Quotes about objection (3858 quotes, page 11)

“Having no human companion I felt a spirit of comradeship for the objects of nature around me. In my childish way I communed with these as with my own soul; they became the sharers of my confidence.”

Jan Smuts (1870–1950) military leader, politician and statesman from South Africa

Holism and Evolution (1926)

Way , Soul , Confidence , Communication

“The theory which follows is entirely based on a calculus of pleasure and pain; and the object of economics is to maximize happiness by purchasing pleasure, as it were, at the lowest cost of pain.”

William Stanley Jevons The Theory of Political Economy

Source: The Theory of Political Economy (1871), Chapter I, Introduction, p. 51.

Pain , Pleasure , Happiness

“The subject detects the presence and interrelationships of the basic components of one of the two-dimensional drawings - particularly, the variously oriented straight lines, the several types of vertices by which they are connected and, presumably, something of the structural relationships among these components within the two-dimensional pattern. Then, on the basis of some higher-level processing of these extracted features and their interrelationships, an internal representation, code, or verbal description is generated for each picture separately that captures the intrinsic structure of the three-dimensional object in a form that is independent of the particular orientation in which that object happens to be displayed.”

Roger Shepard (1929) American psychologist

Source: Mental images and their transformations. 1982, p. 64; as cited in: Keith K. Niall, "‘Mental rotation’, pictured rotation, and tandem rotation in depth." Acta psychologica 95.1 (1997): 31-83.

Drawing

“The Declaration of Independence was a source of inspiration to believe in ideals that transformed us from Jews to Israelis. … I am asking today with deep sorrow: Can we, despite all our achievements, ignore the intolerable gap between what the Declaration of Independence promised and what was fulfilled, the gap between the idea and the realities of Israel? Does the condition of occupation and domination over another people fit the Declaration of Independence? Is there any sense in the independence of one at the expense of the fundamental rights of the other? Can the Jewish people whose history is a record of continued suffering and relentless persecution, allow themselves to be indifferent to the rights and suffering of a neighboring people? Can the State of Israel allow itself an unrealistic dream of an ideological end to the conflict instead of pursuing a pragmatic, humanitarian one based on social justice. I believe that despite all the objective and subjective difficulties, the future of Israel and its position in the family of enlightened nations will depend on our ability to realize the promise of the founding fathers as they canonized it in the Declaration of Independence. I have always believed that there is no military solution to the Jewish Arab conflict, neither from a moral nor a strategic one and since a solution is therefore inevitable I ask myself, why wait?”

Daniel Barenboim (1942) Israeli Argentine-born pianist and conductor

Statement at the Knesset upon receiving the Wolf Prize, May 9, 2004, transcript online https://electronicintifada.net/content/daniel-barenboims-statement-knesset-upon-receiving-wolf-prize-may-9-2004/5080 (16 May 2004) at The Electronic Intifada.

People , Family , Justice , Dreams

“The eulogy of the non-lover in the speech of Lysias … stresses the fact that the non-lover … does not commit extreme acts under the influence of passions. Since he acts from calculation, he never has occasion for remorse. … The non-lover demonstrates his superiority through prudence and objectivity. … We must now observe how these points of superiority correspond to those of “semantically purified” speech, … the kind of speech approaching pure notation in the respect that it communicates abstract intelligence without impulsion. It is a simple instrumentality, showing no affection for the object of its symbolizing and incapable of inducing bias in the hearer. In its ideal conception, it would have less power to move than 2 + 2 = 4, since it is generally admitted that mathematical equations may have the beauty of elegance, and hence are not above suspicion where beauty is suspect. But this neuter language will be an unqualified medium of transmission of meanings from mind to mind, and by virtue of it minds can remain in an unprejudiced relationship to the world and also to other minds. … Instead of passion, it offers the serviceability of objectivity … It distrusts any departure from the literal and prosaic.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric,” pp. 6-7.
The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953)

World , Beauty , Intelligence , Communication

“Open your hands, ye Whose hands are full! The world is waiting for you! The whole machinery of the Divine beneficence is clogged by your hard hearts and rigid fingers. Give and spend, and be sure that God will send; for only in giving and spending do you fulfill the object of His sending.”

Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819–1881) Novelist, poet, editor

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 25.

God , World , Waiting , Heart

“While I was not consulted prior to the President's decision to intervene in support of the Republic of Korea, that decision from a military standpoint, proved a sound one, as we hurled back the invader and decimated his forces. Our victory was complete, and our objectives within reach, when Red China intervened with numerically superior ground forces.”

Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) U.S. Army general of the army, field marshal of the Army of the Philippines

1950s, Farewell address to Congress (1951)

Support , Decision , Victory

“If society is organized to insulate its own arrangements from challenged and change, and thus to give itself the semblance of a natural object or an alien fate, the noncomputable and the nonmodular aspects of the mind will remain no more than a penumbral light around the darkness of computability and modularity. However, as society acquires the features of democratic experimentalism, those aspects become central to the life of the mind. The hold of the innate mental faculty on our experience gets turbinated by a political construction.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 132-3

Life , Fate , Nature , Light

“In vain do individual great men seek to mint new concepts and to set them in circulation — it is pointless. They are used for only a moment, and not by many, either, and they merely contribute to making the confusion even worse, for one idea seems to have become the fixed idea of the age: to get the better of one's superior. If the past may be charged with a certain indolent self-satisfaction in rejoicing over what it had, it would indeed be a shame to make the same charge against the present age (the minuet of the past and the gallop of the present). Under a curious delusion, the one cries out incessantly that he has surpassed the other, just as the Copenhageners, with philosophic visage, go out to Dyrehausen "in order to see and observe," without remembering that they themselves become objects for the others, who have also gone out simply to see and observe. Thus there is the continuous leap-frogging of one over the other — "on the basis of the immanent negativity of the concept", as I heard a Hegelian say recently, when he pressed my hand and made a run preliminary to jumping. — When I see someone energetically walking along the street, I am certain that his joyous shout, "I am coming over," is to me — but unfortunately I did not hear who was called (this actually happened); I will leave a blank for the name, so everyone can fill in an appropriate name.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Journals IA 328, 1835
1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s

Men , Age , Idea , Past

“But they say, "It is not so much the Dreadnoughts we object to, it is pensions". If they objected to pensions, why did they promise them? They won elections on the strength of their promises. It is true they never carried them out. Deception is always a pretty contemptible vice, but to deceive the poor is the meanest of all.”

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

Speech in Limehouse, East London (30 July 1909), quoted in Better Times: Speeches by the Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P., Chancellor of the Exchequer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), p. 145.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

“Friends and fellow citizens, I warmly congratulate you upon the highly interesting object which has caused you to assemble in such numbers and spirit as you have today. This occasion is in some respects remarkable. Wise and thoughtful men of our race, who shall come after us, and study the lesson of our history in the United States; who shall survey the long and dreary spaces over which we have traveled; who shall count the links in the great chain of events by which we have reached our present position, will make a note of this occasion; they will think of it and speak of it with a sense of manly pride and complacency.”

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

1870s, Oratory in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (1876)

Men , Travel , History , Thinking

“Our ultimate concern is that which determines our being or not-being. Only those statements are theological which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of being or not-being for us.”

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) German-American theologian and philosopher

Systematic Theology (1951–63)
Context: The question now arises: What is the content of our ultimate concern? What does concern us unconditionally? The answer, obviously, cannot be a special object, not even God, for the first criterion of theology must remain formal and general. If more is to be said about the nature of our ultimate concern, it must be derived from an analysis of the concept “ultimate concern.” Our ultimate concern is that which determines our being or not-being. Only those statements are theological which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of being or not-being for us.

“I happen to like the "feel" of OpenGL more, which isn't something I can explain well to those that aren't programmers, but I don't think it matters much at this point which API one chooses. More or less, you have feature parity between both APIs, both have made a handful of design mistakes, and both do a few things in slightly more pleasant ways than the other. Of course, the unforgivable thing about Direct3D is that it only works on Windows. If it was truly cross-platform, though, I wouldn't really object to using it. But since you write OpenGL almost everywhere, and Direct3D almost nowhere, it seems like a false choice to me.”

Ryan C. Gordon (1978) Computer programmer

Quoted in Luboš Doležel, "Interview: Ryan C. Gordon" http://www.abclinuxu.cz/clanky/rozhovor-ryan-c.-gordon-icculus?page=1 AbcLinuxu.cz (2011-03-08)

Way , Feeling , Thinking , Falseness

“Finally, I wish to speak, through you, directly to those who came to London today to take life. I know that you personally do not fear to give your own life in exchange for taking others — that is why you are so dangerous. But I know you do fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society, and I can show you why you will fail. In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations, and even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.
They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don't want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our cities where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.”

Ken Livingstone (1945) Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008

Response to London bombings (7 July 2005)

Life , People , World , Fear

“A person examining too nearly a small portion of a very large circle… would see in this detached portion merely a certain quantity of physical points, grouped in a more or less irregular manner, and so, indeed, as to seem as if they had been arranged by chance… But, placing himself at a greater distance, the eye embraces of necessity a greater number of points, and already a degree of regularity is observable… and by removing still farther from the object, the observer loses sight of the individual points, no longer observes any accidental or odd arrangements amongst them, but discovers at once the law presiding over their general arrangements, and the precise nature of the circle so traced.”

Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist

Introductory
A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties (1842)

Law , Nature , Chance , Personality

“Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.”

Albert Camus book The Fall

The Fall (1956)

Truth , Beauty , Light

“.. the thing was to choose one [a ready-made object] that you were not attracted by.... and that was difficult because anything becomes beautiful if you look at it long enough... [My intention was to] completely eliminate the existence of taste, bad or good or indifferent.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Quote from The New York school – the painters & sculptors of the fifties, Irving Sandler, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978, p. 164
posthumous

Beauty , Indifference

“Professor Smith has kindly submitted his book to me before publication. After reading it thoroughly and with intense interest I am glad to comply with his request to give him my impression.
The work is a broadly conceived attempt to portray man's fear-induced animistic and mythic ideas with all their far-flung transformations and interrelations. It relates the impact of these phantasmagorias on human destiny and the causal relationships by which they have become crystallized into organized religion.
This is a biologist speaking, whose scientific training has disciplined him in a grim objectivity rarely found in the pure historian. This objectivity has not, however, hindered him from emphasizing the boundless suffering which, in its end results, this mythic thought has brought upon man.
Professor Smith envisages as a redeeming force, training in objective observation of all that is available for immediate perception and in the interpretation of facts without preconceived ideas. In his view, only if every individual strives for truth can humanity attain a happier future; the atavisms in each of us that stand in the way of a friendlier destiny can only thus be rendered ineffective.
His historical picture closes with the end of the nineteenth century, and with good reason. By that time it seemed that the influence of these mythic, authoritatively anchored forces which can be denoted as religious, had been reduced to a tolerable level in spite of all the persisting inertia and hypocrisy.
Even then, a new branch of mythic thought had already grown strong, one not religious in nature but no less perilous to mankind — exaggerated nationalism. Half a century has shown that this new adversary is so strong that it places in question man's very survival. It is too early for the present-day historian to write about this problem, but it is to be hoped that one will survive who can undertake the task at a later date.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Foreword of "Man and his Gods" by Homer W. Smith
Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and Religion (1999)

Truth , Books , Fear , Religion

“But girls often marry when they are too young," exclaimed Mary-Marie quickly; "so, if you don't object to my age —”

L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) Children's writer, editor, journalist, screenwriter

"The Witchcraft of Mary-Marie", in Baum's American Fairy Tales (1908)
Short stories

Age , Girl

“The Sultan now received information that there was a city in Hindustan called Thanessar, and there was a great temple there in which there was an idol called Jagarsom, whom the people of Hindustan worshipped. He collected a large force with the object of carrying on a religious war, and in the year AH 402 marched towards Thanessar. The son of Jaipal having received intelligence of this, sent an envoy and represented through him, that if the Sultan would relinquish this enterprise, he would send fifty elephants as tribute. The Sultan paid no heed to this offer, and when he reached Thanessar he found the city empty. The soldiers ravaged and plundered whatever they could lay hands upon, broke the idols and carried Jagarsom to Ghaznin. The Sultan ordered that the idol should the placed in front of the place of prayer, so that people would trample upon it.”

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) Sultan of Ghazni

The Tabqat-i-Akbari translated by B. De, Calcutta, 1973, Vol. I, p. 7
Quotes from Muslim medieval histories

War , People , Intelligence

“One of the things that happens at the speed of light is that people lose their goals in life. So what takes the place of goals and objectives? Well, role-playing is coming in very fast.”

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

Interview between Californian Governor Jerry Brown and Marshall McLuhan, 1977
1970s

Life , People , Light , Speed

“Computer science research is different from these more traditional disciplines. Philosophically it differs from the physical sciences because it seeks not to discover, explain, or exploit the natural world, but instead to study the properties of machines of human creation. In this it as analogous to mathematics, and indeed the "science" part of computer science is, for the most part mathematical in spirit. But an inevitable aspect of computer science is the creation of computer programs: objects that, though intangible, are subject to commercial exchange.”

Dennis M. Ritchie (1941–2011) American computer scientist

Reflections on Software Research (1984)

World , Mathematics , Nature , Study

“The behavior and reactions of the oppressed, which lead the oppressor to practice cultural invasion, should evoke from the revolutionary a different theory of action. What distinguishes revolutionary leaders from the dominant elite is not only their objectives, but their procedures.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Source: Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970), Chapter 4, Cultural Invasion

Behavior

“"Some fool has put the head of this nail on the wrong end." "You idiot, it's for the opposite wall!" To be sure, if the space of physical objects allowed motions of translation only, and not also rotations. That space has such geometry is a fantasy; experience shows otherwise. It is only experience that makes this complaint and the rejoinder a dialogue of madmen.”

Abraham Kaplan (1918–1993) American philosopher

Source: "The Conduct of Inquiry", p. 35.

Fools

“Mathematicians do not study objects, but the relations between objects; to them it is a matter of indifference if these objects are replaced by others, provided that the relations do not change. Matter does not engage their attention, they are interested in form alone.”

Henri Poincaré book Science and Hypothesis

Les mathématiciens n'étudient pas des objets, mais des relations entre les objets ; il leur est donc indifférent de remplacer ces objets par d'autres, pourvu que les relations ne changent pas. La matière ne leur importe pas, la forme seule les intéresse.
Source: Science and Hypothesis (1901), Ch. II: Dover abridged edition (1952), p. 20

Study , Change , Indifference

“OK, let's go and explore the rest of the world, and how easy is it to put together music through found objects and stuff, and people, and ideas and certain electricity, certain environments.”

M.I.A. (1975) British recording artist, songwriter, painter and director

Interview http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/m-i-a-s-global-party-the-futuristic-pop-star-on-her-decades-journey-20091229#ixzz1i1EWoIDV on Kala to Rolling Stone (2009)
Sourced quotes

People , World , Music , Idea

“America is the object of their loathing because, for a half-century or more, she has been the most prosperous and creative capitalist society on earth. Ultimately it is liberal democracy - or quite simply liberty itself - that they are eager to destroy, even though they are among its foremost beneficiaries, being free to travel anywhere, anytime in order to hatch their plots. If their diktats were carried out, if frontier barriers were reestablished everywhere, with passports and visas even for tourists, there could have been no Seattle and no Goteborg.”

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) French writer and philosopher

Source: 2000s, Anti-Americanism (2003), p. 35

Travel , Democracy

“Here, then, is another way to understand the intentions of the social theoretical project that this critical analysis of the contemporary situation of social thought prepares and suggests. Philosophical disputes about the social ideal have increasingly come to turn on an unresolved ambivalence toward the naturalistic premise, an incomplete rebellion against it. The visionary imagination of our age has been both liberated and disoriented. It has been liberated by its discovery that social worlds are contingent in a more radical sense than people had supposed; liberated to disengage the ideas of community and objectivity from any fixed structure of dependence and dominion or even from any determinate shape of social life. It has also, however, been disoriented by a demoralizing oscillation between a trumped-up sanctification of existing society and would-be utopian flight that finds in the land of its fantasies the inverted image of the circumstance it had wanted to escape; disoriented by the failure to spell out what the rejection of the naturalistic view means for the vision of a regenerate society. The social theory we need must vindicate a modernist—that is to say, a nonnaturalistic—view of community and objectivity, and it must do so by connecting the imagination of the ideal with the insight into transformation.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Social Theoryː Its Situation and Its Task (1987), p. 47

Life , People , Age , World

“Nothing was more likely to aggravate the difficulties of the present situation than any suggestions that our ultimate objective was to unite France, Italy and ourselves against Germany.”

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax (1881–1959) British politician

Remarks to the Cabinet (15 March 1938)
Foreign Secretary

“Monumentality is an affair of relativity. The truly monumental can only come about by means of the most exact and refined relation between parts. Since each thing carries both a meaning of its own and an associated meaning in relation to something else — its essential value is relative. We speak of the mood we experience when looking at a landscape. This mood results from the relation of certain things rather than from their separate actualities. This is because objects do not in themselves possess the total effect they give when interrelated.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Excerpts from the Teaching of Hans Hofmann', p. 68
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Mood , Parting

“Borges, alas, had no particular objection to extreme authoritarianism as such. The reason he hated Peronismo was that it was a mass movement. He didn't like the masses: he was the kind of senatorial elitist whose chief objection to fascism is that by mobilizing the people it gives them ideas above their station and hands out too many free shirts.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Jorge Luis Borges', p. 69
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

Hate , People , Idea

“Thwarted, or starved, in the important objects proper to young capacities, the boys and young men naturally find or invent deviant objects for themselves. … Their choices and inventions are rarely charming, usually stupid, and often disastrous; we cannot expect average kids to deviate with genius. But on the other hand, the young men who conform to the dominant society become for the most part apathetic, disappointed, cynical and wasted.”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 13.

Men , Stupidity , Disappointment , Boy

“The root objection to the pact is the nature of the Labour Party. It is not liberal. It is not becoming more liberal. The social democrats remain ineffective, or sneak off, after preaching equality to everyone else, to some of the highest-paid jobs open to the British. As a final spectacle of degradation, they are to be seen intimidating the Grunwick workers…The Labour Party remains without principle, clinging to office, paid by the trades unions, and with an anti-democratic Marxist wing. The pact, I fear, is having no effect on the nature of that party.”

Jo Grimond (1913–1993) British soldier, politician and academic

The Daily Mail (28 November, 1977).

Fear , Nature

“The second level of legitimation contains theoretical propositions in a rudimentary form. Here may be found various explanatory schemes relating sets of objective meanings. These schemes are highly pragmatic, directly related to concrete actions. Proverbs, moral maxims and wise sayings are common on this level. Here, too, belong legends and folk tales, frequently transmitted in poetic forms.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

1991; 112
The Social Construction of Reality, 1966

“Objectivity does not simply involve passivity and detachment; it is a particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement.”

Georg Simmel book The Stranger

Source: The Stranger (1908), p. 403

Indifference

“Although people seem to be unaware of it today, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Waiting on God (1950), Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God

People , Study

“Physical objects cannot exist unless they exist in a definite perspective and space continuum. But each individual creates his own space continuum... I want to tie this in with the differences you seem to see in one particular object. Each individual actually creates an entirely different object, which his physical senses then perceive.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Seth Material (1970), p. 127

Sense

“The passions are a kind of thirst, inexorable and intense, for certain feelings or felt states. To find or invent 'objects' (which are, more strictly speaking, relational structures) whose felt quality satisfies the passions, - that for me is the activity of the artist, an activity which does not cease even in sleep. No wonder the artist is constantly placing and displacing, relating and rupturing relations; his task is to find a complex of qualities whose feeling is just right – veering toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Source: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), pp. 38-39

Feeling , Sleep , Passion

“How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! … Even so, I think there is some virtue in eagerness, whether its object prove true or false.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“June: The Alder Fork”, p. 39.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "May: Back from the Argentine," "June: The Alder Fork," "July: Great Possessions," and "July: Prairie Birthday"

Thinking , Fish , Time , Falseness

“Man seeks objectives that enable him to convert the attainment of every goal into a means for the attainment of a new and more desirable goal. The ultimate objective in such a sequence cannot be obtainable; otherwise its attainment would put an end to the process. An end that satisfies these conditions is an ideal…
Thus the formulation and pursuit of ideals is a means by which to put meaning and significance into his life and into the history of which he is part.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1970s, On purposeful systems., 1972, p. 237, as cited in: William E. Smith (2008) The Creative Power. p. 58.

Life , History , Parting

“Mr. Soame Jenyns, a writer of verse and member of the Board of Trade… In twenty three very small pages he had disposed of the "Objections to the Taxation of Our American Colonies" in a manner highly satisfactory to himself and doubtless also to the average reading Briton, who understood constitutional questions best when they were "briefly considered," and when they were humorously expounded in pamphlets that could be had for sixpence…. The heart of the question was the proposition that there should be no taxation without representation; upon which principle it was necessary to observe only that many individuals in England, such as copyholders and leaseholders, and many communities, such as Manchester and Birmingham, were taxed in Parliament without being represented there. "… are they only Englishmen when they solicit protection, but not Englishmen when taxes are required to enable this country to protect them?" As for "liberty," the word had so many meanings, "having within a few years been used as a synonymous term for Blasphemy, Bawdy, Treason, Libels, Strong Beer, and Cyder," that Mr. Jenyns could not presume to say what it meant.”

Carl L. Becker (1873–1945) American historian

The Eve of the Revolution (1918)

Communication , Beer , Question , Strong

“Well, what that means is that it doesn’t happen very often. Now it’s happened to one small group of people—us—twice in a short time. That would seem to indicate that,” he ticked a finger, “something’s seriously out of whack in general, or,” he ticked the next finger, “someone’s out to get us in particular; which I feel is quite unlikely. At times in my paranoid past I would have assumed that the Universe is teaming up to get me, but now I’m more objective and I don’t believe that. I think it, but I don’t believe it.”

Michael Kurland book The Unicorn Girl

Source: The Unicorn Girl (1969), Chapter 4 (p. 40)

People , Feeling , Thinking , Universe

“She was already putting her distance between herself and this woman she would kill. She was becoming an object, something she was going to do something unpleasant to; not a person with a right to live.”

John Varley (1947) American science fiction author

"Equinoctial" (1977), The Arbor House Treasury of Great Science Fiction Short Novels, p. 84

Personality

“This realistic image, however, does not catch at all what really is, but what should not be - death and misery - what should not exist, from our moral and humanistic point of view. And at the same time making an aesthetic and commercial, perfectly immoral use and abuse of this misery. Images that actually testify, behind their pretended "objectivity", of a deep denial of the real, and of an equal denial of the image - assigned to present what does not even want to be represented, assigned to the rape of the real by burglary.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

New millennium

Death , Time

“In the Vienna of the late 1020s and 1930s there throve an internationally famous philosophical bunch called the logical positivists. …They said that a key ingredient of knowledge was "sense data," and proclaimed emphatically, in the words of… J. S. L. Gilmour, that sense data are "objective and unalterable."”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

…Good guess, but no cigar!
Source: Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), Ch.7 A Trip Through the Perception Factory

Knowledge , Sense

“The age we live in is largely – and I think mostly – 'objective', but a minority is reacting against this... My feeling is that I made colour – the colour plane – 'objective' in 1918, 1920 and 1921. There is a feeling of objectivity in all the great Primitives – but in 'the subject' there is no solution for the object, which has so much intrinsic value that it is 'highly explosive'; it destroys all the things around it, unless they have been designed specifically to serve as a setting for it.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote from a letter to Simone Herman, 3 September, 1933, as in quoted Fernand Léger - The Later Years -, catalogue edited by Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 28
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1930's

Age , Feeling , Thinking

“Whatever analogy we choose, one thing is clear - any group with influence needs people outside that group who will criticise it. In the real world of politics and society, journalists do that - proper journalists who know what having principles means, who aim for objectivity while accepting that it is unattainable, and who are open about who pays them and who they work with.”

Bill Thompson (1960) English technology writer, born 1960

" Blog eats blog: The rise of the blogeoisie. http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/00000006DDA4.htm" by Bill Thompson, May 15, 2003.

People , World

“Given a man full of faith, you will have a man tenacious in purpose, absorbed in one grand object, simple in his motives, in whom selfishness has been driven out by the power of a mightier love, and indolence stirred into unwearied energy.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 220.

Love , Faith , Motivation , Selfishness

“How strange it seems that education, in practice, so often means suppression: that instead of leading the mind outward to the light of day it crowds things in upon it that darken and weary it. Yet evidently the true object of education, now as ever, is to develop the capabilities of the head and of the heart.”

Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) American architect

Emotional Architecture as Compared to Intellectual (1894)

Education , Light , Heart

“There is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, — light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quoted in C.R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, Composed Chiefly of His Letters (1843), (Phaidon, London, 1951), p. 280
Reply "to a lady who, looking at an engraving of a house, called it an ugly thing"
posthumous, undated

Life , Beauty , Light

“Corporate strategy is the pattern of major objectives, purposes, or goals and essential policies and plans for achieving those goals stated in such a way as to define what business the company is in or is to be in and the kind of company it is or is to be. In a changing world it is a way of expressing a persistent concept of the business so as to exclude some possible new activities and suggest entry into others.”

Kenneth R. Andrews (1916–2005) Business scholar

Source: Quote, The Concept of Strategy, 1971, p. 28

World , Way , Business , Change

“I asked him [Samuel Johnson] if it was true as reported, that he had said lately, ‘I am for the King against Fox; but I am for Fox against Pitt.’ JOHNSON: ‘Yes, Sir; the King is my master; but I do not know Pitt; and Fox is my friend.’ ‘Fox, (added he,) is a most extraordinary man; here is a man (describing him in strong terms of objection in some respects according as he apprehended, but which exalted his abilities the more) who has divided the Kingdom with Caesar; so that it was a doubt whether the nation should be ruled by the sceptre of George the Third, or the tongue of Fox.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Samuel Johnson in conversation with James Boswell (11 June 1784), quoted in James Boswell, Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 1292.
About

Strong

“The virtual suppression of ethical discussion after 1845 produces the semblance of purely descriptive analysis, dressed in the mantle of positivist objectivity, analysis which is, in fact, strung to a framework of crude, because unexplicated, moral assumptions.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 80

“His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) British Conservative politician and statesman

Letter (2 November 1917) to Lord Rothschild; this letter became known as the Balfour Declaration, quoted in Blanche E. C. Dugdale, Arthur James Balfour, First Earl of Balfour, K.G., O.M., F.R.S., Etc. 1906–1930 (London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, 1936), p. 171.

People , Home , Communication , Country

“As the idea of permanence of objects has faded, the idea of permanence of physical laws has become better established and more powerful.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Source: Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987), Ch.7 New Star

Law , Idea

“In June–July 1998, progressives kicked up quite a racket. The government has packed the Indian Council of Historical Research with pro–Ram Mandir historians, they shouted. It has surreptitiously altered the aims and objectives of the Council, they shouted. As is their wont, they had sparked the commotion by giving wind to a concoction. As is their wont too, they were charging others with planning to do in some undefined future what they had themselves been actually doing for decades – that is, write history to a purpose.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

History , Future

“The mandate entails a generous synthesis of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. The title requires the expert to be truly independent, keep an open mind, conduct his/her research objectively and without ideological prejudices, listen to all sides of an argument and seek the opinion of all stakeholders.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Alfred de Zayas Statement by on his personal website http://alfreddezayas.com.
2013

“It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.”

Jorge Luis Borges book Evaristo Carriego: A Book About Old-Time Buenos Aires

Evaristo Carriego (1930) Ch. 3

Books , Art , Parting

“These two characteristics make revenge the most suitable source for the formation of ressentiment. The nuances of language are precise. There is a progression of feeling which starts with revenge and runs via rancor, envy, and impulse to detract all the way to spite, coming close to ressentiment. Usually, revenge and envy still have specific objects. They do not arise without special reasons and are directed against definite objects, so that they do not outlast their motives. The desire for revenge disappears when vengeance has been taken, when the person against whom it was directed has been punished or has punished himself, or when one truly forgives him. In the same way, envy vanishes when the envied possession becomes ours. The impulse to detract, however, is not in the same sense tied to definite objects—it does not arise through specific causes with which it disappears. On the contrary, this affect seeks those objects, those aspects of men and things, from which it can draw gratification. It likes to disparage and to smash pedestals, to dwell on the negative aspects of excellent men and things, exulting in the fact that such faults are more perceptible through their contrast with the strongly positive qualities. Thus there is set a fixed pattern of experience which can accommodate the most diverse contents. This form or structure fashions each concrete experience of life and selects it from possible experiences. The impulse to detract, therefore, is no mere result of such an experience, and the experience will arise regardless of considerations whether its object could in any way, directly or indirectly, further or hamper the individual concerned. In “spite,” this impulse has become even more profound and deep-seated—it is, as it were, always ready to burst forth and to betray itself in an unbridled gesture, a way of smiling, etc. An analogous road leads from simple *Schadenfreude* to “malice.””

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

The latter, more detached than the former from definite objects, tries to bring about ever new opportunities for *Schadenfreude*.
Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Life , Men , Smile , Way

“Administration has to do with getting things done; with the accomplishment of defined objectives. The science of administration is thus the system of knowledge whereby men may understand relationships, predict results, and influence outcomes in any situation where men are organized at work together for a common purpose. Public administration is that part of the science of administration which has to do with government, and thus concerns itself primarily with the executive branch, where the work of government is done, though there are obviously administrative problems also in connection with the legislative and the judicial branches. Public administration is thus a division of political science, and one of the social sciences.”

Lyndall Urwick (1891–1983) British management consultant

Source: 1930s, "Science, Value and Public Administration", 1937, p. 189

Men , Understanding , Knowledge , Problem

“Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Interview for The Sunday Times (1 May 1981) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=104475
First term as Prime Minister

Soul , Change , Heart

“It is the habit of the boa constrictor to besmear the body of his victim with a foul slime before he devours it; and there are many people in England, and perhaps elsewhere, who seem to be unable to contemplate military operations for clear political objects, unless they can cajole themselves into the belief that their enemy are utterly and hopelessly vile. To this end the Dervishes, from the Mahdi and the Khalifa downwards, have been loaded with every variety of abuse and charged with all conceivable crimes. This may be very comforting to philanthropic persons at home; but when an army in the field becomes imbued with the idea that the enemy are vermin who cumber the earth, instances of barbarity may easily be the outcome. This unmeasured condemnation is moreover as unjust as it is dangerous and unnecessary.”

Winston S. Churchill book The River War

The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan (1899), Volume II pp. 394–395
(This passage does not appear in the 1902 one-volume abridgment, the version posted by Project Gutenberg).
Early career years (1898–1929)

People , Home , Idea , Personality

“I know I will be severely criticized by the interventionists in America when I say we should not enter a war unless we have a reasonable chance of winning…. We are no better prepared today than France was when the interventionists persuaded her to attack the Siegfried Line….
It is not only our right but it is our obligation as American citizens to look at this war objectively and to weigh our chances for success if we should enter it. I have attempted to do this, especially from the standpoint of aviation; and I have been forced to the conclusion that we cannot win this war for England, regardless of how much assistance we extend.”

Burton K. Wheeler (1882–1975) American politician and lawyer

Speech, reported in Robert G. Torricelli, Andrew Carroll, In Our Own Words: Extraordinary Speeches of the American Century (2000), p. 126.

War , Chance , Success

“In every nature, and in every portion of nature, which we can descry, we find attention bestowed upon even the minutest parts. The hinges in the wings of an earwig, and the joints of its antennae, are as highly wrought, as if the Creator had nothing else to finish. We see no signs of dimunition of care by multiplicity of objects, or of distraction of thought by variety. We have no reason to fear, therefore, our being forgotten, or overlooked, or neglected.”

William Paley (1743–1805) Christian apologist, natural theologian, utilitarian

Source: Natural Theology (1802), Ch. 27 : Conclusion.

Fear , Nature , Parting

“If in the case of a notion whose specialisations form a continuous manifoldness, one passes from a certain specialisation in a definite way to another, the specialisations passed over form a simply extended manifoldness, whose true character is that in it a continuous progress from a point is possible only on two sides, forwards or backwards. If one now supposes that this manifoldness in its turn passes over into another entirely different, and again in a definite way, namely so that each point passes over into a definite point of the other, then all the specialisations so obtained form a doubly extended manifoldness. In a similar manner one obtains a triply extended manifoldness, if one imagines a doubly extended one passing over in a definite way to another entirely different; and it is easy to see how this construction may be continued. If one regards the variable object instead of the determinable notion of it, this construction may be described as a composition of a variability of n + 1 dimensions out of a variability of n dimensions and a variability of one dimension.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

On the Hypotheses which lie at the Bases of Geometry (1873)

Way , Imagination

“Socialism does not propose to abolish land or capital. Only a genius could have thought of this as an objection to Socialism. Socialism proposes to abolish capitalism and landlordism.”

Keir Hardie (1856–1915) Scottish socialist and labour leader

Source: From Serfdom to Socialism (1907), p. 11

“And if you look at other referee professors, they all have LLDs. Therefore, either he hasn’t tried or he is too busy or he doesn’t think it’s important. But if that’s the case, he will be devaluating [sic] … maybe of the lecturers or professors who have got PhDs who have gone through the rigors of academic pursuits. Now can you … can someone be in charge of the promotion of other persons who actually has not gone through same rigors as that other person and give an honest, independent, objective view?”

Arthur Li (1945) Hong Kong politician

Leaked recording: Arthur Li speaks against Johannes Chan, EJ Insight, http://www.webcitation.org/6cfxbjx4k, 30 October 2015 http://www.ejinsight.com/20151028-leaked-recording-arthur-li-speaks-against-johannes-chan/,

Business , Thinking , Personality

“In a few weeks, or at most a few months, thanks to the skill of the Allied Commanders and the bravery of their men, the objects for which we and they have endured more than four years of sacrifice and suffering have been attained. The lands upon which the enemy had laid his cruel and predatory hand are in course of being evacuated. The exiled peoples are returning in joyous crowds across the war frontiers to their homes. The military power of the enemy is broken. His resources are spent. His armaments are in course of being surrendered. Hope breathes again in the souls of the unhappy peoples whom he has trampled in the mire. The impious spirit that claimed that Might was superior to Right and that there was no law but that of successful violence in the world has been exorcised, let us hope for ever. The conflict for international honour, righteousness, and freedom has been won, and the authors of this vast and wicked conspiracy against the liberties of mankind are fugitives on the face of the earth. My Lords, this is a great hour. It has been a wonderful victory. Are we presumptuous if we see in it the judgment of a Higher Power upon panoplied arrogance and enthroned wrong?”

George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston (1859–1925) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1918/nov/18/the-armistice-address-to-his-majesty in the House of Lords (18 November 1918).

Men , War , People , World

“The more freely abstract the form becomes, the purer, and also the more primitive it sounds. Therefore, in a composition in which corporeal elements are more or less superfluous, they can be more or less omitted and replaced by purely abstract forms, or by corporeal forms that have been completely abstracted... Here we are confronted by the question: Must we not then renounce the object altogether, throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract? This is a question that naturally arises, the answer to which is at once indicated by an analysis of the concordance of the two elements of form (the objective and the abstract). Just as every word spoken (tree, sky, man) awakens an inner vibration, so too does every pictorially represented object. To deprive oneself of the possibility of this calling up vibrations would be to narrow one's arsenal of expressive means. At least, that is how it is today. But apart from today's answer, the above question receives the eternal answer to every question in art that begins with 'must.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

There is no 'must' in art, which is forever free.
Quote from: Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, eds. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, 2 Vols. (transl. Peter Vergo); Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., (1982), p. 195; as cited in: Samet, Jennifer Sachs. Painterly Representation in New York, 1945-1975. Dissertation, The City University of New York, 2010. p. 25
1910 - 1915

Art , Question , Nature , Tree

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

Source: Projective methods for the study of personality (1939), p. 402-403; As cited in: Edwin Inglee Megargee, Charles Donald Spielberger (1992) Personality assessment in America: a retrospective on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Society for Personality Assessment. p. 20-21

Life , World , Way , Feeling

“so you think there’s no validity at all in the subjective?
there may be, there may not. in either case, it should not be used as a basis for an objective truth, which is after all what we are seeking. i have no doubt that many of those who claim to have found god have indeed felt something, but i suspect that the “something” they felt was merely a self-induced mystic experience—akin to a drug trip. witness the great numbers of drug users who claim spiritual insights as a result of their experiences. witness also the evangelists and faith-healers who induce hysteria and frenzy into their audiences so that they might feel “the hand of god” upon them. to them, god is little more than a meaningful “high.””

David Gerrold book When HARLIE Was One

Section 15 (p. 75; Dr. Auberson, then HARLIE)
When HARLIE Was One (1972)

God , Truth , Faith , Feeling

“In attempted justification of the statute, it is said that it deals not with publication per se, but with the "business" of publishing defamation. If, however, the publisher has a constitutional right to publish, without previous restraint, an edition of his newspaper charging official derelictions, it cannot be denied that he may publish subsequent editions for the same purpose. He does not lose his right by exercising it. If his right exists, it may be exercised in publishing nine editions, as in this case, as well as in one edition. If previous restraint is permissible, it may be imposed at once; indeed, the wrong may be as serious in one publication as in several. Characterizing the publication as a business, and the business as a nuisance, does not permit an invasion of the constitutional immunity against restraint. Similarly, it does not matter that the newspaper or periodical is found to be "largely" or "chiefly" devoted to the publication of such derelictions. If the publisher has a right, without previous restraint, to publish them, his right cannot be deemed to be dependent upon his publishing something else, more or less, with the matter to which objection is made. Nor can it be said that the constitutional freedom from previous restraint is lost because charges are made of derelictions which constitute crimes. With the multiplying provisions of penal codes, and of municipal charters and ordinances carrying penal sanctions, the conduct of public officers is very largely within the purview of criminal statutes. The freedom of the press from previous restraint has never been regarded as limited to such animadversions as lay outside the range of penal enactments. Historically, there is no such limitation; it is inconsistent with the reason which underlies the privilege, as the privilege so limited would be of slight value for the purposes for which it came to be established.”

Charles Evans Hughes (1862–1948) American judge

Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697 (1931).
Judicial opinions

Exercises , Business , Freedom , Dependency

“It is impossible for the behavior of a single, isolated individual to reach a high degree of rationality. The number of alternatives he must explore is so great, the information he would need to evaluate them so vast that even an approximation to objective rationality is hard to conceive. Individual choice takes place in rationality is hard to conceive… Actual behavior falls short in at least three ways, of objective rationality:”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947

Way , Behavior

“This law covers many pages. But the heart of the act is plain. Wherever, by clear and objective standards, States and counties are using regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote, then they will be struck down. If it is dear that State officials still intend to discriminate, then Federal examiners will be sent in to register all eligible voters. When the prospect of discrimination is gone, the examiners will be immediately withdrawn. And, under this act, if any county anywhere in this Nation does not want Federal intervention it need only open its polling places to all of its people.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Voting Rights Act signing speech (1965)

People , Law , Heart

“When the act of navigation was made, though England and Holland were not actually at war, the most violent animosity subsisted between the two nations. … It is not impossible, therefore, that some of the regulations of this famous act may have proceeded from national animosity. They are as wise, however, as if they had all been dictated by the most deliberate wisdom. National animosity at that particular time aimed at the very same object which the most deliberate wisdom would have recommended, the diminution of the naval power of Holland, the only naval power which could endanger the security of England.”

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

Source: The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book IV, Chapter II

Wisdom , War , Time

“We're trying to change the Kleenex mentality of technology - you buy a smartband or an Android Wear watch and next year you'll throw it away. This is a horrible world we're preparing for the next generation. We have to get away from that crazy approach, as we look at the resources left on this planet. We need to be able to create objects that are worth keeping and upgrading.”

Philippe Kahn (1952) Entrepreneur, camera phone creator

Wareable, April 7th, 2015 http://www.wareable.com/meet-the-boss/the-man-behind-motionx-too-many-sensors-are-counterproductive-7383.

World , Change

“It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it; nay, absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people.”

John Jay Federalist Papers

Federalist No. 4 (7 November 1787) Full text from Wikisource http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Federalist/4.
1780s, The Federalist Papers, Federalist No. 4 (1787)

War , People , Family , Justice

“It is presumed, that juries are the best judges of facts; it is, on the other hand, presumed that courts are the best judges of law. But still both objects are within your power of decision … You have a right to take it upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy.”

John Jay (1745–1829) American politician and a founding father of the United States

Georgia vs. Brailsford http://www.friesian.com/jury.htm (1794)
1790s

Law , Decision

“I must tell the House that the Falkland Islands and their dependencies remain British territory. No aggression and no invasion can alter that simple fact. It is the Government's objective to see that the islands are freed from occupation and are returned to British administration at the earliest possible moment…We cannot allow the democratic rights of the islanders to be denied by the territorial ambitions of Argentina.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech in the House of Commons (3 April 1982) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104910
First term as Prime Minister

Housing , Dependency

“In the case of psychology, of course, it is not only the concepts and methods of the discipline that undergo constant historical change, but the very subject matter itself. Human subjectivity, the reality behind the objects of psychological investigation, is itself strongly implicated in the historical process, both as agent and as product.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

Source: "Does the history of psychology have a future?." 1994, p. 475

Reality , Change

“A man who works under orders with other men must be without vanity. If he has too strong a will of his own and if his ideas are in conflict with those of his chief, the execution of orders will always be uncertain because of his efforts to interpret them in his own way. Faith in the chief must keep the gang together. Obviously deference must not turn into servility. A chief of staff or a departmental head should be able, if it seems to him (rightly or wrongly) that his superior is making a serious mistake, to tell him so courageously. But this sort of collaboration is really effective only if such frankness has true admiration and devotion behind it. If the lieutenant does not admit that his chief is more experienced and has better judgment than he himself, he will serve him badly. Criticism of the chief by a subordinate must be accidental and not habitual. What must an assistant do if he is sure he is right and if his chief refuses to accept his criticisms? He must obey the order after offering his objections. No collective work is possible without discipline. If the matter is so serious that it can have a permanent effect upon the future of a country, an army, or a commercial enterprise, the critic may hand in his resignation. But this must be done only as a last resort; as long as a man thinks he can be useful he must remain at his post.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Working

Men , Faith , Way , Idea

“A country cannot be defeated politically unless it is defeated culturally. Our alien rulers knew that they could not conquer India without conquering Hinduism - cultural India's name at its deepest and highest, and the principle of its identity, continuity and reawakening. Therefore Hinduism became an object of their special attack. Physical attack was supplemented by ideological attack. They began to interpret for us our history, our religion, our culture and ourselves. We learnt to look at us through their eyes…. The long period created an atmosphere of mental slavery and imitation. It created a class of people Hindu in their names and by birth but anti-Hindu in orientation, sympathy and loyalty. They knew all the bad things and nothing good about Hinduism. Hindu dharma is now being subverted from within. Anti-Hindu Hindus are very important today; they rule the roost; they write our histories, they define our nation; they control the media, the academia, the politics, the higher administration and higher courts. They are now working as clients of those forces who are planning to revive their old Imperialism… During this period our minds became soft. We became escapists; we wanted to avoid conflict at any cost, even conflict and controversy of ideas, even when this controversy was necessary. We developed an escape-route. We called it "synthesis". We said all religions, all scriptures, all prophets preach the same things. It was intellectual surrender, and our enemies saw it that way; they concluded that we are amenable to anything, that we would clutch at any false hope or idea to avoid a struggle, and that we would do nothing to defend ourselves. Therefore, they have become even more aggressive. It also shows that we have lost spiritual discrimination (viveka), and would entertain any falsehood; this is prajñâ-dosha, drishti-dosha, and it cannot be good for our survival in the long run. People first fall into delusion before they fall into misfortune.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

On Hinduism (2000)

People , Religion , Hope , Way

“[Object-oriented analysis is] the challenge of understanding the problem domain and then the system's responsibilities in that light.”

Ed Yourdon (1944–2016) American software engineer and pioneer in the software engineering methodology

Source: Object-oriented design (1991), p. 8-9; as cited in: Elisa Bertino, ‎Susan Urban (1994) Object-Oriented Methodologies and Systems. p. 160.

Understanding , Problem , Light

“The object of education is not merely to enable our children to gain their daily bread and to acquire pleasant means of recreation, but that they should know God and serve Him with earnestness and devotion.”

Hermann Adler (1839–1911) Chief Rabbi of the British Empire from 1891 to 1911

Source: Quoted in Joseph H. Hertz, The Pentateuch and Haftorahs (One-volume edition), p. 78-9

God , Children , Education

“C being what it is lacks support for multiple return values, so the notion that it is meaningful to pass pointers to memory objects into which any random function may write random values without having a clue where they point, has not been debunked as the sheer idiocy it really is.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: Allegro CL foreign function interface http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/2ec281a4f469bb35 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles

Support , Memory

“Being an incomplete female, the male spends his life attempting to complete himself, become female. He attempts to do this by constantly seeking out, fraternizing with and trying to live through and fuse with the female and by claiming as his own all female characteristics - emotional strength and independence, forcefulness, dynamism, decisiveness, coolness, objectivity, assertiveness, courage, integrity, vitality, intensity, depth of character, grooviness, etc. - and projecting onto women all male traits - vanity, frivolity, triviality, weakness, etc. It should be said, though, that the male has one glaring area of superiority over the female - public relations. He has done a brilliant job of convincing millions of women that men are women and women are men.”

Valerie Solanas (1936–1988) American radical feminist and writer. Attempted to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. 2 (hyphens (not en- or em-dashes) so in original).

Life , Women , Men , Courage

“I think that Hitler was abnormal in his sexual needs. That is, he needed too little from the opposite sex. He considered women as objects of beauty, and he often talked with affection about his own mother. I obtained the impression that he disliked his father, because he never mentioned him. But it is a bad thing if a man has too little Eros in him. It makes him insensitive, and probably leads to cruelty. Freud, Sigmund Freud, the last of the great German psychiatrists, who died in England, pointed out the relationship between frustrated love and cruelty. I believe it is what you psychiatrists term sadism. I'm convinced that a man who does not need the love of a woman, and thinks he can forgo it, or who does forgo it, can turn to cruelty and sadism as a substitute.”

Hans Frank (1900–1946) German war criminal

To Leon Goldensohn, July 20, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Love , Women , Beauty , Sex

“Time did a devastating hatchet job on Uri Geller (and others). Time selected those events and circumstances thoroughly discrediting Geller. Time also grouped such meticulous researchers as Charles Tart with highly suspect and careless showmen, tarring all with the same brush. Guilt by association is hardly objective journalism. Nevertheless most "nonordinary" phenomena are subjective and not amenable to cultural "prediction and control." This has been one issue of my book. Should Geller-type material become fully acceptable within such channels of the culture such as Time, we would know that the cultural force would have absorbed, and not destroyed, the Crack-sign value of such phenomena. When those working in the field of "nonordinary" phenomena stop trying to prove to the Establishment, they will make a great leap forward. Anonymity is the direction.”

Joseph Chilton Pearce (1926–2016) American writer

Source: Exploring the Crack In the Cosmic Egg (1974), p. 146

Books , Time

“… a rather different class of applications of the idea of best allocation of scarce resources… usually referred to as the theory of optimal economic growth. In most studies of this kind made in the countries with market economies there is not an identifiable client to whom the findings are submitted as policy recommendations. Nor is there an obvious choice of objective function, such as cost minimization or profit maximization in the studies addressed to individual enterprises. The field has more of a speculative character. The models studied usually contain only a few highly aggregated variables. One considers alternative objective functions that incorporate or emphasize various strands of ethical, political, or social thought. These objectives are then tried out to see what future paths of the economy they imply under equally simplified assumptions of technology or resource availability.”

Tjalling Koopmans (1910–1985) Dutch American economist

Source: Concepts of Optimality and Their Uses, 1975, p. 244

Idea , Optimism , Study , Future

“We are frequently faced with the necessity of looking for the picture required for the visualization of an object, not in the perception of this particular object, but in a different perceptual image. …we can assert the discrepancy between the perceived picture and the objective state. This discrepancy… proves absolutely nothing against the fact that all visualizations are merely sense qualities of the perceptual space. …If the parallelism is …to be visualized, we must supplement our assertion by the description of certain qualities with which we are familiar from perceptual space.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

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

Sense

“Once I went professionally to an archaeological expedition--and I learnt something there. In the course of an excavation, when something comes up out of the ground, everything is cleared away very carefully all around it. You take away the loose earth, and you scrape here and there with a knife until finally your object is there, all alone, ready to be drawn and photographed with no extraneous matter confusing it. That is what I have been seeking to do--clear away the extraneous matter so that we can see the truth--the naked shining truth.”

Agatha Christie book Death on the Nile

Hercule Poirot
Death on the Nile (1937)

Truth

“Man's secret horror of his foot is one of the explanations for the tendency to conceal its length and form as much as possible. Heels of greater or lesser height, depending on the sex, distract from the foot's low and flat character. Besides the uneasiness is often confused with a sexual uneasiness; this is especially striking among the Chinese who, after having atrophied the feet of women, situate them at the most excessive point of deviance. The husband himself must not see the nude feet of his wife, and it is incorrect and immoral in general to look at the feet of women. Catholic confessors, adapting themselves to this aberration, ask their Chinese penitents "if they have not looked at women's feet.
The same aberration is found among the Turks (Volga Turks, Turks of Central Asia), who consider it immortal to show their nude feet and whoe ven go to bed in stockings.
Nothing similar can be cited from classical antiquity (apart from the use of very high soles in tragedies). The most prudish Roman matrons constantly allowed their nude toes to be seen. On the other hand, modesty concerning feet developed excessively in the modern ea and only started to disappear in the nineteenth century. M. Salomon Reinarch has studied this development in detail in the article entitled Pieds pudiques [Modest Feet], insisting on the role of Spain, where women's feet have been the object of most dreaded anxiety and thus were the cause of crimes. The simple fact of allowing the shod foot to be seen, jutting up from under a skirt, was regarded as indecent. Under no circumstances was it possible to touch the foot of a woman.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, p.21-22

Women , Secret , Sex , Study

“Pure mathematics proves itself a royal science both through its content and form, which contains within itself the cause of its being and its methods of proof. For in complete independence mathematics creates for itself the object of which it treats, its magnitudes and laws, its formulas and symbols.”

Christian Heinrich von Dillmann (1829–1899) German educationist

Source: Die Mathematik die Fackelträgerin einer neuen Zeit (Stuttgart, 1889), p. 94.

Law , Mathematics , Science

“My entrance into the field of abstract art came about as the result of a visit to the studio of Piet Mondrian in Paris in 1930.
I was particularly impressed by some rectangles of color he had tacked on his wall in a pattern after his nature.
I told him I would like to make them [Mondrian's flat painting] oscillate, he objected. I went home and tried to paint abstractly - but in two weeks I was back again among plastic materials.
I think that at that time and practically ever since, the underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe, or part thereof. For that is a rather large model to work from.”

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) American artist

Quote (1951), in 'What Abstract Art Means to Me' http://www.jstor.org/stable/4058250, George L. K. Morris, Willem De Kooning, Alexander Calder, Fritz Glarner, Robert Motherwell, Stuart Davis; as cited in the The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 18, No. 3, (Spring, 1951), pp. 2-15
1950s - 1960s

Art , Color , Home , Nature

“.. I will endeavour to make clear to men of good will what the word 'material' means with regard to painting and that, without the material substance of paint, a painting is not a work of art but merely a decorative object, or rather, if it deals with an invented painting, the value of the image resides in its spiritual content.
In order to be a work of art, a painting must be very well painted and the good quality of the paint depends completely on the material substance of the paint with which it is executed. This matter, which constitutes the substance of painting, is composed of two elements which are equally important and absolutely inseparable: physical substance and metaphysical substance. These two elements complete each other reciprocally and when they are of a superior quality, create a masterpiece by way of their absolute harmony.”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Quote from De Cirico's text 'A DISCOURSE ON THE MATERIAL SUBSTANCE OF PAINT', 1942 http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/541-547Metafisica5_6.pdf, p. 542
1920s and later

Men , Art , Way , Painting

“Beloved guests, in what form does God, the Creator of all things in the universe, exist? God exists as the dual characteristics of a subject partner in the male position and object partner in the female position. God created Adam and Eve, the first human ancestors, by dividing the male and female positions within Himself. The children of Adam and Eve were to have been created in the same pattern of male and female as a result of the union formed by Adam and Eve.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

The Holy Marriage Blessing is the Path to Unite the Virtues of Heaven and Earth and Harmonize and Unify the Universe as One http://www.unification.net/2005/20050820.html (2005-08-20)

God , Children , Universe

“But there are motifs that would need three or four months' work, which could be done, as the vegetation doesn't change here. There are the olive trees and the pines that always keep their leaves. The sun is so fierce that objects seem to be silhouetted, not only in black or white, but in blue, red, brown, violet. I may be wrong, but this seems to be the very opposite of 'modeling'. How happy the gentle landscapists of Auvers would be here, and that [con, or 'bastard'? ] Guillemet.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Quote from Cezanne's letter to Camille Pissarro, from L'Estaque 2 July 1876, taken from Alex Danchev, The Letters of Paul Cézanne, 2013; as quoted in the 'Daily Beast' online, 13 Oct. 2013 https://www.thedailybeast.com/cezannes-letter-to-pissarro-picture-business-isnt-going-well
'The very opposite of 'modeling' meant roughly that Cézanne and Pissarro in their common painting-years in open air would lay down one plane or patch of color next to another in the painting, without any 'modeling' or shading between them - so that it looked as if each component part of the painting could be picked up from the canvas a little like a 'playing card from the table', as Cezanne explains here.
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, 1860s - 1870s

Tree , Change , Sun , Happiness