Quotes about other
page 71

“James Callaghan: …I am not pro, nor am I anti…
Robin Day: What are you doing on this programme?
Callaghan: I'm here because you asked me.
Day: You're here to advise people to vote 'Yes' aren't you?
Callaghan: …I am here, and the Prime Minister has taken the same line; it is our job to advise the British people on what we think is the right result. Now there are a lot of other people who've always been emotionally committed to the Market. A lot of other people have been always totally opposed to the Market. I don't think the Prime Minister or myself have ever been in either category and that is not our position today. I'm trying to present the facts as I see them and why we have come down in favour of – now Britain is in, we should stay in.”

James Callaghan (1912–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; 1976-1979

On Robin Day's phone-in (27 May 1975), quoted in David Butler and Uwe Kitzinger, The 1975 Referendum (Macmillan, 1976), p. 176.
Foreign Secretary

People, Thinking

“I've taken my fun where I've found it,
An' now I must pay for my fun,
For the more you 'ave known o' the others
The less will you settle to one.”

Rudyard Kipling book Barrack-Room Ballads

The Ladies, Stanza VII.
Barrack-Room Ballads (1892, 1896)

“American statesmen might like some Europeans more than others and even detect quaint resemblances to their own outlook; but they no more committed themselves to a particular group or country than a nineteenth-century missionary committed himself to the African tribe in which he happened to find himself.”

A.J.P. Taylor (1906–1990) Historian

"The Great War: The Triumph of E. D. Morel", p. 157
The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)

Country

“As a rule people don’t think other people on drugs are funny. They think they are tragic. They have a point, but I still had the funny.”

Natasha Lyonne (1979) actress

As quoted in "Spoonful of Sugar : Natasha Lyonne’s Sweet Comeback" by Shira Levine, in Heeb Magazine (20 January 2009)

People, Thinking

“In the end, I am morally bound to speak only to the things that command my allegiance, and to which I have dedicated my life's work: the Republican Party, and more importantly, the United States of America. I will not refrain from doing my utmost by those lights simply because it may benefit others with whom I disagree. I claim no moral superiority over Donald Trump. I have a long and well-known public and private record for which I will have to answer at the Final Judgment, and I repose my hope in the promise of mercy and the moderation of age. I challenge the nominee to set the example for what our country can and should represent.”

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

2010s, 2016, Statement regarding the Khan family (1 August 2016)

Life, Age, Hope, Light

“We’re thinking about other ways we can bring the organizations together. It was always intended that the UN, a political organization focused on justice and development, would work together with the financial organizations in order to make the world a better place.”

Jim Yong Kim (1959) Korean-American physician and anthropologist, 12th President of the World Bank

UN News Centre, Interview with Jim Yong Kim, 7 October 13

World, Justice, Way, Thinking

“I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course — year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy. It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while, on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man. Many of them have no relation to him. The cycle of their existence has gone on independently of his, and is disturbed or broken by every advance in man’s intellectual development; and their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation alone, limited only by the equal well-being and perpetuation of the numberless other organisms with which each is more or less intimately connected.”

Alfred Russel Wallace book The Malay Archipelago

The Malay Archipelago (1869)

Love, Life, Death, Hate

“I said years ago that I would rather be the man who helped on a rational scheme which should secure the comfort of old age than I would be a general who had won ever so many victories in the field. These are, to me, the two most tragic sights in the world—a man who is able to work, and anxious to work, and who cannot get work; and the other tragic sight is that of a man who has worked until his eyes have become dim, and his natural force has become abated, and he is left to spend the declining years of a life that has been so nobly used, so honourably used, in straits, difficulties, and hardships.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Speech in Manchester (4 July 1895), quoted in 'Mr. Morley In Manchester', The Times (5 July 1895), p. 10.

Life, Age, World, Nature

“The other, more nebulous, but very strong influence of RPGs was the weird fetish for systematization, the way everything is reduced to “game stats.” If you take something like Cthulhu in Lovecraft, for example, it is completely incomprehensible and beyond all human categorization. But in the game Call of Cthulhu, you see Cthulhu’s “strength,” “dexterity,” and so on, carefully expressed numerically. There’s something superheroically banalifying about that approach to the fantastic. On one level it misses the point entirely, but I must admit it appeals to me in its application of some weirdly misplaced rigor onto the fantastic: it’s a kind of exaggeratedly precise approach to secondary world creation.”

China Miéville (1972) English writer

interview with Joan Gordon http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/mievilleinterview.htm

World, Way, Game, Strong

“By promoting justice and thus the interests of the international community as a whole, a state will be able to make its influence over others sustainable and achieve its own national interest.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Neo-statecraft and Meta-geopolitics (2009), p.147

Justice, Communication

“If that were true [that the principles of the Ten Commandments brought about universal human rights, women's suffrage, the abolition of slavery and parliamentary democracy], then all this progress would have come about thousands of years ago, and not just in the last century or so. But each of the advances… cited were made only recently, after the Enlightenment and in spite of the Commandments, because those Commandments are authoritarian, not democratic; they allow special privileges for one race over all others, they permit and endorse slavery, and they treat women as property. So, for these unique achievements to have occurred at all, the Commandments would have to be ignored or discarded first.”

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

Youtube, Other, The Damn Commandments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u3z69YpLx0 (January 7, 2015)

Women, Democracy, Universe

“Apart from sin we have nothing of which to be ashamed. Only an evil desire to shine makes us want to appear other than we are.”

Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897–1963) American missionary

The Pursuit of God (1957)

Appearance, Evil

“One was kind, out of a bounty that could hardly be exhausted, to old governesses and gardeners, who could be relied upon to give thanks with proper abjection; one performed public duties, for which one was paid in full by deference; one was chaste, refusing to run away from one's husband with other men who for the most part did not ask one to do so, and who in any case had nothing better to offer than one's own home. Knowing no difficulties one was without fortitude; knowing no criteria but one's own achievements one was without taste.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

Source: The Thinking Reed (1936), Chapter VII

Men, Home, Parting

“Think about every example, every time someone comes up with religion as the reason why they want to impose it. It is always stupid. It is always imposing bigotry or limitations against somebody else’s freedom because you want to pretend in your special brand of pixie dust that is different from the gods and monsters other people want to make up. That’s what it is all about. There is simply no true religion because literally none of it is true.”

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

Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist https://conatusnews.com/interview-aron-ra-past-president-atheist-alliance-america/, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)

God, People, Stupidity, Religion

“Robin Hood: Because unlike some other Robin Hoods, I can speak with a English accent.”

Mel Brooks (1926) American director, writer, actor, and producer

Robin Hood: Men in Tights

“Their is one advantage in a plurality of wifes; tha fite each other, insted ov their husbands.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

“There are some men whom a staggering emotional shock, so far from making them mental invalids for life, seems, on the other hand, to awaken, to galvanize, to arouse into an almost incredible activity of soul.”

William McFee (1881–1966) American writer

"On a Balcony", First lines, in The Atlantic Monthly (January 1920), p. 27

Life, Men, Soul

“He seems a very harmless sort of young man, nothing to like or dislike in him — goes out shooting or hunting with the two others all the morning, and plays at whist and makes queer faces in the evening.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to Cassandra (1813-09-23) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

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

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

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

People, World, Peace, Food

“RockNet: Were you terribly uncomfortable at the recent Grammy Award Show?
Cornell: I don't know. It's just a strange subject. It's almost as if the music industry is patting itself on the back in a way. This was the seventh Grammy nomination for us and had we won one for our first nomination I would have had a really cool attitude about it because it would have meant that the people who were actually voting were paying attention to music for music's sake as opposed to some other reason.
I was happy that we were nominated because it was an independent record company and it was a low-profile record. We didn't win a Grammy until we'd sold several millions and it seems that what sells a lot is what wins, even though the record may or may not be any good, but that seems to be the requirement.
I'm not critical of the people who work in the music industry, and I appreciate the Grammy. (But) to me it's their party and it's not really mine. It's not for the musicians. It has more to do with the industry. You can tell after a Grammy period all the record labels and artists who won a bunch take out full-page ads in the trades gloating. That's fine. That's what they do, they sell records and they work really hard to develop careers. If they're into it, I'm not going to be disrespectful, but I'd hate for anyone to think that it's something that was a necessity for me or the rest of the band, or that it was a benchmark to us of legitimacy for us because it's not. It doesn't really matter that much to us. It seems like it's for someone else. I'd never get up and say that. If I was totally not into it, the best thing to do is to not show up.
Maybe ten years from now I'll reflect and say "wow, that happened and it was pretty unusual. Not every kid on the block gets to go up and pick up a Grammy Award."”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

It's just one more thing to take the focus away from what we like to do, which is to write music and make records and try not to think about anything whether it's how many records we sell or what people think of us. For us, I think the key to success for being a band and always making good records is always going to be forgetting about everything else outside our own little band. RockNet Interview: Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, May 1, 1996 https://web.archive.org/web/19961114054327/http://www.rocknet.com/may96/soundgar.html, Soundgarden Era

Hate, Happiness, People, Music

“We have all experienced the moments that William James calls melting moods, when it suddenly becomes perfectly obvious that life is infinitely fascinating. And the insight seems to apply retrospectively. Periods of my life that seemed confusing and dull at the time now seem complex and rather charming. It is almost as if some other person a more powerful and mature individual has taken over my brain. This higher self views my problems and anxieties with kindly detachment, but entirely without pity. Looking at problems through his eyes, I can see I was a fool to worry about them.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Access to Inner Worlds (1990), p. 2-3

Life, Fools, Mood, Problem

“All life produces waste. The act of living produces costs, hazards and disposal questions, and so the (Environment) Ministry has found itself in the center of all life, mitigating, guiding and policing the detritus of the average person along with investigating the infractions of the greedy and short-sighted, the ones who wish to make quick profits and trade on others’ lives for it.”

Paolo Bacigalupi book The Windup Girl

Source: The Windup Girl (2009), p. 121

Life, Question, Personality

“Let it be remarked … that an important difference between the way in which we use the brain and the machine is that the machine is intended for many successive runs, either with no reference to each other, or with a minimal, limited reference, and that it can be cleared between such runs; while the brain, in the course of nature, never even approximately clears out its past records. Thus the brain, under normal circumstances, is not the complete analogue of the computing machine but rather the analogue of a single run on such a machine. We shall see later that this remark has a deep significance in psychopathology and in psychiatry.”

Norbert Wiener book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

V. Computing Machines and the Nervous System. p. 121.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)

Way, Nature, Success, Past

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

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

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

Men, World, Democracy, Madness

“Without getting into blushing territory, think how in almost all of creation the male and female are made for each other. From dogs and elephants, to birds and bees, to man, each is designed for reproduction. Like a nut and a bolt, they are made to fit together perfectly.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

God doesn't believe in atheists (2002)

Dogs, Bird, Thinking, Bee

“I think everyone has what it takes to be a good actor innately within them. It’s really about connecting to your own humanity and your own behaviors, and getting to a level of self-awareness so that you can have perspective and step outside of yourself and transform and become another person. You can’t become another person if you’re not self-aware; you wouldn’t know what’s changed. [But] the ability to play pretend is something that everyone has access to; you see little kids doing it. On the spectrum of imagination, there are people who are more imaginative than others—I guess some kids are hardcore pretenders and have imaginary friends for years and other kids play and they have fun, but it’s not quite as specific like that. I’m sure there’s a range, but I think everyone can pretend.”

Bryce Dallas Howard (1981) American actress

Bryce Dallas Howard https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/bryce-dallas-howard (February 10, 2017)

People, Behavior, Imagination, Thinking

“I can show you the truth of evolution. I can show you the facts of evolution. I can show you the positively indicative and physical evidence that is exclusively concordant with one conclusion over any other. I can do that all day, but religion can’t. No religion can because they’re all just made up. They don’t have any truth at all in them, none of them. The best that you can get out of people is that they can give anecdotal nonsense or will cite logical fallacies or they will say, “Somebody wrote once that there were Christians back in the 1st century and that means Jesus existed.””

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

Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist https://conatusnews.com/interview-aron-ra-past-president-atheist-alliance-america/, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)

People, Truth, Religion

“We simply must speak to each other honestly about all these hard truths. In the words of Dr. King, 'We must learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Truth, Fools, Learning

“In that respect, and in that only, Charles Sumner was like him, but Sumner, in almost every other quality, was quite different from his three associates — altogether out of line.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“One of the remarkable things about Russ Meyer's films is that they continue to live and play, long after the other work of the soft-core era has been forgotten. That is partly because of their craftsmanship, partly because of Meyer's leading ladies, and partly because of a spirit of paramilitary commitment that can be sensed as the cast and crew struggle through rugged terrain to enact their rural melodramas. But the central reason, I believe, is that Meyer is an auteur whose every frame reflects his own obsessions. Like all serious artists, he doesn't allow any space between his work and his dream.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

"Russ Meyer busts sleazy stereotype" Chicago Sun-Times (15 November 1985) http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/russ-meyer-busts-sleazy-stereotype

Dreams, Sense

“The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.”

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) Swiss psychologist, biologist, logician, philosopher & academic

As quoted in Education for Democracy, Proceedings from the Cambridge School Conference on Progressive Education (1988) edited by Kathe Jervis and Arthur Tobier

Women, Men, Education, School

“It is often said that in prosperity we have many friends, but that we are usually neglected when things go badly. I disagree. Not only do malicious people flock about us in order to witness our ruin, but other unfortunates as well, who have been kept away by our happiness, and now feel close to us on account of our troubles. When Shelley was poor and unknown, he had more friends than the triumphant Lord Byron. It takes great nobility of soul to be able, without any taint of self-interest, to be friends with fortunate people.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

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

Happiness, People, Feeling, Soul

“It was so frightening at the time to be seventeen and have heart monitors hooked up to you. That was the moment the songwriter in me was born. I discovered a whole other side of me. I came home that night and started writing lyrics. I discovered it all at once: It was like opening up a lockbox, and inside was a depth that I didn't even know I had as a person, or a writer — incredible creativity and vision and neurosis, complete neurosis. They all go together in a package.”

John Mayer (1977) guitarist and singer/songwriter

On the effects of having a critical cardiac arrhythmia at age 17 Hiatt, Brian (2006-09-21), "My Big Mouth Strikes Again" http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/11515443/john_mayer_speaks_listen_to_his_hilarious_takes_on_paris_hilton_brad__angelina_living_in_ny. Rolling Stone. (1009): 66-70

Home, Time, Heart, Personality

“Is there still a possibility of public truth?
The prime condition for that would be that you pose your own questions, not just answer them. The questions of others have a distorting influence, one adapts to them, accepts words and concepts that should be avoided at all costs.
Ideally, you should use only words which you have filled with new meaning.”

Elias Canetti (1905–1994) Bulgarian-born Swiss and British jewish modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 5
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

Truth, Question

“Some other schools have a liking for extra-long swords. From the point of view of my strategy these must be seen as weak schools.”

Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese martial artist, writer, artist

Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Wind Book
Context: Some other schools have a liking for extra-long swords. From the point of view of my strategy these must be seen as weak schools. This is because they do not appreciate the principle of cutting the enemy by any means. Their preference is for the extra-long sword and, relying on the virtue of its length, they think to defeat the enemy from a distance.
In this world it is said, "One inch gives the hand advantage", but these are the idle words of one who does not know strategy. It shows the inferior strategy of a weak spirit that men should be dependant on the length of their sword, fighting from a distance without the benefit of strategy.

School

“For thousands of years people have been trying to force other people to think their way. Did they succeed? No. Will they succeed? No. Why? Because brute force is not an argument.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

People, Way, Thinking

“If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America.”

Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998) American activist

Part II: "The White Race and Its Heroes"
1960s, Soul on Ice (1968)

Hope, Change

“One love, one blood
One life, you got to do what you should
One life, with each other
Sisters, brothers
One life, but we're not the same
We get to carry each other, carry each other”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

"One"
Lyrics, Achtung Baby (1991)

Love, Life, Sister

“I am still convinced that the American people, since 1932, continue to insist on two requisites of private enterprise, and the relationship of Government to it. The first is complete honesty at the top in looking after the use of other people's money, and in apportioning and paying individual and corporate taxes according to ability to pay. The second is sincere respect for the need of all at the bottom to get work — and through work to get a really fair share of the good things of life, and a chance to save and rise.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, Fireside Chat in the night before signing the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938)

Life, Money, People, Chance

“We should ask, critically and with appeal to the numbers, whether the best site for a growing advancing industrial society is Earth, the Moon, Mars, some other planet, or somewhere else entirely. Surprisingly, the answer will be inescapable — the best site is "somewhere else entirely."”

Gerard O'Neill (1927–1992) Physicist, author, and inventor

The High Frontier (1976)

“The fact that we are all trained to be mothers from infancy on means that we are all trained to devote our lives to men, whether they are our sons or not; that we are all trained to force other women to exemplify the lack of qualities which characterizes the cultural construct of femininity.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

Speech at Queens College, City University of New York (March 12, 1975). "The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage", ch. 5, Our Blood (1976).

Women, Men, Training

“When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all the other guests. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Luke the Evangelist Gospel of Luke

14:8-11 NIV
Gospel of Luke

Wedding, Personality

“So, there was a girl.
What I’ve guessed, and what the history books imply, is that she was unlucky enough to have been sired by a cruel man. He beat both wife and daughter and abused them in other ways. Bright Itempas is called, among other things, the god of justice. Perhaps that was why He responded when she came into His temple, her heart full of unchildlike rage.
“I want him to die,” she said (or so I imagine). “Please Great Lord, make him die.”
You know the truth now about Itempas. He is a god of warmth and light, which we think of as pleasant, gentle things. I once thought of Him that way, too. But warmth uncooled burns; light undimmed can hurt even my blind eyes. I should have realized. We should all have realized. He was never what we wanted Him to be.
So when the girl begged the Bright Lord to murder her father, He said, “Kill him yourself.” And He gifted her with a knife perfectly suited to her small, weak child’s hands.
She took the knife home and used it that very night. The next day, she came back to the Bright Lord, her hands and soul stained red, happy for the first time in her short life. “I will love you forever,” she declared. And He, for a rare once, found Himself impressed by mortal will.
Or so I imagine.
The child was mad, of course. Later events proved this. But it makes sense to me that this madness, not mere religious devotion, would appeal most to the Bright Lord. Her love was unconditional, her purpose undiluted by such paltry considerations as conscience or doubt. It seems like Him, I think, to value that kind of purity of purpose—even though, like warmth and light, too much love is never a good thing.”

N. K. Jemisin book The Broken Kingdoms

Source: The Broken Kingdoms (2011), Chapter 11 “Possession” (watercolor) (pp. 202-203)

Love, Life, God, Happiness

“When governments and other vested interests attack me personally I usually regard it as a vindication, otherwise they would use facts. That's why I believe in the wonderful Claud Cockburn dictum, 'Never believe anything until it is officially denied.”

John Pilger (1939) Australian journalist

It has certainly been my experience. John Pilger, This much i know http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/nov/13/pressandpublishing.observermagazine, The Observer, 13 November 2005

Personality

“I entirely agree with you, as to the ill tendency of the affected doubts of some philosophers, and fantastical conceit of others. I am even so far gone of late in this way of think, that I have quitted several of the sublime notions I had got in their schools for vulgar opinions. And I give it you on my word, since this revolt from metaphysical notions to the plain dictates of nature and common sense, I find my understanding strangely enlightened, so that I can now easily comprehend a great many thing which before were all mystery and riddle.”

George Berkeley book Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous

Said by Philonous (Berkeley) to Hylas in the opening of dialog 1 with reference to the recent surge philosophic endeavors (Locke, Newton, et al) that seemed to lead to skepticism about the existence of the world
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713)

School, Way, Understanding, Nature

“In that sleep and in sleep to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents, he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

History, Sleep, Science

“I think it is a rule that men in business should not be taught other things. Any one will be almost sure to make money who has no other idea in his head. A college education, or intense study of abstract truth, will not enable a man to drive a bargain … The best politicians are not those who are deeply grounded in mathematical or in ethical science. Rules stand in the way of expediency. Many a man has been hindered from pushing his fortune in the world by an early cultivation of his moral sense.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On the Disadvantages of Intellectual Superiority" Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Men, Money, Truth, World

“One man saluted him, another bowed,
Some kissed his hand, still others kissed his foot;
Whoever touched him, joyful was and proud,
For supernatural he seemed, if not
Divine; jostling around him in a crowd,
As close as possible the Bulgars got,
And clamoured for him raucously and cried
To be their king, their captain and their guide.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

Uno il saluta, un altro se gl'inchina,
Altri la mano, altri gli bacia il piede:
Ognun, quanto più può, se gli avvicina,
E beato si tien chi appresso il vede,
E più chi 'l tocca; che toccar divina
E sopranatural cosa si crede.
Lo pregan tutti, e vanno al ciel le grida,
Che sia lor re, lor capitan, lor guida.
Canto XLIV, stanza 97 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Kiss

“I never did know exactly what was meant by the term "The Beats," but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen Ginsberg, myself, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory Corso, for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years.”

Gary Snyder (1930) American poet

The Beat Vision (1974)

Way, Dead

“It was a world which granted privileges to some and imposed prohibitions on others…Endowed with strength and eager to learn, one had to drag himself in a narrow prison cell when he could see an open field, a vast horizon in the distance; when he could feel the beatings of a heart; and when he believed himself entitled to enjoy the beauty of a dream.”

José Rizal (1861–1896) Filipino writer, ophthalmologist, polyglot and nationalist

"Laughter and Tears", an essay (c.1884)

World, Beauty, Dreams, Feeling

“Like I said, you're in this together. Men have certain needs, women have different needs; that's the way it was hundreds of years ago, and that's the way it's going to be hundreds of years from now. If you both realize that, and you both work on meeting each other's needs, you'll have a good marriage. And part of that, for both of you, is trust. In the end, it's that simple.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Doris, Chapter 12, p. 164
2000s, At First Sight (2005)

Women, Men, Marriage, Way

“It was, I saw, a flat to get out of rather than one to stay in. It was a machine for eating and sleeping in, a suitable dwelling place for a working woman, whose main interest is in her work. I disliked this version of myself, which seemed to negate my other activities, reduced them to after-hours amusements, whereas I had always thought them pretty central. These mute, white walls had been silent witnesses to many encounters; nevertheless, they withheld comment, and their very withholding struck me as unfriendly. Unheimlich was the word which came to mind when I stood on the threshold of my bedroom.”

Anita Brookner (1928–2016) British novelist and art historian.

A Friend From England (1987)

Sleep

“Some owners are competent, effective business people who care about the game. Many others do not share these attributes.”

Andrew Zimbalist (1947) American economist

Source: Baseball And Billions - Updated edition - (1992), Chapter 8, The Future, p. 186.

People, Game, Business

“Mars, Triton, Pluto and Jupiter all show global warming. Climate changes on other planets and their moons show that climate change elsewhere in the Solar System could not possibly be due to human activity on Earth. There must be a driving force outside the Earth. It is the Sun.”

Ian Plimer book Heaven and Earth

Heaven and Earth (2009)

Change, Sun

“[wrote_the_exam]What keeps me awake at night: wondering whether human species is just too stupid to figure out the Universe. I just wonder. I lose sleep over that. Because we define ourselves as intelligent— because we made up the test to say that. And we sit alone at the top of the intelligence chart because we invented the exam, and all the other species of life on Earth are not. So who's to say that the first species (us) to be intelligent (us) has just enough intelligence to actually decode everything that's decodable in the Cosmos? […] Think of the next closest thing to us, the bonobo chimp— 98½% identical DNA, yet you cannot teach them trigonometry, they have no concept of it. So if that's only 1½% difference in our DNA— and so imagine 1½% beyond us, rather than below us, in intelligence. […] Their toddlers would be talking about things that would completely confound us.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Nerdist podcast, Episode #489 http://www.nerdist.com/2014/03/nerdist-podcast-neil-degrasse-tyson-returns-again/ (2014-04) 2010s

Life, Stupidity, Imagination, Intelligence

“Gordon Tullock, on the other hand, might be characterized as the somewhat cynical pragmatist, who set out to understand the world, not to change it. This side of Tullock is visible in his early paper on simple majority rule, and is perhaps most apparent in his work on rent seeking. These differences should not be pushed too far, however. Buchanan (1980) also contributed to the rent-seeking literature, and often has described public choice as “politics without romance.” One of the most dispiriting contributions to the public choice literature has to be Kenneth Arrow’s (1951) famous impossibility theorem. In a too little appreciated article, Tullock (1967b) demonstrated with the help of a somewhat torturous geometrical analysis, that the cycling that underlies the impossibility theorem is likely to be constrained to a rather small subset of Pareto-optimal outcomes, and thus Arrow’s theorem was “irrelevant,” a rather happy result, and one which anticipated work appearing more than a decade later on the uncovered set. In Chap. 10 of Toward a Mathematics of Politics, Tullock (1967a) engages in a bit of wishful thinking about constitutional design by describing how one could achieve an ideal form of proportional representation in a legislative body. He also was an early enthusiast of the potential for using a demand-revelation process to reveal individual preferences for public goods”

Dennis Mueller (1940) American economist

Tideman and Tullock 1976
James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and The Calculus (2012)

Happiness, World, Literature, Mathematics

“Thus men continue to accuse themselves of being unjust, violent, cruel, and treacherous to one another, but they do not accuse themselves of cutting the throats of other animals and of feeding upon their mangled limbs, which, nevertheless, is the single cause of that injustice, of that violence, of that cruelty, and of that treachery. … Men believe themselves to be just, provided that they fulfil, in regard to their fellows, the duties which have been prescribed to them. But it is goodness which is the justice of man; and it is impossible, I repeat it, to be good towards one's fellow without being so towards other existences.”

Jean-Antoine Gleizes (1773–1843) French writer

Thalysie: the New Existence. Quoted in The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-eating https://archive.org/stream/ethicsofdietcate00will/ethicsofdietcate00will#page/n3/mode/2up by Howard Williams (London: F. Pitman, 1883), p. 214.

Men, Justice, Animals

“Game theory is a theory of strategic interaction. That is to say, it is a theory of rational behavior in social situations in which each player has to choose his moves on the basis of what he thinks the other players’ countermoves are likely to be.”

John Harsanyi (1920–2000) hungarian economist

Source: "Games with Incomplete Information," 1997, p. 136

Behavior, Game, Thinking

“Chairman (Larry) O'Brien, Chairwoman (Yvonne) Burke, Senator (Ted) Kennedy, Senator (Thomas) Eagleton and my fellow citizens, I'm happy to join us (sic) for this benediction of our Friday sunrise service. I assume that everyone here is impressed with my control of this Convention in that my choice for Vice President was challenged by only 39 other nominees. And I can tell you that Eleanor (McGovern) is very grateful that the Oregon delegation at least kept her in the race with (wife of Attorney General John N Mitchell) Martha Mitchell. -McGovern's acceptance speech at the 1972 Democratic National Convention, America's Political Parties: Power and Privelige Part 1: The Democrats hosted by Ben Wattenberg”

George S. McGovern (1922–2012) American politician, Congressman, senator, Democratic presidential candidate

Happiness, Parting

“Never encourage a man to cook breakfast; it causes him to wonder if women are necessary. If you always get his breakfast and don’t raise controversial issues until after his second cup of coffee, you can get away with murder the rest of the time. They don’t notice other odors when they smell bacon.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Number of the Beast

Source: The Number of the Beast (1980), Chapter V : “—a wedding ring is not a ring in my nose—”, p. 41

Women, Coffee, Time, Cooking

“Known for centuries, a tenet of classical liberalism, the pacific nature of democracy has become largely forgotten or ignored in the last half-century. That democracy is inherently peaceful is now probably believed by no more than a few prominent peace researchers. In part this has been due to the intellectual defection of Western intellectuals from classical liberalism to some variant of socialism, with its emphasis on the competitive violence and bellicosity of capitalist freedoms. Many intellectuals, and in particularly European and Third World peace researchers, have come to believe that socialist equalitarianism is the answer to violence; others, particularly American liberals, believe that if the socialist are wrong, then at least democracies are no better than other political systems in promoting peace.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

“Political Systems, Violence, and War,” chap. 14 in "Approaches to Peace: An Intellectual Map", edit, W. Scott Thompson and Kenneth M. Jensen, Washington, D.C., United States Institute of Peace, 1991, pp. 347-370; and “The Politics of Cold Blood,” Society, Vol. 27 (November/December, 1989) pp. 32-40

World, Peace, Democracy, Nature

“The human spirit sublimates
the impulses it thwarts;
a healthy sex life mitigates
the lust for other sports.”

Piet Hein (1905–1996) Danish puzzle designer, mathematician, author, poet

Hint And Suggestion : Admonitory grook addressed to youth
Grooks

Life, Sex, Sport

“What a silly question! What a silly person you are! Hezbollah is winning the war; you can see on the other half of the screen. Hezbollah is more popular today in Lebanon amongst Christians, amongst Sunnis, amongst Shiite, amongst all Arabs, amongst all Muslims that it has ever been. It’s Israel who’s lost the war, and Bush and Blair for politically organizing the war, who’ve lost politically. This is a defeat of Bush and Blair and Israel. Everybody but you can see it!”

George Galloway (1954) British politician, broadcaster, and writer

Interview on Sky News http://news.sky.com/skynews/video/videoplayer/0,,31200-galloway_060806,00.html, August 6, 2006

War, Question, Personality

“I'm not a great believer in writing courses, though it must be said I've never been in one. It probably depends on what kind of writer you are. I'm very un-analytical about what I do. I don't plan much for the first draft. I try to let characters come out by themselves, rather than designing them. But other writers work differently, and for them the teaching process - which at least forces you to consider what you're doing, and why - may be very helpful. At the very least a creative writing course mandates someone to spend a period of their life just writing, which can be hard to do otherwise. But beware of thinking too much about what you do.”

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

Associated Content Interview (October 23, 2006)

Life, Thinking, Help, Dependency

“Up until our own times men had only received two sorts of teaching in what concerns the relations between politics and morality. One was Plato’s and it said: “Morality decides politics”; and the other was Machiavelli’s, and it said “Politics have nothing to do with morality.” Today we receive a third. M. Maurras teaches: “Politics decide morality.””

Julien Benda (1867–1956) French essayist

Source: Treason of the Intellectuals (1927), p. 110

Men, Time

“Other people, and it doesn't matter if they are Scandinavians or Celts,
Think that anything is better than theirs just because it belongs to somebody else.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

Versus (1949), Possessions are Nine Points of Conversation
Variant: Some people, and it doesn't matter whether they are paupers or millionaires,
Think that anything they have is the best in the world just because it is theirs.

People, Thinking

“More murders are committed at ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature. Over one hundred, it’s too hot to move. Under ninety, cool enough to survive. But right at ninety-two degrees lies the apex of irritability, everything is itches and hair and sweat and cooked pork. The brain becomes a rat rushing around a red-hot maze. The least thing, a word, a look, a sound, the drop of a hair and—irritable murder.”

Ray Bradbury book The October Country

Touched With Fire (1954)
The October Country (1955)

Cooking

“Marx, although a man of broad knowledge, had one blind spot: he was ignorant of the true character of economics. He did not realize that economics can only be understood in close relationship to the other humanities (and certain sciences), and therefore should not be studied in vacuo. Ironically, this very weakness was largely instrumental in making Marxism successful. Marxist economics—yet another instance of a false but clear idea—can be explained to the merest child in a matter of minutes. (Conversely, to explain the workings of the free market economy to an adult would take weeks of hard work.) Because it was easily grasped, Marxism flooded the world within a few decades, as had other simplistic ideologies and religions, such as Islam and the Enlightenment; this same sort of simplicity gave rise to the French Revolution and national socialism. Christianity, on the other hand, took three centuries to triumph.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Source: Leftism Revisited (1990), p. 337

World, Religion, Idea, Knowledge

“I'd like to say that people people can change anything they want to; and that means everything in the world. Show me any country and there'll be people in it. And it's the people that make the country. People have got to stop pretending they're not on the world. People are running about following their little tracks. I am one of them. But we've all gotta stop just stop following our own little mouse trail. People can do anything; this is something that I'm beginning to learn. People are out there doing bad things to each other; it's because they've been dehumanized. It's time to take that humanity back into the centre of the ring and follow that for a time. Greed… it ain't going anywhere! They should have that on a big billboard across Times Square. Think on that. Without people you're nothing.”

Joe Strummer (1952–2002) British musician, singer, actor and songwriter

Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten (2007).

People, World, Thinking, Learning

“The vocation of man, as that of any other creature, is to be active in all his being. But man cannot act as an individual. The essence of his life activity is cooperation with other individuals of his species. Outside this cooperation, outside of society, man does not achieve any specific human activity. But so long as this co-operation is arbitrarily ruled by accidentality, so long as it is not organized, man remains limited and constricted in his life-activity….”

Moses Hess (1812–1875) German philosopher

Bestimmung des Menschen, p. 275
Hess' Diary

Life

“Have others fear you, and I will have no fear.”

Pierre Corneille Nicomède

Faites que l'on vous craigne, et je ne craindrai rien.
Laodice, act I, scene i.
Nicomède (1651)

Fear

“We always travelled to other cities, other states, looking for the festivals. It's gone the musical way of one generation.”

Kátya Chamma (1961) Brazilian singer and writer

Source: Interview at Recanto das Letras http://recantodasletras.com.br/entrevistas/625556, 2007.

Music, Way, Travel

“The risks attendant upon change may have to be weighed against other risks arising from maintaining the same state of affairs.”

Tom Burns (1913–2001) British sociologist

Source: The Management of Innovation, 1961, p. 21

Change

“And therefore a prince who does not understand the art of war, over and above the other misfortunes already mentioned, cannot be respected by his soldiers, nor can he rely on them. He ought never, therefore, to have out of his thoughts this subject of war, and in peace he should addict himself more to its exercise than in war; this he can do in two ways, the one by action, the other by study.”

Niccolo Machiavelli book The Prince

Source: The Prince (1513), Ch. 14; translated by W. K. Marriot

War, Peace, Art, Way

“(The) pattern of consumption is markedly more equal than in Britain. ‘Prestige-goods’ are widely distributed, and there is less conspicuous contrast between the standard of living of different income-groups. To take the most obvious example, almost every family owns a car; and this is significant not only because a car is the most conspicuous of all consumption goods, but also because universal car-ownership leads to the universal consumption of other conspicuous or semi-luxury goods – holidays, hotels, middle-class habits of shopping, etc. But the lack of external class-distinctions can be observed in many other spheres: e. g. clothes, eating-habits, drug-stores, the ownership of consumer durables, and so on.”

Anthony Crosland book The Future of Socialism

The Future of Socialism by Anthony Crosland.
The Future of Socialism (1956)

Family, Cars, Universe, Holiday

“During the lengthy process of production the business world is incurring outgoings in terms of money-paying out in money for wages and other expenses of production-in the expectation of recouping this outlay by disposing of the product for money at a later date. That is to say, the business world as a whole must always be in a position where it stands to gain by a rise of price and to lose by a fall of price. Whether it likes it or not, the technique of production under a regime of money-contract forces the business world always to carry a big speculative position; and if it is reluctant to carry this position, the productive process must be slackened.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Essays in Persuasion (1931), Social Consequences of Changes in The Value of Money (1923)

Money, World, Business

“Donald Trump betrays. It can start with Trump University, where Trump betrayed schoolteachers and others who dreamed of building a better life for themselves.”

David Brooks (1961) American journalist, commentator and editor

"Donald Trump, the Great Betrayer" http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/04/opinion/donald-trump-the-great-betrayer.html?rref=opinion The New York Times (4 March 2016) 2010s

Life, Dreams, Universe

“All those to whom I looked up, were of opinion that the pleasure of sympathy with human beings, and the feelings which made the good of others, and especially of mankind on a large scale, the object of existence, were the greatest and surest sources of happiness. Of the truth of this I was convinced, but to know that a feeling would make me happy if I had it, did not give me the feeling.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/138/mode/1up p. 138

Happiness, Pleasure, Truth, Feeling

“If we’re going to start calling out religious and political groups for extremism, we could start at home with Republicans. Too many of them spew animus. Too many foment sectarianism. Too many sit by, or make excuses, as others appeal to tribalism. If Obama were to treat them the way they say he should treat Islam — holding the entire faith accountable for its ugliest followers — they’d squeal nonstop about slander and demagogy. They’re lucky that’s not his style.”

William Saletan (1964) American journalist

" Go Ahead and Say It, Mr. President http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/02/barack_obama_should_name_the_enemy_it_s_the_republican_party.html", Slate (24 February 2015)

Faith, Way, Home

“According to a stagist conception of progressive history (which is usually blind to its implicit teleology), the work of figures like Foucault, Derrida and other cutting-edge French theorists is often intuitively affiliated with a form of profound and sophisticated critique that presumably far surpasses anything found in the socialist, Marxist or anarchist traditions. It is certainly true and merits emphasis that the Anglophone reception of French theory, as John McCumber has aptly pointed out, had important political implications as a pole of resistance to the false political neutrality, the safe technicalities of logic and language, or the direct ideological conformism operative in the McCarthy-supported traditions of Anglo-American philosophy. However, the theoretical practices of figures who turned their back on what Cornelius Castoriadis called the tradition of radical critique—meaning anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist resistance—surely contributed to the ideological drift away from transformative politics. According to the spy agency itself, post-Marxist French theory directly contributed to the CIA’s cultural program of coaxing the left toward the right, while discrediting anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, thereby creating an intellectual environment in which their imperial projects could be pursued unhindered by serious critical scrutiny from the intelligentsia.”

Gabriel Rockhill (1972) philosopher

"The CIA reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left" (2017)

History, Support, Falseness

“Now I protest to thee, gentle reader, that I entirely dissent from Francisco de Ubeda in this matter, and hold it the most useful quality of my pen, that it can speedily change from grave to gay, and from description and dialogue to narrative and character. So that, if my quill display no other propertoies of its mothergoose than her mutability, truly I shall be well pleased; and I conceive that you, my worthy friend, will have no occasion for discontent. From the jargon, therefore, of the Highland gillies, I pass to the character of their Chief. It is an important examination, and therefore, like Dogberry, we must spare no wisdom.”

Walter Scott book Waverley

Source: Waverley (1814), Chapter XIX

Wisdom, Change

“In these circumstances, we would undertake a solemn obligation to help the Iraqi people build a new Iraq at peace with itself and its neighbors. The Iraqi people deserve to be lifted from insecurity and tyranny, and freed to determine for themselves the future of their country. We envisage a unified Iraq with its territorial integrity respected. All the Iraqi people — its rich mix of Sunni and Shiite Arabs, Kurds, Turkomen, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and all others — should enjoy freedom, prosperity, and equality in a united country. We will support the Iraqi people's aspirations for a representative government that upholds human rights and the rule of law as cornerstones of democracy.”

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

2000s, 2003, A Vision for Iraq and the Iraqi people (March 2003)

People, Peace, Law, Democracy

“Maybe you can't make the whole body comfortable, but make at least part of the body comfortable and stay with that part. As for the pains, let them be in the other part. They have every right to be there, so make an arrangement with them. They stay in one part, you stay in another. But the essential point is that you have a place where the mind feels stable, secure, and comfortable in the present moment. These are the beginning steps in meditation.”

Thanissaro Bhikkhu (1949) Theravadin Buddhist Monk and Scholar

"Meditation: The How and the Why" (2003)

Pain, Feeling, Parting

“Laymen learn to read photographs the way they do headlines, skipping over them quickly to get the gist of what is being said. Photographers, on the other hand, study them with the care and attention to detail one might give to a difficult scientific paper or a complicated poem.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Becker (1978) in: Creative Camera No.163-174. p. 70.

Way, Study, Learning, Reading

“The holocaust tragedy has been abducted by Israeli strategists, with few Jewish protests, for Israel's ideological acrobatics. As Palestinian recent history has shown, no Palestinian engagement with the holocaust will be satisfactory to Israel and its supporters. Israeli demands that Palestinians recognize the holocaust are not about the holocaust at all, but rather about the other part of the package, namely recognizing and submitting to Israel's "right to exist" as a colonial-settler racist state. The Palestinian authority has given up, but the Palestinian people should continue to resist this Zionist package deal. Their resistance is the only remaining obstacle to a complete Zionist victory, one that seeks to be sealed by Zionism's rewriting of both Palestinian and Jewish histories.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Ibid.
"Palestinians and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission?"

People, History, Support, Victory

“In our Post era, a new phenomenon has emerged expressing this new associative will of the species: I mean the super-networks of communication [Internet]. On this I conceive two images, one enthusiast and another disappointed: I see Gea as a body (the Biosphere) and as a mind or spirit (the Exosphere); the human creatures would be the neurons and the electronic networks the dendrites. Okay, an autistic geopsychology, full of traumas, and other psych pathologies. But let's not say that we already lack the means to understand each other.”

Jorge Majfud (1969) Uruguayan-American writer

Critica de la pasión pura (1998)

Disappointment, Communication, Understanding

“I missed the enormously popular movie that introduced these characters, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, and felt myself blessed at the time. But now I'm not so sure. Their Bogus Journey is a riot of visual invention and weird humor that works on its chosen sub-moronic level, and on several others as well, including some fairly sophisticated ones. It's the kind of movie where you start out snickering in spite of yourself, and end up actually admiring the originality that went into creating this hallucinatory slapstick.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/bill-and-teds-bogus-journey of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (19 July 1991) Reviews, Three star reviews

Time

“When the economy is in a depression, scarcity ceases to rule. Productive resources sit idle, so that it is possible to have more of some things without having less of others; free lunches are all around. As a result, all the usual rules of economics are stood on their head; we enter a looking-glass world in which virtue is vice and prudence is folly. Thrift hurts our future prospects; sound money makes us poorer. Moreover, that's the kind of world we have been living in for the past several years, which means that it is a kind of world that students should understand. […] Depression economics is marked by paradoxes, in which seemingly virtuous actions have perverse, harmful effects. Two paradoxes in particular stand out: the paradox of thrift, in which the attempt to save more actually leads to the nation as a whole saving less, and the less-well-known paradox of flexibility, in which the willingness of workers to protect their jobs by accepting lower wages actually reduces total employment. […] In times of depression, the rules are different. Conventionally sound policy – balanced budgets, a firm commitment to price stability – helps to keep the economy depressed. Once again, this is not normal. Most of the time we are not in a depression. But sometimes we are – and 2013, when this chapter was written, was one of those times.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

“Depressions are Different”, in Robert M. Solow, ed. Economics for the Curious: Inside the Minds of 12 Nobel Laureates. 2014.

Money, World, Understanding, Time

“Man cannot pretend to be higher in ethics, spirituality, advancement, or civilization than other creatures and at the same time live by lower standards than the vulture or hyena … The Pillars of Ahimsa indisputably represent the clearest, surest path out of the jungle, and toward the attainment of that highly desirable goal.”

H. Jay Dinshah (1933–2000) American proponent of veganism and Jain ethics

Out of the Jungle (1967); as quoted in Victoria Moran, Compassion, the Ultimate Ethic: An Exploration of Veganism (Wellingborough: Thorsons, 1985), p. 32.

Time

“God of his Infinite goodness (if we will but take notice of his goodness unto this Nation) hath made this Country a very Granary for the supplying of Smiths with Iron, Cole, and Lime made with cole, which hath much supplied these men with Com also of late 5 and from these men a great part, not only of this Island, but also of his Majestie's other Kingdoms and Territories, with Iron wares have their supply, and Wood in these parts almost exhausted, although it were of late a mighty woodland country.”

Dud Dudley (1600–1684) British metallurgist

Source: Metallum Martis, 1665, p. 38 As cited in: ; Cited in: Samuel Smiles (1864) Industrial biography; iron-workers and tool-makers http://books.google.com/books?id=5trBcaXuazgC&pg=PA65, p. 65

Men, God, Parting, Country