Quotes about other
page 83

“We must stand united in our support of other young democracies, from the people of Lebanon struggling to maintain their hard-won independence, to the people of the Palestinian Territories, who deserve a free and peaceful state of their own. We must stand united in our support of the people of Georgia. The United Nations Charter sets forth the equal rights of nations large and small. Russia's invasion of Georgia was a violation of those words. Young democracies around the world are watching to see how we respond to this test. The United States has worked with allies in multilateral institutions like the European Union and NATO to uphold Georgia's territorial integrity and provide humanitarian relief. And our nations will continue to support Georgia's democracy.”

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

2000s, 2008, Address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 2008)

People, World, Peace, Democracy

“If there were other people on other planets it would certainly raise theological issues. Further, there is no (zip, zero, nada) scientific evidence of any life of any kind outside of Earth”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

except maybe angels
Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 66

Life, People, Angels

“I never encouraged officers to discuss politics at all, and, as a rule, officers of the navy were exempt from political bias, and considered that it was their duty to heartily support the Government in any measures which might be taken to preserve the Union. This was my view of the subject, and I tried to impress it upon others, and succeeded in excluding politics from the mess-table.”

David Dixon Porter (1813–1891) United States Navy admiral

Source: 1880s, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (1885), p. 204

Support

“My friends, after years of hard work and treating people right, isn’t that what we all want to hear? Isn’t that America at our best? We don’t thrive on tearing each other apart, or separating ourselves. We know we are stronger together. We believe in equality and dignity for all. And when we fall short, we strive to do better, not to blame and scapegoat but to improve ourselves, to move toward becoming that more perfect union that our founders hoped for. This election is a chance for us to move still closer to that goal, to make sure everyone can contribute to a growing and prospering America, to say loudly and clearly in this country, no one’s worthless, no one’s ‘less than.’ We’re all of value. In the United States of America, the greatest country in the world, we believe everyone is created equal. And you know what else we believe? We all believe love trumps hate.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Speech in Orlando, Florida (September 21, 2016)

Love, Hate, People, World

“And they noticed what few others had done – that all over the world, charismatic animals that were once numerous were beginning to disappear. The Arabian oryx, which once had been widespread all over the peninsula had now been reduced to a few hundred. In Spain, there were less than a hundred imperial eagles. The Californian condor was down to about sixty. In Hawaii, a goose that had lived in flocks on the lava fields around the great volcanoes were reduced to fifty. The strange little rhinoceros that lived in the dwindling forests of Java – to about forty. Wherever you looked there were examples of animals whose populations were falling rapidly. This planet was in danger of losing a significant number of its inhabitants – both animals and plants.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

World, Animals

“The tyranny of some is possible only through the cowardice of others.”

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

Letter to the Young Women of Malolos (22 February 1889) - translated from Tagalog by Gregorio Zaide

“It is quite obvious therefore, that the knowledge and prudence of the poor themselves, are absolutely the only means by which any general and permanent improvement in their condition can be effected. They are really the arbiters of their own destiny; and what others can do for themselves. These truths are so important to the happiness of the great mass of society, that every opportunity should be taken of repeating them.”

Thomas Robert Malthus Principles of Political Economy

Book I, Chapter V, Of the Profits of Capital, Section III, p. 279
Principles of Political Economy (Second Edition 1836)

Happiness, Truth, Knowledge

“On that Day ye will continue to rove distraught, even as camels, seeking a drop of the water of life. God will cause oceans of living water to stream forth from the presence of Him Whom God shall make manifest, while ye will refuse to quench your thirst therefrom, notwithstanding that ye regard yourselves as the God-fearing witnesses of your Faith. Nay, and yet again, nay! Ye will go astray far beyond the peoples unto whom the Gospel, or the Qur’án or any other Scripture was given. Take good heed to yourselves, inasmuch as the Cause of God will come upon you at a time when you will all be entreating and tearfully imploring God for the advent of the Day of His Manifestation; yet when He cometh ye will tarry and will fail to be of those who are well-assured in His Faith.
Beware lest ye grieve Him Who is the Supreme Manifestation of your Lord; verily, He can well afford to dispense with your allegiance unto Him. Be ye careful and bring not despondency upon any soul, for surely ye shall be put to proof.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

XVII, 2
The Kitáb-I-Asmá

Life, God, People, Fear

“There was no one in the world quite like Plante. I learned more from him in two years with the Leafs than I did in all my other hockey days. He taught me a great deal about playing goal both on the ice and in my head off the ice. He taught me to be aggressive around the goal and take an active part in play instead of waiting for things to happen. He showed me how I kept putting myself off-balance by placing my weight on my left leg instead of on my stick side. He taught me how to steer shots off into the corner instead of letting them rebound in front of me. That old guy made a good goalie out of me.”

Bernie Parent (1945) Canadian ice hockey player

Quoted in Kevin Shea, "One on One with Bernie Parent," http://www.legendsofhockey.net/html/spot_oneononep198403.htm Legends of Hockey.net (2005-11-07)

World, Guy, Learning, Waiting

“This is a book about giving our best and especially about doing whatever we can to help others.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 9

Books, Help

“By following up this idea, also, we might go a little further. We might arrive at the conviction that our present science is human, petty, and contingent; that it is closely linked with the structure of our sensory organs; that this structure results from the evolution which fashioned these organs; that this evolution has been an accident of history; that in the future it may be different; and that, consequently, by the side or in the stead of our modern science, the work of our eyes and hands—and also of our words—there might have been constituted, there may still be constituted, sciences entirely and extraordinarily new—auditory, olfactory, and gustatory sciences, and even others derived from other kinds of sensations which we can neither foresee nor conceive because they are not, for the moment, differentiated in us. Outside the matter we know, a very special matter fashioned of vision and touch, there may exist other matter with totally different properties. …We must, by setting aside the mechanical theory, free ourselves from a too narrow conception of the constitution of matter. And this liberation will be to us a great advantage which we shall soon reap. We shall avoid the error of believing that mechanics is the only real thing and that all that cannot be explained by mechanics must be incomprehensible. We shall then gain more liberty of mind for understanding what the union of the soul with the body may be.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 43

Error, Soul, History, Idea

“We weren't that close. I'd had friends die before that. And even the way that he did it, it was kind of a twist, but other than that, I'd been through it before. But it's a shame, and it's a shame for his daughter, for one, and it's a shame for fans. But really it's a personal thing, and it was a drag. I wish it didn't happen. And I also think like if he had just kind of hung on for six months, who knows, six months later he could've been a completely different guy.”

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

When asked if he was close to Kurt Cobain and if his death affected him in a personal way - Howard Stern Show, June 2007 ** Chris Cornell on Pearl Jam, Eddie Vedder, Alice in Chains, Nirvana and Kurt Cobain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQzyZfhutYk, Solo career Era

Way, Guy, Thinking, Personality

“Isn't there some great, grim irony in the fact that the whole country gets a day off work in honor of a man who struggled against and died to end oppression, even after having re-elected one of the greatest would-be oppressors of the last century? And that the threat of freedom for a minority may have been what finally tipped the electoral scales in Dominar Bush's favor? Yes, I think that's what it is, a great, grim irony. King said, "No one is free until we are all free." Somehow, the Reverend Bernice King has missed that part, as have so many other Americans. All or nothing. Personally, I think that Martin Luther King, Jr. Day should have been suspended this year in recognition of Bush's second term. A nation cannot simultaneously pat itself on the back for granting this group of people freedom and strive to deny freedom to this other group. Or, rather, it can, but it should not be permitted to do so. The vacation has not been earned because the work is not finished.”

Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964) writer

(17 January 2005)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2005

People, Thinking, Freedom, Parting

“We all know in our gut that art educates. In other societies, they're aware of the power it has of speaking directly to the masses, teaching them to be better socialists, better citizens. The trouble is that with us it's fallen into the wrong hands. Forget the speculators… The concept of the collector is so rotten by now that it stinks.”

Mary McCarthy book Cannibals and Missionaries

Cannibals and Missionaries (1979)

Education, Art, Forgetting

“Let us teach ourselves and others that politics should be an expression of a desire to contribute to the happiness of the community rather than of a need to cheat or rape the community.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

New Year's Address to the Nation (1990)

Happiness, Communication, Cheating

“Well, I believe in what might be called spiritualism, be it a Hindu, be it a Muslim, be it a Christian. It makes no difference what religion it is because all religions have only one objective. So, no question, of preferring one religion or the other. *All religions take one to the same God.”

Ramnath Goenka (1904–1991) Indian politician

Ramnath Goenka’s rare Interview

God, Religion, Question

“The word (classical) carries the implication that the works of art and literature produced in Graeco-Roman antiquity possess an absolute value, that they form the standard by which all others are to be judged.”

Jasper Griffin (1937–2019) Public Orator and Professor of Classical Literature

The Oxford History of the Classical World (with John Boardman and Oswyn Murray, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) p. 3

Art, Literature

“There's always something that's smoldering somewhere
I know it don't make a difference to you
But oh! It sure made a difference to me
You'll see me off in the distance, I hope
At the other end
At the other end of the telescope.”

Aimee Mann (1960) American indie rock singer-songwriter (born 1960)

The Other End (of the Telescope), written by Elvis Costello and Aimee Mann
Song lyrics, Everything's Different Now (1988)

Hope

“Abu Hurayra reported that the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, "A believing man should not hate a believing woman. If he dislikes something in her character, he should be pleased with some other or another trait of hers."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 2, hadith number 275
Sunni Hadith

Hate, Peace

“Masculinity is tragic. Masculinity is a lifelong struggle, a gauntlet run against nature ad other men to demonstrate virility and prove one's worthiness as a man in the eyes of other men. Masculinity is a challenge to honor that ends only in death- a challenge to win coupled with a guarantee that, eventually, even the best man will lose.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

Pg 19-20
Becoming A Barbarian (2016)

Death, Men, Nature

“For we are not all equally afflicted with the same disease or all in need of the same severe cure. This is the reason why we see different persons disciplined with different crosses. The heavenly Physician takes care of the well-being of all his patients; he gives some a milder medicine and purifies others by more shocking treatments, but he omits no one; for the whole world, without exception, is ill”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Deut 32:15
Page 55.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

World, Disease, Affliction, Personality

“Women are much more like each other than men: they have, in truth, but two passions, vanity and love; these are their universal characteristics.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) British statesman and man of letters

19 December 1749
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

Love, Women, Men, Truth

“Never marry a good church-going girl, Billy! They can always find moral justifications for anything they feel like doing, no matter how it hurts other people.”

John Brunner book The Stone That Never Came Down

Source: The Stone That Never Came Down (1973), Chapter 5 (p. 44)

People, Feeling, Girl, Hurt

“I’ve made some things for you, Constant Reader; you see them laid out before you in the moonlight. But before you look at the little handcrafted treasures I have for sale, let’s talk about them for a bit, shall we? It won’t take long. Here, sit down beside me. And do come a little closer. I don’t bite.
Except … we’ve known each other for a very long time, and I suspect you know that’s not entirely true.
Is it?”

Stephen King book The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, Introduction (2015)

Time

“Philip being arbitrator betwixt two wicked persons, he commanded one to fly out of Macedonia and the other to pursue him.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

36 Philip
Apophthegms of Kings and Great Commanders

Personality, Flying

“[P]roperty in slaves, recognized as such by the local law of any of the States of the Union, shall stand on the same footing in all constitutional and federal relations as any other species of property so recognized; and, like other property, shall not be subject to be divested or impaired by the local law of any other State, either in escape thereto or of transit or sojourn of the owner therein; and in no case whatever shall such property be subject to be divested or impaired by any legislative act of the United States, or of any of the Territories thereof.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Compromise proposal http://www.civilwarcauses.org/comp.htm#Jefferson%20Davis%20of%20Mississippi (24 December 1860) 1860s

Law

“Opinion considers the opposition of what is true and false quite rigid, and, confronted with a philosophical system, it expects agreement or contradiction. And in an explanation of such a system, opinion still expects to find one or the other.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book The Phenomenology of Spirit

Preface, § 2
The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

Falseness

“An empire derives no advantage from the caresses of two turtledoves who spend a year cooing to each other in public meetings.”

Charles Fourier (1772–1837) French utopian socialist and philosopher

Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World, J. Beecher (1986), p. 315
New Amorous World

“The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around.”

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) American writer

"Gandhi", p. 22. First published in Politics (Winter 1948)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

Way

“In Texas, we have the death penalty and we use it! That's right. You come to Texas and kill somebody, we will kill you back! That's our policy. They're trying to pass a bill right now through the Texas legislature that will speed up the process of execution in heinous crimes where there's more than 3 credible eyewitnesses. That means that if three or more people saw you do what you did, you don't sit on Death Row for 15 years, Jack! You go straight to the front of the line. Other states are trying to abolish the death penalty. My state's putting in the express lane!”

Ron White (1956) American comedian

They Call Me Tater Salad

Death, People, Penalty, Speed

“I know from smoking pot for over thirty years that this is a medicine that works. It works for the wasting syndrome - - the kids have no appetite, but when they eat a brownie, they get out of bed and make themselves some food and for Chemotherapy - - they eat half a brownie before a session, and when they get out they eat the other half. It eases the pain. That's what I'm here to do.”

Brownie Mary (1922–1999) American medical cannabis activist

Rathbun, Mary; Dennis Peron (1996). Brownie Mary's Marijuana Cookbook and Dennis Peron's Recipe for Social Change. Trail of Smoke Publishing Co. ISBN 0963989200.

Pain, Food

“A good rider on a good horse, is as much above himself and others, as this world can make him.”

Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648) Anglo-Welsh soldier, diplomat, historian, poet and religious philosopher

Source: The Autobiography, P. 39

World, Horse

“An artist must pass judgment only on what he understands; his range is limited as that of any other specialist—that's what I keep repeating and insisting upon. Anyone who says that the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. An artist observes, selects, guesses and synthesizes.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (October 27, 1888)
Letters

Understanding, Question

“These testimonies establish once and for all that we are not alone. Technologies related to extraterrestrial phenomena are capable of providing solutions to the global energy crisis, and other environmental and security challenges. (May 9, 2001)”

Steven M. Greer (1955) American ufologist

2001
Source: [David, Leonard, DO NOT PUBLISH: UFO Group Demands Congressional Hearing, Space.com, May 9, 2001, http://www.space.com/searchforlife/UFO_hearings_010509.html, 2007-03-27, http://web.archive.org/web/20031018113821/http://www.space.com/searchforlife/UFO_hearings_010509.html, 2003-10-18]

“Half of the human race lives in manifest obedience to the lunar rhythm; and there is evidence to show that the psychological and therefore the spiritual life, not only of women, but of men too, mysteriously ebbs and flows with the changes of the moon. There are unreasoned joys, inexplicable miseries, laughters and remorses without a cause. Their sudden and fantastic alternations constitute the ordinary weather of our minds. These moods, of which the more gravely numinous may be hypostasized as gods, the lighter, if we will, as hobgoblins and fairies, are the children of the blood and humours. But the blood and humours obey, among many other masters, the changing moon. Touching the soul directly through the eyes and, indirectly, along the dark channels of the blood, the moon is doubly a divinity.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

"Meditation on the Moon"
Music at Night and Other Essays (1931)

Life, Women, Men, God

“Well, then I'd say it takes two to tango. My guess is that both of you are right and both of you are wrong. That's the way most arguments go, anyway. People are who they are and no one is perfect, but marriage is about becoming a team. You're going to spend the rest of your life learning about each other, and every now and then, things blow up. But the beauty of marriage is that if you picked the right person and you both love each other, you'll alway figure out a way to get through it.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Jeremy's father, Chapter 11, p. 148
2000s, At First Sight (2005)

Love, Life, Marriage, People

“Some people think that macrobiotic philosophy is no more than the teaching of a diet - the eating of brown rice, carrots, and gomashio (sesame salt), others imagine that it is summed up in the statement, "Don't eat cake and sugar."”

George Ohsawa (1893–1966) twentieth century Japanese philosopher

How far from the truth!
Source: Essential Ohsawa - From Food to Health, Happiness to Freedom - Understanding the Basics of Macrobiotics (1994), p. 82

People, Truth, Imagination, Thinking

“Competition is the final price determinant and competitive prices may result in profits which force you to accept a rate of return less than you hoped for, or for that matter to accept temporary losses. And, in times of inflation, the rate-of-return concept comes up against the problem of assets undervalued in terms of replacement. Nevertheless, no other financial principle with which I am acquainted serves better than rate of return as an objective aid to business judgment. This principle had governed the thinking of the Finance Committee of General Motors since 1917.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 140

Hope, Business, Problem, Thinking

“It is the threat of the use of force [against Iraq] and our line-up there that is going to put force behind the diplomacy. But if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”

Madeleine K. Albright (1937–2022) Former U.S. Secretary of State

Stated http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1998/02/19/98021907_tpo.html on NBC's Today Show (February 19, 1998) 1990s

Future, Country

“It was the FLP that was committed to reducing the cost of doing business and started by lowering the cost of utilities, and requested the commercial banks and lending organizations to reduce their fees, charges and interest rates. The FLP also moved to reduce public expenditure, which saw a saving of $96 million in its year in office. It was also the FLP, which lowered interest in Housing Authority home loans from 12 per cent to 6 per cent for those on lower incomes. It was the aggregate effect of this and a range of other measures of tight fiscal control, investment in key growth areas and a firm hand on curbing corruption that saw the economy record an unprecedented growth of 9.6% in 1999.”

Mahendra Chaudhry (1942) Fijian politician

Reaction to Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase's address to the Fiji Employers Federation in Nadi, 4 September 2005

Home, Business, Housing

“Christopher Wren, the leading architect of London's reconstruction after the great fire of 1666, lies buried beneath the floor of his most famous building, St. Paul's cathedral. No elaborate sarcophagus adorns the site. Instead, we find only the famous epitaph written by his son and now inscribed into the floor: “si monumentum requiris, circumspice”—if you are searching for his monument, look around. A tad grandiose, perhaps, but I have never read a finer testimony to the central importance—one might even say sacredness — of actual places, rather than replicas, symbols, or other forms of vicarious resemblance.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Lying Stones of Marrakech

"A Tale of Two Work Sites", p. 251
The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2001)

Search, Reading

“If once we go upon niceties of construction, we shall not know where to stop. For one nicety is made a foundation for another; and that other for a third; and so on, without end.”

John Eardley Wilmot (1709–1792) English judge

Rex v. Inhabitants of Caverswall (1758), Burrow (Settlement Cases), 465.

“I hope your Excellency will not think this application results from a lazy habit, or a desire to free myself from business. Far from it. I am never more happy than when I am honorably or usefully employed. If your Excellency thinks I can promote the service as much in this employment as in any other, I shall cheerfully execute the business, without the least murmur.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (July 1776)

Happiness, Hope, Business, Thinking

“It's an open question, the degree to which the cosmos would order itself around you properly if you got yourself together as much as you could get yourself together. We know that things can go very badly wrong if you do things very badly wrong – there's no doubt about that. But the converse is also true. If you start to sort yourself out properly, and if you have beneficial effect on your family, first of all that's going to echo down the generations, but it also spreads out into the community. And we are networked together. We're not associated linearly. We all effect each other. So it's an open question, the degree to which acting out the notion that being is good, and the notion that you can accept its limitations and that you should still strive for virtue. It's an open question as to how profound an effect that would have on the structure of reality if we really chose to act it out. I don't think we know the limits of virtue. I don't think we know what true virtue could bring about if we aimed at it carefully and practically. So the notion that there is something divine about the individual who accepts the conditions of existence and still strives for the good, I think that's an idea that's very much worth paying attention to. And I think the fact that people considered that idea seriously for at least 2000 years indicates that there's at least something to be thought about there.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

People, Family, Communication, Idea

“Zero sum game implies winners and losers. If somebody wins, somebody gotta lose…. I don’t agree with that. Because all boats can rise on a rising sea. Good films help other good films. Different psychology. If you’re overly competitive, you say it is exclusionary, a zero sum game: I must win so he must lose. That’s not true. We can all win without forcing the other guy to lose.”

Oliver Stone (1946) American film director, screenwriter, and producer

Wall Street DVD Director’s Commentary (2000)

Guy, Game, Help, Sea

“I taught at a school in Cincinnati with a 0% graduation rate and that was also interesting so I updated from thinking school was beneficial for other people but not beneficial to me, to thinking school was beneficial for maybe some people around the middle – at least some of the better schools – but not beneficial for the vast majority of people, to then actually reading the literature on education and on intelligence and academic accomplishment and symbolic manipulation and concluding "no, school isn't good for anyone". There might be a few schools that are good for people, like there's Blair and there's Stuyvesant and these schools may actually teach people, but school can better be seen as a vaccination program against knowledge than a process for instilling knowledge in people, and of course when a vaccination program messes up, occasionally people get sick and die of the mumps or smallpox or whatever. And when school messes up occasionally people get sick and educated and they lose biological fitness. And in either case the people in charge revise the program and try to make sure that doesn't happen again, but in the case of school they also use that as part of their positive branding and you know maintain a not-very-plausible story about it being intended to cause that effect while also working hard to make sure that doesn't happen again.”

Michael Vassar (1979) President of the Singularity Institute

In an interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cSG0p-uflA with Adam Ford, December 2012

People, Education, School, Intelligence

“Animals are no one’s property, and they have the right not be ‘taken,’ ‘harvested,’ or ‘culled’ or any other euphemism for murder that wildlife managers use. They are no one’s property, just as you and I are no one’s property other than our own.”

Wayne Pacelle (1965) American activist

"Sabotaging Animal Rights for Deer Hunt," 1986

Animals

“Woes cluster. Rare are solitary woes;
They love a train, they tread each other’s heel.”

Edward Young Night-Thoughts

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night III, Line 63.

Love, Training

“It goes without saying that we have no affinities with the Japanese. They're too foreign to us, by their way of living, by their culture. But my feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance. I feel myself more akin to any European country, no matter which. Everything about the behaviour of American society reveals that it's half Judaised, and the other half negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together—a State where 80 per cent of the revenue is drained away for the public purse—a country where everything is built on the dollar? From this point of view, I consider the British State very much superiour.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

7 January 1942.
Disputed, (1941-1944) (published 1953)

Way, Feeling, Country

“It will be an honour to share the ring with José. You only become a great fighter if you share the ring with other great fighters, and that is exactly what José is.”

Ricky Hatton (1978) English former professional boxer

Hatton praising José Luis Castillo's talent in the ring. http://news2.thdo.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/boxing/6284871.stm Ricky on other boxers (Sourced)

“The word science of administration has been used. There are many who object to the term. Now if by science is meant a conceptual scheme of things in which every particularity coveted may be assigned a mathematical value, then administration is not a science. In this sense only astro-physics may be called a science and it is well to remember that mechanical laws of the heavens tell us nothing about the color and composition of the stars and as yet cannot account for some of the disturbances and explosions which seem accidental. If, on the other hand, we may rightly use the term science in connection with a body of exact knowledge derived from experience and observation, and a body of rules or axioms which experience has demonstrated to be applicable in concrete practice, and to work out in practice approximately as forecast, then we may, if we please, appropriately and for convenience, speak of a science of administration. Once, when the great French mathematician, Poincaré, was asked whether Euclidean geometry is true, he replied that the question had no sense but that Euclidean geometry is and still remains the most convenient. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that a science is, among other things, a particular branch of knowledge or study; a recognized department of learning.”

Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) American historian

Source: Philosophy, Science and Art of Public Administration (1939), p. 660-1

Law, Color, Star, Mathematics

“I love Christmas. I work in Pantomime over the christmas period. On christmas eve I always say to the audience: "Let's celebrate the birth of a child and the start of a new beginning. Let's all sing Silent Night." And we all start singing and halfway through it everybody on the stage is just in tears. Calm comes across everybody. And there is no judgement, there is no anger. It is everybody sitting and thinking about one tiny thing but thinking about it all together and being one with each other. It's just incredible.”

John Barrowman (1967) Scottish-American actor, singer, dancer, musical theatre performer, writer and television personality

Fern Britton Meets John Barrowman BBC (2012)

Love, Birth, Thinking, Tear

“The International War Crimes Tribunal, located at The Hague. When it was established by the United Nations Security Council in 1993, the tribunal was widely viewed as little more that a public relations device. It got off to a slow start (…) During our negotiations, the tribunal emerged as a valuable instrument of policy that allowed us, for example, to bar Karadzic and all other indicted war criminals from public office. Yet no mechanism existed for the arrest of indicted war criminals.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), pp. 189-190

War

“They would talk of nothing but high life, and high-lived company, with other fashionable topics, such as pictures, taste, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses.”

Oliver Goldsmith book The Vicar of Wakefield

Source: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Ch. 9.

Life, Music, Fashion

“The irony of the post-Cold War period is that the fall of communism was followed by the rise of another utopian ideology. In American and Britain, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, a type of market fundamentalism became the guiding philosophy. The collapse of American power that is underway is the predictable upshot.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

A shattering moment in America's fall from power (2008)

War, Communication, Country

“Let me start a different/ analysis by recalling an idea from Max Weber. He characterized cultural modernity as the separation of the substantive reason expressed in religion and metaphysics into three autonomous spheres. They are science, morality and art. These came to be differentiated because the unified world-views of religion and metaphysics fell apart. Since the 18th century, the problems inherited from these older world-views could be arranged so as to fall under specific aspects of validity: truth, normative rightness, authenticity and beauty. They could then be handled as questions of knowledge, or of justice and morality, or of taste. Scientific discourse, theories of morality, Jurisprudence, and the production and criticism of art could in turn be institutionalized. Each domain of culture could be made to correspond to cultural professions in which problems could be dealt with as the concern of special experts. This professionalized treatment of the cultural tradition brings to the fore the intrinsic structures of each of the three dimensions of culture. There appear the structures of cognitive-instrumental, of moral-practical and of aesthetic-expressive rationality, each of these under the control of specialists who seem more adept at being logical in these particular ways than other people are. As a result, the distance grows between the culture of the experts and that of the larger public. What accrues to culture through specialized treatment and reflection does not immediately and necessarily become the property of everyday praxis. With cultural rationalization of this sort, the threat increases that the life-world, whose traditional substance has already been devalued, will become more and more impoverished.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: Modernity — An Incomplete Project, 1983, p. 8-9

Life, People, Truth, World

“In 1897, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) noticed a regular pattern in distributions of wealth or income, no matter the country or time period concerned. He found that the distribution was extremely skewed toward the top end: A small minority of the top earners always accounted for a large majority of the total wealth. The pattern was so reliable that Pareto was eventually able to predict the distribution of income accurately before looking at the data.
Pareto was greatly excited by his discovery, which he rightly believed was of enormous importance not just to economics but to society as well. But he managed to enthuse only a few fellow economists….
Pareto's idea became widely known only when Joseph Moses Juran, one of the gurus of the quality movement in the twentieth century, renamed it the "Rule of the Vital Few." In his 1951 tome The Quality Control Handbook, which became hugely influential in Japan and later in the West, Juran separated the "vital few" from the "trivial many," showing how problems in quality could be largely eliminated, cheaply and quickly, by focusing on the vital few causes of these problems. Juran, who moved to Japan in 1954, taught executives there to improve quality and product design while incorporating American business practices into their own companies. Thanks to this new attention to quality control, between 1957 and 1989, Japan grew faster than any other industrial economy.”

Richard Koch (1950) German medical historian and internist

Introduction
The 80/20 Individual (2003)

Idea, Business, Problem, Time

“Already handbills were in circulation; some presenting, in large print, the alternative of justice on the conspirators or ruin to the Republic; others in equally large print urging the observance of the law and the granting of the Appeal. Round these jutting islets of black capitals there were lakes of smaller characters setting forth arguments less necessary to be read: for it was an opinion entertained at that time (in the first flush of triumph at the discovery of printing), that there was no argument more widely convincing than question-begging phrases in large type.”

George Eliot book Romola

Volume III, Chapter XIII
Romola (1863)

Justice, Law, Question, Time

“She [Chantal] did not understand him [Fiodor]. She never could and never would understand him, being as invulnerable in her truthfulness as he in his falseness. And yet, she hated him unconsciously with a jealous hatred — for what other name, alas, could be given to that revolt of her pure conscience, so well armed and, at the same time, so defenceless? She hated him instinctively as though he already possessed the incomparable secret with which to menace her, to menace God Himself.”

Georges Bernanos (1888–1948) French writer

Source: La joie (Joy) 1929, pp.48–49

God, Hate, Truth, Secret

“Very early, I understood that women were required to be other than what they were.”

Andre Dubus (1936–1999) Novelist, short story writer, teacher

Of Robin Hood and Womanhood.
Broken Vessels (1991)

Women

“It’s hard enough having a relationship with one person, but to have a relationship with three other bandmates that you are so intimately tied to and you spend so much time with — and to have that actually work and function — is just astounding. I have been in a band for more than 10 years now. I never thought I’d be doing anything for 10 years straight, let alone a band, and I feel so fortunate for that. I have been allowed for some reason to do that. But it’s even more amazing that we get along better now than we did 10 years ago.”

Ben Gibbard (1976) American singer, songwriter and guitarist

Source: The Meaning Of Life, III

Feeling, Time, Personality

“For action to be rational, the beliefs on which it is based must themselves be well founded. In turn, this requirement is divided into two parts. On the one hand, the beliefs must be unbiased with respect to the information the agent possesses; on the other hand, he must gather an optimal amount of information.”

Jon Elster (1940) Norwegian academic

Reason and Rationality (2009)

Optimism, Parting

“The Democratic and Republican parties each operates as a necessary counterweight in a partnership designed to keep the pendulum of power swinging in perpetuity from the one set of colluding quislings to the other, and back.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“A Palin Third-Party?” http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=530 WorldNetDaily.com, January 15, 2010. 2010s, 2010

Partnership

“Stalin found out about the community and sent his thugs in, just a few days before I got there, to break all of their arms! That was worse than killing them! It was a horrible sight, Oskar: their arms in crude splints, straight in front of them like zombies! They couldn't feed themselves, because they couldn't get their hands to their mouths! So you know what they did!" "They starved?" "They fed each other! That's the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!" I don't believe in the afterlife.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

"Neither do I, but I believe in the story."
Mr. Black talking with Oskar
"Heavier Boots" (p. 142)
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)

Communication, Hell

“My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.”

Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright

Misattributed
Source: Hermann Weyl as quoted by Freeman Dyson: "Characteristic of Weyl was an aesthetic sense which dominated his thinking on all subjects. He once said to me, half-joking, 'My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.'" - Freeman Dyson, "Obituary of Hermann Weyl," Nature (1956-03-10), pp. 457-458.

Beauty

“The nationalism of a great nation inevitably degenerates into chauvinism and imperialism. The nationalism of a small nation is aimed primarily at the survival of the nation among others.”

Vasil Bykaŭ (1924–2003) Belarusian writer

Правілы жыцця Васіля Быкава http://belsat.eu/news/20412/ // belsat.eu (in Belarusian)

“The notions she fought with needed more than the simple algebra she’d been grudgingly taught at Lamai Hold. More and more she resented how they had robbed her of this, arguably her one talent, driving her from math and other abstractions by the simple expedient of making them seem boring.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Source: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 19 (p. 337)

“The term “system” is unquestionably one of the most widely used terms not only in science, but in other areas of human endeavor as well. It is a highly overworked term, which enjoys different meanings under different circumstances and for different people. However, when separated from its specific connotations and uses, the term "system" is almost never explicitly defined.”

George Klir (1932–2016) American computer scientist

Source: Facets of Systems Science, (2001), p. 4.

People, Science

“If truth were left to a market philosophy, there would be no point in continuing to make an argument for which there are no takers, or to ask a question for which there are no answers. The minority community has other grounds to sustain a wholesome discomfort and thereby keeps the door open for solutions not yet found.”

John Howard Yoder (1927–1997) 20th century American Mennonite theologian

Source: The Priestly Kingdom (1984), p. 99

Truth, Communication, Question

“What about my Soul? That's all right. The essence of such service is unselfishness. My first thought has to be of others, of the relationship of Crown and people: there will be no room to think of money or of my own career.”

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

Letter to J. C. C. Davidson (28 January 1919) on contemplating acceptance of government office, quoted in Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Memoirs of a Conservative: J. C. C. Davidson's Memoirs and Papers, 1910-1937 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p. 95.
1910s

Money, People, Soul, Thinking

“The other economic camp made for quite a different story. James Tobin (an east-coast Ivy League policy advisor) had already won the Nobel Prize when I spoke with him. A true gentleman, he spoke softly about his life and his Keynesian approach to economics. With due respect, I worried after a time that the interview sounded so automatic, so “done” before, that it would add little to the book. Then I brought up Lucas’s criticism. Tobin began to speak much louder and faster (on transcribing the tape I actually had to adjust the volume). He remained reasonable and gentlemanly but his voice betrayed his indignation toward Lucas and his camp, about how they were misleading sensible Keynesian economic thought.”

Arjo Klamer (1953) Dutch columnist, economist and politician

Source: Speaking of economics: how to get in the conversation (2007), Ch. 1 : The strangeness of the discipline

Life, Books, Time

“Does Madison's belief that separation of powers is necessary to prevent tyranny necessarily require a presidential system or even judicial review? As I pointed out, this reading makes Madison silly, or at least a casualty of historical developments, since almost all other democratic countries have rejected the first and some the second. Of course, like all others of his time Madison had to make judgments about constitutional arrangements with very little directly relevant historical experience to go on. Hindsight gives us the advantage of nearly two centuries of later experience, during which most of the stable democracies adopted a parliamentary system, only a few chose a presidential system, and none adopted the American presidential system.”

Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) American political scientist

Foreword : Reflections on A Preface to Democratic Theory
A Preface to Democratic Theory (Expanded ed., 2006)

Democracy, Time, Reading, Country

“Systems can create consequences not intended by any other of their constituent actors.”

Joseph Nye (1937) American political scientist

Source: Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (6th ed., 2006), Chapter 2, Origins of the Great Twentieth Century Conflicts, p. 34.

“If many great books seem unreadable and unintelligible … it may be because we have not for a long time learned to read by reading them. Great books teach people not only how to read them, but how to read all other books.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

People, Books, Learning, Time

“Dialectical logic is loyal to the contradictions, not by the reasoning of “on the one hand and the other” but by tracing the contradictions to their fractured source.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 60

“Let us begin with the simplest illustration possible: let us, emulating Bastiat, choose a broken pane of glass.A young hoodlum, say, heaves a brick through the window of a baker’s shop. The shopkeeper runs out furious, but the boy is gone. A crowd gathers, and begins to stare with quiet satisfaction at the gaping hole in the window and the shattered glass over the bread and pies. After a while the crowd feels the need for philosophic reflection. And several of its members are almost certain to remind each other or the baker that, after all, the misfortune has its bright side. It will make business for some glazier. As they begin to think of this they elaborate upon it. How much does a new plate glass window cost? Fifty dollars? That will be quite a sum. After all, if windows were never broken, what would happen to the glass business? Then, of course, the thing is endless. The glazier will have $50 more to spend with other merchants, and these in turn will have $50 more to spend with still other merchants, and so ad infinitum. The smashed window will go on providing money and employment in ever-widening circles. The logical conclusion from all this would be, if the crowd drew it, that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor.Now let us take another look. The crowd is at least right in its first conclusion. This little act of vandalism will in the first instance mean more business for some glazier. The glazier will be no more unhappy to learn of the incident than an undertaker to learn of a death. But the shopkeeper will be out $50 that he was planning to spend for a new suit. Because he has had to replace a window, he will have to go without the suit (or some equivalent need or luxury). Instead of having a window and $50 he now has merely a window. Or, as he was planning to buy the suit that very afternoon, instead of having both a window and a suit he must be content with the window and no suit. If we think of him as a part of the community, the community has lost a new suit that might otherwise have come into being, and is just that much poorer.The glazier’s gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business. No new “employment” has been added. The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker and the glazier. They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor. They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene. They will see the new window in the next day or two. They will never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made. They see only what is immediately visible to the eye.”

Henry Hazlitt book Economics in One Lesson

Economics in One Lesson (1946), The Broken Window (ch. 2)

Death, Money, People, Feeling

“Most people think themselves kind enough, but rather like a magician thinking he is fooling an audience who can see through his trick, we are the worst judges of the effect we have on others. True, we can mentally point out various kindnesses we have committed and those pleasant aspects of ourselves. Yet by doing so, we ignore the real test cases: how we behave under pressure, how nice we are to people we don’t like, how we deal with other people who seem determined to not live up to our unrealistic expectations.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, There’s Probably No God - The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (2009)

People, Fools, Thinking

“Central banks have moved to stimulate spending in the face of this attempt to increase savings by lowering interest rates. They lowered them to the zero lower bound without having much effect; the fall in desired savings was too large. We are in a Keynesian liquidity trap. Central banks have tried to stimulate spending by actively increasing the money supply, raising fears of inflation in many circles. But no inflation has resulted as the cash sits idle in corporate coffers. Even at zero interest rates, business firms are reluctant to spend!
What to do? Many pundits say we must simply endure what they call secular stagnation. This is an unhappy prediction. Much better is the Keynesian insight that this is the perfect time for fiscal policy. In the U. S. again, there are immediate needs to repair roads and bridges, rebuild the energy grid, and modernize other means of travel. Keynesian fiscal policy expansion will benefit the economy in both the short and long run.”

Peter Temin (1937) American economist

Why Keynes is Important Today (2014)

Money, Fear, Travel, Business

“Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? … No other human institution comes close.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), Ch. 2 : Science and Hope, p. 30

People, Religion, Support, Thinking

“Through religious education, our young people also learn respect for and an understanding of other beliefs and how to make a positive difference to themselves and the world by putting their beliefs and values into action.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Cardinal Winning Lecture (February 2, 2008)

People, World, Education, Understanding

“My deranged mother has written another book. This one is called The Bough and is even worse that the others. I refer not to its quality—it exhibits the usual “coruscating wit” and “penetrating social observation”—but to the extent to which it utilizes, as a kind of mulch pile, the lives of her children.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“The Author”, opening; p. 45.
The Teachings of Don. B: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992)

Children, Books

“The twentieth century was the great century of Christian martyrs, and this is true both in the Catholic Church and in other Churches and ecclesial communities.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Source: [Pope John Paul II, 2005, Memory and identity: conversations at the dawn of a millennium, Rizzoli]

Communication

“Dear Jones.. [I] give you some account of.... the last sad ceremonies paid yesterday to departed talent gone to that bourne from whence no traveller returns. Alas, only two short months Sir Thomas followed the coffin of Dawe to the same place. We then were his pall-bearers. Who will do the like for me, or when, God only knows how soon; my poor father's death [Sept. 1829] proved a heavy blow upon me, and has been followed by others of the same dark kind.”

J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) British Romantic landscape painter, water-colourist, and printmaker

Quote from Turner's letter, London Feb. 1830, to his friend George Jones in Rome; as cited in 'The life of J.M.W. Turner', Volume II, George Walter Thornbury; https://ia801207.us.archive.org/18/items/lifeofjmwturnerr02thor/lifeofjmwturnerr02thor.pdf Hurst and Blackett Publishers, London, 1862, p. 233 1821 - 1851

Death, God, Sadness, Travel

“The rest to some faint meaning make pretense,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.
Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,
Strike through and make a lucid interval;
But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray,
His rising fogs prevail upon the day.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Source: Mac Flecknoe (1682), l. 19–24.

Soul, Sense, Night

“That’s how it goes within a family. You think you know each other so well, and so you don’t bother hardly getting to know each other at all.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Prentice Alvin (1989), Chapter 2.

Family, Thinking

“I cried out. I turned the pages, one after the other, in a frenzy. I could not believe what I saw, would not believe it. For the pages of the book were blank.
Oh, yes, there had been writing, this much I could see, but the inks had faded. Now there were only faint smudges and marks here and there on the yellowness. And I could tell nothing from them…
It came to me, as I walked, how bitter the irony of the Book had been which had said: Herein the Truth. For it had a truth of its own in its bleached barrenness. What was truth except something which faded, lost its shape, grew unreadable and indistinguishable, at last a blank page for men to write on what they wished.”

Tanith Lee book The Birthgrave

Book Three, Part II “The Edge of the Sea”, Chapter 2 (p. 357)
The Birthgrave (1975)

Men, Truth, Books

“Calculation establishes that a quantum positive energy theorem may be possible using a representation based on the Ashtekar connection. Left open is a key question of whether this use of the Ashtekar connection is necessary or whether a positive quantum energy result can be achieved for representations based on other connections, i. e., for [other] values of the Immirzi parameter.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

"Positive energy in quantum gravity" arXiv (Jun 10, 2014)

Question

“Yes. I'm alone.
I would have thought there to be worse fates than this, but now I know there are none. Man is no island. We need those who love us. We need those who hate us. We need others to tether us to life, to give us a reason to live, to feel.”

Pierce Brown book Morning Star

Source: Morning Star (2016), Ch. 1: Only the Dark

Love, Life, Hate, Fate

“I’ve always wondered if people who block each other from expressing their opinions do so because they have so little confidence in their own. To me, encountering an opposing point of view is a chance to gain a deeper understanding of the issues at stake… and develop my own point of view. But the first thing you’ve got to do is you’ve got to let people speak and you’ve got to listen. And that’s what the first amendment is all about. That’s what really distinguishes this country from others.”

Michael Bloomberg (1942) American businessman and politician, former mayor of New York City

http://ww.tufts.edu/home/feature/?p=commencement2007&p4=4
Speaking Out

People, Confidence, Understanding, Chance

“I have always accepted and respected all other schools of architecture, from the chill and elemental structures of Mies van der Rohe to the imagination and delirium of Gaudi. I must design what pleases me in a way that is naturally linked to my roots and the country of my origin.”

Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012) Brazilian architect

Quoted in "Gordon Bunshaft and Oscar Niemeyer: Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureates 1988" http://www.pritzkerprize.com/bunnei.htm#...about%20Oscar%20Niemeyer, pritzkerprize.com (1988).

School, Way, Imagination, Nature

“Beauty in art is truth bathed in an impression received from nature. I am struck upon seeing a certain place. While I strive for a conscientious imitation, I yet never for an instant lose the emotion that has taken hold of me. Reality is one part of art; feeling completes it... Before any site and any object, abandon yourself to your first impression. If you have really been touched, you will convey to others the sincerity of your emotion.”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) French landscape painter and printmaker in etching

Quote from Corot's 'Notebooks', ca. 1856, as quoted in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 241
1850s

Truth, Beauty, Art, Feeling

“Just a reminder, what other people think of you is none of your business.”

Ze Frank (1972) American online performance artist

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/04/040506.html
"The Show" (www.zefrank.com/theshow/)

People, Business, Thinking

“Every woman is infallibly to be gained by every sort of flattery, and every man by one sort or other.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) British statesman and man of letters

16 March 1752
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

“One man, he disappoint me;
He give me the gouge and he take my glee.
Now every other man I see
Remind me of the one man who disappoint me.”

Fiona Apple (1977) singer-songwriter, musician

Get Him Back
Song lyrics, Extraordinary Machine (2005)

Disappointment

“Pain is a gift. Humanity, without pain, would know neither fear nor pity. Without fear, there could be no humility, and every man would be a monster. The recognition of pain and fear in others give rise in us to pity, and in our pity is our humanity, our redemption.”

Dean Koontz book Velocity

Source: Velocity (2005), Chapter 54

Pain, Fear

“Ah jist shrugged, -- Well, as one anarchist plumber sais tae the other: smash the cistern.”

Irvine Welsh book The Acid House

A conversation between plumbers.
"A Blockage in the System".
The Acid House (1994)

“Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I don't want to be just another blade of grass."”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

Regina
All Men are Mortal (1946)

World, Grass

“On Tuesday, the 3rd of Ziqad in AH 700 (10 July, 1301), the strong fort [of Ranthambhor] was conquered. Jhain which was the abode of the infidels, became a new city for Musalmans. The temple of Bahirdev was the first to be destroyed. Subsequently, all other abodes of idolatry were destroyed. Many strong temples which would have remained unshaken even by the trumpet blown on the Day of Judgment, were levelled with the ground when swept by the wind of Islam.”

Alauddin Khalji (1266–1316) Ruler of the Khalji dynasty

About Sultan ‘Alau’d-Din Khalji (AD 1296-1316) and his generals conquests in Jhain (Rajasthan)S.A.A. Rizvi, Khalji Kalina Bharata, Aligarh, 1955, pp. 160
Quotes from the Khazainul-Futuh

Strong

“We have to go along a road covered with blood. We have no other alternative. For us it is a matter of life or death, a matter of living or existing. We have to be ready to face the challenges that await us.”

Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970) second president of Egypt

Gamal Abdel Nasser, speech to Egypt's National Assembly, Cairo (November 6, 1969), as reported by The Washington Post (November 7, 1969), p. 1.

Life, Death

“All, then, are agreed on the pressing nature of this problem, all are bent on its solution, and though it would doubtless be quite Utopian to expect a similar agreement as to the value of any remedy that may be proposed, it is at least of immense importance that, on a subject thus universally regarded as of supreme importance, we have such a consensus of opinion at the outset. This will be the more remarkable and the more hopeful sign when it is shown, as I believe will be conclusively shown in this work, that the answer to this, one of the most pressing questions of the day, makes of comparatively easy solution many other problems which have hitherto taxed the ingenuity of the greatest thinkers and reformers of our time. Yes, the key to the problem how to restore the people to the land — that beautiful land of ours, with its canopy of sky, the air that blows upon it, the sun that warms it, the rain and dew that moisten it — the very embodiment of Divine love for man — is indeed a Master-Key, for it is the key to a portal through which, even when scarce ajar, will be seen to pour a flood of light on the problems of intemperance, of excessive toil, of restless anxiety, of grinding poverty — the true limits of Governmental interference, ay, and even the relations of man to the Supreme Power.”

Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928) British writer, founder of the garden city movement

Introduction.
Garden Cities of To-morrow (1898)

Love, People, Beauty, Hope

Quotes about other page 83

Quotes about other
page 83