Quotes about originality (2478 quotes, page 15)

“I never had a strategy in my dealing with other humans! I've always been very passive socially. I went along with their agenda. I had none of my own! Left to my own devices I stayed in my room or wandered aimlessly in the streets, fantasizing about bizarre things I yearned to do to big ladies, or filled with self-pity and resentment. I was helpless in the presence of other people! My main concern was to make them like me by being as agreeable as possible, and secondly to impress them with my brilliance, my sharp wit, my originality, and my fundamental saintliness. Over time, and after years—decades—of diligent practice, I became very good at this cute little performance of mine. But this performance was improvised in the moment, catered to suit whoever I happened to be with. There was no strategy. It was always an effort. Only in solitude was I completely relaxed. Funny thing…”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

From his sketchbook (16 February 1998), reproduced in The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 380

People , Solitude , Effort , Time

“At the point at which the concept of différance, and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity; etc.)- to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present (for example, in the form of the identity of the subject who is present for all his operations, present beneath every accident or event, self-present in its "living speech," in its enunciations, in the present objects and acts of its language, etc.)- become non pertinent. They all amount, at one moment or another, to a subordination of the movement of différance in favor of the presence of a value or a meaning supposedly antecedent to différance, more original than it, exceeding and governing it in the last analysis. This is still the presence of what we called above the "transcendental signified.”

Jacques Derrida book Positions

Source: Positions (1982), p. 29

Intelligence

“The Chinese and Japanese are perhaps the most industrious of all races, while the Chinese are the most docile. The Japanese excel in imitativeness, but are not as reliable as the Chinese. Neither race, so far as their immigrant representatives are concerned, possesses the originality and ingenuity which characterize the competent American and British mechanic.”

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

pg. 131.
Races and Immigrants in America, 1907

“Many of the visions and revelations handed down as having been given by him are spurious. The miracles ascribed to him are all fabrications of Moslem zealots. He expressly and repeatedly disclaimed all miracles excepting the Koran; which, considering its incomparable merit, and the way in which it had come down to him from heaven, he pronounced the greatest of miracles. And here we must indulge a few observations on this famous document. While zealous Moslems and some of the most learned doctors of the faith draw proofs of its divine origin from the inimitable excellence of its style and composition, and the avowed illiteracy of Mahomet, less devout critics have pronounced it a chaos of beauties and defects; without method or arrangement; full of obscurities, incoherencies, repetitions, false versions of scriptural stories, and direct contradictions. The truth is that the Koran as it now exists is not the same Koran delivered by Mahomet to his disciples, but has undergone many corruptions and interpolations.”

Washington Irving (1783–1859) writer, historian and diplomat from the United States

Mahomet and his successors, George P. Putnam, 1850, p. 330-331.
Mahomet and his successors (1849)

Truth , Faith , Beauty , Way

“Of all human and ancient opinions concerning religion, that seems to me the most likely and most excusable, that acknowledged God as an incomprehensible power, the original and preserver of all things, all goodness, all perfection, receiving and taking in good part the honour and reverence that man paid him, under what method, name, or ceremonies soever”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book II, Ch. 12
Essais (1595), Book II

God , Religion , Parting , Perfection

“I take great satisfaction in seeing people and organizations achieve goals they might have originally believed to be beyond their reach.”

Don W. Wilson (1942) Archivist of the United States

As quoted in e-Study Guide for: American Government and Politics Today Google Books http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=suExAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT51&dq=%22I+take+great+satisfaction+in+seeing+people+and+organizations+achieve+goals+they+might+have+originally+believed+to+be+beyond+their+reach%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=i0iDU8G8BMix0AW17IDgDw&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22I%20take%20great%20satisfaction%20in%20seeing%20people%20and%20organizations%20achieve%20goals%20they%20might%20have%20originally%20believed%20to%20be%20beyond%20their%20reach%22&f=false

People

“1993 California
Los Angeles Times November 28, 1993
“In what observers called an historic ruling, a Russian court has pronounced the infamous ‘’Protocols of Zion’’ an anti-semitic forgey…[It is] the first such verdict in the land where the fraud originated 90 years ago. ‘Up to now, every country has disengaged itself from this shameful book except Russia where it was concocted,’ Tancred Golenpolsky, the publisher of the Moscow Jewish newspaper that won the ruling, said Saturday. The court cast arose 10 months after Golenpolsky’s Jewish Gazette accused the radical nationalist Group Pamyat (Memory) of printing anti-Semitic sentiments…Fostering ethnic conflict is punishable under Russian law.”
Graphic novelist: I’m writing a graphic book that will reveal the true origin of the infamous “Protocols of Zion.” I hope it will alert those who are ignorant of its falsehood!!
Research desk: Haw! Good luck! You’re dealing with an old vampire that will not die in spite of all the absolute proof of fraudulence.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.113

Books , Law , Hope , Angels

“The members of this Eternal Republic have no origin but their purely logical one of reference to each other, including thus their primary reference to God. That is, in the literal sense of the word, they have no origin at all — no source in time whatever. There is nothing at all, prior to them, out of which their being arises; they are not "things" in the chain of efficient causation. They simply are, and together constitute the eternal order.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Preface to First Edition, p.xiv

God , Sense , Time

“Somehow, suddenly, a musical idea occurs to you; either a whole phrase, or three notes, or a series of chords, something that seems pregnant with possibilities for development. Once you have the kinds of ideas that fascinate you, you're no longer in a position to decide the nature of the animal. It's going to take its essence from the musical ideas that occur to you…. Some musical ideas are too short, they don't seem long enough to carry you through ten minutes of music, so you have to start searching about for other ideas; contrasting ones that seem to fit with the original ones.”

Aaron Copland (1900–1990) American composer, composition teacher, writer, and conductor

Aaron Copland: the Life and Work of an Uncommon Man, ISBN 0805049096.

Music , Search , Idea , Nature

“It is a commonplace that eternity is not an endless prolongation of time, has nothing to do with time. Eternity is a characteristic of the mystical experience. The word eternity doubtless meant originally endlessness of time, which must count, therefore, as its literal meaning. But in its religious and metaphysical use it is a metaphor for the characteristic of the experience. For in that experience time drops away and is no more seen.”

Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.

p. 76.

Time

“In Fascism, as in Communism, the idea of the future was based on a critique of bourgeois modernity… It rose from a variety of currents and from authors of very different origins, all of whom demonized the bourgeoisie. The doctrine was cast as post-Marxist, not as pre-liberal.”

François Furet (1927–1997) French historian

Source: The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1999), p. 175

Communication , Idea , Future

“The term 'fundamentalist', which was coined in 1920, derives from the title of a series of tracts - The Fundamentals - published in the United States from 1910 to 1915. It has since been implicitly defined as meaning a person who believes that, since The Bible is the Word of God, every proposition in it must be true; a belief which, notoriously, is taken to commit fundamentalist Christians to defending the historicity of the accounts of the creation of the Universe given in the first two chapters of Genesis. On this understanding a fully believing Christian does not have to be fundamentalist. Instead it is both necessary and sufficient to accept the Apostles' and/or The Nicene Creed. In Islam, however, the situation is altogether different. For, whereas only a very small proportion of all the propositions contained in the Old and New Testaments are presented as statements made directly by God in any of the three persons of the Trinity, The Koran consists entirely and exclusively of what are alleged to be revelations from Allah (God). Therefore, with regard to The Koran, all Muslims must be as such fundamentalists; and anyone denying anything. asserted in The Koran ceases, ipso facto, to be properly accounted a Muslim. Those whom the media call fundamentalists would therefore better be described as revivalists. This conceptual truth not only places a tight limitation upon the possibilities of developmental change within Islam, as opposed to the tacit or open abandonment of one or more of its original particular claims, but also opens up the theoretical possibility of falsifying the Islamic system as a whole by presenting some known fact which is inconsistent with a Koranic assertion.”

Antony Flew (1923–2010) British analytic and evidentialist philosopher

Turning away from Mecca (The Salisbury Review, Spring 1996) quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (editor) (1998). Freedom of expression: Secular theocracy versus liberal democracy. https://web.archive.org/web/20171026023112/http://www.bharatvani.org:80/books/foe/index.htm

God , Truth , Understanding , Universe

“I refer, of course, to the debts our nation has amassed for itself over decades of indulgence. It is the new Red Menace, this time consisting of ink. We can debate its origins endlessly and search for villains on ideological grounds, but the reality is pure arithmetic.”

Mitch Daniels (1949) Governor of Indiana

Reported in Kathryn Jean Lopez, " Mitch Daniels Takes CPAC http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/259623/mitch-daniels-takes-cpac-kathryn-jean-lopez", National Review Online (February 11, 2011).

Search , Reality , Time

“There is a Power, a Power that controls the moon, the stars and the sun. It is a Power that can burn all other powers. It is the Power that pervades each atom, all that is finite, all that is infinite, a Power that no one can see…It has no assistance. It is completely alone. Original.”

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (1900–1986) Sri Lankan Sufi leader

The Point Where God and Man Meet (2006)

Star , Sun

“Theism (whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim) holds that God by wisdom created the world. The origin of the world and its subsequent ordering thus results from the designing activity of an intelligent agent—God. Naturalism, on the other hand, allows no place for intelligent agency except at the end of a blind, purposeless material process. Within naturalism, any intelligence is an evolved intelligence. Moreover, the evolutionary process by which any such intelligence developed is itself blind and purposeless. As a consequence, naturalism makes intelligence not a basic creative force within nature but an evolutionary byproduct. In particular, humans (the natural objects best known to exhibit intelligence) are not the crown of creation, not the carefully designed outcome of a purposeful creator, and certainly not creatures made in the image of a benevolent God. Rather, humans are an accident of natural history.”

William A. Dembski (1960) American intelligent design advocate

[The design revolution: answering the toughest questions about intelligent design, Downers Grove, Ill., InterVarsity Press, 2003, [BS652.D46, 2004], 2003020589, 9780830832163, http://books.google.com/books?id=sKVqpXqE0VwC] p. 8-9
2000s

Wisdom , God , World , History

“The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

“In concluding let me say that we are now but on the threshold of the coming era of true cooperation. The time is fast going by for the great personal or individual achievement of any one man standing alone and without the help of those around him. And the time is coming when all great things will be done by the cooperation of many men in which each man performs that function for which he is best suited, each man preserves his individuality and is supreme in his particular function, and each man at the same time loses none of his originality and proper personal initiative, and yet is controlled by and must work harmoniously with many other men.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) American mechanical engineer and tennis player

F.W. Taylor (1906). " On the Art of Cutting Metals https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015023119582;view=2up;seq=64," Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Vol. XXVIII, 1906, pp. 31–350.

Men , Time , Help , Personality

“... I have excluded the idea of the Fall of Man... man has made a long climb from the status of the animal until the time when he could recognize right from wrong. That recognition, at first, was based on behavior that paid, that avoided the retribution of the tribe and the gods, and that enabled the primitive society to function. Yet, however lowly in origin—and I am referring to a period centuries before right seemed to be worth following simply because it was right, or because man’s dignity and status were sustained by doing right; centuries before right was conceived as pleasing to God because he was holy and righteous—that earliest recognition of a difference between right and wrong was an immense advance, even though wrong was chosen.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.236-237 [ellipsis added]

God , Behavior , Idea , Time

“Anais Nin gave me my most original, or so I thought, creation.As I read Incest, I realized that something which I had always taken to be unique, the voice of Myra Breckinridge, was actually that of Anaïs in all the flowing megalomania of the diaries. Of course, I had not read the diaries then, but even so, if only for that one thundering voice, I am forever in her debt.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Source: 1990s, Palimpsest : A Memoir (1995), Ch. 7: "Today My Nerves Are Shattered. But I Am Indomitable!," pp. 107-108

Reading

“We call the wise age that in which men had a wonderful knowledge of science which we recognize without fail by certain signs, although without knowing who they were, or in what place, or when. …It has become a matter of common usage to call the barbarous age that time which extends from about 900 or a thousand years up to about 150 years past, since men were for 700 or 800 years in the condition of imbeciles without the practice of letters or sciences—which condition had its origin in the burning of books through troubles, wars, and destructions; afterwards affairs could, with a great deal of labor, be restored, or almost restored, to their former state; but although the afore-mentioned preceding times could call themselves a wise age in respect to the barbarous age just mentioned, nevertheless we have not consented to this definition of such a wise age, since both taken together are nothing but a true barbarous age in comparison to that unknown time at which we state that it [i. e., the wise age] was, without any doubt, in existence.”

Simon Stevin (1548–1620) Flemish scientist, mathematician and military engineer

Géographie, in Les Oeuvres Mathématiques de Simon Stevin de Bruges (1634) ed. Girard, p. 106-108, as quoted by Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (1968)

Men , War , Books , Age

“I had zero experience at the time, but I wanted to create something that no-one else was doing. It was that absence of anything like Mafia that really motivated me. I was really proud to finish it and even more proud that the final product was almost identical to the original vision.”

Daniel Vávra (1975) Czech entrepreneur

10 Years On: Interview With Mafia Director Daniel Vavra http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/mafia-director-daniel-vavra-gta-grand-theft-409859 (November 29, 2012)

Motivation , Time

“Rembrandt's comments on his drawing of 'The Rest on the Flight into Egypt', as remembered by his former pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten c. 1643 (translation from the original Dutch: Anne Porcelijn)”

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) Dutch 17th century painter and etcher

Dresden museum, Kupferstichkabinett - author: Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn - Object: 'The Rest on the Flight into Egypt', Inventory number: C 1443 [document/remdoc/e4525]
1640 - 1670

Drawing

“There is … a clever maxim which bears upon what I was saying to you some little while ago, and that is, that unless wicked ideas take root in a naturally depraved mind, human nature, in a right] and wholesome state, revolts at [[crime. Still, from an artificial civilisation have originated wants, vices, and false tastes, which occasionally become so powerful as to stifle within us all good feelings, and ultimately to lead us into guilt and wickedness…”

Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo

Chapter 17 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo/Chapter_17
The Count of Monte Cristo (1845–1846)

Feeling , Idea , Nature , Falseness

“Eubank has forgotten his roots. He is of African origin and seems to have forgotten that”

Steve Collins (1964) Irish boxer

Steve Collins http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,,1010013,00.html#article_continue

“An edition is… still wanted which shall, while in some places adhering… to the original text, at the same time be so entirely remodelled by the aid of accepted modern notation as to be thoroughly readable by any competent mathematician, and this want it is the object of the present work to supply.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

Preface, p. ix
Apollonius of Perga (1896)

Time

“And however one's mind may be elevated, and kept us to what is excellent, by the works of the Great Masters — still Nature is the fountain's head, the source from whence all originally must spring — and should an artist continue his practice without referring to nature he must soon form a manner, & be reduced to the same deplorable situation as the French painter mentioned by Sir J. Reynolds, who told him that he had long ceased to look at nature for she only put him out.For the last two years I have been running after pictures, and seeking the truth at second hand. I have not endeavoured to represent nature with the same elevation of mind — but have neither endeavoured to make my performances look as if really executed by other men….. There is room enough for a natural painter. The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth.I am come to a determination to make no idle visits this summer, nor to give up my time to common-place people. I shall return to Bergholt, where I shall make some laborious studies from nature — and I shall endeavour to get a pure and unaffected manner of representing the scenes that may employ me.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

3 quotes in Constable's letter to John Dunthorne (29 May 1802), from John Constable's Correspondence, ed. R.B. Beckett (Ipswich, Suffolk Records Society, 1962-1970), part 2, pp. 31-32
1800s - 1810s

Men , People , Truth , Spring

“Surely if a single cell may, when subjected to certain influences, become a man in the space of twenty years; there is nothing absurd in the hypothesis that under certain other influences, a cell may, in the course of millions of years, give origin to the human race.”

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist

The Development Hypothesis (1852)

“In my case, I find a blank canvas so beautiful that that to work immediately, in relation to how beautiful the canvas is as such, is inhibiting and, for me, demands 'too much to quickly'; so that my tendency is to get the canvas 'dirt', so to speak, in one way or another, and then, so to speak 'work in reverse', and try to bring it back to an equivalent of the original clarity and perfection of the canvas, that one began on…”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

as cited in Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 111
1960s, Interview with David Sylvester', (1960)

Beauty , Way , Perfection

“These Peripatetics accordingly made careful investigations into the nature of all things, so as to determine which I should be avoided as evil, discounted as useless, sought after as good, or preferred as better, and finally which are called "good" or "bad" according to circumstances. There thus developed two branches of philosophy, natural and moral, which are also called ethics and physics. But, through lack of scientific skill in argumentative reasoning, many absurdities were concluded. Thus Epicurus would have the world originate from atoms and a void, and would dispense with God as its author; whereas the Stoics asserted that matter is coeternal with God, and held that all sins are equally grave. p. 76”

John of Salisbury English philosopher and theologian

The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury (1159)

God , World , Nature , Evil

“In particular, unification represents my purpose to bring about God’s ideal world. Unification is not union. Union is when two things come together. Unification is when two become one. “Unification Church” became our commonly known name later, but it was given to us by others. In the beginning, university students referred to us as “the Seoul Church.” I do not like using the word kyo-hoi in its common usage to mean church. But I like its meaning from the original Chinese characters. Kyo means “to teach,” and Hoi means “gathering.” The Korean word means, literally, “gathering for teaching.” The word for religion, jong-kyo, is composed of two Chinese characters meaning “central” and “teaching,” respectively. When the word church means a gathering where spiritual fundamentals are taught, it has a good meaning. But the meaning of the word kyo-hoi does not provide any reason for people to share with each other. People in general do not use the word kyo-hoi with that meaning. I did not want to place ourselves in this separatist type of category. My hope was for the rise of a church without a denomination. True religion tries to save the nation, even if it must sacrifice its own religious body to do so; it tries to save the world, even at the cost of sacrificing its nation; and it tries to save humanity, even if this means sacrificing the world. By this understanding, there can never be a time when the denomination takes precedence. It was necessary to hang out a church sign, but in my heart I was ready to take it down at any time. As soon as a person hangs a sign that says “church,” he is making a distinction between church and not church. Taking something that is one and dividing itinto two is not right. This was not my dream. It is not the path I chose to travel. If I need to take down that sign to save the nation or the world, I am ready to do so at any time.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

2009, As a Peaceloving Global Citizen http://www.euro-tongil.org/swedish/english/TFbiography.pdf, page 56.

God , People , World , Religion

“Parliament is a potent engine, and its enactments must always do something, but they very seldom do what the originators of these enactments meant.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Statement to the Associated Chambers of Commerce (March 1891)
1890s

“The division of labour is not of recent origin, but it was only at the end of the eighteenth century that social cognizance was taken of the principle. though, until then, unwitting submission had been rendered to it. To be sure, several thinkers from earliest times saw its importance; but Adam Smith was the first to attempt a theory of it. Moreover, he adopted this phrase that social science later lent to biology.”

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) French sociologist (1858-1917)

Source: The Division of Labor in Society (1893), p. 39; Lead paragraph

Science , Time

“The true Christian experience must always include a genuine encounter with God. Without this, religion is but a shadow, a reflection of reality, a cheap copy of an original once enjoyed by someone else of whom we have heard. It cannot but be a major tragedy in the life of any man to live in a church from childhood to old age and know nothing more real than some synthetic god compounded of theology and logic, but having no eyes to see, no ears to hear, and no heart to love.”

Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897–1963) American missionary

citation needed

Love , Life , God , Age

“The theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and myself, is not, as so often misunderstood, a radical claim for truly sudden change, but a recognition that ordinary processes of speciation, properly conceived as glacially slow by the standard of our own life-span, do not resolve into geological time as long sequences of insensibly graded intermediates (the traditional, or gradualistic, view), but as geologically “sudden” origins at single bedding planes.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle

Source: Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987), pp. 2–3

Life , Change , Time

“In societies based around small communities, where almost everyone is either a friend, a relative, or an enemy of everyone else, the languages spoken tend even to lack words that correspond to "self-interest" or "altruism" but include very subtle vocabularies for describing envy, solidarity, pride, and the like. Their economic dealings with one another likewise tend to be based on much more subtle principles. … The work of destroying such ways of life is still often done by missionaries—representatives of those very world religions that originally sprang up in reaction to the market long ago. Missionaries, of course, are out to save souls; but they rarely interpret this to mean their role is simply to teach people to accept God and be more altruistic. Almost invariably, they end up trying to convince people to be more selfish and more altruistic at the same time. On the one hand, they set out to teach the "natives" proper work discipline, and try to get them involved with buying and selling products on the market, so as to better their material lot. At the same time, they explain to them that ultimately, material things are unimportant.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Army of Altruists (2007)

Life , God , People , World

“The critique of the highest values hitherto does not simply refute them or declare them invalid. It is rather a matter of displaying their origins as impositions which must affirm precisely what ought to be negated by the values established.”

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) German philosopher

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 26

“Any such material, received through the board, through automatic writing, or voice communication, should be carefully studied. Generally speaking, if your messages claim to originate from famous dead personalities, you can discount them as valid information. In all probability, they are creative fabrications of your own personal subconscious.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: How To Develop Your ESP Power (1966), p. 31

Communication , Study , Personality , Dead

“Strive not for singularity in dress; Fools have the more and men of sense the less. To look original is not worth while, But be in mind a little out of style.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

Source: Epigrams, p. 345

Men , Fools , Sense

“You need to know at least one foreign language well enough so that you can read the best literature that that language has produced in the original, and so you carry on a reasonable conversation and have dreams in that language. There are several reasons why this is crucial, but the most important is perhaps this: you can never understand one language until you understand at least two.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

The Storm Over the University (December 6, 1990)

Dreams , Literature , Understanding , Reading

“It is to be feared that few who are not experts in the history of mathematics have any acquaintance with the details of the original discoveries in mathematics of the greatest mathematician of antiquity, perhaps the greatest mathematical genius that the world has ever seen.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

Source: Achimedes (1920), Ch. I. Archimedes, p.1

World , Fear , History , Mathematics

“You go outside, light your pipe, whistle a tune and just paint what you come across. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)”

Anton Mauve (1838–1888) Dutch painter (1838–1888)

(version in original Dutch / origineel citaat van Anton Mauve, in het Nederlands:) Je gaat naar buiten, steekt je pijpje op, fluit een deuntje en schildert wat je tegenkomt.
Mauve's advice to his students; as cited by H.L. Berckenhoff, in Anton Mauve, Etsen van Ph. Zilcken, met fascimiles naar schilderijen, teekeningen en studies, Amsterdam 1890, (microfiche RKD-Archive Den Haag: Berckenhoff, 1890, p. 20)
Mauve's way of painting was in fact the opposite of his advice: often changing and much struggle
undated quotes

Light , Painting

“I wonder [interviewer: I hear him saying quite soon] or that line [in the picture he is just working on] doesn't repeat itself. It's more or less the same, isn't it? on both sides, don't you think so? [(interviewer) 'Maybe it is!' - I dare to say; there is no escape; I have to give advice] (translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)”

Willem Roelofs (1822–1897) Dutch painter and entomologist (1822-1897)

(original Dutch: citaat van Willem Roelofs, in het Nederlands:) Ik vraag me [af] - klinkt het al gauw, of die lijn zich niet wat repeteert [in het schilderij waaraan hij werkt].. .Het is zoo'n beetje hetzelfde, hè? aan alle bei de kanten, vindt-je niet? [interviewer: 'Misschien wel! ' waag ik te zeggen. Er is geen ontkomen aan; ik moet advies geven]
Quote of W. Roelofs, 1880's; recorded by an unknown interviewer, published in Elsevier's geïllustreerd maandschrift: verzameling van.., Oct. Nov. 1891; as cited in an excerpt in the RKD Archive https://rkd.nl/explore/excerpts/220, The Hague
1880's

Thinking

“If a society insists that warfare is the major occupation for the male sex, it is therefore insisting that all male children display bravery and pugnacity. Even if the insistence upon the differential bravery of men and women is not made articulate, the difference in occupation makes this point implicitly. When, however, a society goes further and defines men as brave and women as timorous, when men are forbidden to show fear and women are indulged in the most flagrant display of fear, a more explicit element enters in. Originally two variations of human temperament, a hatred of fear or willingness to display fear, they have been socially translated into inalienable aspects of the personalities of the two sexes. And to that defined sex-personality every child will be educated, if a boy, to suppress fear, if a girl, to show it.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 287

Women , Men , Children , Education

“When speaking of a “body of knowledge” or of “the results of research,” e. g., we tacitly assign the same cognitive status to inherited knowledge and to independently acquired knowledge. To counteract this tendency a special effort is required to transform inherited knowledge into genuine knowledge by revitalizing its original discovery, and to discriminate between the genuine and the spurious elements of what claims to be inherited knowledge.”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

Source: What is Political Philosophy (1959), p. 77

Knowledge , Effort

“I abandoned the extraterrestrial hypothesis in 1967 when my own field investigations disclosed an astonishing overlap between psychic phenomena and UFOs … The objects and apparitions do not necessarily originate on another planet and may not even exist as permanent constructions of matter. It is more likely that we see what we want to see and interpret such visions according to our contemporary beliefs.”

John A. Keel (1930–2009) American writer

http://www.ufoevidence.org/Researchers/Detail71.htm

“No original Gauguins were to be seen in Australia, for post-impressionism was officially thought to be the vulgar effusion of five-thumbed lunatics.”

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

Source: Donald Friend (1965), p. 24

“Thank you all very much for your hospitality. We've just had a wide-ranging discussions on the matter at hand. Like the good folks standing with me, the American people were appalled and outraged at last Tuesday's attacks. And so were Muslims all across the world. Both Americans and Muslim friends and citizens, tax-paying citizens, and Muslims in nations were just appalled and could not believe what we saw on our T. V. screens. These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith, and it's important for my fellow Americans to understand that. The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran, itself. 'In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2001, Islam is Peace (September 2001)

People , World , Faith , Quotes

“I disagree with the concept that somehow or another we're going to pack up 10, to 12, to 15 million people and ship them back to the country of origin. That's not going to happen. So reality has to be part of our conversation. And then you need to have a strategy to deal with it. That is what I think we will have, but first you have to secure that border.”

Rick Perry (1950) 14th and current United States Secretary of Energy

2011-11-03T20:27
Perry supports work visas for illegal immigrants
Dana
Thompson
Houston Chronicle
http://blog.chron.com/rickperry/2011/11/perry-supports-work-visas-for-illegal-immigrants/
2011

People , Thinking , Reality , Parting

“The original Golden Dawn was not always as serious as it should have been. Mathers was a clown, and Yeats was just a romantic trying to deceive himself. Most of them were interested in personal power, and it ended up by destroying them. The aim of our group is the scientific exploration of the hidden powers of the human mind.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Schoolgirl Murder Case (1974), p. 113

Personality

“It is important to remove artificial barriers–stumbling stones, often local in origin and coming from incumbent opposition to entry–and to not burden businesses with taxes that reduce their internally generated funds for reinvestment, growth and striving to overcome market challenges.”

Vernon L. Smith (1927) American economist

quoted in Nobel Economist Pans Start-Up Chile Concept http://brophyworld.com/nobel-economist-pans-start-up-chile-concept/ (2011).

Business

“The fabric of American Empire ought to rest on the solid basis of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE. The streams of National power ought to flow immediately from that pure original fountain of all legitimate authority.”

Alexander Hamilton Federalist Papers

No. 22
The Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

People

“I'm doing this for the sake of this country [Malaysia], because this nation belongs to us. We were born here and we will die here. If I were to die fighting, let it be… but I can't just stand and do nothing, when I see the things that are happening in our nation. So right now I have to give a message to my brethren: The people who have been living in unity all this time. Don't believe the propaganda of today's government. They go around to kampungs to spread all sorts of propaganda, that whatever they implement must be obeyed. Think for yourself - are they really doing what is right? Don't just follow without question, use your wisdom and think. What is happening is, they take credit for all that is good, their opponents are responsible for all bad things, and they [government he is referring to as "spreading propaganda"] cover up all the bad things they do and point the finger of blame on the people who stand up to them. So this is the situation today, the press has no voice. When a newspaper reports something, the issue is covered up. This just goes to show that the people who stand up to them have no voice at all. This government [todays government] controls everything. But the ones who really hold power in this nation, you, the ordinary rakyat (Dewan Rakyat). So if we don't seek what is true, or use wisdom to discern a matter, this nation will crumble. If only the rakyat could understand all of this, at the end of the day, the rakyat has the right to vote, and the rakyat itself can elect anyone to be the leader here, ordinary rakyat, think for yourselves, because that "magic lamp" is in the hands of the original rakyat. So, ordinary rakyat with power in their hands, use your wisdom, protect your rights, in order to preserve our beloved nation, Malaysia, because it's not only this present generation that depend on our nation, that depends on fairness in our nation, but even our next generation to come all depend on the governance of our nation. If this Merdeka is to have any meaning at all, may they be well until the end of time. This is our responsibility. I pray that all will be well.”

Tunku Abdul Rahman (1903–1990) Malaysian politician

"Tunku Abdul Rahman last speech" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdoxoum02BA, interview taken on National Day, 1988, Malaysia.

Wisdom , People , Understanding , Question

“Public administration as an American profession originated in the early twentieth century with urban reformers advocating the application of scientific and business practices to rehabilitate corrupt city governments. That approach transformed governance in the United States but also guaranteed recurrent debate over the proper role of public administrators, who must balance the often contradictory demands of efficiency and politically defined notions of the public good. Currently the business approach holds sway. Legitimated by Al Gore's National Performance Review, the New Public Management movement promotes entrepreneurs over civil servants, performance over process, decentralization over centralization, and flexibility over rules. John Rohr demurs, arguing that the movement goes too far in downplaying the distinctively American challenges arising from the separated powers principle. Consequently, the NPM alienates public management from its natural home -- a nation-state established within a constitutional order.”

John Rohr (1934–2011) American political scientist

Abstract
Civil servants and their constitutions, 2002

Home , Business , Nature

“The idea of Curious Yellow, of surrender to a higher cause, seems to appeal to a certain small subset of humanity. These people manipulate the worm, customizing its payload to establish quisling dictatorships in its shadow, and the horrors these gauleiters invent in its service are far worse than the crude but direct tactics the original worm used.”

Charles Stross book Glasshouse

Source: Glasshouse (2006), Chapter 12, “Bag” (p. 210)

People , Idea

“Mr. President, I wish to tell you something personal - not about me, but about my generation. What you have just heard about the Jewish people's inherent rights to the Land of Israel may seem academic to you, theoretical, even moot. But not to my generation. To my generation of Jews these eternal bonds are indisputable and incontrovertible truths, as old as recorded time. They touch upon the very core of our national being. Ours is an almost biblical generation of suffering and courage. Ours is the generation of Destruction and Redemption. Ours is the generation that rose up from the bottomless pit of Hell. We were a helpless people, Mr. President. We were bled white, not once, not twice, but century after century, over and over again. We lost a third of our people in one generation - mine. One-and-a-half million of them were children - ours. No one came to our rescue. We were tertiated, Mr. President. … Tertiated, not decimated. The origin of the word 'decimation' is one in 10. When a Roman legion was found guilty of insubordination one in 10 was put to the sword. In our case it was one in three - tertiated! … Sir, I take an oath before you in the name of the Jewish people - this will never ever happen again.”

Menachem Begin (1913–1992) Israeli politician and Prime Minister

Amb. Yehuda Avner's account of a meeting with U.S. President Jimmy Carter (July 1977)

Children , People , Truth , Courage

“For the Norse people, the Man now named Odin, and Chief Norse God, we fancy, was such a man. A Teacher, and Captain of soul and of body; a Hero, of worth immeasurable; admiration for whom, transcending the known bounds, became adoration. Has he not the power of articulate Thinking; and many other powers, as yet miraculous? So, with boundless gratitude, would the rude Norse heart feel. Has he not solved for them the sphinx-enigma of this Universe; given assurance to them of their own destiny there? By him they know now what they have to do here, what to look for hereafter. Existence has become articulate, melodious by him; he first has made Life alive!—We may call this Odin, the origin of Norse Mythology: Odin, or whatever name the First Norse Thinker bore while he was a man among men. His view of the Universe once promulgated, a like view starts into being in all minds; grows, keeps ever growing, while it continues credible there. In all minds it lay written, but invisibly, as in sympathetic ink; at his word it starts into visibility in all. Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world—!”

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

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity

Life , Men , God , People

“(Dare I say) En fuego. (originally delivered as El fuego)”

Dan Patrick (1956) American sportscaster

Catch Phrases

“Originally, ethics has no existence apart from religion, which holds it in solution.”

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist

Source: The Principles of Ethics (1897), Part II: The Inductions of Ethics, Ch. 1, The Confusion of Ethical Thought

Religion

“We're importing Hinduism into America. The whole thought of your karma, of meditation, of the fact that there's no end of life and there's this endless wheel of life, this is all Hinduism. Chanting too. Many of those chants are to Hindu Gods — Vishnu, Hare Krishna. The origin of it is all demonic. We can't let that stuff come into America. We've got the best defense, if you will — a good offense.”

Pat Robertson (1930) American media mogul, executive chairman, and a former Southern Baptist minister

http://www.sullivan-county.com/news/pat_quotes/hindus.htm

Life , God

“From Thee, great God: we spring, to Thee we tend,
Path, motive, guide, original, and end.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 257

God , Spring , Motivation

“The chief weakness in France’s anti-terrorism strategy is the inability of its leadership elite to agree on a workable definition of the threat the nation faces. Many still cling to the notion that Bouhelel and other terrorists are trying to take revenge against France for tis colonial past. Yet Tunisia, where Bouhelel’s family came from in the 1960s, has been independent for more than 60 years, double the life of the terrorist — who had not been there, even as a tourist. Some, like the Islamologist Gilles Kepel, blame French society for “the sense of exclusion” inflicted on immigrants of Muslim origin. However, leaving aside self-exclusion, there are few barriers that French citizens of Muslim faith can’t cross. Today, the Cabinet of Prime Minister Manuel Valls includes at least two Muslim ministers. Others still claim that France is being hit because of Muslim grievances over Palestine, although successive French governments have gone out of their way to sympathize with the “Arab cause.” France was the first nation to impose an arms embargo on Israel in 1967 and the first in the West to recognize the PLO. The blame-the-victim school also claims that France is attacked because of the “mess in the Middle East,” although the French took no part in toppling Saddam Hussein and have stayed largely on the sidelines in the conflict in Syria. Isn’t it possible that this new kind of terrorism, practiced by neo-Islam, is not related to any particular issue? Isn’t it possible that Bouhelel didn’t want anything specific because he wanted everything, starting with the right to kill people not because of what they did but because of who they were?”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"A cry from France: After Nice, can we finally face the truth about this war?" http://nypost.com/2016/07/15/a-cry-from-france-after-nice-can-we-finally-face-the-truth-about-this-war/ New York Post (July 15, 2016)
New York Post

Life , People , School , Family

“Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Letter to Lady Beaumont (May 21, 1807).

“The progress of botany, as of other sciences, comes from the interaction of so many factors that undue emphasis on any one can give a very distorted impression of the whole, but certainly among the most important of these for any given period are the prevailing ideas and intellectual attitudes, the assumptions and stimuli of the time, for often upon them depends the extent to which a particular study attracts an unbroken succession of men of industry and originality intent on building a system of knowledge and communicating it successfully to others of like mind.”

William T. Stearn (1911–2001) British botanist

Botanical Gardens and Botanical Literature in the Eighteenth Century, 1961

Men , Communication , Idea , Knowledge

“To look forward, to want life, means we have to be willing to look backwards and become more conscious of all those who have hurt us, all that is broken in us and that has brought us inner deaths, hurts that we may have hidden and stifled. It means that we acknowledge the story of our origins, of our own lives, see and accept our brokenness and the times we also have hurt others. When we have accepted who we are and what we need in order to grow in compassion and peacemaking, we can move forward to give life. To forgive is a gift of God that permits us to let go of our past hurts.”

Jean Vanier (1928–2019) Canadian humanitarian

Jean Vanier, Finding Peace, pp 47-48
From books

Life , Death , God , Forgiveness

“But this same process of the old teaching the young can also cause errors and false conclusions to accumulate with the passage of time. One should therefore study ancient writings, not so much in the hope of finding lost wisdom as in the hope of locating the origin of errors that have been, and still are, accepted truths.”

Carl Eckart (1902–1973) American physicist

Source: Our Modern Idol: Mathematical Science (1984), p. 3.

Wisdom , Truth , Hope , Error

“The love of humanity is a pathological state of a sexual origin which often appears at the age of puberty in nervous and clever people. The excess of phosphorus in the system must get out somewhere. As for hatred of a tyrant, that is a more human sentiment which has full play in time of war, when force and the mob are one. Emperors must be mad fools to decide on declaring wars which substitute an armed nation for their Praetorian Guards. That idiocy accomplished, despotism of course produces revolution until terrorism leads to the inevitable reaction.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Les silences du colonel Bramble (The Silence of Colonel Bramble)

Love , War , People , Age

“Palissy, a French writer on 'the Origin of Springs from Rain-water' and of other scientific works, undertook, in 1580, to combat the notions of many of his contemporaries in Italy, that petrified shells had all been deposited by the universal deluge. 'He was the first,' said Fontenelle, when, in the French Academy, he pronounced his eulogy nearly a century and a half later, 'who dared assert' in Paris, that fossil remains of testacea and fish had once belonged to marine animals.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.3, p. 31
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Spring , Fish , Universe , Water

“The rest of the world in which I lived was still stumbling about in search of a weapon with which to exterminate this monster [homosexuality] whose shape and size were not yet known or even guessed at. It was thought to be Greek in origin, smaller than socialism but more deadly, especially to children.”

Quentin Crisp book The Naked Civil Servant

Source: The Naked Civil Servant (1968), Ch. 3

Children , World , Search

“Given my present belief in the much greater range of variability as to both order and kind of complexity in the world's musics versus the world's languages, I can hardly imagine how a model developed really satisfactorily for the detailed structureal explanation of one musical language is so easiy modified to another, and all the more so if the original model be evolved from linguistics rather than from the musical disciplines.”

Harold Powers (1928–2007) American academic

Harold Powers, "Language Models and Musical Analysis", p.48.

World , Music , Imagination

“The word “lost” comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private space conspire to make it so.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

People , World , Home

“Modern European composers…have very largely received their stimulus, their rhythms and impulses from Machine Age America. They have a much older tradition of musical technique which has helped them put into musical terms a little more clearly the thoughts that originated here. They can express themselves more glibly.”

George Gershwin (1898–1937) American composer and pianist

Page 386
The Composer in the Machine Age (1933)

Age , Music , Help

“Only he who possesses a personal religion, an original view of infinity, can be an artist.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Nur derjenige kann ein Künstler seyn, welcher eine eigne Religion, eine originelle Ansicht des Unendlichen hat.
“Selected Ideas (1799-1800)”, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #13

Religion , Personality

“Originally I was supposed to do Grand Prix, but I was under contract to 20th Century Fox at that time and Alex North was supposed to do Sand Pebbles, but he got sick, so Fox preempted me out of Grand Prix, and to my good fortune, I got to do Sand Pebbles. It was my first time working with Robert Wise and it was a great experience.”

Jerry Goldsmith (1929–2004) film composer

AOL Online Host (1995-07-11)

Time

“Mussolini himself, before he knew who would collect around the standards of the new Fascist Republican Party, committed himself to the realization of the original syndicalist and neo-idealist program of Fascism. His original intention was to call his new republic the Italian Socialist Republic—which nonetheless advertised itself as the vehicle of an Italian socialism, a national socialism.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 307

“They say Allen got something from the Marx Brothers. He got nothing. Maybe twenty years ago, he might have been inspired. Today he's an original. The best, the funniest.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

On Woody Allen, in an interview with Roger Ebert in Esquire magazine (7 March 1972) http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19720307/PEOPLE/41116001

“There is no original truth, only original error.”

Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French writer and philosopher

A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (1988)

Truth , Error

“It is not our background that will count but our individual actions and initiatives. Education is the great leveller: irrespective of origin, it places everyone on the same footing.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Address to Sathya Sai School in Matawalu, Ba Province, 8 February 2006.

Education

“Kindliness, sympathy with the under dog, love of home! Are not these all characteristics of the ordinary Englishman that you know? He is a strong individualist in this, that he does not want to mould himself into any common mould, to be like everybody else; he likes to develop his own individuality. And yet he can combine for service. Some of the best things in this country have originated among our own common people with no help from governments—friendly society work, our trade unions, our hospitals and our education before the State took it in hand. Then the Englishman has a profound respect for law and order—that is part of his tradition of self-government. Ordered liberty—not disordered liberty, nor what invariably follows, tyranny; but ordered liberty, at present one of the rare things of this topsy-turvy world.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast from London (25 September 1933), quoted in This Torch of Freedom (1935), pp. 13-14.
1933

Love , People , World , Education

“Programming languages on the whole are very much more complicated than they used to be: object orientation, inheritance, and other features are still not really being thought through from the point of view of a coherent and scientifically well-based discipline or a theory of correctness. My original postulate, which I have been pursuing as a scientist all my life, is that one uses the criteria of correctness as a means of converging on a decent programming language design—one which doesn’t set traps for its users, and ones in which the different components of the program correspond clearly to different components of its specification, so you can reason compositionally about it. […] The tools, including the compiler, have to be based on some theory of what it means to write a correct program.”

C. A. R. Hoare (1934) British computer scientist

Oral history interview http://hdl.handle.net/11299/107362 by Philip L. Frana, 17 July 2002, Cambridge, England; Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.

Life

“Our constitutional history started with the States retaining all powers of sovereignty unimpaired, save those conferred upon the National Government. The evolution of the constitutional system has consisted largely in determining the line of demarcation between State and national authority. The cases involved are many and complicated, but there is a fairly good popular understanding of this continuing struggle between these contending sovereignties. Because of better communication and transportation, the constant tendency has been to more and more social and economic unification. The present continent-wide union of forty-eight States is much closer than was the original group of thirteen States.”

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

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

History , Communication , Understanding

“Theory of selection /…/ leaves untouched all that can be inferred from the existence of the conditions which make organic evolution possible: matter which lives, multiplies, and varies; an environment which possesses the marvellously complex constitution required to make these processes possible. /…/ it cannot produce either the original environment or the original living matter. These must be due either to luck or to contrivance; and, if they be due to luck, the luck (we must own) is great. How great we cannot say.”

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

Theism and humanism

“Because finally, “the equal right of every citizen to the free exercise of his religion according to the dictates of conscience” is held by the same tenure with all his other rights. If we recur to its origin, it is equally the gift of nature; if we weigh its importance, it cannot be less dear to us; if we consider “the declaration of those rights which pertain to the good people of Virginia as the basis and foundation of government,” it is enumerated with equal solemnity, or rather studied emphasis.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

§ 15. Often misquoted as “Religion is the basis and foundation of government.”
1780s, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments (1785)

People , Religion , Exercises , Nature

“Natural science served as - if we overlook the hasty identification of mind and matter which had its origin in natural science - as a shining and fruitful example to psychology.”

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) German psychologist

Source: Psychology: An elementary textbook, 1908, p. 6; Partly cited in: Peter Ashworth, ‎Man Cheung Chung (2007) Phenomenology and Psychological Science, p. 54.

Nature , Science

“I don't have a name - my family doesn't have a name. The law that Mr. Papandreou passed basically says that he considers that I am not Greek and that my family was Greek only so long as we were exercising the responsibilities of sovereign, and I had to go out and acquire a name. The problem is that my family originates from Denmark, and the Danish royal family haven't got a surname.”

Constantine II of Greece (1940–2023) former King of Greece

"King Without a Country," Vanity Fair (July 1995)

Family , Law , Exercises , Problem

“Every man, as the Stoics used to say, is first and principally recommended to his own care; and every man is certainly, in every respect, fitter and abler to take care of himself than of any other person. Every man feels his own pleasures and his own pains more sensibly than those of other people. The former are the original sensations; the latter the reflected or sympathetic images of those sensations. The former may be said to be the substance; the latter the shadow.”

Adam Smith book The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Section II, Chap. I.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part VI

Pain , People , Pleasure , Feeling

“Most men’s conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

Source: The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. II, Reason in Society, Ch. VIII: Ideal Society

Men

“The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organisation. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.”

Francis Fukuyama (1952) American political scientist, political economist, and author

In "The history at the end of history" http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/apr/03/thehistoryattheendofhist, The Guardian, 3 April 2007.
2000s

God , World , Law , History

“Immortality had been perfected, at least in its non-biological forms, but insufficient attention had been paid to the boredom of eternity and the corrosive nature of the ratchet effect which demanded ever sharper, stronger and more intense sensations to maintain something like the same level of satisfaction.
Living forever turned out to be much like long-term sex, psychologically tricky; which was why what killed the original colonists was not hardship but boredom.”

Jon Courtenay Grimwood (1953) British writer

Source: Stamping Butterflies (2004), Chapter 10 (p. 71)

Sex , Nature , Perfection

“While we find such endless differences between the actions of different men under the same temptations, or of the same man at different times, we shall yet be unable to find any link of the chain undetermined by the action of the outward circumstance on the inner law; or any point where we can say a power lay in the individual will of choosing either of two courses — in other words, to discover sin. Actions are governed by motives. The power of motives depends on character, and character on the original faculties and the training which they have received from the men or things among which they have been bred.
Sin, therefore, as commonly understood, is a chimera.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Fragments of Markham's notes
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)

Men , Law , Motivation , Time

“Whoever wants to know a thing has no way of doing so except by coming into contact with it, that is, by living (practicing) in its environment. … If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself…. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On Practice (1937)

Way , Knowledge , Reality , Change

“I well remember receiving from one of the most earnest of my seniors the friendly warning that it was waste of time to study variation, for "Darwin had swept the field." Parenthetically we may notice that though scientific opinion in general became rapidly converted to the doctrine of pure selection, there was one remarkable exception. Systematists for the most part kept aloof. Everyone was convinced that natural selection operating in a continuously varying population was a sufficient account of the origin of species except the one class of scientific workers whose labours familiarised them with the phenomenon of specific difference. From that time the systematists became, as they still in great measure remain, a class apart.”

William Bateson (1861–1926) British geneticist and biologist

Introductory Chapter, p. 3
Mendel's Principles of Heredity (1913)

Nature , Study , Time , Parting

“The writer has found, in analyzing and diagnosing organization and accounting work, that charts can express more on one page than is sometimes expressed in several chapters of writing, and has been the author and originator of many methods of charting industrial expressions. It is necessary, as a first step, for analytical and other purposes, to make a chart expressing all of the relations governing the organization of a business so as to show the very foundation upon which all authorities, accounting, and business transactions are based and conducted. There have been more failures scored both personally and financially for lack of these very elements in a business than by reason of any other one thing. As well try to build a house without a foundation as to try to conduct a business, especially a manufacturing business, without proper organization.”

Clinton Edgar Woods (1863) American engineer

Source: Organizing a factory (1905), p. 23-24

Failure , Business , Housing , Personality

“Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

World , Heart

“The story of the Fall always fascinates me as a play ground, but I cannot find any profound meaning in it, because of my 'liberal' view of human nature: I cannot believe in a state of original innocence, still less in a profound meaning in it, and I am always minimising the conception and the extent of Sin and the sinfulness of sex.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Letter 396, to Eric Fletcher, 9 July 1951
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

Sex , Nature

“[one watercolor] is in spite of all its difficulties, and perhaps because she has given so much trouble, less fresh and has become a little heavy - I myself have considered for a long time whether she was good enough to send it [for a exhibition in Utrecht] (translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)”

Willem Roelofs (1822–1897) Dutch painter and entomologist (1822-1897)

(original Dutch: citaat van Willem Roelofs, in het Nederlands:) [een aquarel] is niettegenstaanden alle moeite, en misschien wel omdàt zij moeite heeft gekost, minder frisch en wat zwaar geworden – Ik heb zelf lang in beraad gestaan of zij goed genoeg was om te zenden [naar Utrecht]
In a letter to P. verLoren van Themaat, 23 Nov. 1866; in Haagsch Gemeentearchief / Municipal Archive of The Hague
1860's

Time

“Then make those studies outside. With the utmost simplicity you try to get rid of all the so-called manners, and try in one word to follow nature with feeling, but without thinking about the works of others. (translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)”

Willem Roelofs (1822–1897) Dutch painter and entomologist (1822-1897)

(original Dutch: citaat van Willem Roelofs, in het Nederlands:) Maak dan die studies buiten; met de grootste eenvoudigheid, tracht u van alle zogenaamde manier te ontdoen en tracht in een woord de natuur met gevoel maar zonder denken aan het werk van anderen, na te volgen.
Quote in Roelof's letter to his pupil Hendrik W. Mesdag, 1866; as cited in Zó Hollands - Het Hollandse landschap in de Nederlandse kunst sinds 1850, Antoon Erftemeijer https://www.franshalsmuseum.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/zohollands_eindversie_def_1.pdf; Frans Hals museum | De Hallen, Haarlem 2011, p. 16, note 7
1860's

Feeling , Nature , Thinking , Study

“The original intent of the 14th Amendment, and of the Congress and the American people who ratified it, can best be understood in the light of the change it effected in antecedent constitutional law. Taney's opinion in Dred Scott was still in effect as the Civil War came to an end. By it Negroes, whether free or slave, could not be citizens of the United States. Although the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, it did not settle the question of Negro citizenship. This was however decided by the opening sentence of the 14th Amendment. "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." The intent of this sentence could however be frustrated if it were possible to make distinctions within citizenship, by which some citizens would have more rights, and others less. It was to prevent this that the Amendment went on to declare that "No State shall… deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Logic of the Colorblind Constitution (2004)

War , People , Law , Question

“[A]ll the non-Stalinist versions concur in the following: the generals did indeed plan a coup d'état… The main part of the coup was to be a palace revolt in the Kremlin, culminating in the assassination of Stalin. A decisive military operation outside the Kremlin, an assault on the headquarters of the G. P. U., was also prepared. Tukhachevsky was the moving spirit of the conspiracy… He was, indeed, the only man among all the military and civilian leaders of that time who showed in many respects a resemblance to the original Bonaparte and could have played the Russian First Consul. The chief political commissar of the army, Gamarnik, who later committed suicide, was initiated into the plot. General Yakir, the commander of Leningrad, was to secure the co-operation of his garrison. Generals Uberovich, commander of the western military district, Kork, commander of the Military Academy in Moscow, Primakow, Budienny's deputy in the command of the cavalry, and a few other generals were also in the plot.”

Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967) British historian

Isaac Deutscher in his Stalin: A Political Biography, second edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 360-361. Quote from Ludo Martens's Another view of Stalin, pp. 176.

Decision , Suicide , Time , Parting

“Substantial changes, introduced during the last half of the 20th century, have built a structure so expanded beyond the original Darwinian core, and so enlarged by new principles of macroevolutionary explanation, that the full exposition, while remaining within the domain of Darwinian logic, must be construed as basically different from the canonical theory of natural selection, rather than simply extended.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 3

Nature , Change

“He read with a charming full voice, and when everyone was applauding, "how much", he asked, "would you have applauded if you had heard the original?"”
Quam cum suavissima et maxima voce legisset, admirantibus omnibus "quanto" inquit "magis miraremini, si audissetis ipsum!"

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

De Oratorio, book 3, chapter 56.
Cicero was telling the story of Æschines' return to Rhodes, at which he was requested to deliver Demosthenes' defence of Ctesiphon.

Reading

Quotes about originality page 15

Quotes about originality
page 15