place in our culture and indeed was recognized as a language of rare sublimity by the whole world. Sanskrit was the language of our philosophers, our scientists, our mathematicians, our poets and playwrights, our grammarians, our jurists, etc. In grammar, Panini and Patanjali (authors of Ashtadhyayi and the Mahabhashya) have no equals in the world; in astronomy and mathematics the works of Aryabhatta, Brahmagupta and Bhaskar opened up new frontiers for mankind, as did the works of Charak and Sushrut in medicine.”

Markandey Katju (1946) Indian judge

On Sanskrit, as quoted in the transcript of a speech, titled "Sanskrit as a Language of Science" http://www.iisc.ernet.in/misc/bang_speech.html and delivered on 13 October 2009, published by Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

God , World , Mathematics , Perfection

“It all comes down to nothing…”

Dave Matthews (1967) American singer-songwriter, musician and actor

Typical Situation
Under the Table and Dreaming (1994)

“I have lately spent some Thoughts relative to the Nature of Light, whether it be subject to the common Laws of Motion. In this particular Newton seems to contradict himself. For in his Principia Sect. 14th he applies the common Laws of Motion to account for Reflection and Refraction, as he does also in one Part of his Optics where he proves the Sine of Incid. to Sine Refr, in a given in a given Ratio. But in another Part he says, “nothing more is requisite for producing all the Variety of Colours and Degrees of Refrangibility than that the Rays of Light be Bodies of different Sizes, the least of which may make Violet, and the Greatest the Red"; this manifestly is not consistent with the Theory of Motion applied to Bodies, where the Magnitude of the Bodies is of no Consequence. Now it is evident that if the common Theory of Motion can be applied to Light, the Red Light must have had the greatest Velocity before Incidence, as it suffers the least Deviation, for if the Vels of all the Difft colour'd Light were equal before Incidence, they must by Newton's Principia Sect. Sect. 8. Prop. 1. have continued equal after, and therefore must have suffered the same Deviation. The Determination of this Point seems to be of considerable Importance, as we so often apply the Theory of Motion to Light.”

Samuel Vince (1749–1821) British mathematician, astronomer and physicist

As quoted in: Russell McCormmach (2011) Weighing the World: The Reverend John Michell of Thornhill. p. 193

Law , Nature , Light , Suffering

“No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1932–2017) Russian poet, film director, teacher

"People" (1961), line 1; Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi (trans.) Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2008) p. 85.

Fate , People

“Possibilities that fail to get realized are, for determinism, pure illusions: they never were possibilities at all. There is nothing inchoate, it says, about this universe of ours, all that was or is or shall be actual having been from eternity virtually there. The cloud of alternatives our minds escort this mass of actuality withal is a cloud of sheer deceptions, to which 'impossibilities' is the only name that rightfully belongs.”

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

The Dilemma of Determinism in "The Will to Believe" p. 151 http://books.google.com/books?id=Moqh7ktHaJEC&pg=PA151
1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

Universe

“St Thomas had lots to say about the mystical quality of createdness. For him the creature is truly a mystery, a mystical reality. Sometimes this strikes me so forcibly that I shrink from crushing a gnat or plucking a blade of grass - how dare one do such a thing, except of necessity? Nothing sentimental about this - not even compassion at having to hurt things - simply awe before their Maker. I'd never dare to tear up someone else's sketch or manuscript without first asking the author's permission - unless, of course, he had asked me to do so.”

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

Broken Lights Letters 1951-59.

Reality , Tear , Grass , Hurt

“Lysenkoism is held up by bourgeois commentators as the supreme demonstration that conscious ideology cannot inform scientific practice and that "ideology has no place in science." On the other hand, some writers are even now maintaining a Lysenkoist position because they believe that the principles of dialectical materialism contradict the claims of genetics. Both of these claims stem from a vulgarisation of Marxist philosophy through deliberate hostility, in the first case, or ignorance, in the second. Nothing in Marx, Lenin or Mao contradicts the particular physical facts and processes of a particular set of natural phenomena in the objective world, because what they wrote about nature was at a high level of abstraction. The error of the Lysenkoist claim arises from attempting to apply a dialectical analysis of physical problems from the wrong end. Dialectical materialism is not, and has never been, a programmatic method for solving particular physical problems. Rather, dialectical analysis provides an overview and a set of warning signs against particular forms of dogmatism and narrowness of thought. It tells us, "Remember that history may leave an important trace. Remember that being and becoming are dual aspects of nature. Remember that conditions change and that the conditions necessary to the initiation of some process may be destroyed by the process itself. Remember to pay attention to real objects in space and time and not lose them utterly in idealized abstractions. Remember that qualitative effects of context and interaction may be lost when phenomena are isolated."”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

And above all else, "Remember that all the other caveats are only reminders and warning signs whose application to different circumstances of the real world is contingent."
"The Problem of Lysenkoism" by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, in Hilary and Steven Rose (eds.), The Radicalisation of Science, Macmillan, 1976, p. 58.

Hostility , World , Error , History

“You can only see what you believe—nothing else is possible.”

Byron Katie (1942) American spiritual writer

Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life (2002)

“There is nothing reasonable about faith. Those two words mean completely opposite things. Putting them together creates an oxymoron, That’s why William Lyin’ Craig thought it would make a clever book title. Faith is an unreasonable conviction which is assumed without reason and defended against all reason. That’s why faith is the most dishonest position it is possible to have. It really is!”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, A Letter to a Certain Christian http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2013/10/12/a-letter-to-a-certain-christian/ (October 12, 2013)

Books , Faith

“If what you own cannot be protected, you own nothing.”

Jack Valenti (1921–2007) President of the MPAA

He later paraphrased this statement in a pamplet: "If You Cannot Protect What You Own, You Don’t Own Anything!" (28 February 2002) (PDF document) http://commerce.senate.gov/hearings/022802valenti.pdf
Testimony to the US House of Representatives (1982)